15

Lucien Valente invited me to breakfast the next week. I dressed to the standards of a country club, as best I could, but the address he gave me turned out to be an IHOP. This time, we were both the best dressed men to ever grace a discount pancake joint. As before, he insisted that I eat a little off of his plate before ordering anything for myself.

“Why pancakes?” I asked.

Lucien grinned. “Who would think to look for the two of us here? Unpredictable targets are hard to assassinate.”

I added an extra creamer to my coffee. “I take it Veruca has been talking.”

“I take attempts on the lives of my employees seriously.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Anything I need to do to make the assassins go away?”

“You know anything about a group called the Faceless Men or why they wouldn’t want you to have a personal wizard?”

He paused to allow the waiter to deliver my food and refresh our carafe. “No. I’m aware of numerous cabals, would-be Illuminati…but none by that name and none that have expressed an interest in my previous wizards.”

I considered mentioning the possible connection to the wendigoes before deciding against it. Maybe it was the way Dorothy had died, but I thought of that business as personal. “It’s possible the fae invented them or are trying to trick us into doing their dirty work for them. Both times I’ve heard of them, it’s been off of a fairy’s lips.”

Lucien replied, but whatever he said, I didn’t hear it. I suddenly realized my last statement wasn’t entirely true. I had heard of the Faceless before, from my own lips. True, it hadn’t been my voice, but I’d been the one speaking. I could feel my dark subconscious probing around the edges of the new revelation and instinctively shut him out from what I was thinking.

When Valente finished speaking, I nodded sagaciously, as if I had been hanging on his every word. I tried to be polite, useful, and knowledgeable throughout the rest of the meal, but my thoughts were busy elsewhere.