The call came while they were watching TV after dinner: Supernatural, which amused Cynara on one level and reminded her of school in a whole different way.

“Got it,” she answered. The kids were listening, so she tried to make her voice sound reassuring. “I’ll take care of it. Thanks.”

On TV, the Brothers Winchester were fretting about how one couldn’t be a monster hunter and have a family. Cynara pulled her Kept aside. He was new, but he was already proving himself to be reliable and reasonably level-headed.

“Look, I’ve got to take care of a thing.” She saw Yoshi was watching her, but what could she do? The life sort of came up on you, regardless of if you had kids or not. “Everything should be okay here, but if anyone comes to the door, if anything strange happens — look, this is not an order, I am trusting you to use your judgement. But if it gets scary, lock yourself and the kids in the bedroom – their bedroom, the windows are protected – and stay out of sight, okay?”

He was fresh out of Addergoole; things being weird really didn’t faze him. He nodded. “Do what you have to do, boss.”

Maybe she was getting better at picking them. “Thanks, hon.” She gave him a kiss, hugged the kids and told them to behave, picked up Go Bag #3, and headed out.

Her first stop was a quick Find, looking for SWAT-worthy crime that hadn’t been noticed by the cops yet. She slipped on her gloves, and, standing across the road and behind a tree, made a hurried 9-1-1 call.

“I think they’re selling guns,” she whispered worriedly. “And they have some woman tied up…”

It was a bad scene, but nothing the cops couldn’t handle. And it would keep them busy.

She dropped the phone in a garbage can a few blocks away and made another call of a similar nature a few miles away. Once she’d gotten the third one down — it was amazing how much crime went on unnoticed in this city — she started making the other calls.

Her friend at 9-1-1 wasn’t supposed to give away any information, but he could confirm three phone calls of a man with “some sort of sword.” He could also deny that there had been any calls of anyone being attacked. Yet.

A quick web search told her the three most likely targets; the two that were most likely innocent got a call in from her second and third burner phones, a bomb threat and a weather warning. She dropped those phones in the river and a garbage can, respectively, and hopped back in the car.

The trick wasn’t finding him. Cynara could find him anywhere on the planet. The trick was minimizing the possible damage.

She made one more call, this one from her own call. “I’ve got it in hand.” The police were thoroughly distracted. The potential victims — the ones that were probably not actually Nedetakaei — were warned. Now all she had to do was either help Leo kill monsters or talk him down from killing innocent people.

She made another phone call, just in case, and kept driving.

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