“Well that was awful,” Lucy said, scrubbing at eyes that were red from staring at computer screens. At the end of twenty hours of mass vampire slaughter, Callum and Lucy were running on empty.

“Yeah,” Callum agreed. It wasn’t as bad as it might have been — there were ultimately only so many vampires, and Taisen had not even bothered with letting them surrender. Between Archmage Hargrave and Archmage Taisen, there was no question of having enough firepower. Only of how fast they could get from place to place.

For once, Callum hadn’t needed to do any combat himself. Instead, the two of them had been running logistics for House Taisen’s and House Hargrave’s people — and maybe even for some GAR types, by the end. He lost track after the first dozen hours.

Most of his time was spent portaling people from one place to another. Under the circumstances, GAR was not exactly restricting its teleport network, but they also didn’t have ready portals to places like South America or India. With the drones, he and Lucy could move entire teams around with more flexibility and speed than flight foci.

The entire mess was what he had been hoping to avoid by providing paths back to the Night Lands by way of Taisen. He knew closing the portal would be a crisis for them, but one with a clear solution — return to the Night Lands. They knew they could go back to Night Lands, so they still had a future. Especially since vampires were supposed to be under the broader framework of GAR, where the sluggish nature of a bureaucracy would work to restrain quick action. He thought, as had everyone else, that it would result in a withdrawal, however disagreeable and grudging, to their native land.

Instead, the vampires as a whole seemed to have gone rogue, even though it meant they would die.

He cast a metaphorical eye at the alcohol he kept in the cabinet at the house, but if he had even a drop he was pretty sure he’d just fall over. It was tempting anyway, just to help him deal with what had happened. What he’d seen, what he had provoked. Even if it wasn’t his responsibility, what had happened had occurred in response to his actions, and it was beyond just random attacks. It was something planned, though the why escaped him.

They were specifically targeting places like hospitals, shelters, orphanages, and even police and fire stations. It was an attack – or rather, a series of attacks – calculated to draw the most attention and do the most damage to vulnerable people. Every single aspect of it was sheer spite and hatred.

Callum had been grimly amused that the vampires hadn’t had it all their own way, even before the mages got on scene. They were supernaturally fast and durable, but bullets weren’t entirely useless, and the younger vampires didn’t have all that many advantages if they didn’t catch someone off guard. In a few places there had been a number of vampires down even before Taisen’s troops arrived.

“If I’d known this was going to happen⁠—” Callum started, then stopped. He would have taken different precautions if he had known, but if anything it only confirmed that closing off the vampires was the right thing to do.

It was hard to say that in the face of so many dead bodies and a half-dozen countries in a full-out panic. All he could taste was the acid in his throat from the sight of at least a hundred battles. He wasn’t sure if every vampire in the world had joined in on the massacre – he rather doubted it, actually – but there were probably tens of thousands of casualties worldwide.

It was a number that staggered him, to the point where it didn’t seem real. He didn’t know how many vampires had died, and really didn’t care, but his actions had precipitated a tragedy that he very much doubted could simply be attributed to random terrorist action. Not only was there a human cost, but he was facing something that could spiral into a worldwide crisis.

“Hey, it’s not just you. Everyone else signed off on this,” Lucy said. “Nobody thought that it’d come to this. If you want to blame anyone, blame the vamps for involving random bystanders.”

“Oh, I do,” Callum said darkly. “But I have to wonder if it was worth it. I know in my head that they were killing hundreds or thousands a year, that they’d been doing it for centuries and would go on doing it for centuries more.” Callum found himself almost shouting, his hands white-knuckled fists. He forced himself to relax and sit back in his seat, taking a long breath. “And I knew more vampires were coming over all the time,” he concluded. “But that doesn’t help when all I can see are piles of bodies that are my fault.”

Lucy stood up and took a step over to him, wrapping her arms around him. He leaned against her and sighed. What was meant to be a triumphant finale had been tainted by mindless, evil violence, and he just didn’t know where to go from there.

“Looks like we aren’t seeing any other outbreaks.” Taisen’s voice came from the magical trinket he’d supplied, lying on the table. A scry-comm, it was called. “We’ll all be monitoring things but I think we’ve cleaned up the bulk of it.”

“Good,” Callum said, slumping in his seat. “What even happened?” He asked aloud, though he’d asked the same question at least a score of times in the past day.

