“Second verse, same as the first,” Callum muttered to himself as he drove through a small town in Nebraska. It was a bit of a haul from Texas but he didn’t really mind, since he was there to pick up almost a million dollars worth of gold bullion. It was hard to be grumpy about the drive when that was the reward at the end.

Especially since he could use his new gut portal to store the truck and teleport back home.

This time the padded case was located in the open belltower of a church, and Callum wondered why Chester had gone for high roofs. At this point he was certain that Chester knew Callum was a spatial mage, but then again, it wasn’t likely that his subordinates knew that it was Callum who was doing the work. Sky access might be a plausible excuse for how the gold vanished without anybody seeing anything.

He stopped at a light while he located the case and the dense gold in the sphere of his senses, and pulled it into the pickup. So far as he could sense none of the few shifters hanging about the small town had line of sight to the case, and none of them made any particular reaction to him driving off with it when the light changed.

Callum waited until he’d driven out into the country for an hour or so before calling Lucy to tell her he’d picked up the package. It seemed she was still on vacation, and it sounded like she was going a little stir-crazy being stuck at home.

He sympathized. At least when he’d gone into his self-imposed exile he had a lot of projects to keep him busy, but all of Lucy’s stuff was over at GAR. Which was a good argument for why she shouldn’t let other people take care of her stuff, as it meant that it wasn’t really, properly hers. Not that he’d point it out at the moment, since it’d just be adding insult to injury.

“I tell you what, big man,” Lucy complained. “I can’t even pet dogs around here ‘cause I’m not sure when it’s going to be someone’s kid instead.” Callum barked a laugh.

“Nothing you want to order off the Internet? I’m sure there are some toys you’ve been wanting to get for a while.”

“Kinky,” Lucy said, reflexively. “Nah, though. I mean, I’ve got everything back in my office. 3-D printers and stuff take a while to ship and what would I do with two anyway?”

“I guess that’s a point,” Callum admitted. “When do you start back, anyway?”

“Still a couple days,” Lucy replied. “This break thing runs into Thanksgiving. I like vacations, but I’d rather plan for ‘em, you know? At least let me bring my coffeemaker home with me.”

When they wrapped up their conversation, Callum opened his gut portal and teleported the case of gold onto a table set up for the purpose. So far as he could tell there were no electronics in it, but even if there were, there was no way any signal would make it out of the enclosed cave. The truck got teleported to the concrete pad as well, and he tossed a rusty hinge with his cleanup enchantment down to cover his tracks. Then he invoked his homebond and made his way to the trailer via telepad.

Callum actually felt rather smug as he pulled the pickup back out of the cave and put it in his driveway. At least, until he noticed how low it was on gas, but he could make a run for that later. The trip back had given him a few more ideas that he felt really dumb for not having explored before.

Obviously he could nest portals. There was no problem running vis through his gut portal, which meant there was no problem running it through any other portal he made. So one between his current position and the edge of his perceptions gave him two sensory spheres, and let him chain out to double his normal distance. Then he could make another portal set, and triple it.

Actually trying that ran into some issues, though. Not so much with the magic, which worked just fine, but with his perceptions. Even if he didn’t pay full attention to that six-hundred-yard perceptual sphere, it was still there. Doubling that input was something he could handle, even if it was somewhat of a strain. Tripling it was not something he could sustain for long, like staring into a bright light, and quadrupling made all his threads collapse as his brain overloaded in a sort of white-out moment and he lost track of his magic.

A little bit of experimentation showed his proper limits were something closer to two and a half times his current volume. He could probably work his way up to three, but if his base perception got larger, that multiplier might actually go down a bit. There had to be some upper limit. The human brain, however magical, was not infinite.

That didn’t mean he could only nest three portals. He could pull back his magical perceptions, and what mattered was the total space he was looking at, not how many ways he could see it. That was why his other experiments with using portals hadn’t really bothered him; they’d all overlapped the same space. If he put five portals within ten feet of each other, six hundred yards away, he only got ten feet more radius on a bubble that half overlapped his original one. Or whatever complicated math described that intersection.

