“Escort these disgruntled clients to my private chambers. Let us review the facts before we damage our delicate treaty or someone loses their head.”
Kiagehul nodded to his bouncers as he spun on his heels in an elegant turn and strode forward, his head held high with an aristocratic sniff of disdain while pulling on his midnight-blue sorcerer’s robe. Although haughty, he kept a cautious eye on the distance the Werewolves were from the security guards.
Opening his private chamber with a flourish, Kiagehul waved his hand at the available Louis XVI settees, Queen Anne chairs, and the lushly embroidered sofa, but the Werewolves declined. Suits of armor guarded the windows and an array of weaponry hung on the walls. The Werewolves glanced around, snarled, and remained standing. Kiagehul nodded as the bouncers parted and closed the door.
“Suit yourselves,” Kiagehul said, going over to a walk-in black granite fireplace. “Let us trace the past… We always place a trace on the black magick spells and dark deals we do or subcontract out, just for instances of buyer’s remorse like this.”
He waved his hand and an eerie black and blue fire roared up from nothing in an instant, the living flames licking the edges of the mantel until the black wax candles on it melted, popped, and sizzled.
Kiagehul smiled. “Give me a moment to tune to the right channel.” He waved his hand with a bored sigh. “The Bayou House, earlier this evening. Start when one of the wolves under our influence entered.”
The Werewolf retinue moved forward, their eyes fixed on the blaze.
“How do we know this isn’t more of your dark magick to trick us?” the leader said.
“You don’t,” Kiagehul said through his teeth. “But this is the only record of the events any of us has… You can go back to your broken pack and corroborate it with any eyewitnesses that are left.”
He snapped his fingers and the inside of the Bayou House appeared. All wolves fell silent.
“Seems the alpha leader of the Southeast Asian Werewolf Clan entered disoriented and in quite a state,” Kiagehul said with a smile. “His men are completely distracted, true?”
“True.” Buchanan’s nephew rubbed his neck and paced down the line of Werewolves that were in attendance. “Is that what you saw when he got there?”
“Yeah, boss. definitely,” one wolf henchman confirmed.
“And they each got picked off one by one, separated,” Kiagehul said, watching events play out. “The alpha is gone… totally consumed by need. The girl is pretty, for a Were,” he said, not caring that the snipe drew growls. “And, from the looks of things, quite talented.”
Kiagehul chuckled when two of the wolves swallowed hard while watching the carnal act unfold across the flames. “But in the interest of time, because it does appear the man has prowess, let us fast-forward to where things began to go wrong.”
“Yeah, let’s do that!” the Buchanan clan leader said in a low rumble, gaining sharp barks from his men.
A snap of Kiagehul’s fingers and the images shifted. “You let the second alpha in… making the assumption that he came in with a weapon drawn to kill the first alpha?”
“Yes, but your magick backfired!”
Kiagehul held up his hand and then slowly strolled in front of the flames with his hands now gracefully clasped behind his back. “To assume makes an ass out of you and me.” He let out a breath and snapped his fingers. “Before you call foul and blame my subcontractor for wrongdoing, let’s be clear about the facts. You let Hunter go upstairs. He went to the door. The prostitute was supposed to kill Shogun in his sleep, if the Shadow Wolf didn’t find him first. Her weapon of choice was to be a Lady Derringer, point-blank range, aimed at his skull when he did what all men do when they finish-went to sleep. Her out would have been that he got insanely aggressive, threatened her life, and it was a matter of self-defense… A rogue Were alpha male that had already had infection issues well-documented by the UCE.”
“Right-but he didn’t go to sleep before Hunter came,” another Werewolf argued. “Our man went up in the false wall and waited. Once Hunter blew Shogun away, we were gonna do Hunter… Then we’d be able to say that we did what we had to do, we stopped a murderer. No blood on our hands at the United Council of Entities, if it went to an investigation.”
Kiagehul nervously cleared his throat and glanced at his security guards. “Yes,” he added, coolly recovering. “But your man rushed the process-didn’t allow the two big dogs to be in the same space long enough to fight.”
“Look at your own recounting, man!” Buchanan’s nephew shouted, pointing at the flames. “Hunter was warning his brother of a setup! He was trying to get him out of there, told him to bring his men out, pronto! Our man heard that bullshit while hidden in the wall-we have better hearing as wolves, just like we can smell a deal gone bad!”
“And you rushed your hand, blowing away your own prostitute in a botched hit that snapped his men out of their euphoria and sent them to war against you instead of each other! That was not my doing!” Kiagehul paced away from the fireplace and flung open the door. “This meeting is adjourned.”
The four battle-ragged Werewolves transformed and went airborne. Bulky Gnomes carrying silver-bladed battle-axes rushed them. Kiagehul ended the dispute by extracting his wand and blowing out the heart of the leader in a black lightning bolt from the tip of his ancient instrument. The three other Werewolves backed off. In an instant Kiagehul spun, directing his wand toward the standing coats of armor to send silver-tipped lances into the Werewolves in a rapid-power fling.
Blood and gore coated his floor and his hands. His henchmen snarled through glistening Gnome smiles. Kiagehul wiped his sweaty hands down his robe and flung it off, to once again stand in his pristine, moss-green shirt.
“Your spell failed in part… They were right,” a disembodied voice murmured in a lethal tone from the shadows. “Hunter did not go to war with his brother over the female… And this is why I said wait. I cautioned patience, because, as your subcontractor, I know wolf behavior… But I also wanted to see if what I had paid dearly for in this collaboration would be delivered flawlessly.”
“We will redouble our efforts… I don’t understand why Hunter had restraint. What could have interfered with his loss of reason?” Kiagehul said, backing up until his spine hit the frame of the mantel.
“I don’t care what the cause was for the failure… I am due a young body along with immortality as payment for my contribution, just as the Buchanan Broussard clan was due their revenge. I am concerned that my needs may not be met, even after I have so dutifully assisted you.”
“Everything that you desire will be taken care of. If you’d like, you may have Sasha Trudeau’s.”
“You make grand bargains and grand plans… but so far, I have only seen botched attempts.” A long sigh hissed out, circling Kiagehul and making him follow the sound. “It was my mark that felled the two Phoenixes… my agility that entered the garden with a dark spell. Tell me, what have you done that has borne fruit?”
For a moment there was silence and then an icy sound that echoed as though someone had spat. “The Buchanan clan could have been a valuable ally in this region. It was therefore a waste of blood, and I told you how we students of The Art of War detest the waste of blood. Make sure, the next time we are forced to spill such a precious resource, it won’t be your own.”
CHAPTER 17
As they moved through the outer gates and into Sir Rodney’s Fae encampment, Sasha was struck by the eerie silence. Before, the evening air had been filled with merriment, the quaint village streets lined with squabbling vendors hawking their wares. Not tonight. It was as though someone had rolled up the sidewalks. Not a soul, save Gnome patrols and Fae archers, was out. Even the air seemed different. There was no iridescent shimmer to it. The trees were a dull, normal green, not the vibrant neon colors that one would expect to see in a Crayola crayon box.