Frostbite (Modern Knights Book 1) (23 page)

I knelt into genuflection, still uncertain what I needed to do. I briefly prayed first, “God, I haven’t always been the best Catholic, but I could really use a little divine guidance right now. Help me know the right words to use.”

“And let’s be honest: YOU owe their kind for the whole Inquisition thing.”

I found myself humming a few bars from an old Mel Brooks movie, stopped myself in horror when I realized what it was, then started again as a plan began to hatch in my addled brain. The Inquisition had undoubtedly wiped out hundreds of fae living in mortal disguise, forced them back into Fairy, even as it had forced many Jewish families into hiding or conversion. But a little Jewish humor might just do the trick…I would just have to improvise a few lines at the end. I tried to picture Mel Brooks dressed as the Inquisitor Torquemada before breaking into full out song.

“The Inquisition, what a show!

The Inquisition, here we go!

The Inquisition, watch ‘em go!

We’re the Inquisition and we’re here to stay.

Oh, the Inquisition’s here and we’re here to stay!

Oh, the Inquisition’s here, but you’re not here to stay!

Oh, the Inquisition’s here, but you’re not here to stay!

Oh, the Inquisition’s here, but you’re not here to stay!”

I belted it out at full volume, including a dance number that I am glad there were no conscious witnesses of. If no one saw me doing chorus girl kicks, I could retain my wizardly dignity. I could feel the energy growing with each line and by the time I stopped singing, the air was thick with power…but Kerath was still lying on the table. My inner voice may have been right about needing a plan before starting to use magic at random, but I was trapped now.

As I breathed in the crackling, energetic air, I recalled that initial image of Mel Brooks as Torquemada. I tried to breathe that in, to let the Torquemada persona cover me, visualizing myself as the Spanish Grand Inquisitor. In my most solemn voice, I intoned, “Sir Kerath, by order of the Grand Inquisition, you are hereby banished to the Fairy realm for a term of no less than one day!” I slashed out behind me with the chaos blade, breaking the flow of the circle, visualizing it as a judge’s gavel banging down.

Something did bang down, with a knock-knock. The power rushed out of the circle, the rustling air momentarily blinding me. When I could see again, Kerath was gone…along with my dining table. The knock-knock came again and this time I placed it as coming from my front door.

9

I
thought of putting myself back together before answering, but decided the disheveled, traumatized look might help increase the believability of my story. I reshaped the chaos blade, put it away, and grabbed an empty red wine bottle from the kitchen for prop use. I opened up my front door, expecting to see an apologetic Devereaux and a half-dozen angry police investigators. Instead, the swinging door revealed just Agent Devereaux.

She stepped past me into the apartment, pushing the door closed as she passed. “All right, I think that’s taken care of. I need to stop being around you; I’m getting spoiled by how efficient your boss’s name is. They suddenly decided it would be easier to tell the media that someone wants to blow up a bunch of housing for sex offenders than to…wait, where’s the troll?”

“Back in Fairy, I hope.”

She shook her head like a dog with a chew toy. “No, no, I mean, where is he? Like a secret panel or a closet or...”

I slid one of my now-table-less chairs towards her, motioned for her to sit, and went towards the kitchen. “He’s gone. I cast a spell and opened up a portal back to Fairyland for him. You can either sit down, accept that, and I’ll try to explain in more detail.” I rummaged around for a pair of glasses, then pulled a gallon of milk from the fridge. “Or you can reject that as the ramblings of a crazy man and nothing I can say will help you make any sense of this.”

When I came back into the main room, she was indeed seated. I handed her a glass of milk and pulled up a chair opposite her. I sat down and waited for her to say something, anything. After a long minute, she gave a harsh nod, wordlessly telling me to go on.

“Anything you repeat outside this room will likely earn you a trip to the loony bin, but I assure you it’s the truth. I am Lucien Valente’s personal wizard. He hired me to deal with the thing that was eating his employees back in Oklahoma. He liked my work, so he’s kept me around.” I took a sip of my milk and was pleased to see she did the same. “Does that fit? Can you wrap your mind around the idea of corporate wizards?”

