“Dad?” said June. “You’re not listening!”
“I am so listening,” said Owen, and he turned his head and cupped a hand to his ear. “See?” The girl giggled.
“You weren’t listening when I told you how to do your math homework,” said Antonia, coming into the kitchen with a scowl. Unlike June, she still wore her school uniform – blazer, white dress shirt, a tie, and slacks. Girls had a choice between slacks and skirt for school uniforms, at least in the US, and Antonia always went for slacks. So did Sabrina, though Katrina wore skirts whenever possible and as high as she could get away with, which was concerning.
“I was so listening,” said June.
“Well,” said Owen, putting her down, “you both can do math homework after you help me set the table.”
“Dad,” they protested in unison, but they headed to the cabinets and started collecting plates.
With that, Owen tried to put aside the bloody day and focus on his family. You had to appreciate things while they lasted. And not just because of the dangers that lurked beyond his home. Even if everything went well and no misfortunes befell them, someday all four girls would be grown up and out of the house, married with children of their own. In another five or six years, Owen might have a grandchild.
Grandchildren. Now there was a strange thought.
But he hoped, for their sake, that any grandchildren he had did not inherit his magical ability.
Dinner went smoothly enough. Everyone was in good spirits, and nobody fought. There had been times in early adolescence when Sabrina and Katrina couldn’t get through five minutes of civil conversation. Though it helped that both girls were tired out from volleyball practice. Sabrina was talking about college applications, which made Katrina glassy-eyed.
After dinner, Anna went to the study to get some work done. She was still an accountant, though usually, she worked from home, getting chunks of work done in bursts between the various obligations of an involved parent. Owen cleaned up the kitchen and washed the dishes (four kids meant that leftovers were a rarity), changed into exercise clothes, and descended into the basement to lift weights. The aging state of his knees meant he didn’t run as often as he used to, so he had been replacing it with more strength training, which was probably better for him anyway.
Owen had just finished his second set of bench presses when the blood ring on his right hand shivered, and the High Queen’s voice filled his head.
“Owen Quell,” said Tarlia. “Tomorrow, you will take over the investigation of the murder of Ronald Doyle and his family. Additionally, unknown forces may be at work behind the murders. I am therefore sending you assistance. Tomorrow morning you will meet another of my agents, a woman named Nadia MacCormac. She will be at your office at 10 AM.” That familiar dry note entered her voice. “Likely you will not get along. I suggest, for your sake, you put aside your differences and work together. Find who killed Ronald Doyle and report the details to me.”
With that, the contact ended.
Owen sat on the end of the weight bench, breathing hard from the exercise and sudden fear, sweat pouring down his face.
“Shit,” he said at last.
He rubbed the blood ring and remembered the day the High Queen Tarlia had given it to him.
###
Owen had found life in the Wizard’s Legion amenable if challenging and would have signed up for a second six-year term of service, but he had instead accepted an honorable discharge after his mandatory tour was complete.
It seemed safer that way.
His growing talent for mind magic had become harder to hide.
The soldiers of the Legion learned to use magic, but the magic of the elements – fire and lightning and ice and earth. In the Shadowlands campaigns, they often acted as artillery, raining destruction on the Elves’ foes and supporting the human men-at-arms. Owen had been good with spells of lightning and fire.
But he had been better with spells of the mind.
That was a problem. Humans were absolutely forbidden to learn any spells of mind-alteration or illusion. Owen had wanted to follow that law, but he couldn’t help it. The ability just came to him naturally. Some fluke of nature had meant that he was born with magical talent, and his talent tended towards spells of mental magic. He had done his best to suppress it, but towards the end of his term in the Wizard’s Legion, he had seen more and more Elven nobles giving him sharp, puzzled looks as if there was something that disturbed them, something about Owen that caught their attention.
It was better to go before they figured out what it was.
He had finished his term in the Wizard’s Legion and used his veteran’s preferment to join Homeland Security, becoming a detective. After what had happened to his brother Christopher, Owen had wanted to work for law enforcement in some capacity anyway. He had settled into his new role, and then he had met Anna. A year after that, they were married, and a year after that, Anna was pregnant with twins.
The twins had come on time, but they hadn’t been healthy.
A problem with their livers. The organs hadn’t formed correctly in the womb. A rare, fluke occurrence, but it did happen. Owen had been sitting at Anna’s bedside when the doctor explained that the condition only had a twenty percent survivability rate, and they needed to prepare themselves for the worst in the next three days.
Anna broke. Owen had not seen her cry like that before or since, racking, shuddering sobs that sounded like a wounded animal rather than anything human. Owen held her hand and murmured useless words until she had at last fallen into an exhausted sleep. Dazed, he got up and walked to the patient lounge to get a cup of coffee. His mind couldn’t process it. They’d bought a house. They’d bought two cribs. Owen had spent every weekend for the last six months getting ready for the babies. Murder cases during the workday, baby prep on his days off.
Maybe he should have been getting ready for the death of his children instead.
He was so distracted that he didn’t notice the shocked silence at the nurse’s station as he walked past.
