Chapter 18 – Fracture

“When we agreed to work together, you agreed to keep me in the loop for your decisions,” Chester began. “So I think it’s only fair I return the favor.”

“Mm?” Callum said, arm around Lucy as she leaned against him. He was still feeling a little disoriented as he reclined on the couch in Chester’s basement. Only the clock told him how much time he’d lost between vis exhaustion and a minor concussion from being smashed in the face, because he sure hadn’t kept track. So far Chester had been an excellent host and Callum had no complaints, but he was ready to leave and take Lucy home.

“With Ravaeb gone, I’m the only supernatural with any real power in the Midwest,” Chester said. That cleared some of the cobwebs from Callum’s head, and he gave Chester a sharp look. He was back in human form, looking like a Viking, but he shook his head at Callum’s expression. “I’ve got no intention of conquering anything, but it does mean that there’s nobody to apply pressure when I break from GAR. Which I’m going to be doing today.”

“Ah,” Callum said. “Congratulations. It’s probably for the best, considering all the issues with GAR.”

“Just so,” Chester agreed. “But of course, even I am not entirely capable of standing on my own. I’ll be meeting with some people to form agreements and get advice on any alliances. Not to make anything like GAR, but just a number of peers aligning themselves in the same direction.”

“That sounds promising,” Callum said cautiously. Anything that replaced GAR would just suffer from the same issues, but a coalition of smaller entities might be less of an issue. It might also be more of a problem, depending on who made it up; there was no such thing as a perfect solution.

“I imagine you won’t want to stay for the meeting, since that’d imply you were endorsing the alliance.” Chester raised an eyebrow, and Callum nodded agreement. It wasn’t like Callum had no interest in what Chester was putting together, since it’d pragmatically influence supernatural politics over most of the United States, but he couldn’t actually be part of it. The only role he could play was that of enforcer, unless he took a direct political stance, and either one would subvert his actual goals and approach.

He couldn’t really decide to be left alone if he was in charge of anything.

“On the other hand, I don’t want to end up in a position where you’re gunning for my head the way you were with Ravaeb,” Chester said.

“I’d rather not be in that position either,” Callum said. So far he didn’t have any issues with Chester, mostly because Chester had no issues with regular folks. Everything he’d heard showed that the Alpha ran a tight ship, and apparently a lot of shifters did janitorial work or construction, which probably helped. It was hard to have an ego when mopping floors or digging ditches.

“Right, so, what do I need to keep in mind to make sure that doesn’t happen?” Chester asked, spreading his hands. “I’m not asking for a Ten Commandments or a manifesto, just your offhand thoughts. You don’t strike me as an unreasonable man.”

“I try not to be,” Callum agreed. Lucy snorted.

“You’re plenty unreasonable, big man,” she disagreed. “But not about this kind of thing, so go ahead.”

“It’s pretty straightforward, I think?” Callum said, speaking slowly as he considered it. “You don’t prey on people. I can’t really say anything about fae or shifter internal politics; I wouldn’t want to meddle. But when it comes with normal folks, you just don’t.”

“You realize that excludes the vampires entirely, right?” Chester pointed out. “At least the ones on Earth. They can’t subsist on moonwater over here. They have to eat people’s vis.”

“Then that’s their problem,” Callum said firmly. “Even if they didn’t have anywhere else to go, I don’t care. You don’t prey on people. Anyone that allows that can be first in line and save the rest of us the trouble.”

“Ha! Well, I can say there’s no real love lost between us and the vamps anyway.”

“Or between anyone and vamps, really,” Lucy put in. “I know there’s some mage families that love ‘em, and they’re great for night shifts, but who wants to work with them?”

“Indeed,” Chester agreed. “That’s easy enough. I was already doing that, but I think the people I am talking to won’t be too put out by that limitation. It’s a good idea anyway, because why would you put yourself at odds with the people who control the entire planet?” He held up a hand. “Which I know is rather mercenary, but not everyone can be convinced by arguments about morality.”

“Sure,” said Callum, who hadn’t intended to argue anyway. “You’re the one who’s playing the politics, not me. Pretty sure I’d get fed up with it.”

“I’d worry about you having to play sheriff all the time if you were part of it,” Lucy said, taking his hand. “You’re doing that enough as it is.”

“I suspect there would be a lot of people who would not want to join an alliance where you’re an enforcer,” Chester observed.

“So that’s three votes against, motion carries,” Callum said. “I’ll leave you to declare your independence, then. I imagine by now you’re ready for the difficulties that’ll cause.”

“Without GAR being able to field Fane or Hargrave against me, I suspect I’ll have little trouble,” Chester agreed. He had gotten a little bit of advance notice from House Hargrave directly, and would enjoy what happened when that particular bit of news became public.

