by A. E. Lowan
“What is your interest in the wizards?” asked Midir.
“That is my concern, not yours.”
Midir frowned hard, sizing up the sorcerer with wary eyes, and Aodhán looked from man to man, his mind fretting as he tried to work out what each would do. He did not want to get into a fight in here – the space was limited and there was a small court of vampires having a party right next door who would be sure to hear the commotion and come running. And even though vampires and therian did not stand a chance against magicians someone would be sure to run and tell the wizard child.
He had to swallow his own frustration that Midir’s temper and this sorcerer were going to combine to lose him this opportunity to learn more about the players in this game, but he knew well how to bide his time. Even when it was not on his side.
Midir finally nodded. “Come along, Aodhán.” He moved toward the door.
Aodhán nodded to the sorcerer as he moved past into the rain. After the darkness of the clinic the parking lot courtyard seemed bright under the streetlights. He watched as the man pulled the door closed behind them and locked it with keys he pulled from his pocket. The lights caught the silver wings that swept through his demon black hair and the fine lines at the corners of his eyes. When the man pulled the wards back into place with apparent practiced ease and turned to face them, Aodhán realized with a start that his eyes were not black at all, but midnight blue. The color was unusual, even among the fae. He motioned to the wards on the door to cover his surprise. “Do that often?”
The sorcerer’s eyes flickered in the direction he indicated, and returned. His smile was cold, and he replied with silence.
“Now, tell me, what sort of magic is soul-reading?”
The man turned his attention to Midir. “Soul-reading is the province of demons and angels. Take what you will from that.” He turned and began to walk away.
“Wait!” Midir moved after him. “How does this relate to her?”
The sorcerer looked over his shoulder. “That is another piece of information, and you have nothing more that I want. Good evening, gentlemen.”
They watched the man disappear into the rain. Aodhán could hear the creak of Midir’s teeth as he ground them together. “At least now we know what she was doing,” he said.
“Yes,” Midir ground out. “She was trying to discover my plans – and she may very well have succeeded.” He headed out towards where they had left his driver, his long legs eating up ground with each stride.
Aodhán thought that over as he fell into step beside. “No, I don’t think she did. She’s too inexperienced and her poker face is complete shit. If she had seen anything worth seeing in you, it would have shown earlier.”
“But she has the potential. She could ruin everything.”
Aodhán had to grant half that point. He thought Midir’s paranoia might be going a little far, though, to be honest. She was a little bottle-filler and by the look of her she was taking too many of her own potions. What could she do, really? “Well, what do we do, now? We just agreed…”
Midir stopped and turned. “We agreed to something?” he asked, his expression wry.
Aodhán thought for a moment and smirked.
Indeed.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“I thought you said the place would be deserted.”
“It usually is.”
Lana walked with Senán through the halls of Moore Investments and hoped the nervous whine in his voice wouldn’t carry, but so far, so good. Three things struck her as strange… well, besides the crowd in the big office building late on a Saturday night. The first thing was that whenever they passed an office cluster or cube farm, very few people were actually working. They were mostly just hanging around, like a low-key office party, and none of them paid her and Senán any mind. Admittedly, she had never worked in an office, but shouldn’t they be, well, doing what they were being paid to do? She knew if she just stood around at the club talking with the other strippers she would get fired.
The second was that very few of them were actually human.
Gathered around a snack machine were three people dressed in what she thought of as weekend office casual; jeans and button-down shirts. But she could see their true forms like after-images. The big, thick-set man crouched awkwardly as he tried to shove his arm through the dispenser slot had the ghost of his real self rising high above him – he was a jack-in-irons, gnashing his tusks in frustration and looking strangely naked without his chains of trophy heads. Lana guessed they weren’t allowed in the office. The short man smacking the side of the machine was a redcap, and the thin-necked woman offering advice in a nasal tone was really a hag. Unseelie fae, all of them.
Being Unseelie herself she was neither alarmed nor uncomfortable, just wary. Midir the Proud was known to associate with both sides, Seelie and Unseelie, so had she seen them at his holdings in the Faerie Realm she would not have been surprised. But everywhere she looked there were Unseelie and wild fae that belonged to neither faction in human seeming – this kind of concentration in the Mortal Realm was just freakish.
Add to that the layers and layers of glamour surrounded by that iron fencing, and it all became highly suspicious. But of what?
And then there was the third thing. Like the ghost of a scent left after a lover has gone, or the fragment of a song half remembered, Lana felt a pull just at the edges of her perception. If she had not been looking so hard for anything out of the ordinary and finding it everywhere, she might have missed it. She knew what that pull meant. A rift, and it was coming from somewhere below her. She had followed just such a pull into the Mortal Realm in her search for Midir.
She followed Senán into the elevator and he swiped his key card. “Will that give us access to the basements?” she asked.
He pulled his hand back from the upper rank of buttons and gave her a curious look. “Yeah, sure, but I thought you wanted to get into his office?”
