“What, no Rambo?”
Jim scowled at me. Usually when he scowled at people, they made a small squeaky noise and tried to look small and nonthreatening. Fortunately, I managed to scrape together enough valor and not faint.
“You keep doing that, your face will get stuck that way.”
“Will you take this seriously?” he growled.
“Okay.” I surveyed the crew of vicious killers. “Let me guess: an elite unit of commandos from some evil empire invaded Bernard’s Restaurant and fortified it. Now it’s trying to secede from Atlanta and the city asked us to take it back?”
Nobody laughed. I must be getting rusty.
Jim scowled harder. Wow. I didn’t think that was possible. Showed what I knew.
“Don’t you think this is overkill?” I asked.
“No.”
Ask a stupid question . . . “Jim, there is enough manpower here to destroy a small country.”
He waited.
“Don’t you think it will communicate that we’re scared of the People?”
“It will communicate that if they even think about starting some shit, we’ll rip them into bite-sized pieces.”
I looked at the red-haired render in the front. His name was Myles Kingsbury and he was built to break bones: broad shoulders, hard chest, lean waist, and a calm look in his eyes. Myles was my age and the few times we spoke, he struck me as competent and sensible.
“Mr. Kingsbury, what do you think?”
The render opened his mouth and said in a deep voice, “I think it communicates that we won’t hesitate to take the initiative to be decisively aggressive.”
I closed my eyes for a second and exhaled. “Jim, if I were Curran, would you saddle me with this many bodyguards?”
“No.”
Well, at least I could still count on the no-bullshit answer from him. “So you agree that being heavily guarded is making me appear weak?”
“Yes. However, it makes the Pack appear strong. I’m not inclined to gamble with your safety. And”—he held up his hand—“I’d make Curran have a guard as well, if that stubborn bastard wouldn’t overrule me.”
I looked at Barabas. “Do I have the power to overrule him?”
“Yep,” Barabas said.
Jim gave Barabas his hard stare.
Barabas shrugged. “Do you want me to lie?”
Jim turned to me. “If I could have a moment of your time, Consort?”
Oh, it’s “Consort” now, huh. “Sure, Chief of Security. I’d be delighted.”
Normally walking a few feet was sufficient to get out of earshot, but everyone in the Keep enjoyed the awesome benefits of enhanced hearing. Jim and I marched fifty yards down the hallway.
“We’re at less than half of our normal strength,” Jim said. “Curran is away from the Keep. Whether accurate or not, you are viewed as much less of a threat than he is. If I were planning something, I’d hit us now and I’d hit us where it hurt.”
I kept my voice low. “This spy-on-the-Council thing is really getting under your skin.”
He inhaled slowly and looked at me. “Are you trying to say I’ve lost my perspective?”
“Maybe a little.”
He bent closer to me. His voice shook slightly, not with fear but with controlled concentrated anger. “Three months. Sixteen of my best people. Over a thousand hours of surveillance. I have nothing to show for it. Nothing. We have a mole and I have no idea who it is.”
Curran was so much better at this shit than I was. “Do you remember the hydra?”
Jim grimaced.
It happened years ago, in my first year in the Guild. We’d had a hell of a winter, and while I was trying to figure out how to stay warm in my old house, a coven of amateur witches near Franklin was throwing odd things into a giant pot. I didn’t know what the hell they had been hoping to cook up, but what came out of the pot became known as the Franklin Hydra. It wasn’t a classic dragon with many heads. It was something tentacled, with spikes and mouths with shark teeth in places mouths shouldn’t be. It ate the witches and slipped into the frozen depths of Lake Emory. Under the ice, it turned the lake into sludge and ate anything that came close. The town asked for assistance and allocated some funds. Two weeks later twenty mercs and a National Guard unit walked out onto the ice. It broke under us. Four people survived.
I shouldn’t have been one of those four. I fell through the ice into the sludge up to my chest and kept sinking while spiked tentacles slithered around me. I knew I was done, and then some merc I didn’t know slid across the ice to me and tossed a belt my way. It fell out of my reach.
If I thrashed, the tentacles would tighten and pull me under. So I inched forward, one painful centimeter every few seconds.
“Do you remember what you said to me?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“You said, ‘Don’t tense up. No sudden movements. Take it nice and slow.’”
He looked at me without any expression. Bull’s-eye. Score one for me.
“Bernard’s is neutral territory where no weapons are permitted, including vampires.” And my sword, about which I wasn’t happy. “The People will come to this meeting unarmed. Our people are always armed, because they can turn at a moment’s notice. Bringing this many combat-trained shapeshifters could be perceived as a threat. With the alphas from the other Clans, we will outnumber the People two to one.”
I nodded at the posse of biological weapons arranged for my inspection. “This is a sudden move. You’re escalating things. The People will feel pressure to retaliate. It will make diplomatic relations a lot harder.”
Jim chewed it over. “Fair enough. However . . .”
I was beginning to really hate that word.
