Silence reigned.
Elara ducked into her tent. All around them Elara’s people were staring at the carnage. He saw pain on some of the faces, fear, sadness. He didn’t see surprise.
“Start the cleanup,” Hugh ordered. “Keep whatever we can scavenge from the beast, take blood and tissue samples, burn the solid remains, salt the blood, and hose this mess down. And get us another damn cake. We’ll have the reception at the castle.”
His voice snapped them out of their inaction, and by the time he reached the tent, everyone was moving.
Hugh walked inside. The tent stood empty. A red-stained gown lay on the ground. He caught a hint of movement behind a screen to his right and crossed over to it.
“Were your people hurt?” Elara asked from behind the screen.
“Nothing that can’t be fixed. Want to tell me about this?”
“What do you want to know?” She sounded tired.
“Who did this, why, and will it happen again.”
“The Remaining. They think it’s a real marriage.”
“And?”
“They’re afraid I might have a child.” She gave a short, bitter laugh. “They will do everything they can to stop it. So, yes, it will happen again, and when it does, I’ll handle it. We both have baggage. You have Nez and I have them.”
Elara fell silent. Hugh stood by the screen, feeling something he couldn’t quite identify. A new troublesome feeling that pulled on him. He felt an urge to fix things somehow, and it irritated him that he couldn’t. He looked at her bloody dress and that irritated him even more.
A few years ago, he would’ve enjoyed the fight. Something fun to break up a boring ceremony. Right now, he would be celebrating a win, halfway into his first drink with a girl on his lap. Instead he was standing here, feeling whatever the hell he was feeling.
The void carved a path through his bones.
“It was a nice wedding.”
“Was it?” she asked quietly.
“It was.”
He walked out of the tent. She was a fucking harpy, but she just married a man she hated and had to walk through blood and kill instead of cutting the cake at her reception. She needed a few moments of privacy, and he would give them to her. Even he wasn’t that much of a bastard.
5
Something was wrong with the forest, Hugh decided. Magic sped up the tree growth. That was an accepted fact. Five-year-old growth looked like twenty-year-old trees. The woods swallowed any abandoned property, and people in the forest towns spent a fair amount of their time trying to keep the wilderness from encroaching. But this place was something else.
An ancient wood spread on both sides of the path. Massive white oaks with trunks that would take three people to encircle. Hemlocks towering a hundred and thirty feet above the forest floor. Rhododendron and mountain laurel so thick, he would need to chop it down to get through. This forest felt old and rugged, soaked in the deep currents of magic.
Life thrived between the branches. Squirrels dashed through the canopy, birds sang, and quick feral cats slithered through the brush. Here and there a pair of glowing eyes blinked at them from the shadows as their party rode through what once was a two-lane rural road and now was little more than a few feet of asphalt, just wide enough for the horses and the truck to pass through.
The dual engine truck burned gasoline during tech and enchanted water during magic. Like all enchanted engines, it made enough noise to wake the dead and their top speed would be about forty-five miles per hour, but faced with dragging the salvage back by hand, Hugh had decided not to look a gift truck in the mouth. The sluggish vehicle lagged about two hundred yards behind them with the main body of his party, but its distant roar didn’t travel far. The forest smothered it, as if offended by the noise.
Bucky loved the woods. The stallion kept trying to bounce and prance, his tail straight up in the air. Hugh held him in check. He didn’t feel like prancing.
Yesterday, after the wedding, instead of getting drunk and celebrating, he’d walked through the second reception site, which Elara’s people quickly set up inside the castle walls, reassuring, healing those who needed it, and expecting another attack. Elara had made an appearance, in a clean dress and her hair still perfect as if nothing had happened, and did the same, moving through the reception area, smiling and asking people about their children. They passed each other like two ships in the night, uniting briefly to cut the second cake, a carbon copy of the first one, which confirmed what he had already suspected. The Departed had expected trouble.
