CHAPTER ONE
Some days you wake up glad to be alive. Some days you wake simply glad not to be dead. Today was still up for grabs.
I was prone on th e ground at a frustrating stakeout in Rwanda for the IR Agency, as I shoved my waist-length braid out of my way and stretched against the powder-fine earth; the scent of dust, old death and charcoal-fueled fires layered over the early morning tang of eucalyptus trees.
I was Alexis “better call me Alex” Noziak, part witch, part shaman and a long way from home. Home being Mud Lake, Idaho.
How the hell had I ended up here?
T he IR Agency—I for Invisible, R for Recruits—we were all new to the world of counter-intelligence, all committed to making a difference of sorts, plus we possessed talents and skills—some acknowledged, some unacceptable—that allowed us to work on a level apart from our all-human counterparts.
Our official job was to infiltrate an arms smuggling meeting and secure enough information to bring the smugglers, arms-dealer and insurgents before an International Tribunal. There was something about the individuals behind this meeting that gave Ling Mai, our director, the idea that this would be a great chance for us to stretch our wings.
By the Great Spirits, I knew we needed the experience.
It hadn’t been long since a few exceptional humans started recognizing how truly fragile their existence on earth was, or how many among us weren’t fully human. We deal with magic every day—electricity, flight, medical technology. We didn’t care how it worked, but only whether it could help or hinder us.
As a species though we’d mostly ignored that non-humans walked among us. Shifters, fairies, vamps and demons--and those were just the tip of the iceberg. Some were benign, if left alone, but many were pure predators. Evil disguised but active, and more and more active in some parts of the world .
So the Invisible Recruit Agency was born. Humans, and mostly humans like myself, against preternaturals and non-humans finding a way to co-exist in the world.
I possessed a dual gift, being both born to magic and shamanism. One of the ones willing to fight to hold the world together, and maybe even improve, our human condition.
This op was a fly-by-the-seat-of-our -pants mission inserted between the last one where I’d gone head-to-head with a certain sexy warlock and got his preternatural and nasty cousin killed, and the next mission, which involved tracking down my brother who’d been kidnapped and supposedly still held in Paris.
Sounds glamorous. It wasn’t; but the need to help my brother was driving me to get this current mission wrapped up . So here I was, with five teammates, isolated in the heartbeat of Africa, going after a gun-smuggling SOB.
It was that the smuggler—or one of his associates-—was doing more than simply selling guns to the highest bidder. He was pitting tribes and factions against each other, to the point that everyday people who were struggling just to survive were now tinder-primed, ready to resort to the genocide that rocked this part of Africa not all that long ago.
The only guy on our team —M.T. Stone, and the only member who didn’t appear to have any otherness about him unless it was his do-or-die approach to life—was the infiltrator into the core of the smugglers, while the rest of the team acted as backup. We didn’t have enough experience to do much more.
Stone, who was our Agency instructor and as scary a dude as you’ve ever met, my IR teammates, Vaughn, Jaylene, Mandy, Kelly and I, each of us came from an ordinary background, one that made it easy for us to blend in where other undercover operatives—trained in law enforcement or as federal agents—still stood out like cop cars in a parking lot.
We didn’t bring a lot of training as operatives, but what we did bring were abilities beyond the average human; Jaylene was a psychic, Kelly could turn invisible, Mandy was a spirit-walker and Vaughn,
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