“He and our associate, Col. Barnett, are asleep in the lavish suite of rooms your… people housed us in,” Harmond said and smiled, trying to get into his role as ambassador.
“Agent Messner was very tired,” Laston said concerned over my reaction. “And Col. Barnett seemed to be under the influence of a drug, so Master Ellorn allowed them to return to sleep.”
“Okay, so this is an overture only, then,” I said to the General. “I won’t be making any decisions without Messner’s approval over this situation. As I said, you’ve already tried to kill them once.”
“And that was a supremely stupid decision,” Harmond said matter-of-factly, “made by supremely stupid individuals trying to cope with a situation well beyond their means. I assure you, Lord Daybreak, that will not happen again. The US Army, nor any other branch of the military, condones such actions—” He started his rant with righteous ire and fire of his own, but I cut him off quickly.
“Save the indignation for the courtroom, General. I’m not interested. You can assume I know at least some of what sat on Pennington’s computers. It’ll be safer for you.” He stared at me, slacked-jawed, unsure of himself again. “Have you bothered in any way to investigate the conspiracy that General Pennington was involved in?”
Harmond exhaled slowly, stalling, getting ready to lie to me. Even Byrnes could see it coming. Apparently, Byrnes’ clamped-shut eyes and gently shaking head were enough to warn the General in time.
“We have,” Colonel Morelli interjected politely, only mildly surprising his superior officer. “But a man with such powerful allies and such a diverse and, frankly, top secret background is difficult to investigate.”
“I’m certain you can find a way to manage,” I said mildly. “Because you really don’t want me nosing around in your business.”
Ellorn stepped into the room leading Lt. Brinks pushing a small cart through the door and into the corner. “Hi, Ellorn,” Jimmy said as Ellorn turned the corner.
“Good evening, First! Good evening, Lord! Would either of you care for refreshments?” Ellorn asked cheerfully, climbing steps set against the rear of the table. I had to lean past the edge of the table to see them but they came in two sets. The first set of steps curved up to the set of the chair, attaching by its weight. The second set spiraled similarly in the opposite direction and attached to the tabletop.
“Oh, that is cool,” I remarked. “Yes, please, Ellorn, any chance you’ve got coffee? That is a clever design. Is that one of y’all’s?”
“Lt. Brinks, do you have coffee?” Ellorn asked crossing to the center corner of the table between the Colonel and Jimmy. “And each room in the Palace seems to be equipped in something to help with size differences, Lord Daybreak.”
“Yes, Lord, freshly brewed,” Lt. Brinks called out from the corner. Zero jumped up and ran off the edge of the table near Ellorn and jerked lightly on Brink’s pant leg.
“Lieutenant, we have guests,” Zero said quietly to Brinks when he looked down at the brownie. Still looking perplexed at the little sprite, Zero went further and explained, “There are protocols to follow. Please answer the questions in the order asked.” Brinks seemed to understand and half-turned to the table.
“My apologies, Master Ellorn,” he said with a slight bow of his head. “Yes, we do have coffee, freshly brewed and enough for everyone.”
“Thank you, Lt. Brinks,” Ellorn chirped merrily. “Lord Daybreak will take a large mug with three teaspoons of sugar and, if it’s available, a small piece of dark chocolate. First, would care for anything?”
“Coffee, please, Ellorn,” Jimmy said turned half-way in his chair watching Brinks. “Lieutenant, is that a bottle of brandy down there?”
“Yes, sir,” Brinks answered as he brought two steaming mugs of coffee to the table. “Mr. Borland sent it down this morning and said Lord Daybreak might appreciate it this evening.”
“Ooohh, that does sound good,” I said, sipping at the too hot coffee. “Maybe after the coffee, for me, though. This is very good, Lieutenant, even better than this morning.” Brinks beamed in pride, smiling at me.
“Thank you, sir,” he said.
“General, colonel, would you care for anything?” Ellorn asked. They both watched Ellorn with great distrust, the kind you’d give a ventriloquist’s dummy that jumped up on the table and started talking to you.
