“HE’S DEFINITELY BACK in the country,” the seer said grimly. He swiveled his gaze, returning his boss’s stare. “We’re getting live footage now, if you want to see it.”

Charles barely hesitated, then nodded.

Loosening his tie from the meeting he’d just left with the National Security Council, where he still acted as “informal advisor” to the President, he clicked his fingers, motioning, seer-fashion, towards the largest monitor in the high-ceilinged room. It stood directly across from the dark blue leather couch he currently stood behind, and where he’d been leaning his hands when the seer asked the question.

While Charles waited for the seer to comply, his mind lingered on his last meeting.

It left him more annoyed than not.

That was a different set of problems though––problems that would be much easier to fix, presuming no one interfered. Problems considerably more straightforward than those relating to his niece and her maddeningly inflexible husband.

President Bradford Regent might not be the brightest bulb Charles had ever encountered, even compared to most humans, but he was relatively easy to manipulate. That was true even without having to rely solely on tricks of aleimi or Barrier constructs to nudge him towards the right decisions. Regent’s motivations were straightforward, as were his reasons for being mostly onboard with their plans.

Keeping him on message was the hard part.

That, and getting him to keep his mouth shut.

Already, he seemed to have convinced himself this whole thing had been his idea. He was beginning to actually believe the messaging Charles’ team had created about him, versus the reality of his role. Charles needed to remind the good President the true nature of that role.

He also needed to remind him just how easily he could be replaced.

Charles might further explain how potentially effective a political assassination would be, in terms of solidifying popular support among the people.

Clicking in dark humor at the thought, Charles unbuttoned the top few buttons of his shirt, taking another, more genuinely relaxed breath that time.

In the end, Regent was only a temporary tool.

Charles needed to remind himself of that fact, and not get worked up over the man’s antics, or his delusions of grandeur.

He was pulled from his thoughts when the live stream popped up on the monitor directly in front of him.

It appeared absent of sound at first.

Then the sound blared abruptly to life.

Calls and shouts of reporters filled the lounge area, along with traffic noise in the background, horns honking, pedestrians talking excitedly as they recognized Black’s face and build as he emerged from the limousine.

Charles watched Miri climb out of the limousine after him, looking overly thin and clearly elsewhere in her thoughts. She walked around to the back of the limousine, seemingly in rote, and proceeded to grab their bags. She’d only grabbed the first one, however, when one of Black’s employees waved her off, grabbing the bag’s handle more or less right out of her hand and smiling as he bent closer to her.

A second security agent behind him grabbed two more designer suitcases out of the trunk and placed them on the curb.

Miri watched them work, emptying out the rest of the trunk, a faint frown on her lips.

Then Black appeared by her side.

Charles hadn’t even begun reading the Barrier space yet, but he could practically see the protectiveness emanating off the tall seer’s light.

Frowning to himself, Charles watched his niece’s husband wrap a muscular arm around her, encasing his wife in his light, and more or less surrounding her with his body. Miriam was hardly a weak woman, but she fell into Black’s light and body with an ease that made Charles frown more.

Maybe to get his eyes off the two of them, he focused on the lines of security guards. Black’s logo was emblazoned on T-shirts that stretched across two rows of muscular backs. They held up their arms, holding off the crowd.

Most of those employees were human, but Charles saw at least four seers standing shoulder to shoulder with the worms. He knew Black had a lot more seers working for him now. It was bad enough that he’d gotten that Adhipan seer, Dalejem… he also had at least four other highly-ranked seers with combat experience under Syrimne d’Gaos himself.

Black had lieutenants of the Sword, for fuck’s sake.

The fact that a pup of his age had such seers answering to him would have been entirely ridiculous even if that young seer wasn’t Black himself––an immature, oversexed, ideologically inconsistent, irreligious mercenary who surrounded himself with worms.

That one seer, Yarli, was worth a king’s ransom all on her own.

Even without reaching out, Charles felt the construct Black’s seers had woven around Black’s building. He couldn’t help noting in some irritation that it was military-grade, and clearly contained Adhipan-like features, along with a number of features and connections he wasn’t familiar with at all.

Truly, he’d never seen a construct like it before.

He hadn’t even encountered one like it on Old Earth.

He had to assume that was the Bridge and Sword training, as well.

