Magi Saga 2: Shadows of Darkness (11 page)

Surveillance

May 18
th

The Bronx, New York

With a whip crack of the night air, Lucian disappeared from the rooftop, leaving Shaun stood on the warehouse roof alone.

Lucian had asked Shaun to be here for a meeting, he had known they were meeting someone that needed to know where Yoh could be found. But he had not known why. But after that little encounter, Shaun had a good idea why this woman wanted to find Yoh. You don’t go to a meeting with Katana and knives and guns strapped to your body just for a casual chat.

Shaun guessed she had been brought in to assassinate Yoh, and the impression he took from that meeting was that it seemed like she might have a personal stake in this as well.

The meeting had ended, and now he needed to get back to Manhattan and meet this woman, whoever she happened to be, in 1 hour. He wandered over to the edge of the roof and looked down. A short way up the road he saw the car he had been driven here in. It idled next to the side of the warehouse with Ben still in it. Shaun glanced around briefly to make sure no one happened to be watching, before he stepped off the roof top and dropped about three stories to the ground, landing easily without hurting himself.

Being a Scion came with certain benefits that he enjoyed, even though it had turned his body into something the Riven masses found horrific.

Everything seemed quiet in the alleyway, so he walked to the car and stepped into the passenger seat, pulling his hood up to hide his face.

‘Back to the stakeout.’ He said to Ben, his assistant, who waited for Shaun to close the door before pulling away.

The roads were quiet and they made good time driving back into Greenwich Village. Most of the drive they sat in silence. Ben didn’t speak to Shaun unless it needed immediate attention, or unless spoken too. Shaun didn’t like being in the car, out in the open, but using a car really was the only way to get back in time, and with a certain amount of privacy. After all, Shaun couldn’t just step onto the next subway train with a face like his.

Hidden in the depths of his hoodie, he watched the world go by as Ben navigated the endless traffic back into the city.

Eventually, Ben pulled into the back alley of the tenement building they were set up in and came to a stop. Shaun opened the door and glanced up and down the street, everything seemed clear so he stepped from the car and shut the door behind him, moving to the service entrance to the building. Ben locked the car behind him and pulled out a set of keys, opening the door with a squeak of metal on metal and waited for Shaun to step through into the relative warmth of the building. Shaun had been here a few times, but usually left this kind of work to his two apprentices as he usually preferred to stay underground. But, Ben had figured out a way for Shaun to get to the apartment with almost no chance of him being spotted by using the service elevator which once on the right floor, exited only a few doors down from their stakeout location. The building might as well have been abandoned for all the upkeep that had been done to it. The service areas were nearly always deserted, apart from the occasional bum who broke in to sleep inside. Tonight, the small complex of rooms that made up the service area seemed empty, so they made their way through without trouble and reached the elevator.

The doors to the elevator car stood open, waiting to be used. They stepped inside and Ben used a key to activate the mechanism that would take them up to the fifth floor. With a bing, the doors closed before them and they started to rise.

After a few moments the elevator stopped and the doors juddered open most of the way. Beyond, a dank corridor led into the building, lined with doors on either side. A short way up, through the flickering light, a stairway on the right hand side led to other floors.

The place looked empty, but they could hear sounds from other parts of the building. Some music, sounds of movement, raised voices, the usual sounds of life.

Ben stepped out, looked left down another corridor, before nodding to Shaun.

‘It’s clear, let’s go.’

Shaun followed Ben out the elevator car and down the corridor just a short distance to the last door before the stairway. With his key ready they were inside the apartment before the elevator doors had closed behind them.

The apartment consisted of just a few rooms, the main living area and kitchen combined, a bathroom and a bedroom and nothing else. It smelled in here and the air felt a little clammy to Shaun, but then his two apprentices had been living here in relative squalor for a few days nonstop, and the whole place was a mess. Food packaging laid about the room, blankets and clothes littered the furniture, but it wasn’t unexpected. This would be a temporary living space while they conducted the surveillance that Lucian wanted.

In front of the exterior wall directly in front of him, a table had been set up with several flat screen monitors hooked up to a couple of computer systems beneath the desk. All the monitors displayed feed from the various cameras they had set up in here and out on the street. DSLR Cameras on tripods stood before the windows, their telephoto lenses trained on the house they could clearly see a little over a block away. The Tenement they were in fronted onto a street down the road and around a corner from Amanda’s house. The other buildings between the tenement and the house were all one or two story structures, meaning they could look over the top of them to where Amanda’s house sat on the other side of the intersection on the far side of their own block. They had a clear view of two sides of the house, its main front door and its side door and garage entrance. An alleyway ran around the back of the house, where another door had 3 hidden cameras trained on it, recording any movement they picked up.

A couple of other cameras on nearby rooftops made up the rest of the video feeds on the monitors that Vanessa had been watching.

She sat on one of the two chairs in front of the table, her legs stretched out with her feet crossed on the table top. With a nail file in one hand, she absentmindedly shaved down her finger nails.

As Ben and Shaun entered, she turned to look, and on seeing Shaun, she removed her feet from the table and tried to look a bit more attentive.

Shaun saw it all, but didn’t comment, he just stepped forward, looking at the bank of screens.

‘Vanessa.’ He said in greeting. ‘Anything to report?’

‘Just the usual movement. Nothing out of the ordinary.’ She said, and handed Shaun a clipboard upon which a sheet of paper recorded who had been seen, who they suspected to be inside the house and who they thought were elsewhere. They were quite aware that this was all guesswork when any one of them could just Port elsewhere from within the house. They had already seen examples of this, with Amanda walking out the front door, only for her to walk out the same door again a short time later but never having seen her walk back into the building first.