“Wizard? And not as a euphemism for problem solver, creative acquisitions, or assassin?”

I almost snarked that no, that would be my girlfriend, but decided some details were better left out. “Wizard as in Merlin-stuff…magic, plain and simple magic.” She was dazed and confused, wanting to believe, but not quite there. I pointed across the room. “See that case? Those jewels belonged to a nineteenth century spiritualist, who claimed they were the key to the success of her séances. Those spears over there are replicas of the one that pierced the side of Christ, made by the Nazis. The prayer rugs hanging on the back wall are all a way of disguising old teachings during the spread of Islam: the craftsmen hid names of djinns and the basic instructions on how to summon them within the weave of the fabric. You think Valente would drop big bucks on all the stuff unless he was absolutely certain that there was something to it?”

Devereaux’s eyes slowly snaked around the rest of the apartment, seeing for the first time all the other display cases I hadn’t mentioned and row upon row of bookshelves. “What is this place?”

“My home…and my lab.” I paused. “Stay with me, Agent. I need to make sure you understand exactly what you’re dealing with.”

“Magic. Got it,” she mumbled. “Like men who turn into trolls and can stop speeding vans with their bare hands.”

“Not exactly. Kerath was born a troll, but he can disguise himself as a man. I was born a man…”

“Ate an old girlfriend to get some power.”

“…and learned how to use magic.” I was at a loss for how to proceed. Normally this was the part where I would downplay my skill and pretend like I couldn’t do anything more impressive than a birthday party trick. The vanished dining table and missing troll said otherwise. In the back of my mind, I thought it couldn’t hurt to let an FBI agent think I was a tad more powerful than I actually was.

She slowly recovered from the shock of it all, the color returning to her cheeks. “So you and the troll were discussing company business, Valente business, tonight? And somebody tried to run you over with a backup plan of blowing you up. No driver, police are thinking robotic device…but it could’ve been magic, couldn’t it? A magic assassin van?”

I nodded. Based on what I had seen this afternoon at the ATM, I suspected it was a little more mundane than that, but it didn’t matter. At the heart of it, magic was a technology, same as robotics. The only difference was that people had forgotten how to use one of them, even as they were excelling at refining the other. I was about to say something when my brain snagged on something funny. For the first day in over a month, I was without the benefit of my demon-spawn bodyguard…and somebody had tried to kill me twice since she’d left. I shuddered and downed the rest of my milk in one shot.

“And the slime in the parking lot this afternoon? Did they try to attack you with some kind of acid golem or...”

I cut her off. “Actually, that was me. There were three assailants. The puddle was what I did to one of them.”

“And it wasn’t a stray bullet that just happened to hit their gas tank, either, was it?”

“Guilty as charged, though I had a little technological assist there.”

She sat straight up in her chair and handed me her glass. “All right, Mr. Fisher. I’m ready to hear what really happened in Oklahoma. And I could probably use a glass of something stronger than milk.”

10

“S
o this wendigo thing was some kind of ancient beast and the Old Ways shaman had managed to whip it up into a murderous frenzy?” Andrea Devereaux shook her head slowly. “You know, I think the hardest part for me to believe is that Valente’s company played the part of the hero in killing the wendigoes off.”

She was catching on quicker than I had at first. “See what I mean about telling you the truth, but not giving you anything you can type up for a report? I’ve held the stuffed and mounted heads of all three wendigoes and it still feels unreal to me at times.”

“I think the bureau is just glad it’s over: 61 bodies in Oklahoma, 1 in Joplin, and 2 in Saint Louis. That’s a heck of a body count to just sweep under the rug, but they’re doing it. They don’t know anything about wendigoes and wouldn’t believe me if I told them…but they know it’s not natural, either. Official word says it’s over, so it’s over.”

The night was drawing closer to morning and I had consumed more than my fair share of alcohol since the sun had set, but my mind wasn’t that dull yet. Still, I didn’t want to alarm her if I didn’t have to. “Did you bring Salazar’s file with you? I would like to take a look at it if I could.” I fumbled for a plausible excuse. “Maybe he came up with something on the Old Ways I missed, some background on what pushed the old woman over the edge.”

