Chapter 6
“Director Toring,” Iannis said coolly, recovering from the shock well before I did. “What an unexpected pleasure.”
“Yes, I suppose it is,” Garrett said, a faint smile playing on his lips as he held Iannis’s gaze.
The two stared at each other for a fraught moment, tension crackling in the air.
Despite Iannis’s deadly calm facade, I knew he was very displeased Garrett had showed up without so much as a phone call beforehand.
Garrett gestured to the other mage, who looked around thirty, with dark brown curls and an air of superiority.
“This is my assistant, Harron Pillick. I apologize for not sending word of our arrival, but the Minister and I agreed that for security reasons, it would be best not to do so.”
I clenched my jaw at the lie. Garrett might have been on some urgent mission, but there was no sincerity in his apology—he had meant to arrive without notice, to throw us off balance.
What was he here for? Did the Minister really know and choose not to tell Iannis?
My mind instantly went to Fenris, standing on my right.
I couldn’t see his expression, but panic and rage rolled off him at the sight of his deadliest enemy, in a way that deeply unsettled me.
Fenris was always so even-keeled, but I could sense his fight-or-flight response kicking in, and the urge to flee was intensely strong in him right now.
Garrett turned to him, his hazel eyes gleaming with interest and calculation.
“You must be Fenris,” he said casually, eyeing Fenris up and down like a wolf might a particularly juicy steak.
The irony wasn’t lost on me that of the two of them, Fenris was the actual wolf in the room. “I have heard much about you.”
“Surely nothing of interest,” Fenris said calmly, and I was both astonished and proud to see that he was smiling cheerfully, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. That would piss Garrett off for sure. “I am a mere shifter, after all.”
“Ah, but you are being too modest,” Garrett said, and his own smile didn’t waver one bit. “A shifter who studies magical theory is quite rare in Solantha, or even the entire Northia Federation. What prompted you to delve into an esoteric subject that is useless to your kind?”
“Director Toring,” I interrupted, sparing Fenris from having to respond. “Surely you didn’t take the trouble to come out all this way—”
“Trouble,” my ether parrot squawked. He materialized between Garrett and me, his glowing blue wings throwing off sparks of magic as they flapped in the air.
“What is that thing?” Garrett snapped, moving out of the parrot’s way.
“A little experiment of mine,” I said breezily—no way was I going to admit to Garrett that Trouble had been the result of an ether pigeon spell gone wrong. “His name is Trouble, and he appears every time I use the word. I’m still trying to smooth out that particular quirk.”
“Quirk,” Trouble squawked, and he sounded highly offended. The parrot turned his back on me and sailed over to Garrett, settling his glowing, feathered body onto the Director’s gilded head of hair.
“Well, I really must be getting back to the library,” Fenris said, stepping past Garrett, who was unsuccessfully trying to shoo the bird off his head.
Trouble wasn’t corporeal, so no amount of shaking or swatting affected him.
“I will come find you later, Lord Iannis, if I learn anything pertinent to these quakes.” He flashed me a grateful smile behind Garrett’s back before slipping out through the double doors.
“Quakes?” Garrett demanded, abandoning his attempts to dislodge the parrot from his head. “What quakes?”
“I fail to see why I should answer that, when you’ve yet to tell me the reason for your visit,” Iannis said, letting some of his annoyance seep into his voice.
“Oh, how rude of me,” Garrett exclaimed, and I nearly rolled my eyes.
“We are here about Thorgana Mills. My office has been working around the clock since the day of the prison fire. We now have proof that not only did Thorgana survive the conflagration, but her confederates are the ones who caused it.”
“Shit.” I’d known that was a possibility, even strongly suspected it. But to hear confirmation… Dammit. I’d really hoped she was dead. “So she’s on the loose again? What is she planning?”
“We don’t know,” Garrett admitted, displeasure coloring his voice. “But we did catch one of the arsonists. After a lengthy interrogation, he confessed that he overheard she might be heading to Solantha. Something about ‘squaring accounts’.”
A chill went down my spine at that. Was I one of the “accounts” Thorgana intended to square away?
She had every reason to want me dead, and Iannis as well—we’d thwarted her plans at every turn, and were the ones who had finally taken her down.
I tried to catch Iannis’s eye, but his shimmering violet gaze was firmly fixed on Garrett.
“Not now,” he said to me in mindspeak. “We’ll discuss this later.”
Aloud, he said to Garrett, “While I do appreciate you taking the time to relay this information, I don’t see why you had to come out all this way. A simple phone call or telegram would have sufficed. We are more than capable of handling Thorgana, as we have proven in the past.”
