Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
Tori
Slumped on the sofa, I watched Aaron pace his living room, his phone pressed to his ear.
“Right,” he said tersely. “Yeah, got it. Thanks, Tabitha. Get some rest.”
He returned his phone to his pocket. Beside me on the sofa, Ezra leaned forward, elbows braced on his knees and his mismatched eyes focused on Aaron. Kai, sitting on the recliner in the corner, looked up from his laptop.
“Felix and Zora are okay,” Aaron said. “It would’ve been a different story if Zora hadn’t been home with Felix when the agents showed up.”
A knot of tension released from my chest. “Where are they now?”
“They’re at Sylvia’s place.”
“Do we know why the MPD wanted to arrest Felix?” Ezra asked.
“No clue,” Aaron growled.
Kai shrugged. “It could be they wanted to curb communication between guilds, confiscate the information Felix was helping to compile, punish our guild, or intimidate and frighten us with random violence against our members.”
“Or all of the above,” Aaron suggested.
I pressed my clenched fists against my thighs. “What are we going to do about it?”
Aaron and Kai shared a look, and then Kai turned his gaze back to his laptop. “Taye’s and Gwen’s teams are still staking out the precinct. No changes there.”
Meaning the precinct was still locked to mythic civilians. No one, including our guild officers, could get inside to demand an explanation for our disbandment or try to reverse it.
I shoved loose curls away from my face. “Is the precinct allowed to bar mythics from entering?”
“Does what they’re allowed to do matter at this point?” Aaron dropped onto the cushion beside me. “Girard hasn’t been able to reach a single agent. All calls to precinct numbers are going to voicemail.”
“Makiko managed to speak to Agent Harris.” Kai’s upper lip curled in distaste.
“Acting Captain Harris, rather. He revealed that all the agents we’ve been dealing with—the ones who disbanded our guild and tried to arrest Felix, as well as the ones who’ve been confiscating artifacts and all the other shit we’ve been hearing about—are from the Special Investigations department. ”
Goosebumps prickled down my arms, and I rubbed them through the sleeves of my hoodie. “But isn’t Special Investigations an international mythic spy agency?”
“Pretty much,” Kai confirmed.
Aaron ran both hands through his hair. “That’s bad. That’s very bad.”
Unable to sit still any longer, I shoved off the sofa and started pacing the same track Aaron had been wearing in the carpet. “What reason does a mythic CIA have to disband our guild or arrest Felix or care about anything in Vancouver?”
Kai closed his laptop. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
The first and most obvious reason that a scary international MPD department might be messing with us? Darius and Kit’s secret investigation. The one that, unless I was connecting the wrong dots, had led to Kit murdering two top guys from the Dissimulation Department.
“You know what’d be great?” I punctuated the question by spinning on my heel and pacing in the opposite direction. “If Darius was here instead of trying to manage this shitstorm by phone. What the hell is he doing right now that’s so important?”
I didn’t realize Ezra had left the sofa until I turned to make another lap around the room and almost crashed into him. He placed his hands on my waist and gently tugged me against him. Only once I’d stopped moving did I realize how frenetic my pacing had become.
But the warmth of his embrace couldn’t soften the sharp spikes of tension inside me.
“We can’t just sit around,” I said. “What are we going to do?”
Before anyone could answer, a chorus of chimes pinged through the room—all our phones going off at the same time.
We scrambled for our devices. I got mine out a second before Ezra, and I frowned at the new email with a blank subject line from an unfamiliar sender with a nonsensical address.
It wasn’t from a guildmate. The Crow and Hammer—and all of Vancouver’s guilds—had switched to fully encrypted communication channels and apps to keep the MPD out of our business.
I tapped the email to open it.
We aren’t all unaware or complicit. We see what’s happening. We’re doing what we can.
- Capybara
Beneath that were three lists titled “Quit,” “Suspended,” and “Dismissed.” Two dozen names were grouped under the headings.
“Oh shit.” I skimmed the list again. “Are those all agents and analysts from the precinct? Guess that explains why no one is answering the phones. Are there any of the usual staffers even left?”
“How many people did Capybara send this email to?” Aaron asked, frowning at his phone.
“As many mythics as possible would be my guess.” Kai drummed his fingers on his closed laptop. “If the precinct staff are being driven out by SI agents, what—”
Another electronic trill erupted, this time a ringtone from Aaron’s phone. He answered the call, and I scooted so close that I was practically standing on his toes to eavesdrop. With a roll of his eyes, he switched the call to speakerphone.
“Aaron.” An indistinct roar of background noise competed with Girard’s voice. “I just arrived at the Grand Grimoire—Gwen’s team tailed a group of agents from the precinct—”
He broke off as a wailing siren drowned out everything else. “Agents forced entry into the guild. There was a confrontation. The building collapsed.”
“Collapsed?” Aaron repeated, his eyes widening.
“I don’t know exactly what happened—there was fighting inside—the roof caved in. I don’t know how many casualties.”
Nauseating cold filled my gut. These SI agents weren’t just frightening and arresting mythics—they were killing them now?
“Some of the guild members ran for it,” Girard continued. “The agents arrested others. There are human emergency services and media arriving, and there are bodies in the street—I’ve never seen anything like this, not involving the MPD.”
“Shit.” Aaron scrunched his eyes shut. “What should we do?”
A muffled burst of distortion rattled the speaker, and then our guild’s first officer replied so quietly I almost missed it.
“I don’t know.”
I dug my fingers into my temples, squeezing the ache in my skull. Aaron spoke with Girard for a minute more before ending the call. Silence fell over the room.
“So.” Dropping my hands to my sides, I looked from Ezra’s grim expression to Kai’s dark stare to Aaron’s pale, terse features, and when I spoke again, my words weren’t a question—they were an expectation. “What are we going to do?”