Chapter 1 – Moving

Callum and Lucy had spent a lot of time in the Texas trailer, and even with the bunker nearly complete they weren’t entirely moved out. Callum’s teleportation and gravitykinesis, or even telekinesis focus, made things a lot easier physically, but did nothing on the side of organization. Nor could his magic speed up how fast concrete or paint dried, so the move to the bunker was a slow and piecemeal affair, something they were still working on a week after dealing with Ravaeb.

At least until events conspired to force the issue.

Callum jolted into full wakefulness when a mage bubble brushed across the edge of his perception. Under most circumstances waking up with someone snuggled in against him was a pleasant thing, but the hammer blow of adrenaline ruined it. He was up and out of bed before he realized he didn’t really need to be, since grabbing everything and leaving was purely a function of magic.

“Whuzzah?” Lucy said, stirring sleepily as he reached out with his vis and started transferring everything that was left. The mage bubbles were moving quickly somewhere overhead, and while not headed directly at his trailer he had to assume they’d notice something if they’d gotten so close.

“We gotta go,” he told her. The food in the fridge, the clothes in the dresser, the grill outside. Some of the furniture had come with the trailer, so he didn’t take that, but he grabbed everything else he could in the first few seconds. A handful of the cleaner beads got distributed over the whole house, and a more powerful one put on a small plate that he dropped on the floor of the room.

The mage bubbles were still several seconds away, and while he couldn’t tell whether they’d seen him directly or not he had to assume they knew. Besides, they could launch attacks from that far away, so he wrapped both himself and Lucy in a teleportation matrix – tube based, so it wouldn’t so hard on her – and pulled them into the cave. Only then did he feel like he could breathe, heart still hammering.

Lucy squeaked as she dropped a few inches onto the cot he had set up before propping herself up and squinting into the darkness of the cave. Callum reached out with his perception sphere and teleported an LED lamp into his hand, flicking it on and lofting it over toward Lucy. She squinted and snagged it out of the air, shivering in the cool cave atmosphere.

“The heck?” She demanded.

“I sensed mages overflying the trailer,” Callum explained. “I wasn’t going to hang around and hope they passed by.”

“Oh.” Lucy said, wrapping her arms around herself. “Well, damn. How’d they find us? Not through the portal anchors I wouldn’t think?”

“Timing is weird too,” Callum said, pulling clothes out from the piles he’d teleported and handing Lucy hers. Even if he’d gotten around to heating the cave, which he hadn’t, it was still bare stone and concrete. “I would have figured it’d be earlier, if it were some magical scrying.”

“I’ll have to doublecheck the server, though it’s not like I ever even accessed it from the trailer house…” Lucy shrugged and hastily dressed, sitting on the cot to put on her shoes and socks. “What about the bunker? Do you think it’s safe?”

“Not if they can trace us directly, but otherwise I think so.” The bunker didn’t even have a mailing address as such. Even if some mundane organization found out about it from Miguel, the town councilman who was handling the local businesses, that didn’t imply any supernatural activity. The greatest risk was that his bunker house would attract the interest of a cartel, and he had thoughts on how to deal with that, but for the most part he suspected the bunker was invisible to state-level actors.

That wasn’t a certainty, though, which was why one of the portal nexus links was to another safehouse, a little campsite with supplies that wasn’t too far from civilization. Lucy had a teleportation setup for it made of anchors and obsidian tiles, just in case she needed to escape while he wasn’t around for some reason. Considering what had just happened, that seemed more likely than it had before.

“Well, at least we’ve got power here now,” Lucy said in resignation. Callum still had to wait for the last of the construction equipment to be cleared away before he could set up the infinite portal generator, but the solar he’d gotten worked well enough in the interim, as long as the two of them were sparing with it.

“I guess it’s not a terrible thing, even if I hate being forced to run away. Means we have to actually buckle down and finish our chores.” Callum finished dressing and studied the cave-cache in his perceptions to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. All his supplies were there, minus the ones that had been ruined when he’d assassinated Ravaeb.

