Magic Tides

2

When humans had prophesized about the Apocalypse, we had always expected it would be fast. Oh, there would be war and natural disasters and other preliminaries that might take their time, but the actual moment when the world ended would be swift. A rain of fire, a nuclear mushroom cloud, a meteor, a catastrophic volcanic eruption… And when magic hit us for the first time, it had delivered exactly what we anticipated.

Planes fell out of the sky. Electricity shorted out. Guns stopped working. Ordinary, normal humans turned into monsters or started shooting lightning from their fingertips. Ravenous mythical creatures spawned out of thin air. For three days the magic had raged, and then it vanished, leaving a mountain of casualties in its wake. Just as the world reeled and tried to pick up the pieces, the magic came again, and the slow crawl of the Apocalypse began.

We called that first magical tsunami the Shift, and everything after post-Shift. Magic flooded our world in waves, without warning, smothering technology, gradually chewing skyscrapers into dust, and slowly but surely changing the very fabric of our existence. Landscape, climate, flora, fauna, people—nothing was left untouched. Nobody could predict how long the waves lasted or how intense they would be. Over the past half a century, we learned to live with it.

Wilmington had fared better than most cities. Certainly, better than Atlanta where we came from. For one, it was a century and change older. Being older helped. And it wasn’t nearly as built up as Atlanta, where the once-glistening office towers and high-rises lay in ruins. Magic had taken a solid bite out of the city but didn’t quite reduce it to rubble.

Wilmington hadn’t escaped unscathed. Some of the taller buildings had fallen. The Cape Fear Memorial Bridge was no more. It had collapsed in that first magic wave. The Murchison Building had slowly turned to dust until it finally imploded. The spire of the First Baptist Church, once the tallest point of the city, had broken off one day and crashed onto the street, killing several people. But the main damage had been done by floods.

The sea level had risen, partially due to pre-Shift global warming and partially due to magic issues nobody fully understood. Now parts of the city looked like Venice with bridges, sometimes solid, sometimes cobbled together with whatever was handy at the time, spawning canals, ponds, and marshes.

Thomas and I rode across one of those bridges now, the hoofbeats of our mounts thudding on the worn wood. He rode an old bay mare. I rode Cuddles. When Thomas first saw Cuddles, he gave her a side-eye. She stood ten feet tall, including the two-foot ears, and was splattered with random spots of black and white. She was also a donkey, a mammoth jenny, to be exact.

Horses had their advantages, but most of them spooked easily. I once rode Cuddles across a rickety bridge infested with magical snakes, and she stomped right over the hissing serpents like they weren’t even there and then pranced when we reached the solid ground.

Unfortunately, Cuddles failed to reassure Thomas of my badassness. Getting information out of him was like pulling teeth. He didn’t trust me at all, and as he rode next to me, his entire body communicated that he thought coming on this adventure with me was a very bad idea.

I’d met Thomas’ type before. He kept things in. In the chaos of the magic and tech mad dance, Thomas was a calm rock on which his family could always rely. He handled his problems on his own, without any fanfare. Except now his son was taken, and he couldn’t solve this problem on his own. A lot of people would be frantic, with their emotions spilling over, but Thomas went even deeper inward, all the way down. He was a hair above catatonic. Sooner or later, he would explode. It would be better if that happened sooner, before we got to where we were going.

I had run across all sorts of human scum, but traffickers were at the very top of my shit list.

“How did it happen?”

“They came in a car and took him off the street,” Thomas said.

“What was he doing at the time?”

“He was playing soccer with his friends.”

“And they only took him? Not any of his friends?”

Thomas nodded.

This smelled like a targeted grab.

“Is Darin special in any way?”

“No.”

“Does he have any enemies?”

“No.”

“Is he handsome? Is anybody obsessed with him?”

“No.”

“Does he have any magic?”

There was a small pause before Thomas answered. “No.”

Right. We would have to work on the trust bit.

“Have you tried the Order?” I asked.

Thomas sighed.

