Magic Claims by Ilona Andrews

“They expect the threat to come from the north,” Curran said. “This is a fallback point.”

“CC?” Keelan said.

“Mhm,” Curran said. “The radio tower.”

A command center, designed to coordinate the defense if the wall was breached. Nice.

The house Ned set out for us was just two streets over, on the imaginatively named North Wall Road. The wall was on the other side of the street. We parked the SUVs in the garage, hauled out our bags, and went into the house. It was a nice three-story place, with a porch on the ground level and wide wrap-around balconies on the top two floors. Curran and I dropped our bags in one of the third-floor bedrooms, and I walked out onto the balcony.

The wall was in front and below me, with a solid gatehouse almost directly across from the balcony, guarded by a tower on the right side. The two nearest towers rose about equal distance to the left and to the right. Past the wall, five hundred yards of clear ground offered a nice kill zone. Beyond it, the woods towered, like a second ominous wall.

Curran stepped out onto the balcony and came over to lean on the guardrail next to me. We looked at the woods.

“This is the timber gate,” I said. “Before the problem started, they harvested timber in the north forest and brought it through here to the sawmills.”

“Makes sense,” Curran said.

We watched two guards cautiously check us out from their respective towers and turn back to the forest. That tree line five hundred yards away was where the strange women first appeared.

We still didn’t know who they were or what they did with the people they had taken. Were the tribute people alive? Were they enslaved, or were they killed? Of all the magic practices, human sacrifice was the worst. It gave you a boost of magic but at a terrible cost. It tapped into the kind of powers that fed on humanity and drove us mad. They had been long banished from the world by tech, and that was for the best. Even my father steered clear of it.

The woods waited.

“Do you want to go in?” I asked.

“We have six hours of daylight left.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“We’re going in five,” Curran called out.

A chorus of ragged “Yes, Alpha” answered him.

Five minutes later, we assembled in front of the house, a small army in sweatpants. I was the only fighter out of uniform.

“We’ll enter together,” Curran said quietly. “As we go in, drift into two groups. Group One: Kate, Keelan, Troy, Owen, and Hakeem. The rest with me. We’ll widen the gap by five hundred yards and hold it there.”

He was splitting us up to invite an attack on one group or the other. Might as well find out what sort of welcome party the forest had planned for us.

“The thing that’s behind this knows we’re here,” Curran continued. “Whichever group is attacked will hold, while the other group will close in. The enemy uses magic. Kate is a magic expert. Obey her without question even if it goes against your training. She’ll keep us alive.”

Curran turned toward the woods.

“Alright,” Keelan barked, “you heard the Alpha. You’re going into enemy territory. This is the real thing. This is what you’ve trained for. Ears up, noses open, look alive.”

We started to the gate.

A small group turned the corner, entering the street a block away and hurried toward us. A middle-aged man was in the lead, short, stocky, with light brown skin and short brown hair, dressed in sawdust-covered overalls with safety googles perched on his head. Beside him was a stocky red-headed woman in her twenties armed with a bow and a sword, and a well-dressed woman in her forties with dark brown skin and glossy hair pulled into a bun.

The middle-aged man waved at us. “Wait!”

Curran stopped and everyone stopped with him.

The group reached us. The middle-aged man stuck his hand out and said, slightly out of breath, “Mayor Eugene Dowell. Everyone calls me Gene.”

“Curran Lennart. This is my wife, Kate, and these are my associates.”

Curran and I took turns shaking his hand.

The associates, who a moment ago had put on their game faces and were ready to invade enemy territory and fuck shit up, made valiant efforts to appear non-threatening.

“This is Ruth Chatfield, city clerk and finance director.”

The dark-haired woman put her hand out, and we shook it.

“And this is Heather Armstrong, our interim wall guard captain.”

We shook again.

“If you need anything, please let us know,” Gene said.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’re not going in, are you?” The anxiety dripped from Gene’s voice.

“We are,” Curran confirmed.

“But the magic is up,” Gene said.

“We know,” I told him.

Ruth looked like she was imagining our funeral. Heather’s face told me that she had seen this exact scenario before and knew none of us would come back in one piece. Or at all.

“I wish you’d reconsider,” Gene said.

“Thank you for your concern,” I told him. “Can you please open the gate for us?”

Gene sighed. “Heather?”

“Open the gates,” Heather called out. One of the guards ran down the wall, took the stairs, and went to the gate to unbar it.

The three of them watched the gate open with resigned looks on their faces.