“Going over what I should say.”
“Say what we practiced, and you’ll be fine. Alice isn’t stupid. She might be angry with us, but a leader like her knows a good deal when she hears it. She wants control in the States, not a hundred years of insurrection.”
“Why did she choose to meet us at night, do you suppose?” Rose turned to watch Matt’s profile.
He shrugged. “Probably the best time for her. She’s busy wooing Society elites all day.”
“But why give us an advantage? We could have Piper with us for all Alice knows.”
“Maybe Alice heard we’re on the outs with Piper, so she isn’t worried about that.”
Rose looked him in the eyes. “That doesn’t make you nervous?”
“No.” He drawled, favoring her with his lopsided grin. “I’m scared as hell.”
Rose chuckled, heartened by his familiar humor. It did her good.
“It’s going to be fine,” Matt said. “I believe in your plan—I believe in you. We’re doing the best thing for our people.”
He leaned in and kissed her. The surprise of it mixed with fierce love did more to bolster Rose’s resolve and belief in herself than any words ever could.
“Thank you,” she said. “I needed that.”
“I love you.” Matt had said those words many times in the last several months, so often they had somewhat lost their meaning, but not this time. He pressed his forehead to hers. “When this is over, I want to have a real talk—about our future, about the future of the Order. It’s been a while since we did that.”
“Okay,” she whispered. Rose knew he wasn’t proposing a discussion about finances or how to reach new slinkers. He wanted to talk about the sorts of events that involved rings and white dresses. Her heart gave a little lurch in her chest at the thought, but she quelled it with a stiff draw on calm. She didn’t have time for that sort of thing, not now, not with the entire Order on the line.
“I know,” Matt said when he saw the look on her face. “Not now, but soon.”
“Soon.”
Car headlights momentarily lit the rental, and a large sedan pulled into the space beside them, its tires popping and crunching over broken asphalt long ago churned to gravel. Chibueze climbed out first on the passenger’s side, followed immediately by Sam Wolf, who had been driving. The two of them scanned the area for a moment before Chibueze opened the rear door for Thandiwe.
“Here we go,” Matt said quietly and opened his own door.
Rose followed him out to greet the newcomers. The air outside was refreshingly cool for late May, a welcome feeling considering the armor she wore underneath her clothes.
“Thank you for being here.” Matt clasped Thandiwe’s hand in both his own, his smile warm and genuine.
“We never leave a member of the Consortium to face danger alone,” Thandiwe said as Rose took her turn shaking hands.
Four SUVs and a small bus had pulled in with Thandiwe’s car and a steady stream of people dressed in black filed out of them and into the park.
“How many people were you able to bring?” Rose hoped the older succubus wouldn’t take offense at the question, but at this point, her need to know outmatched her concern for etiquette. The Consortium director had been tacit with the details of how much support she could lend leading up to this meeting.
“Twenty,” Thandiwe answered without pause. “I took the liberty of having my security chief report directly to your Tanner Watts.”
Twenty. It was more than Rose had hoped and yet still seemed too few, even added to her own forty-three. She wanted insurance against Alice’s forces should things devolve tonight. With enough bodies gathered on the Order’s side, Alice would think twice about fighting. Worst case, should their peace talks break down, the two sides could simply walk away without anyone getting hurt. Or so Rose hoped.
“Where are we meeting?” Thandiwe asked. “Surely not in this broken-down car park.”
“Alice didn’t give us many details, only the address.” Matt gestured toward a tree-lined expanse of grass that had once been a playground. “Do you think she meant for us to meet her there?”
“It’s covered in dew,” Rose said. “No thanks.” Though she could see only a handful of their combined forces standing guard out there, she knew the rest wouldn’t have gone far. Those positions gave an excellent view of the defunct lot. Still others, mostly Thandiwe’s people, stood nearest the entrance, sub-automatic rifles strapped to their shoulders.
