Author Archives: Emrys

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The staircase was steep, dark, and narrow enough that we had to walk in single file. I went first, with Aiko behind me and Kyra behind her. The werewolf was in fur, and handling steep stairs on four feet was tricky enough that everyone involved would be happier in the back.

 

It occurred to me that might not have been the best idea. Kyra had plenty of experience in fur, and she was generally better off that way in a fight, but it also tended to bring out the more instinctive parts of a werewolf’s personality. That might well leave her more vulnerable to Blind Keith’s influence.

 

Too bad, if so. It was a little late to stop so she could change.

 

I thought for a moment that the door at the top was locked, but it turned out to just be stuck, the wooden door warped in its frame by the years. I pushed a little harder, forcing it, and it popped open with a groan.

 

Through the door was an apartment, dimly lit by the light coming in the windows. The floor was carpeted, relatively clean, but cluttered, like the person who lived here had a tendency to just set things down wherever was convenient and then not bother to pick them up again—not a slob, exactly, just someone who didn’t necessarily feel a need for the space to be open and tidy.

 

There were no lights on in the apartment that I could see, but I could hear a quiet, regular creaking from the room to my left. I walked that way, moving carefully and ready to fight or run at any moment. I didn’t see Blind Keith being the kind of guy to set up an ambush at a peaceful meeting, but I’d been wrong before.

 

The other room appeared to be a living room of sorts, small and cozy. Blind Keith was sitting in a rocking chair, and the creaking noise came from the chair as he rocked back and forth. The movement was precisely timed, one cycle every three seconds, like clockwork. It was hard to say in the dim lighting, but I was pretty sure he looked exactly like the other time I’d seen him, a grey figure that was only vaguely humanoid in its shape, with a heavy grey bandage wrapped around its eyes.

 

I wasn’t aware of us having made a sound, but he knew we were there. Of course he did. “Hello, Shrike,” he said. “Come in, have a seat.”

 

I stepped into the room, still expecting something to happen at any moment, but nothing did. “Hello, Keith,” I said, walking to a small love seat across the room from him. “You wanted to talk?” Kyra and Aiko stayed by the door.

 

Blind Keith didn’t seem to care; his attention was all for me right now. “Yes,” he said. “I’ve been looking into you since our last meeting, Shrike. You piqued my interest.”

 

Oh, man. That couldn’t be good.

 

“You’ve accomplished impressive things, for your years,” he said. “I want to see for myself whether your skills are as great as they say. I think you and I should go hunting.”

 

I opened my mouth, then paused. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting, but this wasn’t it. “I’d have to know a few more details,” I said cautiously.

 

“We shall hunt. What more is there to know?” Blind Keith asked curiously.

 

I tried to gauge his expression, but it was too dark. In fact…I glanced around the room and confirmed it. Things actually were darker than they had been just moments before, and it wasn’t because there was less light coming in the windows than there had been. It was like Blind Keith somehow made it harder to see, by his presence alone.

 

It made sense, I supposed. He was an embodiment of the hunt, and he inspired terror by his very nature. Darkness went along with that, isolating people and removing the comfort of knowing what was around them. Still, it was annoying.

 

“Well,” I said, hoping I wasn’t making a very bad mistake, “what would we be hunting?”

 

He grinned, showing teeth sharper and longer than belonged in a human mouth. “I hadn’t decided,” he said. “But I am sure we can find worthy prey.” He stood and held his hand out to me. “Come.”

 

I hesitated again. I knew that it might make me look weak to someone who I really didn’t want thinking of me like that, but I couldn’t help it. I’d come into this expecting something like the Sidhe, a clever conversation where I had to watch for hidden traps and shades of meaning. Blind Keith was nothing like that, no subtlety or illusion. He was what he was, and he was about as in-your-face about it as it was possible to be.

 

What had Gwynn ap Nud said about him? He wasn’t Sidhe, wasn’t a part of any of the groups or factions, but he was still fae. I could use that.

 

“A day and a night,” I said.

 

He cocked his head to the side, looking at me curiously. Well, sort of. For a certain value of looking.

 

“I have obligations to fulfill,” I said. “Commitments. Give me twenty-four hours to take care of those first.” I smiled a little. “Surely you wouldn’t force me to default on the commitments I’ve made.” I was concerned that I might be laying it on a little thick, but better that than the alternative.

 

This time it was Blind Keith’s turn to hesitate a moment. He obviously didn’t want to wait, but he was fae, and the one thing that you could say with confidence about the fae was that they were good to their word. They bent the truth, but they didn’t lie. They exploited any loophole you left them, but they didn’t actually break their word. And, naturally, they respected the same qualities in others.

 

“Of course not,” he said, letting his hand fall back to his side. “I shall collect you in a day and a night, then. Now go carry out your duties, and take those two with you.”

---

 

Back in Colorado, I checked in on things first. Snowflake was still in surgery, which was good and bad. If she hadn’t died yet there was a good chance she’d pull through, but to have been under the knife for so long…well, it wasn’t exactly reassuring.

 

I’d seldom felt so helpless. I wanted to be there with her, helping her, but I knew that I’d only get in the way. She was hurt, maybe dying, and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it.

 

I channeled that frustration into action instead. Back in the north side of the city, I set the werewolves to tracking down Katrin and her vampires. I had Kyra, Daniell, and Ryan to look for scents, with Unna there to do any necessary talking. I doubted the selkie’s ability to smooth things over with the police, but at the moment that was a minimal concern.

 

I couldn’t help with that either. I was middling useless as a tracker, never put the time in to really learn. That was the whole reason I’d gone to get the werewolves for this.

 

That left me with nothing to do but pace around my office while the work went on around me. Most of the housecarls were either patrolling the area or making sure the hospital Snowflake was in was secure, but Selene and Tindr were at the house, as were the mages and the new, human recruits. The work going on right now was passive in nature, support and logistics, but still absolutely vital. And, again, nothing I could help with. Having the warlord making coffee and running papers back and forth would be more distraction than it was worth, even without the hit to my image it would entail.

 

All of which meant that over the past thirty minutes I’d gotten better acquainted with that office than I’d ever wanted to be. Ten steps, turn. Ten steps, turn. Rinse and repeat until I thought I’d lose my mind.

 

When Selene stuck her head in, it was a relief, but I was so full of pent-up frustration that I almost snarled at her anyway. “What is it?” I snapped, turning to face her.

 

She didn’t seem to care. “Someone here to see you,” she said. “One of Kikuchi’s people.”

 

“Send them up,” I said, moving over to my desk and sitting. I tried to relax, let the frustration fade. By the time the door opened, I thought I’d done a pretty decent job of pushing that aimless anger away from the forefront of my mind. I wasn’t calm—I wasn’t likely to get calm until this was all settled, one way or another—but I thought I could carry on a conversation without making the other person think I was about to kill them.

 

“Hi,” Kimiko said, walking in. “Am I interrupting something?” She smirked.

 

I stared. I’d been expecting a tengu, not the only kitsune in Kikuchi’s employ. “He sent you?” I asked.

 

“Yeah,” she drawled. “Apparently we’ve got a working relationship, whatever that means. Plus we’ve got a bit of a situation on our hands right now, and he didn’t want to send one of his soldiers to get you. About that, by the way…he said to tell you he didn’t intend to fall back on it so soon, but this is the sort of thing your deal should cover, so if you could give us a hand, that’d be great.”

 

I thought about it for maybe half a second. “Fine,” I said. Anything to be moving, to be doing something, anything. “Where are we going?”

---

 

“So the thing is, we’ve been helping out where we can,” Kimiko said, lounging back against the seat of the limo and sipping from a water bottle. “Nothing obvious, nothing people could point to and say that we were doing your job for you, but we’ve been active. Feeling people out, pushing on them when we thought they were a little more resistant to the new order than we wanted them to be, spreading the word to the people that would listen to us. That kind of thing.”

 

They had? Interesting. I hadn’t heard about anything like that, but it was a hard sort of thing to verify, and under the circumstances it wasn’t unlikely that I wouldn’t have heard about it.

 

“So what’s the problem?” Aiko asked. She and Kimiko had taken one look at each other and made an unspoken agreement to pretend the other wasn’t there, apparently. They were cousins, but neither one was terribly fond of her family. You’d think that would give them some common ground, but apparently the opposite was true.

 

“Well, a while ago Kikuchi noticed that some people were responding weirdly. Like, they seemed really passive, but they wouldn’t actually listen. Show up, tell them how it’s going to be, and they don’t argue, but they don’t adjust, either. Like they’re only listening to get you to go away. Except it seemed like they wanted to agree with him, but they didn’t. And they were all in a certain area, too.”

 

It wasn’t hard to put that together. “Another faction,” I said. “One that’s playing the long game. They don’t want to make a move yet, but they’re ready to.”

 

“That’s what he said,” she agreed. “So he decided to move on them, see if he could force them into the open. And now…well, we’re almost there. You can see it for yourself.”

 

The car coasted to a stop less than a minute later. I reached for the door, but Kjaran was opening it before I could, stepping out of the way and bowing.

 

I blinked. He’d been driving. How the hell had he stopped the car, gotten out, gotten back to the backseat door, and opened the door before I could move my hand a foot?

 

I got out, suppressing a shiver. Bloody hell, that guy creeped me out.

 

It wasn’t hard to see what situation Kimiko had been talking about. A trio of tengu were standing in the road about a hundred feet away, looking like humanoid crows, and carrying swords. That was normal enough for them, but something about their posture made me think they were being more serious about it than usual. There was a tension there, a tautness that made me think of a cat about to pounce.

 

Standing opposite them were half a dozen other figures. These things were harder to categorize or identify. They looked human, generally, but each of them had something wrong about it. One was grotesquely fat, its frame loaded down with so much excess flesh that it shouldn’t have been able to stand. The next was better than six feet tall and skeletally thin, with a tiger-striped beard and his hands tucked into his sleeves. A third looked almost like a ghoul, with limbs too long for its body and the suggestion of a muzzle, with paper-white skin covered in intricate tattoos.

 

There was no commonality there, nothing that I could point to as a unifying feature. There was something oddly familiar about them, though, something that made me think I should recognize them. I felt a vague sense of foreboding, and hurried my pace a little.

 

“Ah,” the creature in the center said. This one looked perfectly human, even normal, but his shadow was that of a hulking, predatory monstrosity. “And there’s the man of the hour now.”

 

The tengu turned to face me. “Jarl,” one of them said, dipping his head slightly—not a bow or a sign of subservience, more a salute between equals. “I am glad that you could come.”

 

“Dai-tengu,” I said. “I feel similarly.” Then, to the other creature, “What’s going on?”

 

His smile spread, and the shadow smiled as well, showing teeth that were easily large enough to dwarf those of a werewolf, easily six or seven inches in length. “It’s quite simple, really,” the thing said. “We owe the both of you a rather serious debt. I’d planned on waiting a little longer before we moved, but I think this will work just fine.

 

A moment later his body melted and flowed in a burst of spice-scented magic, jasmine and ginger with hints of cardamom. He took on the shape that his shadow had suggested before, a vaguely tiger-shaped creature that stood easily eight feet tall, with massive claws and obscenely oversized teeth. His shadow, though, looked human now.

 

At that moment, I realized several things. The first was that there was a reason these things had seemed familiar. I’d encountered that vaguely floral scented magic before, and it had belonged to things that looked much like these, strange and warped. The second was that I’d accidentally advanced too quickly, leaving Aiko, Kimiko, and Kjaran a ways behind me. The third was that more of the creatures were pouring out of the alleys and doors around us, surrounding me and the tengu, and they didn’t look friendly.

 

With a cacophony of roars, screams, and whistles, the rakshasas charged us.

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“Coma,” the vet said firmly.

 

“Are you sure?” I asked, trying to keep my voice from showing any emotion.

 

Apparently I wasn’t doing a great job, because he looked at me with an odd expression. I wasn’t sure quite what it meant. “Absolutely,” he said. “Traumatic brain injury leading to coma. Probably cranial hemorrhage as well.”

 

I swallowed hard. “Can you fix it?”

 

“Maybe,” he said doubtfully. “Probably not, especially if she’s bleeding internally. And even if she wakes up, she’ll probably never walk again with the damage to her shoulder. It’s probably kinder to let her go. She’s suffered enough already.”

 

This time there was no mistaking what his tone meant. Accusation, plain and simple. Just as well, I supposed. If a vet saw a dog with severe trauma, a missing eye, and teeth replaced with metal implants, and he didn’t feel a certain amount of condemnation towards that dog’s owner, he wasn’t a very good vet.

 

“Fix it,” I said, more firmly. “I’ll see to it you have whatever you need.”

 

“A hospital,” he said instantly. “I don’t have the equipment to treat this kind of injury in my clinic. If you want her to live, she needs to get to a hospital immediately. And it’ll take a neurosurgeon to deal with it if there is a hemorrhage.”

 

I nodded. That made sense, I supposed. Vets probably didn’t have much call to treat comas. “Selene,” I barked, turning away from the scene. I couldn’t stand to watch Snowflake lie there, so close and yet utterly beyond my ability to help.

 

She appeared next to me so fast that she must have been just standing there waiting for me to call. “Yes?” she said.

 

“Take the housecarls and take over the nearest hospital.” I racked my brain, trying to think of which hospital that was, but I couldn’t remember, so I left it at that. “And recruit a neurosurgeon.”

 

“How should we handle this?”

 

“Do what you have to,” I snapped. “Bribe them, threaten them, whatever. You’re smart, you’ll figure something out.” Turning back to the vet, I asked, “Is that everything?”

 

He pursed his lips and nodded. He clearly still disapproved of this, on numerous levels, but he wasn’t arguing. Offering someone a quarter of a million in cash, up front and no questions asked, tended to have that effect on people.

 

“Good,” I said. “Because I’ll blame you if anything goes wrong.” Turning back around, I saw that Selene was still standing there, and glared at her. “Why are you still here?”

 

She cleared her throat. “Blind Keith got in touch while we were on our way here,” she said. “He named a location in London for your meeting, and says he expects you there in two hours.” She held a piece of paper out to me, which presumably had directions written on it.

 

“Shit,” I muttered to myself, glancing back at Snowflake. She was lying on an examination table, her breathing labored, although at least if the vet was right she was too far out to feel any pain.

 

I wanted to be there with her. But I knew I couldn’t do anything to help her now, and if I didn’t go to meet with Blind Keith things were liable to get even worse.

 

“Don’t screw this up,” I told the succubus, before stalking out of the room. It wasn’t the best stalk, if only because it still hurt to walk. Not just a little, either; I’d gotten a few minutes of rest on the way to the vet’s, but the inactivity only served to emphasize how bad of shape my body was in right now. It was letting me know in no uncertain terms that I would need some rest, and soon, or it was going to give out on me entirely.

 

Not that I had any idea of when I could manage that rest. There were just too many things going on, too many balls in the air—as evidenced by this message from Blind Keith. I’d almost forgotten that I was supposed to be meeting with him, and now that was coming back to bite me, since I hadn’t prepared for it at all.

 

I tried to plan as I walked to the edge of the road. Two hours wasn’t much time, not enough for me to really do anything else first, especially if I wanted to show up early. I hated to waste a moment right now, though, so I thought I might pick up the werewolves before going to London.

 

“Where are we going?” Aiko asked, falling in step beside me. She’d been watching the area, making sure that Katrin’s people weren’t planning a follow-up attack while we were distracted.

 

“London,” I said. “Blind Keith wants a meeting. With a stop in Wyoming on the way to get the werewolves.”

 

“Cool,” she said. “Staging point in Faerie, I’m guessing?” She turned to the edge of the road, starting to spin magic out into a portal without waiting for me to answer.

 

“I can get it,” I said.

 

She snorted. “Sure,” she said dryly. “But it’s obvious you’re pretty much dead on your feet, and I’m feeling decent. I can handle this one.”

 

It only took her a few minutes to open the portal, dropping us into the middle of a small glade in the deep woods. It was a quiet, isolated place with a small stream running through it, one of Aiko’s favorite staging points.

 

She was obviously more tired than she’d let on, because opening that portal took something out of her. She wasn’t even fully recovered by the time I’d finished the next portal, so I went to Wyoming without her. I was feeling too hurried to wait for her, and she would be safe there. It was one of the more secluded places in Faerie, and she knew her way around.

 

It was a short walk from my destination point in the forest outside Wolf to town. It felt a lot longer today, with how overwhelmingly crappy I felt, but I didn’t waste time feeling sorry for myself.

 

All I had to do was think of Snowflake, crippled and maybe dying on that table, to drive those thoughts out of my mind. I’d gotten lucky. I’d gotten very lucky.

 

And if I had anything to say about it, Katrin was going to die slowly and in a great deal of pain for that. Trying to kill me was one thing. I expected that; it was nothing personal, for either of us. But what she’d done to Snowflake, that made it personal.

 

Once I got to town, I spent a few moments trying to think of where I could find the people I was looking for, then snorted. I was still thinking like a human. If there was anywhere in the world, any single place, where I could reliably use my magic to find someone, it was this town. A decent chunk of the population here were werewolves, probably eighty percent or more had some kind of pet that I could work with, and I knew the terrain as well as anywhere. It had been years since I spent all that much time here, but nothing much had changed.

