25 
A GOOD MINION IS HARD TO FIND
There’s some kind of Asian were-woman watching this place.” Gordon Porter signed. He was a knight if no longer an active one, one of those rare geas born who survive their sixth decade with all of their limbs intact. A greying hardcase, he leaned on a spiked truncheon disguised as a walking stick and ran a small alarm-installing company. Most of his employees were lay servants, which meant that they hadn’t been born into the Knights Templar but had tumbled onto the existence of the supernatural under terrifying circumstances. When not eliminating, intimidating, or discrediting such people, knights like to make use of them—it both bolsters the order’s ranks and helps them keep tabs on potential whistle-blowers.
Gordon was one of three (again with the three!) discreet contacts that I was maintaining with the Grandmaster of the Knights Templar, and the contacts had to be discreet. Alliance or no alliance, it was going to be a long time before any knights and I posed for a Christmas card together.
“She’s a kitsune,” I signed back.
“She knows we spotted her,” Gordon replied silently. “And probably knows we’re knights too. She’s not just a natural tracker. She’s developed some serious skills.”
I just nodded. I wanted the kitsune to recognize Gordon and his people. Hell, I had rented a furnished apartment quickly in New York—which meant paying way, way too much money—specifically so that she could see Gordon’s company at work. Akihiko was watching me full time now, and I needed to verify my ties with the Templars so that the lies built around that connection might sound more credible.
Gordon gave me a sour grimace and went back to helping his men secure the place. Since his most sophisticated alarms had a nasty habit of not working around magic, Gordon and his people also took other measures: sigils and wards that only showed up in ultraviolet light, holy symbols, medicine bags that prevented clairvoyant spying, and bug spray that kept out more than bugs. Finally, they strategically placed several white-noise generators so that no one with extra-sensitive hearing or directional microphones could eavesdrop from outside.
When the place was secure, Gordon spoke aloud. “Give it to me from the top.”
I told Gordon everything I knew about Akihiko’s operation in New York.
“This doesn’t sound like an emergency.” Gordon wasn’t crazy about dealing with me, by the way. He was hard-core loyal to the Grandmaster, but we weren’t friends.
“This cunning man is building up a cadre of enforcers and assassins from different monster types,” I said. “And that kitsune out there was spewing some pretty serious anti-knight propaganda at the first meeting I attended too. I kind of thought the Grandmaster would like to have someone on the inside.”
Gordon huffed. “You think we don’t already know about an underground fighting circuit for monsters? It’s not our job to keep supernaturals from killing each other.” Gordon’s eyes were cold. “We’ve got real problems we’re dealing with. Homeless guys in Boston are having prophetic visions while they die from a seizure, and we have no idea why. A jinn is running around New York like a bull in an explosives lab. One of your werewolves attacked the knights that he was supposed to be helping track down a boo hag. And more fucking people are seeing fucking shadow beings every fucking day and talking about it on the fucking Internet, and we have no idea if it’s really some kind of shadow race or if these people are getting peripheral glimpses of supernatural creatures because the Pax is weakening. So why are you wasting my time with this shit?”
I tried to explain without mentioning Kevin or Sarah. “This guy’s bad news Gordon. I’m investigating.”
“Uh-huh.” Somehow he managed to stay unmoved by my passionate eloquence. “What do you want, Charming?”
“I want you to get in touch with the yamabushi for me,” I said.
Yamabushi are warrior monks and Japan’s equivalent of the Knights Templar. Like the Templars, yamabushi started out as a society whose focus was on training a small number of elite warriors to impact a much larger population, and also like the Templars, the yamabushi fell in and out of political favor and had to become skilled at operating in secrecy. So skilled that they are as much legend as fact. There are still groups that operate under the yamabushi title publicly, and I’m not clear if there’s a connection between them and the yamabushi that went underground after agreeing to the Pax Arcana or not. There are still groups who publicly call themselves Templars too, and some of them are splinter groups and some of them are parallel organizations and some of them are posers and some of them are fronts.
“That’s not how this works,” Gordon informed me. “I’m not your waiter. I snap my fingers and you come running, not the other way around.”
I considered telling him that I was good at snapping fingers too, especially other people’s, but then I remembered that I was asking a favor. “I just want a file or a conversation so I can learn more about this onmyouji. Akihiko lived in Japan for most of his life, and apparently, it’s been a long, long life. There’s no way the yamabushi haven’t kept tabs on him.”
Gordon considered this. “You’re asking us to owe another group a favor. We take that kind of thing seriously. But I’ll pass your request on. In the meantime, if the Grandmaster decides he wants this cunning man removed, I’ll give you a call. If you take the cunning man out anyway, give me one.” Then the son of a bitch handed me a bill.
“Really?” I asked.
“Details.” His face was still stony, but there was a slight hint of a smirk in his voice. He hadn’t given me a discount.
