“I should note, Mr. Woodrow, that I have a significantly greater degree of access to the Vancouver Unseelie Court’s finances than you do,” I told him quietly. “One of my requests when this file arrived on my desk was that a Covenant-bound neutral auditor review Lord Sherburn’s files.”
In this case, that had meant borrowing people from the accounting firm used by Vancouver’s shifter population. They’d been inside the Covenants of Silence but not involved in fae politics.
“So?” Woodrow demanded.
“Lord Sherburn agreed to that review immediately,” I said. “It was clear in my communication with him that I was requesting an unusual degree of transparency on his part but that he valued peace with Lady Belrose above the usual privacies of a fae court.”
I shook my head at the Seelie before he could try to interrupt.
“There is no evidence that Lord Sherburn or his people received any of the money that Vadim Argyll stole.”
Woodrow looked rebellious but then sighed.
“Would we be able to see the auditors’ high-level report, at least?” he asked.
“Lord Sherburn has agreed to provide a copy to Lady Belrose,” I told him. “However, before anyone starts cheering…” I turned back to Clarkson with a grim smile.
“Regardless of Lord Sherburn and his Court’s knowledge or benefit from Argyll’s actions, the fact remains that he was Lord Sherburn’s man. Argyll is of your Court and bound by Fealty, which leaves Sherburn with a responsibility for his actions and his crimes.”
Now I had everyone’s attention.
“It is not equitable to demand that Lord Sherburn bear the full responsibility for a theft he did not benefit from,” I noted. “It is also, however, true that Sherburn and his Court do bear some responsibility for Argyll’s actions.”
Of course, along with everyone’s attention came everyone’s rebellious glares, and I smiled at them.
“My suggestion is that Lord Sherburn compensate Lady Belrose for half of the Seelie Court’s portion of the loss,” I concluded. Technically, after all, this wasn’t a binding arbitration.
Of course, refusing the suggestions of the Queen’s Vassal tended to result in pointed commentary from the Queen herself. No one wanted to be on the receiving end of Mabona being sarcastic.
“I also suggest that both Courts combine their information on Argyll’s activities and see if they can track him down,” I told them. “If the funds can be retrieved from Argyll, then they should be distributed as per the new ratio applied to the losses.
“Does this seem reasonable?”
They didn’t really have a choice, but both Woodrow and Clarkson seemed relatively mollified. My job wasn’t to make everyone happy…my job was to make sure no one was going to go to war. Minimizing the dissatisfaction was useful, but satisfying everyone wasn’t required.
“I will consult with my lord,” Clarkson told me. “But I believe that should be acceptable.”
“I will speak with my lady as well,” Woodrow agreed. “It should suffice.”
“Thank you for being reasonable,” I replied. “It’s always a pleasure for these conversations to be so straightforward.”
Clarkson chuckled at that, but I wasn’t entirely joking. It wasn’t often that “split the difference” was actually the right solution.
I was about to close out the meeting when my cold iron sense exploded. I could feel our kind’s ancient bane at any distance less than about ten meters—there was no way it was suddenly five feet from me.
The second Seelie Gentry had just dropped a bag on the table and opened it. It was linked to a pocket of Between…and it held a cold iron–laced bomb!
I’d liked it a lot better when my abilities were a surprise to my enemies. They’d tended to be a surprise to me at the time as well, but using an enchanted bag to sneak a cold iron bomb up to me wasn’t something the Masked Lords would have done if they didn’t know I was an Iron Seeker—though it had also got the weapon past my bodyguards outside.
“Down!” I bellowed, force flashing out from my hand as I tried to close the bag. Everyone was staring at me as I moved and I threw out force with my other hand.
Clarkson, especially, could have stopped me if she’d been prepared. The Gentry could probably have resisted my power, too. I was rushing—but I was rushing with enough power to send everyone around the table crumpling to the floor as I failed to close the bag.
