She tried to jerk her hand out of his, but he was holding her tight and she couldn’t yank her fingers out without making a scene. “Sure thing. I think I packed a magnifying glass.”
He lifted her hand and kissed her fingers.
“You’ll pay for that,” she ground out.
“Mmm, are you going to punish me? Kinky girl.”
Insufferable ass. Elara let a tendril of her magic slither from her fingers and lick his skin. He didn’t let go.
They caught up with Armstrong and Chambers. Chambers was looking at them wide-eyed.
“Don’t worry, Deputy,” Hugh winked at him. “I’m just trying my wife’s patience with public displays of affection.”
“Ignore him,” she said, smiling. “He has no boundaries.”
“I’m only human,” Hugh said.
Yes, you are.
A dark shape rushed through the woods and Sharif emerged on the road, his eyes shining with the telltale shapeshifter glow. Deputy Chambers grabbed for the vial on his belt.
“The road is clear,” Sharif reported. “Empty palisade. The scents are old.”
Chambers let go of the vial, and she glimpsed the pale-yellow substance inside. The color was almost gone. Opportunity.
“Your wolfsbane has soured, my friend,” Hugh said, letting go of her.
Ah! He saw it too.
Chambers startled.
“He’s right,” she said, holding out her hand. “Here.”
Chambers unclipped the vial from his waist and handed it over. She unscrewed the top and smelled it. Barely any scent. “Sharif, would you mind?”
The werewolf took the vial and held it to his nose. “Tingly.”
“Thank you,” she said, taking the vial back.
“Potent wolfsbane should’ve sent him into a sneezing fit,” Hugh said. “A strong wolfsbane has a deep orange color.”
“It should be stored in a dark container in a cold place,” Elara added. “Until you’re ready to use it.”
“Sadly, the stuff they issue us is barely yellow to begin with,” Armstrong said.
“We’re the biggest producer of wolfsbane in the region,” Elara said.
“We can cut them a deal, can’t we, honey?” Hugh asked.
“I’m sure we can.” They would take a loss on it. It didn’t matter. The contacts and good will at the county level was worth more than all their wolfsbane put together. “How much are you paying per gram now?”
“We pay five hundred per half-pound,” Armstrong said.
She waved her hand. “We can do better than that. We will supply you with premium quality wolfsbane at six hundred per pound.”
Armstrong blinked. “We don’t want to take advantage.”
“Call it law enforcement discount,” Elara said.
“Look,” Hugh said, his face somber. “One day things could happen, and I may not be here when they do. My wife might be in danger. My future children. My people. When that day comes, I’ll count on you to ride out here just as you’re doing now and uphold the law. You can’t do that if you’re dead. Let us fix this small thing for you. It’s the least we can do to help.”
Wow, he was good. If she didn’t know better, she would’ve believed every word. What a “good” man I’ve got there. Elara almost rolled her eyes.
“I’ll have to run it by the chain of command,” Armstrong said.
“The wolfsbane will be ready to go when you are,” Elara said.
The road turned. The empty palisade loomed ahead.
Hugh watched the forensic mage read the magic scanner’s printout. The m-scanners sensed the residual magic and printed them as colors: blue for humans, green for shapeshifters, purple for vampires. They were, at best, imprecise and clumsy; at worst, misleading. He’d seen printouts that made no sense, and from the faint lines on the paper, this one held very little value. The magic signatures were too old. Whatever took the people was long gone. Might as well get some druids to cut open a black chicken and study its liver.
Speaking of druids. He turned slightly to watch Elara’s magic users waiting patiently outside of the palisade. They wore the typical neo-pagan garb; light hooded robes, just generic enough to make it difficult to pin them down. They could be witches, druids, or worshippers of some Greek god.
Eight people. Not really enough for a coven.
