“And the real reason?” Kingsley pushed, his face turning crimson again.
“It was me.” Edgar stepped forward, his whole body bent and his arms just sort of dangling. “I did it. I am the culprit. She is trying to take the blame for my gross negligee.”
“Your gross…what?” Bewilderment bled through Kingsley’s expression. Edgar could crack the best of them.
“I think he means negligence,” Austin said, realizing what this was about. “Alpha, if I may, this is an order of business I’d hoped to discuss with you later in the meeting. Not the creature—I didn’t know about that—but the matter Cyra is likely referring to. I ask that we put off the specifics until a later time. I think we’ve gotten far enough off track as it is.”
“Fine.” Kingsley stepped forward again, his movements brusque, his patience at an end. “Let’s get down to business.”
EIGHTEEN
Jessie
I LISTENED to Austin and Kingsley negotiate the various placements of their defenses. It was like watching a chess match. I hoped one day I could be that good at organizing a defense.
In the end, it was determined we’d have a couple of our people in the shifter town, and the rest would be posted along the borders of the territory. That was probably for the best. Our fliers able to cover more area and the townspeople wouldn’t need to worry about strangers watching their goings-on.
That topic out of the way, Kingsley moved the conversation on to what we’d do in the event more mages were caught assessing the pack defenses.
“Did you check out the metallic element by the river where the mage was captured?” Austin asked as Kingsley gestured to his shifters. The beta came forward holding a stack of papers balanced on a laptop.
“We did. We’ll get to that in a moment.” Kingsley set the computer on the edge of the table and handed back the stack of papers.
In the corner of the room, a projector blared to life, flashing a spreadsheet across the wall. The projector guy pulled down a screen to better showcase the image.
“That’s a list of all the attacks we’ve had, where they took place, when, and a summary of each.”
Kingsley motioned James around the table. “This is a report in paper form of everything you’ll see on the slides. Now, as you can see, most of the attacks were made by two or three mages. We usually catch them shortly after they cross the perimeter, except in the cases of deep night. It is rare for there to only be one, so we’re thinking one or two probably got away yesterday.”
The slide flipped as I took a packet from James.
“This next slide shows the severity of the various attacks. As you can see, most of these mages ran after they were found out. But a few of these instances have resulted in severe altercations where we’ve had wounded shifters and one death. The worst outcomes were always against three mages.”
The next slide flicked onto the screen, and I could feel the impatience from Austin and also a low hum of emotion from a gargoyle connection, nothing dire. I homed in anyway, not incredibly interested in Kingsley’s analysis of when the mages had struck and his predictions on when they might come again. The world fell away and that connection came into focus. Tristan. He was in this room with us, feeling frustrated and impatient.
Clearly he and Austin had heard a different account from that mage I hadn’t actually killed.
That had been a relief, both because if I was going to hurt someone, I’d like to mean to, and also because they’d gotten valuable information from him before he kicked the bucket. Close call. We needed a better system for this stuff, but we were all relieved with how it had worked out.
“Alpha, if I may?” Austin waited for Kingsley to nod. “You have recorded less than half of the invasions that we know of, and those you have noted were assessments, nothing more. They weren’t real attacks. You’ve given them information and gotten nothing in return.”
The air thickened in the room. Kingsley’s shifters’ eyes narrowed at Austin. They clearly thought he was calling their alpha ineffective. Maybe useless.
The former was true, of course, but it wasn’t Kingsley’s fault. He didn’t know mages like we did.
He didn’t have eyes on their spies, hidden behind spells and potions. Knowing magic existed was a far cry from knowing what it could do. All he could see was what they’d encountered, a low hum of activity, dangerous but manageable, never getting worse, never giving a real threat. Given he led a pack that wanted peace, that were used to a mostly sedentary life, he’d probably had people look at those numbers and whisper in his ear that the coming threat wouldn’t be that bad. That their pack was too solid. That Momar had never taken on anyone like them before. After a while, even a guy like Kingsley would probably start to believe.