After they left, I used my phone to call Ben Lafontaine.
“Hey, Ben.”
“What do you need now?”
“What do you mean, now?” I said, annoyed. Ben too? “I haven’t talked to you for a month.”
“Exactly,” Ben grunted. “What do you want?”
“Did I forget to send you a birthday card or something?” I asked. “What’s got your nuts in a knot?”
“I’m trying to hold the largest coalition of werewolf packs on this continent together, and werewolves aren’t even a Chippewa tradition,” Ben reminded me. “They came over here with the French Canadians. The only reason I wound up leading a tribe of wolfwalkers is because one of them got loose on my rez a hundred years ago, and all you white folk think the People know more about this stuff than you do. And now I’m trying to get knights to work with werewolves without treating us like trained dogs, and werewolves to listen to knights without biting their heads off, and the one man who knows what it’s like to be a knight and a werewolf isn’t much help.”
It was the longest speech I’d ever heard from Ben.
“Hey, I’ve been teaching some of your pack leaders how to interact with knights,” I protested.
“You did that twice.” Ben sounded a little grim. “And you set the pack leader from Chicago on fire.”
“Traditional teaching methods didn’t seem to be working.”
“He has been easier to deal with,” Ben admitted. “But I know you want something because everybody wants something from me.”
So basically, I’d caught him on a bad day and he was feeling grumpy and overwhelmed. It happens. “You’re right, Ben,” I said. “I’m coming back to Wisconsin to be your second in command as soon as I hang up the phone. That ought to make your life easier.”
“You don’t have to make threats,” Ben grumbled.
“No, I think it will be great,” I said earnestly. “It’s not like the Templars resent me. And there aren’t any wolves who blame me for the way their old clan broke up, either.”
“Like you’d really leave that blonde. My people have a saying.” Ben’s voice was curt. “Shut your damn pipe hole if you’re just going to blow smoke up my ass.”
“Huh,” I said. “I’m not sure, but I think that lost a little bit of its cultural richness in translation.”
“My people’s heritage can be difficult for an outsider to appreciate,” Ben explained. “What do you want?”
“Does the Round Table have any people in New York City?”
“We have two packs there,” Ben responded. “We had to weed the troublemakers out of one pack, and it’s too small. We had to combine two other packs into one when a pack leader got killed, and it’s too big. You should know this stuff.”
“Hey, you need help with a fight, you call me.” I was nettled, mostly because he was probably right. “You want somebody dead, or you want somebody tracked down or protected, I’m there. Anything involving Constance and you don’t even have to ask.”
Ben and I had both agreed to be godfathers to the Grandmaster’s last surviving relative. It was one of the terms of the werewolf/knight truce, and it’s complicated.
“Are these roaming charges?” Ben wondered.
He was right. Despite what I’d told the kitsune about everybody needing help sometimes, I have a hard time asking for it. “There’s this underground fighting ring called the Crucible going on here.”
“I know. A pack of were-hyenas tried to bite the people behind it and wound up getting eaten.”
Huh. That was pretty up-to-date intel. It suddenly occurred to me that maybe I should have reported that to Ben myself. I really was a shitty pack member.
“I’m competing in the fights,” I said. “I was wondering if maybe you could place some of your people in the audience.”
“No,” he said. “But maybe I can put some of our people in the audience.”
My first impulse was to tell him to fuck off. My second impulse was to apologize. I swallowed both impulses, and they made uncomfortable lumps going down. “I’m not good at this, Ben. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“You mean being part of a community?” he asked.
“And that’s important to you?” he wondered. “Being good at things?”
“It is,” I admitted.
“Because you grew up being judged by those knight assholes all the time and having a lot to prove.”
“What’s your point?” I snapped.
“There is no point,” he said. “But being part of a real community isn’t something you have to be good at. You just are.”
“Then why have you been busting my chops about needing to do better?”
“Hmmm,” Ben grunted. “Did I mention that my people’s ways can be difficult for an outsider to understand?”
“I’m supposed to fight three times,” I informed him through gritted teeth. “If you could pad the crowd out with some of our people a little more each time, it might not be noticeable.”
“Oh, I don’t have to sneak anyone in,” he said. “A lot of our people have been going to the fights since they started.”
“What?!?” I exploded. “And you made me go through all that?”
“Yes.”
“You dog-breathed shit heel!”
He interrupted before I could gain steam. “You just make sure you kick some ass. A lot of werewolves joined our group because they wanted to fight knights. Now some packs are calling us traitors or weak because we made an alliance instead. We have members leaving us, and other werewolves who like the idea of pushing other monsters around are asking about joining us for the wrong reasons. Our people need good stories right now.”
“I’ll put on a good show, Ben.” It was a promise I felt comfortable making. Fighting for my life is the one thing I don’t find complicated.