Decker
It’s mid-afternoon when Viktor’s next meeting request arrives.
He’s scheduled it after dark, and that alone tells me something.
Aurora runs on the clock. Briefings at oh-seven, ops check at noon, debrief when the light is going.
An evening meeting isn’t policy; it’s accommodating something.
Someone important enough to schedule around, who keeps hours that aren’t ours.
I reach the main meeting room before anyone else so I can choose a seat. Long table, eighteen chairs already pulled out, screens dark along the wall. This is going to be a discussion then, not a presentation. I take the inside corner nearest the door. Viktor sees me do it as he walks in.
“You’ll have a better read from the far end,” he says.
“I’ll have a better exit from here.”
He doesn’t argue. He sets his folder at the head of the table and leaves it at that.
Caleb and Dorian come in together. Caleb has road dust on his sleeve. Dorian looks like a man who hasn’t slept through a night in a week and has decided not to discuss it.
“Anyone going to tell us what this is about?” Dorian says.
“You’ll know when we get started,” Viktor says.
Dorian looks at Caleb. Caleb pulls the folder Viktor left at his place and reads it, and Dorian sits back like a man used to getting his answers secondhand from his brother.
Lila and Talon come in behind them. Lila sets a folder down and doesn’t open it. Talon takes the chair to her right.
Torbjorn comes in and drops into the chair at the near end, looking like he has better places to be.
He looks at me for a moment. “This part of the job too?” he says.
“Maybe,” I say. Viktor’s called me in on pretty much everything that might involve sensitive information, hoping I’ll pick up a pattern.
Which makes me wonder if he’s completely committed to the theory that the girl is our problem.
She has absolutely no reason to enter this room.
And I don’t know why that disappoints me.
Riven comes in ahead of Iris, reading the room the way I’m reading it.
He sees me. He sees the empty seats and works out who they’re for.
He pulls Iris’s chair out without looking at it, sits beside her, and his attention goes to the far door and stays there.
I’ve crossed paths with Riven before; every time, he’s struck me as a man not to be trifled with.
The last to arrive on the coalition side comes through quietly enough that I hear the door before I see her—tall, pale, fair hair pulled back, with the bearing of someone who has sat through more meetings like this than anyone else in the room.
“Leora,” Viktor says. “Thank you for coming down.”
“You said Nocturne,” she says, taking the chair at the far end. “The fae don’t let the Court sit at a table without someone watching. Old habit.” Her eyes move over the Aurora side, unhurried, and stop on me a half-beat longer than the rest. “You’ve added another bear since last time.”
“Decker,” Viktor says. “He consults for us.”
Leora Sky inclines her head at me and says nothing else, but I have the sense of having been weighed and shelved, which I don’t mind. It’s what I do to a room myself.
Then the far door opens.
Four of them. The woman who comes in first is somewhere near fifty by the look of her, though her features are so smooth, it’s impossible to tell; dark-haired, composed in the way of someone who has held authority long enough to wear it lightly.
She takes the chair across from Viktor like she’s sat in it before.
The other three settle along the right side of the table.
Lean, pale, eyes that move with a quick intensity that makes my senses jangle.
Third from the end is a man I know.
Crowe. I’ve worked two jobs that touched him, both the kind of work nobody writes down.
He’s Nightshade Guild…assassin. An operative, not a principal; the sort who turns up where he’s needed and leaves when he isn’t.
What I’m only confirming now, in this light, at this hour, is what he is beneath the work.
His chest isn’t keeping time the way a living man’s does.
My bear notices before I do, and what it sends up isn’t a threat. Which doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous.
Viktor says, “Ysabelle Faine, of the Nocturne Court.” He glances around at the rest of us as he makes the introduction. “We appreciate the Court making the journey,” he says to her.
“We didn’t make it lightly,” Faine says. “We don’t come to Aurora as a habit. I’d rather be honest about why we’re here than pretend it’s goodwill.”
“Then be honest,” Viktor says.
Faine folds her hands on the table.
“There’s a blood trade running,” she says without ceremony.
“I don’t mean the trade your people know—the Syndicate taking magic-bloods into their facilities.
I mean blood. People taken for it. Held captive and drained, in numbers, across a spread of territory too wide to be one appetite working alone. ”
The room goes quiet, and no one moves to fill it.
