“Pillar Rock,” he said. “We know where Caleb is likely to be. We know we’ll have to go and see him at some point tonight.”
“Him and his gang of enforcers who think they are big and bad.” Julie’s eyes narrowed. “We should talk to them about the Iveses.”
“We will,” he promised. “We don’t know who is at Pillar Rock. Maybe it’s a third party.”
“Maybe it’s Caleb.” Julie smiled.
“If we’re lucky.”
They looked at each other. In that moment he knew they were thinking the exact same thing. Caleb Adams didn’t know the Ives family, but before the night was over, he would regret their deaths. He would regret them more than he ever regretted anything in his life.
CHAPTER 2
PILLAR ROCK THRUST OUT of the ground among the ruins of North DeKalb Mall, a little over five miles away. He could’ve run it in half an hour, even if he took his time and carried Julie, which would be faster than her horse picking her way through the treacherously degraded streets. But Peanut had to come along and she trotted at about eight miles per hour, so he kept pace with a light jog.
He’d pointed out before that the horse was neither brown nor peanut-shaped, so the name didn’t describe her in any way, and he was told that was the point. He let it lie. Some things you simply accepted, the way you accepted the sunrise or the winter cold. They called it lupine fatalism, but in reality it was plain common sense.
The moon lit their way. The north side of the city fought a never-ending battle with encroaching wilderness. On some streets, the pavement had worn away, surrendering to the forest growth, but North Druid Hills Road was still somewhat clear, if overgrown. Here and there a rusty car poked through the spring weeds, pushed or driven off the road just far enough to not block the way. The trees grew thick here, their massive branches shading the road, painting it in patches of shadow and light. Behind them houses crouched, most still occupied. The closer they got to North DeKalb Mall, the fewer houses would be occupied. The wilderness was frightening now to most humans. They sought safety in numbers, migrating toward the center of the city.
The wilderness never bothered him. He loved it.
He wondered idly if Julie liked it, too. He’d never asked her.
He wondered about many things he never talked about—most of the time there was no need for questions. He would get his answers if he waited long enough. However, she had said something that required a clarification.
“Herald?” he asked. He’d never heard Kate use the term.
“That’s the official title,” she said. “Before one becomes a Warlord, one must be a Herald. That’s what Hugh d’Ambray was before he became the Preceptor of the Iron Dogs. “
Hugh d’Ambray. The name raised invisible hackles on his back.
He fought to keep the snarl out of his voice. “I didn’t know Kate needed a Warlord.”
“She doesn’t. She has Curran. He is her Consort and her general.”
His mind struggled for a few seconds. Those terms were usually flipped. To him, Curran was the Beast Lord, ex-Beast Lord now, and Kate was his Consort. That was the official title, and Kate had hated it. She would’ve never used it to refer to Curran. He knew where this was coming from, and he didn’t like it.
“You’ve been talking to him again.”
She didn’t say anything, her gaze fixed on the street ahead.
Damn it. “Why the hell do you keep talking to him?”
“Because Roland teaches me things.”
“What could he possibly teach you? How to be an immortal megalomaniac dickhead who kills his own kids? That’s some great lesson.”
“He teaches me magic.” She glared at him.
“Stay away from him. He is dangerous.”
She opened her eyes really wide and blinked at him. “Oh really? You think so? I had no idea.”
He killed another growl. “You don’t need to be talking to him. Nothing good will come from it.”
“No, you are right. You are totally right. Let’s not talk to the enemy we are all going to fight at some point.” She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “Let’s not try to figure out how he thinks or what weapons he might use. Honestly, Derek? You did all that spy stuff for Jim for years. I can’t believe you.”
“Believe it.”
“I know!” She clapped her hands together. “Maybe we could all go into battle blindfolded.”
He had an urge to pull her off her horse and shake her until some sense appeared in her brain.
“I can sew you a cute grey blindfold with some little scars on it—”
“He’s a homicidal tyrant who’s been alive for five thousand years!” he snarled.
“Six. Longer, probably, but he admits to six.”
“Do you honestly think he’s going to let you see anything he doesn’t want you to see?”
“There are things he can’t hide from me. Things that only I can see.” She leaned forward. “He’s teaching me, and that means I’m learning how he thinks. Someone has to talk to him, Derek. Kate isn’t going to. That leaves me. I’m learning. I can make my own incantations now. I know how to build them and infuse them with power. That’s something Kate doesn’t know how to do.”
“Incantations?” She was out of her mind. “Have you used one in an actual fight?”
“Not yet. It’s dangerous.”
“So he’s teaching you something that may or may not work.”
She glared at him. “It will work. I haven’t used it yet, because it takes a crapload of magic. It’s my last resort, and I haven’t needed it.”
“Kate doesn’t need to incant. She uses power words.” He had no idea how they worked. He knew only that they came from an ancient language and commanded the magic.
“That’s what you think,” Julie said.
“That is what I think. He’s grooming you for something.”
“Don’t you think I know that?”
“Okay.” He spun around and walked backward facing her. “Tell me one thing that you’ve learned that we don’t know. One thing. Go.”
“Okay. Do you know what he did to Hugh d’Ambray?”
