“Nice? I’ve got to get a new fucking phone and number.” She disconnected and Bone dropped his own phone onto the desk.

He breathed in deeply and let his breath out slowly. Longford. He had spent so much of his life travelling that he’d long-since stopped believing that he would ever return home.

* * *

A Grey carried everything he needed with him. The tools of his trade were varied, but the heart of Bone’s talent lay within him. He used and nurtured the talent he had been born with to be the best that he could be.

Over the past twenty years he had only met two other Greys. The nature of their work meant that meetings were rare, and secrecy was as much a part of their daily lives as eating or breathing. The old man had crossed trails with him on an assignment in Canada fourteen years before, when both of them had been sent to pursue a woman who could allegedly read minds. Nile, the old man, believed she was the result of an accident, a brain trauma that might have left her damaged and different. Bone knew better. He’d let Nile take the lead, because the older man believed he was wiser, and doing so would mean he was not so wary. It was Bone who found her. She was so obviously in distress, and he’d had only minutes to try and define exactly who or what she was before Nile arrived. In that short time, he managed to establish that she carried blood similar to his own, and did not know.

He told her and sent her on her way. He hoped it would help her understand.

The other Grey he met was called Jodine. At first he’d suspected that they were alike, and he had spent some time on their assignment trying to discern whether she knew as well. Once they’d tracked down their quarry—he was simply a madman, so not significant in Bone’s eyes—he’d decided that Jodine was merely someone with an exceptional IQ and physical aptitude. If he’d approached her about his own origins, he would have compromised himself, turning from Grey into a target of the Greys. So they parted ways without him saying anything.

Bone was grey amongst the Greys, inhabiting a deeper level of secrecy than the most secret government organisation. While his peers sought the legendary Kin because they might be dangerous, damaging or potentially viable as weapons for the military or security services, Bone worked with his own secret intact—that he was not entirely human.

His purpose was to find more like him, make sure they knew who or what they were, and let them go.