PERIWINKLE
It’s weirdly both comforting and unsettling to be back in the van as it bumps along the roads from the private landing strip where we flew in on Rollick’s private jet to the even further reaches of northern Canada.
The vehicle is familiar now, with its textured padded benches and the steady rumble of the engine. I appreciate the wild beauty of the view outside, mostly forest and rocky hills. We’ve left Gloss and almost all of the other students who’ve ever mocked me far behind.
And Raze has decided to stay in physical form for most of this trip, sitting next to me with his arm alternately linked with mine or tucked around my waist, wafting fond devotion like French toast drizzled with just the right amount of syrup.
But even wrapped in his obvious affection, an uneasy buzz courses through my nerves. We don’t know what we’ll find on our second expedition.
There’s an aggressive sorcerer somewhere up here doing unpleasant things to the local shadowkind, and we have no idea how he’ll react if we finally track him down.
At least I have a little protection wriggling around in my brain. Jonah couldn’t expend the energy to keep all our potentially harmful powers under control once we left the school, since he needs the strength to try to sway the strange creatures we’ve encountered too. As Rollick remarked when the subject came up, that would defeat the purpose of testing us with this mission anyway.
Our sorcerer was able to give us each a basic command not to listen to any other sorcery. “It might not hold if he hits you hard with his own orders,” Jonah warned us, “but it’ll hopefully buy you time to get away if you need to.”
I can’t actually feel the sorcery he spoke to me anymore, but knowing it’s there is like a cozy cardigan keeping me warm.
Jonah calls to us from the driver’s seat. “We’re coming up on the first town Rollick suggested now. Peri and Hail, make sure you’re ready to interact with the locals.”
Raze frowns, but it was hard for him to argue when Jonah pointed out earlier that he and Mirage would have a harder time blending in. Probably partly because none of us really trust Mirage not to whip out his ears or tails in view of humans.
I look down at my leather jacket, close my eyes, and flicker in and out of the shadows in a blink. My new attire includes a cloth hood on the jacket that I pull up over my vibrant hair in case it starts to glow.
Hail sighs as if this is all too much work for him. He adjusts the sleeves of his collared shirt to ensure they cover the stark blue veins that stand out against his pale skin.
A few minutes later, Jonah pulls the van over by a small clearing with a couple of picnic tables, neither currently occupied. He twists in his seat. “The three of us will walk into town. Raze and Mirage, you can roam around and stretch your legs, but steer clear of any humans for now, all right?”
Mirage springs into a handstand and then flips back into his feet with a flash of a grin. “Lots of space for the human race.”
Hail rolls his eyes, but he gets out of the van without complaint.
Raze hesitates and leans in to give me a quick kiss. “Be careful out there.”
I squeeze his arm reassuringly. “We don’t know if we’ll find anything at all. But if there’s any trouble, I’ll shout loud enough that you can hear!”
When we clamber out, Hail’s dark gaze is fixed on me with unusual intensity. He jerks it away when I notice and strides toward the road. “The town is this way?”
I glance over at Jonah for his answer and find that he’s also watching me and Raze together, with a tightness to his mouth I can’t read and a quiver of emotion that passes by me too quickly for me to really taste it. A prickle of self-consciousness makes me duck my head. Is it really so odd that Raze would care about me?
I guess they’re not used to seeing him even touch any of the other shadowkind, let alone kiss them. Of course they’re a little surprised.
Jonah jerks his attention to Hail with a nod. “Yes, it’ll be just over the bridge. There’s a convenience store and a café I thought we could stop in to grab some lunch—we want to talk with the locals casually, but do your best to find out if they’ve seen any unusual people coming through or if there’ve been any animal attacks lately.”
Hail ends up hanging back to let our sorcerer take the lead. The fae man slips his hands into the pockets of his slacks in a casual pose, but the set of his shoulders as he walks looks a little tense to me. I catch a whiff of tartly metallic anxiety off him.
I push my shorter legs faster to keep pace with him. “I’m sure it’ll be fine. You’re good at talking to people. Everyone at the school always wants to hang out with you.”
