Chapter 20

Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, I realized I was nearing the end of a trip quite literally around the world. Vancouver to Copenhagen to Ho Chi Minh City and back to Vancouver, crossing three different continents and spanning two oceans.

My biggest regret—other than the general suckiness of letting Kade escape with the weapon—was that I'd been too busy being an agent to be a tourist. I'd hit one Viking ruin in Denmark but missed out on Legoland and a whole schwack of castles and museums. Don't even get me started on Vietnam: Halong Bay, the Golden Bridge, Ban Gioc waterfall, not to mention the multitudinous markets, street vendors, national parks, and restaurants.

Instead, I was heading back to Canada for the briefest of moments before jetting off to New York City. There were no shows on Broadway, views from the Empire State Building, or strolls through Central Park in my future.

When we landed at the Vancouver International Airport, we didn't even get that universal pleasure of exiting the airport with maximum haste enjoyed by every long-haul flight passenger. Instead, Lienna and I followed Darius to a small, out-of-the-way gate at the opposite end of the terminal where a private charter plane awaited us.

The ex-assassin had made some calls before we vacated Vietnam, and to absolutely no one's surprise, he knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a filthy rich guy who was willing to loan us his private jet to save the world. Though if Mr. Big Bucks had known our history of road-vehicle-related destruction, he'd have been less than keen at offering up his luxurious Bombardier aircraft.

Anyway, that's how I found myself standing under a dreary noon sky, squinting at the sleek white jet with bloodshot eyes, wondering if it included a bed. Hell, I'd sleep on the floor as long as no one drove a drink cart over my slumbering form.

Darius had ditched us on the tarmac with his luggage, vanishing back into the airport for some mysterious errand. Maybe he wanted to buy one of those cushy neck pillows that prevent your head from bobbing weirdly while you slowly lose consciousness from sleep deprivation.

Sweet Somnus, I needed some shut-eye.

Unfortunately, I wouldn't be getting any sleep—not until our team had properly assembled and we were on our way to the Big Apple.

Sitting beside Lienna at the foot of the steps leading up to the plane, I fantasized about pillows, blankets, and king-sized mattresses. Maybe there was an obscure sleep-related psychic ability I could tap into. "Allucinators" could control others' dreams, but maybe there was a skill that would allow my mind to enter a state of much-needed dormancy while still fulfilling my day-to-day duties. Clairnappience? Hibernesis? Teletorpidity?

Lienna nudged my foot with hers. "They're here."

I looked up. Captain Blythe was striding across the tarmac toward us, a carry-on suitcase rolling along beside her and her blue glare laser-beaming into my skull. Vinny and Tim followed in her wake.

"Kit!" she barked. "You'd better be ready with that ‘full explanation' you promised me."

Before I could summon a response from the foggy recesses of my lethargic mind, her attention snapped to Lienna.

"Agent Shen," she said with noticeably less venom.

The juxtaposition between our respective greetings was both stark and strange: the colloquialism of my first name versus Lienna's formal address; and Blythe's tone of "I am one wrong word away from spit-roasting you over a vat of nuclear waste" for the psycho warper, while the abjuration sorceress had received words with notes of respect.

The captain was a complicated—and often terrifying—enigma.

I pushed to my feet and stepped aside, gesturing grandly for the newly arrived trio to approach. "Welcome aboard. Where are Vigneault and Cutter?"

"They're keeping the precinct running while I'm gone." Blythe stalked past me. When she reached the bottom step, she released her suitcase, and it floated ahead of her as she ascended.

"Where did you get a private jet?" Vinny hissed, gingerly kicking the stairs as though he suspected it was all an elaborate warp.

I wiggled my fingers at him. "I work in mysterious ways, Agent Park."

He squinted suspiciously at me as he followed Blythe upward. Tim didn't say anything; he just arched his eyebrows so high they almost detached from his face.

Lienna and I boarded last. The jet's interior was about as swanky as you'd expect: varnished wood paneling, a fully stocked bar, which we would unfortunately not be taking advantage of, and cushy leather chairs. There were only eight seats, which, in a space that a commercial airliner would have packed the population of a small country into, amounted to enough legroom for Robert Wadlow to fully stretch out.

After tucking their bags away in the dedicated baggage compartment next to the bathroom, Blythe, Vinny, and Tim swiftly selected seats. I plonked onto a cushy chair across from my fellow agents, and Lienna took the spot next to me. This opulent sky wagon had clearly been designed with socializing and/or business dealing in mind, because all the chairs could swivel, allowing for easy conversation.

