Lucian tugs on his hat again, so agitated at hearing the name spoken aloud he nearly rips the brim right off. “Our intel on them is barebones at best, because of how tightly the High Court keeps the details under wraps and the fact that we can’t run any sort of infiltration job without the risk of tipping off the High Court to the fact we know about their secret cult of super-soldiers.
“What we do know is this: One, the Rooks are selected shortly after they’re identified as major practitioners at the onset of puberty; we assume the selection criteria is based on raw power and aptitude as assessed by the ICM’s general entry tests given before apprenticeships are assigned. Two, the selected few are sent off for special training to a facility whose location we’ve never been able to determine; we suspect the facility is moved to a different remote area every few years to ensure it’s never found. And three, the young practitioners emerge from this facility about three decades later as magic powerhouses, and are subsequently seeded into mid-level positions in the ICM’s administration all over the world, with rock-solid cover stories, where they then lie in wait until the High Court activates them for a mission.”
It takes me about three minutes to fully process this information.
“Holy shit,” is all I can say.
Foley removes his glasses, revealing his red irises, and rubs his face with his free hand. “Our latest intel on the Rooks has been spotty, due to the recent ‘upheaval’ in House Tepes, but we believe that several of the Rooks have been deployed to eliminate or otherwise influence certain elements of the Methuselah Group. There’s also reason to believe the Court has a Rook plant in the MG, though we have no idea who it might be. We believe that the current Rook roster is eighty-odd people, but we’ve only been able to identify about twenty with any degree of certainty. Because, again, we can’t poke around too much without giving ourselves away. If the Court finds out we know about the secret army they’ve been fostering for the better part of a millennium, there’s no telling how they’ll respond.”
“Whoa! Hold on.” I throw up my hands in a frantic gesture. “Over half a millennium? The ICM didn’t even exist back then, did it?”
“Not in its current incarnation, no,” Lucian confirms. “But there’s always been at least one major practitioner organization in Europe, as far back as antiquity. And you can directly trace the connections between the leaders of those groups to the turn of the second millennium AD. Over half the members of the current High Court have a direct apprentice-to-master connection with the leaders of the proto-ICM organization that existed in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Their masters were apprentices to the apprentices of those leaders. The degrees of separation are only a few generations, due to how long practitioners can extend their mortal lives.”
“So, what you’re saying is”—I work out the tangle of thoughts in my head—“the Choir of Rooks just got rolled over from one organization to the next, and no one ever leaked the secret of its existence?”
“Since practically no one beyond the High Court, and the secretive Rooks themselves, has ever learned the Choir exists,” Lucian replies, “there’s really no one liable to spill the secret.”
“Then how did House Tepes find out about it?”
“The Spanish Inquisition,” Foley says.
I blink. Twice. “Got to say, I didn’t expect that.”
“Who does?” Lucian shrugs. “Anyway, there were a lot of fights between human practitioners and vampires in Spain during that time period, resulting from the turmoil caused by the Inquisition. One of those skirmishes led to the exposure of a single Rook’s true identity to two agents of House Tepes. The agents informed the then Lord Tepes of that man’s affiliation, and since that time, the house been running near constant ‘soft touch’ intelligence operations to root out as much information about the Choir as we can without tipping anyone off.
“None of the other vampire houses have ever found out about the Choir, as far as we’re aware. The Wolves are totally in the dark too. And we think the same is true of most other supernatural communities.” He gives me a stern look. “We would like to keep it that way.”
“I got the message.” I stomp my boot against the transparent ground. “Chill.”
“Just making sure to impress the gravity of the situation, kid.”
“Thanks. You’re so considerate.”
Foley clears his throat again. “We really do need to leave soon, so you two are going to have to cut the sniping short.” He slips a piece of paper from his pocket and offers it to me. “Earlier today, one of our moles inside the ICM’s European headquarters received this message from an anonymous tipster that we believe very much to be someone you know, Cal.”
“Someone I know?” I grab the paper and unfold it, revealing what appears to be a random sequence of numbers and letters written in black ink. A code of some sort. “I don’t know anybody who works at the ICM’s HQ except…” My eyebrows fly up. “Erica?”
Lucian removes his hat and runs a hand through his hair. “We think the High Court’s own informants in Aurora theorized that DSI has some kind of ongoing affiliation with House Tepes, due to the role DSI played in thwarting the Black Knights at the museum last month. This theory would have been passed up the chain to the offices of the High Court practitioners, including the office of Omotoke Iyanda, where your witch ex is currently employed.”
“You think it tipped Erica off to the fact she might be able to pass information to DSI through you?”
“Milburn’s no chump, I know that.” Lucian spins his hat around on his fingers. “She’s smart enough and resourceful enough to use even the smallest opportunities to her advantage. Makes sense that she’d take the chance to pass on vital information about the current machinations of the Court’s dark underbelly, after she became aware that those machinations were bound to negatively impact DSI.”
“What machinations?” I examine the coded note. “Does the High Court have something to do with what’s currently happening in Aurora? With the assassin…?”
The revelation hits me like a bullet train, and I nearly stagger into the wall and get shunted off into fairy land.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding,” I hiss. “The High Court is behind the killings?”
