Chapter Three
EJ
EJ sent the pizza order ahead and ducked out of the cold wind into a specialty tea shop, his jacket flapping.
He was a coffee guy himself, but the shop imported expensive teas, the kind Aunt Jane and Uncle Bruiser liked.
Without telling his sister, EJ placed orders every month, double orders on holidays, to be sent to his aunt.
He never received thanks, but the gifts had never been returned either.
Tea—or hunks of meat from Hallelujah Bacon, a local artisan pig farmer—kept the queen and her Beast entertained and let her know he thought of her, and not because he wanted something.
Beast was the other soul that lived inside with the queen’s human one.
Beast was a mountain lion, and Aunt Jane could turn into Beast, or sometimes a half form that was human-Beast. She could turn into other animal shapes if needed, if she had the animal’s genetic material, but Beast was the favorite.
There were whispers that the crown she wore wasn’t something she had fought for and won, but rather that the crown had chosen her because she possessed two souls.
EJ didn’t know. He’d been too young to know the details and no one talked about such things if they valued not being eaten by Beast. So he sent Beast treats too.
Freedom was nice and EJ wanted as much autonomy as he could get, but he also wanted resources for the day the shit hit the fan. EJ had been trapped before. He knew the value of potential allies, assistance, and a protective place to retreat.
This time, for the first time, EJ might want something. A favor. Something big.
As he crossed the street, the wind tearing at his clothes and hair, he ruminated about the client’s personal irregularities and the fact that this case could be a setup for them or someone they loved.
He needed more data, and fast. “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action,” was a quote he’d learned as a royal child.
This scenario didn’t fit the quote perfectly, but well enough to make him dig deep and keep all options open.
Perhaps the most important thing to consider was the look on his sister’s face when Chancy entered the office.
That expression had warned him immediately that this case, and this client, were going to require additional resources.
His sister didn’t know he studied her nonverbal responses on the vids as intently as he did the clients themselves.
Her precognition had kept them alive several times as children, and he’d taught himself to recognize her tells, small things: the way her fingertips fluttered as if she were playing a piano, the tightening of her eyes, the way she closed her mouth, too firm, too stiff.
And then there was the sound of her magic. In the same way that Angie saw magic without casting a specific working, he heard it: soft notes, or tapping and ticking. The background melody of Angie’s magic had changed pitch when Chancy entered the office.
Her precog had stirred, for only a second. That was enough.
He entered the tea shop and engaged a second part of his mind, the frivolous part that made women happy.
Absently, he flirted with Londyn as she prattled about golden tips and first flush and all the desirable tea traits, which tea drinkers cared about.
He selected three new teas from Sri Lanka and had eight ounces of each overnighted to the queen’s official winter residence.
While he was prattling inconsequential things, his mind pulled up the humming tones of Chancy’s glamour, a passive working. Not something that would have sent him into the office, primed to end a threat. But one that had sent him to observe up close and personal.
“Dinner tonight?” Londyn asked.
EJ consciously considered their conversation over the last minutes and his attention to the case halted, as if he’d put a finger in a paper book and opened another.
Before he could reply she said, “I’ve got a really good vegetarian pasta recipe, with chickpeas, those new purple snap peas, and zucchini.”
EJ leaned over the counter and kissed her on the forehead. “We just caught a case. I can’t promise, so I’ll take a rain check.”
“So not fair,” she said, her narrow face tight just for an instant.
EJ smiled, paid for the tea and shipping, and left the store, glancing back once to wave.
Londyn was annoyed. It might be time to move on from this relationship.
He had discovered that humans who claimed to want only a casual relationship were usually not telling the truth, and since he was perfectly content alone in his own witch skin, when women started to want more from him than he had offered to give, he moved on. Fast.
The war had taught him to keep relationships on the surface. Anything more put people in danger.
