Chapter 11 – Reconnaissance

Florida was unreasonably warm, at least to Callum’s sensibilities. Despite it being well into November, it was temperate enough he didn’t need a jacket, which just seemed wrong. He had to adjust his attire to fit in, though the license plate of his van still marked him as out of town. Admittedly, most all moving vans had plates from different states, but he still felt conspicuous.

Miami itself was no treat, either, the actual city crowded and claustrophobic, though there was more green than he had expected. The real problem, though, was that it seemed to be quite the supernatural hotspot. He could sense the trails of various mage-bubbles and spotted a number of shifters and fae with his own eyes. They seemed to cluster around the financial district, which only made sense. Even in the supernatural world, money was important.

It wasn’t just individuals, either. There were threads of wards running over the entire city; nothing immensely powerful, just something that linked various houses or businesses that had their own, denser warding schemes. If that sort of infrastructure required actual wire strung along the utility cables, that was one explanation for why it was in short supply. Utilities generally trumped luxuries.

It was the most complex magical infrastructure he’d seen, or rather, the most complex one he’d paid attention to. He hadn’t been looking for such things in other places, not even in the Night Lands, so there might well have been similar setups there he just hadn’t noticed. The one other GAR building he’d sought out had been in a far smaller city as well, so it might just be a scale issue.

Either way, he wasn’t comfortable driving around and possibly tripping some kind of alert. Given that every mage carried enchanted materials in the form of foci, the raw material he had with him probably wouldn’t set anything off, but mages also had the tattoo. Callum had no idea how much of an anomaly he’d look like, but he had to assume there was some kind of surveillance. He’d be far more comfortable if he could work his way around the various lines of wards.

He stowed the van in a parking lot and walked into town. The address of the GAR office was not in the densest part of the urban sprawl, but close enough. There were buildings everywhere, fenced in houses and squat blocks of businesses, pretty much all of which seemed to be owned and occupied by normal people. Still, mixed in here and there he saw some blatantly fae figures, or sensed some shifters by their vis.

It made the back of his neck itch, but there was nothing to make him stand out from the teeming masses, or at least he hoped there wasn’t. With his tattoo long gone and no bubble, plus having the RFID blocker in his wallet enchanted to suck up any stray vis, he shouldn’t have anything to make anyone suspicious about him being a supernatural. Not that he’d stand out in a city like Miami.

Even without the address he probably could have tracked down the office of his own accord. Not only was it at the center of the spiderweb of various ward lines, or maybe they were even mana transmission lines, but there was a subtle flow of mana coming from it. Callum was almost certain his ability to perceive mana had improved, since he was able to tell that not only was there denser mana at the GAR building, it was generating a slight current.

The effect was a very, very underpowered version of the outflow from the portal worlds, enriching the local atmosphere. Since he knew what to look for, it was easy to follow that upstream to the source, which was a fairly ordinary-looking two-story office building. At least, to his eyes it was ordinary; to judge by the layered threads of mana and vis around it, there was some serious glamour at work.

He took a walk around the block as he slowly worked his perceptions past the intricate warding, noticing a number of supernaturals coming and going even as he did so. Not just mages, either. There was a steady trickle of fae and shifters going into the office and leaving again, engaging in some kind of workaday business.

It took him at least twenty minutes of patient and focused inspection, during which he ran across a small gaming store and flipped through books as an excuse to linger, but eventually he was able to see through the outer defenses and into the actual building. Aside from the magic everywhere it was almost depressingly mundane. There were clerks at their desks, a janitorial staff emptying trash cans and vacuuming, and a bunch of offices mostly staffed by mages.

That immediately shut down the vague plans he had of leveling the building somehow. Someone had to answer for the blatant evil of kidnapping the victims of fae tricks, but it wasn’t the people who staffed the computers or cleaned the floors. The bureaucracy was evil, but it would be monstrous to judge all those laboring under it as equally evil. Some were, no doubt, but most people were likely just indifferent at worst.

