*Major gratitude to everyone who's given feedback. Makes a difference knowing this isn't flying off into the void. Thank you!

Chapter 10

In a back booth of a kitschy Irish pub, Dyson nursed a bottle of water and watched his human surveillance target - an anthropomorphized cocktail shaker named Dave Hubbard - slug back his fourth Captain and Coke. Dave made a bundle on a stock trade earlier in the day, and he kept telling everyone in earshot that he planned to get "violently drunk and gently sexed, or vice-versa." As he pinned down a barstool and chatted with friends, Dave seemed blissfully unaware that a mystical clan of thieving assassins might behead him tonight.

For his part, Dyson had stopped drinking early in the afternoon and he wasn't happy about it. Sobriety made his memories glow like stoked iron, and he touched them compulsively hoping to grow inured to the pain. He burned himself more than once by recalling the peace and hope that came from waking beside Bo, and then compounded the injury with fresher memories of Bo smiling at Lauren, defending her against Gael's insults, touching her easily and often.

Though things were developing faster than he'd expected on that front, Dyson was not surprised. Even before breaking things off with Bo, he suspected that her natural reaction would be to reconcile with Lauren. For all the doctor's flaws and weaknesses, she and Bo shared an organic intimacy that appeared more resilient than most human/Fae affections.

Dyson wondered if that connection would have doomed his romance with Bo, even without the Norn's curse. He hadn't been willing to share Bo with anyone - not strangers, not hirelings, and least of all someone she might love. With temptation so nearby, would Bo have stayed faithful? Was monogamy even a healthy option for her – or for him?

Her appetite already exceeded his strength, and she was still so very young. When she came into her full powers, the succubus would be more than your average Fae virago; Bo could become the Alpha Bitch of the whole damned clan. Dyson pictured himself curled at her feet like a whipped Beta, and his inner wolf responded with a nasty, rumbling snarl.

Maybe it's just as well, Dyson thought. He reflected that at some point, Bo likely would have hammered his heart by fucking Lauren behind his back. Or she might have let her hunger pulp his bones and suck the last electron from his marrow, turned him into a mindless Thrall. Either way, her love would have crippled him, broken him in ways that did not heal.

Yeah. Dodged a silver bullet, he thought. For a moment, he almost believed it. The whole thing was just ridiculous; love, envy, lust and fear and loathing and all the other silly trash that clung to every second of life that was not spent in battle. At times like this, Dyson desperately missed war and wondered if a cross-clan throwdown would really be so awful. He shook it off and took a thirsty pull from his water bottle.

Dyson's senses pulled him back to the moment. He smelled something familiar, heard the faint echo of known voices coming from the pub's backroom. He scooted deeper into the booth and watched from the shadows as double doors squeaked open. Two black-suited hulks that Dyson recognized as Light Fae security agents lumbered into view.

Their attention sifted through the modest weeknight crowd and settled quietly on Dave Hubbard. One agent tapped a button on his Bluetooth headset and said, "Right here, safe and sound." They stood casually near the end of the bar and ordered beers they did not drink.

Shortly, the backroom doors opened again, and in walked Serena. The head of Light Fae security did not join her men; she looked a slow circle around the room until she found Dyson. Serena smiled as if she expected to see him, gave him a friendly salute, and joined him in the booth. The detective masked his uneasiness with a light remark.

"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world," Dyson said, and chuckled at Serena's baffled expression. She was notoriously dismissive of human culture – of humans in general, really – and he knew she wouldn't get the Casablanca reference.

"Pardon me?" she said.

Dyson shrugged and finished his water. "Wouldn't hurt you to see a movie once in a while."

"Not my thing. Some of us work for a living." Serena glanced over her shoulder at Dave Hubbard, still laughing and drinking like a deranged frat boy. "Seems even dumber than that Popobawa we killed in Zanzibar. Aren't you curious why brain bandits would want such a fool?"

Dyson gritted his teeth; of course Gael had run straight to Serena and told her of their suspicions. "Little man has a big mouth."

