" I am aware of the existence of at least one more subtle tradition for surveillance but the are likely more of which I am unaware" Wilson sighs. " They would have seen whatever your uncle wrote to you in that note, along with the details in our contracts. You should know that each magical practice is a walled garden. No matter how hard I tried or who taught me, I could never see through one of those coins." 

"So our surveillance guy can only surveil and you can only do contracts? What's the more subtle guy's trick? What could my uncle do?"

Based on the content of the letter, she has lost the following secrets: what Abernathy can do and how the two of them are related, the location of both of the caches she was supposed to seek out, the passcode of one and the appearance of the key to the other. The fact that her uncle had plans at all, if they didn't know. Several of those were also lost by the conversation more broadly. 

"Not necessarily. Some traditions are more versatile than others, but yes, I can create magically enforced contracts, and that is the limit of my power,' Wilson explains. 'I don't know about our eavesdropper, but I would assume they don't have too many more tricks up their sleeve."

He pauses briefly before adding, "Jonathan was a practitioner of Phoenician charm traveling. He could travel instantly between linked carved cedar tokens."

"To go back to my initial questions. What sort of mess was my uncle in, that I have sinister plots coming up like mushrooms around me as his heir?" 

That explanation reeks of incompleteness - why would he forbid a travel witch to scry on him? But she's not going to push. 

"I don't know what your uncle got himself into. he was a bit of a fixer in our community he sometimes acted as a mediator between groups and would ask me to draw up contracts to settle disputes"

"to answer your earlier question, there are plenty of perfectly mundane ways to turn gold into cash, I do however know one group that would be more than willing to buy any gold your uncle left you in bulk and for fair market rates" 

"I'll keep that in mind if I manage to even get to my Uncle's caches before whoever's watching us clears me out. I should probably call the storage company." 

"Can you summarise the magical political situation as you understand it? Why aren't you going public with this stuff?" 

Wilson returns to his desk and sits down. He begins to explain:

"Let me give you Magic 101. There are broadly four categories that all magical entities fall into."

"First, you have practitioners. Some call us witches or hedge witches. This is the category that I fall into. We learn a magical tradition and use it to our own ends. Traditions are diverse, and no two are exactly the same."

"The second category are ritualists. Not usually worth mentioning, these are people who are aware magic exists and have found some scrap of it to cling onto."

"Then we have creatures. Vampires, dryads, goblins, and faeries - if it's inherently magical, it's a creature."

"Finally, we come to The Order Arcanum. They're the longest-standing magical institution. They call themselves classically trained magicians, somehow having managed to unlock the key to learning multiple traditions. They impose one absolute rule: you cannot establish a school for magic. Hope you never meet a member of the Order - they have been known to nearly wipe out covens that grow too large."

"Now, as to why I don't just reveal magic to the world, the answer is twofold. First, it would be all I spent my life doing. Without experiencing magic firsthand, most people are unnaturally resistant to abandoning their disbelief. Secondly, we police our own. It's better for everyone that magic stays underground. If ever a coven decides this isn't the case, they are usually dissuaded by other covens. And if not, you can count on the Order to come in and make sure they stop running their mouths."

So, cope, the fact that Order would murder him, and more cope. She barely knows two things about the magical world and she has a strong first contender for who killed her uncle, the professor of anthropology. She wonders how many of his students will drop dead in only barely plausibly deniable manners over the next month. Also, the order can teach people multiple types of magic, so that's her main method of threat mitigation out the window already. 

"What other things will people get murdered for doing?" 

" don't go to Perth, don't deal with the fey and don't trust anyone with mirrored eyes"

"... Perth. Really?" The other two make perfect sense. 

" I don't know why but Witches who try to leave Perth just die"

Never visiting one of Australia's most ecologically distinctive forest regions will have to be her tragic cross to bear. If she wants iron mines, she can go somewhere other than Perth. She's not technically a witch (yet), but even so. 

"And I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that for every mysterious city-wide death field that you personally know of, there are five or a hundred you've never heard of?" 

" possibly, but most everyone knows about Perth and I'm unaware of any others" 

"Naturally." 

What else does she need to know. What does her enemy know? Too much. What can they do? Possibly anything. Are they the sinister conspiracy murdering anyone who doesn't fit into the vision of the world they have? She gives the best odds, with the rest split equal ways between 'it was a normal stroke and she's paranoid', 'he made an enemy in an ordinary coven as a magic broker' and 'residual incomprehensible magic outcome'. Possibly she's underrating residual incomprehensible magic outcome. 

