Magic Claims

2

We waved goodbye as Ned and his people left. I turned to Conlan.

“Follow them and make sure they make it onto the main road.”

“Yes, Dad.”

He ran after the cars. Grendel shot out of his hiding spot in the corner of the courtyard and chased after him.

I waited until he was too far to hear us. We needed to have an adult conversation.

Kate stood next to me, flipping through a thick file Ned left behind. The record of Penderton’s battle with the evil in the woods.

“Thank you,” I said.

“For what?” Kate asked.

“Agreeing to help. For coming with me to the woods.” I paused. Looking for the right words. “All of it, I guess.”

“He put ten people in front of us and let us know they were going to die. What was I supposed to do? I would have to tell them to their faces that saving them would inconvenience me.”

Oh, it would be more than an inconvenience and we both knew it. “Agreed. That was a dick move.”

She stared at the forest tunnel around the road, watching the SUVs disappear into it. “Ned is a manipulative bastard.”

“Yes. He’s also desperate. We are who we are, baby. And I really do want those woods.”

She groaned.

“I liked Ned,” I said. “He outplayed us. He’ll be a good man to know.”

“Aha. I saw your face when you found them in our courtyard.”

“I didn’t know who they were or why they were in our house.”

She shrugged. “Technically, they were in our courtyard.”

I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. They were in our territory uninvited.”

“When we were picking out this place, you told me that it was perfect because we had no neighbors and that you didn’t like people.”

“I like everybody,” I told her.

I thought I’d get her to laugh, but she just looked at me.

“Name one person I don’t like,” I told her.

“My father.”

“Fair enough.”

“My aunt.”

“We are polite and careful with each other.”

“My cousin.”

“I dislike him less now that he’s several states away and safely domesticated by his wife and kids.”

“And he stopped trying to kill me.”

“That’s the main part of it,” I growled. “Everyone you’ve mentioned has tried to kill you.”

At some point in our lives together, keeping her lovely family from trying to murder her became a full-time job for me. They were powerful, homicidal psychopaths, and they didn’t half-ass it. When they came to kill her, they gave it their all.

Her eyes sparked. “You wanted to kill me at some point.”

“No. The most I promised to do was to throw you out of a window.”

She smiled, then thought about something, and her smile died. Kate leaned back and dragged her hand through her hair. I knew that expression. Something had been eating at her for a while.

“I started this by looking for Darin,” she said.

“You didn’t start anything. It was inevitable. And I don’t regret helping Darin.”

“Neither do I. I’m just acknowledging that I kicked this door open.” She had that calculating look on her face she got when she was assessing someone she was about to take down. “This Penderton problem is going to be complicated. I don’t like it, I don’t want to get involved in it, but you’re right, we need the woods and Penderton needs help.”

“Good. Then we agree.” I thought it would be harder to convince her. Something changed in her, and I’d missed it.

“The bad news is that we don’t know what we’re dealing with and it’s strong,” she said.

“The good news is that it has finite resources. It didn’t want to tangle with the National Guard. The Magic Rapid Response Unit has 75 veteran soldiers in it. That’s the max the National Guard could’ve sent, so we know that whatever is in the forest decided that 75 soldiers were too many. It sat back and waited for them to leave.”

“And it worked.”

“But we won’t be leaving.”

“No. We’ll stay until the end,” Kate said.

We didn’t abandon things half done. Both of us knew that when we said yes.

Kate lifted the file in her hand. “Everything in this file Ned gave us tells me that the evil in the forest is powerful enough to snatch people from Penderton whenever they want. They don’t need to formally request a tribute.”

I thought about it. “It’s about subjugation. Get the town under your thumb and keep them pinned to make sure that they won’t even consider rebelling. The forest broke Penderton’s will.”

She nodded. “It owns the town now. It can take from Penderton, and Penderton will comply.”

“We’ll have to force a confrontation. How terrible.”

She rolled her eyes.

