“For the airport again?” I asked, not realizing until I took the envelope that it was unaddressed.
“Not this time,” Michael said, shaking his head. “The envelope is for you—consider it our payment for your services so far. The package has an address on it—Ink Quill Industries; they’re in the northeast near the airport, so delivering there shouldn’t be a problem.”
I glanced at the address on the label. My slowly growing awareness of the locations of things in the city agreed with his assessment of the office’s location. A faint whiff of a spicy scent I couldn’t quite make out caught my nose before the cold wind swept it away.
Sliding the package into my truck, I opened the envelope. It contained cash—crisp, clean twenty- and fifty-dollar bills totaling about a week’s worth of my salary.
“A bribe to keep my mouth shut?” I asked.
“Compensation for services rendered,” Michael disagreed. “We reward those who work with us, Jason.”
If everyone rewarded those who worked with them like the Enforcers and Oberis, I almost didn’t need to work for Direct!
I pocketed the money and shrugged. “All right, I’ll see your package delivered,” I told him. He nodded and returned to his gray sedan with the stylized K symbol decaled onto its wing mirrors.
With a sigh, I got back into my truck, turning the heat up to beat back the city’s vicious cold. On one hand, vampires and fae lords, and on the other, a day job and a “police” force all too eager to exploit said job for their own purposes.
If the vampires didn’t kill me, job stress might.
Ink Quill Industries turned out to be a midsized building that looked like it contained a factory, a warehouse and an office, buried in the middle of a small industrial and warehousing district south of the airport. The name of the company was on the side of a large quill-pen logo with stylized drops of red ink on the tip.
The parking lot was all but empty and it looked like the factory was shut down. I pulled in next to a blue compact car and eyed the snow that covered the parking lot. Someone had gone through at some point with a snowblower and cleared off most of it, but it still looked frozen and slippery.
With a sigh, I pulled my gloves on and grabbed my clipboard and the delivery package. Whatever else moving up to Calgary had taught me, it was teaching me a little bit of tolerance for cold.
Not that said tolerance would stop me bitching about the cold anytime soon, and I was cursing under my breath as I half-ran across the slippery parking lot to the office door and ducked inside.
The heavily tinted glass with its silkscreen quill pens had kept me from realizing it was one of those two-door setups, with an interior door a secretary has to buzz you through. Of course, to add insult to confusion, the inner doors were also silkscreened and heavily tinted, and I could barely see through well enough to tell that there was no one at the front desk.
There was a buzzer by the locked inner door, however, and I hit that. I heard it sound on the other side of the glass, faintly. I waited a minute or so and pushed the buzzer again.
I was about ready to hit the buzzer for a third time when I finally saw movement on the other side of the glass. A figure, heavily blurred by the tinting, walked up to the front desk and hit a button. The door in front of me clicked and I entered the building.
A young, fair-haired man stood behind the desk in suit pants and a dress shirt. He waved me forward into the office.
“Sorry, I was in the back, trying to set up a print job,” he said cheerfully. “Most of our guys and gals are totally snowed in; they’re not getting anywhere till something radically melts this snow.”
“I have a package for Ink Quill,” I told him, passing him the clipboard.
“Awesome!” He took the clipboard in one hand and offered me his other. “I’m James Langley, the VP of operations and one of only three of us who made it through this spectacular snow dump.”
The man’s enthusiasm shone through even bad news, and I couldn’t help returning his smile as he dashed off an extravagant signature on the clipboard and passed it back to me.
I handed him the box, and he took a quick glance at it.
“I’ve been waiting for this,” he said. “So glad you could make it through this total wreck of a city. Want a tour of the presses? It totally doesn’t look like we’re getting much else done.”
Somehow while he was enthusiastically proclaiming, the box managed to disappear into the desk.
“Presses?” I asked.
“Yeah, we’re a totally radical small independent book-binding and print shop, man,” he explained. “Take special orders for some amazing folks—pamphlets, self-published authors, those sorts of radicals. Helping change the world in our own small way.”
“I’d love to see the place, but I have to get back to our dispatch,” I told him. “Like you said, the city is a bit of a wreck, but the deliveries must go through.”
“‘Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,’” Langley quoted at me, and then laughed at my somewhat blank return look. “I guess that’s the US post service, isn’t it? And it’s just an inscription anyway, if a totally awesome one. Powers speed you; drive safe.”
“And may They guard your hold,” I answered automatically before I realized this theoretically mortal human had just used an inhuman blessing. He winked at me and buzzed the door to allow me out.
“Like I said, we work for some amazing folk,” he told me, and allowed me to flee to my courier truck, where I found myself huddling in on myself for warmth as it warmed up and I thought.
There were humans who knew about the inhuman world—I was pretty sure that was part of how we kept our presence secret—but I’d assumed most were like Bill. Bill knew something was going on and was not unwilling to help if favors were called in, but he didn’t know or want to know everything.
Langley was clearly sufficiently “in the know” to either know or guess that I wasn’t human, and to know a blessing most inhumans would respond to instantly. I guess even our world needed its books and pamphlets, and a small print press would be the perfect size for the sort of quantities we would need.