Rose wore a small body cam in a fanny pack across her midriff, its forward-facing lens tilted to capture everything in front of her. Though Brendan and Luke tried to insist she employ several drones to follow her interactions with Alice, Rose had forced them to settle for the pack alone. She doubted Alice would look favorably on having the contraptions buzzing overhead. Rose wasn’t about to risk this meeting even for the sake of her votaries.
Strident voices caught the group’s attention, and they all turned in the direction of the park. To Rose’s surprise—and that of her forces judging by their reactions—more than a dozen shadowed figures had appeared in the park without warning. The plug in her right ear buzzed with excited, angry voices exclaiming their shock at the sudden intrusion.
“Enough!” Tanner Watts’ voice cut through the chatter. “Observe radio discipline. Silence unless you have significant intel to pass. Teams Alpha and Gamma, slowly make your presence known. All others remain behind cover awaiting orders.”
A shorter figure, her shape decidedly feminine, led the group of newcomers. Rose counted six of them, including the female whom she took for Alice McAleese, though Rose figured the chances Alice had brought so few guards along for this negotiation hovered somewhere around the zero percent mark.
The newcomers approached the parking area slowly though they all walked as if they owned the world. None of them carried a firearm so far as Rose could see. That, like their numbers, was probably a bluff. Rose doubted Alice’s people went anywhere without weapons. The five men at Alice’s back wore cheap suits with ties and broad lapels. They reminded Rose of slum lords come to collect back rent.
Determined to hide her surprise at the newcomers’ ability to slip through her defenses, Rose stepped forward, keenly aware of the Kimber pistol resting in a concealed hip holster at her side. Her draw on calm kept her heart out of her throat but could do little to dry her palms. She resolutely did not wipe them on her jeans.
Alice stopped short of the asphalt, her blond hair rendered white by the distant glare of streetlights. “Do you know how I found success taking over societies in my home country and beyond?”
Rose stopped as well, taken aback by the abrupt question. She shook her head, nonplussed.
“By doing exactly what you have done here.” Alice spread her arms. “I empowered the lowborn. I gave them a voice—even better, I gave them guns. A thousand years of pent-up anger and resentment boiled in their breasts, and I set it loose. The upper class in Ireland and England didn’t know what hit them. They had never imagined an uprising like the one we brought to their doors. Yes, they were powerful, but we had the numbers.”
“Then you understand what you’re facing here in the States.” Matt kept his voice even, but Rose could hear the fervor beneath it.
“I do that, Matthew Snow. Otherwise, I wouldn't have come here tonight—I wouldn’t have agreed to meet you at all.”
“Are we negotiating here?” Rose had no problem talking in the open—she’d take that over some stuffy office anytime—but these weren’t the environs she had imagined for peace talks with a foreign invader.
“Negotiating?” Alice’s accent rang heavy on the word. “Is that what you think we’re doing here?”
“What would you call it?”
Alice turned aside slightly, her gaze darting to a group of shadowy figures heading their way from the park.
“What the hell?” Tanner’s voice rang over the shared channel broadcast into Rose’s ear. She had rarely h
eard the usually jovial man sound this frustrated. “Where are they all coming from? How’d we miss them in our sweeps?”
“Charm.” Chibueze pointed in the general direction of the newcomers. “One, perhaps more, of the Irish are powerful charmers—strong enough to hide themselves and their soldiers from us.”
“Just now figuring that out, are you?” Alice asked, her pretty lips drawn to one side in a smirk.
Rose frowned. She hadn’t felt a thing. Though she excelled at drawing physical traits like dexterity, speed, and strength, she was no slouch when it came to charm, and yet she hadn’t felt even the smallest amount of it affecting her thoughts.
But that was the giveaway, wasn’t it? Always amongst succubi, she could feel the tingle of charm brushing her awareness. Most of her kind couldn’t suppress their charm if they tried. It boiled out of them like sweat in a sauna. Except now, that constant susurration was gone. Somehow one, or perhaps dozens, of Alice’s people were suppressing the natural charm Rose should be feeling. Instead of the reassuring tingle she expected to find amongst other succubi, she felt an absolute void—a nothingness like the silence of an empty house.