"Were you able to get a hold of Ashbluff?" I asked before Blythe could launch into a tirade about my insubordinate secret-keeping.

She crossed her legs at the knee. "I spoke with half a dozen assistants, managers, and security personnel and left a message with Ashbluff's office."

"That's it?" I asked, my gut sinking. "Didn't you tell them that a rogue agent with a potential weapon of mass magical destruction is going to?—"

"Of course I did. I was assured that they take security ‘very seriously.'" She hit the air quotes so hard I almost expected them to manifest on either side of her head like one of my warps. "But as I pointed out on our call, you haven't sufficiently explained what this weapon is, how you know Kade's plans, or how we're supposed to do a damn thing about either."

"Been wondering all that myself," Tim remarked dryly.

Beside him, Vinny nodded.

"Well, you see…" I hedged. "I've been working on this investigation from a few different angles. Not all those angles have been, shall we say, wholly aboveboard."

Blythe's eyes blazed, but before she could comment, footsteps sounded on the plane's stairs. A moment later, two men stepped into view.

Darius boarded first, a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. Accompanying him was the Crow and Hammer's first officer. Girard was around Darius's age, but where the ex-assassin was a well-dressed silver fox, Girard had a "Western gentlemen circa 1920" air to him, with chin-length, steel-gray hair, a short beard, and a mustache that challenged Eggert's for magnificence.

Blythe lurched out of her seat, face twisting at the sight of Darius. "What the hell are you doing here?"

I cleared my throat. "He's one of those not ‘wholly aboveboard' angles I mentioned."

Her glare flashed to me then back to Darius. The awkwardness in the ensuing silence was so palpable it made my very soul cringe.

"Aurelia," Darius murmured. "If you can allow me a moment to talk to the crew, once we take off, I'll explain."

"Explain what?" she snapped.

"Everything."

Her eyes widened briefly before she controlled her expression. Jaw clenched, she dropped back into her chair and folded her arms.

Darius handed his duffel bag to Girard, then disappeared through a curtain at the front of the plane.

You're in deep shit.Tim's voice in my head was half amused, half intrigued. How long have you been playing double agent?

It's not like that,I retorted with a sharp internal thought, then swiveled toward Girard. "Did Darius volunteer you for this wacky adventure?"

Girard grinned through his mustache as he selected a seat, leaving the one beside me empty for Darius.

"He figured we could use some extra Arcana expertise—and firepower." He nodded at Lienna. "Not to suggest you aren't an expert, but I've developed something of a specialty when it comes to weapons."

"We're happy to have you," Lienna replied graciously.

Some of us were. Blythe looked ready to test whether her telekinesis could yank a man's intestines out of his nose, which was about as far away from "happy" as one could be on any imaginable spectrum of emotion.

The plane's engines started a moment later, and Darius reappeared. He sat between me and Girard, and I belatedly realized we'd created an unfortunate "Darius's team versus Blythe's team" vibe with the center aisle as no man's land.

The appreciable awkwardness clouding the cabin increased steadily while we waited to speed down the runway and whoosh up into the sky. Blythe's seething disposition suggested she was continuing to contemplate the variety of ways she could disassemble Darius's innards, while the GM himself remained so still I was briefly concerned he'd been zapped by a holding spell.

When the seat belt light blinked off, Blythe shucked off her safety strap and spun her chair to face Darius.

"What do you have to do with Kade and this weapon Morris reported?" she demanded.

Ah crap, I was back to "Morris" again. Not even Agent Morris. How far down her shit list had I fallen?

The deepest shit, Tim whispered helpfully in my mind.

Darius's gaze moved across Blythe's face in a searching look layered with unspoken things I couldn't even guess at. With that inscrutable glance, the airborne awkwardness that was damn near suffocating me morphed into brusque anticipation. I realized I was holding my breath—and it looked like everyone else had forgotten to exhale as well.

"I've thought about this a thousand times over the last twenty years," Darius began in a slow, measured voice, as though weighing each word. "And a thousand times, I decided there were countless reasons to keep my silence and only one reason to break it."

Despite the fact that six people were hanging on his every word, he was speaking only to Blythe. Her eyes had gone wide again.

"But that's changed," he continued. "Now, I have every reason to tell you, and only one to stay silent—the fear that the truth won't make a difference, not after this long."

Blythe held completely still. A subtle shift had come over her features: an open, naked vulnerability I'd never seen before and couldn't have imagined on my harsh, commanding captain's face.

"Now?" she said hoarsely. "You're going to tell me now? Because of this?"

"Yes."

His answer was simple, and fury burned across her face, overtaking the vulnerability. She gripped her seat's armrests, the ferocity of her glare back in full force.