“Yes, please,” Morelli finally managed. “Two coffees, black, and two waters would be excellent.”
“And I’ll take a shot of that brandy if you don’t mind,” Harmond added a little brusquely.
“Certainly, sir,” Ellorn chirped, turning to see Brinks already pouring their requests. “And for you, Major?”
“The same, please, Ellorn, thank you,” Byrnes said, watching their discomfort with us with amusement.
“So, General Harmond, what do you expect your defense to be?” I asked quietly as Brinks settled mugs and glasses around the table.
“Well, sir,” Harmond started after pausing to sip his coffee to collect his thoughts. “According to both Special Agent Messner and Colonel Echols, you have close to four hundred confessions of unconditional guilt. There isn’t much defense I can do against that unless I can show coercion.”
Glancing at Byrnes, we just sat and waited for the other shoe to drop. It’s not often the defense “attorney” admits to both client and key prosecution witness—one of the victims—that he’ll lose. This guy’s throwing in the towel before he even knows the evidence.
“You see, Lord Daybreak, the problem is,” Harmond started, then exhaled slowly, drumming his fingers on the table and taking a sip of brandy. Stalling poorly while he gained some courage.
“Oh, just spit it out, man,” urged Morelli in a harsh whisper. “He’s just a k—”
“Don’t finish that word!” Byrnes shouted, interrupting the colonel and using himself as a missile to cross the table fast enough to stop him. Brinks was on him with towels to sop up the two water glasses and single coffee mug he managed to spill.
“Wow, I tell ya, it’s the simple things in life that are amazing,” I remarked as I picked Byrnes up off the table and around the brownies, back to his chair. “Are you all right, Major? Any broken glass stuck in anywhere? Bleeding?”
“No glass on the table, Lord,” Brinks said softly.
“No, Lord, I’m fine, thank you,” Byrnes admitted. “Just winded.”
“Amazing that you only hit three, though,” I said, grinning. Seemed to be a perpetual state with me. Checking on Laston and Zero, I asked, “You guys okay? Ellorn?”
“Yes, Lord Daybreak, we’re fine,” Ellorn chirped. “We just don’t understand the nature of Major Byrnes’ action.”
“He was trying to warn the Colonel off from using the word ‘kid’ in reference to me,” I explained to Ellorn, and of course to everyone else in the room. “He is aware that on several occasions, several people have used that particular word to belittle me and use it as a slur. Specifically, several of the last people I killed used that slur in their final epithets. For some reason, I just don’t take kindly to it. Makes me want to show ya just how much this kid can do.”
“However, Colonel Morelli is correct in one sense, General,” Byrnes said. “Please continue. It’s late and Lord Daybreak has had a long day.”
Harmond sighed, still shaken by Byrnes’ excitement. “The problem is, neither of us can afford to have this come to open court and you know it. If a conspiracy of this nature and size were to become public knowledge it would devastate our ability to operate in world theaters. And you as a… Faery Lord cannot allow the nature of your position to become public. Please pardon my candor, we are quite new in dealing with your kind and you have barred our normal lines of information from these types of talks.”
“Lord Daybreak is the first and only of his kind,” Jimmy said simply. “You are not the only one to have this problem. Perhaps the first step is to learn carefully those lessons learned by those who have earned his en
mity.”
“Yeah,” I said, off-hand, then a lot more devilishly to them, “Fuller missed quite a show tonight. Be sure to tell him the Queens showed up unexpectedly and that you got to see them. That’ll really tick ‘im off. Especially that you’re here of all places and he’s not.”
“Um, where exactly is ‘here’?” Harmond asked, obliquely looking about the room.
“Didn’t Messner or Mike explain?” I asked incredulously. “Oh, well, from the hotel in Dublin, I brought you back to the manor you drove to this afternoon, the one Gordon kicked you out of, remember?” Harmond and Morelli both nodded assent. “Middle of a field, well-lit, with a few hundred, brightly clothed people milling around, right? Then this big stone thing appeared in the middle and the grass got a little greener and the light in the field changed? That was a knowe, a part of my realm brought to Earth so people could visit it. Mike and his men let you stay in the knowe long enough to hear the translation of the monuments then they brought you here and left you in Ellorn’s care. You passed from the knowe into Gilán. So at the moment, you are in my Palace in Gilán.”
