While it wasn't the swankiest location Ximena had ever met a contact at it also wasn't the most rundown. The nature of her work meant that she hobnobbed with nearly-legitimate crime lords in upscale restaurants almost as often as she did smugglers in abandoned car parks. The key to any meeting was privacy, and that could be secured in several ways. Front establishments could be closed for the day and remote stretches of forest could be counted on to remain undisturbed, as long as outsiders were kept away Ex had no complaints.

But she wasn't about to just walk in without doing her due diligence. Before she had set out for the meet Ximena had sent a message to one of her contacts, some faceless geek in a basement a thousand miles away. All she had to do was give them an address and they dug up the details, all the sordid shit that had gone down at 3 Sideroad.

And it wasn't much. There had been a small meth cook operation back in the early 2000s but since then the farm had been left unoccupied, on paper anyway. Whoever was behind the meeting had managed to snag themselves a solid hideout, just another bit of run-down real estate in a rinky-dink town.

She had elected to take a dirt bike as opposed to a car, the busted-up Honda she had in her garage more suited to subterfuge than the family car. Only just street legal and faded years of abuse under the Arizona sun the third-hand Honda blended in with Boring better than a Cadillac would. The bike puttered to a stop next to the beat-up truck, Ximena idling as she waited for more people to appear.

There was always some trepidation when meeting with new associates. The same isolation that kept her meetings free from law enforcement ensured there would be no one to rescue her if things went bad. Not that she expected her fellow fledgling hunters to try and stick her up but it paid to be prudent. That was why Ximena brought her Hellcat, the sub-compact concealed neatly beneath her jacket.

Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.

The professional shook the hair out of her face as she slipped her helmet off, curious as to whether any others would show.

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Although The Exorcist had always been his favorite piece of fiction, not even in his wildest dreams did Father Stone see himself as Max von Sydow, wearing a hat with his clerics and arriving at a house that didn't look like a home at all.

The young Jesuit thought for a moment that perhaps Father O'Malley was playing a joke on him – but only for a moment. From what Father Stone knew and heard about O'Malley, it seemed as though there was never a time when the old priest wasn't serious. The few times that O'Malley bothered to write him back and the even rarer occasions that they spoke to one another face-to-face, it felt as though John O'Malley always carried with him an anchor around his scrawny, ancient neck that threatened to wrap itself around his neck too.

Ever since the day O'Malley became his mentor – if what he did could be considered “mentoring” – Alex Stone always wondered where that anchor would take him, were it allowed to simply fall.

And isn't falling the most natural thing in the world for an anchor to do?

Come to think of it, it wasn't disquiet that he was feeling at that moment. If anything, it felt more like a homecoming, even though he's never been here before.

“Should I feel bothered by that?” Stone asked out loud, before realizing that he wasn't the only one anymore standing outside the premises. There was a rider now, not too far from where he stood, and whoever they were, he hoped they didn't hear him talking to himself through that helmet.

“Pardon me, uh, miss,” he said, approaching the rider as her helmet came off, “are you with whoever's in that house over there?”

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She hadn't been interested in speaking to the man, not yet anyway. He could have been one of her allies, or just someone lost and looking for directions, or even an undercover cop. Ex knew that her name wasn't listed in the police files as anything more than the victim of a break-in but she had no idea how secure her new organization was.

So Ximena ignored him for a moment, reading the information sent to her by anonymous code monkeys. It wasn't as much intel as she would have liked but it was enough to ensure that she was headed into a building long forgotten by the rest of the world. Just the right location for a secret of hunters looking to take on the vampiric underworld.

Or just the right location to set up an idiot fledgling hunter to be murdered before her career even began.

Ex had in fact heard the man talk to himself, cataloging the statement as she hoped he would stay focused on his monologue instead of her. No such luck, the stranger feeling the need to approach her as she shook the hair from her face.

"Yesss, I think so?"

The sentence curled into a question, Ex working to buy herself some plausible deniability.

"I was supposed to meet someone but I've never been all the way out here so I might be turned around. Are you local?"

Or are you with me?

The second question remained in her head, Ximena wondering if the bespectacled stranger was an ally or a liability.

To hitchhike was a dangerous practice, to do so this late at night and so far from civilization a riskier prospect still - but the drivers who'd been picking him up on and off on his long walk out to Boring had found themselves lucky enough to be harmless themselves, or wise enough not to push it if they weren't; now, Rose was on the approach to the farmhouse proper.

Initially his plan had been to arrive a few hours early and stake the place out, see if he couldn't get eyes on whoever it was he'd been more or less instructed to meet out here before they could get eyes on him - but on reflection it seemed a tad hostile, especially considering that he'd at least met somebody in person this time around. In fairness, even when he hadn't, these sorts of meetings had a way of working out for him - sure, there had been mishaps in the past, but more often than not he'd walked away with a new job. For once, there was no need for excess caution.

He still watched for an hour. When he saw others arrive - a woman and a man, each carrying themselves with a similar kind of nondescript weight, as if it were a secret rather than something physical they were wearing. Rose had felt and seen the same weight in himself at times - when he caught snatches of his own face, reflected in windows as he passed them by, or when he thought back to that night, and that indestructible woman; some posh bitch who didn't see staff as people, who took them to bed for sustenance rather than company, whose skin bore strong against not only blade and bullet but bomb as well.

Normally that weight meant nothing. Everybody had secrets. Everybody would feel them on some days more than others - everyone knew what it was like to have that guilt-fear burning a hole in their stomach, the idea that they'd done something or found something out that could get them into serious trouble.

Normally it was normal - and normal meant nothing.

Not tonight. Coincidence is a mask worn by conspiracy, and this conspiracy involved him.

His plan had been to watch from concealment in a surrounding field, then move around the house to gain access from the rear, and either join the meeting in progress or avoid an ambush before it happened. But this felt right.

Right enough.

Rose worked his way from cover in the field back to the main road, and started to walk up the path towards the house - and his suspected-colleagues - much more openly. He held up a hand in greeting and beamed a grin at them.

"I was beginning to think I was on my own out here, you know."

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