 

Nothing much had ever really changed, here. That was part of why I’d had to leave. Even with the current turbulence, the way things everywhere were changing dramatically and permanently, I had a strong suspicion that I’d be able to come back in another ten years and still recognize almost everything.

 

It took me a couple of minutes, but I eventually found them in the town’s only real bar. They were sitting around with the attitude of people who’d been sitting around for a while, and were starting to get pretty tired of it.

 

I hurried to get there, as best I could, and it was only a couple of minutes until I pushed open the door and stepped inside. My left leg gave out as I did, with spectacularly inconvenient timing, and I had to grab at the door to hold myself up. I still stumbled forward, knocking over the sign that had the night’s specials written on it.

 

The clatter from that ensured that everyone present was looking my way. I could practically see the bartender debating whether he should go for the shotgun he kept behind the bar, but luckily he was smart enough to look around first. Kyra gave him a thumbs-up, and he relaxed again.

 

I walked over to their table, managing to avoid any more embarrassing incidents, and slumped into one of the open chairs. “Hey,” I said. I would have said more, but that one word triggered a coughing fit that went on for a few seconds and left me breathing hard and biting my tongue to keep from making embarrassing noises from the pain.

 

“Damn,” Kyra said. “You look like crap.”

 

“I feel worse,” I said, grabbing her beer and taking a sip to try and keep the coughing down. There wasn’t enough alcohol in it to matter to me. “Got in a fight with Katrin a little while ago.”

 

She frowned, then suddenly blinked. “You mean the vampire? How’d that go?”

 

“I lived,” I said, shrugging, and then wincing at the pain that caused my ribs. “Snowflake maybe didn’t. She’s in surgery right now, brain injury, some broken bones, maybe internal damage.”

 

I was a little surprised at the reaction that provoked. I’d expected Kyra to care, but Ryan reacted as well. Even Daniell, the other werewolf Kyra had brought with her when she came to Wyoming, looked concerned.

 

The only person at the table who didn’t seem to care was Unna. But then, that was to be expected. The selkie had to be more personable than most of the fae, given that she and Ryan had apparently been married for a couple of years with a reasonable amount of happiness. She still wasn’t human, though, or anything like it. Even if she cared, it was pretty unlikely she’d show it in a way that I could recognize.

 

Kyra was looking at me oddly, and I realized that she must have said something that I missed. I shook my head, trying to shake some sense into it. I needed to focus. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Missed that.”

 

“I asked what you’re doing here while she’s under the knife,” Kyra said patiently. She had her tough face on, but I knew her well enough to recognize that she was covering up genuine concern, for me or for Snowflake. Probably both, now that I thought about it.

 

“Have a meeting in London,” I said. “Big, nasty fae that might want to eat me. I thought I’d pick you up on the way. Hopefully you guys can track Katrin’s people back to their hideout and I can take her out during the day.”

 

“So you just left us hanging until you needed something,” Ryan said. I thought he sounded upset.

 

“How long have you guys been here?” I asked.

 

“Most of the day,” Kyra said. The anger in her voice was more deeply buried, but I knew her well enough to pick up on it. “Eight or ten hours, I think?”

 

“Crap,” I said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I’d kept you waiting that long. Too many things to keep track of right now….” I shook my head again. “I’m sorry. I need to get moving if I’m going to make it to that meeting on time. If you don’t want to come with, I understand.”

 

“Of course we’ll come with you,” Kyra said, clearly exasperated. “Let’s go.”

---

 

London was dismal. It had been close to dawn in Wyoming by the time we left, which put it closer to noon in England, but it was overcast, the air somewhere between a heavy mist and a light rain. I’d reluctantly stopped long enough to take a massive dose of painkillers, enough to have a little bit of an effect even with my metabolism, but even with an accompanying dose of stimulants it hadn’t done much to shake me out of my near-daze. Determination and chemicals could only take you so far beyond the limits of your body, and the result was that at the moment was that I felt almost the same amount of pain, exhausted, nauseous, a little dizzy.

 

How long had I been awake, now? It was hard to remember. Almost twenty-four hours, I thought. Pretty close to that. And I’d been moving pretty much nonstop the whole time, a couple of fights, a couple of high-stress meetings, the time in between spent trying to organize everything.

 

Not the best state to be meeting one of the scariest predators in Faerie, I had to admit. But there wasn’t much I could do about it.

 

Blind Keith had given me an address, but it took a while to find it. I’d thought that London would be better off than most of the world right now, and in a sense I’d been right, but one of the things that was easy to forget when you weren’t a local was that London wasn’t really a city in the same way that I was accustomed to. It had built itself organically over the last two thousand years, and the result was a city that had so many neighborhoods, boroughs, and regions that you could spend your whole life there and not see more than a tiny fraction of the sprawling mass of streets that was London.

 

Blind Keith had chosen one of the very worst parts of that mass, a back street near Soho that had never really gotten its act cleaned up from when that part of town was a scary one. It was the kind of place you went to do things that were legal only so long as nobody was watching too closely, and that had been before the shit hit the fan.

 

Now, well, it was worse. My portal location in London was a good distance away, and the streets weren’t in much better shape than those back in Colorado. Maybe worse, in areas. Our stolen car was decent, but it still took a while to reach our destination.

 

The building he’d selected was a small one, dingy and easy to overlook. There were bars on the windows, and only a small sign in one of the windows identified it as a sex shop. I didn’t see anyone around or inside the building, no customers, no employees.

 

Where were they, I wondered? Had they just chosen not to go to work today? Had they shown up, but been scared away by Blind Keith so that we could have our meeting?

 

Or had he chased them through the streets, hunting them down, their lives ended in blood and pain and fear?

 

I tried not to think about it too much.

 

The door was unlocked, and the interior of the building was dark except for one light above a door. I went to that door, carefully, flanked by Aiko and Kyra. The other werewolves were waiting outside, watching for trouble.

 

Kyra whined a little as we crossed the room. Discomfort over being there, or thinking about what might have happened, perhaps?

 

Or maybe it was the aura of fear, of primal heart-pounding terror, that Blind Keith carried with him. I could feel it myself, a little, although I might not have recognized it as unnatural unless I’d already encountered him. It was just a nagging sense, at the back of my mind, that this was bad, that I should turn and run right now, because there was something very very very bad upstairs and if I kept going I was going to die, I was going to run and scream and bleed and die and there was nothing I could do….

 

I pushed that feeling away, although it was a struggle. Blind Keith’s magic was designed to speak to a part of me that didn’t have a lot in the way of reason or control, an instinctive level of my hindbrain that just wasn’t capable of too much in the way of rational thought. He scared people, made them revert to hunted animals at the mercy of anything lurking beyond the firelight, and then he capitalized on that. If I wanted to survive the next few minutes I had to keep that part of my psyche tightly controlled, because if I let it control me Blind Keith would eat me alive, maybe literally.

 

For a moment, I considered walking away. If I could run far enough, or find a good enough hiding place, I might be able to get away. I’d have to abandon the responsibilities I’d taken on to do it, of course, but I could be safe. I could give up the power that had been thrust upon me, that I’d never really wanted but felt that I had to take, for one reason or another. I could stop dealing with gods and monsters. I could stop having nightmares about these things.

 

Then I sighed. It was a nice thought, but in the end I knew I wasn’t smart enough to back down now.

 

I opened the door and went inside.

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I’d heard that you saw your life flash before your eyes, just before you die. Like watching it on film.

 

Apparently the person running my projector called in sick, because I didn’t get that. I only got one day, not my whole life, and even that was more of an extremely intense memory than a vision.

 

I woke up around six and got out of bed. Laura turned over and grumbled sleepily, pulling the covers up around her chin, but my alarm hadn’t woken her. That was good.

 

I grabbed clothes out of the closet and went to the bathroom. I brushed my teeth and showered, moving on autopilot. A little too much so, maybe; I accidentally used Laura’s shampoo instead of mine, and walked out smelling like lilacs.

 

Although it could have been worse. I still remembered the time I’d used Ginger’s shampoo. Although maybe that hadn’t been such a bad idea. I hadn’t had to worry about fleas for a while after that, for example.

 

I could be pretty silly before I got my coffee.

 

Once I’d dried off and gotten dressed, I went downstairs and poured a cup. The machine was set to start automatically just before I woke up, since the less time I was up before I got my caffeine fix, the happier I was. Although usually it wasn’t this bad. I hadn’t gotten much sleep. Too worried about today.

 

By the time I’d started on my second cup, I was feeling a little more awake. I rummaged through the cupboard, getting out the pans I would need, then went to the fridge.

 

I started frying the bacon first. The trick to a really good breakfast was to cook the bacon, then save the bacon grease to fry the eggs and potatoes in. It was a little more work, but it tasted so much better.

 

About the time the bacon was starting to sizzle, I heard the shower turn on upstairs. Laura was up, then. Good.

 

She came downstairs a few minutes later, wearing a terrycloth bathrobe. I pulled her close and kissed her. Her mouth tasted like toothpaste. “Good morning,” I said a long breath later, letting her go.

 

“Good morning,” she said, getting out another cup. She poured herself coffee and then got cream out of the fridge and sugar from the cupboard. Laura had never been able to stomach her coffee black, and expressed mild incredulity whenever I said that I preferred it that way.

 

I took the pan off the heat and started pulling the bacon out of the pan, setting each piece on a paper towel to drain. Laura got eggs from the fridge and hash browns from the freezer while I poured some of the grease into the other two pans.

 

I fried the eggs and potatoes, making sure to keep everything cooking evenly. Laura put bread in to toast and got out butter and a jar of raspberry jam her mother had given us for Easter.

 

While I got the food on the table, Laura went to wake Robbie. He came bounding out of his room a minute later, Ginger bouncing along next to him. No surprise there. The collie had been a part of our family about a year longer than the boy, but the two had been inseparable almost since he was born.

 

Breakfast was good. It was over too soon, but it was good. I cleaned up afterward, washing the pans and putting everything away. Laura helped Robbie get ready for school.

 

Once he was safely on the bus with the other first-graders, she came back inside and hugged me from behind, nuzzling against my neck. I finished washing the last pan and set it on a towel, turning to hug her back. She grabbed my hair and pulled me down to kiss me. That went on for a minute or so before Ginger started barking, reminding us that she hadn’t had her breakfast yet.

 

Once that was tended to, Laura caught my hand again, rubbing her thumb over my wrist. She smiled wickedly, making her intention clear.

 

I hesitated, then sighed. “You have to get ready for work,” I pointed out. So did I, but I didn’t have to be there quite so early today as she did.

 

“We could be quick.”

 

“Later,” I said, more firmly this time.

 

She groaned, then leaned forward and gave me a peck on the cheek before letting go. “I love you, Tommy.”

 

“I love you too, baby,” I said, and meant it.

 

A lot of people had warned me, when I first proposed to her, that it wouldn’t last. Feelings cooled, they said, and sooner or later I’d wind up feeling like she wasn’t even the same person I’d fallen in love with.

 

I was glad that hadn’t happened to Laura and me. Seven years later, and I loved her as much as ever.

---

 

I tugged my uniform awkwardly into place. I hated waiting, and I hated courtrooms. I’d been in them before, of course, part of the job, but still.

 

There were more people than I was used to today, though, and the hearing hadn’t even started yet. The judge wanted enough armed guards here today to keep anyone from doing something stupid. It was volunteer-only, though.

 

Most of the people who’d signed up did so for the hazard pay—silly, if you asked me, but there it was. I wouldn’t have done it for that. Money wasn’t that important.

 

But I’d seen some of how this guy was treated in prison. And that just wasn’t right. He hadn’t even been found guilty yet, and even if he had it wouldn’t have been right. I couldn’t do a whole lot to help him then, and I probably couldn’t do a whole lot to help him now, but I figured he at least deserved to have one person in the room who was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

 

The chief knew how I felt about it, and it had been almost three weeks since I’d even seen him. I was shocked at the difference. He looked terrible, fifty pounds too thin and haggard. More than that, though, was the way he carried himself. He moved like a man in a daze, shuffling his feet. His head hung to one side like he couldn’t muster up the strength to straighten it. When he sat down it seemed like he went away entirely, not even seeing the room in front of him. He stayed that way throughout the hearing. Even when someone asked him a direct question he was slow to respond, and when he spoke his voice was sluggish, almost slurred.

 

I felt a spark of anger stir inside me at that. They’d broken the man in there. This was beyond wrong. It was a betrayal of everything I stood for.

 

I tried not to pay too much attention to this travesty of justice, and as a result I was maybe the only person in the room who was watching when the doors slammed open. The guy that walked in was big, almost a giant, and he didn’t look happy.

 

I watched as he gave his little speech about cameras. For a second I was thinking I’d have to deal with him, but then the judge told the bailiff to take care of it. I was just as glad for that. I’d often had to deal with crazy people in my life, but it hadn’t gotten any more pleasant.

 

Then the bailiff hit the ground. I hadn’t seen what happened, but I’d seen people die before, in the hospital, and twice on the street.

 

And now once in a courtroom, as well.

 

I wasn’t sure what to do, but around me the other cops were drawing guns, and he had just murdered someone right in front of a judge, so I grabbed my gun as well. I lifted it, my hands shaking just a little, and then I pulled the trigger.

 

I’d practiced at the range almost every day for several years. But I’d never fired a gun in anger. I’d never shot at another human being. I’d certainly never killed anyone.

 

I wasn’t sure how to feel, now that I was doing it for the first time.

 

Except that he wasn’t dying. He wasn’t even falling down. I shot, and shot again, and I knew I hit him, and other people were shooting him too, but he didn’t seem to care.

 

I lowered my weapon, and I saw other people doing the same. This was just…not right. What was going on?

 

“Thank you for your courtesy,” he said. “The next person to try something like that gets turned into something.”

 

I took a deep breath, looking from my gun to him and back again. I didn’t understand it, didn’t understand any of it, but now that I could think about what had happened, I was ashamed of myself. That had been wrong. Shouldn’t we have tried to arrest him first? Why had they gone straight to lethal force? Why had I gone along with it?

 

Hadn’t I just been thinking that everything about this hearing was a travesty of justice? If anything I should thank him for interrupting this.

 

I took a step forward and lifted the gun, intending to say something along those lines and then cast the weapon aside. Dramatic, but hell, I was on camera, wasn’t I? And it was a way to send a message, if nothing else.

 

I didn’t get the chance. Before I could even open my mouth, the man who had burst into the room twitched, and suddenly I hit the ground.

 

There was no pain. That was the strangest thing about it. I could still see, and when I looked at myself I could see what had happened to me. I was broken, twisted. There were bits of me exposed to the air that shouldn’t have been. By all rights, I should have been in agony.

 

But there was no pain, none at all. All I felt was a sort of calm, peaceful lethargy. I found myself drifting, looking back on what had happened.

 

It had been a good life, I thought to myself. If I could do it over I’d do it the same, and in the end that was all you could ask for.

 

I would miss my family. Watching my son grow up. Growing old with my wife. We used to joke about how we’d make Robbie get a good job so he could support us in our old age. She’d wanted to go to France, where her family was from. See the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower. I’d talked about raising horses after I retired. My sister and I had made plans to visit Australia.

 

I felt a nagging sense of regret as I drifted off. So many dreams left unfulfilled.

 

I wished I could have had just a little more time.

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Okay. So my situation wasn’t great. I was effectively crippled, Snowflake was probably unconscious and definitely out of commission, and there were still at least a dozen vampires up and fighting.

 

As I crawled, I took stock of what I still had to work with. My people had superior positioning. Katrin obviously hadn’t been prepared for me to have something like that arranged, or her minions wouldn’t have been hit nearly so hard. That meant that the vamps were going to be struggling to respond. Katrin would be able to coordinate them, I was sure, but it would take a few precious seconds.

 

That meant that they would just now be starting to hunt people down. My housecarls were split into groups of two, which meant that the vamps would have to split up comparably to tackle all of them at once. I was guessing they would do that rather than concentrate their forces on one at a time. Vampires tended to be rather arrogant in my experience.

 

The other main advantage I could think of was that Katrin couldn’t really have expected me to be back in the fight. If they were trying to hunt me down they’d already have found me, which made me think that they were probably prioritizing taking the other targets down first.

 

Which was the right choice, tactically. But it also put me in a position where I could potentially do some good.

 

The first thing I had to do was get to a position where I could see the scene of the fight, make sure that my guesses weren’t totally off. The gunfire and explosions were sure to have terrified any animals away, and I would probably need to spend several seconds going the wrong direction to lay eyes on it myself.

 

Fortunately I’d thought ahead. Each team of jötnar had a cat in a carrier, where it could see the target area. In addition to giving me a clear idea of where each of my teams were, it also gave me a way to see for myself what was going on.

 

The nearest of these cats was pressed tight against the back of the carrier, not looking in remotely the right direction. I tried to nudge it to turn so that I could see, but it was scared almost out of its mind, and not inclined to pay attention to me.

 

So I pushed a little hard, taking control and just moving it, until the amphitheater was in my field of view. I could see a lot of vampires, on the ground or struggling to stand. None of them were in condition to fight, and there weren’t as many as had initially shown up, which made me think that my guess about what they were doing was probably accurate.

 

I didn’t see Katrin or Aiko.

 

I let go of the cat and kept crawling, moving towards the closest group of housecarls. They were about a hundred feet away, on top of a small hill.

