Cloak of Wolves

by Moeller, Jonathan

  I took the stairs, keeping my Cloak spell in place. I passed perhaps a dozen Homeland Security officers and civilian workers, no doubt on their way to plant evidence, harass suspects, and frame innocent people for Punishment Day videos. Okay, that probably wasn’t fair, but I wasn’t in a good mood. I did pass several women, both uniformed officers and civilian workers. In the old days after the Conquest, Homeland Security had been entirely male. The High Queen’s view was that human women in general ought to be focused on producing and raising the next generation of her soldiers and workers, not spending their fertile years on careers. Except there had been a massive scandal when it turned out that some officers had been systematically abusing female prisoners before Punishment Day videos, so Homeland Security had been reformed to include female officers in various roles.

  The recollection of this fact did not improve my mood.

  I reached the Homicide department, which was a large room filled with low cubicles and desks. The door was locked, and I didn’t want to lower my Cloak spell to unlock it, so I waited until someone went inside and I followed them. The room smelled of disinfectant and bad coffee. Detectives in either uniform or plainclothes sat at their desks, doing paperwork or talking on their phones. Working for Homeland Security involved a lot of paperwork, and I saw the UNICORN interface open on every computer screen. Doors lined the room since higher-ranking officers got their own workspace.

  I followed the wall until I came to the office of Colonel Owen Quell.

  The door was partly open, and Quell sat at his desk, a UNICORN file open on his screen and a printed case file spread next to his keyboard. I’d seen his official picture on the Homeland Security website, and he looked…rougher in person. I could tell that his nose had been broken a few times, and there was an old, vicious-looking scar on the right side of his face. Quell was a big guy who looked like he had just started running to fat, but he was probably in good shape, especially for his age. He had deep, heavy-lidded dark eyes and black hair that was well on its way to gray.

  There was a wedding ring on his left hand and the blood ring of a shadow agent of the High Queen on his right.

  I felt a faint magical aura around him. He was a wizard. I hadn’t expected that since none of the information I’d found about him had mentioned that he had been part of the Wizard’s Legion. But former members of the Wizard’s Legion tended not to advertise the fact on the Internet.

  I wasn’t sure what to make of him, at least not yet. My initial impression was that he was another dumb thug, Office Kirby in another twenty years, who had played the internal politics of Homeland Security well enough to reach the rank of colonel. He probably watched Punishment Day videos for entertainment. Then again, he could use magic, and I could not see Tarlia recruiting an incompetent shadow agent. If she wanted a dumb thug, they were as common as dirt among both humans and Elves.

  Well, I could stand here speculating all day, and it wouldn’t accomplish a damn thing.

  First impressions are important, and I decide to make a lasting one on Colonel Owen Quell.

  His office door was half-open, and I eased through it. Then I settled into one of the guest chairs in front of his desk. The office was small enough that I could reach the door handle. I gave it a sharp jerk, and the door slammed shut.

  Quell’s eyes snapped up from his computer in surprise, and I dropped my Cloak spell, resting my head against my right hand so he could see the blood ring.

  “So,” I said. “Seems like our boss wants us to work together.”

  ***

  Chapter 5: Shadow Agents

  The office door slammed, and Owen Quell looked up in annoyance. If someone wanted to talk to him, they should have knocked first…

  Then he saw the woman sitting in his guest chair.

  Owen had been absorbed in the Doyle case file, reading the grisly details, but he had been in Homeland Security for a long time, and his guard never went down completely. There was no way the woman could have gotten into his office without him hearing it, especially since she was wearing heavy steel-toed boots. For that matter, she was a civilian, and she didn't have a guest pass. If she had come through the front door, they would have questioned her, given her a pass, and called up to let him know he had a visitor.

  His hand had started to slide towards his holstered pistol when he saw the ring on her right hand. It was a heavy gold band set with a red gemstone that looked like a ruby but wasn’t, and Owen recognized it at once. It was the ring of a shadow agent of the High Queen of the Elves.

