Wolf Hunted

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Gerard, Axlam, and Jax would enter through the “hotel” entrance where the elves had set up the equivalent of magical locker rooms. The Great Hall removed all glamours, and forced the pack into wolf form. The changing area kept clothing safe and clean.

  I waved my arm and parted the magic veil between the real world and the elven glory on the other side.

  Evening might have spread her violet shadows throughout the mundane world, but in here, she’d spread gold. Every dark space had a golden edge; every bright, an edge of silver. The sky above shifted from near-black violet dotted with stars to a firmament of borealis shoals and swirling heavenly fires.

  The red oaks rustled. An owl hooted nearby. The air, though holding the chill we left outside, smelled crisp and fresh.

  In the distance, the gold of the evening cumulated as the sunshine roof of The Hall, and lit the tops of the trees like a beacon.

  Laughter rolled down the path. Chatter followed, plus a howl or two. The feast brought the elves and the wolves together. They were upbeat, but there was still a strained tone to the gathering’s sounds.

  The last time I’d stepped through that gate, I’d had an oily, low-demon-like rage stuck to my soul. One that, like so much of the other magicks sticking their icy fingers into Alfheim these days, had been concealed.

  If anything, it had proved that yes, I saw magic, but not all magic. Natural magic drifted around everything in the world. Elven magic created structured lines and coiling sigils. Spirit magic danced. The kitsune version of kami magic wagged its many fox tails. Vampires gleamed like the predators they were. The werewolves were all wolf, all the time. And the fae… well, the fae were the fae.

  But every form of magic could be twisted and hidden. It could be pushed so large I lost it on the horizon, or so small and thin I missed it in my peripheral vision. It could be worked smooth, or turned into a shadow. Or it could simply be rendered invisible.

  I’d lived with the elves for so long I’d forgotten how they sheltered Alfheim from the corrupted magicks of the world. Except now it was getting in. Carried in on the back of the unsuspecting, or with my brother, tucked neatly into the crevasses made by the scars our father laid upon us both.

  What did it mean? I wasn’t sure. The world was changing, and magic with it. Was this new escalation a reflection of the mundane escalation of technology? Of humanity’s unending horrors?

  Something was coming, though. Something big. Because if escalation was anything, it was a harbinger.

  Maura touched my arm. “You okay?”

  I looked down at my fully out-of-glamour elven sister. She and her daughter were all things beautiful about the world. All of life’s wonders, and all its power. And I was better by far for having been adopted into their family.

  “When I came through the veil,” I pointed over my shoulder, “I was hit by a feeling of foreboding…” I didn’t know how else to describe it, especially with Akeyla, my axe on her shoulder and in small-warrior-goddess mode, standing right next to me.

  Turned out I didn’t need to.

  Akeyla swung Sal down to her hands. Maura’s safety spells coiled around Sal’s blade like a rubber bumper, and this close to The Great Hall, they had taken on a solidity they didn’t have in the mundane world.

  Sal weighed a good thirty-five pounds, or she did when I wielded her, but in Akeyla’s hands, she looked fast and light.

  “I want to go to fifth grade next year,” she said. She flipped Sal back up to her shoulder. “Then I’m going to skip sixth grade, too.”

  What veils had just dropped for Akeyla? Because she stared down the path with a look much older than her almost nine years.

  Sal agreed with Akeyla’s decree.

  Akeyla looked up at her mother. “I want to learn real spells, Mommy.”

  Maura didn’t seem all that fazed by Akeyla’s comments. “Sure, honey.”

  Akeyla nodded her head as if she, too, had felt the foreboding I had. “Sal says when Samhain comes, and the veils are at their thinnest, sometimes the past and the future talk. Sometimes they tell each other stories.”

  “I didn’t hear Sal,” I said. Next to me, Maura shrugged as if she hadn’t, either.

  “She’s practicing speaking to one of us at a time. She says that she needs all her skills and learning, too.”

  Maura obviously shared my surprise. Akeyla had moved way beyond my simple foreboding.