His gaze slid to the harpy. There was something witchy about Elara. When he goaded her into letting her magic out, it felt odd, a touch witchlike, a touch female, and a whole lot of something else, sharp and cold. Daniels had felt like that, a little witchy, but mostly her magic felt like boiling blood. Elara was ice.
The void yawned at him. Thinking of Daniels always put him on the edge of the chasm. If he lingered too long on her or her father, the void would swallow him again.
The mage came out.
Here it comes, the magic signatures are too old, there is too much interference, blah blah blah.
“The magic signatures are too old and faint for a clear reading,” the mage said to Armstrong.
The deputy sighed. “Is there anything you can tell me?”
“It wasn’t an animal,” the mage said. “Animals would’ve left more evidence. It wasn’t an undead and the scene isn’t indicative of a loup attack.”
When shapeshifters failed to keep their inner beasts at bay, they turned loup. Loups weren’t playing with a full deck. When they attacked a settlement, they tore humans apart, usually while fucking them, they boiled children alive, and generally had a great time indulging in every perversion they could think of until someone put them out of their misery. The only cure for loupism was a bullet to the brain or a blade to the neck.
Armstrong sighed again. “Any idea at all?”
“No.”
“Something comes into this place, takes sixteen people out, and leaves no trace of itself.”
“In a nutshell.” The mage shrugged.
Armstrong looked at him for a long moment.
“What do you want, Will?” The mage spread his arms. “The scene is three weeks old. I don’t work miracles.”
“Perhaps we could try?” Elara asked, her tone gentle.
“Are you done with the scene?” Armstrong asked.
The mage nodded. “Can’t hurt. We’re not going to get anything more from it at this point.”
Armstrong looked to Elara. “It’s all yours.”
“Thank you.”
She walked toward the gates. When she wanted to, she moved like she was gliding. Mostly she stomped like a pissed off goat.
The eight people followed her and formed a rough semicircle.
“Come on,” Hugh said to Armstrong. “We’ll want a front row seat for this.”
They walked through the gates. The mage followed them.
Elara’s people pulled the hoods of their robes over their faces, so only their chins were visible. A low chant rose from them, insistent and suffused with power.
She stood with her back to them, seemingly oblivious to the magic gathering behind her.
The chant sped up. They poured out an awful lot of magic, but it felt inert.
Time to see what you really are. Hugh grounded himself, focusing through the prism of his own power. The world rushed at him, crystal clear, the magic a simmering lake submerging the eight chanters. Feeling magic was one of the first things he learned under Roland. Show me what you’ve got, darling.
Elara raised her arms to her sides and waited, her eyes closed.
The magic streamed toward her, as if a dam suddenly opened.
It drenched her.
She didn’t touch it. She didn’t absorb it, didn’t use it, didn’t channel it. It just sat there around her.
Elara opened her eyes. Magic whipped inside her, and to his enhanced vision she almost glowed from within.
They were treated to a show, he realized. The chanters were there to make it look as if she channeled their power. She didn’t need them. Whatever was about to happen was hers alone
.
His lovely wife didn’t want anyone to know how powerful she was. Smart girl.
Elara knelt, scooped a handful of dirt, and let it crumble from her fingers, each soil particle glowing gently.
The chant rose with a new intensity, rapid and sharp.
A pulse of magic burst from Elara, drowning the palisade. For half a second every blade of grass within stood perfectly straight and still. She’d poured a shitload of power into that pulse.
Silver mist rose from the ground in thin tendrils, thickening in the middle of the clearing, flowing together into a human shape, translucent, tattered, but visible. A man, six feet tall, broad shoulders. Big bastard. Long blond hair braided away from his face. Pale skin. A tattoo in a geometric design marked his right cheek, a tight spiral with a sharp blade on the end. He wore dark scale armor with a spark of gold on one shoulder. Hugh rifled through his mental catalogue of scale mail, everything from Roman lorica squamata to Japanese gyorin kozane.
He’d never seen anything like it.