Still, being able to double his range if he needed to was not something to sneeze at. Especially since he only needed to use teeny tiny portals to do so, and those had to be harder to detect than something large. Obviously not impossible, but it might give him an edge. Considering what he was up against, he needed every edge he could get.

Callum took a break from his work simply by driving into town and getting a burger and a milkshake from the local greasy spoon, then pulling up some videos on his laptop to distract himself with. Thanksgiving hadn’t been much for the past few years, but at least he’d had a proper house. It was all he could do to not be maudlin.

On the other hand, despite what he’d given up to be on the wrong side of GAR and supernaturals in general, it wasn’t like he hadn’t accomplished anything. He’d seen other worlds and dealt with dragons, and most importantly he’d actually saved some people. Not everyone, but at least the Connors and Clara.

A few good deeds were better than none.

***

Getting a teleport pad smuggled into Lavigne’s penthouse was not easy. Vampires tended to use thralls for their gruntwork, so there was nobody to suborn, coerce, or bribe. On the other hand, they still had to take deliveries and Chester’s work with Lucy had prompted him to get in contact with other unsavory mundane elements.

The team he had hired gave the go-ahead when the crate was unpacked and the pad free and open. It was afternoon, but considering how many vampires Lavigne had lost, it probably wouldn’t matter if it was midnight. Once other nests caught wind of how weak Lavigne had become, they’d likely start making moves, but Chester was making one first.

He owed Lavigne for both what had been done, and what had been attempted.

To avoid suspicion, he’d had members of his pack bring their mana charges to the compound. They’d have to forego some of the benefits of commercial enchantments for a week or so, but some judiciously arranged family reunions and vacations ameliorated most of that. There were plenty of people at Chester’s compound, enough to gather a number of watchers who would be absolutely certain Chester never left.

It wasn’t like GAR was even being particularly subtle about it. Some poor bastard from the Bureau of Shifter Relations was sitting in one of the guest houses to be available to Chester in what was tritely referred to as trying times. Although Chester, certainly, wasn’t really being tried by GAR’s issues with Wells. At least Chester had long had the interior of his compound warded from prying eyes, with Jasper certifying it properly worked.

“Team One, ready?” The Wolfpack made noises of agreement.

“Team Two, ready?” The secondary team, including a few of his subordinate Alphas, nodded.

In the next room, others were stocking janitorial carts with chemicals, mops, brooms, vacuums, and a few fae charms. Even Chester couldn’t evade the consequences of eradicating one of the Masters of the Midwest, if GAR knew about it. But only if they knew about it.

It wasn’t like he could hide Lavigne’s disappearance, but he could deflect the blame. After all, he was at his pack compound the entire time and there was someone else who could infiltrate a protected building and clean it out. It didn’t matter whether or not the Ghost had done it, just that he could have done it.

Jasper sat next to the new, double-size teleport pad as it energized. The other end had some mana charges to reduce the cycle time, so it didn’t take more than a minute after the surveillance team had given the go-ahead before it was ready for them. Chester stepped onto the plate, both teams crowding on with him, and pricked his finger with the token.

The moment their surroundings shifted Chester pushed the go-ahead through the pack bonds. Now that they were inside Lavigne’s building, they wanted to keep things quick and quiet. They spread out from the storage room the pallet was being kept in, all of them in war form and with claws out. They’d bypassed the outer wards, but there were still internal alarms that could make life difficult for them.

Unfortunately, a lot of the thralls would have to die. While Mister Summers, or Wells, or whatever he was calling himself had spared them, it was a wasted effort. Thralls had once been mundanes who had somehow survived feeding, but something essential had still been taken from them. They were slavishly obedient, unable to consider doing anything other than carrying out the orders of whatever vampire they had latched onto.

That didn’t mean they were stupid, though, and they wouldn’t ignore the invasion of a bunch of powerful shifters. Not that they would be expecting said invasion to come from the core of the building. Chester’s team headed upward, while Alpha Vernon’s team went for the security center. Arthur Langley would have wanted to come, but Chester thought it was better if he was nowhere near the operation. Or even knew about it.