"This all began with what seemed like a routine contract twenty-three years ago," Darius said. "A former Special Investigations agent had gone rogue and was selling classified information. I tracked him down in Chicago and eliminated him. As I was cleaning the scene, I found correspondence between him and his buyers. What caught my attention was the information he was leaking: details of illegal actions by certain agents within Special Investigations.

"The rogue was selling the information to be used to blackmail SI members. I collected everything I could find and turned it over. I assumed it would trigger an internal probe into the bad actors within the SI. Instead, the evidence I submitted disappeared. The hard copies vanished from evidence storage, and when I pulled up my report, all references to it were gone."

"Why didn't you ever mention that?" Blythe asked tersely. "I was working in Special Investigations. I could have looked into it."

Hold up—Blythe had worked in Special Investigations too? How the hell had I never come across that tidbit? Was that how she and Darius had met?

Darius studied her for a moment. "I didn't know the extent of what I'd stumbled on. If someone could make evidence and reports disappear from the SI, could they make an SI analyst disappear too?"

Blythe grimaced. "But?—"

"I didn't want to risk your life, Aurelia. I didn't tell you—and I didn't tell anyone else either." His shoulders shifted in a sigh that was absorbed by the drone of the jet engines. "I started paying closer attention to the contracts I was offered. I began asking careful questions. I talked to other contractors, and they told me about unlikely targets and flimsy rationales."

He paused, eyes distant for a few seconds before he refocused on Blythe. "The deeper I dug, the more I found. Espionage and assassination contracts that couldn't be traced back to whatever SI agents had ordered them. Bogus investigations with falsified evidence. Paper trails that dissolved into nothing. The other contractors and I were spying on and assassinating people we thought were dangerous criminals, when in reality, there was no evidence, no transparency, and no accountability.

"I eventually connected with Anson Goodman. He was an investigative journalist, and he'd been hunting whispers of MPD corruption for several years already but didn't have a way to dig for information within the upper echelon of the MPD. I did.

"I brought in others—connections I'd made, fellow contractors, MPD agents and administrators, even anti-MPD radicals. Anyone I thought I could get information from. Some knew what I was doing, some didn't. The picture that formed, the pieces we connected…"

A rumble of turbulence shook the plane, and we all sat silently, waiting for it to subside.

"They called themselves the Consilium." Darius entwined his fingers, elbows on his knees, eyes on Blythe. "A group of politically and financially powerful mythics inside and outside of the MPD's upper ranks. We identified some of them, but not all—not the ones at the very top. They had spies, acolytes, and minions everywhere. They had a death grip on the SI. They controlled or influenced multiple MPD departments, international guilds, and GM coalitions. They were taking over."

His words eerily echoed the present we now faced.

"My allies tried to bring the MPD's inbuilt system of checks and balances into play. They reported the corruption and submitted the evidence we'd gathered." His mouth pressed into a thin line. "Then they started to disappear."

Blythe's shoulders stiffened.

"In the space of three months, sixteen people I had involved in my investigation were missing or dead. The evidence they'd helped provide disappeared and the cases were closed.

"I sent out warnings to everyone I'd ever talked to about possible corruption, and almost all of them went into hiding. Only a few remained, but we were moving more carefully now. I was the only one who knew the names of everyone connected to my investigation, and the Consilium didn't know I was behind it—not yet.

"About three years had passed by that point. Only a few of us were still tracking the Consilium's moves. That's when…" His gaze broke from Blythe's, moving across the gathered mythics one by one. "We identified the leaders of the Consilium."

Even knowing how this story went, I found myself dreading the next part.

"A new member had been appointed to the Supreme Judiciary Council—the former Director of Special Investigations, whom we knew to be near the top of the Consilium's hierarchy. He'd already turned the SI department into an extension of the Consilium's will, and having him at the highest judicial level of the MPD was potentially catastrophic. We started tracking his every move—everywhere he went, everyone he met with, all his correspondents and flunkies—and we began to realize that not only was he a leader of the Consilium, but so were five of his fellow Supreme Judiciary Council members."

Blythe's face paled to a ghostly white, all vestiges of her trademarked glare having drained away.

"They occupied a full half of the Council," Darius continued heavily. "They had the power to block or push through laws, pardon their allies and followers, and consolidate their hold on the MPD and, through it, the mythic world.

"The Supreme Judiciary Council meets twice a year to ratify new and amended laws for the mythic world, and the controversial law dominating mythic discussion at that time was a revival of the Senatus Consultum Ultimum, a decree dating back to the Roman Republic that granted unchecked power to the Senate—or in this case, the unchecked power to create and deploy a military force of mythics."