It took him a bit longer to actually find the people he was looking for. The basement of the GAR office had cells that looked a lot like the ones the shifters had back in Winut, only with an additional layer of warding and shielding. That made them just that much harder to see through, and he actually went walking again in the hopes that the change in physical perspective would help him finagle his perceptions through the walls of vis and mana.

It didn’t, of course. Peering through just took time, and a sensation a little bit like his eyes adjusting to bright lights as his perceptions resolved the strands of energy. He was pretty sure it would be actually impossible for him to push his perceptions through a completely flat wall of vis or sufficiently condensed mana, but nobody used those as structures, save maybe for mage bubbles. Since every functional bit of magic had some specific shape to it, a flat wall would actually interfere with the way that a ward or shield even worked.

There were two normal people in one of the cells, with a woman lying down on a cot and a man sitting in a chair next to the cot, reading a book. He couldn’t precisely judge whether they were the exact same people he had rescued before, but they were a close match and besides, there probably weren’t many non-supernaturals floating around in GAR facilities. At the very least it was good to see they were being treated reasonably well, not that he had expected whips and chain.

It was tempting to try and pull them out right then and there, but Callum knew that he was not ready for such a thing. It’d probably cause a furor that might well bring more kill teams through the teleports, plus he wouldn’t be surprised if the pair had been tagged with tracking devices of some sort. If it were magical he could probably find it, but some little tech bug was probably beyond his abilities.

The truth was he needed some way to keep them safe, and he sure couldn’t do it alone. He could barely take care of himself, let alone some young couple who ought to be off honeymooning in Acapulco. Unfortunately, the only way he could figure that GAR would let them be was if they were taken under the wing of some supernatural force or another. He remembered, vaguely, that Lucy said that once a normal person was in the know they were supposed to be someone’s responsibility.

That was a genie he couldn’t put back in the bottle. The only thought he had to deal with that was put them in the care of someone who was supernatural, and could at least be trusted to be reasonable. He didn’t know enough about supernatural politics to know if it was really possible though, so he’d have to expose himself a little bit.

“What’s up, big man?” It was evening by the time he called, after spending a couple hours observing the GAR office. It had taken him a while, but he’d eventually concluded that some portion of the visitors were simply getting foci recharged. He wasn’t sure how the fae and shifters used magical items, or if they were just passive, but there was a definite exchange of mana-charged crystals.

“Hey Lucy, I’m kind of at an impasse,” he said, walking along a relatively uncrowded side street several blocks from the office. As much as he disliked using anything magic unless necessary, he had a glamour up just in case. “I need to know some political stuff, but the only person I can think to ask is basically you. Maybe Chester, but it might get weird.”

“Ooh, kinky.” Her tone was pitched precisely to pull an involuntary bark of laughter from him. “Whatcha need there, big man?”

“Well, you know those people you told me about? I was thinking about it and what the heck am I supposed to do with them when I get them?”

“Uh. You know what, that’s a good question.”

“Yeah, so at this point GAR knows about them and how they got pulled into the supernatural world, so it’s not like I can vanish them properly. Not unless they’re going to change identities and stuff, which is possible, but they probably wouldn’t be up for that. Most people aren’t.”

“Oof. You’re right, most people aren’t like you. No offense there, big man, I just can’t imagine keeping so low profile for so long.”

“None taken,” he told her. Sometimes he found it kind of weird himself. “You can see how they need to get some sort of supernatural sponsorship so they can live their lives normally, but that is probably quite a bit of an ask since GAR is going to want to use them against me.”

“Hoo boy, you’re not asking for a small thing there, big man. Yeah that’s a problem.”

“Right, so how do I get that protection? I’m not conversant with the internal politics but there’s got to be some way.”

“I dunno, big man. If the people up top want something, and want it hard enough, it’s awful hard to say no.”

“Sure, but, they can’t all be aligned. Internal politics and that.”