The Order of Merciful Aid was a knight order that functioned as a private law enforcement organization. They took petitions from the public and charged on a sliding scale. Their services were reasonable. Their definition of “aid,” not so much. Their definition of “human” was also rather narrow.

“We have a small chapter in Wilmington,” Thomas said. “There are only three knights. They are busy.”

True, but the kidnapping of a child would be a priority even for the overworked knights. There was something about Darin that Thomas wanted to keep hidden. Pushing him about it would get me nowhere.

That was fine. The day was still young.

“What kind of person is Darin?”

Thomas turned and looked at me as if I’d punched him.

“What sort of kid is he?” I asked.

“You want to know what kind of person my son is? I’ll tell you. Jason has a friend who comes down here during the summer to visit his grandma and grandpa. Last summer they went down to the beach after a storm. Jason told him not to go into the water, but the boy thought he was a good swimmer and the boy’s grandfather said it was fine as long as they didn’t go out too far.”

That did not sound good.

“The boy got caught by a riptide, and it pulled him out into the ocean. Jason ran to get Darin and by the time they made it back to the beach, you couldn’t even see him anymore. Nothing but ocean. Darin went in after him. Somehow, he found the boy. They washed up three miles down the shore in the marsh, and then Darin carried that exhausted child all the way home through the marsh filled with leeches and God knows what. That’s the kind of person my son is.”

Thomas looked me straight in the eye. “But even if he was a lazy, terrible kid, I would still be out here, looking for him, because he is my son. My child. I don’t know why you’re doing this. Maybe it’s a power trip for you, maybe you can actually help. But if you can’t, don’t waste my time. Don’t waste my son’s time, because I don’t know how much he has left.”

My eight-year-old son hoisted an entire pallet of lumber with a look that asked if it was enough.

Beside him, Jason looked slightly shocked. He was gamely struggling with smaller individual boards.

“Yes, very impressive. Carry it inside the big gate and then meet out here by the doors. Jason, you’re doing fine. I’m just going to borrow Conlan for a minute.”

Conlan deposited his burden, trotted back, and stood a respectful distance from me. Waiting. He was my son, but he was also a shapeshifter standing before his alpha.

“Well?”

“Jason is my friend, and his brother was taken. Right off the street. Nobody will help them. Everybody is afraid of those guys.”

“Did you ask your mother to find him?”

He hesitated. “Not exactly.”

“No. But you knew if you brought Jason to her and mentioned it, she would drop what she was doing and go fix it.”

“Yes.”

“You manipulated her. I wonder where you learned that?”

Conlan’s face turned slightly defiant. “He likes you. He says you’re powerful.”

“I’m sure he does. Your grandfather says a lot of things.”

“He’s very old. He knows about a lot of things. He was a king.”

“He was that.”

“He wanted Mom to be a queen, to rule with him.”

No, he didn’t. “Do you think he means it?”

Conlan seemed to think it over. “No. He wouldn’t share his power. Ever. With anyone.”

“Good. That’s the most important thing to understand about him.”

He frowned. “What does that mean?”

“Your grandfather will never sacrifice anything for your sake. Your mother is his only living child. All the rest, and there were many, are long dead.”

“He says he loved them all.”

“I’m sure he did in his way. At least until he didn’t anymore. Then, he destroyed them.”

“Except for Mom.”

“Not for a lack of trying,” I told him. “Your mom is not like the others. She survived, and she beat him.”

“Is she stronger? Is that why she beat him?”

“Your mother is very strong, but that’s not why she won. She beat him because she’s not like him. He didn’t raise her. As young as you are, you’ve spent more time with him than she ever did.”

He squinted at me. “That’s what this is about? You don’t like me visiting him.”

“Yes and no. No, I don’t like it, but I don’t have to. He’s your grandfather. His blood runs through your veins. I can’t change that. Learn from him, listen to his stories, but don’t ever buy into his bullshit.”

“Dad!”

“Have I ever forbidden you to see him?”