"Gael is a spoiled, sadistic piece of shit, but that's beside the point. Do you have any clue what the end game is here? Why these humans are being drained, and why it's happening right now, when the Ash is away dreaming of sunshine and bumblebees?"

Dyson's eyes narrowed to slits. Beneath the table, his palms began to sweat. Serena clasped her hands and leaned closer, whispering. "If you did know, my friend, I think you wouldn't be here tonight. I think you'd trot home to bed and sleep like a cub."

Every hair on Dyson's body stood on end. "Don't tease," he said, trying to sound intrigued more than alarmed.

His phone buzzed on the tabletop, flashing an incoming call from Bo. He went to answer it, and Serena snatched the phone away. She looked at the caller I.D. and pressed 'Ignore' to reroute Bo's call into limbo. Dyson hoped that Bo was just checking in, because if she needed help from him, the succubus was out of luck.

Serena smiled like her secrets were burning holes in her pockets – which was funny, since her entire wardrobe was flame-retardant. "Okay," she said. "You asked for it."

XXxxXX

Kenzi's legs were giving out by the time they reached the entrance to "Gatekeeper," the nearby club which provided the only source of crowd protection in this desolate area of town. Would have been easier to drive, naturally, but the beater had suffered a badly bent fender well when Kenzi used their car as a battering ram against the snake-faced Fae that attacked Bo.

"Hey, look! We caught some luck - no cover charge," Kenzi said as they approached the unguarded club entrance. She wasn't in the mood to slick past some bloated rope jockey masquerading as a bouncer, and she was pretty sure all Bo's money was soaked in blood.

Bo was past caring, past talking, almost unable to stay upright. She leaned heavily against Kenzi and murmured something that sounded like 'bathroom.' So that's where they went, slowly weaving through a few dozen people dancing to house music under purple light, down a dim hallway festooned with graffiti of marker and nail polish and logo stickers for bands that broke up too soon or too late, and into the flickering fluorescent haven of an empty bathroom.

Kenzi barricaded the door with a heavy steel trash can. Bo collapsed onto the floor like a rag doll. Her injuries, starkly visible in the bright light, made Kenzi bite her jaw to keep from crying. She rolled out a massive puff of paper towels and fell to her knees, blotting blood from Bo's shredded upper thigh.

She pressed a second makeshift bandage against Bo's bitten arm, and the succubus grunted a curse and clenched her teeth. The blood flow was slow there, along her triceps, but the leg bite was frightening, all torn skin and dark puncture wounds and blood that gushed out in time with Bo's erratic pulse.

Kenzi dropped the sodden towels and clasped Bo's face between her sticky red palms. "Bo! Bo! The blood won't stop and I don't know what to do! Dyson and Hale still aren't answering their goddamn phones!" Kenzi shouted. Fae secrecy be damned, she had to do something. "I'm calling 911!"

Bo roused enough to grip her wrist before Kenzi could dial. "No," she gasped. "Lauren."

XXxxXX

There's a reason endurance athletes risk shame and sanctions to engage in blood doping: it works. After Lauren – with help from Sharon – finished her autologous transfusion and choked off the nosebleeds with C-A swabs, her hematocrit levels rose to 44% and she felt like running a marathon.

Sharon bullied her into taking a break for a few hours. Do some yoga, take a shower, have a nap. I can stare at the Ash just as well as you can, she had said. And though her nurse intended for these activities to take her mind off current events, Lauren couldn't shut her brain off, even while straining to maintain peacock pose.

She was stuck on the idea that Kenzi wasn't just having a laugh at her expense, that those thirty-two dips and peaks in the Ash's delta pattern comprised some sort of message. Sweat dripped from her brow onto the yoga mat as she rushed through another set of possibilities.

Icosidodecahedron. Archimedean Solid with thirty-two faces - twenty triangular and twelve pentagonal, but geometry is not words. Germanium has an atomic number of thirty-two, but chemistry is not words. Adult humans have thirty-two teeth. Dentistry is not fucking words. Think, idiot!