Well, at least she had stopped looking so grim.

“Before we go there, I want to touch base with the Order,” Kate said. “According to this file, Penderton petitioned them. They sent a five-knight team in. Only the pathfinder came out.”

Pathfinders were an odd lot. To a pathfinder, there was no such thing as a maze, and if you presented them with a haystack and asked for the needle hidden in it, they would stick their hand in and pull it out on the first try. They were as close as a non-shapeshifter human could come to a trained werewolf scout.

“The Order lost four knights,” Kate said. “They wouldn’t have let it go, but I can’t find anything else about it. They didn’t follow up. I want to know what they know.”

“You think Claudia will tell you? Just like that.”

“She owes me a favor.”

“Okay. While you’re doing that, Conlan and I will go see his new favorite uncle. He can stay with them, or they can send him back here with babysitters. Either way, he won’t be here alone again, and he doesn’t need to go anywhere near Penderton for now.”

“Agreed,” she said. “He likes staying at Keelan’s. Especially if Darin will come to visit.”

Ever since Kate saved Darin, the merman kid made a habit of hanging out at the Wilmington Pack’s HQ and safehouses. Darin had been searching for something and now he seemed to have found it. He wasn’t our kind of shapeshifter, but we welcomed him all the same. He was a good, responsible kid. Everyone liked him, including Conlan.

“It’s about thirty miles to Penderton from the Wilmington Pack’s HQ,” I said. “I want to bring at least seven or eight shapeshifters. We’ll need a couple of cars.”

“Are you taking ours?”

“I’ll take Keelan’s.” The tech was holding, but sooner or later magic would come. Chanting at cars was never my favorite bit. If I could get someone else to do it, all the better. “It will take me a couple of hours to get everyone together. Do you think you’ll be done by then?”

“I should be,” she said.

“What do you need to bring?”

“I’ll make a bag.”

“Meet you on I-40 outside of town?” I asked, and leaned in to kiss her.

“Wait for me,” she said and kissed me back.

“Always,” I told her.

I watched her leave and wrestled that little anxiety I always felt when she left back down where it belonged.

Conlan returned a little later.

“They’re on the road,” he told me. “Where’s Mom going?”

“Into town,” I told him. “I’ll meet her on the road to Penderton later.”

My son’s face fell a bit. “And me?”

“You and I are going to play a game on our way to see Keelan. The choice is yours: catch, or hide and hunt?”

“Is it a punishment?” Conlan asked.

“No. I’m not sure what we’re walking into with Penderton, and your mother and I would feel better knowing you’re safe. What do you think you’ve done to deserve punishment?”

“I invited Mr. Calloway and Solina into the courtyard. I fed them.” He let it hang there for a moment. “Is that why you’re mad at me and I can’t go?”

Ah, best to nip this in the bud. “No. I’m not mad at you and, as I said, you aren’t going because it’s probably not safe. As far as giving cookies to Ned and Solina, that was polite. But human polite. Had they been shapeshifters...”

“Don’t know them, don’t feed them.”

Keelan’s words coming out of my kid’s mouth.

“Put simply, yes. But do you understand why?”

“Because we’re different.”

“From who?” I asked.

“Whom,” he corrected.

I let a little growl into my voice. “Conlan.”

“Yes, sir. We’re different from humans and other shapeshifters.”

Correct again. “We are. We’re stronger than both. Because of that, some people, like Keelan, will want to help us. Some people will want us to help them.”

“Like Mr. Calloway.” Conlan said.

“Yes, like that. And some people will want to hurt us. You need to be able to tell the difference.”

“Even other shapeshifters?”

“Especially those. We both know you could handle most humans. Even adults. But you’re young and there are shapeshifters that could hurt you.”

“Like the pigs.”

“Yes. If I wasn’t there. If Keelan and his people weren’t there that night, could you have fought both?”

A little bit of gold rolled over his eyes. “I would fight.”

