Magic Claims

3

Isaac Silverstein looked like a knight-pathfinder. A shade under six feet tall, somewhere between twenty-five and fifty, he had the lean build of a long-range hiker, a perfect balance between flexibility, endurance, and moderate calorie needs. His navy sweatshirt hung off his shoulders, and his dark brown lightweight pants were tapered to his legs, loose enough to allow freedom of movement but tight enough not to snag on the brush. He wore serious hiking boots that looked like they had seen a lot of miles in a rough terrain. We weren’t anywhere near a hiking trail, so he must be wearing what he felt comfortable in.

Isaac’s tousled hair, cut short on the sides and slightly longer on top, was a cooler shade of brown, more ash than red. His skin wasn’t that pale naturally, but it didn’t have even an echo of a tan, which told me he’d stayed the whole summer inside the chapter.

His hooded blue eyes still held a hint of the “woods” stare, however. Human eyes were expressive. We communicated with our glances as much as with our mouths. When shapeshifters hunted in the forest, their eyes lost emotion and communicated nothing. They simply watched, observing their prey, tracking it, cataloguing danger and weakness, and if you happened to meet their gaze, your mind might not even recognize that you were looking at a human. Isaac’s eyes were a bit like that.

I paused in the doorway.

“Come in,” he said.

I stepped inside.

Isaac’s office was square, with a window in the wall opposite the door. On both sides of the window, mounted weapons waited—a bow with a quiver and an assortment of knives and bladed weapons that doubled as tools: axes, tomahawks, and machete-style short swords.

A desk sat on the left, filled with neat, orderly stacks of papers. Behind it, floor-to-ceiling shelves held books, rolled-up scrolls, chunks of twisted roots, jars of dried herbs, and other assorted things an outdoorsman might find in the woods and drag home.

The wall opposite the desk, on my right, was covered by a curtain.

“Claudia wants me to talk you out of it,” Isaac said. He had a quiet voice, slightly raspy.

“Claudia is a good person.”

“Would it work?”

“No.”

Isaac leaned against his desk and pushed the wheeled client chair toward me. I saddled it backward and leaned my arms on its back.

“There were five of us,” he said. “Me, a knight-enchanter, and three knight-defenders.”

Standard team. Isaac would’ve led the way, the knight-enchanter would have set and broken wards, and the three knight-defenders would have kept all of them breathing.

“Everyone was seasoned. Everyone knew their way around the wilderness. Tim, the senior knight-defender, and I had worked together before a few times. He was a good man, reliable, competent. Kept a cool head.”

“SnS or SnD?”

Knight teams of this type came in three varieties, depending on their mission: search and rescue, search and scout, and search and destroy. The first one was off the table, so it would be one of the other two.

“SnS,” Isaac said. “Get in, locate the threat, identify if possible, and get out to tell about it.”

That meant that once things got hairy, the team would’ve bailed. They wouldn’t have pushed their luck, and yet he was the only one left.

“We got to Penderton when the magic was up,” Isaac said. “As you get closer to town, you get a bad feeling.”

“Like what?”

“Like you should turn around. It starts subtly, but the farther you go, the stronger it grows. Something doesn’t want you to be there.”

Isaac paused. I didn’t rush him.

“Did they tell you about the hill?”

“No.”

The knight-pathfinder walked over to the bookcase and pulled a cord hanging on one side. A map unrolled from the top shelf, showing Wilmington and the surrounding area. It looked different. The border of Wilmington proper was larger, and a dozen or more small towns and villages dotted the area above and to the west of the city, connected by a network of roads.

“There used to be a hill south of Harrells,” he said.

It took me a second to find it. A small town about twenty miles north-northwest of Burgaw, currently Penderton. A couple of miles south of Harrells, someone—probably Isaac—had put a big black dot.

I pulled Ned’s file out of my bag and found the map. The hill was right in the middle of the blue square marking the land Penderton had given us. Dead center.

“How big was this hill?”

“A little under two square miles in footprint, conical, 260 feet high.”

“Unusual for this area,” I thought out loud. Most of the surrounding landscape was flat, with round depressions that were lakes or pastures randomly strewn here and there.

