“Sure thing, but a quick question.” My answer was a half-hearted lie.
“Shoot.”
“When are you going to remember you are neither my boss nor my father?” I asked before tapping the hang-up button on my car’s touch screen.
I drove in silence after that. Paden was rightfully worried, but I was a dog with a bone. There was nothing, including the idea of dying, that was going to pull me off this now. He knew it just as well as I did. I didn’t much care for a friend I’d had for a few decades telling me to let go of something that happened long before I ever knew him. In the end, the choice would never be answers or my life because I put too much time and effort into my own survival. It would always be what else was I willing to lose for those answers, and that was an easy choice for me. It always had been and always would be.
Everything.
6
Chapter Six
Getting home, I moved fast, reading through what I had copied from Sinclair’s. I had to go quickly, or I could miss my only window. I ran through his aliases again and punched them into separate searches through local government databases. Mygi had reason to believe Raphael was in Phoenix, but they were wary of getting close due to his skittish nature. They nearly had him once in San Diego and once in Los Angeles. He once went home to New Mexico, but they had completely missed him there, only to find out about it afterwards. From there, he went to Houston and spent a stint in San Antonio as well. Now, he was in Phoenix, and they were damn near sure of it, which was why the bounty had originated in the area and brought everyone to my city.
Great. But now I need to figure out where he actually is in Phoenix. Can’t they have something good on this?
I kept looking through the pictures, reading the small print. I narrowed the searches to southern Phoenix, near and in Tempe and Mesa, based on another report one of their agents had written. They found reasonable evidence in some security tapes that he was hiding in that region. They even had a few guesses on which alias he was using and a possible second, so I cut the rest of the searches off except those two.
Essentially, Mygi had enough information to find Raphael again, but they were afraid of scaring him off. They went to the bounty hunters, but they didn’t feel comfortable giving out too much information. I wouldn’t want most of the information out either if I were them. They talked about him as if he was an asset, but a dangerous one. It looked bad for one human to give a wealthy, highly trained team of supernaturals the slip, not just once but several times. They would have turned into laughing stocks, and that would kill their reputation.
I stopped on another letter and a cursory glance told me there wasn’t anything important in it except for the fact that it shined a light on some internal politics at Mygi.
It was a board member, personally in contact with Sinclair. He was frustrated the board elected to go with the bounty hunter route, instead of just hiring Sinclair straight up. He was paying Sinclair ten million out-of-pocket to get started, and the vampire would be able to claim the bounty when it was over.
Yup, I was right on the money. Double. I knew they were paying him big money, and that explains why Sinclair has all this, and no one else does. He shouldn’t have bragged about it, that overconfident piece of shit.
I scrolled past it, knowing Paden would like that kind of information. A board member going against the rest of them? That was easily good money on the blackmail market. I should have felt guilty, but there were shades of crimes for supernaturals. Blackmail wasn’t even against the law, and really, most human laws weren’t covered in supernatural law. Supernaturals were old and cunning, so to avoid major fights, sometimes blackmail had its purpose. People like Paden had to make money. Unsanctioned murder was against the law, but species dealt with that internally unless it was murder of another type of supernatural. Then things got ugly. Most of the laws, though? They covered ancient treaties to preserve a precarious peace between different species, or to help keep the supernatural secret from the