“Electi,” Sofia said to the seemingly normal stretch of rocky hillside. A slight groan sounded out, and then, a small door in the hillside opened. Sofia quickly stepped inside, and the door groaned shut behind her. She shivered as the cool air of the rocky tunnel hit her, and she wished she’d had time to go home and change out of this blasted suit before coming here. She’d seen Leif looking at her suit with mild disdain, which amused her. If only he knew that she hated dressing in suits as much as he apparently hated seeing them. But Sofia had a part to play—the role of a dutiful High Council audit agent. And a prim and proper suit was the required costume for that role, so Sofia wore it.

Here, in the Dark Warriors’ meeting room, there was no dress code. As Sofia walked into the main area of the secret cave, she saw shifters and wizards wearing everything from full suits to ratty jogging pants. No one cared about your clothes here. They cared about what you could do for the cause of dark magic.

Sofia smiled brightly at the wizard who stood at the front of the room. He did not smile back.

“You’re late.”

“Sorry, Vincent. I got caught up at the Dragon Utilization Department. Leif Redding isn’t easy to deal with.”

Vincent frowned at Sofia, but then merely waved for her to sit down. He cleared his throat and looked out across the small crowd again. “As I was saying, we need to be more careful about the paper trails we’re leaving behind. Another document that aroused suspicion was left behind at the Advocacy Bureau this morning. There is no reason for any of you to be writing down anything related to the Dark Warriors. Please make sure you’re making all of your notes in our encrypted, password protected digital portal. Now…”

Sofia wished she could roll her eyes, but she was already in enough trouble for being late. She didn’t want to draw any more attention to herself. The beginnings of these meetings always seemed to drag on forever, though. And Vincent was always saying the same things: warning about paper trails, pushing for higher recruitment numbers, and chastising everyone for taking too damn long to get their jobs done. As though infiltrating the major Torch Lake government divisions with dark magic should have been as easy as sneaking into a six-year-old’s birthday party.

Sofia could not deny that Vincent had smarts. But he also had a horrible temper and zero patience. He wanted things done in a week that would realistically take a year to complete. His ranting impatience made the meetings nearly unbearable, but Sofia did her best to keep a respectful expression on her face.

After all, she should be grateful for Vincent’s impatience—because that impatience would be his downfall. The man acted impulsively when he wanted something badly. That’s how Sofia had been drawn into this circus. Vincent had wanted an audit agent on his side, and he had recruited Sofia without fully vetting her. If he’d taken time to get to know her fully, he would have known that she would die before she would practice dark magic. He would have known that he had unwittingly recruited a High Council spy.

Of course, he didn’t know. He prided himself on how quickly he had found Sofia, and he seemed to think it was appropriate to scold Sofia twice as much as all the other group members, just because she was “his” find. Sofia suffered his insults with as much grace as she could muster. She would have the last laugh, and that knowledge kept her going on nights like tonight, where she was forced to sit and smile like she actually supported the revival of dark magic.

Vincent droned on and on from the front of the room. He was surrounded by two wizards and two bear shifters who served as his personal security guards. Sofia knew he would have loved to have a dragon shifter guarding him, but dragon shifters were notoriously difficult to corrupt with evil. That’s part of why Vincent was so interested in what went on at the Dragon Utilization Department. He wanted to know if there were any dragons there who might be convinced to join his cause, and he wanted to get rid of any dragons who weren’t.

“Sofia!”

The sound of her name broke through the monotony of the meeting. She looked up to see Vincent watching her expectantly.

“Well? Would you like to update us on your progress?”

“Uh, sure.”

Sofia stood and made her way to the front of the room. She knew better than to try to quickly give her report from her spot near the back. Vincent insisted that anyone speaking up in a meeting needed to do so from the front of the room, and he threw a temper tantrum if someone tried to bypass that rule.

Sofia cleared her throat and looked out over the crowd. The Dark Warriors seemed to grow every week, a realization that made her feel sick inside. After the horrors of the Great Dark Magic War, she couldn’t understand how anyone would want to be part of a dark magic movement. She wondered, as she briefly studied the faces, whether anyone else in here was a spy for the High Council. For safety and security reasons, she was not privy to the identities of any other spies. Still, it would have been nice to at least know she wasn’t alone. If there were other spies here, though, they were doing a good job of playing their part. None of the eyes looking back at her were particularly friendly or encouraging. Sofia smiled as bravely as she could, and began to speak.

“I managed to secure an audit job based in the Dragon Utilization Department. Getting this job was a big victory in and of itself, because any jobs that involve working with the dragons are highly sought after, and I’m still considered a junior auditor.”

