Authors: Saje Williams
He was curious to know what she’d been able to offer the valkyrie. Not that any of that mattered at the moment. All that mattered from this point out was putting together some sort of seaworthy vessel and going after Val. His first instinct, which was to say the hell with it and
swim
to the mainland, had been suborned by a growing sense that they’d need the hybrids when they finally reached the end of this little venture.
Assuming Val kept her mouth shut—and he had no reason to believe she wouldn’t—Goban was in for a few very nasty surprises when they caught up to him. Next time he ran into Bryon, the kid wouldn’t be so easily dispatched. And if he read the wolves right, he and Byron would be racing them to get their hands on the ex-merc first.
If taking Val wasn’t the stupidest thing he could have done, it wasn’t far from it. If Raven had his way, he’d be finding out how bad he fucked up before the end of the next two weeks. And Raven didn’t care if he had to wade through a thousand Church soldiers and Deacons to drive the point home.
Morrigan reached out and grasped his shoulder. “I’m with you until the end,” she told him. “Come hell or high water, as they say.”
“Oh, there’ll be high water,” he answered with a grim smile. “And there’s going to be some serious hell coming down, too. Bank on it.”
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Chapter Twenty-five
Rumors swarmed the city, thick as the small black flies with the painful bites that filled the air during the summer months. Citizens stayed indoors as much as possible after nightfall, frightened by the reports of the animalistic creatures roaming the streets and rooftops night after night.
The tavern was crowded, and filled with noxious smoke, but the windows remained shut. No one wanted to risk opening up to whatever prowled the midnight streets. A solitary figure sat in one corner of the room, alone at the table despite the crowded conditions. It was as though everyone avoided him, though none of the other customers could have said why.
He wore a commoner’s cloak, the hood thrown back to reveal a chiseled, frightfully handsome face the color of polished alabaster. Dark hair fell in waves across his shoulders and he scanned the crowd with strange violet eyes—a color no man or woman had ever seen.
The stranger had a mug of something in front of him, but, had anyone been paying attention, they wouldn’t have seen him drink from it.
He had an air of patience about him, as if waiting for something or someone in particular.
The door opened suddenly, letting in a cloud of black flies. No one noticed as the man in the corner lifted his hand and all the flies dropped to the floor dead. The newcomer threw back his hood, revealing a youthful face and the mustache and goatee of a nobleman. His skin was so white, it almost looked blue. Despite the heat, not a single bead of sweat marred the perfect flesh of his face.
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He nodded to the man in the corner and threaded his way through the crowd.
As he sat down, the one who’d been waiting leaned across the table and murmured, “So, what’s the news?”
“If she’s in the city, they’re hiding her very well and Goban hasn’t returned to his old job.”
“Shit. And the Church?”
The newcomer smiled. It wasn’t a friendly sort of smile. “They’re busy trying to figure out why there’s a gaping hole in their stronghold wall.”
“That was good work, by the way. Did you have to kill any guards?”
“No. Their security is as bad as you said it was. They all rushed to the hole and milled around while I went up the outer wall and slipped in around them.”
“Idiots.” Raven shook his head, leaned back, and grinned, even though he didn’t feel much like smiling. It was good the operation had gone off as planned, but the longer he was in the city without finding a single sign of Val, the more frightened he became. For all he knew, she was dead. She’d be difficult to keep prisoner, considering her psychic gifts, though he did consider the possibility that she’d burned out her teek ability when she’d taken out the valkyrie.
He couldn’t help but wonder. Part of him thought he’d know if she was dead, but that was wishful thinking and he couldn’t lie to himself about it. Just because he’d fallen in love with her, and they’d had sex, didn’t mean they had some sort of preternatural connection.
His life wasn’t some sort of supernatural romance tale, after all. Hell, the stench in this goddam bar was enough to tell him that, if nothing else did.
He levered himself to his feet. “Take my place at the meeting,” he told Bryon. “I’ve got something I need to do—something I should have done when we first got back.”
The younger vampire nodded slowly, clearly puzzled. “All right. Is there anything you want covered specifically?”
Raven shook his head. “Just tell them to keep doing what they’re doing. They’re scaring the locals into staying in at night, and that’s half 184
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the battle right now. As long as their existence is merely rumored and not confirmed, it works to our advantage. The longer we can move around at night without being observed, the better.”
