War Of The Alphas: Alpha - War of the Alphas: Alpha Part 12
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War of the Alphas: Alpha Part 12

"He wants you safe," Vidya said without stopping. She leaped into the sky, and her muscular form vanished into the clouds.

"That's what I was afraid of," Deirdre muttered.

Rylie pushed through the line of agents. She was naked, and there was unidentified blood caked to her shoulder. "That was the valkyrie you freed from the detention center a few weeks ago, wasn't it?"

"Her name's Vidya," Deirdre said. It felt important that Rylie know who she was. After all, it was partially Rylie's fault that Vidya had been trapped in that hellhole in the first place.

"I take that to mean she's not aligned with the people who just attacked us."

"No, that was the unseelie. I told you that they're in the middle of a coup." Deirdre rubbed her forehead where Kristian had touched her again. "And I think they just tried to assassinate me."

"We need to talk to Secretary Friederling," Rylie said. Trevin settled a bathrobe over her shoulders, and the Alpha cinched it tightly around her waist. "Let's go."

The agents escorted them to a glass elevator, which took them to a floor labeled with the OPA seal. Deirdre was given another pat-down before she was allowed to enter the offices, as if she could have obtained a weapon at some point during her fall from the airship. Even Rylie was given a cursory pat-down before she was allowed into the offices. She tolerated it with great patience, even though they couldn't take an Alpha's deadliest weapons away from her.

When they were done, Rylie flashed a smile at Deirdre. "Ready to meet the head of the Office of Preternatural Affairs?"

Deirdre couldn't even fake a smile.

Her relationship with Rylie Gresham, Alpha of the shapeshifters, was fraught enough on its own.

She didn't have a relationship with the OPA secretary. Nor did she have any reason to give her allegiance to him.

He was a mundane human, a bureaucrat, the kind of fat cat who probably called shifters silver-suckers when throwing dinner parties for other mundanes who wanted to figure out how to earn more money from gaean lives.

Deirdre wasn't going to pretend to be excited to meet him.

The secretary's office was all glass and sleek lines, the furniture had obviously been created by a Scandinavian designer. A man stood from behind his elegant steel desk when they entered.

He looked like a rough forty years old or a young fifty-it was hard to tell. His blond hair was receding. He leaned heavily on a cane, and the leg of his slacks hung oddly on one side, as though there wasn't a normal leg inside of them. Deirdre had the mental image of him being a pirate with a peg leg.

The smile that he gave Deirdre when she approached was more political than actually friendly. He wore an American flag on one lapel of his jacket and the OPA seal on the other.

"Deirdre Tombs, this is Fritz Friederling," Rylie said. "He's the head secretary of the Office of Preternatural Affairs. He's worked with me to pass a lot of legislation that benefits our people. Great guy. Fritz, this is Deirdre Tombs, Everton Stark's Beta and his envoy for the purposes of the election."

Friederling had a strong handshake, almost like he was trying to crush Deirdre's hand.

She squeezed right on back and smiled toothily at him.

"I recognize Secretary Friederling," Deirdre said, maybe a little too sweetly. She used to have his face on a dartboard at one of her boarding schools. Niamh had drawn a Hitler mustache on him with black lipstick.

He'd been a lot younger in the picture, of course.

"It's a pleasure to meet you," Friederling said. "I haven't had the privilege of meeting anyone from Stark's camp personally." His empty tone made it clear he didn't consider it to be any kind of privilege at all. The feeling was mutual.

There were so many things she wanted to say to this man. So many complaints. So many years of pain he deserved to have unloaded on his head.

He was a mundane human. How he had gotten to the head of the Office of Preternatural Affairs, Deirdre had never known. It was stupid and unfair that a man who wasn't even preternatural should be in charge of making so many of their decisions.

"I saw the airship fall through my window," Friederling said. "It's lucky you two survived. I'm told you were attacked by a harpy and some kind of sidhe with a sword-interesting team of assassins." Interesting, but not dangerous. It took a lot more than that to impress the secretary of the Office of Preternatural Affairs.

"They might have been from the Winter Court," Rylie said. "We need to get in touch with Ofelia even more urgently now."

"That appears to be the case, doesn't it?" He turned to his agents. "I'd like privacy with the Alpha and Miss Tombs, please."

They stepped outside with surprisingly little resistance.

"Ms. Tombs," Deirdre said as soon as they were alone, just she and two of the most influential people in the United States. No big deal.