 

I paused as I went. A hundred feet wasn’t that far, but…I wasn’t running right now. I wasn’t even walking. At a crawl, it would probably take a minute or so for me to get there.

 

A minute was way, way too long for my people to hold out against vampires. And that wasn’t even taking the other locations into consideration.

 

I needed to be moving faster.

 

I took a deep breath and called Tyrfing. The sword appeared in my grasp, the weight a comfortable presence in my hand. I unsheathed it, setting the scabbard carefully by my side so as to avoid making a sound, and then used it as a sort of cane to push myself to my feet.

 

It wasn’t so much that the cursed sword made the pain go away, exactly. It was more that it just didn’t matter as much. Rage and bloodlust rushed through me from the weapon, bringing something like an endorphin rush to swamp out the pain signal from my body. The emotions called an answering impulse from within me, raging hunger and a violent, feral anger at those who had dared to violate my territory.

 

Normally I would have tried to fight those feelings. They came from the wolf more than the man, and under most circumstances letting them run rampant was a very bad idea. I’d gotten used to limiting the way Tyrfing affected me, locking them out, until I hardly even had to think about it.

 

This time I encouraged them, stoking the anger up until the pain was lost behind it.

 

It still hurt, and my body still wasn’t responding to my directions quite right, but I managed to stagger forward, using Tyrfing to help my balance. It wasn’t pretty, but I was moving.

 

I heard a shout of pain from about the right location to have come from one of my housecarls, and gritted my teeth. Those people were mine, dammit. There was no way in hell I was going to let vampires have them. I started moving more quickly, although it still wasn’t nearly as fast as I’d usually be.

 

A few seconds later I got a look at the hill. There was one vampire, instantly recognizable by the strange, stiff grace of its movements. Brandulfr was on the ground in front of it, with an obviously broken arm. Skallagrim was halfway up a tree nearby, out of immediate danger, but obviously not confident in his ability to shoot the vampire without hitting Brandulfr. And that tree wouldn’t mean much of anything against a vampire. The thing could probably jump high enough to hit him.

 

I’d wanted to get a sneak attack in, take the vamp by surprise, but it would only be seconds before it killed the downed housecarl. That necessitated certain changes in my approach.

 

“Hey,” I shouted, moving closer. “You didn’t really think that killed me, did you?”

 

The vampire glanced over its shoulder at me. Then it grinned, a wide and profoundly wrong expression that showed teeth a bit too sharp for comfort, and turned back to Brandulfr. It wasn’t carrying a weapon, but it didn’t need one.

 

I growled and tried to run, managing only a sort of slightly-faster shamble.

 

I wasn’t going to make it in time.

 

I stopped and lifted Tyrfing, getting ready to throw it at the vamp. It was a stupid thing to do, but I had to do something, and I couldn’t think of any other weapon I was carrying that could put it down before it had time to kill Brandulfr.

 

Then the vampire paused suddenly. I couldn’t see its face, but its posture looked confused.

 

A moment later Aiko flickered into view, standing right next to him. Her wakizashi was thrust through his neck to the hilt, sticking out the other end covered in blood. She leaned in close and whispered something in his ear, then pulled the blade back out.

 

The vampire dropped like a marionette with its strings cut. She’d cut through the spine entirely, apparently.

 

“Nice job,” I said, trying to pretend that hadn’t surprised me as much as everyone else. I kept walking forward, not leaning on Tyrfing. That wouldn’t be good for my image. “Do we know what happened to the others?”

 

“Kyi and Nóttolfr bolted,” Aiko said instantly. “Pretty sure they got away. The rest…I don’t know.”

 

“Okay,” I said. “We’re going to go check on the rest. Brandulfr, Skallagrim, you’re with us.”

 

The next location was an office building, currently empty. Haki and Njáll had been on the third floor, barricaded inside an empty office.

 

Now the door on the office was hanging open from one hinge. Njáll was lying on the ground under the window, broken in ways that not even a jotun was going to be standing up from. There was no sign of Haki.

 

I didn’t like that, but if there was one person on my team who could get by on his own, it was Haki. So we kept moving, looking for the next team.

 

Continuing around the park, it took more than a minute to find the next location. This one was a small store that had been empty for several years for reasons I wasn’t entirely clear on. Ragnar and Vigdis had been on the roof earlier to get the height they’d needed to shoot down into the crowd. From the sound of things, though, they’d since moved down into the main room of the store, and they were still fighting.

 

I froze, startled, then rushed into the building.

 

The interior of the building was a striking tableau. Three vampires were on the ground, each marked with damage from the bullets and explosives, then decapitated. Vigdis was lying next to the door, her right leg snapped like a toothpick just below the knee. Ragnar was still standing, holding a broken spear, which he was using to fight against the last vampire still standing.

 

The vamp was missing its left arm near the shoulder, and the other injuries were severe enough that it could hardly stand. And it was still obviously, easily more than a match for the jotun. He was feinting with the spear, keeping it at bay, but there was no question of who would win.

 

I didn’t say a word, just stepped up behind the thing and swung Tyrfing, aiming to chop its head clean off. It heard something and dodged at the last second, so rather than kill it, I cut deep into its right shoulder.

 

Not lethal, but still pretty decent. Now both its arms were effectively useless.

 

That’s what I thought, anyway. I was swiftly proved wrong as it spun, not seeming to care about the injury, and slapped me in the chest.

 

It couldn’t put more than a small fraction of its full strength behind the blow, but then, I wasn’t in much better shape. Even that weak of a hit was enough to knock me from my feet.

 

The others were filing in the door, though, and the vampire was seriously outnumbered. It turned, looking at what was happening, then tried to bolt for the door.

 

Vigdis’s hand around its ankle brought it up short. The giant had to be in terrible pain, but she held tightly enough that even vampire couldn’t jerk away easily, and she was grinning wildly.

 

Ragnar lunged forward, trying to impale the thing on his spear. He succeeded, sort of, but apparently he missed the heart, because it didn’t even slow down. It didn’t even turn to face him as it lashed out, kicking him in the chest.

 

Ragnar flew backward, his feet coming an inch or two off the ground, and hit the wall. He dropped, instantly, and I was guessing he was out of the fight. Maybe permanently; that was a hell of a kick.

 

Vigdis took the opportunity to tug his supporting foot out from under the vamp, toppling it. That put it on the floor not far from me. I grabbed the spear sticking out of its chest and started pushing, trying to shove it further into the thing and get the heart.

 

The reaction was instant and violent. It had been trying to stand, but once I grabbed the spear it gave up on that and started scrabbling away from me on the ground.

 

It had only three limbs, one of which was basically nonfunctional, and poor leverage, so it made only limited progress. A moment later Vigdis let go of its ankle and moved up, pushing against its back and shoving it into the spear.

 

The vamp went berserk, bucking against me, kicking out and hitting me with its remaining arm. I gritted my teeth and shoved the spear another inch into the thing.

 

The vampire screeched, a sound more like metal tearing than a human scream, loud enough to hurt my ears. I ignored the pain, braced myself as best I could in such an awkward position, and pushed.

 

The vampire bucked one more time, almost throwing me off completely, then went still. I pushed myself slowly to my feet, still holding the spear, and looked at what I’d done.

 

The vampire was lying on the ground, perfectly still, blood trickling from its mouth. I’d shoved that spear clear through its body and an inch into Vigdis’s breast on the other side. She didn’t seem to care about that injury, any more than the broken leg. She just kept right on grinning at me, wild and ecstatic.

 

Skallagrim grabbed one of Vigdis’s axes off the floor and brought it over without any hesitation. He glanced at me to make sure it was okay, then brought it down, chopping the vamp’s head clean off.

 

I felt woozy standing up, almost so much so that I couldn’t, even leaning on Aiko. When I looked around, the rest of the crew didn’t look much better. Brandulfr had a broken arm, and Vigdis wasn’t going to be standing on that leg any time soon. Ragnar was unconscious, and even if he weren’t that kick had shattered several ribs, apparently driving them into his lung.

 

A normal human would very probably have died from that already. Jötnar were tougher, but whether Ragnar was tough enough to survive this was not at all certain.

 

“Okay,” I said, and then stopped to cough. I was a little surprised by how much it hurt; I couldn’t even see straight, and I had to lean heavily on Aiko to stay standing. Apparently some of my ribs were cracked, too. I didn’t want to think too much about what might have happened without the armor. Grappling with a vampire wasn’t high on my list of things to do again. “Where are the rest of us?”

 

“Watching from the roof, it looked like almost everyone made it to the shelter,” Vigdis said. “We were farther away and they’d already sent some vamps after us, so we thought it’d be better to hunker down here.”

 

“Shelter,” I said. “You mean the basement we prepped?”

 

“That’s the one,” she said.

 

I sighed with relief at that. I’d done what I could to prepare for this, but I hadn’t had much warning. The closest thing I’d been able to arrange to a decent fallback position was the basement of a nearby house. For reasons I couldn’t even really guess at, he’d converted his basement into a tornado shelter. I’d had my people reinforce the door as best they could, and sent Jimmy and Aubrey to set up some basic wards.

 

It wasn’t great, as fortresses went. The best I could really hope for was that the vampires would think it was more work than it was worth. But it was the best I’d been able to arrange on such short notice.

 

“You stay here,” I said to the housecarls. “Aiko and I will go check on the scene there.” I didn’t like leaving them there, but there was no way Vigdis or Ragnar could travel. This building was reasonably defensible, and Katrin had already sent four vampires to clear it. With luck, she wouldn’t bother throwing more at the job. And if not, well, Brandulfr, Skallagrim, and Vigdis were still in shape to fight, sort of. I’d give them even odds against one vampire. Against more than one, I’d lose at least one housecarl, maybe all four.

 

Not great. But probably better odds than if they came with us.

---

 

The five blocks to the shelter were among the hardest in my life. I could barely walk, it hurt to breathe, and I was terrified that a swarm of vampires would fall on us at any moment. It didn’t help that Aiko had seen where Snowflake fell, and we detoured to pick her up.

 

I’d seen her injured as badly before, but very seldom. Her shoulder was shattered, as were a couple of her ribs, and I thought her skull might be cracked. In any case, she was definitely unconscious, and to my magic it felt like she was more unconscious than usual. It was like, if the usual feeling of her being knocked out was a phone that was playing a dial tone instead of her voice, this time the phone wasn’t even plugged into the wall.

 

A crappy metaphor, especially when I couldn’t even remember the last time I used a landline. But it was the best I could come up with.

 

I wasn’t sure how Aiko managed it, given that she was carrying Snowflake and holding a lot of my weight up as well. I only really straightened up again when we reached the house in question.

 

The basement-turned-shelter had a separate entrance, a heavy steel door set in the ground. Runes cut crudely into the metal acted as the focus of the warding spells, and I knew that there were several steel bars hastily welded to it to help hold it closed. A vampire could probably batter their way through it, given enough time, but not casually.

 

Luckily, there were no vampires nearby. Apparently Katrin had been confident that the minions she left behind were enough to get the job done, and she hadn’t thought that getting the rest of the housecarls out of this shelter was worth the effort.

 

I looked around for a few seconds and then cut a branch off a nearby tree with Tyrfing. I used the branch to tap on the door. The pattern was simple enough that I didn’t need to worry about messing it up, but complex enough that an aggressor was unlikely to get lucky and guess it.

 

There was a brief pause before I heard the locks, bars, and chains being undone. A moment later the door opened a crack and Kyi stuck her head out. “You made it,” she said, with some relief.

 

“Yeah,” I said. Looking inside it seemed like all the rest of the housecarls were here. Even Haki had made it, though I wasn’t sure how he’d been able to cross the entire park on his own after his partner was killed by a vamp.

 

“Almost all of us made it,” Aiko said. “Now it’s time to start thinking about how to get back at them for this betrayal.”

 

I nodded and sat down, leaning against the house. Katrin’s betrayal, if you could even call it that, had been inevitable and entirely predictable. Now that we’d gotten through it, I could finally slap her down for good without worrying about taking a hit to my rep.

 

Maybe after a nap. A nap sounded good.

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Before any of the vampires could do much in the way of moving, things started blowing up.

 

They were freakishly strong, almost invulnerable, and possessed of bizarre powers that I really couldn’t even guess at. But at the end of the day, they were still meat. There were certain rules they had to follow.

 

When land mines started going off under their feet, they were about as helpless as anyone else. The sheer force of the explosions tossed them around like rag dolls, bodies flying ten feet or more into the air before falling back to the ground.

 

They weren’t dead, barring unlucky exceptions. It took a lot to kill a vampire, and while explosions were a good way to get the job done, these particular weapons hadn’t been intended to kill them.

 

What they did do was sow chaos and confusion, making it pretty hard for them to actually do much. Even the ones that hadn’t been sent flying were falling to the ground, screaming in surprise or pain, if they were alive enough to feel pain. The things were horrifically strong and tough, but they were still meat, and they couldn’t operate well with half their bones broken, or muscles torn to pieces by shrapnel.

 

Kyi had had enough time to remove the mines closest to us from the detonation pattern, so we weren’t at risk of the same fate. The impact was still enough to knock Aiko from her feet, and Snowflake and I staggered hard.

 

A moment later, before anyone really had a chance to recover or adapt, the gunfire started. I couldn’t really hear it—I was effectively deaf from the explosions—but I knew the plan, and I could see the results. This wasn’t precision shooting with a sniper rifle; that kind of thing wasn’t a great tactic for vampires, and the housecarls weren’t exactly precision shooters, either. The weapons they were using were more crude, designed to just inflict mass damage. Automatic weapons, shotguns, that sort of thing.

 

Most of them just trained their weapons on the crowd of vamps and pulled the trigger. That kind of spray-and-pray tactic wasn’t effective, but there were around ten of them shooting into a massed group of enemies. Even if one bullet out of ten actually hit a target, it was still inflicting damage, putting enemies down.

 

The handful that were actually competent—Kyi, Brandulfr, a couple of others to a lesser degree—were using the same weapons, but with a very different intent. They were aiming mostly at the vamps closer to us, they were aiming carefully, and they were shooting to kill.

 

It’s hard to kill a vampire. It’s even harder to get the job done with a gun. Guns are good at killing, but the way they typically get used doesn’t lend itself well to vamps. But if you know what you’re doing, and these guys did, it can be done. I’d seen videos of assault rifles being used to cut down trees; cutting off someone’s head wasn’t out of the question with sustained fire. Similarly, a couple well-placed shotgun blasts could pulp someone’s heart or brain well beyond what a stake could manage.

 

When those attacks put vamps down, not all of them got back up again.

 

Those closest to us had started to react, though, rushing towards us at speeds considerably greater than what I could manage. Running was out of the question. Snowflake could probably get away. If I were on four feet, I’d even give myself decent odds. But there was no way Aiko could move fast enough, and her magic wasn’t remotely strong enough to hide from a vampire.

 

So I did the next best thing. I drew Tyrfing, and I charged right at them.

 

I felt a few bullets hit me as I did so, either ricochets, missed shots, or bullets that had passed clean through their target and kept going to hit me. Most of them didn’t penetrate the armor, and the couple that did didn’t do any critical damage. Not right away, at least; bullet wounds could be tricky that way. But I was fine for the moment, and that was all that mattered right now.

 

I ran straight at them for about three steps. Then I threw Tyrfing at them. I didn’t bother trying to aim. The objective wasn’t to cut them, after all.

 

Then I forced power through the focus I’d built into the boots of my armor, thickening and controlling the air underneath them. It was very challenging to do it at full speed—turning it on and off in time with my steps, when I was sprinting as fast as I could—but I’d practiced it. I’d practiced a lot.

 

It was strenuous, not unlike sprinting up a very steep staircase, except that I also had to create the staircase. It was a massive physical, mental, and energetic strain, and I knew that I couldn’t keep it up for long.

 

But by the time I reached the leading group of vampires, I was twenty feet above their heads, maybe a little more. They could easily have jumped and caught me, but they were still trying to adjust. I’d kept this facet of my abilities very quiet, specifically so that people and Katrin wouldn’t know I could sort of mimic flight. Between that, the mines, the gunfire, and Tyrfing, they didn’t react in time as I ran right over their heads, dropping a pair of grenades as I passed.

 

When they detonated an instant later it knocked me out of the air, sending me tumbling to the ground. It was a hard fall, hard enough to stun me for a moment.

 

That left me on the ground in the middle of a crowd of hostile vampires, but in an odd way that was actually the best place I could be. I was lying under the gunfire, for the most part, and in the chaos they weren’t able to really make use of their advantageous position.

 

Then I called Tyrfing again, and swept it in a circle around myself, at around knee height. It sheared through flesh and bone, and vampires hit the ground all around me, crying out. I was swamped by the rush of dark, foul-smelling blood. There was no real force behind a vampire’s blood—no heartbeat—but I’d just cut off their legs, and even without pressure that translated to a lot of bleeding.

 

There was another explosion, although I could only dimly hear it. A grenade, most likely. A moment later Snowflake burst through the crowd to my side. Her metallic teeth were stained with that same dark blood, her eye was bright with excitement, and her lips were peeled back in a snarl that I couldn’t hear.

 

I could really get to hate this reliance on guns and explosives. They were potent, but being effectively deafened for minutes at a time was a pain in the ass.

