Magic Claims

EPILOGUE

“He’s taking this herding thing a bit too far,” Troy said.

I glanced up from the piece of paper in my hand. We sat on the porch of what we were calling the front office. The building had three levels, and we were on the second floor, accessible from the ground by a wide stone staircase. The new front gate was directly in front of us. Technically it wasn’t a gate yet. Right now, it was a gap in the wall, located where the Pale Queen’s favorite tower used to be.

I had done more damage than I thought with that sword strike, and once Curran and the Pack had taken the Pale Queen down, the tower cracked and was judged unsound. My husband and the rest of the shapeshifters demolished it.

He was standing by the gap now, with Paul, our general contractor, who was saying things. I couldn’t hear them from my spot—they were a full hundred yards away—but I knew that expression. Yes, it can be done. It will be expensive.

Expensive now was relative.

Between my husband and us, Owen was walking along, carrying a large stick. He had a big straw hat on his head. Behind him, three juvenile giant rhinos ambled along. One of them nudged Owen with its horn. The werebison turned around and tapped the rhino with his stick. The rhino ran in a circle, making short hops like an overly excited baby goat. Owen rolled his eyes.

I’d offered to get him a cowboy hat instead of the straw one, but apparently, he had an intense dislike of all things cowboy.

“Where are you taking them?” I called out.

“Southern pasture, away from the mastodons,” Owen yelled back.

I waved.

My guess had been right. The fortress was square, although calling it a fortress was grossly inaccurate. The outer wall, composed of a multitude of towers, enclosed an area of almost one and a half square miles. The towers doubled as storage facilities, and we had managed to look at the first eighteen so far, although the shapeshifters had done a quick run and checked all of them to make sure nothing alive was trapped inside. We had found some crazy stuff.

In the center of the inner space rose a crude palace. A multitude of structures surrounded it: barracks, living quarters, more storage facilities, some weird platform that was likely used for rituals, and barns. Lots of barns housing a variety of Ice Age animals. We found a small family of mastodons, all of them freaked out beyond all reason, some kind of weird huge camels, more stag-moose, and the juvenile giant rhinos. Owen immediately declared that as the only herd wereanimal present, he wanted to be in charge of all the herds, and Curran and I couldn’t sign off on that fast enough. The baby rhinos were his favorite.

“As long as he isn’t herding us,” I told Troy.

The werejackal shook his head.

“How are the Agers?” I asked.

“Better. Food, clean water, and showers can do miraculous things.”

My desperate claiming had managed to save the lives of nine horned shapeshifters and two hunters. A drop in the bucket. They hadn’t been treated well by the Pale Queen. In fact, the animals had been probably treated better, and they were all still traumatized. The shapeshifter living quarters didn’t even deserve that name. If I could’ve set that place on fire, I would have.

We installed the shapeshifters into barracks, where Troy administered first aid. The hunters must’ve been higher in the hierarchy, because their barracks were a little better, but not by much. Although we had found a room filled with dried meat, we dumped it all because we had no idea what it was and we’d brought food in from Penderton. Watching people try fresh bread for the first time was an unforgettable experience.

“Here she goes again,” Troy murmured.

One of the hunters, a tall woman with light brown hair, climbed up the stairs. Her legs had been damaged in her desperate attempt to escape the Pale Queen. Troy had healed her, but walking was clearly difficult. Even so, as soon as she could walk, she climbed the stairs and parked herself on the side guarding them. If I got up and went somewhere, she would try to hobble behind me. She took the morning shift, and the other hunter, a man about her age, would take the evening.

After watching her stand there for thirty minutes the morning after we took the complex, I asked Keelan to find a chair. He couldn’t find one, so he brought a big log he cut from a tree.

She and the other hunter had washed off the blue clay. Their ears, teeth, and the ghostly bark-like swirls of green and brown pigment on their skin told me they were fae or at least had some of the blood in them. Despite the growing magic, fae were still rare. The few I’d met held humanity in low regard, and several of them had no problem eating human flesh. But then most of the people I came across in my previous line of work weren’t exactly upstanding citizens. I would have to make some calls and figure out if there was a fae expert we could invite to visit us once things settled down.

We still had no idea what the horned people were.

The hunter reached the top of the stairs. I got up and nodded to her. She nodded back and sat on the log, holding her spear.

“Why is she doing this?” Troy said.

