Chapter 14
Alexander Hernandez had a system for moving into new towns.
First, he would drive through without stopping to learn the geography.
He’d catalog exits, chokepoints, and lines of sight.
He’d note what was permanent and what was transient.
A town that hadn’t changed in forty years had a different character than one that was growing, and the difference mattered for what he intended.
On his second pass, he’d stop. He’d eat at the local diner, buy something at the gas station, let himself be seen as an ordinary traveler passing through.
He’d listen to how the locals talked to each other.
A town where strangers were watched with suspicion required different handling than a town where they were ignored.
This one seemed to fall into the second category. People looked up, then looked away.
His third step was to find a rental. He’d establish a base that was unremarkable, with good sight lines and quick access to the main road. This three-step plan had worked in a dozen towns before this one. It had worked here, weeks ago, when he’d first found the place.
He’d been on the shifter’s trail for weeks before he finally found the town.
The tracking had been difficult. He thought it probably wasn’t because the shifter knew he was being followed.
More likely, the man had simply spent years being careful out of habit, leaving nothing behind him because that’s the way he’d been trained.
He’d driven himself home from Salt Lake City in a vehicle that couldn’t be traced back to him and vanished into the Arizona desert like water into sand.
But Hernandez was patient. He had built his career on patience.
He had other gifts, too. His teacher had called it senso oscuro, the dark sensing, in the old tongue of the Order.
The ability to feel magical signatures the way a blind man felt heat.
It had led him here eventually, by a route that was less tracking than listening.
Shifters left traces. Not physical ones.
Not the kind that cameras or informants could catch. No, they were magical traces.
A place inhabited by something other than humans for a very long time carried a slight disturbance in its ambient field. He felt it as a pressure, like a change in the air. The same sense that told him when weather was coming.
The town was small. One main street. A diner, a bar, a handful of small businesses, with a gas station at one end.
In the middle was a hardware store that looked like it had stood there forever, judging by the wear on the building’s facade.
A residential area sprawled out behind the commercial strip, grown rather than planned.
Beyond the town, there was a reservation.
He had stopped at the boundary and sat for a long time with the engine idling.
The pressure there was different. Not stronger, exactly.
Denser. Older. This was warding with real age behind it, not recent construction.
Not a wall, either. A landscape, worked into the sand, soil, and the rock itself.
He had run across this kind of working perhaps four times in his entire career, and always in connection with shamanistic traditions that predated the Venifucus by centuries.
Something that old was worth being wary of. It was also worth investigating. If he could take the jaguar’s magic for himself, what might he do with whatever power soaked this ground? The thought warmed him more than the whiskey waiting back at the rental would.
He drove to the house on the eastern edge of town, unpacked his bags, and opened his notebook. He wrote one name at the top of the first page: Pedro Ortiz.
Finding that name had taken considerable effort.
He’d cross-referenced mentions in three separate archives, none of them complete, and none of them recent.
A human shaman of unusual longevity and demonstrated capability who had attached himself to a jaguar Clan that migrated north from South America.
What was left of the decimated Clan had probably folded itself into the indigenous population here and disappeared.
But Ortiz was still around, and at least one small family of shifters survived and lived nearby.
Maybe there was more to it than that, but he wasn’t sure.
It was worth further investigation, though.
Hernandez looked at the name he’d written in his book and considered what it meant that a shaman of Ortiz’s caliber guarded what he had initially assessed as a small, isolated family. He added a question mark and turned the page.
The shifter’s presence had been confirmed.
A large blond man with a noticeable limp and the controlled movement of a person managing pain without showing it, staying at a house on the edge of the reservation with his elderly parents.
The limp confirmed the injury. The other mage in Salt Lake had reported a hit on the man before the shifter soldier disappeared.
Part of a truck had done significant damage that would take time to heal, even with shifter physiology.
He was still healing. Not healed. That was useful. And he was almost certainly a jaguar. Either that or a native mountain lion, but given Ortiz’s presence, it was likely the family were jaguars.
And his surveillance of the family had shown him there was a second younger jaguar. Dark-haired, with no visible injuries. He’d arrived by plane and had been collected from the airport by the shifter Hernandez had followed to this one-horse town.
He suspected the new man was the first’s twin, given the resemblance. The dark twin moved without a limp, and with a watchfulness Hernandez rated as professional. He was the more dangerous of the two right now. Hernandez made a note of it.
The hardware store appeared in his notes soon after he’d arrived in town. He had gone into the store on the pretense of needing screws for a minor repair at the rental. A legitimate pretense, as it happened. The cabinet under the bathroom sink really was coming loose.
Hernandez learned that the woman who ran the hardware store was completely human with no magic about her at all. Her father was also human. The store was exactly what it appeared to be—worn and functional, and staffed by people who had spent most of their lives inside it.
The jaguar had come in while Hernandez was selecting screws. Not the injured one. The dark one. He came in through the back door and went straight to the woman behind the counter, easy and familiar. They were friendly, then. He wasn’t sure what that meant.
Hernandez took his screws and left, avoiding being seen or scented by the shifter. He’d been using a simple charm to hide his scent ever since he’d started on this quest and he was glad of that precaution now.
He sat in his car and made notes in his book. A jaguar with professional training and a familiar presence in a human-run business. A woman who met him with a friendly smile. He couldn’t classify the relationship yet, but it was clearly more than incidental.
He wrote: Hardware store. Monitor.
Over the following days, he expanded the monitoring.
The hardware store employed a fit young man who made deliveries and moved like someone trained well beyond his years.
And there were older people coming and going from the store more often than ordinary retail in this sleepy town could really explain.
On two separate mornings, sitting in the diner with a clear view of the hardware store entrance, he counted heads.
He opened his notebook to the page with Pedro Ortiz’s name and looked at it for a long time. Then he turned to a fresh page and wrote at the top: How many?
He didn’t know yet. He added a question mark and closed the notebook.
Back at his rental, he poured himself two fingers of good whiskey and stood at his window, watching the ordinary desert town settle into evening, and thought about what kind of operation he was actually looking at.
The answer forming in his mind was bigger than he’d imagined.
Bigger meant he might need more resources. He wouldn’t move until he had them.
Decision made, he picked up his phone and called his regional lieutenant. “I need six more men. In town by the end of the week.”
The lieutenant asked no questions. Hernandez ended the call and went back to his notebook. He wrote the number six in the margin and circled it twice. Below it, in smaller letters: Assess before moving. Footprint first. Confirm count.
He underlined confirm count.
Hernandez had survived longer than most in his profession by never underestimating what he didn’t know. Whatever was hiding in this town, he intended to understand it fully before he moved on it.
He closed the notebook, finished his whiskey, and went to bed. In the morning, the work would still be there. So would the jaguar. And someday soon, everything the jaguar had would be his.
A day later, he had all his players in place.
Two men were frequenting the diner, letting themselves be seen as the menaces they were.
One was in a rental car, watching the hardware store and keeping tally on who went in and out for him.
And the others were making their presence known in other ways, approaching business owners and seeking out the shadier characters in this small town.
It was something they’d done many times in other towns just like this one.