Against almost any other device, I could have used my Gift of Force to block the explosion. Cold iron, however, would go right through any force field I raised. What I could do, though, was hold something else in place.
Like a table that wouldn’t normally stop an explosion on its own. I started to flip the conference table into the air, sending the bomb sliding away from me.
And then the bomb went off with the table mere centimeters into the air. I kept it moving, absorbing the force of the bomb as it went off, holding the table together against the iron hammering into it with the force of my will.
I was fast enough. Somehow, I got the table rotated under the exploding bomb to use it as a reinforced barrier to stop the cold iron shrapnel. Some debris still scythed around the room, and Clarkson’s Gentry companion went down.
But he looked like he’d live. The bomb had failed…and now I had a bomber to deal with. I was turning toward the Seelie Gentry when an unfamiliar popping sound echoed through the room.
Repeatedly.
And three tranquilizer darts materialized in my throat and chest.
“Nobody move, please,” the young Gentry said calmly as I staggered. He studied me for a moment, then fired a fourth tranquilizer dart into me.
They weren’t succeeding in knocking me out, but they were doing a damn good job of disabling my powers and my ability to think as I stumbled, half-paralyzed.
“I don’t want to hurt anyone else. I’m here for Kilk—”
Everyone in the room had forgotten my sword. It had slid off the table when I’d reacted and skidded across the floor—landing by Ocean Woodrow’s feet.
Even fae tended to forget how fast Gentry were. Woodrow kicked the sword up into his hand as his friend started speaking and was across the room in the time it took to start saying my name.
The tranquilizer pistol went flying and the Gentry dodged backward. He was going for another weapon…but he never made it.
Ocean Woodrow cut off his head with a single blow.
6
The rented conference room was very, very quiet.
“I need to call Eric,” I said softly as I looked at the wrecked table, the wounded Unseelie and the dead Seelie. The tranquilizers were already fading from my system, but everything was still a bit foggy. “We need a cleanup team and a doctor.”
Clarkson was already at her companion’s side. The glamor that made her look young and beautiful was fading, revealing the natural appearance of a hag—that of a woman in her late eighties, withered and worn with years the fae hadn’t necessarily experienced.
From the glow around her hands, she was one of the roughly half of all hags with healing magic. Her companion was in good hands, but a doctor wouldn’t hurt.
“You do that,” Woodrow told me. He laid my sword on one of the chairs. “I apologize for borrowing your sword, Master Kilkenny. I know it is a…touchy matter for the Wild Hunt.”
“It is,” I agreed. “But seeing as how you just saved my life, I think the only response I have is ‘You’re welcome for the loan.’”
That got a small forced smile out of the Seelie as I reclaimed my sword and returned it to my dimensional storage unit. As I did so, I was pulling out my phone and dialing Eric, the city’s Keeper.
The Keeper was in charge of the neutral ground amongst fae, the Manor. He stood outside the Court politics and was, therefore, in charge of the small group of professionals tasked with making sure that the Covenants of Silence were kept.
“Eric, it’s Jason,” I said quietly. “I need backup at my meeting. So
meone just tried to bomb us and drag me off to the Masked Lords.”
The gnome on the other end of the line was silent for several seconds.
“Well, fuck,” he said bluntly. “I can have people there in about thirty minutes. Can you cover that long?”
“We’d already screwed any video or audio recordings, and I think the room is soundproofed enough to cover the bomb,” I told him. “I’ll talk fast if anyone has questions, but the room is booked for another three hours.”
“On our way.”
Eric hung up on me and I turned my attention back to Ocean Woodrow. He was kneeling over the other Seelie Gentry’s body, gently patting at the dead man’s clothes as if to sort out the inevitable mess.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’ve known Harrison Avery for longer than you’ve been alive, Master Kilkenny,” Woodrow said very quietly. “We weren’t close, but I’d have called us friends for over two decades. I…would never have thought he’d turn on me like that. What the hell?”