According to reports he’d gotten, which were nowhere near as detailed as Charles would have liked, that ex-Adhipan seer, Dalejem, was their primary construct architect, and therefore behind the unusual design. Charles’ infiltrators told him Dalejem was an unlikely recruitment opportunity, which irritated Charles even more, and not only because it meant he might have to eventually take him out.

Charles didn’t like killing his own kind.

He didn’t like killing his own kind even for a good reason.

He’d heard from his people that Dalejem, or “Jem,” managed to survive whatever happened to him in Thailand, despite how badly he’d been abused by those feral jungle humans. Damned stupid of Black, to risk his most highly-trained operative on two essentially worthless humans––human tourists, no less, who’d been stupid enough to get lost in the jungle, then captured by those deranged lunatics.

For Charles himself, it was a pity, really, that Dalejem survived.

It would have solved one of his problems, at least.

Although, if Charles were being fully honest with himself, he wouldn’t mind taking another crack at recruitment––regardless of his infiltrators’ assessments. If he could learn more about him, about his past, possibly even his religious beliefs, maybe he could find a way in.

Everyone had a weak point.

Everyone had something they wanted, something that motivated them.

For a lot of seers that was family.

At the thought, Charles’ gaze flickered to Black.

He watched the tall, dark-haired seer as he began steering Miri by the waist, still enveloping her visibly with his physicality and light as he walked her towards the glass doors of his flagship building on California Street.

His wife had been with him the whole time he’d been in Europe.

Of course she had been. Black would never go without her, regardless of the risk to her person. It wasn’t exactly the first time Black had put Charles’ niece in the direct line of fire of entire covens of vampires.

Scowling, Charles’ gaze flickered back to Miri.

He didn’t get too close, not with his aleimi at least. Miri, even more than Black, always seemed to know when he read her light.

He couldn’t help studying her intently with his eyes, however.

As he’d noted when she first stepped out of the limousine, she’d lost weight.

She’d lost too much weight.

Was that left over from the bonding? Or was there another reason?

The seer standing over the keyboard glanced back at him.

“I think that’s as good as I can get the image for now, sir,” he said apologetically. “They’re making it really hard to surveil the place… this camera was only able to be snuck in because the reporters were already there.”

“When did they arrive?” Charles said. “In the country, I mean. When did they land here?”

“They flew into SFO on one of his private planes just over an hour ago. Pretty much alone, from what we can tell, just him and his wife, plus a four-person crew. The team he had with him in Europe appears to have remained there; they’re continuing to work on the ground with law enforcement and local military branches in Germany and France.”

“Looking for Nick Tanaka?” Charles clarified.

The seer nodded, once. “From what we know, yes.”

“Any seers? In Europe?”

The East Indian infiltrator shook his head slowly, but not really in a no, frowning as he examined the data on his screen, a compilation of intelligence readouts from several different teams.

“We suspect they have at least two there,” he said after a pause. “But we haven’t been able to ID exactly who, so they might be newcomers, via the portals. Someone we never tagged and entered into the database when they came through.”

He glanced up at Charles.

“Just about everyone he had with him in Thailand, including his new seer military team, the refugees who defected to his side, and his human allies, all got back to San Francisco a few months ago. All but a few have been identified and accounted for by our infiltrators. All but a few appear to be living and working out of one of six main buildings, with the majority of the military and infiltration-trained personnel living at the two high-security buildings, highlighted on the map in blue. But we don’t have IDs on everyone yet. We especially don’t have IDs for anyone working outside the United States.”

A map appeared on one of the smaller monitors. The seer pointed at lit spots on a map of San Francisco, most of them blue and green.

“These are the structures where most of the seers appear to be housed,” he said, pointing out a number of the blue spots. “He has them broken out into various categories. The primary demarcations is the civilian/military split… meaning, the ordinary seers are generally housed together, and away from those with infiltration and/or military experience. He has some guards living with the civilians, presumably to keep them safe until they assimilate, and to make sure we aren’t actively infiltrating them. But most of the infiltrators are housed separately, under a different security designation.”

Charles gave the map a bare glance.

He would look at that in more detail later, when he didn’t have a live feed of his niece and her husband right in front of him.

He did look long enough to note the names and locations of the main buildings.

It looked like most of the core group lived at California Street.

That meant they now lived with Miri and Black.

