on

---

little “pocket parks” and sat in her Mercedes. Tannim could cloak himself, and even his car—but once the girl left his presence, she would register to Aurilia’s mage-senses. And the girl was really what Aurilia was after at the moment.
It took longer than Aurilia had thought it would, but towards sunset, the girl finally “appeared” to Aurilia’s ­inner eye. She quickly triangulated with a mental map of the town, and determined that the girl was at the corner of Bee and Wheaton streets.
She reached out in thought, and seized mentally on the nearest pigeon, taking over what little mind it had with her own. Pigeons were possibly the stupidest creatures on the planet, but that stupidity made them remarkably easy to enslave. When she was done with it, it would drop dead of shock, of course, but that didn’t matter. One more dead pigeon on the sidewalk would excite no one except a ­feral cat or dog.
She sent the bird winging in a direct line to the area where the girl loitered. With sunset coming, a pigeon was perhaps not the best choice of slave-eyes, but it would do. A grackle

---