Now that Dragos was back in control of his temper, Rune fell into their normal friendly informality. Uh, I don’t think so, buddy. I’ve never known you to do junk food before.
Make it a small, then. Dragos held the receipt up, sniffed and frowned. Even to his sensitive nose the receipt was starting to lose that delicate feminine scent and smell like him.
He strode inside. The penthouse took the Tower’s top floor. Just below that were his offices, meeting rooms, an executive dining hall, training area and other public areas. The third floor down housed his sentinels and other top Court and corporate officials. If it had been a stand-alone building, it would have been a mansion. All the rooms and halls were built on a massive scale.
Dragos located the kitchen in the penthouse. It was a foreign place filled with chrome machines and countertops. No one was there. He went in search of the communal kitchen responsible for serving the dining hall and all the sentinels, Court and corporate executives’ needs. He located it on the next flight down.
He strode through the double doors. A half-dozen kitchen staff froze. In the corner a brownie gave a squeak of dismay and faded into invisibility.
The head chef hurried forward, wringing her hands. She was a dire wolf in her Wyr form, but she kept her human shape, that of a tall gray-haired middle-aged woman, during work hours. “This is an unexpected honor, my lord,” she gushed. “What can we do for you?”
“There are plastic bags with zippers on them. I’ve seen them in commercials,” Dragos said to her. He snapped his fingers, trying to remember the name. “You put food in them.”
“Ziploc bags?” she asked in a cautious voice.
He pointed at her. “Yes. I want one.”
She turned and snarled at her staff. A faerie leaped to a cupboard and then bounded to them. She bowed low to Dragos, head ducked and eyes to the floor while holding a cardboard box up. He pulled out a baggie, placed the 7-Eleven receipt inside and zipped it closed.
“Perfect,” he said, placing the small bag in his shirt pocket. He walked out, ignoring the babble that rose behind him.
While he waited for Rune to show up, he went to his offices to confront the most urgent of issues waiting for his attention. His four assistants, all Wyr handpicked for their quick intelligence and sturdy dispositions, occupied the outer rooms that were adorned with works of abstract expressionism by such artists as Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky and sculpture by Herbert Ferber.
Located in a corner of the building, his office was decorated in natural tones with wood and stone. As with the penthouse, the outer walls of the office were plate glass set with wrought-iron French doors that opened to a private balcony ledge. The interior walls were adorned by two mixed-media canvases he had commissioned from the late artist Jane Frank. They were from the artist’s Aerial Series, which depicted landscapes as if seen in midflight. One canvas was a landscape by day, the other by night.
As he sat at his desk, his first assistant, Kristoff, poked his dark shaggy head in the door. Dragos clenched his teeth on a surge of irritation. Head bent to the contracts laid on his desk, he said, “Approach with caution.”
The Wyr’s ursine nature and shambling demeanor masked a Harvard-trained MBA with a quick-witted, canny mind. Clever bear that he was, Kristoff said the two words guaranteed to grab his attention. “Urien Lorelle.”
His head lifted. Urien Lorelle, the Dark Fae King, was one of the seven rulers of the Elder Races; his demesne was seated in the greater Chicago area, and he was the guy Dragos most loved to hate. He sat back and flexed his hands. “Bring it.”
Arms overflowing, Kristoff lunged forward and spilled documents onto his desk. “I’ve got it—the link we were looking for between Lorelle and weapons development. Here are hard copies of everything. Transcontinental Power and Light’s 10-K filing with the SEC, last year’s proxy statement and annual report and its quarterly corporate-earnings conference calls. I’ve marked the relevant pages and typed up a report.”
Formed in the latter part of the nineteenth century, Transcontinental Power and Light, Inc., was one of the nation’s largest investor-owned utility companies. The Dark Fae King was the largest individual shareholder.
Dragos picked up the 10-K filing and began to flip through it. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission document was thick, some 450 pages in length and dense with statistics, tables and graphs.
Urien Lorelle and he shared so many differences of opinion. Lorelle’s utility company was partial to mountaintop-removal mining. Dragos preferred mountaintops to stay where he could see them. Urien’s fleet of aging coal-burning power plants emitted over one hundred million tons of carbon dioxide annually. Dragos preferred to breathe clean air when he flew. Urien wanted to see him dead. Dragos preferred to see Urien not just dead but utterly destroyed.