“Pre-Shift, the hill had problems,” Isaac said. “People would see odd things around it. UFOs, skunk ape, Bigfoot, ghosts, the usual modern folklore nonsense. Post-Shift, the locals avoided it, because it gave them a bad feeling.”

“Kind of like it didn’t want you there?” I guessed.

Isaac nodded. “The hill is gone.”

“What do you mean, gone?”

“When the woods started expanding, the Forest Service went up there and put a big flagpole with a flag and a feylantern on the apex of the hill to help people orient themselves. On a clear night, you could see the lantern all the way from the tower at Penderton. It disappeared during the last flare. No flag, no feylantern, no hill.”

That wasn’t in Ned’s file.

“They tried looking for it,” Isaac said. “Flew a drone up there. Something took it down, but not before it transmitted a picture of a clear sky and woods where the hill used to be.”

“You bet on the hill, then?”

He nodded again. “We waited until the tech came and went in as soon as it was light enough to see. It’s about twenty miles through the woods to where the hill used to be. Now, all of it was supposed to be your regular longleaf pine savanna. It’s light, bright, open. The forest floor is grass, very little underbrush, with an occasional bog here and there. This was a fun, easy forest. Not even close to the Ozark broadleaf woods or spruce-fir upstate, where you have to cut your way through.”

Yes, the ninja woods. Tall pines and sunshine.

“We go in, and that bad feeling starts growing stronger. After the first hour, Taylor, the knight-enchanter, said we were going in circles. She was sure she had seen the exact tree twice before, and she said she’d nicked a pine trunk, and there was the nick. The thing was, we were going the right way. She wanted to go back to town, regroup, and try again. I told her no, and Tim backed me up.

“By the end of the second hour, everyone except me was sure we were going the wrong way. We stopped at a clearing by a pond. I took one of the knight-defenders, pointed to the north, and told him to look in that direction and memorize what the woods looked like. He said he did. I had him cover his eyes, spin around three times, and tell me where north was. He had no clue. Even though he knew that the pond was on his west side, he couldn’t orient himself. He said that every time he turned his head, the woods looked different. Now, tech is up this whole time. None of this shit should be happening.”

“What did you do?”

“We went to ropes. I got my paracord out, tied everyone to each other, with Tim bringing up the rear and me leading the way, and told them to look at the back of the person in front of them while they were walking. We kept going. All the while I’m looking around for the shaman totems, witch markers, anything that could possibly explain what’s going on, and there is nothing.”

Isaac dragged his hand over his face, as if wiping memories away.

“The woods started closing in. Suddenly, there is an underbrush. I’m seeing willow, alder, and blueberry. I’m seeing quaking aspens. They don’t grow south of Zone 6, so it’s strange, but they are native to North Carolina. You can find them on some Smoky Mountain slopes. Then I see this.”

He turned to the shelves, pulled a glass jar off, and set it in front of me. Inside was a clump of golden pine needles.

I looked at him.

“Tamarack,” he said. “Also known as American larch. A conifer that loses its needles in the fall.”

“Not something I’m familiar with.”

“That’s because it grows in Canada and northeastern US.”

“Oh.”

“This forest is thriving. Trees look healthy, birds are singing, squirrels are running around, deer, mice, everything is as it’s supposed to be except all of it should be a lot farther north and something doesn’t want us there. All of this is confirming that we’re going the right way, because the farther we go, the weirder things get. We keep moving. Our path gets denser and denser. I had to get my machete out, and I’m cutting through now. In every other direction, there are clear animal trails, but directly in front of us, it’s a wall of green.”

The evil in the woods was trying to get them to turn back any way it could. It must’ve recognized them as large-caliber magic users and didn’t want a confrontation. But with the tech up, there were only a handful of ways to do it. Three, to be exact, and all of them meant serious trouble for us.

“Do you think you might have gone through a portal?” I asked. “A pocket realm of some sort?”

Isaac shook his head. “No. I’ve gone into places like that twice. One hundred percent sure there was no portal. And the enchanter confirmed it.”

It was down to two, then. I would’ve taken the portal over either one.

