-Richelle Mead

Their journey was a tense one, with the silence only broken occasionally by Layla herself. John had asked her to warn him if the woman following them broke off her path or showed any signs that she had been alerted to their plans or their awareness of her. Layla noted quietly several times as John's follower took the long way around certain stands or took a complete detour down another alleyway, but she always stayed close, never more than a half-minute behind at the most.

"We're almost at the market's edge," Layla said eventually, her eyes never leaving the path ahead of them. "Another fifty meters and we will exit the Barrier."

"Perfect," John acknowledged, glancing around. Most of the crowds around them had faded out. Very few people were entering the markets at these hours, and none of them were paying much attention to the group very obviously on their way out.

True to Layla's directions, it wasn't long before John felt himself passing out of the Barrier and into the far more crowded Springfield streets. Whatever magic that prevented the mundanes from noticing their presence seemed to be in effect; nobody looked twice at the strange trio waltzing onto the sidewalks of downtown Springfield despite them having essentially warped into reality. John was far more familiar with the layout of this area than with the Abyssal Market barrier, and he knew a side street that was often unoccupied.

"Follow me. Layla, can you tell me when she comes out of the Barrier?"

"I will let you know the moment I can detect her."

John didn't bother with a response, pushing them at a fast pace along the sidewalk. There was a side street only a block away that had mostly nerd-oriented stores, ranging from comic book stores to board game and miniature emporiums. The street rarely got traffic, and it was something John had frequented long before embracing the Abyss. Even now he could see through store windows that there were numerous gatherings going on, mostly consisting of your average male nerd wearing a band or geeky t-shirt huddled around a table with either cards or figurines spaced around purposefully.

"Follow me. Third door down on the right side, follow me into a Barrier the second we walk in. There won't be anyone in the lobby."

"Are you sure, Father?"

John nodded, intensity never leaving his features. "Absolutely. It's basically a dedicated tabletop store. I've never seen more than one or two people in there at a time, but everything is so overpriced that they stay in business because the owner is basically a trust fund child with a passion. He'll be in the back as long as nobody is checking out their inventory when we come inside."

The group pressed forward faster. Layla never mentioned that their pursuer had left the barrier behind them, but John wasn't willing to risk the woman following too closely, because, if she thought they were lying in wait, she would not follow them as closely as he needed her to.

"She has exited the Barrier. Should we-"

"No, just wait a moment," John assured Layla as he pushed open the door in front of them. The jingling of the shop bell rang out through the empty storefront. John cast his eyes around momentarily, reassuring himself that no one was about. Before anything could change that fact, John erected a Barrier over the store, and was gone.

Willow had taken up a few dozen mercenary contracts since she was introduced to the Abyss, most of which were relatively simple, without attachment. Either fighting in a war she had no stakes in or participating in a one-off mission that she had no interest in. For the most part, win or lose, she didn't really suffer much. Either she pulled through and got her built-in compensation for a successful mission… or her employer went under, and there was nobody around to pursue her for the initial fee. At least not as far as she tended to flee the area.

Willow had received numerous offers from various organizations, not the least of which was Lady Arista's Springfield base to join them as a permanent soldier-for-hire. Willow had never liked the idea of belonging to a particular organization, no matter how laissez-faire they were about the general behavior of their mercenaries. Lady Arista was almost infamous for her hands-off approach to contracts and mercenary alignment, after what had happened during her introduction to the Abyss - poor woman - but even her restrictions were too much for Willow. In a land as free and chaotic as the Abyss, one's morals and structure had to be as free as the wind. Otherwise you were simply leaving yourself open to failure.

Of course… leaving oneself open tended to be a two-way street, or perhaps more accurately a double-edged sword. Willow had made her living off risky contracts and unreliable sources, banking on up-front fees and her own tenuous loyalty to carry her through the hardest times. No matter how unreliable her nebulous loyalty may have made her in the eyes of some, no matter how hated she was, there were always those **** enough to hire her for simple jobs.

