The phone still offered only tortured silence.
“Can anyone there tell me why this is the case?” Ghastek ground out.
Silence.
“This is your chance to help me understand why I’m now facing an injured In-Shinar and having to explain our failure. Demonstrate to me that someone in the intelligence division has even the smallest modicum of intellect, or I’ll replace the lot of you.”
“The sahanu must’ve identified a pattern to our patrols,” said a different voice.
“Who is this?” Ghastek asked.
“Journeyman Wickert, sir.”
“Wickert, find the pattern and bring me your results.”
Ghastek hung up.
The pain released me. I took a nice, deep breath and checked my arm. I couldn’t even see the scar. Eve was a miracle worker.
The ice stabbed into the gouge on my left shoulder. I gritted my teeth. Here we go again.
Ghastek knelt next to me, his sharp face serious. “It’s my fault. I take full responsibility for this failure. I’m sorry.”
He bowed his head. I wished to be anywhere but here. What do I do now?
I waved Eve off and she stepped away. “Stop, Ghastek. We agreed. No kneeling, no bowing. I can’t do it.”
He stayed where he was. “Protecting you and your son is what we do. We exist to fulfill this purpose. We didn’t know that girl was here. We didn’t know Razer was here. It’s a failure of leadership. If my people are incompetent, I didn’t realize it. You have given me free rein over my subordinates. I restructured the People, I oversaw personnel assignments, I approved patrols. The ultimate responsibility for this is on me.”
I finally understood. Ghastek prized competence above all else. He was deeply ashamed. He didn’t want Kate, his friend, right now. Convincing him that he’d done nothing wrong wouldn’t work. He needed absolution or punishment. He wanted the In-Shinar.
Something in me died a little. First Raphael, then Teddy Jo, now Ghastek. I would never again be just Kate. You are the Princess of Shinar, the beacon of your people’s hope, and if you succumb, that hope will perish with you.
Sooner or later, in every relationship I had, I would end up becoming In-Shinar, and once I did, if only for a few moments, it altered that relationship forever. Mercs in the Guild remembered my voice shaking the building when I had spoken in the old tongue to the projection of my father. Shapeshifters who fought in the battle against Roland remembered In-Shinar’s rage.
Once I showed my true face, people never forgot it.
I’d fought it so hard for these last three years, but in the end, it didn’t matter. I had claimed Atlanta and everyone in it. I accepted responsibility for their safety. I was Sharratum na Shar. The queen who didn’t rule, but a queen still the same.
I dropped my cloak and pulled the magic from the depths of my soul. It bubbled up to the surface like a geyser. If it’d had a voice, it would’ve whispered, I’m awake. I’m alive.
Eve knelt by my side.
“Mama!” Conlan said, the same way he’d tried to tell me that the shiny walls of Biohazard were pretty.
I reached for Ghastek and my skin glowed with pale gold. Gently I touched the right side of his jaw and made him look up at me.
“I forgive you.”
The reverence in Ghastek’s eyes almost broke me. He was a natural skeptic, but in that moment, he would’ve followed me off a cliff. It was the last thing I wanted.
“I forgive you,” I repeated in English. “Keep my son safe. I have faith in you.”
Ghastek just nodded quickly several times.
At least I still had Curran. Curran would always want me, Kate. He would be human with me. I was enough.
“Rise,” I told him.
Ghastek got up to his feet. As he moved, I saw Javier and the other men staring at me from beyond the glass, awe in their eyes. Oh brother. Just what I needed.
I pulled the magic back, curling it inside myself like the petals of a closing flower. An odd emotion flickered through Ghastek’s eyes, almost as if he wanted to stop me. Yep, In-Shinar was addictive, and if I kept showing my inner self to the people around me, soon I would be as bad as my father.
“Thank you for your help,” I told Eve.
The medmage startled as if waking up from a trance. “Of course.”
She gathered her bag and walked out. I waited until she cleared the stairs.
“She wasn’t one of my father’s spies, was she?”
“No,” Ghastek said.
“Conlan doesn’t know how to cloak. He’s ridiculously easy to track if you can sense magic.”
“Makes sense,” Ghastek said, his voice and expression neutral.
“I thought about letting his grandparents watch him at the Keep.”
“That might not be a good idea,” Rowena said behind me.
“Why not?”
Ghastek walked to the desk, opened a drawer, and brought me a photograph. A shot of a wooded road in twilight. A man in his forties, salt-and-pepper hair, strong profile, walking between two shapeshifters in warrior form, a werejaguar and a bouda. I recognized both. Renders, the deadliest fighters the Pack had at their disposal. Jim wasn’t taking any chances.
“This is Avag Barsamian,” Ghastek said. “Landon Nez’s second-in-command.”
Landon Nez was Ghastek’s counterpart, my father’s right-hand necromancer and the head of his Golden Legion. Any time Nez got involved, things went from bad to worse.
I scrutinized the photograph. Avag was carrying a briefcase. He didn’t appear to be in distress. The two shapeshifters flanking him didn’t have their claws on him. The lines of their bodies suggested caution, but when guards transported a dangerous prisoner, they watched for outside threats, rescue attempts, and so on, because the person in their charge was properly restrained and unlikely to escape. These two watched Avag instead. He was there of his own free will.
I tapped the photograph. “I recognize this oak. This is the road to the Keep.”
“He visited the Keep two nights ago,” Rowena said. “I saw him through the eyes of my vampire. He was there for two hours and then he left, except this time he didn’t have a briefcase. They escorted him just like that to his car parked on the side of the road.”
And the next day Robert came to us with the offer of alliance.
“I was told my father is mobilizing. Is that true?”
“Yes,” Ghastek and Rowena answered at the same time.
Wasn’t that interesting. “The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question is, what was in the briefcase?”
“We don’t know,” Rowena said.
The vamp at Ghastek’s desk rose, grasped a cord suspended from a roll of fabric above the window, and pulled it down, unrolling a large screen. On it, in painstaking detail, spread a map of Atlanta. In the center of the map sat a small red dot. A ragged ring of city blocks outlined in blue enclosed the dot, followed by another ring in green. Choppy lines crossed the whole thing, looking like some sort of Gordian knot. Colored dots marked other points of interest: the Casino, the Guild, and so on. The whole thing looked disturbingly like some distorted bull’s-eye centered on . . .
“Why is there a red dot over my house?”
“I’ve had two years to prepare,” Ghastek said. “The blue is the kill zone, the green is the outer perimeter. About”—he checked the clock on the wall—“twenty-two minutes ago, I doubled our patrols and deployed six strike groups, each member of which has memorized the dossier of the twenty-one sahanu in our database. They know their magic signatures, their movement patterns, and they will recognize them by sight. They will work in shifts around the clock and can be activated at a moment’s notice, because they will sleep here in the Casino, next to the OPS room. I know we got off to a less-than-ideal start, but I personally guarantee to you that no sahanu will penetrate our defenses and get through to you.”
And if he switched sides, the entirety of the Casino vampire stables could converge on my house and kill my child while I was out, thinking Conlan was safe and protected. He was unlikely to change sides, but then the Pack was equally unlikely to betray us.
Ghastek and Rowena were both looking at me.