She transitioned to plank position and kept going, kept thinking it through, trying to brute force an answer from the incomplete equation.

Twenty-two paths connect the ten Sephiroth energy spheres in the Tree of Life... God – Tree of Life? It sounds good, but it's not communication. The Persian alphabet has thirty-two letters. Communication in thirty-two… shit.

Lauren dropped to the mat like a sack of stones. She pulled on a track jacket and some sneakers and dashed from her apartment grinning like a lunatic. She took the private spiral staircase, jumping down two and three steps at a clip and bounded into the lab, startling Guatemala Sharon – the only staffer left in the lab at this late hour.

"It's a hash function!" Lauren whooped. "The Ash sent out a goddamned hash function!"

"Okaaay," Sharon said carefully, setting aside her issue of In Style magazine. "I don't know what that means."

Lauren was already riffling through the Ash's charts and translating the thirty-two blips into the server. "It's a message-digest algorithm that compresses large amounts of data into a string of thirty-two hexicecimal characters," she explained.

Sharon hovered over her shoulder, almost bouncing on her heels from excitement. "If that was the blip, would it mean the Ash is conscious on some level?"

Lauren turned to her and smiled. "Yeah. It would."

"So… what did he say to the little Russian girl?"

The doctor winced and delivered the bad news. "We might not know for a while. Interpreting high-level hashes can be a best-guess affair, but older variations can be broken by grinding the algorithm through hundreds of thousands of keys per second until it gives up its secrets."

"This is why you bought the big computer," Sharon said, nodding at the blade server mainframe and the giant touchscreen. "Other Sharon said it was for porn."

"Other Sharon can eat me," Lauren grumbled, prompting a junior-high snort from her nurse. She keyed in a series of instructions and tasked two software programs and some custom flex-loop rainbow tables for the job, then left the grunt work to the insane co-processing power of multiple integrated Xeon CPUs and Tesla GPUs. "Now we let the computer hash it out. Pun intended."

Sharon mimed gagging on the weak, nerdy joke. "You're awful."

Lauren smiled. "I know. Don't tell anyone."

The Balam crossed the center of her chest, over her heart. "I'm your man, boss."

From the pocket of her track jacket came a harsh buzzing sound. Lauren answered the phone and Kenzi's shouts leapt from the tiny speaker. The doctor's dark eyes went round and wide.

"Where are you? Kenzi! Tell me where you are!"

She started pacing in small circles, listening to Kenzi's frantic recap of events. Sharon stepped back, gave Lauren room to move and think.

"Okay, I'm on my way," Lauren said, in her most reassuring voice. "I want you to put major pressure above that leg wound. All your weight, if you can. You can do this! You can!"

She took the phone away from her ear and Sharon heard sobbing through the speaker. Silent tears ran down Lauren's cheeks. The doctor took a breath and gathered herself, then spoke again as if she were the calmest human on Earth.

"Kenzi, just listen to me and do exactly what I tell you. Straddle Bo and lay your shinbone across her bikini line, right above the bite. Now press down, let your weight settle onto that point… good. Is the bleeding slower now? Good. Take it easy, Kenzi. You're doing fine, Bo is doing fine. I'm on my way."

Lauren cut the call and snatched a set of keys from her desk. She looked at Sharon with red eyes full of panic. "I have to go," she said. "Will you -"

Sharon waved off her concerns. "I got this place on lockdown. Go. Help your friend."

Lauren hesitated, looked toward the busy server and then toward the Ash's quiet, curtained patient bay. She pounded a fist against her thigh, as if to jumpstart her body into motion. Then she ran from the building and peeled out in her car, darting down sidestreets at breakneck, illegal speeds.

Though her only cogent thoughts were of Bo, on some level, the drive felt like a jailbreak.