 

And then, a moment later, I found myself being grabbed by the neck and hauled into the air. I tried to struggle, but I might as well not have bothered. The person lifting me was stronger than me, in the same sense that I was stronger than a puppy. I might as well have been trying to overpower a locomotive as outmuscle them.

 

Katrin lifted me up until my face was on a level with hers. She was tall and I wasn’t, so my feet were dangling a couple of inches above the ground. I could breathe, barely—the armor was limiting the compression on my throat, and she wasn’t really squeezing. But it’s pretty much impossible to have much in the way of strength when you don’t have anything to push against. I supposed that I could try to use Katrin herself as an anchor, but that seemed like a spectacularly bad idea.

 

She looked at me coldly, seeming completely oblivious to the ongoing hail of gunfire, to her minions screeching and dying all around. “You,” she said, “are an exceedingly irksome man.” She must have been almost screaming, for me to hear her clearly, but her face remained blank and calm.

 

I opened my mouth to reply, and then I felt something, a surge of emotion that wasn’t mine. It took a second to process and figure out what was happening, by which time it was too late. Snowflake leapt through the air, jaws spread wide, claws ready to rake and tear.

 

And the vampire swatted her out of the air with one hand.

 

Snowflake was tough and strong and usually smarter than that. But she was still a dog, and not even a particularly large dog. Even with the armor, she couldn’t weight more than about two hundred pounds, max. And she didn’t have anything to push against either, which made it a matter of pure mass and velocity.

 

When Katrin hit her, she flew. Literally flew, twenty feet or more, out of sight. At the same time, I completely lost contact with her. My magic just suddenly stopped telling me that she was there, at all.

 

Before I had time to think about what that meant, Katrin threw me in the opposite direction. It almost felt like I was falling, the same wild and uncontrollable movement, and just about as fast. I was horizontal in the air and spinning, the world flashing before my eyes too quickly for me to take it in.

 

I’d felt a lot of kinds of pain in my life. There was the pain of having your eye melted out of its socket by magical fire. There was the pain of being crucified with silver spikes. There was the pain of broken bones and crushed organs.

 

The pain I felt then was easily on a par with the worst I’d ever felt, a solid bar of agony from one end of my body to the other. It hurt so much that I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t even really breathe.

 

I’m pretty sure I blacked out for a couple of seconds after that. Once I was cognizant of my surroundings again, I realized that I was lying face-down on concrete. I tried to roll over and look around, and this time I almost did scream. And all I really managed was to flop around a little. My body wasn’t responding the way I wanted it to.

 

Biting my tongue to keep from making any more noise than I had to, I tried again, and again. By the time I managed it I was sweating hard, I felt like I was about to throw up, and my tongue was bleeding.

 

And it was still a relief. For a second there, I’d been genuinely terrified that my back was broken.

 

Lying there, I took a few seconds to think, trying to figure out what had happened and what I should do. As far as I could tell, I’d slammed flat on my back into a brick wall, then fell to the ground. My spine wasn’t actually broken, but I’d still taken some serious damage. Broken ribs, a spectacular amount of bruising, probably some internal damage. It was hard to say for sure.

 

I tried to stand, and couldn’t. Everything hurt, my coordination was shot, and my balance wasn’t much better. I could maybe have gotten on my feet, but I didn’t know how long I could stay there, and I was scared that another fall would knock me out for good, leaving me helpless at a time when I really couldn’t afford to be.

 

So I rolled back onto my stomach, gathered my cloak around myself for a little bit more concealment, and started crawling back in the direction I’d come. I wasn’t sure what I’d do when I got there, but I’d be damned if I just let this happen.

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“You’re not dead,” Aiko said. “Congratulations. Who’s the boring guy?”

 

“This is Andrews,” I said. “He’s one of Pellegrini’s people. Whatever magic he’s using is also apparently apocalyptically badass, which is fun.”

 

“I’m strictly freelance,” Andrews said calmly. “And Maker’s concern wasn’t so much about my own talents as the potential interactions it might have with the ongoing situation in Russia.”

 

“Right,” I sighed. Just what I needed, a pedantic superpower. “You said Pellegrini wanted to talk with us. I’m guessing that you didn’t intend that to be, say, tomorrow?”

 

“No. And this invitation was for you, specifically.”

 

“Screw that,” I said cheerfully. “I’ve got a lot of people I’m supposed to be talking to. If Pellegrini is going to raise hell about me bringing Aiko, he suddenly dropped a few steps on my priority list.” I saw that he was hesitating, and said, “Come on. Worst case, we get there and he tells me otherwise. I saw you in there. There’s no way you’re scared of us.”

 

Andrews went dead still, instantly. It was sort of creepy, actually. Normally, even when people stop moving, they aren’t really still. They fidget, at least a little, blinking, unconscious tics, eye movements, that sort of thing. They can’t stop themselves, because they aren’t even aware they’re doing it.

 

Andrews wasn’t moving, not even those little unconscious movements. He was still breathing, but other than that he might as well have turned into a statue. It was a short step away from seeing a vampire pull the same trick.

 

“Very well,” he said, a moment later, his body relaxing back into the normal human state. “Your associate and your hound may accompany us. When we arrive I will ask my employer whether they are welcome in the meeting or they will be waiting outside.”

 

He resumed walking and we followed him. There was something about what he’d said that bugged me, and it took a couple seconds to realize. Snowflake had stayed outside the building so that she would know if anyone tried to sneak up on us or otherwise cause problems.

 

Andrews hadn’t ever seen her, to my knowledge, and even if he’d talked to someone who had, that shouldn’t have told him that she was with me right now. So how had he known?

 

It didn’t matter for the moment, so I tried to put it out of my mind. Outside, Andrews walked briskly across the parking lot, with Aiko and I a few paces behind him. Snowflake caught up within a few seconds, rubbing her head affectionately against my thigh. Armor on armor, there wasn’t a lot to feel, but it was still comforting on a level.

 

I did pause when Andrews stopped by an expensive-looking silver Mercedes. “Wait,” I said. “We aren’t taking a portal?”

 

He paused and looked at me oddly. A moment later, he relaxed again. “Ah,” he said, as though he’d just realized something. “You learned that trick from the kitsune, I take it?”

 

“Yeah,” I said, a little confused. “Why?”

 

He smiled, the expression almost more of a smirk, and glanced at Aiko. “It’s not my business,” he said. There was an odd emphasis on the words. I wasn’t sure what it was supposed to mean, and it was so faint that I optimistically assumed it was just my ears playing tricks on me. “And I don’t interfere with things that aren’t my business. Suffice to say that no, we won’t be taking a portal. Get in the car.”

 

I glanced at Aiko dubiously, then shrugged and got into the passenger seat. Aiko got in the backseat, and Snowflake sat next to her, her head extended up next to my arm.

 

What happened after that was one of the more interesting experiences I’d had recently. The streets were dark, more of the streetlights broken or disabled than were functioning properly. The sky was cloudy, blocking even what little light the crescent moon and stars might have provided, with the end result that the Mercedes’s headlights were the only illumination most of the time.

 

The car was not exactly an off-road vehicle, and the streets were still in pretty crappy condition. Between those factors and the poor illumination, I would have expected Andrews to take it slow and careful on the drive.

 

Instead, he went a good bit faster than I would have felt comfortable with in full daylight. He was hitting speeds that would have been respectable on the Interstate on a good day, except he was driving mostly on back roads, in the dark, when the quality of those roads was deeply questionable.

 

I managed to keep from clutching something, but it took a serious exercise of will. Even Snowflake was a little unnerved, and that was saying something. For his part, though, Andrews seemed totally calm, not showing any concern for the possibility of a wreck. And he had the competence to back it up, too. Cars stopped and moving, piles of refuse, the occasional collapsed bridge or building—whatever the obstacle, he swerved around it smoothly. He might only leave a foot or two between the car and the obstruction, but apparently he was just confident enough in his skills that he didn’t care.

 

Damn. I didn’t know how he did that, how his magic worked, but it was pretty unnerving to deal with. Everything I’d seen so far pointed at his approach being something unusual, well outside what I’d normally seen. Most mages focused their talents on something concrete and immediate—water, fire, force, emotion. My own approach was more vague, focusing on the concept of predation, and extending out to other ideas that related to that concept to a greater or lesser extent. That was good, in that it meant I had a little more versatility than a lot of people managed. It was also problematic, though, in that it meant that I had one very specific thing I did reasonably well, and a whole bunch that I was pretty spectacularly bad at.

 

From what I’d seen of Andrews’s work, I was guessing he was a step beyond even how I approached things. His magic seemed more abstract, something that didn’t necessarily interact with the world in a way that I could easily categorize or describe.

 

I didn’t have the faintest idea how he did what he did, and that bugged the hell out of me.

 

Maybe ten or fifteen minutes later, he skidded to a stop outside a small apartment building. We piled out of the car and stood around, waiting, as Andrews slowly got out of the car and locked it up.

 

I wanted to make a wisecrack about that kind of driving not being a whole lot safer than an Otherside portal. I restrained myself. It didn’t seem like a good idea.

 

“Wait here,” he said. “I’m going to go check with my employer about your associates attending the meeting.”

 

We stood out in the street and waited while he went into the building. It started to drizzle, the sort of fine, cold rain that could drag on for hours. I didn’t care too much about the temperature, and the others were encased in armor, but it was still gloomy.

 

Maybe three or four minutes later Andrews came back out. “They’re cleared,” he said. “Follow me.”

 

Inside, things were…quiet. At a glance, the whole building was empty. I didn’t hear anything, I didn’t smell anything out of the ordinary. There were a handful of animals in the building, but nothing I could really get much use out of—rats, mostly, and a handful of pigeons and starlings on the upper floors. Nothing my magic worked well with. A quick glance through them suggested that none of them could see, hear, or smell anything which hinted of human occupation.

 

Eerie. Had Pellegrini emptied the whole building for this meeting? I didn’t think so; the fact that vermin had already reclaimed the place suggested a longer period of emptiness. It was possible that he owned the whole building, and it had never seen use other than as a front, I supposed.

 

Or it was possible that it had been a normal apartment building, originally, and then something happened to the residents. Most of the supernatural predators I could think of would have left more signs of their presence, but there were ways to leave this kind of emptiness behind. A vampire could have walked in and just led the residents out without any kind of struggle, to be fed upon later. Some of the fae, or other, more exotic, creatures, could have slaughtered everyone without so much as a drop of blood to show for it.

 

I shivered a little. This place was creeping me out. Being led by Andrews, who had to be one of the creepiest mages I’d seen, wasn’t helping things. And the fact that I was here to meet with Pellegrini, a ruthless crime lord who could and would arrange my death if he felt it was necessary? That was just icing on the cake.

 

Andrews led us to apartment 108, where he knocked on the door and opened it without waiting for a response.

 

The room inside was dim, except for one illuminated table. I think he wanted it to be completely dark, but he was used to working with human vision. The lamp he’d chosen cast enough light that I could see that the rest of the apartment was completely empty. Either he’d cleaned it out completely, or it had never been occupied in the first place.

 

Andrews walked to the other side of the table and sat down on the other side of the table, to the side of and slightly behind Pellegrini. An enforcer was sitting on his other side, a massive guy that Pellegrini had brought along at least once before that I remembered. He looked like the sort of dumb bruiser that got thrown out of the WWE for extreme brutality, but I was guessing he was smarter than he looked. Strong or not, you didn’t get to be the lieutenant of a guy like Pellegrini if you were dumb.

 

“Hi,” I said, sitting across from the crime lord. Aiko and Snowflake took up positions flanking me, mirroring the people on the other side of the table.

 

“Good evening,” Pellegrini said. “I’m glad you could make it.”

 

“No problem,” I said. “I was hoping to meet with you soon anyway. Although I do have another meeting across town in,” I glanced at my watch, “three hours. Damn, where does the time go?”

 

He smiled. It was a thin, dry expression, but I almost thought it might be sincere. “I’ll try to keep this brief, then,” he said. “I know that you’ve been building capital recently. I know that you’ve declared yourself the ruler of all things in this city. I’m still trying to determine whether it’s in my best interest to assist you or shut you down. I strongly recommend that you convince me of the former.”

 

I managed to keep from showing nervousness at that, but it wasn’t easy. Pellegrini might be human, but he’d still kept himself on top of organized crime in this region for at least several years. You didn’t do that unless you were smart, committed, and ruthless. He was the kind of guy that had to be treated with extreme caution.

 

I took a moment to gather my thoughts, then nodded. “Okay,” I said. “Let me put it this way. You’re a businessman, Mr. Pellegrini. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about business, it’s that you need a stable operating environment to make it profitable. I’m trying to hold things together, keep things from turning into an even bigger mess. As I see it, backing my play is the best way you have to keep business in this city profitable.”

 

“Assuming,” he said dryly, “that you don’t take action to limit or compete with my business yourself.”

 

I snorted. “Why would I want to? You think I want to deal in your kind of business?” I shook my head. “No. I’m fine with you still owning the industries you do right now. I’m not interested in dealing drugs or running prostitution. I would have a couple of rules for you to follow, but nothing you’d be too upset by, I don’t think.”

 

“Rules,” he said, with obvious distaste. “What sort of rules?”

 

“You’d have to acknowledge my authority for this to work,” I said. “I can’t maintain respect otherwise. Think of it as…we’re equals, but you’re operating in my territory, so you show respect, right? Other than that, most of what I want is stuff that you already enforce on your people. No pushing drugs to kids, no forced prostitution.”

 

He nodded slowly. “Reasonable,” he said slowly. “But why should I cede my territory in this city to you?”

 

“Because you can’t hold it anyway. No offense, but we both know it. Andrews said during the conference that you’ve been attacked recently. Those attacks are just going to get worse as more people take an interest and stronger groups get involved. Apparently you’ve handled them so far, but it’s going to get harder.” I shrugged. “I’m basically offering to defend your holdings in this city for you. And I’ve got the ability to do so. As I see it, that’s a pretty good deal for you. All you’d have to give me is recognition and maybe a bit of assistance.”

 

“Assistance. What sort of assistance?”

 

“Information, primarily. Possibly funding; I have plenty of cash, but accessing it is difficult at the moment. I might want more concrete support at some point, but I’d negotiate that separately.”

 

He pressed his lips together and nodded. “Very well. I will consider your offer. In the meantime, I believe you have another meeting to get to.”

 

I fled, with gratitude and as much dignity as I could muster.

---

 

Not having Andrews’s crazy driving skills, we did use a pair of Otherside portals to travel to the north side of the city. On the other end, Aiko took a couple minutes to recover from the effort of making them, then we stole a car. I felt sort of bad about it, but rationalized it away by telling myself that what I was trying to accomplish here was important enough to justify it.

 

I wasn’t sure that I liked that train of thought. “The ends justify the means” was a hard ideology once you took it past the most basic level. That was how you rationalized things like preemptive war and genocide. At the same time, though, I’d seen what happened when you went too far the other way, doing the “right” thing without paying any attention to what it would cost. There had to be somewhere in between, a way to balance the two and not wind up doing horrible things.

 

Didn’t there?

 

I shook it off and called Kyi. “Are you in position?” I asked, the moment she answered.

 

“Yes, jarl,” she replied instantly. “Target is within sight and does not seem to have noticed us.”

 

Was it my imagination, or was her voice a little colder than it had been before? Or maybe it was just circumstance. This was a time for professionalism, after all, not emotion.

 

“Good,” I said, trying to ignore that thought in the back of my head. “We’re on our way, should arrive soon. Get your people ready to move into final positions.”

 

“Yes, jarl,” she said, before hanging up.

 

The location Katrin had chosen for our meeting was a small outdoor amphitheater in a park solidly in the portion of the territory she’d claimed. I felt more than a little anxious as I walked up to it. It felt like I was being watched, probably because I almost certainly was.

 

The vampire was waiting for us. She was alone, which worried me more than a little. I’d killed Natalie, sort of, but she still had Hrafn. I wasn’t sure why she wouldn’t have brought her right-hand vamp, especially when he was an absolutely lethal fighter. Even by the standards of vampires he was hard to beat.

 

There were only a couple of reasons I could think of for her to leave him behind. I didn’t like any of them.

 

“Good evening,” I said, approaching her. Snowflake was growling quietly next to me—she likes vampires even less than I do, generally—but Aiko seemed entirely calm.

 

“Good evening,” Katrin replied. She was doing that vampire thing, where she didn’t breathe except to talk, and her voice was a dry rasp. “You’re early.”

 

“Yeah,” I said. “That a problem.”

 

“Not at all,” she said. “You have been acting up. Making claims on the city.”

 

“Yeah,” I said. “But you’re one to talk. The way I hear it, you’re snatching people off the street to feed your minions.”

 

“We need power to maintain order in this city.”

 

“If that were your only interest, there are other ways you could have gone about it,” I said. “You could have asked for volunteers. You could have asked me or Kikuchi for assistance.”

 

A thin, cruel smile played around her lips. I might have been projecting a little, but I didn’t think so. “Perhaps.”

 

I considered her for a moment, then sighed.

 

So. It was like that, then.

 

I already knew how this was going to end, had known since before I even agreed to this meeting, but I thought I’d give Katrin one more chance to surprise me. “I’m taking over the city,” I said. “I’m going to keep things stable. Keep the peace. We made a deal, three years ago, that we’d provide assistance to each other against outside threats. Are you going to keep that deal?”

