Makun stayed where he was, unbothered. Things like this happened around him all the time: people provoking him, insulting him, fighting right next to him. It was just another day. He drank his beer and watched. A distraction was exactly what he needed, and this was a perfect one. Once he finished the bottle he would go and find the shelter. He had only just woken, but he still felt tired; the book seemed to have taken more than its fair share.
The two men were trading blows, fast and vicious. The shorter one, blond and sturdy, went for the legs; he had no reach against the taller redhead, so a takedown was his best play.
Then he took a knee to the jaw.
He went down with his eyes wide in shock. "Since when does Joe fight like that?" someone near Makun muttered. "The man's a farmer."
The blond, Shane apparently, tried to get up, but Joe sprang onto him with his fist already raised. "Why'd you call me a liar, Shane?"
He started punching. Shane couldn't protect himself, and the blows kept coming, one after another, until blood sprayed from Shane's face. Joe didn't stop.
Makun watched, troubled now. If this kept on, wouldn't Joe kill him? Should he step in or mind his own business? He decided to stay out of it; it would never end in his favor. But the longer he watched, the stranger it looked. It was as if Joe had no control over himself.
He looked again, and this time he strained his forehead to reach for his new sight. It was hard, since the book had taken nearly everything, and pain throbbed through his skull as he forced it, but he clenched his teeth to keep from grunting aloud and looked at Joe again.
What he saw shocked him. A dark, eerie energy was wrapped around Joe as if it had taken hold of him, and Makun had the sense that it was the energy lifting Joe's arm and bringing it down on Shane, not Joe at all.
He was baffled. Were they mystics? No, they couldn't be, or Joe wouldn't look so empty. Was the Mystic world so tangled up with this one that everything was connected to it? Maybe. But why Joe? Or. Makun began scanning the room. Is someone here doing this, playing with ordinary people? That felt like the most logical answer. But if so, why here, right next to him? Was he being paranoid, or had he seen it right? Was someone sending him a message?
Outside the bar, a tall, lean, strikingly handsome blond man appeared out of nowhere beside a petite brunette with fair skin and a pentagram tattooed along her jaw. She was smiling from ear to ear and giggling, clearly amused.
"Cheryl, you've had your fun, haven't you?" the man said.
Cheryl turned to him with her unsettling smile. "Yes, I'm having fun. What? You want to end it?" As she finished, the smile vanished and her eyes went cold, daring him to try.
"We shouldn't attract attention, Cheryl. We're here on a mission."
She turned back to the window and giggled again. "Yes, yes, we have a mission. But shouldn't we move once we have information?"
The man sighed. "That's what I went to get, and I got it. I have the place where his signature last disappeared."
"Where did it disappear, Bol?" Cheryl asked, without taking her eyes off the window and the chaos inside.
Bol sighed again. The higher-ups had given them a mission: track down a man in this run-down Naija City. Neither of them knew why he mattered so much. The higher-ups didn't even have a picture of him, as if they had deliberately avoided any contact with him at all.
Then something had happened, and they had lost his signature. The two of them had been alerted on Friday, when the higher-ups noticed something had gone wrong; it had taken them a day to travel from Nashville, and they had arrived this afternoon. Their first task, mainly Bol's, was to pinpoint where the signature had disappeared, and he had done it.
But while he was gone, Cheryl, who was a hazard, had done what she did best and caused trouble. She had taken control of Joe and set him on Shane, which was the terrible scene Makun was watching inside.
Bol pulled out his phone and opened the gallery. "Stop what you're doing and come."
Cheryl pouted, looked through the window once more and, reluctantly, loosened her grip on the doll in her hand. "Show me what you found, then."
Bol held up the phone. On the screen was a photo of a run-down apartment building, peeling paint and cracked windows. "Tomorrow, we go there."
Cheryl leaned in, squinting. "That's where the signature disappeared?"
"Last recorded location. Strong residual energy. Whatever happened, it happened there."
Her smile came back, slow and dangerous. "Good. I was getting bored."
Bol pocketed his phone. His expression stayed neutral, but his eyes flicked toward the bar entrance.
If Makun had been out there to hear it, he would have gasped. The place they meant to visit was the building he had just been evicted from.