Nathan Marsh
I drive as fast as I dare in a stolen rental car from the airport to a little motorsports shop on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio. There is no KTM 690 Duke III in the parking lot or visible through the windows of the small showroom. I walk inside and there isn’t one there, either. I find somebody that looks like they’re in sales, and they tell me it just went out the door an hour ago.
I ask to speak to the employee that completed the transaction, and am led to a desk near the service bays. I sit down at the desk and inquire about the buyer. Even without using any powers, I can put people at ease in conversation. He apologizes, but says he cannot remember anything about the buyer. I ask again for any information he can give me, this time using some powerful influence on him. I tried subtlety once. I do not have the time to keep playing. The fact that he can give me absolutely nothing, even with me leaning on his psyche tells me the hunter had used some compulsion on him to blank herself from his memory.
“I need to see the sales contract,” I say. He produces it from a desk drawer. Everything on it is in perfect order, for a vehicle purchased by the representative of a holding corporation. I am sure that looking up the corporation name will get me nothing useful in a timely manner, if at all.
I leave the building and call Kate to tell her it was a good lead, but that I had just missed contacting the hunter. “This close, I don’t want to give up just yet. Will Ivy be alright until morning without me?”
“I’m going to spend the night here,” Kate says. “I will get in touch right away if anything changes, alright?”
Kate’s promise does little to reassure me, but I also cannot walk away from this chance to find the hunter, and through her, perhaps locate Ben. I stand next to the car I stole, and look at the streets leading away from it, trying to feel out which one might be the one the hunter took. I get a sudden and powerful sense of a vampire coming up from the east. Too strong to be the hunter, for one, but also very different than her presence. I think very obscure thoughts as a car pulls into the parking lot next to mine, and the driver gets out. This one is handsome and slick, looking like a twenty-something startup superhero from the Silicon Valley, and carrying himself like somebody long used to a mantle of authority. This vampire is not insignificant in whichever clan he is in. I follow at a discreet distance, and see him work his way to the same employee I had talked to. His use of compulsion glows in my true sight, and I see him get nothing more for his trouble than a look at the same tax and title forms I had seen. I shed my mortal body as fast as I can, and tail, slipping invisibly into his back seat. As he drives off, he makes a phone call over the hands-free, in French. That narrows him down to one of three clans.
We start driving fast down the highway as the person on the other end of the call loops others into a conference call. It looks like my hunter is now being hunted. The hunt seems well organized, too. Staying on it sounds like my best option for finding the one I want. I have to take a gamble that Ivy will be well, since my phone is currently in otherspace.