“It’s early afternoon now,” Isaac said. “And we’re being watched. I can feel the stares. Something large is moving all around us, just out of sight. The woods end suddenly and we’re in a swamp. I stop on the edge trying to figure out the path, and I see these things in the water. I don’t know what the hell they are but they’re furry, they’re the size of black bears, and there are a lot of them. We turn to go around, and something comes out of the brush and rips Jeremiah out of our line. Sliced right through the paracord on both sides. You’d think it would hit me or Tim, but it went for the man in the middle.”

“What was it?”

Isaac sighed. “A blur. Never saw it clearly. It was so fucking fast. But you want a gut-feeling call: a shapeshifter.”

Crap. “What kind?”

“I don’t know. I’ve fought shapeshifters before, and this bastard was on another level.”

I didn’t need to ask him if they chased the attacker. Knights of the Order didn’t leave their own behind.

“It took us another two hours to find his body,” Isaac said. “There was a clearing with a rock sticking out of it. He was on that rock, impaled by his own sword. The rock had carvings all over it, and his blood had run down into the grooves and painted them red.”

Great.

“The knight-enchanter had never seen anything like that. She had no clue what culture it might have come from. By this point it was dark. So, we left him, alone, on that rock, and made camp away from it. Taylor put the salt circle down in case magic hit at night. We slept in shifts, two people down, two people watching. In the morning, Sander, one of the knight-defenders, is missing. None of us heard or saw whatever took him. He’s just gone. It’s down to Tim, Taylor, and me.”

The pauses between his sentences were getting longer. He was struggling to get the words out.

“We took a vote to go in or to get out. Everyone wanted to keep going, so we did. At noon, I climb a tree to see how deep into the woods we had gone. While I am up there, something comes out of the forest. I can’t see what, the brush was too thick. I hear Tim scream. I get down off the fucking tree and they are both dead. Skulls caved in, just crushed like walnuts. Blood and brain everywhere.”

He fell silent. I gave him room.

“I’m pissed off, so I keep going north,” he said finally. “I don’t know how long I walked, but they trailed me the whole way. Finally, I see the forest thin out up ahead. I come to a clearing and see this animal chewing on some bushes. I don’t know what it is but I sure as hell know it shouldn’t be here, in coastal North Carolina.

“We look at each other, and this realization comes over me. This animal, it fits perfectly into this environment. It’s exactly where it’s supposed to be. It’s me who is out of place. I’m the one who doesn’t belong.”

“The magic hit, and it was like someone pinned me under a microscope. I don’t have words to explain. It’s like whatever it was that had been keeping an eye on me suddenly stared and the weight of it almost made me black out.”

He paused.

“What happened?”

“I ran. Whatever was watching me chased me, but I’m very fast when I have to be, and I was squeezing out everything I could of my pathfinding magic. It threw me out onto an abandoned, overgrown road—421 as I found out later—and I took it. Came out of the woods the next day with barely a scratch on me. Sat down. Wrote a report. Explained how I was the only one who had lived. Sent it to the Citadel in Wolf Trap.”

“Why didn’t they send another team in?”

Isaac crossed his arms on his chest. “The town asked me what would happen if the woods decided to retaliate. They wanted to know if the Order could protect them.”

“What did you tell them?”

“The truth. We have no idea what it is, and we don’t know how to defend against it. The mayor called the Citadel, spoke with the Grand Master directly, and I was told to fall back.”

“And now you’re here.”

“The four of them are still in that forest,” Isaac said. “The thing that killed them is still there, too.”

All the unsaid things hung between us, making the air heavy and oppressive. That he lost his whole team. That he came out unharmed, while the rest of them had their skulls bashed in. That the town was still under siege. That he met something in those woods that disturbed the very core of his being and he needed to confront it to make the world right again.

And Grand Master Damian Angevin had allowed him to stay right where he was instead of ordering him to a new assignment. The Order had gotten a lot choosier about which fights they picked under Angevin’s leadership, but once the knights went in, they saw it to the end. No matter what it cost them. Leaving this matter unfinished went against everything they stood for. Angevin was giving Isaac a chance to resolve things, but not the means to do it.

“What did the animal look like?” I asked.

Isaac pushed away from his desk and pulled the curtain on the opposite wall to the side. A big map of Pender Forest was pinned to the wall, with a twisted route leading north-northwest inked on it. Landmarks dotted the map here and there: fallen tree, pond, bog—each marked with a symbol and a piece of a string that connected the marks to pencil sketches drawn with startling accuracy on watercolor paper.