  “Oh,” I said, as Sal confirmed Akeyla’s words.

  So the past and the future were having their own feast, and we just happened to be in the middle of their conversation. “Can you and Sal understand any of the stories?” I asked.

  Akeyla looked up at me, and a new set of flames danced up Sal’s handle. “I don’t think they’re talking to me, and if I listen in, they might get mad.” She looked to her mother. “No one should gossip, right, Mommy?”

  “Unless you hear something important and you think you should tell an adult,” Maura said.

  Akeyla nodded in agreement. “That’s what I did in the park. They were talking about that man so I told Uncle Frank and Mr. Bjorn.”

  “Thank you, honey,” I said.

  “They’re comparing notes,” she said. “Like we do in school when we talk about what a book means.” The flames on Sal’s handle vanished. “Let’s go eat. I’m hungry.”

  With that, my also-escalating niece walked toward The Great Hall with my axe on her shoulder and her perplexed mother following close behind.

  And me, her equally perplexed uncle, wondering if—with all my sense of foreboding, and the increase in hidden dark magic, or just the all-around intensification of harm done by the wicked somethings that had come our way—I’d just witnessed a real harbinger.

  Something big was definitely coming our way.

  Perhaps it was Akeyla’s new Sal-awakening. Perhaps it was my proximity to The Great Hall. But that night, I dreamed.

  In my manic, raging “youth,” my body’s death-like sleep held my dreams to their most basic state—practice with my clumsy fingers, memories of walking a path, or other simple coordination tasks.

  I was, after all, not fully alive; nor am I now, but in my early days I thought less and responded more.

  As my mind formed and I began to understand my hungers, my dreams shifted toward touching another with those clumsy fingers, or longing for an unknown woman I followed down a path, or other simple emotional processing.

  I suspect that, like any child, I was growing up, except I was re-born into a hideous giant’s body, which also colored my dreams. So yes, overall, my two hundred years of re-life had been filled with the most common dreams a man could have.

  None of which explained why I dreamed that I sat cross-legged on the roof of Raven’s Gaze Brewery and Pub, on my sunning mat, in only my shorts. No sun warmed me from above, only the soon-to-be full moon, but I squinted anyway at the brightness.

  The air shimmered with heat mirages the way it does in the desert. The mirages also buzzed, the way mirages sing because a mind cannot handle that it is looking at an illusion and fills in sound effects.

  Behind the restaurant, Alfheim’s thick, impenetrable forests blocked all light as if I was looking at the dark lands of the Old World and not the pine, ash, and oak of the New. Out there, timber wolves howled. A red hawk and a bald eagle soared above the treetops. Squirrels ran the branches and a white tail buck snorted and hopped back into the trees.

  Behind me, at the front of the restaurant, a blindingly bright neon sign blinked: Raven’s Gaze Brewery and Pub, a Crossr…

  The rest of the sign was under the edge of the roof. I could not make out what it said.

  Around me, the warmth of the moon wafted off the black tar of the restaurant’s roof. To my left, the door leading inside. To my right, chimney stacks.

  And directly in front of me, no more than two arm lengths away, Betsy and Ross laid out one by one their pieces of lake glass—white, black, red, and pale green.

  Betsy and Ross
were not these birds’ names. No, they were Ravensdottir and Ravensson, though neither of those names was correct, either. But they were significantly closer to the truth.

  Ravensdottir clucked. Ravensson cawed. They bopped around their cache.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  Ravensdottir cocked her head. “When the wolves consume the sun and the moon, who will return the light to the world?” she asked.

  Someone poked my shoulder. “Frank!” My real shoulder.

  I startled awake.

  Maura stood next to my bed with her phone in her hand. “We have a problem.”

  Chapter 15

  Alfheim woke up with the city version of a headache and a dry, plaque-filled mouth: Someone had plastered posters all over downtown. Large posters covered shop display windows. Small posters greeted customers on doors. Several had been found glued to the sidewalks, and not one of the lampposts along Main Street had been spared.