Lana pursed her lips and looked at the ranks of buttons as the elevator doors slid shut on their own with a whisper of air. She was operating on guesswork and instinct, and while her guess wanted to take her up to Midir’s office on the off-chance of finding something useful there, instinct was pulling her down with the rift. She nodded to herself and reached over to push the lowest of the basement buttons. Her instincts had never let her down before.
“All that’s down there are the servers and crap.”
She passed him a sly smile as her mind churned and then she dug into her purse, pulling out a jump drive in the shape of a neko kitty. “And this bad boy will work better plugged directly into the servers instead of into your father’s computer.”
Senán’s gray eyes lit up. “Awesome.” He reached out and tried to take the drive, and she pulled it away. He gave her a petulant frown.
“I’ll take care of this, babe,” she said as she tucked it into her jeans pocket and leaned up to kiss his pout away. It was so hard to not bite the moron, but she resisted. All that was on the drive were some video clips for a porn audition tape one of the other girls at the strip club wanted her opinion on. Lana thought she needed some work.
Lana was also hungry and it was shortening her temper. Saturday night was the busiest night of the week at the club and as a succubus Lana fed well on the sexual energy. But she had begged the night off for this chance to break into MI. She had planned on working last night and bringing someone home for a heavier feed to tide her over. But once decided on the plan Senán had become fucking nervous and clingy and had wanted to stay with her. Since he tended to be a possessive asshole when she stripped she could not take him to the club, so she had had to take off Friday night, too. Only her status as a top-earning dancer kept her employed this week.
Too bad it was doing nothing to feed her.
The elevator doors slid open and cold air rushed in, making Lana think there might really be servers down here as they stepped out. A long, blank hallway stretched out on either side, arcing away from
them seemingly in a circle of naked concrete. The pull of the rift was no stronger – which was odd; if they had gotten closer it should have increased – but it had changed direction, coming from behind the elevator now.
Senán was looking up and down the hall. “So… which way?”
Lana turned right, figuring they only had the two directions, and strode with purpose down the featureless passage. She did not look behind her, but smirked with satisfaction when she heard Senán’s quick footsteps rushing to catch up.
The hall was lit at infrequent intervals by ugly fluorescent lights – apparently they were on some sort of weekend power saving plan down here. She moved from pool to pool of yellow-green light in the concrete hallway and was reminded of the stone corridors of the Unseelie court she called home. With all the Unseelie fae in the building it was a comparison that did not make her comfortable, that made her painfully aware that she only had a moron ignorant of his true heritage to stand by her. If they chose to hunt her in these halls there was little he would do to protect her. She was pretty sure Senán would piss himself and run if he knew what was really upstairs.
No, her patron, her Unseelie prince, her protection in the corridors of the court, was gone. She mourned for her sense of safety, even though she did not mourn the man. She had only her cunning and her knives to protect her, now. She flexed her forearms slightly, feeling the reassuring grip of her wrist sheaths hidden under glamour and the sleeves of her jacket. It took some fancy maneuvering to keep Senán from noticing them – unlike her he was a full-blooded sidhe and would be able to feel by touch through her glamour, even if he could not see through it. If he felt them she would have to come up with a song and dance to explain them, but as the blades were sidhe steel and an iridescent, silvery gold color not found in mortal metals she did not want to mess with it. Oh, he would believe whatever bullshit she fed him – he was an idiot, after all. But he had smart friends, and she did not want them asking him smart questions when he talked to them about it, which he would because he was an idiot.
They came to a set of glass doors on their left and through them Lana could see row upon row of rectangular boxes with blinking lights and miles of cables streaming out behind it all in a river of plastic-coated color. Cold air leaked out, tickling her hands and cheeks. Senán swiped his card over the box beside the door and pulled the door open, letting the chill escape in a rush. Lana frowned. The pull of the rift was not coming from inside. She turned away and kept moving down the hall. It was coming from her right.
“Where are you going?”
“Trust me,” she said over her shoulder.
“But the servers are in here.”
She stopped and turned around. “Jeremy, would you just trust me?”
He looked confused but let the door fall closed and followed her. “What’s this way?”
“Something good.”
“Better be,” he muttered.
She ignored him. The pull was getting no stronger. Very strange. But a few hundred more feet brought them to another door on the right, the interior wall. This door had no windows, was simply blank steel with a swipe box beside it. But when she stopped she could feel the weight of wards all around the door, and shifted to her magical sight. They were wickedly complex and looked to her poorly trained eye like there may even have been more than one magician behind them. Shit. What was she going to…?
Senán reached past her while she was thinking, swiped his card and opened the door in one practiced motion.
“Fuck!” she yelped. The wards exploded, shooting like stars to their caster…
He flinched. “Jesus, what?”
Lana waited another moment, but nothing else happened. “Just get in,” she said, pushing him ahead of her into the dark room. If there were going to be any more surprises she wanted them to blow up on his idiotic ass. They might only have minutes, now.
“What the fuck was that all about?” he demanded, the whine back in his voice.
She set her teeth against it. “Just feel for the light switch.” She could have told him he tripped a silent alarm or something, but she did not want him freaking out. Not now. Because when they stepped into the room, the pull of the rift changed, and she knew why it had been so strange before.
