Chapter 7 #3
“They’d know exactly what you were doing,” Andrew argues.
“Don’t forget, they know we have two of their people in custody.
Standard procedure is to assume that at least some information has been compromised—which it has.
You coming back just a few days after your last visit, with a senior CSG investigator glued to your side, would be viewed as a hostile incursion to confirm information obtained during interrogation.
There’s a much better chance that they’ll take you hostage or kill you outright than that they’ll try to fob you off again. ”
I keep my mouth closed for now and let Andrew do the heavy lifting. After all, he won’t care how Aidan feels about him once the call is done, but I still have high hopes for sex later—which I’m not likely to get if Aidan’s mad at me.
Unless he likes angry sex…?
Not worth the risk—not while Andrew’s willing to take the brunt of his anger, anyway.
Sneaking a sidelong glance at Aidan, I can see he’s fuming but reluctantly resigned to the fact that Andrew’s right. That doesn’t stop him from a last-ditch argument.
“The magic will protect me.”
Silence falls, and glances are exchanged. “Do we really want it to come to that?” Percy asks. “Even if the magic saves your life in an initial encounter, once they attack, they commit to that path. We’re not ready for an all-out war with the CCA, Aidan. We want to avoid that altogether if we can.”
Aidan sighs. “I know. I know. Okay, fine,” he concedes. “But I don’t need a babysitter here in Portland. And how is it safe for Alistair to go out to Beker County, then?”
“It’s not,” Gideon says bluntly. “That’s why he should go. It would finally rid us all of his presence.”
I gasp, Sam slaps Gideon upside the head, Ellie—my beloved cousin!—laughs out loud, and the others all cough or look away to hide their amusement.
“How… how could you say such a thing?” I demand. “You would be in the depths of despair if anything happened to me! Your grief and pain would know no bounds… it would take over your every waking moment and suffuse your sleep.”
“Suffuse?” Noah raises an eyebrow. “Really?”
“You would suffer as you had never before imagined possible. And you wouldn’t get any for ages because Sam would feel the same way. Worse! He’d feel worse! The loss of his bestest BFF would tear the very breath from his lungs and—”
“That’s absolutely true,” Sam breaks in. “Gideon, if something happened to Alistair, I’d be too upset to have sex.”
The expression on Gideon’s face would be comical if he wasn’t talking about murdering me, wiping me from this plane and sending me to the next. Don’t get me wrong, I look forward to one day returning to the spiritual plane for some R&R before my next life, but I’m nowhere ready to go yet.
“By all means,” Gideon snarks, “let’s do everything in our power to keep Alistair alive. Maybe imprisoned?” He shoots a glance at Sam, who shakes his head.
“At least Sam loves me,” I say mournfully. “It gives me peace to know that my death would be mourned by my bestest bestie, that the loss of me would cause him to rend his hair with grief—”
“Whoa,” Sam interrupts. “Let’s not go too far. I wouldn’t look good bald—I have the wrong shaped head.”
“—and should I be taken hostage and tortured, I will take strength from the knowledge that my BFF is tearing the world apart, stone by stone, in an attempt to get me back.”
“Yeah, that I would do,” Sam agrees. “I’d even make these guys help.”
“I don’t know,” Ellie says doubtfully. “Stone by stone? That sounds like hard work.”
“You suck,” I tell her. “I’m telling Aunt Vivienne on you.” I stop and think about how that conversation would go. Aunt Vivienne would likely want to know why I couldn’t just rescue myself. “Well, I’ll tell your mom, anyway.”
“Now that we’ve decided to keep Alistair alive and try to get him back if he’s taken hostage,” David begins dryly.
“After they’ve tortured him a bit,” Andrew qualifies. “Al said something about needing to take strength while he was being tortured. We don’t want to deprive him of that.”
I shake my head. “You’re supposed to be my secondary best friend,” I accuse.
“What?” Aidan asks. “I… What is even going on here?”
“You get used to it,” Percy assures him, smiling slightly.
“ Anyway ,” David raises his voice. He’s not shouting, because I don’t think he ever does, but there’s a definite edge there, “before Alistair can be taken captive, tortured, and rescued, we need to put together a plan for his trip to Beker County.”
There’s a momentary silence before I say, “I want to put a pin in the idea of bringing enforcers down to stay with Aidan—”
He immediately begins to protest, and I hold up a hand.
“I know you’re against it, but I think the idea has merit and I want to come back to it later. First, let’s focus on what I’m doing. If we can’t come up with a good plan for me, we won’t need to argue about what to do with you.”