Hail’s head ticks toward me with a scattered burst of emotion he quickly reins in. “I didn’t ask for your advice,” he says, but his tone is more stiff than cutting. And he doesn’t call me “pipsqueak,” which I’ll take as progress.
The town we’ve stopped at is another small one, with several shops and a few common buildings surrounded by a cluster of a few dozen homes. Nothing about it looks particularly remarkable to me.
Rollick took all the information from our report and mapped it out with whatever details he’s discerned from his past investigations to mark this area of the province as the likely center of the strange activity. There are only a few human settlements with in it.
If no one here can give us any hints about where to go next, we’ve got a lot of combing of the wilderness ahead of us.
In the convenience store, Jonah immediately ambles over to the counter with a friendly smile and strikes up a conversation with the cashier by asking for directions. As he veers from that subject into a comment about how few other tourists we’ve run into up here, I scan the shelves for any new snacks I might want to try and notice a teenager in a bright, off-the-shoulder sweater and dark jeans poking around at the back. She takes a magazine off a rack and flips through it with a dissatisfied expression.
I stroll over to join her. “Hi! Any good articles in there?”
It seemed like a decent opening, but the girl’s eyes dart to me and narrow. She shoves the magazine back into the rack. “I dunno.”
Her scowl contradicts the trickle of emotion flowing off her—all fishy insecurity and chalky determination. I grope for a good thing to say that might cater to those feelings. “I love your shirt! It looks great on you.”
To my delight, her posture straightens up, a hint of a smile she tries to suppress crossing her lips. Pride washes away her uncertainties. “Thanks. You just passing through?”
I motion toward the shelves. “We’re stopping to get some snacks. It seems like a pretty quiet town. Do you have to worry much about wild animals with so much forest all around?”
Her laugh is a bit scoffing, but it gets me an answer. “We don’t. They don’t bug people usually. But my neighbor stupidly lets her cats go roaming around, and one of them got snapped up by a coyote or something last week.”
Or something. She doesn’t know for sure what did it.
She turns away from me, so clearly she isn’t interested in continuing the conversation, but I file the tidbit of information I got away in case it’s important.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
I pick out a couple of candy bars, and Jonah rings those up along with some spicy chips that Hail brings over.
As we head out and across the street, Jonah slings the bag over his elbow. “It doesn’t sound as if anyone’s passed through here who’s drawn people’s attention.”
“The shadowkind creatures might have,” I say, and tell him about the poor cat.
Hail shrugs. “It could have been just a coyote. Humans should take better care of the animals they claim they’re going to look after.”
For all his posturing, I taste genuine frustration in his comment. He doesn’t like that an innocent animal was killed—the same way it bothered him to kill the shadowkind creatures that attacked us.
I touch his arm tentatively. “You’re right. They should.”
Hail’s gaze flicks to me with a flex of his jaw, and then we’re walking into the café. He shifts his attention to the patrons sitting at the few small tables that fill most of the room.
We end up seated at a table right between a couple of local families. In the space of a quick lunch, we find out that they haven’t seen any notable tourists either—but someone else in town had their dog go missing from their yard a couple of days ago.
“Hopefully it wasn’t gotten by the same thing that tore up those wild rabbits in Mr. Johnson’s field,” one of the kids pipes up before his mother shushes her.
Jonah and I exchange a knowing glance. Some kind of creatures have been on the hunt around here lately—and more so than the town is used to, it seems.
We return to the van to find Raze prowling around it and Mirage perched on the roof. The fox shifter leaps down with a flare of at least two tails. “What did the intrepid explorers discover?” he asks.
Jonah opens the driver’s door. “It sounds like the shadowkind creatures might have been clashing with animals in and around town, but we still don’t know where they’re coming from. We’d better go on to the next town and see if we can find out more there.”
#
By the time we reach our next destination, the sun is starting to set.
This settlement looks even smaller than the last one, just a spiral of scattered buildings surrounded by craggy hills with scruffy trees. But a building at the edge of the town has a big parking lot packed with at least twenty cars. Artificial light beams through the hazy windows, and a mix of laughter and music spills out when a new arrival steps inside. The sign says it’s the Blueberry Sunshine Restaurant and Bar.
Jonah pulls the van into the parking lot. “This looks like the best place to get started chatting up the locals.”