Okay. Yes. He probably would. “But would you win?”

“Maybe.”

“No. You would have fought and died. I need to be sure that you know when to fight and when to run.”

“Did you ever run?” he asked.

I had. I’d run for my life. And I’d hid. I had done it for so long that after a while all I could remember was running and hiding.

“Yes, and I was older than you. Faster and stronger than you are now. That is why you’re going to run toward Keelan’s place. I will wait, and then I will chase you. Try to get to Keelan before I catch you. This is serious, Conlan. Act like this is real.”

My son smiled. “What do I get if I win?”

If it was real, everything. But he was a little boy, and this was a game to him. “If you manage to evade me and get there safe, I will take you to Penderton. If not…”

“I stay put.”

“Yes. Your head start is dwindling away. Best get moving.”

Fall in Wilmington was lovely. It was a perfect October day, full of golden sunshine and happy trees. The locals told us that the foliage wouldn’t turn until closer to November, and the poplars and maples shading the streets were just beginning to show hints of gold.

The sky was a crystal-clear blue, and a slight breeze stirred random hair that had escaped my braid. The temperature at our fort was always lower than inland, and I optimistically wore my favorite light hoodie, gray with a green stripe. If the weather turned any warmer, I’d have to take it off.

Around me, Wilmington buzzed as Cuddles made her way through the old streets at an unhurried pace. Since the Shift, foot traffic had increased because gas was expensive, chanting a car to life during magic took at least fifteen minutes, and horses needed to be fed, secured, and taken care of. If the destination was less than five miles away, most people opted for walking, and Castle Street channeled a steady crowd: craftsmen coming back from lunch, shoppers heading to the markets, laborers, businesspeople, a couple of mercs, all on their way to somewhere.

The hot red dot that burned in my mind got hotter. A vampire, ahead of me, not too far. I’d been watching it for about a mile, and I seemed to be getting closer.

To the left of me, on the empty lot, someone had set up a chicken market, and it had drawn a crowd. A couple of people on their bicycles stopped to crane their heads. The chicken vendor, a dark-haired older white man, waved a huge chicken around asking for bids. She was gray and fluffy and seemed content to sit in his arms like a docile cat.

“…lays five large brown eggs a week!”

That was a good-looking chicken with some serious egg-laying power. I should probably look into that.

The Order had chosen a historic firehouse as its lair. The old brick building rose on the corner of Castle and 5^th Avenue, complete with a lovely red door and four-story tall tower housing a large metal bell. As I got past the chicken crowd, the tower came into view on my right. A green gaunt shape crouched on the tower’s top floor by the bell, shaded from the sun by the tower’s small roof.

There you are, precious. We finally meet.

The vampire sat perfectly still, like a mint-green gargoyle. If a navigator had come to visit the Order, they would’ve taken their undead inside. There were only two reasons why a vampire would end up in the Order’s tower. Either the Order and the Farm were cooperating on something and the undead was keeping watch, or Barrett and Claudia were taking potshots at each other, and Barrett had one of his necromancers park an undead there to annoy the Order.

Either way, this would be entertaining.

We reached the tower. I dismounted, secured Cuddles to the rail, and walked inside.

The interior of the firehouse looked just as I had left it about three months ago: a single bright room with brick walls, sealed concrete floor, and large windows secured by thick grates. The two desks on the left were occupied, one by an athletic man in his thirties with a handsome face and a ragged scar that crossed his neck, drawing a dark slash on his light brown skin, and the other by a trim woman in her early twenties with tan skin and short blond hair, frosted with red dye.

Claudia sat at the larger desk on the right. She was in her fifties, with a round face, russet-brown skin, and a powerful build. Her short, curly hair was streaked with gray, and her eyes told you she had very little patience for your nonsense.

I gave her a big smile and a cheery wave. “Hello!”

The knight-protector gave me a flat stare.

The other two knights pretended to be absorbed in their paperwork.

“Yes?” Claudia asked me.

