"Yes, and?"

  "I don't think I can stand the answer right now."

  A Little Talk

  Todd 'Quincy' Adams was not having a good morning. In fact, he wasn't expecting to have a good afternoon either. He was currently 'bagged and gagged', as the lycans liked to call it. He'd been gagged, a bag put over his head, his hands put into tight 'mittens', and bound tightly behind his back against the opposite elbow. His legs had been tied together as well, and a rope ran from his ankles, around his neck, and back down, forcing him to kneel on the floor.

  The hard metal object being pressed into the base of his skull, he had no doubt, was the barrel of a firearm of some sort or other.

  He'd been walking out of his home, when suddenly he'd been hit with a number of spells, as a man in some sort of government uniform ran up to him and hit him in the face with the butt of a rather nasty looking rifle.

  Todd didn't remember anything after that, until he'd regained consciousness in his current situation, where he'd been hauled painfully to his knees some time ago. He couldn't hear anything, not even his own heartbeat. Best he could figure it out was the president had taken issue with their attempt to kill him.

  Todd snorted, imagine that.

  He felt someone undo the ties on the hood, which was then suddenly pulled off of his head, forcing him to close his eyes against the painfully bright light that was shining into them.

  "Before we remove the gag," a voice that sounded vaguely familiar began, "understand that if you try to cast any kind of magical spell, you and your family will immediately be put to death, along with the entire senior council of Vestibulum. All of Vestibulum will be declared outlaw, and the government will pay a bounty for the head of every member of the Vestibulum.

  "And by head, I mean severed. Now, if you understand this, please nod your head, or we'll just kill you now and move on to your underlings."

  Todd nodded, then coughed around his gag as it pulled the rope around his neck tight for a moment.

  "Un-gag him."

  Todd took a breath as the gag came off, then immediately spoke. "I want my lawyer! You can't do this! It's against the law!"

  "But the law doesn't apply to you, Todd, now does it?"

  Blinking, Todd's eyes started to adjust, and he suddenly recognized the man he was talking to. Vincent Kensington, the director in charge of the Secret Service, and the man charged explicitly with dealing with the different magic councils and magic users in the United States.

  "Director Kensington! I am the head of the Vestibulum! How dare you! I have rights!"

  Kensington shook his head. "Rights are for citizens, Todd, and according to the Treaty of York, the laws of the United States don't apply to you Magic Users and your little organizations."

  "Unless you want to face the full wrath of the Vestibulum, I suggest you release me immediately!"

  Kensington laughed. "We already faced that yesterday, when some two thousand of your lycans attacked and attempted to assassinate the president of the United States."

  "What?!" Todd said, doing his best to show the shock he felt at this unexpected response, which wasn't all that hard. Who would have expected the U.S. government to respond in such a violent fashion after all these years of refusing to engage them?

  "We did no such thing!"

  "We've got a lot of dead lycans, a few dead mages, and a dozen more in a holding cell, that all say differently, Todd. The only reason we haven't killed you already is that the president wants to know why you did it."

  "We sent the lycans out there to attack Valens, that was it! That and nothing else! Ask my fellow council members! Ask the ones you caught!"

  "You expect me to believe that your attacking on the same day the president visited him was 'just a coincidence'? Honestly, Todd, just how stupid do you think we are?"

  Todd felt the barrel of the rifle prod the back of his head as he tried to figure out what to say next.

  "Okay! We wanted to change the president's mind! We thought if we staged a big public attack while he was in town, he'd see that the lycans were no better than animals and change his mind about freeing them! No one was supposed to attack the president or even go near him!"

  "Oh? What about your special assassination squad? I believe you called them the 'Primes' or something?"

  "What are you talking about? We sent them to Mexico!" Todd lied easily. "We sent them with one of our most trusted member's sons in charge! He was to take them to Mexico City to meet up with our people there before Valens could free them!"

  Kensington stopped and pondered a moment. So far, none of the members they'd interrogated had admitted to the assassination attempt. In fact, they'd all been rather shocked by it. Kensington's instincts told him that Todd wasn't being completely honest with him, but so far everyone they'd talked to had agreed with that story.

  Even those few who had been weak enough to fall prey to the mind spells of the magic users Duncan had loaned him. Unfortunately, a man like Todd Adams was too strong of mind to succumb to that kind of magic.

