Finding proof that Sabrina was wrong was harder than Jake expected it to be.
He returned to work the next day, almost eager to get into the office and get to it. He even breezed past his uncle’s dour comments about sick days and responsibilities. For the first time since he had reluctantly dragged his ass into the office to start learning the ropes, Jake had something he wanted Barbara to help him with. He sent her off to find who was running the development project for the tracker and where they were located.
It ended up being a small subsidiary in California, so Jake told his uncle he was heading out on a get-to-know junket and flew to L.A. the next morning. He left Barbara with instructions to set up a meeting for him.
It was almost unnerving when he took his cell phone off flight mode to find an email from her with details of the appointment and a map on how to get there.
The meeting with Caspar Marik, the CEO of the little company, was a disaster. He spouted company policy for the entire thirty minutes, even when Jake tried to herd him toward project specifics.
Jake stayed in the family’s beach house in Malibu that night and stared moodily at the waves, not even tempted to go swimming.
He missed Nyanther, he realized with a shock of recognition. How…novel.
How scary.
Thinking of Nyanther reminded him of the weekend he had spent with some of the toughest-minded people he’d ever met. Their bodies could be dropping with exhaustion, yet they kept going, determined to see it through. Survival demanded no less, but their relentlessness was still awe-inspiring.
And here he was, whimpering about a simple set back.
He picked up his cell phone and called up Sabrina’s contact information. He’d plugged it in there only a few hours after she had left his apartment, using the business card she had slipped him and his uncle at the dinner table the night before.
Then he swiped out a text.
JAKE: Road block. R&D ceo too political.
He tossed the phone back on the table. It was past midnight in New York. If he got an answer at all, it would be tomorrow.
Fifteen seconds later, the phone chirped at him.
SABRINA: Find ambitious subordinate. Start with head of research.
Of course. The top dogs wanted to keep their positions and were risk averse. The research people, though, weren’t interested in politics at all. They just wanted their project-babies to thrive.
It took another day and a half to dine and sweet-talk the head of research, Tommy Ross, a hard sciences professor with a practical turn of mind, into giving him a tour of the facilities.
Jake had wooed the R&D director at the New York facilities years ago, when he had acquired both the sticky net and a cooperative bio-technician to develop the anti-toxin, so he knew the way such people’s minds worked and it helped him deal with Tommy Ross.
The tour of Ross’s facilities included the labs where the tracking device was being refined for final approval and marketing. Jake looked at the shoe-box sized thing, with its buttons and dials and his spirits fell. “It looks like two people would need to carry it and more to operate it,” he said.
“At that size, sure,” Ross said expansively. He was enjoying the attention immensely. “That one has the greatest range.”
“How big a range?”
“From here, we could find someone in the Ukraine if we had the right criteria plugged in.”
“You mean, the keys for finding them?”
“Sure. A city of people gives off very similar traces. You need something that will identify an individual uniquely. We’ve been working on gait, head size, heat signatures and more. That’s part of the final development, of course and only if our funding goes through for the next three years.”
Jake almost laughed at the man’s feeble attempt to campaign for money. Instead, he went back to something he’d said earlier. “If this is the biggest one you have, do you have one that is, say, hand-held size?”
Ross shrugged. “We haven’t made one that size. The software is the same for any of them, though. It’s the juice that drives them that determines the range. A handheld could probably only track someone up to a hundred miles away.”
Jake hid his excitement. “I’d be interested in looking at the schematics and programming.”
“The programming is proprietary,” Ross said instantly. “It’s not even ours. We’re working with a boutique software company in the valley to build it. The schematics for the hardware, sure. I can have them emailed to you.”
Jake almost shook his head. Sabrina had even anticipated this snag—that the software wouldn’t be hackable, not if they were going to stay on the right side of the law.
The schematics, though, would tell Nyanther’s people what processes they needed to build to make the hardware work.
Damn it, the woman had been right, all along.
“Just the schematics would be great,” Jake told Ross honestly.
* * * * *
Sabrina was almost startled when she found Nyanther sitting in front of a laptop, typing at great speed. Even more bizarrely, he was wearing reading glasses, which he took off with a self-conscious air.
She sat at the table next to him. “You really need them, then? They’re not just for show?”
He grimaced.
“I thought you all had perfect vision, better than human?”