“We are…” Harmond gulped at the thought of it, “no longer in Ireland?”
I shook my head slowly. “No.” Watching them as they worked their way through the idea was quite humorous. “What did you think it meant to be a faery lord if it didn’t mean you traveled to a faery world to see him, gentlemen? And while I’m on the subject, why would you think that I wouldn’t be willing to tell the world who I am?”
“Our advisors say that the Unseelie Accords prohibit the Faery from announcing their existence publicly.”
“But as we found out tonight, the Accords cannot bind me.”
“What does that mean, exactly?” Morelli asked, his eyes squinted and thin eyebrows knitted tightly together. It gave him a severe look to his mid-fifties face.
“Hmm. I would have thought that rather obvious. If the Unseelie Accords cannot bind me, then anything that the Accords prohibit is perfectly within my discretion to do. That is precisely what that means, Colonel Morelli.”
“You have no governing body?” Harmond asked.
“I am my governing body, General. I gotta say, guys, your lack of grasp for the obvious is not impressing me.”
“It’s not impressing me, either,” Harmond said. “So basically what I’m dealing with is a seventeen year old man with extremely powerful abilities who is very ticked off at the United States government. You aren’t bound under any of the same customs and conditions as others of your kind.”
I grunted softly and said, “That last statement is more complex than you think, General. Specifically, no, I am not bound in the sense that, say, Mr. Fuller or the Faery Queens would use the word. I am however bound to customs and conditions in the same manner that you are, sir. That is the reason I do not take kindly to being treated poorly. There is a very small limit to what I can do over there because I chose to follow certain conditions and restrictions. For instance, I don’t invade people’s privacy. I don’t invade military bases and kidnap personnel just for fun. I have already paid my expected quarterly income taxes, personal as well as business. In short, I am a model United States citizen.”
I was on a roll and I wasn’t going to let up on them. “And yet, when my brothers and I just happen to look into my First’s family’s home, we find evidence of blood magic. That led us to where Pennington and his men were trying to locate my home. There was also a blood mage trying to locate us using two different spells of particular nasty violence. Now, tell me, how does this model, seventeen-year-old citizen deserve being attacked by over four hundred soldiers? What could I have done in seventeen years to have become so hated?”
“Your brothers, perhaps?” Morelli suggested weakly.
“Far too few people even know my brothers exist, even Peter,” I said. “We are becoming more well known as a group as we act together. They were after me, specifically. I have records that show three separate searches for a house in my name at the county records office. All three searches failed, though. The satellites they aimed at the vicinity could never seem to lock onto my house for some reason. They were about to just overrun the territory. Invade innocent people’s houses, just to find mine.” I looked at Byrnes. He watched Morelli closer than Harmond, barely giving him a glance.
“Wouldn’t you say that a reasonable but far too quick synopsis, Major?” I asked him, wanting to see where the distraction took him.
“Yes, sir,” Major Byrnes answered me, meeting my gaze quickly before returning to Colonel Morelli. “Details may change the tenor of individual cases on our end, but do little to change the outcome.”
“Thanks, Major,” I said curtly, not quite seeing his fascination, but I wasn’t willing to dip down into their minds just yet. “Can’t have that, General. Too many innocent lives would have been lost. Those people are mostly farmers, General, who’ve worked their lands hard for years. I’d only been there for eight, nine months, by that time. I didn’t feel that they deserved to die for that. So I stopped the forces aimed to do that.
“Now, when I complain to law enforcement officials about this, it’s by pure chance that I catch my normal sources with their pants down. Nothing bad, really, just a changing of the shifts, but unfortunately at the time, I couldn’t wait and they weren’t equipped to handle the problem I had at the time anyway. Someone else had to come in and that turned out to be quite fortuitous for me and this is where I tie the ‘bound to customs and conditions’ into all of this and bring this rant together.