They tore through three rooms before there was any hint of resistance, snapping necks and tearing out throats, as the thralls were only slightly faster than an ordinary mundane. The danger was in their silverite weaponry and ammunition, because all it really took was one good hit. The petrified tree sap silverite was made from was poisonous to the symbiote, disrupting their intrinsic magic if it even pierced the skin. It wasn’t simply a risk of wounds that didn’t heal with their usual alacrity; a shifter could be rendered temporarily mundane. Or permanently, with enough of the stuff.

The thralls were equipped both with all kinds of bane types, as shifters were not the only threat Lavigne had to worry about. He was quarrelsome even for a vampire, and got into occasional spats with other Masters or even fae, which could easily result in at least moderate amounts of violence. The first pops of gunfire came as Chester entered a large lounge area, punching holes in the wall behind him as he dropped to all fours and rushed the shooter.

Sheer impact sent the thrall flying backward, organs ruptured and bones shattered before he even hit the wall, and the first actual vampire appeared through the far door. While they didn’t exactly burst into flames in sunlight, they were very nocturnal and their raw power waned with the sun. They relied on blades and guns more than shifters did, so the one that came through the door had a silverite dagger in each hand.

It was more difficult to deal with a vampire that was aware of the threat, even a sun-weary one, than one surprised by ambush. There was a reason that shifters moved in packs, though, and Chester feinted forward, drawing out attacks from the daggers as they ripped through the air while Roy maneuvered to flank their attacker. Chester and Roy danced with the vampire for a few moments, feinting and swiping, until he overextended and Roy’s claws lashed out and severed his spine.

Chester’s earpiece clicked twice to let him know that Alpha Vernon’s team had secured their objective, and if the mundanes he’d hired were doing their job right, any attempt to call out should be jammed. That actually made things easier; the vampire’s own glamours would silence the sounds of battle, so none of them needed to worry about being quiet.

Climbing upward was the most dangerous part of taking the building, because whether they used elevator shafts or stairwells, there was an angle for someone to shoot at them. Even so, silverite bullets were still only bullets, which was why Chester had given Craig a big steel shield, and why the burly shifter took point as they went upward. The Wolfpack practically sprinted up, but nonetheless making sure to check and verify each room and kill. According to public record, Lavigne was supposed to only have a dozen vampires with him, but that same record said that Chester was still in his compound so he knew how little to trust it.

Despite owning the whole building, Lavigne’s nest only filled the uppermost floors, so it didn’t take very long to reach the top. He had to send two shifters back due to injuries, and three more were relegated to support because they’d gotten silverite injuries, but he had more than enough people to deal with the remaining vampires and thralls. Most importantly, enough to deal with Lavigne himself.

By the time they reached the opulent penthouse on the highest floor, Lavigne was waiting for them. The vampire master had kitted himself out for a fight, with silverite-lacquered armor and a long silverite-edged saber, rather than just a knife. Chester could smell it from across the room; it was the pure stuff, not the alloys normally used for weapons.

“You’re not even dogs,” Lavigne sneered, holding the saber in a ready stance. “You’re jackals, slinking around the backs of your betters.”

Chester didn’t respond. He was more concerned with the surroundings than the words of a soon-to-be dead vampire. There was no way that Lavigne would be out in the open like he was without some kind of trap or fallback. Nothing presented itself too obviously, but Chester remained cautious as he directed his people to fan out along the walls on either side of the door.

“Cat got your tongue, dog?” Lavigne taunted, poorly, then switched to French. “Honorless cur, come forth and fight me properly. It is what you are here for, is it not?”

“It is not, actually,” Chester replied in the same language, happy to have extra time for his people to move. “A fight is for an opponent, not an enemy. Besides, I’m a shifter. We work in packs.”

He directed his Wolfpack through the bonds, two of them shifting down to beast form and feinting in toward Lavigne. Even if they weren’t as powerful in beast form, they were more agile and far smaller targets. Considering that Lavigne almost certainly had something planned, it was more important they be able to dodge.