“No, but…”

Roland was a wound that wouldn’t heal. Trying to keep Conlan away from him would only backfire. The last thing we needed was for our son to discover his magical grandfather when he was 25, because then Roland would be a forbidden secret we had hidden from him. No, we let him visit, and when he came back spouting dangerous nonsense, we dealt with it right then and there. As I was about to do now.

“Yes, Conlan, he was great. An immortal god king who wanted to rule everyone, everywhere and give them all a better life as long as it was on his terms and his alone. Look where that got him. Next time you see him, when he tells you how special you are and how much he loves you, and I know he means every word, really think about where he is now and how he got there. That’s all I ask.”

“I will. But you were like him.”

“How?”

“You were the Beast Lord. You were in charge of everyone like us. You were a king.”

“No, I was a pack leader.”

Conlan’s eyes flashed gold again. “How is that different? People did what you told them to do.”

“I also had to do things I didn’t want to do. I was responsible for other people’s lives and safety. When they died, it was on me. I never wanted the power or the burden of it. Look at Jason.”

A couple dozen yards away Jason dropped a board, struggled to pick it up, and finally ended up dragging it toward the gates.

“How good a fighter is he?”

Conlan opened his mouth, looked at Jason, and closed it again.

“Tonight, his family will come here. They are all ordinary humans like him. They don’t have our speed, our strength, or our regeneration. People, regular people, are fragile. The most important thing tonight won’t be hurting the bad guys. It will be keeping the bad guys from hurting the people under our protection. If we aren’t careful, Jason may die tonight.”

My son took a step back. “I’ll protect Jason! I’ll protect all of them.”

“There are times when no matter how powerful you are, you aren’t enough. You can’t be everywhere at once. You have to assume that people will die because of your orders and actions and accept responsibility for it. This is what being a leader means. Your grandfather was too weak to carry that burden. This is how he started on the path that made him an abomination, a man who murdered his children, betrayed his sister, turned your uncle into a butcher, and destroyed the people he was supposed to lead and serve. He had also wanted to protect everyone, and when he couldn’t, it broke him.”

Conlan stared at me.

I gave him the alpha stare until he lowered his gaze.

“Do you think your mother doesn’t know that you manipulated her?”

“She knows,” he said quietly. Guilt in his voice. Good.

“She loves you very much, Conlan. Don’t abuse that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Next time when you need help, you will state your request clearly and honestly. In a very short time, some very bad people will be coming here to harm Jason and his family. And us. I will tell you where to stand and what to do, and you will stand where I told you and do it until I tell you to stop. Do you understand?”

He answered with his eyes still glued to ground, “I understand.”

“Good, son. Get to work.”

The Red Horn Nation had their HQ in Lincoln Forest. The first few magic waves had reduced the population at a catastrophic rate, and the survivors quickly figured out that the old rule of safety in numbers still applied. Like many cities, Wilmington had fractured into dense clumps, with neighborhoods bundling together and fortifying, and Lincoln Forest sat right in the middle of everything, near Midtown.

It was a lower-middle-class neighborhood, with brick ranch houses set back on large lots. The surrounding neighborhoods of Forest Hills cushioned it from every side, so Lincoln Forest didn’t bother with a communal defensive wall, leaving fortifications to individual homeowners.

I surveyed the large ranch house. It sat a good distance from the street at the end of a longish driveway. Magic hated high tech buildings, but it loved trees, and the two oaks flanking the driveway looked like they had been growing there for half a millennium, their massive crowns spreading all the way over the street. Three cars waited by the garage, a black Ford truck and a couple of sedans with bloated hoods, modified to run during the magic waves. Modifications like that were expensive. The stolen kid trade must’ve been profitable.

No defenses, except for the usual bars on the windows and a solid door. No wards that I could feel. Nothing out of the ordinary except for a cow’s horn, dipped in bright red paint and stuck onto a metal stick by the driveway, announcing the house’s ownership.

“Why Red Horn? Why not Red Blade or something like that?”

“I don’t know,” Thomas said.

I dismounted. There was no need to tie Cuddles. She wouldn’t go anywhere.