“I have powerful enemies,” I told Woodrow. “Their reach is long and their resources are vast. I won’t say every man has his price…but it seems my enemies found Avery’s.”
Woodrow inhaled sharply and nodded.
“We’ll need to bring his body back to Vancouver,” he said. “I will need to inform Lady Belrose of his actions and his fate.” Fae or not, he was on the verge of shock. “This was…”
“This is civil war,” I said. “It’s messy and ugly and I hate it, Mr. Woodrow. We’ll find the people behind this. They’ll pay. I promise you that.”
He nodded grimly and looked back up at me.
“I’ll hold you to that, Master Kilkenny.”
Eric von Radach, Keeper of Calgary’s Manor, was a gnome. Roughly three and a half feet tall even in platform shoes, thick white hair, recessed eyes and a hooked nose made him one of the fae who found moving around mortal society somewhat difficult.
Despite that, he arrived with the cleanup team himself. They were all casually dressed, nothing to draw attention to the half-dozen fae as they swept into the conference room. The apparent leader of the team, a tired-looking older man with a faint green tinge to his skin, studied the space for several long seconds, then gestured.
The glamor the dryad conjured recreated the room as it had existed before we’d entered. It didn’t replace anything that was lost, but it gave the team a solid idea of where things needed to go back to.
“Nothing ever goes smoothly with you around, does it?” Eric asked me calmly as he studied the room. “Davies, the table’s a write-off. Get a model number from the wreck if you can and text it to Langdon. We should have something he can make look right.”
I shook my head.
“I had the whole arbitration handled, a relatively agreeable solution decided—and then someone working for the Masked Lords pulls a cold iron bomb out of a Between pocket.”
The gnome grunted. He opened a pocket similar to the one Harrison Avery had just accessed, and pulled out a chair that matched the ones wrecked in the meeting room.
“How many chairs, Davies?” he asked.
“Three are repairable here,” the dryad replied, watching two of his subordinates do just that. “The other five are wrecks.”
“All right,” Eric said. A gesture opened his pocket wider. “Toss the wrecks in there while I work on seeing what Langdon can pull together. There were only two in the warehouse.”
It had taken me weeks to learn to create a pocket of Between I could store my gear in. Gnomes did it instinctively and could do far more complicated things than I could. They could, for example, create a shared warehouse that Langdon, one of Calgary’s other gnomes, could stock with whatever furniture the cleanup team needed.
A gnome could also create a pocket someone else could access.
“I guess it’s not a surprise that the Masked Lords have at least one gnome,” I said quietly. “Andrell had gnome-forged arms, after all.”
“They’re the leaders and right hands of courts across the world,” Eric pointed out. “If Oberis asked me to make him a portable pocket, I wouldn’t ask him what it was for.” He snorted. “Well, I might now. It’s been a messy year.”
“You’ve got this under control?” I asked, watching the team go through the room with practiced efficiency.
“Completely,” he confirmed as he checked his text messages. “Just waiting on Langdon to find the right table. We’ll have the place looking like nothing happened in twenty minutes. When do you have to give it back?”
“A bit over two hours now. You have time,” I said. “Eric…what do we do?”
“You volunteered as bait, kid,” Eric pointed out. “This is what that looks like. The Masks won’t be coming at you with an army from the front, not unless they run out of other ideas. Mercs and bombers? That seems about what I was expecting.”
“Wonderful.” I shook my head. “I’ll have to check in on people. Let me know if you find anything unusual in the clean-up.”
“Will do,” the Keeper told me. “The real clues, though, will be back in Vancouver. I’d put a bug in Lady Belrose’s ear, if I were you.”
I sighed and nodded. My job required me to arbitrate between Fae Lords. That didn’t mean they weren’t still terrifying to me.
“Lady Belrose,” I greeted the Fae Lord who ran Vancouver’s Court as politely as possible. I was hoping it was easier to avoid giving offense over a phone call than in person. My experiences with Fae Lords were mixed, after all.
“This is Jason Kilkenny.”