  "For your information, we found the body of one Lucas Stokes in the bus used to transport your 'Primes' after they were wiped out in their failed attempt to assassinate the president."

  "Lucas? Dead? Who killed him?"

  "He committed suicide, no doubt after he learned of his failure. The body was still warm when our investigators discovered it."

  "But, but why? Why would he do such a thing?" Todd asked. He'd picked Lucas because the young man had always been something of a hothead and a braggart. Just the kind of person to come up with some harebrained idea all on his own.

  "Why don't you think about that for a while?" Kensington said and motioned to someone standing behind Todd. "Maybe you'll have an answer when I come back."

  The hood came back down over Todd's head. But he felt a lot better about it now than he had before. If they'd been positive he'd been behind the attempt, he'd already be dead. No, they weren't sure and they weren't taking chances. This was good.

  #

  It was getting late. Kensington looked around the room at his agents, plus the magic users Duncan had loaned him, and the lycans that had been borrowed from Sean Valens.

  "Well, so far everyone's story agrees with everyone else's. Lucas was supposed to travel with all the other lycans to Dallas, then continue on to Mexico. But he told them at Dallas that the plans had been changed and he was supposed to use the Primes against Sean instead. The person Lucas told, and who passed it on to the others, died in the attack."

  "Convenient, isn't it?" Agent Simms said.

  "But apparently something that wasn't planned. They were supposed to abandon the lycans before they engaged Valens' people. Lucas and the other guy, Jake something, were the two in command, and when Lucas finally left them, supposedly to go find a couple of whorehouses or something, none of them really expected to see him again until they got back to Boston, where he'd regale them all with tales of his bravery and prowess."

  "So, you don't think Todd ordered him to do what he did?"

  Kensington shook his head. "As much as I don't trust Mr. Adams, and I suspect he's lying to us, I would have pegged Lucas to be the type to sell out his superiors in a hope for leniency. Not the type to kill himself."

  "Unless he really did do this on his own," Simms said.

  "But why would he do such a thing?" asked Kevin, one of Duncan's mages. "Surely he had to know what would happen to him afterwards?"

  "It's not like he was risking his own life," Simms pointed out.

  "And," Kensington added, "if he'd been successful, he'd have achieved Todd and the council's goal."

  "What about Walters? How did he fit into all of this?"

  "That's what bothers me," Kensington admitted. "Everything we've been able to find out about Walters doesn't put him in touch with Lucas. But it does put him in touch with several of the members of the Vestibulum in Brussels, at their main headquarters."

  "And Lucas' phone records don't show anything other than a few calls between him and Jake after he left Boston."

  "Could the folks in Brussels have gone behind Todd's back?" Kevin asked. "It is the kind of thing they're known for."

  "Possibly," Kensington admitted. "Though I thought you folks had a big prohibition against working with demons?"

  "According to what Sean and your man Carl told us, he didn't turn into one until after he died. So it's likely they didn't know he was allied with them. On top of that, it seems even more likely that this whole thing was an attempt by Walker and his demon allies to frame the Vestibulum as well as the lycans."

  Kensington sighed. "Still, I'd like to put a bullet in Todd just on general principle."

  "If you kill him without proof, I don't think the president's plan to renegotiate the Treaty of York will go well for him," Kevin pointed out.

  "I know, I know. Let's turn the others loose, but we'll keep Todd on ice for a few more days and see what shakes loose. Maybe we'll get lucky and he'll break or something. I just hate the idea of letting him go."

  "Right, Boss." Simms said and they all got up and left the meeting, leaving Kensington to sit there by himself and worry. He debated calling Valens to see if he could offer any advice, but the president had made it clear that he didn't want the lions involved in this matter any more than they already were. It was their problem and nobody else's.

  #

  Todd smiled, it had taken a few days, but in the end the evidence had backed up his claims of innocence. They had nothing linking him to the attack on the president. Oh, there had definitely been a few bad decisions, like staging an attack on Valens while the president was in town, and the small matter of breaking the silence, even if it had ended up being a minor event that was easily glossed over.

  Todd did regret that the attempt had been defeated, but he'd deflected the blame from the Vestibulum and placed it firmly on the shoulders of the now dead Lucas. He'd even managed to shift a little of the blame onto Lucas' friend Jake, who had apparently been aiding and abetting the scheme.