  Remy sent me several photos, and I promptly forgot about my strange raven dream. The elves and the wolves were frantically trying to figure out how someone could have gotten in under their collective magical radar. I was to check the posters for magical residue.

  The posters varied somewhat in color, but not design. They all featured a blocky, modernist “Alfheim”—I had to admit that the art was interesting and the design looked professional—plus an equally modernist “Revitalization!” and a website.

  The site had a whole lot of nothing. Parts slid, pictures burst forward, and icons moved and declared a bright and shining future. Colors danced on every page. But not one of the catchphrases said anything substantial.

  I pulled into the same small lot I’d parked in when I’d come by Sif’s shop yesterday, and parked Bloodyhood off to the side. Even here, someone had glued a large version of the poster onto the adjoining building, and instead of historic brick, I was greeted with a huge “Revitalization!”

  The air smelled crystalline and just as dappled with proto-ice as the light was with gold and gray. A hint of the coming storm smudged the northwest horizon. We were in for a bruiser of a blizzard. Close examination of the poster revealed nothing, but the sun had yet to hit the lot, and the night’s shadow still clung to the wall.

  I shouldered Sal. This time of the day, I would usually leave her in the truck, but I suspected an extra pair of magical eyes would be appreciated, and the best place for me to start was downtown, where the posters had been layered on the thickest.

  Sif was using a big razor blade and a lot of magic to scrape three of the posters off her front window. As I walked up she waved, set down her tools, and wiped her hands on her jeans. “Frank,” she said. “Sal.”

  My axe did her version of cuddling up to my shoulder. She was afraid she’d be used to scrape windows.

  Sif chuckled. “Don’t be silly.” She returned to scraping her window.

  “Did you hear anything last night?” The downtown owners lived in the apartments above their shops. Sif did, and up and down Main Street, others were coming down from their beds to survey the damage.

  She shrugged. “No.” She returned to scraping. “Do you see anything?”

  I peered at the posters plastered over the windows across the street. They’d covered at least five blocks of shops on Main Street, and hit Wolftown, too. “No one’s alarms went off? No spells were tripped?” All those posters meant a lot of activity.

  Sif wiped her hands on her pants. “I slept through the whole thing. Sigard didn’t wake up, either.” She pointed down the street at the tattoo parlor.

  Three elves worked at and lived above the tattoo parlor, Sigard Tovsson being the most powerful. Two other shops within sight of Sif’s also had elves. And the pack mostly lived in Wolftown.

  Whoever had done this had come in under Alfheim’s magical radar, which meant I should be seeing some magical residue.

  I wasn’t. I picked at a smaller poster glued to the lamppost outside Sif’s shop. The corner lifted up, and I leaned over to see if I could catch anything at all backlit by the dawn’s first rays.

  “There’s nothing here,” I said. “No shadow. No magic clinging to the paper or the glue.” I swung my axe close. “Sal agrees.”

  Sif leaned against the window. “There is no way a group of mundanes could have done this without magical help.”

  She was correct. No way could they have snuck in under the noses of so many elves. “What is going on?”

  Sif tapped her fingers against the glass. “There was an elf,” she said, “in the enclave where I was born.” She stared out at the road. “He liked to offer hollow gifts to the women of the village. Mundane, elf, even a spirit or two. He’d make these grand, sweeping promises but they were all promises to himself.” She shook as if the thought called up other, worse memories. “He was one of the reasons I moved here.” She turned back to the window. “This feels the same, except it’s directed at the entire town.”

  Maybe. Or the true target hadn’t yet been separated from the Alfheim herd. “What happened to him?” I asked.

  Sif didn’t look at me. “He’s dead.”

  The memory obviously caused her pain, so I didn’t ask a follow-up. “I’ll check a few more posters.”

  Sif peeled one of the posters off her window. “Frank.”

  I turned back toward the small elf with the golden glamour. “Yes?”

  She opened her mouth as if to say something, but closed it and shook her head. Her magic contracted as well, and her normal shimmer pulled closer as if forming a shield around her body. “Be careful, okay?”