“You see, after we went to the camp where our evidence pointed to blood magic, we found the owner of the land driven quite mad by the blood mage and a battalion’s equipment if not its men being unconstitutionally billeted on his land. When the attending General was confronted, he made no attempt to stand down, even when faced with complete failure of his mission. He lost his head for that right.
“That was one of my decisions to not just stand around and let my government officials do something about a problem that was occurring in my backyard. How, exactly, would the County Sheriff’s office have handled the Army? And very likely, they’d have thought me a crackpot!”
Harmond tried to say something, but I cut him off. “I’m not through yet! So I call in the two federal law enforcement groups that I have some pull with and while neither of them knows exactly what to do, both of them stepped up and come in to help. Well, one of them does, the other one is coming in to play games as I soon found out. Still, I leave these now-dependent soldiers in their hands and though I really don’t have any reason to do so, I check back hours later and find out that someone from your branch of five-sided idiots has landed there and claimed preeminence. His plan was to subsume the whole group back into the military and forget the whole thing ever happened. Does that sound like a good idea to you, General Harmond? Or you, Colonel?”
“Unfortunately, I can understand why it was considered,” Harmond said honestly.
“Yeah, I bet. It solved a lot of problems for you guys, didn’t it? Except the most obvious ones. You missed those completely. I had to point those out to Echols. So Colonel Black-Ops went for his next option, forcing me to once again choose to step outside of those customs and conditions of a model citizen, or maybe going steps beyond them. I removed the soldiers before he was able to kill them rather than stand by and let it happen.
“So, the moral of this story is to point out quite strongly that I am willing to live with the same terms and conditions as are locally invoked provided they are fairly enforced. But I will be pushed only so far before I push back.”
“So these men aren’t your prisoners?” Morelli asked, confused.
“No, they are definitely prisoners awaiting trial, Colonel,” I said. “But they are here under my protection. Once I’m certain they won’t be summarily shot before they even have a chance to say anything, I am more than happy to return them to whoever is actually responsible for them. Some of them are merely guilty
of being supremely stupid, while others have more serious crimes to answer for.”
“So… you aren’t actually asking for treason on everyone?” Harmond asked cautiously.
“No,” I admitted for the first time, though I’d known pretty much all along. “I will demand treason on one case only, posthumously. The rest can be decided later on a per case basis.” Byrnes’ relief was evident, like a smoke clearing the room, the tension leaving his body and his aura was blatant.
“Look at him!” Jimmy exclaimed laughingly, pointing at Byrnes. “He’s almost a puddle on the floor!”
“He’s been worried about his men, Jimmy,” I said mildly, watching Harmond and Morelli as I spoke. It was an odd triangle of watchers, me on them, them on him and him on me. “The Army has been taking care of him for a long time and in a lot of ways, he’s been a good soldier for them. When they turned their backs on him, tried to kill him for doing what he thought he was supposed to be doing. His men still looked to him for support, though, so being the good officer that he is and staying as within the lines as he could, he kept his act together, saw to the needs of his men first, and worried about himself second. I believe the penalty for treason is death by firing squad?”
“Only in times of war, Lord Daybreak,” Morelli corrected me. “Mostly now it’s life in prison. I say that like it happens every day…”
“Besides, there was only one man trying to put his version of the United States in place,” I said firmly. “Everybody else was either just scared to death of us or too stupid to know better. Let the punishment fit the crime more appropriately.”
“That is quite a relief, Lord Daybreak,” General Harmond said, clasping his hands together on the table in front of him. Morelli mirrored his motions almost immediately and nodded, looking at me to gauge my sincerity.
“And now that you’ve gotten an agreement in principle from me, let’s call it a night,” I said tiredly, standing. “It’s later than you think and morning announces itself prominently in the Palace.” Jimmy and Byrnes both snickered at me.
Sons (Book 2) Page 66
