by DM Fike
Vincent simply shrugged.
We kept on going, breaking through the bramble when necessary. We lost the trail at one point and had to backtrack in order to find it. I was about to call the whole thing a prank when suddenly light broke through the canopy. The trees thinned, and we stumbled out onto a familiar bulldozed patch of earth.
We’d returned to Rafe’s former lava crevasse.
I froze in shock as I calculated all the encounters in my head. Linslaw County Park sat only a half mile west of Whittaker Creek. I felt so stupid not having made the connection until that very moment.
But I felt even worse staring down at the carnage in front of me. A dozen or so black-tailed deer of all ages and sizes lay scattered throughout the clearing like the aftermath of some horrific battle. Blank black eyes stared into nothing, tongues like stiff sponges jutting out of the corners of their mouths. The heat hadn’t stunk up the bodies yet, meaning they couldn’t have been dead for long, but that only made them appear all the more lifelike and fragile, like we should have been there to protect them.
That’s when I finally identified that nagging feeling in my gut. The black-tailed deer were obviously Tabitha’s old kidama companions. Darby had mentioned banishing an unreasonably vicious kenawa that had attacked her at Noti Creek, near another lesion not far east of here.
What if we weren’t dealing with human poachers at all?
“Ina,” Vincent’s reassuring voice whispered in my ear. “Are you all right?”
I swallowed a lump in my throat. “Where did poachers kill the first batch of deer?”
“Outside Noti.”
Just as I’d feared. “And how were they killed?”
“Gunshots.” Vincent shot me a concerned glance. “You want to tell me what’s going through your head?”
“This is a former lesion spot, the one where Rafe nearly killed me.” Vincent knew the whole sordid story. His shoulders clenched as I continued. “Darby killed a vaettur at Noti Creek, next to your first poached deer. Noti is another lesion Rafe created to access Nasci’s lifeblood. I don’t like coincidences.”
“I understand that,” Vincent said. “I feel like punching something just thinking about that guy, but I’m not really feeling your monster theory here. From everything you’ve ever told me, vaetturs don’t shoot their victims.”
“Of course not. But still…” I trailed off, unable to shake the feeling that I was onto something.
A steady arm went around me, stopping the shakes I hadn’t known had spread throughout my body. “It’s normal to feel helpless,” Vincent said into my hair.
I almost retorted in reply, but then I felt his deep, calming breaths. His chest heaved. His arms, strong as they were, shook ever so slightly.
He barely held his anger under control.
Vincent pulled away just enough so we could lock eyes. “I feel helpless sometimes too, but we’ve got a job to do. Sometimes you have to just forge ahead, even if it tears you apart.”
Then he let me go and trudged over to the nearest victim.
My heart slammed in my chest. I didn’t realize until then how much guilt Vincent still carried about my near-death experience with Rafe. It wasn’t Vincent’s fault at all. As usual, I’d forged ahead to deal with my own problems solo. Now I looked at the entire event from his perspective. If he’d almost died with me idling around worthless, I would have gone insane.
I followed behind him, for once not knowing what to say. I wasn’t used to people worrying about me. It was humbling.
Instead of dwelling on the past, we went to work. Vincent took the left, and I went right, bending over the bodies to examine them. At first glance, they all appeared the same: lifeless corpses with a single sharp round hole near a vital spot, usually the forehead or the chest. The apparent victims of gunshot wounds.
It wasn’t until I came across a buck with 6-point antlers that I noticed something amiss. One of his antler tips had broken off, fragments of keratin sprinkled around him. It would have been easy to write off the damage as part of the line of fire, except he’d been struck in the neck, just underneath the jawline. He had no other injuries that I could tell.
Unless bullets traveled in non-linear lines, the same shot could not have caused both wounds.
He also didn’t have an exit wound on the back of his head. I kneeled next to him, hand over the wound, channeling my earth pith to feel for any telltale metal. I couldn’t feel anything, but then again, I didn’t know enough about bullets to know if they were made with natural alloys or not. Grimacing, I did the only other thing I could think of.
