Ryu frowned. “Actually, no,” he said. “There are relatively few halflings on our radar, at the moment. Which is more than a mystery, but one that has nothing to do with Conleth. And Conleth is too old to be hitting his power now. He's probably around your age, but we don't know very much about him.”
“What do you know?”
“There was a laboratory blown up in Dorchester, killing a bunch of humans, shortly after our trip to the Compound. It appeared to be an entirely nonsupernatural affair, so we left it alone. Not least because I was still dealing with the fallout from what happened with Jimmu. But then a bunch of supes, starting with an ifrit male, were murdered by someone with a hell of a lot of power. Eventually, we put together that it had something to do with that human laboratory.”
“Why would Conleth just show up and attack a laboratory?”
“No,” Ryu said, his expression dark. “He didn't attack it. He escaped the laboratory.”
“Escaped?” I blanched.
“Yes.”
“So, he was… what? A test subject?”
“Yes.”
“Holy shit,” I breathed. “No wonder he's pissed off.”
“ ‘Pissed off' is an understatement, even for you.”
“How long was he in there?” I asked, horrified by what I was hearing.
“We think for his entire life. We're almost certain that the ifrit—the one who was murdered—fathered a child with a human woman. He wasn't around when the child was born, and the baby must have come to the attention of human authorities under circumstances that were probably unpleasant. Conleth ended up in that laboratory.”
“How could a baby just disappear like that?” I couldn't imagine what Conleth's life must have been like. I still felt betrayed by my mother's abandonment of my father and me. But contemplating a life spent as some guinea pig…
“Who knows?” Ryu shrugged. “If the baby was born with his powers intact, shooting flames, a human woman would think she'd given birth to the Antichrist. And the father probably wasn't even aware he had a child. But, you're right, somebody should have known of the existence of this laboratory. We have people at every level of human government. We are part of their medical community, their military, their university system. How a research lab with connections to all of these institutions could have existed without our knowledge is mind-boggling.”
“The military and the government? Really?” I wasn't surprised that supes were part of the university system. Some of my more eccentric professors now made perfect sense. But I couldn't quite picture any of my supernatural buddies in either fatigues or the Oval Office.
“Of course, Jane. And now we have people in the private sector. Ever since the Roswell debacle, the military has made it policy to contract out government involvement with the ‘paranormal' to private companies, like the one running the laboratory from which Conleth escaped.”
“Roswell?” I squeaked. Tonight I was getting a heady dose of “too much information.”
Ryu's eyebrow shot toward the ceiling. “Yeah, Roswell. That was one of us, obviously. You don't believe in aliens, do you?”
“I didn't believe in vampires until a few months ago, either, Ryu. You can cut me some slack. So you've got people spying on humans from, like, everywhere?”
“Yes.”
“And who do these spies report to?”
Ryu paused, looking away from me. “Traditionally, the monarch's second-in-command performs the duty of spymaster.”
I blinked, cursing Alfar traditions. “So you're telling me that Jarl is in charge of all the information that is passed on to the Alfar.”
“Yes. But before you get all crazy with conspiracy theories—”
“Ryu, come on! Seriously? They've got Jarl in charge of spying. So everything they know is filtered through him. He can keep to himself, or exaggerate, or even make up whatever he wants.”
“Yes, any spymaster could do those things, Jane. But that doesn't mean Jarl does. Remember, he is one of us. He needs to keep us all safe for his own benefit, as much as ours.”
“You're assuming he has the same priorities that you have. What if he doesn't? I still think we don't know everything about why Jimmu murdered those halflings, and I still think the real reason, whatever it is, involves Jarl.”
“Jane, I'm not going to argue about this again. No, I don't trust Jarl. But you take it too far. You'd have him be this ultimate bad guy from some human blockbuster, twirling his mustache and ordering the destruction of the entire planet. My team and I went over every single crime the nagas committed and couldn't pin a single thing on anyone except Jimmu and his nestmates. They were acting on their own.”
I wanted to argue, but to harp on why I distrusted Jarl so much would only lead toward the one secret I had kept from Ryu: that Jarl had nearly choked the life out of me four months ago at the Alfar Compound. After Anyan had saved me, he convinced me to keep Jarl's actions a secret for Ryu's own sake. Although I agreed with the decision we had made that night, I knew Ryu would freak right the hell out when he found out that I had kept something from him… especially something that involved Anyan Barghest.
“Fine,” I said, changing the subject. “So, Conleth was in a laboratory that you should have known about. But couldn't it just have been the one private lab that you guys missed somehow?”
“Maybe. I suppose. Still…” Ryu's face darkened in thought, till he sighed. “Anyway, what matters is that Conleth is back, again, and he has to be stopped.”
The way Ryu said “stopped” gave me pause.
“So what do you do with people who commit crimes?” I asked. “I mean, do you have prisons, like we do?”
Ryu gave me a long look, the look he always gave me when he was about to tell me something about the supernatural world he knew I wouldn't like.
“We do have methods of incarceration, yes. And sometimes we use them, usually for those of high status who've done something that can't be ignored but also can't be treated… normally.”
“And the ‘normal' treatment?”
Ryu pursed his lips, and I knew what he was going to say. So I said it for him.
“You just kill them, don't you?” The leap to execution wasn't a long one; after all, I'd seen Orin and Morrigan, Ryu's king and queen, condemn Jimmu to death in front of me without even consulting one another.
Ryu shrugged.
“I'd think the fact that Conleth was abandoned and raised in a laboratory would serve as ‘mitigating factors' in your decision as to whether or not you just kill the guy—”
“Jane, he's vicious. Yeah, he's suffered. But it's made him an animal. There's nothing there to be saved, Florence.”
“That could have been me, Ryu. What if I'd been caught in the Sow as a child and ended up in a lab? Would I just be one more loose end?”
Ryu snorted. “You're nothing like Conleth, babe. The comparison isn't even close to accurate.”
“Yeah, but I had a loving father who took care of me. Who knows what I'd be like if I'd had Conleth's life. I mean, can you imagine what he must have gone through…”
Ryu's strong hands stilled at my words.
“Jane, you do realize you're defending the guy who just tried to kill both of us. Conleth is a monster.”
“Maybe he is, Ryu, but he was made a monster.”
Ryu shifted me over and then drew me out of bed. “Come with me,” he said.
I pulled on my underpants and his discarded dress shirt before following him out of the bedroom and down the stairs.
Ryu was already in his office waiting for me with a file folder. My breath whooshed out of my body as he used a central table to spread out pictures of various crime scenes. I withdrew my eyes from the gruesome montage of twisted, blackened bodies.
“Conleth killed nine people when he escaped from his laboratory. Under such circumstances, however, extreme actions could, perhaps, be excused. Then he went after various employees of the laboratory. Again, revenge might have been understandable. But he was killing anyone associated with the lab. Not just the scientists, but a janitor. A secretary. A parking lot attendant. Their families, if they were in the house with the victim. At some point during this spree, he discovered the identity of his true parents. That's when he killed his human mother, her human husband, and their three teenaged children. His half siblings. Burned the house down while they slept.” Ryu pointed to a photo. I glanced at it only long enough to see the huddled, blackened figures before I had to look away or be sick.
“Then he went after his ifrit father. And then he just started killing any supernatural being he could get his hands on. Three beings, total. He did all of this in two weeks, Jane. Two. Then he disappeared. We figured he'd gotten his revenge and had hightailed it. That he'd disappeared into the Borderlands or had become some other Territory's problem. We were wrong.”
