The next morning was a mess. Like any good family, get together. Which again, wasn’t something Connor wanted to deal with. This was purely work. This strange clan of fae-blooded people living in the middle of nowhere was something to be concerned about. Or at least something his superiors should be concerned about. Your duty is to breed and then die for the gain of your elders and your betters. He shook his head. Tired.

  Kellan’s voice dripped down from the stairs like warm syrup gone bitter, quiet but impossible to miss.

  "Thanks for reminding me I have bad taste, Granny."

  Connor turned first, slowly. Kellan was barefoot, incredibly brave for someone in such an old home. His shirt was loose, hair was a little wild from sleep. Or from trying to sleep while the weight of generations whispered through the floorboards. His frown was soft, but deep. The kind that comes from real hurt.

  Granny didn’t flinch, more concerned about stirring the porridge than the complaints of her family members. She finished stirring, and grabbed her mug. She drank from the mug, pondering what to say. She sat the mug down, looked at Kellan like she was looking through the layers of him.

  “You don’t have bad taste,” she said, even.

  “You said it.”

  “I said you’re drawn to pain,” she corrected. “Not that it’s a flaw.”

  When had they had that conversation, Connor wondered, as he had been downstairs this entire time, and not noticed it.

  Kellan descended the last few steps, each one deliberate. “Same difference.”

  Connor didn’t speak. He watched Kellan approach.

  “Pain,” Kellan repeated, voice thinner now, “isn’t the same thing as wrong.” He grabbed one of the mugs, again without thought or worry. “You said I love people who hurt me.” He said accusatorily.

  Granny watches him like a slow-burning lantern. “ You do.”

  Kellan frowned, but didn’t say anything.

  “You spoke to your mother yesterday. But you didn’t finish anything. Because then it wouldn’t hurt anymore. “ Granny told him. “That is a flaw. Masochism. Uncontrolled. You are punishing yourself for something you had no control over. “

  Kellan stopped in front of her. “Still. And that thing, whatever it was, was very happy to finish your sentence.”

  Granny looked up at him, calm as ever. “You know I don’t speak for them.”

  Kellan opened his mouth, but she raised a hand and continued “That’s why you went with that upper classman. Because you know how it will end and that it will hurt. You didn’t try to change his mind, you just took.”

  She hit him with a spoon. “Foolish child. These things are dangerous. Not everyone is so insulated from consequences. Even if we were to accept you hurting yourself, you will inadvertently hurt others.”

  Kellan frowned, holding his stinging hand.

  Connor spoke up “What is this about?”

  Kellan turned to him, eyes tired but steady. “Nothing of concern. It doesn’t affect my ability to perform my tasks.”

  He continued, the previous conversation, voice stronger now. “So, fucking what? They hurt me because they’re real. Make me feel. They don’t tiptoe around me like I’m glass. It’s honest.”

  He looked between them. “I’ll take that over clean lies any day.”

  Granny frowned faintly. “I said what I said, Kellan. And I’ll say it again when you ask me in ten years.”

  Kellan tilted his head.

  Connor spent the rest of the morning composing a report in his head. Before lunchtime, he has gotten quite hungry, but he knows better than to accept food from the fae, Kellan stepped up to him “When are we leaving?” he asked. Connor raised an eyebrow “Do you not want to spend more time with your family? “

  Kellan nodded his head, “Yes. But I don’t want you to keep lurking around.”

  Connor snorted “Understandable. If it makes no difference to you, we can leave.”

  Kellan said farewell to his family and then they left.

  Later, when they were on the road, heading out of the dense woodland. The recorder has been set up again. The trees were much less horrific in the daylight. Even the scent was less present, or maybe Connor had just gotten used to it. He looked at the passenger seat “So. Find out anything new?” He asked. Kellan shrugged “Maybe. Nothing that concerns you though. “

  Connor nodded, accepting this answer. “Did you get a clear answer on why they wanted to meet me?” He asked.

  Kellan shrugged again “Well you are my boss, so everyone wanted to make sure that you weren’t… like weird. Or trouble.”

  Connor scoffed, “ I am not trouble.”

  Kellan just raised an eyebrow.

  The open road stretched before them, a smooth ribbon of asphalt unspooling beneath a wide… sky. The sky wasn't really anything special, entirely lacking the grandeur that one might think appropriate. For a few uninterrupted hours, their world consisted solely of the vehicle, the hum of the engine, and the continuous, playlist pouring from the speakers. Connor, much like his passenger, had gotten annoyed with the same news in between the same advertisements after a bit, so Connor had plugged his phone in.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  The windows were down, letting the fresh, cool air rush through the car. Connor watched the shadows lengthen as the afternoon wore on, the sun sinking closer to the horizon, painting the clouds in shades of gold and warm orange. It was a suspended moment. The road stretched out.

  Kellan waited until they had been on the road, until the woods had turned into farmland and the farmland into suburbs, until the spell of that house, the smoke, the watchers, the old stories echoing like dust in the corners, had faded enough to let her breathe without tasting memory.

  “I wanted that,” he said simply. “Trouble, I mean.” He paused. “Or not really. I wanted to belong to something. Someone maybe. Larger than myself. A purpose beyond the rat race. For a while. I don’t think that’s it anymore.” His eyes grew distant “It was a belonging like the way kids belong to older kids they think are cooler, smarter, stranger. I wanted to be part of their world.”

  Connor glanced over, uncertain as to what was going on in the young man's head.

  “And what happened?”

  “They wanted too much of me. And I let them take it. But they never made me feel anything. They just made me want to disappear.”

  Kellan looked back at the road.

  “You don’t make me want to disappear,” he says.