There was a snap of some spellform as Roy darted in, and he yelped as something lashed out from beneath the floor. He scampered backward on three legs, the fourth one pouring blood out onto the carpet, his foreleg a stump. A flex of pack energy staunched the bleeding, but Chester could feel the crackling of competing magics at the wound. That was something that would take a while to heal.

“Only you can approach me,” Lavigne said, pointing his saber at Chester. “Your vaunted pack will not help you here,” he added. “Once I tear you apart⁠—”

Lavigne’s speech was interrupted as Vernon’s team, having finally made it to the roof and rappelled down a floor, appeared at the top edge of the windows and fired. The vampire blurred into action, but even he couldn’t dodge a shifter-directed fusillade of bullets completely. The mordite ammunition tore through Lavigne’s body and sent him sprawling on the floor, still mouthing imprecations with his last breath.

Chester watched dispassionately. It would have been far more difficult if Lavigne had kept his subordinates on the same level, instead of lording over them. But that was the difference between Chester and Lavigne. Chester and his Wolfpack were the fastest and strongest, but that just meant they could feint and lead with the least amount of risk. Roy’s wound might have been lethal for a slower shifter. There would have been some satisfaction in disassembling Lavigne himself, but that was nothing compared to getting the job done right and bringing everyone home alive.

“Good job, everyone,” Chester said, reaching up to his earpiece. “Send in the cleaners.”

In a sense, actually killing their way through the building was the easy part. Now they had to make sure there was no evidence of shifters. Not even a trace. They’d have to somehow break the spell trap that was on the carpet, and probably take away the carpet itself, given that Roy had bled on it.

After all, they’d never been there. It was the Ghost.

***

Buying an armored van was more complicated than it should have been.

Callum was somewhat staggered by the sheer variety of armored vehicles available to him, at least in theory. Most of them were old cash trucks, but there was a lot of military surplus knocking around up to and including honest-to-goodness APCs. Not that he wanted one of those, tempting as it was. They’d stand out too much.

A normal armored van wouldn’t look like much, though. Put a ladder on one of them and it’d be hard to tell it apart from some random utility vehicle. He definitely wanted the additional protection that an armored vehicle gave him, mostly because he needed a very secure place for a teleport plate, one that he could move around. That was the primary reason, but part of it was also that he wanted to be able to handle an attack like the one that had hit him in France.

He actually had no idea what level of armor rating would be required to resist a spell like that, but he was pretty sure it would take more to punch through a proper armored car than a brick wall. It was magic, true, but he’d seen that his constructs failed to work properly when they hit solid material. He didn’t imagine that a fireball or whatever would just pass through obstacles. Mana wasn’t entirely ephemeral.

Hopefully he’d never have to find out, but at the same time he felt a lot safer in a vehicle that would deflect rifle fire and small explosions. Heavy enough munitions would still be an issue, but he was dealing with the supernatural. An actual tank likely wouldn’t be enough against a serious opponent.

The guy who actually had the armored van, which looked like some generic white utility vehicle, was in fact quite happy to take gold bullion instead of cash. He reminded Callum of some of the people his father had hung around with, old and crusty and full of stories. The heavy Texas accent really helped round out the stereotype, but Callum wasn’t complaining. The official sale was just a twenty-dollar bill and Callum had a new vehicle to use.

Callum’s only real objection was that it was a bit of a gas hog, and was bulkier than the pickup with an oddly floaty start and stop. Still easier to handle than the Winnebago, though, so he couldn’t complain too much. The back was big enough to haul practically anything he would have wanted to put in the pickup, too, so it was just as handy.

The best part was, he could just slide it into his portal cache rather than trying to figure out a way to drive both it and the pickup all the way back home. He was still tickled by how useful it was. Obviously he had to do so out of sight of the previous owner, but that was only a little bit awkward.

Unfortunately, he was really damn low on enchanting stuff so he couldn’t kit out the van as much as he might like. Not without cannibalizing supplies he’d already earmarked for just-in-case weaponry and eventual home warding. He’d really have to get more, but he was sure that the portal worlds were still being very closely guarded, and trying to get through one now would be idiotic.

Not that his original trip was any great shakes, but he hadn’t had much of a choice.

