Approaching the woman before me and allowing her to see that I was armed; I motioned for her to be quiet and then quickly patted her down and searched the Vespa for any obvious communication devices, trackers, or weapons. We could do a more thorough search at the house, but I wanted to search for anything obvious before deciding on how to deal with her. The only things that she had on her were a California ID card, some cash, and a backpack containing a couple of bottles of water, some thread, and a few other odds and ends inside.

She was holding a needle on a thread, and the needle was floating in the air and pointing directly at me for some reason. I assumed that the latter was how she had tracked me. She didn’t even have a phone on her. “Travelling light,” I muttered.

To my surprise, she nodded. “This was personal, and I didn’t want anyone following or tracking me.”

Hopefully, that was the truth, and she was as thorough as it looked like she was. I figured that I could probably start questioning her though, so I decided to start with the question that was weighing most on my mind. “Did Carmichael send you to find us, Corporal Morales?”

”What? No! Why would the General have sent me? As I said, I was following your magic, I don’t know what it’s like wherever you Fae come from, but magic is fading from our world, has been for a long time, and is almost gone entirely. I have never sensed anyone else with magic since my abuela died, and certainly not anyone as powerful as you seem to be. General Carmichael probably doesn’t even believe in magic, the Fae, or anything like that… and if he did, he’d probably be searching for every way possible to weaponize them,” The last bit was quietly and bitterly muttered under her breath, but my acute hearing easily picked up the muttered words.

From her reactions and what my senses were telling me, she didn’t seem to be lying and there was a lot to unpack from that one answer. First, she seemed to think I was some sort of fairy creature, but I guess that wasn’t all that surprising given the magic and that my pointy ears weren’t shifted. I might have jumped to that conclusion as well.

Secondly, this woman, who was Camichael's aide according to Uncle Jack’s intel, seemed to have no idea what he was looking for here in Cuba. I could understand the compartmentalization of information, but he was making his job that much harder if he wasn’t giving the people working under him at least some idea of what to look for. Of course, it could just be Corporal Morales who was being kept in the dark. Uncle Jack’s intel seemed to indicate that she was the only female under his command that he had brought to Cuba, and he did have a reputation as a misogynist.

She also didn’t like her commanding officer, or maybe it was a distaste for the military in general. She had tried to keep her face impassive and her tone neutral when speaking about Carmichael but her scent, the slight increase in her heart rate, and the narrowing of her eyes indicated negative feelings there. There was also the barely audible side comment to consider.

The last bit of information was that she was an experienced magic-user, a fact that she was wisely keeping from her commanding officer. She had to have at least some formal teaching to be competent enough to track me down by my magic, perhaps that abuela who she mentioned? How had she tracked me down anyway? Were we Naethari that much more powerful than her, even with the often limited scope of our abilities, or was she sensing the primal growth energy that we Naethari radiated?

If she truly wanted answers, presumably regarding something of a magical nature, then maybe I was looking at a potential ally here. Either way, I couldn’t let her go back to her boss now that she had found our hideout and seen me like this, and I would rather not have to kill someone who was caught up in all of this with no idea of what was really happening. I decided to throw her a bone while giving her a chance to show her true colors.

“I’m not Fae, I don’t even know if they exist or not. I’m something else entirely, something that General Carmichael wants very badly. Badly enough that he is going after the people I care about to get his hands on me and the others like me,” I said as I shifted my features to a form that I knew she would find familiar. Carmichael doesn’t even know about our magical abilities; he likely thinks us mere beasts and underestimates us. We wish to live in peace, and he wants to weaponize us.”

For a long moment, she stood there frozen, as if her mind was trying to process what she had just seen. When her voice finally returned with a squeak, her reply was more of a question. “Danica Holmes?”

“Not really,” I replied with a shrug before shifting back to Naiya with legs, “she doesn’t exist outside of the fake documents and online presence that we created for her. One of my personal forms of magic allows me to change my form and this was just the form that I decided to use when I showed up for Carmichael’s trap. I could have impersonated an already established person if I chose, of course, but we didn’t want to drag potentially innocent people into this.”

Confusion gave way to realization on her face, and then horror. “Such an ability could be misused in so many ways.” And I didn’t even tell her about the mind control thing. That wasn’t something that I wansted to mention in a tense first meeting like this, especially since I might need to use it if she proved uncooperative.

“Which is why Carmichael can never find out about it, and it is just one ability of many among our kind,” I told her flatly. There it was. The bait. Now to give her the choice and see if she’d try to run back to Carmichael with this information in hand or follow me and find whatever answers that she sought with us and become a potential ally. If she tried to start the Vespa, she would try to run, and I would have to kill her. “If you want to get your answers, and find out what’s truly going on here, grab that bike and follow me on foot.”