  Connor stared at him. I am absolutely going to make you disappear, the second you are a threat to her, that doesn’t mean I want to. But he didn’t say that.

  He looked over “I am certainly trying not to.” He said.

  There was a tracker on the car.

  An inconspicuous, black plastic square wired deep into the vehicle’s CAN bus, invisible without a deep-dive diagnostic.

  There was a more sophisticated one embedded in his work phone, a standard issue from the security department that all operatives carried, a necessary evil, framed as operational security.

  But worst of all, there was a tracker on his personal phone.

  Connor knows. He’d always known, in the way a person knows the air pressure has dropped right before a storm hits, that subtle, undeniable shift in reality. He pretended he didn’t, the way people pretend not to see the massive arachnid on the ceiling, paralyzed and silent in its web. It’s not a threat until it drops. It’s not dangerous until you try to kill it.

  So he was aware of that. But then, when he was deleting some stuff, Email storage had been full- somehow, he had found the tracking app, months ago. It was an application buried beneath another, tucked down into a folder labeled "Utilities" . Like a bad joke. A parody of convenience. It seemed almost like it was supposed to be added with an air of plausible deniability, a 'maybe I just downloaded it for the flashlight' excuse, but whoever was responsible couldn't even be bothered with the pretense.

  They were arrogant or lazy, perhaps both.

  So he knew it was legit. This wasn't some third-party, off-the-shelf spyware or the amateurish spyware-for-cheaters kind of garbage one could buy online. This was custom-coded. Professional. Silent. It pinged location data in irregular, randomized intervals to avoid the tell-tale smooth line of a battery-draining, always-on connection, and its data transmission was masked as an essential OS process, rendering it invisible to all but the most granular network analysis.

  He didn’t delete it. He didn't smash the phone or perform a factory reset. To do so would be to pull the pin on a grenade. As he had been told in basic training, don't do that unless you want rubble.

  He also didn't rip the chip out of the car or even try to disable the one on the work phone. From those, the tracking would have been moot anyway; they were assets. As such their monitoring was technically justified, no matter how invasive. But the fact that they had gone the extra, wholly unwarranted step of putting one on his personal phone, the one he used to call his sister and check his bank balance well, that had utterly pissed him off. It wasn't Opsec anymore. It was personal. To him it was a declaration of total distrust.

  Removing it, well that would have been too obvious. It would have been the equivalent of shouting a confession. The silent war he was fighting had to remain silent.

  So instead, he started curating his movements. Not randomly, but with meticulous, theatrical effort. He started sending that tracker on field trips. He engineered fake coffee dates with girls who wore the precise brand of vanilla-and-chocolate perfume his girlfriend hated, creating a fictional narrative of a careless man slipping up. He set up über accounts logged into burner phones, which he then stashed in an oblivious friend’s glove box. That one was a fairly common tactic with some of his colleagues actually. He wasn't certain of its purpose but it was expected.

  He left a distinct Connor-shaped breadcrumb trail, a plausible, flawed path a monitored agent might leave. Partially, this was expected; Opsec didn't stop just because you were off work, and the security department was likely testing him, seeing if he was compliant or foolish enough to think he had privacy.

  But he knew the truth. He was being managed.

  So he was feeding them the exact data they expected to receive.

  He knew that his journey to the Cross house had been logged. He knew, with absolute certainty, that when the GPS unit in the car finally pinged the receiver with its cryptic digital signature. A sole Ping in the middle of nowhere.

  He wasn't entirely convinced they would even be able to zero in on the exact location. Partially because, despite his efforts he hadn't been able to comprehend how exactly coordinates worked in adjacent spatial dimensions, or any form of cross realm translocation. That was all assuming the house had indeed not been in baseline reality. The way the air had seemed thicker and the light wrong, had suggested that the house wasn't in baseline reality. Not to mention the nonsense happening with its inhabitants.

  There was of course the ancient burial mound, and the grove surrounding it. He hadn't even come near either of those, but they were most certainly not of this realm.

  At best, the satellite data and logs would show a single, stationary dot on a digital map, divorced from any meaningful context. Or street view. There would be no street, no dirt road, no house, just a point of light in the middle of a blank area. One that the system insisted was vacant land.

  And that lack of context, that deliberate, gnawing hole in their normally comprehensive surveillance, was exactly the kind of anomaly that would gain the attention of his most obsessive, control-freak superiors. Which given his employer was all of them.

  It would drive them mad with suspicion and procedural frustration. Which, he knew from long, painful experience, would likely make them reckless, but he couldn't really do anything about it, except for hoping that they would listen to his report first.

  But for now, the mission was complete. Well the excursion more accurately.

  As he drove Kellan back toward the familiar, comforting hum of the town, the tension in his shoulders began to ease.

  He gripped the steering wheel and allowed himself a smidge of optimism. Perhaps, just this once, the panic and paranoia would be held in check. Maybe, no one would be rash enough to send a team based purely on a (hostile) assumption and a missing map coordinate.

  Probably.

  Hopefully.

  Maybe.

  He parked the car.

  Kellan looked at him “Right, so um” he paused, flushing “Thanks for driving me. I guess?” He looked at his shoes. “You should eat something, get some rest.” Kellan told him.

  Connor nodded, loathed to be lectured by a child, even if it was correct. “I will. Check-in at our regular time, next week. Don't forget to focus on school!” Connor said, faux-cheer filling his voice.

  Kellan blinked “Oh yeah…school. Almost forgot about that…” he unlocked his seat belt, and let it rip up into the side of the car. He stood up. “ I will try to…” the teenager said, opening the door. A few moments later, he had disappeared.