His eyes narrow dangerously. “What to do with me?”
Those might have been the wrong words. Fortunately for me, David steps in.
“Do you have any ideas, Alistair?”
I tear my gaze away from Aidan’s set face—sex is beginning to look like a pipe dream—and focus on the screen.
“Nothing I love. The original plan to actually talk to the pack members in Beker County and just poke around casually is obviously not feasible now. That leaves me with trying to recon without being noticed.” I grimace.
“In an area full of hellhounds?” Andrew shakes his head.
“They’d smell you before you got close enough to find out anything,” David agrees. “There’s no way you’d be able to poke around without a confrontation.”
“And you’re not that good an actor,” Ellie adds. “Even if they’re inclined to believe that your presence is completely coincidental and unconnected to CSG—which, if they really are connected to Tish, they won’t—you’d probably fuck it up and make them suspicious anyway.”
“That hurts, Elinor. You’ve ripped my heart from my chest. Don’t you know I have dreams of someday becoming a thespian envied by all others? Once I retire from being the preeminent investigator CSG has ever seen—”
“Excuse me?” Andrew says. “Preeminent?”
“—I plan to follow in the steps of so many outstanding actors and tread the boards—”
“Yeah, okay, Al, let’s shelve that dream for a little while and concentrate on building your preeminent reputation,” Sam cuts in. “But I’ll buy you some acting lessons for your birthday.”
I blink. “Why would I need acting lessons?”
“I think we can all agree,” David says hastily, “that even a low-key attempt at recon in Beker County would have too high a risk of capture or worse. We’re not ready for any kind of direct confrontation yet, not until we know more about what we’re up against.”
“Which we won’t if we don’t go into Beker County,” I point out.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not keen to be taken prisoner and tortured—sorry to disappoint, Gideon—but we can’t just sit on our hands and wait for the sky to fall and a million elves to pop in through portals.
I’m trained for this kind of covert op. The risk isn’t great, but any risk assessment you do is going to tell you it’s necessary. ”
Before anyone else can say anything, Aidan holds up a hand. “Hang on. What do you mean, you’re trained for covert ops? I didn’t think CSG did those.”
“I haven’t always worked for CSG,” I say, bringing up Google Maps and searching Beker County.
“I used to work for Enforcement on a special ops team.” It was a long time ago—something I took up right after the fiasco with Timothy left me feeling like my life could only be worth something in service to my people—but I still regularly attend retraining and accreditation courses.
I figure the skills might come in handy, even if I no longer want to be treated like a chess piece by the higher-ups at Enforcement.
“Really?” he sounds surprised. “I thought those special ops teams were hard-bitten superhero types.”
I slowly turn toward him. “Are you… Do you not think I’m the hard-bitten superhero type?” How could he?
“Well…”
“Uh-oh,” someone mutters as my jaw drops.
“I am too a superhero!” I insist. “I—”
“Alistair,” Percy intercedes, and I shut my mouth. “You know I think you’re a superhero, right? We talked about how valuable I find those skills during your interview for the team.”
Damn right we did. I nod, maybe a little sulkily. Can you blame me? The guy I’ve been weaving decadent sexual fantasies about doesn’t think I’m the special ops superhero type.
“Yes,” I mutter.
“So you and Aidan can resolve this… whatever it is later. Let’s stay focused on the primary issue.”
Before I can reply, Gideon’s talking. “Alistair’s right about the risk assessment. However you look at it, the value of any information we can gather is currently worth—”
“Worth more than Alistair’s life?” Sam sounds angry. “I can’t believe you said that!”
“Well, technically you said it.” Gideon reaches out and takes Sam’s hand, only to have it snatched away. “And it’s not what I was going to say.”
“What were you going to say?” My bestest bestie sounds pissed. It’s nice to know he loves me so much, but in this case, he needs to get over it.
“It’s worth deploying a covert operative into the area for recon, even given the level of danger.
That doesn’t mean Alistair should just stroll in there.
We know it’s inevitable that they’re going to notice him, so we need to work out what we need, what the safest and fastest way to obtain it is, and then build our plan around that. ”
Sam sniffs, and I bite my lip to hide a smile. See? Nobody can resist the wonder that is me.
“Okay, so what do we need?” Noah asks. “What information do we think we can get from Beker County that we can’t get elsewhere?”
“Tish’s location,” Ellie says immediately. “And anything about the elves.”
Yeah, because that’s going to be easy to lay hands on. The doubt I’m feeling is reflected in my teammates’ expressions.