Thinking about that, Charles tore his eyes off them a second time, scanning the list of security measures they’d already ID’d for the main building. He knew that list wouldn’t be exhaustive. Also, knowing his nephew-in-law, Black would add to that list now that he was back in town. The main security would come from the construct itself, of course.

That construct would be entirely useless against vampires, however.

Then again, Black seemed to think they were the enemy––not the bloodsucking monsters who’d tortured and abused him, stolen his people, abducted him, abducted his niece, betrayed him, lied to him again and again.

Charles’ leaf-green eyes focused back on the main monitor.

Leaning his hands on the back of the leather couch, he watched Black and his wife getting ready to enter the building, two of Black’s staff trailing behind them, both wearing concealed weapons, and pulling a trolley containing all of their luggage.

The limousine pulled away from the curb as Charles watched.

He frowned, his jaw clenching.

He found himself examining the other male’s living light, or aleimi, in more detail––Black’s in particular, although he’d already noted changes in Miriam’s light, as well.

Something was definitely different.

Some of that would have come from the bonding, which they’d clearly completed.

Charles fought to bite back his annoyance at that fact alone.

Delusional as it had been, he’d begun to hold out hope that bonding might never be completed, thanks to Black’s immaturity and his seemingly insatiable need to screw things up with his wife, right when they should have been consummating for real.

Charles had even begun to wonder if Black was sabotaging things between them intentionally, or if Miri was, or both of them together. Whatever the truth of it, he’d let himself believe Black might really fuck things up between them––as in, permanently fuck them up––before he managed to get Miri to fully agree to him.

It was a fool’s hope.

Charles had known it. He hadn’t been able to stop himself from entertaining it, though, however briefly.

Feeling his emotions roil around that end of things, he never lost his focus on the other male’s aleimic light.

The bonding being completed didn’t explain all of it.

It didn’t explain everything he was seeing.

Whatever was different in their light, in his light, Black’s specifically, couldn’t have occurred simply due to their being fully bonded to one another. Although, Charles supposed the bonding could have acted as a catalyst in some way, to other, more hidden changes. Perhaps Miri helped him grow beyond himself in this area, as well.

Charles slid into the Barrier, focusing his light more intently on Black’s.

Cautious, he moved closer to the other male, keeping his light totally still.

When he felt no reaction in the other to his presence, he moved closer.

Then closer.

Then closer still.

He slid carefully past the younger male’s shields, into the edges of the light that coiled around his body, and the aleimic structures that lived over Black’s head.

Charles didn’t know exactly how, or even precisely when, it changed.

He didn’t feel anything different, in terms of the quality of light. He felt no prior warning that he was about to get too close.

At some point he did get too close, though.

In retrospect, it was more like he’d stumbled over a tripwire in the jungle, like he or his people might have left for Black back in Vietnam or Guatemala. Only, instead of a click and an explosion, the difference crept up on him, coiling around him silently, seeping into his light.

The realization of it crept up just as gradually.

Until all at once––he knew.

He was no longer the hunter. He was the hunted.

The difference alarmed him so much, shocked him so much, he froze. He did so initially out of pure instinct. Looking back on it, however, it struck him that his heeding of that silent warning may have saved his life. He had no way of knowing how or why he believed that, either, but it felt true. Whatever that thing was… it could have killed him.

What happened after that defied logic––defied any experience he’d ever had with another seer inside the Barrier, in this world or the world he’d left behind.

A thick black wall of no-light rose up.

It slid up liquidly, towering high above him, a tidal wave of dark, dense presence.

Charles’ breath compressed in his chest.

He could only stare up at it, knowing nothing he did would allow him to move out of its way. That presence enveloped him before he could recover, before he could catalogue it in any way. Rather than the gradual, subtle tendrils he’d felt before, this thicker presence wrapped into him, invading him, slicing into him and pulling him apart like he was a frog pinned to a dissection board. It proceeded to systematically assess him, swimming into his light, filling every crevice and crack, leaving no part of him unexplored.

It examined his mind, the structure of his light, his thoughts.

It proceeded next to his matter, to his very atoms, the building blocks that made up his person.

It took him all in, inhaling him in a matter of seconds.

Charles stared into it, lost, bewildered––

Scared out of his goddamned fucking mind.

