Paranoid Mage - Chapter 14: Annoyances

Chapter 14: Annoyances

Callum couldn’t make a proper nexus with only two portal anchor pairs. There had to be a dedicated link between the cave-cache and where he put anchors that he was actually using, so the incident with the hacked anchor cut his links from three to one. Better than none, but he was very seriously considering recycling the teleportation pad into a portal anchor. They were just that useful.

The longer chain also meant he had to constrict his maximum perception distance, so he could have his maximum at the destination and not uselessly at the bottom of the ocean where he’d put the beginnings of his nexus. At least he’d already been practicing that, so it wasn’t as difficult as it might have been, but there was nothing like necessity to spur practice and repetition.

“We really need more enchanting materials, big man,” Lucy said, despite the fact that she was playing with the glass tiles. Not that she was wrong. The tiles were great, but they couldn’t act like anchors.

“I still have to recycle the pair that we had to break, but yes. We do,” Callum agreed.

“So how are we gonna get it?” Lucy leaned back in the couch and yawned. They were both low on sleep after the scare with the portal anchor and the subsequent scramble to minimize any further risk. It actually made him feel better that it wasn’t perfect, because it had seemed too good before. “We can’t put it off, ‘cause we need that flexibility.”

“Well, we could try going to the Night Lands again,” Callum said. “I’ve been once so I kinda know what I’m looking for, and I imagine the drone will work just as well over there as here.”

“Okay sure,” Lucy said. “But what about Fane’s stuff? I know he’s got to have a bunch.”

“I don’t think it’s right to just take from the House coffers,” Callum said with a frown. “That’s not just Archmage Fane’s wealth, it’s— oh, wait, the lab.”

“Yeah, the lab too. But like, might as well take House Fane’s stuff,” Lucy said, opening a soda with the characteristic pop-hiss of an aluminum can. “Not like they deserve it, is it?”

“That’s the kind of thinking that leads down a bad road, I think,” Callum said. “I mean, that’s money not just for people like Fane himself, but the janitors, the help, the children, all of that. You know?”

“I guess,” Lucy said, not entirely convinced but ceding the point with a shrug. “So, the lab. We definitely don’t want people reusing some of that stuff anyway right?”

“Very much,” Callum agreed. “And that is completely on Archmage Fane. I guess there’s some argument that it should be left as evidence, but I don’t think mages care much about evidence that way do they?”

“What, like police procedural stuff? Nah.”

“Right,” Callum said. “Not sure about trying it now, though. We just got hacked by Duvall; what if she’s still there?”

“She just got you ‘cause you didn’t clean up, and you’ll clean up this time. I mean, if she’s still there you’ll know before she can do anything right? Your long range radar and all that.”

“Yeah, but I don’t like taking the chance.”

“But as far as they know, you don’t have any more business there,” Lucy argued. “And now that we’ve told people about that lab someone is going to get to it, sooner or later. So there’s no reason to lay in wait for you, that’s just paranoia talking, but if we wait it’ll be crawling with mages and even more risky.”

“Hm.” Callum considered it, and had to grant the point. “Alright, we’ll have to see if there are people there already, but if not we can loot it. I should have thought of that when we found that damn place but I was just too disturbed.”

“Yeah seriously.” Lucy’s nose wrinkled and she shuddered. “I don’t know if I’m looking forward to tearing that stuff apart or don’t want to even touch it.”

“Hopefully the former, because we might have lot of it to do. So long as I can get stuff by teleports. I’m sure as heck not sending either of us over there to start unscrewing things,” Callum cautioned her.

“Yeah, I’m on board with that,” Lucy said. “Creepy place in the middle of a bunch of House Fane people? That’s just straight up horror movie stuff.”

“It is,” Callum agreed, and reached through his linked portals to start moving the drone. He was glad they had the more powerful repeater, since it was going through more links even if the ocean-bottom portal nexus was just two anchors in a block of steel instead of one.

Even with the Alcubierre style movement it took time to move the drone all the way around the world to China. He could only go in short jaunts with a fairly rough idea of where he’d land, and they had to home in on the target more or less manually. The two of them ended up watching some streaming movie for most of it, since there wasn’t anything that required much brainpower.

They approached the House with rather more care than the first time, with Lucy landing the drone well outside the perimeter and Callum moving it in with teleports. This time, though, he was more careful. He’d gone back to his old standby of ball bearings, since they were cheap and he didn’t actually care if they knew that he’d been there. Only that they couldn’t actually trace his vis.

