The walk is brief, and cold, and dark. The wind is not gentle to you, plucking at your hair and your coat and your skin, as soft a breeze as it might have seemed to anyone else. You cross two alleys in your journey, you jump as there is the staccato rap of gunfire from the building you've just left, you-
There. In the alley you've just turned into.
A car with the brake lights on, a figure leaning up against the rear passenger door, their face lit by a cigarette.
She has an elegant stature and features - when they're shown by the glow of inhalation, at least - and she turns to look at you as you enter the alley.
"Siobhan?" The woman has an accent. Polish. Faint but extant, like a pretty well naturalised 0th generation immigrant. You'd recognise it anywhere.
She stands from the lean, turning to face you completely. The woman is dressed inconspicuously, in black skinny jeans and a dark green hoodie, but there's a certain air to her that is... well, not quite magnetic. She has presence, gravitas, and grace - but not to the point where you think she has power. Not to the point where you think she could use it.
At least not to speak.
It takes a moment for it to click, but it does eventually. She holds herself like a dancer - specifically, like a ballerina. Which might make sense, given her background. She looks like she's in her mid 30s, but could be older and aging well - or younger and not - pretty easily.
"My name is Ana. It's time to go."
The car drive is slow and uncomfortable, and you are forced more than once to take incredibly inconvenient detours to avoid the periodic roadblocks set up by your pursuers - or at least, by their law enforcement lackeys, the state police. Brooks gets texts every now and again to report on police checkpoints before the car comes into view of those barricades, from his at-least-for-now partner, a young man from Texas called Billy Ray. Billy is keeping watch on your immediate destination, with a rifle; it's a mostly abandoned shack out in the desert, with a significantly less abandoned basement-garage. It was how you got out here, and it is how you'll get back.
You're not sure how Billy knows about the roadblocks. He's not a mage, at least as far as you know - though that doesn't mean he's not in contact with one.
Most likely he's getting reports from local cell members, but that wouldn't necessarily explain how he knew where
you were each time either - and you’ve been keeping an eye out for drones or anything of that sort.
In spite of everything in your favour - your secrecy, your headstart on the FOE, your mysterious eye-in-the-sky - the tension in the car never fully disappears. Billy sends you another text.
“
aw shit. Cops. how far off are u.”
But things are worse for Abigail.
In the endless sands and shifting dusts of the realms of sleep, lost in the liquid clouds of fatigue and exhaustion, sinking into the floor of your somnolence… you begin to dream. For a moment, you find yourself looking up a short flight of stairs at a ramshackle door, formed of broad planks and slats, outlined by a near-blinding light. The steps up to it are steep and muddy, covered in this thin grey slurry that looks maybe half an inch deep, and there’s an almost sour smell in the air. You look down and find that the mud is everywhere, not limited only to the steps out of this-
Out of this basement.
You don’t know how you know it’s a basement.
You don’t know how you know where you are, but you know you’re not where you were.
Your trek is an ambling one, never sure which turn to take or which route is best - though you’re smart enough to stay away from the main roads. You also don’t know what precisely you’re looking for, though you figure that whoever sent the text will make themselves known when it suits them.
You’re turning into a new alleyway when you’re confronted with something you’ve never seen before.
A body. Two cops stand over it, one of them prodding the unfortunate young man’s leg with her foot as something dark pools around him.
“Whaddya think?” Her partner, a big man with a paunch and a sparse beard, muses.
“I think we got lucky, bud.” The other woman is short, but stocky, with blonde hair tied back in a tight ponytail. They’re both wearing local police uniforms and ballistic vests - but they’re not the FOE.
“I’ll say. Hey, d’ya - wait.” He stops, his hand reaching instinctively for his pistol. “You there! Come out into the light, hands up!” The pair of them turn to face Angeline with their guns drawn.
This is where you thought you were going to meet your mysterious saviour. This is where they said they’d be.
Is that them, dead on the ground? Are you joining them?
As you head out of your building, you can hear police cars pull up in front of it. It would seem that you got out in the nick of time - something that may not surprise you.
What might surprise you a bit more is the immediate sounds of screaming and gunfire from inside the lobby of your apartment block. You give it a glance backwards, and you see cops in riot gear by the dozen advancing on the front of the house - until there is another shout, and their ranks are awash with bright white flames. The front four or five are caught in the blast, their gear and their skin catching alight like petroleum as they wail and stumble backwards away from the heat.
One of them does not, charging forwards instead, unaffected by the fire.
Your blood runs cold.
That was an agent of the CA3 - the Canadian Agency for Arcane Affairs, Canada’s answer to the American FOE. There is another brief round of gunfire, the sound of breaking glass, and then the complete stop of the stream of fire.
Good thing you didn’t go out the front.
You will hear your name called before you see the caller.
“Yo! Zephyr! Big man! Over here!”
It’s a skinny teenage looking guy, in ripped jeans and a leather jacket, with a disappointingly dull coloured mohawk. Behind him, there’s a sweaty looking overweight asian man in an ill fitting business suit, who seems alarmed by the kid’s sudden shouting.
“Come on man, let’s get the fuck outta here! You get in the front, Sam’ll drive until we’re outta city!” The punk gestures to a slick looking black mercedes, before practically leaping into the back seat.
Behind you, you hear someone shout;
“I saw someone go down the alley!”
With the electrical cable for your alarm clock trailing idly behind you through the dirt of the city alleyways, half-illuminated by the light from the nearby streets, you make your way towards what you’d approximate as the rendezvous point. You have trouble remembering the last time you felt snow on your skin, but it’s not an unfamiliar sensation as it starts to fall.
Your breath fogs up the air before you, snowflakes begin to settle on the ground as the snow gets heavier and thicker and muffles more of the world around you. Sometimes it would be easy to suppose that you’ve moved from one world over to the next, when you turn corners and find the floor covered in soft white where it wasn’t but a moment ago.
The start of the riots in the city seems so distant through the snow.
You know that, for all you don’t remember, you will remember this; you will remember it perfectly.
The next corner you turn, you see a young woman with dark, curled hair, a frown on her face, and a big fuck off puffy jacket on. She’s still shivering, so it’s clearly not helping. The woman is standing idly around an incredibly dilapidated brownish sedan, which doesn’t look like it would survive you driving it for very long, but looks like it could still build speed for a little while if it needed to.
She turns to look at you as you enter the alley, and you notice that she’s open carrying a boxy, plastic looking pistol, the kind that cops are usually issued.
“You Matthew? Matthew Mearls?”