The presence was like a highly-intelligent machine. It felt like a machine mixed with some kind of feral animal, and possibly a mad scientist.

Whatever it was, he feared it might kill him just for irritating it.

He felt hints of Black in whatever it was, but a Black that had been turned inside out and remade with different materials, or perhaps bred with a whole new species. This version of Black felt like another being entirely, one nothing even remotely like the Black he’d known, especially back when he last had intimate access to his light––back when Black was even younger than he was now, and Charles first encountered him in the jungles of Vietnam.

Even so, it felt like him.

It fucking felt like him.

It contained flickers and flavors of that Black he’d known, despite its utterly alien and terrifying consciousness.

Whatever it was, whoever it was, fighting that thing was out of the question.

Resisting it in any way was out of the question.

Charles was powerless under it, and he knew it instantly, without having a single fact or conscious awareness to support that knowing. He knew it the instant that, that… thing that wasn’t really Black, yet somehow was Black… actually touched him.

He could only submit.

He could only hope he didn’t piss it off.

There was no time to even to call for help from his military infiltrators. There was barely time to realize what was happening to him. That abyss-like presence completed its assessment, contemplated what it found.

There was a moment of silence, a tilting jerk––

Then, whatever it was, it was through with Charles, too.

That teeming wall of black slammed into him.

It felt like a sledgehammer to his body and light.

Charles was forced out of the other seer’s light––out of the Barrier––before he realized what was coming, before he had any idea of what was about to hit him. He wasn’t pushed out so much as shoved, hard, by a hand made of cement and opaque shadow. It felt like being tossed casually off a cliff. He didn’t have time to brace himself, to even try to break his own fall.

In a split second, every hint of the other’s presence vanished.

Miri’s presence vanished, too.

Charles blinked, his eyes struggling to focus.

He found himself panting, sweating, fighting to breathe, his heart hammering in his chest as he gripped the back of the leather couch. He didn’t realize how far he’d been pulled out of his body by that thing until he found himself back inside it. He couldn’t breathe. He seemed to have forgotten how to breathe, to work his jaw, his hands, his body.

He hadn’t been knocked out of the Barrier so completely since he was an adolescent.

Maybe not since he was a child.

His mouth tasted coppery, like… blood.

He was tasting his own blood.

“Sir?” The lab tech stared at him, alarm in his silvery-gray eyes as he rose swiftly to his feet. “Sir! Gaos! What happened? Are you all right?”

The male seer was already moving towards him, but Charles turned away, straightening with an effort as he fought to catch his breath. He waved the other male off as he pulled a handkerchief out of the pocket of his suit jacket, unfolding it with a snap of his wrist.

Fighting embarrassment, anger, fear, a confused disbelief… he glanced at the mirror on the wall across from the main monitor.

His reflection looked like something from a horror film.

Blood ran freely from his nose and ears, staining the collar of the white shirt he wore.

He hadn’t imagined it.

He’d been tasting his own blood.

Wiping his nose and mouth with the handkerchief from his breast pocket, he turned to his ears next, staring at his reflection in the mirror as he cleaned himself up as best he could. He still found himself caught somewhere between competing reactions of disbelief, anger, shock.

“What happened?” the other seer asked again.

Charles’ jaw hardened. He finished wiping his left ear before he glanced at the tech.

“Never mind.”

He turned back towards the main monitor, still sniffling blood through his nose, still swallowing blood in the back of his throat.

The images of Miri and Black were gone.

His niece and her husband had vanished inside the mirrored windows of the luxury business and residential complex. The crowd of reporters and onlookers were already dispersing from the front of the building, most of them simply walking down the street, either to continue their days, or to return to their media outlet offices downtown.

Charles watched them go, his jaw hardening as he clutched the blood-soaked handkerchief in one hand, his knuckles white.

He needed to go talk to his infiltrators.

He needed to talk to his infiltrators right fucking now.

CHARLES SQUINTED, LEANING over the back of an office chair occupied by a female seer with dyed, wheat-blond hair done up in tight braids. Peering over her shoulder, he read the summary on her monitor of the first few jumps her team had completed.

Nothing. They hadn’t learned a damned thing.

Even Jalisa, the blond seer in front of him, his jump squadron lead who boasted one of the most impressive sight-ranks on his team, couldn’t see past that wall.

