Followed by all these probing gazes, we traveled deeper and deeper toward the heart of the fort.
When we turned onto the nth identical corridor, I started to tune out my immediate surroundings and pondered what lay at the end of this tedious trek. O’Sullivan hadn’t led us down any stairs, so wherever we were going was apparently on the ground floor.
The brig for a sídhe military installation wouldn’t be aboveground—that would make it too easy for those with sídhe strength to attempt a prison break—so they weren’t planning to lock us up and throw away the key, at least not immediately. I inferred that this meant some sort of formal judicial process was in play.
Being that I had left the Unseelie Court at age six, I wasn’t entirely up to snuff on military judicial procedures. I knew the Army Investigative Service dealt with criminal accusations laid on soldiers and crimes committed against military personnel by civilians. But I didn’t know how well they did their jobs, or whether they possessed enough integrity to remain impartial no matter who was doing the accusing and who was being accused.
Pretty sure I was about to find out though.
The question that rankled me the most about all this was: What was McCullough planning to say or do that he believed would allow him to slip the metaphorical noose for his gross mishandling of his assignment to protect Kinsale? No matter how the proceedings were structured, surely Orlagh and Boyle would be allowed to give testimony in their defense. And since everything they said had to be true, the full details about McCullough’s misbehavior would come to light.
McCullough couldn’t bypass Orlagh and Boyle to nail me to the cross either, because he would have to outright deny my version of events. Which he wouldn’t be able to do as long as I phrased everything I said in an airtight manner.
There was no way that any sort of legitimate judicial proceeding would absolve McCullough of his dereliction of duty. So why had he bothered to go whining to the High Command to have us rounded up and brought to the one place in the realm where we would have the opportunity to verbally eviscerate him in front of every single person save Mab who could influence the future of his career, and bring about the end of it?
It didn’t make any sense.
Unless McCullough was plotting something much nastier than a courtroom drama.
My fingers brushed the hilt of Fragarach. God, I hope this doesn’t devolve into a fight.
The group took a hard left at another corner, and abruptly, the hallway ended in a set of wide wooden doors with the construction for a complex ward carved across both panels. The ward was designed to raise a two-way shield around the entire room beyond the doors. When it was active, no one would be able to enter or leave the room.
I leaned toward Orlagh. “What room is this?”
“The inquest room,” she murmured. “It’s reserved for court-martials, civilian trials pertinent to the army, and preliminary hearings on various important legal matters whose judicial jurisdiction, civilian or military, is still in question. I suspect we are here for the last reason, since the issue with McCullough involves nonmilitary personnel in addition to his own subordinates. The inquisitor will review all the facts presented during the hearing and decide which charges should be laid on who and which court should hold the trial of each of the accused.”
“So we’ll be allowed to give testimony during this hearing?”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t track,” I said quietly. “You said it yourself.
McCullough’s incompetent when it comes to dealing with shit on Earth, but he knows how fae politics work, and he’s intimately familiar with the inner workings of the military. He would know better than to set himself up to be completely wrecked during a formal hearing overseen by the AIS.”
Orlagh frowned. “You’re right. He must have some trump card up his sleeve.”
“But what?” I watched O’Sullivan approach the doors and beat the center of the carved ward with her closed fist three times, the dull sound echoing down the corridor.
“I don’t know,” Orlagh replied in a tone that conveyed she was loath to admit her ignorance. “I have no idea what that man could be plotting.”
A miasma of unease hanging in the space between us, we stood in silence as the two doors of the inquest room opened inward, revealing the expansive room in which the powers that be had decided the fates of thousands, the innocent and the guilty, the strong and the weak, the kind and the wicked, and the countless who fell into the gray chasm between those lines.
Now, those same powers were going to decide our fates, and I was not at all confident that the scale of faerie justice wouldn’t sentence us all to our ultimate doom.
Chapter Five
Eight Hours Till Dusk
The inquest room was three times larger than any courtroom I had ever seen.
Along the left- and right-hand walls were three rows of seating from which onlookers could gawk at the proceedings. Today, almost every available spot was taken by a stone-faced soldier.
At the back of the room was the high bench where the inquisitor, the equivalent of a judge, looked down their nose at the accused.
The inquisitor for this hearing was a lithe woman with a straight black bob, whose name plaque read “Bradigan.”
Sitting on a lower bench to Bradigan’s left, where a witness stand would be in an American courtroom, was McCullough. His position was that of the accuser, and he was meant to be readily available to answer any questions posited by the inquisitor throughout the hearing in order to clarify his claims against the accused.
And finally, to Bradigan’s right was a bench only slightly lower than hers. This was where the commanding officer under whose
purview the hearing had been staged would oversee the proceedings to ensure they followed sídhe law and military protocol.
The woman overseeing this hearing was General Máire Maguire.
I had never met her before, but you could peg her as Orlagh’s mother a mile away. Not because they looked all that similar—
General Maguire was tall and stocky with a hard, rugged face, whereas Orlagh was a couple inches shorter than me and had soft, delicate features—but because they had the same colors.
Light-gray hair. Light-gray eyes. Light-gray sídhe marks. A triple-color match was extremely rare, so any two people who possessed the same monotone color scheme were almost certainly close relations.
