2006, 7th February

Dublin, Ireland

Nolan O’Neill was in a foul mood.

His warehouses were in flames, and the people he had entrusted with their safety behind bars.

He had been inclined to simply kill them for their failure, but even that option had been taken away from him.

But Maeve’s daughter had arrived with a ray of hope, claiming she knew who was responsible.

“Aaron Sterling. Working on his father’s orders.”

“Jack? He and I have been working together forever. Why the hell would he go against me now?”

Ciara could sense the distrust and hostility emanating from the man’s psyche.

Playing him would be far too easy.

“Your son’s dead,” She told him bluntly, “He made the same mistake you’re making right now; he trusted Aaron too freely. When was the last time you heard from him?”

She would have liked to claim that using Pierre’s name in this underhanded way was making her stomach churn, but the cold truth of the matter was that she had never overly cared for the man as Aaron clearly had.

And she could taste her victory over her mother and all these other parasites that had made her life miserable over the years; she was yet to find the limits of what she wouldn’t give to see them torn down.

It was so tempting to simply strike this pathetic worm dead, here and now, but if Michael had taught her anything, it was how useful a sharp mind and a silver tongue could be, in lieu of simple and raw supernatural power.

“Pierre is dead?”

Ciara could sense a storm of blending emotions from the man in front of her, foremost among them being a perverse possessiveness.

If Pierre was to die, he should die at his father’s hands, or by his will, the man’s psyche seemed to say.

Ciara would enjoy ridding the world of this vermin.

For now, she had to set other things in motion.

“My mother told me Lionel seems to have disappeared.”

Disbelief now; Ciara did not blame him.

Nolan did not know half of what Lionel Bellone truly was and yet, the thought of him having come to some harm was near unbelievable to the man.

“I didn’t say he died,” Ciara added hastily, “He’s just gone. I don’t know where, and I don’t know why. But people are inclined to move in for a bigger piece of the pie.”

Nolan’s fears were beginning to subside, overtaken by his greed, but he was not yet convinced.

“And what happens when he comes back? Lionel isn’t a forgiving man; he finds us squatting on his property, he’ll string us up with our guts.”

“Why would he leave in the first place if he intended to come back? And besides, if he does come back, you’d be holding all the cards anyway,” Ciara laced her next words with some supernatural suggestion, “You’d have all the men, all the power, all the resources. What would he do, even if he did return?”

Of course, an ancient vampire like Lionel would likely grind whatever army Nolan managed to rally against him like bugs beneath his heel, but Nolan didn’t know that; and he was beginning to get increasingly enamoured with the idea.

Of course, all his doubts had not vanished, but he was far more receptive now.

“You can go, girl. I have some things to discuss… with your mother.”

Good; Ciara had already visited her mother yesterday, greasing the wheels for this potential alliance, although she had been a bit more heavy handed with the use of her power in that case, both as retaliation for the past and self preservation as well.

All that mattered now was Aaron manoeuvring his father the way they required, and the spark would be lit.

Aaron had had to do very little by the way of attempting to convince his father to take the initiative in view of Lionel’s suspicious absence to move in on now unoccupied prospects, but his father’s organisation was relatively large and unwieldy compared to that of Nolan or Maeve, so Aaron had a bit more grease to apply to the wheels.

Not for the first time, he wondered how close his current assignment danced at the edges of the no interference rule.

He was to pump an information broker- he had no idea those things actually existed- for information about a senator who was in talks with his father.

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Jack apparently preferred the carrot-and-stick approach to these matters.

He had tracked the man down to Killiney, but knowing the reputation of his family, the man would be unwilling to grant Aaron an audience, so he would have to get creative.

Invisibility was a neat trick when combined with his newfound powers of flight, allowing him to comb through areas with very little effort while tracking the man he was looking for.

But now he knew what he was looking for and his feet touched down on the Vico road.

The home of the man he was looking for was fairly well guarded, surrounded by armed security.

A bit conspicuous, he supposed, but it would succeed in giving pause to nearly any would-be assailants all the same.

Not him, though, obviously- beating such mundane precautions would be laughably easy.

He floated over the hedges, shielded by detection from the eyes of the guards dotting the front lawn as well as the motion sensors and laser traps concealed within the green, but clearly visible to him all the same.

He hovered like a ghost outside the premises, wondering how to best breach the premises.