Like most of the female seers now working for him, Jalisa was new to this version of Earth. She’d arrived here when the portal doors opened, less than a year earlier.

Charles couldn’t help but be relieved the female problem had been solved for his people on New Earth, in addition to the low-numbers-in-general problem seers had suffered from since he’d arrived here. He knew every male seer from his original team was more than a little relieved, as well. All of them, pretty much without exception, had been indulging with their newly-arrived sisters as much as they possibly could.

Many hadn’t had sex with a female seer in decades.

For a few, it had been more than one hundred years.

There’d been a handful of fights, of course, along with a number of crushes and fixations. Some of that was still going on, with the most recent exploding in the infiltration barracks just that afternoon. There really was no shortage of females at this point, but the scarcity mentality was proving tough to shake, particularly in some of the younger males.

Since more female seers came through those doors than male, Charles hoped things would calm down relatively soon.

Part of the issue was that normal sex and breeding habits had been disrupted on this version of Earth since he’d arrived here. A fair-few male seers explicitly wanted not just sexual partners, but mates––and children.

Many felt they’d been cheated of such things for too long already.

Others felt it was their duty to propagate the race.

Still, the sudden influx of females was a damned distraction, truthfully. Charles hoped things would return to the usual levels of chaos and conflict that existed in seer sexual culture soon, hopefully within the next few months. In order for that to happen, the males would need to stop feeling like they needed to make up for lost time.

Charles suspected the psychology was more the issue than the sex itself.

Most of those males had resigned themselves to the likelihood they’d never have another female seer for a partner––or have biological children. While most had relationships with other male seers, in addition to female and male humans, Charles knew the inability to have children would have bothered a lot of them.

He’d had a hard enough time keeping them away from Miri.

Once they found out she was biologically compatible with full-blooded seer males, she became a lot more interesting to a lot of them.

Luckily, after Solonik––and particularly, after what Black did to Ian––most of the male seers seemed to get the message that attempting to poach Miriam from Black wouldn’t end well for them. Charles made it clear he wouldn’t support such a move, either. Although he was loathe to acknowledge Black and Miri’s bond, Charles promised his niece, his now-deceased brother, and himself that he wouldn’t get in the way of Miri and any partner she chose.

The promise to his brother, in particular, was one he couldn’t make himself break.

As long as she chose her partner freely, he was off-limits.

Charles had more than one occasion to regret that particular vow, but so far, he’d managed to keep it.

Until recently, he’d still worried someone might get past him and Black to get to Miri. After all, it happened once already, and although Solonik wasn’t exactly a normal seer, it wasn’t inconceivable it could happen again.

Now, his male seers had other distractions.

Of course, the seer females who came through those doors were useful for more than simply their hirik pouches and their ability to have seer babies. A hell of a lot of them had worked in the West, and many were highly-trained infiltrators.

Jalisa was now the highest ranked seer he had.

Well… the highest ranked one currently in his rotation.

Jalisa gave him a sideways look.

She must have heard that.

From her expression, she’d caught some of his thoughts, at least.

She looked away at once, but soon after, feeling his eyes on her profile and the back of her head, she glanced up a second time, her dark, blood-orange eyes meeting his. Her expression and her craned neck pulled at the Nazi scar on her face, the same diagonal scar he’d seen on the faces of a lot of seers from Old Earth.

Hers was thick enough to confuse the lines of otherwise striking features, making them all look just slightly askew, and out of alignment with one another, right at the point where the white line bisected her face. The scar appeared to slightly drag down the lines of her cheek and eye on that side as well, along with the tilt of her full lips.

“You’re thinking about bringing him back for this,” she observed. “Solonik.”

Charles frowned, glancing down at her.

She’d heard more than he realized.

She also knew a surprising amount about their operations here.

He honestly couldn’t decide if he was annoyed or impressed.

He might need to bring her further into the upper echelons of his leadership team, sooner rather than later. He’d planned to do so anyway, based on her working sight rank alone, but he might have to speed up the security checks his team had been surreptitiously conducting on her since she first appeared through those doors.

“I’m thinking we need every resource we have,” he said, studying those blood-orange eyes. Exhaling then, he muttered under his breath, “…Even the crazy, intractable, and utterly unpredictable ones.”

Jalisa nodded, her expression carefully neutral.