Something that had obviously become critical. Archmage Fane could kill anything his vis touched, so other Archmages probably had similar talents. Like Duvall and her ability to compromise his anchors. So he needed to make sure there were no traces of his magic anywhere, or as close to that as possible.

He left a little trail of ball bearings as he teleported his way in past the wards and smaller buildings, back to where the lab was. For some reason he’d expected to have to wait for people to clear out, even if it was late evening over in China, but it was deserted. It didn’t look like anyone had even gone down there, and Callum realized that he hadn’t exactly shown where it was. The entrance was deep inside Fane’s house anyway, and that seemed to be off limits for everyone, at least so far.

Which gave him space to ransack the lab. Despite Lucy’s arguments, he was worried that Duvall might reappear at any moment, and there was no telling what she could do if she were prepared and found an active portal of his. So even if it was deserted he had to be as fast as possible. If it weren’t for the fact that they really needed the portal materials he probably still wouldn’t.

There was a lot of enchanted stuff there, though much of it was just part of the room. Anything that was mounted in furniture or appliances was pretty much off-limits, unless he could teleport out screws and such to free it from the mountings. Which he could probably do given time, but he didn’t have that time.

The ward box was an obvious target, since he and Lucy had already disassembled those and found that they were mostly recyclable. But the wards dropping would probably draw attention, so that would have to go last. Instead he focused on the strongest, most mana-dense and highest-purity signatures in the tools that lined the shelves and counters of the lab.

He had no idea what most of them did and really didn’t want to. They probably were dangerous to activate, so he was hardly going to play with them himself, though he could just transcribe them later on. The richest strike seemed to be a set of sealed chambers, each of them maybe a foot in diameter, each with a sphere hanging from the ceiling. The spheres were solid chunks of metal and glass and, most importantly, nearly pure enchanting material along with energy-charged crystals. The way the chambers were arranged and furnished reminded him of incubators, with the enchanted sphere as the lightbulb, but they were thankfully empty so he had no idea what they might be for.

Each sphere was secured to the ceiling with ordinary chains and charged with one of the vis or mana crystals, which was something he was very much looking forward to getting his hands on. Since there were no screws or other complicated mounting means he simply teleported them off their chains and into a distant corner of the cave-cache.

He would have preferred moving it further, but with only one anchor he didn’t have the options. The enchantments were active and he did not want to deal with whatever effects the thing created. The best he could do was put it somewhere he could see that the magic didn’t overlap anything he cared about.

The tools from the shelves went to a different corner, and then he put together a water grenade to take out the ward box and the associated feeder portals. Trying to shift that while the enchantment was active would be impossible, or at least inadvisable, considering all the spell forms around it. Before he actually deployed it, he made sure he had lots of the vis cleanup beads around, since he had to assume someone would notice and investigate such a big change. There was no way he wanted another portal hack.

While he’d tested the slightly improved grenades before, seeing the damage they did to a real object was sobering. Instead of just bending the trays out of shape he actually blew the side out of the ward box and sent it ricocheting off the wall. Callum winced at that, making a mental note to dial down the amount of compression he was using. He just wanted stuff disabled, not destroyed.

Even with the debris it only took a few moments to scoop up the ward box and scatter a number of cleanup beads across the area to make sure there was nothing left of his vis. Then he put several more on the roof where the drone was before recalling it back to the cave-cache and closing the portal.

“That didn’t take long,” Lucy observed. He’d kept up a running commentary because she could hardly see what he was doing, and it surprisingly helped clarify his thoughts to actually say what he intended to do. It was only while talking about it that he realized it would be incredibly stupid to teleport out the screws holding the incubator enchantment spheres in place instead of just separating the links of the chain holding them up, for example. He just found it far too easy to get fixated on a particular solution.

“Yeah?”

“Man, I know that you do all the planning ahead of time normally but it took like five minutes. You’re quick.”

“Not when it counts,” Callum said with a grin, and Lucy laughed and blushed.

“You got me there, big man,” she said.

Since they’d already had experience with breaking down enchanted goods, it wasn’t really a difficult process to start tearing stuff apart. Which was for the best, because he was barely paying attention, his senses focused on the incubator enchantments as they ran down. Something that took longer than it should have because of the ambient mana in the cave-cache. It would have taken far longer if he hadn’t been able to disconnect the crystals fueling them.

