Page 21 of The World She Never Knew Existed

“I don’t know. I asked, but Raf just said that he heard things around town. He was vague about it.”

“Do you think that he suspects that the poker games are something else?” Jesse asked.

“If he did, he didn’t give any kind of clue about it.”

“Hmm,” Jesse said. “I sure would like to know how he found out about them.”

“My guess is that someone has seen people coming into the store after hours and asked one of the shifters. The shifter probably just said that we play poker and it got around.”

“Why hasn’t anyone said anything about it?” Jesse asked.

“The person might not have thought anything about it. After all, we do use the poker games as a cover for the meetings. The person might have just thought that they were maintaining cover.”

“That makes sense,” Jesse said. “I do wonder if we need to be worried about anything.”

“I don’t know. Like I said, it didn’t seem like he was suspicious that the poker games were anything but that. I do think that it would be even more suspicious if we quit having them,” Dillon said.

“I agree with you,” Jesse said. “We just have to make sure that Raf or any of his men don’t have a chance to get in the back of your store and plant bugs. I know that I sound paranoid, but I can’t help it.”

“I don’t see that happening,” Dillon said. “I change the code on my alarm every three days and no one knows what it is. The alarm would trip if someone tried to get in when I wasn’t around. Don’t worry, you aren’t the only one who is feeling a little hyper-vigilant these days.”

“I might be getting too old for this. Maybe I should think about retiring to Florida,” Jesse said, half jokingly.

“Nah, you’d miss it here,” Dillon said.

“I don’t know about that,” Jesse said. “All the stress is going to give me a coronary.”

The rest of the day was quiet, with only a few customers coming in every so often. Dillon thought that he was about to fall asleep when Daniel came in.

“Hey, Dillon. How is it going?”

“Slow day,” Dillon replied. “How’s it going at the garage?”

Daniel owned a garage where he did everything from fix tires to rebuild engines. He seemed to have some kind of magical touch with vehicles because he could take a clunker that barely ran, make some adjustments, and it would go for another hundred thousand miles.

“I think that every tourist that comes to town is having car trouble. I barely have time to think,” Daniel said.

“That’s a good thing,” Dillon said. “Better than the opposite.”

“That’s for sure,” Daniel said.

Dillon told Daniel about the conversations that he had with Raf and Jesse earlier.

Daniel thought about it for a second and said, “I agree that we just keep having them. It would seem weird if they suddenly stopped after Raf said something about them. They do seem to know about everything that is going on in the city all the time. The Faisons are like Santa Clause. They know when you are sleeping, they know when you’re awake, etc.”

“You make them sound a little creepy.” Dillon laughed.

“They are,” Daniel said. “But let me tell you the reason why I dropped by.”

“I decided to take a quick break and go for a run up in the mountains. I came across some hunters. Two of them I didn’t know. The third was Crystal,” Daniel reported.

Crystal was a very vicious hunter who had worked for the Faisons for a long time. She had been involved in the battle between the hunters and shifters a few weeks ago. She had been injured during the fray. She was now even more determined to kill every shifter that she possibly could.

“I’m guessing that the two hunters you didn’t recognize are the new hires. The Faisons brought them on board a couple of days ago. One of them is an experienced hunter, who, according to Brent, will kill anything supernatural, whether they have hurt mundane humans or not. The other one is a mercenary who simply kills anyone and anything that the highest bidder pays him to,” Dillon said.

“That makes both of them very dangerous,” Daniel said.

“We need to keep a watchful eye out for them,” Dillon said. “We need to warn the shifters to be extra careful as much, as much as we can.”

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