“I need a favor,” I said.

“Don’t we all.”

I had sent her a report on Darin’s rescue, complete with all the sins of the Order’s former knight-enchanter, Aaron, spelled out in excruciating detail. And there were a lot of sins. Kidnapping, imprisonment, human trafficking, conduct unbecoming a knight, reckless disregard when practicing magic…

I tilted my head and waited.

Above us, the undead shifted a foot to the left. Claudia glanced up. If she could’ve fired laser beams from her eyes, a smoking undead corpse would’ve plummeted to the ground in a fraction of a second. So the vampire wasn’t a welcome guest.

This was a flex by Barrett. He’d waited until the tech was up—otherwise the wards would’ve kept the undead off the building—and parked his vampire in the tower, knowing full well that the Order would never tolerate it. Claudia had to chase it off. There was no question about it. But she also would have to avoid making a spectacle or damaging the vampire. A spectacle would make the Order look weak, and any harm to the undead would escalate tensions with the Farm and, again, would cost the Order their street cred. Whichever party resorted to violence first would lose face.

“What do you want?” Claudia asked me.

“Access to Knight-Pathfinder Isaac Silverstein.”

Before I left the fort, I’d called down to Atlanta’s chapter of the Order and asked Nick to look up Isaac Silverstein. After he told me that he wasn’t my secretary and we’d bickered for ten minutes about who was keeping score on favors, he came back with an interesting tidbit.

Silverstein was a really good pathfinder, highly decorated and experienced. He’d come to Penderton as a part of a five-man knight team specifically dispatched to handle this problem. Five knights went in, Silverstein came out alone, and after he came out, he stuck around in the area. Officially, he was on an extended mental health leave. Unofficially, he’d hung around Wilmington for the last six months, but the Order had no address for him. His mail was forwarded to the chapter.

The Knights of the Order were like soldiers in enemy territory. When possible, they preferred the company of their own and the safety of their base, so Isaac was likely inside the Wilmington Chapter right now. He’d probably lived here for the last half a year.

“That’s a big ask,” Claudia said.

“I realize the knight-pathfinder is working through some things,” I said. “But I’m about to go into Pender Forest.”

“Ask the National Guard,” Claudia said. “They can brief you.”

“What’s the point? They didn’t see anything. Knight-Pathfinder Silverstein saw something, because instead of leaving, he’s here impersonating a monk. Like you said, it’s a big favor, but there are five thousand people trapped in Penderton.”

She sighed. “You don’t need to be anywhere near that damn forest. I’m sure Penderton promised you the sky and the moon, but all you’ll get is pain and death. This isn’t me dissing you. This is me speaking as an expert with two decades of experience in the field: powerful people tried to resolve this and failed. This is above your paygrade. It’s not worth it.”

Claudia was trying to look out for me. I felt so…touched. Genuinely touched. This meant three things: Claudia was a real-deal, by-the-book knight, Nick hadn’t told her who I was, and I wouldn’t see Isaac Silverstein unless I convinced her that I was capable of surviving.

This would require a show of power.

If it was just about me, I might have hesitated. Showing my cards to Claudia meant she would start digging deeper. Eventually she’d figure out exactly who I was. But I wouldn’t go alone into the woods. Curran would be with me, and we would be bringing Keelan and his crew. I had already made the decision to take Penderton up on their generous land offer, cracking the door open. Might as well open it all the way so I could get through.

Letting go of the need to hide was surprisingly easy.

Above us, the vampire shifted again.

“I appreciate where you’re coming from,” I said. “But I already gave my word to Penderton. Getting the knight-pathfinder’s input would really help me.”

Claudia shook her head. The world was filled with fools, and I was clearly the dumbest of them all.

I gave her a smile. “While you’re thinking it over, would you like me to get rid of your unwelcome visitor? I can take it off the tower without damaging it, and if you humor me, Barrett won’t ever put one up there again.”

