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Another pasture, sheep this time. No dogs. Optimistic of them.
Something stirred on the roof of the barn and stood up. The creature was about forty inches at the shoulder, gray, with a lean lupine body and a wolf’s tail. Its head resembled that of an eagle, with a dark beak the size of a dagger. Its feathery wings draped over its back.
“What is that?” Da-Eun asked.
“A wolf griffin,” I told her. “A pretty good-sized one, too.”
Magic hit. The SUV’s gasoline engine sputtered and died, and Curran gently guided the vehicle to a stop just past the barn.
An unsettling feeling touched me. A kind of instinctual unease, as if a sniper were staring at me through the scope of their rifle.
Hmmm. I opened the car door and got out. Curran exited on the other side, and the two shapeshifters followed.
I stared at the woods, trying to sort out what my senses were telling me. Magic wasn’t a specific sense like a scent or a sound. We didn’t have an organ devoted to analyzing it. Instead, it was a combination of things, a pressure, a feeling, heat or ice, a faint odor, a sense of danger, sometimes overwhelming, sometimes vague.
This was… I wasn’t sure what this was.
Da-Eun began to chant, priming the water engine. Behind us, the second SUV disgorged its passengers, and I heard Troy’s voice launching into a monotone chant.
The wolf griffin pivoted to us. It gripped the edge of the roof with wicked, sickle-shaped talons, lowered its head, and raised its spotted wings, every feather erect, tipping them down like an owl trying to make itself larger.
“Quit it,” Keelan told it.
The wolf griffin rocked side to side, fluffing its feathers to maximum capacity, and let out a low shriek.
“Stay on your roof,” Keelan warned. “Don’t you come down here, or I’ll pluck your feathers out and make myself a nice pillow.”
The wolf griffin shrieked again and gave Keelan an evil raptor eye.
The creepy feeling grazed my skin, like an itch I couldn’t scratch. I turned and jogged down the road, moving in the direction we’d come from. Curran caught up with me.
We ran for about ten minutes. I stopped.
Yep, it was lighter here. Very slightly, almost imperceptibly lighter. If I wasn’t concentrating on it, I might have missed it.
“What’s up?” my husband asked.
“I’m trying to figure that out.”
I turned and walked back in the direction of the cars. It felt like walking through a very shallow stream. The magic barely wet my toes, offering no resistance, but the farther I went, the deeper it would become, until I would be wading in it.
If I was right, this would explain some things but not the others.
I crouched and put my hand on the ground. Magic touched my fingers, alien yet slightly familiar. There was a way to test my theory, but that would mean giving away the element of surprise.
I straightened.
“This might be harder than we expected,” I told Curran.
“Do you want to turn back?”
“No. Curran, that thing Keelan does, where he sends a scout team out? He can’t do it here. Nobody can go into the woods unless I’m with them. If they enter the forest without me, they won’t come out.”
“That bad?”
“Do you remember after Mishmar we camped at an abandoned gas station? We woke up, and the world was white with snow, and then the magic wave hit. It feels similar.”
Curran’s face snapped into a hard mask. “I see.”
“It’s not exactly the same, and it’s very weak here, so I could be wrong. But if I’m right, this isn’t a portal or a magic fissure like Unicorn Lane. This is deliberate and it’s driven by something intelligent. It knows we’re here. I don’t want anyone to die because they brought teeth and claws to a magic fight.”
“I’ll speak to Keelan,” he promised me.
Ned told me that Penderton’s town center was walled in. Looking at the thirty-foot wall, he might have left out some details.
Curran frowned at the big gatehouse in front of us, wide enough to accommodate the two-lane road. “What did his file say again?”
I pulled the file from the backpack resting by my feet.
“A double timber palisade filled with packed dirt,” I quoted.
The gate was built with gray oversized bricks and flanked by two towers of the same gray under shingled roofs. More towers rose on both sides, about four hundred feet apart from their neighbors, connected by a wooden wall of thick pine timber. Guards were walking on it, so it had to be at least three or four feet wide.
Curran’s eyebrows crept up.
“Solid,” Keelan said.
“And expensive,” Curran said.
“According to the file, they paid for it with a state grant, a federal grant, municipal taxes, and private donations. Ned’s father built most of it. Oh, and you’ll love this, those gray bricks are made out of Shift dust.”
