27. Chapter 27
Bastien
The wards on this building are built to hold things in. I feel them at the door. They sit against my skin the whole way down the corridor. Whoever laid them wasn’t worried about what might come up the mountain. They were worried about what might already be inside.
Crowe walks half a step behind me.
He’s the reason I’m on this mountain. When the invitation came from Vasile’s people, I took it to him. He took it to Faine. Faine decided the Court wasn’t walking into this part alone.
They bring us to a briefing room three floors down in the Aurora Collective’s headquarters, screens on two walls, a table long enough for fourteen.
The heat in here is bad. The room is full of shifters, and shifters run warm.
Under the coffee I can smell every one of them.
Wet wool. Wolf. Bear. Something dry and scorched at the far end that’s dragon.
The man at the head of the table stands when we come in. Tall, weathered, one eye gone pale and blind. An ancient. I pick it up immediately; I just don’t know what he is.
“Seigneur de Val-Serein. Viktor Parlance. I run Aurora.” He doesn’t offer his hand, which I appreciate. “Thank you for coming to us. I know it isn’t how you usually work.”
“It isn’t.”
“Then I’ll keep it short and introduce everyone, and we’ll get on with it.
” He nods around the table as he goes. “Nadia Frost leads our field teams. Jericho Allon handles security communications. Vanya Arrowvane runs our intelligence. Caleb Craven speaks for the dragon clans.” The dragon at the end of the room is the only one on his feet.
Charcoal suit, no coffee, arms folded. He tips his chin and stays where he is.
“Decker is our tracker, and beside him—”
I lose the end of the sentence. The bear takes up a third of that side of the table, and by the time I’ve finished measuring him, Viktor has moved on. There’s a small fair woman next to the bear. I don’t catch her name, and I assume that’s my own fault.
Faine takes the middle of the long side, the way she does at her own table. I sit at her right. Crowe stays on his feet against the wall behind us, which is where he stands in any room filled with strangers.
“Crowe tells me you’ve been inside this trade,” Viktor says. “That makes you closer to it than anyone we have.”
“Close enough to end it. That’s why I’m here.”
“That’s what we’re here to decide.”
I take the folded map out of my coat and lay it on the table.
Nobody moves. Then Viktor draws it toward himself and opens it, tracks down the page and stops.
“This is the compound where they process their…product?”
“Yes.”
“You have the location.”
“I’ve been driving to it since the fall.”
The room changes. Chairs come forward. Nadia already has her hand out for the map.
“How far is the building off the public road?” she asks.
“Two miles of private track. One gate. There’s a second track on the north side that deliveries use at night.”
“What’s around it?”
“Double fence, floodlights on poles every twenty feet. Six men on the front doors and four on the vehicle gate.”
“Are they armed?”
“Yes. With what, I can’t tell you. I’ve never been stopped. My guess is that it’s human caliber, but they’d probably be ready for anything.”
Viktor looks up from the map. “Lady Faine gave us transport corridors. Timings. A delivery schedule. She never mentioned a building.”
“Because I asked her not to. The Court has heard everything that comes out of that place, but I didn’t want the location shared until there were people ready to act on it. The more rooms that information gets said in, the better the odds it reaches the wrong ears.”
Faine’s hands stay folded on the table. “And I wanted his intel verified before I brought it to Aurora,” she says. “It’s verified.”
Craven looks at the map, then at Viktor. “Am I here for a rescue or a raid?”
“That depends on the next hour.”
“Then I’ll listen to the hour.”
They put the map up on a screen and start pulling it apart, and for a long while I answer questions.
Nadia wants the guard shifts. Six in the morning, six at night, and the night crew runs about a third thinner.
Craven wants to know if the roof will hold a dragon’s weight.
I tell him I’ve never been on it, and he nods and moves on.
Jericho has had a laptop open since the map went up. “You were in the room when the manager called his superiors. Is that right?”
“I was standing four feet from him.”
“Did you see the number he dialed?”
“No. He dialed from memory with his hand over the base.”
“But he called from his office. The phone on his desk.”
“At four in the morning. In October.”
He starts typing. “Then I don’t need the number. I know the line, and I know the time and date. Give me some time, and I can find out where that call rang.”
Vanya has been writing since I sat down. Now she puts her pen down.