“Hey, Raven? Where are you going?”
“To see a man about a dick,” Raven answered with a wry smile.
Tomas had been mayor for less than a year, since his governor-appointed predecessor had died unexpectedly. In accordance to the agreements signed between the Church and the governor, the Church had put him raised him from Commissioner of the Watch to the allegedly esteemed position of city mayor. Of course, now he owed the Church and the proctors were all too happy to remind him of the fact anytime something came up they didn’t like.
He’d signed their goddam Warlock Act, hadn’t he? It put the power of the government behind their battle against magic done outside of Church auspices. Not like they hadn’t always acted as though the secular authorities were already on board.
But he knew the rumors as well—that the Governors were starting to question the Church, and working to limit its power. Though he hadn’t wanted to look very deeply at the time, he was now certain that the former mayor had died because he’d, at least covertly, supported this trend.
There were a lot of advantages to his new office. A nice house, beautiful clothes, and a bank account balance that bordered on the obscene, not to mention hot and cold running mistresses.
At the moment he was relaxing in between visits from two of said mistresses, lounging in a bathtub large enough for three grown men, liberally scented with lilac and jasmine. He reached out and picked up his goblet, realizing it was empty. “Tholin!” he bellowed Typically a single shout was enough to bring his manservant at a dead run. When he didn’t arrive, Tomas threw the goblet across the room in a fit of pique and dragged his body out of the tub. “Tholin, you lazy bastard!”
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“He’s not lazy, Sir Laubaw,” came a voice from the shadows of the doorway leading toward the kitchen. “He’s a bit…constrained right now.”
The voice was deep and steady, dark like a swatch of velvet, and somehow carried a hint of casual threat.
A black clad figure strode out of the hallway, seeming to glide across the marble tiles of the bath chamber. Laubaw struggled to climb into his robe, cursing as the thing wrapped itself against his ample belly and refused to budge. He ended up standing there, only half covered, as the stranger drew near, pausing on the other side of the bath.
It was a man, and a strikingly handsome one at that, with clear eyes the color of a poignant sunset, skin like burnished ivory, a snub nose, and a wide, expressive mouth. Black hair hung loosely around the collar of his swirling, ankle-length black jacket. His face might’ve been carved with an axe, all sharp angles from the cheekbones down.
Women would have found him beautiful, Laubaw was certain. The bastard. He wouldn’t need riches to attract a mistress. “Who are you and what do you want?”
The man leaned against a column bordering the bath and folded his arms over his chest. He wore a strange kind of pointed-toed boot, the mayor noted, and the cut of his long jacket was also unfamiliar. An outlander of some sort? Perhaps, but he had no discernible accent. “I have a few questions to ask you. If you answer them honestly, I’ll be gone and none the harm. If you do not…” He let his voice trail off and Laubaw felt icy fingers clutch at his chest.
“Guards!” he screamed.
The man simply sighed and began walking around the bath. Despite wearing boots, his footsteps were utterly, eerily, silent as he skirted the sunken tub. “Your guards are incapacitated, I’m afraid. I wouldn’t look at it so much as a failure on their part, but as a success on mine. I can be…” He smiled, a cold, merciless expression as if a hunting cat had suddenly sprouted a human grin.“…most persuasive.”
The mayor suppressed an involuntary shudder. Something about this man made him want to scurry into a hole and pull the hole in over 186
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himself. He fought his robe into some semblance of order and stood there blinking at the stranger as he approached. “Wh…what do you want?”
“Information,” he said, in a voice barely above a whisper. His gaze caught Laubaw like a bug in amber. “I want to know where Goban is.”
“G…Goban? I haven’t seen him since he left town with that thief-catcher and the Governor’s son last autumn.”
“I didn’t ask if you’d seen him. I asked where he was. There is a difference, if you care to notice.” The man’s voice was smooth and calm, but something of a threat lingered behind it as well. Laubaw shrank back from his advance, his foot sliding off the edge of the tub and costing him his balance. He fell into the water and came up sputtering.
His visitor stared down at him with a mocking eye. “You are truly pathetic, fat man. I believe you know where Goban is—he worked for you.”
“He
worked
for me. I don’t know anything about him now.”
The stranger gave a quick nod. “So you say.” He reached down and buried his fingers in Laubaw’s robe, lifting him effortlessly out of the tub.
