Todd Navarro

Vigilante slayer of House of Navarro, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line, known as The Ash Scythe. Craft: Mission Watch.

Todd Navarro was born in 1970 at San Antonio, in the King William district of Texas, and is living today in King William, where he works as an insurance adjuster and, since 1994, as a vampire slayer of the House of Navarro, the Tejano ranching families who guarded the San Antonio missions. The family book knows him as The Ash Scythe, a name for the curved blade that cuts what has already burned, and it classes him as a Vigilante, a hunter who acts on his own account, outside any chain of command, on behalf of the neighbourhood that has no one else. His craft is Mission Watch, the nightly keeping of the five missions of the river and of the roads, ditches and old walls that lead to them, and his gear is a service pistol and a silver-edged knife. He was called in 1994, in a stable, when the horses screamed and the groom was found cold. He is the son of the electrician and slayer Jose Navarro, The Bitter Ferryman. In 1994 he married the county investigator and slayer Loretta Proctor, and they have one daughter, Gwen Proctor, who is a slayer in her turn. The first thing that an adjuster learns is that a loss has a shape. Water comes from above, fire from below, and a burglar goes in by the door that was easiest, and Todd, who has looked at some eleven thousand losses in thirty-one years, can stand in a ruined kitchen and tell the owner what happened to it before the owner has finished the sentence. He says that he does not need to believe a claim. He has to measure it. He walks every site twice, once for the company and once for himself. It is an excellent trade for a Vigilante. It sends him, with a company badge, into any house, shop, warehouse or barn in the county that has suffered a loss that nobody can explain, and it gives him the right, which no policeman has, to ask the owner, politely, what exactly they were doing between nine and midnight. He was born in a room on Guenther Street, in the winter of 1970, in the German quarter that his father's family had lived in for forty years, in a two-storey house cut into flats, with a midwife, a kettle and his great-great-aunt Pilar standing in the doorway with a cane. His mother, whom the family papers do not name, had a rented room on the upper floor and took no part in the Ledger, and Jose, who was thirty-six and had never married, brought the baby home to the ranch on the south side within the week. He raised the boy in a trailer by the creek, among horses, with the great-aunt ruling the child as she had ruled the stalls of the old livery. Todd was on a horse before he could walk. He learned, from the age of four, to stand still and breathe slowly and let his shoulders drop, and to put a flat hand on a horse's neck when it was frightened. It was his father's whole creed, and he has never had another. Jose was a Mercenary, who sold his horsemanship by the night to whichever house required it, and he did not teach it to his son as a trade. He taught him the horse. By ten Todd could take a gelding through a creek in the dark. By fourteen he could take a skittish mare past a bus, and the old men on the ranch, who had said that the boy was too quiet to be any use, took it back. Jose's illness began in 1985, when Todd was fifteen, and for three years the boy did the evening feeding and the pasture work in his father's place, and sat with him on the porch in the dusk, listening to the horses settle. He did not know what his father did at night. He knew that he came home at four, that he washed his hands and that the horses, after certain nights, would not go near the east pasture. Jose died in the summer of 1988, and Todd, who was eighteen, rode the grey to the cemetery behind the hearse, and it did not shy. He took a degree in business at the university in San Antonio, working nights at a Southside filling station to pay for it, and in 1991 hired on with an insurance company as a trainee adjuster, which he said was the only job in the city in which a man was paid to be suspicious. It was the best education that he could have had. He learned to read a scene and a ledger, to ask a stranger the same question three times in different words, and to find, in a pile of ash, the one fact that was not as the owner described it. He knew nothing of the Ledger. His father, who had been a private man, had written down a short account in a green exercise book, in a hard, upright hand, and left it in a tin in the tack room, with a note that it was not to be opened until the boy was twenty-four. Todd, who was twenty-three, opened it in the winter of 1993, out of impatience, and read the first page standing in the cold, and shut it, and read it again by the stove, and went out to look at the horses. He was called in the spring of 1994, in a stable. It was the old livery barn on the creek, which he had bought a share in from a cousin that year, and he had gone down at night in March to check the horses, because a mare was due to foal. The yard was quiet and the lights were out. He crossed to the barn door and heard, from inside, a sound that he had never heard and recognised at once. It was the sound of every horse in the building screaming, together, at the top of its voice, and then, quite suddenly, silence. He went in with a torch, and found them standing against the far wall with their ears flat and their eyes ringed with white, and on the straw at the foot of the loft ladder, in the beam of the torch, the groom, a young man named Esteban who had been hired in February, lying on his back, cold, with his collar unbuttoned and a line of small marks on the side of his neck. Todd had a pistol in the truck. He did not go for it. He put out the torch, stood still, breathed slowly and let his shoulders drop, as he had been taught, and in the dark, by the sound of the horses, he learned where it was. They were no longer afraid of him. They were afraid of the loft. He walked to the foot of the ladder, laid a hand flat on the nearest mare's neck, and said that he would be a minute. It is recorded that he was a minute. It is recorded, in the family book, that he went back for the pistol and the knife and came down the ladder some time before dawn, and that the horses stood quiet. Esteban, who was cold only from loss of blood, was found by the ambulance and recovered. He never learned what had happened, and he is now the foreman at the ranch. Loretta Proctor, who had been called at fifteen, in the doorway of a bank at dusk, and was by 1994 the best young investigator in the county, came out at six in the morning, in her county car, with a notebook, and stood in the barn with her arms folded. She was twenty-eight, a tall, brown, level-eyed woman with a ponytail, the daughter of Elena Navarro and Wendell Proctor and the sister of Travis Proctor, and she had been waiting, she said, for three years to find out whether he would come to it. They were married in the autumn of that year in the mission church of San José. His kinswoman Melissa Navarro, who married Loretta's brother Travis Proctor in the same twelvemonth, sat in the front pew. Gwen Proctor was born in 1995, and Loretta, who has said that her whole method is to be thorough and unsentimental, trained her daughter in the family way, at the kitchen table, with a notebook and a map. He works Mission Watch as his father worked the horses, without a fee. The five missions of the river, San Antonio de Valero, Concepción, San José, San Juan and Espada, lie in a chain along the river for eight miles, from the middle of the downtown to the open ranch country on the south. By day they are parish churches and national parks. By night, from the bell tower of San José to the dam at Espada, they are the longest wall that the Navarros have ever held. He walks them, in a grey canvas jacket, on foot or on a bicycle or, in the winter, on a horse. He knows the place at the Espada dam where a creature will stop. On the attacks of September 2001 he was in the middle of a warehouse inspection on the Southside, and he spent that night alone at San José, for no reason that he could have explained, and the priest brought him coffee at four. In the pandemic years the claims came in by telephone and email, and he worked them at the kitchen table in a mask, and walked the missions in the evenings, because the parks were closed and the paths were empty and there was, he found, a good deal to watch. He is fifty-six, a lean, dark, slow-spoken man with a leathery face, his father's hands and a habit, in a crowded room, of standing close to the wall. He lives in a tall narrow house in King William, with a horse trailer in the lane, a cabinet of his father's notebooks and a wife who is, he says, the only person who has ever called his estimate of damages into question. Todd Navarro is remembered in the Navarro family as The Ash Scythe, the adjuster who walked the five missions at night for nothing and who put his flat hand on a frightened horse and went up the ladder. In the Slayerverse he stands for the Vigilantes of the Navarro house, the hunters who answered to no one but the neighbours they watched, and who proved that a torch, a tape and a quiet voice can guard a river of old walls as well as any army.