“What about the new seer?” she said, her voice neutral. “The female from Black’s camp? Raven? I hear her sight rank is also high.”

Charles frowned. After thinking for a few seconds, he shook his head.

“Not yet,” he said. “Solonik might be crazy, but he’s damned loyal. I haven’t finished vetting her yet. For all I know, Black sent her here.”

Jalisa nodded, her expression unmoving.

Charles knew her sight rank was high enough that he likely wouldn’t know her thoughts unless she wished it, not without the aid of the construct and probably a few of his higher-ranked infiltrators. That knowledge made the look on her face essentially meaningless, as was the silence he felt on her living light.

“What about your niece?” the female seer said, her voice as neutral as her face. “With Solonik, I mean.”

Charles scowled.

Rather than answer her question––either the one she spoke aloud, or the one implied under it––he nodded towards the team on jump seats in front of them.

“What are they doing?” he said. “They’re not on the Black thing too, are they?”

Twelve seers lay in rows on modified recliners, eyes closed, heads, chests and arms hooked up with electrodes. Those electrodes should be monitoring their vitals, and also connecting the individual team members to one another, as well as providing a partial feed into the rudimentary recording devices Charles’s team cobbled together from tech they were working on replicating from Old Earth.

Jalisa’s eyes flickered to the rows of infiltrators.

“No. They’re still with the Purists.” She looked up and back at him. “Do you want me to pull them off that? Get them to help out with the mapping of Black’s light?”

“No.” Charles shook his head, adamant. “No, we go forward with our plans. If I have to put a bullet in Black’s brain myself––or,” he muttered darkly. “More likely, a collar around his neck––I won’t let him interfere with the work we’re doing here.”

Jalisa hesitated. In the end, she only nodded.

“I have a connection to Kalri now,” she offered. “If you want to talk to him.”

Charles nodded towards the monitor.

“Please. Put it on the screen.”

She hit in a few keys, using the trackpad.

The face of an unusually European-looking seer appeared, wearing dark blue contact lenses. For a seer, his hair was cut short, more in the style of the humans around which he currently worked. He’d also dyed his hair blond, but not that unusual, near-silver shade of Jalisa’s braids; instead, his looked almost brown, and utterly nondescript.

The end result was shockingly close to the appearance of a Western human––a handsome, if completely unremarkable human male.

Granted, Charles could feel what he was. Any seer would feel it, providing they could see past his shields. Without looking from his light, however, Charles would have been fooled, even with the strange flatness of the seer’s artificially-colored eyes.

Of course, here, on this version of Earth, no one would know how unusual it was, to see a seer with such coloring and features. Humans here didn’t know about seers at all. Yet Kalri’s appearance still constituted a distinct advantage, especially in the southeastern United States and Texas, where he was currently posted.

“I can’t talk for long,” the blond seer said, grim-faced.

He looked over his shoulder, at the vast conference auditorium visible on Jalisa’s monitor. Glancing around for possible witnesses, he switched to Prexci, the seer tongue.

“…It’ll be starting again soon,” Kalri added, when he saw no one within earshot. “I’m the second speaker after the break.”

“How is it going?” Charles said. “Progress report.”

Kalri flinched. Until then, Charles hadn’t realized the visuals only went one way. Clearly, Kalri hadn’t known he was there.

The blond seer recovered quickly, nodding once, seer fashion.

It was a nod that verged on being a salute.

“Of course, sir,” he said politely, still speaking his native tongue. “We’re continuing to solidify and grow the group. The ideology’s still a little amorphous, but that’s mostly our fault, as we’re still on a bit of a learning curve here. We’re doing everything we can to nail it down, while still maintaining some flexibility.”

Glancing behind him, again looking for witnesses, he added,

“I’ve got most of our non-public-facing people working on construct maintenance and manipulation. That’s partly to accommodate the larger crowds, but also to ratchet up the tension, infusing more fear and violence, as well as more urgency and paranoia. I want to wean the team off pushing individual humans. Really, I’d like humans to take over recruitment of other humans. I’d prefer to relegate pushes to the leadership team only. I am therefore telling my team to adjust the construct and/or the rhetoric first… to fall back on pushes and overt light manipulation only if the other tactics aren’t working. I assumed you’d want the ability to manage most of these cells remotely, once we get them up and fully operational––”

“You would be correct in that,” Charles said.

