I reached for Ghastek and my skin glowed with pale gold. Gently I touched the right side of his jaw and made him look up at me.
“I forgive you.”
The reverence in Ghastek’s eyes almost broke me. He was a natural skeptic, but in that moment, he would’ve followed me off a cliff. It was the last thing I wanted.
“I forgive you,” I repeated in English. “Keep my son safe. I have faith in you.”
Ghastek just nodded quickly several times.
At least I still had Curran. Curran would always want me, Kate. He would be human with me. I was enough.
“Rise,” I told him.
Ghastek got up to his feet. As he moved, I saw Javier and the other men staring at me from beyond the glass, awe in their eyes. Oh brother. Just what I needed.
I pulled the magic back, curling it inside myself like the petals of a closing flower. An odd emotion flickered through Ghastek’s eyes, almost as if he wanted to stop me. Yep, In-Shinar was addictive, and if I kept showing my inner self to the people around me, soon I would be as bad as my father.
“Thank you for your help,” I told Eve.
The medmage startled as if waking up from a trance. “Of course.”
She gathered her bag and walked out. I waited until she cleared the stairs.
“She wasn’t one of my father’s spies, was she?”
“No,” Ghastek said.
“Conlan doesn’t know how to cloak. He’s ridiculously easy to track if you can sense magic.”
“Makes sense,” Ghastek said, his voice and expression neutral.
“I thought about letting his grandparents watch him at the Keep.”
“That might not be a good idea,” Rowena said behind me.
“Why not?”
Ghastek walked to the desk, opened a drawer, and brought me a photograph. A shot of a wooded road in twilight. A man in his forties, salt-and-pepper hair, strong profile, walking between two shapeshifters in warrior form, a werejaguar and a bouda. I recognized both. Renders, the deadliest fighters the Pack had at their disposal. Jim wasn’t taking any chances.
“This is Avag Barsamian,” Ghastek said. “Landon Nez’s second-in-command.”
Landon Nez was Ghastek’s counterpart, my father’s right-hand necromancer and the head of his Golden Legion. Any time Nez got involved, things went from bad to worse.
I scrutinized the photograph. Avag was carrying a briefcase. He didn’t appear to be in distress. The two shapeshifters flanking him didn’t have their claws on him. The lines of their bodies suggested caution, but when guards transported a dangerous prisoner, they watched for outside threats, rescue attempts, and so on, because the person in their charge was properly restrained and unlikely to escape. These two watched Avag instead. He was there of his own free will.
I tapped the photograph. “I recognize this oak. This is the road to the Keep.”
“He visited the Keep two nights ago,” Rowena said. “I saw him through the eyes of my vampire. He was there for two hours and then he left, except this time he didn’t have a briefcase. They escorted him just like that to his car parked on the side of the road.”
And the next day Robert came to us with the offer of alliance.
“I was told my father is mobilizing. Is that true?”
“Yes,” Ghastek and Rowena answered at the same time.
Wasn’t that interesting. “The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question is, what was in the briefcase?”
“We don’t know,” Rowena said.
The vamp at Ghastek’s desk rose, grasped a cord suspended from a roll of fabric above the window, and pulled it down, unrolling a large screen. On it, in painstaking detail, spread a map of Atlanta. In the center of the map sat a small red dot. A ragged ring of city blocks outlined in blue enclosed the dot, followed by another ring in green. Choppy lines crossed the whole thing, looking like some sort of Gordian knot. Colored dots marked other points of interest: the Casino, the Guild, and so on. The whole thing looked disturbingly like some distorted bull’s-eye centered on . . .
“Why is there a red dot over my house?”
“I’ve had two years to prepare,” Ghastek said. “The blue is the kill zone, the green is the outer perimeter. About”—he checked the clock on the wall—“twenty-two minutes ago, I doubled our patrols and deployed six strike groups, each member of which has memorized the dossier of the twenty-one sahanu in our database. They know their magic signatures, their movement patterns, and they will recognize them by sight. They will work in shifts around the clock and can be activated at a moment’s notice, because they will sleep here in the Casino, next to the OPS room. I know we got off to a less-than-ideal start, but I personally guarantee to you that no sahanu will penetrate our defenses and get through to you.”
And if he switched sides, the entirety of the Casino vampire stables could converge on my house and kill my child while I was out, thinking Conlan was safe and protected. He was unlikely to change sides, but then the Pack was equally unlikely to betray us.
Ghastek and Rowena were both looking at me.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll do it your way.”
“I won’t fail you,” Ghastek said. It sounded like a vow and I didn’t like it.
“Do you still have the body of the creature I sent you?” I asked.
“Yes,” Ghastek said.
“The creatures pose an imminent threat. If you encounter them, I want them followed, and if you can’t follow them, I want them destroyed. My aunt recognized them and called them yeddimur.”
“Understood,” Ghastek said.
“It would mean a lot if you could analyze the body. Luther believes these creatures started out as human, and they may be contagious when alive. It would also be a great help if you could study the body or perhaps just display it somewhere where it may be observed by journeymen.”
“And possibly apprentices?” Rowena asked.
“Yes. Perhaps someone could be overheard using the word ‘yeddimur’ when referring to the creature.”
Ghastek frowned. “Why?”
“Because I want my father to know about it.”
Ghastek thought about it. I could practically see the wheels in his head turning, but he didn’t ask. He preferred to discover things on his own, and I gave him just enough to motivate him to continue digging. My hairy abomination would get top billing now at the People’s dissection party.
I got up. “Do you have a copy of this photo?”
“We have others,” Rowena said.
“Can I take this one?”
“Of course,” she said.
I pocketed the photograph of Avag and took my son from her. Conlan yawned and flopped on my shoulder like a rag doll.
“I need an escort to my house.”
“It would be our pleasure,” Ghastek said.
The phone rang. Ghastek picked it up, listened, and turned to me. “Your husband is on his way to the Casino. He seems to be upset.”
“How do you know?”
“He’s running. There are two Guild vehicles following him, and they’re having difficulty keeping up.”
Curran didn’t want to wait for the mercs. He ran much faster than an average human, but he was a lion, not a wolf. Long-distance running was never his thing. Either something bad had happened, or he’d found out about the fight at Biohazard and somehow tracked me down. The People worked for me now, but we’d been on opposite sides for so long that even though I’d spent a lot of time with them over the past months, every time I walked into the Casino, I snapped into alert mode. I didn’t expect to be attacked, but I wasn’t at ease either. Curran had never warmed up to the People. If he’d found out about what had happened at Biohazard and thought that Conlan and I were injured, he wouldn’t just arrive at the Casino. He would land like a bomb.
I turned to the door, patting Conlan’s back. “Let’s go meet your dad outside before he causes an incident.”