“You awake there, big man?” Lucy said, startling him.

“Yeah, I’m just keeping an eye on these things,” he told her. “They’re about out of juice but I don’t trust ‘em.”

“I wouldn’t trust anything from Fane’s dungeon either,” Lucy said.

“So while we’re waiting, what exactly are these?” Callum asked Lucy, putting the crystals on the table. Each of them was about the size of a grape, with six sides and flat ends, and looked like polished quartz. Certainly they didn’t stand out very much to the naked eye, but he could feel the enormous amount of mana inside. Which was odd, since he would have thought that would have ended up in some kind of enchantment instead of just being a magical capacitor.

“All I know is that the Guild of Enchanting makes them,” Lucy said. “They’re not, like, dug out of the ground or anything.”

“Huh,” Callum said, examining the crystals. Experimentally, he poked his vis into it and tried to siphon out some of the mana, finding it to be as easy as pouring water out of a glass. The same went for pushing mana into it, though that was harder simply by virtue of his lack of control over ambient mana. Vis didn’t seem to want to stick at first, but once he emptied it out completely – bringing it below the ambient even in Texas – it accepted his vis.

“Seems like it holds a lot,” Callum said, as he tried to fill it up. “Either that or I don’t have much endurance.”

“I’m certainly not looking to complain, big man,” Lucy winked at him. He winked back. “Seriously though, I haven’t really heard of any other mages running out of vis, not like you do. Guessing it’s part of your whole general thing.” She waved vaguely in his direction.

“I’d have to ask that Archmage about it,” Callum said with a sigh. That certainly wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. Maybe ever. The man had seemed neutral enough but there was a big gap between neutral and trusted.

“Something to put on the list,” Lucy said. “I remember seeing something about the thaum capacity of mages a while back, so I can probably find it again.”

“I hope so,” he agreed. “I wish GAR digitized more records.”

“You and me both, big man.”

It wasn’t the most cheerful of notes to start work on, but at least with the recycling they could make visible progress. Callum did end up transcribing the enchantments on the incubators – or whatever they actually were – on the off chance they weren’t something horrific. It might well be something that Fane had created and was unique to the lab, and Callum wasn’t quite ready to destroy an enchantment that he didn’t understand.

Lucy even took pictures, just in case, before they started tearing the thing apart. Each of the incubators supplied enough nearly-pure mordite to make a portal anchor pair, which was the largest influx of material yet. The rest of the stuff was rather less pure, less potent, and could be relegated to things like their own set of wards. They even had enough that Lucy could start on proper integration between metal enchants and the obsidian tiles.

That meant another go-round with the local metal shops. Callum really wanted a CNC machine, but they were hilariously expensive as well as bulky, and there wasn’t any point in making that kind of investment until they were fully moved into the bunker and had a shed or something. Lucy’s new 3D printer, even if it was one of the miniature ones, took up enough space as it was.

There was only one change made to the base anchor design, and that was to make it so the core, the bit that had to be cut in half, wasn’t permanently fixed in place. Instead of being a solid, integral piece inside of a metal shell, it was held together with little locking pins. Considering the amount of prototyping they were doing, setting it up so he could move the core to some other sort of projection enchantment only made sense. It made the anchors slightly larger, but they didn’t need to be implantable like his gut portal.

“So how exactly are we going to do this nexus?” Lucy asked from her armchair in the rear of the van. Until they had more options for their nexus, Callum wasn’t comfortable hanging around the same spot too long. He didn’t entirely trust that their location, at least in general, hadn’t been compromised when the portal had been accessed. So they were in the van, and Lucy very reasonably didn’t want to hang around in a bare, boring rear compartment.

They’d furnished the back of the vehicle with some chairs and desks bolted to the floor, and Lucy had even put up a few posters of some bands she liked. It was not and never would be a place to live, but it was at least more welcoming than before. Hopefully it wouldn’t be necessary for very long, assuming there was no sign of anyone snooping around any of their holdings.

They’d stopped for lunch on the way to the metal shop they’d sent their designs to, because there had been a problem with the order. The shop didn’t want to ship to a PO Box, and under the circumstances it was faster to just pick it up rather than try to convince some underling to send it anyway.

