Page 44 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

“Until this one mission, when a first-level master—that Barrio guy from Jersey; you remember him?”

I nodded, even though I did not remember him. And if he was first-level, I should have because they weren’t exactly thick on the ground. So, he was probably a screw-up or into some highly illegal stuff—and illegal by our Senate’s definition, not that of the local police—or else he’d have been at court instead of trading blows with lowlifes like Tony.

“Anyway, the boss had gotten into a . . . difference of opinion . . . with one of Barrio’s boys,” Alphonse remembered, “and I was sent to mediate.”

“With or without his head on a pike?”

Alphonse shrugged. “Depended on how reasonable he was willing to be. Which was not very reasonable, as it turned out, since his master was visiting him.”

“I thought you said masters didn’t back up their pawns,” I reminded him.

“They don’t unless said pawn ain’t one, and Barrio’s boy, a guy by the name of Fletcher, was working directly for the boss. He was pretending to be out on his own, so if he screwed up, the boss had plausible deniability. But he was under orders the whole time.”

“To do what?”

“Barrio had him giving fey wine to normies, getting ’em sloshed, and seeing if any latent magical abilities showed up. If any did, he held ‘em for Barrio, who sold ‘em on to some dark mages for extraction. It was a nice gig, too—the Circle gets all pissy when magic workers go missing, but if it don’t know they were magic workers?”

I scowled. That sort of thing wasn’t unknown and was one of the reasons why the many concoctions known on Earth as “fey wine” were banned. They brought out all kinds of latent abilities in the human population that would have never surfaced otherwise.

Most people with a witch as their six-times great-grandmother didn’t know it and acted like the regular old, garden-variety humans they believed themselves to be. But they weren’t regular humans, and nobody knew how many there were. Many of the old records had been lost through the years in wars and fires and what-have-you, not to mention mages fathering kids in brothels or through one-night stands and not knowing it.

As a result, magic blood was more common in the human population than the Circle liked to admit, mainly because they couldn’t keep track of it all. That was usually fine, as it tended to be recessive anyway. Right up until fey wine brought it out, that was, just in time for the newly minted witch or wizard to get grabbed up and sold to some dark mages, who sucked the power, and the life, right out of them.

That was even more the case these days since the Black Circle was on the other side of the war and needed all the weapons they could get. And all the magic it took to make them. And humans went missing all the time. . .

“Nasty business,” I said because Alphonse already knew all that.

“It was that night,” he agreed. “We showed up about a different matter, only to find a hundred or so freaked out people in cages, a couple dozen of Fletcher’s guys armed to the teeth, and Barrio the Bastard himself. He was there to take a new shipment and was not pleased about being interrupted.

“We were boned.”

“How did you get out of it?” I asked because obviously he had. Yet I didn’t see how.

A first-level master didn’t need Fletcher’s people to back him up, not when facing a group ranked at fourth or fifth level, with maybe a few strong sixes thrown in. And working with the Black Circle would likely end with Barrio’s head in a bag if the Senate ever found out about it. So, he had every reason to ensure that Tony’s men didn’t live long enough to tell anybody what they’d seen.

“It wasn’t fun,” Alphonse said dryly. “I lost five guys that night, and I only had six to begin with. Me and Sal were the two survivors, and she was disemboweled. I dragged her out of there, holding her guts in my hands while she was double-fisting a couple of semi-automatics and firing incendiary rounds from both barrels. Luckily, one of ‘em caught Barrio himself, and he went up like a Roman candle.

“Must have had a little too much of that “wine” he was giving the normies, and when one of her bullets ripped his gut open, it spilled like gasoline.”

I winced, but Alphonse smiled at the memory.

“His boys stopped to save the boss,” he added, “and I threw Sal on my back and ran like hell. And even after we got back to the farmhouse, when they told me she’d be okay, when I knew a vamp don’t die from shit like that, it didn’t matter. It changed things. You know what I’m saying?”

He threw me a glance, but it didn’t help.

Because no, I didn’t know.

He sighed. “Anyway, I anonymously reported Barrio, even knowing what might happen if he found out it was us. Or me, ‘cause Tony didn’t want to know. He was too scared to risk taking on a first-level master, even at the loss of five guys, and was holed up in the basement to wait it out.”

“What happened?” I asked, pretty sure that I already knew.

I had a feeling there was a reason that Barrio’s name didn’t ring a bell.

“Barrio had an accident a week later,” Alphonse confirmed. “Nobody knew exactly what happened, but everybody knew it was the Senate ‘cause they took his head. It allowed Tony to move in on Fletcher, making him one of his satellite houses. The fat man shut down the human trade soon after as it was too risky, and that was that.

“Only it wasn’t. Cause the next time I had a little errand, I left Sal behind. She was healed by then and well and truly pissed about me ditching her, getting all up in my face when I got back. But it wasn’t like she thought; I didn’t blame her for anything. She was the reason we got away that night, and the roasting she gave that bastard allowed the Senate time to finish him off before he came after us.”

“Then what was the problem?”

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