“He exiled him. He should’ve killed him and saved us the trouble.”
“No,” Julie said quietly. “He purged him.”
“What does that mean?”
“He took away his immortality. Roland was everything to Hugh. Father, mother, teacher. God. For sixty years, since he was a kid, Hugh did everything Roland asked exactly as he was told. All his life he tried to make Roland proud. And Roland cast him out. He stripped the gift of his magic from him and severed all magic ties between them. Hugh can’t feel Roland anymore, Derek.”
“And?”
“‘When God shall remove all his presence from a man, that is hell itself,’” she quoted. “Hugh is in hell. He’ll feel himself age slowly and know that eventually he’s going to die.”
“Good.” He had no problem with that. Hugh had tried to kill Kate, he’d done his best to murder Curran, he’d almost started a war between the People and their vampires and the Pack, and he’d kidnapped Kate and nearly starved her to death, all in the name of trying to force her to meet with her father. The man’s list of transgressions was a mile long, and Derek would happily take a payment in blood for every single one. If Hugh happened to step out of the shadows now, only one of them would leave this street.
“It would’ve been kinder to kill him,” Julie said.
“Why are you so concerned about Hugh?”
“Think about it,” she said, her voice sharp. “It will come to you.”
He mulled it over. She was right. It came to him. “You are not Hugh.”
“I am. I’m bound to Kate by the same ritual Roland used to bind Hugh.”
“You’re nothing like Hugh, and Kate is nothing like Roland.”
Julie turned in the saddle and pointed to the northwest. “I can feel her. She’s there.”
He tried not to lie to her, so he said the
first thing that popped into his head. “That’s creepy.”
“It is.” She put a world into those two words.
“But creepy or not, you know Kate won’t do what Roland is doing to Hugh. Roland doesn’t love Hugh. She loves you. You’re her child.”
She sighed. “I know she loves me. That’s why I’m worried. Derek, she still hasn’t told me that I can’t refuse her orders.”
Alarm dashed down his spine. He hadn’t realized she knew. “How long?”
“Roland told me months ago,” she said.
“She hasn’t told you because it’s hard.”
“I know,” she said. “She tries not to order me around. She’ll start to say some Mom thing and then stop, and you know she’s rephrasing it in her head. It’s kind of funny. Instead of ‘Stop stealing Curran’s beer out of the fridge and wash the dishes’ it’s all ‘It would make me a lot happier if you stopped stealing Curran’s beer’ and ‘It would be great if you did the dishes.’ She probably thinks she’s subtle about it. She isn’t.”
He didn’t see anything funny about it. “What are you going to do?”
“It’s not a problem now,” she said.
“And if it becomes a problem?”
“I’ll do something about it.”
He didn’t like the sound of that. “Still, you should stop talking to Roland.”
She sat up straighter. “Will you stop bossing me around?”
“Stop doing stupid crap, and I’ll stop.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Eat my horse’s ass.”
Ugh. No thanks. “What, was Desandra at the house recently?”
“I don’t need Desandra to teach me insults. And what the hell is it with all the comments about what I’m wearing? There’s nothing wrong with these shorts.”
“Don’t you own any jeans?”
“I do.”
“You should wear them.”
“Why? Is the sight of my legs disturbing you, Derek?” She stopped Peanut and stuck her left leg out in front of him. “Is there something wrong with my legs?”
There was nothing wrong with her legs. They were pale and muscular, and men who should know better noticed them. He was not going to notice them for a list of reasons a mile long, starting with the fact that she was sixteen, and he was twenty. He sidestepped her leg. “The more protection between your skin and other people’s claws, the better.”
“I took down a werejackal. I’m not the one bleeding.”
“I’m not bleeding.”
“You were. And there is a rip in your hoodie where he got your shoulder.”
He looked at her.
“Was I not supposed to mention it?” She put her hand to her chest. “So sorry, Sir Wolf.”
“In a few hours I’ll heal. You wouldn’t. If you got cut up by a cat’s claws, you would bleed unless we treated the wound. It would make you weak. Hours later you could reopen your wound if you turned the wrong way. Cats are filthy animals, and they carry all sorts of shit on their claws. You could die from an infection.”
They made a right onto Birch Road. To the left the ruin of the mall spread out. During the mall’s life, a narrow strip of lawn had ringed it, dotted by ornamental trees. Now the trees had grown, and thorny bushes sprouted between the trunks, forming nature’s answer to a barbed wire fence and offering only glimpses of the mall beyond. Most of its buildings had long since crumbled into dust. The rains had washed it away, and an occasional sign was all that remained of the shopping center. He read the names—Burlington Coat Factory, PayLess Shoe Store, Ross . . . They meant nothing to him.
“Did you share this cat view with Curran?” Julie asked. “Or are werelions slightly less filthy than other cats?”
He refused to take the bait. “A wound that’s a minor inconvenience to me could be a death sentence for you.”
Julie sighed. “Do you really think that if a wereleopard attacks me, jeans would stop him? Clothes don’t have magic powers, Derek. They don’t mystically protect you from three-inch claws, rapists, or murderers. If someone decides to hurt you, they will do so whether or not you have a thin layer of denim over your skin. Lighten up.”
