The Shades headquarters in Rolling Hills was still a makeshift operation. They had plenty of experience setting up temporary field offices, but this had been a much more rapid transition than most. And eventually this wasn't going to be a temporary field office. The presence of the last genie deserved a permanent presence. And very serious, very careful watching over. She seemed nice enough, and so did the young man she was bonded to, but that was still a lot of potential magical danger all in one spot. Magical danger which had erupted in town just a short while ago, the cleanup was still going on, and was only likely to get worse.

Especially after what the young man in the other room had told her, before falling back asleep.

Taliesin Cromlaire.

The most wanted wizard in the world probably wasn't in the sleepy little town of rolling hills. That giant tree wasn't his style, he didn't favor natural magic at all. But he'd been sniffing around, and there was no way this was a coincidence. The treant had been sent to target Benny Gold because they thought he must be connected, and they couldn't find anyone else. Which didn't mean they wouldn't find the others involved, no matter how secret and exclusive. Myrden's little hideaway camp was. So she had to warn them. But warning them was dangerous all by itself.

She stood in a room full of desks and looked around at everyone.

“Full security check,” she said. People began furiously typing on consoles. A few moments later, they started giving her their reports.

“No electronic listening devices detected on the premises.”

“No magical artifacts not listed in inventory detected.”

“No signs of magical creatures not listed on staff.”

“No signs of scrying, divination, or other spying enchantments.”

“Security cameras show no intruders or null facial recognition contacts.”

“Heartbeat sensors detect only the individuals meant to be in the building.”

“No signs of a stealth or invisibility spell, check one.”

“No signs of a stealth or invisibility spell, check two.”

“No signs of a stealth or invisibility spell, check three.”

Nunez nodded.

“Good work. Back to what you were doing.”

The agents returned to their work. Security checks weren't exactly uncommon, this was a secret government operation after all. And for the same reason, even if it had been strange they all knew not to ask questions. Nunez, on the other hand, focused on her own task.

This base was new, and slapped together at the last minute. She did not have all the security measures in place she would like to have. But still, every scan came up negative. And it was highly unlikely that anyone could have gotten through three layers of magical stealth detection. Still, she took further precautions.

Once she was alone in her office, she stomped to her desk to pull out a golden bowl and a brass coin. She spun the coin in the bottom of the bowl and chanted a few mumbling words. The coin caught fire as it spun, and as the smoke wafted into the room she felt a sense of peace. Isolation. Safety. As if a wall of soft cotton stood between her and anything that could harm her...or more importantly, listen in.

The last security measure was that she was the only one who actually knew where Myrden and the kids were. That wasn't agency information, just her information. Well, not quite the last. The phone she made the call with wasn't the one on her desk, it was one she pulled from a secret drawer that looked like it was made of crystal.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

“Myrden?” She said. “Yeah yeah, you're up to your ass in teenagers...okay, young adults. Look I don't have time to argue, Benny Gold was holding out on us. He got a visit right after he woke up from Taliesin Cromlaire. Oh, got your attention now? Good. You need to be careful. I don't know who they are, but they attacked the hospital to try and flush us out. That's why I'm contacting you like this, so they can't track it. I'll be honest, I'd prefer to have you and the kids back here. Concentrate our strength.”

And let me watch over that genie personally before things go all to shit, she didn't say out loud.

“I know they're still training but...alright. Alright. But if they keep causing a mess here I'm going to have to call in reinforcements. And the last thing we want is Uzbedi attention.”

She hung up the crystal phone and leaned back in her chair. She did not want to deal with this right now.

“You know it's funny,” a voice she'd never heard before said. “You spend so much time fighting us, but you don't like the Uzbedis any more than we do.”

Nunez was up, whirling around with her hands raised in a fighting stance, before the voice got to the end of the word “funny.”

“Who's there!?” She demanded.

“Me!” the voice giggled. It was feminine, and there was a childish lilt to the tone and chosen words, but the voice was too deep to be a child. “I'm over here! Behind you! No, the otherbehind you!”

The voice giggled as Nunez whirled back and forth.

“Oh fine I'll come out! You suck at this game.”

A woman rose out of Nunez's shadow. She had pale skin and wore a leather outfit. Not tight, shiny leather meant to be erotic, though she'd definitely chosen clothes that hugged her figure, this was the worn beaten leather of something meant to be functional. It covered her from neck to ankles. Her hair and fingernails were both green, and her hair hung down in drooping spikes that suggested leaves. There was green around her eyes as well, which could have been eyeshadow but Nunez thought was more likely to be some side effect of the woman's magic.

Whatever the hell that was.

“Hi!” The woman waved. “Thanks for staying on the call long enough for me to trace it!”

“How the hell did you do that?” Nunez demanded.

“Oh it's got a lot to do with the nature of shadows, the infinite dimensions that exist all around us, the horrible things that peek at us out of the dark at night...” the green haired woman waved her hand dismissively. “You know, boring stuff. Basically your security checks people and their shadows as one thing, but they're actually two. Or, like, infinity things. I just hid in one of the infinity things inside your shadow.”

That...was not magic Nunez understood. In the back of her mind she resolved to get someone who knew about shadow magic on security.

“Pretty ballsy,” Nunez said out loud. “Revealing yourself to me. Why not just take the information and sneak out?”

“Because I want to go right away, duh,” the woman rolled her eyes. “And you're not likely to leave the building. So I had to get out of your shadow, and you're not distracted fighting a treant anymore. Besides, nobody here can stop me.”

“I can stop you.”

“No you can't!” The woman laughed. “That's why you haven't called an intruder alert yet. You're not sure you can beat me if we fight. Well I'm gonna tell you a little secret: I'm way, waystronger than you think I am.”

“You'll forgive me if I test that,” Nunez snarled, her fingers hooking into claws and a green glow seeping around the edges of her sunglasses.”

“Okay but if you're gonna fuck around,” the green haired girl shrugged, “you're gonna have to find out.”

The destruction of the old Winstead building, recently bought by a federal agency for their new headquarters, was eventually covered up as a gas explosion related to the one which had demolished most of the hospital parking lot the evening before. Eventually it lead to a complete overhaul of the city's gas line system, since hadn't there been a few gas explosions just before that crazy kid bombed the town? Not that this was another bombing! No, not at all.

Most of the articles used the word “miracle” when talking about the survivors. They didn't have the specifics, or names, but it was a fact that only one or two people were seriously injured in the “blast.” Most of the agents had survived with minimal injures. An unconscious Benny Gold had lived, and in fact slept, through the whole thing. Even Agent Nunez survived, though heavily injured. When she heard about those articles later, Nunez laughed.

Because it had been no miracle which had saved them. Their attacker simply had better places to be, and didn't really care about the agents in the building. She'd brushed them aside as an afterthought, the way you'd kick a pile of leaves out of your way on the sidewalk. She wanted to follow her magical phone trace to where Myrden was, and the kids, and the last genie.

Unfortunately, all the careful security precautions backfired there. Because the only one who knew all of that was Nunez. And she didn't regain consciousness until it was far too late.