“Tell me about their paperwork.”
“There isn’t much of it. When something leaves the building, two pages go with it. A code instead of a name, a rating, and a signature.”
“Whose signature?”
“Someone above the manager. He’s never met them. Whenever they come up, he gets flustered.”
She opens the folder beside her, takes out a single page, and slides it down the table to me.
“Is that the form?”
I look at it. Same layout. Same code block at the head, same rating box, same signature line. This one is blank, and the letterhead belongs to a different house.
“Where did you get this?”
“Out of the facility we raided this winter. Different building. Different manager.” She takes the page back.
“On paper, that facility and your compound have nothing in common. Not an owner, not a bank, not a name. But the same person signs off on both.” She looks at Viktor.
“He hasn’t found us another branch. He’s found proof that one person sits above at least two of these operations.
If we can find out who that is, we’ve found the top of this trade. ”
There’s a light knock at the door. A woman with cropped red hair comes in with an armful of folders, puts them at Viktor’s elbow, says something to him too quietly for the table, and goes out again with the empty coffee pot.
“Thank you, Zoe,” Viktor says as she walks out of the room.
Nadia gets up and shuts the door behind her.
The small fair woman at the end of the table hasn’t spoken yet, and I keep not looking at her.
That’s what makes me look.
My attention has slid past her four times now.
Each time it lands on the bear instead, and each time it feels like my own choice.
It isn’t. I’ve spent weeks living with this exact trick, and I recognize it.
My eye is being moved along, and she’s the one moving it.
That’s why her name never reached me at the introductions.
I make myself keep looking at her.
She’s small. Fair. Her jacket is too big, and she sits very straight inside it. There’s a healed mark at the join of her neck and shoulder. Under her heartbeat runs a second one, smaller and faster, that isn’t hers.
“How many people are in there?” she says.
“Twenty, give or take.”
“Give or take. You didn’t count?”
“I counted heartbeats. The house doesn’t show clients the ward; they bring people up to us. But a heartbeat carries through a building, and the ward sits two floors under the client rooms. Twenty, when I was last there. The number moves.”
“Moves how?”
“They’re sold. Or moved on.” I don’t add the third option.
“That doesn’t tell me anything.” Her eyes narrow. “What condition are they in? How many of them can walk?”
“I can’t tell you who can walk. I can tell you what their blood says, because reading their condition was half the reason I drank from as many as the house would give me.
Their blood runs thin. Their hearts run fast. They’re weak, but they’re mobile.
” My voice stays level. “I don’t think I saw the worst of them, though.
Some of those people may need to be carried out. ”
“Stretchers go in the second truck,” Nadia says. “I’ll see to it.”
“What about names?” the small woman presses. “Did you get any names?”
“Grace,” Viktor says. “That’s enough for now.”
Grace.
Serenity has said that name to me three times.
The first was over dinner, weeks ago, when she asked me to find out what happened to her sister, and I told her I’d look into it.
I never did. There was always the compound.
Always something that mattered more. She stopped asking, and I let myself believe she’d stopped hoping, because that was easier than the truth.
The woman is nine feet from me. Alive. Mated, going by the mark. Carrying a child, going by the second heartbeat. There’s a mug in front of her that she hasn’t touched.
Four words. Your sister is alive.
Then I realize something else. If I say them, this room learns that I have Serenity. That I bought her from the same people we’re planning to burn. Viktor sends this woman and her bear to my house before dawn, and they’d be right to go. Nothing I could say in this room would hold for ten seconds.
And Serenity would walk out of my door with them.
I take my hand off the table and put it in my lap.
“Then let’s talk about the one we know of from our side,” Vanya says. She doesn’t need her notes for this. “Serenity Sangrey. I’ve had people hunting her. Every trace of her is always a month cold by the time we reach it.”
She says it to the room. She isn’t looking at me.
My eyes stay on the map.
Say it.
“Is she in that building?” It’s the bear. The first thing he’s said all evening, and it comes out in a low rumble, and every head turns.
“The ones they brought to me went by numbers. I never heard a name.” Which is true. Every word of it is true.
And I’m lying.
“Then she could be.”
“She could be.”
Grace stands up.
“Then we go fast.” Her chair scrapes back. “Tomorrow.”
“Sit down, Grace.”
“Viktor, if she’s in there—”