“VINE has started to work on the logistics of the situation,” West said. “There are obviously a lot of moving parts to consider, and we cannot risk acting too quickly.”
Another round of agreement and disagreement—the static of Isaac’s electronic indignation hard on Took’s ears—kicked off. Graven finally broke his silence. The rough growl of his voice compelled attention without being raised.
“This pantomime is wasting time,” he said. “Why don’t you just tell us what we’re going to do, cardinal.”
Madoc raised his eyebrows and started to say something diplomatic. Before he could get more than the “I’m just an agent—” out, Dale interrupted him.
“Save the false modesty and the fake deference for another time.” Dale had been caught in his twenties for the last two hundred years. He added sharply, “The Biters do what needs to be done. That’s what they’re for. So what needs to be done?”
This time Madoc didn’t bother to hedge. He pushed himself off the wall and stepped forward. West held his ground at the head of the table as he straightened his back and spread his knees, as though he thought Madoc would just pull him bodily out of the chair.
He shouldn’t have worried. Madoc didn’t need the chair to claim the attention of everyone in the room, physically or electronically. The focus shifted naturally to him as he started to speak. Took felt an odd tickle of smugness as he watched everyone’s eyes shift to Madoc. He’d always enjoyed watching Madoc work a room, but now he felt a little bit more… possessive.
“We still don’t know what this group wants with these children,” Madoc said as he braced his knuckles on the table.
“Cult,” the mayor interjected. “I have seen no evidence that the leaders of the Proverbial Church have had any involvement in this terrible situation.”
Madoc gave him that point with a tilt of his head and a midexplanation correction. “Thiscultwants. The mayor is right, the abduction of dhampir children is far from the public doctrine of the Proverbials’ mission. Whatever aim the cult has, however, they want these children.” His attention flicked to the Anakim faces in the room, physically or not, and he smiled thinly. “Some of us are old enough to remember what excuses were made in the past when they stole our children. To save their souls. To raise them to kill their own. I remember the platitudes my own family used as they tried to starve the Devil out of me, beat it out. Whatever their motivation, however, they have gone to great lengths over the years to bring them here, to raise them and we can use that to draw them out.”
It was West’s turn to interrupt as he shifted in his chair. “I still say the best option is to press Waring for this information. Once he spills his guts about what he did or didn’t do, we can decide how best to proceed then.”
He always favored caution. It had been West who told Took that he didn’t have enough—any—evidence against Madoc, that he couldn’t afford to make any accusations until he had something concrete to back him up.
It had seemed like good advice at the time, but now Took wondered if it wouldn’t have been better to just rip the Band-Aid off back then. Madoc would still have been hurt by the accusation, but Took wouldn’t have wasted two years trying to resolve whether he could trust the Biters or not.
Of course, his dark little voice of paranoia murmured to him, that wouldn’t have suited West’s purposes.
It wasn’t a lie—West had been upfront about his ambitions to clear some of the old blood from VINE’s upper echelons—but it wasn’t relevant either. Maybe Took had just gotten so used to suspicion that he needed to slot in someone he didn’t trust.
Took leaned forward and cleared his throat to catch the attention of the assembled dignitaries.
He saw the flicker of morbid interest in a few eyes, the recognition and dark fascination about exactlywhathad happened to him, but for once, it didn’t make his brain claw at the inside of his skull to get out of there. Maybe the psych panel would bounce him from the team at the next eval, but for now, he was an active agent and he was still the best at what he did. They could pocket their prurient curiosity until he was done.
“Waring is willing to help,” he said. “But the price for him is pain.”
“It’ll harden him,” Graven said dourly.
Took cocked an eyebrow at that. The bits and pieces he remembered of his torture hadn’t particularly improved his life.
“Maybe,” he said. “The problem is that each time he speaks, the magic backlash knocks him out for hours. By the time he tells us anything useful, he’ll be cognitively impaired or dead. And we might be too late to find any of these children.”
Graven scowled but nodded. “So what do we do?”
“We get one actionable piece of information from Waring,” Madoc took back the meeting. He gave the assembled dignitaries a dry smile. “Then we act on it.”
Dale snorted and curled his lip enough to show the fine white point of a fang. “That’s not a plan. That’s a declaration you don’t trust us.”
“You?” Madoc inclined his head in a faintly courtly nod. “Perhaps, but who do you trust? We know this… cult… had someone in the Charleston fire department, and they were willing to burn down an entire neighborhood to cover their tracks. It’s more than likely there’s also sleeper agents in the police force and possibly even in VINE itself.”
The DA glanced between Graven and the mayor as he weighed where the backlash from that would land. “What makes you so sure?” he asked.
“It’s what I’d do,” Madoc said. He glanced at Dale, and something in his expression made the Senate representative carefully fold his lips back over his fangs. “It’s what I’ve done before.”
It was the director who picked a side first. She rapped her finger hard against the table. “I trust my people,” she said harshly. “But I trust them to accept that there are children’s lives on the line here too. Madoc can tell us what we need to know, but I will expect a full report afterward.”
It was only the mayor and West who objected in the end, and they were both outranked by the yes votes from the Senate reps. In the end they had to bend their heads and agree.
“You understand how this works, Agent Madoc,” the director said as she leaned forward and fixed him with her remaining bright green eye. A wing of hair hung over the side of her face and hid the socket, although she’d made no effort to disguise the raw, red scar on her jaw. “If you get these children back, then we’ll be happy to claim responsibility. If you don’t, then anything dubious you do was done without our knowledge.”
