Eva wore a gray short sleeved button up, slim fitted gray slacks, and black matte heels with a gray bottom. There was a smart watch on her left wrist provided by the Digital boys and girls. Her hair was straight, pulled back and pinned by a bright red clip. She stood flat against the sand colored back wall of the Los Angeles Emergency Operations Center in light that was dimmed more than it's usual fluorescent glare. She was little more than a gray ghost on a field of sand as far as the almost fifty people in the room were aware. Jeff Berger had been talking to the CEO of Los Angeles County and one of the County Supervisors among a Board of five when he mentioned it was strange there was such an outbreak when the air in the county wasn't all that dry, more humid from an El Nina airflow. 

[i]It wasn't natural.[/i]

Screens large and larger still covered most the walls. Between Eva and the biggest of the screens was a giant bullpen of neatly rowed desks filled with computers and screens upon screens. The action was fevered but not out of control. This was not a frenetic moment, this was a hive of ants going into a controlled frenzy with a focused outcome in mind. They weren't going to let the fire hit Los Angeles, if they could help it. They called John Ketterman, owner of the largest private fire brigade on the West Coast. The moment county and city officials hung up with him, the phone rang again to tell him every private fire brigade in the state was moving towards LA County. 

Rachel reappeared next to her, leaning in with a hint of Tom Ford perfume and excitement, "The Governor hasn't issued any orders to the National Guard in the area but the fire departments are none-the-less moving. This will be the most expensive fire prevention action in history based on the bonus you're providing the private fire companies alone. I wish I knew why we were spending that kind of money."

Eva couldn't help the little smile. "Because something needs to happen in this city."

"What needs to happen?"

The smile only crept larger. "I don't know." The following shrug dismissed the amusement of the smile, "Lubbock. Let Andre know." There were a number contingencies that would be put into effect.

"You're going to have to move up the timeline regarding the Inquisition." Rachel stole a long look at Eva's face as she said it, looking for the reaction that never came. At least, it never showed. Eva's internal grimace may have remained internal but odds were the old coterie mate felt it all the same. 

No use in hiding the sigh, "Yeah. I'll have to warn Grace."

"Have to?" Rachel's brows slanted in concern. "I know they haven't been hostile, and maybe you showed them some things, but...it seems unnecessary. It seems like a risk."

Eva's eyes sank in every screen and display in the Emergency Operations Center. "There's nothing left to us but risk now, Rach." She might have reached out to comfort the girl had the earpiece not blinked with cold blue light to indicate a new call. There was a certain amount of fun, and if she was behing honest, pride, as she stood back and watched Rachel appear behind the Fire Coordinators along the third row of desks and monitors in the bullpen of the command center. It was just a few whispers into the ear of a human, and then the Fire Coordinators spread among the room with new information and new plans. With so many private assets bring brought to bear so quickly the actual State and Federal fire fighters could focus on the main fire line and not the pockets of homes inside the hills. 

It was no sure thing, but the odds were at least closer to their favor now. Rachel caught up with her in the parking lot, as she sweet talked a guard about why she didn't have a security pass on her windshield and why that was okay. Very quickly they started talking about the vintage midnight black Corvette with the back fin spoiler instead of the missing security pass stickered to it's windshield like everyone else's. Rachel smiled and wished the guard a goodnight as the two climbed into the car and the car started in silence. They talked a little about some weird signals from various Sabbat in the area, Eva tried to explain what exactly Yanci was dealing with in Palm Springs on a movie set. By the time they reached Rachel's car, the girl was no closer to understanding why the actors and the editor didn't just do what the director was going for, although she had to agree trashing a hotel room in a coked up rage was probably a bad impression on your crew. 

Eva always knew where she was headed, it was the same place she went on the first Thursday of every other month and right now Lakewood sounded like the place to live if you weren't fond of the threat of fire. In a small one bedroom apartment a dozen or so blocks from the Port of Los Angeles. The apartment complex wasn't very large; the small size and dependency on cement and facade as part of the design a large hint as to the decade of when it was initially constructed. She had owned it for a few years, apparently it was useful of money laundering purposes. Dusty had lived there for a little over threes years. 

There were a few Dusty's. Not Dusty, exactly, but kine with which Eva had a lasting friendship. Dusty was from Nacogdoches, Texas, and had grown up helping his father and uncle harvest and replant pine trees. A tour in the Navy, some civilian cargo sailing, and now Dusty helped to manage the unload of cargo from ships into the Port of Los Angeles. In terms of boots on the working floor, Dusty was a bit of a boss. He made around sixty thousand a year, give or take, and worked longer hours than any office 9 to 5 gig. The sun had been hotter than expected today, so she'd heard, and Dusty looked it. In an old black teeshirt that was nearing dark grey around the underarms with a few little holes towards the bottom of the shirt where it had snagged on this crane or that forklift or that shipping crate during the movement of the work day. 