Nyanther looked at the folded up glasses in his hands. “I do, except for close distances.” He shrugged. “Comes from sleeping for two thousand years, I suppose. I can’t go to an ophthalmologist to find out.”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Besides, it’s only sometimes. Sometimes I can see as well as I ought.” He pushed the glasses into his shirt pocket and looked at her expectantly.
“How good are your coders, Nyanther?”
“The best in Europe,” he said instantly.
“No, really.”
“Really,” he said flatly. “I pay for the best.”
“Then they’re probably all hackers at heart, if they’re that good. Do you figure one of them could adapt a dark net browser to work on a cell phone?”
“They’re probably the ones who developed the original dark net browsers,” Nyanther said, with a small smile. “Why do you want it?”
“You get me the browser, I’ll show you why I want it.” She nodded toward his laptop. “It’s ten in the morning in Scotland. Your favorite coder is probably on his second cup of tea by now.”
“He drinks cocoa,” Nyanther said and pulled the laptop toward him.
“I’ll buy him a crateful of Criolla beans straight out of Venezuela if he does this in the next twenty-four hours,” Sabrina said.
“Yes, madam,” Nyanther said. He paused. “Criolla beans?”
“Look it up while you’re surfing,” she said and left him.
* * * * *
Sabrina found Riley sitting in the pool of early morning light puddling on the floor in front of the old windows, her feet up on the window sill and her cell phone in her hands.
“Perfect,” Sabrina declared, leaning against the windowsill next to Riley’s bare feet. She crossed her arms. “You said once your mother left behind a big list of hunters and their addresses and phone numbers if they had them. She used the list to keep in touch, to hear about any possible gargoyle movement, the last time they were here.”
Riley hefted the cell phone. “That’s exactly what I’m doing right now, only twenty-first century style. I can’t believe everyone put up with snail mail back then.”
“Wasn’t it horse-back couriers in Nick’s day?”
Riley grinned. “Sometimes not even horseback. It took nearly a week for England to find out King Richard had died in France.”
Sabrina pulled her cell phone out of her back pocket and opened up a fresh text to Riley. “I’m sending you something. A new sort of web browser. For the dark net.”
“I’ve heard of that. It’s where all the drug dealers hang out, isn’t it?”
“It’s where anyone hangs out who doesn’t want anyone to know they’re there. Quite legitimate businesses, revolutions, political parties and yeah, probably a lot of criminals…anyone who doesn’t want to leave traces or reveal their true identities. That sounds a lot like hunters, doesn’t it?”
“It does,” Riley said slowly.
“This browser will let all your hunter friends get onto the dark net. Once they’re there, they can talk freely and exchange information and…well, one step at a time.” She sent the message.
“You want me to send this out to everyone?” Riley asked, looking down at the text message and attachment on her phone. “And tell them to use it?”
“They just have to double click the file. It will install itself.”
“Most of these people are so poor, they don’t have computers,” Riley said patiently, like she was explaining a fact to a small child.
Sabrina leaned forward and tapped Riley’s phone. “They all have cell phones, don’t they? That’s where we can start. Thanks, Riley!”
“Start what?” Riley called after her.
“Thanks!”
* * * * *
When Sabrina got home after a grueling Friday in the office, when everyone had seemed to want a piece of her attention and nothing had gone well, she had no plans for the evening beyond opening the bottle of tequila sitting in her pantry and finding a glass…and she wasn’t too fussed about the state of the glass, either, although Jake was pretty good about cleaning up after himself. She suspected Nyanther was the real influence there, even though he didn’t drink or eat, because she remembered the state of Jake’s bedroom.
It was a habit for her to reach her apartment by going through Riley’s first, in case Chloe was up. It gave her a few precious moments with Chloe before heading down to her apartment.
Tonight the upper apartment was dark, with the very last of the daylight making it barely navigable. She would have thought it was empty because the place was so still.
“Sabrina.” It was Nick’s voice and she jumped.
“Nick?”
He switched on the lamp on the side table where his books were usually parked. He was sitting in the big armchair and there was a book open on his knee, which he had clearly been reading. “Indeed,” he confirmed.
“Chloe’s not here, then. Oh, well.” She hefted her heavy briefcase bag. “Sorry to disturb you.” She turned to head for the stairs.
“Have a seat for a moment,” Nick said. “I’d like to talk to you.”
Sabrina’s heart squeezed. She should have expected this to happen sooner or later. Hunters didn’t have hierarchies, supervisors, generals or ranks, only Nick was a leader, all the same. Sabrina had heard Riley was a better hunter than Nick himself, but when it came to coordinating effort and planning hunts, everyone looked to Nick.