Rose clenched, a technique that allowed her to shut herself off from outside influence. Instantly, her vision cleared, though she hadn’t realized it was cloudy. She couldn’t draw her own powers while clenching against outsiders, but she could at least feel certain no one was manipulating her. She glanced at Matt and saw, to her satisfaction, that he too appeared suddenly more aware, his expression morphing from a near stupor to sudden rage.
“You were charming us?” Matt rounded on Alice, which prompted her two nearest bodyguards, incubi of considerable height and girth, to start forward.
Alice raised a lazy hand to ward them off. “You can’t blame a girl for trying.”
“I wouldn’t exactly call that acting in good faith,” Matt said.
“I don’t particularly care about your faith, Matthew.”
With her mind cleared, Rose took a second look at the group headed their way. She didn’t recognize any of them, especially in the dark. There were eleven by her count. And...she blinked and sucked in a sharp breath. Upon closer inspection, she realized she did recognize one of them, a handsome older man dressed in jeans and a bulletproof vest. She couldn’t remember his name, but she had seen him on television the last several months as her interest in politics grew during Torres’ campaign. A senator of some renown, he was a fixture on the evening news opinion shows so popular these days. Him, and the woman next to him—a young succubus senator on the rise inside the Beltway. God, were they all DC elites?.
Olivia, Preston, and Satterfield kept pace with the new group, careful to keep them surrounded though at an acceptable distance. Satterfield carried a subgun on one shoulder while the other two appeared empty-handed. Not that guns mattered much to vampires.
Rose didn’t know how she felt about revealing the vampires’ presence this early in the talks. Alice might take it as a threat, but Tanner must have deemed it a sound idea given the circumstances. If Alice and her people could sneak past them this easily—and charm the hell out of them in the offing—perhaps a show of force was a good idea.
“Senator Leeds,” Thandiwe said to the young woman at the head of the group. “What an interesting surprise.”
“Director.” Leeds dipped her head fractionally as she and the others assumed positions adjacent to Alice and her bodyguards.
“Some of my friends decided to show their support,” Alice said with a nod to Leeds. She turned back to Rose and Matt, grinning. “This, you see, is not a negotiation. Let us be clear on that from the outset. It is an unconditional surrender on your part.”
“Call it what you like,” Rose said, struggling to keep her composure, “we’re here to talk terms.”
“Terms for your ruffians, yes?”
“For the Order.”
Alice rolled her eyes. “You and your clan names, how gang-like you are. I’m surprised you don’t have a common tattoo and an initiation ritual. Exactly what terms are you demanding of me?”
Alice knew what Rose wanted on behalf of her people: freedom, the chance at representation in whatever government Alice forged on Society’s glowing ashes, and the ability to live unmolested by anyone in power. If she wanted Rose to say all that aloud, fine.
“We want freedom. We want—”
“You want what every terrorist organization wants from a legitimate government: a share of the power.”
“Legitimate, my ass,” Matt said.
Ignoring him, Alice stepped forward to face Rose, close enough to touch though she made no move to do so. “I’m going to give you the same deal I’ve given your sort everywhere I’ve found you. My lads and I will allow you to live.”
Rose ground her teeth for a moment before she trusted her voice. “How generous.”
“I thought so.”
“Question is, will we let you live?”
Alice’s grin spread into a full smile, her teeth white in the wan light.
“You aren’t facing the Order alone here, Alice.” Thandiwe made no move to confront the smaller woman, yet somehow she seemed to grow taller, as if she had enlarged like a pool of light magnified. “The Consortium has thwarted you elsewhere.”
Alice looked her up and down before nodding at her. “Yes, you make quite the coalition. The ragtag vagabonds, the slinkers, and—” Alice turned her gaze on Olivia and Preston. “The blood merchants of fear. Tell me, where is Piper? I see her babies, but not the queen herself.”
Though Alice’s tone remained conversational, Rose needed no draw on discernment to feel the anger boiling beneath her calm exterior. Piper’s attacks on Alice’s people had left the Irish succubus in a rage.