  True, they'd lost all the wolves that by rights should have been sent off to Mexico or points further south, but he'd been given his orders and followed them. So that wasn't his burden to bear. He had some regrets over the loss of their Primes, they'd been good and faithful wolves up until the finish, however their failure had made it clear to him that their usefulness truly had come to an end. When a well-armed elite band of werewolves can't take down a bunch of humans, the time of lycan warriors was obviously at an end.

  There were rumors now as well that the president was pushing to renegotiate the Treaty of York. Todd had several congressmen, and even a senator, who he all but owned these days, and they'd expressed the outrage Todd had asked them to over the last Executive Order the president had signed, but honestly, Todd couldn't care less about the lycan question anymore, that was the past, and he was only interested in the future. The York thing worried him, but that was going to be a problem for somebody else. Jeremy and the leadership in Belgium had been impressed with the way Todd had managed to get the Vestibulum out from under the government's scrutiny here, and they apparently had need of him.

  Things were definitely going his way.

  Tank watched Todd as he got out of his car and started to walk towards the brownstone where he lived. The trip here had been a long and arduous one, but once he'd discovered how to hitch a ride on a couple of boxcars heading east, it had turned a trip of weeks into mere days.

  Still, his feet were sore, and his belly was empty after all the running and skulking he'd had to do for the last week. He'd been waiting here for Todd all day, and it appeared the man didn't have a care in the world as Todd started up the concrete steps. Tank knew he'd have to get close to make this work, but thankfully he had Quick's bar as well as his own. So the explosion was sure to be a big one.

  "I wanted to thank you, Todd, for our freedom," Tank said, stepping out of the shadows by the door he'd been hiding in.

  Todd stopped and blinked at the large wolf standing in front of him.

  "What? Who are you?"

  "My name is Tank, and I just wanted to shake your hand," Tank said as he shifted.

  End Book Ten

  Afterword

  Hello everyone. First I'd like to apologize for the length of time between this installment in the Valens Legacy series and the previous one. Most of you don't know that I had to move across the country from California to Texas, and it the move itself was started near the end of July and just completed today, at the end of September. Moving eighteen hundred miles is a very complicated process it turns out, and unfortunately I'm not nearly well off enough to just pay someone else to take care of everything. So I had to drive it, three times. The last time with a very large dog and a very unhappy cat.

  But all of that's over and so is (hopefully) the related stress. Now I just get to unpack it all!

  That being said, as always, I would once again like to than you for having gotten to this poing in the ongoing story of Sean and the battle into which he's found himself drawn. If you enjoyed this book, I'd appreciate it if you'd rate and review it on Amazon. Writers are rewarded by Amazon when we get four and five-star reviews, and the more we get, the more we're rewarded.

  So please! I'd appreciate it very much if you gave me a good review.

  If you find any typos or 'wrong words', please feel free to email what and where they were to me. Typos always make it through, no matter how many people I have checking things.

  Character List: I'm starting to build one on my website for those interested:

  http://www.vanstry.net/stryvant/Valens Cast of Characters.html

  Book Eleven: I haven't started writing this one yet. I'll probably do that in a day or two. I'm hoping to turn that one around very quickly. I've been told that I've left a lot of you guessing over what's going to happen next, and while I've been foreshadowing certain events from almost the very beginning of this series, I'm not sure you're going to figure it out before I drop it all on you.

  At least I hope not!

  My goal for the next few months is to focus on this series and try to get the next several books out faster.

  Some Recommendations: As mentioned before, I do have another name I write under: John Van Stry. If you haven't looked at it, you might appreciate my 'Portals of Infinity' series. It's currently at eight books and will continue, but right now I'm focused on the Valens Legacy series, so I probably won't be revisiting the Portals series until sometime in the Fall.

  Some other people I enjoy reading in this genre, and you might, as well:

  William D. Arand

  Blaise Corvin

  Michael-Scott Earle

  They're all good people and good writers. You may also want to check out this group on Facebook:

  https://www.facebook.com/groups/haremlit/

  Again, thank you for your support and for buying my books.

  My Amazon Author's webpage:

  https://www.amazon.com/Jan-Stryvant/e/B06ZY7L62L/

  Occasional announcements at:

  https://stryvant.blogspot.com/

  Jan Stryvant website at:

  http://www.vanstry.net/stryvant/

  Email:

  stryvant@gmail.com

 

 

  Jan Stryvant, It Ain't Easy

 

 

  Thank you for reading books on GrayCity.Net
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