Those were the contracts Willow tended to enjoy the most. Contracts based around tailing or monitoring others, which were either simple enough to justify their low fees or rapidly became complex enough that she had little guilt in turning tail and escaping the situation altogether. Live to die another day, and all that. But that meant Willow no longer received combat missions, and those she did receive were too risky and far too low-paying to even consider.
So it was that Willow felt herself growing more and more restless. Not particularly because of her orders - she wasn't foolish enough to question being paid for something between babysitting duty and playing hide-and-seek. Still, something deep within her yearned for the thrills and adrenaline-induced ecstasy of her early days as a mercenary, no matter how much her eagerly honed instincts scared her away from those contracts these days. The Abyss ate the complacent. She needed to expand either her personal power or her wealth. Both created influence... and truthfully, there was a smaller part of her that yearned for the excitement of her old days all the same.

It was that yearning, that impossible to shake thrill-seeking behavior that cried out with every movement she made, that had enticed Willow into taking the contract most recently offered to her. It wasn't the first time the contract had been offered to her. It wasn't even the most rewarding. What made her finally take it was that it was an easy job with a lower, but still ludicrous payout. And it sounded rather too good to be true...

The target was an oblivious young man, one who had shown no signs of awareness to the Abyss' greater machinations, and who had never expanded his influence beyond a single town. Originally the contract had been all about assisting the young man in his war and providing him with training in his growth after the war had finished - however, the payment was never enough for the implied risks.

It always seemed to expect Willow to somehow instruct a target to grow their potential so far as to go even beyond her own, and to also aid him in a moderately dangerous war, but never provided her with adequate compensation. That was the nature of the market, of course, and she knew it. There was always war in the Abyss. It no longer drove up the prices for mercenary work as it once had.

The latest version of the contract offered to her had changed that, just before the end of the war. The request was changed only to follow the same target, tailing them and reporting their activities. If he was assailed by anyone too powerful to handle on his own, Willow was to reveal herself and assist, but that was the only time that she was supposed to reveal herself. Willow had been provided an initial promise of over 100 mana gems, which she had hastily stowed away, with the promise of 400 more if she was able to report back after saving the target’s life or tailing him for three months with no incidents. Willow's mana reserves had never been particularly talented, but as a highly-valued mercenary with plenty of hard-fought enemies, she had long since learned to substitute mana for sleep. Following a target who had apparently never learned such a valuable technique was practically child's play. Not that she had needed it.

Usually she was hired to follow people with at least the tact to bother with an anti-scrying spell or to occasionally check behind them. Some of the boy’s companions seemed to have that awareness, that alertness, but it was still a simple matter to blend in with the crowds. Particularly with the blonde one about… she seemed half-blind whenever Willow tailed them as closely as she did at the markets. How she was so accurate with the firearm when “rescuing” her from the Cabal was beyond her. So after a few sleepless nights spent watching an empty home, Willow allowed herself to doze off, and not once had she ever been awoken by the wards she set around the boy’s house.

He wasn’t exactly a night owl, or so it seemed. He barely even left the house, in fact. The most frustrating thing for Willow was how he made his aura vanish completely to her wards and the equipment her benefactor had provided - sometimes he remained obscured for days on end. Yet he always appeared again… Willow never noticed any others driving by the house or searching the neighborhood, so she wasn’t entirely sure the purpose of shielding one’s home, but only part of the time… did he have a Barrier set up in his home? Her tests and magical spectrum analyses said no, and so his purpose for those long disappearances remained a mystery. Aside from that, her own research and the information granted by her benefactor was quite thorough.

Willow had even done enough research on her target's enemies to allow herself to be captured at one point. Granted that the insanely driven necromantic urges of one of her fellow prisoners had nearly resulted in far more personal damage than she would have preferred… but that was a fault of her captors' security and her own lax and thrill-seeking behaviors, not her target's or her benefactor's particular urges. Willow could have easily continued following in the shadows of her target had she been willing to ignore the sub-contract’s bonus to report the end of war occurrences to her benefactor.

But the more she thought of retiring early and establishing herself as a proper player in the Abyssal marketplace, buying and selling weapons to those most interested in **** and destruction, the harder she had found it to resist every single opportunity her benefactor provided her. Willow wished that she would have had a better understanding of who was offering her these anonymous contracts. Whoever they were, they were absolutely loaded, even by the standards of the Abyss. Never had Willow received so many mana gems for so little work. Her instincts screamed the suspicious nature of such a contract, but her dreams of becoming a world-infamous arms dealer overpowered that suspicion every time a new shipment of crystals arrived.