Callum still wasn’t clear on whether the fae magic had gone through the portals or worked through more esoteric means. No matter how it had happened, Ravaeb had managed to send a fae after Callum, and only the presence of the shifters had kept him intact. More lasting damage had been done to the corner of the cave-cache where the antimaterial rifle had been, with the actual rifle being turned into some kind of goo and the water barrels blowing apart from the sudden growth of stinking algae. Even the stone had suffered, and while he’d portaled the worst of it back into the remains of Ravaeb’s enclave, the stone under where the gun had been was still slowly crumbling.

The rest of his cache was intact though. The armored van, the other water barrels, the preserved food. The guns, the ammunition, the clothes and camping equipment. The secondhand furniture and bedding. The last were the most important at the moment since the bunker was unfurnished, and with the emergency move they’d have to make do until Alpha Chester came through on his agreement.

“Easy for you to say, mister I-was-on-my-feet, but you weren’t the one who woke up falling,” Lucy said, only half serious. “What time is it even?” Her hand went for her pocket by reflex, but her phone wasn’t there. Callum located it in the pile of stuff he’d more or less blindly swept off the dressers and handed it over. Lucy groaned.

“Too early to be awake, but too late to go back to sleep,” she said. Callum snorted. She wasn’t exactly a morning person.

“I couldn’t sleep anyway. I can still taste adrenaline.” Callum grimaced, then opened a portal to the bunker basement, the only fully finished area so far. Since the cave was only a few hundred yards from the house, it didn’t even need a dedicated portal anchor. With carpet and interior walls, the basement was considerably warmer than the cave and, when Callum flicked a switch, actually illuminated.

“Aight.” Lucy yawned and meandered sleepily through the portal and over to where her laptop and 3D printer were laid out. The printer actually required so much power that with just solar panels they could only fuel the simplest of builds, but that wouldn’t be the case for long.

Callum eyed the clock – it was quite early – and then the backhoe and dozers still on his property. The only real work left was taking care of all the dirt and mud and piles of gravel that were strewn about from the construction. But he could take care of that himself, with gravitykinesis.

“Hey Lucy, might as well set up the building-wide glamour, but don’t use it yet. I’m going to move all the equipment off and tell Miguel everything’s finished.” So far Miguel had been nothing but helpful, the town representative perfectly happy to put in the work so long as Callum supplied gold bullion. It was actually a little suspicious, but finding someone like him was preferable by far to trying to negotiate directly with the locals.

“Great!” Lucy yawned again. “Have fun with that.”

Callum would prefer not to use the glamour, since a building vanishing would be more suspicious than the initial construction, but he was worried about regular folks poking around. Supernaturals didn’t have any reason to check out the area, but it was hard to hide construction equipment and laborers. If he were lucky he wouldn’t need it, but Callum didn’t believe in luck.

Moving the construction equipment wasn’t really too difficult. Despite all his practice, creating a framework much larger than a car was still a strain, but not so much of one that he couldn’t move everything out to the edge of the property. He still had to use a portal anchor, since the house was smack dab in the middle of his hundred-acre swath and that was too far even for his senses, but they had enough extra that keeping one around the house was no issue.

Once he had all the equipment lined up next to the actual bit of road that wound near his property, he grabbed the van from the cave-cache and obscured the license plate with mud before he drove it into the village where Miguel lived. Despite it only having been maybe six months since he started paying Miguel for the house, there were some obviously new bits of infrastructure in the village. Which Callum certainly didn’t begrudge. He had expected a bit of skimming, especially since he was paying for things to be done quietly, and it was good seeing it being used to improve the town rather than Miguel’s own pockets.

He still wasn’t sure whether the toughs that always seemed to be around Miguel’s place were part of the village, belonged to a cartel, or something else entirely, but they didn’t hassle him so he ignored them. When he knocked on the front door, the usual man let Callum in and asked him to wait in the front room. With his sphere of perception he knew exactly what the guy was busy with even if he didn’t really want to, and wasn’t about to rush the man.

“Señor,” Miguel said, some fifteen minutes later as he sat on the couch across from Callum. “Is everything going well with the house?”

“Yeah, it is,” Callum told him. “Actually, I came by to say that they’re done. I know they were still working on some tidying up but I can attend to that myself.” He reached into his pocket and teleported two more gold plates into his hand. That pretty much finished off his gold bullion but the money from shipwreck salvage was a decent enough income for the moment. “Just wanted to settle accounts,” he said, extending the gold plates to Miguel.