 

“Here’s the thing,” she said, with that smile still in place. “As I see it, that deal was made in a different context. The world’s moved on since then. So let me give you a counteroffer. You withdraw your claim and get out of the city, and we can let bygones be bygones.”

 

“I can’t do that,” I said quietly. I supposed that I should have been afraid, or excited, but I mostly just felt sad.

 

She nodded slowly. “I understand,” she said. “I want you to know that I really did respect you, Winter.”

 

Then she whistled, loud enough to make me wince.

 

And then vampires came out of the night. First one, then two, five, ten, then I lost count. Within thirty seconds, there must have been twenty-five or thirty vampires in that amphitheater, standing all around us. Some of them were holding weapons, others weren’t. I doubted it really mattered. If a vampire hit you full strength, it wasn’t too important what they’d hit you with.

 

“Kill them,” Katrin said, in that same raspy, emotionless voice.

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Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

“You know, I think this might be a first,” Aiko commented, getting out of the car.

 

“Oh?” I asked, waving to Kjaran. He drove the Rolls off, probably going to park in a nearby lot. It fit with the chauffeur image, and if I had to ride in a limo I was damn well going to play up the image as far as I could.

 

“Yeah. I can’t think of anyone getting a ban lifted at Pryce’s before, offhand.”

 

“Not a lot of reason for it anymore,” I said, shrugging. Selene had spent several hours talking with him, and paid him a quarter of a million, but ultimately I knew he’d agreed because he wanted to. Not even Selene was persuasive enough to talk Pryce around once he’d really made his mind up about something, and he didn’t care enough about money for the bribe to be the deciding factor.

 

“Still,” Aiko said. “Not bad.”

 

Inside, I walked straight to the bar, where Pryce was pouring what looked like a pint glass of brandy. The room was fairly crowded, but people were gathered in small groups, with lots of empty space between, making it look emptier than it should have. There was a decent group sitting at the bar, tossing back drinks with the grim enthusiasm you only saw when things were really bad, and the long table in the middle of the room was playing host to three different groups, all firmly ignoring each other.

 

“I’m here for the private meeting,” I said to Pryce, not saying anything about having been allowed in again. He wouldn’t appreciate it.

 

He grunted and nodded, not pausing as he handed the brandy to one guy and turned to grab a bottle of absinthe for the woman sitting next to him. A moment later, though, a member of his staff appeared next to me. He led us silently through the crowd to a small hallway, where he left us outside an unmarked oak door.

 

I licked my lips nervously before I opened the door. I’d hoped that I could take more time to get prepped for this meeting, reading up on people who would be attending. My handful of minutes in Gwynn ap Nud’s realm had translated to a couple of hours in the real world, though, eating up the time I’d been hoping to use. After I’d checked in with Selene and Kyi and made sure that Jibril’s ghouls were ready to go, it was already dusk.

 

Which meant that I’d not only been unable to do my research for this meeting, I was also already having to think about my coming chat with Katrin. Which was just lovely.

 

Inside, I found that Pryce’s conference room hadn’t changed much. The long table in the middle of the room was the same, with the same chairs along its length. The same banners hung from the rafters, adorned with the symbols of various major political groups. A fire burned brightly in the massive fireplace, making the room uncomfortably warm—for me, at least. I preferred things chilly, and I was wearing heavy armor and a cloak.

 

I didn’t have much time to look over that, though, because I hadn’t been able to get here as early as I wanted to be. There were already almost a dozen people sitting at the table. Each of them had a wide space around them, the chairs evenly spaced along the table as though they were trying to consciously ensure that everyone had the absolute maximum possible elbow room. Apparently it still wasn’t enough, though, because they were all looking warily at each other. At best; some were glaring daggers, and a couple looked like they were inches from pulling weapons on each other.

 

I recognized more than a few of them. Ironsides was about halfway down the table, trying a little too hard to look confident. Shadow had a chair near one end, her mask firmly in place, and Newton was sitting at the other end, smirking behind his own mask. He was trying to pretend that he was fully recovered from the battle earlier that morning, but not doing a very good job of it; his posture was tense, and he was favoring the leg I’d almost chopped off. He hadn’t recovered yet, not even close.

 

Then there were some other faces, familiar from more than just the past couple of days. Luna was tense in her chair, fingering various pockets as though she were very much prepared to pull weapons out of them and use them. Rachel looked like she was in pain, which she probably was; she could sense emotions as easily as she could see, and the miasma of hate, fear, anger, and generalized stress in this room couldn’t be much fun. Just down the table from her, Alexander looked mildly amused. He was practically the only one in the place that didn’t seem at all concerned, which made sense; if he felt like it, he could probably take everyone else in the building at once. I was guessing Pryce was the only one who could even slow him down, and Alexander was smart enough that he would know Pryce’s weak points.

 

I was a little surprised to see him there. He was wearing the heavy blue robes that he was entitled to as the Maker of the Conclave. It probably didn’t matter—I was guessing I was the only one in the room who would know what it meant. But it was a reminder that he was on the Conclave, and considering how Brick had made that situation sound, I figured he’d have been in Russia helping to keep it contained.

 

I mean, he’d said it was an all hands on deck, maximum priority kind of situation. Watcher didn’t strike me as the type to use that kind of description lightly.

 

“What are you doing here?” one of them said when I walked in. It was a guy I didn’t recognize, wearing an expensive suit, who was otherwise about as bland as it was possible to be. He even had a pocket protector, and I didn’t think anybody used those anymore. There was something about him that suggested it was an intentional blandness, though, an impression that had been carefully cultivated. It was a mask of sorts, I thought, something for him to hide behind.

 

“I have as much stake in this as any of you,” I said. “Maybe more.”

 

“I’ll vouch for him,” Alexander said. “He’s not the type to break a truce.”

 

“Fine,” the bland man said, glowering. “But the female leaves. He gets one representative, same as the rest of us.”

 

I opened my mouth to protest, but Aiko elbowed me in the ribs. It didn’t hurt—I was wearing armor, after all, and it had been designed with nastier things in mind than that—but I got the message. I shut my mouth.

 

“That’s fine,” Aiko said. “I’ll wait outside.”

 

She left and I claimed one of the few remaining chairs, between Rachel and Alexander. That was good positioning, in that it put me between two of the people I was least anticipating an attack from. It was a little unfortunate, though, in that I was next to Alexander. If anyone did try something, he would be their main target, and if they knew enough to be here they would probably be smart enough not to hold back when they went for him. I didn’t exactly want to be in the blast radius if that happened.

 

“We waiting for anyone else?” the bland guy asked. “I have obligations coming up.”

 

“There’s a couple guys said they’d be here,” another person said, one that I recognized but didn’t really know. “Don’t know if they’ll show or not. They’re coming from a rough neighborhood.”

 

Several others made similar comments, and the table returned to sullen, anticipatory silence. Over the next twenty minutes or so, more people trickled in. Some of them took seats at the table. Others were turned away, sent to wait in the main room of the bar. There was no single voice that determined whether a given person was going to stay or go. It was more of a general consensus. There was very little argument back and forth; one person might raise a complaint, another might retort, but it didn’t turn into a general discussion. Most people agreed as to whether a given person was welcome or not.

 

Eventually it became clear that everyone who was going to be here was. I looked around warily, taking stock of who was there, and who wasn’t. There were about twenty people, all told. I recognized almost all of them, and I could put names to maybe half the faces.

 

This wasn’t a gathering of the strongest, most powerful people in the city. Oh, Alexander had backing on a global level, and I was a local power with decently large-scale recognition, but by and large these weren’t the heavyweights of the city. They didn’t have all that much power, on a relative scale.

 

What they did have was respect. These were the people who were respected in the community. People might not like them, but even their enemies admitted that they were worth paying attention to. They knew people, and when they said things people listened.

 

A few years ago, I wouldn’t have hesitated to include myself in that group. I hadn’t been all that active in the supernatural community, but I’d known people. I’d been on good terms with most of them, not friends, but I could have asked for a favor and felt confident that people would trust me to pay them back. That sort of thing.

 

Now? The situation was…a little more complex than that.

 

“I think this is about all we’re going to get,” somebody said, about the same time I reached that conclusion. “Should we get started?”

 

“Yeah,” the bland guy said. “I think we all know what we’re here to talk about.”

 

Rachel snorted. “Shit hitting fans, past, present, and future tense. Not complicated.”

 

“I think we all have the same interests, here,” I put in. “Things are bad, they’re getting worse, and there are only going to be more people trying to take advantage of it going forward. We all want to minimize the harm done, locally.”

 

“Well said,” Alexander murmured. I felt an involuntary rush of pleasure at the compliment. It had been years since he was really my teacher in any meaningful way, but the habit was still there.

 

“You’re missing the point,” Newton said, glaring daggers at me. “Some of us have things to do. And the time is ripe. This is the best opportunity we’re ever going to have.”

 

Yeah, I didn’t think he was going to forgive me for almost chopping his leg off anytime soon.

 

“You’re thinking in a strictly short-term sense, fool,” the bland man said, almost absently. “Overreach your position right now and you’ll be crushed when the greater powers move in turn.”

 

I couldn’t see Newton’s face, but I was confident that it went homicidally insane when he heard that. The telekinetic stood, gesturing furiously, and the glass of wine that had been sitting on the table by his elbow was suddenly flying at the bland man’s head.

 

I was expecting there to be blood on the table at that. That glass was traveling at a speed more commonly associated with bullets than anything else, and when it hit it was going to shatter, sending razor-sharp fragments of glass into the man’s head.

 

Except that it didn’t. The bland man didn’t even seem concerned. He pushed his chair back from the table, in no evident rush, and the glass flew past about an inch and a half from his nose. He then stood and turned towards Newton.

 

I blinked. You couldn’t dodge an attack like that at close range. Human reflexes weren’t that fast, especially not when the actual dodge was practically in slow motion.

 

Except that, apparently, you could.

 

Newton growled something inarticulate and grabbed a handful of ball bearings from his pocket, throwing them into the air in front of him. An instant later they took off like they’d been shot from a gun, a loose cloud of metal maybe five feet in diameter.

 

The bland man walked right through it. I wasn’t sure how, and I was watching. He didn’t actually do anything to stop the bits of metal. It was just that he wasn’t where they were. They passed over him, beside him, between his legs, between his fingers. He didn’t speed up, and he didn’t break stride.

 

I was staring at this point. I was just now coming to my feet, as were many of the others, and the bland man had almost reached Newton. The telekinetic started to do something else, something big enough that I could smell it even through the cloud of magic in that room. My guess was that he was planning to flip the table over, crushing the bland man and many other people under its weight.

 

I felt just the tiniest whisper of power from the bland man, exactly as Newton’s magic began to take solid form. It was a masterful bit of work, just enough energy at just the right time to shake the telekinetic’s concentration. The spell fizzled out, accomplishing nothing.

 

He tried again, slopping even more power into it this time, and the exact same thing happened. Before he could try a third time the bland man reached out and pressed one finger against Newton’s throat. Just one finger, but it was perfectly placed against his carotid artery, and this guy knew how to use that. Newton dropped in less than a second, out cold. He’d only be out for a minute or two from that, but somehow I didn’t think he’d be in a hurry to start more trouble. Not after he got his ass handed to him that badly.

 

“I agree with the jarl,” the bland man said, making his way back to his chair. He wasn’t even breathing hard. “My employer has seen five different incursions across the state. Making gains right now is secondary to preparing yourselves to defend against similar attacks.”

 

“Thank you, Mr. Andrews,” Alexander said. “As usual, your analysis is sound. And thank you for dealing with that fool. He was becoming annoying.”

 

The bland man—Andrews—smiled. “Agreed,” he said, sitting back down.

 

“On that note,” Alexander said, “I would strongly recommend you consider taking the jarl’s advice, and fortifying yourselves. There is already an ongoing situation in Russia that is literally world-threatening in scale, and the possibility exists that others will arise. If a threat of similar scope arises here, you would be extremely well-advised to devote all your resources to combating it. That also means that anything you expend on infighting is a waste.”

 

“Wait,” I said sharply. “That thing in Russia. That’s public knowledge now?”

 

He smiled. It wasn’t a happy expression. “At the rate things are going, we aren’t going to be able to keep it a secret much longer.”

 

Andrews sighed. He sounded disappointed, but not surprised. “I would offer to assist,” he said. “But I suspect my involvement at this stage would present more risks than it would solve.”

 

Alexander shuddered. “God, yes. I said that things were world-threatening, not that I wanted to make them world-ending. No, we’ll all be happier if you stay the hell away from Russia until this is resolved.”

 

Andrews nodded. “I understand,” he said. “And I will do what I can to provide assistance from a distance, of course, although my capabilities are limited. With that in mind, jarl, did you have a specific plan in mind before that interruption?”

 

“Not really,” I said, looking around the table, meeting each person’s gaze in turn. Alexander and Andrews were the only ones that didn’t look down. “I know a lot of the people sitting here,” I said. “A lot of you have grudges against each other, a lot of you hate each other. I don’t expect you to set that aside. What I do expect is that you will refrain from acting on it until things have settled down.”

 

“And what are you doing?” someone asked. I wasn’t sure who; no one I knew, I thought.

 

“I’m going to be consolidating my power base and taking over the city,” I said. There wasn’t much point lying, and being blunt like that would be good for my rep. “I know many of you would rather I didn’t, but at this point it’s the only practical option. We need to have a strong organization to hold against these threats. What I am proposing is that I will provide that organization, providing the legitimacy and much of the manpower to prevent this city from being attacked.”

 

“And then you take power after?” another person said. “Pass.”

 

I shrugged. “Someone has to do it,” I said. “I’m not after power. It’s a means to an end, for me. It’s a tool. And right now it’s a tool I need in order to do things I actually care about, like protecting my city. I know you aren’t likely to believe me, but I truly believe that we need a strong authority figure to deter aggressors, and I don’t see anyone else that I’d trust to do it.”

 

“Alexander?” Rachel said. “You have the reputation to hold a position like that.”

 

The wizard shook his head. “I can’t take that much time away from the situation in Russia right now,” he said flatly. “There are three different people covering for my absence as it is. And even if that weren’t the case, I likely wouldn’t be a very good candidate for the position. I’ve not gone out of my way to make friends in life.”

 

“Pryce?” someone else tossed out.

 

Another person scoffed. “Not a chance,” she said. “He’s neutral. And he only gets respect inside the city, which negates the whole purpose.

 

“Katrin?”

 

“That might work, but then you’ve set yourself up with a vampire overlord. Personally, I’d take my chances with a war first.”

 

I cleared my throat, and was a little surprised when people actually stopped talking. “Excuse me,” I said. “But I have another engagement that I can’t afford to miss. And I’m going to do this regardless of your opinion of me. So feel free to continue discussing this, but I’m afraid I have to go.”

 

I stood and walked to the door. To my surprise, Andrews fell in beside me on the other side. “Good work,” he said. “Playing them off each other like that.”

 

I eyed him warily. I hadn’t forgotten Alexander’s comment about Andrews being world-ending, and anything that could get that kind of reaction out of the old wizard was something best treated with extreme respect. “You helped me out in there,” I said. “Why?”

 

He smiled. “I meant what I said,” he said, which really didn’t explain anything. “In the meantime, however, do you have a bit of time before your next engagement? My employer would quite like a meeting with you.”

 

“And who is your employer?” I asked.

 

His smile got a little wider. “That would be Nicolas Pellegrini, at the moment,” he said. “I believe you’re already acquainted.”

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Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

“Erin?” I said. “Erin, are you there?”

 

There was a brief pause, followed by the sound of running footsteps. “Sorry,” she said. “I had the shot, and it was too good not to take. Anyway, where were we?”

 

“You were giving me advice about dealing with Blind Keith,” I said, trying to ignore the fact that she’d just murdered somebody. Things were busy right now, I told myself. She couldn’t have the free time to be doing freelance work, which meant that her mark had died because Conn wanted him dead. Conn wouldn’t have given the order unless he deserved it.

 

Right. I believed that.

 

“Oh, yeah,” Erin said. “Try to stay on his good side if you can. If he comes after you, he’ll probably bring the Wild Hunt, so plan for that. And whatever you do, don’t run. You run from him, you’re as good as dead.”

 

“Great,” I said dismally. So far, all stuff I’d already guessed, and none of it helpful for actually beating him if it came to it. “Anything I can actually use?”

 

There was a short pause. I wasn’t sure whether she was thinking, or she had to evade the cops or something. “He’ll try to turn out the lights,” she said. “I don’t know how he senses his prey, but he doesn’t need light to do it. He’s vulnerable to iron, but in the same way as most of the Sidhe. I don’t think it hurts him, exactly, but it makes him lose control, somehow. Be careful with it.” She hesitated, and this time I knew it was deliberate. “He knew your mother. I don’t know how, but they knew each other.”

 

“Great,” I groaned. “This just gets better and better.” I sighed. “Thanks, Erin. Good luck with the killing people.”

 

“I don’t need luck,” she sniffed. “I’ve got skills.”

 

I hung up and dropped the phone back into my pocket. Aiko wandered over to stand next to me, looking curious. “What’s the matter? You look like somebody just ran over your puppy.”

 

“Blind Keith is a lot scarier than I was giving him credit for,” I said sourly. “And he also knew my mother.”

 

“Ah,” she said. “Yeah, I can see how that might be awkward.” She was quiet for a few seconds. “Does it seem like Kyi is taking a while?” she asked. “Because it sure seems like it to me.”

