I found myself in Chicago’s River North District, not too far from the House of Blues, staring up at an unassuming loft office space. As I considered my approach to the situation amid a throng of annoyed Chicagoans who had to step around me, I wondered if I should go down the Riverwalk afterward. Considering Gran’s distress at my coming to see the Raven’s Council at all, I wondered if thinking there was going to be an afterward was overly optimistic on my part. I shrugged that thought off. I couldn’t afford those kinds of doubts. I decided that going straight in was the only real option. I needed to talk to these people, not hack into records or rifle through files. If they knew what I needed to know, it would be in their heads, not their hard drives. I walked through the front door and stared at the directory or, rather, what should have been the directory on the wall. There was only one company listed: Corvus, Inc. Cute, I thought, let’s not be too obvious guys.

Following the logic that all bureaucracies followed similar idiocy about where the good offices were, I went to the top floor and found someone who looked like a receptionist. She was pretty in an icy, I’d like to gouge your eyes out with these lacquered fingernails, sort of way. Her dark hair was cut short and slicked back. She looked gaunt to me, like she’d been intentionally starving herself for a while. I shrugged to myself. Maybe it was always like that in the world of occult corporate door-keepers. You only get fed if you do your job well enough or something like that. She disdained in my general direction, cueing immediately that I was not the proper sort of person to be where I was and should be turned back, preferably with a stun gun and a tumble down the stairs. She showed me some teeth.

“Can I help you,” she paused, “sir?”

I looked at her for a long beat. It wasn’t that long ago that I’d sent things a lot scarier than her on a one-way trip into hell. I let my knowledge of her insignificance and the ease with which I could do awful things to her bleed into my face. It wasn’t an expression, so much as a personified attitude that said I was perfectly capable of bringing the building down around her head and only good manners were keeping me from carrying through on it. I’ll give her credit, she didn’t flinch. One of her hands did disappear beneath the desk to hover near what I assumed was a silent alarm. I showed her my teeth.

“I’m here to see the Raven’s Council.”

She covered it as well as she could, but I saw the flicker of recognition in her eyes and the tightening of muscles around her mouth before she smoothed her expression.

“I’m quite sure you’ve come to the wrong place. Security will show you out.”

A hand landed on my shoulder. “If you’ll come this…”

I broke his wrist before he could finish his sentence. By the time the other guard registered what had happened and started to reach for a baton from his belt, I cracked him across the back of the head with the first guard’s baton. He went down in a limp heap. I swung the baton one last time and the first guard went to the floor. I stepped back up to the receptionist’s desk and very calmly placed the baton on top of her computer keyboard.

“Now,” I said, “would you like to try to escort me out, or would you like to announce me to the Raven’s Council?”

Her eyes moved from the baton on her keyboard, down to the guards on the floor, and then up to meet my eyes. She reached out without even looking and pressed a button on her phone.

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“Sir, there is a man here to see the Council.”

A deep, annoyed voice responded. “Who is it?”

The receptionist raised an eyebrow at me.

I leaned down and enunciated in the general direction of the phone. “Jericho Lott.”

There was the muffled murmur of several voices over the speaker before the man came back on. “Very well. Send him in.”

The receptionist gave me a hateful glare. “He injured two of the guards. Shall I phone the police, sir?”

“No, Megan. Don’t phone the authorities. We’ll handle this internally.”

“Very well, sir,” said Megan, sounding disappointed on almost every conceivable level.

She disconnected the intercom and rose to her feet. She spared me another look that swore retribution and violence if only she could get away with it. Then, she took on a resigned expression. “Follow me.”

I fell in behind her and she led me down a hallway. Every door was closed, which seemed strange to me, but I suppose evil corporations probably need to keep the doors closed. They wouldn’t want some eager beaver temp overhearing something nefarious they shouldn’t know about. Then again, maybe the executives were on a retreat somewhere, practicing trust falls and passing a story stick back and forth. There wasn’t a good way to be sure. Megan turned to face me and pointed at a door to my left.

“The council will see you now,” she said.

I stared at her until she lost her nerve and fled back to the relative safety of her desk. I waited until she was out of sight and I was confident there wasn’t a security team waiting to jump out from one of the closed doors. That didn’t mean there wasn’t a security team inside the room she’d just directed me to go into, but my intuition wasn’t warning me that things were about to get sketchy. I turned the knob and walked into what turned out to be a conference room. There was a conference table shaped like an arch with the ends pointed in the direction of the door. There were five people seated at the table, two men and three women. I wondered if that signified anything, some kind of feminine principle at work, or if it was just the vagaries of ruthlessness in securing a leadership position. They stared at me in open anger and spoke as one.

“We are the Raven’s Council. This is the Court of Unkindness. You are not welcome here, knight of the shadowed queen.”

I waited for them to speak again, but they just kept staring at me. I wondered if their little speech was supposed to intimidate me. I hope they hadn’t expected me to run away, because that wasn’t going to happen. Still, I needed to tread carefully. I could feel magic everywhere in the room. It was in the floor, the walls, the ceiling, and most especially in the members of the Raven’s Council itself. One-on-one, on neutral ground, I might have picked a fight with any of them if it came to it. There, at their center of power, I was in no hurry to throw down. Challenging people in a place they had prepared as their own was suicidal. There was simply no way to predict what kind of defenses they had in place. Even a minor witch or sorcerer can set up so many layers of violence that it can kill something truly powerful. I’d seen it happen once or twice. No one in that room was minor league, and they’d had God only knew how long to prepare for something like this. Still, never let them think they have the upper hand.

“I’m Jericho Lott. You obviously know me by reputation. So, just skip to the part where you answer my questions and I’ll be on my way.”

The woman seated at the apex of the arch stood. “Ignorant child. You’re nothing more than the pathetic servant of a forgotten power. We do not fear you, boy, but you should have feared us.”

I felt it right before the trap sprung, but there was no time to react. The world exploded in a blue-white haze of agony that went on and on and on. I couldn’t tell if it was physical pain or psychic pain. It was too much to process. The pain was a living thing that had taken up residence in my body at a molecular level. I wish I could have blacked out to avoid that agony, but I stayed mercilessly, relentlessly conscious for the whole thing, and experienced every last iota of pain they had to dole out. When I finally collapsed to the floor in a twitching, trembling, sweaty heap, I had a single lucid moment. I wasted it on a superfluous thought. The Court of Unkindness had lived up to its name.