I closed my eyes and stuck two fingers into the small bloody cavity of the wound.
I ignored my churning stomach as slushy, moist tissue slid over my skin. I dug deeper until I could feel the back end of the tunnel. While I could feel the sharp edges of broken bone, one thing was clear.
There was no bullet inside this buck.
I yanked my hand back out. “Hey, Vincent!” I called as he hovered over a young doe. “Did you ever recover any shell casings at Noti?”
“No. The poachers must have picked up after themselves.”
I motioned him over to the buck. His lips curled at my bloody hand. “Gross! What were you doing? Playing some morbid version of Operation?”
“No, Mr. Squeamish.” I pointed at the deer’s only wound. “I checked, and there’s no bullet in there, which is weird since there’s no exit point. Last I checked, bullets don’t dissolve inside bodies.”
“Okay,” Vincent said slowly. “I get it, but next time, you really should wear some of these if you’re going to go digging around in bodies.” He lifted his hands, and only then did I realize he’d put on latex gloves.
I slapped my palms together, hoping to wipe away the gore, but it only smeared up my wrist. “Whatever. Shepherds are hardy. We don’t get sick easy.”
Vincent grumbled something about sanitation as he kneeled next to the buck. Much more gently than me, he stuck his own protected fingers inside the bullet wound. It was a lot harder watching him probe around, but I swallowed my disgust, refusing to look away. I did use the time, however, to discreetly absorb some water pith and wash most of the blood off my hands with Vincent’s back turned to me.
When Vincent finally found the same lack of evidence, he withdrew his gloves. “Well, hell. That’s not good.”
I nodded. “I don’t think we’re dealing with poachers. I think these deer were attacked, and this poor fellow tried to defend himself with his antlers.”
He stared dismally at the antler fragments. “What could do something like this to an animal of this size?”
“I don’t know, but I plan to find out.”
We both stood at the same time. I couldn’t bear to look at the poor dead buck any longer, so I turned away, eyes glancing toward the tree line across the field. That’s the only reason why I caught the outline of someone crouching against a tree. They shifted out of sight once they realized I had glanced in their direction, but it was too late.
I knew someone was back there.
“Hey!” I yelled.
Vincent recoiled from my sudden shout.
But I’d scared whomever hid in the shadows. The brush around them rustled as they stood up and ran, exposing a full head of hair and a dirty shirt.
A dude. I broke out into a full run, hands clutching at my charm necklace. I thought I heard Vincent running behind me, but I focused on the lanky person trying to escape. He’d been watching us for who knew how long.
“Come back!” I yelled at his retreating form. But the person did not stop, barreling through the forest almost as fast as a shepherd pursuing a vaettur. It was pretty impressive for a non-follower of Nasci.
But I’d been trained to travel through dense forests. I skipped and skirted across obstacles with more ease, gaining on him as the bubbling hum of Whittaker Creek grew louder. His worn sneakers slapped against the stony bank as I chased him north. At one point, he turned his head
in profile to catch a glimpse of me, giving me an equal view of his acne-marked forehead and growing pubescent stubble.
It was the teenager I’d run into after banishing the mulruka.
“I just want to ask you some questions!” I yelled.
The teen continued to run, a bluish haze appearing at the base of a tree not far away. A wisp channel. I didn’t think much of it until the boy changed course, heading straight for it. Not that it meant anything. A random kid couldn’t use a wisp channel.
Except he did, jumping straight into the haze and disappearing like a ghost.
I halted so fast in my tracks, I nearly tripped. “What the—?”
“Ina!” I heard Vincent call far behind me, trying desperately to keep up with the two of us.
I didn’t have time to tell him what I’d seen. “I’m fine!” I yelled as I sprinted toward the twinkling lights. Then I teleported too.
I emerged at the edge of a small wooded pond, rolling mountains surrounding me. The teen had already dashed halfway down the other side. Just a few hundred more feet, and the trees would make him difficult to spot again.
