“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.”
When magic gnawed on a building, it slowly ground concrete into dust, a fine gray powder that was completely inert and useless. There were small hills of that dust in the city centers, and most cities had no idea what to do with it. Ned’s father would have gotten it dirt cheap. In fact, Wilmington probably paid him to remove it.
Hmm. And I bet these bricks were magic-proof, too. There was a business opportunity if I ever saw one.
“How are they made?” Curran asked.
“A proprietary process of mixing it with water, cornstarch, and sticky rice,” I read.
“How strong could rice concrete be?” Keelan asked.
“They built the Great Wall with it, you ignorant savage,” Da-Eun told him.
The speed limit dropped to twenty miles, and we joined the short line of pickup trucks, carts, and riders crawling through the gates.
“Ned has a house set up for us,” I said. “Take the second left past the gate.”
Before the Shift, Burgaw must’ve been a typical Southern town with plenty of space to spread out. I’d guess ranch-style houses, generous lots, and few if any front fences. Hints of the old town were still there, mainly in the layout of roads and parking lots, but the city wall only enclosed a square mile, and space inside was at a premium. The houses sat closer together, a lot of them two stories and a good number of them almost touching. The lawns had been converted to vegetable gardens and fenced in with chicken wire or short wooden fences. I saw a communal stable and a reinforced, bunker-like building with the sign South Walker Shelter. The town was compact, purposefully laid out, and ready to defend itself.
Ned’s directions brought us across Penderton, all the way north. A couple of street markers were missing, so we stopped to ask a local for directions, and he helpfully told us to “go on past where Pender Prison used to be.” The prison was no longer there, although some of the white one-story buildings remained. It now housed the town guard barracks, a municipal storage facility, and an emergency clinic, all sheltered behind a razor-wire fence.
“They expect the threat to come from the north,” Curran said. “This is a fallback point.”
“CC?” Keelan said.
“Mhm,” Curran said. “The radio tower.”
A command center, designed to coordinate the defense if the wall was breached. Nice.
The house Ned set out for us was just two streets over, on the imaginatively named North Wall Road. The wall was on the other side of the street. We parked the SUVs in the garage, hauled out our bags, and went into the house. It was a nice three-story place, with a porch on the ground level and wide wrap-around balconies on the top two floors. Curran and I dropped our bags in one of the third-floor bedrooms, and I walked out onto the balcony.
The wall was in front and below me, with a solid gatehouse almost directly across from the balcony, guarded by a tower on the right side. The two nearest towers rose about equal distance to the left and to the right. Past the wall, five hundred yards of clear ground offered a nice kill zone. Beyond it, the woods towered, like a second ominous wall.
Curran stepped out onto the balcony and came over to lean on the guardrail next to me. We looked at the woods.
“This is the timber gate,” I said. “Before the problem started, they harvested timber in the north forest and brought it through here to the sawmills.”
“Makes sense,” Curran said.
We watched two guards cautiously check us out from their respective towers and turn back to the forest. That tree line five hundred yards away was where the strange women first appeared.
We still didn’t know who they were or what they did with the people they had taken. Were the tribute people alive? Were they enslaved, or were they killed? Of all the magic practices, human sacrifice was the worst. It gave you a boost of magic but at a terrible cost. It tapped into the kind of powers that fed on humanity and drove us mad. They had been long banished from the world by tech, and that was for the best. Even my father steered clear of it.
The woods waited.
“Do you want to go in?” I asked.
“We have six hours of daylight left.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“We’re going in five,” Curran called out.
A chorus of ragged “Yes, Alpha” answered him.
Five minutes later, we assembled in front of the house, a small army in sweatpants. I was the only fighter out of uniform.