The dark metal scales lay close to the man’s body, not uniform, but varying in size, smaller on the waist where the body had to bend, wider on the chest. This wasn’t made with the ease of manufacture in mind. It was created from life. Whoever made this was looking at a snake for inspiration.
The man’s eyes flashed with gold fire. He thrust his left hand forward. Mist spiraled up in five different spots, melding into the outline of creatures, barely visible. They stood on two legs, hunched forward, big owl eyes unblinking, their mouths slashes across their faces.
He felt a small remnant of humanity buried deep within the brown bodies, a barely perceptible hint of the familiar. They were once human.
The beasts darted forward into the nearest house. A ghostly door swung open and the first beast dragged out a body, a woman, her head hanging down from her twisted neck.
Another beast carrying a man followed. The man was large, at least two hundred pounds. The creature had slung him over its shoulder like he was weightless.
A scuffle, then a beast emerged with an adolescent girl, her long hair sweeping the ground. Blood dripped down her hand. The owner of the torn nail.
Another beast followed, one carrying a boy of about five, another a baby. Both dead.
The beasts laid them in a row and darted into the next house. The man watched, impassive.
“Sonovabitch,” Armstrong ground out.
The neat line of corpses grew. Sixteen people lay in a row, their ghostly bodies shimmering and fading into the mist.
Hugh studied the corpses. Quick and efficient. It only took a moment to snap a human neck. He’d done it enough times to recognize the practiced skill. That’s why nobody raised the alarm. The beasts killed them almost instantly.
The man turned toward the open gates and walked out, vanishing at the edge of Elara’s spell. The beasts grabbed the corpses and scuttled after him, darting back and forth until all were gone.
“Can you bring him back?” Hugh asked.
“I can hold him still for a bit.” Elara concentrated. This time he felt the power sink into the ground in a controlled burst. The armored man returned, frozen in mid-move.
Hugh circled him. The scales of the armor lacked polished shine, and the metal wasn’t black, but blue and brown with flecks of green, like tortoiseshell. Scuffs on the armor. That’s what he’d thought.
The mage grabbed a sketchpad and frantically drew. Hugh glanced to make sure his own people were sketching. They were.
“Who is this guy?” Dillard growled, her face contorted. “Does he look familiar to anyone?”
Armstrong grunted. “The question is, is he some random nutjob, or is he a part of something larger?”
Hugh would have to explain it. They didn’t see it on their own. Hugh pulled his sword out, stepped back, and swung. The blade lined up perfectly with a barely perceptible scratch across the scales.
Armstrong crouched next to him, so his face was inches from the sword and tilted his head. “He took a swing.”
“And survived.” Bad news. The cut didn’t angle enough to be a glancing blow. No, someone had slashed across this asshole’s middle straight on and probably dulled his sword.
“How do you know he survived?” Chambers asked. “Maybe he took the armor off a dead man.”
“The armor isn’t broken,” Sam said quietly. “And it was custom made for him.”
The kid was learning.
Hugh kept his voice low. “You see the gold on the shoulder?”
Armstrong studied the gold star etched into the armor, eight rays emanating from the center with a bright gold stripe underneath.
“Insignia?” he guessed.
“There is no other reason to put it on armor.”
Armstrong glanced at him. “You think there are more of them.”
“He’s a soldier. Soldiers belong in an army.” Hugh sheathed his sword. “The insignia is a rank, an identification. He’s clean-shaven, his hair is put away, the armor isn’t ornate. This is a uniform. Put him in the woods, and he’ll be near invisible. He’s part of a unit. If we’re really lucky, it’s just a unit and not an army.”
Armstrong rose and surveyed the woods around them. “We’re done here,” he said. “Let’s go back before something else shows up.”
The mist dissolved. Elara stood on the other side. She looked … in pain. No, not pain. Worry.
That same annoying feeling that flooded him when he’d looked at her bloody wedding dress came over him. He wanted to fix it, just to make it go away.
He strode to her and said, barely above a whisper, “Do you recognize this?”