“We’ve cut our ties with her.” Rose hoped the truth might go some way to winning Alice’s favor. Better to admit the break than make it seem like Rose had Piper hidden away somewhere nearby waiting to strike. “What she did, killing your people, that was wrong.”
“That was war.” Alice shrugged one shoulder. “I had hoped she would show tonight, but perhaps that’s for the best. Less distraction, eh?”
“I’m glad you see it that way,” Rose said. “I had hoped we might start anew. I didn’t come here to make threats or—”
“Of course, you didn’t. You can offer me no threat. You came here to plead for my indulgence.”
Rose’s throat clogged with rage, her eyes opened wide.
“Tell me I’m wrong.” Alice leaned forward, so their noses almost touched. “You tried attacking me once before. As the youngsters say these days, how did that go for you?”
“I want peace, Alice. I want the chance for my people to live without fear.”
Alice shook her head slowly, a look of utter sadness and pity creasing her features. “Darling, you lost that chance the night you crossed me. The best you’ll get now is the ability to go on living, unlike your vampire friends.”
She made a gesture, an offhanded flick of her wrist, and Olivia’s head exploded. Blood sprayed across the grass and onto the asphalt at Rose’s feet, followed immediately by the concussion of distant gunfire.
Someone screamed, Rose thought it might have been herself, and Olivia’s lifeless body hit the ground.
22
Engagement
Rose couldn’t say when she switched from clenching to drawing. It happened instantly, the way her shock and fear gave way before her rage. She could only hope that whatever supercharged charmer Alice employed either couldn’t break through her raging emotions or else suddenly found herself too overwhelmed to control anyone.
The decision to attack came in like manner to Rose’s towering anger. One moment she stood frozen, her body cold with shock and anguish. And in the next, her limbs unfolded like weapons of war. She momentarily forgot the pistol at her side, settling instead for a whip-cracking punch to Alice’s jaw. If she had been human, the blow would have broken Alice’s neck on impact. Maybe it did. It cert
ainly sent the smaller succubus reeling backward on her heels, her face contorted in pain and not a little surprise. She must have supposed herself so much faster than Rose; she saw no danger in standing close.
Big mistake.
That answered at least one question: Alice’s charmer hadn’t stopped Rose from delivering that punch, which meant she was free to exact revenge. Rose showed her teeth and drew every trait she could manage.
Alice fetched up against one of her thugs, who dutifully helped her find her balance while his peers drew concealed weapons to defend their leader. Rose half expected Alice to call them off as she had earlier, but not this time. Alice smiled, blood staining her white teeth, and with a bestial growl, launched herself at Rose, her limbs a blur of speed.
Gunfire filled the air, loud enough to damage hearing with its relentless barking. Rose didn’t notice. She was too busy fending for her life. Alice moved with a supernatural swiftness, grace, and accuracy Rose had only ever managed to match once in her life. The fear draw had given her that sort of sublime animation—a kind of mechanical precision no physical body should be able to obtain. And like a machine, it robbed her of all emotion, all care except that directly associated with the moment. She recognized the fear draw in Alice, but Rose refused to reach for it herself. Its passionless drive struck fear in her—fear of what she might become if ever again she sought its cold, raw power.
However, relying on her on regular abilities left Rose at an appreciable disadvantage, one she could feel the instant Alice attacked.
Though Rose managed to duck two of the other woman’s first punches, a swift kick to the gut doubled her over. Pain shot through her like a bullet. For an instant, she feared Alice had managed to shoot her, but she had no gun, only an immense draw on speed and strength, two traits she put to work again when she followed up the kick with a resounding left hook that spun Rose to the asphalt in a heap.
It took a deep draw on healing and wakefulness for Rose to remain conscious. Even so, the world spun for a few seconds as she scrambled to gain her feet. Such a delay would have proven deadly had Chibueze and Matt not intervened. Matt, who knew the fear draw well and wasn’t afraid to employ it from time to time when necessary, interposed his body between Alice and Rose while Chibueze attempted to punch the Irish succubus in the jaw.
Sketched Page 20