He was tall, a goofy kind of handsome, and spoke with an East Texas accent as thick as the sap of Texas pine. He knew a rough Mexican Spanish, though he'd learned it from a girlfriend back home in Texas. Or was it the first wife? Eva had lost count. Usually they talked about Los Angeles, and California beyond, culture and society. It blew his mind, and Eva admitted a real joy in seeing the world through Dusty's eyes. She had never fed on him, he wasn't her type. She had never really thought about it. Next Wednesday she was supposed to see Sarah, the waitress turned restaurant assistant manager and occasional actress, if acting classes and mostly open auditions on the weekends counted as occasional actress.

Eva thought it did. Eva thought it was the heartbeat of acting as an artform. Before the Kid forced everything to change forever Eva would sit in on auditions, and sometimes audition herself. It was a more organic, naturally flowing thing then the 60s and 70s when she and a handful of young actors and actresses got deep into method acting. Those were desert nights, and hallucinations that Eva was certain she'd never match. Now it seems innocent, looking back, given the visions Eva had these days. And they had nothing to do with acting or art anymore. 

Eva always brought her own beer. Yancy knew a kindred and ghoul brewing partnership in the Valley that had an especially high degree of knowledge in what worked and what didn't work for Kindred. The glass was dark brown, the bottles unremarkable. Dusty had tried one once, said it gave him a weird headache. 

Most nights they talked, but tonight was different. Tonight instead of his back porch they sat on small patch of concrete outside his front door in folding yard chairs. He nursed a bottled beer and alternated between drags on his cigarette and drags of pot on his one-hitter. She had asked him as he finished his cheeseburger when she walked in if he was okay if she handled some business out front. Dusty didn't know what she did. He told her, once, he figured she was some kind of high powered Hollywood exec. When she told him the truth of it all, he didn't say anything until she was completely done talking. Then, after a long moment, he had smiled with bloodshot eyes and politely thanked her for never eating him.

Tonight there were no details, only vague warnings. That was unlike Eva. As unlike Eva as her asking to conduct business outside his apartment. "Just take the vacation. Yellowstone sounds nice. It's away from most major population centers." There were other things in Yellowstone, but Eva hoped the best for the werewolves and the mages and the ghosts and every other bump in the night. He was shaking his head, deep in thought, when the two black Cadillac SUVs came slowly into the parking lot and stopping just feet away from there. Andre slipped out of the first SUV's front passenger side door, his jeans dark, his LeBron's loud, broad shoulders covered in a dark Nike tee with windbreaker on over it. His head motioned to the driver side back door as he came around the SUV, and opened the door he had motioned to.

"Hello Tara."

She was bloody, bruised. Restrained. Eva was soft spoken, sweetly toned and smiling. Whether it was genuine or genuine condescension was anyone's best guess. Andre's voice rumbled quietly as he spoke to Tara and Eva in his low pitch. Tara's voice was too quiet to escape beyond Andre and Eva to Dusty, but Dusty got a decent look at just who the two Kindred were speaking to. The bruises, the bindings. 

"I should kill you," Eva's delivery was so plain and matter-of-fact, there was no subtlety, there was no mystery, there was no playful anything. Just black and white, I should kill you. "To not kill you would risk sending the wrong message to others who might be having similar grand ideas such as your ideas of your role in San Diego." Tara had built San Diego into what it was, in the every-day running of a thing. Yancy had spent decades of time in San Diego in the last century, but it wasn't the same as the person who was there and at ground level. 

"I'd say you're lucky, because I'm just going to let you go, but I have a feeling I'm not doing you any favors by just cutting you loose." Not after what Andre had done to her places of power and allies. The very Kindred she crossed the Southwest of what was then not even all the United States, making it to San Diego, surviving, leading, eventually working with Yanci and Eva and the Kid. "Drop her downtown."

Andre closed the door quickly, but his head followed Eva as she walked away. Then his eyes fell on Dusty, and suddenly Dusty stopped taking a drag off his cigarette and stopped loading his one hitter with another hit of weed. That was what Eva saw. What she felt within was even more intense, but even if there was no supernatural sense Dusty's sudden freeze alone would have told Eva what she needed to know. 

Black matte heeled feet turned on a dime, bringing her eyes directly in line with his. "It's about to get bad. Rachel called you about Lubbock?"

He was irritated. "We didn't do what we did down in San Diego for nothing." 

"Dre, you know you didn't. Things are changing. We're out of time. Focus on the Indian Subcontinent."

"I'll focus on Lubbock."

Eva didn't argue, instead just blinking long lashes as he walked back around the running SUV and got in, both black Cadillacs disappearing into the night. She stared as they passed old Toyotas and Fords with mismatched paint near the exit 'gate' (that was always open) of the apartment complex. It wasn't until she heard Dusty's voice that she processed much of anything. And even then, she had lost anything besides the simple sound of his voice. "What?"

"I said, should I focus on India too?"

Eva smiled. "Take the damn vacation."