“Thank you for what you did,” he said flatly, “but I need to know something.”
“What?” I asked, my voice small as I studied his feet. This was not how I’d envisaged seeing Tarvers after taking on Sigridsen.
“Look me in the eye,” he ordered, “and tell me why you lied to us.”
Slowly, I raised his gaze to look into his eyes. It was the first time I’d looked into the Alpha’s eyes, and I realized for the first time that it was not size or strength or blood right that made Tarvers Tenerim master of Calgary’s shifters. He looked into my eyes and through them into my soul, and I knew, in that moment, I could no more deceive him than myself.
“I did not lie to you,” I said quietly, sure that he knew I spoke the truth. “I did not tell you everything, and I cannot tell you now what I did not tell you then, but I did not lie to you.”
“Huh,” he grunted. He held my gaze for a long moment before he finally allowed me to look away. “I will accept that, Jason Kilkenny. Know that my Clan owes you two boons. I will try to convince Mary you didn’t lie to us,” he added, “but I don’t know if even success will help you.”
“Why?” I asked.
“You will be barred from seeing the Clan,” Tarvers told me bluntly. “Your Lord is rightly angry in his belief that you have used his name falsely. Even if only by implication.” He winked at me and offered his massive hand.
“You have done us all and the Covenants a service,” he told me as I shook his hand. He pulled me in and whispered in my ear. “We got the bitch’s computers out before the fire took everything. I will let you know what we learn...discreetly.”
He released me and opened the door.
“Good luck, Jason,” he told me.
“Thanks,” I drawled slowly, taking in everything he’d said. “Good luck yourself.”
He nodded and gestured me out of the Den toward my guard.
LAURIE WAS WAITING OUTSIDE, standing by the door of a dark blue SUV. She wordlessly pointed me to the passenger seat, and I obeyed just as quietly. The key turned itself in the ignition as she got in, and the car shifted into gear as she placed her hands on the wheel.
Show-off.
The drive through the city was painfully slow. Laurie, like many hags, was apparently completely anal about rules. Every stop sign was stopped at for exactly three seconds. Every yield sign was slowed for. She even slowed down to a stop when the lights turned yellow!
This being the real world, this meant we got passed by almost everyone, honked at three times, and flipped off once. We passed that last car again several minutes later, the driver having gone off the road and slammed into a retaining wall. Someone was standing by the vehicle, talking frantically into a cell phone, but I couldn’t tell if the driver was okay.
Laurie had a vicious little smile on her face as she drove by at precisely the speed limit, and I shivered. It was certainly within the hag’s abilities to hex a driver into crashing, and it was a potent reminder that hags were Unseelie fae. They didn’t tend to be nice people, and it seemed Laurie was no exception to that stereotype.
Thankfully, that was the only incident on our way, and she eventually pulled us into the parking lot of a midsized hotel and conference center in the southwest quadrant of the city. A central tower stood by the road, proudly proclaiming its western-themed name, with one wing stretching along the major road and one stretching away. On the base of the large green-and-yellow sign, I readily recognized the delicate script of fae-sign, invisible to mortal eyes.
This was the joint Seelie-Unseelie Court. The physical home of fae authority in Calgary. The place I had consistently avoided even learning the location of since I got there. Also, and most important today, here was where Oberis, fae Lord in Calgary, would pass judgment on his subjects.
Laurie pulled into a STAFF ONLY parking spot and stuck a plastic parking pass on the SUV’s rearview mirror.
“Let’s go,” she ordered, the first words she’d spoken since I came out to meet her. She led the way, and I followed her into a lushly decorated lobby done tastefully in dark blues and greens. Display signs behind the reception counter announced the bookings for conference rooms A1 through C6. All of the C-block conference rooms were booked by “Callahan Enterprises”.
“C wing is always booked,” Laurie told me as she led me toward the door with its two security guards. “We change the name every few days, but we don’t let mortals in—it’s the permanent Court.”
Apparently, she was aware I hadn’t been there before, and I was grateful for the unexpected explanation. Maybe she wasn’t all bad.
The two guards shifted slightly as we approached, and I realized what they were with a shock. Both were gentry—the second highest class of Fair Folk, physically equal to the nobles but almost lacking in the mystical gifts that made Laurie, for example, so terrifying.
Of course, “physically equal to the Nobles” meant “faster and tougher than human tanks,” so the gentry were plenty terrifying in their own right. At the sight of Laurie, both bowed slightly and stepped aside.
The door swung shut behind us, and it was suddenly very clear we’d entered a region mortals didn’t enter. The lights were dimmer, calibrated to the fae’s superior vision. Gentle murals of forest landscapes covered the walls, and if you looked at them out of the corner of your eye, you could swear you saw animals moving.
The carpet didn’t change immediately, but as we moved farther into the Court, the dark blue fabric of the lobby carpet gave way to a thick mass of dark green moss, warm and comfortingly moist on the feet. The air in there, a space belonging to the fae, felt more alive than anywhere I’d been in a while.
I breathed deeply. For all that I avoided the politics of the fae Courts as best as I could do, even I could not deny that being there was more relaxing than walking in the mortal world outside.
Finally, Laurie stopped at a set of double doors and gestured, swinging open both sides. With a deep breath, I preceded her through, and she allowed the doors to swing shut behind us.
“My lord, I present the prisoner,” she announced loudly, and the mutter of conversation in the room ceased, leaving me to study the people I’d been brought before.
The Court of the fae in Calgary resembled a business conference more than anything else. Twelve large tables filled the room, with half of them empty and small meetings going on at the others. The twelfth, the largest table, stood on a raised platform at one end of the room, and Oberis himself sat at it, looking down over his people.
Maybe two dozen people were in the room, mostly true fae with a scattering of changelings like myself. This was, as I understood it, about a third of the fae in Calgary. There was easily enough space in the room to hold all of the eighty or so of us in the city.
“Bring him before me,” Oberis ordered.
I didn’t wait for anyone to enforce the order—if nothing else, both Oberis and Laurie could theoretically force me to obey by puppeting my limbs. I suspected that they couldn’t do so through the geases being the Queen’s Vassal had left on me, but I also knew that revealing that would be a bad thing.
“Jason Kilkenny,” Oberis said flatly as I reached the space directly in front of this table. “You stand accused before this Court of risking the Covenants of this city, of pursuing vigilante justice against the best interest of this Court and of falsely using the name of this Court to support some quixotic quest against this cabal of vampires you believe has infiltrated the city. What do you have to say for yourself?”
I took a deep breath. Getting out of this without pissing off Oberis enough to get myself killed, or revealing why I had been hunting the cabal, was not going to be easy.