  “I have Sal,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Oh!” Sif tapped her thigh. “After you left, I pulled up a couple of special order bikes for you to look at.”

  My phone buzzed. “Hold on a sec.” I swiped it open. “It’s Ed.” And then into my phone, “Hello?”

  “Open the site that’s on the posters,” he said. “Then get down to City Admin immediately.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I gotta deal with this,” he said, and hung up.

  I stared at my phone’s screen for a moment, at the frustrating photo of Ellie, and realized how ubiquitously annoying life had been since the re-wedding.

  I opened the site listed on the posters, and right there, right at the top, a video opened.

  Some kid with a microphone was walking around Alfheim’s empty City Admin parking lot. “We’ll be starting our tour here, at City Hall,” he said.

  “What the hell?” I said. Alfheim was dealing with a threat, but one that didn’t feel like a real threat. It really did feel as if we were dealing with loud pranksters.

  Sif pointed at my phone. “You and Sal need to go now,” she said. She didn’t look frightened, but her contracted magic vibrated.

  “If you need any help, or sense anything, call Bjorn or Lennart, okay? They’re working on a spell that might break open whatever hidden magic we’re dealing with here.”

  She nodded. “Go on.”

  Sal and I jogged toward my truck, and City Admin.

  Chapter 16

  I turned into the Alfheim Administration Complex lot. The thick, concrete buildings of the Complex sprawled along the road, and provided both the town and county governmental space. The Sheriff’s Department shared space with Alfheim’s City Police around the corner from Dag’s mayoral offices, City Planning, and the main library.

  Ten feet in front of the Administrative Complex’s main entrance stood the hungry-looking young man who had been broadcasting on the website moments before. He wore dress pants and a jacket, and held his microphone in a way that suggested he knew what he was doing. A bored-looking guy next to him held a different boom mic, and an equally bored-looking woman with a new, expensive camera stood to the side. None wore identifiers.

  They weren’t amateurs, but they didn’t have an uplink van, so they were most likely freelance stringers.

  Which meant someone was paying them.

  Ed leaned a
gainst his cruiser, which he’d parked in such a way as to block the best shots of the Admin building. He’d also turned on the cruiser’s lights, which flickered an annoying red throughout the lot, also probably in an attempt to ruin as many shots as possible.

  He’d also called Arne and Dag, and probably half the pack, and they were on the way. I’d just happened to show up first.

  At least the crew wasn’t from one of The Cities’ major television stations. The last thing Alfheim needed was a celebrity reporter asking questions as pointed as an elf’s ears.

  Sal did not want to stay in her seat pocket. She didn’t sense any magic, but she didn’t like any unknowns walking around Alfheim.

  “We can’t chance one of them taking pictures of you,” I said. “Bjorn said that some seers can read real photos. What if some witch somewhere gets a whiff of you and comes looking to start a war?” Because with the number of villains looking to cause problems in Alfheim, I pretty much expected some random fae-born witch to saunter down Main Street looking for an elven battle axe or two to kidnap.

  Sal tossed me a clear Fine.

  She, like my wayward dog, did not like to stay in the truck.

  “Don’t worry. If I need you, I’ll come get you.”

  I didn’t see any magic, but I hadn’t seen any magic around our interloper, either.

  The sun crested over the lower level of the east building, and a lovely sliver of golden light spread over the parking lot. The reporter pointed, and the entire crew moved to take advantage.

  They didn’t seem particularly professional. Their equipment probably cost as much as Bloodyhood, but they didn’t really seem to understand what they were doing.

  Ed noticed their attempt to take advantage of the light. “You three have been here long enough,” he called.

  As one, the camera crew straightened. Their shoulders squared. And they turned toward Ed’s vehicle as one unit of semi-belligerence.

  The crew wasn’t acting oddly—anyone might be frightened by a police cruiser showing up at dawn—but the whole situation smelled too much like Saturday’s wedding episode.