“I know that you think you are tough,” Thomas said. “But these people, they are violent. Very violent.”

“Do you have a picture of Darin with you?”

He reached into his wallet and pulled out a large folded missing poster. On it a lean, dark-haired teenager smiled into the camera. He looked a bit like Thomas and a lot like an older version of Jason.

“Hold on to that.”

“They are going to kill you. They’ve killed people before who came looking for their kids.”

“Let’s try not to get killed then. I’m going to knock on their door. You can come with, or you can wait here.”

Thomas dismounted and tied his horse to the mailbox post. His face told me that he really didn’t want me to go in there. He looked around, went to the nearest oak, where someone had sawed a branch off and left it in pieces, picked up a good size chunk, and looked at me.

“All set?”

He nodded.

I walked up the driveway. On the door, someone had written RHN in blood. So good of them to identify themselves. I’d hate to get the wrong house.

I tapped the door with my foot.

It swung open, and a beefy guy in his twenties with ruddy skin and a skull tattoo on his neck peered at me.

“What the fuck do you want?”

“To come inside.”

“No.”

Most people aimed for the head when they punched. Unfortunately, heads were hard, because our brain was precious, and we’d evolved durable skulls to protect it. I punched him in the solar plexus. He was beefy but not fat, so he didn’t have much padding, and since he was a head taller than me, the solar plexus presented a convenient target.

Whatever the guy was expecting, my left uppercut wasn’t it. I punched him very fast and very hard. I could remember not being able to read, but I knew how to punch even in my earliest memories. I had over 3 decades of practice.

The gang’s doorman folded to the ground. I kicked him in the head to make sure he stayed down there, stepped over his body, and walked inside. Thomas took half a second to come to terms with the body on the ground and followed me brandishing his log.

The house opened into a long rectangular living room that stretched to my left. Directly in front of me a doorway led into the kitchen. There must’ve been a hallway here at some point, separating the entry hallway from the living room, but the house had been remodeled, and some of the walls had been taken down for a more open floor plan. On my right was another door, which remained closed.

In the living room, two men and a woman lounged on the couches. The coffee table in front of them held a cleaver falchion, which was basically a machete with a cross guard, a mace, and a shotgun. Behind them, at the far wall, four large cages waited, stacked 2 x 2. The cage on the right in the bottom row was full. A little boy with dark hair and a tear-stricken pale face huddled in it, curled into a ball.

If Julie were here with me, I wouldn’t have had to lift a finger. She’d been a street kid before she became my ward. The sight of that child in the cage would have been enough to send my kid into a tailspin, and when she came out of it, everyone in this house would be dead.

The three gang members stared at me. One was tall and lean, in his forties, with dish-water blond hair, stubble, and a lantern jaw. His left index finger and pinkie were cut off at the middle phalanges. The other was shorter, stockier, and younger, with olive skin, dark hair cropped down to almost nothing, and a patchwork of tattoos across his neck and arms exposed by a sleeveless black T-shirt. The woman was in her mid-twenties, with a round face, pasty makeup, and light blond hair worn long. Soft, like she didn’t swing a weapon for a living. Stylized flame tattoos ran from her wrists up her forearms. Probably a firebug, a fire mage.

A decade ago, I’d quip something funny about borrowing a cup of sugar right about now, but being a parent and having had my child threatened had given me a new perspective. Everyone knew that human trafficking was one of the ugliest lows a human being could sink to. But it was one thing to intellectually understand. It was entirely another thing to have your child taken and stare his kidnapper in the eyes as he cut your son’s face.

“The poster,” I told Thomas.

He held it up.

“Who did you sell him to?” I asked.

“The fuck…” The shorter man started.

Lantern-jaw man stood up and grabbed the mace off the table. “Jace!”

A door swung open deeper in the house. A moment later a man in his late thirties came out of the kitchen. Jace was broad in the shoulder, dark-haired, tan, and scarred on both cheeks. A short black goatee perched on his chin like a smear of dark hair. He looked like he’d been through a lot of fights and liked putting his hands on people.

