Barry glanced around, and then leaned closer to me.
“Ask someone inside,” he half-whispered. “We’re trying to keep things quiet. Talk with Clementine.”
Confused and rapidly getting even more worried than I already was, I stepped through into the “flooded” bar. The inside was even more crowded than the outside parking lot—mostly because a good third of the bar had been roped off and turned into an impromptu emergency room. Treating shifters mostly involved bandaging them up, feeding them, and letting them heal their own injuries.
The rows of pub tables put into service as impromptu hospital beds, covered in duvets and cushions probably “acquired” from the department store just down the street, holding barely moving bodies, stood at odds to that normal treatment.
A number of young men and women, apparently impressed as nurses, moved up and down the tables at Clementine’s direction, checking on patients and applying salves and hypodermics at the doctor’s direction.
When Clementine saw me, he gave some final instructions and came over to me.
“What the hell happened?” I asked.
“Tenerim Den is gone,” he said bluntly. “Someone firebombed us just over three hours ago. We got all the people, all the pets, and I think all the important gear out, but the Den is gone. Mary’s okay,” he continued, forestalling my next question. “She was one of the ones who went back in to pull out the explosives, and got hit pretty hard by smoke inhalation. She’s sleeping it off over there.” He pointed toward a corner.
“Smoke doesn’t bother us too much, and we can heal minor burns pretty quickly, but major burns are bad even for us,” the doctor explained quietly. “We have over twenty sets of third-degree burns, and those will take even our people a few days to heal.”
“Damn,” I said softly. Tenerim Den gone? Over twenty shifters badly hurt enough to put them out of commission for several days? “Why? Who the hell would do this?”
“Don’t know who,” Clementine said quietly, taking a seat in one of the bar booths. “But the why is politics—whoever Tenerim chooses as its new Alpha would have a foot in the door to become Speaker, even though they’d be the most inexperienced Alpha—Tenerim is the strongest clan, and the last Speaker was ours. But now we’ve been shown to be weak, unable to defend ourselves. Tenerim will not be the next Speaker.”
“They did this”—I gestured around the impromptu burn recovery ward—“to make sure Tenerim wouldn’t be in the running for Speaker?”
“We don’t play politics gently,” Clementine said sadly. “Fire and bullets and knives can’t kill us, after all. This sort of thing is worse than usual, but it’s a difference in scale, not in kind.”
He sounded very tired. I suspected that this was the first he’d sat down since everything had gone to hell. Even through that, though, something didn’t sound quite right in what he was saying.
“I’m hearing a but,” I said quietly.
“Yeah,” he agreed, resting his head in his hands. “There are four more days until the vote, at Tarvers’s funeral. If we’re starting off this bad, there’s a real risk things are going to get worse. Most of our elections see a dozen or so duels with steel knives to sort out differences. If we’re starting with firebombing, I don’t think we’re going to calm down.”
“Any ideas who it could have been?” I asked.
“There are three Alphas in the running,” he told me. “Darius of Clan Fontaine, Joseph of Clan O’Connell, and Thomas of Clan Smith.”
“Clan Smith?”
The shifter doctor shrugged. “They’re all family names originally,” he reminded me. “I wouldn’t think any of the three would stoop to this level of violence, but none of the other four Alphas have a chance unless those three were to die—and I haven’t heard of an assassination in shifter politics anytime in the last few centuries.”
“What about the...Grandfather, I think he called himself?” I asked, thinking back to the old Native shifter who’d cursed out the Enforcers.
“Enli Tsuu’Tina,” Clementine said with a nod. “He isn’t in the running—by choice. If he wanted the job, Tarvers would have stepped aside for him to have it—and the other Alphas would do the same now. Enli doesn’t want the job.”
I nodded, looking around the bar. It looked like Clan Tenerim had mostly moved into the Lodge for the moment.
“Are you going to stay here?”
“Just for tonight,” Clementine told me. “I and Tarvers’s two boys have access to the Clan accounts. Jim and Bryan are busy booking hotel rooms across the city right now, spreading out the Clan as much as we can as we set up to find a new Den.”
“What was the favor you wanted?” I asked, remembering why he’d called me here as the full reality of the situation sank in. “Any help I can give Clan Tenerim, I will,” I promised.
“The Clan will survive,” the doctor said simply. “I am the only shifter doctor in the city, so I am mostly untouchable. Mary, however, is just as weak as I am by shifter standards and lacks that protection. I want you to take her out of here and let her stay with you for the week.”
“I may not be the safest place to be hiding this week,” I warned him. “Fae politics are...causing me issues.”
“Nowhere in this city is safe,” Clementine said bluntly. “I want her out of the line of fire of Clan politics, and I know you’ll take care of her.”
“Fair enough,” I agreed. It was hardly like I was going to complain about having my girlfriend staying with me for a week. I just worried that some of the fallout from my duty to the Queen, or my apparent ability to piss off the fae Court, would fall on her.
“Let’s go wake her up,” I suggested. Clementine nodded and led me back to a darkened corner of the bar, where a dozen or so shifters had been covered with blankets and sleeping bags.
I saw Mary and knelt down next to her, gently shaking her awake. She blinked her eyes open and smiled broadly when she saw me. I almost missed it in shock at the state of her eyes. Even after several hours of regeneration, her eyes were still red and puffy from smoke.
“Jason,” she said softly before pulling me down to kiss her. “When did you get here?”
“About fifteen minutes ago,” I told her. “Clementine called me. He’s filled me in on what happened.”
“It was awful,” she admitted quietly. “We had to make sure the guns and explosives were out of the house—the fire will be bad enough without the authorities wondering why the house blew up like an ammo dump.”
“You had that many guns in the basement?” I asked. I’d assumed they had some—all the inhuman groups had long-standing arrangements to have illegal firearms—but enough to cause a noticeable explosion?
“Two hundred assault rifles and submachine guns, about twice that in various handguns, half a ton of plastique and a million or so rounds of ammo,” Clementine said from behind me. “We have armored trucks in the lot full of the shit.”
That would have been an explosion to bring down the authorities. Ammo dump was an accurate description.
“Mary, I’ve asked Jason if you can stay with him for the next few days,” Clementine told his sister. “I want you out of the way until the damn vote is over.”
“What?” she demanded, glaring at both of us. “Do I get a say in this?”
“Yes,” I answered instantly. I wasn’t stupid, after all. “I’m hardly locking her in my apartment, Clementine,” I told the doctor.
“Mary, I have to stay with our people and make sure they’re okay,” he told her. “Otherwise, I’d be finding my own place to hide. You and I don’t have the strength or power of other shifters; if we get caught in the politics we’ll get crushed. Please?”