Killing people in video games was easy. Sure, sometimes complicated moves were required, buttons to push, or intimidating bosses to beat, but the cleanup was nonexistent. People didn’t vanish or dissolve into dust in real life. An intentional lack of realism, perhaps?

Real life required being creative, and actual death was messy. People bled and left behind evidence like hair and skin cells with everything they touched.

“I don’t know what else you wanna know,” the guy whined. Tied to a chair with hemp rope, he wriggled, causing the bonds to cut into him and make him bleed. He had already sung a long sad tune of why he was what he was. Con didn’t care. He’d heard every excuse there was.

Traffickers were all worthless pieces of shit. Didn’t matter what or who they trafficked. Could have been drugs, people, magical artifacts, didn’t matter. They ruined lives. That was their job.

“Piece of shit,” Con said. Did he know what Con wanted to know? Didn’t seem like it. Con’s job as a retriever often led him down dark and twisting paths through the bowels of the shit-stained sewers of the world.

“I’m looking for a book,” Con said for the hundredth time. “On old magic. Has a sort of trinity looking thing on the cover.” Pictures, brief glimpses of it from aerial cameras or something faded on someone’s desk, led everyone to believe it was one of a handful of particular books hidden by the Dominion to limit witches and retain control of the entire world of magic.

“There are some books in a crate… it’s in a bunker. Haven’t cataloged them yet,” the man said, scrambling for something to tempt Con as he continued to struggle against the ropes. “Might be what you’re looking for.”

“Yeah? Where’s this bunker?” Out here, in the middle of nowhere Arizona, desert stretched for miles in every direction. It was why Con chose this location, away from everyone. His phone left at his hotel. The car was something that only halfway ran. He found it in a repo lot, and he’d hot-wired it. The car was old enough that it had none of those electronic parts or trackers featured in newer vehicles. Because getting rid of a body was the hard part of real life killing.

“I can take you there…” the man said.

“Naw,” Con said, feeling a chilly wind rise, contrary to the warm night. It always brought gooseflesh to his skin and a stir of something in his chest, like a ghost sliding through him. He wasn’t haunted, though sometimes it felt that way. “Tell me where it’s at. What do you need books for anyway? Can you even read?” The sand rose, the wind picking up tiny pieces and pelting them at the man like small shards of glass.

The man gasped, and lowered his head, spitting out dirt and sputtering.

“Freak windstorm,” Con said as he folded his arms across his chest. “Best start talking before we are both sandblasted.” The sand didn’t touch Con, a mild wind swirling around him in a protective bubble, gathering any shred of hair or skin cells of his own to him like static electricity. Years of practice, and a few specific runes tattooed into his flesh, clarified his power. He didn’t have to cast spells much anymore. He was a walking spell.

The man stammered and protested as the wind assaulted him with sand until his face was bleeding and he choked on mouthfuls of the stuff. Con waited. He’d rather be home playing games, snuggled with Sam, or fucking Luca. But he needed that book. He hadn’t failed a mission since he’d begun working for Hart and didn’t plan to start now. Getting rid of one more trafficker was a side bonus, like extra points in a video game’s secret Easter-egg quest.

“Fine,” the man wheezed through the assaulting wind. “I don’t know if the fucking book is there…” He rattled off a location, and Con let the wind die down long enough to ask a few more questions, refining. Something was still shady with this dude.

“What aren’t you telling me?” Con prompted. Was the place booby trapped? He was a doughy, boring incel type of guy who got off on stealing magic artifacts, selling them to the highest bidder, and shipping them overseas to be used in some war. This guy didn’t seem smart enough to build traps. Last time Con had encountered something like that, it had been over in the Middle East. Now those were some deserts. The loose sand, a thing of beauty to be used effortlessly by the wind.

“Nothing. Just let me go.”

That wasn’t happening. Con studied him another minute, watching the man continue to bleed and squirm. He offered no other information, but Con would use the lead he got, and hope it led to another, because this whole dog and pony show was for shit. He wondered briefly if Hart was fucking with him, sending him on some wild-goose chase. Con had studied the pictures; most of them old, faded, and yellowed, of photos taken half a century or more ago. They rumored it to be a book on necromancy, one of the forbidden magics.

Real? Or just a carrot to dangle in front of him? Con longed to talk to his sister again, but as a walking corpse? He didn’t wish that on anyone. Hart, the mob boss of the vampire world, made the rules and was always digging for new sorts of intelligence. A collector of magic and information rather than people. He took a lot of the darkest artifacts and books out of circulation, burying them in the depths of his vaults. Was that the plan? Con didn’t think so, but he’d also learned to not ask a lot of questions.

He turned and headed back toward the road. He had parked the old car a half dozen yards away from the trafficker. Evidence was the hard part of real life killing, Con thought again as the winds rose, punishing this time, like a hurricane in this tiny area of the desert. A freak storm it would be called by anyone watching radars. Massive wind gusts and pelting sand, wiping away all traces they’d been here at all.

He got no satisfaction from the kill, and since the whipping wind swallowed the screams up, they never haunted his sleep. Not like the early days when he could hear his sister in his head begging for help and he hadn’t known what the fuck to do about it. He’d been young, stupid, and helpless. He was none of those things anymore.