Another man followed him, looming a full head above his boss. This one was in his twenties, sun-burned, tall, and sheathed in hard fat. The bruiser.

“I see we got ourselves a mercenary, boys and girls,” Jace declared. He’d stopped just outside where he thought my striking distance was. Should have stopped two steps earlier.

“You know what your problem is, Tom?” Jace drawled. “You’re too fucking dumb to know when to quit.”

The woman on the couch smiled. The other two men by her watched me. The shorter one had relaxed when Jace showed up, but the older blond was still uneasy. You didn’t survive into your forties in his line of work without getting a feel for people, and he didn’t like what his gut was telling him about me.

Jace kept on. “You should’ve quit when Dewane here nailed your missing poster to your front door.”

Judging by the proud look on the large guy’s face, he was the Dewane in question. Thomas had neglected to mention the poster incident. No matter.

“Instead, you hired yourself some broad who’s dumb enough to take your money.” He turned to me. “Let me tell you how this will go, sweet thing. I’m going to fuck you up and then I’m going to hang—”

I stepped forward and kicked him in the head. I hadn’t put my hands up, and he never saw it coming. My foot connected with a meaty smack. Jace’s head snapped back. He stumbled and fell flat on his back. Timber.

I pointed to the poster. “Who did you sell him to?”

The slow hamster wheel that powered up Dewane’s brain finally processed the fact that his boss was on the floor, groaning. Dewane understood violence. He knew that when violence happened, it was his time to shine. He charged me.

I stepped out of the way. He tore past me, spun around, and I smashed my palm against his right ear. Dewane swayed. Most people would’ve gone down, but he stayed on his feet, unsteady but upright, and tried to grab me. I leaned back and drove an oblique kick to his knee. The knee collapsed inward with a crunch. Dewane howled and toppled over like a felled tree.

At the couch, the firebug jumped up, her hands rising.

I grabbed the log out of Thomas’ hands and threw it at her. It hit her in the chest. She yelped and went down.

Jace rolled to his feet, his face bloody, grabbed the falchion off the table, and came at me. In the half a second he took to cover the distance between us and draw his sword back for a strike, I pulled Sarrat out of its sheath on my back and slashed across his neck. It was a textbook cut, slicing diagonally from below the left ear. The saber’s blade severed muscle and the spinal cord with the slightest of resistance. Blood gushed from the cut. His head fell from his shoulders.

The headless body teetered and crashed to the floor.

Everything stopped. The firebug, who’d scrambled up, froze with her hands halfway up. Even Dewane forgot to moan about his ruined knee.

I picked up Jace’s head by his hair and held it in front of the poster. “Who did you sell him to?”

The traffickers gaped at me.

I looked back at them. “He can’t answer me, but one of you can. I’ll go through you one by one, and I’ll kill the last of you very slowly. You won’t die until you tell me what I want to know. Don’t be last.”

“Onyx,” Lantern Jaw said. “He’s a necromancer with the People.”

Damn it all to hell. Talking to the People was the last thing I wanted.

“Was this a random grab or a special order?”

“A special order,” he said. “He asked for the kid by name. I don’t know why. Jace didn’t ask.”

I dropped the head. “Good.”

The firebug glared at me. Her hands twitched.

I pinned her down with my stare. “Try me.”

The woman looked into my eyes. All the fight went out of her. She swallowed and shook her head.

A wise decision, but she gave up kind of quick.

“This is done.” I indicated the house around us with Sarrat’s point. “This criminal enterprise is finished. Your gang is finished. If I see you again, I’ll kill you. Leave here, take nothing.” I pointed at the firebug. “You stay.”

The shorter trafficker looked at Lantern Jaw. “Are we just …”

“Yeah.” Lantern Jaw skirted around Jace’s body and headed to the door.

“What about Dewane?” the shorter guy said.

“Fuck Dewane.” Lantern Jaw went out the door.