Despite all his obvious advantages, he wasn’t arrogant enough to believe he was invincible, and even hollows had plenty of means at their disposal which would get around even his forcefields.

So he waited, acutely aware of motion within the manor with his amplified senses, every vibration of sound and motion, and the flowing current through the wires within the very walls all laid bare for him.

But he could not wait forever, so reaching out with his power, he exerted his common on the weather around him, and with a push of his will, then assisted by thermodynamics taking over, he had soon summoned a thunderstorm.

More cataclysmic weather conditions required far more than a simple nudge, creating raw forces on a scale he simply wasn’t capable of yet, but this would suffice for his purpose.

Amplifying static charge building in the clouds above, and seizing control of the motion vectors of lightning, he plucked from the skies and brought it crashing to the ground.

Right on the head of one of the security personnel, who was cut down then and there.

Aaron was reasonably sure the man would survive, but his comrades congregated around him, before bodily picking him up and carrying him indoors, which provided him the opportunity he needed.

He hovered in behind them, but although his energy shield could veil him from light and sound, it couldn’t do much about the trail of moisture he would leave behind on the tile floor.

His presence was yet shielded by his proximity to the other men that had carried their comrade indoors, but he would have to move carefully from here on out.

He had a precise map of motion throughout the manor as far as his enhanced senses reached, and he began his search while also formulating a plan on what he was supposed to do when he found the man.

Perhaps busting out of the place with a highly sought after information broker wouldn’t be the best course of action if he wished to keep a low profile.

Electronic security measures scattered throughout the manor were useless to keep him out; all energy bent to Aaron’s will.

Still the man frowned; of thirteen sources of beating hearts and signatures, he was now fairly sure he had accounted for each one, various bodyguards and other servants but no sign of the man himself.

Aaron decided to salvage at least something from the manor before moving out and onto his next target to look for the broker.

The vibrations reverberating through the mass of the rooms he walked through revealed to him a large hollow behind a painting in the study of the man.

Moving the painting aside, he beheld a safe, a manual lock on it instead of an electronic one, and no hidden surprises waiting for him as far as he could tell.

He was wrong, of course.

He pried the metal with telekinetic force, then took two steps backward.

He had found the man he was looking for, but it seemed this merchant of information was no longer in the business, judging from the bullet wound on the side of his skull and the awkward way the man had been crammed into his own safe.

He decided to make himself scarce before any more of his plans could be thrown into disarray.

Without ever physically laying a hand on the surroundings to avoid leaving forensic evidence behind, he gingerly placed everything back the way it was using his telekinesis alone, and vacated the premises, to report back to his father.

Jack Sterling showed no outward sign of displeasure, but the way his knuckles whitened on hearing the news was indication enough of the turmoil he felt.

“Did you know the government very recently decided to downsize and replace prison staff throughout the country. And I didn’t even hear about such a step. It’s being contested of course, but for now, their decision stands. And we’re stuck in the mud.”

Jack’s organisation depended on a careful network of payments to prison wardens to recruit from among prisoners; it was, for most of those men, the best prospect of employment they would soon find.

“This cannot be a coincidence, with this timing,” Jack continued, “Someone is moving against us.”

“Who knew you were looking for this man specifically?” Aaron asked him.

“No one but you, but it’s not hard to guess I would need a man like that around in my line of work. But again, the timing…”

“If it is an attack, we should guess what their next move is going to be,” Aaron said.

He wasn’t entirely sure how much he should involve himself if this invisible adversary was working through the government, or indeed, was the government.

He wasn’t even sure if he should assist his father; After all, the whole point of this operation was to get rid of him and the other major players, ultimately clearing the board for a more palatable network that kept tabs on the earthbound population as Apotheosis would dictate.

He wasn’t sure how that mandate in itself wasn’t a violation of their primary directive, but he supposed going one step further than mere surveillance would cleanly overstep that line.

“If I want to cripple this organisation in one blow, well, it would be killing me. But I’ve made myself near untraceable,” Jack said.

To the mundane methods of Hollows, Aaron thought.

But the statement went unsaid.

“But crippling us would be easy enough,” Jack continued, “By definition, we have to have faces in the public to field government contracts. Cut them down and our stock is sitting cold.”

“Or they hit our supply.”

“That’s not even located in this country. If they have that wide a reach, we’ll have to… reassess.”

Jack paced around the room agitatedly.

“Go. I’ll let you know when I have something. I need to make a few calls.”