There were two reasons the file on Jack Darrens listed him as a low-grade pyromancer.<br/><br/>The first was that, on the scale of international magical emergencies, he wasn't one. He wasn't some criminal mastermind smuggling trolls across borders, or setting up an organ theft ring like the pixie in Dallas. His grand aspirations were his own and, frankly, below the radar. As much as the Council kept an eye on the traffic of information, they couldn't police every storehouse of arcane knowledge in the world; when a few scrolls on Gaelic fire rituals went missing, or if a Middle Eastern account of some djinni glassing a section of desert wasn't returned after it was checked out, no real flags went up. Jack had the rare ability to let the things that didn't matter to him simply cease to exist.<br/><br/>The second was that, on the scale of things, nothing he'd bothered doing really took anything fancy. When you're working as magical muscle, nobody cares if you can make a fire that never stops burning, or whether or not you boil the blood in someone's veins instead of frying him with a flamethrower. The fancy stuff, the real technical stuff that mucks about with combustion spirits and spiritually charged incense and whether Mars is in the fourth house and all that? That's big league magic. Heavy hitting stuff.<span style="font-style: italic">Not</span>the kind of thing it takes to burn down some mobster's girlfriend's house.<br/><br/>If he'd ever read the council's file on him, Jack Darrens would have laughed.<br/><br/>Jack was a low-grade pyromancer the way Mozart wrote pop hits.<br/><br/>---------------------<br/><br/>His last known employer, as listed in his file, was a mafiosi by the name of Carlo Lombardi, a big wig up in Chicago who had a few ins with the supernatural underworld and used it to keep him floating in the natural one. Big enough to run into a few paranormal problems but not big enough to be able to deal with them himself, how he'd gotten Jack's contact information was a mystery, but one way or another Jack had been seen doing some general work for him on and off for the better part of a year. Half trigger man, half enforcer and half nuclear deterrent, he did his job and did it well enough that Lombardi had risen from some lieutenant to running half the city during that time.<br/><br/>There was also a record number of burn deaths and victims, arson cases and insurance claims for fire damage that year.<br/><br/>Big enough that everyone knew where to find him, the first place to look would be Il Botitcello, an Itallian restaurant that was basically Lombardi's office. He'd spent his working hours of the past half a year giving orders from a booth in the back, and it showed--he was a heavy man with thick jowls, slightly balding, in an excellent suit. Thick fingers wrapped around his silverware, he worked his way through his lunch order of carbonara with surprising dexterity.<br/><br/>If he'd known Stephanie was coming, he would have been smart enough to be worried.