The rest of the day was slow and silent. In a fsh of brilliance, Shilloh had realized that both she and her cover identity would be feelings pissed off. There was no need for clever lies and half-truths or trying to use as many words to say nothing as possible.

  She just let the anger fre back up, and it had been easy to be curt and not helpful when answering Jasque's questions. When he tried to pin her down and ask what she had noticed, making her senses more or less acute, she just said that being pissed off didn't help and gred.

  Eventually, they gave up, and an icy silence grew.

  Perfect. They hadn't paid enough for entertainment. She guided them to the spot with the bodies. They examined it.

  Then, it was a process of attempting (and failing) to track down what had done the killing before moving on to a brute-force, systematic search pattern.

  Shilloh struggled to keep herself firmly in her cold-yet-proffesional mode. It was hard. She had really started to get a good feeling about Wade. Hell, she even had seen a distant hope for Jasque. A very, very distant one. So distant that it would have required her to update her passport if she wanted to see it in person.

  There was almost a sense of betrayal. Wade seemed like someone she could be friends with, but in the end, this was business. Many professionals worked with people with conflicting beliefs, so she could too.

  As they searched, she called out when she sensed a stretch of nd cimed by the ominous presence. It was hard to find and got harder as the day went on. She was scrupulously careful to not point out when they passed over the territory a Were had cimed with their magic. That would give away too much.

  However, she made a point of stopping to examine one in eight of the Were territories she judged a regur person to be incapable of noticing just to keep the waters muddy without losing their faith in her and cutting her out of the hunt. Some Marks were so strong that it was impossible to step across their threshold without goosebumps and an instinctive warning of what you were doing. For the more subtle or weak stretch, she made a production of 'examining' the nd and spending a long time meditating on it before saying it wasn't the same presence.

  In some way, the theatre helped her get over her hurt feelings. The day ended with her calmer but still pissed, sad, and shocked by how disappointed she was in Wade. The whole thing was weird and made her feel a bit crazy. She could easily spend a week guiding people whose ideologies she found damaging and repugnant with only a mild sense of ennui. This really shouldn't be affecting her so much.

  But feelings were a fact, even if they didn't always tell the truth. Some part of her really had expected him to be better. That feeling existed in her, and there was nothing to do but acknowledge that while the feelings weren't rational, they didn't have to be: they simply were, and she was stuck with them. Her annoyance and exhaustion from constantly confronting that feeling were a reasonable and rational reaction to an unreasonable fact.

  She breathed out the annoyance and focused on moving with dignity, unsullied by annoyance.

  They got to their cars well before the sun started setting. Apparently, Wade and Jasque had commitments the next day, so no hunting, which was fine with her. She avoided giving them her personal number by saying she would call the Blightbane office she had gone to yesterday, and the secretary could pass on any information they needed her to have.

  Then she was free for the evening and all of tomorrow.

  It was weird.

  She could have gone home, read a book, and maybe lingered in a hot shower, but she felt too wired. There was also this lingering discomfort in her belly, a sense that now was the time to work, that she was being zy and missing something important.

  Trying to rex with her anxiety screaming in her metaphorical ear like that would be a nightmare. So she decided to do something useful with her time. Something that might actually make her feel better.

  ~~~

  She went to the retirement home where she usually volunteered and asked after her favorite person.

  The retirement home had not seen Agnes, That was concerning for them but entirely expected for Shilloh. The old woman had long since filled out whatever paperwork was required to let Shilloh pick up her meds and get access to her most recent information. So she grabbed the older woman's pills and took advantage of the city's WIFI to check her email. Sure enough, Agnes had typed out a message letting her of where she would be residing and a code to get through the front door.

  She tried to use her cell phone to call ahead, but the towers were down. Not surprising. It was the End-Of-Days (or so she had been told), the towers were usually out.

  It was a short drive, so she decided to roll the dice and drop by even though Agnes might not be home.

  The apartment complex was nice and very close to New Town.

  "Damn," she muttered to herself. It wasn't so fancy as to have doormen. But it was clean and in good repair, and the street outside was so tidy that she started to wonder if there was such a thing as an anti-homeless ward. If so, this was the pce that would use it.

  All the codes in the email worked, which was no surprise. What shocked her more was that all of the door's electronics worked. That was no small feat, with magic being so common. The stuff was invisible, hard to predict, and tended to spike ambient energies in small ways that were unnoticeable to humans but more than enough to disrupt the careful bance of a microchip.

  Despite that, the keypad beeped, the electronic locks clicked, and the elevators moved smoothly. She was several stories up the very expensive building when she finally saw Agnes DeSong.

  The woman was older but refused to say just how old. Her hair was white and fluffy, her skin full of smile lines and fine wrinkles. However, she was not so aged that her skin looked thin under the wrinkles. She wore a rge, bright, out-of-style neckce, a comfy cardigan, and a shirt with a cartoon Weiner dog on it that could have come from any tourist store in the world.

  From the slightly veiny back of her hands to the orthopedic shoes on her feet, Agnes looked every inch a robust and thriving grandma. And, to hear her tell it, she had been one long enough that she could smuggle a bag full of hard candy into any holiday (no matter how much of a stick in the mud her own children had grown up to be.)

  "Agnes!" Shilloh said, throwing open her arms.

  "Shilloh!" the older woman said, stepping out of her apartment's door to give her a hug that was warm, tender, and surprisingly strong.

  "Tell me, Deary, are those my medications from the handsome doctor at the complex?"

  "Yes, they are."

  Agnes waved her into the apartment, "Shame, there might have been time on Thursday for me to drop by for them. I could have asked him to examine me again," she said with a wink.

  "Oh, uhh, well…"

  The white-haired woman ughed, ushered Shilloh in, and told her that Clint, her boyfriend, didn't care if she wore shoes in the house. Still, she had added significantly. His house or not, there were standards, right?

  Desperately gd the older woman couldn't see the state of her own floors, Shilloh shucked off her boots and grinned, "Standards. Yes, of course. Sorry about the state I'm in. I just left the most frustrating job. Also, why have I not heard about this Clint before? I thought you were scheming to tie down that handsome doctor?"

  Agnes smiled at her and put on gsses that had been hanging from an obnoxiously beaded string around her neck. "You still love those horrible supermarket cookies, don't you? And believe you me, if I thought he could be tied, then I'd have him face down with a ball gag in his mouth already."

  "Agnes!"

  "What?" she called back, bustling to pull out a pack of cheap cookies and pce them on a lovely piece of china, "Clint already knows all about it. I've even had him try on a b coat once or twice to spice things up."

  Shilloh stomped over and pulled the pte and the bag of cookies from the old woman's hands.

  "Seriously. We haven't even been talking for three minutes, and you're already going on about ball gags again. Also! You're avoiding the question. How long have you been dating this one?"

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