“Oh no, you don’t.” I grabbed my water charm and let the energy splash along my pithways. I drew a V with a slash with one hand, my other hand pointing at the pond. Then I lifted the pond’s watery edge and yanked it toward the teen.
He didn’t even see the sudden 8-foot wave come crashing down on him. He simply fell into the slippery muck. I ran forward as he scrambled to get back on his feet. I sent a second crashing wave to prevent him from maintaining his balance.
I towered over him as he sputtered water. The idiot tried to kick my legs out from under me. I filled my hands with fire pith so fast, flames rolled off my palms, flickering in the kid’s terrified green eyes.
I leaned over him menacingly. “Now that I have your attention, we need to talk.”
CHAPTER 14
IT’S ONE THING to intimidate someone who deserves it, but the kid cowered below me like a drenched kitten. Although he must have been at least a foot taller than me, he curled up into a tiny quivering ball, eyes squinted shut. Couple that with his bedraggled clothes, and he looked like someone who’d just survived a mudslide.
“Go away,” he whispered between chapped lips.
The flames on my fingers burnt out. I didn’t have it in me to act like a schoolyard bully, but I also couldn’t just let a kid who’d used a wisp channel walk away. “Who are you?”
He shivered. “A nobody.”
I nudged his knee with the toe of my boot. “Seem pretty real to me.”
He whimpered, squeezing even tighter into his fetal ball.
I sighed. “Look, I’m not here to hurt you. I just want answers.”
He risked cracking open one eyelid. “You’re that chick climbing the power pole before.” Both eyes shot open. “You’re a freak.”
“Gee, thanks for noticing.” Could this kid get any weirder?
“No, I mean you attacked that flying dog thing. The one bothering the owls.”
My muscles tensed. “You saw the vaettur?” And there I went, giving away knowledge I shouldn’t. Why didn’t my mouth have a filter to my brain?
The kid didn’t seem to care about my terminology. “It was hard to miss, yipping around before you showed up.”
Of course the kid had ken. He’d just jumped through a wisp channel like it was the automatic doors of a supermarket. “How long have you been able to”—I searched for the right word that wouldn’t give too much away—“see things?”
“A year, maybe? Right around the time I got placed with the Haskins.” He scowled, transforming his meek face into something like a cornered animal. “And I ain’t going back. You can’t make me.”
“Whoa, whoa.” I held up my hands. “What are you even talking about?”
“My last foster family. They’re worse than Ms. Cruiser, if you can believe it. They took all the money for my clothes and school stuff and spent it on their own kids. They also locked me in the basement unless I had school. I’m not even allowed to eat with them upstairs.”
“So, you’re some sort of runaway?”
He nodded. “Left a few weeks ago. I know a lot about wilderness survival.” He pulled out a worn pocketknife from his shorts. “This is all I need to get by. That, and sometimes the animals help me. In fact, a pair of doves led me out this way to where the purple owl lives.”
As crazy as it might sound, his story made sense. It was pretty common for an eyas to originate from a broken home. They were often led into the woods by dryants to meet an augur who could evaluate them for the job.
But as a rank-and-file shepherd, I had no idea what to do with him. I didn’t even know if I’d be a follower of Nasci in a few days. “You meet anyone else out here like me? Maybe an older, grumpy guy with a black beard?”
He shook his head. “Even most animals stay clear of that field you were in. It’s like they sense it too.”
He’d lost me again. “What?”
“The bad mojo that drifts over that place,” he said as if I were stupid. “The deer are the only creatures who linger there. It’s almost like they’re guarding it.”
A chill went up my spine. Black-tailed deer, guarding the very crevasse where Rafe had ripped open lesions straight into the goddess Nasci. The same deer who once followed Tabitha, whom I’d met in the magma at that very spot.
But there was one problem. “I don’t sense anything there.”
He gaped at me. “It’s the same stuff radiating off you, but about a billion times stronger. How can you whip water around and create fire in your hands, but not feel it?”