 

I frowned. “Yeah. Yeah, it does.” I took a step towards the trees, intending to look for her.

 

I was interrupted when Kyi appeared from behind an aspen that I would have sworn was too thin to conceal her. “Jarl,” she said. “You are finished with your call, I take it?”

 

“Yeah,” I said. “You’ve been checking out the new talent, I heard?”

 

She grimaced, and the expression told me all I needed to know. “I’ve been checking out the new recruits,” she said. “Talent? That’s another question.”

 

“I see,” I said. “Not good?”

 

She shrugged. “They have decent training. Some of them have useful skills—Nóttolfr’s smooth, Thraslaug’s a berserker. But they don’t have the experience, they don’t know how to deal with unusual enemies or improvise, and they don’t know how this world works. Give me some time and I could turn them into something you could use, maybe.”

 

Give her time.

 

Time, it seemed, was something that I did not have in plentitude. She would not have the chance to make them into a usable fighting force.

 

“I might not be able to,” I said quietly. “And I might need to use them anyway.”

 

Kyi was watching me, her eyes flat and unreadable within their nest of tattoos. “If you do,” she said, “they won’t hold up. Some of them will die.”

 

“Yes,” I said, even more softly. “I know.” They would die, but they could create a hole that other, more capable forces could exploit. Drawing enemies out of position, leaving them open to attack. Sacrificing a pawn to take a rook.

 

The jötnar were the pawns in that comparison. Expendable. I was looking at them as resources, rather than people. Hell, I couldn’t even remember most of their names.

 

Kyi was still looking at me, and I got the impression that she knew everything that had just run through my mind from those three words. “We are your housecarls, my jarl,” she said. “We will serve.” Then she turned and walked back into the trees.

 

I’d often felt like the world was stacked against me, like nothing I did could really make progress. Try to fix things, try to be something other than what I was, and it was like swimming upstream. One step forward, two steps back. Use the powers I had, and I could make headway, but the act changed me, making me less of who I wanted to be.

 

Let the wolf inside my skin off the leash, and I was stronger, faster, filled with certainty of purpose, but the wolf would never again be leashed quite as thoroughly as it had been. Use the Second Sight and I could see through the masks that were meant to fool me, but what I saw damaged me. Make a deal with Loki or Scáthach, and I got what I needed, the secrets and the power, but something was taken in return.

 

The pattern, overwhelmingly, had been that I could get what I wanted, but it wasn’t ever free. If I wanted to accomplish something, I had to give up something else.

 

I’d never tried anything on this level. Nothing even close.

 

I watched Kyi go, and I knew that she’d never look at me quite the same, knowing that I was willing to trade the lives of loyal followers for nothing more than a tactical advantage. Kyi and I hadn’t been friends, exactly, but there had been a certain casualness to our relationship. Less formal than what I had with the other housecarls. She respected me as a person, as well as a jarl. I had a strong suspicion that I had just lost that respect.

 

What else was I going to have to give, to hold my city together?

---

 

Gwynn ap Nud had sent a token with his messenger, a slender piece of wood that served as the focus for a powerful and intricate piece of magic. Once I was finished talking with Kyi, I broke the stick, and an instant later a hole appeared in the world directly in front of me.

 

I stepped through it, alone. This invitation had been for me and no one else, and I had no intention of upsetting Gwynn by bringing anyone with me. Which pissed Snowflake off immensely—she still wasn’t over being separated from me while I was in prison—but she was smart enough to recognize that getting on a Twilight Prince’s bad side wasn’t worth it.

 

The portal dropped me in a small corridor, which appeared to have been carved into the bedrock. Clumps of crystals protruded from the stone at odd angles here and there, shedding just enough light that I could see. A human would likely have been blind, or at least nearly so.

 

I glanced back and saw that the corridor ended just behind me, as though the architect had simply stopped carving. No one else was in sight. I couldn’t smell anything other than stone, the air wasn’t moving, and as far as I could tell there were no animals within a mile.

 

I shrugged and started walking. There didn’t seem to be much else to do.

 

Maybe ten minutes later, the corridor opened up into a room, as large as a small stadium, lit only by more of the small crystals. The ceiling was still low, though, almost enough to make me uncomfortable, and I wasn’t a tall guy.

 

I paused just before crossing the threshold. I couldn’t see anything immediately threatening—no weapons, no tripwires or odd-looking patches of ground, no mystic symbols—but there was something…odd here.

 

On an impulse, I glanced up, and saw mushrooms sprouting from the ceiling. Classic toadstools only an inch or two high, they grew from bare stone in a perfectly defined line, right at the boundary between the corridor and the room it lead to.

 

No, I realized. Not a line. It looked straight at a glance, but upon examination there was a very slight curvature to it, as though it were a tiny arc of a much larger circle. A circle, perhaps, that might include the entire room I was looking at.

 

I stared. Magic circles were simple spells, and not usually difficult ones. It didn’t take that much power to make them work. But the power it did take was dependent upon size, and the relationship was an exponential one. A circle big enough to stand in could be charged easily. A bit of blood, a casual effort by a practiced mage—it didn’t take much. Something the size of a small room was more challenging, requiring concentration. The largest I’d ever managed was a clearing, when I performed the ritual to claim Legion as my familiar, and that had been a very faint circle, just a whisper to block undirected currents of energy.

 

This was maybe ten times the radius of that clearing, which meant that the circle’s total area was closer to a hundred times that of the one I’d created. Add in the exponential scaling in the actual power expenditure and I estimated that this circle would require somewhere around ten to fifteen thousand times that of the biggest one I’d ever created.

 

Even if I were to dedicate myself wholly to the task, drawing on the energy of the world around me and drawing on blood magic, it would take a couple orders of magnitude more than what I was capable of just to establish this circle. Actually using it to anchor a ward was…almost unbelievable, something that would take the power of a god.

 

Or, perhaps, that of a Twilight Prince.

 

I stopped short of crossing the circle. It was probably safe, given that I was invited, but I thought it wiser not to take the chance. “Winter Wolf-Born,” I said, projecting the words clearly. “Here to seek audience with Gwynn ap Nud.”

 

Enter and be welcome, as a guest in my hall, a voice said inside my head. It was a beautiful voice, in an odd way, a very inhuman way. There was a sort of delay to it, as though it had to translate each word before it spoke, and then my mind had to translate them again to process their meaning.

 

That was about as close to a guarantee of safety as I was going to get, so I swallowed hard and stepped over the threshold.

 

An instant later, the whole world seemed to change. I wasn’t standing in a vast subterranean hall. I was in a similarly vast meadow, the evening sky perfectly clear overhead, stars so bright and pure that they looked like diamonds.

 

I glanced backwards and saw a of toadstools, almost hidden in the grass. They were on the ground now. Or I was on what had previously been the ceiling. It was hard to tell what was what, under the circumstances.

 

Was this illusion? The glamour of the fae, that let them mold illusions to their will and make the dream almost more real than reality? Or was it something deeper than that, the power of a demigod to control the world he had built for himself? Which was real—the cavern, the meadow, both, neither, somewhere in between?

 

As was so often the case with the fae, it was hard to say what the answer might be, if there even was an answer. As was also often the case with the fae, although it had taken me longer to realize it, it really didn’t matter what the truth was.

 

Directly in front of me, in the exact center of the meadow, was a throne, a massive thing carved from granite. I walked towards it. I could see things out of the corner of my eye, glimmers of light and flickers of movement, but I kept my gaze focused on the throne. I was dealing with the fae, after all, and I’d read enough fairy tales to know better than to look at the distractions.

 

Seemingly between one step and the next, the throne went from being a hundred feet off to right in front of me. Gwynn ap Nud was sitting in it, or so I presumed. I couldn’t quite focus on him, as though my eyes slid from one side to the other, so that I could only see him in my peripheral vision. I got an impression of lean muscle and sharp features, well-worn hunting leathers and a sword, but details just weren’t there.

 

“You asked me to visit,” I said. Establishing my right to be there, before anything else was said. I’d been welcomed as a guest and that was enough to protect against most dangers, but it was best to be careful. There were all kinds of stories about guests of the fae that wound up getting more than they bargained for.

 

“Yes,” he said, and I wasn’t entirely sure whether I was hearing him with my ears or my mind. The voice seemed to have the same vagueness to it as his physical appearance, conveying meaning but leaving no memory of what it actually sounded like.

 

Damn, this was eerie. I’d dealt with Twilight Princes before, but never on their home ground. The difference was striking, unsettling, and more than a little frightening.

 

“I came,” I said, redundantly, trying to gather my thoughts.

 

“You have attracted the attention of a powerful being,” he said. “And not a kind one.”

 

“I have attracted the attention of many. To whom do you refer?”

 

“You would call him Blind Keith.”

 

I sighed. “Oh. That being. I don’t suppose you could tell me anything about him?”

 

“The hunt is an ancient idea,” he said, not answering my question. Unless he was; Blind Keith was a hunter, after all. “It is a primal concept, one that lies at the heart of the world.”

 

“Yeah,” I said. “The Wild Hunt. I know about it.”

 

“Yes,” he said, and the wind seemed to sigh the word with him, brushing through the grass and swirling around my ankles. “He is a lord of the hunt.”

 

“So are you,” I pointed out. “What’s the difference?”

 

“There are many faces in the hunt,” he said. “Once the fae were as a single people, but eventually it became clear that our differences were too great. Words had been spoken that could not be unsaid, and it was clear to all that there was no hope for reconciliation. Lines were drawn, alliances were formed, and we went our separate ways.”

 

“And you were there for this?” I asked. It was almost incredible to conceive of. Logically I knew that many of the truly powerful beings of the world were also truly ancient, but it was one thing to know that and it was another to hear one of them discussing it.

 

“Yes,” he said. “But I tell you this for a reason. On that day, the one you call Blind Keith was there as well. But when it came time to choose sides, he chose not to choose. He stood apart then, as he has stood apart ever since. He is not of the Tylwyth Teg, the Fomorians, the Sidhe, or any of the other great powers. He stand alone, and he does not choose to pursue the aims that others seek.”

 

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked. As usual, that was the most important question. Powerful beings did nothing without a reason, and they did nothing for free.

 

“That is not for you to know. What matters is this. I am a hunter, as is Scáthach, and Herne, and Bleiddwn, and all the other masters of the Wild Hunt. And like them, I am more than a hunter; there is more to my story than the hunting. That is not true for Blind Keith. There is nothing in him but the hunt. Do not be fooled into thinking otherwise.”

 

I wanted to ask again why he was sharing this, but he’d told me I wasn’t supposed to know, and I’d have to be an idiot of monumental proportions to contradict a demigod in the middle of his own private world. So I just bowed my head and said, “I appreciate the advice.”

 

“Go,” he said, “with my blessing. My agent shall join your struggles shortly, and I shall speak on your behalf.”

 

The next instant, between blinks, the meadow vanished, as did Gwynn ap Nud and the throne he sat in. I was standing alone in the middle of the cavern, the only light that which came from the luminescent crystals scattered around.

 

Well, that was one problem down, at least. And resolved pretty well. Sure, it was enigmatic as hell and I was absolutely certain that it was going to bite me in the ass at some point, but he was backing me, and right now that was what mattered.

 

I wasn’t sure which hallway I’d entered from, so I picked one at random. It looked like what I remembered, and there was a portal waiting at the end, so I figured it was probably right enough, and stepped through.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

The black SUV stood out against the depressed neighborhood.

 

Depressed. The term amused me. Calling this sort of place depressed was a pathetic cover-up of the realities of the area. This was a suicidal neighborhood. Surrounded by industrial zones, far from convenient transportation or concentrations of wealth, it was a place that no one would choose to live.

 

Then again, many were not given the choice.

 

The vehicle stopped and I got out, checking that my coat was neat and straightening my tie. The expensive clothing stood out even more than the expensive car. That was the purpose. To many of these people, who were more accustomed to worn jeans and thrift-store rejects, such a casual display of wealth would set me above mere mortals. I might as well have been the devil himself, come to walk the streets.

 

Or an angel, I supposed. It was not a devil that went to Sodom.

 

Before I had taken two steps away from the vehicle, my employees had fallen in on either side of me. Michaelson was on my left, Andrews on my right. Brown would remain with the car, ensuring that there were no unpleasant surprises when I returned.

 

Across the street, Michaelson opened the door with a key. He held it open as Andrews and I stepped through; the courteous gesture looked odd on him, at odds with his bulk, his almost brutish appearance. The key word there, of course, being almost. Michaelson was violent only when necessary, and brutish never.

 

Inside, we were in a large, dim room. It had been years since this slaughterhouse had seen any use, but the scents of blood and feces lingered. Although that last might have been my imagination. Greeley in general smelled strongly enough to cover any absence here. Meatpacking plants are excellent investments, but on the rare occasions I visit the city I almost regret my investment in the industry. It is…distasteful.

 

A trio of men were waiting for us, although they did not know it. Kneeling on the floor, bound and hooded, they knew very little. Michaelson nodded slightly at the one on the left, telling me which to start with. A subtle reminder from someone who seemed disinclined to subtlety, but that was Michaelson, generally. There was both more and less to him than met the eye.

 

I approached the indicated man and Andrews handed me a pistol before taking the man’s hood off. His hands secured behind his back with cable ties, he was little to no threat. Not that it mattered, given that Michaelson and I were both holding guns.

 

Andrews was not, but he was likely still the most dangerous man in the room. He costs me a fortune, and is worth every penny of it. Whether he is worth the other costs is…open to debate, perhaps, would be the simplest way to phrase it.

 

“Good morning,” I said, although the reality was closer to midnight. People seldom came near this building, but some business is still better conducted after dark.

 

“Fuck you,” he said, glaring at me.

 

I put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. It was a suppressed weapon firing subsonic ammunition, which was still louder than many people seemed to think, but not enough so to attract attention from outside.

 

The man fell on his side, and I stepped to the next. Andrews pulled this man’s hood off as well. “Are you from Chicago?” I asked.

 

“You can’t do this,” he said. “Do you know who you’re dealing with?”

 

I shot him as well, and then proceeded to the final one. “Chicago,” I said confidently as Andrews removed his hood. “You know who I am?”

 

The man looked at the two corpses and then back at me. He licked his lips nervously and then nodded.

 

“Finally someone who can answer a question,” I said. “My people caught you dealing drugs in Denver.”

 

He paled slightly. He’d known that his position was precarious, of course, but he might have been hoping that he could deny any wrongdoing. Now, that wasn’t an option.

 

“I have an agreement with the Chicago families,” I said. “Out here, I’m in charge. I run the drugs. I run the prostitution. I run the bookies. If you’re trying to renege on that deal, I’m going to be upset.”

 

“I was just working for the capo,” he said, sounding panicked. “I thought he’d cleared it with you!”

 

I glanced at Andrews, who in turn looked at the second man I’d killed. So the capo had come to handle this job in person. That made things simpler.

 

“I’m going to send you back to Chicago,” I said to the bound man. “And you’re going to explain to your family that this was all an unfortunate misunderstanding.” I didn’t bother with threats. If the corpses of his former associates didn’t convince him that I meant what I said, nothing would.

 

Andrews hooded him again, and then we left. I handed the gun to Michaelson, and then peeled the gloves off my hands and passed them over as well. “Get someone to drive him back to Chicago,” I ordered. “Keep him hooded on the way.”

 

Michaelson nodded and then took out his cell phone, sending a simple text message. And that simply, the deed was done. As soon as we left, cleaners would descend upon the scene, ensuring that no incriminating evidence would remain. The bodies, the bullets, the gun, even my gloves would disappear. In New York, such things tended to find their way to the ocean; in Chicago, Lake Michigan was the venue of choice. Colorado lacked such a convenient body of water, so the cleaners here had to be more creative. Sometimes they used the incinerator of a well-bribed funeral home; other times an abandoned mine shaft was more convenient. Either way, no sign would remain of what had happened here. Two more bloodstains on a slaughterhouse floor would go unnoticed by all.

 

“You left one alive,” Andrews commented, while Michaelson made the arrangements. “You’re usually more ruthless than that.”

 

“I am a businessman, Mr. Andrews,” I said. “Returning a competent employee is a sign of respect.”

 

“So why not return all three?”

 

“The other two would have taken it as their due. That one will be indebted to me forever.”

 

He nodded. “Everything’s just business to you, isn’t it?”

 

No, I thought. Not quite.

---

 

Back in Denver, I sat at my desk and read paperwork. I owned the building, as I owned a considerable proportion of the buildings in the city, and the state. A large part of why I had risen to prominence was my understanding that, approached with the proper attitude, legitimate business interests could be considerably more valuable than traditional criminal enterprises.

 

This particular location, however, was solely to serve my interests. The center of my empire moved on a regular basis, preventing anyone from becoming too confident of where to find me. Typically I used buildings that were still under construction, working out of the areas that weren’t currently being worked on. That way the construction crews and I didn’t interfere with each others’ business.

 

Although, in reality, both sides were my business. I owned the property, I owned the construction company, I owned most of the subcontractors. When the buildings were finished I sold them at a profit and bought more property. This one would be a medical complex when it was finished, and I would probably have a considerable investment in it, in addition to having ready access to medical personnel.

 

Efficiency is the hallmark of good business.

