Twiceborn Endgame (The Proving Book 3) (21 page)

She named a few more familiar names, most of them well-known overseas identities. Considering how few dragons there were, dragons seemed over-represented on the list.

“And then there’s a whole pile of goblins. Most of the Stromboli clan, all the Baders, the Everharts, a few others … it makes no sense.”

“But they’re all really shifters? There’s no humans on there?”

“No. This list is from someone who knows what they’re doing. It’s got to be a shifter.”

“But why would a shifter leak a list like that? They’ve got to know it’s going to come back to bite them in the arse. Once people start finding real shifters, they’re not going to stop poking around until they’ve uncovered them all.”

Could it have been that traitor, Patel? He was already working with Taskforce Jaeger. But how could it benefit the taskforce to have all these names out in the open? Their work was better done in private, without the glare of publicity this information would bring. Besides, he was a goblin himself. With that many goblin names on the list, one of them was bound to lead to him. It would be suicide to let this kind of information out.

“I don’t know. If it was just dragons, I’d say it was someone who wasn’t happy with the status quo—maybe one of the males who thinks he’d like to go it alone without a queen. I could see someone like Gideon Thorne pulling a stunt like this.”

Except he was dead. Could he have released this list before he died? But he’d been perfectly happy with the rule of the queens. He just wanted to have one in his pocket.

“But who gains from putting the goblin clans out of business?”

“It’s got to be someone local with so many from this domain.”

God, what a mess. As if the shifter world needed any more attention focused on it at the moment. People had already been killed just on suspicion of being a shifter. What would happen now the haters had real targets? “What’s the reaction been like so far?”

“As you’d expect. Some group calling themselves Christians Against Demons is whipping up a storm on the Internet. Talk-back radio is running hot. The nutters are out in full force. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen the same clip of the prime minister calling for calm on TV—but the stations have also interviewed enough people frothing at the mouth about the threat to our children, our way of life, our whatever-you-care-to-name, to make sure that nobody’s listening.”

Not that calls for calm meant much from the man who’d rushed his divisive hate-filled legislation through Parliament. He’d make pious noises about national security and be first in line for a pitchfork when the burning started.

“Okay. Everything quiet at the house?”

“Yeah. I figure we’ve got a while before they trace any of the names on the list here.”

“Hope so. Well, sit tight until we get there. We’ll be a couple of hours yet.”

I hung up and stared out the window, mind whirling. Nothing made sense.

Garth cocked an eyebrow at me. “So I’m a wanted man, am I?”

Baby, you have no idea how much.

“Probably not for the first time.” I dragged my mind back from contemplating how his smile lit his whole face and handed the phone back to Steve. “See what you can find.”

Steve had the list in no time flat. It wasn’t hard; it was all over every social media and news site. He found the footage of the prime minister that Luce had mentioned, but I didn’t want to see it.

“Here’s something. Maria del Fuente’s made a statement.”

He passed the phone back to me and the familiar face of the Spanish queen filled the little screen. She was based in Argentina these days, since she held the whole of the South American continent, but was still known as “the Spanish queen” in the same way Celeste Rousseau was “the French queen”, despite France being the smallest part of her extensive domain. She was the public face of a hugely successful fashion house in her current incarnation—the “designer”, though I’d be surprised if she actually did the designing. More likely she had some dryads on staff. They were wizards with a needle. High fashion wouldn’t be too much of a stretch.

It was an odd choice for a queen. Usually their lives were designed for maximum luxury with minimal publicity. Having such a well-known face made it harder when the time inevitably came to disappear and start a new life as someone else. Already the speculation had started on what work she’d had done to retain her youthful good looks so long. It wouldn’t be too many more years before Maria del Fuente’s brilliant career would have to be cut short by a tragic accident.

That is, unless someone decided to kill her now her name was out there. They might get a surprise when they discovered how difficult that was.

