“You know they are, and you also know they do not care. You are at their beck and call as punishment for your actions with your cousin, and they all know I am never one to let the perfect opportunity to overcharge expenses pass me by.”
I snorted and clattered down to the second level as fast as I could without upsetting my headache or spilling my tea—the latter being the more important of the two. The guards at the double doors leading into the council’s chambers opened them as we approached, but the minute I stepped inside, the magic woven into the antechamber’s fabric to protect those in the main room from both regular and magically enhanced weapons detected my knives and sounded the alarm.
Of course, it was no longer necessary for me to carry them—these days, I could simply imagine them in my hand, and they appeared—but I still preferred to keep them close. That aside, the alarm going off every time I entered this room annoyed the hell out of the councilors in the room beyond and, as petty as it may be, that always made me happy.
Mathi switched the noise off, then motioned me on through the next set of doors. The meeting chamber was the size of a grand hall, without any of the usual decorations—no wall hangings, no crests, no paintings. Basically, there was nothing here that could be manipulated in any way by the elves or pixies present. Even the furniture was plastic. In normal circumstances, this would have given the shifters a serious advantage, thanks to their greater strength, but aside from the chamber being an electronic null zone designed to block listening and recording devices, it was also wrapped in magic so strong it actually prevented shapeshifting.
There were only five people in the room, which was very unusual. Two were light elves, two were shifters—one being the rat shifter who never seemed to miss a meeting and who also seemed to have taken a great dislike of me—and the fifth was a dark elf. That there were no Malloyei pixies here surprised me, because they were the most political branch of us all and always had a representative present. But given Mathi had only received notification two hours ago, maybe the notice had simply gone out too late for them—and everyone else—to get here. Very few Malloyei lived in Deva, be it the old section or the new.
My gaze was drawn to the far end of the table and the Myrkálfar sitting in Cynwrig’s usual position. Recognition stirred. It was Bodhrán, a thickset dark elf who’d accompanied Cynwrig to a previous meeting. His gaze met mine, and he nodded politely, but there was no instantaneous, hungry response from deep within me. Dark elves were renowned for their seductive nature and their ability to render even the stoniest maiden into a puddle of wanton desire, but this elf’s energy held none of the magnetism of the one who was about to become his king. That might be nothing more than my hormones remaining determinedly—stupidly—fixated on the man I could never have, but, given my father’s comment, it couldalso be due to the fact that he’d been deliberately set in my path by the opposition to cause chaos.
Game wise, it was a very good move, because chaotic was certainly an apt description of my feelings and responses to Cynwrig.
Mathi seated me at the head of the table then walked around to the right and claimed a chair not far from the convener, who, if his golden brown hair and sharply hooked nose were anything to go by, was some kind of hawk shifter.
He banged the gavel and said in a voice that held a sharpish edge, “Thank you for being so prompt, Ms. Aodhán.”
“Always eager to be of service,” I said blandly.
Mathi was too controlled to snort in such company, but I could nevertheless feel the deep amusement practically oozing from him.
The shifter raised an eyebrow, obviously sensing the insincerity, but simply pushed a red folder toward me. “Your next mission.”
I stopped the folder’s slide with my fingers but didn’t bother opening it. “Which is?”
“Aamon’s Pectoral. It gifts the wearer with invisibility.”
A pectoral, I knew from Lugh—who was not only my older brother, but an antiquarian with the National Fae Museum—was a pendant or ornament worn as a brooch or attached to a necklace. They often had iconography carved or painted on them, and while they generally had nothing more than symbolic importance, Lugh had told me there were some that had been blessed by the gods with certain “attributes” in return for the wearer’s devotion.
“I take it there’s a reason behind the sudden urgency to find this thing?”
“Indeed,” Bodhrán replied, his tone dry. “It appears that someone wearing the pectoral walked into the Tylwyth Teg bankjust before opening this morning, rummaged through the safe deposit boxes, and then presumably left with whatever they were there to find.”
Which definitely explained it. The Tylwyth Teg Banking Group was the largest fae banking group in the UK, and was used by a good portion of fae, who generally had little faith in human banks. I had never banked with Tylwyth Teg, even though it was just up the road from my tavern, and if his unconcerned expression was anything to go by, neither had Mathi.
“Whether gifted with invisibility or not,” I commented, “that should not have been possible. Not with the amount of alarms, heat sensors, and indeed all the security measures placed around and within the vault itself.”
“As we have noted in the file,” the shifter said, “it appears the brooch shifts the wearer’s being from flesh to vapor.”
His tone suggested we should read the file first before asking inane questions, which only made me determined to continue asking them. I was, as previously noted, nothing if not petty, especially when I had a booming fucking headache.
“While a vaporous form would certainly allow them to bypass security and even breach the vault’s defenses,” I said, “it’s unlikely they’d be able tophysicallyinteract with our world in any meaningful manner. They certainly wouldn’t be able to carry anything solid through either the building’s walls or the thickly constructed nature of a vault.”
“Unless, of course,” the rat man said, his voice as sharp and as unpleasant as his face, “the brooch’s gift extends to whatever the wearer was holding or has on their person, which we believe is the case here.”
I instinctively wanted to say that wasn’t possible, but we were dealing with a godly relic and impossible wasn’t a word in their vocabulary.
“The security cams didn’t catch anything unusual?” Mathi asked.
“I believe the IIT are still in the process of acquiring and examining the tapes, and have said they will brief us if and when they get anything solid,” the convener said. “In that regard, it’s likely your joint connections will give you more complete information far faster than whatever they decided to provide us with.”
Given Mathi’s father was the day commander of the IIT—or the Interspecies Investigation Team, as it was more properly known—that was a certainty, because Ruadhán had basically given him full access to IIT’s computers and records. The few restrictions he did have had been placed there by Sgott Bruhn—who was not only the night commander, but the man who’d been my mother’s lover for nigh on sixty years, and the only real father I’d ever known.
“Are we allowed to visit the crime scene?” I said.
The convener raised an eyebrow. “Again, it would probably be faster if you requested that directly yourselves, but I have to ask, why would you need to do so?”
“I might catch something they missed.”
