After a long moment, Mary nodded. “Can we take your car?” she asked.
Clementine chuckled. It was a quiet, rather pathetic excuse for a laugh, but it was a laugh, and Mary smiled at him.
“Yes, you two can take the car.”
BY THE TIME we made it to my apartment, Mary had passed out again from sheer exhaustion. As gently as I could, I carried her downstairs and put her to bed. Not wanting to wake her in the morning, I then went to sleep on the couch.
I slipped out of the house in the morning after checking on her. She was still sleeping like the dead. I left her a short note on the nightstand, letting her know when I’d be home, but that was all I could do.
With everything going on, I was horrendously distracted at work. Thankfully, my various coworkers had grown somewhat used to my moods at this point and gave me a bit of slack. We got my truck loaded up, and off I headed.
Shortly after my third stop, my phone buzzed with a text message.
It was from Michael, the Enforcer who I’d been meeting every morning to pick up packages, and it simply said, MEET ME. IT’S NOT ABOUT WORK. He gave a specific Starbucks, and for once it wasn’t conveniently on the way.
I left the text message unanswered as I made my next two deliveries. Bill likely wouldn’t be happy with me for the delay, though he’d give me some slack, knowing something had gone down last weekend. I wasn’t supposed to be helping Enforcers at all, though that order came from Oberis.
Plus, Michael had generally been straight with me, and he’d been honestly confused when I’d told him I wasn’t allowed to help him. With a sigh, I texted him back.
CAN’T TILL WORK IS OVER. MEET ME BY THE OFFICE?
His response was just OKAY. I was left wondering just what was up until my day rolled to an end, and the Enforcer’s blue sedan pulled up outside my dispatch office. Michael popped the side door.
“Get in,” he told me.
Hesitant, and wishing I was armed, I obeyed. As soon as I was in the car, he took off.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Nowhere,” he told me, a shadow of a grin crossing his face. “The more we keep moving, the less my brothers can track us. They don’t have a full Magus’s abilities, and movement confuses their scrying.”
I blinked. That was a weakness of MacDonald’s minions I hadn’t been aware of.
“Should you have told me that?” I asked carefully.
“No,” he admitted wryly. “But if I can’t be honest with you right now, I am fucked.”
I looked carefully over the Enforcer. He was as neatly dressed as every other Enforcer had been each time I’d seen them, but there was a set to his stance and features I’d never seen before. He was stressed. He was...afraid?
“What’s going on, Michael?” I finally asked.
“I tried to go to the Magus about what you told me yesterday,” he said quietly, his eyes focused on the road. “I’ve been an Enforcer for ten years. It’s not easy to see MacDonald, but it’s always possible. Just a few months ago, I managed to get into his office just to get him to sign a birthday card for Percy.”
“And this time?”
“I was blocked at every turn,” the Enforcer said quietly. “Doors that are normally open are locked. His phone goes straight to voice mail. His receptionist says he’s in a meeting, yet no one has come to the Tower to see him.”
“He could actually be in meetings,” I said dryly. “He did just have a ticking time bomb dropped on him.”
“That’s the thing,” Michael continued. “I tried to tell Winters or get Sarah to pass what you said onto him, and they told me that he was aware of it and that I wasn’t to tell anyone else. ‘The situation is under control but very delicate. Please keep this under wraps, or you may be disciplined.’”
“That’s...not good,” I told him. “The situation is not under control.” The situation was rapidly spiraling even further out of control, with the Clans bombing each other, and the Court preparing for open war.
He nodded. “That’s what I was afraid you’d say.”
“So, why come to me?” I drawled back at him.
For a moment, Michael was silent, focusing on the road as he ran us through a random selection of clear-ish side streets.
“I am afraid that the Tower has been corrupted,” he finally confessed. “I fear that at least some of my fellow Enforcers have not merely failed in the charge given to us by the Magus but actively betrayed it.”
“From where I sit, I’m not seeing how that changes much for anybody,” I told him.
“It should change a lot,” he snapped. “Don’t you get what I’m telling you? The Enforcers have betrayed the Covenants—and, I’m afraid, the Magus. MacDonald has nothing to do with this and probably doesn’t even know Tarvers is dead.”
“I’ve heard a lot about Wizard’s Sight in recent weeks,” I said slowly, trying to internalize what he was saying. “How is that possible?”
“There are ways to block Sight, to fool it, and who knows those ways better than the Enforcers?” Michael asked. “No one I’ve spoken to has seen MacDonald in about a week. I’m afraid he’s been imprisoned—there are ways to contain a Wizard, and who has a better chance to use them than his own bodyguards?”
I stared at the road in front of us as pieces began to fall into place. I didn’t have all the information yet, but the basics were there.
Someone—probably the vampires—had co-opted senior members of the Enforcers, probably including Winters, to their plan. The vampires had then played provocateur, sparking conflict, drawing the Clan and Court into action while the co-opted Enforcers kept their master inactive and in the dark.
Then Winters had acted, murdering Tarvers to create an intolerable provocation and ignite tensions between the local inhumans and the Wizard. Chaos was following. Conflict. And in the anarchy, the Queen’s fear—MacDonald assassinated.
The scale was massive, the effort huge—and yet, Wizards were untouchable. Undistracted, they were unbeatable. Even if one was killed, three more would descend upon the murderer and annihilate him and everyone connected to him. But in the middle of the kind of chaos forming in our streets, who would they blame? Who would be held responsible?
With the Wizard’s former employees to stir up the pot and spread confusion, either there would be no target, or there would be a false target, with either the Court or the Clan suffering the wrath of the students of Merlin.
“We can’t let this happen,” I said aloud, and turned to face Michael. “What do you need from me?”
“I’m not sure yet,” he admitted. “I just had to make sure someone outside the Tower knew what was going on. I’m going to investigate, ask more questions. I’ll keep in touch.”
“And if I don’t hear from you?”
“If you don’t hear from me for more than a day, go to Lord Oberis,” the Enforcer said grimly. “Tell him what I told you, and that I am likely dead. If you don’t hear from me”—he paused for a moment, taking a deep breath and hesitating before he finally continued—“the Tower has truly betrayed its charge.”
We pulled up outside my apartment. “Done,” I promised him. I didn’t want to face Oberis yet, but if things were that far gone, I would have no choice.
“Thank you, Jason,” he said quietly. “I will be in touch.”
25
I GOT home to find Mary in the process of leaving. I almost bounced off her in the stairway leading down to my floor, her hair up under a black toque and her winter jacket on.
“Plans?” I asked carefully. She and I hadn’t had a chance to discuss how this whole situation was going to work, so the last thing I wanted to do was make her think I was being jealous.
“Sort of,” she said. “I just got a call from a girlfriend of mine; she’s in trouble.”