The shorter guy blinked, thought about it, then grabbed Dewane’s arm, strained, and got him upright. They struggled past me. At the doorway, the shorter man bared his teeth at me.

“This isn’t fucking over. We’ll come for you.”

“Fort Kure, on the beach. You can’t miss it. Get the whole gang, get your friends, their friends, and people they know. Bring everybody. Save us all some time.”

They staggered outside.

I went to the cage with the little boy. It was locked with a simple padlock. I looked at the firebug. She grabbed the lock. Her fingers shook so it took her three tries to get it open. I took the little boy out of the cage. He was so thin, he weighed almost nothing. His fingers were bruised and there was a burn on his right forearm, where someone had put out a cigarette. He stared at me with big, dark eyes. I hugged him gently, and he clung to me, as if afraid I would disappear.

“Are there more?”

The firebug nodded.

There were three more in cages in the basement. Two boys and a girl, none over the age of six. The girl and the oldest boy knew their addresses, the two younger kids only knew their first and last names, but it was enough to go on.

We put two boys onto Thomas’ horse. I settled the little girl on to Cuddles and lifted the smallest boy into the saddle in front of her.

“Hold on to him, kiddo.”

She nodded. She was short and dark-haired, with round cheeks and dark brown eyes, but something about her reminded me of Julie. Maybe it was the way she hugged the little boy. Like she had decided that this was her job and was determined to do it.

The firebug waited for me on the lawn. I surveyed the house and the three vehicles in the driveway. “Torch it.”

She did a doubletake. “There are money and weapons in there…”

“I know.”

She raised her hands. Magic swirled inside her, slow and sluggish. Moments crawled by. Her power was moving now, a ghostly outline of a pinwheel of flames forming between her fingers. She strained, spinning it more and more tightly with her hands, winding it into an invisible ball until it glowed with nearly white light. She held it there for as long as she could, trying to build it up, but it broke free. The fireball ignited to life, streaked to the house, and smashed into the front window.

Thunder pealed, the sound of magic bursting from containment of the spell. Glass exploded, and flames surged in the living room.

The firebug waved her arms around. Now her earlier hesitation made sense. She needed a lot of time to get her power going, while I only needed a fraction of a second to swing my sword.

Twin flame jets erupted from the woman’s hands and washed over the house and the cars.

Pre-Shift, this would have gone down completely differently. There would have been a formal investigation and warrants issued by the court. There would be due process, a trial, and public outrage. Now it was just me.

It wasn’t that cops were inept or corrupt. It was that they were stretched thin, and the power difference between them and the magically juiced-up criminals was often too vast. We lived in an unsafe age where one individual could overpower thousands if their magic was strong enough. My father was the living example of how that setup could go catastrophically wrong. Given a choice, I would take the pre-Shift system over ours any day.

The house was fully engulfed now, and the firebug was breathing hard and sweating.

“Stay here until it burns itself out.”

“You’re letting me go?” she asked.

I nodded. “If I find out that this neighborhood burned down because you took off, I’ll find you.”

I started down the street, leading Cuddles on. Thomas gave the firebug the kind of look that would haunt one’s nightmares and followed me, guiding his horse. We rounded the corner. Thomas drew even with me. The line of his mouth was straight and hard, like he was trying to keep his words in.

“Share,” I told him. “Don’t keep me in suspense.”

“They are traffickers. Slavers.”

“Yes.”

“You could’ve killed them all.”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you? They sold Darin. God alone knows what’s happening to my son. Do you know how many kids they stole?”

“Many.” The cages were grimy and worn, likely used for years.

“Why did you let them go?”

“Your brother said Red Horn Nation has about 50 members.”

“Yes.”

“What’s the most important thing to a gang after money?”

He gave me a blank look.

“Reputation,” I said. “Street cred. They run on fear and pride. If I killed them all, it might take them awhile to figure out who did it. If I only left one alive, the rest might not believe what happened. They would want to verify and probably shut that survivor up to buy themselves time to think things over and plan their response. I don’t want them to think. I want them to react. “

Thomas blinked at me.

