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He fell silent. I gave him room.
“I’m pissed off, so I keep going north,” he said finally. “I don’t know how long I walked, but they trailed me the whole way. Finally, I see the forest thin out up ahead. I come to a clearing and see this animal chewing on some bushes. I don’t know what it is but I sure as hell know it shouldn’t be here, in coastal North Carolina.
“We look at each other, and this realization comes over me. This animal, it fits perfectly into this environment. It’s exactly where it’s supposed to be. It’s me who is out of place. I’m the one who doesn’t belong.”
“The magic hit, and it was like someone pinned me under a microscope. I don’t have words to explain. It’s like whatever it was that had been keeping an eye on me suddenly stared and the weight of it almost made me black out.”
He paused.
“What happened?”
“I ran. Whatever was watching me chased me, but I’m very fast when I have to be, and I was squeezing out everything I could of my pathfinding magic. It threw me out onto an abandoned, overgrown road—421 as I found out later—and I took it. Came out of the woods the next day with barely a scratch on me. Sat down. Wrote a report. Explained how I was the only one who had lived. Sent it to the Citadel in Wolf Trap.”
“Why didn’t they send another team in?”
Isaac crossed his arms on his chest. “The town asked me what would happen if the woods decided to retaliate. They wanted to know if the Order could protect them.”
“What did you tell them?”
“The truth. We have no idea what it is, and we don’t know how to defend against it. The mayor called the Citadel, spoke with the Grand Master directly, and I was told to fall back.”
“And now you’re here.”
“The four of them are still in that forest,” Isaac said. “The thing that killed them is still there, too.”
All the unsaid things hung between us, making the air heavy and oppressive. That he lost his whole team. That he came out unharmed, while the rest of them had their skulls bashed in. That the town was still under siege. That he met something in those woods that disturbed the very core of his being and he needed to confront it to make the world right again.
And Grand Master Damian Angevin had allowed him to stay right where he was instead of ordering him to a new assignment. The Order had gotten a lot choosier about which fights they picked under Angevin’s leadership, but once the knights went in, they saw it to the end. No matter what it cost them. Leaving this matter unfinished went against everything they stood for. Angevin was giving Isaac a chance to resolve things, but not the means to do it.
“What did the animal look like?” I asked.
Isaac pushed away from his desk and pulled the curtain on the opposite wall to the side. A big map of Pender Forest was pinned to the wall, with a twisted route leading north-northwest inked on it. Landmarks dotted the map here and there: fallen tree, pond, bog—each marked with a symbol and a piece of a string that connected the marks to pencil sketches drawn with startling accuracy on watercolor paper.
On the left, a sketch showed a triangular rock with a blond man sprawled on it, a sword protruding from his chest. His blue eyes stared up at the artist from a face twisted by fear and pain.
At the top of the map, on a thirty-inch piece of paper, a landscape unfolded, the trees framing a small slice of grassy plain. A big animal stood in the grass. It looked like an elephant, and yet it clearly wasn’t. It had an elephant’s trunk and elephant’s ears, but the ears were too small and its trunk was too long. Very short beige fur covered it, reminiscent of a horse’s pelt. Its legs seemed wider apart than an elephant’s, and its profile was wrong, too. Elephants had high foreheads, and this beast’s cranium sloped. But the tusks were the most obvious. They were massive and long, as long as the trunk, pointed down, and spiral-shaped.
Wow.
“How big?” I asked.
“Almost eight feet at the shoulder. Four tons in weight. Maybe more.”
We stared at the drawing.
“What the hell is it?” I murmured.
“No clue.”
We looked at the beast some more.
“Still plan on going in?” he asked.
“Yep. Want to come?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“If you decide to join us, find me in Penderton.”
“I’ll think about it,” the knight-pathfinder repeated.
Ned was right. The woods past the Northeast Cape River bridge were beautiful. Massive pines crowded the old highway, drenched in sunlight, their branches thick with clusters of long pine needles that looked deceptively fluffy. The underbrush was nonexistent, mostly fledgling pines poking out of the clumps of golden wiregrass. It was a far cry from the impenetrable bramble of stunted live oak, wax myrtle, and yaupon holly that made up the maritime forest around our house.
