Chapter 24
Chapter
Twenty-Four
CALEB
Four hours later, Jesse and Emile sat at the kitchen table while I made sandwiches.
Or attempted to. I knew my way around a kitchen like I knew my way around the Colosseum. Like, I’d been in it. Kicked the tires and stuff. But I wasn’t going to start giving tours or anything.
I needed something to do with my hands so I didn’t think about the fact that Jesse was missing one of his.
The second time I cut into a tomato, he half-rose from his chair. “Do you need help?”
I pointed my knife at him. “If your butt leaves that chair, I’ll slice you open like this tomato.”
He sat. “Inefficiently, then.”
Emile chuckled.
I trained the knife on him. He sipped his coffee.
“You’re going to cut the tips of your fingers,” Jesse said.
“You’re missing a hand.” He’d talked me through a field dressing in the bathroom upstairs, and now the stump was wrapped in white gauze and secured with medical tape.
“It’ll grow back,” he said mildly.
I layered tomato slices on a row of bread. “It can grow back while you sit there and don’t try to get up again.”
Emile gave Jesse a smug smile.
“You don’t have to stay in Rome, you know,” Jesse told him. “You can probably return to London.”
Emile sat back in his chair. “Mais non. I’m enjoying this.”
“That makes one of us,” I muttered.
Emile looked at Jesse. “Do you have any cigarettes?”
“No,” I said.
He sniffed. “Americans.”
Jesse looked toward the foyer, suddenly alert. Emile looked with him, their heads turning at the same time. Two sets of chocolate brown eyes fixed on the kitchen doorway, their profiles so similar it might have fucked with my head if Emile hadn’t been so…French.
“Stefanos is here,” he said softly.
A moment later, the sound of the front door opening echoed through the house. Footsteps sounded, and Stefanos entered the kitchen.
“I guess knocking is optional,” I said.
Stefanos smiled and set his small bag on the floor. “Caleb. It’s good to see you again.”
I went back to slicing. “Okay.”
Stefanos sat at the table and gestured to Jesse’s bandaged stump. “Ertem will be able to help with that.”
“Who’s Ertem?” I asked.
“One of the elders on the Council,” Jesse said.
“No thanks. We don’t want their help.”
Stefanos regarded me. “We’re not the enemy, child.”
I set down the knife. “Yeah, calling me that isn’t exactly giving me warm fuzzies.”
Jesse looked like he fought a wince. “Caleb.”
I looked at Stefanos. “You want a sandwich?”
“I’d love one. The airlines don’t serve meals anymore. It’s a travesty of the modern world.”
I built his sandwich. “What can this Ertem guy actually do? I thought the hand would grow back on its own.”
“It will,” Jesse said. “Ertem is a healer. Without his help, the regeneration could take months. He’ll speed it up to days.”
Days was good. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Jesse’s hand on the floor of the dungeon.
Stefanos looked at Jesse. “Emile told me the abbreviated version. I would like to hear everything from you. Leave nothing out.”
Jesse told him, covering the hunt to find Pyotr, his transformation, the vials, our capture, the blinded werewolf, the operating room, Carlo’s revenge and choking fit, the fire, Alessia’s confession.
“The choking fit was undoubtedly a geas,” Stefanos murmured.
Jesse paused his story to look at me. “G-E-A-S. Gesh. It’s Fae binding magic.”
I nodded as I worked, sandwiches accumulating on the counter.
Stefanos had a lot of explaining to do, and I could only hope he knew what the fuck was going on with the Fae woman we’d seen outside the opera house.
As if things couldn’t get any worse than body-snatching Latvians and vampire torture dungeons.
Jesse continued his recital of events. When Jesse finished, Stefanos looked at me. “You had a premonition of the opera house burning?”
“No. I was joking when I said it.”
“And yet it came to pass.”
I wiped my hands on a towel, any response I might have made dying in my throat. Because what the fuck could I say? My jokes were coming true. That was a thing I did now.
Stefanos turned back to Jesse and Emile. “Alessia had the name of Carlo’s business partner right. But she was almost certainly spelling it wrong. It’s not Dun.” He paused. “It’s Donn. D-O-N-N.”
Jesse gave a curt nod. “Fae.”
“Yes,” Stefanos said. “He retreated to Undersomm with the others when iron spread through the world.”
“But he didn’t stay there?” Emile asked with a slightly raised brow. It wasn’t really a question.
Stefanos’s expression went grim. “Our intelligence has reported rumblings of civil war among the Fae. We believe some Umbrals are displeased with their exile. They view Undersomm not as a kingdom but as a prison. Those Umbrals want to return.” He glanced toward the window, where the sun was just beginning to rise.
“Strange storms have been developing all over Europe. An F5 tornado took out a bridge in London last night.”
