“Related to this whole mess about the Speakerhood?”
“Yeah,” Mary admitted. “She isn’t Tenerim—she’s Clan Fontaine—and she was being threatened.”
“So, you’re going to go charging right back into the fray?” I asked dryly. “Why won’t her Clan help her?”
The whole point of Mary staying with me was to keep her out of this fight. Of course, looking at her now, I wondered if Clementine had realized just how completely futile trying to keep this woman out of any fight she chose was. She was his sister, so he probably did.
“She didn’t say, but she’s my friend and I’m not going to hide in this basement until everything blows over while people I know are in danger,” Mary snapped. “I’m not asking for your help and I don’t need your permission.”
“No, you don’t,” I agreed quickly. No twenty-first-century male, half-human or not, was dumb enough to push that point. Mary was as capable of taking care of herself as I was. However, in the world of the supernatural, well, neither of us was very capable.
“Do you want my help?” I asked.
“I am not helpless, Jason,” she snapped. “I can handle my own affairs. I don’t need to be nursemaided and coddled.”
That was...not quite the reaction I was expecting.
“Wait,” I told her, pausing to think for a moment. “I don’t know who you’re angry at,” I continued slowly, “but I don’t think it’s me. I’m just offering to help.”
She took a deep breath and then laid her hand on my arm with a heart-melting smile—a huge difference from her snappish tone of a moment before.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I’m so used to being regarded as the weakest member of the Clan, to be coddled and protected. I see it even where it isn’t.”
“I’m a changeling, Mary,” I reminded her gently. “I understand being assumed to be weak. Hell, you’re probably more dangerous than I am!”
She smiled again at that.
“I tend to forget that,” she admitted. “Is that offer of help still open?”
“Of course,” I told her with a smile. “Just let me grab a gun. I’d rather be over prepared than under.”
WITH THE TINY but still lethal compact Jericho pistol the Queen had given me tucked away in its concealed holster under my heavy winter jacket, Mary and I piled into her brother’s car and headed off to check in on her friend.
It was snowing again, rapidly turning the roads into a slushy nightmare. There was just enough slush and muck to make them slippery, and just enough snow coming down to reduce visibility. Mary drove us through the mess with a skill and confidence I envied—necessity had taught me how to drive in the snow, but I wasn’t nearly as confident about it as she was.
She took us downtown and pulled in to the visitor spot of one of a dozen apartment buildings on the west side of the core. We walked around to the front door and Mary buzzed her friend’s apartment.
There was no answer.
“She said she’d wait at home for me,” Mary told me. “She should be here.”
“Can we get in if she doesn’t buzz us in?” I asked.
“I don’t have a key or anything,” she said. “It’s a magnetic lock, so I can’t even pick it. Can you do anything?”
I eyed the door, with its magnetically activated lock. If I had the telekinetic powers common to higher-order fae, this would be a cinch. Unfortunately, I didn’t. I wasn’t sure I could get through short of melting part of the door.
“Make sure no one walks in on me?” I asked her, and then knelt by the door, inspecting the lock close up. It was a pretty simple mechanism, when you get down to it. A trigger upstairs sends a signal to the lock, switching off the electromagnet and allowing the door to open. I could, theoretically, warp the switch with heat and break the connection for the power.
It might not lock again afterward, but it was more likely to than if I burnt the lock out of the door.
“When I say go, push the door,” I told Mary, and then laid my hand on the door opposite to the box with the electromagnet. Tiny tendrils of green flame streaked out from my fingers, burning neat little holes in the glass and then in the casing of the electromagnet. Hoping I’d judged the location of the switch correctly, I took a deep breath and focusing on heating it up.
“Go,” I told Mary, moments before the door clicked as the heat popped the switch. She pushed the door open, and I released the flame. “If we’re lucky, it will lock behind us,” I told her, stepping through the door.
She let the door swing shut and crossed to the elevator. “She’s on the eighteenth floor; we’ll have to take these,” Mary told me.
“Can you call her?” I asked, double-checking my gun as we waited for the elevator. I had, thankfully, picked up some normal bullets to go with the tiny automatic pistol, as given what I’d been told about shifter politics, I probably didn’t want to be shooting people with silver tonight.
“If she’s not answering her intercom, and she’s here, I probably shouldn’t,” Mary pointed out. I nodded agreement and, on that thought, actually drew the pistol and hid it in my coat pocket.
Paranoid, probably. But better paranoid and armed then unarmed and dead.
The elevator arrived, empty. The entire building seemed pretty empty so far, but then it was an apartment building lobby in midwinter. Most of the people who lived there had probably gone elsewhere for the holidays.
The eighteenth floor was dead silent when we arrived. Apartment buildings like this had always creeped me out—I could see ten doors, all closed, and no audible sound came from any of them.
“This way,” Mary told me, and led the way clockwise around the building. As we stepped around the corner, she stopped in shock, and I pulled the gun out of my pocket. The door to the third apartment down had been torn off its hinges. Somehow, I figured that was our destination.
As we approached the door, Mary produced an ugly-looking machine pistol I’d never seen before. It looked like a handgun with a magazine and a vented submachine-gun barrel tacked onto the end. Where the hell she’d been hiding it, I had no idea—probably under her coat, but I hadn’t even thought to check to see if she was armed.
“I’ll go first,” she whispered. “I can survive being shot better than you.”
She had a point, unless they were using silver. I nodded, and waved her forward while taking the safety off on my pistol. Mary looked at me, smiled, blinked, and her eyes were suddenly those of a cat.
For the first time, I saw her move with intent, and was stunned at the sheer silence of her motion. She stepped forward into the room, over the broken door, without making a single sound. I followed her, slowly and carefully, but I still crunched a bit on some fragments of wood.
It was a small apartment, and once we were inside, I heard whimpering coming from what I assumed was the living room. Mary sneaked forward, peeking around the corner. I don’t know what she saw, because the next thing I knew, she’d stepped around the corner and opened fire.
By the time I’d made it the four steps to get into the living room and track what was going on, Mary had emptied the thirty-round clip in her machine pistol. Three men in the room had been thrown to the ground by the spray of bullets, and the rapidly healing wounds from the bullets that had hit marked them all as shifters.
A woman lay on the ground as well. She was tall, with long dark hair, and was probably very pretty when she wasn’t bloodied and beaten in ruined clothes. Her shirt was torn to shreds, exposing her chest. Her pants were still on, but it looked like that had been a near-run thing.
One of the shifters started to stand again. I had enough time to recognize him as my “welcoming committee” from my first day in the city before I shot him in the head. Twice. The second got most of the way to his feet before I shot him, too.