Of course he would want to talk to her. She hadn’t asked his permission for any of the projects she had in play at the moment.
She sat on the sofa, directly opposite him, put her bags on the floor and crossed her legs.
“You look tired,” Nick said.
“Comes from lack of sleep. There are times I envy you vampires, especially when I think of all the things I could get done if I didn’t have to sleep for a third of my life.”
“You’re doing a lot of extra-curricular work these days.”
Bingo. This was going to be Nick’s “what-are-your-intentions?” conversation. Sabrina gave him a small smile. “I like keeping busy.”
“You used to spend all your time at the office,” Nick said. “Now you’re coming home at what most people consider to be reasonable hours. Nyanther says you work at your kitchen table until long after midnight each night.”
“Nyanther is observant.”
“We’ve all noticed what you’re doing. Riley told me about the contact lists you asked her for. Nyanther has a whole division of his highland corporation developing applications for you and he’s working in the basement most of the hours of the day.”
“Feeling left out, Nick?”
He scowled. “I know why you don’t come to me for help.”
“You think you do. I guarantee you’re wrong.”
Nick just looked at her, his gaze steady. Sabrina had seen more penetrating stares across boardroom tables and wasn’t unsettled in the slightest. She lifted her hand and checked off items on her fingers. She had no trouble recalling any of them, because when she wasn’t sitting at the table with her laptop, working on them, she was usually in bed, trying to sleep while obsessing over their details. She had started to keep a notepad next to her bed, so she could scribble down details in the dark, to get them out of her mind where she was afraid she would forget them, onto paper, where they might let her sleep.
“I started a blog on the legitimate web. The general public probably thinks it’s all a lark, just like the Viking and vampire groups out there. The people who belong to those groups really do believe they’re vampires or Vikings, so the conversations on there sound bizarre to the average surfer. Another blog about demon hunting looks like it fits in with them.”
“Why do it?” Nick said sharply.
“It’s a net,” she said. “The average joe on the street who sees something or hears something odd, that they can’t explain, might do a search for help and find themselves on the site. If they’re really having issues, they might even post a question. That’s what the blog is for. We’ll hear about strange things out there sooner through the social networks than perhaps even the hunters living in the area will hear them.”
She held up her next finger. “The blog is building higher and higher traffic every day. That means I can monetize it, so it pays for itself and brings in income. Affiliate links, advertising and product placements…they build a revenue stream.”
“So you can grow richer?” Nick asked curiously.
“Any hunter out there who can put a few words together for a guest post becomes a contractor. The profits get split among them all.”
Nick’s brow lifted.
Sabrina kept going. Nick was the lynchpin of the group. She had to get him on her side and the only way she could do that would be to hold nothing back. Nick would know if she was. “The real communications network is on the dark net,” she told him. “Every hunter Riley had on her list is now a member of a closed, air-tight discussion group. There’s a public page, so anyone who knows how to get onto the dark net will know we’re there. There’s an anonymous email dropbox, so they can reach out if they need to. The discussion group behind the shield gives everyone a chance to talk to each other, group-solve problems, exchange news and more. The lack of real-time communications of this sort has hampered hunters forever.”
Nick pressed his lips together. “We’ve survived until now. That’s success,” he said roughly.
“How many more of you would have survived in 1877, Nick, if you had been able to text ahead and warn the scouting party they were walking into a trap?”
Nick drew in a breath, controlling his reaction. “Damian talks too much,” he said, his voice hard.
“He was talking to Jake. I listened. Don’t blame him.”
“I’ve noticed that. You listening, I mean. You never used to.”
“No, I didn’t,” she agreed. She lifted another finger. “There’s a mailing list on the dark net that uses SMS technology, so text message alerts can be blasted out to every single hunter, anywhere, if you need to do that.”
Nick rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. “Can that be broken down into regions? Could I send out an alert to, say, everyone in the state?”
“I’ve broken the list down into geo-regions as small as cities,” Sabrina assured him. “You could send an alert to anyone who is in Tampa that day, if you wanted to.”
“That day? You mean it uses GPS positioning and builds a list based on where someone is at that moment?”
Sabrina smiled. “A tiny tweak I asked Nyanther’s people to make.”
Nick closed the book and put it on the pile by his elbow and leaned forward. “Go on.”