  Which, now that he thought about it, explained how she had gotten into his office without anyone seeing her.

  “So,” said Owen. “I assume you must be Nadia MacCormac?”

  “Yep,” said Nadia, watching him.

  Owen looked at her, years of experience in detective work noting details.

  She was short, slim, and pretty. Fit, too, to judge from the veins Owen saw on the back of her hands. Probably lifted a lot of weights. Had he been unmarried and twenty years younger (okay, ten years) he probably would have tried to get her into bed. She wore a heavy pea coat and black jeans, the coat loose enough to conceal a weapon, though the jeans definitely were not. Her brown hair had been pulled in a loose tail, and her gray eyes were flat and hostile as they watched him.

  They were a killer’s eyes.

  The idea that you could judge someone’s character by looking into their eyes was, of course, total bullshit. Owen had interrogated killers and con men who radiated sincerity. Yet there was a kernel of truth to it. The subconscious mind, the instincts, often knew when someone was dangerous, and the conscious mind chose to interpret that as someone having “dangerous eyes” or a “killer’s eyes” or something.

  And all of Owen’s instincts and experience screamed that this woman was dangerous.

  With an effort of will, he worked the aurasight spell.

  At once, he saw that his instincts were correct. Nadia’s emotional aura did not look at all like that of a normal, healthy human woman. For one thing, it was charged with power. She had more raw magical strength that any human Owen had ever met and quite a few Elven nobles. Nadia clearly found Owen suspicious as well. Her aura seethed with dislike and wariness and something like old hatred. There was something more, though, a distortion in her aura that he associated with long-term persistent trauma.

  He realized that Nadia was probably one of the High Queen’s pet killers. As much as Owen believed in the value of his work, he didn’t look at the High Queen with rose-colored glasses. Ruling two worlds was a nasty, dangerous business, and sometimes Tarlia got her hands dirty. Or she sent someone to do it for her. Likely Nadia MacCormac was such a woman, a woman who had left a trail of broken and ruined lives behind her, people who had wept the way the families of Dean Osmond’s victims had wept.

  Maybe she was someone like Peter Walsh.

  She had stopped the Rebels in New York, he knew. But he suspected that she had worked with the Rebels and likely helped them locate the Sky Hammer weapon. Which meant that Nadia MacCormac was a Rebel terrorist who had managed to secure a pardon for herself by betraying the other Rebels. He wondered how many of Nadia’s victims would never know justice.

  “What are you doing?” said Nadia with a frown.

  She sensed the aurasight? She shouldn’t have been able to do that. But if she was as powerful as he suspected, she might have been able to sense the spell. Nadia gestured with her left hand, and there was a pulse of gray light around her fingers. The spell to sense the presence of magic, he thought.

  “Ah,” she said, settling back in the chair. “Some sort of emotional sensing spell, isn’t it? Bet you’re picking up all sort of interesting things from me. That kind of thing is illegal for humans, but I think that’s why the High Queen recruited you. Someone realized you could use mind magic, and instead of executing you, she made you a job offer.”

  “Something like that,” said Owen. She was very quick on the uptake.


  “Bet it’s real useful in Homeland Security,” said Nadia. The dislike in her aura strengthened. “Can’t solve a crime, so hey, just grab someone off the street, use the mindtouch spell to magically compel him into confessing, and then you’re hitting your Punishment Day video quota for the month. Then it’s time to kick back and have some coffee and doughnuts.”

  “We don’t have quotas,” said Owen. She was deliberately trying to irritate him, seeing how he would react. If he had to guess, he would say she could use mental magic or illusion magic, which explained how she had gotten into his office without anyone seeing her. If she hadn’t been a Rebel, then she was probably a former thief the High Queen had recruited, maybe a shadow agent she had poached from another noble. That would explain why Nadia hated Homeland Security so much. Those who had spent their lives running from the law tended not to enjoy the company of law enforcement officers.