“Oh, yeah, no, there’s all kinds of bickering. Let me give it a think, big man.” There was silence from the phone for a little bit. “Okay, okay, I think I’ve got an inkling of a hint. You said you rescued them from fae?”

“A wild hunt,” Callum confirmed. “Or their re-creation of it, anyway.”

“That means that they’re sort of under the fae’s umbrella, then.”

“I’m hardly going to send them back to the people who were hunting them,” Callum said dryly.

“No, no, I mean. Not all the fae are like that, I mean, they’re all a bit weird but that whole human-hunting thing is not normal. Heck, they fight each other way more than they bother humans.”

“Mmm.” He could see that. A lot of the nonhumans he’d seen over the years were fae and for the most part they hadn’t been given anyone issues, even if it was damn weird to see a tusked ogre thing buying eggs at the grocery. “Okay I can buy that much. What are you thinking?”

“Didn’t the fae make that pair an offer of some sort?”

“Hmm, yes,” Callum said slowly, starting to see what Lucy was getting at. “That if they survived to sunrise they’d be free.”

“So there you go. Fae take their offers very seriously, and right now, GAR is breaking that agreement.”

“Huh. I don’t know that I like it, but what do you think are the odds? That the fae would actually make sure they were left alone?”

“It wouldn’t hurt to ask. I may not be as plugged into the GAR stuff as before but I can get you a direct line. So, some advice: giving the local fae king a reason to stick his thumb in the eye both of GAR and of a different fae king might be enough for him.”

“Mm.” Callum considered it. He didn’t much like the idea of dealing with the fae directly, but he’d always known that at some point he’d have to interact with the frameworks of authority. Most people couldn’t exist outside them, for very good reason, and it wasn’t like he didn’t already have some illicit links in the persons of Lucy and Chester.

The question was how much he was willing to risk. Pragmatically, he couldn’t give up everything to help two people, and just in driving to Florida he’d let emotional reasoning rule him maybe too much. At the same time, he wasn’t going to give up just because he had to do something difficult.

“Can it be done safely?”

“If you mean can I get you an anonymous link to them, yeah I think so. If you mean can you deal with the fae without agreeing to something you didn’t mean to, that’s on you, big man. It’s not like they can bind you to anything over the phone, but, you know. Still don’t want to agree to things you shouldn’t.”

“I suppose I have to give it a try. Unless you think Chester would be willing to help?”

“Nah, not without a lot of finagling. Keeping people unmolested by GAR is a completely different ball game from deniable assets. I could be wrong, but I just don’t see him taking that risk.” Callum had more or less figured that. Just because he avoided politics didn’t mean he was totally unaware of the subtleties of high-level play.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“So what do I need to do to talk to this fae?”

“Weeelll,” Lucy drew the word out, and he could hear papers shuffling in the background. “First I gotta tell you, Jissarrell, the fae king who was after you before, has been telling the story of tracking you over to Europe all over the place. So you’ve got a reputation, and they gave you that scary name and you’re supposed to be some real bad dude with big backers and stuff.”

“I knew I wasn’t really anonymous anymore, but I don’t like that.” He still found being called The Ghost incredibly stupid, but there were probably worse things he could be called.

“Not much you can do about it, big man. Fae loooove their stories.”

“Ugh.” Callum tried to recall what he’d read about the fae, that wasn’t confused with pop culture descriptions. “They actually can lie, right?”

“The less powerful ones, definitely, but the kings and stuff, not really. Supposedly the King and Queen back in Faerie literally can’t, because if they say something it just is true.”

“Well that’s not terrifying at all.” It sounded like Faerie was very definitely not on his list of tourist destinations.

“Eh, yeah, but that’s so deep in Faerie you’ll never see it. Of course, that’s all stories I’ve heard from the fae that moved out here so who knows how accurate it is.”

“Mm, so, they’ll keep their word and not lie, but be careful of what words?”

“That’s exactly it, big man.”