A couple of days later, I was perched on a power line across the street from an unassuming office building, home to Focus. Wizards, or agents, as they called themselves, bustled in and around the place, hurrying from one job to the next. There was certainly no lack of activity, and I hadn’t seen any slowdown since I had started watching the building the day before.
I stretched my wings in discontent. I had taken on the form of a sparrow, which had excellent distance vision and even sharper ears. I had been watching the activity, trying to spot one of several people, but none of them had shown up yet.
I tallied up everything I knew about the organization once more, keeping my eyes peeled.
There were about six hundred wizards working for Focus, though the real number could have been higher. They recruited young, mostly, which made sense. I figured that a young wizard going through puberty with access to power over the elements might be dangerous if that kind of thing isn’t taken care of quickly. Skinchangers were similarly trained young.
Each wizard was aligned with one of the elements when they grew up, which seemed odd to me. From what I had been able to scrape together between stories from my family and a few contacts who were clued in on the supernatural world, wizards of a certain age could only do magic with one element. Apparently there was some kind of tradeoff, though, because they were universally stronger than those who were younger, though whether that was age and experience or something to do with the way their magic developed, I wasn’t sure.
The younger ones, the ones who were trained but whose power hadn’t fully developed, were called initiates. They were on a kind of rotating apprenticeship, according to a skinchanger friend who knew a few wizards. They worked with the agents of different elements, trying to figure out what kind of job they’d do when they finished growing. I didn’t really understand all of it, but I knew what it meant: access.
Initiates were expected to travel between the different branches of Focus, doing different jobs and seeing different people. It might have been odd for an Air wizard to work with a Fire wizard, I reasoned, but not for an initiate to work with both.
I had… two-thirds of a plan. I was watching the building until I saw an initiate leave. Then I was going to follow him or her (there were an awful lot of pretty women coming and going, and apparently Focus didn’t discriminate) home, knock them out, take their place, and gather whatever information I could.
The fact was that I just didn’t know what was going to happen. I was completely in the dark about what kind of catastrophe was being planned, and unless I found out, I wasn’t going to be able to do a damn thing to stop it. The responsibility on my shoulders was severe, and it constantly pressed on me, creeping up when I least expected it. Every so often, I felt a jolt of fresh fear and apprehension as the enormity of the task and the consequences of failing it was swept into my thoughts.
So. Take the place of an initiate, infiltrate Focus, find out the evil plan, and then… stop it, I guessed. I wasn’t sure what I’d be able to do to stop a wizard from doing whatever he or she damn well pleased, but I wouldn’t be able to do anything unless I learned what it was I was stopping.
Hell. Maybe I’d just call the police or ATF and let them handle it.
Espionage was kind of my thing. I was good at it. I was confident that I could get inside eventually, maybe get onto a computer, copy whatever information I could find, and bail. What came after that, though, left me with the copper taste of fear in my mouth.
Or beak, actually.
I knew of three people who were definitely initiates, or who had been a few weeks ago when my friend last heard. I guess wizards felt pretty free to talk to people who already knew about them. Hell, my friend had pulled a group photo off of the guy’s Facebook page. Their names were even tagged.
God bless social media and the Information Age.
So I watched and waited, staring at the parking lot, waiting for one of my targets to appear.