“They are trying to show that they are useful,” I told him. “If she could talk, she would be saying, ‘Please don’t kill me. I can work. I will guard you. I will be loyal.’”

The language barrier was a problem, but we would get past it eventually. Conlan has made a lot of headway with the two younger shapeshifter teenagers. They were up to five words. Water, food, yes, no, and chocolate. Eventually we would explain to everyone from the Ice Age that they were free to do as they wanted.

I looked back at the paper.

Isaac had survived. Not only had he walked away from that fight, he had gone all the way back to Penderton, and when the tech hit that evening, he called back to the Order HQ. Now I was in possession of a letter from Grand Master Damian Angevin, sealed with his sigil and signed by his hand. I’d asked Isaac if he had any shades so the golden light of the Grand Master’s magnificence wouldn’t blind me when I opened it. He hadn’t even cracked a smile.

The Order was officially requesting permission to establish a one-knight chapter at our temple complex to “facilitate the retrieval of our brothers and sisters so their bodies can be returned to their families.” Unofficially, Angevin wanted to keep an eye on us, and I had no doubt that once the bodies were retrieved, he would find some pretext to keep Isaac or someone else stationed here.

I had dealt with him before. He had a thing for Erra, but besides that, my aunt and the Grand Master were a part of a much larger strategy involving the higher levels of federal government. So far, the feds had wisely left Curran and me alone.

Having a knight of the Order on hand brought both advantages and disadvantages. He would, of course, report everything to Angevin, probably directly, considering that the Grand Master knew exactly who Curran and I were. Our family was likely at the top of Angevin’s Watch Me list. But having access to the authority wielded by the Order could prove beneficial down the line.

Curran and Paul were walking toward me.

“Hey, baby!” my husband called.

“Hey, handsome! You come here often?”

“Just to see you. Hey, did those files you got from Ned mention any kind of caves or anything in this area?”

“No. Why?”

“Where does the sewage go?”

Good question. The fortress had almost no furniture, and what little there was was made of stone mostly, but it did have toilets. Sort of. If you could call a hole in the floor a toilet. I had thrown a match in there, which in retrospect wasn’t the brightest thing to do, but it hadn’t illuminated anything and went out before it hit the bottom.

“No idea.”

“First priority,” Paul said. “That and running water. The wells are good and all, but there need to be sinks and showers. This will take a lot of manpower.”

“We’ll hire Penderton people,” Curran said.

“It will be expensive.”

Curran grinned. “We’re bucks up.”

Paul shook his head. “Whatever you say.”

They walked away.

We had just finished renovations on the other house. None of the buildings around me were fit for human habitation without serious construction. I would be stuck in renovation hell forever.

What to do about the Order? I looked at the paper some more. It didn’t say anything new.

If we did allow the Order to establish their one-man chapter here, it would have to come with a lot of conditions attached. For one, I would want its existence to be sealed. I should be able to count the number of Order people who knew about it on one hand, and Nick Feldman couldn’t be one of those people. Curran’s Pack rescue strategy relied on surprising the alphas. Nick was in love with Desandra. He would do anything to keep her and her two sons safe. If he found out what we were planning, he would immediately tell her. We had to keep him in the dark.

Come to think of it, we’d need to stick to our schedule as well. Before we had left for Wilmington, Mahon and Martha made us promise to return for holidays and during summer, so they could spend time with us and especially with Conlan. We’d need to keep that up no matter how busy things got here. As far as Atlanta knew, we were chilling on the beach. The last thing we needed was for them to come looking for us before we were ready. And Mahon would, too. We didn’t need that old cranky bear stomping through our woods.

I was reasonably sure Penderton would keep our secret. I had released my claim on the town, so I held up my promise. That and getting rid of the Pale Queen made us trustworthy, and Penderton wanted to maintain a good relationship with us. First, we proved we were handy at dispatching threats, and if Penderton came to us for help, we would take care of it to be neighborly. And second, renovating this place would require a lot of manpower and skilled tradesmen. Curran already talked to Ned about supplies, and judging by the way Ned’s eyes lit up, we would be keeping Penderton’s builder guilds happily employed probably for years to come.

I would have to discuss all of this with Curran tonight over dinner.

A commotion broke out at the gap. Jynx appeared in it and took a deep breath. “Consort! There is a man here to see you! He says he is a wizard!”

I needed to invest in a bullhorn or something. “Is his name Luther?”