I could feel the muscles in my neck tense, just as they had five months ago when Darius had first explained the Ultimum to me. The reasoning behind it was that the mythic community needed a reserve force in case of a major conflict with human militaries. The reality would have been a large-scale, personal army for the Consilium to control.

"There was no way to postpone the ruling and no time to expose the corrupt Council members. To prevent them from turning the Ultimum into reality, I had one option left."

Blythe balled her hands into fists, but that didn't hide the faint tremor in her limbs.

Darius leaned back in his seat. "I had started this, and I owed it to my allies to see it through. I knew I would be a suspect—for the MPD and the Consilium both. But who else could do it? So, the night before the Council met, I killed the corrupt members and collected whatever evidence of their crimes or plans I could find."

He said the last part so simply that he could have been talking about making a pot of coffee before work. His expression, however, was stony and closed off, his emotions tightly controlled.

"It almost went to plan. Almost." His eyes were locked on Blythe. "I didn't account for news of the first two deaths reaching you, or for you to figure out I was responsible and confront me in the last Consilium member's hotel room."

Woah.

Darius had not included that rather glaring detail when he'd told me the tale of the Consilium of twenty years past. No wonder Blythe had always been so dead-set convinced that Darius was a traitor and guilty of those six murders. She'd caught him red-handed.

Blythe pressed her lips into thin white lines, saying nothing.

"No one in the MPD could prove I was the killer," Darius continued abruptly, and I got the distinct impression he'd skipped over something. "And the Consilium was leaderless. What was left of their organization fell into chaos—or so it appeared based on the behavior of the remaining Consilium supporters we'd identified."

He rolled his shoulders. "Expecting that the MPD would investigate me, I split all the evidence I had gathered and sent it to my allies-in-hiding for safekeeping. Then I retired as an MPD contractor and joined the Crow and Hammer as a bartender."

"In Vancouver." Blythe's voice cracked. "You aren't even from Vancouver."

Another biographical datapoint I hadn't known. Darius was Canadian—according to his passport, which I'd seen during our globetrotting travels—but I couldn't guess his province of origin.

"I wanted to be close," he said. "I'd beheaded the Consilium, but I hadn't eradicated it. Anson and Georgia came with me, and we kept our ears to the ground, listening for any sign that the Consilium was resurrecting itself."

Which, as we were all painfully aware, it had.

Vinny shifted uncomfortably, then asked in a small voice, "Um, I'm sorry, but you wanted to be close to what?"

Darius didn't reply, his gaze on Blythe. Her throat moved as she swallowed.

"He wanted to be close to me," she said through gritted teeth. "After he murdered half the Council, I resigned from Special Investigations and returned home to Vancouver to be a regular agent."

"But… why?" Vinny asked gormlessly.

"I didn't want anything more to do with the shady ethics of the SI. I wanted to put criminals behind bars, not watch them walk away scot-free after murdering six high-ranked MPD leaders." Her jaw tightened further, as though she were steeling herself for the worst part. "In the SI, I would have always been known as the Mage Assassin's jilted fiancée."

Fiancée? Holy Shakespearean Tragedy. I'd assumed they were ex-lovers, but engaged was a whole different level of wrecked passion and bitter leftovers.

"You let me believe you'd been bought," she said to Darius, the words a barely audible hiss as though she didn't want the rest of us to hear. "You didn't even have the guts to break off our engagement before your unexplained killing spree."

"I couldn't risk it," he said just as quietly. "The Consilium was watching me, and I couldn't afford any sudden changes in behavior that would put up their guard."

"That hasn't been a concern for two decades now. Why keep it from me?"

"Because I was guilty." His gray eyes were shadowed, hinting at the grief and regret he kept buried. "If I confessed, you would have had to choose between concealing a murderer and keeping your integrity as an MPD agent. I couldn't put you in that position."

She opened her mouth furiously, glanced around at her rapt audience, then snapped it shut without speaking.

Darius took a deep breath as though centering himself. "The Consilium went quiet after that. I kept track of known affiliates for years, but when there were no signs of coordinated activity, I grew complacent."

He said the last words with acerbic bitterness. Silence fell.

"Then earlier this year," I said, picking up the tale, "S?ze showed up at our precinct and ordered Damnation-o Moria?—"

"Damnatio memoriae," Lienna corrected.

"—against the Crow and Hammer."

Darius settled back in his chair. "It was such an overreach of power that I immediately suspected the Consilium, or some surviving piece of it. They wanted to eliminate me and my guild."

