Chapter 13 – Trap

“Well, this is weird as heck,” Lucy said, squinting at her phone. Callum had no idea how it was comfortable for her to sprawl across the couch at that angle, let alone read on her smartphone while half upside-down. If he tried that he’d have a headache in about a minute.

“You can’t just leave it there,” Callum said, not looking up from where he was trying to feed Alexander. Mage baby or not, he was still as fussy and messy as any child that age. “Considering our line of work, if something’s weird it’s weird.”

“No kidding!” Lucy agreed. “One of the packs out near California had a run-in with a vampire that turned into bats and flew away.”

“Um.” Callum blinked. “Vampires can’t do that though, can they?”

“Nope.” Lucy said. “That’s just mythology. So what the heck?”

“Maybe it was some kind of glamour or illusion? I don’t know why they’d go with something that involved, though,” Callum said, wiping off Alexander’s chin. “Unless — you know, that would kind of make sense for a fae, right?”

“I guess, but why would they be masquerading as a vamp?” Lucy rolled off the couch and onto her feet. “I mean, okay, I guess that’s an option for fae, but why would they bother? I dunno, maybe they’re making up something to cover why they let a vamp get away.”

“That’s possible,” Callum agreed. He didn’t believe shifters were very far different from ordinary humans when it came to that sort of thing. For that matter, he would bet there was the same impulse to shirk and deflect in vampires and fae, so someone inventing a wild tale wasn’t out of the question. The question would be why, since if they needed help with a vampire nest they only needed to supply The Ghost with certain details.

“I think we’ll have to look into it anyway. Vamps are bad news no matter what and if they’re teaming up with other supernaturals…” Callum trailed off and shook his head.

“I mean, they’ve teamed up with other supernaturals for forever,” Lucy pointed out. “That’s what GAR is anyway, right?”

“Point,” Callum admitted. “But this feels different. Enchantments are pretty damn limited if you’re not a mage, but fae magic can do more if you can get ahold of it, right?”

“I know some people use fae artifacts for stuff, but I don’t know how well they affect mages as such. Some of the things they do are just weird. Like with how they protected the Connors.” Lucy shrugged and Callum nodded. He still wasn’t sure how the fae king had managed to affect the whole of GAR; that was some world-changing power. But then again, the Connors were inside Ferrochar’s land and he’d already seen that fae kings had serious power there.

He didn’t like the idea of what fae-empowered vampires might be able to do.

“Right, well, where are we going to be looking for this storybook vampire?” He asked.

“You’re gonna laugh,” Lucy warned.

“Lay it on me.”

“Tijuana,” she said. He laughed.

“Okay, that is pretty funny,” Callum admitted. “Hard-partying vampire fae.”

“They may not even need their glamours,” Lucy agreed. “Makes me wonder what the shifter pack was doing out that way, but I guess they’re not one of Chester’s so whatever.” She waved it away. “There’s probably vampires in all the west coast cities but if we’re looking for fae you should be able to find them, right?”

“Maybe,” Callum said. “I mean, the enclaves are kind of obvious but if it’s over the whole city it might well be the same problem as hunting vampires in general. I don’t suppose they’ve got any more precise a location than a huge city.”

“Not so much. Here, check the email,” Lucy said, holding out her phone. Callum took it with telekinesis and looked over the message. What Lucy hadn’t mentioned was how careful the wording was in the email to the Ghost, as if the author was afraid he was going to offend Callum by being disrespectful. Verbal circumlocutions aside, the meat of the message was clear enough.

The Sonora pack, as they called themselves, were trying to push over to Baja California, and in doing so they’d stopped by Tijuana. The sighting in question was on the outskirts of the city, and reading between the lines someone had stumbled across a vampire trail and tracked it down to start a fight. Which seemed a poor decision from his point of view, because it was the vamps’ home turf and they’d have all the advantages. Regardless of how questionable the choices had been, it’d still led to the sighting.

Once they put Alexander down for a nap they headed down to the war room to start moving a drone in that direction. Given his slowly increasing finesse with the Alcubierre magic, it really didn’t take more than an hour or so to get a remote into the area. He’d never been to the area in his prior life as an architectural consultant, and looking at the video feed from the air he didn’t think he’d been missing much. His mental picture of a Mexican town was shaped by westerns and historical studies, but Tijuana was just another boring modern city.

