Magic Claims by Ilona Andrews

And there it was. This was why they were here.

“Now, I’ve got to hear this,” Curran said. “What kind of evil is it?”

“We don’t know,” Ned said. “That’s part of the problem. It started after the last flare.”

Flares were the potent magic waves that came every seven years and lasted several days. With each flare, a bit more of our world became irrevocably changed. Flares brought disasters. Gods manifested, large structures collapsed, and weird monsters went on rampages. The last flare was about five years ago.

“Three days after that flare ended, some strange-looking people walked out of the woods near Penderton,” Ned said.

Solina reached into the tote bag by her feet, pulled out a rolled-up piece of paper, and opened it on the table. A sketch made in colored pencil showed a human female, but not any kind of human I had ever seen.

Her skin had an odd, almost bluish tint with a pattern of hairline cracks. One time Andrea, my best friend, dragged me to a spa where they smeared clay on my face. It cracked when it dried, and the body paint on this woman looked strikingly similar.

Her shoulders sloped down at a sharper angle than normal, her limbs and her neck were too long, and there was something strange about the proportions of her features. Almost as if her entire middle of her face was stretched along the vertical axis, flattening and elongating her nose and cheekbones. Her mouth was a narrow slash, and the corners of her lips sagged down, giving her a derisive or mournful expression. Her eyes were round, almost black, set close together, and completely blank.

The woman wore a tan-colored garment, a kind of robe or a tunic cinched at the waist by a belt. Her long brown hair was pulled back from her face and stiff. It looked like she’d taken a handful of the same bluish mud or clay that was on her face and arms, smeared it on her hair at the hairline, and let it dry. A metal collar clasped her neck, a kind of plaited band formed from strips of golden metal. Her right hand clutched something. A sack or a net?

After the Shift hit, a lot of people turned to ancient gods and long-abandoned religions. I’d seen neo-pagans wear some weird stuff, but that didn’t explain the strange facial features.

“What is she holding?” I asked.

“A banner,” Solina said. “That’s how they communicate.”

She pulled a Ziploc bag out of her tote and put it on the table. Inside was a roll of tan cloth.

“May I?” I asked.

She nodded.

I opened the bag, took the roll out, and let it fall open. Three pieces of cloth. It felt like wool. I unfolded the first one. On it, in bright red, was a single English word written in all caps. TRIBUTE.

Shit.

The word wasn’t painted onto the banner. It had been woven into it with crimson wool.

“Penderton lost a town guard during that flare,” Ned said. “Selma Butler. We are reasonably sure this is her handwriting. She always wrote the bar in a capital T at an angle like that.”

Curran took the banner, sniffed it, and held it out to Conlan. Our son trotted over and took a long whiff.

I unfolded the second piece of cloth. A symbol for the first quarter moon, a circle split in half vertically. The left side was solid red. The right side showed moon spots with paler and darker shades of red.

“The deadline,” Curran said.

Ned nodded.

There was one piece of fabric left. I opened it. A symbol for a person, one step above a stick figure and featureless, but undeniably a person, woven in red in the center of the banner.

“They wanted a human tribute,” Curran said.

“Yes.”

A cold, uncomfortable knot formed in my stomach. This was looking worse and worse.

“The town ignored it, of course,” Ned said. “Penderton has solid defenses, and the guards are well trained. These are all tough people, lumbermen, farmers, hunters. On the deadline, at sundown, the forest people came back. The town expected them to storm the walls, but they just left. Everything seemed to have blown over. Then at noon the next day a huge brown boulder shot out of the woods, landed in the town square, and exploded into brown dust.”

“Everyone who was in the open in the square died,” Solina said. “Nine people. Two kids.”

“In the evening the women were back,” Ned continued. “Same message, but this time they wanted their tribute by the full moon. Penderton sounded the alarm, of course. It was all hands on deck. Forest service, the National Guard Magic Rapid Response unit, three teams of mercenaries, everyone came to find the cause of this disaster. They went into the forest. Four days later some of them came out. Pender Forest is a big place, over three hundred thousand acres. They’d walked around in circles. Some of them disappeared. Some were eaten, nobody knows by what.”

Great.

“Why not evacuate?” Curran asked.

“People tried,” Ned said. “Every single person that left the town after that first blast became sick two days later. Some came back to town and recovered. The others died. A day trip like coming here, for example, is fine. But any longer than twenty-four hours outside of town, and they start to develop symptoms.”

“Nobody has any answers,” Solina said.

It infected them somehow. Probably with that first boulder, although it could have been something else. And Ned and Solina weren’t sick because they’d moved out of Penderton before this whole mess happened.