It had been shielded.
The lights came up with a soft click and she moved past Senán’s body, the pull overwhelming. Of course it was shielded – no fae could be in the building with a rift this strong and think straight if it had not been. The room was huge and circular, which explained the shape of the hallway, and looked like it took up most of the central footprint of the office tower. The floor was mostly just an outer walkway with a railing all around, and below that was exposed bedrock.
And like an open wound in the bedrock was the rift.
Lana stepped forward until the railing stopped her, silent in awe. She had heard tales of rifts like this, but never in her two centuries had she dreamed of seeing one. It was over a hundred feet long and close to thirty feet wide, an utterly massive tear in the veil. She stared past the licking flames into the darkness within and gasped when she saw the bedrock beneath it. The rift had not finished forming!
“Oh my god, what is that?”
This close, she guessed even Senán could not help but feel the pull of the nascent rift. But she ignored him. If it was still forming, that might explain the power flux this morning. She had convinced Senán he’d had the mother of all hangovers. But what could Midir need with a rift? What did it have to do with…?
“Lana?”
“Shut up, I need to think.”
“But…”
Oh, what she would give for the ability to compel right now! “Jeremy, seriously. Shut. The. Fuck. Up.” That whine could shatter her thoughts like glass.
He sulked, but it was in a panicked fashion. She had seconds to think, at most.
The rift. The fae. The iron. The glamour. Her mind churned, pulling out the puzzle pieces and trying desperately to put them into a picture she could see. What was Midir doing? Senán shifted beside her, and prodded her memory to supply another piece. The princes.
Lana felt like her whole being was a bell that had just been rung. Two faerie courts, two ruling Sons of Dagda, two heirs removed; one by murder, the other by kidnapping. Two courts destabilized. She looked up at the ceiling, her thoughts moving to the fae above them, and her heart sped up as one more piece emerged in her mind.
Samhain was two nights away. The veil between the worlds would thin naturally. This rift would open on its own like a flower.
What was gathered upstairs was no office party.
It was an army.
“Lana, what’s happen…” Senán began again.
“Babe, we have to get…”
The door swung open, and Midir the Proud burst in with another sidhe she did not know. She froze, afraid to breathe, but even in her fear something about the stranger struck her as familiar. His face, his eyes – but where did she know him from?
“Dad?” The whine had been replaced by a distinctive cracking tremble.
Lana glanced over at Senán. The whites showed all around his eyes, and his hands shook at his sides. He was breaking. Useless.
“Jeremy, what the hell are you doing down here?” Midir demanded, and then his eyes fell on her. His face flushed with rage. “You idiot! How dare you bring…”
And that was her cue to run. Her knives were useless against a prince as ancient and powerful as Midir, so she used the only other weapon she had at hand. Senán screamed as she gripped him by his right arm and whipped him through the air with every ounce of strength her half-blooded body possessed – which was still quite a bit, considering her mother was only a sweetheart faerie. His tall body flew sideways and crashed into both men, bringing all three down in a tangled heap. But Lana did not stay to enjoy the havoc she had caused, instead flitting out the door with Senán’s pass key now firmly held in her hand.
She made it to the elevator running fl
at out in a blur of speed and sent out a prayer of thanks to whoever was listening that it was still in the basement, then swiped access to the lobby. Damn Senán for insisting on driving his own car! But that was a minor matter. First she had to get out of this building. She had not seen a stairwell, but that meant nothing – they had only gone one way down the hall. Both sidhe lords were faster and stronger than she was. They could race up a stairwell and cut her off before the elevator made the lobby. If she could just make it out into the city she stood a chance.
The elevator doors opened onto the quiet lobby. She stepped out, keeping her demeanor casual, and walked with her heart hammering in her mouth past the rest of the elevator bays and towards the bank of glass doors. Just her and the two guards sitting encircled by the central desk. She relaxed with each step. Through the doors and down the drive, and she was certain she could coax a lift from a passing driver – all she needed was eye contact with someone who found her desirable and they would-
A door burst open behind her, and she ducked around the last corner before the doors. Expensive shoes crossed the polished stone of the lobby floor in rapid steps. “We have an intruder in the building,” Midir’s voice echoed in the tall space. “A woman, petite with long dark hair and a dark jacket…”
Lana did not catch any more with her sensitive hearing. She was walking just short of a run, putting as much distance between her and Midir as she could, but her path was taking her deeper into the building. She needed… she needed… her mind whirled, trying to formulate a plan as she peered into office doors. Nothing useful came to her sight. She needed… she clipped her elbow on a pressure handle and bit back a curse. And then she paused. It was a fire door to one of the stairwells.
She needed to be higher.
She pushed her way into the stairwell and ran at full speed up the stairs, her footfalls blending into each other in wild echoes. If she was seen coming down from one of the upper floors it would raise less suspicion than if she was spotted on the ground floor. She picked a floor at random and came to a stop, pausing to catch her breath. She was not huffing and puffing; stripping was an athletic job and she was in good shape. But she did not want to attract any attention until she was ready.
