“You bet on it,” I promised. She smiled sleepily at me and I quietly left the room, turning the light back off as I did.
The morning chill seemed minor and unnoticeable as I walked to work. Part of that was my frame of mind, and the rest was that the temperature had clearly risen. A check of my phone showed we were going to have highs around freezing, instead of twenty degrees lower than that, for the rest of the week.
I drifted in to work with a cheery smile on my face and immediately fell to helping everyone get set up for the day. With everyone’s loads and pickups established, I left a few minutes early, heading out on my route.
Halfway through my morning run, I got a text from Michael telling me there wouldn’t be a pickup today. Meeting him had become such a regular thing that I had to take the most convenient Starbucks out of the route my GPS was calculating to get me back to the office.
The day passed quietly. The lack of more snow after the snowstorm meant the roads were now almost completely cleared. Many places were still accessed by narrow canyons of cleared path through waist-high banks of snow, but everywhere had managed to dig themselves out by day three after the storm.
I was honestly impressed. I’d never seen a snowstorm like the one that had struck, and I’d expected it to take more than two or three days for everything to return to mostly normal. Everyone had spent the first day digging out of their homes, the second day digging into their workplaces, and the third day acting like nothing had happened.
I finished my routes exactly on time and checked quickly in with Trysta before grabbing a cab. For all that it was warming up in the city; I still wasn’t planning on trying to take transit to get to the hotel that doubled as the fae Court for this city. It was cold out, the roads, while improved, still sucked—and I did not want to be late to meet Oberis.
The cab delivered me to the hotel and I paid in cash, entering the building just over five minutes before Oberis had told me to arrive. I followed a young man in a dark gray suit with long blond hair into the lobby and checked the conference board.
“Talisman Energy” had booked the C wing today, I noted, and then I walked to the doors to that wing of the hotel. The blond youth I’d followed in had beaten me there and was shaking hands with both of the guards.
One of the guards noticed me and gestured me forward. I joined them and the newcomer in front of the security doors.
Now I got a closer look at the newcomer, I saw the resemblance to Oberis immediately. His hair was cut almost identically and was the same shade of gold. His eyes shared the lord’s tawny gold and his chin followed Oberis’s sharp lines. There were differences as well, but this youth was clearly closely related to the Seelie lord.
The guards waved me through and the noble youth followed me into the hallway. We walked forward until the carpet turned to moss in silence, and then he eyed me sideways.
“So, you’re the changeling who’s been stirring up such a ruckus?” he asked. “Jason, right?”
“I guess so,” I admitted in my slow Southern drawl. “And you are?”
“Talus,” he answered. “I’m normally Oberis’s representative up in Fort McMurray, but he called me down here to help deal with the commotion you’ve raised.”
“Which you shouldn’t be discussing in public.” Laurie’s cold voice cut into our conversation as the hag stepped out of a door to join us in the hallway, tucking a cellphone away in a pocket of her conservative business suit as she did. “Lord Oberis is waiting for us; let’s go.”
With a shrug at me, Talus fell into step on one side of the hag while I joined them on the other, allowing her to lead the way for all three of us.
She led us down the same hallway Oberis had led me down after my first visit there, and then into Oberis’s office. Oberis was sitting behind his desk, watching us enter, his fingers steepled on the desk in front of him.
Two men and one woman, all with the neatly perfect features of the gentry, were seated waiting for us alongside three empty chairs. Without being instructed, I took one, as did Talus and Laurie.
“I’m glad you could join us,” Oberis told Talus. “I hope my call didn’t interrupt anything up north?”
“Naw,” Talus replied. “We just finished the semi-annual audit of the heartstone production. Speaking of which—” He pulled a folder of papers out from under his suit jacket and tossed it on Oberis’s desk.
“What’s the summary?” the Seelie lord asked, glancing at the folder without picking it up. “It may be relevant to this whole affair.”
“We checked and double-checked after you warned us about lifesblood in the feeders’ possession,” the young noble told us all. “None of the known production is going astray, and we’ve got enough agents and contacts in the projects to be certain there’s no hidden production.
“In short, if heartstone is going missing, it’s after it reaches Calgary, not at the source,” he concluded.
“So, from the Enforcers or one of the Covenant’s authorized receivers, then,” Oberis said grimly. “We have reviewed our own stockpiles, and the Clans destroy their share. It’s not coming from us or them. But there are receivers outside the city, so it could be any of them.”
The Seelie lord shook his head and eyed us all over his hands.
“For those who don’t know,” which I suspected was only me, “Talus is my nephew and the Court’s senior representative up at the oil sands projects in Fort McMurray, where he watches over heartstone production to be sure none goes astray and that we get our fair share.
“Given what he just told us, it looks like our best bet for finding the heartstone source is to track it through the vampires, which is why you all are here,” he continued.
“Thanks to Jason here”—he nodded toward me—“we now know of a company, a real estate investment trust, founded by the doctor who helped the vampires enter the city. Review of its records show that its investment base has dramatically increased in the last nine months—since the time we believe the vampires entered the city.
“Much of said investment is through shell companies and holding agencies,” he added. “This makes it difficult for us to track down what properties are owned, but we can find the offices of the REIT itself.
“You six are going to raid said offices,” he told us. “You are operating under my sanction, so tell any Enforcers that give you difficulty to refer their issues to me. You are sanctioned to use whatever force necessary against any vampires you encounter—I would prefer prisoners, but I’ll settle for corpses over free vampires, clear?”
I nodded in grim acceptance, and so did the others in the room.
“Humans involved, I leave to your discretion,” Oberis said quietly. “Minimize injuries or fatalities if possible, but do what is necessary. Remember that most of the employees will have no clue what is really going on; that is why you are going in at night. However, some will be fully aware of their employers and what they’re involved in.”
“Though they may not know the rest of us exist,” Talus interjected. “Vampires recruiting humans tend to try and pretend they are the only part of the supernatural that exists—trying to draw on the Twilight influence and similar ‘vampires are our friends’ tripe.”
Oberis nodded. “Exactly,” he said. “You are all capable of taking on any humans involved; the only real threat is vampires on site.
“I want prisoners if possible, records regardless,” he said. “Paperwork, property deeds, invoices, entire hard drives—clean them out. Don’t let the police get called.
“Talus is in command,” he finished. “Good luck.”
With that, we were dismissed and followed Talus out of the office and back deeper into the hotel. We headed downstairs, into the basement of the hotel, where the moss and wall murals faded away to bare concrete marked with fae-sign.