“See him?” Conrad asked quietly.
Hugh scanned the forest. A few yards away, from the side of a fallen chestnut, a big shaggy wolf stared back at him. It was the size of a pony, gray, with golden eyes that caught the light, glowing softly with magic. A dire wolf.
The wolf turned and stalked off into the woods, melting into the green shadows.
“Pretty boy,” Conrad murmured.
“Do they come close to the castle?” Hugh asked.
Darin nodded his dark head. “The woods are full of them. We’ve got three packs by the last count.”
Three packs of dire wolves meant there was plenty of prey for them to hunt. “Any other predators or game?”
“There are all sorts in the woods,” Conrad said. “Bears, cougars. Things.”
“We’ve got stags,” Darin jumped in. “Seven feet tall, with really big horns. Looks like there is a whole tree on their heads. And hippogriffs. We’ve got hippogriffs.”
Better and better. Hippogriffs only hunted in old-growth woods.
“We should be going,” Conrad said. “It’s not far now.”
Hugh shifted his weight, and Bucky danced forward. Hugh let him prance for a few steps and then reined him in.
“Tell me about this place we’re going to,” he said.
“Old Market,” Conrad answered. “About five hundred people lived there before the Shift. Not much there: a grocery store, a post office, a gas station. Your typical one-street-light, one-church town. It was a bit of a hub for the country people in the area, so they did have a decent hardware and county store, which is where we’re going. Should be some good salvage there.”
“When did it go dark?” Hugh asked.
“About fifteen years ago.” Conrad grimaced. “The flare came and the woods just blew up. Things came out of them that nobody ever saw before. That’s when a lot of small towns around here died. People left for the cities. Safety in numbers and all that.”
“What about the castle?” Sam asked. “When was that built?”
“That was pre-Shift. A guy called Mitch Bradford built it for Becky Bradford, his wife. His second wife.” Conrad paused for dramatic effect. “Bradford made his fortune in bourbon and then branched out to international trade. He called Becky his princess, and Becky liked castles, so he went and got one for her from the Old Country somewhere. After the Shift, his company didn’t do so well. Then there were some natural disasters. Fire in the left wing, bad plumbing, that type of thing. By the time we got here three years ago, his son practically begged everyone he knew to take the castle off his hands. It needed a lot of repairs, but we fixed the drafty old thing. It’s home.”
“Where was home before this?”
“Oh, we lived in all sorts of places,” Darin said.
“Why did you leave to come here?” Hugh asked, glancing at Darin.
“Because of the Remaining,” Darin said. “They—"
“Darin, why don’t you go on and scout ahead,” Conrad said. “Make sure we don’t run into anything.”
Darin clicked his mouth shut and rode on.
Conrad turned to Hugh. “I know what you’re doing. If the Lady wanted you to know, she’d tell you. Leave the boy alone.”
Hugh considered stringing Conrad up by his ankles. An hour or so with the blood pooling to his head, and the older scout would sing a beautiful song filled with all his secrets. Hugh was still deciding if he was going to do it, when Darin came riding back around the bend.
“A fort!” he reported. “Looks empty.”
Hugh looked at Sam and nodded at the column behind them. “Get Sharif.”
The kid turned his horse and rode back. Half a minute later, Sharif came riding up from the back. The lean dark-haired scout had been covering the rear. Sam followed him.
Hugh touched the reins, and they rode on. The path turned. A wooden palisade rose to one side of the road, a ring of sharpened tree trunks ten feet high. A crude guard tower stood on the right, just inside the palisade walls, overlooking the road. A bell hung from its ceiling. The gate of the palisade stood wide open. The road curved to the left, widening into what used to be Main Street. An old pre-Shift two-story house crouched on one side, a trailer on the other, both mostly eaten by the forest. He could just make out the sharp point of a church steeple in the distance between the new trees.
The palisade lay silent. No sentries. No movement.
Hugh glanced at Conrad.
“This is new,” the older scout said. “Wasn’t here nine months ago.”
Sharif dismounted. Light rolled over his dark irises and flashed green. He inhaled deeply, crouched and sniffed the road.
“Nobody’s home,” he said quietly.
Hugh dismounted and fixed Conrad with his stare. “Stay here with the boy.”
If something happened to those two idiots, Elara would screech at him for days.
Hugh walked inside the gates. Three large log houses waited inside, two to the left and one to the right. In the back, an animal pen stood empty. The wind brought a hint of carrion.
“The road smells odd,” Sharif said quietly.
“Human, animal?”
“Odd. Nothing I’ve smelled before.” He held out his arm. The hairs on it stood straight up. “I don’t like it.”
Shapeshifters had a freakishly strong scent memory, and among all of the shapeshifters, werewolves were the best. They had no problem taking a whiff of blood and sorting through a couple of thousand scent signatures to identify a guy they’d shared a drink with once two years ago. Sharif had been with him for five years. If he hadn’t smelled it before, it had to be one hell of a rare creature or something new.
New. Hugh smiled. “Well, that’s interesting, isn’t it?”
Sharif rolled his eyes for half a second before schooling his features into a perfectly neutral expression.
Hugh turned to the nearest house, walked up the wooden stairs onto the porch and touched the door. It swung open under the pressure of his fingertips. A simple open floor plan with the kitchen and dining area to the far left and the living room space to his right. Dinner was laid out on the table. He moved across the floor on silent feet to the table. The reek of rotten food made him grimace. Fuzzy blue mold blossomed on the abandoned food. Looked like pulled meat of some sort with mashed potatoes on the side and a serving of formerly green vegetables. A fork lay by the nearest plate, its tines covered with mold.
He crouched and looked under the table. A broken plate.
Sam was hovering nearby. Hugh pointed at the plate. “Thoughts?”
“It happened in the middle of dinner?”
Hugh nodded. “There is a walkway built along the palisade and a tower. What was under it?”
Sam blinked.
“Go look.”
The kid took off.
Sharif crossed his arms. “I don’t like it.”
“I heard you the first time.”
Sam came back. “A broken plate.”
“What does that tell you?”
“There was a guard on duty. They brought him dinner.”
“And?”
“Something killed him so fast, he couldn’t raise the alarm.” Sam paused. “Was he shot?”
“No blood spatter,” Sharif said. “But there is this.” He slid his finger down the wooden frame. Four long bloody scratches gouged the wood.
“And this.” He crouched and pointed to the floor.
A bloody human nail.
Sam’s face turned pale. “Something dragged them out of here.”