“No.” She looked at him, and a small hopeful spark lit her eyes. “Do you?”
“No.”
The spark died. Hugh felt a sudden rush of anger, as if he’d failed somehow.
If they got hit on the way back, she would jump into the fight. She had too much power to sit back. If he lost her, her nature-worshipping cabal would riot. Like it or not, everything in Baile and the town revolved around Elara.
“Stay near me on the way back.”
Surprise slapped her face. She turned it into cold arrogance. “Worried about my survival?”
“Don’t want to miss an opportunity to use you as a body shield.”
“How sweet of you.”
“Stay near me, Elara.”
He walked away before she could come back at him with something clever.
7
Elara leaned against the table. They were upstairs in the room designated as her “study,” which she never used. She preferred the small room off her bedroom. The study held a large wooden table, flanked by five chairs on each side, which nobody was using, except her and Johanna, who sat cross-legged on the table, mixing reagents in small glass beakers.
Past the table, an open area offered four plush chairs set around a small coffee table, with smaller chairs scattered here and there along the walls. Hugh had taken one of the soft chairs. Stoyan, Lamar, and Felix picked seats along the wall. The crazy one, Bale, wasn’t invited to the meeting because he was standing watch. Just as well.
On her side of the room Savannah sat in a plush chair, while Dugas leaned against the wall.
Hugh was in a foul mood. They’d had three of these weekly meetings so far, with cooler heads on both sides present, because when they tried to work things out on their own, their discussions ended in a barrage of mutual insults. She’d seen him irritated before, even enraged, but this was new. His gaze was focused, his eyes dark. He sat in a large Lazyboy chair, flipping a knife in his hand, tip, handle, tip, handle. At first, she watched, waiting for him to cut himself, but after the first ten minutes she gave up. Some people paced, Hugh juggled a razor-sharp knife with his right hand. Aw, the man she married.
Ugh.
Elara tried to sink some sarcasm into that inner ‘ugh’ but couldn’t even fool herself. Hugh was worried. She never seen him worried before. Hugh always had things in hand and
the grim look in his eyes was setting her on edge. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but he looked like a king whose kingdom was on the brink of an invasion. And she was his queen.
Ugh.
What was even going on in his head? She had a feeling that if she cracked his skull open and somehow let his thoughts free, they would be echoes of her own. What is that creature? Why did the warrior kill? What did he do with the bodies? How do we guard against him? And the loudest thought of all, playing over and over. What did I miss? What else can I do? It was driving her crazy.
“Next item on the agenda,” Dugas said. “Rufus--“
She pushed away from the table. “We should send people to the nearest settlements.”
Savannah reached out, touched Johanna’s shoulder, and signed.
Hugh gave her a dark look. “Why?”
“To warn them. And to set perimeter wards.”
“What makes you think the wards would hold him?” Hugh asked.
Johanna put the beaker down. “They would not. He would make noise breaking them. An early warning system.” She picked up the beaker, raised it, shook the dark green liquid in it, and put it down again. “We have soil from the palisade where he stood. We can key the spell to him. It would not be expensive.”
Hugh stared at her for a long moment.
“Not very.” Johanna gave him an apologetic shrug.
“I need your approval, Hugh,” Elara said. “It’s a safety measure.”
“Your people will need escorts,” he said.
“Yes.”
“How many settlements do you want to warn?”
She glanced at Savannah.
“Seven,” she said.
“Okay,” Hugh said. “We’ll do them one at a time.”
“That will take a week.”
“Congratulations, you can count.”
She crossed her arms. “Hugh, this is important. Every day we delay, people may die.”
“I will have to send at least twenty people with each party. Any less is inviting an assault.”
“So what’s the problem? Seven by twenty is one hundred and forty.”
“Exactly. You want me to send almost half of my force out into the woods at the same time. That risks the lives of my soldiers and leaves us vulnerable, and I won’t do it. One at a time.”