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“I don’t grant favors,” I said calmly.
Mag entered in the manner so many of these self-absorbed supernatural cretins seem to adore. He blasted the door into a cloud of flying splinters with what I presumed was magic.
For God’s sake.
At least the vampires would call for an appointment.
The blast amounted to little debris. After a few visits from Dresden and his ilk, I had invested in cheap, light doors at dramatic (as opposed to tactical) entry points.
The fomor was a pale, repellent humanoid. Seven feet tall, give or take, and distinctly froglike in appearance. He had a bloated belly, legs several inches too long to be proportionately human, and huge feet and hands. He wore a tunic of something that resembled seaweed beneath a long, flapping blue robe covered in the most intricate embroidery I had ever seen. A coronet of coral was bound about his head. His right hand was extended dramatically. He carried a twisted length of wood in his left.
His eyes bulged, jaundice yellow around septic green, and his teeth were rotted and filthy. “You cannot run from me,” he said. His wide mouth made the words seem somehow slurred. “You are mine.”
Justine looked up at me, evidently too frightened to turn her head, her eyes wide with fear. A sharper contrast would have been hard to manage. “Sir. Please.”
I touched a button on the undersurface of my desk, a motion of less than two inches, and then made a steeple of my hands again as I eyed Mag and said, “Excuse me, sir. This is a private office.”
Mag surged forward half a step, his eyes focused on the girl. “Hold your tongue, mortal, if you would keep it.”
I narrowed my eyes.
Is it so much to ask for civility?
“Justine,” I said calmly, “if you would stand aside, please.”
Justine quickly, silently, moved out from between us.
I focused on Mag and said, “They are under my protection.”
Mag gave me a contemptuous look and raised the staff. Darkness lashed at me, as if he had simply reached into the floorboards and cracks in the wall and drawn it into a sizzling sphere the size of a bowling ball.
It flickered away to nothingness about a foot in front of my steepled hands.
I lifted a finger and Hendricks shot Mag in the back. Repeatedly.
The fomor went down with a sound like a bubbling teakettle, whipped onto his back as if the bullets had been a minor inconvenience, and raised the stick to point at Hendricks.
Gard’s axe smashed it out of his grip, swooped back up to guard, and began to descend again.
“Stop,” I said.
Gard’s muscles froze just before she would have brought down the axe onto Mag’s head. Mag had one hand uplifted, surrounded in a kind of negative haze, his long fingers crooked at odd angles—presumably some kind of mystic defense.
“As a freeholding lord of the Unseelie Accords,” I said, “it would be considered an act of war if I killed you out of hand, despite your militant intrusion into my territory.” I narrowed my eyes. “However, your behavior gives me ample latitude to invoke the defense of property and self clause. I will leave the decision to you. Continue this asinine behavior, and I will kill you and offer a weregild to your lord, King Corb
, in accordance with the conflict resolution guidelines of section two, paragraph four.”
As I told you, my lawyers send me endless letters. I speak their language.
Mag seemed to take that in for a moment. He looked at me, then Gard. His eyes narrowed. They tracked back to Hendricks, his head hardly moving, and he seemed to freeze when he saw the sword in Hendricks’s hand.
His eyes flicked to Justine and the child and burned for a moment—not with adoration or even simple lust. There was a pure and possessive hunger there, coupled with a need to destroy that which he desired. I have spent my entire life around hard men. I know that form of madness when I see it.
“So,” Mag said. His eyes traveled back to me and were suddenly heavy-lidded and calculating. “You are the new mortal lord. We half believed that you must be imaginary. That no one could be as foolish as that.”
“You are incorrect,” I said. “Moreover, you can’t have them. Get out.”
Mag stood up. The movement was slow, liquid. His limbs didn’t seem to bend the proper way. “Lord Marcone,” he said, “this affair is no concern of yours. I only wish to take the slaves.”
