Tasìa approached the storage facility from a hill above the opening she had spotted in the dilapidated fence. She waded through shrubbery along the rocky slope that ran up against the facility's cement excess runoff drains.

Puffball mushrooms grew down the rubbled slope. Gently, they spewed their brownish-orange gas as the night air cooled.

Tasìa scanned the ground ahead, remaining mindful that the slope of the hill faced towards the West - a perfect condition to attract any snake who sought to rest and absorb the radiant surface heat of the nighttime surroundings.

Tasìa stopped for a moment to take out her Kel-Tec .32 pistol. Ever diligent in the proper handling of firearms, she went through her inspection routine. She felt around the inside of her bag. There were only four clips left to which she could feed the magazine after she had dealt with the ascospore oddities earlier.

Tasìa had surveyed the facility a second time before she descended the hill for a more complete idea of whom she faced. She had potentially twenty-two targets ahead of her, so she needed to make every bullet count.

As she continued her descent, Tasìa did so cautiously. Even still, the glaring lights and blaring sound coming from the impromptu discoteque made it much easier for her to execute her task.

Something a mere two yards in front of her caught her eye.

Her near hairless flesh along her arms tensed up in goosebumps as she watched the smooth, curving motion of a small blackhead snake.

It so thoroughly resembled the mesmerizing sway of the Wise One as to cause Tasìa a good deal of alarm.

Blackheads were mostly harmless to humans. In the scheme of things, a bite could possibly prove to be infectious, otherwise, its venom was a mild one.

She typically kept a few blackheads as pets in her aquariums at times that she settled down long enough to make a home. Tasìa always regretted having to release them back to the wild when she inevitably picked up and moved again.

The elders of the Anewed kept blackheads for their venom.

Good for arthritis and spiritual healing.

So her favorite of the elders, Viejo Moisés, often claimed.

As Tasìa stopped dead in her tracks, the agile blackhead turned its head towards her and flicked its long forked tongue her way.

From whence tongue came the soft, sobering voice of the Wise One.

What is the nature of what you are seeking to do here?

It asked.

The blackhead slithered away between slabs of quartz rocks that gleamed by moonlight in the near coppery color of malachite.

Was this mere hallucination? The Wise One was never so succinct in its verbiage.

"My most sincere apologies, El Sabianté. There is no time left for reflection, only for doing."

Tasìa whispered this beneath her breath.

She sprinted through the bent-inward fence. Her leather boots made easy work of the tattered wire supports.

The lights nearby pulsed an ungodly red hew. Arced downward atop metal poles that lined the storage facility's outer parameter, they were part of the facility's original structure.

The other lights were strung up along the storage unit entrances. They must have been brought in by the indigent North Americans.

As Tasìa formulated how she was going to use the array of lights to her advantage, she heard a strident 'cah!' from behind her.

She had missed hearing the flutter of its wings. Again, her normally acute senses failed her.

Mel chose this moment to make his presence known. She should have been aware that he was there the entire time, but not once since she left Sachmilli's building had she successfully spotted the crow.

He sat upon the nearby fence. He cahed again, repeating the same pattern he had just made.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

She thought she understood him.

"True," Tasìa whispered to him. "I expected there to only be three of them when I took up this task."

She twisted her head in a jolting mimicry of his avian body language as she looked Mel in the eye.

Tasìa continued, "that only means their greater number makes my task ever the more urgent."

She waited a moment for Mel to respond, but somewhere between the slow blinking motion of her eyes opening and closing, he disappeared.

Like a magician's stage trick, there was no longer a crow that sat perched on the rail but instead a tiny, sprig of a man in a gaucho's jacket and a Buffalo Fur Stetson hat on his head.

The man's voice came at her in a subdermal tickle against her chest. In spite of this, she understood him perfectly.

Since when does the Angel of Theft, a creature of deft and supple stealth, engage in targeted assassinations?

Tasìa shivered her head in a hard shake as she tried to blink the impossible image away.

Finally, Mel, the crow, sat in the spot once more.

"Is that what you are trying to tell me? That my actions are now compromised by the Manifest?"

The mobile PA vibrated against her thigh from inside her trouser pocket. Tasìa answered the call.

"Felicité, here. So anything going on at the moment, Tasìa?"

It was bad timing, Tasìa thought, but she could not even make herself be rude to Felicité, of all people.