On the left, a sketch showed a triangular rock with a blond man sprawled on it, a sword protruding from his chest. His blue eyes stared up at the artist from a face twisted by fear and pain.

At the top of the map, on a thirty-inch piece of paper, a landscape unfolded, the trees framing a small slice of grassy plain. A big animal stood in the grass. It looked like an elephant, and yet it clearly wasn’t. It had an elephant’s trunk and elephant’s ears, but the ears were too small and its trunk was too long. Very short beige fur covered it, reminiscent of a horse’s pelt. Its legs seemed wider apart than an elephant’s, and its profile was wrong, too. Elephants had high foreheads, and this beast’s cranium sloped. But the tusks were the most obvious. They were massive and long, as long as the trunk, pointed down, and spiral-shaped.

Wow.

“How big?” I asked.

“Almost eight feet at the shoulder. Four tons in weight. Maybe more.”

We stared at the drawing.

“What the hell is it?” I murmured.

“No clue.”

We looked at the beast some more.

“Still plan on going in?” he asked.

“Yep. Want to come?”

“I’ll think about it.”

“If you decide to join us, find me in Penderton.”

“I’ll think about it,” the knight-pathfinder repeated.

Ned was right. The woods past the Northeast Cape River bridge were beautiful. Massive pines crowded the old highway, drenched in sunlight, their branches thick with clusters of long pine needles that looked deceptively fluffy. The underbrush was nonexistent, mostly fledgling pines poking out of the clumps of golden wiregrass. It was a far cry from the impenetrable bramble of stunted live oak, wax myrtle, and yaupon holly that made up the maritime forest around our house.

Ahead two gray SUVs waited, parked on the side of the road. That had to be my ride.

I caught a hint of movement out of the corner of my eye. Eight shapeshifters slipped out of the woods and flanked me, with my husband popping up on my right like a jack-in-the-box. I took half a second to catalogue the familiar faces: Keelan, dark blond hair tousled, a massive claymore on his back; Da-Eun, his beta, athletic, with dark hair pinned to the back of her head; Jynx, a bouda with wild eyes and long, bright yellow nails; Andre and Hakeem, whom I first met on their cow-pawing adventure; Troy, the red-haired werejackal who was our medmage; Luiza, dark-haired and willowy; and Owen, who looked like he enjoyed bench pressing small cars as a light workout. A good team.

Curran grinned at me, his gray eyes happy. “Hey, baby. You come here often?”

I laughed.

“Your hand looks heavy. Let me hold it for you.” He squeezed my hand with his warm fingers.

“Smooth,” Jynx murmured.

Andre winked at her. “Hey, Jynx, your hand—”

“Touch me and I’ll break you,” she told him.

“Aww.”

“Conlan?” I asked.

“Back at the safe house with Helen,” Curran told me.

I figured he’d choose that option over having someone watch him at the fort. This way everyone could pretend that he was a guest and not someone they were babysitting.

“Luiza will take Cuddles back to the safe house,” Curran said. “Helen will need backup until the patrols come in.”

At any given moment, there were three shapeshifter patrols moving through Wilmington and the surrounding area, not counting the pair of shapeshifters who watched the Farm. Keelan wanted to know what was happening in the city, and he was very thorough about things.

We reached the cars. I dismounted, took the saddlebags with my gear off Cuddles, and handed the reins to Luiza together with a bag of carrots.

“If she stops in the middle of the road, don’t try to force her. Show her that you have a carrot, give her a small piece, and keep the rest. She’ll follow you. Also, Conlan looks like an eight-year-old, but he doesn’t think like one. He’s very polite, so he’ll say things like ‘Yes, ma’am’ and ‘No, ma’am,’ and before you know it, he’ll talk you into letting him do something everyone will regret. Treat him like a smart, conniving teenager. Above all, please keep him away from Penderton.”

Luiza smiled. “I can handle him. No problem.”

Famous last words.

I pulled a copy of Isaac’s sketch out of my bag. I had made several at the chapter while the tech held out.

“What’s this?” Curran asked, focusing on the creature.

“Something the knight-pathfinder saw in the woods. I’ll tell you more on the way.”