O’Sullivan’s people herded their captives to the center of the room, which was totally bare except for two uncomfortable-looking chairs. Odette, Drake, Indira, and surprisingly Boyle were roughly pushed down to their knees, while O’Sullivan grabbed Orlagh and me by the arm and led us to the chairs.
She commanded us to sit with nothing but a nod. We obeyed, dropping onto the rough wooden seats that were bound to leave us with a butt full of splinters before this hearing was over.
O’Sullivan marched up to the inquisitor’s bench, folded her hands behind her back, clacked her boot heels together, and said in the fae dialect common to the upper class, “I bring before you today two soldiers, Major Orlagh Maguire and Captain Eamon Boyle, both accused of defying direct orders from their immediate superior, Colonel Odhran McCullough. I also bring before you a civilian half-sídhe, Vincent Whelan, accused of assault and battery against Colonel Odhran McCullough. The remaining three people are Vincent Whelan’s associates: a human witch, a lesser Seelie half-fae, and a dhampir who is believed to practice necromancy.”
Gasps of revulsion filled the air, and Drake practically shriveled up like a prune, trying to make himself as unnoticeable as possible. A difficult task, considering he was sitting on the floor in the middle of a well-lit room. There was nowhere for him to hide.
Once the clamor died down, O’Sullivan finished, “Per traditional inquest policy, I have placed Major Maguire and Vincent Whelan in the speakers’ seats, as they represent the highest-ranking military officer and highest-ranking civilian among the accused.”
Inq
uisitor Bradigan, outwardly unmoved by the announcement of Drake’s magic profession, said in the same dialect, “Thank you, Lieutenant Colonel O’Sullivan. You and your subordinates are dismissed.”
“Permission to observe the hearing, ma’am?” O’Sullivan asked.
“Permission granted.”
O’Sullivan and gang dispersed, squeezing into what few open seats remained among the crowd. And we were left all alone, surrounded by people who did not look happy to see us.
Bradigan picked up a gavel, banged it once, and announced, “I, Eabha Bradigan, Inquisitor of the Army Investigative Service, now open this inquest into multiple criminal accusations laid upon the six people before me by the individual on the accuser’s bench to my left.”
She grabbed a notebook and a fountain pen that had been set next to her gavel, then continued, “The accuser, Colonel Odhran McCullough, may now recount, to the best of his memory, under the requirement of absolute truth, without intentional minimization of critical details or other forms of verbal obfuscation, the events that led him to accuse these six individuals of wrongdoing.”
All eyes turned to McCullough.
The man was a sorry sight—an intentional move, I guessed, in order to garner sympathy.
His uniform was rumpled and torn, and the whole front of his coat was stained with half-dried blood. His hair was sticky with blood as well, and faint reddish smears dotted his hairline from where he’d wiped his face with a wet cloth at some point. Said face looked a great deal better than it had the last time I’d seen it, after it had met the business end of my magic-powered fist.
The only thing that hadn’t healed, of course, was the jagged iron scar he’d already possessed. That would always remain.
Even so, there was something about McCullough’s face that struck me as…off. With my ability to sense deception jacked up to eleven, my brain picked up some detail or another that did not fit what I knew of McCullough.
Something in his eyes? They held a more tempered look than they ever had before. But it was possible that was due to the presence of his superior officers. He wouldn’t want to come off as excessively aggressive in full view of the few people who had the power to punish him. So he might have just suppressed the unhinged fury he’d unleashed on me earlier in the day.
Something in the flat line of his lips? The man’s mouth generally had two settings, scowl or grin. While it was possible that he wanted to appear composed and indifferent, a picture of a professional soldier, I struggled to believe that McCullough possessed the wherewithal to perfectly mask his disdain for me when I was sitting fifteen feet in front of him.
Then again, I didn’t know him that well. This could be how he normally acted on this side of the veil, where people who mattered could see him.
Still, his demeanor didn’t sit right with me. Especially when, at Bradigan’s behest, he snapped to attention so hard that his spine cracked, loud enough that it almost sounded like he broke a vertebra. McCullough had never been a graceful person—he fought less like a wolf and more like a moose, plowing down everything in his path—but his movements seemed abnormally stiff and rehearsed. Even for a man who spent ninety percent of his time playacting a person who was much smarter, who was much better, than his actual self.
Could be that you just scrambled his brains, I thought. You did punch him really, really hard, and even with a sídhe healing factor, the brain can take a little while to normalize after serious damage.
McCullough worked his jaw back and forth for a moment, seemingly trying to figure out how to best phrase his partial truths to paint us in the most negative light possible. Then he began to speak in a manner that was infinitely calmer and more professional than any he’d used when talking to me.
“A little under two days ago,” he said, “Vincent Whelan attended a meeting held by myself in conjunction with the appointed lesser-fae government officials of the protected city of Kinsale.
During this meeting, Whelan, who works as a lieutenant for the city police, made several claims about escalating criminal activity related to the vampire coven that invaded the city some months prior.
