Chapter 8 – Tension

The car turning into Callum’s driveway was familiar, and it wasn’t the sheriff’s. He was still feeling tired and hungover, even if he hadn’t drunk a single drop of alcohol, so it took him a moment to recognize Jessica Langley driving and Clara in the passenger seat. Part of him was surprised it was just those two, but at the same time he was glad there was nobody else.

Of all the people who might have shown up after what had happened, those two were probably the least worrisome to see arrive on his doorstep. He struggled out of bed and splashed water on his face, making sure he affixed the hairpiece and summoned his cane to his hand. Though he’d been out of sorts when he’d gone to the café before, he couldn’t allow himself to break the habits of his disguise. When the knock on the door came he grabbed his cane, stumped down the stairs, and opened it up while offering the pair a smile.

“I wasn’t sure you’d be here,” Jessica said.

“Should I have gone?” He could barely summon the adrenaline to wake himself any further, but he did reach out with his senses to find his supplies, ready to move at a moment’s notice.

“No, I don’t think so,” Jessica told him. “There are GAR agents here to investigate things, but they don’t know about you.”

“I wanted to say thank you,” Clara said abruptly, hovering uncertainly a moment before stepping forward to give Callum a hug, squeezing with more strength than a girl her age should have. He just stood there awkwardly, arms partly raised, too stunned to do anything but try and let his brain catch up.

“You’re welcome,” Callum said. “But remember, I wasn’t there, I didn’t do anything.”

“We understand,” Jessica said, as Clara finally let him go. “But at the same time, we can’t just forget it, so…” She nodded at Clara, who picked up a large package from where it was resting on the porch and offered it to him. He hadn’t smelled it before, but once it got closer the scent of steak and garlic and butter wafted to his nose. Callum’s stomach growled.

“The Sienna Café is kind of closed for a while anyway, until they finish cleaning up the motel remains, so we brought you a bunch of food,” Clara explained.

“Well, I am hungry,” Callum said, suddenly feeling ravenous. “Why don’t you come around back and you can fill me in.”

He led them around the side, knowing that his worries that they’d be able to smell the guns and money he’d confiscated from the vampires was probably unfounded, but he didn’t want to take the chance. If nothing else, he hadn’t exactly cleaned up the house for company. The back porch, on the other hand, was nice enough even with the chill in the air.

Callum got one of the take-out containers from the package, opening it to reveal a heroically large steak, far larger than he ever ordered. He did offer to share it with Clara and Jessica, but they declined. Clara slightly more reluctantly than Jessica. Though considering she worked in the café, he was pretty sure she could get ahold of all the eats she could ever want. On the other hand, teens were always hungry.

“If you don’t mind my being rude by eating, what’s going on?”

“Alpha Langley went to meet the GAR agents this morning,” Jessica said, unperturbed. “He says they didn’t get anything off the bodies, but they’re going to be poking around anyway.”

“Mmm.” Callum mumbled through a mouthful of steak. Unless they had something specifically pointing to Callum, it was probably better to stay and try to brazen it out than vanish. If he decided to up and leave, that would look damn suspicious. Then they’d investigate his house and yard and probably find some evidence that he had been involved, considering how thorough forensics could be. His greatest security was simply not being suspected.

“The GAR people have been going over the motel for almost a whole day now,” Clara put in. “But I don’t think they found anything either. I don’t really know much about what mages do, though.”

Unfortunately, neither did Callum. He thought his little siphons and the subsequent fire would remove the only traces he’d left of his magic from the portals, but he really didn’t know. There was always the possibility that there was some mage or, more likely, some fae who could just see the past and sniff him out no matter how careful he was.

“I appreciate you telling me,” Callum said, cutting himself another bite. “I’m not sure there’s anything we can do to affect things at this point, though.”

“We’re keeping our mouths shut,” Jessica said. “But Alpha Chester is worried that your help might cost something. Something we can’t afford.”