“Very shortly, five people will be explaining to the Red Horn’s big boss that I came into their house and squished them like the cockroaches they are. I killed their underboss, slapped them around, made them give up the name of their client, took their merchandise, and set their house on fire. Five people is too many to shut up. They will be making a lot of noise, so if the Red Horn wants to hold on to the tattered shreds of its reputation, they’re going to retaliate and fast, before this news spreads. I told them exactly where to find me. They will get every warm body they have down to Fort Kure tonight.”

“You want them to attack you?”

“I want them to attack my husband specifically, but yes.”

“You’re talking about 50 people! Maybe more than 50!”

“Well, they are one less since Jace is dead, so I softened them up for him.”

He stared. I winked at him. If the Red Horn thought I was scary, I couldn’t wait for them to meet Curran.

“You’re crazy,” he said.

“When my oldest kid was thirteen, her best friend sold her out to a group of sea demons. The demons tied her to a cross, and she watched as they devoured her birth mother’s corpse. When my son was a little over a year old, someone sent a group of assassins to kidnap him. They wanted to eat him so they could grow their power.”

Thomas was clearly having a rough time coming to terms with the words coming out of my mouth.

“Of all the human filth, I hate human traffickers the most. Wilmington is too small for both of us. It’s either Red Horn or me, and I just finished painting my second living room. I’m not leaving. Do you know how hard it is to make a straight edge along the trim? They used to have painter’s tape just for that pre-Shift.”

Actually, painting the trim wasn’t hard, since I had good hand-eye coordination, but Thomas looked like he needed a bit of humor to nudge him back to reality.

Thomas shook his head, as if waking up. “Where are we going?”

“To the Order.” I had a general idea where it was, but Thomas would know for sure.

“Why?”

“Because time is short. We need to drop off the children with someone who can protect them and take them home, while we get over to the People’s compound.”

Onyx was likely a Master of the Dead or a journeyman. Probably the latter. Masters of the Dead were premier navigators who made too much money and were under too much scrutiny from their power-hungry peers to dabble in human trafficking. But journeymen earned considerably less, and they lived in the dorms, on-base. Onyx had no means of keeping Darin for himself, so he was likely a middleman, an intermediary between the Red Horn Nation and the final buyer.

I seriously doubted that Red Horn people would let Onyx know that I was coming. They had bigger worries right now. Even if they had, he would stay put. He was at his safest in the middle of the People’s base. But I didn’t want him to warn whoever put in the custom order for Darin.

“Are you going to tell me what’s special about your son or do we have to play the guessing game?” I asked.

“He has gills,” Thomas said quietly. “He can’t drown.”

Ah. “Does he transform?”

He nodded.

“Is that something that runs in the family?”

“No. He’s the only one.”

There was a connection between the population and the mythical creatures spawning. If the area had a lot of Irish settlers, you would get kelpies and selkies. If there was a sizeable Brazilian population, the water might manifest an Iara. Some creatures were harmless, but most weren’t, because humans tended to focus on things that could kill and eat them and immortalize them through legends as a warning to future generations. Magic brought those legends back to life, and the more people worried about something, the greater the chance of it manifesting.

Wilmington had a thriving port, which was the reason the city became one of the vital trade centers after the Shift. Shipping by land had become more perilous, and the importance of ports skyrocketed. Not only was the city multicultural, but also crews from just about every part of the world traveled here to unload their cargo, bringing their myths with them. Oceans were deep, and sailors had a healthy respect for them. They believed in aquatic monsters, no matter their mythological origin. It was pointless to try to guess what Darin had turned into. I’d know more when I found him.

“I know you’re worried about your family,” I said. “My husband knows me. He would’ve anticipated what happened and made sure that your and Paul’s loved ones are safe. By now they’re probably all at the fort.”

“The fort that will be attacked?”

“It’s the safest place for them. Trust me on this. I need your help finding the Order and then the People, because you know the city better than I do. If you can get me to the Farm, I’ll take it from there, and you can join your family.”

“Okay,” Thomas said.