That time the business was actually in Colorado rather than Texas, so the van pulled double duty. He rarely actually drove any real distance, simply using the drone to teleport the van to some handy spot near his destination and arriving in the van to keep up the façade of normalcy. It also gave Lucy the opportunity to do some wardriving and catch up on whatever she was involved in from the internet security side of things.

“Well, we have to have a way to defend against it getting compromised. I have to assume that eventually someone might stumble across an active anchor no matter how careful I am. If not the nexus itself. So, bottom of the ocean for now, but a water mage wouldn’t have any trouble with that I imagine.”

“Yeah okay, so why not put it in one of those underwater vent things? Smokers, I think?” Lucy said, and Callum pursed his lips in consideration but she wasn’t done. “Wait, you’re looking into making new portal world portals so what about in a completely different portal world! Oh, even better! Put it on the moon!”

“The moon.” Callum raised his eyebrows at Lucy.

“Sure! I mean, portals don’t care how far away something is right?”

“I suppose not,” Callum said slowly. “But getting to the moon is not easy, even when you have spatial abilities.”

“Aw, c’mon, don’t you want to have a secret moon base?” Lucy said, draping herself against him.

“I definitely wouldn’t say no to a secret moon base,” Callum said, putting an arm around her. “But I don’t think we’re quite there yet. I mean, if nothing else I’m pretty sure there’s no mana out there. Hardly any when you get up high, and the moon is really high.”

“Oh man, I’m gonna get to design magic rockets,” Lucy said.

“Maybe, but first you gotta design the bottom-of-the-ocean nexus,” Callum replied. “Like, a hydrothermal vent— isn’t that going to be just as vulnerable to water mages? Or will the temperature make it hard for them? I guess it depends on how they come at it.”

“I mean, I guess it’d be better if you could stick it in lava but that would probably just melt.”

“Yeah, too hot and it will ruin mordite and corite both,” Callum agreed. “So we’ll have to be careful of where we put it.”

“Right, I’ll get to sketching,” Lucy said.

“Yeah. I guess I’d better get back to driving.” Callum shifted himself up to the front of the van and pulled out of the restaurant parking lot. Only a few minutes later he arrived at the address on the shop’s site, a gravel lot on the outskirts of a minor city.

He opened a portal back into the rear to give Lucy a kiss before he headed in to see if he could get their anchors. The man behind the counter looked bored enough until Callum gave the order number. The moment he typed it into the computer at the counter his eyes widened and he looked faintly panicked.

“I’ll go check,” the guy said, and hurried into the back. Callum frowned and created a portal to listen in, since there was obviously something going on. His perceptions didn’t pick up on anything too unusual, nothing supernatural anyway, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t trouble brewing.

“Hey, that guy is here,” the clerk told his apparent supervisor.

“What guy?”

“The one that ordered that pattern on the watchlist. Terrorist dude.”

“Oh. Oh!Well call the goddamned cops, don’t just tell me.”

Callum made a fist beneath the counter. He could read between the lines pretty easily and it was clear that he wasn’t going to be getting the anchors today. Possibly ever. There was no telling which party had clued people in to the enchantment patterns he was using, because of course it had to be the enchantment part. Nothing else about what he was doing was unique.

What really pissed him off was that he’d already paid for it. Lucy had handled that account so it didn’t lead back to them directly, but they’d still have to burn it now that it was compromised. Also the destination address, and the email, and associated IDs. The only disguise he had on was some putty to change his nose, and a hat to hide his hair, but that would probably be enough. He didn’t really stand out.

In a way he was surprised that there weren’t already a bunch of federal agents crawling around. Or that they hadn’t sent the package anyway with an attempt to catch him picking it up. Probably that bit of missed opportunity was the shop acting on its own. He doubted that some proper federal agent had come and told them exactly what to do if an enchantment order showed up. No, if this random shop in Colorado had the information then it was something that had gone out to all of them, some bulk mailing from the GAR central office. Or some alphabet soup agency.

He focused on the area again, sweeping around in case he’d missed anything obvious, though if someone was lying in wait they probably would have sprung the trap already. There was nothing supernatural, but there were a pair of people in a car across the street with holstered guns. Maybe they were just normal people, but he couldn’t help thinking they were government agents.

Callum dropped some cleanup beads and teleported back out to the van. No point in waiting around to see what else the shop had to say, let alone what the authorities might do. Lucy glanced up as he popped into existence in the back of the van and saw the look on his face.

“What happened?”