“Then I guess there’s nothing else but to thank you for your help and your hospitality,” Callum said, standing and offering his hand. Chester took it, and then gave Lucy a smile.

“Take care of him,” he said, and Lucy nodded with faux solemnity. Callum rolled his eyes and opened a portal back to the Texas trailer.

“We’ll stay in touch,” Lucy promised, and linked arms with Callum as they stepped through. Once they were back in familiar territory, and the portal was closed, she stretched and gave a little shake. “You did it, big man! Was a little scary there, though.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It was the right call to involve the shifters.” Callum took a long breath and let it out. “Plus, Ravaeb seemed pretty damn nasty.”

“Yeah,” Lucy said, leaning into him again. “So what are we going to do now that the big bad fae is gone?”

“Well,” Callum said, looking down at her mischievous little smirk. He smiled back, knowing she didn’t mean work but he had to tease her anyway. “There’s always moving⁠—”

“Nah,” Lucy said, grabbing his hand and hauling him toward the bedroom. “We’re gonna celebrate.”

***

“You can’t do this,” the mage threatened as Chester’s claws ripped apart the vis of the man’s shield. The mage reeled backward and Chester grabbed his arm. Neither of the watchers that GAR had installed were particularly powerful mages, so their magic was essentially impotent when he drew on his pack bonds.

“You might want to start using your brain,” Chester said, force-marching the man out of the well-appointed room that he’d been living in for weeks. At Chester’s expense, no less, which had made his presence all the more galling and his expulsion all the more satisfying. “If anything you should be thanking me for merely throwing you off my land.”

He had originally intended to shove the mages through the GAR teleporter, but with those out of commission he had decided to settle for tossing the mages out into empty grassland. Which was almost as good. Let them fly back under their own power.

The mage tried saying something else but Chester shut him up with a deep growl. It was freeing to be able to be as rude as he wanted to representatives of GAR, though he wasn’t going to go so far as to injure them. Unless they really brought it on themselves, of course.

John had the other watcher in a headlock when Chester met him at the outside of the building, and kept batting away the attempts of the mage to form something from his focus. A twitch through the pack bonds and Chester gave him permission, so John tightened his grip and growled warningly in the mage’s ear.

The two shifters raced for the edge of the compound’s property, dragging the mages along. It was never pleasant for humans to be moved that quickly, but Chester didn’t really care. The two of them stopped at the edge of the property, at the big private gate, and as one hurled the mages over the gate and into the grass beyond. Neither of them were talented enough to cushion their fall, but Chester wasn’t going to feel bad for any bruises or sprains they got from the rough handling.

“Remember,” Chester rumbled. “Tell your masters they are no longer our masters.”

He watched as the pair of mages took to the air. Shifters technically didn’t have any real air power, but that was why he’d quietly acquired a little bit of military hardware. The anti-air weaponry wouldn’t do anything to an Archmage, but it’d do well enough for lackeys, and by the time anyone in GAR decided to move on him he would hopefully have more support.

The two mages vanished behind glamours, though Chester could still track them by the way they displaced the air as they flew off and away from the compound. Once he was certain they were gone, he joined in with the rest of his immediate pack. They had quite a bit of work to do in clearing out the inner courtyard and setting things up for the summit.

Wells had actually been kind enough to clean out the worst of Ravaeb’s odious remains by simply sending the pieces back to the fae court. Nobody yet knew what the fallout of the fae king’s death would be, and the last time a fae king had died it’d been over in Europe so Chester wasn’t familiar with the process. So far the only issue was the stinking dirt he was helping to shovel into a dump truck, but there would be more. Which was why he was rushing the meeting a bit.

Fortunately he didn’t really need to impress anyone with the surroundings for the summit. Most of the work was just making the area less offensive to the senses, and he would have done that anyway. The main meeting room in the big pack house only needed some touching up, and he already had someone out getting drinks and snacks while Lisa baked cookies.

Though he didn’t have much to prepare, he still cut it close as he was just stepping out of the shower when the first guest arrived. Surprisingly, Shahey came by car, an old beat-up sedan that didn’t look like it should even be on the road. But it smelled of magic and purred like a kitten, and to Chester’s shifter senses it wasn’t actually even an internal combustion engine. Dragonblooded secrets, it seemed.

“Alpha Chester,” Shahey said, shaking Chester’s hand. He had either dispensed with the glamour or acquired a new one, because the scaled man looked somehow old, with fins and scales somehow implying a bearded elder in a worn but impeccably clean suit. Though Chester imagined the clothes were just as misleading as the car. “I expect this will prove to be interesting, even if I am only here to give advice.”

