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“Outside the city?” Chelsey repeated. “You’ve seen what it looks like down there. It’s like hell on earth.”
“I know, but I think this is the best chance we have.” Wyatt leaned over August’s seat to peer through the windscreen. “How close can we get before they target us with weaponry?”
August sighed and clicked his tongue against his teeth. “I’d say at any normal time, five hundred yards. Now? With how fucking trigger-happy everyone is? The closest I’d want to get is about a mile.”
“A mile through a war-torn battlefield?” Crew asked. “Sounds like a walk in the park.”
“Find us a good spot. Preferably as far from fighting as you can get,” Wyatt said.
Below us, bursts of light lit up the neighborhoods as spells arced through the sky. It looked like some packs had either hired wiccan or fae mercenaries, or some of those folks had decided to take the fight to the wolf shifters before they came knocking on their doors. Distant flashes of gunfire were also visible—silver rounds, most likely.
Nothing about this would be fun. The closer we got to Fangmore, the more encampments I spotted, similar to what we’d put together back home on our borderlands. This was not just a battle, but a siege. If we didn’t hurry, the leaders of Fangmore might get itchy and put up a magical barrier, and then we’d have no chance of getting in.
“Are those vampires?” Chelsey asked, pointing out the side door.
I looked down. In the dim light of late afternoon and early evening, a group of two or three dozen forms rushed from the sun-safe forest and descended on a group of wolf shifters.
“My gods,” Eli said. “This really is a full-scale war. It’s not isolated to the wolves. It’s everyone, isn’t it?”
Wyatt gave a tight nod. “Wolf shifters are the most powerful shifter species in the world, and shifters outnumber all the other species or beings. I’ve always known that if such a war broke out,we wolves would use our power to pull in allies, or the others were going to band together to fight us off before we came to kill them. We’ve got to stop this. If we can,” he added uncertainly.
“I’ve got eyes on that spot out there,” August said, pointing through the windscreen. “Looks like the nearest encampment is at least half a mile away. I don’t see any weapon flashes. It’s the best I can see. It’s also a little closer than I wanted, but it is what it is. Fingers crossed we don’t get a prostate exam from a missile.” He steered the craft toward the location he’d pinpointed.
The sights below grew clearer and easier to see as we descended. Now I could see the bodies. Dozens were dead or writhing on the ground. I did this. My stupid rant on that show had tipped everything over the brink. These deaths were on me. With a few quick words, I’d overturned the whole world. Men, women, and maybe even children had been killed.
A heavy, icy knot twisted in my chest. Deep down, I knew some type of catalyst had been necessary. Nothing big ever happened without it, yet the enormity of it ripped at my mind. So many dead, so many hurt, and it was my all fault. No matter how much I told myself that this upheaval had to happen, the idea of all this suffering made me sick with guilt.
As the thoughts bounced through my mind, Wyatt put an arm around my waist. “I don’t like seeing this, either, but it was coming. Nothing you did or didn’t do could have stopped it. If you didn’t say something to start it, someone else would have. You can’t put all this on yourself. All we can do is focus on getting into the city and doing everything we can to end this.”
“I know, it’s just…” I looked down at the fighting again and shook my head. “It’s so awful.”
“Landing in fifteen seconds. Everybody, take a seat,” August announced.
The five of us plopped down in our seats and strapped in. A few moments later, we landed with a small bump. August powered down the engines, then unstrapped himself from the captain’s chair to join us.
“Still clear?” Wyatt asked.
“Same as what it looked like before landing. No fighting within a couple hundred yards of us, but that’s the problem.”
“I’m not gonna like this, am I?”
“I managed to get a look at the city,” August said, his face grim. “I know why this area is deserted. There’s a massive battle happening near the city walls ahead of us. We’ll have to go through it, unless we want to spend hours circling around the walls to an area with no fighting.”
Wyatt’s body tensed beside me, and he shook his head. “Can’t wait that long. If there’s fighting this close to the walls, they could throw up barriers at any moment. We’ve got to hurry.”
August reached up, slapped a button, and the rear hatch lowered. “That’s what I thought. Let’s go be dumb.”
Moving down the ramp, we hurried to a bombed-out building for shelter before taking stock of the situation. The cacophony of war echoed everywhere around us. Magic, firearms, explosions, and howls bounced off the ancient walls of the city. Fangmore had been shifter capital for centuries, and the massive stone walls surrounding the city attested to the fact that it had always known war, though it had been at least a hundred years since it had seen anything of this magnitude.
“This way,” Wyatt said, moving between two smoking structures that looked to have been homes until a few days ago.
The sun had fully slipped below the horizon, and the orange glow of sunset had rapidly faded to the gray light of dusk. Creeping through the shadows and hiding from roving bands of shifters, vampires, and enraged wiccans gave me flashbacks of the jungles, marches, and swamps of Bloodstone Island.
A group of what looked like human special forces operators moved down a street lined on both sides by burned-out automobiles.
“Holy shit,” August hissed. “Is every species on the planet here? Are they handing out free kegs of beer if you join the fight or something?”
“Shh,” Wyatt said. “Let them pass. I don’t feel like eating fifty rounds of silver bullets, do you?”
