Chapter 10
Biker werewolves causing trouble, our hero meets a relative and saves a damsel in distress
That night Elgin left the garage and drove west. As he approached the Bears Den he ‘saw’ rippling distortion around the bikers’ club, the ripples limned faintly orange, purple, red, blue, green. But as he got closer the distortion faded away and then it was just a few glowing dots and rectangles buried in the blacker black of the forested rise.
The road twisted away from the lake for a little way to climb to the top of the den and then swooped about halfway down to the overlook. Elgin stopped and walked to the rock wall and looked down. The Den was the fossilized remains of a small volcano. Before an uplift had damned the river to form the lake, the river had run down the side of the Den, and a breach in the outer wall had let in current that over hundreds of thousands of years had hollowed out the sandstone interior. Today the steep inner slope above the water continued almost vertically underwater to a smooth sandstone bottom just slightly lower than the lake outside. Once the den had been a dumping ground for old cars and other trash but today it was pretty much back to what it had been before the intrusion of the white man.
*This was a powerful locus,*Cutter-Iffrit whispered.
“You’ve been here before?”
*Many times Elgin, once this was the meeting place of the tribes for this whole region, a holy area that they mostly shunned,* something like a sigh interrupted the words, *I and the Basik were responsible, the Basik hunted men when they could and I set guardians here to harry hunters when they intruded too deeply.”
“So over time the tribes came to believe it was a powerful locus because people got eaten and shadows chased them if they got too close?”