“Might be. He looks like a Luther! Let me check!” Jynx disappeared from view and came back. “Yes!”

“Let him in!”

She stepped aside and a man strode through the gap, looking like an academic who had gotten lost in the woods and was now seriously put out. His dark hair was damp with sweat. His naturally pale skin still showed a little of his summer tan. He wore hiking pants and a sweatshirt that said A WIZARD IS NEVER LATE. Tolkien. Of course.

Luther adjusted his glasses and noticed me. “You!”

“Troy, this is Assistant Director Luther Dillon. We are in the presence of Biohazard royalty. We are not worthy.”

Troy executed an elaborate bow.

“Laugh it up, you philistine. I hiked twenty miles to get here!”

“What brings you to our neck of the woods, Assistant Director?”

“You sent me a kilogram of enchanted gold and a blood sample with DNA from an extinct American cheetah! Of course, I…”

He trailed off. I couldn’t blame him. Seeing a ten-foot-tall furry mastodon coming around the corner with an eight-year-old boy riding on her back would give anyone pause.

“Conlan, where are you taking Mona?” I called out.

“Southern pasture.”

“You can’t. Owen went there with the baby rhinos.”

“I will take her to the west then.”

“Where is Darin?” I asked.

“He went to the lake again. He found some sort of magic freshwater clams in it. He’s very excited about it.” Conlan shrugged.

“Okay,” I told him.

Mona trotted her way past Luther and exited through the gap, carrying Conlan with her.

“What the hell is going on?” Luther demanded. “What is…all of this?”

I got up. “Come. I’ll show you.”

We walked through the antechamber of the palace, taking it slow so my hunter guard could keep up. The palace felt eerie, its ceiling too high, its contours too severe. Shadows pooled in the corners.

Luther hadn’t said a word in the entire fifteen minutes it took us to walk over here. I had done the impossible. I had rendered Luther Dillon speechless. It only took a magical scheme roughly twelve thousand years in the making to accomplish this feat.

We entered the main hall. I whispered an incantation, and feylanterns ignited on the walls, bathing the room in bright light. I’d had them brought specifically from Wilmington just so I could see everything in this hall clearly.

The hunter halted in the doorway. She didn’t want to enter.

Murals filled the walls, painted in red, brown, black, and white on massive stone panels. I stopped before the first one.

“Some time ago, probably between 15,000 and 10,000 B.C., when the world was covered in ice, and North Carolina was sheathed in boreal tundra, a fae woman was exiled from her tribe.”

In the mural, a lone figure with long blue hair walked away from a group of people. Some of them had blue hair, some, like the hunters I’d saved, were brown-haired. Dark dots peppered the space between the crowd and the blue-haired figure, rocks thrown at her. Behind the group, rectangular shapes portrayed houses, with the largest house towering above them. A palace. One of the smaller houses was on fire.

I moved to the second mural. “She was driven away into the woods, but she was powerful, and she survived. Her magic grew, and she found acolytes who followed her.”

In the mural a fae woman stood in the center of the forest, lit up by inner fire. Figures knelt around her, their arms raised in supplication.

“When she was strong enough, she came back.”

The third mural was smeared with blood. It had dried to a dull brown, and someone had added red pigment on top of it. Just a sea of blood with people in random poses drowning in it and the blue-haired woman’s inner fire. In the distance, all the houses burned.

“She killed most of her old tribe, enslaved those who had survived, and ruled over them from this palace. She became the Pale Queen.”

The fourth mural showed a lone figure with blue hair in the center of the palace, her inner fire surging to encompass everything. Many figures with gold collars knelt before her, her acolytes bowing on both sides.

“She fought a war with a neighboring shapeshifter people and enslaved them, too.”

Another panel filled with blood, portraying horned people and animals dying. The next one showed her back in the palace, with lions, wolves, and horned people kneeling before her in collars.

I crossed the chamber to the other side. Luther followed me.

“Then the world began to warm. The climate was changing.”

This panel had the sun, bright and scorching, wreathed in fire.

“She decided to put her kingdom into slumber.”

On the next panel, a massive hill formed over the palace and the houses, all people lying flat, including the blue-haired woman in the palace.

“A fae queen asleep in the Underhill,” Luther murmured. “How fitting…”

The next panel was blank. I stopped before it. “And then the fae woman woke up and found herself in the new world, which she decided to rule. She sent her emissaries to the closest town and demanded human sacrifice to bend them to her rule. At first the town paid, but eventually they asked us for help. We came, killed her, took over her house, and freed the people she didn’t manage to sacrifice. The end.”