“I don’t doubt that,” Garrett said, sounding thoroughly unimpressed, “but I am under strict orders from the Minister to find and capture her myself. Her compatriots killed dozens of mages during the breakout, never mind her other crimes. He will not be satisfied until she is back behind bars, and if she happens to be killed while resisting arrest, so much the better. Besides,” he added silkily, “if Solantha is about to be hit by an earthquake, I imagine your hands will be full with preparations to secure the city. You could use my eyes and ears, Lord Iannis. I am very good at what I do.”
There was a long silence, and even though I hated the idea of Garrett being here, I couldn’t find any flaw in his argument.
We really were stretched thin right now, and Thorgana needed to be taken down.
It would be just like her to use the commotion of an imminent earthquake as a cover while she cooked up some plot to hit us hard and take down the Mages Guild in Solantha.
“Very well,” Iannis finally said. “I cannot argue with your logic, though I will bring the matter of your jurisdiction up at the next convention. But as you say, we are very busy preparing for a possible big quake, and I will not be able to spare significant manpower to assist you with this search. Now is really not the best time for a manhunt,” he said ruefully, and I knew then that he really would have preferred to go hunt for Thorgana himself, if only so that he could get Garrett out of here as quickly as possible.
“I’ll help,” I said, drawing the gazes of both men my way. “There will be little time for my usual magic lessons, and I have a personal stake in finding Thorgana. I’m not going to sit on my ass while waiting for her to come and kill me.”
“Perhaps we can devise a plan to draw her out, with you as bait?” Garrett’s assistant suggested, his eyes gleaming eagerly as he studied me. From his expression, his mind was no doubt racing, chewing on calculations, studying all angles.
“It might be worth considering,” Garrett agreed. “Although—”
“Absolutely not,” Iannis snapped, his eyes blazing. “Sunaya is my fiancée, Director Toring, not a tool for your personal use.”
“She’s also right here in this room,” I said irritably.
“And although I don’t love the idea of being bait, I wouldn’t be opposed to it in the right circumstances.
” Iannis opened his mouth to argue, but I cut him off.
“That’s not going to be my first plan of attack, and I definitely will not do anything like that without discussing it with you first. But I’m a trained enforcer with intimate knowledge of this city, including possible allies and suspects,” I pointed out.
“I even knew Thorgana before we identified her as the Benefactor.”
“Did you really?” Garrett asked, sounding intrigued. “In what capacity? I can’t imagine a wealthy, pampered socialite like her rubbing elbows with an enforcer.”
“I did a couple of security gigs for her,” I said coolly, not appreciating the insinuation that I was riffraff.
Garrett flinched slightly, as if realizing how offensive his statement was, and I wondered a little at that.
Did he actually care about my feelings? I’d scented interest from him once or twice during our return trip from Garai, but lust didn’t necessarily translate to affection.
“I don’t like this,” Iannis said in mindspeak, simmering with ire. “However, someone needs to keep an eye on Garrett while he’s here—to make sure he doesn’t go poking into things he ought not to.”
“No kidding.” I held in a sigh. “I’ll do my best to deflect any questions about Fenris, and keep his focus on Thorgana.”
“Sunaya makes valid points,” Iannis said to Garrett.
“She would be an asset in this search, and I can think of no one better to assign as your liaison. The two of you will work together to find Thorgana, but you will keep me informed every step of the way.” His eyes narrowed, and his voice turned dangerously soft.
“I will not overlook another slight, Director Toring.”
“Understood.” Garrett said stiffly, his scent changing subtly—he was wary of Iannis’s power, if not outright fearful. I wasn’t sure how powerful Garrett was, but clearly, he did not want to provoke an actual conflict. “Shall we meet for breakfast tomorrow to discuss our plan of action, Miss Baine?”
“Yes.” I paused for a moment, considering my options, then said.
“We’ll meet back here, in the Winter Garden room, at eight.
” I didn’t want to invite him into my suite for breakfast, nor was I interested in going to his—that would be all kinds of inappropriate.
“In the meantime, let’s get you settled in for the night.
” I rang a bell, summoning the Palace staff.
“Excellent.” Garrett smiled, his hazel eyes glinting. “I look forward to seeing what we might accomplish together.”
I don’t, I thought as I handed Garrett off to a servant who would show him and his assistant to appropriate guestrooms in the East Wing. By Magorah, we didn’t need this. But I met Iannis’s eyes again, and they were surprisingly steady.
We’ll find a way through this, his gaze said. We’ve been through worse.
Nodding, I slipped my hand into his, and we hurried down the hall to find out where Fenris had gone off to.