I started the truck into motion, both intrigued and somewhat disturbed by the thought of a world that had never even occurred to me existed—one of humans recruited into supporting the inhumans and given enough knowledge to be able to do so.
It was a surprisingly strange thought.
13
The rest of the day passed in the calm frenzy inevitable when the roads were horrible and your job mainly involved driving from place to place. I passed at least five separate accidents, but thanks to my fae reflexes and the high quality of the delivery truck’s tires, I made it through my delivery routes an hour or so late but perfectly safe.
I returned home through now mostly clear streets to an email from Oberis, letting me know that he was coordinating several people, and that I should come to the Court tomorrow for five PM. I dashed off a quick reply letting him know I would be there, and moved on to other emails.
The second of these was from Tarvers.
I know you are forbidden to contact us, he began, but nobody has been stupid enough to tell me I can’t contact you.
We’ve dug into the files in Sigridsen’s computer. They’re all majorly encrypted and some pile of gibberish my tech boys fed me to explain why it’s taking so long to get any useful data out of them. From what they have got, we’ve managed to track down two of the cabal’s members—both outsiders brought into the city.
Neither was overly cooperative and both are now dead. One, however, had a quantity of lifesblood in his apartment—if you don’t know what that is, suffice to say it has an ingredient that is highly controlled by the Enforcers.
We are backtracking the feeder’s movements and dealings as best we can, and we think we have some clues as to where he got the ’blood. I’m going to see them followed up, and I wil
l email you again once we know more.
I will be in touch. And call Mary. If anyone counts that as contacting the Clan, I’ll claw them into silence.
I reread the email twice. At least someone was getting somewhere productive with this whole mess. The fact that the shifters had found lifesblood confirmed the suspicion Eric and I had shared. Hopefully, they could track it back to its source.
If we could identify the specific Enforcers who had broken the Covenants and provided heartstone to the vampires, we could get the Magus to punish them. That kind of proof would shake up the whole city, but it would also see the guilty punished—which would probably lead us to the cabal and whatever conspiracy against MacDonald the Queen wanted me to pursue.
Reading the email a fourth time, I decided to obey his last instructions and called Mary. The phone rang several times, and I was beginning to fear I’d either called at a really bad time or she didn’t want to talk to me after all.
Then she answered the phone.
“Hi!” she said breathlessly. “Sorry, you caught me in the middle of something.”
“I can call back later,” I offered, suddenly worried I’d caught her with a guy or something. That thought triggered a spark of an anger and unexpected spasm in my chest.
“No, I was, um, just thinking about you, actually,” Mary said awkwardly. “I wasn’t sure I’d ever hear from you again; Tarvers told me you’d been banned from contacting the Clan.”
Not quite sure what she meant by that, I answered her second comment.
“Tarvers told me to contact you,” I told her. “He said he’d ‘claw into silence’ anyone who counted it as contacting the Clan.”
She chuckled quietly. “I guess he likes you,” she said. “I think he threatened to claw the last guy I was interested in into pieces if he didn’t go away.”
I swallowed. Somehow, the concept of Tarvers as overprotective patriarch of the women of his Clan was...very plausible.
“I do have to ask one question,” Mary said, and her voice was suddenly colder. “Were you only seeing me to use me for information?”
“No,” I said instantly. “That you could help me made it easier to work up the nerve to do so, but it was hardly my only reason. And I never lied to you,” I added.
“So Tarvers said.” Her voice was suddenly warm again. “He said you looked him in the eye and said that, but that you couldn’t explain why not.”
“I have orders from a fae Court,” I said simply. “Just not Oberis. I really can’t say more.”
“I guess,” she answered, and was quiet for a moment. “I’m still pissed at you.”
“I don’t suppose I can blame you,” I said after a moment, feeling small.
We were both quiet for a long moment, and then a hunch struck me.
“Can I buy you dinner to make it up?”
“Good boy,” she said with a soft laugh. “Yes, yes, you can. There’s an Indian restaurant—Namskar’s—about fifteen minutes’ walk north of you. Meet me there in an hour?”
“Tonight?” I asked, surprised by her sudden shift in mood.
“Why not? I had no other plans!”
I mentally shrugged.
“In an hour, then,” I agreed. “I need to change; see you then?”
“Me too,” she said. “See you.”
Shaking my head, I hung up the phone and went looking for some of my nicer clothes.
I’d done a little bit of clothes shopping since being employed and collecting a few payouts for various services, so I managed to come up with nice slacks and a dress shirt to wear underneath my heavy winter jacket.
I quickly showered, shaved and threw on said slacks and shirt before heading out. It was likely to be faster to walk than wait for a bus, but it was a chilly night. Walking briskly through the foggy dark lit by streetlights and car headlights, I managed to stay somewhat not-frozen until I reached the red brick building that contained the restaurant Mary had suggested.
Stepping inside, I found the restaurant was quiet enough that I quickly secured a table for two and managed to shed my winter coat. Looking less like the Calgary winter default of a puffy marshmallow, I settled into my chair and ordered a tea while I waited.
