"I need good news. Tasha. Stu." Jonny watched over the shoulder of the hacker named Stuart at his workstation in the operations center in the basement of his Oregon headquarters. The vamp's shoulders were hunched, a sign of his discomfort at having the Black God and his charged energy so close, and his fingers flew over the keyboard.
"I might have some," replied the female vamp, his third in command.
Easing back, Jonny went to Tasha's adjacent workstation. "The talisman is working?" he asked. The slender, stone like tool they'd recovered from the phone Brandon had sat on top of her laptop.
"Sort of," replied the blonde vamp.
"What does that mean?"
"It's working. But it's not."
"We need a dataset to focus it," Stuart supplied. "It can't just find anyone. It has to have a point of reference. Some sort of historical data or individual signature for it to track."
"It's a simple form of artificial intelligence. Or I guess, magic," Tasha added. "But in order to learn, it has to have a starting point."
Jonny listened. It wasn't the greatest news ever, but it was better than nothing.
"Did it work?" Charles asked from behind him. The vamp smelled of fire and blood from his long night and day in Idaho and had returned to Jonny's side immediately upon returning, as usual. The Traveler with him winked out of existence, leaving a singed Charles.
"I'm not sure yet," Jonny replied.
"We followed his instructions exactly."
Jonny nodded, waiting patiently to see if their gamble paid off. Stuart had instructed Charles how to access the trunk and now was testing their ability to link into the White God's system.
"We're in," the hacker reported. "Testing out our ability to access the Guardian records system." Before he completed the sentence, the screen filled with an alphabetical index of Guardians.
Jonny watched the names with interest, wishing he had the ability to exploit the information rather than use it defensively. Perhaps, once he'd fixed his rogue vamp problem, he could. For now, he needed the names of every Tracker he could get. "Find the ones not yet pulled into the organization," he told Stu. "We need to quietly grab the people least likely to be noticed."
Charles moved away from them while Jonny watched his hacker work. Jonny half-listened as his second spoke on the phone.
"There are about a fifty spread out all over the world," the hacker reported. "Their ages range from five years to seventy."
"Narrow it down to ages eighteen to forty or so," Jonny instructed. "Healthy enough to survive being vamped."
"Fourteen."
"Send me and Charles the list."