 

The door to my office had not been hung yet, so Andrews knocked on the sheetrock before entering instead. I kept reading the letter I was currently dealing with. It was from a trusted accountant, and I didn’t want to take the chance that it was urgent. Disregarding the advice of accountants had been the downfall of many empires, criminal and otherwise. I knew that much of my success could be attributed to my understanding of economics, and I likewise knew that ignoring such things could lead to my rapid downfall.

 

Of course, with recent events, many of the lessons life had taught me would need to be reevaluated. But, all things considered, I suspected that meant I had to pay even more careful attention to the reports I received in the next few days.

 

Eventually I finished it, made a small note of what was to be done, and placed it in the tray on my desk. “Yes?” I said to Andrews.

 

He nodded to me. “Boss,” he said. “There’s been an incursion in the southeastern part of the city.”

 

“Understood. Take a group of troubleshooters and take care of it.”

 

He hesitated, and then said, “Boss, you might want to check this one out yourself.”

 

I looked at him sharply. Andrews was a powerful man in his own right, and I expected less subservience from him than I usually required from my employees. But he sounded concerned, or perhaps even worried, and anything that could worry the wizard was something that I very much wanted to pay attention to.

 

“Why?”

 

“It…isn’t a human incursion.”

---

 

I walked into the building, with Andrews on my right and Michaelson on my left. There was blood everywhere, staining my shoes and the hem of my slacks; I regarded this with mild irritation. The expense was negligible, but having to replace my clothing was always irksome. Bodies lay scattered around the room, broken and ripped apart, like toys after a child’s tantrum.

 

The child in question sat on the counter, his feet dangling above the floor. He was wearing a suit not unlike my own, although his was entirely saturated with blood, and a beret that was similarly soaked.

 

There was one other person in the room, a young girl. Perhaps twelve years old, huddled against the wall. She was bloody, and she was crying.

 

I felt a natural protective instinct at the sight, remembering another girl, another night.

 

I quashed that urge immediately. This was not a time for sentiment.

 

“Redcap,” Andrews murmured, watching the bloody man with a wary expression. “Nasty fae. Don’t trust it, and don’t get close.”

 

“You’re in my territory,” I said to the man. Thing, if Andrews was to be believed; he had called it fae, and the fae were not men, however close the resemblance might sometimes seem. “And you just killed several of my clients.”

 

The redcap shrugged. “What should I care for your clients, mortal?” it said. Its voice was smooth, almost musical, but there was a grating undertone that spoke of an underlying cruelty. It was off-putting, like a violin slightly out of tune.

 

Or perhaps I was reading too much into it. It must be difficult to sound benevolent while soaked in blood and surrounded by the bodies of your victims.

 

“They were my clients,” I repeated. “I do not tolerate challenges to my authority. Should you continue to assault my clients, I will regard it as an act of war, and I will act to defend myself appropriately.”

 

It looked at me oddly. I thought it was probably surprised that I reacted so calmly. “There are no rules protecting you any longer, mortal,” it said. “I am under no obligation to leave you in peace.”

 

“No, but your Courts explicitly grant self-defense rights to anyone who has expressed and proven a clear and substantial obligation to defend a person, location, or object which has been attacked, threatened, or stolen. I have expressed my obligation to defend my clients, and if you would like proof I can provide a copy of the contracts.”

 

Its eyes narrowed. “You are not a part of the Courts.”

 

“No,” I agreed. “But an outsider can take advantage of the self-defense rights, provided they pay the requisite weregild to the appropriate Court.” I smiled thinly. “It’s in the charter of the Twilight Court. Section twenty-three.”

 

“Clause seven,” Andrews added helpfully. “Paragraph four.”

 

I almost smiled at that. I read enough letters from my attorneys that I understood their language. It was amusing, if unsurprising, that Andrews could speak it as well.

 

“Self-defense only applies if you can do so,” the redcap said. It wasn’t smiling now. “I have killed thousands of your kind, mortal. Leave now and I may not do the same to you.”

 

“I will provide a counteroffer,” I said quietly. “Hand the child over, and get out of my city, or I will destroy you. Right here, right now.”

 

The creature tensed, and it seemed about to attack for a moment. Michaelson had his hand on the machine pistol in his shoulder holster, but I doubted it would care about that.

 

Then it noticed that Andrews was touching the dagger at his belt, and it relaxed again, although it didn’t look happy about it. “Take the mortal, then,” it said. “But you will learn to respect your betters, human. I will enjoy the instruction.”

 

I beckoned to the girl, who stood and ran to us. We left the building, the creature watching us the entire time.

---

 

“Will it attack us?” I asked, as we got back into the SUV. Brown was driving, as before. A quiet woman, but a very good troubleshooter. More than one person had underestimated her, and found to their dismay that she was quite, quite deadly.

 

“Absolutely,” Andrews said, with no hesitation. “After you challenged its pride that way? There’s not a chance it’ll back down.”

 

“Excellent,” I said. “Ms. Brown, take us to the fallback location, please. Mr. Andrews, what can we expect from this redcap?”

 

“It depends on how badly he wants you dead,” the wizard said. “If it’s a casual investment on his part, stopping it will be difficult but not impossible. He’s lethal, but more a predator than a fighter. Redcaps like to take their prey by surprise, ambush them or trick them somehow. You can’t trust anything you see with him around. He’ll also have other tactics, nasty ways of attacking. He’ll be faster, stronger, and tougher than a human.”

 

“I see. And if it isn’t casual?”

 

Andrews shrugged. “If he wants it badly enough, there’s an effectively unlimited number of ways he could attack us. I can’t really give you advice on how to deal with it.”

 

I nodded. “Could you beat him?”

 

“Maybe,” he said, but he didn’t sound confident. “In a straight fight, I’d give myself two in five.”

 

“Yet he backed down from you in there,” I said.

 

“He wasn’t ready for a fight then. Next time, he will be. If he’s really prepared for it, my odds drop considerably. I’d have to ask my patron for help. It would be…expensive.”

 

“Understood,” I said. “We’ll have to use our other plan, then.”

---

 

The fallback shelter was designed quite simply. The facade was that of a small office building, and on the upper floors this facade was a reality; doing things that way limited the potential of discovery. A heavy steel door blocked access to the basement level, ostensibly for security. The two basement levels were the defensible location, with the actual safe room a level below that.

 

Following certain incidents, many of them involving werewolves, it had become clear that I required an advisor for dealing with the less mundane threats to my power. Andrews served that role admirably, in addition to performing his other tasks. On his advice, I had taken considerable pains to ensure that my protections could serve against a broad range of enemies, human and inhuman alike.

 

A strong attacker, a werewolf, an ogre, could be handled easily. A skilled attacker was more challenging to defend against, but could be handled by brute-force tactics. An intelligent attacker was more challenging yet, but I felt confident there were measures in place. If nothing else, Andrews himself was a significant deterrent against that type of thing.

 

An unusual attacker, one that approached matters in a more abstract way, was harder to deal with. It was hard to plan for people who made a point of approaching things from unusual directions. Unusual threats were problematic, to one degree or another.

 

The redcap, I was confident, was an unusual threat. Something that had to be dealt with in its own way.

 

Andrews was confident that the creature would take its time about attacking, waiting until the opportunity was ripe for the picking. I waited in the safe room, sitting at my desk. Michaelson was seated next to the door, having already dismissed the few workers still in the offices upstairs, and arranged for my troubleshooters to be waiting in another building across the street, also owned by me.

 

Their weapons would not be enough to bring down the redcap. But they might be of use if it brought friends.

 

The girl we had rescued was curled into a small ball on one of the three cots in the room. She had not spoken since we extracted her. I was not concerned; I had seen this type of reaction to stress before, the overwhelming shock. Likely she would recover. If not, there wasn’t much I could do about it.

 

I was halfway through a notice from one of my lieutenants in Colorado Springs when Andrews came in. “Redcap’s on his way,” he said. “Two blocks out and closing fast. He’s got a lot of friends.”

 

“Anything that we should take special precautions with?” I asked, dropping the paper and standing. Michaelson stood as well. Like me, he was wearing body armor. Unlike me, he was carrying a large steel axe.

 

“No,” Andrews said. “They’re fae, so use iron. And remember not to trust anything you see.”

 

“Very good,” I said. “Mr. Andrews, please stay here and ensure that nothing gets past us. Mr. Michaelson, let’s go give our friends a warm welcome.”

 

Upstairs, on the first basement level, we stopped at a low wall. In front of us, a single long hallway stretched; at the other end was a narrow set of stairs, leading up to the ground level. Behind us the hallway took a ninety-degree turn and led down another set of stairs to the next level.

 

I ignored the waiting gun emplacements and turned instead to the video screens on the wall beside me. I pressed a button and they came to life, showing slightly grainy video of the building’s exterior.

 

For almost a minute, all was quiet. Then something bounded around the corner, looking almost like a dog, but wrong, too large and oddly proportioned. My uncle had bred dogs, and I was familiar with a wide variety of breeds. This was larger than anything short of a mastiff, but leaner, built to hunt rather than to guard.

 

More followed it, first one and then five and then dozens, until there might have been a hundred of them rushing at the building. Behind them, almost invisible behind all that fur, was the redcap. It was wearing armor, matte black mail with spikes at the shoulders and elbows, and it was armed, carrying a black staff in its hand and a silver sword on its hip.

 

A few seconds later guns began to fire, and the dog-creatures began dropping, spraying blood. The troubleshooters were not using light or suppressed weapons; attracting police attention was unlikely at the moment, and I was planning to abandon this location after today in any case. These guns were heavy, military-grade rifles, and the damage they could do was such that not even monsters took it lightly.

 

“That’s our cue,” I said, going to the wall. Michaelson grunted and joined me, kneeling behind the wall a short distance to my left.

 

We waited there for perhaps another minute before something struck the steel door, causing it to buckle. It was hit again, and again. The fourth blow tore it from its hinges entirely, and it flew back with enough force to hit the opposite wall before falling to the floor.

 

I frowned. Disappointing. Andrews had been confident that a heavy steel door would be an impedance to fae beings. Evidently he had overestimated their vulnerability to the metal.

 

“Hold fire,” I murmured to Michaelson, slipping my own finger into the trigger guard. He grunted at me.

 

A few seconds later, the first of the dog-creatures bounded down the stairs and turned towards us, sprinting down the hallway. It was fast, very fast, but it was also a long hallway. “Hold fire,” I said again, putting just a bit of tension on the trigger. Michaelson’s grunt was more annoyed this time. He knew this as well as I did.

 

More creatures came down the stairs, until the hallway was thronging with black fur and glowing eyes. The leading creature was close enough that I could clearly see its teeth.

 

“Fire,” I said, squeezing the trigger.

 

The M2 Browning belt-fed machine gun is one of the most widely used heavy weapons in the world. At a full rate of fire, it can send approximately five hundred rounds per minute downrange, each of which will travel fully two thousand yards while retaining enough energy to inflict lethal damage.

 

Using two of them in a confined space was, to phrase it lightly, overkill.

 

Bullets began pouring down the hallway, ripping into the enemy. The leading ranks of dog-creatures went down almost instantly, their bodies more shredded than shot. The creatures behind them fared better, on the whole, simply because they were shielded from the onslaught by their less fortunate brethren. But these rounds were designed to penetrate tank armor; even after passing through five or six other bodies, they retained enough momentum to inflict very serious wounds on those they struck.

 

The guns fired for less than ten seconds before they both jammed at the same moment, locking up entirely. A moment later the fluorescent lights illuminating the hallway flickered and died, leaving the area entirely devoid of light.

 

I smiled at that. Humans are a primarily sight-oriented species. Removing that sight is one of the most straightforward, effective means of incapacitating someone. It’s been a common tactic throughout history. Nonhuman attackers—the fae, werewolves, vampires, practically anything, really—tend to find it particularly effective. They can function better without vision than a human, and the fear that blindness causes is a weapon in itself, driving people to panic, pushing them beyond the point of reason.

 

It was also, of course, an entirely predictable tactic. Andrews had identified twenty-three different ways an attacker might plausibly attempt to blind us. Contingencies were in place for each of them.

 

Simply turning out the lights was one of the simpler approaches, and one of the easier ones to deal with. I took a step back and turned, moving for the staircase. At the same time I reached up to my forehead and pressed a button. A moment later the headlamp began emitting light, bright enough to make any worries about dimness seem laughable.

 

Downstairs, I waited for Michaelson to join me, and then hurried down the hallway. Behind us the dog-creatures were howling, and from the sound of it they were already reaching the bottom of the stairs.

 

I opened my mouth, but Michaelson was already taking a grenade from his belt. He pulled the pin, held the grenade for a second, and then tossed it backwards before hurrying on.

 

A moment after we reached the end of the hallway and ducked behind cover the grenade went off. My ears were still ringing from the machine gun fire, but I could hear the explosion, and I could hear the dog-creatures screaming afterward.

 

I smiled. A fragmentation grenade in an enclosed area was a phenomenal weapon. When it was loaded with steel shrapnel, and you were fighting fae, well, that was just icing on the cake.

 

Peering down the hallway, it looked as though all of the dog-creatures were dead, and no more were coming down the stairs from above. Good. I doubted the main threat had been eliminated yet, but removing the auxiliary threats was very good.

 

Several seconds later, the redcap walked down the stairs. Two humanoid figures stood to either side of it. None of them were obviously injured.

 

“Mortal,” the redcap called. “You accomplish nothing with this pathetic attempt. Give me the girl, admit your weakness, and you may yet live through this night.”

 

“Let me think about it,” I said, waiting for the other humanoids to join it at the base of the stairs. Once they had, I reached out and grabbed an unobtrusive lever at the top of the next flight of stairs. I tugged on it, triggering an entirely mechanical reaction. My understanding was that electronic devices could become unreliable when exposed to certain types of magical energy, so I had gone to great lengths to prepare for that. This trap involved no circuitry whatsoever. A marvel of engineering, really.

 

When pulled, that lever had three effects. The first was to open a trapdoor above the stairs, dumping napalm over the people standing there. The second was to trigger a pair of thermate grenades hidden at the base of the stairs.

 

Michaelson and I hurried down the stairs as the flames began, and the creatures started screaming. I was a little surprised at how human they sounded. I would have expected such creatures to be more obviously alien while in pain.

 

Down in the safe room, we stopped and waited. Andrews was standing by the door, holding his dagger in one hand and a wooden staff in the other. “Is he dead?” I asked, gasping a little. That had been quite a bit of running.

 

Andrews shook his head, watching the stairs with a blank expression that suggested he was seeing something entirely different. He didn’t say anything and I didn’t ask him to, walking over to my desk instead. I took my pistol from its shoulder holster and placed it on the desk in front of me, then grabbed the submachine gun from the desk drawer and held it loosely, pointed at the door.

 

The girl was still curled up on the cot, evidently having not moved the entire time. I frowned. That could be problematic.

 

My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of another, louder explosion from upstairs, as the redcap discovered the third thing the lever had done. The pressure trigger had not been armed when Michaelson and I crossed it, and as a result the landmines in the wall halfway down the hallway hadn’t detonated.

 

The redcap and its allies were not so lucky.

 

Once the noise of the explosion had faded, I looked at Andrews. He shook his head, not looking back at me, and I nodded. Predictable. The redcap was still alive, then. Pity.

 

The next few seconds were ominously silent, before a small black ball rolled down the stairs. It hit the ground and rolled to a stop a few feet away, just inside the door. I stood, thinking that I might take a closer look at the thing, and then I saw that Andrews was pressed against the wall as far from it as he could get, cowering and holding his staff between himself and the thing.

 

If Andrews was frightened of what this thing could do, that was all the reason I needed to feel similarly. I ducked down behind my desk and waited to see what would happen.

 

I didn’t have to wait long. Only a few seconds later the stone went off. It was something like the opposite of a grenade; rather than explode, it seemed to implode, pulling everything towards itself. The desk slid forward a few inches, I slid forward until I hit the desk, and my left shoulder pulled itself out of its socket.

 

The odd force faded after less than a second, and I pushed myself back to my feet with my working arm. Andrews had apparently been able to protect himself, but Michaelson was lying on the ground, evidently unconscious.

 

Andrews stepped between me and the redcap. The creature looked at him with something approaching respect. “Wizard. Stand aside. You need not die this day.”

 

“I signed a contract,” Andrews said quietly. “I meant what I said, and I don’t back out of deals.”

 

The redcap nodded, and the two began to circle each other. It was, in a way, like watching a man fight his evil twin. Andrews was carrying a staff of pale wood, wearing a light grey robe, and wielding a dagger. The redcap was carrying a dark staff, wearing black armor, and wielding a sword.

 

Which of them was evil was open to debate, of course.

 

The redcap cut at Andrews repeatedly, moving with inhuman speed. Andrews was limited to normal human speed, but nevertheless, none of the redcap’s attacks connected. Somehow Andrews was always in just the right place to not be hit. He looked more like he was dancing than in a fight for his life. The redcap’s sword came closer and closer to him, first six inches away, then three, then less than one, and still the wizard seemed perfectly calm, not even rushing his movements.

 

Even Andrews could make a mistake, though, and I didn’t feel like taking the chance. So the next time I had a clear shot, I took the pistol from my desk and shot the redcap in the chest.

