“I wasn’t going to mention this until later, but since we’re pretty deep into the stake out; is there anything you forgot to ask while we were at Fairfield Manor?”

  The four of us considered the question for a moment as we watched life pass by in the plaza.

  “We forgot to ask what they look like.” I said.

  “Correct!” Maggie said. Some of her humor returned in the intervening hours. “Since I know what they look like, you’ll at least have someone to confirm the descriptions against.”

  “Can’t you just tell us?” Mika groaned, more embarrassed by the slip than irritated.

  “Where’s the fun in that? You guys made a mistake and now you get to show off your [Inquisitor] skills.”

  I looked at Maggie. She was smiling again and seemed back to her normal self. I couldn’t help but wonder if she really wasn’t going to act different now that she’d seen my weakness. Not that I’d complain about it, but I wondered how her view of me changed because of my breakdown.

  Maggie caught me look and gave a brief glance, careful to avoid my eyes, and raised her eyebrows. I looked away and Nora spoke.

  “Why don’t we ask Sibille? She seems young. Maybe she’s low enough Tier that the Band tried to bother her.”

  “That works. If she doesn’t know anything, we can split the plaza. I bet most of the people around here at least know of them.” Mika added.

  “Me and Mika will go ask Sibille if she knows anything. If not, we’ll ask around.” Nora picked up.

  “What about Ellena and I?”

  “You’re too scary looking. Me and Mika, however, much more approachable.”

  “You two can watch the warehouse, see if you spot anyone in charge.” Mika added.

  Before either of us had the chance to object, Mika and Nora marched back into the Ugly Beagle. Before the door fully shut, I heard Sibille say.

  “I thought I told you we were closed.”

  ~~~***~~~

  When Nora and Mika reemerged onto the patio, they had the description of two men who tried to extort Sibille for a protection fee before she ran them off.

  The first was a tall, lanky man, with oily brown hair and large eyes sunken into his skull. But according to Sibille, his most notable feature was his mustache. Which was thick enough to be a desert worm. The other man was handsome with long blonde hair down to his mid-waist that he tied back into a ponytail. He was skinny as well, but according to Sibille, it fit him ‘like the gods just designed him without much meat on his bones.’

  “Sounds like two of Hardbuckle’s lieutenants payed Sibille a visit.” Maggie said and extracted two charcoal drawings from her storage ring.

  Written underneath the picture of the man with the terrible mustache was the name Trevor, while the handsome one had John written under him. Both matched the descriptions given to us, and I idly ran my hand through my hair as we looked over the pictures. My own just long enough to reach my shoulders.

  “Two of them right off the bat. What are the odds?” Mika asked and leaned back in his chair with a smile.

  “About one in ten.” Ellen said with a smile of her own for the smaller man.

  Nora, whose eyes darted between the smiling pair, lit up with her own grin and grabbed Ellen by the arm. With an exaggerated wrench, she lifted Ellen from the chair and turned to leave with a knowing smile at Mika.

  “Me and Ellen are going to go talk to some people. Have fun watching the warehouse!”

  “I thought I was going with you?” Mika called after them.

  “You and Bran use this time to get to know one another!” Nora called back. Maggie looked after them with a smirk before she turned that grin onto Mika.

  There is nothing more awkward than being left alone with someone after being told to bond, well, mostly alone. Maggie was still at the table. It’s happened to me a couple of times at festivals and usually when mom had to talk with other clergy members and the kids stayed behind. Or it happened when the Orders were commanded to mingle amongst one another.

  Even though Mika and I were friendly to one another, we barely knew each other. There had been effort from both sides in the weeks we’d known each other, but it was still too early. Not to mention my poor first impression with Ellen and him and I would not exactly say we were friends.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  “I’m content with silence if you are.” Mika said tentatively.

  “I am.”

  “I’m not! Come on, boys, why don’t we talk about our first crushes? Mika you’ll go first!”

  Maggie prodded us to tell embarrassing stories, or give trivia about ourselves. Mika and I kept silent mostly, content to watch the warehouse. Though I learned his favorite color was orange.

  It took only an hour for Ellen and Nora to return, chatting and laughing as they walked.

  They ended up with the descriptions of six people, all of which they wrote down. However, out of the six, only two were useful for us. One of the six matched the picture Maggie presented of Greg Hardbuckle himself and another matched with Hardbuckle’s primary enforcer. A woman named Tina, who, like many my age, hadn’t earned a last name yet.

  Greg was a short man, at only five foot six, but his short curly hair framed a face filled with regal features.

  “Pretty boy over here almost looks like a noble, but I’ve never heard of a house Hardbuckle.” Ellen said as she stared down at the picture of Greg.

  “I’ll give you this one for free. He’s not noble, though his parents were respected mercenaries in their time.” Maggie responded.

  “What happened? How come their boy is trying his hand as a crime lord?” Ellen asked.

  “Both of them died in the Under Tunnels a couple years back. It was pretty big news in the mercenary guild for a couple of weeks. A group of aranae turned traitor while they were under contract and they died in the rebellion.”

  If Greg was a fancy show dog, Tina was a wolfhound. Her shaggy grey hair covered most of her face but did little to hide the scar that ran from just under her eye, across her nose, and to the bottom of her left cheek. A street vendor described the scar as angry, and I took that to mean it hadn’t healed well.

  An assumption backed by the drawing of Tina. She certainly wasn’t pretty, something compounded by her eyes. The [Artist] who made this sketch masterfully captured a sense of rage and madness in the woman’s eyes. Even through charcoal, the woman constantly sized everyone up. A predator in search of visible weakness.

  “Mean looking one.” I said.

  “Y’never know.” Nora said. “Maybe she’s a big softy.”

  The look I gave her must have conveyed my full disbelief before Nora laughed, the sound full bodied and from deep in her belly.