“Lieutenant Owen Quell?”
Owen blinked, came to a stop, and finally noticed the Royal Guard standing in front of the nurse’s desk.
The Elf was tall and gaunt, with vivid purple eyes, pointed ears, and a shock of gleaming golden hair. The Elven man wore silver armor made of overlapping metal plates that covered his body, and a sword and a pistol hung on the leather belt around his waist. Owen recognized the Royal Guards at once. He had fought alongside them in the Shadowlands campaigns since the High Queen often took direct command of the Wizard’s Legion.
“Lord Elf?” said Owen.
The analytical part of his mind, the part of his mind trained by Homeland Security and not currently paralyzed by grief, wondered what the hell a Royal Guard was doing at a hospital in Milwaukee.
“Come with me,” said the Royal Guard.
There was no question of disobedience. Owen followed the Guard through the hospital’s corridors.
“My wife, Lord Elf,” said Owen. “She is very sick. I should be with her when she wakes…”
“She is well-cared for here,” said the Guard, “and this will not take very long.”
They entered the hospital’s administrative wing, the floor carpeted, the walls painted in neutral shades of sea green. The Elf stopped before the door to the office of the Chief of Medicine, knocked twice, and swung it open. Why would the hospital’s chief of medicine want to talk to him?
Probably to give him more bad news in person.
Owen followed the Royal Guard into the office and froze.
The office was large, its furniture screaming of sober medical authority, and there were four other people inside. Two were Elven Royal Guards, standing on either side of the massive desk. The third, somewhat incongruously, was a middle-aged human man wearing jeans, work boots, and a denim button-down shirt. He looked like a shop teacher, and there was a nervous expression on his lean face.
Tarlia,
High Queen of the Elves, sat behind the desk, watching Owen.
His brain froze up in shock for a moment. He’d seen the High Queen in portraits and news clips all his life and in person several times during the Legion’s campaigns in the Shadowlands. Standing up, she would have been seven feet tall, with flame-colored hair and ghostly blue eyes like fire licking the bottom of a copper pan. She wore the armor of a Royal Guard, a crimson cloak, and a simple gold circlet upon her red hair.
For a moment, Owen gaped at her. His reflexes were good in a crisis, but his brain had absorbed one too many shocks today.
“Mr. Quell,” murmured Tarlia, her voice soft and musical. “Do close your mouth. This is a hospital.”
“Your Majesty,” said Owen, and he went to one knee, his brain trying to work through his surprise and grief. The High Queen was sitting in front of him. She had summoned him, personally.
That couldn’t be good.
“Have a seat, Mr. Quell,” said Tarlia, flicking her hand at one of the guest chairs. She wore rings of gold and silver and steel, each one set with a stone of different color. “It is time for us to have a conversation.”
Quell rose and seated himself. The Royal Guards watched him, impassive. The shop teacher tried to give him a reassuring smile and failed abjectly.
“I was disappointed when you left the Wizard’s Legion, Mr. Quell,” said Tarlia. She opened a folder on the desk and Quell realized it was a personnel file. His, most likely. “You had considerable talent. Why did you leave?”
Owen forced moisture into his mouth. “I wanted to settle down and get married, Your Majesty.” He had just lied to the High Queen, to her face. “I wanted to have kids and…” He felt his voice start to break and forced down the emotion. “I wanted to start a family.”
“Mr. Quell,” said Tarlia, a faint note of disappointment in her voice. “That’s a lie, and we both know it. You left because you could no longer suppress your talent for mind magic and it was becoming impossible to hide.”
Quell stared at her, the certainty of utter ruination closing around his mind like a fist. In a single day, he was going to lose his daughters and leave his wife a widow.
To his astonishment and mild alarm, he felt himself laughing.
Tarlia raised an eyebrow. “Is something amusing?”
“No, not at all,” said Quell, wiping at his eyes and forcing himself back into control. “Well, yes. The doctor just told my wife and me that our babies are going to die in the next three days. Now the High Queen has come here to execute me, personally. Your Majesty…when the shit hits the fan, it just sprays everywhere.”
One of the Royal Guards snickered, once. Tarlia shot him a look, and the Elven man’s expression returned to impassivity.
“Fortune, alas, is a fickle bitch,” said Tarlia. “I believe Job in the Bible had something to say on the topic. But you misunderstand, Mr. Quell. I am a bitch, but I am not a fickle one. I came to Milwaukee to make you a,” she paused to think about her words, “a job offer, let us say, but your daughters’ illness expedites matters.” She gestured at the shop teacher. “This is Mr. Vander. He has a particularly rare magical talent called bloodcasting. I won’t waste time with the technical details, but he can heal nearly anything. Including the particular sort of liver deformity afflicting your daughters.”
Owen blinked several times. Hope, which had been crushed, flared to new life in his chest.
“He can?” said Owen.
“Yes,” said Tarlia. “But Mr. Vander is my liegeman. If I allow him to help you, I’ll be doing you a favor. If he heals your daughters, what kind of favor will you do me in turn? You see, you have a set of useful talents, and I need those talents. Ruling both Elves and mankind presents me with endless challenges, and I need capable people to handle those problems. So, to come to the main point, Mr. Quell…if I have your daughters healed, what will you do for me?”