Foley winces. “That’s what the message says, unfortunately. It appears that the Court has made minimal progress with interrogating Delos since his arrest, because he’s so capable at counteracting mind magic. While they’re still working on a daily basis to crack him open and dig out all the secrets he knows about the Methuselah Group, they’ve now decided to attempt alternative tactics to get him to talk. Torture tactics.” He licks his bottom lip. “Psychological torture tactics.”
Rage burrows deep into my chest, and my hand clenches the paper so hard my fingernails tear right through it. “Killing what few family members he has left after most of his bloodline was wiped out during World War II? Killing innocent people in horrible ways on the chance the threat to one of them makes him spill his guts?”
Lucian slaps his hat against his leg. “A nasty tactic, but far from unprecedented. Even for regular humans.”
“I know that.” I start to shake as the rage steams toward the surface of my skin. “But it still makes them hypocritical bastards. Always pretending to be so goddamn superior, and here they are, targeting babies because they’re apparently not skilled enough to get the answers they need in any way less heinous.”
Lucian and Foley appear startled.
“Babies?” Foley whispers.
“One of Delos’ distant blood relatives,” I say, fury threaded through my words, “is a two-year-old girl. Who is horrifically traumatized now because the High Court’s assassin murdered her mother in front of her yesterday afternoon.”
Lucian sticks his hat back on and tugs the brim down to cover his eyes. “That’s pretty gross, even compared to the kind of brutal shit vampires tend to get up to.” He pauses. “Though she could be the lynchpin, now tha
t I think about it. A two-year-old. That might do it.”
“Lynchpin?” Foley leans forward and takes the crumpled paper from my hand before I can totally destroy it. “What do you mean?”
“He means the key to breaking down Delos’ defenses.” I shove my hands into my pockets. “But surely it would’ve been the threat to the child’s life that made Delos fold, not the actual murder attempt.”
Lucian points to the note in Foley’s hand. “It’s not the girl herself. It’s what her death would represent: that the ICM has no problem killing children in the course of their efforts to make Delos talk. Because, you see, the people the Court is currently targeting in your city are not Delos’ only relatives.”
“Ah,” I say. “I get it. They have Delos’ direct descendants in custody already, don’t they?”
He draws his lips into a thin line. “Your ex’s note said they’re currently holding four of his direct descendants, including a five-year-old boy, and threatening to kill them if Delos doesn’t spill. But they haven’t touched a hair on anyone’s head. Yet. Because even the High Court can’t easily sweep a series of plainly connected murders under the rug. If they kill Delos’ descendants anyway, and news of their actions leaks out to the general practitioner community, it could destroy all public confidence in the Court as a reliable and sensible authority. Which would make the ICM as a whole even more vulnerable to Methuselah’s influence than it already is.”
“So, let me get this straight. This whole fiasco with the assassin picking off Delos’ relatives in Aurora”—I grind my heel into the ground—“is a matter of using proxies to circumvent a potential scandal because going straight for the ‘real meat’ is a tad too risky? This is all an attempt to convince Delos, who may or may not fall for it, depending on his current state of mind, that if he doesn’t break soon, the Court will start killing the relatives who actually matter to him?”
“That’s what it looks like to me,” Lucian confirms.
“I hate them,” I say. “I fucking hate them all.”
“You and me both, kid. Though perhaps not for the same reasons.”
I suppress the urge to start ranting and raving about the ICM and their constant stream of faux morality and disgusting hypocrisy.
I’ll have time to scream all those frustrations into my pillow, when I’m alone in the dark and no one can see me unraveling under the strain of the heaping mound of problems that life keeps piling onto my shoulders, doomed to one day become a mountain too heavy to bear.
I’ll have time to figure out how to set up the High Court to take a hard and damaging fall when the truth of this situation finally spills out of the bloated corpse of the ICM’s high and mighty attitude.
I’ll have time to shake out a plan to force Iyanda to release Erica from her indefinite servitude, so that she can remove herself from the bowels of the Court and the awful things she must be witnessing within, things that drove her to commit a spy job that could literally get her killed.
I’ll have time to release my anger in a productive way. I’ll have time to make things right. Later.
For now, I have an immediate problem to solve.
“Targus,” I mutter. “He’s a Rook, isn’t he?”
Lucian gives me an almost imperceptible nod. “And one of their favorites, from what we can tell. They activate him more than any other Rook we know of. In the last ten years alone, Targus has completed extremely dangerous solo missions in Brazil, Russia, Cambodia, and Egypt, among other countries, during which he’s racked up kill counts you’d hardly believe. He’s committed high-profile assassinations, wiped out entire drug cartels singlehandedly, and totally eliminated thousand-strong infestations of ghouls and other nasties without breaking a sweat. Every time, he’s extricated himself from the situation without leaving behind a hint of his true identity. The only reason we’ve been able to track him is because we’ve learned what to look for over the past few hundred years.”