  ~~~***~~~

  Time was hard to track in Dustreach. The high walls and constant green light made it impossible if you couldn’t see the celestial bodies overhead. I wouldn’t have known evening arrived if Sibille hadn’t left the bar and hung a small wooden sign that read ‘Come On In.’ In neat flowing script on a hook screwed to the doorframe.

  “Evening already?” Nora asked.

  “Yep! Can I get you folks anything?” Sibille asked, her voice filled with friendly expectation.

  “Can we get five of whatever’s for dinner and a round of ale, please?”

  “Sure, be back in a minute.”

  “Thanks.”

  We’d spent the last four hours with our eyes locked onto the warehouse to see if we could spot any movement from Hardbuckle or his lieutenants. Maybe even just a glimpse of them walking the block, but we never saw a single one. The regular members of the band left the warehouse all the time, and while it was valuable to keep track of them, they were worth practically no money, so we didn’t pay close attention.

  By the time our food was served, eaten, and paid for, all of us could feel that our stake out would not yield fruit any time soon. Part of me wanted to continue as we were, but something about cities was throwing me off my game. The sight lines were all wrong, and it was far harder to blend into the scenery than it was in the forest.

  In the forest, I felt like I belonged. Like at any moment I wished for it, the forest would shelter me or guide me to my prey. Here, everything felt so cold and distant. The city had an atmosphere that made it feel like one giant living being. While the spirits of the forest welcomed me into their home, it felt like the city very much disliked my presence within it.

  “Any ideas?” Mika asked the table.

  "What’s stopping us from simply walking up to the warehouse and checking it out once it gets dark? Or as dark as it gets around here.” I asked.

  “Nothing really. Two of us could go check out the warehouse while the other two patrol the neighborhood. See if we can find any of them that way.”

  We were gone from the Ugly Beagle’s patio not long after. We stuck with one frontliner and one backliner per team. Before anyone could speak, Nora took Ellen by the arm and declared her as her partner for this. Mika and I wound up in the surrounding neighborhood for our assignment, thanks to a coin toss. Not that it mattered much who scouted the warehouse, none of us had training in urban stealth after all.