I passed the sketch to Luiza. “When you get back, show this sketch to Helen in front of Conlan and tell her that we asked you to research it. If he asks you for the sketch, tell him it’s boring adult stuff.”

She grinned back at me. “Got it.”

“It will keep him occupied,” I said. “But we do need to know what this animal is. Maybe run it by Forest Service.”

“And the hunters,” Curran said. “Butcher shops buy venison and other game at auction during Friday market, so a lot of hunters will be there. Ask them if they ever saw something like this.”

“Yes, Alpha.”

We climbed into the vehicles and started down the road. Curran drove, with me in the front passenger seat and Keelan and Da-Eun in the back.

“Did you find out anything?” Curran asked.

I brought him up to speed on my fun visit with Barrett.

Curran laughed.

“Barrett’s been the king of his little island for too long,” Keelan grumbled. “He needed a reality check.”

“That man has the straight-A student syndrome,” Da-Eun said. “He’s been the most powerful Master of the Dead for so long, it’s gone to his head and permanently fucked it up.”

Isaac’s story didn’t go over as well. Neither did the copy of his sketch, which I had passed to Da-Eun and Keelan.

Da-Eun rubbed the bridge of her nose. “It’s not enough that there are mud-smeared women and human sacrifices, now we’ve got a weird-ass elephant.”

Keelan shrugged. “It’s still a herbivore, just larger. It bleeds, so it can be killed. If it gives us trouble, we’ll bleed it and run it down like an oversized stag.”

Werewolf thoughts, uncensored. If it bleeds, it dies. Not worried about the giant mysterious pachyderm in the slightest.

A side road came into view on our left. We took it, rolling deeper into the woods. After a couple of minutes, the trees turned into fields wrapped in barbed wire. Onion, corn, squash—most of it either waiting to be harvested or in the process of it. An occasional farmhouse and a few solid barns dotted the landscape, all reinforced new construction designed to shelter the farmers and their livestock from the weird predators breeding in the magic-soaked forest. To the right, a herd of red and white cows with foot-long horns grazed in a pasture. Three big Anatolian shepherds watched us as we drove by.

Another pasture, sheep this time. No dogs. Optimistic of them.

Something stirred on the roof of the barn and stood up. The creature was about forty inches at the shoulder, gray, with a lean lupine body and a wolf’s tail. Its head resembled that of an eagle, with a dark beak the size of a dagger. Its feathery wings draped over its back.

“What is that?” Da-Eun asked.

“A wolf griffin,” I told her. “A pretty good-sized one, too.”

Magic hit. The SUV’s gasoline engine sputtered and died, and Curran gently guided the vehicle to a stop just past the barn.

An unsettling feeling touched me. A kind of instinctual unease, as if a sniper were staring at me through the scope of their rifle.

Hmmm. I opened the car door and got out. Curran exited on the other side, and the two shapeshifters followed.

I stared at the woods, trying to sort out what my senses were telling me. Magic wasn’t a specific sense like a scent or a sound. We didn’t have an organ devoted to analyzing it. Instead, it was a combination of things, a pressure, a feeling, heat or ice, a faint odor, a sense of danger, sometimes overwhelming, sometimes vague.

This was… I wasn’t sure what this was.

Da-Eun began to chant, priming the water engine. Behind us, the second SUV disgorged its passengers, and I heard Troy’s voice launching into a monotone chant.

The wolf griffin pivoted to us. It gripped the edge of the roof with wicked, sickle-shaped talons, lowered its head, and raised its spotted wings, every feather erect, tipping them down like an owl trying to make itself larger.

“Quit it,” Keelan told it.

The wolf griffin rocked side to side, fluffing its feathers to maximum capacity, and let out a low shriek.

“Stay on your roof,” Keelan warned. “Don’t you come down here, or I’ll pluck your feathers out and make myself a nice pillow.”

The wolf griffin shrieked again and gave Keelan an evil raptor eye.

The creepy feeling grazed my skin, like an itch I couldn’t scratch. I turned and jogged down the road, moving in the direction we’d come from. Curran caught up with me.

We ran for about ten minutes. I stopped.

Yep, it was lighter here. Very slightly, almost imperceptibly lighter. If I wasn’t concentrating on it, I might have missed it.