“Weltentor must have somehow gotten a final order out,” Taisen said grimly. “He’s not dead — my contacts in Weltentor Landing have assured me of that. This was retaliatory, pure and simple.”

“That was simply evil,” Callum said.

“I’ve seen worse,” Taisen replied. “All things considered, we’re damn lucky that we got on it before it turned into something we couldn’t deal with.”

“We can’t let something like this happen again,” Lucy said, leaning over the table to talk at the device. “Like, how many supernatural people are going to be willing to just do this if they don’t get their way? Especially if it works?”

Callum was a little startled. That kind of approach was usually his role, but he wasn’t really thinking his best. Or maybe he’d underestimated how much he’d rubbed off on Lucy. While he didn’t exactly rant about his perspective, they’d discussed it and Lucy was on board. He just didn’t realize how much.

“Yes,” Taisen said shortly. “The entire reason I made Defensores Mundi was to keep dangerous things away from Earth. Clearly that hasn’t worked.”

“We have to…” Callum trailed off, rubbing at his eyes. He knew what he wanted, but he wasn’t sure how to put it. “We have to get out in front. Everything I’ve been doing has just been for me. That, or it’s been a reaction to GAR or whoever.” All he’d wanted, originally, was to be left alone. Unfortunately, he couldn’t leave well enough alone, and he had to intervene when he saw things happening. Which had led him down the road to the current situation.

Just acting on the things he could see wasn’t enough. When all he did was act on things in front of him, he missed the larger scope of things and ended up being blindsided. His caution had served him well and it was only through his preparations that he’d survived some of those things, but preparation was not enough.

It was time for the Ghost to do more than lurk in the shadows.

***

“This entire debacle shows how dangerous it is to let these people run around unchecked.” Archmage Janry addressed the assembled Archmages, gathered together in an emergency session at House Janry in Faerie. Despite the rich liquor and delectable hors d’oeuvres, people didn’t seem to be enjoying themselves. At least, most of them.

For those who were part of House Janry’s inner circle, nothing had come as a real surprise. The destruction of the Night Lands portal itself had been unwelcome, but in the cold calculus of politics it was actually a net benefit. The vampires had made useful tools, but they were becoming less controllable, and their removal made it far easier to pull the uninterested and unaware Houses from their indifferent neutrality over to the side of House Janry.

The one thing he hadn’t been prepared for was breaking from his own position of apparent neutrality so early. Even up until a few weeks ago he had been included in some of the discussions between GAR and the breakaway Houses or the American Alliance, which had done wonders for knowing where he needed to put his people. But he’d been a supposedly neutral party, and there was no way to affect that disinterest anymore.

Most of his allies were keeping relatively quiet, letting him be the face of the political change. Janry knew and cultivated his reputation, and his apparent indifference to things gave him a strange sort of legitimacy in the current climate. All of his allies had people within GAR to make sure it ran properly, but they were limited in how they could affect things without completely breaking GAR and running against the interests of other Houses.

“Hard to argue that,” said Archmage O’Toole, his red hair making his pale face look even paler. “But what do you suggest, outright war against House Hargrave and House Taisen?”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Janry demurred, mostly for the fact that he knew most people wouldn’t commit to that. He was certain they could absolutely destroy those Houses, since there were more Archmages on his side by sheer numbers. But most of them didn’t have the fire in their belly to risk themselves in combat. “However, we certainly can’t let them have a free run of Earth, let alone risk the other portal worlds. We still need access to the rest of the portals, and Earth itself, to retain the potency of our bloodlines.

The looting of House Fane had revealed a number of interesting tidbits, including Fane’s research into mages. Houses that had not been interested in Earth for over a century now had a stake. One that was easy to leverage.

“Even if we don’t take the fight to them directly, I propose that we eject the renegade Houses entirely. Cut them off from the portal worlds. Pressure the Guild of Enchanting to stop doing business with them. I would like to go after the American Alliance – they don’t have Archmages, after all – but I suspect that would be treated like a direct assault on the renegade Houses themselves.” Janry shook his head. “They have unfortunately close ties.”

There were some uncomfortable murmurs at that. Some of the Houses predated the discovery of the Deep Wilds and of shifters themselves. Most of the Archmages there really didn’t think of anyone outside of the Houses themselves as properly people, especially those that weren’t human. Not that Janry really thought better of them himself, but he properly understood the weakness of such an attitude.