The void crept closer with the evening, and by the time the subdued celebration finally died down and Bale found him wanting to get drunk and celebrate, it was gnawing on him with sharp icy teeth. Hugh knew that the moment booze touched his lips and he felt fire and night roll down his throat, he wouldn’t stop. The lure of a numb stupor, where the void was a distant memory, was too strong. But Hugh had to stay sharp, so he told Bale no. He went to bed alone. Vanessa was still sulking, and he didn’t care enough to look for her. Seven hours later, at sunrise, he was on horseback and out the gates. There would be no moat without the salvage.
Ahead, the two guides Elara sent with him halted their horses. Hugh rode up, Sam at his heels. He would’ve preferred just one guide, Darin, the one barely in his twenties and obviously starstruck at being invited to lead twenty Dogs into the wilderness. It wouldn’t have taken much convincing to get Darin to spill Elara’s secrets, which was probably why his lovely wife saddled him with Conrad, who was in his fifties and had that unflappable quality farmers and older tradesmen got with age. He would be a tougher nut to crack.
“See him?” Conrad asked quietly.
Hugh scanned the forest. A few yards away, from the side of a fallen chestnut, a big shaggy wolf stared back at him. It was the size of a pony, gray, with golden eyes that caught the light, glowing softly with magic. A dire wolf.
The wolf turned and stalked off into the woods, melting into the green shadows.
“Pretty boy,” Conrad murmured.
“Do they come close to the castle?” Hugh asked.
Darin nodded his dark head. “The woods are full of them. We’ve got three packs by the last count.”
Three packs of dire wolves meant there was plenty of prey for them to hunt. “Any other predators or game?”
“There are all sorts in the woods,” Conrad said. “Bears, cougars. Things.”
“We’ve got stags,” Darin jumped in. “Seven feet tall, with really big horns. Looks like there is a whole tree on their heads. And hippogriffs. We’ve got hippogriffs.”
Better and better. Hippogriffs only hunted in old-growth woods.
“We should be going,” Conrad said. “It’s not far now.”
Hugh shifted his weight, and Bucky danced forward. Hugh let him prance for a few steps and then reined him in.
“Tell me about this place we’re going to,” he said.
“Old Market,” Conrad answered. “About five hundred people lived there before the Shift. Not much there: a grocery store, a post office, a gas station. Your typical one-street-light, one-church town. It was a bit of a hub for the country people in the area, so they did have a decent hardware and county store, which is where we’re going. Should be some good salvage there.”
“When did it go dark?” Hugh asked.
“About fifteen years ago.” Conrad grimaced. “The flare came and the woods just blew up. Things came out of them that nobody ever saw before. That’s when a lot of small towns around here died. People left for the cities. Safety in numbers and all that.”
“What about the castle?” Sam asked. “When was that built?”
“That was pre-Shift. A guy called Mitch Bradford built it for Becky Bradford, his wife. His second wife.” Conrad paused for dramatic effect. “Bradford made his fortune in bourbon and then branched out to international trade. He called Becky his princess, and Becky liked castles, so he went and got one for her from the Old Country somewhere.
After the Shift, his company didn’t do so well. Then there were some natural disasters. Fire in the left wing, bad plumbing, that type of thing. By the time we got here three years ago, his son practically begged everyone he knew to take the castle off his hands. It needed a lot of repairs, but we fixed the drafty old thing. It’s home.”
“Where was home before this?”
“Oh, we lived in all sorts of places,” Darin said.
“Why did you leave to come here?” Hugh asked, glancing at Darin.
“Because of the Remaining,” Darin said. “They—"
“Darin, why don’t you go on and scout ahead,” Conrad said. “Make sure we don’t run into anything.”
Darin clicked his mouth shut and rode on.
Conrad turned to Hugh. “I know what you’re doing. If the Lady wanted you to know, she’d tell you. Leave the boy alone.”
Hugh considered stringing Conrad up by his ankles. An hour or so with the blood pooling to his head, and the older scout would sing a beautiful song filled with all his secrets. Hugh was still deciding if he was going to do it, when Darin came riding back around the bend.