Kalri gave another of those formal nods.

“Very good, sir. For the same reason, I have those of us who are public-facing focused on shaping the discourse and ideology as a whole, and creating an atmosphere that is more religious in nature and fervor. The hope is, more leaders will arise organically from the human ranks, once they are more fully radicalized within the ideology itself. If we keep their overall organization hierarchical in nature, the construct should adhere to that naturally.”

Charles nodded, lips pursed.

“A sound approach,” he said. “Have you begun introducing more information about vampires yet? What they are? How many there might be? Their agenda?”

Kalri nodded, again in the form of a near-salute.

“We have, sir,” he said. “We’ve floated a few test balloons during this conference alone. Conspiracy theories about ‘hybrid’ humans being built in government labs, mainly. We’ve got a few different versions, with one calling them a form of genetic ‘super-soldier’ being manipulated by outside governments. Another calls them the product of Satanic rituals being conducted by members of a global shadow government elite. We have a third set of stories that claims they’re aliens from outer space––”

Charles grunted, clicking under his breath.

“Which is sticking the best?” he said.

“Right now?” Kalri appeared to be thinking, or perhaps consulting data with his light. “Strangely, they seem to work best in concert. They tend to reinforce each other, sir,” he added after a pause. “The religious overtones work best for the original Purists, since that’s a large part of their rhetoric already… but it doesn’t explain the numbers as well as the other two. They tend to merge the three things into an ideology of its own, which works well for our purposes.”

The blond seer added,

“We figure as long as it channels their fears and aggression in the directions we want, let them come up with as much of the specific mythology as possible. It’s likely to stick better that way. Anyway, like I said, most of us down here are still learning about the human population on this version of Earth. We’d probably just screw it up if we got too rigid or controlling at this stage. We can nail it down later, once they’ve given it their own flavor.”

Charles nodded, thinking.

“Let me get back to you on that,” he said after a pause. “I’ll see if I can get some of our people up here working on narratives that could help. They know the humans in this world better. Maybe we can come up with some ‘evidence’ you could use, too… maybe get the President hinting about such things in his next major media appearance.”

“Thank you, sir,” Kalri said, exhaling in obvious relief. “That would be fantastic.”

The blond seer’s gratitude startled Charles somewhat.

The sincerity Charles heard there, the willingness to accept help without defensiveness, arrogance or resentment not only surprised him, it impressed him.

“And what about military recruitment?” Charles said. “Where are we with that?”

Kalri answered without hesitation.

“A lot of interest at the lower levels,” he said. “Military targeting has been a priority, sir. We’re currently looking at some bigger fish to bring over now.”

“They need to be willing to follow orders,” Charles warned. “At all levels.”

Kalri nodded intently. “Yes, sir.”

“…That means we absolutely need some hard-core believers at mid-ranks and above,” Charles added. “I’d like at least one general, preferably more, and preferably at least one who is high-profile, and respected enough that his people will follow him willingly. If the military doesn’t fall in line after the President declares himself a Purist, this will be all for nothing. The vampires will definitely counter-attack if they get wind of what we’re doing.”

Pausing, he added,

“We need them. Do you understand me, Kalri? I don’t want to make a move without the military in hand. We can’t rely on the President’s private security forces alone. C.I.A. and federal law enforcement won’t be enough, either. We absolutely need military support.”

“Understood, sir. Completely.”

Relaxing somewhat at the look in the other’s eyes, Charles nodded.

“Good,” he said. “Is there anything else you need from us?”

Kalri pursed his lips, thinking.

Watching him think, Charles relaxed still more.

He liked this seer.

Not only did he not resent an adjustment to his strategy, he didn’t blow off any offer of help. Moreover, he clearly grasped the larger strategy of what they were doing here.

Charles would be keeping the young infiltrator in mind for future postings.

“What about a meeting, sir?” Kalri said, breaking Charles out of his thoughts. “I know the President isn’t coming out publicly, not yet, but what if we arranged a meeting between him and a few generals? Maybe a few admirals, as well. We now have a list compiled of those who might be open to influence. The President is a war hero, sir. His word would go a long way with these people. He’s very popular in all of the branches.”

Charles frowned, turning this over.