“We got found out,” Callum said, hearing the disgust in his own voice. “Nobody’s after us yet, but let me drive us out of here.”

“Right,” Lucy said, and he teleported himself up front and climbed into the driver’s seat . The car didn’t follow, but they might be tracking with satellites or something. He definitely didn’t have the range to tell anything on that score. Still, all he needed to do was turn off into a wooded driveway, screened from the road and the house, and he was ready to leave.

He reached into his cache for a number of washers, turned them into vis-cleaning enchants, and dropped them underneath the van. It wasn’t actually an emergency, so for the sake of Lucy’s comfort he took the time to assemble the teleport for the van out of tubes and brought them back to the cave. Only then did he return to the back of the vehicle.

“So, what are we doing now?” Lucy asked, visibly nervous.

“Well, we have to assume everything related to the request is compromised. Email, bank account, address, ID ⁠— everything. The van too probably, but it’s just a van so all we need is new plates. So I guess I need you to try and empty out the accounts in some untraceable way and make sure there’s no connections back?”

“That much I can do,” Lucy agreed. “Well, we’ll have to stop off somewhere to pull the cash out but there’s not much left in there. Like a hundred bucks or something.”

“Well that’s good,” Callum said. “Is everything else secure?”

“I think so,” Lucy said. “I’ll go through it all though. Once people start digging there’s a lot of weird connections people can make though.” She wrinkled her nose, obviously thinking how she’d been found out. “Better make triple sure.”

“Thanks,” Callum said, and sighed, leaning against the inside of the van. “Dammit, I’m going to need to buy CNC stuff now. Not ready for that.”

“Shouldn’t be more than a couple weeks before we have room for one,” Lucy said.

“Yeah, but a couple weeks without portal anchors,” Callum grumped. “Okay, I did plenty fine before I had them but still. I want a full nexus.”

“They can’t possibly have reached every metal shop in the world,” Lucy said. “We can just go down to Brazil or something.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Callum said. “I just hate being pushed out of my home. I’m going to have to do something about that eventually.”

“That’s not ominous at all.”

“Well, it’s all the same thing, right?” Callum started charging the telepad to head back to the Texas trailer. “GAR’s the one fueling all this. I’m already at odds with them, so when that problem gets solved, this all goes away. That’s the theory, anyway.”

“The theory, huh?” Lucy stepped onto the telepad with him and squinted as she tried to trigger it. After a minute she shook her head, but Callum wasn’t too disappointed. The telepad was not set up for being triggered by someone else, since it used only the most basic of enchantments.

“Yeah, I’m sure it won’t be that simple,” Callum said with a sigh. “But one thing at a time.”

***

“Be damned with Duvall,” Lorenzo Rossi growled. “What is she thinking, shutting down the entire transport network in the middle of a manhunt?”

“Perhaps she forgot that its not just her enemies that use it,” Ordermaster Minot suggested diffidently. “There has been much public unhappiness about Duvall of late.”

“And there’s going to be more,” Rossi grumped. “If we’d had the network we might have been able to get there before Wells arrived.”

“Even BSE teams couldn’t capture him,” Minot pointed out. “It’s unlikely our own people would have performed much better.”

“We don’t need to capture him,” Rossi said. “We just need to make him stop spreading our designs around! I’m sure we could cut a deal.” With Wells able to contend against Archmages, especially Archmage Fane, it was no longer an issue of dealing with some heretic mage on the outs with everyone. He was a power in his own right, and required somewhat more careful dealing.

It was still imperative to stop Wells from flinging around their designs freely and openly, regardless of his reasons. Preventing him from using them at all was probably impossible, but there were possibilities. Another source of spatial vis for enchanting wouldn’t go amiss, especially if he could negotiate a better deal than the one with House Duvall.

“We can look into alternate methods of getting in contact with Wells,” Minot suggested. “Hunting him down has proven to be a problem for, well, everyone. Yet it’s almost certain he is in communication with, for example, Scaletooth.”

“Who doesn’t care about enchanting at all,” Rossi pointed out. The dragonblooded had never been tempted by anything the Guild of Enchanting had created, and they even eschewed the transportation network for the most part. “But you’re right. There may be another way to get to him. Thank goodness we’ve at least stopped him from spreading stuff around for now.”