What can she do, then? She could close this letter, go back to london, and pretend magic doesn't exist. She can imagine as many as several possible foe-motivations who would give up at that, and as many as several who would kill her because she made it cheap to do so. Also then, she'd never learn magic or get to the bottom of this mystery, and that'd be awful. 

She can go for the vault right now, follow her uncle's clues with every drop of skill and alacrity she possibly can. Can she outplay someone with actual experience at the game and god knows what magical advantages. Maybe. The world is full of teenage girls stumbling into occult power, probably, and a sinister conspiracy can't put their full weight behind only the competent ones. Unless they have precogs. Which they might. It's arrogance, but she feels well-equipped as far as amateurs go; she assumes that security shenanigans and world mythology were not an accidental preoccupations for her uncle to instil in her. But she's not better than a professional. Even with the edge that she's law-abiding and has nothing to hide and her hypothetical assailant is neither of those things.

Same proposition for the dead-drop, except it has all the risks and forty thousand dollars is worth less risk to her than answers. If she needs forty thousand dollars, she can get it in about two days by insinuating that a sufficiently nice car will make up for her father missing her eighteenth birthday dinner. Her father thinks himself a master of efficiently using money to make up for his inability to pay attention to things other than his work. He had gardening leave once when she was twelve, it was nearly worse than when he was properly employed. 

What else could she do, that her assailants wouldn't think to do. Visit her uncles house, his university office, the old family home out of the city. If she thinks they have dozens of people, or the magical ability to obviate that level of manpower to surveil every location (coins buried in every doorway?), then she's just uncomplicatedly screwed in the middle term unless they all get tossed in jail. She needs a bodyguard, probably. She probably can't afford to pay cash for one, even with her inheritance, in the long run. What does she do if she goes there and the signs all just point towards the vault, because her uncle couldn't afford - or wasn't able - to leave multiple entirely parallel chains of indicative letters for her. No, she's under time pressure, to obtain something which her uncle presumably thought was worth the risk of this entire setup in the face of whoever would be trying to kill him. So she'll have to be as subtle as she can about doing the straightforward and stupid thing, and run like hell if things look like trouble.

... She also needs to remember that not every suspicious magical thing is the direct avatar of whatever killed her father. She needs to not alienate every other possible ally under the possibility that there is a sinister conspiracy involved. That's fine, she can track conspiracy-membership and friendship-potential separately in her head, for now. 

So her plan is, tentatively, to go in disguise to The Melbourne Vault (what a confusing name for a glorified rent-a-locker facility) after calling ahead to clarify the situation there with security, and hope that her Uncle had an actionable plan.

This doesn't seem like Abernathy's skillset really, but she may as well ask. 

"Is there any other advice you want to give me, before I follow my uncle's advice and seek out his vault?" 

"Trust is hard to find, but not everyone is out to get you," Wilson says, getting up from his desk and proffering a hand

Obviously. The problem is, it only takes one person and she doesn't know who they are yet. She takes his hand anyway as she also stands up. 

"I'll remember." 

"Now, may I make use of your bathroom? I need to be less conspicuous." 

"please it's just down the hall"

She will go down the hall and get changed then, from her own perfectly stylish and elegant outfit into some jeans and a tshirt and a hoodie. It looks bad, but most people's outfits look bad, and blending in is the point. 

She comes back out.

"Do you mind if I leave my luggage here until I've confirmed it's safe to go to my home?" 

"Of course, I can have it delivered to a hotel or back home for you when you need it, just give us a call"

"Thank you very much. I'll be on my way, then." 

She takes a minute to move some stuff she might need into a backpack, then she orders an uber for the street on the other side of the block and goes to jump the fence and leave that way. 

Minutes later, a Toyota Camry arrives.The make and plate number match expectations, as does the driver's appearance.

Wonderful. She'll get in. 

The driver engages in brief small talk before pulling away from the curb toward Alecto's destination. The cityscape moves steadily past the window, and soon the car halts on a busy street, a few blocks from the vault. A trendy café with a mostly convincing minimalist aesthetic welcomes her.

Right. Now, she is a normal non-paranoid person who has a perfectly normal need to visit her bank. Normally. 

She does her best to not glance around constantly trying to see if anyone is watching for her as she walks there. 

The few-block walk from the cafe to the Melbourne vault is uneventful as Alecto weaves through the bustling sidewalk traffic.The vault resides in the subbasement of a sleek high-rise in the heart of the city. 

Parked on the curb directly across from the entrance is a blacked-out Range Rover, its tinted windows concealing any occupants. A large, hard-case roof box sits atop the SUV, which sits low on its suspension.