  Sure, I’d trained in woodcraft extensively and on how to move through a forest quietly. Yet, no matter how hard fanciful texts proclaim it, a city and a forest are two vastly different environments. Moving through either required distinct skill sets and, unfortunately, I hadn’t trained to move silently through a cobbled street.

  The surrounding area past the fa?ade of the plaza was desolate. For rent signs hung from nearly every window and at least a third of the buildings we passed were completely void of people. By the time the four of us got near where we’d split up, Maggie disappeared. And I mean in the literal sense. One moment she stood right next to me and the next she was gone.

  I wasn’t alarmed however, she’d told us she was a Tier three scout before she retired to the admin side, and what use was a [Scout] if you could see them when they did not want to be seen.

  Another minute and we were close enough to the warehouse that we split into our groups. As Mika and I meandered deeper into the winding maze of side streets, I idly wondered who Maggie followed. Presumedly, she took after Nora and Ellen because their assignment tonight would be the most dangerous.

  “How do you want to do this?” I asked, letting Mika take the lead.

  “For right now, let’s circle the neighborhood. See if we can spot anywhere they might hang out, or anywhere that seems suspicious.”

  Mika was a ball of tension beneath his robes and he had to clear his throat twice before he could force his feet to move. It was an odd thing to watch him duck from shadow to shadow with some success. Often it was only his golem pack that remained visible, but it still let his outline be clear enough to be trivial to spot.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, walking next to him on one side of the street.

  “I’m sneaking.” He hissed back and beckoned for me to join him beneath the shadow of an overhang.

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean why?”

  “What are you hiding from? We’re just two men walking. The band does not even know we exist, let alone that we are hunting them.”

  Mika flushed and stepped out from the shadows, his blush framed by the green light that cascaded onto the street from the nearby city wall.

  ~~~***~~~

  “You haven’t seen him?” Mika asked the street vendor.

  The man leaned across the bar of his mobile wooden stall, his eyes more focused on the occasional passing person than on Mika.

  “I’m sure, kid.” He said and spat through the gap between his front teeth.

  Above the man was a sign that read ‘Daemen’s Joyous Skewers’ with an almost well-done drawing of a smiling man holding a trio of skewers to the sky. I looked back down at the scowling man and tried to overlay the drawing with the man before me in my mind. The two had enough features that there was a chance the [Carpenter] modeled it after him, but if it was, I couldn’t see why. From our brief interaction, he was anything but a joyous man.

  Mika tried to argue with him for a moment longer but eventually gave up and stomped away down the green-tinted cobblestone street. The man was now one in a long line of people who we’d asked about the band only to be stonewalled. Everyone we had asked in the district so far had refused to give any details on where members of the band might be and if they had any habits.

  It was a shocking display of loyalty from an entire community to a bunch of street kids who were involved in smuggling drugs into the city alone, with at least two murders.

  “I just don’t get it.” He complained as we passed under the chipped sign for the ‘Tipsy Mare’

  “We’re outsiders.”

  Mika turned from just ahead of me to look back. His eyes studied me and almost met my own, but I turned to study the drawing of a seated horse before we could. Not eager to have a silent stare down with Mika, I kept walking.

  I slowed only briefly until I heard him continue after me. We spoke little for the rest of our assignment, both of us content to look at the pieces of art we passed. Most commonly it was small sculptures of some kind in the windowsills of most homes. Larger estates and stores had their entrances flanked with runed statues, usually of some kind of monster or spirit beast.

  Mika reached out and grabbed a hold of my sleeve as I passed under a swaying sign with a yellow ox and dragged me into a small alcove where the faces of two cramped buildings didn’t perfectly align.

  “That’s him.” Mika whispered fiercely.

  “Who, Hardbuckle?”

  “No, John!”