A gust of wind howled down the street between the buildings and cut through to his skin, the first sign of a winter storm heading in from the northwest and slamming into the stationary, warm, high pressure that had been keeping the South unusually temperate into late autumn, even in the Appalachian Mountains.
Ducking into a shallow notch in the brick facade marking a wall between two buildings, EJ pressed his comms’ ear-patches into and over each of his ears, waited a moment until they adjusted to his ear shape, tapped the system on, and said, “Call Alex Younger.” The unicom put him through, and when the electronics genius answered, EJ said, “Update?”
“Still analyzing the vids you sent from your office, kid, and I have some programs creating some vid schematics for you. As we speak, I’m preparing a file on Ivyanna Holmes.”
“I’m preparing that,” EJ said before he could catch back the complaint.
“Ivyanna Holmes was on the queen’s property, in close proximity to the queen,” Alex stated. “That, Evan Everhart-Trueblood, means she gets my priority and our resources.”
What EJ wanted didn’t really matter, though stated more politely. Got it.
Watching traffic and the buses dropping off shoppers and workers, EJ tucked his hands under his armpits for warmth. The low pressure had brought hard winter to them.
Alex went on, unyielding, reminding him of the stakes. “You would have come to me at some point if for nothing but Ivyanna’s past paperwork. She’s been contracted to seven different vampires over the course of the last ten years, and we have all the contracts on file. You. Do not.”
Uncle Alex’s tone almost had EJ apologizing, but he managed to say instead, “That’s a lot of fang hopping.
” EJ took in the sidewalk with a quick glance.
Delivery bots crawled down the walkways.
To his right was a security bot armed with Tasers and what looked like a nine-millimeter weapon shaped into a third upper limb.
Expensive. A new model. It was guarding a high-end jewelry store and a leather bag and shoe store that catered to the city’s elite.
“All short-term contracts?” he asked.
“Yeah. One year max, which is interesting. Holmes gets around. She has a strong public and underground social media presence in the vampire world. Makes one wonder what she was looking for and never found. She is, or maybe was, human, depending on how much blood she ingested over the years. She was born totally mundane, not a witch, not a were, and no indication of a magical bloodline was discovered when she traced her genetic line seven years ago. All that should be in your inbox, when you get back to The Firm. Along with Eli’s and my security assessment of the fiasco at Kegs and Boots. ”
EJ didn’t respond to Alex’s statement that he wasn’t at The Firm.
His unicom wristband had a GPS tracker in it; so did his vehicle.
As the queen’s godchildren, there was little privacy in their lives, though usually it wasn’t quite so in your face as Alex was making it feel.
The fight at the bar must have really upset their godmother.
The queen’s security programs were better than anything he and Ojos could create, and though EJ could call on resources that Alex and the others at royal HQ didn’t know about—people he’d met in the war and after—he wouldn’t utilize those unless things were desperate. His background was still classified.
He had to react to the Kegs and Boots comment. “What was the reaction?” EJ asked.
“The queen saw it. Analyzed it. And then she said, ‘Fuck.’ ”
The queen didn’t cuss. Ever.
It was Alex’s and Eli’s job to keep the Dark Queen and her Consort safe, which meant keeping her clan and family safe from harm—from mundane or magical attack and from abduction, and since last night’s attack, that surveillance would grow only tighter.
Alex was probably watching him on some hacked security feed right now.
“Sorry about that. Go on,” EJ said, lightly, as if the queen hadn’t said the forbidden word. “Walter and I handled it.”
“You did. And quite well.” Alex changed the subject.
“Your missing woman, Holmes, shows only on human spectrum video on the event at the queen’s reception.
We have vid of her talking to fourteen fangheads and interacting with five witches, over thirty-two human blood servants, and two Onorios, in various groups. ”
EJ considered that as he pressed deeper into the wall’s small notch and scrunched his shoulders against the cold. In front of him, a dark gray Toyota approached, moving slightly slower than the regular traffic. The car behind it had to brake, which caught his attention.