"Right after we averted said mass annihilation of his guild, Darius met with Anson and Georgia to warn them that the Consilium was up to some shady shit again," I filled in, directing the words at Blythe. "But the Consilium had done their homework. S?ze and Kade already knew Anson and Georgia were his allies."

"They moved far faster than I expected," Darius agreed, grief and anger darkening his eyes. "Even after Anson and Georgia were killed, I still wasn't prepared. I would have died that night in March if not for Agent Morris and Agent Shen."

"Meanwhile," I added, "you had picked up on some major corruption inside the IA. Darius figured out I was working with you on that?—"

"—and I recruited him to help me," Darius finished. "Without revealing to you what we were doing."

Blythe was glaring again, her wrath flipping back and forth between me and Darius.

Holy shit, Morris, Tim remarked, sounding kind of impressed.

Would you quit with the commentary?I retorted silently.

Tim glanced at me, a curious furrow in his brows. When did you?—

"Wait," Vinny said, interrupting Tim's telepathic remark. The kryomage swiveled toward me. "You've been investigating the Consilium with Captain Blythe and with Darius at the same time?"

"Yup."

"And you kept it a secret from all of us?" He scowled. "How?"

In Vinny's case, it hadn't been difficult, but I didn't mention that.

"Your discovery of Kade's plans with this weapon came from your investigation with Darius?" Blythe asked me, still looking as though she'd like to dice me up and shove little Kit bits out the airplane window to scatter across several miles of uninhabited Midwestern wilderness thirty thousand feet below.

I launched into a hasty recap of our visit to Jayce Tyrian's skyscraper, the stolen files, and Floris Visser selling her ill-gotten artifact to the Consilium. I may or may not have glossed over certain specifics regarding my outright inability to defeat Kade in a cargo-hold, bare-knuckle brawl. They didn't need to know that.

"Now Kade is taking it to New York," I summed up. "And we know his target." I plucked a folded printout from my pocket, almost dislodging the other piece of paper tucked against my buttocks for safekeeping. "This."

I unfolded the page and held it out with a flourish. Everyone—minus Darius and Lienna—squinted at the big red letters.

"A security notice?" Tim said. "For—oh hell."

"Tonight at eight o'clock"—I waved the paper in emphasis—"is the vote for the Director of the Dissimulation Department. Three hundred Special Committee invitees will be descending on the North American MPD headquarters, along with Director Ashbluff, the other candidates for the job, and any number of high rollers and schmoozers of the mythic elite."

"It's the perfect opportunity to destroy Ashbluff and destabilize the DD," Lienna added. "That's where Kade is taking the weapon."

Vinny fidgeted with his seat belt, which he'd kept snug across his torso for the entire duration of the flight. Was it a fear of flying or a fear of Kit warps while hurtling through the atmosphere at nine hundred kilometers an hour?

"What does the Consilium get out of messing with the DD?" he asked.

"It's one of the most influential departments in the MPD," Darius explained. "The Consilium already controls Internal Affairs through Commissioner Sparks. We can assume they have influence over the Obscura Influentia department through Kade's father, Peter Druthers. Although I killed the former Special Investigations Director two decades ago, I now assume his successor was equally loyal to the Consilium."

That was three of the four Boss Departments of the MPD: Internal Affairs, which oversaw—and could interfere with—all other departments; Obscura Influentia, which interfaced with human political regimes across the planet; and Special Investigations, which wielded unchecked intelligence gathering, espionage, and "disappear troublemakers" powers.

That left the Dissimulation Department, which controlled all information about mythics—the masters of propaganda, the suppressors of truth, and the only thing that stood between mythics and full-on public exposure, aka total apocalyptic anarchy.

"Twenty years ago," Darius said grimly, "the Consilium took control of the Supreme Judiciary Council. While that allowed them almost unfettered influence over the MPD and worldwide mythic community, it came with an inherent weakness."

"They had to gather together." Blythe's expression matched her ex-fiancé's level of grimness. "It created an opportunity for you to wipe them out."

Darius nodded. "This time, they've set their sights on the most powerful MPD departments. If they gain control of the Dissimulation Department, they'll have de facto control of the entire MPD. Whatever they intend to do at the vote tonight, we can't let it happen."

Our small party exchanged looks ranging from jittery to determined to downright anxious. Somehow, it was up to us—a ragtag band of misfits from Vancouver pitted against the seemingly unstoppable tide of the Consilium and its secret faction of the MPD's most powerful leaders.

I'd never wished that "the underdog always wins" movie magic applied to real life more than I did now.