The mayor heard a strange sound—a sort of squealing—and realized it was coming unbidden from somewhere deep in his throat.
His visitor set him gently on the tiles next to the tub and bent close.
“I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, Mr. Mayor, but I’m giving you two days to find out where Goban is. Two nights from now I’ll be back and you’d better have the answer I’m looking for.” He released him, stepped back , and strode toward the other door leading to Laubaw’s bedchambers without another word.
He stopped on the verge of stepping through and turned back to scrape him with his gaze once again. “I wouldn’t recommend going to the Church for help,” he said. “They won’t be able to, and it’ll make me angry. Bad things will happen. Very bad things.”
“Who are you?” Laubaw yelled out, regretting it the moment the words had left his mouth. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
“Some call me ‘The Redeemer,’” the stranger replied as he vanished from sight. Laubaw scurried across the tiles as fast as his pudgy little legs would carry him, but of his visitor he saw no sign. He rushed to the www.samhainpublishing.com 187
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only window in the room, throwing it open to the night and leaning out.
It was a good three story drop to the flagstone courtyard below, but there was no other egress from the room.
He’d said that others called him The Redeemer. The mayor felt the icy fingers of supernatural dread crawl up his spine. He’d never really believed in any of that Church stuff, but now he found himself considering it seriously.
If it came down, which side of things would he want to be on? Now
that
was a dangerous question to be asking, even in the silence of his own head. If it was a war brewing, no matter what side he chose, he’d do more than his share of suffering.
The Church Stronghold was a massive keep-like structure tucked into the corner where the west and north walls of the city came together, its towers stretching skyward many leagues above the intersecting walls.
The city Watch patrolled the wall proper, but their jurisdiction ended where the Stronghold and the wall met. Inconvenient for the Watch, since they had to post two different sets of guards on each side of the Stronghold rather than one set that could traverse that whole section of wall, but no one was foolish enough to complain.
Some hundred yards or so from the Stronghold’s main gates stood a row of old warehouses once used to house goods that came in from the old caravan routes to the west, before most of the city’s trade goods started coming in by sea.
Despite the fact that someone had blown a hole in one of the Stronghold’s walls, they still weren’t particularly security conscious. They must have perceived someone putting a gaping wound in their defenses and having a walk around inside without being sighted once as being a fluke. Or the people running the place were simply insane.
That’s a distinct possibility,
thought Morrigan, from her position atop one of the warehouses along with three members of the hybrid wolf-pack.
They were clad in camouflage fatigues, and carried assault rifles like the soldiers of old Earth, but no one could mistake them for human soldiers.
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The lead bitch, the alpha, Bridget, caught her in her golden gaze. “She is not in there,” she repeated for the fourth time. “Why do we guard this place if the human woman isn’t there?”
For some inexplicable reason, the wolves had bonded to Val, and none more than their alpha. Morrigan didn’t understand it, but, then again, she didn’t need to. It had nothing to do with her business here.
The cats were coming along well enough—she didn’t need the wolves. She had the feeling they’d be wearing the TAU ankh before all of this was over.
She’d have to talk with her partner about devising an agency symbol of their own once they came out into the open. “We’re watching the Stronghold because they’re sneaky bastards, and Raven wants to make sure they don’t decide to take her inside since we already searched it.”
Tuck and a few of the feline hybrids were prowling the city’s sewers, monitoring any sign of the Church’s agents using it as an alternate entrance and exit into the keep. It wouldn’t be the first time people had waded through shit to hide their movements from prying eyes.
The wolf thought about this, then nodded. “We will watch, then.” She went back to the edge of the building and returned her stare to the Stronghold’s gate.
The only one whose whereabouts of which Morrigan remained uncertain was Bryon. The young vampire’s actions had grown increasingly erratic from her point of view, though she had a suspicion that Raven knew exactly what the boy was up to at any given moment.
He’d grown wilier, somehow, as if the infusion of fox’s blood upon his awakening had changed him in some deep, fundamental way. Where once he’d worn his heart and intentions boldly upon his chest, now he’d become furtive and cunning.
Not that this is necessarily a bad thing,
she thought with a wry smile. Ordinarily she very much approved of such behavior. But when it was
she
who was left in the dark, she didn’t tend to like it quite so much.