He had to get surprisingly close to get a hint of the fae enclave. The subtlety of it reminded him of the fae he’d tracked down over in India, though he knew that didn’t mean they were directly connected. Still, he suspected. The enclaves in Florida and Colorado and even in Paris were all fairly obvious, almost flaunting their existence. They weren’t trying to hide, at least not from other supernaturals.

The Tijuana enclave was definitely trying to be circumspect. Callum wouldn’t have been surprised if they were completely off the books, hiding even from GAR. Though considering GAR’s diminished capacity, he wondered if there was a point to that. Admittedly, they were definitely enforcing their rules within GAR, and a lone enclave was probably easier to make an example of than either Callum or the American Alliance.

“You think maybe we should capture someone to explain what’s going on here?” Callum wondered aloud.

“I mean, that’d be awesome, but do you think you can?” Lucy asked.

“No, I don’t.” Callum sighed. “Taisen has a bunch of stuff for imprisoning supernaturals and it all looks really specialized, and he still backs it up with guards. I guess I could try tossing someone in an enclose cave; a vampire isn’t going to be able to get out of that, even if they can turn into bats. But only if there’s an opportunity.”

“Sure,” Lucy agreed. “Safety first. Also, finding them first.”

“Yeah,” Callum agreed. “Might be a while.” The enclave was spread out over a huge area, spilling over the border into California, and he had doubts that he’d find his target at the exact center. If they were trying to be subtle they’d avoid that issue exactly because it was so obvious.

In a normal fae enclave he would have used the wooden ball, but Tijuana was full of the usual hustle and bustle of a city. It was busy enough that the drone wouldn’t stand out, and besides which there was already mage activity there to mask anything he did. It wasn’t a full network like in Miami but it was clear that the fae-vamps weren’t the only game in town.

“Or maybe,” he said, musing to Lucy. “Maybe there’s already a fae presence here and the vamp types are hiding in it.”

“Eh, let me doublecheck, but I don’t think GAR has one registered there.” She took a moment off from working the cameras to dig through her database connection. Despite the clear move away from using the electronics from GAR, they hadn’t yet found Lucy’s tap nor had they purged the extant databases. Callum figured that was because most of what was in those databases was harmless and useless, except for GAR’s internal bureaucracy. Especially the parts that collected money.

While she was busy, Callum poked around the city, finding a few neighborhoods where there were mages about but no GAR office as such. Either the teleporter was like the hidden ones he’d seen, a single pad for discreet use, or the office had gotten shut down when GAR had to scale back. He didn’t see any shifters, which made sense, but he did run across traces of something that he was pretty sure was a dragonblooded.

So far the only one of those he’d met was Shahey, but he knew that there were others, if not many. For better or for worse he couldn’t find an actual dragonblooded, just traces of magic that looked like theirs. It certainly didn’t look like fae or human.

“Okay there’s a lot of entries for Tijuana,” Lucy said, sounding surprised. “More than I thought. But not a fae king or anything. Have an address for a vampire nest but I bet it’s outdated.”

“Might as well start there,” Callum said, and Lucy navigated the drone to the block in question. As expected, there weren’t any supernaturals there, but there were remnants of wards in the walls where someone had missed stripping out all of the enchantment metal, resources he promptly took for himself. If nothing else, a normal private detective could probably find out who had rented it and where they’d gone — assuming that the vampires hadn’t just brainwashed someone and hijacked the building.

He started spiraling outward from the old address, something that took a lot of time and was the reason why he didn’t just skim over every city that crossed his path. Despite the scale of his perceptions there was just so much that he’d be doing it every waking hour if he expected to get anywhere. Lucy left to go check on Alex, and Callum followed to help after a moment since he didn’t actually need to be in the war room.

It was lunch by the time something supernatural crossed his senses, and he paused in the middle of assembling his sandwich. Lucy was scowling at him because he was adding pickles, and for some reason she thought pickles on a sandwich was a travesty. When he stopped she actually brightened for a moment before he shook his head at her.

“Got something,” he said, finishing the sandwich and taking a bite. Lucy made a face at the crunch the pickle made. “We’ll see if it goes anywhere,” he added, after he chewed and swallowed.