“Of course, Wells himself clearly has to go,” Janry said, and waited for the noises of assent to stop. “Furthermore, we need to take a firmer hand on Earth directly. It’s far too valuable to be left to people who would be so hasty as to close an entire portal world.” Janry looked around at the assembled Archmages, catching the eyes of his allies where they sat in the expansive ballroom. “GAR has been effective in the past, but now I suggest we repurpose it for more direct action.”

That occasioned an argument, but Janry wasn’t worried. Most Houses saw GAR as the thing that transported good for them and occasionally dealt with some annoyance. Not as a fairly powerful organization, even now, with broad authority and significant wealth. Not to mention being the main conduit for controlling all Earth-based supernaturals, of which there were a fair few.

It wasn’t the most subtle play, but emergencies were the kind of opportunity that subtlety couldn’t capitalize on. He didn’t even have his favored agent in play anymore, since Teller Janry had been summarily removed in the latest attempt to neutralize The Ghost. In fact, the spectacular failure of that attempt was why Duvall wasn’t attending the meeting, despite the power of her House and her expertise in portals. She’d come around eventually, but for now she was cowering in the Deep Wilds, refusing to deal with any of the political issues.

The people they already had in place would be enough. With the other Houses on their side, it wouldn’t even be difficult to restructure GAR to take more aggressive action.

Once he had someone new installed to control GAR directly, they could finally get some real work done.

***

“It’s probably only a matter of time before we have to read in the mundanes,” Chester said, regarding the people gathered together in his meeting room. The mood was sober, as it might well be after the catastrophe they’d endured. Wells had been affected the most, but he was not a party to the discussion. Sometimes it was easier to talk things through without someone like him.

Hargrave grunted. Taisen frowned. Wizzy shrugged. Shahey shook his head.

“I don’t think that will go well,” the dragonblooded said mildly. “I’ve warned others, but revealing magic and the existence of supernaturals is likely to be catastrophic.”

“Oh, right now it absolutely would be,” Chester agreed. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if people followed up on this vampire incident and started asking some pointed questions. Glamour and compulsion work very well, but there are far too many people to deal with them all. In fact, manipulating too many people might itself reveal us.”

“There are already cover stories we didn’t even invent, something about a cult or a terrorist organization,” Hargrave said. “Claiming responsibility wouldn’t exactly endear us.”

“Of course not,” Chester agreed. “As I said, right now is not a good time. But think about it, eliminating the vampires as a concern – I know there are still some about, but they’re almost irrelevant now – is a good first step. Wells is certainly rather extreme, but his attitude is similar to the way mundane authorities will react. If we can claim that we removed the monsters from our midst before we contact them, that will go a long way toward establishing our bona fides.”

“No matter what we do, the mundane governments are not going to like a completely separate faction among them,” Taisen said. “Because there is no way that mages are going to work under mundane authority.”

“Not to mention, every mundane authority is going to want mages. They’re going to want to make more, to be able to call on them for peacekeeping and emergency response if nothing else,” Shahey said. “There will be wars over the portal worlds.”

“There would be,” Chester agreed. “If we remain limited to the portal worlds we have now.”

“Ah,” Shahey said.

“Wells,” Hargrave said.

“Just so. He’s figured out how to access other portal worlds. Whether there are permanent portals or not, that means that we’re no longer restricted to just the six. Well, four, with the Night Lands and Mictlān off the table.” Chester said, looking around at the others. “If there are dozens or even hundreds of such worlds, and there are portals to them, that solves the issues of access and space at once.”

“That would likely only trade one set of problems for another,” Wizzy pointed out, twisting the cap off another beer. “One has seen the kind of monsters that portal worlds create from humans. In every sense of the word.”

“We wouldn’t necessarily need the permanent portal,” Taisen said thoughtfully, considering the idea. “I don’t know what the effects of hundreds of such portals would be on Earth.”

“There might be enough mana here for mages to start showing up normally,” Hargrave said, frowning at Wizzy’s beer. “Which would solve some problems and cause others.”

“And any of them would be avenue for all kinds of things to crawl through.” Taisen nodded in agreement and pointed at Hargrave. “But a teleportation link? No mana, no access, no creatures. Very controlled.” Even Wizzy looked appreciative about that.