“I’m in the middle of building a shop front on the dark net,” she told him. “It will link with the bigger markets on the dark net, so we’ll be rubbing shoulders with merchants advertising cocaine by the kilo and crates of semi-automatics available to the highest bidder. The sort of people who shop there, though, will take us as seriously as they do the cartels.”
Nick frowned. “What customers? What are you selling?”
“Everything,” Sabrina said simply. “We’re going to be a clearing house for hunters and for the people who need hunters, who know where to look.”
Nick gripped his hands together. “Hunters have always worked under the radar.”
“And you will continue to. You won’t be useful if you come out into the world and declare that demons are real, vampires are real and you’re responsible for the extinction of gargoyles.”
Nick stared at her blankly.
Sabrina relented. “You’ll understand soon enough,” she assured him. “Let me give you a quick example. Miguel’s extending long knife.”
“He made it because he can’t keep a sword under his jacket,” Nick said shortly.
“Exactly. No one wears long coats in Florida and Florida is not the only hot-weather location in the world. Demons are everywhere, Nick. I patented Miguel’s knife for him—it’s a dark net patent, so calm down,” she added quickly. “Once the patent was locked in, I put the knife up for sale. That’s what Nyanther has been doing in the basement all this time. We got three orders in the first day.”
Nick’s knuckles were white, which Riley had explained meant a vampire was under stress—his heart was beating and supplying blood except where squeezing his fists stopped it from flowing, just like a human. “How much are you selling them for?”
“Enough to cover costs and then some,” she said. “It’s all in bit coins, Nick. I can’t give you specifics. If Miguel sells one a week, that’s his rent paid for the month.”
Nick’s lips parted. “That much? Where are they getting the money from?”
“If the buyer is a registered hunter, someone we know, then they get it at cost plus five percent,” Sabrina explained. “Everyone else is at full retail, which is always at least one hundred percent over cost.”
“Twice the cost price?” Nick frowned. “Even at cost plus five, it would be steep for some of the hunters I know. They’re living out of the back of their cars.”
“If they really need something, we’ll let them buy on credit,” Sabrina told him. “With a tiny bit of interest, so they don’t get stuck in a credit trap. I want everyone to make money, Nick, so the ones living out of their cars and dumpster diving for dinner we can work with. They’ll have some sort of knowledge they can teach, a skill they can impart. Maybe they’ve invented a weapon or tool others will find useful, like Miguel’s knife. When they’re not hunting, they can teach, or write blog posts, or build tools they can sell. Because of the dark net communications network, we will be able to help them find students and customers from among other hunters and interested members of the public who use the dark net and understand discretion.”
Nick stared at her. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
“It’s just a matter of reframing the problem,” she added, starting to feel uneasy about his motionless stare. “Once the hunters have a few streams of income, the need to exchange their time for a crappy ten bucks an hour will ease. Then they can develop more streams. It’s a numbers game.”
Nick didn’t move.
Sabrina licked her lips. “The tracker Jake and Nyanther are building will be a breakthrough for everyone. No more relying in human senses, for the human hunters. Even for vampires like you, it will be useful.”
Nick finally stirred. “More useful than picking up a gargoyle’s scent, a mile away?”
“The tracker will pick up its scent ten miles away, Nick. And what if the gargoyle is in its stone sleep? Vampires can’t smell it then. They have to wait for sunset.”
“You’re saying the tracker can?”
“Not its scent, not during the day. The gargoyles have other markers it can be keyed for.” She leaned down and reached into her briefcase and pulled out the dog-eared notepad and her pen. “You said I hadn’t asked you for help. Now I’m asking. I need you to tell me every marker you use to hunt gargoyles. Scent is one. Track marks. Size. Shape. Bero used to fly crookedly, Jake said. Stuff like that.”
“The tracker can pick out a gargoyle by how it flies?”
“If flight patterns are individual enough and different enough from, say, how an albatross flies, then sure. It’s simply a matter of programming in the different keys.” She kept her pen poised over the open page and looked at him.
Nick sat back. “Why bother?” he asked, his voice harsh.
“Why bother with what?”
“The tracker. There are only three gargoyles left.”
She stared at him, mentally scrambling. “Oh my…you really don’t understand, do you?”
Nick’s jaw rippled. “That you’re turning hunting into some sort of underground eBay? I might be eight centuries old, but I buy my socks from Amazon the same as you do.”
