After the Shift hit, a lot of people turned to ancient gods and long-abandoned religions. I’d seen neo-pagans wear some weird stuff, but that didn’t explain the strange facial features.
“What is she holding?” I asked.
“A banner,” Solina said. “That’s how they communicate.”
She pulled a Ziploc bag out of her tote and put it on the table. Inside was a roll of tan cloth.
“May I?” I asked.
She nodded.
I opened the bag, took the roll out, and let it fall open. Three pieces of cloth. It felt like wool. I unfolded the first one. On it, in bright red, was a single English word written in all caps. TRIBUTE.
Shit.
The word wasn’t painted onto the banner. It had been woven into it with crimson wool.
“Penderton lost a town guard during that flare,” Ned said. “Selma Butler. We are reasonably sure this is her handwriting. She always wrote the bar in a capital T at an angle like that.”
Curran took the banner, sniffed it, and held it out to Conlan. Our son trotted over and took a long whiff.
I unfolded the second piece of cloth. A symbol for the first quarter moon, a circle split in half vertically. The left side was solid red. The right side showed moon spots with paler and darker shades of red.
“The deadline,” Curran said.
Ned nodded.
There was one piece of fabric left. I opened it. A symbol for a person, one step above a stick figure and featureless, but undeniably a person, woven in red in the center of the banner.
“They wanted a human tribute,” Curran said.
“Yes.”
A cold, uncomfortable knot formed in my stomach. This was looking worse and worse.
“The town ignored it, of course,” Ned said. “Penderton has solid defenses, and the guards are well trained. These are all tough people, lumbermen, farmers, hunters. On the deadline, at sundown, the forest people came back. The town expected them to storm the walls, but they just left. Everything seemed to have blown over. Then at noon the next day a huge brown boulder shot out of the woods, landed in the town square, and exploded into brown dust.”
“Everyone who was in the open in the square died,” Solina said. “Nine people. Two kids.”
“In the evening the women were back,” Ned continued. “Same message, but this time they wanted their tribute by the full moon. Penderton sounded the alarm, of course. It was all hands on deck. Forest service, the National Guard Magic Rapid Response unit, three teams of mercenaries, everyone came to find the cause of this disaster. They went into the forest. Four days later some of them came out. Pender Forest is a big place, over three hundred thousand acres. They’d walked around in circles. Some of them disappeared. Some were eaten, nobody knows by what.”
Great.
“Why not evacuate?” Curran asked.
“People tried,” Ned said. “Every single person that left the town after that first blast became sick two days later. Some came back to town and recovered. The others died. A day trip like coming here, for example, is fine. But any longer than twenty-four hours outside of town, and they start to develop symptoms.”
“Nobody has any answers,” Solina said.
It infected them somehow. Probably with that first boulder, although it could have been something else. And Ned and Solina weren’t sick because they’d moved out of Penderton before this whole mess happened.
“What happened with the National Guard?” Curran asked.
“They stayed a month past the tribute deadline, but they couldn’t stay in Penderton indefinitely,” Ned said. “The day after they left, a second boulder exploded at the school. It just so happened that most of the children were in a separate building for a school assembly. Only five people died.”
There was an awful flatness to his voice.
“Penderton offered tribute,” I said.
“Jimmy Codair,” Ned said. “Sixty-nine years old and dying of cancer. He volunteered. He walked into the woods with the women, and nobody ever saw him again. The next year, on the same day and hour, they were back.”
They gave it a person.
“The town fed it,” Curran said. “Of course it would be back.”
“It’s been five years since the flare,” I said. “How…?”
“The town holds a lottery,” Ned said.
I’d learned over the years that you can adjust to just about anything to survive. Penderton adjusted to the price of their survival. One person a year to let the other five thousand go on with their lives. It felt monstrous because it was.
“These people are not monsters,” Ned said, as if reading my mind. “They have no other options. Whatever you think they should have done, they have done. They have appealed to everyone, from the military and mercenaries to the Order and the Covens. Everyone has tried. I’ve personally traveled to Washington for help. Nobody could help and in the end the town paid the price every single time.”
“This is the fifth year,” Solina said. Her voice had an edge to it.
Ned looked at her.
She inhaled deeply and looked at the sky above us.
Curran fixed Ned with his stare. “That’s a terrible story.”
Ned nodded. “Yes, it is. Thank you for listening to me. I’ve rambled on for far too long. I should probably get to the reason why I am here.”
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded map.
“The town of Penderton is very excited about your move to our neck of the woods. But your lovely home is so far from us. We’d like to invite you to move closer.”
He opened the map, presenting us with an aerial view of Wilmington and the surrounding area. The Atlantic Ocean was on the east side, a vast pale blue. The city of Wilmington sat toward the bottom of the map, a little north of where Cape Fear River and the Atlantic finally met. Above Wilmington, the map was green with dense woods, with the narrow lines of the major roads cutting through them.
Just above the northern border of Wilmington, a dotted line marked Pender County, perched like a big mushroom cap on top of the city. Almost the entire county was tinted green, indicating the massive sprawl of Pender Forest. Midway through it, not too far from I-40, a small red circle marked Penderton. And several miles northwest of Penderton, a big square of blue cut through Pender Forest, taking up about a third of the woods.
“Move closer where?” I asked.
“Here.” Ned tapped the blue square with his fingertip.
Conlan soundlessly moved to look at the map over my shoulder.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Your woods.”
What? “I don’t follow.”
“These are the woods that Penderton gifted to you. Our welcome present to our wonderful new neighbors. Eighty-two thousand acres of woodlands, two-thirds of it longleaf pine, prime timber; one third swamp with incredible biodiversity; and the thousand-acre Big Skunk Lake. Best fishing in the county.”
Curran focused on the blue square of the woods as if it were a bloody steak and he’d been starving for a month.
Ned put a photograph on the table. It showed a forest of pines, straight like the masts of the tall ships, rising to dizzying heights from the sun-dappled golden wiregrass.
“Ninja forest,” Conlan breathed.
“We have the prettiest woods,” Ned said. “There are many suitable places to build a keep.”
A keep. Like the Pack Keep. Damn it.
“I always appreciate a man who does his homework,” Curran said. “You think you know who we are. But do you really?”
The flesh of his head split and twisted into a different shape. A new head formed on his shoulders, a massive, nightmarish blend of human and lion. Faint, smoky stripes marked his gray fur. His black lips trembled and opened, flashing fangs the size of my fingers. Curran’s gold eyes locked on Ned and Solina with predatory intensity.