“I wonder if he could be convinced to share his technique with Duvall,” Hargrave mused. “While Wells clearly has certain advantages, Duvall is still an Archmage. If she could replicate it, or even better, refine it and teach it to her apprentices…” He trailed off and took a sip from his glass of liquor. “I hate to give her more power, but that would be even more valuable than stabilizing the portal worlds so we can live there.”

“I would still advise against it,” Shahey said. “But it’s not my world and if you decide to go that route I will dredge up some of our older records.”

“One has found it rather surprising that the secret has lasted as long as it has,” Wizzy said. “Though the world seems to have done just fine without magic. Perhaps Wells would conclude that as well, and decide to shut all of them.”

Chester frowned at him, and Hargrave growled in the back of his throat. Taisen was the only one who didn’t react, but he’d surely had similar thoughts. After all, it was an old debate, and one of the reasons GAR had been formed in the first place. Back before the spell-forms had been developed and perfected, before the symbiotes had adapted to humans and human form, mundanes had seen them as an unnatural threat and acted accordingly. They had thought that the world was better off without the supernatural.

Even now people debated it in fantasy forums on occasion, purely as a hypothetical. Chester didn’t follow it so much, but the younger members of the pack did, if for no other reason than it wasn’t really a hypothetical to them. But Chester wasn’t interested in packing off to the Deep Wilds, and even Wells wasn’t going to force him to do that.

“For all our sakes we had better hope he does not,” Chester said instead.

“I’ll talk to Lucy,” Lisa said, speaking up for the first time. “Make sure he’s not thinking in that direction. Personally I doubt it, but if he starts to I think she can break him out of it.”

“Good,” Taisen grunted. “There’s the rest of the issues to worry about, though. They’ve already kicked me out of Faerie. They can’t manage it in the Deep Wilds, but losing Garrison One is a worry.”

“You don’t have access at all?” Hargrave asked sharply.

“Hardly. I’m not completely without friends over there, and the portal anchor is in safe hands. But that’s not the same as having a serious foothold.” Taisen sighed and swirled the whiskey in his glass, making the ice clink. “Besides, I doubt whoever took it over can hold the Garrison against a real assault. Sure, there hasn’t been one in thirty years, but now that things have changed?”

“That seems like their problem,” Chester said. He was only concerned with the internal mage politics so far as it affected him. Which was an unfortunately broad scope, but internal struggles over in Faerie were actually good for him. Anything that weakened GAR and the reach of the Archmages was, at least for the moment, good for him.

“At least until it spills out over to Earth,” Taisen said grimly. “There are already too many incursions from people in Faerie who shouldn’t have had access at all.”

“Which is another situation where the secret could get out to mundanes,” Chester said. “For all its flaws, at least the fae that GAR let through before have been happy to keep their activities hidden. Open conflict between Courts, though? They’d probably flaunt it on purpose.”

“There is only so much you can do to get the house in order,” Wizzy said, his shadow moving restlessly under his chair. “Though one can at least exert himself on your behalf. Archmage Taisen, if you could pass along anything found in Central and South America, it will be resolved.”

That was a surprise to Chester, since as far as he knew Wizzy didn’t tend to get involved with worldly affairs. Though things were changing, and fast, and as much as Chester knew that Callum Wells would hate to hear it, how that change turned out depended on The Ghost.

***

Ray Danforth was bored.

That was probably unusual for someone who had been kidnapped and was being kept in the center of a hostile Court, but there just wasn’t much to do. The surroundings were nice enough, in typical Faerie fashion, with the various humans the Court kept as guests or “guests” inhabiting what could only be described as a bower. It was a massive castle furnished with craftsmanship that would have cost him a good amount of his yearly salary.

It was at least better than being thrown into a dark dungeon or being threatened with the tender mercies of what fae considered interrogation. If that happened he would have had to break character, though he was pretty sure that wouldn’t go well. In the middle of the Court, the fae king – or rather, prince, as he styled himself – had as much power as most Archmages. Possibly more in certain respects, given how strange fae magic was.

It’d only been a few days, but from what he’d seen of the Court, any assault to try and free him from their control would be fraught at best. The Courts of Faerie had far more to them than the ones on Earth, which was one reason he hadn’t yet tried to make a break for it. He wasn’t certain he could even find his way out, despite the lack of any walls or fortifications. The geography was almost arbitrary.