“Thank you, Señor,” Miguel said. “I do wish to tell you there were some inquiries about who was building nearby. Idle questions, nothing special, but it is difficult to hide such construction equipment.”

“That’s fine, if anyone comes by I’ll take care of it,” Callum assured Miguel, though inwardly he grimaced. Those inquiries could be anyone from nosy neighbors to policemen or criminals. Though so long as they were mundanes the glamour would probably be sufficient.

“As you say,” Miguel replied, and Callum nodded to him before heading back out to the van. He didn’t really even need the cane anymore, thanks to the Connors. Lucy was still the main point of contact between Callum and the couple he’d rescued some six months back, and their input had helped his knee recover. Mostly. It probably needed mage healing to be perfect again, but Callum didn’t need things to be perfect.

He recalled himself and the van back to the cave-cache the moment he was out of sight of the village and then stepped back into the basement. Lucy was still tinkering with the obsidian tiles, and she gave him a wave as he appeared on the designated receiving spot. He’d made it a proper telepad, since it was Lucy’s escape hatch as well, adding in some drywall enclosures to create a homemade teleportation booth.

“Everything go okay?”

“Yup,” he confirmed. “Time to get us some power.”

“Woo!” Lucy left off her wiring and stood. “Let’s go.”

His infinite power setup was simply a pipe with a portal at the top and bottom, hooked up to a secondhand water turbine generator. Simple as it was, it developed more than enough power from his tests so all he needed to do was wire it into the house. Lucy had done wonders with setting up a little monitor and valve to actually reduce or stop the flow when and if they were at full capacity.

He used gravitykinesis to assemble it outside the back wall of the house while Lucy dealt with the wiring plugs. This was exactly why he’d had a consultant for the electrical wiring, because he was not going to mess with figuring out electrical distribution himself. There was just a simple connector for the generator’s output.

Then he started transferring purified water from his barrels to the interior. The water’s infinite fall was interrupted by the turbine blades, and the generator started to spin. The big house-supplying battery registered current, and nothing caught fire.

“Wonderful!” Lucy said. “Now all we need is the furniture.”

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“I guess we should check in with Chester,” Callum said. They’d been laying low for a while, to let the excitement die down, so it was probably time to pop their heads out and see what had happened.

“Sure thing, link me up,” Lucy said, heading back inside to get her laptop. Callum followed, reached out through the portal nexus and found the drone they’d left in the US. It was near to Chester’s place, though near was a relative term when it came to the speed that he could achieve with the drones. It didn’t take much maneuvering to get the drone near a café wifi and Lucy pulled up her VOIP program.

“Hey Lisa,” she said. “Yeah, okay. Sure, we can probably come over?” She glanced at Callum, and he shrugged and nodded. He didn’t have any objections, and it wasn’t like it took any real time.

Half an hour later, he opened a portal to Chester’s house. Unlike every other time he’d sent the drone in, there were no mage bubbles keeping watch. In fact, the entire GAR office that had been there, small as it was, had been demolished, and recently. There was still construction equipment in place near the foundations.

“Welcome,” Chester said, for once not greeting them in the basement. With the break from GAR, Chester no longer needed to hide dealing with Callum. Which wasn’t the same thing as being entirely in the open, since the warding was still up.

“Feeling okay? Recovered from the concussion?” Lisa asked, setting out hot chocolate for everyone.

“Yeah, everything seems fine,” Callum said, accepting a mug with thanks. “You all haven’t had any trouble?”

“Well, that’s what we asked you over here to discuss,” Chester said. “I assume you saw that House Hargrave and their faction also left GAR?”

“Lucy told me.” Callum allowed himself a smile. “I don’t imagine they liked that, especially coming on the heels of your independence.”

“No, they do not, but it has actually helped us a lot. So far they haven’t been able to drum up any Archmages to try and force the issue with me and my allies,” Chester said. “So first of all, I have a number of contact requests from our allies.” He slid across a stack of cardstock. “I didn’t screen them, and I don’t know what they want, but I said I’d at least forward them.”

Callum grimaced. He didn’t want to deal with any other forces; he had barely wanted to deal with Chester and even though that had turned out okay that wasn’t likely to happen twice. Despite that, he wasn’t so blind that he didn’t see the value in at least being able to talk to a bunch of non-GAR supernaturals when necessary.