“A fort!” he reported. “Looks empty.”
Hugh looked at Sam and nodded at the column behind them. “Get Sharif.”
The kid turned his horse and rode back. Half a minute later, Sharif came riding up from the back. The lean dark-haired scout had been covering the rear. Sam followed him.
Hugh touched the reins, and they rode on. The path turned. A wooden palisade rose to one side of the road, a ring of sharpened tree trunks ten feet high. A crude guard tower stood on the right, just inside the palisade walls, overlooking the road. A bell hung from its ceiling. The gate of the palisade stood wide open. The road curved to the left, widening into what used to be Main Street. An old pre-Shift two-story house crouched on one side, a trailer on the other, both mostly eaten by the forest. He could just make out the sharp point of a church steeple in the distance between the new trees.
The palisade lay silent. No sentries. No movement.
Hugh glanced at Conrad.
“This is new,” the older scout said. “Wasn’t here nine months ago.”
Sharif dismounted. Light rolled over his dark irises and flashed green. He inhaled deeply, crouched and sniffed the road.
“Nobody’s home,” he said quietly.
Hugh dismounted and fixed Conrad with his stare. “Stay here with the boy.”
If something happened to those two idiots, Elara would screech at him for days.
Hugh walked inside the gates. Three large log houses waited inside, two to the left and one to the right. In the back, an animal pen stood empty. The wind brought a hint of carrion.
“The road smells odd,” Sharif said quietly.
“Human, animal?”
“Odd. Nothing I’ve smelled before.” He held out his arm. The hairs on it stood straight up. “I don’t like it.”
Shapeshifters had a freakishly strong scent memory, and among all of the shapeshifters, werewolves were the best. They had no problem taking a whiff of blood and sorting through a couple of thousand scent signatures to identify a guy they’d shared a drink with once two years ago. Sharif had been with him for five years. If he hadn’t smelled it before, it had to be one hell of a rare creature or something new.
New. Hugh smiled. “Well, that’s interesting, isn’t it?”
Sharif rolled his eyes for half a second before schooling his features into a perfectly neutral expression.
Hugh turned to the nearest house, walked up the wooden stairs onto the porch and touched the door. It swung open under the pressure of his fingertips. A simple open floor plan with the kitchen and dining area to the far left and the living room space to his right. Dinner was laid out on the table. He moved across the floor on silent feet to the table. The reek of rotten food made him grimace. Fuzzy blue mold blossomed on the abandoned food. Looked like pulled meat of some sort with mashed potatoes on the side and a serving of formerly green vegetables. A fork lay by the nearest plate, its tines covered with mold.
He crouched and looked under the table. A broken plate.
Sam was hovering nearby. Hugh pointed at the plate. “Thoughts?”
“It happened in the middle of dinner?”
Hugh nodded. “There is a walkway built along the palisade and a tower. What was under it?”
Sam blinked.
“Go look.”
The kid took off.
Sharif crossed his arms. “I don’t like it.”
“I heard you the first time.”
Sam came back. “A broken plate.”
“What does that tell you?”
“There was a guard on duty. They brought him dinner.”
“And?”
“Something killed him so fast, he couldn’t raise the alarm.” Sam paused. “Was he shot?”
“No blood spatter,” Sharif said. “But there is this.” He slid his finger down the wooden frame. Four long bloody scratches gouged the wood.
“And this.” He crouched and pointed to the floor.
A bloody human nail.
Sam’s face turned pale. “Something dragged them out of here.”
Hugh pivoted to his right. A row of guns and swords on the wall, just by the door. It would take him less than a second to cover the distance from the table to the wall. “Something smart and fast.”
“Vampires?” Sam asked.
“It’s possible.”
“I don’t smell the undead,” Sharif said.
“But you do smell something. If Nez has resorted to snatching people from isolated communities, he wouldn’t use the regular bloodsuckers to do it.” Hugh straightened.