"Pardon?" Friederling asked.

"I prefer Ms. Tombs. I'm not much of a Miss."

He gave her a you're one of those types of women look. "It's my understanding that you're more than just Stark's Beta, Ms. Tombs."

Wild thoughts raced through her head.

How could he know about the kissing thing? The weird tension between them? Had he been spying, and if so, what would he do with that information?

"I told him that you started out as our informant," Rylie said softly.

Deirdre burst into laughter. "Oh!" Of course Secretary Friederling neither knew nor cared about the personal nature of her relationship with Stark. "Yes, I was Rylie's informant."

"Was?" Friederling asked. He didn't look nearly as amused.

Her laughter faded. "My opinions have been changing."

"I've also heard that." He drummed his fingers on a tablet on the edge of his desk. "I'm arranging a very nice cell for you at one of my detention centers. Solitary confinement. Nowhere near any other shifters. I'd originally set that cell aside for Everton Stark, but we have no plans of detaining him anymore."

The lingering vestiges of a smile drained from Deirdre's face.

She had seen what solitary confinement at the OPA detention centers looked like.

"I'd rather die than let you put me in one of those," Deirdre said.

"That's another possibility, but let's not start making melodramatic declarations of martyrdom yet. You just survived an assassination attempt. I don't see any reason to rush off to your next potential death."

He was a sarcastic guy. Deirdre hadn't thought she could hate him more than she already did, but she impressed herself by finding new depths of loathing within herself.

"I don't know, I'm not convinced it was an assassination attempt," Rylie said. "They didn't try to attack me directly. And if they intended to kill any of us, they failed, obviously. The unseelie are usually more competent than that."

Friederling's voice went cold. "They were competent enough to kill one of your sidhe guards and six of my men. They drowned in the dirigible before we could retrieve them." His eyes fixed on Deirdre. "If the assassins wanted to reach you, the question is...why?"

She bared her teeth. She wasn't even pretending to smile now. "Wouldn't you like to know?"

"I would. So why don't we ask?" He punched a button on his tablet. A communications line opened. "Send him in, please."

The door opened again.

Melchior entered. He wore a leather duster over his otherwise naked torso, baring the scales that marked his abdomen. He glittered in the light of the desk lamp, serpentine and deadly.

She'd dealt with serpents before. She'd dropped a whole damn building on Jacek, the viper who had been out to kill her.

A dragon was just a really big snake.

But this one was particularly deadly in a thousand different ways, not least of all because of the way the sight of him made Deirdre's heart race.

He smiled at the sight of Deirdre, as though it were a pleasant surprise to find her in Friederling's office. Their last interaction had involved shooting him with a giant fireball and throwing him back into the Winter Court, which had been followed shortly by Deirdre's horrible death by stabbing. It was a surprise to see each other, all right. But not a pleasant one.

"I don't appreciate my meeting being delayed, Friederling," Melchior said. "You set a time to talk with me about this election, and I expected that time to be upheld."

Friederling leaned heavily on his cane. "So sorry. Your assassins pushed things back a few minutes. We'd love to hear an explanation as to why you did that."

"Any unseelie assassins must have come from loyalists to the last queen of the Winter Court. I'm sorry you had trouble with them, but it wasn't my fault." It was impossible for a dragon shifter like Melchior to look innocent, but he made a good effort at it anyway.

"You're lying," Deirdre said. "Kristian and Niamh belong to you. They're Rhiannon's pawns. That was your attack!"

That slow smirk lingered over Melchior's lips. "Stark's mate is filled with such lies. It seems downright anticompetitive. He's not afraid I'll defeat him in the election, is he?"

At the words "Stark's mate," both Friederling and Rylie turned to Deirdre.

It felt like having a spotlight blazing down on her.

She forced herself to keep her features smooth. There was no point denying it. She wasn't Stark's mate, but saying that would only make her seem defensive. It was also completely beside the point. "You guys aren't a blip on his radar. Neither is the election-which you're not even eligible for, since Rhiannon isn't the true queen."

Melchior's smile tightened. "I just came from the Winter Court. I know who's sitting on the throne."

"We would have heard if Ofelia were no longer in control," Friederling said.

"I promise she's no longer in charge," Melchior said. "Rhiannon controls everything. But you don't need to take my word for it. Come to the Winter Court-all of you-and bring the seelie king with you. You can see who's in charge of Niflheimr, take the oath together, and kick off this election as only the sidhe can."