He waited a beat. When no one said anything, he added, “It’s all over the news.”
I carried sandwiches to the table and set them down. “Yeah, we’ve been kind of busy being tortured by vampires.”
Jesse pulled his plate toward him as I sat beside him. When he peeked under the top slice of bread, I slapped his hand.
He dropped the bread. “Looks good, babe.”
“The Council has been monitoring the situation,” Stefanos continued, “but information is difficult to come by. The Fae are secretive by nature, and the Umbrals even more so.” He looked at Jesse.
“We were aware of a handful of missing werewolves over the years. We never connected them to Carlo. He was very careful. But we didn’t know all of Italy was missing its wolves. That’s new.”
Jesse regarded him with steady eyes. “It would have been nice to know these things before my mate and I landed in the middle of it.”
“Until today, we weren’t certain of anything.”
“Your operatives need as much information as possible. Even if that information is incomplete.”
Stefanos held his stare for a long moment. Then he dropped his eyes. “Agreed.”
I smothered a gasp. Maybe I wasn’t the most experienced werewolf in the world, but I’d been on the receiving end of Jesse’s staredowns enough times to know the significance of what I’d just seen.
Jesse had bitched out Stefanos in front of witnesses. And Stefanos had admitted fault and apologized. I filed that under Things I Will Absolutely Ask Jesse About Later. Preferably after we screwed each other’s brains out.
Stefanos cleared his throat, his flash of submission buried as he swept a look around the table. “In that spirit, I’m going to tell you everything the Council knows. Some of it is confirmed. Some is conjecture.”
I slid a look at Jesse. He was quiet in his chair, but I knew he was itching for a notebook and a jumbo pack of highlighters.
“Ulfrik went missing eight months before he surfaced in New York,” Stefanos said. “We logged his disappearance, but we had no reason to search for him. He’d lost his mate in the Americas two centuries before. A solitary, grieving wolf dropping out of contact isn’t unusual.”
That tracked with the little I knew of Ulfrik. Jesse had mentioned his mate had died in “a long-forgotten war.”
“We now believe Ulfrik spent those eight months in Carlo’s dungeon,” Stefanos said.
“And we believe that window is when Donn approached Carlo.” He looked between Jesse and me.
“Based on your report, it seems like this is the point when Carlo’s operation changed from a quest for revenge into experimentation.
He had the infrastructure, discretion, and harvested blood. Donn had a use for all three.”
Emile frowned. “What did Donn want with Carlo’s operation?”
“We don’t know for certain,” Stefanos said.
“But something Alessia said makes the Council nervous. Servizio. Service.” He looked at me.
“The Fae can’t tolerate the modern world.
But a werewolf infused with Fae gifts and bonded to a Fae through blood could move through a world of iron untouched.
Such a creature might be able to serve his creators. ”
Cold spread through my chest. In my mind, Alessia’s cracked, bloodied lips formed a single word, almost identical in Italian and English.
Servizio.
Service.
“Carlo kidnapped and tortured werewolves,” Stefanos said. “His operation went undetected because he found a way to harness the lycanthropy virus at a flashpoint between lucidity and madness. We had no idea because the blood he sold didn’t leave a scent signature.”
“Until Ulfrik,” Jesse rasped.
Stefanos nodded. “We believe your bond with Caleb changed the chemistry. The mate bond ran from you through Caleb to Caleb’s sire. When Pyotr Zarins consumed it, you could track what no wolfseeker alive should have been able to track.”
“And Carlo knew it,” Jesse said, mouth twisting. “He used me like a hound.”
Emile growled, his eyes lightening a shade.
I made a mental note to never piss them off.
Jesse pulled a card from his pocket and slid it toward Stefanos. “The Fae woman delivered this. By crow.”
Stefanos picked it up and examined it.
“Abigail Skinner,” Jesse said. “She wore a glamour at Carlo’s orgy.”
Stefanos lowered the card. “That’s her human alias. She’s the Morrigan.” He looked at me. “A very powerful Fae.”
“Is she really a lawyer?” I asked. Maybe Undersomm really did suck if she’d gone to law school to get out of it.
“Yes,” Stefanos said. “And one of the few Umbrals whose identity we know. She controls the crows. Her eyes are as old as battlefields.”
Not a battlefield, like the kind Jesse wrote about. Just…battlefields. All of them, ever.
I sat back, my head spinning a little. “Crows have been following us since we got to Rome.”
“No,” Jesse said. “Since London. We saw them outside Moray Tower.”
Stefanos studied the business card. “She watched you both and didn’t interfere. We can’t be certain where she stands. But it’s clear to me that Carlo didn’t know who she was. The Council believes some Umbrals oppose Donn’s faction.”
“So she’s an ally?” I asked.