Sofia paused a moment to let her words sink in. The truth was that she had been given the job because she was a spy, and the High Council knew she needed the job in order to make herself invaluable to the Dark Warriors. Under ordinary circumstances, a junior auditor would have had less than a one percent chance of a job like that. Vincent didn’t need to know that, though.

“And?” Vincent piped up impatiently. “Did you manage to actually help our cause over the course of the week?”

Sofia forced a smile on her face again, and nodded. “Yes. Observing Leif Redding and his associate trainer, Clint Wallace, gave me some invaluable information on these two dragons. I have uploaded a full report to our encrypted database, but suffice it to say that neither of those two dragons are likely candidates for recruiting. They are, as is typical of dragon shifters, obsessed with honor, and with guarding Torch Lake against dark magic.”

Vincent let out an exasperated sigh. “That doesn’t sound like it’s very helpful to our cause.”

Sofia resisted the urge to roll her eyes at him. Instead she kept smiling, and put an expression of sorrowful concern on her face. “It’s not the outcome we would have hoped for, true. But it’s still helpful to know what we’re dealing with. Once I determined that Leif and Clint were unlikely to be convinced to join us, I turned my attention to the newest dragons in town, the trainees Seth and Evan.”

“And?”

“They are also not good candidates for recruiting. However, the good news is that they are not yet sold on the idea of moving to Torch Lake. If we can convince the High Council to cut their training short and send them out on a mission right away, then we can probably keep them from moving to Torch Lake permanently.”

“Hmph,” Vincent replied.

Sofia waited while Vincent considered the matter. Another thing she’d learned the hard way in these meetings was that Vincent did not like to be interrupted while he was thinking. He expected everyone to always realize when he was thinking, which wasn’t an easy task. But he expected a lot of things that weren’t easy tasks. Sofia had gotten somewhat used to his overblown expectations.

Sofia hadn’t wanted to suggest to Leif that the dragon trainees be sent on a mission early. For one thing, she knew that saying it was for budget reasons made her look like an idiot. Leif’s point was well-taken: the High Council had paid out millions to get dragon shifters to come to Torch Lake. Why in the world would they balk over the expense of a few more weeks of training? But Sofia wore a hidden camera and microphone so that Vincent could review her work as an auditor if he wanted to. She needed to act like she was actually trying to do things to help the Dark Warriors’ cause, like convincing Leif to send the dragon trainees out early.

“And what are the odds of the High Council listening to your advice to cut training short?”

Sofia hesitated. “I’m, uh, not quite sure.”

“An educated guess, at least?” Vincent snapped.

“Right, well, they trust the auditors a great deal, so if I say I think they’re ready and that getting these guys finished with training will open the door for more dragons to come to town, they might take me up on the offer.”

Sofia actually wasn’t sure whether the High Council would want to send the dragon trainees off on a mission right away. On the one hand, the High Council wanted to do whatever they could to give Sofia credibility with the Dark Warriors. But on the other hand, they wanted to do everything they could to keep more dragons in Torch Lake, and Sofia had been telling the truth when she said that she didn’t think Seth and Evan were sold on Torch Lake yet. A lot of dragon shifters weren’t ready to settle down in towns with wizards after the Dark War, and Sofia wasn’t sure she blamed them. She herself sometimes dreamed of moving far away to a human town where no one knew that magic existed, and she could act like a normal, everyday non-wizard. But she knew she would never follow through with that dream. No matter how hard things were in the wizard-shifter world, Sofia felt a duty to do what she could to hold back the forces of dark magic.

“Well, I’ll expect you to convince the High Council that ending training early is the right thing to do. Understood?”

Sofia nodded at Vincent. She kept a pleasant expression on her face, but inside she was seething. Vincent stood up there and barked orders like he was asking her to do something as simple and easy as picking up coffee for him from the local café. Under normal circumstances, there was no way the High Council would listen to a junior auditor’s recommendations to end dragon training early. They would only listen to her in this case because Vincent would use any perceived failure on Sofia’s part to accuse her of not being loyal to his cause, and the High Council needed Vincent to trust her.

As Sofia sighed with relief and went to sit down, Vincent continued on with the next item on his agenda. He had no idea how the government in Torch Lake worked, but that was probably a good thing. If he’d been a little more clued in, Sofia’s cover would have been blown long ago. But now, she lived to fight another day—and hopefully to take down this whole Dark Warriors operation. Dark magic would not gain a foothold in her town. Not as long as she still had breath in her body.

Still, she wasn’t looking forward to the conversation she was going to have to have with the High Council. They weren’t going to be pleased at the prospect of ending Seth and Evan’s training early. There was always a high price to pay, though, when you wanted to outsmart a dark wizard. Sofia just hoped the price would not go up any higher.