Chapter 187 The New Cut
POV: Callum | Rookeries, various locations
I find out about the foreclosures from a woman named Bea who runs the laundry on the Rookeries' main street and who has been running it from the same building for eleven years, which means she was there before the war and before my father died and before any of this began, and she is telling me in the flat precise voice of someone who has already moved past shock into the territory of needing to know what comes next.
"Letter came yesterday," she says. "Property transfer notice. The building's been purchased by a holding company called Vermithrax Consolidated. New lease terms. Forty percent rent increase, effective in thirty days."
I take the letter from her and read it. The language is legal and clean and completely unambiguous and has the specific quality of documents written by people who know they are correct and want you to understand they know.
I spend the next four hours walking the Rookeries with Tom, who has been compiling a different version of the same information from thirty different sources for the past three weeks and who has been waiting, I realize, for me to be ready to hear it.
"The dragon," I say.
"Vermithrax," Tom confirms. "Not personally. Through holding companies, property trusts, investment vehicles. Sixteen of them, incorporated across four jurisdictions, all ultimately owned by the same entity." He has the documents in a folder that is thicker than I want it to be. "The Rookeries land is forty percent already. Another twenty percent is in the process of being transferred. He's been buying quietly for eight months, starting right after the facility raids, when attention was everywhere else."
Eight months. While we were fighting the Order and managing Parliament and protecting the children, someone was buying the ground under our feet.
"It's not illegal," Tom says. "None of it is illegal. Supernatural property law allows it. Mortgages defaulted because the supernatural economy has been disrupted by the war, values dropped, foreclosures triggered the purchase rights. All of it documented and correct."
"Vermithrax's philosophy," I say, and I say it out loud because saying it out loud makes it a real problem I can work with rather than a diffuse dread. "Chaos creates opportunity."
"He's been patient," Tom says. "He didn't create the chaos. He waited for it and then he bought it."
This is a different kind of attack than anything the Order has done or Mordaunt has attempted. Violence has responses. Political maneuvering has responses. Someone purchasing your community from underneath you through entirely legal mechanisms while you are occupied with everything else has responses that I do not yet fully understand, because they require a kind of fighting that is not the kind I have been doing.
Bea is not the only one. I spend the afternoon with six other business owners, a butcher and a clothier and two pub landlords and a supernatural herbalist and a man who runs a wolf-specific medical practice and who has been serving the Rookeries for twenty years. All of them have received the same letters. All of them are looking at me with the expression that means they need someone to tell them this is solvable.
The autonomy we fought for is built on land we do not own. Everything we have defended and organized and sacrificed for sits on a foundation that a single patient dragon has been quietly purchasing for eight months while we were looking elsewhere.
"What do we do?" Tom asks.
I look at the documents. I look at Bea's letter. I look at the Rookeries street outside the window, which is mine in every way that matters and in no way that the law currently recognizes.
"We figure out how to fight a dragon who hasn't done anything wrong," I say.