Derek rolled his eyes.
“In the last couple of decades, all the rich people moved back into the city for safety, and now there’s a farming community there. Mostly the houses sit on five acres or so, and it’s all gardens and orchards. It’s nice. We went there for the peach festival in June.”
“Without me.”
I gave him my hard look. “You were invited. As I recall, you had ‘something to take care of’ and decided to do that instead.”
“It must’ve been important.”
“Have you thought about investing in a cape? As much time as you spend running around the city righting wrongs, it would come in handy.”
“Not a cape guy.”
The Jeep rolled over the waves made in the pavement by thick roots, probably from one of the tall oaks flanking the road. Before the Shift, this trip would’ve taken us roughly half an hour. Now we were almost two hours into it. We drove down I-85, which with all the traffic and problems took us about ninety minutes, and were now weaving our way west on South Fulton Parkway.
“He’s landing,” Derek announced.
“Oh goody.”
Ahead, Teddy Jo swooped down. For a moment he hung silhouetted against the bright sky, his black wings open wide, his feet only a few yards above the road, a dark angel born in a time when people left blood as an offering to buy their dearly departed safe passage to the afterlife.
“Show-off,” Derek murmured.
“Green doesn’t look good on you.”
Teddy Jo lowered himself onto the road. His wings folded and vanished into a puff of black smoke.
“Do you know what he is when he’s flying?” Derek asked.
“No, enlighten me.”
Derek smiled. It was a very small smile, baring only an edge of a fang. “He’s a nice big target. You can shoot him right out of the sky. Where is he going to hide? He’s six feet tall and has a wingspan the size of a small airplane.” Derek chuckled quietly.
You could take the wolf out of the woods, but he would always be a wolf.
I parked by Teddy Jo and opened the door. A blast of sound from the enchanted water engine assaulted my ears.
“Leave it running,” Teddy Jo screamed over the noise.
I grabbed my backpack and stepped out of the Jeep. Derek exited on the other side, moving with fluid grace. We took a right onto a side road and followed Teddy Jo, leaving the snarling Jeep behind.
The trees overshadowed the road. Normally the woods were quiet, but this was the summer of the seventeen-year cicada brood. Every seventeen years, the cicadas emerged in massive numbers and sang. The chorus was so loud, it screened all normal forest noises, distorting birdsong and squirrel chittering into odd alarming sounds.
A hastily erected sign by the side of the road announced, STAY OUT BY ORDER OF THE FULTON COUNTY SHERIFF.
Underneath was written, COY PARKER, YOU CROSS THIS LINE AGAIN, I’LL SHOOT YOU MYSELF. SHERIFF WATKINS.
“Who’s Coy Parker?”
“Local daredevil kid. I had a chat with him. He didn’t see anything.”
Something about the way Teddy Jo said that told me Coy Parker wasn’t about to poke his nose into this mess again.
“Why didn’t they post guards?” Derek asked.
“They’re stretched too thin,” Teddy Jo said. “They’ve got five people for the whole county. And there isn’t much to guard.”
“What’s all this about?” I asked.
“You’ll see,” Teddy Jo said.
The road curved to the right and brought us to a long street. Driveways peeled away from the road, each leading to a house on about a five-acre lot. Tall fences flanked the houses, some wood, some metal, topped with razor wire. Here and there a wrought iron fence allowed for a glimpse of a garden. With transportation chains disrupted by the Shift, a lot of people turned to gardening. Small farms like this sprang up all around Atlanta, sometimes in the city, but more often just on the outskirts.
It was quiet. Too quiet. This time of day, there should have been normal life noises: kids screaming and laughing, dogs barking, enchanted water engines growling. The whole street was steeped in silence, except for the horny cicadas singing up a storm. It was creepy.
Derek inhaled and crouched low to the ground.
“What is it?” I asked.
His upper lip trembled. “I don’t know.”
“Pick a house,” Teddy Jo said, his face devoid of all expression.
I turned down the nearest driveway. Derek took off down the street at what for him was an easy run and for most people would’ve been an impossible sprint. A wolf could smell its prey from almost two miles away. A shapeshifter during its lifetime cataloged thousands of scent signatures. If Derek wanted to track something, I wouldn’t stand in his way.
I scrutinized the house. Bars on the windows. Solid walls. A good post-Shift home: secure, defensible, no-nonsense. A narrow crack separated the edge of the solid blue door from the doorframe. Unlocked. I pushed it with my fingertips, and the door swung open on well-oiled hinges. The stench of rotting food wrapped around me. I stepped inside. Teddy Jo followed.
The house had an open floor plan, with the kitchen off to the left and a living room space to the right. On the far left, behind the kitchen and the island, a table stood with the remnants of someone’s breakfast on it. I moved closer. A glass bottle of maple syrup and plates with what might have been waffles covered with fuzz.
No proverbial signs of struggle. No blood, no bullet holes, no claw marks. Just an empty house. A street of empty houses. My stomach sank.
“Are all the rest like this?”
Teddy Jo nodded. He stayed at the entrance to the room, as if not wanting to enter the space. There was something disturbing about it, as if the air itself were solid and still. This was a dead house. I didn’t know how I knew it, but I felt it. Its people had died, and the heart of the home had died with them.
“How many?”
“The whole subdivision. Fifty houses. Two hundred and three people. Families.”
Damn.
What could do this? Had something compelled them to abandon their breakfast and simply walk out? A number of creatures could put humans under their control, most of them water-based. A Brazilian encantado could probably enchant an entire family. A strong human mage with a focus in telepathy might be able to keep four people under and make them obey his commands. Let’s say someone walked these people out of their house. Then what?
Outside I took a deep breath. Derek sauntered over.
“How are you involved in this?” I asked.
“I was called,” Teddy Jo said.
Ah. A Greek family had prayed to him, probably offered a sacrifice. In the old days it would’ve been a slave. Now it had probably been a deer or a cow.
“I drank the blood,” he said.
A pact had been made. He’d accepted their offering, and that obligated him to do something in return.
“What did they want?”
His voice was hollow. “They asked if their son was dead. He was supposed to get married on Saturday. He and his fiancée didn’t show. They became worried and came to check on them on Sunday. They found this. The family called the sheriffs. They are coming today to process the scene. That’s why we had to get here before they did.”
“What about their son?” Derek asked.
“Alek Katsaros is dead,” Teddy Jo said. “But I can’t return his remains to his family.”
“Why?” This was what he did. If a human of his faith or of Greek descent died, Thanatos would know exactly where his body fell.
“I’ll explain on the way.”
“Before we go,” Derek said, “there’s something I need you to see.”
I followed him to the back. A furry brown body lay behind the wrought iron fence. A shaft thrust out of the dead dog’s eye.