“So he’s the guy trying to kill Sadie Wheeler.” The image of Frances Wheeler as a Wolf dying on the floor of her living room assaults me, that desperation in her eyes, pleading with me to protect her daughter from the monster that invaded her home and destroyed her world for no good reason. “He’s the guy who wiped out an entire DSI team without hesitation and without remorse, just because they happened to be in the same building as one of his targets at an inopportune moment. He’s the guy who killed six Wolves because they dared to help DSI. And he’s the guy who attacked my team and laid my friends up in the infirmary. Alexander Targus.”
“Cal,” Foley says softly, his hand brushing my shoulder, “you can’t beat him in a fight. Not even with your magic. He’s too strong, too well trained.”
“I’m aware of that.” Violet sparks dance between my fingers, magic rising as my emotions churn like an unsettled sea on the cusp of a great storm. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t win this little game he’s playing. After all, his goal is to kill Sadie. If I make sure he can’t kill Sadie, then he fails his mission, and the High Court’s revolting gambit fails with him.”
Lucian stares at me with interest, and I can tell he’s betting with himself on whether I’ll succeed or crash and burn. “As far as our intel can figure, Targus has never failed a mission.”
“Doesn’t matter.” I turn to face the way I came, hand poised to rip open the fabric of the universe once more. “There’s a first time for everything.”
Chapter Thirteen
I lie on my couch for an hour after returning from the Eververse Bridge, working out all the nuances of the ways that Targus screwed us over yesterday. And the ways he’s undoubtedly planning to do so again today in order to get his grubby hands on Sadie Wheeler and use her as a sacrifice to crack open Robert Delos. It always comes down to Delos. Delos and the goddamn Methuselah Group.
My brainstorming session eventually dredges up six key revelations, all of them harkening back to Targus’ visit to the DSI office.
The first revelation: Targus’ list of red herrings was in and of itself a red herring. He knew we’d never fall for a ploy so obvious—a local ICM leader giving us real assistance with no ulterior motives—not after we’d been misled and mistreated by the ICM leaders of the recent past.
So he didn’t bother with more than a token effort, just slapped together a list of men who vaguely fit the profile he guessed we’d been building and handed it off, knowing it would be discounted. Knowing we wouldn’t do more than glance at it. No, the real purpose of giving us that list was to give himself a valid reason to visit DSI’s new nearly impregnable fortress without raising suspicion.
The second revelation: Targus brought the polong into the DSI building with him, and none of us were any the wiser. He probably had the creature cooped up in its bottle, hidden somewhere on his person, and because he was there on official business, no one at the outer gate or the main entrance gave him more than a cursory security inspection.
Because they couldn’t. Not without running the risk of offending the ICM and causing another diplomatic incident. So he walked right on in with the dangerous “murder weapon” we were actively searching for. It could have killed anyone. He could have killed anyone.
The third revelation: Targus didn’t use the polong to kill anyone—and in particular, Sadie—inside the DSI building because it would have given him away as the culprit. And if that had happened, it would have risked revealing his status as an ICM-sponsored hitman. So instead, Targus used the polong for reconnaissance.
I don’t know how intelligent the polong is, but since it’s a type of spirit, I assume it possesses some level of sentience and can probably pass its master information. All Targus had to do was set it loose in the building and tell it what to look for.
The fourth revelation: Targus didn’t know Frances and Sadie were werewolves until he attacked them at their apartment, which is why he didn’t manage to kill Sadie before DSI arrived. This unexpected wrinkle is what prompted Targus to breach the DSI building in
the first place, because he suspected we’d use Sadie as an excuse to appeal to the Wolves for help.
He waltzed into the office to learn exactly how we were planning to work in conjunction with the Wolves—via scent. He then left the building, polong tucked safely away again, and skipped off to set a deadly trap guaranteed to derail all cooperative efforts between DSI and the Wolves.
The fifth revelation: The whole incident with the shed in the woods was a setup. Targus was never camping out in the suburban woods. He created a decoy scent trail, I assume through the use of some high-level spell that allows him to manipulate the particulates that make up his scent. (A spell he must’ve first utilized during his visit to the DSI building to suppress his scent so the Wolves wouldn’t make him.) That trail that passed through all three murder sites and led to a random shed he found in the woods, where he helpfully laid out some fake evidence to point us in the wrong direction.
And god, the shed setup isn’t even the worst part. There’s something more insidious in the works.
The sixth and final revelation: As I lie here staring at my ceiling, Alexander Targus is currently framing another practitioner for the murders. He left that evidence in the shed specifically to point us toward one person—a person whose identity an analyst as keen as Edith will be able to uncover in a matter of hours—and while we’re busy picking through that evidence, recovering from the brutality of his attack, and dealing with the fallout between us and the Lycanthrope Republic, he’s spending the night setting up that poor wizard to take the fall for his plot.
Now, maybe this patsy already has a target on his back. Maybe he’s not a good guy. Maybe he’s someone who’s violated the ICM’s laws, broken the Unified Magic Code, and marked himself for a bad end by being a bad practitioner. And maybe the ICM would’ve crushed him with their overbearing heel eventually anyway. But that doesn’t mean the guy deserves to get punished for crimes he didn’t commit.
Yet I’m going to have to allow that man to take the fall, if I want to save Sadie Wheeler.
Spell Caster Page 15