But the attempts, whether successful or not, would surely come. This list changed everything. It gave targets to those baying for our blood already, put faces to the names. No more hiding in our comfortable anonymity. The cracks that had started when Valeria took to the sky above Sydney Harbour had been blown wide open, and the world would never be the same again.

I started the video and she began speaking. Half a dozen reporters thrust their microphones at her face. She was on the steps of a ritzy hotel, her usual look of boredom twisted into a sneer.

“Ridiculous.” She spoke English with a hint of British upper-class in her accent. “This is obviously some hoax by a rival fashion house. And no, I’m not going to name names. My new spring collection is going to be the talk of Fashion Week and they’re looking for ways to cut me down.”

“Ms del Fuente, do you know any of the other people on the list? What do you think the connection is between you?”

“I doubt there is one,” she said. “They’ve named people at random to divert suspicion from their real aim. Excuse me.”

She pushed her way through the reporters, ignoring their cries of “Ms del Fuente! Ms del Fuente!” and got into a black Merc waiting at the kerb. The video ended with two reporters chasing the car down the street.

No doubt the other queens on the list were getting the same treatment. They were all richer than Midas, though none were as well known as Maria del Fuente. They wouldn’t be hard to track down, though.

I ran my eye down the other articles on the site. More than half were to do with the list in some way, either profiling people named on it or trying to find links between them. Conspiracy theories ranged from the bizarre—they were all terrorists and the list had been circulated by the FBI in an effort to get vigilantes to take them down—to the more credible: that someone with a grudge was trying to harm their enemies. No one knew where the list had come from. Someone “highly placed” in the Australian government, according to some reports, though the CIA and even the UN got a mention. The fact that Australians were over-represented in the list seemed a compelling argument for the Australian government connection to most. Some thought it was a hoax, but most seemed to think the list itself was genuine, though debate raged about whether the people it named were really “supernaturals” or not. The press hadn’t adopted our name for ourselves yet. “Supernaturals” sounded so much more angels-and-demons than “shifters”, and the press loved a good scare tactic.

Nowhere was Taskforce Jaeger mentioned, though ASIO got a lot more publicity than they probably preferred. The Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation wasn’t part of the everyday vernacular the way the CIA and the FBI were for Americans. Nobody made thrillers featuring their operatives playing cloak-and-dagger with the Russians or al Qaeda. If Australians ever thought about them at all, they probably assumed they had glorified desk jobs listening in on tapped telephone calls.

I was every bit as ignorant as any other Australian, but I didn’t believe that Taskforce Jaeger operated under an ASIO umbrella. Though well set up, they’d had a cavalier attitude to legalities that made them seem more of a cowboy operation. Patel’s sick experiment seemed way out of line even in the current climate of fear. The anti-supernatural laws might allow for arrest without charge but I was pretty damned sure that medical experiments weren’t mentioned anywhere. That was the problem with giving a lot of power to men with an agenda. Even my friend the prime minister would surely be horrified at how far his hounds had gone once they’d slipped their leash.

We’d killed a lot of them, but they were just grunts. Poor glorified police officers just doing their job. Wilson and Patel were still at large, and they could easily re-establish themselves somewhere else with new recruits. Maybe even without the thin veneer of government legitimacy they’d had before. They’d have plenty of work now. But how would they cope with the extra publicity the list had caused? Those guys really didn’t want the government—or the media—poking into their affairs and finding out what atrocities had been committed on behalf of the people of Australia. Publicity would make it harder to attack people and spirit them away to an underground lab. Those people would be watched now, and it would be noticed if they went missing. That, more than anything else, convinced me that our friends at Taskforce Jaeger couldn’t be responsible for the leak.

But then who was? And what did it mean for the people who’d been named?

Steve’s phone buzzed in my hand, making me jump. I passed it back to him to answer, but a moment later he was offering it to me again.

“It’s for you. Valiant.”

“Valiant?” I took the phone. “How did you get this number?”

“I rang the queen’s palace, and your wyvern gave it to me. She thought you’d want to hear from me.”

