A tall figure emerged, dressed in dark clothing, their face obscured by the angle and distance. Male? I wasn’t quite sure. He stood beside the vehicle, scanning the area.
“Wait, is that—” Riley shifted forward slightly. “Mary’s truck.”
The maintenance worker’s pickup pulled up beside the sedan, its engine cutting off when it came to a stop. Mary stepped out.
The man from the sedan opened his trunk, removing three medium-sized boxes. He and Mary exchanged words we couldn’t hear, and she took the boxes, one by one, loading them into the back of her truck.
I took photos with the long-range camera I’dpositioned on a tripod, the soft click of the shutter the only sound besides our breathing.
“What do you think is in those boxes?” Riley whispered.
“Hard to say.”
We watched as Mary handed the man an envelope. He checked the contents, nodded, and returned to his vehicle. The entire exchange took less than five minutes.
“This could be related to whatever Joyce meant,” Riley said.
I nodded, continuing to document the interaction.
Mary returned to her truck and drove away, heading back toward town. The sedan followed a different route, turning toward the main highway. I relayed the information to my brothers, instructing Tark to follow the sedan at a safe distance while Ruugar tracked Mary’s return to town. He’d try to get to the boxes if he could and let us know if he discovered anything about the contents.
For the next three hours, we maintained our vigil over the luminook pens, but no one approached them.
Mary parked her truck inside her locked garage, so Tark returned to his surveillance spot.
The sedan continued toward the next state over, and he didn’t follow.
The penned luminooks seemed more agitated than usual, their humming showing an erratic quality that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
“They know something’s wrong,” I said.
Riley nodded. “They’re sensitive to changes in theirenvironment. They can probably sense the increased human activity around them.”
Even us.
“Or they’re picking up on pheromones we can’t detect.” I shifted, trying to find a more comfortable position without disturbing our careful arrangement. “In the orc kingdom, luminooks would often hum warnings before earthquakes or cave instabilities.”
“Early warning systems,” she mused. “That could be valuable to researchers.”
When Sel and Holly arrived to relieve us around midnight, I was reluctant to leave. Not because I didn’t trust my brother and his mate, but because I wasn’t ready to end this time with Riley. Despite the cramped quarters and the tension of surveillance, it felt good having her beside me.
“Mary met with an unidentified male, exchanged boxes for an envelope, but no one approached the pens,” I told them.
“We’ll keep watch.” Sel said, his gaze flicking to Riley. “Everything else alright?”
“Yes,” I said. “Everything is…good.”
Sel smiled, nudging my shoulder with his knuckles. “Excellent.”
Riley and I didn’t say anything as we took the long trail home.
“Drink?” I asked, unlocking the back door.
“Something strong, if you have it.”
We went to the living room, where I strode to thecabinet where I kept the special reserve of orcish spirits my brothers and I had brought from the orc kingdom. The bottle gleamed in the low light as I removed it.
“Crushoon liquor,” I said, pouring two fingers into each glass. “It’s similar to your tequila and made from fermented rock-dwelling plants found only in the deepest caverns.”
