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Come to think of it, we’d need to stick to our schedule as well. Before we had left for Wilmington, Mahon and Martha made us promise to return for holidays and during summer, so they could spend time with us and especially with Conlan. We’d need to keep that up no matter how busy things got here. As far as Atlanta knew, we were chilling on the beach. The last thing we needed was for them to come looking for us before we were ready. And Mahon would, too. We didn’t need that old cranky bear stomping through our woods.
I was reasonably sure Penderton would keep our secret. I had released my claim on the town, so I held up my promise. That and getting rid of the Pale Queen made us trustworthy, and Penderton wanted to maintain a good relationship with us. First, we proved we were handy at dispatching threats, and if Penderton came to us for help, we would take care of it to be neighborly. And second, renovating this place would require a lot of manpower and skilled tradesmen. Curran already talked to Ned about supplies, and judging by the way Ned’s eyes lit up, we would be keeping Penderton’s builder guilds happily employed probably for years to come.
I would have to discuss all of this with Curran tonight over dinner.
A commotion broke out at the gap. Jynx appeared in it and took a deep breath. “Consort! There is a man here to see you! He says he is a wizard!”
I needed to invest in a bullhorn or something. “Is his name Luther?”
“Might be. He looks like a Luther! Let me check!” Jynx disappeared from view and came back. “Yes!”
“Let him in!”
She stepped aside and a man strode through the gap, looking like an academic who had gotten lost in the woods and was now seriously put out. His dark hair was damp with sweat. His naturally pale skin still showed a little of his summer tan. He wore hiking pants and a sweatshirt that said A WIZARD IS NEVER LATE. Tolkien. Of course.
Luther adjusted his glasses and noticed me. “You!”
“Troy, this is Assistant Director Luther Dillon. We are in the presence of Biohazard royalty. We are not worthy.”
Troy executed an elaborate bow.
“Laugh it up, you philistine. I hiked twenty miles to get here!”
“What brings you to our neck of the woods, Assistant Director?”
“You sent me a kilogram of enchanted gold and a blood sample with DNA from an extinct American cheetah! Of course, I…”
He trailed off. I couldn’t blame him. Seeing a ten-foot-tall furry mastodon coming around the corner with an eight-year-old boy riding on her back would give anyone pause.
“Conlan, where are you taking Mona?” I called out.
“Southern pasture.”
“You can’t. Owen went there with the baby rhinos.”
“I will take her to the west then.”
“Where is Darin?” I asked.
“He went to the lake again. He found some sort of magic freshwater clams in it. He’s very excited about it.” Conlan shrugged.
“Okay,” I told him.
Mona trotted her way past Luther and exited through the gap, carrying Conlan with her.
“What the hell is going on?” Luther demanded. “What is…all of this?”
I got up. “Come. I’ll show you.”
We walked through the antechamber of the palace, taking it slow so my hunter guard could keep up. The palace felt eerie, its ceiling too high, its contours too severe. Shadows pooled in the corners.
Luther hadn’t said a word in the entire fifteen minutes it took us to walk over here. I had done the impossible. I had rendered Luther Dillon speechless. It only took a magical scheme roughly twelve thousand years in the making to accomplish this feat.
We entered the main hall. I whispered an incantation, and feylanterns ignited on the walls, bathing the room in bright light. I’d had them brought specifically from Wilmington just so I could see everything in this hall clearly.
The hunter halted in the doorway. She didn’t want to enter.
Murals filled the walls, painted in red, brown, black, and white on massive stone panels. I stopped before the first one.
“Some time ago, probably between 15,000 and 10,000 B.C., when the world was covered in ice, and North Carolina was sheathed in boreal tundra, a fae woman was exiled from her tribe.”
In the mural, a lone figure with long blue hair walked away from a group of people. Some of them had blue hair, some, like the hunters I’d saved, were brown-haired. Dark dots peppered the space between the crowd and the blue-haired figure, rocks thrown at her. Behind the group, rectangular shapes portrayed houses, with the largest house towering above them. A palace. One of the smaller houses was on fire.
I moved to the second mural. “She was driven away into the woods, but she was powerful, and she survived. Her magic grew, and she found acolytes who followed her.”