Wind stripped everything. Sand sliced through flesh, bone, and metal alike. The car deteriorated under the assault. Leaving only a shell of it buried beneath the shifting sand. The body of the trafficker, and even the thrift store, wood chair, broken down into nothing but shards. The wet pieces of what had once been a person easily absorbed by the bone-dry dirt, burying the remains deep. Out here in the arid heat of Southern Arizona, the sand wasn’t as free and wild as it was in places like the Middle East. Care had to be given. Bodies didn’t vanish in real life like they did in video games. But breaking it all into pieces no bigger than the sand itself and scattering the remains, made it hard for forensics to piece together the puzzle Con painstakingly tore apart.

Morning was coming, and he had an address to check out. He turned and found his backpack near the road, stripped out of his clothes and stuffed everything inside. The change was fast, the new moon easing the stretch of bones and flesh to feathers and talons. The pack was only a few pounds, but he had to work hard to find something he could lift in his other form. He’d crafted this bag himself, and it was getting worn with use, but still endured.

He stretched his wings out to a nearly six-foot span and snatched up the bag before taking off. His night vision in this form was sublime. Every desert critter a bright spot of heat on the run from him, but he’d rather eat a pizza than some rodent.

Finding the book came first anyway, an enigma into the pieces of the life beyond. The weight in his grip kept him flying low, and his brain focused on a very human fact even when he would have loved to fly the early morning thermals for a while. As a great horned owl, the night and early morning were peak times for play, and without Sam in his raven form to watch over, Con could have lost himself in the desert, dancing on the thermal glide of the winds. He could be an owl or a hawk and didn’t know any others who could pick their changed witch shape. His sister’s gift, now his.

Focus, he reminded himself, while the wind tugged at him in the swirling energy of freedom. Book, food, rest. Then maybe home to fuck his guys, if they were home. Hart kept them running all over the fucking world. Con wished they had something to bind them closer together.

Technically, he could submit to being Sam’s Focus, allow the formal bond that required biting and blood ties, but he still couldn’t bring himself to accept fangs piercing his skin. A thousand needles for tattoo art, but not fangs. How Sam didn’t hate him, Con wasn’t certain, but they worked around it, as Luca loved being bitten. Vampire bites and sex went together like peanut butter on toast.

Con landed some distance from the hotel, an off the highway rattrap that didn’t have all the modern conveniences of surveillance and tracking transactions. He had already paid for a week in advance in cash. No one would notice him leaving in the early dawn hours.

Con changed and tugged on his clothes, hating how tight they felt after a flight, and headed back to his room on two feet rather than on wings. Being human was heavy. Physically and mentally. As the owl, life was simpler. It was one of the few times he’d really understood Rou and his constant struggle to just be. The owl didn’t have conflicts about being bitten by a lover, or what the world found socially acceptable. It just owl’ed all day. The desire to shut his human mind down and just accept that simplicity always lingered when he changed. It would be easy to let it all go and just be the hawk or the owl. He sometimes wondered if there were witches who completely lost themselves to their shifted form and never returned.

Did the Pillar of Air have that struggle, Con wondered, as he knew Sam often battled the same need to fly. Why did no one talk about what it meant to be a high-level witch and the struggle for balance with their element? It couldn’t simply be because he didn’t have official Dominion training. Rou and Harding had full training, degrees in magic and all that bullshit. Both Pillars, despite being male witches, and Con knew they battled with the call of their element. It was some sort of unspoken bane not found on forums or even mentioned on the deep, dark edges of the web. Frustrating.

It was why Con always took the retrieval jobs for information. Sometimes it was just a jaunt to a library across the world to snatch a book hidden away. Other times it was breaking into the estates of rich witches, unlocking enchanted safes, and stealing all their sacred artifacts. Those were fun. Not because he felt he ever really found anything super informative, but because the Dominion witches were bitches who thought themselves invincible. Until Con waltzed into their homes and robbed them blind without leaving a trace of himself behind. Everyone thought earth had all the power. Wind moved earth all the time, shifting landscapes, building and destroying mountains. Everyone underestimated the wind. Con used that to his advantage.

He gathered his things, the last bits of his short stay, and got into the rental. The drive up to Vegas would take him a while. He mapped it out on his phone, the bunker just outside of Henderson. Hopefully, he could drop the rental off in Vegas and head home before noon. He didn’t do planes unless he had to. Overseas was necessary, but in the USA, he drove. And his real car was parked in a private lot in Vegas, ready for his drive home. Not a quick trip, since his main drag was in Minnesota. Sometimes they lived in Cali, sometimes in Italy, but with the fall sweeping in soon, he wanted to be home, visit his sister’s grave, and ready himself for the cold rise of winter.

His stomach growled, reminding him he hadn’t eaten. But there wasn’t much open at five in the morning, and he didn’t think a gas station burrito would be the best way to spend his day driving. Highway 40 was the straight shot up, but if he took 93 it would give him a chance to lose any suspicion that might arise from seeing him. Caution was key. He decided he’d weave a bit, make a few stops, and arrive in Henderson hopefully unannounced, find the book, and head home.

The plans of mice and men and all that…