Besides, by the time she had agreed to spy on this gentleman in the first place, Willow had little to worry about in terms of risk. In addition to the equipment that her benefactor had provided for tracking, they had even offered an up-front bonus - an enchanted amulet that contained a shielding spell, designed to activate when Willow was hit by a powerful enough spell. The inscriptions and one of the Market’s magical appraisers verified the story, and aside from the time she had allowed herself to be captured, Willow had not taken it off since she began her task of trailing her target.

The few times that John did leave his home, it was only to visit the Order, the Moon Clan, or the Abyssal Market. All three of those were locales which Willow had long since scouted out to one extent or another, minus the interiors of that well-guarded Moon barrier. No matter how tempting the bonuses were, Willow refused to come anywhere near the Moon Clan or the Order - the Cabal had been fractured and failing when she’d allowed herself to be captured. The Order and the Moon Clan were as strong as ever, and both had figures strong enough to more than handle Willow, even with her new protections.

While Willow had initially expected an angry message accompanying a reduction in reward for her contract the first time she reported a failure to tail John inside the Order’s halls, she was shocked to find that nothing had decreased the reward. No bonus was delivered, but her benefactor never even contacted her to express annoyance. The only change in direction was to report more often - at least once a day, rather than weekly summaries. The daily summaries were also required to show she had knowledge of his whereabouts any time he wasn’t within direct eyesight.

So as her target exited the Abyssal Market, Willow found herself beset with exasperation rather than relief. She had already purchased enough items to track aura and mana residue outside of the stakeout location setup she had near his home, but she regretted each use of such items. It meant a dent in her profits.

So it was that Willow trailed hastily after the vanished mana of John Newman, hoping to avoid needing one of them. She had followed him almost as closely the last time he entered this area, and he had never shown the slightest sign of noticing her approach, so she felt perhaps a bit overconfident in her positioning when she finally exited the barrier.

It was that same overconfidence that brought forth the petulant curses when she realized her target's aura was nowhere to be found. The street was far too empty for him to have blended into a crowd against her keen gaze, but he was nowhere to be seen. Grumbling, Willow reached into her pocket and pulled out another magical device.

Willow mashed the buttons of her tracker several times, ignoring the concerned looks of mundane passersby as she fiddled with the AurAligner v1.195 to try to trace the signal she had been following for nearly a week now, trickling in a pinch of mana dust to fuel it. Unfortunately, although she had settled into her own routine, her tracker seemed to have a mind of its own. As soon as she exited the Barrier, it traced a brief path forward, then started to go haywire, lighting up most of a block.

"Tsk, typical Abyssal independent," Willow mumbled under her breath, following after the signal as best as she could. "How do you survive this long without even learning to hide and minimize the signal of your Barrier? Such a pain in my ass though. Now I have to see what you’re doing, and-"

Willow cut herself off as she entered and saw someone behind the counter looking quite confused. She continued inside, grinning and nodding toward the shopkeeper in front of her as she entered what appeared to be a rather high-end store for board games and tabletop components. The man seemed almost shocked to have her within his store, following Willow far more closely than she would have liked. It made entering the Barrier she could tell was lurking around her difficult, but not impossible. No matter how **** the shopkeeper was, Willow had dealt with enough mundanes to know their limits. Taking a sharp turn around a section of shelving, Willow initiated a Barrier entry before he could catch up with her. Willow took a deep breath of air, finally free of Axe body spray---

But not free of the blade now pressed against her throat. Blood trickled down Willow's throat thanks to the inaccuracy of her opponent, the sword pressed against her throat pressing just a bit too tightly to not harm her. Unless he had no care for her safety, that is. Willow felt a bittersweet smile crossing her face, almost subconsciously. The man she had been following now stood before her, gripping a blade that was pressed firmly against her jugular. Behind him stood two women, their eyes as cold as steel and as fiery as the flames of hell themselves, each standing at attention and ready to assail her at the slightest sign of attack.

"Well, then… John Newman, is it? You're not as oblivious as I'd thought."