“Your security guy in New York is really sharp,” Andrej Marković said, sliding into my booth at the club on a Saturday night.

I didn’t bother correcting him and telling him that my security guy wasn’t a guy at all, since it didn’t actually matter and maybe that tiny bit of anonymity might be a good thing.

“Well, I’ll let him give you all the details, but it has been fascinating, doing this thing for you,” Andrej said, his accent thickening in his enthusiasm.

I waved to Theo and pointed at Andrej. Theo gave a salute that he understood, and a moment later set Andrej’s drink down in front of him.

“Your Sidecar, Mr Marković,” Theo said.

“Thanks, Theo,” Andrej said. “Nobody makes them better than you.”

“I do my best,” Theo said with a smile as he left us to talk.

“Leah,” Andrej said, after taking an appreciative sip. “Whatever you pay him, it isn’t enough. He’s worth more.”

“He’s good, alright,” I agreed. “You know, I went to one of those places in New York where the bartenders are famous for their, well, their tricks, I guess. You know, tossing the jiggers up in the air, catching it behind their back, silly shit like that. And you know what? The drinks were really expensive, and not very good. When I hired the staff for this place, I made it clear that class and professionalism mattered more than anything. They get paid well, but the standards are high.”

“I hate going anywhere else,” Andrej admitted. “This place has me so spoiled.”

“Well, you need to see this new club we’re opening up down in LA. I’ll make sure you’re on the opening night invite list, if you want. It’s going to be spectacular,” I said. “Bring Lauren- make a weekend of it,” I suggested. “It’s going to open on New Year’s Eve.”

“Lauren- she’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Andrej said, looking a bit nervous.

“Yeah?” I asked, curious.

“I was hoping- I don’t know if there’s any way…” he said, a bit flustered.

I just waited for him to say whatever it was, and my patience was rewarded.

“We’d like to hold our wedding reception here, at the club,” Andrej finally got out. “Maybe during the day, when it would normally be closed?”

“Oh, hell no!” I snorted. At the look of dismay on Andrej’s face, I said, “Of course you can have your reception here, but it’ll be at night, when it should be. We’ll just let everybody know the club is reserved for a private function that night. Like I said, anything I can do for you, just let me know.”

“We could schedule it for a Tuesday or something…” Andrej said.

“Nonsense. People get married on Saturdays. The reception will be here, on a Saturday night,” I told him, making it perfectly clear I was willing to shut the place down any night he needed. “Andrej,” I said, “there is one condition.” At his questioning look, I said, “I expect an invite to the wedding.”

When I told Emmy the next day that I’d gotten her a gig as a wedding guitarist, she laughed. “How did he react when you told him that I would play at his wedding?” Emmy asked, amused.

“He just about died,” I said with a chuckle. “It was a big deal for Andrej to even ask if he could hold the reception at the club. He was thinking maybe during the day when the club wasn’t open, or something like that. When I told him it would be fine if it was a Saturday night, that was huge. But then, when I told him that you would be happy to play at the wedding, he actually wept.”

“It will be fun,” Emmy said. Thinking about it for a moment, Emmy asked, “Why did you- is he that good a friend that you would do these things for him?”

“Andrej’s a good guy, sure, and I like him, but I can’t say that I really know him all that well. He did step way up when I asked him for a favor with the New York mystery strays thing, and I’d think that was enough,” I said, thinking about it. “But there’s also- and this might sound cold- the fact that he’s a rising star at Google and in the Valley, right? If I can, um, make him seem even that much more so by letting him show off his real world connections, that makes him an even better ally going forward, right? If all his tech buddies think of him as, well, somebody to keep an eye on, it helps us as well as him.”

Emmy laughed that pretty, musical laugh of hers and gave me a kiss. “The rumors are correct- you are a true queen of the Night Children,” she said. “Every day I love you a tiny bit more, Leah. You are the best possible thing that could have ever happened to me.”