“It’s a good idea,” he said. “But I don’t think a group meeting, given the likely press coverage and the questions it would raise––”

“Agreed,” Kalri said at once. “Private, one-on-one meetings would be preferable. And preferably outside D.C. Maybe he could come down here for a rally? Something that would provide a distraction, as well as an excuse for his being here? We can fly in those who are stationed in other areas.”

Charles found himself nodding slowly.

Again, he couldn’t help but be impressed by this young seer.

“I like it,” he said. “But not a rally. We need a bigger distraction than that. Arrange for a riot… a big one. We need to start scaling up the violence anyway. I want the rest of the country to start to worry about what’s happening down there. The precipitating event is up to you. As long as it’s something that will enflame more fear of outsiders and agitators. And, of course, vampires,” he added curtly.

Still thinking, he drummed his fingers on the back of Jalisa’s chair.

“We’ll send the President down to ‘calm things down,’” he said next. “We could use the distraction away from D.C. right now, anyway. We have a number of institutional and legislative changes we’d like to push through to lay the groundwork for stage two. That would be easier if eyes were focused elsewhere. If the incident got enough media coverage, we could likely speed things up significantly on that front…”

Still thinking, Charles added,

“Send out teams to capture a few more vampires––males, preferably, but either sex is fine, as long as they look like adults. I’d rather not use those we have in the labs up here. Get them front and center in media footage for the riot itself. Better yet, get them to kill a few reporters… or someone else relatively high-profile. Memories are short. The incident in Louisiana is almost six months old now. Let’s remind them what a vampire kill looks like. Try to do it in a way that won’t allow them to dismiss it as special effects or doctored footage. We’re not ready to have the President come out publicly against them either, but the more groundwork we lay, the easier it will be later.”

“Yes, sir.” A faint humor reached Kalri’s voice. “We can do that. Timeframe?”

“As soon as possible,” Charles said at once. “Just let us know when you’ve got everything set up, and we’ll take care of everything on this end.”

Behind the blond-haired seer, the doors opened at the top of the auditorium steps.

Humans began filing in, filling the auditorium with their murmurs as they flowed down the aisles. Within seconds, some began passing by where Kalri stood, close enough that he was glancing over his shoulder, distracted by their nearness.

“All right,” Charles said. “Clearly you must go.”

Kalri switched to English, his words colored with a distinctly Southern accent. “I’m afraid I must, sir. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your help.”

Charles nodded, once. “Very good work you are doing, brother. Love to you.”

The seer looked over, flushing in obvious pleasure.

“Thank you, sir––”

“Pull this off, and I’ll want you to join me here in Washington,” Charles added, his voice holding a denser pulse of light. “Excellent work. I mean it, brother. I am most impressed.”

The seer’s smile crept out wider. “Thank you, sir––”

Someone grabbed his shoulder, and the blond seer turned, looking into the face of a flushed, red-faced man wearing a brown suit and a cowboy hat. The auditorium was filling up fast, and growing noisy as people filed in, now crowding Kalri where he stood in the aisle towards the back.

Many of them were carrying signs, and wearing T-shirts with Purist slogans.

“Sorry, sir,” Kalri said. “I guess I’d better get back to it.”

Charles waved him off.

“Go. We’ll talk again soon.” He raised his voice when the seer got grabbed again by an enthusiastic supporter as they passed, hearing a cheer go up in the nearby crowd as more of those passing by recognized him. “Good luck today.”

The seer smiled, nodding. “Thank you––”

A whole group of young men shouted then, seeing Kalri standing there.

The screen went dark.

Charles straightened, still gripping the back of Jalisa’s swivel chair.

It struck Charles to check the seer’s online presence, now that he was considering him for a national role. He remembered now, hearing that Kalri and a few others had garnered quite a following on several social media platforms.

Kalri, in particular, was popular with young human males. It was partly how he’d been invited to this event. Unlike many of the others, he likely would have been invited even without seers manipulating things behind the scenes.

“He’s good,” Jalisa said, agreeing with his thoughts. “I think you’re right to bring him here. Maybe he could even run for office.”

Charles nodded, thinking about that, too.

It wasn’t a bad idea.

Maybe Kalri could even replace Regent.

Before any of that, however, Charles needed to deal with Black.

He needed to deal with Black so he didn’t fuck everything up once Charles started rolling things out for real.