“I hope it’s only interesting. There’s always a risk in bringing people together.” Chester escorted Shahey to the meeting room, letting him select one of the overstuffed armchairs.

“It would be quite rude for people to start fighting in front of me,” Shahey replied mildly, and Chester nodded. That was at least some guarantee of good behavior from everyone.

Wizzy was next, the Archmage strolling up to the gates of Chester’s compound from nowhere in particular, dressed in jeans and a duster. Like Wells, Wizzy didn’t have any scent of magic lingering around him, but also like Wells, the very way he carried himself made it obvious he wasn’t ordinary or mundane. Chester hadn’t been sure he would come, since getting a message to the man was not easy, but it was good to have a mage involved.

“I don’t suppose the Wells boy is going to be here?” Wizzy asked, in his leathery voice.

“No, we judged that to be too impolitic,” Chester said. Wizzy seemed disappointed, but nodded anyway and took off his hat as he stepped inside. The others filtered in over the next couple hours — Ferrochar, who looked like an elf with dragon horns, Alphas Smith and Carlson, who headed the packs in the south and east respectively, and several unaligned but still powerful fae who lived in Chester’s territory.

There were no vampires. Chester hadn’t invited any to begin with and with Callum’s condition he certainly wasn’t accepting any crashers. Which there were, as insanely stupid as it was.

The information came through the pack bonds as he chatted with his guests. Someone had tried sneaking through and been run off. One was fae, the other vampire. Half an hour later, the anti-aircraft gun Chester had smuggled in coughed, swatting a mage out of the sky. These were all minor incidents though, and didn’t require any of those inside to bestir themselves.

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“To make it completely official,” Chester said, once everyone had arrived. “I have declared independence from GAR as of today. The Midwest Pack no longer recognizes its authority over our actions.”

“As has the Miami enclave,” Ferrochar said immediately after, which Chester had not heard about. In fact, he wouldn’t be surprised if Ferrochar had decided that on the spot. “GAR has no hold over us.” Chester gave Ferrochar an appreciative nod anyway.

“Nor do I have any interest in making my own version of GAR. I don’t want to tell fae what to do, or dragonblooded, or even mages. Nor do I want to be told what to do. I merely wish an alliance of like-minded individuals.”

“Including the dragonblooded?” One of the independent fae asked.

“Mister Shahey and Archmage Wizzy are advisors,” Chester said. “Being by far the oldest supernaturals in America.” Wizzy chuckled at that, but didn’t contradict him.

“What were the terms you had in mind for the alliance?” Ferrochar asked.

“Nothing significant. I’m not certain that even mutual defense is the best idea; that is something better handled between individuals. But nonaggression between parties, and a commitment to prevent any behaviors that might bring us to the attention of mundanes.” Chester shrugged. He really didn’t think anyone there would be too interested in any military alliance as such, though he would be glad to be wrong.

“Though there is one particular mandate,” he continued. “Provided by The Ghost.” That got everyone’s attention, though Shahey and Wizzy didn’t seem particularly surprised. “He is not part of this alliance, nor does he approve or disapprove of it. But he has informed me that what he cares about is preying on people. Internal disputes for fae or shifters are not his problem, but he is very firm that we should live among mundanes rather than on them, as it were.”

“Not everyone is going to like that,” Ferrochar said with a frown. “Some of my⁠—”

“The Ghost has destroyed Ravaeb,” Chester interrupted him. “For what he allowed his people to do. You may wish to take this opportunity to look to your own and decide if it is really worth pursuing that path.”

“Ah,” Ferrochar said, looking enlightened. He had probably noticed that Ravaeb was dead, but everyone else looked various degrees of surprised or stunned save Shahey. As well they might. Even Archmage Wizzy raised his eyebrows.

Chester had never seen Wells in action before, and was struck by how little there was to see. The man had just sat there concentrating — at least until a fae curse converged on him and pulled one of Ravaeb’s guards from wherever the fae were. Then there had been something. A brief roaring sound and then an impact like a meteor, to judge from the splatter. Chester had doubts he would survive that sort of thing himself — and he very well knew that Wells could insert his anchors into position with nobody the wiser.

“I don’t much care about fae, and hunting mundanes is stupid,” Alpha Carlson said. “But I don’t like the idea that you can send the Ghost my way.”

“I can reassure you on that part. I can’t tell the Ghost what to do at all.” Chester shook his head. “He’s turned down the opportunity to work for me more than once, and if he found out I was coercing him in any way I suspect he’d take it personally. If anyone does wish to contact him I would be more than willing to forward a message, however.” Several people spoke at once and Chester held up a hand. “After we’re finished,” he said.

“Now, let us discuss life without GAR.”