There had been fears that Amanda had discovered that she must be under surveillance and so did these confusing things to throw them off, but after a while they concluded it was just normal Magus behaviour.

Shaun scanned the paper on the clipboard and felt happy with the evenings work. The only movement had been the usual three residents; Yoh had not been seen today.

Shaun checked his watch, they were back in good time, the Lotus would not be here yet, but he needed to inform his apprentices that she would be coming.

Vanessa and Ben had been with him a while now. Ben the longest of the pair, and after getting to know them, he held some genuine affection for them.

Ben had been just a dumb kid who got himself into trouble with his formidable hacking skills. As the modern world had progressed, and the digital age dawned, some in the Magi and Scion communities were early adopters of this new technology. They were able to take some of these basic computer systems and with the aid of their Magical ability, modify them, making them more and more powerful. While many Magi stayed away from this frightening and powerful technology, those who did embrace it tended to be those with a younger outlook on life and it became a way for these Magi to become lords of their own domains.

They created faster and more powerful machines, and a small community grew online, hidden within a private encrypted forum they built called The Dark Web, or DWeb for short.

Today, the pioneers of this digital Magic were creating lifelike virtual reality worlds that you could plug into with the VR Rigs they were developing.

The Dark Web certainly is one of the most secure sites on the internet, but there was no full proof way to stop breaches in security, and Ben had been one of the hackers who had made it inside, into the Dark Web.

Punishment came swiftly for those who broke the DWeb’s security, but Shaun thought he saw something he liked in Ben, and managed to reach him just before the others did. Shaun had saved him, but he could not save his family who were killed without mercy. Ben had been forever grateful for Shaun saving his life, but carried the scars of his family’s demise around with him.

Vanessa had been a street kid for a while. She’d ran away from home, from her abusive family, lived on the streets, getting into drugs and prostitution before ending up in a bedsit where she saw another resident on a computer system. It turned out there were a few of them in here, they were part of a community of digital rights activists who used the internet to cheat the system and make a kind of living. They hacked, they took part in the work of the hacker group Anonymous and provided various digital services to those who needed them. They actually earned good money, doing everything from hacking the social media accounts of a cheating partner to hunting down kidnapped children, and facilitating business deals that otherwise would not be possible.

Fascinated, Vanessa watched and learned, before quickly joining the group and becoming a trusted worker.

Ben happened across her online, and the pair struck up a friendship, even though they had never met. Then one day Ben got a frantic text, Vanessa’s group had landed themselves in trouble and their building had been raided by men with guns. She had ran, like others of her group. They had been tracked down twice already with more of her group being killed. She ended up separated from them and knowing no one else she even vaguely trusted, she contacted Ben.

Ben, after speaking with Shaun, agreed to meet her and bring her in. In an out of the way diner, Ben met her for the first time, and fancied her right away.

Ben warned her that he and his associate would be able to save her, hide her from those who wanted to kill her, but that there would be no going back, this would be a one way trip into the shadows. Desperate, she agreed, and followed Ben into the tunnels beneath Manhattan, and into their hidden sanctuary. There, Ben sat with her and started to tell her some of the truth of the world, about the Scions and the Magi, and, with some warning about Shaun’s appearance, introduced her to him.

She handled it well, and soon settled into life beneath the streets. Shaun’s work and contacts kept the three of them living in comfort. Money was never a problem, and they wanted for nothing really. It wasn’t an uptown penthouse with views over Central Park, but when you lived on the fringes of society and in Shaun’s case, looked like Bram Stoker’s nightmares, your choices were few.

Shaun walked over to the window and looked out over the buildings towards Amanda’s house. Everything looked quiet, so he turned to his two apprentices. He couldn’t think of another word that seemed suitable for them really, they were learning from him after all.

Scions could pass on their gift to others, by pouring their blood into a cut on a human or by allowing them to drink of their blood.

Either worked just as well. But the transformation could not be guaranteed. The blood of a Scion in well over ninety percent of cases, killed the subject. Their blood was toxic, and only a few humans ever survived the process. When it came to passing the gift onto a Magus, the chances of it working were even less, and in either case, there was no way of telling who would survive and who would not. There seemed to be no pattern.

Shaun knew this, as did most Scions, so passing his gift onto Ben or Vanessa would be a last resort.

‘Guys, you need to know that we will have a visitor here shortly.’

Vanessa raised her eyebrows, but said nothing. Ben raised his head in surprise.

‘What?’ Ben said.

‘The meeting with Lucian tonight, turns out he was introducing me to someone who is interested in finding Yoh. My guess is that she’s an assassin, and this won’t end well for Yoh.’

‘Oh, right,’ said Ben, clearly a little unhappy at the thought of bringing someone in here on such short notice.

‘She?’ said Vanessa. ‘Cool. She must be pretty bad ass to be able to take on Yoh.’

Shaun smiled, something that scared most Mundanes when they saw his mouth filled with sharp teeth, not unlike a shark. Vanessa had become used to it though. ‘Indeed,’ he said.

‘I thank you for your compliment.’ Said a voice from the other room. It’s tone creamy with a far eastern accent.

All three of them looked round to see the figure step from the bedroom. She wore the same outfit from the rooftop meeting, her whole body covered in the black and white catsuit, including her head.

Her movements were entirely silent as she stopped and stood in the doorway to the bedroom.