She either realized that I was testing her, or she was willing to cooperate and face a walk down a potentially long access road. She began to push the Vespa along behind me as I stepped onto the road and walked along it, back toward the villa. I wasn’t too worried about her trying to attack me from behind since I would hear her, and she would have to stop pushing the Vespa to do so. She was unarmed, and my reflexes and physical abilities would put a stop to such an attempt. Besides, now that we were on the access road, Uncle Jack probably had his eyes on us, which was why I was in front.

The entire access road was monitored by trail cameras with motion detectors and Uncle Jack would be ready to monitor the cams as soon as one of them detected movement. The reason that we hadn’t been alerted to Corporal Morales’s presence by more mundane means was that she was on a major road when I approached her. Having motion sensors pointed there would only be an annoyance since they would be going off constantly.

In addition to the surveillance along the access road, land mines, and other traps throughout the trees surrounding the villa, we also had some other surprises for uninvited guests. If Uncle Jack thought that we were being assaulted, he would hit the remote detonators for the very nasty bombs that he, Aunt Carmen, and my dad had set up. The bombs were attached to trees near the roadside, starting at the midway point of the access road. If someone was stupid enough to bring personnel or vehicles along this road to attack us, they would soon be dodging shrapnel in the form of small bits of metal, and falling trees too.

Thankfully, Uncle Jack didn’t see any reason to hit the remote for that particular trap at the moment, because I made sure to give the other Naethari a status report through mind-speech as soon as we started making our way toward the house. We walked in silence and were in sight of the villa when the woman behind me asked, “Why are you offering to answer my questions? Are you going to kill me?”

I frowned at the final question. Her heart rate and breathing had hardly shifted at all, and her tone was almost blasé as she mentioned the possibility of her death. Were her answers more important to her than her life, or was she looking at her possible death as an escape from something else?

“We would rather not kill anybody who doesn’t deserve to die or who isn’t trying to kill or cage us, but we also can’t afford to let you leave here until we can be sure that you won’t go straight to Carmichael,” I told her honestly. “I don’t know what answers you seek, but if you’re going to be our guest for a while then the least we can do is try to make up for the inconvenience. To be honest, I would rather have you as an ally, if possible. You have knowledge about our enemy and if you truly found me by using magic, then that shows that you’re gifted with it and resourceful as well.”

“So, that’s why you are letting me see you like this?” she inquired.

“Honestly, you caught us at a bad time, and I was more concerned with giving myself legs and getting armed before you either fled with potential information on our whereabouts or drove into the meat grinder along this road before I could question you,” I told her candidly.

“I’m sorry, did my presence wake you? Is that why you aren’t dressed? Wait… giving yourself legs?” Her tone made her seem genuinely remorseful for her unexpected presence, but her breath caught when she realized what I had said.

“No, we were celebrating. My mate and I were about to cut our wedding cake, and clothes aren’t really practical for my kind a lot of the time,” I explained. “You’ll find out soon, you might as well join us for some cake, and then we’ll want to ask you some questions before answering yours.”

Mom, Dad, and Aunt Carmen were all armed and waiting for us at the front door. Uncle Jack had his bug sweeper kit as well and ran it over both our guest and the Vespa while the others watched intently. Corporal Morales recognized every single one of them; I could see it in her eyes, but to her credit, she seemed more curious than anything. Uncle Jack was able to give her and her belongings the all-clear, even the rented Vespa didn’t have a GPS, but it was a fairly old model, like many vehicles in Cuba.

With that unpleasant task out of the way, we decided to wait to grill her about her knowledge of her boss and his activities until we were all more comfortable on the beach, preferably with cake once Kara and I could cut it. We even left our weapons in the house since she was unarmed, and it would make her feel like less of a hostage. I also asked if she would be more comfortable if we addressed her by her first name instead of her rank, which she seemed to appreciate.

We all knew that we couldn’t let her go until our safety was assured, but there was no reason to make the experience any more uncomfortable than it needed to be unless she tried to make a break for it. For now, we were willing to give her the benefit of the doubt in that regard. If she did try to escape us, she was going to have to get through me and the other Naethari first anyway, and I wouldn’t take any bets on her making it out alive.

We led her through the house and back to the beach, where Luiza stopped to gape at the five Naethari who were watching her with varying degrees of concern, curiosity, and suspicion. “Madre de Dios, mermaids!” she gasped.

Kieshala rankled at that, and I put a hand gently on the Corporal’s shoulder. “We find that name offensive, Luiza, it’s a label created by humans. We’re Naethari.” Then I walked past her toward Kara, making sure to shift back to my natural form while she was still staring at us, before kissing my mate lovingly.

It was several moments before the poor woman could articulate words again, but she immediately apologized when she could. “Sorry, I’ll… umm… try to call you Naethari from now on.” Then she took a deep breath and tried to be a little less obvious about staring at us before adding, “Fuck, I have so many more questions now.”