  He wondered how many crimes Nadia had committed, how many people she had murdered before Tarlia had recruited her. Owen had tried to do some research on Nadia, but her UNICORN entries were suspiciously empty or under heavy lock. Only the highest levels of the Inquisition would have the clearance to view her information.

  Then the horrors in the Doyle case file had absorbed his attention, preventing him from doing more than cursory research on Nadia MacCormac.

  “Sure you don’t,” said Nadia. “Just a word of warning. If you do have the mindtouch spell, don’t look into my thoughts. Seriously, don’t.” The emotion drained out of her face, but the sense of trauma in her aura intensified. “It won’t be good for you.” She smirked. “But I bet you won’t be able to stop yourself. If there’s one thing a Homeland Security officer can’t resist, it’s planting evidence and breaking the law.”

  To his annoyance, he felt a pulse of irritation. Nadia was trying to get under his skin, and it was starting to work. Well, two could play at that game. He had spent nearly twenty years listening to Anna complain about her coworkers (especially the other women in her office), and he remembered one of her pet peeves.

  “We’re going to have to work together, so we might as well get started,” said Owen. He nodded at the coffee maker on top of his file cabinet. “Why don’t you make us some coffee? Then you can take notes.”

  She grinned at him. It wasn’t really a smile, though, more of a rictus that showed a lot of teeth, almost a snarl. “Why don’t you get off your ass and get your own coffee?” She paused. “You could probably use the exercise.”

  Ouch. He’d lost that one, hadn’t he?

  Owen snorted in amusement, got to his feet, and walked around the desk. Nadia watched as if expecting him to attack. “All right. We don’t like each other, that’s obvious.” He took a mug and poured coffee into it, steam rising from the black liquid. “But we’re going to have to work together. I don’t think our boss will like it if we screw this up because we were too busy insulting each other.”

  “She would not,” said Nadia, still watching him. She looked relaxed, but he could tell she was wound tight.

  “No,” said Owen, and he passed her the cup of coffee.

  Nadia looked at the coffee, and him, and then back at the coffee as if she expected it to explode.

  “It’s coffee,” said Owen. “You do drink coffee, right?”

  She seemed to come to a decision, and some of the tension in her emotional aura receded, though didn’t vanish entirely.

  “Yes,” said Nadia, and she took the cup. “Thank you.”

  “You are welcome,” said Owen, and he poured himself a cup. He would have to remember to make more before they left. He thought about leaning on his desk, but then realized he would tower over her, so he walked around and sat back at his chair. “Did the High Queen tell you what she wants us to do?”

  “Yeah,” said Nadia. She sipped at the coffee. “She wants us to find who killed Ronald Doyle.”

  “You know who he is?” said Owen.

  “Property developer,” said Nadia. “Construction guy. Owns a company that made a bunch of defective concrete, and he’s getting sued for it. Or he was, anyway. He’s in tight with Governor Arnold and the Brauners, and they’ve been covering for him.” Her mouth twisted. “Suppose that won’t be a problem for the Brauner family anymore.”

  “No,” said Owen. She knew that the Brauners were crooked, which would save time. Then again, if she was a shadow agent and had lived in Wisconsin for any length of time, it was easy to realize that the virtuous patriotic image the Brauner clan presented to the world wasn’t entirely accurate. “Did she tell you any details?”

  “No,” said Nadia. “She just told me to show up here, so I did. Early, I might add.” Her mouth twisted. “I figured there was no point in digging up details since you people were going to do that all anyway.”

  “All right,” said Owen. “So, here are the details. Three days ago, Ronald Doyle, his wife, and their three children were all found dead in their condo in downtown Milwaukee.”

  “How did they die?” said Nadia.

  “They were torn apart,” said Owen. “Which is how the bodies were discovered, incidentally. Some of the blood began leaking out beneath the door and into the hallway. One of the neighbors called it in. The responding officers had probable cause to enter the residence, so they did, and they found the bodies. See what you think for yourself.”

  He reached into the printed file and drew out the crime scene photos and autopsy reports.

  “I should warn you,” said Owen, “these will be disturbing.”