There was a long, long pause.
Owen had heard about this kind of thing, about Elven nobles binding humans to their services through favors. He knew it did not often end well for the humans involved.
But he thought about Anna’s broken sobs, about the small, dying bodies shifting in the incubators in the nursery.
There was only one possible answer to that question.
“Anything you want,” Owen said.
“That’s right,” said the High Queen. “You will.”
###
But it hadn’t been as bad as he feared.
Owen had thought the High Queen would use him as an assassin, or a spy, or for something that would forever scar his conscience. But it wasn’t anything like that. She wanted him to do what he was already doing for Homeland Security.
She wanted him to investigate.
Just more thoroughly.
That very day, Mr. Vander healed Sabrina and Katrina. The High Queen also took a sample of Owen’s blood, transformed it into a crystal, and set it in a golden ring. That ring, the ring of a shadow agent, let the High Queen communicate with him from any distance. It also allowed him to project an image of her seal, giving him the authority of a Royal Herald, but she emphasized that he was to avoid using it.
Tarlia taught him several spells of mind magic. Aurasight, which let him view the emotional state of those around him. The mindtouch spell, which permitted him to look into the mind of another, though there was always a measure of risk to it. The High Queen arranged his transfer to Special Investigations, and both Tarlia and the Department of Homeland Security used him on the hard cases, the ones that baffled the normal investigators. Owen’s abilities with mental magic gave him a powerful advantage. He could look into the mind of a suspect or a witness and know at once whether or not they had committed the crime in question. Then it was a matter of collecting the physical evidence that would gain a conviction before a jury.
Several times Tarlia’s staff had Owen flown across the country simply to question someone and find out if they were telling the truth.
Owen kept an uneasy balance between the three sides of his life – his family, his job with Homeland Security, and his role as the High Queen’s shadow agent. He had done it for nearly seventeen years, though his jobs for Tarlia had nearly gotten him killed several times, and he had seen more horrors than he cared to recall. The Rebel cell that had nearly bombed a kindergarten in Seattle, for example, or the cult of Dark Ones that had been kidnapping children and sacrificing them to the horrors from beyond the Void.
And the High Queen never gave him easy jobs.
###
Owen was sitting on the end of the bench, lost in the dark memories, when Sabrina came downstairs and headed for the washing machine, a basket of laundry on her hip. He suddenly remembered the way she had looked in that incubator as a newborn, hours from death.
“Dad?” said Sabrina, blinking at him. “Is everything all right?”
“Yeah,” said Owen. “Do me a favor. Ask your mother to come down here for a second. I have to talk to her.”
Sabrina nodded and went upstairs at once. Owen realized that he had been speaking to her in his interrogator's voice, what his kids called his Scary Dad voice. He had only shouted at his children maybe half a dozen times in the last seventeen years. But when he got really angry, or when something was seriously wrong, his voice got deeper, quieter, harder.
Anna came downstairs a moment later.
“What’s wrong?” she said, worry in her eyes. “You didn’t hurt yourself, did you?”
“No,” said Owen. “The High Queen contacted me. She’s got a job.”
Anna took a deep breath. “When do you leave?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” said Owen. “It’s the Ronald Doyle case.”
Her brows creased. “Ronald Doyle? I know that name, don’t I? It’s the concrete guy, yeah? The one who’s getting sued because his buildings kept falling down.”
“Something like that.” Owen rubbed his face. “Warren had the case.”
“Warren?”
“But the High Queen wants you to take it,” said Anna, folding her arms across her stomach. He didn’t need to use his aurasight to know that she was frightened.
“Looks like it,” said Owen. He had seen lies destroy a lot of marriages during his career, so he hadn’t kept anything from Anna during the years they had been married. Owen had told her about his deal with the High Queen, about the blood ring (even though she couldn’t see it), and whatever else she wanted to know. And he always told her when he had a case. Though he hadn’t volunteered details unless she asked. Like the reeking cellar where the Dark Ones cultists had buried their sacrificial victims. Or the recording of the Rebels giggling about how many kindergartners their bombs would kill, how that would shock the complacent sheep who supported the Elves.
She didn’t need to know that. Owen would tell her if she asked, but he wouldn’t inflict that on her.
“Okay,” said Anna. “I’ll tell the girls to be extra cautious. I’ll make sure that the security system is working, and that all our guns are ready.”
“Thank you,” said Owen. “I don’t think I’ll be alone this time. The High Queen said she was sending someone to help me.”
“Oh.” Anna smiled, some of the fear lifting from her face. “Someone to watch your back, that’s good. Did she say who?”
“Some woman named Nadia MacCormac,” said Owen. That sounded familiar, come to think of it. Though he feared she might be one of the High Queen’s more dangerous minions. Rulers, Tarlia had told him, had to get their hands dirty. Which meant they needed people of limited conscience to do what needed to be done when the time came.
Cloak of Wolves Page 6