I pulled Emmy in closer, so that she was lying on top of me on the couch. I drew her up so we could kiss some more, whispering that I hoped she would always feel that way.

As we kissed, I slid my hands up under her shirt, stroking the silky skin of her back. Emmy wriggled out of her shirt and tossed it aside, crawling up my body a little bit so she could bury my face in her cleavage.

“My heart is in there,” Emmy said. “Can you hear it? It is calling your name, Leah. It calls your name with every beat. It will continue to call your name as long as it beats, Leah. As long as it beats.”

Choosing to focus on the loving aspect of what Emmy had just said and not on the hint of mortality, I kissed her right between her breasts.

“And I’ll love you twice as much,” I said. “Because you’re twice as perfect.”

In New York for a long weekend, I finally got to talk to Mia about what Andrej had hinted at. We’d gotten in late, so the first chance was over breakfast. Angela and Emmy were still asleep in bed, but I was up early, as usual.

“Here, let me show you,” Mia said, grabbing her coffee cup and a bagel and indicating I should follow her down to the sub-basement and the little security room down there.

The small space had changed quite a bit since the last time I’d checked in, with a large bank of flat-screen monitors showing the views from the various external cameras. In one corner was a large safe door, perhaps five feet tall, mounted to the wall. At my puzzled look, Mia explained that it was the gun safe.

“You have no idea how much work it was to get it down here,” she said. “It weighs a fucking ton, and only juuuust barely fit down the stairs at all.”

“Why did you need a gun safe?” I asked.

“Well, why do you think? For my guns, of course,” she said, keying in the numeric code and then turning the handle to open it up. When she did so, I could see that I’d misunderstood- it was actually a complete safe that had been sunk into the wall, and not just a door mounted to the concrete.

Inside the gun safe were four rifles and at least half a dozen pistols, plus boxes and boxes of ammo.

“That,” Mia said, pointing to a black plastic waterproof case, “Is my sniper rifle.”

“Why do you even have a sniper rifle?” I asked, amazed.

“Why else? To snipe, of course.”

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At my look of bewilderment, Mia said, “Look. I’m not seven feet tall and built like a linebacker, like some people. I only have one point three legs, and I’m not any sort of master of knife-jitsu, like some people. If I have to go toe to toe with a bad guy, I need an equalizer like this little baby, here,” she said, and reached up under her baggy sweatshirt to pull a gun from her waistband. “I’m licensed by the city, and State, of New York to concealed carry, which is pretty much a miracle. The rest of this? Just in case.”

I looked at Mia’s earnest face. She wanted me to understand, and I did, but I knew I could have a little fun with it, so I did.

“That’s all well and good,” I said. “But I think I’ll stick with this,” I said, reaching back to the small of my back and pulling out Old Stabby. “Pun intended.”

Wide-eyed, Mia asked, “Shit, that’s the knife?” pronouncing it ‘thee’.

“Honestly, I’ve mostly gotten out of the habit of carrying it,” I said. “I only carry it nowadays when going out with Emmy. The only reason I have it on me right now is that it was in my pile of clothes from last night, and I just grabbed it out of habit or whatever this morning.”

“Dad told me about that knife,” Mia said, continuing to stare at the dagger. “He said that the Night Children have, like, almost developed a cult about it.”

“What,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s what he said. He said that all your, um, I don’t even know what to call them, your little army, they all have tattoos of that knife on their shoulders, right here,” Mia said, tapping herself where an Army guy would have his shoulder patch.

“You’re freaking kidding me,” I groaned.

“No, that’s what he said,” Mia protested.

I sighed as I slipped the eight inch blade back into its horizontal carry sheath. “Of course they do,” I said, my shoulders drooping. “Of freaking course they do.”

Mia shut the gun safe, then took a seat in front of the desk and keyed a few quick strokes onto the keyboard. “Anyway, this is what I wanted you to see,” Mia said. I grabbed the only other chair in the small room and pulled it over to peer at the monitor.