“But why?” Sharif asked.
“That’s a good question.”
Vampirism came about as the result of infection by the Vampirus Immortuus Pathogen. The pathogen killed its human host and reanimated it after death. Because every loose vampire would slaughter anything it could get its claws on, to an average human, the idea of vampires was terrifying. But to Roland, the undead were an effective tool. He’d made his first one accidentally, thousands of years ago, and he found them exceedingly useful. He wanted to seed his Masters of the Dead into every major city. They were his spies and his secret arsenal.
To accomplish this goal, Roland had to position the People as an operation with a flawless record, beneficial to the community. They presented themselves as a research institution with a focus in undeath, financed by casinos and other similar venues, and they offered a valuable service. They removed and neutralized any undead reported to them free of charge, and they offered the dying a chance to guarantee a payout to their families. If you were terminally ill and chose to donate your body for voluntary infection by the Vampirus Immortuus pathogen, the People would deposit a substantial sum into the account of your choice. The People acted like academics, dressed like high-priced lawyers, and treated the general public with utmost courtesy, and it worked. The general public happily forgot that each Master of the Dead, armed with just one vampire, could wipe out ten city blocks in less than an hour.
It was one of Roland’s greatest cons. He would go to any lengths to preserve it. If said general public suspected that the Masters of the Dead had begun grabbing warm bodies to turn into vampires, people would panic, and the entire carefully constructed network of the People’s offices would collapse. Roland would be livid, and the guilty would be dead before they had a chance to repent their sins.
But the pattern did fit the navigators. A fast, stealthy surgical strike.
What are you planning, Nez? Is this you? Is this someone else?
Hugh needed more data. He headed for the door.
“Are there irregular bloodsuckers?” Sam asked behind him.
“You have no idea,” Sharif told him.
The other two houses showed the same pattern. In the animal pen bones and chunks of rotting hide and fur told the story of a goat massacre.
“A cougar,
” Sharif said. “Came back more than once. Scaled the wall here and here.”
The invaders hadn’t been interested in livestock. Only in people.
Hugh walked out of the palisade. His convoy had arrived and waited on the road.
“Williams and Cordova, go through the houses. Do not touch the guns or any valuables. IDs only. Copy them and put them back.”
The two Dogs who were his best artists peeled off and ran into the palisade.
“We get our salvage and we haul ass out of here. The less time we spend here, the better.”
The Dogs moved. Hugh turned to Conrad. “From now on, nobody goes out alone, and nobody goes more than a mile into the woods without an escort. Pass it on.”
Conrad swallowed and nodded.
Hugh glanced at the palisade one last time and followed the convoy into the Old Market. This was, indeed, proving interesting.
Sometimes killing a man wasn’t an act of anger or punishment. It was a public service. One she would be glad to perform, Elara reflected as State Senator Victor Skolnik marched through the gates of Baile. Lean, about an inch or two above six feet, Victor Skolnik endeavored to personify his job: dark hair in that neither-too-long-nor-too-short, I’m-running-for-office cut, clean jaw, slightly droopy gray eyes, and a forced too-wide smile.
She knew entirely too much about the man. He was forty-eight years old, married, with two children. He made his money in real estate, prided himself on running marathons, and wore his piety on his sleeve. He’d also made a deal with Landon Nez. She didn’t know the particulars of the deal, but it involved running them off their land, so Nez could have it.
Skolnik had spent the last six months whipping up the congregations of Sanderville’s and Aberdine’s largest churches and lathering up spit, trying to turn the tide of public opinion against them and sever their trade agreements. He didn’t make much headway. Both Sanderville and Aberdine came to rely on their milk, cheese and beer, and especially on their medicines. Oh, they didn’t like her or her people, but they weren’t quite ready to storm the castle with pitchforks.
Thwarted, Skolnik went after the sale of Baile itself, trying to challenge its legality. The previous owner of the castle had left the state a long time ago and refused to come back from California to participate in Skolnik’s scheme.