“What’s up?” my husband asked.

“I’m trying to figure that out.”

I turned and walked back in the direction of the cars. It felt like walking through a very shallow stream. The magic barely wet my toes, offering no resistance, but the farther I went, the deeper it would become, until I would be wading in it.

If I was right, this would explain some things but not the others.

I crouched and put my hand on the ground. Magic touched my fingers, alien yet slightly familiar. There was a way to test my theory, but that would mean giving away the element of surprise.

I straightened.

“This might be harder than we expected,” I told Curran.

“Do you want to turn back?”

“No. Curran, that thing Keelan does, where he sends a scout team out? He can’t do it here. Nobody can go into the woods unless I’m with them. If they enter the forest without me, they won’t come out.”

“That bad?”

“Do you remember after Mishmar we camped at an abandoned gas station? We woke up, and the world was white with snow, and then the magic wave hit. It feels similar.”

Curran’s face snapped into a hard mask. “I see.”

“It’s not exactly the same, and it’s very weak here, so I could be wrong. But if I’m right, this isn’t a portal or a magic fissure like Unicorn Lane. This is deliberate and it’s driven by something intelligent. It knows we’re here. I don’t want anyone to die because they brought teeth and claws to a magic fight.”

“I’ll speak to Keelan,” he promised me.

Ned told me that Penderton’s town center was walled in. Looking at the thirty-foot wall, he might have left out some details.

Curran frowned at the big gatehouse in front of us, wide enough to accommodate the two-lane road. “What did his file say again?”

I pulled the file from the backpack resting by my feet.

“A double timber palisade filled with packed dirt,” I quoted.

The gate was built with gray oversized bricks and flanked by two towers of the same gray under shingled roofs. More towers rose on both sides, about four hundred feet apart from their neighbors, connected by a wooden wall of thick pine timber. Guards were walking on it, so it had to be at least three or four feet wide.

Curran’s eyebrows crept up.

“Solid,” Keelan said.

“And expensive,” Curran said.

“According to the file, they paid for it with a state grant, a federal grant, municipal taxes, and private donations. Ned’s father built most of it. Oh, and you’ll love this, those gray bricks are made out of Shift dust.”

When magic gnawed on a building, it slowly ground concrete into dust, a fine gray powder that was completely inert and useless. There were small hills of that dust in the city centers, and most cities had no idea what to do with it. Ned’s father would have gotten it dirt cheap. In fact, Wilmington probably paid him to remove it.

Hmm. And I bet these bricks were magic-proof, too. There was a business opportunity if I ever saw one.

“How are they made?” Curran asked.

“A proprietary process of mixing it with water, cornstarch, and sticky rice,” I read.

“How strong could rice concrete be?” Keelan asked.

“They built the Great Wall with it, you ignorant savage,” Da-Eun told him.

The speed limit dropped to twenty miles, and we joined the short line of pickup trucks, carts, and riders crawling through the gates.

“Ned has a house set up for us,” I said. “Take the second left past the gate.”

Before the Shift, Burgaw must’ve been a typical Southern town with plenty of space to spread out. I’d guess ranch-style houses, generous lots, and few if any front fences. Hints of the old town were still there, mainly in the layout of roads and parking lots, but the city wall only enclosed a square mile, and space inside was at a premium. The houses sat closer together, a lot of them two stories and a good number of them almost touching. The lawns had been converted to vegetable gardens and fenced in with chicken wire or short wooden fences. I saw a communal stable and a reinforced, bunker-like building with the sign South Walker Shelter. The town was compact, purposefully laid out, and ready to defend itself.

Ned’s directions brought us across Penderton, all the way north. A couple of street markers were missing, so we stopped to ask a local for directions, and he helpfully told us to “go on past where Pender Prison used to be.” The prison was no longer there, although some of the white one-story buildings remained. It now housed the town guard barracks, a municipal storage facility, and an emergency clinic, all sheltered behind a razor-wire fence.

“They expect the threat to come from the north,” Curran said. “This is a fallback point.”

“CC?” Keelan said.

“Mhm,” Curran said. “The radio tower.”

A command center, designed to coordinate the defense if the wall was breached. Nice.

