Page 40 of His Human Believer

Human eyes are not made for a Hyrrokin night, and the light is playing tricks on me, which means it must be doing considerably worse to her. She can’t even flash flame to make her own light.

I hand my female a small, handheld illumination light that I’ve already sparked.

“Thank you,” she whispers.

At some point in the first hour, she put her hand on my forearm.

Not for comfort. For orientation, so that she knows where the ground is and where I am and which direction we are moving. She keeps it there while we walk and takes it off when we stop and puts it back when we go on again.

The motion sensors show nothing across the entire wall line. The thermal ones show our own search parties and nothing else. Every heat signature belongs to a being whose name I know. The resonance meter sits in its housing on my back and produces the flat carrier tone it has produced every night for eight diurnals.

Finally, we find the wulver at the third hour.

Off the path and down in the undergrowth, in a direction that makes no sense until I understand that he dragged himself. Skylo came off the path where it happened and went into the growth toward the deep preserve and he made it this far before he could not make any more, and he is lying in the leaves facing inward.

Facing the way the boy went.

“Skylo.” Margaret’s voice cracks. “Skylo…”

One head is down. It is not moving. The other two come up when we reach him. He tries to stand.

“Oh, thank gods,” Margaret exclaims.

He gets his front legs under him and shifts his weight and then he goes back down into the leaves, and all three heads keep watching the deep preserve.

Margaret goes down beside him and puts her hands on him. “I’m finding the wound. It is above the shoulder, forward, angled downward. The entry is small and clean. The surrounding skin is scorched in a pattern I recognize.” She puts it over comms immediately. “This is Reyes. I have the wulver, south of position eleven. He is alive but needs immediate medical assistance.” She keeps her voice level. “The wound is a projectile wound. Close range. Sidearm, not a rig.”

The channel is silent for one full nanco.

And then the entire operation changes character, all at once, everywhere in this preserve, because a missing offspring has just become an armed being with a kidnapped boy.

Hannibal arrives in moments.

He comes through the growth and then drops down into the leaves beside his wulver and puts both claws on him.

He says something low and private to his beast in ancient Hyrrokin.

Skylo’s tail moves. Twice. Slowly.

Hannibal puts his forehead against the animal’s main forehead and stays there.

“He’ll make it, Hellstone,” a deep voice says from behind us. Bergelmir has come up on our position. “I have seen worse than that in the field and walked the beast out.” He crouches, examines the wound with the flat competence of a male who has done this before, and stands. “He does not have all night, but he has hours, and there is a med lab eleven minutes from this gate.”

Then, he says over comms, “Strikestone. Extraction, forty south of eleven, animal casualty, get him to the community and then get him to the lab.”

He looks at Hannibal. “Your offspring is somewhere in this preserve with an armed being. You will go forward. Strikestone and Idun will get your wulver out.”

He is a hundred and fifty nanco of guardian animal and does not want to go. Two heads keep turning back toward the deep preserve the entire time they are lifting him.

Hannibal watches them go then he turns and walks deeper into the preserve without saying anything to any being.

“Dagr Hellstone did not walk out of this preserve on his own,” Margaret says. “There is no way Dagr leaves a wounded wulver lying in the undergrowth. He would have stayed with him until he died.”

“So he was taken by a being with a sidearm who used it on a guardian animal.”

“Agreed.”

“Whoever took him is not from this community. Every domicile behind that wall is accounted for and every resident is standing in the drive under the alignment or out here calling a name into the dark. We have worked this line east and west and there is nothing, no track, no disturbance or reading on any sensor. Whoever took Dagr went inward. Toward the center of the preserve, away from the community. And I do not know who he is, but I know why a being goes into the deep preserve on an alignment night with a child. This has everything to do with the Skyggjar…I think this is a poacher,” I say to Margaret as we walk through our search grid.