Luther stared at the walls, taking it in.

“I will tell you the whole thing in more detail over some tea, if you want.”

“I want,” he said. “What do you think woke her up?”

“I don’t know. Although I’m maintaining a cordial relationship with the Order, and I’ve asked a knight-pathfinder I know to check their records. During the last flare, this entire area froze over. Nobody knows why, but apparently, they’d had a record drop in temperatures with three feet of snow and ice on the ground. It took weeks for it to thaw. Perhaps she had structured her sleeping spell in such a way that it awakened her when the world turned cold again.”

“But how? By what mechanism? Look at these buildings. They are primitive to the point of crudeness. How could she put all of these people and animals to sleep for fifteen thousand years?”

“I don’t know,” I told him. “We will probably never find out.”

“Did you have to kill her?”

“We really, really did.”

He sighed. “There was so much we could’ve learned from her.”

I nodded at the guard in the doorway. “Do you see her? She refuses to enter this room. Even if she had been forbidden, the person who issued that order is dead, but she still wants nothing to do with this place. Bad things happened here. Some magic isn’t worth learning.”

Luther surveyed the walls again.

“As soon as we get the urgent basics taken care of, I’m going to tear this palace down,” I told him. “If you want the panels for posterity, I will send them to you.”

Luther looked around. “You want to tear this down? This giant building?”

I nodded. “I’ll level it, purify it by claiming all this land so none of her magic remains, and then we’re going to build a nice modern Keep in its place.”

Luther looked at me. “Is that ‘Keep’ with a capital letter?”

“Probably.”

“So this is the new Pack HQ?”

“Yes and no. Penderton has given us eighty-two thousand acres and you’re standing in the exact center of that plot. I will claim all of it and keep it safe. If years from now things don’t go well in Atlanta and any shapeshifters decide to move down here, we will have housing ready for them. But this will never be a Pack-exclusive place, Luther. We’re done with that. Shapeshifters don’t need to live apart from other people. In fact, the more we all interact, the better.”

Luther would keep our secret. I had no doubt about it.

He dragged his hand through his hair. “I will take the panels. Of course, I want the panels. This is a wealth of magical knowledge. And I understand the sentiment and the plans, but the cost of all of this will be prohibitive. Just transporting the panels alone out through the woods. I may have to get a grant from the Mage Academy…”

I motioned him to follow me and walked to the back of the chamber, past the big stone chair that must’ve served as the Pale Queen’s throne.

We walked through a wide doorway into a hallway, and then through another doorway. I whispered a word, and the feylantern flared to life.

A long chamber spread before us. Chunks of gold and heaps of uncut precious stones littered the floor, piled against the walls on both sides. Here and there strange crystals glowed, fluorescing gently with magic. Odd bones, skulls and femurs, lay between the gold nuggets. Some I recognized. Some were too weird to identify. Everything in the chamber was either a precious metal, gem, or magically potent item. The chamber kept going, its end lost in the darkness. I had only installed enough feylanterns to light up the first twenty-five yards.

Luther stared, stunned.

“We don’t know how long the Pale Queen was alive,” I said. “Long enough that she noticed the world was warming up. That didn’t happen overnight. It must’ve taken centuries. Some people think fae could live for several hundred years if their magic is strong enough, and she had a lot of magic at her disposal.”

Luther was still staring. I let him come to terms with it all.

“Gold?” he said finally.

“It takes enchantment well and it’s malleable with minimal tools. You don’t even have to dig for it that often. Sometimes you can find it on the ground. All those boring looking rocks lying about are uncut gems, and every gem here carries potential for off-the-charts enchantment. She wanted them because they are magically potent. Emeralds, garnets, sapphires, aquamarines… I’m guessing she went on field trips to the mountains, and she must’ve had some way to sense them because there are way too many here. We took a small one to Wilmington to be appraised. Just one of those good size ones will pay for an apartment building.”

Luther made a small, strangled noise.

“This wasn’t her treasure room,” I told him. “It was her craft closet. The source of the collars and some other things we found. We will pay for the transport of the panels. No need to worry.”

Luther closed his eyes for a second, then opened them. “You mentioned other things?”

I smiled. “So many other things. Come with me. I’ll show you.”