“Alpha Chester?” Callum asked, then immediately castigated himself for doing so. If he was pretending to be a mundane, he wouldn’t know anything, but if he was pretending to be a normal member of supernatural society, he really shouldn’t ask about local leaders. Any ordinary person would know, and he had heard the name before. Admittedly, he wasn’t in the best state of mind then.

“The Midwest Alpha,” Clara told him, not seeming to care about his ignorance. “He’s Alpha Langley’s own Alpha, so while you did help us, in a way you helped him too.”

“Well.” Callum considered how to play it. He wanted to use as few lies as possible, because that sort of thing was easy to get tangled in, but that wasn’t the same as telling the whole truth. It was best to just play the mysterious stranger, because then people would draw their own conclusions and confirm their own biases. “It was not something I did to get rewarded. I did it because I told you I would help if I could. And I could.”

“So you’re not looking to call in anything for what we owe you?”

“You don’t owe me.” Callum smiled briefly. “Like I said, I was never there. It never happened. In fact, while I appreciate the gratitude, I would prefer that we leave it there and not speak of it again.” For all he knew, a mage somewhere could listen in from a hundred miles away, and with two GAR agents in the area it was better to be circumspect.

“Yes, of course,” Jessica said, glancing at Clara. “Well, we’ll be opening the café again in a few days. I hope to see you there!”

“I’ll probably be out of food by then,” Callum said with a laugh, looking at the stack of takeout containers still in the package. “Well, maybe not, but you can be sure that I’ll be stopping by.” Assuming he was still there. Knowing there were actual GAR agents made him think of his to-do list. He needed to go into town and get supplies.

Now that he had some basic magic, he actually had two ways of bugging out. One was the mundane way, hitching rides, using cash, and generally not leaving a trail, and the other was the magical way. He could teleport himself now, or he could, at least in theory, nullify his own gravity and space-drag himself. That gave him the option of a poor man’s flight, though it absolutely came with issues of its own. Among them the fact that he hadn’t actually tried it yet.

The only problem was that he did have to worry about the vis itself being traceable. That probably wouldn’t matter too much most of the time, whatever disturbance he made lost over time or mixed in with the presence of other mages, but with a pair of GAR agents nearby he couldn’t take the chance. At least not immediately. He would only feel comfortable using magic if he was far away from anyone who could track it.

“Great,” said Jessica, and stood up, Clara following suit. “We’ll get out of your hair, then. Enjoy your meal!”

“Enjoy your meal!” Clara echoed, Callum stood to walk them out to the car before returning to put the take-out in the fridge and finish the absolutely massive steak. Alone, he teleported the notepad to himself and added more items, on the presumption that he might be able to bring more than a bag or two with him. More of a pious hope, really, but it was better than not being prepared.

He drove out maybe half an hour later, circling around the closed road while he cast his senses out at the remains of the motel. It was still surreal to think that he’d done that, so hard to believe that it was like watching the actions of a stranger. But the truth was he’d do it again, considering what they’d done.

There were people combing over the ruins, as Clara had said, and while at least half of them weren’t human, none of them were shifters. Nor were there any vampires; they seemed to be some kind of fae, by the pointy ears and the bizarre haze of magic coming off them. It wasn’t threads and fields like mage spells, but rather like flowing water. He didn’t dare probe too closely, but he did see some weak flickers of magic from some kind of mage, which probably did a great job of hiding any tracks he might have left.

The stores he needed to visit were far enough from the motel as to be out of range, but he kept his senses active anyway. Camping supplies, duct tape, hardware cloth, plastic bags, tarp — nothing that would raise an eyebrow by itself, but taken all together it might look like he was getting rid of bodies. Which was why he went to different stores, of course.

He got back home and busied himself with cleaning up his loot. The camping supplies went into the duffles along with clothes, money, and one each of the guns with a small amount of ammunition. While before he’d taken it for the principle of the thing, now he knew exactly how lethal he could be. And how lethal he might need to be.

