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Predictably, he couldn’t see anything. “Where?”
She pointed northeast, in the exact direction the birds flew. “Maybe five, six miles.”
He glanced behind them. “The Warren is there.”
She turned and looked at the Warren. “Nothing there. If the birds belong to Adams, then he took what he had over there, or else the birds belong to someone else, and Adams knows how to hide his rock.”
He searched the dark city. “And you haven’t seen it before?”
“No.”
“Let’s say I’m Caleb. I want the shiny rock, but I don’t like getting my hands dirty. I send some assholes to retrieve the two pieces of the rock. They get one from Luther, but they botch the other job, kill people, and cops are called. So I hire some idiot shapeshifters to go get the rock for me and bring it here. I break the linked ward guarding this place, so the fucked-up mermaids will eat the shapeshifters.”
“Then, when it’s daylight, the lobasti will hide and I’ll come and get the rock,” Julie said. “Easy.”
“Except that if I were Caleb, I’d want to make sure that everything went according to the plan.”
“You’d stay and watch.” Julie’s eyes narrowed. “You’d see us kill the lobasti and then hide on the pillar. You’d know we would be trapped up here for at least an hour. Plenty of time to make a new plan, summon some birds, and take the rock away from us. And then have them take it there?” She pointed to northeast. “Why?”
If Caleb watched, it was from afar, because Derek hadn’t smelled him. He could’ve hidden in any one of the ruins around the place. Tracking him down was pointless—he’d left already, gone northeast with his own chunk of the magic rock. He would expect they would follow. He had all the time he needed to set a trap.
“Two possibilities. Either he has to do something with the rock over there, or he has figured out that you can see it. We keep interfering and screwing up his plans. He could be baiting a trap.”
Derek wished he knew what the rock did.
Julie was looking into the distance, probably at the glowing rock, with a pinched expression on her face. She knew a lot more about witches than he did. Kate was related to one of the three witches on the Witch Oracle. Her name was Evdokia, and Julie had lessons with her every Tuesday.
“What do you know about Adams?” he asked.
“He’s a warlock.” She said the word as if it tasted bitter.
“A male witch.” He knew that much. He also knew that Adams was feared. People didn’t like mentioning his name.
“No.” She shook her head. “He isn’t a witch.”
“What’s the difference?”
“A witch strives for balance. For a witch, everything is connected. Everything is a tangle of binding thread; pull on one end too hard and you could make a knot nobody can untie. If you’re sick, a witch will heal you, because plague is imbalance, but if you come to the same witch asking to give you another year of life through magic, he’ll turn you down, because you’re asking for something unnatural and there is always a price. The word witch comes from Old English wicca, an ancient word meaning a practitioner of magic. There are words similar to it, like wigle or wih in Old German, and they always mean things like divination, or holy, or knowing. Caleb Adams isn’t a witch. He’s a warlock. That word comes from Old English wærloga. It means traitor, liar, enemy. Oath-breaker. He cares only about his own gain, and he’ll cut every thread he can to get what he wants. That’s why they cast him out of the coven. He broke his covenant. There’s no limit to the fucked-up things he’ll do to get his way. Evdokia hates him. Every time she mentions his name, she spits to the side.”
A man like that would want the magic glowing rock for only one reason—power. Adams had already killed for it once. He would kill for it again, and if he obtained it, he would use it to keep killing. Derek thought of the Iveses. Of the bloodstains and blood scent, sickening because he knew the people it belonged to and because it called to him, threatening to wake up something he kept chained deep inside.
“There is only one thing to do,” he said.
She looked at him, her face apprehensive.
“Let’s go get the rock back,” he told her.
Julie bared her teeth. She wasn’t a shapeshifter, would never be one, but right now, under the light of the moon, she smiled like a wolf.
CHAPTER 3
HE JOGGED NEXT TO PEANUT as Julie steered her down the overgrown street. They were moving northeast on Lawrenceville Highway, heading into Tucker. Since the city was now his territory, he took the time to learn about it. After the first Shift, when planes no longer worked and highway travel became dangerous, the industries looked to railroads for shipping. With buildings in Atlanta falling left and right, Tucker became the industrial hot spot for about fifteen years, growing fast until the newly built factories also decayed and fell. This was all ancient history, as far as he was concerned. Now Tucker stood abandoned, all but claimed by the wilderness, as the people pulled in to the heart of the city.
All around them dark ruins stabbed through the growth. A flock of school buses rusted, abandoned in some old parking lot. The remnants of a gas station, all but swallowed by dense kudzu, hunkered down to the right. Two owls sat on the remnants of the Exxon sign, waiting for some hint of movement. This would’ve been an ugly place without the green, Derek reflected. Sharp, rusted, trashed. The plants softened it, hiding the disfigured land underneath the happy leaves. Even the old power lines, dead for years, looked cheery, wrapped in vines and dripping small white flowers like garlands.
A creek had broken free of man-made restraints, flooding the road as it found an easy path down the paved highway. The water ran only a couple of inches deep, three at most, but he didn’t like to get his feet wet, so he moved on the right side, where debris and soil deposited by the water formed a natural shore. Tiny fish darted in the clear stream. He smelled deer. A few moments later he saw them, too, drinking from a stream: a group of three does. Two were pregnant. They raised their heads, looked at him and Julie, and took off.
“Cute,” Julie said.