The most he’d been able to do was to snoop around with his vis senses, using the reinforcement techniques to keep any of the fae from being able to actually compel him and at the same time listen in on discussions he shouldn’t be privy to. While it was fairly obvious he was being kept as bait, what surprised him was exactly who they were trying to catch. He would have guessed it was Taisen, but it seemed their interest was in Felicia, instead.

He'd always known she was more important than the normal exiled fae, the kinds that decided to stay outside of enclaves. That she was important enough to risk Archmage Taisen’s wrath was news to him, though there were other goings-on. Something to do with House Janry and the Seven Lesser Courts. That was a bit of a surprise, since Archmage Janry had never impressed him as having any particular aspirations, but Ray wasn’t an expert on the various Archmages either.

Ray wandered out onto the balcony of the castle’s second floor, ignoring the gossiping of the entranced men and women that inhabited the gilded cage, and stretched out his hearing once again. The fae magic that suffused the area hid much of the surroundings from sight, but not from his augmented senses. The center of the court wasn’t that far away, and he overheard quite a bit, albeit in a mangled form of Old English that he barely understood.

He committed as much of the gossip to memory as he could, mostly because he was almost certain the court was involved in the case he was pursuing. Which might well be moot, but he knew Felicia would be interested regardless. While he would have preferred to write it all down, there was no way that would go unremarked by his jailors.

The snooping was really the only form of entertainment around, since the other people the fae had trapped were poor conversationalists and he had no interest in indulging in carnal appetites. Something that seemed to be the primary diversion for some of the mundanes. Most of the time he heard useless – if entertaining – anecdotes, but after twenty or thirty minutes of listening in he heard something that sent a shock down his spine and almost made him lift off into the air before he remembered himself.

The Night Lands portal had been destroyed.

Ray cursed to himself. He had no idea what was going on back on Earth, but he had a good guess on who was responsible. Only one person dealt both in portals and wholesale destruction, and in a sense it was inevitable that Wells would go after the vampires. There was nothing he could do from where he was, but with the chaos that he knew was coming, there would surely be some opportunity he could exploit.

He just had to wait for it.

***

“I’m as frustrated as you are,” Archmage Taisen told Felicia. She raised her eyebrows, and he corrected himself. “Perhaps not, he is your partner,” Taisen conceded. “But he’s one of my men, and I do not abandon my people,” he said, punctuating the last few words by thumping his palm against his desk. “But since we’re not welcome in Faerie, it’s considerably more difficult to look for him.”

“Understood,” Felicia wrote, though she wasn’t happy about it. Faerie could be deceptively hostile, and to be unwelcome in Faerie was more serious than it might be for other portal worlds. As an Archmage, Taisen himself could deal with most of what Faerie could throw at him, but not everything, and of course he’d be a very tempting target.

Those were all practical considerations, but she still resented that they hadn’t yet found Ray. Felicia was almost certain he was alive, for reasons beyond just refusing to believe the contrary. Nobody was in the habit of snatching mages, for various reasons, and for someone to take Ray specifically was especially unlikely. Perhaps someone had caught wind of the leak they were investigating, but it seemed more likely to her that she was the reason.

She didn’t want anything to do with Faerie, and never had, but that didn’t mean that Faerie felt the same way about her. Even when she went, she always stayed within the human bounded areas, and that was bad enough. For all that she wanted to go out and find Ray herself, she couldn’t. It would be a disaster.

“I’m going to be asking some of the friendly Houses over there to help,” Taisen told her. “But they’re not going to be all that willing to go up against any of the local Courts.”

“I doubt they’ll help,” Felicia wrote. She wasn’t generally impressed with the mage Houses, though they were marginally better than the Courts she was familiar with.

“Likely not,” Taisen agreed with a sigh. He glanced around the spartan office as if there might be some answer there. “The best bet would probably be the American Alliance. They have a number of Fae Kings aligned with them who might have some idea of who and how and where. I’d be happy to give you a Defensores Mundi crest by way of personal endorsement.”

“I appreciate it,” Felicia wrote. “But none of the Fae Kings on this side of the portal are going to be able to do anything to any of the Lesser Courts.” She stopped for a moment, since while she had the idea, actually saying it made it real. “We need someone who can infiltrate the Courts and find and extract Ray without needing to actually fight them. We need the Ghost.”

End of Book Four