“I know who you are,” she said sharply. “Your decision should be carried to me by my representatives. What is the purpose of this contact?”
“Harrison Avery attempted to murder everyone at the meeting,” I told her flatly. If she wanted to cut the Gordian knot of fae conversation, well, two of us could do that.
There were several seconds of silence.
“That is impossible. Avery is one of my longest-serving retainers. What happened?”
“He pulled a cold iron bomb after I’d laid out my decision,” I told her. “He’d concealed it Between and was probably relying on my iron sense to preserve me, since he was apparently tasked to deliver me to the Masked Lords.”
“The Masked Lords,” she repeated. “They’re gone, Kilkenny. Calebrant defeated them.”
“Oh, I wish,” I sighed. “Calebrant defeated them, yes, but they have merely regrouped. Lord Andrell was one of them. I presumed you had been briefed on that.”
The call was silent.
“I do not necessarily, Master Kilkenny, assume everything that the High Court says is true,” she warned me. “The Masked Lords are a bogeyman that has been used to justify a thousand sins over the last few decades. Why should I regard this as any different?”
“Ask Woodrow,” I replied. “Then see if you can find out how they got to Avery. Right now, Lady Belrose, I would worry about the security of your Court, not conspiracies in the High Court.”
“You are extraordinarily naïve, young Noble,” she told me with a chuckle. “From that alone, I think I can believe you for now. I will investigate our Avery. I will learn who turned one of my most loyal servants against a Vassal of our Queen.
“But I do this for my own reasons, Kilkenny. Don’t expect updates.”
The call cut off before I could say anything more and I sighed. If nothing else, the Vancouver Court probably wasn’t going to be a source of future threats. Even if Belrose was a Masked Lord herself, Avery’s actions had embarrassed her.
And the last thing Fae Lords tolerated was being embarrassed.
7
I was home even later than usual, trading off bodyguard teams when I left the conference room that had become a battlefield. The inevitable cascade follow-on from that occupied my entire afternoon and evening, and it was easily past eleven by the time I arrived at my apartment building.
“You guys go check in with the rest of the team,” I told my pa
ssengers and escorts. “I don’t think I’m going to get jumped between the parking lot and my apartment.”
“You realize that just by saying that, you made sure we have to escort you?” Isaac MacAlister told me. The dark-haired Scot Hunter was grinning as he said it…but he was also entirely serious.
“Fine,” I told him. “Send Alissa up to check in and you can walk me to my apartment door. If you insist, MacAlister.”
The bodyguards chuckled…but Alissa Perry headed upstairs and MacAlister fell in beside me as I headed down into the basement.
My Queen had called my apartment “a hole in the ground” to my face once, and she wasn’t entirely wrong. It was the end unit in the building’s basement, down a set of stairs and along a windowless corridor.
No monsters jumped from the shadows to ambush us and MacAlister left me at my door with a grin and a slight bow.
I wasn’t sure what my neighbors thought of my stream of assorted gorgeous men and women escorts. If they didn’t know I lived with Mary, they probably thought I was an escort or something.
I shook my head as I stepped into the apartment, opening the door quietly in the hope of not waking Mary if she was still up.
“I’m in the kitchen,” she greeted me. “I only got home half an hour ago myself. Can we go one day without kicking up a crisis?”
I stepped around the corner into our tiny kitchen to find that she’d brewed up an entire pot of hot chocolate and was already pouring me a mug.
I was an extraordinarily lucky man.
“To be fair, we had a couple of months with nothing major,” I said as I took the cup. “You’re incredible, you know that?”
“Yup,” she agreed. “Most of today’s bullshit wasn’t even your fault. Cleanup on the asura attack, yeah, but also soothing tensions over a nine-way fistfight at the Lodge.”
The shifters’ Lodge was equivalent to the fae’s Manor, neutral ground between Clans. Fistfights weren’t supposed to happen there—and Calgary only had nine shifter Clans.
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