Chapter 7 #4
“What’s involved in this kind of recon?” Noah asks suddenly.
“I mean, introducing yourself and sitting down for a conversation is not an option, and if they’re aligned with Tish, there’s a good chance they’d recognize you, so it’s not like you can strike up casual chats with locals and ask leading questions, right? ”
Andrew turns to face his… boyfriend? lover? bedtime snack? and purses his lips. “What exactly would those leading questions be? ‘Have you noticed any unusual-looking strangers hanging around?’”
Noah shoves him. “I just said that wasn’t something he could do. Stop being a smartass and tell me what’s actually involved.”
All eyes turn to me. “Mostly observation,” I tell them.
“Using whatever intel I can get beforehand, I’ll try to position myself near people who might have information and hope to overhear something.
I’ll see what—and who—I can smell. I’ve smelled both Tish and an elf before, so I’ll know if they’ve been in the area recently or are still there.
I’ll count heads and see if our estimate of numbers is right, look for any weapons that can be used against us…
that kind of thing. The big issue is that my time will be very limited—like we said, these are hellhounds.
They’ll smell an unknown hellhound pretty quick and come looking for me.
With other species—especially humans—I’d spend hours or even days skulking around the area, maybe even risk breaking into some buildings overnight and looking through documents. ”
David sighs and rubs his forehead. “We need to rethink this. How long do you realistically think you could have before they found you?”
I think about it. I’m completely unfamiliar with the terrain, whereas it’s their home ground.
On the other hand, none of our information so far has shown them to have more than rudimentary training, and definitely nobody with special ops-level skills.
It’s a largely rural area, not much concrete to bounce sounds and lots of wildlife and nature to muddle scent, and it’s a large area.
“Two, maybe three hours. Depends on how spread out they are through the county.”
“How long before they noticed you and began the search?” Gideon asks. “Because once they know you’re there, you’re not going to get anything more and you’ll need to get out.”
I grimace. “Hard to say. It depends on whether they have any kind of perimeter set up or if they’re still acting like it’s a normal town. Let’s say fifteen minutes at worst, forty-five at best.”
“This sucks,” David declares. “What you’re saying is that realistically, you’d have about half an hour to find the information we need and leave without even knowing where in the county to look.
If they find you or even suspect that you’re more than some random passing through, it could make them act before we’re ready.
” He shakes his head. “Could you even locate a person of interest to eavesdrop on in that time?”
“I can point out the houses of the senior pack members on Google Maps,” Aidan says, “and describe them for you. You’d at least know where to go right away. But they live a bit outside of town and off the highway. Just getting out there will take up most of your time.”
“Fuck,” I mutter, flipping back to the map screen and zooming in on the outlying areas of town.
“It won’t work, then. They’ll hear a vehicle coming faster than they’ll smell me.
If I can’t go on foot, I’ll never get close enough, and if I go on foot, it’ll take too long. ” There has to be a way to do this.
“Let’s be practical,” Noah says. “With that kind of time limit, the chances that you’ll overhear or see something valuable are ridiculously slim. How does the smelling thing work?”
I blink. “Did you just ask me how smelling works? Humans can smell, right? I always thought humans could smell!”
“They can,” Aidan assures me, then stops. “Well, I just assumed they could.”
“Of course we can smell,” Noah snarls, and I’m glad there’s the width of a continent between us. “But we can’t smell as well as you can, so shut the fuck up and tell me how your sense of smell works!”
I don’t say anything, partly because he told me to shut the fuck up, and partly because I don’t actually know what to say. How does my sense of smell work? It just… does.
I breathe in. Scents register. That’s all.
But I’m afraid to say that, because Noah’s face is going red.
“I’ll take this one,” Ellie says. I feel like maybe I should warn her about how dangerous Noah is, but she’s been kind of mean to me today.
His wrath might be the just desserts she deserves.
“Our sense of smell is maybe seventy thousand times better than yours, in general terms. We have about fifty times as many olfactory receptors as you do, and the part of the brain dedicated to processing scent is a lot bigger too. So we can not only smell things you can’t, we can also analyze them better. ”
Noah’s just staring at her. “Seventy thousand times better?”