The house Ned set out for us was just two streets over, on the imaginatively named North Wall Road. The wall was on the other side of the street. We parked the SUVs in the garage, hauled out our bags, and went into the house. It was a nice three-story place, with a porch on the ground level and wide wrap-around balconies on the top two floors. Curran and I dropped our bags in one of the third-floor bedrooms, and I walked out onto the balcony.

The wall was in front and below me, with a solid gatehouse almost directly across from the balcony, guarded by a tower on the right side. The two nearest towers rose about equal distance to the left and to the right. Past the wall, five hundred yards of clear ground offered a nice kill zone. Beyond it, the woods towered, like a second ominous wall.

Curran stepped out onto the balcony and came over to lean on the guardrail next to me. We looked at the woods.

“This is the timber gate,” I said. “Before the problem started, they harvested timber in the north forest and brought it through here to the sawmills.”

“Makes sense,” Curran said.

We watched two guards cautiously check us out from their respective towers and turn back to the forest. That tree line five hundred yards away was where the strange women first appeared.

We still didn’t know who they were or what they did with the people they had taken. Were the tribute people alive? Were they enslaved, or were they killed? Of all the magic practices, human sacrifice was the worst. It gave you a boost of magic but at a terrible cost. It tapped into the kind of powers that fed on humanity and drove us mad. They had been long banished from the world by tech, and that was for the best. Even my father steered clear of it.

The woods waited.

“Do you want to go in?” I asked.

“We have six hours of daylight left.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“We’re going in five,” Curran called out.

A chorus of ragged “Yes, Alpha” answered him.

Five minutes later, we assembled in front of the house, a small army in sweatpants. I was the only fighter out of uniform.

“We’ll enter together,” Curran said quietly. “As we go in, drift into two groups. Group One: Kate, Keelan, Troy, Owen, and Hakeem. The rest with me. We’ll widen the gap by five hundred yards and hold it there.”

He was splitting us up to invite an attack on one group or the other. Might as well find out what sort of welcome party the forest had planned for us.

“The thing that’s behind this knows we’re here,” Curran continued. “Whichever group is attacked will hold, while the other group will close in. The enemy uses magic. Kate is a magic expert. Obey her without question even if it goes against your training. She’ll keep us alive.”

Curran turned toward the woods.

“Alright,” Keelan barked, “you heard the Alpha. You’re going into enemy territory. This is the real thing. This is what you’ve trained for. Ears up, noses open, look alive.”

We started to the gate.

A small group turned the corner, entering the street a block away and hurried toward us. A middle-aged man was in the lead, short, stocky, with light brown skin and short brown hair, dressed in sawdust-covered overalls with safety googles perched on his head. Beside him was a stocky red-headed woman in her twenties armed with a bow and a sword, and a well-dressed woman in her forties with dark brown skin and glossy hair pulled into a bun.

The middle-aged man waved at us. “Wait!”

Curran stopped and everyone stopped with him.

The group reached us. The middle-aged man stuck his hand out and said, slightly out of breath, “Mayor Eugene Dowell. Everyone calls me Gene.”

“Curran Lennart. This is my wife, Kate, and these are my associates.”

Curran and I took turns shaking his hand.

The associates, who a moment ago had put on their game faces and were ready to invade enemy territory and fuck shit up, made valiant efforts to appear non-threatening.

“This is Ruth Chatfield, city clerk and finance director.”

The dark-haired woman put her hand out, and we shook it.

“And this is Heather Armstrong, our interim wall guard captain.”

We shook again.

“If you need anything, please let us know,” Gene said.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’re not going in, are you?” The anxiety dripped from Gene’s voice.

“We are,” Curran confirmed.

“But the magic is up,” Gene said.

“We know,” I told him.

Ruth looked like she was imagining our funeral. Heather’s face told me that she had seen this exact scenario before and knew none of us would come back in one piece. Or at all.

“I wish you’d reconsider,” Gene said.

“Thank you for your concern,” I told him. “Can you please open the gate for us?”

Gene sighed. “Heather?”

“Open the gates,” Heather called out. One of the guards ran down the wall, took the stairs, and went to the gate to unbar it.

The three of them watched the gate open with resigned looks on their faces.

The gate swung open, and we went through.

Behind us, Heather sighed and said, “I’ll get the first responders ready.”