"No way," Deirdre said.

"I think you can understand why we'd be hesitant to visit the Winter Court if it's in the middle of a revolution," Rylie said. "And you can't take the oath until we verify who's in charge, Melchior. If you want to engage in this election, you need to be patient and play by our rules."

The dragon's eyes smoldered with barely-bridled annoyance. "If you won't let me take the oath, I will consider it obstructionism. There will be consequences."

Friederling glanced at his watch. "Moving from shallow efforts at diplomacy veiled threats already? The meeting is only three minutes old. Most people put a little more effort into their politics than that."

"We'll be in touch once we make a decision," Rylie said.

"You'll regret this," Melchior said.

The secretary gestured to the door. "Yes, I'm sure we will. Thanks."

Melchior was focused on Deirdre now, like she was the only person in the room. "It's a shame you won't cooperate. There's so much I could offer to all of you. Especially those with fire in their blood."

Her heart skipped a beat.

Did he know what she was?

He must know.

For a breathless moment, Deirdre was trapped in Melchior's gaze. The way he was looking at her made her think that he had something to say. But it wasn't coming out in words-just in body language, which was open and inviting, as though he were silently encouraging her to leave the office with him.

If Melchior was his own kind of Alpha-an Alpha dragon-what could he do for Deirdre's phoenix?

She didn't have time to consider the possibilities. Melchior gave a shallow bow to Friederling and backed out of the room, escorted closely by OPA agents.

Deirdre realized she hadn't been breathing. She felt dizzy.

"I don't even need Alpha senses to smell the lies all over that guy," Rylie said as soon as the doors shut. "But he sure is nice to look at. The question is, where's the true queen of the Winter Court?"

"Only one way to find out, and that requires a visit to the Summer Court," Friederling said grimly. "In the meantime, having the Winter Court in a game of tug-of-war has deadly implications for us all. We'll have to move quickly if we hope to minimize the damage."

"We can take Melchior and Rhiannon," Deirdre said. "I'm not worried about them." It was probably bravado, but she'd already survived them once. She'd find a way to do it again.

"They're more dangerous than you could possibly realize." His tone was so condescending that he might as well have added "little girl" to the end of the sentence. Friederling hobbled to the desk and sat down, propping the cane against his leg. "The sidhe are masters of illusion. If the unseelie decide they want revenge against us, they will get revenge in some way that is both creative and horrible." He propped his chin on his hand, studying Deirdre thoughtfully. "You're coming with us to the Summer Court whether I like it or not. What happens after that, however, is up to you."

"Fritz," Rylie said, "do we need to do this right now?"

He cut her off with a wave of his hand. "This is the deal, Ms. Tombs: I'm going to have you arrested for Everton Stark's crimes and placed in solitary confinement...unless you to make a statement on camera declaring that Stark is cooperating with the OPA. As we all know, he's a close second to Ms. Gresham in the polls, so we need his cooperation to pull this off. A statement from you, his popular Beta, could prevent deadly riots."

Deirdre immediately opened her mouth to agree to it. She wanted Stark to participate anyway, and if a statement would save lives, then it was an easy deal to make with him.

But she shut her mouth without speaking.

Stark really wouldn't like her making statements on his behalf. Especially when those statements would make American gaeans believe that Stark was complying with the very political machine that he'd spent months railing against.

They needed to win the election, but it had to be done more carefully than that.

And they couldn't do it by pretending to ally with the OPA.

"I'll have to talk with Stark," Deirdre said.

"That's out of the question. I have an arrest warrant that says you're not going anywhere without escort, Ms. Tombs, and I don't think Everton Stark is going to want to sit down with you in a government facility."

"You realize he would kill me if I did this without talking to him, right?" Deirdre asked. "You're offering me solitary confinement or death."

"Maybe so, but your death could mean the safety of the gaeans you pretend to care about. Don't you think it's time to put your life where your mouth is?"

"It's not fair, Fritz," Rylie said. "We should discuss this."

"Fair or not, those are my terms, and I'm not changing them. Even for you, Ms. Gresham. Make a statement on camera or get arrested. It's your choice."

Deirdre's mouth was dry. She couldn't speak. Couldn't think.

Friederling checked his watch again. "Take your time deciding. We still need to visit the Summer Court and track down the queen of the Winter Court, after all." Friederling's eyes sparked with dark mirth. "But I expect you to make a statement as soon as we return to Earth-or you'll never see sunlight again."