“No, it’s the scale you’re missing, Nick.” She put the pad down and pressed her hands together. “This is all cottage-industry size right now. It’s a start-up venture. Bill Gates used his garage. Some people use their kitchen table. We’re using the dark net and your basement. It won’t last. It can’t. We’ll have to scale it up to match demand. If we control it properly, costs will never exceed profits and profits come after everyone is paid. That’s the difference, Nick. We pay the hunters first. Then we reinvest the remaining profit to scale up. Production will move out of the basement into a properly equipped workshop. Then a factory. Then…well, who knows? There’s always a natural limit to scale and I don’t know what the cap is, because I don’t know the hunting world as well as you. I suspect it’s a lot bigger than you’ve ever thought it might be.”
Nick shook his head. “There were just over a hundred people on Tally’s contact list.”
“There are already five hundred people on the network,” Sabrina replied. “And no one gets on without three other people vouching for them, so they’re not lurkers. They’re hunters, one and all.”
Nick looked down at his hands. “With only three gargoyles left, the tracker you’re spending so much time developing won’t be needed.”
“It’s digital programming, Nick. We can set it for any parameter we can reduce to digital code. Anything. Gargoyles now. Demons should be next. After that…well, what else is there? I keep hearing about an official hunt list….?”
Nick lifted his hand, copying her. He tapped off his fingers as he spoke quickly. “Demons, incubus, succubus, psychic vampires, ghosts, wendigo, centaurs, blurrs, cockatice, amarok, dark dryad, peluda, gnomes, hell hounds, golems, dark fae, elementals….” He dropped his hands. “Should I keep going? It’s a long list.”
“Exactly,” she said. “The tracker will be useful long after the last gargoyle is killed.”
Nick was back to staring at her again.
This time, Sabrina sat and let him. She had laid it all out. Now it was up to him.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked.
“What? The tracker?”
“All of it. All this work for the hunting world you hate.”
“I don’t hate it.”
“You don’t like the way it threatens your conservative world view. You don’t like that there are things out there that aren’t controllable.”
Sabrina’s middle clamped. “That makes me sound like a control freak.”
“We all have our crosses to bear.” Nick’s grin held no mirth.
She shook her head. “I do all this because it’s fun. Because there’s a genuine benefit at the end.”
“Because you can make a difference?” The dry tone was even drier.
“Well, I can make a difference,” she shot back. “I will make a difference. Your people have needed something like this for…forever. I’m right on the edges of all of it, so I can see the big picture. You’re all too busy ducking and fighting and if the list you started to give me is as long as you say, then business isn’t going to slow down any time soon.”
“There’s a limit,” he warned. “You said it yourself. There’s always a natural limit to scale. The supernatural world…it’s a tiny subset of the real world. You’re trying to build a megalith balanced on a pebble.”
Sabrina smiled. “You think that because you can’t see the big picture. Soon, you’ll understand.” She picked up her pen and notepad. “Let’s start with gargoyle markers, first.”
Then her stomach growled and it sounded loud in the silent apartment. She put her hand to her belly, astonished.
Nick picked up his cell phone. “I’ll order you a pizza. You’re going to need it.” He put the phone to his ear and looked at her. He was smiling.
* * * * *
Three days later, Riley announced they had been approached on the dark net about consulting work. She stood between the armchair and the sofa, where everyone was sitting eating popcorn or stringing it for Christmas decorations, the print out of the message moving between her fingers. There was a dazed look on her face.
Sabrina smiled. It was starting. She glanced at Nick. He was looking at Riley with narrowed eyes. “A client?” he said sharply.
Riley nodded. “They think they have a poltergeist problem, or it’s simply a mass-psychosis they want to disperse and they think hiring supernatural experts will eliminate the impossible, which leaves them to deal with mental issues instead. Of course, they want it kept super-silent and under the radar.”
“Mass-psychosis implies lots of people. Who are they?” Nyanther said.
“That’s just it.” Riley swallowed. “I ran their contact credentials through Nyanther’s hacker.”
“Bob?” Nyanther clarified.
Riley nodded.
“So who is it?” Nick pressed.
“The dark net profile makes them look like a para-military group living in rural Kentucky. Bob says…” Riley shook her head in disbelief. “It’s the Bureau.”
“The FBI?” Jake said, dropping the string of popcorn into the bowl on his knees.
Nick looked at Sabrina sharply. “That’s what you meant about scale?”
“Anyone can be a victim of the supernatural,” she said. “Including heads of government, public figures and state authorities.” She smiled.
After a minute, so did Nick. This time, the warmth reached his eyes.