The rest of the guns, the ammunition, and the magical items went in small packages, plastic bags wrapped in duct tape. He needed to cache it in some way, but he’d been chewing over the possibilities for that and had maybe a solution. It wasn’t a pretty solution, but it would probably work.

Callum got a spade and went to the basement, then reached out with his senses to find a rock somewhere deep in his yard. He carefully surrounded it and exchanged its position with air, though if it needed an extra-hard push of mana, creating a little bit of a pocket that he quickly opened a portal into. It was about as wide as his hand, and he started shoveling dirt out with the trowel. Once it was big enough, he widened the portal and shoved one of the packages into it. Then for good measure, tossed a siphon bearing in with the package and dropped the portal, leaving the entire thing buried nearly ten feet underground.

He worked his fingers, feeling a little bit of strain from the short handle of the spade, but he had a lot of packages to cache. At least the soil was much softer and deeper in Winut. It would be impossible to go so deep back in his hometown of Tanner, so close to the Appalachians.

The bundle of hard drives got wrapped in the wire mesh of hardware cloth with some aluminum foil for the heck of it, on the off chance there was still some buried chip or something, or even some proximity thing for someone wandering around with a gadget he’d never heard of. That one went as deep as he could find, though it wasn’t much deeper than any of the others. The magic bundle got a siphon bearing, even though he couldn’t discern any kind of signature leaking from it, and the faraday cage wrapping just in case.

Once he was done, the only evidence that there had been stolen property around was a pile of dirt in his basement, and considering that it was unfinished the pile of dirt didn’t even look too out of place. He had no idea if anyone would ever visit or look, but he felt a lot better with things cleaned up like that. Now he was ready for a visit, if the agents ever came.

***

“They’re definitely hiding something,” Ray Danforth told his partner. “There isn’t a chance that Alpha Langley is as ignorant as he professes to be.”

“So eavesdrop,” Felicia Black suggested languidly. “I thought you could hear anything within a mile radius.” Most people would have thought that pairing someone with siren blood with an air mage would be a recipe for disaster, but Ray had some certain advantages. Mostly, he’d been tutored in how to safely reinforce his ears with his air magic without accidentally causing an embolism or similar issue, allowing him to screen out magical effects.

Despite their improved hearing, a properly trained air mage was the most immune to siren effects.

“I have been,” he told her. “You have no idea how lusty these shifters are. So I’m overhearing quite a lot, but none of it is pertinent to our case. In fact there’s remarkably little gossip about it, for all that some mysterious benefactor came and handled their problem for them.”

“I could try to get some of them to talk,” Felicia suggested with a smile.

“With Alpha Langley here, that probably isn’t the best idea.” Ray frowned. Shifters were touchy at the best of times, but Langley clearly didn’t like the idea of GAR agents in his town. Quite a reversal, considering the complaints Alpha Chester had to GAR in the files. Felicia’s voice wasn’t quite beyond the bounds of propriety to use, especially on a suspect, but hypnotizing random shifters was a good way to get teeth buried in someone’s throat.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“So, actual groundwork?” Felicia asked, making a face as she sat up from the couch.

“Let’s see what the cleaners found first,” he said. “I’m sure we would have heard already if there was anything exciting, but you never know. Considering we have exactly nothing so far in this case, any evidence of anything would be welcome.”

“Fine,” Felicia sighed. “Let’s see what car they stuck us with.”

It wasn’t even a car. It was a white pickup, and Ray wasn’t much of a fan of the gearshift, but it did drive and it was, at least, scrupulously clean. If there was one nice thing about shifter compounds, it was that no slovenly behavior was tolerated. He let Felicia drive, her feet only just reaching the pedals, and focused on his air sense as they headed into town.

The local mana was more or less undisturbed. Shifters didn’t leave much magic residue and there didn’t seem to be many fae or mages around, so any serious use would stick out. He could use the nearby air to trace out small passages and check houses and basements for anything unexpected, but there was nothing terribly unusual. Not that he expected to find much on the drive to the crime scene.