There was a temptation to try and raid some depot somewhere, but that wasn’t the same as taking from those who preyed on people. They had forfeited their right to property. GAR as a whole was definitely on his bad side, but there were a lot of people inside GAR as a whole who hadn’t done anything wrong. Just stealing stuff from a random bunch of people who had no doubt paid for it with their own time and labor would make him no better than a common criminal.

It was a problem he mused on as he took another trip down to his bunker to survey the ongoing construction work. Things seemed to be going well, but building a house took time. It’d still be a couple months before he could move in, let alone start properly furnishing and doing magical experiments.

For the first time in what seemed like ages he was on top of all the various crises and had time to focus on fundamentals. He still had years and years of magical theory and practice to catch up on, everything from basic magical reflexes to vis field uniformity exercises. Not to mention, he just needed more magical stamina.

Between the rock-hucking and moving the armored van around, it was pretty obvious he didn’t have much of a capacity. Studying his own vis with his perceptions, he didn’t really see any significant change in his body, even when he was completely out of gas. Though it wasn’t like he could tell a difference when he was biologically tired, so it was probably something closer to the molecular level than the thread level.

At least he had enough of a tank to escape when he needed to, but crashing for twelve or eighteen hours afterward was not good. It also sent him looking for any biological understanding of vis, because if he got physically tired then there was some physical role it played in his biology. Unfortunately, the backup literature he’d cached didn’t have anything useful.

The only real references to vis-exhaustion he could find were about when a mage was first learning how to construct their bubble. Or shell, or most officially, “sphere of authority,” which sounded insanely pompous. The segment on the bubble was fascinating otherwise, though, since there were various basic social rules for interacting with other mages when bubbles would intersect.

Generally, bubbles were supposed to be kept flexible so they’d deflect each other and mages could do things like shake hands. Though, reading between the lines, mage society didn’t have much in the way of casual social contact. That was reserved for only the closest of family or lovers, and going without a bubble entirely was akin to being naked, so it was basically only done when a mage was completely safe.

That meant the very first mage he’d killed had almost literally been caught with their pants down.

A more powerful mage, though what powerful meant was left vague, could effectively shoulder a less powerful mage’s bubble aside. That was, quite obviously, considered somewhat rude, but that didn’t stop people from doing it. The whole thing sounded tedious, but Callum had to concede bubbles made some kind of sense.

Or at least, it made sense in a world with low-grade inter-House feuds and other kinds of supernatural violence. The sort of world from five hundred years ago, not the modern one that ordinary people had spent a lot of time and blood building. Not exactly the kind of society he would spend his time in, if he had the choice.

“Hey, big man!” Lucy greeted him when he called, pre-empting his question with one of her own. “Did you go and take out Lavigne?”

“What?” Callum blinked. “Who? Oh, right. No, I didn’t. What happened?”

“Oh man, he just vanished. The whole nest, all cleaned out and empty, everyone gone. No traces of anyone, the security tapes trashed, whole nine yards. Looks like your work, kinda, just because the outer wards didn’t get tripped and there’s no evidence of anything.”

“No, that wasn’t me,” Callum said, frowning. His first thought was, naturally, Chester. He very well knew how absolutely insane being able to teleport was, and Chester had two sets of telepads. That didn’t mean it was him, though, because it was one thing to arrive somewhere undetected, and it was another to eliminate an entire building undetected.

“I suppose I should have seen this coming,” he concluded glumly. “Copycats. If anything, I should have expected this earlier. Why not take out a rival and blame it on me? It’s not like I’m going to issue a press release stating that I didn’t do it.”

“I guess not, but like. That’s just going to make things harder for you, isn’t it?”

“It might?” Callum pursed his lips. “I don’t like it, but if I was nowhere near, they’re just going to come up empty. Damn. I almost wish I could tip someone off that it wasn’t me, but at the same time, there’s no way to do that without it causing all kinds of problems. Besides, it’s not my business.” It still rankled, though. Not that he had any objection to taking out Lavigne as such, but if such copycat crimes caught on then a lot of things might get blamed on him.