“Whelan attempted to use these claims, none of which he could definitively prove, to support a complicated plan to raid a significant number of vampire-controlled locations throughout the city, at which he believed abducted humans were being held captive. However, I refused to give Whelan and his police cohorts permission to enact this plan because I believed the potential cost to police personnel, as well as the cost to the city’s dullahan guard, would be far too high for too little reward.”
I clenched my jaw, barely restraining myself from yelling, The reason you believed that is because you knew you’d seriously compromised Project Watchdog!
Undeterred by my silent protest, McCullough continued.
“Unfortunately, Whelan did not heed my concerns and went behind my back to enact the raid plan anyway. A misstep that resulted in the deaths of dozens of police officers, as well as the destruction of numerous buildings, further damaging Kinsale’s already fragile infrastructure.
“Even worse, I belatedly discovered that two of my own subordinates had a hand in helping Whelan bring the disastrous raid operation to fruition. Major Maguire and Captain Boyle abused the command structure of the contingent to issue fraudulent orders to the dullahan guard patrols so that they wouldn’t happen upon the police at any time during the operation.”
Here, McCullough paused for effect, spurring most of the crowd to throw us accused wretches all manner of furious and disgusted looks. Behind me, Odette snorted, annoyed at the theatrical aspects of the proceedings, which earned her a reproachful glare from Bradigan.
I didn’t peer over my shoulder to see how Odette responded to the rebuke. But whatever she did—flashed some kind of rude gesture, I assumed—made Bradigan recoil, and several people in the crowd let out salacious gasps.
Dropping my arms behind the back of my chair, I gestured for Odette to chill before her attitude got us all tossed into solitary confinement.
Bradigan shirked off the offense and finished jotting down the notes she’d been taking. She nodded to McCullough and said,
“Continue.”
“Shortly after the failed raid operation,” McCullough picked up,
“the vampires began launching coordinated attacks on numerous neighborhoods across the city.” Implying that the vampires attacked because they were provoked by the raid operation.
“I dispatched my soldiers to support the dullahan guard in the efforts to protect the city and its populace, as vampires are difficult for lesser fae to handle alone.” Framing his boneheaded decision to leave City Hall undefended as if it was based on his concern for anything other than his own ego.
“Regrettably, while my soldiers and I were preoccupied in the worst-impacted areas of the city, the vampires decided to launch a direct assault on City Hall. Whose defenses, it turned out, were woefully inadequate in the face of vampire sorcery. The vampires broke the wards, stormed the building, and abducted several lesser-fae government officials, including the mayor.”
Conveniently leaving out the fact that he’d been in charge of bolstering City Hall’s defenses after the neamh-mairbh invasion and making it sound like he wasn’t at fault for the inadequacy of the wards.
“Once I received word of that attack, I immediately recalled several of my soldiers and sought to return to City Hall.” Not because he cared about saving Connolly and friends, but because he cared about how bad it would look if he didn’t.
“That plan was upended, however, as I finally became aware of the deception laid out by Major Maguire and Captain Boyle. Since their egregious actions had already contributed to a disastrous blow to the city police, as well as countless civilian casualties resulting from the vampire attacks, I decided it would be prudent to suspend them from active duty before they did any further harm.” Any further harm to his reputation and his tenuous hold over the command of the contingent.
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br /> “Before I was able to sequester them in a place where they could be contained until a better time to pursue appropriate disciplinary action against them”—skirting around the fact he’d taken inappropriate disciplinary action against them by stabbing Boyle—“I was confronted by Vincent Whelan, who attacked me without physical provocation and then used a portal talisman to send me to a place where I was very nearly killed by enemies of the sídhe.”
A bone-shattering chill tumbled down my spine.
He didn’t just say that. He couldn’t have said that.
I observed Orlagh in the corner of my eye. She was staring at McCullough in open-mouthed shock. Boyle, kneeling on the floor behind her chair, wore an almost identical expression of disbelief.
I reviewed McCullough’s last sentence in my head, again and again. But no matter how I framed it, those words didn’t work. I was confronted by Vincent Whelan, who attacked me without physical provocation…
That wasn’t true. That wasn’t true at all.
McCullough had taken a swing at me with his sword, and that had prompted me to punch him in the face and send him portaling off to Maige Itha. I attacked him in self-defense, which by definition required physical provocation from the other party.
Odhran McCullough had told a lie.
But the sídhe could not tell lies.
Orlagh jumped up and pointed an accusatory finger at the man.
“You…You are not Colonel McCullough!”
A curtain of stunned silence fell over the room.
General Maguire smoothly rose from her seat. “Clarify your meaning, Major Maguire.”
“I mean what I said, General.” Orlagh bowed her head slightly in deference to her mother. “That man is not McCullough. He can’t be. He just told an outright lie.”
Boyle stood up behind her, ever at her defense. “She speaks without deceit, General. What that person stated in regards to the ‘attack’ by Vincent Whelan was a fabrication. Whelan did not harm Colonel McCullough without physical provocation. It was Colonel McCullough who threw the first blow. He attempted to kill Vincent Whelan for defying his authority and revealing his gross mismanagement of sensitive information, and Whelan defended himself accordingly.”
What Dusk Divides Page 6
