Chapter 258 The Revenge
POV: Dante | Surrey, dragon hoard complex
I have been tracking Mordaunt for a month and the tracking has the specific quality that tracking a person who does not want to be found has, which is that the trail is real but it is also managed, the specific trail of someone who understands that leaving no trail at all is itself information and who has therefore left a trail that is technically present and which leads to the correct destination at a pace that he controls.
The Surrey location is in the network of properties that Vermithrax Consolidated owns outright rather than holds in debt, the distinction being that debt properties have other parties involved in their management and outright properties do not, and the dragon hoard that occupies the underground portion of a Surrey estate that appears from the outside to be a private agricultural business is Vermithrax's specific infrastructure, the place where the things that belong to Vermithrax and to Vermithrax's protected assets are kept at the specific remove from London's jurisdiction that Surrey provides.
I am a dhampir, which means I walk in daylight in a world where most of what I am hunting cannot, and which means that the timing of my approach, which is eleven in the morning on a Tuesday, is the timing that maximizes the specific advantage of being the only person in the building who does not have a complicated relationship with the sun.
The guards are human, which is also expected, because human guards in daylight are the correct security architecture for a facility that is primarily protecting supernatural assets from supernatural threats, and human guards are susceptible to approaches that supernatural guards are not, and I have been a hunter for nine years and the approach takes twenty-two minutes.
The vault is forty feet underground and it has the quality that underground spaces used by very old things have, which is the accumulated weight of everything that has been stored in them over the centuries they have been in use, the specific atmosphere of age that is not decay but density, the air of a space that has been filled with important things for a very long time.
Mordaunt is in the secondary chamber, which my intelligence from Violette's records placed him in, and the records are four weeks old and the placement is accurate, which tells me that Mordaunt's routine in exile has the quality of someone who has decided to be patient rather than agitated, someone who has organized their exile around a specific purpose rather than around managing the frustration of the exile itself.
I have been carrying my sister since Parliament steps and I have been managing it the way I manage everything, which is by directing it somewhere, and for a month the somewhere has been this building and this chamber and this man.
He hears me before I am fully through the door, which is the six-hundred-and-twelve-year advantage, the specific hearing of something that old, and he turns with the expression I remember from the Parliament steps, which is the mild amusement that I have decided is the thing about him I find most infuriating, because amusement requires a distance from the situation that nothing in his situation justifies.
"Valentina's brother," he says.
I do not answer. I move.
The fight has the quality that fighting someone six hundred years old has, which I have been preparing for since the Parliament steps by training every day in the specific way that grief channels itself into preparation when you give it somewhere to go, and the preparation has produced something different from the grief-fight on the steps, which is controlled rather than consumed, the specific quality of someone who is fighting with intention rather than just pain.
Mordaunt is weakened. The exile and the loss of his power base and the specific isolation from the institutional support that six hundred years of his fighting has relied on have produced a version of him that is still six hundred years old but which is operating without the infrastructure that made him formidable at the summit, and the difference is real and I can feel it in the engagement.
I hit him. This is not a figure of speech. I hit him with the specific force of nine years of hunter training applied to a target I have been thinking about for thirty days and he goes back and his expression changes, the amusement becoming something that assesses rather than dismisses, which is the first honest response he has given me.
We fight for six minutes, which is longer than the Parliament steps and which produces more from both sides than the steps did, and I am winning the fight in the specific sense that I am managing the engagement's direction and he is responding rather than initiating and the gap between us is narrowing with each exchange, and I am aware of the gap closing and I am not stopping.
The air in the chamber changes.
I know what the change means before I understand it consciously, the specific weight of something very large becoming present in a space, and I stop, not from choice but from the specific physical response of a dhampir body that is twenty-five years old encountering something that is very old and very large deciding to be present.
Vermithrax does not take his full form in the chamber because the chamber cannot contain his full form, but the avatar he wears fills the space with the quality of something that is not the avatar but which the avatar represents, and the quality is unmistakable.
"He's under my protection," Vermithrax says, and the voice has the texture it always has, the grinding stone quality of something very old using a human register without being able to fully reduce itself to it. "Leave or die."
I look at Mordaunt across the chamber, at the blood that is on his face from the exchange, at the expression that has moved from assessment back to the amusement, and I understand that the amusement now is real rather than performed, because he knew this moment was coming and he has been waiting for it, and the waiting has produced exactly the outcome he arranged.
He smiles.
"Tell Callum I'll return," he says. "Immortals always do."
I leave. I walk out through the vault and through the underground corridor and back up through the estate building and into the Surrey morning, and I drive back toward London in the specific quality of someone who went somewhere and accomplished something and also did not accomplish the thing they went there for, and the two outcomes are both true simultaneously.
He is alive and he is patient and he has six hundred and twelve years and Vermithrax's protection and whatever network he has been rebuilding for a month.
And I have my sister's daughter, who was born this morning before I left London, and who is alive, and who is the reason Valentina died, and who is therefore the only answer to Mordaunt's smile that exists.
I drive toward London.