Elinor nods solemnly.
“How do you know that?” Sam asks curiously. “Alistair and Aidan weren’t even sure if humans could smell at all.”
“Hey,” Aidan protests before I can, then subsides when Sam raises an eyebrow. Because… yeah. We weren’t sure.
Ellie shrugs. “I worked it out once.”
I want to call her a nerd for going to all that fuss over something so esoteric, but Sam and I once worked out the difference between shifter and human metabolism, so… nerds of the world unite?
“Okay,” Noah says, shaking his head, “okay, putting aside the fact that I don’t know how you even get through the day being assaulted with smells like that, does that mean that Alistair could drive down the main street of the town and collect a bunch of smells that might be useful?
Like, could you smell from the car? And what kind of range would you have—just the street itself? Or more?”
I stare at his face on the screen and then smack myself repeatedly on the forehead.
“There, there.” Aidan pats my shoulder. “Nobody else thought of it, either. Maybe numbers aren’t the only reason the humans nearly exterminated us.”
Andrew groans. Noah grins. I can just imagine what the conversation will be like at their place tonight.
I flip back to the maps page and zoom in on the town center.
It looks like the highway cuts through part of the town rather than going around, which is a massive win for us.
Even if someone did manage to get a whiff of me on my way through, it wouldn’t set off warning bells—there must be plenty of people using the highway to get through town.
“There’s where most of the people I met with live,” Aidan says, pointing to a cluster of properties a little ways from the south end of town.
I switch to the Earth view, wanting the satellite images.
He was right before—the location is well away from the highway and thus any ambient noise that could disguise the approach of my car.
Even if I added hours to my drive time and circled around to approach the town from the south, there’s no way I could get close enough on foot within the allotted timeframe.
But—
“Alistair,” Sam complains, “we can’t see what you’re looking at. Share the screen, please, or at least talk us through it.”
Oh. I forgot about them.
“How do I share, again?” Sam’s shown me plenty of times, but it’s one of those pieces of information that just doesn’t stick. He walks me through it in a long-suffering tone while the others heckle me.
“Okay,” I say once he’s confirmed that they can see the map. “This is the area where Aidan says he visited.” I circle my cursor over it. “Aidan, is this the exit you took off the highway to get there?” I hover over the line on the screen. Aidan leans forward for a closer look, squinting.
“Aye, I think so.”
I spare a second to wonder what’s brought out his Irish this time—he can’t be mad at me for asking him to look at the map, can he?—then return my attention to mission planning.
“That looks like the only road leading out to those properties, doesn’t it?” I zoom the map in, looking for smaller roads and dirt tracks. They’re there, but none of them are positioned in a way that would cause a local to avoid using the highway.
“The highway is the best way to get to town and beyond,” Gideon’s voice agrees. “If Tish is there or has been there at any stage, he’ll have traveled on the highway.”
“Potentially having left a scent trail, even from a vehicle?” Noah sounds skeptical. “How long would that even last?”
“Not long, if it’s even there,” I confirm.
“It’s still pretty cold, so the windows would probably be up in the car.
Plus, if they’re using portals to come and go, there won’t be any scent of them along the road and probably not much within my range around it, even if I parked at that exit and took a quick run through the area. ”
“So it’s a bust,” Sam says gloomily.
“Not necessarily,” Andrew counters. “Driving through town and then past that exit will still give Alistair more information than we currently have. Plus, if Tish or the elves have been in the area for a while and left enough scent markers around, he may still get a whiff of them.”
“David,” Ellie says slowly, and even without seeing her, I can tell she’s got that “thinking” expression on her face. “What’s the weather like in Beker at the moment?”
“Why are you asking me? It’s been so long since I was outside, I barely know what the weather’s like here,” David protests, but I hear the clack of keys and know he’s looking it up.
“Been sleeping in your office?” Percy asks.
“Uh… no. Of course not.”
“Ah, in my office, then.”
“Ellie, the weather in Beker right now is clear but damn cold, low humidity, light wind out of the— Oh.”