“Your hacker guy is really good,” Mia said. “We’ve been kicking a few things around, and have managed to do some pretty amazing things, really.”

“He thinks you’re a guy,” I said.

“Cool,” Mia said. “I’ve kinda been leading him that way when we chat. I figure the less he knows about me, the better.”

“My thinking, too. When he mentioned ‘my security guy’,” I said, making finger quotes, “I didn’t correct him.”

“Anyway, once he got us access to the facial recognition package at MTA, I realized that we could use the system to do our work for us. We had it generate a heat map for our mystery visitors, and we hit gold,” Mia said, bringing up an overlay on a map of the New York subway system.

She pointed out two areas on the map that were nearly a solid red where many fainter red lines converged.

“We’ve developed two different plans of attack in these two areas,” Mia explained. Tapping her finger on one just north of Harlem, Mia said, “This one is interesting. Here, the number one mystery dude looks around, makes sure nobody is watching, then uses a key to slip into a restricted-access maintenance door.” Glancing back at me, Mia gave a sly grin. “Since your IT guy has complete admin access, he generated a few work orders. Official work orders, for MTA workers to do work authorized and paid for by the MTA,” she said with a little laugh. “MTA workers installed a bunch more security cameras tied into the system down in the maintenance and access tunnels in that area. The cameras kept getting trashed, or spray painted, so the workers got creative and mounted them in places that are hard to spot and even harder to reach.” With that, she hit a few keys and brought up a low-light camera’s view of a subway side tunnel. The camera had a viewpoint well off the ground, maybe twenty feet up.

“So anyway, what with one thing or another, we’ve managed to visually follow the one main guy to right here,” Mia said, bringing up a video recording of a man walking through the dark tunnel with no problems, before he stopped and looked around. Satisfied nobody was watching, he pulled some sort of piece of sheet metal aside, revealing some sort of opening. He quickly wormed his way inside, pulling it back into place behind himself.

“When Dad and that guy Jody were here a month ago, we did a recon. We waited until mystery dude was plenty far away- out in Brooklyn, but I’ll get to that- and we slid down there and took a look. The guy has a cozy little hidden home in there. He’s pulled electricity in there, and has a microwave, a bed, a couch, table, all the comforts of a completely off the grid hidey-hole. It looks like he lives alone down there, and we’ve never seen any of his friends go down there with him.”

“Did you find anything interesting in his place?” I asked, amazed at the initiative Mia had shown.

“No, but we were very careful about not disturbing anything,” Mia said. “We didn’t want him to realize that somebody had found his little nest.”

“How hard would it be to raid his place?” I asked.

“Easy as fuck,” Mia said. “We could be kicking in his front door in twenty minutes, and there’s nowhere he could bolt to. One way in, one way out.”

“Could you sneak in there and plant a spy cam?”

“Well, sure, but no way would any sort of wi-fi signal ever get out of there,” Mia said. “It’s like, seventy feet underground or some shit. Plus, it’s all concrete and rebar.”

I sat back, giving it some thought. Nothing really leapt to mind, so I said, “Tell me about the other hot spot.”

Mia grinned like the cat that ate the canary and said, “Now this one… This one has legs.” With a few keystrokes, she brought the heat map up again. “Check this out. Dude number one, and all of the others- we’ve seen six other guys with him so far- all, sooner or later, get off the subway at this stop. It’s the end of the line in an area that really hasn’t seen much, uh gentrification at all. That’s a nice way of saying it’s a shitty-ass area,” Mia said. “High crime, sure, but that’s what happens in really poor places. But what really makes that part of town suck is all the old factories and shit that used to be there have all closed up and moved production to China or someplace like that, and now it’s all car chop shops, tire retread places, delivery company service yards… You get the idea. All the crappy stuff that every city needs, but nobody wants to see or be near. Well, the poor people that live around there, they get to see that shit, and be near it, ‘cause they’ve got nowhere else to go. So they get cancer and their kids do bad in school because they’ve been inhaling lead dust since they were born,” Mia said, bringing up Google’s street view of the area. I could see what she meant- it was a grimy place, one where nobody was ever going to be in any hurry to clean it up.