“I have intelligence that indicates that the People bought one of the buildings next to Bernard’s and set up a command center inside. Tonight it will hold several journeymen and at least six vampires. You know what six vampires can do.”
Six vampires could depopulate Atlanta in a week. Six vampires piloted by navigators would do it in three days. A vampire telepathically guided by the navigator was a precision instrument with the destruction potential of a small nuclear bomb.
“It’s a precaution,” I said. “Ghastek isn’t about to jeopardize his rise to the top.”
The most skilled navigators were known as Masters of the Dead. There were seven of them in Atlanta, and two of them, Ghastek and Mulradin Grant, were currently scheming and plotting, trying to gain control of the chapter. My money was on Ghastek. We had cooperated before out of necessity. He was smart, calculating, and ruthless, but he was also reasonable. It was his turn to attend the Conclave.
“Maybe a war with the Pack is exactly what he wants,” Jim said. “I don’t want to take chances. Hold on.” He peered at the far end of the hallway.
A man with pure-white hair turned the corner and sped toward us. Stick-thin, he moved at a near run, holding a stack of books to his chest. His jeans sagged on him, and his turtleneck, which would’ve been tight on most people, had a lot of spare fabric. Christopher occasionally forgot to eat. Sooner or later Barabas caught it and made him consume three meals a day, but Christopher never seemed to put any meat on his bones.
Jim turned and watched him close in. No love lost there. Jim viewed Christopher as a puzzle box. It could open to reveal a treasure or a bomb, and Jim didn’t like not knowing which it was.
“Remember all those bodyguarding jobs we used to run?” Jim asked.
“I remember. Are you trying to tell me I’m being a difficult body to guard?”
“Something like that.”
Christopher reached us. His blue eyes were opened wide. Some days they were like a clear summer sky, not a thought in sight, but right now they were focused with a single-mindedness bordering on obsession. Some idea had grabbed hold of him and driven him off a cliff. He probably didn’t even know he was carrying books.
“Mistress!”
I had given up on telling him to call me Kate. He always ignored it. “Yes?”
“You can’t go!”
Jim’s eyebrows came together.
“Go where, Christopher?” I asked.
“To that place.” Words came tumbling out of him. “I’ve been trying to be in my right mind.”
“Aha.” When in doubt, stick to simple words.
“I know what I used to be, but I cannot be that anymore. I try. I try so hard. But my mind is unraveled and the threads, they’re too tangled. There are pieces of me floating. I’m shattered. He broke me.”
“Who broke you?” Jim asked.
Christopher looked at him. His voice was a mere whisper. “The Builder.”
My father. The Builder of Towers. Anger spiked inside me. I wished I could reach across time and space and punch Roland in the face.
Christopher turned to me. “If I had known what it was like to be shattered, I would’ve rather died.”
Oy. “Don’t say that,” I said.
“It’s the truth.”
“Christopher, you matter to me. Shattered or not. You are my friend.”
Christopher opened his arms. The books fell to the floor. He clutched at me, long fingers gripping my shoulders. “Don’t go. Don’t go to that terrible place, or he will shatter you and then you’ll be alone. You will be like me. Don’t go, Mistress.”
Jim moved, but I shook my head.
“What terrible place?” I asked, keeping my voice soothing.
He shook his head and whispered, “Don’t go . . . Don’t leave.”
“I won’t,” I promised him. “I won’t go, but you have to tell me the name of the place.”
“You don’t understand.” Christopher looked at me, and in his blue eyes I saw pure panic. “You don’t understand. I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth, but not there. I cannot go there again.”
I wouldn’t go there either, if I knew where “there” was. “It’s okay. Just tell me . . .”
He shook his head. “No. No. It’s not.”
“It will be okay.”
He reached out, touched the strand of my hair that had slipped out of my braid, and yanked it, ripping some hair out.
Ow.
Jim lunged at Christopher, knocking him back. The thin man fell on the floor. I rammed Jim with my shoulder. “No!”
Christopher scrambled to his feet, wild-eyed, a few strands of my hair in his hand. “Don’t trust the wolf!”
He turned and fled down the hallway.
“What the hell?” Jim growled. “I’m going to have him sedated.”
“He knows something,” I told him. “I don’t know if he had a vision or someone told him something, but it freaked him out and he can’t explain it. Let’s see what he does with the hair. I might be able to figure it out from there.”
Hair, like body fluids, retained the magic of its owner once removed from the body. A year ago I would’ve killed Christopher to retrieve the hair, because studying it would reveal all my secrets. But my secrets were about to burst into the open anyway. Hugh knew the truth, Roland probably knew as well, and sooner or later everyone would know. I had come to terms with it.
“If someone told him something, it has to be either someone in the Pack or divination magic,” I thought out loud.
Even now the Keep held at least two hundred shapeshifters, and strangers weren’t welcome. Christopher never left the Keep and the grounds.
Jim growled. “I’ll put a guard on him. Someone discreet. If he’s getting his information from some apparition that manifests in his bedroom at night, I don’t want him sharing your hair with it.”
I looked at him. “What wolf do you think Christopher was talking about?”