He pauses and looks back at the rest of us sitting on the benches. Even Mirage has drooped a little with the long day of travel.
Jonah offers a faint smile. “Do you think you all can behave yourselves for enough time to grab dinner and have a little conversation?”
The fox shifter springs up with typical buoyant energy and gives our team leader a jaunty salute. “Eager and ready to follow orders! I’ll fox out all their secrets.” He manages to grin without revealing the points of his fangs.
Raze’s thumb strokes over my wrist, and he draws his massive form up straighter. “I’d like to help.”
Hail casts a skeptical glance toward the basilisk shifter. “And to keep an eye on the cream puff.”
I feel Raze start to bristle next to me—but then he wills down his temper with a huff of an exhalation. “Yes, that too. If you can’t rile me up, then I think I’m safe for now.”
The corner of Jonah’s mouth kicks higher upward, but somehow his smile looks more strained now. “It’s settled, then. Let’s go in.”
We tramp into a restaurant big enough to hold everyone from this town twice over—but maybe people come from farms and other places nearby. At least two thirds of the tables are taken, and several figures sit along the varnished wooden bar counter.
The locals must immediately clock us as newcomers. Several heads turn toward us and watch with open curiosity as we wait for the hostess to seat us. She places us at a long table at one side of the room.
Our waitress glides over a moment later. “Glad you could make it up here,” she says cheerfully. “Let me go over the specials…”
By the time I’ve ordered myself a burger and fries, Hail has turned on the charm. Maybe he feels he needs to prove himself after Jonah and I dug up all the info in the last town.
“I hear it can be pretty dangerous living out here in the wilds,” he says, cocking his head. “You must be very brave.”
Something about his smooth tone niggles at me, I think because I know he’s faking it. But when he aims his cool smile at the waitress, she giggles.
She shakes her head as she jots down Mirage’s order of nachos. “Oh, not much happens out here. I like it because of how peaceful it is. Hanging out at the Blueberry Sunshine is usually the most excitement of my week.”
Hail slides his graceful fingers over his napkin in a way that’s weirdly provocative. “We were hearing about pets going missing and wild bunnies hunted down. I suppose the predators know well enough to leave humans alone.”
The way he says human has a slightly terse cadence to it, but the waitress doesn’t seem to notice. “You know, if people are careful enough, even the animals should be fine. You just have to know how to live in harmony with the elements.”
Jonah eases into the conversation in a mild voice. “You must hear a lot of stories, working in here—about all sorts of things. We’re actually collecting tales of local legends. Ghosts, bigfoot, all that kind of thing. Does Pilverton have any fables like that? Older ones or recent stories that’ve caught hold?”
The waitress taps her pen against her lips. “Hmm. I’ll have to give that some thought. Let me get your order in, and maybe I’ll have something for you when I come back with the food.”
She walks away emitting nothing but a subtle sense of satisfaction, but a smack of avid interest hits me from a different direction, as crisp as the french fries I’m looking forward to eating.
I peer around and notice a man at the table behind me. He’s sitting with a couple of other men around the same age, but he’s watching us while the other two are laughing over some joke.
The impression of interest is coming from him.
I aim a bright smile at him. “You look like you might have a story. If you do, we’d love to hear it.”
Surprise flickers across his face, and his friends turn toward us too. “What’s up, Henry?” one of them asks, elbowing him. “Got bored of our company?”
“They told Marcy they’re collecting strange stories.” Henry chuckles and runs his hand over his hair sheepishly. “I don’t really go in for that stuff. I was just thinking they should talk to Ted McGaffery.”
The other friend’s eyebrows shoot up. “He’s just crazy.”
Mirage leans toward them with a glint in his eyes. “Crazy stories are good too. What does Ted McGaffery talk about?”
The three men exchange a glance. Henry shakes his head. “I’m mostly kidding. It’s ridiculous. He’s an old-timer, usually keeps to himself on his property a couple of hours from here, out in the middle of nowhere. Regular hermit. But he comes by the bar every now and then. A few days ago, he was waving his hands around with the wildest claims.”
My own curiosity wriggles up inside me. “What claims?”
Henry pauses. “He said his house got attacked by monsters.”