  “Yup,” said Nadia indifferently. She stood, dragged his guest chair closer to the desk, and then sat back down, setting her coffee mug next to his business cards.

  Owen passed her the photos, and Nadia flicked through them. He had seen a lot of violent death over the years, but what had happened to the Doyles had been particularly bad. Especially since the oldest of their children had only been twelve. One of the responding officers, a veteran of fifteen years, had gone outside and thrown up. People responded to violent death in many different ways, and he was curious to see how this arrogant, unstable woman would react.

  Nadia’s expression did not change as she looked at the mortal remains of Ronald and Josephine Doyle. She even took another sip of coffee. Her expression remained unchanged as she looked at the pictures of Doyle’s kids, but her emotional aura altered, began to roil with anger.

  To put it more bluntly, she was pissed off.

  “Wraithwolves,” said Nadia, arranging the photos back into an orderly stack.

  “You think so?” said Owen.

  “I know so,” said Nadia. She started to hand the photos back to him, thought better of it, and flipped through them again. “Look. Here and here. You see this wound on Josephine Doyle’s leg? That’s a wraithwolf bite mark. And the cuts across Ronald Doyle’s chest? Wraithwolf claws. It was trying to disembowel him. Looks like it succeeded on the third try or so.”

  “Bad way to die,” said Owen.

  For an instant, her emotional aura turned entirely black.

  “Yes,” said Nadia. She set the photos back on his desk, and Owen returned them to the file.

  “As it happens, the medical examiner agrees with you,” said Owen. “So did Kyle Warren, the chief investigator on the case. Which meant the case would get passed over to the Inquisition…”

  “And then Tarlia started talking inside your head,” said Nadia.

  “Yeah,” said Owen. He dismissed his aurasight. Using it too long drained his strength and gave him a headache, and watching the roiling mixture of rage and dislike in Nadia MacCormac’s aura was disturbing. “This is already an unusual case, but if Tarlia is giving it to people like us, that means something exceptionally unusual is going on.”

  “Okay,” said Nadia. She took another drink of coffee and rubbed her forehead. “As far as I can tell, there are four possibilities.”

  “Go on,” said Owen, curious on what she had deduced.

  “One, the Doyles were killed by
a stray pack of wraithwolves that slipped in from the Shadowlands. Rare, but it happens. Two, someone in the Doyle family tried to summon wraithwolves, screwed it up, and got everyone killed. Three, someone else summoned the wraithwolves and sent them after the Doyle family. Four, something strange we don’t know is going on. Can’t make any assumptions.” Her mouth twisted halfway between a smirk and a grimace. “Isn’t that what like half of your book is about?”

  “You read my book,” said Owen. Ever since it had become the textbook for Homeland Security’s investigative training course, he received no end of complaints and ribbing about it from other officers. Still, the royalties were nice, especially after Anna had gotten unexpectedly pregnant with June.

  “Yeah, I was forced to,” said Nadia. “It helps with insomnia.” He snorted. “Still, I remember some of it. But four possibilities. Random wraithwolf pack, one of the Doyles was a summoner, someone else summoned the wraithwolves, or something weird is going on.”

  “It’s possible the wraithwolves slipped through from the Shadowlands,” said Owen. “Incursions from Shadowlands creatures have been happening more frequently in the last few months.”

  “I’d heard that.”

  “But the Doyles’ condo was on one of the upper floors of their building in downtown Milwaukee,” said Owen. “If wraithwolves were going to attack random victims, there were easier targets closer at hand.”

  “What time were they killed?”

  Owen checked the file, even though he already knew the details. “Sometime between 6 PM and 9 PM. The neighbor saw the blood leaking beneath the door at around 9:30. His emergency call came through at 9:33.”

  “Okay,” said Nadia. “6 PM. Downtown Milwaukee on a weeknight. Tail end of rush hour. If the wraithwolves just wanted to grab a bite to eat, there were lots of easier targets around. That means someone either sent the wraithwolves after the Doyles or someone in the family summoned them up and it went bad.”