“Right,” Mia said, shaking off her bitter mood. “So anyway, our boys all get off at this stop sooner or later. Usually together, but not always. Well…” Mia said, drawing it out for dramatic affect. “You know that part about high crime? That part was important. Your IT guy got into the NYPD’s neighborhood surveillance cameras and we’ve managed to follow the dudes around the neighborhood. Since the area is high crime, they have a lot of cameras. I know for a fact that nobody at PD HQ ever watches the feed, but that’s a different matter. Anyway, it’s taken a lot of watching because the NYPD doesn’t have the same sort of facial recognition that the MTA does, for some reason, so I’ve had to actually follow them real-time once I get the alert they’ve gotten off the train.”

“This seems like a real pain in the ass,” I said.

“Oh, more than you can even imagine,” Mia admitted. “But you’re paying me good money to mostly just sit here on my ass, so what else am I gonna do? Anyway, like I said, I’ve watched these guys, and even though they always wander around for a while before they get there, they always wind up here,” Mia said, bringing up a picture of a dirty brick building with a battered old sign with peeling paint that read “Thomas Bros”, but gave no indication of what the Thomas brothers actually did.

It was just the sort of building you’d imagine in an area like that, and disturbingly reminiscent of the place where we’d wiped out The Boss’s people back in Chicago. The same filthy, barred windows, the same rusty metal roll-up door.

“Like I said, they all go in and out of there on the regular,” Mia said. “So what did I do? Why, I installed cameras, that’s what I did. I put up three cameras on surrounding buildings, and have been busy taking photos of everybody that ever goes in and out of that place. Your IT guy is working on how to feed the images into the MTA’s facial recognition so we can track all of them as they use the transit system all over town.”

“Let me guess- nobody ever goes in or out of that place during the day?” I asked.

“Not once in the month I’ve had it under surveillance,” Mia confirmed.

“Also let me guess. That street has no street lights?”

“It does,” Mia said, nodding. “But none of them work. On the rare occasion city crews come out to fix one of them, it gets busted out right away.”

“So at night, that block is mighty dark,” I said, nodding along with Mia. “And none of the visitors ever seem to need flashlights.”

“Got it in one,” Mia said.

“Well then,” I said, leaning back. “You have been kicking ass on this. Seriously, this is amazing. Keep digging, and also seriously, spend any money you need to, and just keep building up your database of faces. If we can figure out how many Night Children there are in this, um, network, I guess? Then we’re way ahead of the game. They obviously know somehow that Emmy owns this house, so they must have some source of intel, whatever that is, but if we know more about them than they know about us…”

“That spend money thing? I’m glad you brought that up, because I have some ideas, but they’re gonna cost some money…” Mia said with a grin.

Angela and Emmy were eating their breakfasts when Mia and I went back upstairs.

“If you don’t need me this morning, I’m gonna go crash,” Mia said, hitting the call button for the elevator. “I’ve had a long night.”

“We’ll be fine,” I said. “And thanks. Seriously, amazing work.”

“At least two thirds of it is your IT guy,” Mia said, stepping into the elevator. “Buy him a beer next time you see him.”

“What was that about?” Angela asked.

Unable to remember if I’d ever told Angela about the Night Children that case the house every so often, I just said, “Home security stuff,” with a shrug and left it at that. Sure, she knew about my evidently tattooed ‘paramilitares’, but there was no real reason to read her in on the whole mess.

“Leah, how do you feel about going shopping with us? We need new gowns for the gala tomorrow night,” Emmy asked, to my dismay. There was no way to weasel out of this one.