"You could say that. I am in the middle of something here, but you're welcome to tag along if you like."

"I see that you are. Quite an interesting little friend you have there. Why is there a nightwing following you?"

"Have you acquired its eyes?"

"Yeah. Your PA has been getting hit by a constant ping for the last few hours. It got my attention. When I ran a query, I discovered that little guy on the other end."

Tasìa waved a hand at the bird.

"Its master is an old friend of the family. As for my own little exploit, I have run into some organ harvesters and what looks like some ghouls accompanying them."

"Tasìa . . . enough trouble in this world comes and finds you without you having to go seek it!"

"I have to do something about it, Felicité. They are going to slaughter four women if I don't intervene."

Tasìa leaned up against the side of a storage unit.

"Is that their music blaring?"

"Yeah. It's giving me some cover so I can talk to you now."

"Call in a domestic disturbance."

"If I did that, it could lead to a full-scale investigation where the Salvage gets involved. They will go door to door and kick up a shitstorm."

Felicité cleared her throat before she answered back.

"A harvest operation of that scale is not going to stay put long. They'll slaughter the local streetwalker talent and move on to the other side of the Quadra to set up shop again. Likely those motherfuckers will make their move tonight after they bag and tag those four women."

Tasìa snarled as she stared into the eyes of the crow.

"That is all the more reason for me to eliminate them now."

"Tasìa, listen to yourself. You don't think that a slaughter of a dozen or more North Americans would not bring a full-scale Salvage investigation?"

Tasìa frowned with a stuttering puss for a lower lip. Vigorously, her head shook. She did not have an immediate answer.

Likely, none would satisfy Felicité's concerns.

The Argentinian spoke with a worried sounding softness in her tone.

"I can see through the nightwing that you are running a temperature. Not only that, but several other vitals that it registers tells me that you need to get your inoculation re-upped, ASAP."

However dire Felicité made this sound, Tasìa barely paid attention to what she was saying.

A solution came to her. Tasìa knew how she was going to play this out. The keyword was in what the gaucho gnome said.

Targeted.

Before she executed her new plan, she had to make damn certain that the indigent Canadians were what she and the others suspected of them. It was easy to let one's imagination run wild.

Especially here in the Quadra.

In her compromised condition of fleeting sanity, Tasìa needed to be as empirical in her observations of the world around her as she could maintain.

It would not do to go around killing people based upon a paranoid delusional reading of her present circumstances.

She had to be sure.

Fortunately, there was one easy way to test her hypothesis. The ghouls, if they were ghouls.

"I hear you, Felicité."

Tasìa said to keep the conversation going. She actually registered very little of what Felicité had said.

"Tasìa, I'm going to get a set of IDs made for you and then sent to you so you can get that inoculation taken care of. I am surprised that you do not already have your own set of fakes."

Tasìa chuckled as she re-engaged in the conversation.

"Not here. This town is so laid-back that I never needed to have one. It is not like Vida Escondida. Quite the opposite in lifestyle from that vida loco tempo."

Felicité got quieter.

"Be careful. I have to go. The nightwing is fighting my attempt to make it stay put. He wants to be elsewhere. Stay safe, I'm thinking about you."

"Trust me, okay? Even now, under this strain, I know exactly what I'm doing."

Mel sprung up and swooped back up the hill. Tasìa watched it as she rested against the building.

Did the crow have its own agenda that it was following through on?

She closed her eyes to run a visualization of her plan so she could accurately time its execution.

She was grateful that her mind still felt sharp. It was the one advantage that she still had as she questioned what she sensed around her.

Tasìa heard the trickle of liquid splattering against the tin surface of the storage unit wall from merely a few yards away from where she stood.

A man leaned on his arm against the wall as he took a leak. He seemed as oblivious to her presence as she was to his just a few seconds before.

Maybe that was why Mel high tailed it.

The man licked at his swollen lips. His face was bruised with welts. He was one of the three Canadians that Annebél fucked up.

Tasìa stood perfectly still, admiring the display, as the drizzle came to a slow halt.

The man clenched his dick and gave it a good shake. He pulled it back inside his trousers while he walked on past her.

Good God All-Mighty, if we don't all live in our own fucked-up little worlds.

The encroaching insanity was making her as oblivious to the world around her as any hustler's marked man.