Claudia pondered me. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

She didn’t ask how I would do it. I pulled off my hoodie and held it out. “I need one of your knights to put this on with the hood up, get on my mount, and ride around the block. The undead needs to see me leaving.”

I didn’t want Barrett’s attention focused on me. Eventually he and I would have a reckoning, but not yet. Not for a while.

Claudia nodded. The female knight walked over and took my hoodie. “Which horse is yours?”

“The black and white mammoth donkey up front. Trust me, you can’t miss her.”

“Incoming,” Claudia murmured.

“Barrett?” I asked through the undead’s mouth.

“In the flesh.”

Getting from the Farm across the river to the Wilmington Chapter took about half an hour. Barrett made it in twenty minutes. Either he was already in the city, or he was very motivated. He wouldn’t have trusted just anyone with antagonizing the Order, so whoever piloted the vampire on his behalf had to be good. If someone had yanked an undead from one of my best navigators, I’d be motivated, too.

My new vampire crouched behind a whiteboard stand I borrowed from the Order’s situation room, on the side of Claudia’s desk. I’d taken a fat roll of paper from there, too. English letters were a lot easier to write through a vampire than Shinar’s flowing sigils. There were few things better for training precision navigation than writing out your family’s lineage in a dead language while your aunt despaired over the sad state of your calligraphy.

“He looks pissed,” the other female knight murmured.

I’d locked myself in their armory, so the vampire was my eyes and ears for this little date. From my vantage point, I had an excellent view of Claudia, but the screen blocked the entrance and the windows, so I had to settle for imagining pissed-off Barrett marching across the street.

The door swung open, and firm footsteps announced Barrett approaching.

Claudia raised her head from her paperwork. “Well, this is a surprise. What can the Order do for you, Mr. Barrett?”

“You have something of mine.” His voice was light. You could almost hear the smile.

“Do I?” Claudia frowned. “Oh, the vampire. Is it one of yours?”

“All of them are mine.” Barrett chuckled and pushed the whiteboard stand aside. I twisted the undead into a picture-perfect impression of a person caught naked in the shower and tried to cover myself up with my undead hands.

The male knight made a strangled noise.

Barrett blinked.

I spun the vampire around, picked up the long roll of paper I’d been writing on, and held it out in front of Barrett. On it, in a beautiful cursive, I’d written a little song.

Old Barrett had a Farm

E i e i o

And on his Farm he had some cows

E i e i o

With a paw print here

And a paw print there

Here a paw print, there a paw print

Everywhere a paw print

Old Barrett had a Farm

E i e i o

And on his Farm he had some vampires

E i e i o…

I’d covered about five feet of paper with that nonsense. I’d mentioned the vampires, the journeymen, the cadre, and so on.

Barrett stopped smiling.

I handed the paper to him. He took it and looked at it. His face showed no emotion.

I lifted the vampire upright. It’d been undead for about fifteen years, and its hips had shifted to quadrupedal locomotion, but even the oldest vampire still possessed the ability to imitate the human posture. I put my arms down, slightly apart from my body, with the hands held up and turned around on my toes. Then I crouched slightly, bounced back up, put one hand on my hip, and held the other arm to the side, bent at the elbow, with my fingers together.

“What is this?” Barrett asked.

“I believe it’s a little teapot,” Claudia said, completely deadpan. “Short and stout. See, there is its handle and there is its spout.”

“Cute,” Barrett said.

His magic clamped on the vampire’s mind, gripping me in a steel vise and trying to force me out. Wow. Barrett packed some serious power.

In its unpiloted state, a vampire’s mind was an empty shell, a car without a driver rocketing forward at full speed and, like a runaway car, the undead wrecked anything it came across. Once a navigator took the driver’s seat, getting them out was a lot harder than simply grabbing an unpiloted vampire. It wasn’t a matter of skill but of raw power, which was why Barrett had dropped what he was doing and ran over here to see who had won the tug of war over his vampire. And the tech was up. Navigators, like shapeshifters, stored magic like a battery, which allowed them to navigate even when the magic was down, but doing this song and dance during tech was considerably harder.