“If it does, at least wait until Alex is finished,” Lucy said, bouncing their son before settling him in the high chair to feed him. By now he’d been up for a few hours while Callum had worked. They’d had to work their hours around his. “Your father has very weird food tastes,” she added, speaking directly to Alex. “You’d better not have inherited those.”

“What’s wrong with pickles?” Callum asked in exasperation.

“What isn’t wrong with pickles?” Lucy answered, sticking her tongue out. Alexander giggled. Callum rolled his eyes and kept teleporting the drone in pursuit of the speedster, who was actually flying. It had a small pair of butterfly wings keeping it impossibly aloft, though considering it was only three feet tall to begin with it wasn’t as silly as it might have been.

It wasn’t quite as straightforward as leading Callum right to the vampires, but the winged fae seemed to be some kind of messenger. It went from group to group of supernaturals, something that Callum considered to be rather indiscreet, but after the third stop he was more than happy to just follow it around. Even if it didn’t bring him directly to what he was searching for, it gave him a short list of supernatural concentrations.

The tracking paid off at the ninth stop, where there were a number of supernaturals resting in interior bedrooms. It only took a moment of study to determine they were vampires, given how familiar Callum was with their vis and their general physical proportions. The question was whether any of them were actually fae, or if some aspect of fae magic had altered normal vampires. Just because he’d found a nest didn’t mean he’d located the source of what had been reported.

“Right, marking this one,” Callum said, and left a drone there while he continued following the messenger with one of the others. Part of him was surprised that the drone hadn’t been noticed, though given that he was teleporting it from rooftop to rooftop several hundred feet away from the little flying faerie it would be difficult to tell even with super-senses. Whoever was in charge of the enclave probably realized there was magic about, but relative to all the residue kicked up by mage bubbles and whatever active spells were going on, his teleports were barely there.

“You think there’s more than one?” Lucy asked, taking down notes while Alexander played with blocks. “I mean, generally different nests don’t play well together.”

“Yeah, but if there’s fae involved who knows how many rules are being broken,” Callum said. “Just want to see if there’s anything else obviously off.” He rubbed at his face. It was entirely possible that the vampire nest were not the only ones who needed to be dealt with, but sorting out normal innocent supernaturals living their lives from those who were preying on people was difficult enough. Some of them might well be part of mundane crime to begin with, and that was a knot he didn’t even know how to start untangling.

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The little fae seemed to have finished its route a few stops later, and while Callum was suspicious of pretty much every set of supernaturals that the messenger had visited, none of them had been doing anything obviously terrible. Not even the vampires, though Callum simply marked that down to them being inactive during the day.

If he was being fair, most supernaturals didn’t seem to be particularly evil. Vampires fed on people, and so were monsters absolutely, but it seemed to be the minority of fae who decided to go the monster route. Most of them wanted to be minor pranksters or fairy godparents or whatever harmless role they were acting out. There were probably some nasty shifter packs outside the American Alliance, but Chester had stomped on things pretty firmly, so there was less to worry about on that score. Despite knowing that, he still felt like any supernatural he ran across might be doing something terrible just out of sight.

Lacking any actual evidence, however, he returned his attention to the vampire nest. There were fifteen vampires, which was actually on the large side for a nest so far as he’d found, but if one of them was actually a fae he couldn’t tell the difference. Not with them inactive and with the lake of fae mana that every enclave had muddying the metaphorical waters. He would bet that the vampire disguise wouldn’t extend to mordite vulnerability though, so if one was unusually resistant to his bullets, that would mark them.

“Okay, let’s go downstairs so I can check the weapons and get this done.” Barring actual emergencies, he wasn’t going to perform any carnage anywhere but the war room, which was meant for that kind of thing. He had to separate the activities of the Ghost from his normal life or he’d go crazy.

“I’ll hang around outside,” Lucy said, picking up Alexander. “It isn’t naptime for a while.”

Callum nodded. There wouldn’t be anything to see, since the drone with its cameras would be parked a hundred yards away or more from the building, but neither of them felt it was appropriate to bring Alex into the war room. Hopefully by the time he was older and trying to get into places of his own accord, the war room wouldn’t be needed.