Five minutes after the hour she’d suggested, Mary arrived. Her small form was entirely lost in a padded blue winter coat that hung all the way to her ankles. She saw me and joined me at my table with a brilliant smile that I nearly lost myself in before regaining wits enough to stand up and take her coat.
Under it she wore a tight red sweater and black jeans that accentuated every single curve of her body, and I swear I simply ogled her for a good few seconds before hanging up her coat and accepting her hug hello.
“It’s good to see you,” she said as we took seats opposite each other. “With everything that went down, I wasn’t sure you’d be willing to see me again.”
“Powers, no,” I admitted. “The only reason I hadn’t called was because I was forbidden to talk to the Clan.”
She smiled at me and then glanced down at her menu. We both went through them in companionable silence until we found what we wanted, and put them aside to wait for the waitress.
“I’m sorry for using you for information,” I said quietly after we ordered. “I don’t have a lot of contacts in this city, or I wouldn’t have.”
“We lean on the friends we have,” she told me. “It’s not like you weren’t up-front about what you were asking for. Are you having any luck on your end?”
“Some,” I said cautiously, looking around the restaurant full of humans. “Not sure how much I should talk about it in public—or at all.”
She nodded acceptance of that. “All right, then, tell me about you!”
“What do you want to know?” I responded, fumbling for some acceptable answer.
“Well, tell me about your parents,” she decided.
“My mother was a historian and apparently a changeling, though I didn’t know that till after she passed on,” I told her, speaking quietly enough when mentioning the inhuman parts, I was reasonably sure no one else heard me. “I was raised on a university campus, for all purposes.”
“I’m sorry about your mom,” Mary said impulsively, reaching across the table to squeeze my hand. “How did your dad take it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never known him—no idea if he’s even alive or not. About all I know is that he was true fae.”
The redheaded girl across the table from me shook her head, and I realized she hadn’t let go of my hand. A slight shift on my part and we were holding hands across the table, which she met with a brilliant smile.
“The whole changeling thing is hard for me to grasp,” she admitted, also speaking quietly so we wouldn’t be overhead. “Shifter...genes, for lack of a better word, are much more dominant—any child of a shifter is a shifter, end of story. One reason why there’s so many of us, I guess.”
I nodded. Fae, including changelings, worldwide only had about three quarters the numbers of the shifters, and between fae and shifters, we made up almost two thirds of the inhuman population of the world.
Of course, said population was around a hundred and fifty, maybe a hundred and sixty thousand people all told—a tad less than a quarter of one hundredth of a percent of the world’s population.
Our dinner arrived, interrupting that line of discussion. I finally released Mary’s hand so I could eat, and dug in with ravenous hunger.
After a few minutes of both of us thoroughly demolishing our food—both of our species had highly active metabolisms, after all—I eyed Mary across the table and snuck my hand out onto the table. I didn’t quite take hers, but I definitely offered mine.
She quickly slid her hand into mine with that same brilliant smile.
“What about you?” I asked. “What’s your family like?”
“Well, there’s Clementine, the doctor, who everyone in the Clan looks up to,” she started. “There’s Mom, the dire wolf shifter from Ireland�
��I’ve mentioned her. She passed on when Clementine and I were still kids.”
She was quiet for a moment, probably reflecting on the similarities to how her mother had died and the current situation with the vampire cabal.
“What was your father like?” I asked to break that chain of thought.
“He was the lynx shifter who fell in love with and earned the love of a dire wolf,” Mary said simply. “What he lacked in power he made up in charisma, wisdom and the willpower to stand up to anyone. I remember, when I was younger and Tarvers was a new Alpha, my father arguing him down from some of his more dangerous plans.
“It was my father who negotiated the Covenants between Tarvers, Oberis and MacDonald,” she told me. “I think that was when he managed to convince my mother he was worth her time. He had the will and wisdom to talk three powerful men into working together instead of staying at loggerheads.”
“What happened to him?” I asked softly.
“Car accident,” Mary said, her voice equally soft, and I squeezed her hand comfortingly. “One of those freak things that can happen to anyone—he was hit by a semi, crossing the street. There is damage even shifters can’t heal—he was killed instantly.”
The arrival of the bill distracted us from the morbid tone of the conversation, and I quickly paid it. Dinner sorted, Mary rose from her seat, offering me her hand to pull myself to my feet.
“Walk with me?” she asked as we pulled on our coats.
I nodded and followed her out of the restaurant. We walked a bit of the ways down the street, shivering against the cold until we’d passed out of sight of anyone in the foggy night. Once the fog had enwrapped us in glittering whiteness, Mary stopped and turned into me.
My arms came up around her almost without thinking, and for a long moment, we simply stood in the night, sharing warmth and holding each other. I couldn’t say which of us moved to kiss the other first, but heat warmed me from the inside as our lips touched.
We stood there like that, warming each other, for a long moment, and then a cold breeze swept through the fog and we both shivered, breaking apart slightly.
Changeling's Fealty (Changeling Blood Book 1) Page 11
