Magic Claims (Kate Daniels: Wilmington Years, #2; Kate Daniels, #10.6)

Isaac leaned against his desk and pushed the wheeled client chair toward me. I saddled it backward and leaned my arms on its back.

“There were five of us,” he said. “Me, a knight-enchanter, and three knight-defenders.”

Standard team. Isaac would’ve led the way, the knight-enchanter would have set and broken wards, and the three knight-defenders would have kept all of them breathing.

“Everyone was seasoned. Everyone knew their way around the wilderness. Tim, the senior knight-defender, and I had worked together before a few times. He was a good man, reliable, competent. Kept a cool head.”

“SnS or SnD?”

Knight teams of this type came in three varieties, depending on their mission: search and rescue, search and scout, and search and destroy. The first one was off the table, so it would be one of the other two.

“SnS,” Isaac said. “Get in, locate the threat, identify if possible, and get out to tell about it.”

That meant that once things got hairy, the team would’ve bailed. They wouldn’t have pushed their luck, and yet he was the only one left.

“We got to Penderton when the magic was up,” Isaac said. “As you get closer to town, you get a bad feeling.”

“Like what?”

“Like you should turn around. It starts subtly, but the farther you go, the stronger it grows. Something doesn’t want you to be there.”

Isaac paused. I didn’t rush him.

“Did they tell you about the hill?”

“No.”

The knight-pathfinder walked over to the bookcase and pulled a cord hanging on one side. A map unrolled from the top shelf, showing Wilmington and the surrounding area. It looked different. The border of Wilmington proper was larger, and a dozen or more small towns and villages dotted the area above and to the west of the city, connected by a network of roads.

“There used to be a hill south of Harrells,” he said.

It took me a second to find it. A small town about twenty miles north-northwest of Burgaw, currently Penderton. A couple of miles south of Harrells, someone—probably Isaac—had put a big black dot.

I pulled Ned’s file out of my bag and found the map. The hill was right in the middle of the blue square marking the land Penderton had given us. Dead center.

“How big was this hill?”

“A little under two square miles in footprint, conical, 260 feet high.”

“Unusual for this area,” I thought out loud. Most of the surrounding landscape was flat, with round depressions that were lakes or pastures randomly strewn here and there.

“Pre-Shift, the hill had problems,” Isaac said. “People would see odd things around it. UFOs, skunk ape, Bigfoot, ghosts, the usual modern folklore nonsense. Post-Shift, the locals avoided it, because it gave them a bad feeling.”

“Kind of like it didn’t want you there?” I guessed.

Isaac nodded. “The hill is gone.”

“What do you mean, gone?”

“When the woods started expanding, the Forest Service went up there and put a big flagpole with a flag and a feylantern on the apex of the hill to help people orient themselves. On a clear night, you could see the lantern all the way from the tower at Penderton. It disappeared during the last flare. No flag, no feylantern, no hill.”

That wasn’t in Ned’s file.

“They tried looking for it,” Isaac said. “Flew a drone up there. Something took it down, but not before it transmitted a picture of a clear sky and woods where the hill used to be.”

“You bet on the hill, then?”

He nodded again. “We waited until the tech came and went in as soon as it was light enough to see. It’s about twenty miles through the woods to where the hill used to be. Now, all of it was supposed to be your regular longleaf pine savanna. It’s light, bright, open. The forest floor is grass, very little underbrush, with an occasional bog here and there. This was a fun, easy forest. Not even close to the Ozark broadleaf woods or spruce-fir upstate, where you have to cut your way through.”

Yes, the ninja woods. Tall pines and sunshine.

“We go in, and that bad feeling starts growing stronger. After the first hour, Taylor, the knight-enchanter, said we were going in circles. She was sure she had seen the exact tree twice before, and she said she’d nicked a pine trunk, and there was the nick. The thing was, we were going the right way. She wanted to go back to town, regroup, and try again. I told her no, and Tim backed me up.

“By the end of the second hour, everyone except me was sure we were going the wrong way. We stopped at a clearing by a pond. I took one of the knight-defenders, pointed to the north, and told him to look in that direction and memorize what the woods looked like. He said he did. I had him cover his eyes, spin around three times, and tell me where north was. He had no clue. Even though he knew that the pond was on his west side, he couldn’t orient himself. He said that every time he turned his head, the woods looked different. Now, tech is up this whole time. None of this shit should be happening.”

“What did you do?”

“We went to ropes. I got my paracord out, tied everyone to each other, with Tim bringing up the rear and me leading the way, and told them to look at the back of the person in front of them while they were walking. We kept going. All the while I’m looking around for the shaman totems, witch markers, anything that could possibly explain what’s going on, and there is nothing.”

Isaac dragged his hand over his face, as if wiping memories away.

“The woods started closing in. Suddenly, there is an underbrush. I’m seeing willow, alder, and blueberry. I’m seeing quaking aspens. They don’t grow south of Zone 6, so it’s strange, but they are native to North Carolina. You can find them on some Smoky Mountain slopes. Then I see this.”

He turned to the shelves, pulled a glass jar off, and set it in front of me. Inside was a clump of golden pine needles.

I looked at him.

“Tamarack,” he said. “Also known as American larch. A conifer that loses its needles in the fall.”

“Not something I’m familiar with.”

“That’s because it grows in Canada and northeastern US.”

“Oh.”

“This forest is thriving. Trees look healthy, birds are singing, squirrels are running around, deer, mice, everything is as it’s supposed to be except all of it should be a lot farther north and something doesn’t want us there. All of this is confirming that we’re going the right way, because the farther we go, the weirder things get. We keep moving. Our path gets denser and denser. I had to get my machete out, and I’m cutting through now. In every other direction, there are clear animal trails, but directly in front of us, it’s a wall of green.”

The evil in the woods was trying to get them to turn back any way it could. It must’ve recognized them as large-caliber magic users and didn’t want a confrontation. But with the tech up, there were only a handful of ways to do it. Three, to be exact, and all of them meant serious trouble for us.

“Do you think you might have gone through a portal?” I asked. “A pocket realm of some sort?”

Isaac shook his head. “No. I’ve gone into places like that twice. One hundred percent sure there was no portal. And the enchanter confirmed it.”

It was down to two, then. I would’ve taken the portal over either one.

“It’s early afternoon now,” Isaac said. “And we’re being watched. I can feel the stares. Something large is moving all around us, just out of sight. The woods end suddenly and we’re in a swamp. I stop on the edge trying to figure out the path, and I see these things in the water. I don’t know what the hell they are but they’re furry, they’re the size of black bears, and there are a lot of them. We turn to go around, and something comes out of the brush and rips Jeremiah out of our line. Sliced right through the paracord on both sides. You’d think it would hit me or Tim, but it went for the man in the middle.”

“What was it?”

Isaac sighed. “A blur. Never saw it clearly. It was so fucking fast. But you want a gut-feeling call: a shapeshifter.”

Crap. “What kind?”