The pressure intensified. He was really going for it now. This was what a walnut must feel like in a nutcracker. That wasn’t all of it though. He was still holding back.

Let’s see what you’ve got.

I shook the vampire and tilted it to the side. When I get all steamed up, hear me shout. Tip me over and pour me out.

A blast of power smashed into me. Like being buried under an avalanche. A massive weight crashed into my mind, squeezing, bombarding me, trying to crush me out of the driver’s seat.

There it is. Welcome to the game.

Barrett’s power hammered at me. It was a good, powerful punch. It even drew some blood. But I was the daughter of the Builder of Towers. My father had brought the undead into existence. I had ignored this side of my power for years, but I’d used the last decade to make up for it.

The pressure ground at my mind. Barrett stared at the vampire with a terrible intensity.

It was time for a reality check.

I raised my arms, did a pirouette to build up momentum, extended my leg to the second position, whipped it to the back of the supporting knee, bringing it to the front, and turned en dehor. A fouetté.

Barrett’s eyes widened. He clenched his fists and pushed with everything he had.

One turn, two, three. I kept spinning. Turn, and turn, and turn, ten, fifteen, eighteen…

Uncertainty shivered in Barrett’s eyes. The three knights were staring at the vampire like they had never seen one before.

Twenty-four, twenty-six…

He must have thought of himself as an unstoppable force but, in the mind of an undead, I was truly an immovable object.

Thirty…

The pressure eased just a hair. It was barely less than it had been, but it still meant surrender. Barrett was running out of his magic reserve. I won.

I finished the last fouetté, landed, and raised my right arm, inviting applause. Nobody clapped. Party poopers.

I let go. The transition back to only one pair of eyes and ears was always slightly nauseating. I stayed still in the armory, listening.

Barrett would’ve grabbed the undead instantly, but we both knew what had happened. He didn’t win. I let him have his undead back.

“I don’t know who you brought in,” Barrett said, his voice low and full of contained menace. “But I’ll find out.”

A door swung open. I waited. A minute crawled by. Another…

“He’s gone,” Claudia called out.

I opened the door and trotted out. “You didn’t clap. My feelings are hurt.”

Claudia gave me a slow golf clap, and the other two knights followed. They were looking slightly freaked out.

Claudia squinted at me. “Who are you?”

“Someone who really wants to talk to Isaac Silverstein.”

Claudia got up. “I’ll ask him. No promises. Sit tight.”

I sat in a client chair. Claudia opened a door leading to an interior staircase and left.

How was it that she didn’t know who I was? My file in the Order’s database should’ve been a mile long.

Unless they had sealed it. I had seen that before, during my tenure with the Order in Atlanta. The file on my father was invisible to me. I didn’t have the clearance to know it existed. Andrea, my best friend and, at the time, a high-ranking knight, could only see a very brief summary that amounted to a warning sign and had to call in favors to learn more.

As a knight-protector, the head of her own chapter, Claudia should’ve had a high enough clearance, but then Wilmington was a lot smaller than Atlanta or Charlotte.

I wonder how tightly they have my file locked up...

I heard Claudia coming down the stairs. The door swung open, and she emerged. “He’ll see you.”

“Thank you.”

“I hope you’re ready for Barrett,” Claudia said. “He won’t let it go. You didn’t see his face as he walked out. That man was pissed off. He’s going to make it his purpose in life to find you and make you suffer every humiliation his psychotic mind can think up.”

“He won’t find out, unless one of you three tells him.”

“He will find out,” Claudia said, “because you enjoy screwing with him. Sooner or later, you’ll slip up.”

Slipping up wasn’t in the cards. I planned to keep Barrett ignorant for as long as I could. “Thank you for the warning.”

“Take care,” Claudia said.