“She was right. I suppose you’ve heard about the list?”

“Of course. That’s why I’m ringing.” A quiver in her voice told me she wasn’t as confident as she was trying to sound. “It’s all over the Internet, the TV, the radio. What are we going to do?”

By the end of that sentence, she sounded like the teenager she was. If she’d been human, she’d still be in high school. To have a disaster of this magnitude land in her lap must be stressing her out of her tree.

“First of all, we’re not going to panic. We’re going to beef up our security, keep our heads down, and deny, deny, deny.”

“Some of the others thought you might have leaked this list.”

“Me? Why would I do that? My name’s on it too. So are half my staff’s.”

“Maybe as a way to set the humans on us, so you didn’t have to share. You could have put your own name on it to divert suspicion.”

She sounded like she couldn’t decide whether to accuse me or beg me to deny it.

“Easier just to not offer to share in the first place, don’t you think? Landing myself in the shit right next to you doesn’t seem a great trade-off for keeping the domain to myself.”

“No, I suppose not.” There was definite relief in her tone. “Who do you think released it, then?”

“Obviously a shifter.” Although it could have been a herald, come to think of it. They knew all the shifters. I wasn’t going to put that idea in anyone’s head, though. I didn’t want to set anyone on Ben’s tail. “Someone who wants to watch the world burn.”

“What about Taskforce Jaeger? They attacked us—and they killed Faith.”

“She’s dead?” I hadn’t heard that.

“Yeah. Her people got her out of the building before it burned down, but she was already dead when they found her.”

I’d love to know how she died. Had removing her channel stone killed her? Or had its removal weakened her to the point where she could be killed by ordinary means? It didn’t seem like the right time to press for details, though.

“This isn’t going to go away, is it?” she said. “I mean, once it’s on the Internet, it’s out there forever. How are we going to deal with it?”

“In the long run? I think we’ll have to come to some agreement with the humans.” It felt odd to speak of “the humans” as something “other”. “The world is changing, and we’ll have to change with it. It makes it even more important for us to be able to work together. Do you think your sisters will agree to share the domain?”

“I think so. I’ve talked Charity, Justine and Prudence round already. I only have to persuade Hope and Virginia now, but I think this list will have scared them. They won’t want to face this on their own.”

“Good. Let’s work on getting them on board and getting through the coronation first. That will get the foreign queens off our backs. Then we can work out how to handle this going forward.”

“Maybe the queens will be too busy with their own problems now to bother us.”

“Maybe.” From what I knew of them, that didn’t seem likely. “You keep your head down. We’ll talk again soon. Take care of yourself.”

“You too.” She hung up.

“That’s a good sign, that she wants to talk,” Steve said when I handed his phone back.

“Yes.”

I stared out the window, watching the world unfold beside the motorway. We passed a cheap motel, just like the one Garth and I had stayed at the night we went to the cemetery and dug up Lachie’s grave. The night I discovered that he was still alive.

We had spent too much time apart. I needed to hold my boy in my arms again, to know he was safe, to make sure he was eating properly. He was such a picky little eater. I needed to know he was happy, and not lying awake at night worrying what his father might do next. The poor kid needed a life. He’d spent so much of the last year shunted around, abandoned, endangered.

“You’re very quiet,” Garth said.

“Just thinking. What will we do if Jason goes to ground and takes Lachie with him?”

What if I was in Japan and Jason just disappeared? All that risk and effort to free the kitsune, and Jason might do a runner and it would all be wasted. Lachie would be gone.

“Ain’t gonna happen.” Garth sounded very assured. “Daiyu isn’t going to let him out of her sight, however many lists he gets his name on. Besides, we’ll be watching. Just because you’re away doesn’t mean the rest of us will be sitting around on our arses.”

Just as well. I couldn’t bear it if the fallout from this stupid list put Lachie into more danger.

“God, I wish this was over.” I couldn’t wait to get on that plane. I felt so helpless. I needed to
do
something.

“Amen to that,” said Garth.