 

I thought it was the noise and the steel-jacketed bullet, more than any actual injury, that startled the redcap. Its head whipped around to stare at me for just a moment before it returned its attention to Andrews.

 

A moment was considerably too long. Andrews moved in exactly as I shot, still not hurrying, and lifted his arm exactly in time with the redcap’s movement. As it turned its head back to the wizard, it dragged its own throat across the edge of the dagger.

 

The redcap was an incredibly tough combatant. It had been shot repeatedly, set on fire, and had two mines go off right next to it, and emerged unscathed.

 

But Andrews’s dagger was an entirely different sort of threat.

 

The redcap was, in a sense, confronted with the same issues that I had been. It had to be able to defend itself against a wide variety of threats.

 

Against strong threats, a brute force approach, its swarm of dog-creatures would have protected it. Against skilled threats, artistry and grace, it would have been shielded by four fae allies it had brought. Against smart threats it was competent in its own right. The fact that it had faced off against Andrews and not immediately lost was sufficient proof of that.

 

But that dagger was an unusual threat. It was something that presented a unique danger, and which required unique countermeasures.

 

Under ordinary circumstances, perhaps, the redcap would have been able to block even that attack, which had been optimized specifically to bypass such defenses. Perhaps.

 

But it had already expended an enormous amount of energy, and all of its allies, just to get this far.

 

The redcap hit the ground in a rapidly-spreading pool of blood. Andrews watched it for a few seconds, then carefully wiped his dagger clean with a handkerchief and sheathed it again.

 

“Are we done?” I asked. The wizard closed his eyes for a few moments, then nodded. “Good. Check on Mr. Michaelson, please.”

 

He grabbed the industrial-size medical kit from under one of the cots and dragged it over to where Michaelson was lying on the ground. I turned back to check on the girl.

 

She was still lying on the cot, watching me with wary eyes. She appeared uninjured; evidently she had been outside the blast radius of that strange grenade the redcap had thrown. That was good.

 

My first impulse was to bring her somewhere she could be properly cared for. A foster home, perhaps, or a psychiatrist.

 

Upon consideration, that impulse was a poor one. The situation out there was very uncertain at the moment. It was, I thought, not unlike a gang war. Tensions had been building up for a long time, and now that they had been released every side was fighting every other. As odd as it seemed, the safest place for her right now might very well be with me. I was likely to be tested again in the coming days, but at least I could defend myself.

 

“He’s fine,” Andrews said, interrupting my train of thought. “Just passed out from it messing with the blood flow to his brain. He’ll wake up in a few minutes.”

 

“Very good,” I said. “Come help me reduce this shoulder, please.”

 

He obligingly stood and walked over to me. “You know, Boss,” he said quietly, as he moved into position, “this was a risky move. Luring him in like that…it was risky. And expensive. His weregild is going to be almost half a million, I think.”

 

“He challenged me,” I said. “Reputation is important. Letting people challenge you and get away with it is bad for business.”

 

“Right,” he said. “And you couldn’t have dealt with it any other way?”

 

I noticed that he was looking over my shoulder at the girl on the cot. “It was business,” I said, enunciating the words very clearly. “I do not tolerate challenges to my reputation, Mr. Andrews, particularly when they are likely to become public knowledge.”

 

He took the hint and said nothing more as he pulled on my shoulder, tugging it back into place. I clenched my teeth around a scream, but the pain actually faded quite quickly. Andrews was quite skilled with simple medical procedures. A side effect, I thought, of his more unusual talents.

 

A few minutes later Michaelson woke up, and a few minutes after that he felt entirely recovered. “Very good work, gentlemen,” I said. “Let us go and get some food. I suspect our work will only get harder from here.”

 

“What about the girl?” Michaelson asked.

 

“My name is Carrie!” she snapped, the first thing she’d said.

 

“My name is Nicolas,” I said to her, carefully not smiling. “You can come with us if you want to.” She seemed to still be in shock, but there was clearly something in her that refused to give up. I suspected she was going to recover from this experience.

 

She considered it for a few seconds, then stood up and walked over to us. She paused to kick the redcap’s body as she passed, getting a little more blood on her thoroughly bloodied sneaker.

 

I did smile at that. Yes, Carrie was going to be just fine.

 

Which was good, because I could see something of myself in her. Anyone who could get over her shock and feel grateful rather than frightened over the perpetrator’s death so soon after the fact was…well, we had something in common, I supposed. A certain kinship, perhaps.

 

I’d lost one daughter to gang warfare already. They had kidnapped her with the intention of forcing a reaction out of me, and I supposed that it had succeeded, although not in the way they intended. I’d tried to save her, and a great many people died, and Julie had been one of them. At the end of the day, that was all that mattered. The rest of the story was just…trimmings.

 

The strange thing was that, in an odd way, it had been the biggest favor they could have done for me. Julie and her mother had been the only things left from my life before I started a career in organized crime. With one dead, and the other gone, I’d been able to dedicate myself wholly to my work.

 

In an odd way, they were the only reason I’d been able to rise as far as I had. With nothing holding me back, and a powerful motivation to gain power, I’d climbed the ranks very quickly indeed. I’d always been more ruthless than my peers. You would think that an accountant would have more principles than a thief, and in some respects you’d be right, but the scruples line up oddly with each other.

 

Between the lengths I’d been willing to go to and my understanding of how easy it was to bring someone down if you hit them with an attack they were utterly unprepared for, it had been surprisingly easy to set myself up as the sole ruler of organized crime in Colorado. I liked to think I’d done a decent job. I’d cut down on a lot of the violence. Even the cops agreed that I’d been a stabilizing force, even if they wouldn’t admit it.

 

And none of it would ever bring my daughter back.

 

But in spite of the pain, I was still smiling as I reached out to pat Carrie on the shoulder. It was good to be reminded of that, once in a while. It was good to remember why I’d started down this road.

 

As I’d expected, she recoiled from my touch, an expression of shock and pain going across her face when the steel-jacketed bullet I’d concealed in my hand.

 

I smiled sadly. I liked Carrie. I really did. But nothing is what it seems with the fae, and at the end of the day, business is business.

 

She hissed at me, her expression turning to fury, and in that moment it was easy to see that she was nothing human.

 

And Andrews’s dagger came out again.

 

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

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“Holy shit,” Aiko said. “Did you seriously buy a limousine?”

 

“I’m not sure yet,” I said, stepping inside. I left the door hanging; it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to hold it for my housecarls. “How was your morning?”

 

She shrugged. “I’ve had worse. Yours?”

 

“There are three factions of independents in the city,” I said, grinning. “One of them’s probably going to stay out of my way, and the other is tentatively backing me up. I also recruited a bunch of ghouls.”

 

“My,” she said dryly. “Sounds like you’ve been busy. And you even got things done without me around to help.” She shook her head. “What’s the world coming to?”

 

I snorted and kept walking. It was late enough now that people were waking up and moving around. There were maybe half a dozen people in the throne room, moving tables around and setting out reams of files, and I could smell food cooking upstairs. Noises from both the bedrooms upstairs and the safe room below suggested that more people were waking up and getting ready to start the day.

 

It felt rather bizarre to be walking through my own headquarters and realize that it felt like a home. People were talking, laughing quietly, drinking coffee as they discussed the work ahead and got ready to get to it. Even more bizarre was that I was oddly separate from the whole thing. This was my place, and yet very much not, like I was an outsider in my own home base. I walked through the crowd, such as it was, and people nodded respectfully or said good morning, but then they went right back to what they were doing. Nobody tried to draw me into a conversation, or make casual small talk the way they did with each other.

 

Which, I supposed, made sense. From where these people were standing, having me around was a lot like having a Special Forces soldier who’d killed enough people to fill a stadium on your flag football team. Sure, you appreciated what he brought to the table. You were glad he was on your team. You were sure as hell glad he wasn’t on the other one.

 

But you weren’t going to invite him home for dinner.

 

I told myself it didn’t matter, with limited success. Better was to just keep moving, keep focusing on the task at hand, so that’s what I did. I found Selene upstairs in the office, predictably enough. I took one chair, Aiko took the other, and Snowflake curled up around my feet.

 

“Things go all right, Boss?” Selene said absently, not looking up from the paper she was reading.

 

“Eh,” I said. “Might have gotten some more people. Decent skills, it sounds like, and fairly good numbers. But I definitely pissed some other people off, and they got away.”

 

“How unlike you. Should I be expecting these people to try something?”

 

I frowned. “Doubtful. I don’t think they even know where to go. But I suppose it isn’t impossible.” My frown deepened. “I should probably look at getting some better wards around this place. Something further out, so you’d have a little more warning.” Crap. How was I going to work that into my schedule? Wards took time to design, time and effort to set up, and more time to repair after they’d been damaged.

 

Stop fidgeting, Snowflake said irritably. You’re making it hard to sleep.

 

It wasn’t until she pointed it out that I realized that I was tapping my foot. Once she did, I found that I’d been doing it long and enthusiastically enough that my leg was getting tired.

 

Double crap. Of all the times for my head to be out of whack, this was one of the worse ones.

 

“Business,” I said, forcing myself to be still. “Starting with, why the hell do I apparently have a limo now?”

 

Selene grinned at me. “I’ve been thinking for a while that you need something with a bit more style,” she said. “Something that was a little more appropriate for someone of your wealth and station. So I bought you a Rolls-Royce. Later today someone’s going to come by and spruce it up a bit. You know, put your arms on the door and such.”

 

I stared. Aiko chortled, probably at my expression. “You bought me a Rolls-Royce,” I repeated.

 

“Well, technically you bought it,” she said. “But I handled all the work, so I figure I get some of the credit. Apparently you have to jump through some hoops to get the armored version, or it would have been ready sooner.”

 

“Did you clear this with Tindr first?” I asked. I didn’t actually ask how expensive it had been. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know.

 

“Yep,” she said cheerfully. “It was well within the budget. And the payment went through before all this started, so it didn’t come out of the budget he gave you the other day.”

 

“Okay,” I said. It seemed fairly insane to me, but apparently that was just how things worked in my world these days. “Moving on. Any more replies come in?”

 

“Several,” she said, losing any hint of humor. “Scáthach says that she won’t give you formal support, but she will prohibit her people from causing any trouble within your territory for the next week. Apparently you have carte blanche to kill anyone from her Court you find here.”

 

“Good enough,” I said, with some satisfaction. Snowflake agreed enthusiastically, although she didn’t bother putting it into words. Aiko looked a little less happy, which probably made sense. She had issues with the Sidhe.

 

“Gwynn ap Nud also sent a messenger,” she continued. “He didn’t promise support, but he did request that you pay him a personal audience. Watcher didn’t reply directly, but she forwarded an internal memo recognizing you as the local authority and instructing her people to contact you before they take any action in your territory. Edward Frodsham called to say that his town isn’t having any difficulties, and your friends are ready for pickup whenever.”

 

Well, that wasn’t great. It wasn’t terrible, but I’d been hoping for more. Thus far all I’d gotten was unofficial backing, and while that was valuable in its own right, it didn’t have the oomph that a formal statement would. It was hard to point to conditional statements and internal memos as grounds for your authority and respect.

 

“You also got a few unsolicited messages,” she said. “Do you want to hear them now?”

 

I sighed. “Yeah, I’d better.”

 

“Okay. First off, Katrin requests a meeting on neutral ground at midnight tonight. She included an address.”

 

“Skip it for now,” I groaned. I’d known it was coming, but still, I really didn’t want to deal with that.

 

“You got it, Boss. Next, a man who identified himself as Jack called to offer his services. He claimed to be a mage, but didn’t offer any details.”

 

“Could be worth following up on,” I said, glowering at the desk. “Could be a waste. Anything else?”

 

“One more,” she said. “This one is from a Blind Keith. He says he wants to meet with you to discuss future prospects.”

 

I groaned. Triple crap. Judging by our last chat, a discussion with Blind Keith was like playing with fire, if fire was intelligent and enjoyed scaring the shit out of people.

 

“Okay,” I said. “I’m guessing you got contact information for all of them?”

 

Selene looked somewhat offended. “Of course.”

 

“Right. Call Jack, tell him I want to meet with him before I commit to anything. Don’t give him this address, though. Set it up at…shit, I guess Pryce’s.”

 

“Aren’t you banned?” Aiko asked. “Just, you know, in case you forgot or something.”

 

“I’m really hoping that won’t be an issue,” I said. I tried to think of what else I needed to do. Dealing with Katrin wasn’t optional, but I also didn’t really need to call her back. She wouldn’t even be conscious for hours. I could pick up Kyra and Ryan later; I mostly wanted them in case I needed a werewolf for something, rather than as actual fighters. I liked them too much to want them fighting in this mess.

 

That was why I’d brought in new housecarls, and hired Jibril’s ghouls. They were…disposable. And I hated thinking like that, but that didn’t make it any less valid of a point.

 

That just left Gwynn ap Nud and Blind Keith, neither of which could be ignored. Of the two, I thought Gwynn was the higher priority. He liked me, at least a little, and he was a Twilight Prince, which meant that his opinion counted for a lot. Blind Keith was also powerful—I was sure of that, if nothing else about him—but I hadn’t forgotten his parting words in our last meeting. He’d said he wouldn’t come to my territory again without talking to me first, and given that he was fae of one stripe or another, there was no questioning that commitment.

 

In fact, that was very likely why he wanted this meeting. Which, in turn, meant that putting it off until I had other things settled down couldn’t be a bad idea.

 

“Okay,” I said to Selene. “Tell Gwynn ap Nud that I’ll be there as soon as I can arrange it, and tell Blind Keith that I’m willing to meet with him. Ask him to pick a neutral location in…shit, I guess London.” It wasn’t my favorite place, but I knew a portal terminus there. It also had more supernatural protectors than the vast majority of cities, between the Conclave’s strong presence in the city and various local powers. London was old, and that meant it had had the opportunity to pick up all kinds of protections.

 

“You got it,” she said. “Anything else?”

 

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Is Kyi outside?”

 

“Yep. Putting the new recruits through their paces, I think.”

 

“Great,” I said. “I’ll go talk to her, then.”

---

 

Out back of the house, I didn’t immediately see anyone. Not surprising, and just as well; there was another thing I needed to take care of.

 

Aiko amused herself painting graffiti on the trees while I struggled to get the phone to work. As Selene had warned me, reception was intermittent; I’d had fairly good luck earlier in the morning, but this time it took a few minutes to find somewhere I could make a call.

 

For much the same reason, I was expecting to have to leave a message. To my surprise, though, Erin answered on the second ring. She didn’t say anything, though; I couldn’t even hear her breathing.

 

I smiled a little. She’d gotten more paranoid, it seemed; the last time I called she’d at least had a greeting. “It’s Winter,” I said.

 

Instantly, the sense of quiet, latent hostility vanished. “Winter!” she said brightly. “Hey, how’s it going? Nothing too bad after the whole prison thing, right? I wanted to come break you out, but Father wouldn’t hear of it.”

 

“I’m fine,” I said, although she almost certainly knew I was lying. All of Conn’s family were almost impossible to lie to. “Do you have a minute?”

 

“Sure,” she said. “I’m on a stakeout right now. Trust me, any distraction is welcome.”

 

“Great. Listen, I had a question. I ran into a guy called Blind Keith the other day. I remember you mentioning the name, and I was hoping you could maybe tell me a little about what I’m dealing with.”

 

There was a long, ominous pause. “Blind Keith?” she said. “Are you sure?”

 

“Absolutely.”

 

“Well, that’s not good.” Erin’s voice was somber, and I shivered a little. She only had a couple of emotional states, and somber wasn’t typically one of them. “Blind Keith is…well, I told you there’s only so many people at the top of the business, right?”

 

“Yeah,” I said. Said business consisted primarily of killing people and secondarily of killing people while preventing other people from being killed, but I didn’t bother pointing that out. Erin was a little sociopathic, even by my standards. It wasn’t so much that she enjoyed violence—that was standard for werewolves, really. She just didn’t care about it at all. It had no real emotional value for her, and I wasn’t entirely sure she grasped the basic concept of ethics.

 

“Well, he’s one of them. Except he isn’t really in the business, you know? Like, he doesn’t take pay or anything. He takes strictly the jobs he wants, and he’s in it for thrills.”

 

Great. Just what I needed. “When you say he’s one of the best,” I said. “What does that mean?”

 

There was another ominous pause. “He’s good,” she said at last. “One of the more powerful people I’ve seen. The rumor is he could have been a Twilight Prince, but he didn’t care enough. I know for a fact that he can call the Wild Hunt.”

 

I shivered again. I’d seen the Wild Hunt, once. More than that, I’d Seen them, using the Second Sight. That experience had played a major role in convincing me that the Second Sight was not remotely worth the dangers of using it, in fact.

 

I knew the magic, the spirit of the Hunt. I knew exactly what it would take to call that power up and control it.

 

“Shit,” I said. “This is not sounding good.”

 

“No,” she agreed. “Let me put it like this. As a bodyguard, I’ve lost five bodies. Four of them were killed by Blind Keith. I’ve only beaten him once, and that was on one of the luckiest days of my life.”

 

“Shit,” I repeated. “Do you have any advice for me?”

 

“Maybe,” she said, then paused. “My mark just came out of his house,” she said. “Hang on a second.”

 

Before I could say anything, I clearly heard her set the phone down.

 

Then, loud and sharp and unmistakable, the sound of a gunshot.

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