On the other hand, they couldn’t mimic the ability that made him so difficult for them to deal with: his physical distance from any kind of crime. His vague understanding was that copycats often got caught very quickly, because committing a crime in a certain way meant it was premeditated. That meant a paper trail, and that meant getting caught.

“If you say so, big man,” Lucy said, somewhat doubtfully. “But if it wasn’t you, who was it? The boss man?”

“Yah, probably,” Callum agreed. “But maybe some other vamp was tipped off, who knows. It smells like high level politics and that’s not a game that either of us want to play. If we ask Chester and he denies it, what are we going to say?”

“I guess,” Lucy grumbled. “But I’m a little hurt. Usually he lets me in on these kinds of escapades.”

“Mmm, but this one involves me. You’d probably have told me, and I would’ve objected. And he wouldn’t have cared unless I pressed the issue, and I might have.” Callum sighed. “I’d appreciate it if you’d tell him not to do that again, whether or not he admits that he did in the first place.” Technically Callum could talk to Chester himself, but he had enough foresight to know that was not a conversation he wanted to have.

“Will do, big man. Though the boss man doesn’t take orders too well.”

“Yes, well, if he didn’t do it, he’s got nothing to worry about. If he did do it, he deserves it.”

“You’re not the one who has to tell him!”

“Tell him if he has to growl at anyone, growl at me.”

“Ha! Man, do not make dog jokes at a shifter.”

“What, afraid they might bite you?” Callum grinned as he got Lucy to laugh. “Anyway, it’s a message from me. I’m pretty sure he won’t blame you. Didn’t seem the type.”

“Nah. I’ll let him know, big man.”

***

“I think we’ve got something.” Agent Dave, no last name given or required, slapped down the folder on Jahn’s desk. “Well, there were a lot of somethings, but most of that was just people gambling or other stupid things. This…” He paused for effect. “This is substantial.”

“How substantial?” Jahn asked, not particularly impressed by the theatrics.

“Over a hundred thousand dollars in gold. She tried to hide it, but large amounts of gold get noticed.”

“She?” He was impressed, now.

“Lucille Harper. Two large cash transactions, one just after the incident down in Florida, and another one right about the time that Lavigne fellow got hit.” Dave looked very smug. “She did try to use different accounts, but all the actual exchange places she used where in the same geographical area so it wasn’t too hard to localize it.”

“Hm.” Jahn didn’t recognize the name, so he picked up the folder and flipped through it. She was just a dud, so it was no wonder he didn’t recognize the name. “She was already interviewed,” he said, somewhat doubtfully.

“Yeah, I pulled the video on that. Whoever you got to do it did not do a very good job. I spotted a couple of answers that were clearly evasions, and a couple of questions that were just flat out stupid. You should’ve gotten that other lady, Black, to do all the interviews.”

Jahn grimaced. Agent Black was definitely good at pulling out answers, given her fae background, but she’d been focused on the high profile members of GAR. People who had real access, real connections, and real stakes. They just didn’t have enough people with experience in questioning to handle the hundreds of GAR employees, so inevitably the less valuable targets had gone to less experienced BSE agents.

“What do you suggest?” Jahn knew that if he reported things up the chain, or really to anyone, they’d want to rush in and grab Harper. He also knew that was a stupid idea, given how she’d already proven to be at least somewhat resistant to questioning under compulsion.

“Bug her office. And her home. See who she talks to, and track them down. Depending on how plugged in she is to the network, we could uncover the entire group if we just give her enough rope.” Dave reached over the desk to flip to the end of the stack of pages, and tapped the spec sheet he’d included for the devices in question. “Don’t think a place like this would have problems with the budget.”

“No, indeed.” The only reason Jahn wasn’t spending more money was because he didn’t have anything to spend it on. BSE was crawling all over Lavigne’s office already, and adding more people wouldn’t help that. There were really no other leads to go on, since the fae were being unreasonable and he was already applying what pressure he could.

“Very well, you’re cleared to do that. A full work-up, everything. I’ll have Danforth and Black join you; they’re wasted on the Lavigne scene.”

“Fantastic,” Dave beamed. “I think we’ve finally got a good lead here. We just have be patient and reel it in.”