The Guild had spent a substantial amount of money and not a few favors getting mundane detectives and law enforcement to canvas the entire United States and Europe. That had involved revealing some small portions of the enchantments Wells was using, but the core parts were barely secrets anyway and without the whole thing most people wouldn’t be able to put it together.

Even then it was not so much the secrecy itself as the knowledge that it was the Guild’s secret. The best way to harness Wells was to get him on the Guild’s side. Obviously not with threats — that had not gone well for anyone so far. But if Wells was making black-market enchantments by blindly cribbing designs, he likely could use the expertise of real enchanters.

“Very well, see if you can get a meeting with Scaletooth. The more we have to deal with Wells the hard way the more things are likely to escalate.” Rossi frowned. “At the same time, we might as well pursue whatever leads the mundanes turn up. No sense in wasting that investment.”

***

The skinwalker snarled and lashed out with its ragged, rotted-black nails, and Chester slid back out of range, claws scraping on the tile of the despoiled kitchen. With its human guise shed, the monstrosity was even taller than Chester, skin like tanned leather overstretched on a gaunt, too-long frame with muscle and sinew like steel cords. The thing was incredibly ugly, as befit such a monster, and stank of cold and rot.

Since GAR had more or less blacklisted them, they’d run out of corite ammunition in their spats with Ravaeb’s forces — not that they’d had much to begin with. Chester hadn’t been trading favors with the right people, so they were down to claws and blades, which was how the fae liked it. They would even call it fair, which meant it was anything but.

Roy lunged in with his corite dagger, punching a hole through the tough hide of the thing’s back, and jumping away again as it rounded on him. Thick, lumpy black blood oozed from the wound, but it didn’t seem to be slowing the skinwalker down. They were tough bastards, which was why it took him and the Wolfpack to deal with this one rather than leaving it to the local Alpha.

That and it had eaten the local Alpha, which was how it’d gotten noticed in the first place. Even skinwalkers couldn’t manage to replace a shifter in the pack bonds, the connection the symbiotes created among themselves. Chester wasn’t sure why the skinwalker had even tried, save for that shape-changing fae seemed to have an especial hatred of shifters.

Chester sprang in the moment the skinwalker turned, sinking his claws into the thing’s back. It felt simultaneously like trying to dig through steel and like cutting rotted meat, a thoroughly unpleasant sensation compounded by the fae’s mana rattling against his own.

It was a contest the skinwalker lost, of course, since a single fae couldn’t stand up to the power of Chester’s entire pack, funneled upward to him. He rent and tore, and leapt back when the thing’s arms bent entirely the wrong way to try and cut his throat. John took his turn flanking with his own dagger, the three of them whittling it down rather than just grappling it. Chester could simply tackle it and outlast the thing, but there was no point in doing anything that stupid when they could kill more safely and efficiently some other way. It was strong and fast, but not stronger or faster than the Wolfpack or Chester, and it was outnumbered.

Three minutes later it had slowed enough, not from blood loss as it seemed to have an unlimited supply of the stinking, half-clotted stuff, but from severed tendons and punctured muscles. Crippled that way, Chester simply bore it down to the blood-smeared tile floor and severed its spine at the neck, grimly sawing his way through until he beheaded it.

“These things are awful,” Roy rumbled, holding his arms out so his claws wouldn’t accidentally smear any of that awful black blood on his fur. “I think we’re going to have to burn this place.”

“Probably,” Chester agreed. He scraped his own claws across the wood of the wall in an effort to clean them, but it was already hopeless. He was going to have to bathe in lye or something to get the stink out.

“How many of these does Ravaeb have?” John asked, staring down at the corpse. “They’re tough.”

“Only when they’ve successfully replaced someone,” Chester said. “The more they follow their story the stronger they get, but fae this nasty rarely get the chance.”

“Good thing, too,” John said.

“Yeah, well, with Ravaeb encouraging them we’re only going to see more problems.” Chester scowled.

“I hope you’re not intending to walk into Yellowstone,” Roy said dryly, trying to wipe off his own claws. The house was a loss, and Chester was only glad that the late Alpha Moore’s mate and children had gotten out of there before something worse could happen.

“Hardly. No, Ravaeb is not someone I could reach without major casualties. But perhaps there is someone who could reach him.”

“Yeah?” Ray frowned at his claws, which still were stained black.

“We will have to see what Mister Wells has to say. If anyone can eliminate a fae king in his lair, it would be him. And if anyone has earned it, it would be Ravaeb.”