And that still left one major problem. “Did you see what attacked those deer?”
He shook his head, shivering. “I thought I heard something scurry off into the brush once after I saw the deer bodies. Couldn’t have been more than three feet high, but wicked fast. Definitely not human.”
“Did you see where it went?”
“No, but I’m pretty sure I sensed it somewhere else. It might have been that other place with the bad mojo where the blond chick killed the toad monster.”
My head spun with everything he had just revealed. The kid had ken. He’d seen both me and Darby fight vaetturs. He could sense the lesions, which shouldn’t have been possible because the other shepherds had sealed them all up after we defeated Rafe.
I couldn’t just leave him here in the woods. I extended my hand. “Get up, kid.”
He glared at me. “I’m not a kid.”
I didn’t know how much teenage drama I could take. “I could call you ‘Nobody’ like you asked, but that doesn’t seem like an appropriate name either.”
“Oh. Yeah.” He stared off into the sky for a few seconds. “I guess you can call me Callum.”
Honestly, I had no room to judge his obviously made-up name. “I’m Ina. I’m taking you to see a friend of mine who can also sense magic. Think you can handle it?”
“As long as it’s not Child Protective Services, sure. I’ll go.”
Before I could respond that I had no interest in turning him into any normal authorities, my phone buzzed in my pocket. Vincent’s number came up on the screen.
Why wasn’t anything ever simple?
I answered as casually as I could muster. “Hey, what’s up?”
“What’s up?” Vincent shouted back so loud I had to move the phone away from my ear. “You just disappeared into thin air chasing someone. Where are you?”
Callum froze. “Who’s that?”
I didn’t want to spook the teenager. “The game warden who came with me to check out the deer.”
“You mean that cop?” Callum asked. “Because of the tip I left?”
Vincent’s crackled voice broke through our conversation. “Who are you talking to?”
“Just a sec,” I told Vincent, trying to juggle these two competing conversations. I tapped what I thought was the mute button on the phone, then turned back to Callum. “He�
�s not a cop.”
“What are you talking about?” Vincent’s voice rang out between us. “Yes, I am.”
I stared in shock at my phone screen. I’d pressed the speaker button instead of mute.
Callum jerked as if to run. I only had a moment to detain him. Pulling on my earth pith, I drew several squares within squares, sinking the panicked kid into the dirt. Then I slapped the ground shut over his ankles, effectively anchoring him.
I held up a cautious finger to a panicked Callum. “Just let me finish this call, m’kay?”
He squeaked as I took the phone off speaker and put it back up to my ear. “I found your anonymous tipster. He went through a wisp channel and I followed.”
A hard edge crept into Vincent’s voice. “Is he dangerous?”
I glanced over at the struggling teen, who nearly keeled over with his foot rooted to the spot. “Definitely not. He’s a teenager, and he didn’t kill the deer, although he may have seen the vaettur who did.”
“Is he magical like you?”
“Maybe.”
Vincent paused, and I knew he was composing himself so he wouldn’t shout. “Then why don’t you come back here with him so we can discuss what he witnessed?”
I knew my explanation was going to make Vincent mad, but I didn’t have time to play diplomat. “Because he didn’t actually see much, and you can’t document anything he knows in a police report. Plus, he’s deathly afraid of the police because he’s been burned by the foster care system. I’m going to bring him back to the homestead. Hopefully Sipho can help me figure out what to do with him.”
Callum wobbled back into a standing position. “What does that mean?”
I ignored him as Vincent continued. “So, you’re going to escort a kid with potential powers you don’t know through the forest alone?”
“I can handle myself. I even crossed the street by myself the other day. You should be proud of me.”
“Ina,” Vincent warned.
“I’ll text you once I get there, okay? Shouldn’t take more than a half hour at most.”
“Fine.” He wasn’t fine but knew he couldn’t argue. “Just please be careful. You know I hate it when you take risks like this.”
