Into Focus (Focus Series Book 1) by Alex Bostwick Read Free Book Online

war-torn areas of
Africa from time to time, usually in freak accidents involving
fire. Hell, California might have fallen into the Pacific if it
weren’t for them, for all I knew.
    Focus helped people, at the end of the
day.
    So why now? Why plan to kill thousands of
people? They could certainly do it if they decided to, but it
didn’t make any damn sense.
    I didn’t understand it. They were good
people, or so I had learned over the years.
    I sat in my hotel room, trying to puzzle
things out. I stared out the window, considering what I knew, what
I had learned, and what I was going to do.
    Why Focus wanted to do these things didn’t
matter, I decided. Either they had decided to go from philanthropy
to world domination without anyone realizing it, or there was a
separate faction gaining who knows how much support within the
organization. I didn’t know if I was about to go up against all of
Focus or just a few insane members of it, but someone had to do
something.
    And, at the moment, it looked like that
someone was going to be me.
    I went to the mini bar, and pulled out
several tiny bottles of liquor. I twisted off the tops one by one,
and drank swiftly without bothering to look at the labels.
    God. Wizards.
    When I finished my drinks, I dumped the empty
bottles in the garbage can. Then I gathered up my things, went to
the front desk, and checked out.
    I had work to do.
     

Chapter Six
     
    A couple of days later, I was perched on a
power line across the street from an unassuming office building,
home to Focus. Wizards, or agents, as they called themselves,
bustled in and around the place, hurrying from one job to the next.
There was certainly no lack of activity, and I hadn’t seen any
slowdown since I had started watching the building the day
before.
    I stretched my wings in discontent. I had
taken on the form of a sparrow, which had excellent distance vision
and even sharper ears. I had been watching the activity, trying to
spot one of several people, but none of them had shown up yet.
    I tallied up everything I knew about the
organization once more, keeping my eyes peeled.
    There were about six hundred wizards working
for Focus, though the real number could have been higher. They
recruited young, mostly, which made sense. I figured that a young
wizard going through puberty with access to power over the elements
might be dangerous if that kind of thing isn’t taken care of
quickly. Skinchangers were similarly trained young.
    Each wizard was aligned with one of the
elements when they grew up, which seemed odd to me. From what I had
been able to scrape together between stories from my family and a
few contacts who were clued in on the supernatural world, wizards
of a certain age could only do magic with one element. Apparently
there was some kind of tradeoff, though, because they were
universally stronger than those who were younger, though whether
that was age and experience or something to do with the way their
magic developed, I wasn’t sure.
    The younger ones, the ones who were trained
but whose power hadn’t fully developed, were called initiates. They
were on a kind of rotating apprenticeship, according to a
skinchanger friend who knew a few wizards. They worked with the
agents of different elements, trying to figure out what kind of job
they’d do when they finished growing. I didn’t really understand
all of it, but I knew what it meant: access.
    Initiates were expected to travel between the
different branches of Focus, doing different jobs and seeing
different people. It might have been odd for an Air wizard to work
with a Fire wizard, I reasoned, but not for an initiate to work
with both.
    I had… two-thirds of a plan. I was watching
the building until I saw an initiate leave. Then I was going to
follow him or her (there were an awful lot of pretty women coming
and going, and apparently Focus didn’t discriminate) home, knock
them out, take their place, and gather whatever information I
could.
    The