XXxxXX

"Things are happening, Dyson, things above your pay grade," Serena began. "Pieces are moving. You can get behind them and push or get knocked off the board – but you must choose."

He wanted to laugh or run or bare his fangs and rip out her throat – all stupid, impossible options, animal options. He needed to think like a cop instead, get her talking. "I can't choose anything… until I know what's in it for me," he said, offering a cautious smile.

Serena grinned and nodded, as if she knew Dyson would be reasonable. "For starters, more money. Once the coffers are raided, our wealth will be distributed fairly," she said. "The old families rest on their fortunes while we serve them like slaves. That's gonna change, and fast, once we control the cash."

Explains why they're targeting the money men, he realized. But Lauren said most of the Light assets have been relocated to emergency positions, liquid accounts that only she and the Ash can access… shit. Means they'll take her. Keep her alive until they get the money.

Dyson kept his face stone-still. "More money, more problems. What else you got?"

Serena rolled her eyes and pressed on. "How about freedom? Relaxed regulation of human predation, and no restrictions on association between clans. The branding of Fae as Light or Dark will cease and we will simply be Fae, judged as we live and not as we are labeled."

He raised his eyebrows, amused by the scope of her group's ambition. "I'm all for trashing the two-party system, but will the Dark get on board?"

"Their voice will be our voice. The clans will merge slowly. Once the Ash and the Morrigan are deposed and exiled, they will be replaced with worthy Elders."

Dyson had to laugh, imagining the Morrigan taken unawares by a bunch of turncoat thugs who had decided she was little more than a Fae version of Evita Peron. "Will we get to vote for these worthy Elders?"

Serena smirked. Dyson's phone buzzed again; she ignored the call and tucked it into her coat pocket. "Still working out the details on that one. Gorrick says vote, Vinata says appointment. Tomato, tomahto."

He didn't point out that her flippancy was ignorant and inappropriate. Serena obviously didn't care that she was in the employ of aspiring dictators, but Dyson intended to throw a monkey wrench into the works if he could. He eased one hand behind his back to the butt of his gun. "Do you have a mission statement? Manifesto? Anything I can take home and study?"

The former mercenary, who knew Dyson quite well from their years of black ops work, sparked up a two-handed fireball and cradled the mass of flame inches from his face. Bits of his beard singed and crackled in the heat.

"You're a good soldier and I don't want to lose you, but please believe that I will incinerate you if you fuck with me," she warned. "Hands on the table."

Slowly, Dyson complied. His jaw trembled as he struggled to calm his wolf. "This is a lot to take in," he said evenly. "How do you plan to get the money? I thought it was hidden."

Serena shook her head and sighed. "That's where the bandits come in, stupid. Gorrick worked out a trade: we kill the money men, the dacoits suck out all the information we need, and we deliver something they've wanted for years."

Dyson quirked a brow; he knew that Serena couldn't stop now. "The formula for Coke?"

"Maybe," she said, rolling the little fireball from hand to hand. "Whatever it is, they're gonna pull it out of Dr. Lewis's head tonight. And you get to watch."

He shut his eyes. Wondered if it was worth it. And went for his gun.

That's when it all went to hell.

Serena's fireball engorged with panic fuel and engulfed the table. He fired three rounds at Serena, all of which melted to lead and copper dribbles. One of her goons rushed up alongside and fired two tranquilizer darts into Dyson's chest.

At the bar, the other goon grabbed Dave Hubbard and snapped his neck with a single, neat twist. He slung Hubbard's body over one massive shoulder and clomped through the rear exit.

The tranq darts worked fast. Dyson was seeing double and slanting sideways when the second thug scooped him up in a fireman's carry and rushed him out the back door.

The last thing he saw before losing consciousness was Serena throwing massive gouts of flame at the pub, setting it alight. Dyson heard screaming and knew she had barricaded all of the human witnesses inside - more casualties of the latest inane Fae insurrection.

He went to sleep wishing he was inside the bar with them, burning until the whole ridiculous world just stopped.

TBC