“It’s better than nothing.”
She narrowed her eyes, looking sly. He braced himself.
“I saw a picture of Hugh when he was your age,” she said.
“Mhm.”
“Hugh was a hottie.”
His reaction must’ve shown on his face, because she threw her head back and laughed.
THE ROAD CURVED GENTLY. They kept going around the bend, to the mouth of Orion Drive. Here no trees hid the mall, and the view was wide open. He stopped. Next to him Julie jumped off her horse, tied Peanut to a tree, and took a cloth backpack from among the saddlebags, hanging it over her left shoulder.
The parking lot unrolled before them, about fifteen hundred feet wide and probably two thousand feet long. Irregular holes pockmarked the asphalt, each filled with mud-colored opaque water. No way to tell how deep they were. A thin fog hung above the water, and in its translucent depths tiny green lights floated, their weak light witchy and eerie. In the center of it all, a spire of dark grey rock jutted out at a forty-degree angle, like a needle that had been carelessly thrust into the fabric of the parking lot. Rough and dark, twenty feet wide at the base and tapering to a narrow end, it rose about thirty feet above the parking lot. Pillar Rock. They would have to clear the parking lot to get to it. The three idiot shapeshifters had been told to meet their contact there.
Derek inhaled. He’d smelled swamp before; it smelled musky and green, of algae and fish and vegetation, like a heap of grass clippings that had been allowed to turn into compost, so new plants could grow from it. It smelled of life. This place smelled of mud and water, but no life. Instead a faint fetid smell of something foul, something rotting and repulsive, slithered its way to him.
Julie tensed, her hand on her tomahawk.
“What do you see?”
“Blue,” she said.
Blue stood for human.
“Ugly, bleached-out blue, almost grey. This is a bad place.”
He took a few steps back and sat on the curb. She moved into the scrub behind him. He heard the tomahawk bite wood. Leaves rustled, and she handed him a six-foot-long dry sapling. A walking stick. He took it and nodded. Good idea. She disappeared again, came back with a walking stick of her own, and sat next to him.
They waited quietly, watching, listening. Minutes dripped by. Mist curled above the dark water and shimmered in the moonlight. Julie didn’t move.
A few years ago, when he was only eighteen, Jim, then Security Chief of the Pack, had put him in charge of a small group of twelve- and fifteen-year-olds who showed potential for covert work. Of all the things Derek tried to teach them, he found patience was the hardest. By now all of them would’ve scratched, or sighed, or made some noise. Julie simply waited. It was so easy with her.
They saw it at the same time: a brief flash of something pale as it moved within the deep blue shadow of the Spire. The hair on the back of his neck rose. Someone stared at them from those shadows. He couldn’t see it clearly, but he felt the weight of its gaze, saturated with malice. It stabbed at him from the gloom. He pretended not to notice. Sooner or later it would get impatient.
The mist began to wane, thinning as if boiling off. It was luring them in.
“It will get foggy once we enter,” he said quietly.
“Yes,” Julie agreed.
There was no need to tell her to stay next to him. He knew she would.
“Look to the right, where the tree trunk splits,” she murmured.
It took him a moment, but he finally saw it: the remnants of a small bundle of dried mistletoe hanging from the tree, tied with a leather cord. A small wooden medallion hung from the cord. A druid had been here, recognized it as a place of evil, and tried to contain it.
“Is the spell active?” he asked under his breath.
“No. It doesn’t radiate magic. It’s a
linked ward and someone has broken it.”
Magic and wards weren’t his expertise, but he’d learned what he had to from Kate. A linked ward meant that identical wards had been placed all around the perimeter of the mall, forming a ring, each ward a link in a chain. If one link was severed, the chain broke, and the containment failed.
She shuddered. He felt her fear. Something about this place deeply creeped her out.
The mist thickened to the right, twisting. He pretended not to see the woman who stepped out of it. She was about twenty-eight or thirty, white and very pale. A ragged dress hung off her shoulders, once probably blue or green, but now faded to a dirty grey and damp. Her stomach bulged out—she looked either dangerously bloated or about seven months pregnant. She didn’t smell pregnant. She wore no bra, and the fabric snagged on her erect nipples, tracing the contours of breasts. Her dishwater-blond hair fell to below her waist, framing her face like a curtain. It might have been a pretty face, he reflected, with sharp but delicate features, except her eyes were too hungry.
She walked up to the edge of the parking lot and stopped. “What are you doing here?”
“We’re waiting to meet someone,” Julie said.
“This is a dangerous place. Come with me. I have food.”
Julie looked at him. He read hesitation in her eyes.
“She has food,” he said, keeping his voice neutral.
“Then we should come.”
“Come with me,” the woman repeated, backing up. “Come.”
If he were alone, it probably wouldn’t have been food. It might have been sex. Or both.
He stepped into the parking lot, moving slowly, careful where he put his feet, tapping the stick in front of him. Julie followed closely. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the mist flood behind them, a milky impenetrable curtain.
“Come,” the woman repeated, moving deeper into the lot, toward the spire.