Viktor’s face doesn’t change, but he’s gone very still. “This is the first I’m hearing of it.”
“I know. That’s part of why we’re here.” Faine’s voice stays level.
“Understand something about the Court before you decide what you make of us. We have lived alongside humans a very long time, and others besides…wolves, your kind, the fae. We’ve done it by being careful.
We take what we need, we leave no one dead, we draw no attention, because attention is the one thing that has ever cost us everything.
Discipline isn’t a courtesy we extend. It’s the reason we still exist.”
“And someone’s stopped being disciplined,” Caleb says.
“Someone’s made blood an industry.” She lets it sit a beat.
“We found it a while ago. We thought we’d handle it the way the Court handles its own: quietly, internally, without making waves.
We were wrong. It’s outgrown us. It’s organized, and it has no regard at all for the thing that’s kept the rest of us alive: you do not leave bodies. ”
“You think it’s coordinated?” Viktor says.
“I think whoever runs it has reach we don’t, and money we don’t, and a tolerance for exposure no one who’s lived in hiding would have.
” Faine looks down the table, then back to Viktor.
“I won’t stand in your house and name your enemies for you.
But you’ve been pulling magic-bloods out of facilities successfully.
You know who collects creatures with power in them as though they were stock.
When I look for something big enough to run something this size, and careless enough not to fear what comes of it, I find myself looking the same direction you would. ”
Nobody says the name. It’s in the room without being said.
Syndicate.
“Why bring it to us?” Dorian says. “If the Court can’t stop it, what do you think we’ll manage that you couldn’t?”
“You’re already at war with the people we suspect,” Faine says.
“We’re not. We’d like to stay that way. But we can’t sit on this and watch it grow, because it’s only a matter of time before we’re exposed.
We’re offering what we have. Corridors. Timing.
The buyers we’ve identified. In exchange, we want it stopped. That’s all of it.”
Viktor is quiet for a moment.
“We’ll take what you have,” he says. “And we’ll look at it seriously. I won’t promise an outcome if I don’t understand the rest of it.”
“I’m not asking for a promise,” Faine says. “I’m asking for attention. You weren’t giving it because you didn’t know. Now you do.”
Viktor turns the folded page she’s slid across, reads it, passes it to Caleb without a word.
It’s Talon who turns the conversation; he’s been quiet, and when he speaks it’s with the care of a man who’s noticed something he doesn’t like the look of.
“It isn’t only the trade,” he says. “There’s been a wrongness across the board these last weeks. Small things out of line. Reports that don’t add up the way they used to.”
“I’ve felt it too,” Lila says. “The energies are shifting.”
Everyone looks at her. She doesn’t soften it.
“Elena feels it more clearly than I do—it runs stronger in her than in me. But I’ve felt it too. Something’s unsettled. The Heartstone hasn’t been quiet. For weeks now.”
“Unsettled how?” Viktor asks.
“Restless. I don’t have a tidier word, and I don’t like using one I can’t define at a table this size. But that’s the truth of it. It’s restless; I don’t know why, and neither does Elena.”
Leora Sky speaks for the first time since she sat. “The fae have felt it as well. Our wards read pressure on them they shouldn’t be carrying. We assumed it was local to us.” She looks at Lila. “If a Rossewyn witch is feeling the same thing, it isn’t local.”
“Two old things stirring in one season,” Faine says. “A blood trade outgrowing every limit that ever held it, and an artifact that won’t settle. I don’t believe in that much coincidence.”
Caleb glances at Dorian. “You should probably tell them, Dorian.”
There’s a long pause, and then his twin exhales.
“I don’t think the two are connected.” Dorian draws every eye at the table to him.
“There’s something I should share, since we’re laying it all out there.
” He turns his water glass a half-inch and leaves it.
He’s fighting back a smile. “Juno’s pregnant.
It’s why we haven’t brought her into any of the action lately. ”
Lila’s whole face changes. “Dorian. Oh, my God! Are you sure?”
“Early days,” he says. “But yes.”
“That’s wonderful.” She reaches across and presses his forearm warmly, then frowns at Caleb. “Elena doesn’t know about this, I’m guessing?”
He shakes his head. “Not mine to tell her.”
Lila raises an eyebrow. “She’ll have something to say about that, I’m sure.” Then her expression softens. “A baby!” Her smile is genuine. Her daughter is mated into this family. A child of it is her family too, near enough.