Those of the ancient Wyr that chose to adapt to human civilization were driven from time to time to slip away from modern cities and towns. They would shake loose from their human facades and drench themselves in archaic argent sunlight as they lost themselves in flight, or in plunging deep into the magic-saturated green of the oldest of untamed forests. There was a fundamental difference between the old ones and the younger Wyr. The younger Wyr were born into civilization. They arrived at the ball already tamed.
Tiago was not tame. He was more feral than the majority of even the most ancient Wyr. He needed to be worked hard, to face tough challenges and to be let loose to roam free. It was not wise to hold him too long in a city.
Two and a half weeks had passed since Rune had called him back from South America. Dragos Cuelebre, Lord of the Wyrkind demesne, had been missing at the time. Tiago had just arrived back in the States when Dragos had reappeared with a strange woman. The tale they told was one of thievery, kidnapping, magic and murder.
A lot had happened since Tiago’s return and Dragos’s reappearance. Some of it had been fun, like tracking Dragos’s new mate when she had been kidnapped—again—and being in on the kill when Dragos had finally taken down his old enemy Urien, the Dark Fae King.
Vengeance, served hot. That had been Tiago’s kind of party.
Since then all he had been doing was cleanup and busywork. Make sure all involved Goblins were dead, check. Chase down and slaughter any Dark Fae that had been part of Urien’s party, check. Go to sleep with his thumb up his ass, check.
He smacked open the door that had the number 79 painted in a circle. His long legs ate up the distance as he strode down the marble-floored hall.
Cuelebre Enterprises was a multinational corporation that made an ungodly amount of money. Corporate employees and those involved in the governance of the Wyr demesne were compensated extremely well. Wyr sentinels had expense accounts that took care of clothes (the violent aspect to the sentinels’ lives made this a substantial perk), travel, food and weapons. What else did a guy need? Once in a while Tiago would double-check his escalating bank balance to make sure all the numbers added up, but otherwise, for the most part he ignored it.
He remembered when Cuelebre Tower had been built. The 1970s had seen the invention of the neutron bomb, the Three Mile Island disaster, the terrorist attack at Munich’s Olympic Games and the construction of Cuelebre Tower.
Yeah, staying far away from that project had been a good thing. He had been quite content to travel across the world to hunt down, depose and kill a dusty little sorcerer in South Africa who had acquired his own army and a penchant for the Power he could gain through human and Wyr sacrificial rites. When Tiago returned to New York—and he had been sure to take his own sweet time in doing so—Cuelebre Tower had erupted onto the landscape and forever changed the skyline of the city.
The outer surface of the Tower was sleek and gleaming, reflecting the changeable sky, while the interior had been decorated with an extravagance of gold-veined Turkish marble flooring, gleaming frosted glass lights and polished brass fixtures, along with strategically displayed, priceless works of art and sculpture. The entire skyscraper was a proclamation of the Wyr Lord Dragos Cuelebre’s wealth and power.
The achievement had more than architectural or economic significance. It made more than a political statement to the other Elder Races. The year of the Tower’s construction went down in recent Wyr folklore as a miracle of collective cooperation, personal dominance and merciless rule. Just as Dragos had dragged the recalcitrant, volatile Wyrkind under his reign so many centuries before, he bludgeoned them into modernity and forced them into compliance.
Although some of the Wyr bloodied each other during the highest-stress points of the Tower’s construction and the subsequent move of corporate and administrative offices, nobody actually dared to commit murder. They had been in the final stages of settling in when an amused Tiago had taken a tour of the skyscraper. All Wyr had been sent to their respective corners to settle ruffled fur or feathers, lick literal and metaphorical wounds, furnish their offices and unpack files. Now, without exception, anyone who had been involved in the creation of the Tower spoke of that time with pride and without the slightest comprehension of irony.
Tiago reached the conference room. It was a large executive boardroom with all the perks: black leather seats, a large polished oak table, state-of-the-art teleconferencing equipment and mysterious black metal contraptions that Tiago had been told were designer cappuccino and espresso machines. He couldn’t remember the instructions for how to operate them. As soon as he had realized they weren’t some kind of newfangled weapon the sentinels would be trained to use, he had lost interest in the conversation.