I don’t think she bought it entirely, but she stood up anyway. “Yeah, it’s out in my car. I’ll go grab it.”

After I let her out, I tried not to process any of the extras. They were words not easily unheard, though: one in Joplin, two in Saint Louis. Had those happened before we killed them? Maybe the wendigo had woken up there and used those as stopovers to get breakfast en route to its destination in Oklahoma. But, either way, why hadn’t I heard about them?

“Because they weren’t Valente employees.”

That fit. I knew about all the attacks on people who fell under the corporate umbrella of Valente International. The Old Ways massacre and these three took me by surprise, because they weren’t under Valente’s protection. I remembered something from my discussion with the Eye of Winter about two separate events: a man walking the Shadowlands
and
the woman calling down the curse. Was there an uncursed wendigo, woken by the shadow walker, out there? And if so, was it my responsibility to stop it? I wasn’t walking the Shadowlands and I sure wasn’t being paid to protect the public, but somehow I felt vaguely responsible. It wasn’t that I had caused it…but I knew I had the power to stop it and with that power…Agent Devereaux’s return knock broke my reverie.

11

I would pay a lot to know what Andrea Devereaux, special agent, Behavioral Sciences Investigative, was thinking as she watched me flip through the pages of the dog-eared file. I tried my best to be nonchalant, as if I expected and understood everything that was between its manila covers, while secretly memorizing every line. I checked and re-checked names and dates, trying to fix the timeline in my own mind, lining up my whereabouts for each. I would have liked a few hours alone with the file, but instead I settled for a few minutes.

I closed it up and offered it to her. “It all fits. Definitely a wendigo pack.”

“And they’re all dead?” I couldn’t tell if she was eyeing me with suspicion or if it was residual fear of the things that go bump, growl, and bite in the night.

I had been right on one thing: I hadn’t heard about the other three killings, because despite the same M.O., the victims weren’t Valente employees, ergo, no company interest. I had been wrong, however, about the direction and timing of the Joplin and Saint Louis killings. I was theorizing without facts; now I had facts, no matter how much I disliked them. I lied to her. “Three, bagged and tagged.”

“How is it a lie? We killed three.”

“It’s a lie in that it makes no mention of a fourth.”

I watched her to see if she would buy it. She seemed to. Maybe she didn’t, but it was well past two in the morning and all of her novel experience circuits had been overloaded in the last few hours, so she nodded. “Good. Not a lot I can use, but it’s good to know, I suppose.”

“That’s what I keep telling myself. It’s nice to know how far down the rabbit hole goes, even if what lives at the end of it scares the bejeezus out of me.” I tried to sound friendly, while secretly wishing she’d decide it was time to leave and never come back.

She yawned. “I should probably call it a night.” She paused. “Look, Colin, if you ever need anything…y’know, stuff like this.” Her silence was longer this time, her voice nearly inaudible when she finished, “Or help getting away from Valente, just let me know.”

I nodded sagaciously, but said nothing. She favored me with one last smile, which drove home the reminder of just how much she looked like long-lost Sarai, then turned and reached for the door knob. I hoped she stayed the hell away from me, but not because I disliked her. I was starting to take a shine to her and the world always need more people like Sarai. But I was absolutely certain being around me was a really good way to die.

Before going to bed, I walked downstairs to use the payphone in the parking lot. I left a detailed message with Duchess of what I needed, then trudged back upstairs. My hand never left the grip of my chaos blade, but if there were any assassins waiting in the wings, no one tried anything. I crashed into a deep sleep, where my thoughts roamed through ancient forests full of trolls struggling for their next breath.

12

T
he next week was a blur to me. Between settling in, the side projects I was working on, waiting for word that the fae courts had decided to go to war with Valente International, and brushing up on how to make a Thanksgiving dinner, I barely had time to stop and breathe. Veruca stayed gone longer than I had expected, which helped me get half the time I needed, but I missed her fiercely. She had gotten under my skin in a way no one since Sarai had, but I hadn’t realized just how deep until she was gone.