Theino wandered off, leaving the three of us with our privacy. With one of those cryptic exchanges of glances no male would ever understand, Holly and Mary decided that Holly would follow him, leaving me alone with my girlfriend.
“What are you going to do?” she asked quietly.
“Wait for Talus to get back into town with his hit squad,” I told her slowly. “Then we are going to kill every last fucking one of them.”
SHELLY ARRIVED SHORTLY AFTER CLEMENTINE. Where Clementine just nodded to me and then asked the goblins where the girl was, Shelly settled down into a chair in the neatly furnished living room in the apartment suite the girls were living in.
“I repeat what I said earlier,” she told me. “You are going to get yourself killed. They’re going to know someone rescued the girl.”
“So far as they know,” I drawled to her, my composure mostly recovered by now, “no one knows they’re there. Which seems more likely to you: someone finds your secret sanctum, breaks in without you noticing, rescues a single victim, and leaves without anyone seeing them; or someone dropped a knife by accident in the room and the girl escaped?”
Shelly sighed. “You have a point, and it’s not like I can really blame you,” she admitted. “You’re sure they’re in the hotel, then?”
“Most of the rooms on the upper floor were occupied, but had only recently been left—within the last hour,” I told her. “There wasn’t enough dust on the floor for the hotel to be unoccupied. Plus, the girl is a pretty damn good sign.”
“Good enough for me,” Shelly nodded. “I’m going to step outside and call Talus; I’ll let you know what the plan is beyond ‘kill them all’.”
Mary and I sat on the couch, waiting silently. She held my hand, and I appreciated her letting me think. Enough shit had gone down in the last few days to last me a lifetime, and we were nowhere near done yet.
Talus was back in town tomorrow, and Tarvers Tenerim’s funeral was the day after. At the funeral, Holly would give her evidence against Darius Fontaine, throwing out everyone’s prediction of how the election would break down. Oberis’s deadline to MacDonald would run out. Talus and I would hopefully have evidence to prove the existence of vampires—in all honesty, Jill was likely enough evidence on her own.
But oh, I wanted to bring more evidence. I wanted to bring the burnt and mangled bodies of the vampires and throw them before the court. I’d disliked vampires before, fought and killed them since coming to Calgary, but the fate of that one poor girl put just what they were in perspective.
“Talus agrees with us,” Shelly told me, coming back into the room. “He’ll be bringing his team—three gentry and three greater fae, he said—into town tomorrow afternoon. They’ll meet up with you and move in while there’s still some daylight left.”
“Good,” I replied grimly. “I’m looking forward to it.”
“He said,” she added, “that they could pick you up from work.”
That stopped my thoughts in their tracks. With everything else going, I had completely forgotten that I had to go back to work tomorrow.
THE DAY at work passed in a blur of busy work and angry customers, none of which fazed me. It turned out, to my mild entertainment that I could hardly explain to my coworkers, that the prospect of walking into a firefight after work made facing the normal issues of a work day completely dismissible.
I walked out of work at the end of the day, Bill having kicked everyone out on time with “It’s Friday; get out of my damned building,” to find a black sedan waiting for me. The tinted window rolled down as I approached, and Talus wordlessly gestured for me to get into the back.
I obeyed, joining a dark skinned older woman in a conservative black pants suit. She wore a headscarf but her features were very much Greek, not Arabic. Talus, dressed in a plain black long sweatshirt and slacks, gestured toward her as the driver took off.
“Jason, be known to Celine Mattas,” he told me, and the lady bowed her head to me. “She’s a Fury. Our driver is George O’Malley, one of the gentry.”
“Howdy,” the ginger-haired driver told me in a thick Texan drawl. “Nice to meetcha.”
“We’re going to swing by your apartment so you can grab anything you need,” Talus told me, “and then meet up with the rest of the team at a property of mine near the target.”
“Sounds good,” I confirmed.
I lived close enough to my work that I’d barely finished saying that before O’Malley pulled us up to the curb by my house. I had left everything I would need on the table in the morning, so it was a quick trip. I was already wearing the Queen’s armor, so all I picked up were the pistol and the Micro Uzi, strapping one concealed holster under each arm and the clips for both weapons into special pouches on my belt.
“I’m ready,” I told the others, returning to the vehicle.
We drove south, opposite rush-hour traffic until we’d pulled into downtown. O’Malley wove us through the traffic with consummate ease, eventually pulling us into a tiny parking lot behind a small apartment building on the south side of downtown.
“I own all four of the ground-floor apartments,” Talus told us, leading us into the back rooms. “Normally, three are rented out to cover what’s in the fourth, but I’d ordered renovations this month, so they’re all empty. Convenient for us.”
“What’s in the fourth?” I asked, and Talus smirked.
“Take a look,” he told me, opening the first door inside the plainly decorated apartment building.
For a moment, I got the impression of a normal-ish apartment. Same brown carpeting as the apartment building corridors outside. Plain white drywall. A single table, some chairs.
Then I stepped farther in and realized that as soon as you were out of the front hallway, that impression vanished. All of the internal walls of the apartment except the one in front of the main door were gone. It had been turned into one large spartan room with the single table at the left side.
The rest was filled with three rows of back-to-back floor-to-ceiling cabinets, clearly mounted straight down into the concrete under the carpet. If you blew up the building, those heavy metal cabinets would probably still be standing there, undamaged.
“I know you have armor,” Talus told me, “but throw a flak vest over top of it, will you? I prefer my people over protected to under, and, bluntly, you’re the weakest of us here.”
As I obeyed, Celine silently following me to the cabinets to help me pick out and fit a suitable jacket, I surveyed the other four people in the room. Shelly sat at the table, pointing out details in a low voice I couldn’t make out on what looked like a set of blueprints. Two men with the eerily perfect features of gentry passed a cigar back between themselves and a woman with skin black as night, a tiny flicker of red flame glittering over her skin to my eyes.
“John MacDougall and Kyle Lawrence, gentry, and Tamara Roxeville, nightmare,” Talus introduced them to me. “Meet Jason Kilkenny, our scout on this operation and a trusted friend of mine—changeling.”
The noble glanced around. “Where’s Frankie?” he asked.
“Right here,” a voice said from right next to me, and the air next to where I was strapping on the flak jacket blurred, like a mirage, and a tall man suddenly stood there, dressed in camouflage greens.
He offered me his hand with a grin as I jumped in surprise at his sudden appearance.
“Frankie Mckenny,” he introduced himself. “I’m what you call a green man; I blend in with everything. You’ll want this,” he finished, handing me a black cylinder sized to go on the barrel of my Uzi—a sound and flash suppressor.
“All right, now we’re done playing games,” Talus said repressively, “can we all gather around?”