Courts and Cabals by G.S. D'Moore (best e reader for academics txt) 📕

. .” he couldn’t quite put his finger on what he was feeling. Everyone from human to Fae had instincts born out of evolutionary necessity. As a mage-shifter hybrid, he liked to think his instincts were a little more than just gut feelings. Right now, he was getting something from this kid.

“He’s marked,” she nodded at the top of Dupree’s right hand. “And recently by the looks of it.”

Vernon had noticed. Humans wouldn’t see it, but anyone with supernatural blood could identify the slightly glowing tattoo. He’d seen this one before, and in his opinion, it put Dupree right on the edge of being associated with organized crime. However, being on the edge didn’t mean he’d crossed the line. Being associated with a cabal didn’t automatically mean you were a criminal.

The cabals had been a pain in the UN’s ass before the WRA was passed. Once the world’s governments got their shit together, and everything was forced out into the open, it revealed a lot of the lobbying against the WRA had been financed by businesses owned or associated with the various cabals. Even after the law’s passage, they had armies of lawyers on standby to fight every warrant, every investigation, every interrogation . . . they just made everything more difficult than it had to be.

Cabals themselves covered a spectrum of groups, but normally; they were made up of supernaturals that fed on humans to some degree or another. They could be comprised of a small gathering of a single species, or a large, multi-national conglomeration of races. The Response Division mostly ended up dealing with the former.

Vernon had once busted up a cabal of drudes committing extortion and murder in an immigrant community in Pittsburg. Drudes were at the same physical levels as humans, but had the ability to pierce into the minds of humans, and even weak-minded shifters, while they slept. They caused nightmares and feasted on the terror, pain, and anxiety they caused. The urban legend that if you died in your sleep, you died in the real world was propagated by drudes. They could literally give a healthy person a heart attack by trapping them in a dream state and feeding until the person’s heart gave out.

His instructors at the UN’s training facility taught him about drudes by making him watch Nightmare on Elm Street. While they didn’t have those knife-things for fingers, they did grow claws when threatened. Thankfully, a .44 caliber round to the head killed them just as easily as anything else. Drudes were bad, but there were worse things out there.

The cabal mark on Cameron Dupree’s hand wasn’t a tag by some supernatural gangbangers. It was from one of the Big Three: the three cabals that had tendrils throughout the economic, political, and cultural foundations of the entire world.

A subtle, magical glow detailed an inverted pyramid with the edges designed into a stylized V. The All Seeing Eye sat in the center with a circle of runic script encircling it. Those runes let whoever Dupree was tethered to know everything from his location to his mental state. Over the eye, near the inverted pyramid’s base was a name written in Latin; which Vernon couldn’t quite make out. That was the name of Dupree’s owner.

The cabal didn’t use the same terminology, and their markings didn’t have the same power as the Fae, but to Vernon, they were all the same. He couldn’t imagine signing over his life to someone else. He felt sorry for the kid, but that didn’t make the hairs standing up on the back of his neck go away.

“Five more minutes and I’m going to talk to him. Did he eat?” Vernon made sure the Dean put some food out. If people were nervous, they tended not to eat, and it might be an indication of potential guilt.

“He’s had four donuts and a cup of coffee,” Woods replied.

“That’s another point for the kid,” Vernon could feel his own frustration mounting. All the evidence was saying the opposite of his instincts. “I need to get in there and figure this out for myself.”

He took one final look at the medical data. Everything was within human normal, with the only outstanding bit of data being the DNA test. Those tended to take at least twenty-four hours. Vernon hit a button and typed in his priority-authorization code. The tablet demanded a retinal scan to confirm, and then beeped a positive acknowledgement that the request was received. With the priority request, the lab techs were usually good enough to have the results back in half an hour.

He put the tablet in his pocket and pushed open the door. “Cameron Dupree?” he asked in his slow, Texas drawl.

“Yes, sir,” Dupree had crumbs on his clothes, but sat up a little straighter.

“I’m Special Agent Vernon Dud from the UN. Can I get you anything else?” The key to a good interrogation was to build a rapport with the subject.

The UN’s training facility taught them three tactics to achieve this; mirroring body language, conversation, and finding communal points of interest to facilitate a relationship. Vernon had watched the kid and reviewed his school records. He knew Dupree was a bit of a troublemaker, but nothing serious. The teachers suspected him of plagiarism and cheating, but could never pin anything on him. Vernon didn’t care about that; he had other people do his math homework for him in high school. Dupree had also been busted for weed his freshman year, but this was 2020, so it wasn’t an expellable offense. Vernon wasn’t willing to bet the kid was a genius so bored with school that he acted out, but the kid was definitely connected to the school’s internal black market.

“As much of a black market as you can have with a bunch of trust-fund kids,” Vernon had to control himself not to laugh at the thought. St. Vincent’s