PERIWINKLE
I get the feeling we’re heading into trouble before Jonah has even parked on the gravel drive that should belong to Ted McGaffery.
There’s nothing I can really put my finger on. Across the yard, the two-storey house looms quiet and still. The yellow clapboard siding has turned into a dingy beige most places, but I can’t imagine it’s easy to find house painters all the way up here. No artificial light glimmers in any of the windows, which isn’t surprising when it’s late morning, if overcast.
The gray clouds smothering the sky only add to the ominous mood. When I step out of the van, a damp breeze licks over my skin.
I pull up my hood both to conceal my hair and to ward off the chill.
The house stands in a cleared patch of forest about ten times as big as the house’s base. A rocky hillside rises up beyond the back end of the garden. Tall pines surround us on all other sides.
A pick-up truck is parked farther down the drive by a shed not quite large enough to serve as a garage. If Ted is the only person who lives here, that should be his vehicle and mean he’s home, unless he has more than one car.
Jonah walks tentatively toward the house. “Mr. McGaffery?” he calls out. “We’ve just come up from Pilverton.”
His voice rings through the hush of the wilderness. If the house’s owner is around, he should have been able to hear our engine several minutes before we reached the house, crawling along that narrow, bumpy lane.
No one comes to the door or any of the windows. As Hail makes an impatient sound, Jonah strides toward the porch, presumably to try knocking.
He’s still a few paces away from the stairs when a stronger gust of wind washes over us—and the front door swings open with a squeal of its hinges.
I nearly jump out of my skin, feeling without seeing the flash of panicked glow that shoots through my hair. Raze springs to my side in an instant. Mirage lets out an uneasy hum.
Jonah has frozen in his tracks. “Mr. McGaffery?” he tries again.
No one has appeared on the threshold. It looks like the door was unlocked and opened by the wind.
But if the house’s owner is home, why isn’t he answering? If he isn’t here, then where’s he gone?
Jonah walks the rest of the way to the door and leans his head inside. He calls out a few more times to no response before turning back to us.
“I don’t feel right tramping around in there when we don’t know what’s going on. We could start by looking around outside, and maybe he’ll come back.”
“Seek and you shall find!” Mirage declares brightly, and springs off to inspect the shed.
Hail aims a cool glance at me and Raze before heading toward the trees. “I’ll see if I notice anything unusual in the woods.”
I watch him go, unable to pick up on more than a trace of indecipherable emotion from him. A wobble runs through my pulse.
The fae man tried to be sweet with me last night—to get closer with me than I’d ever have thought he’d want to. There was something thrilling about having him let down his guard and reach out to me.
But he didn’t totally want to. I don’t understand why he’d touch me or kiss me if it unsettled him, even if he kind of liked it too. And he got angry when I tried to talk to him about it, which means it’s probably bothering him even more than I could tell.
I shake off those thoughts and nudge Raze toward the other side of the house from the shed. “Let’s see what’s around back.”
Whatever’s going on with Hail, he couldn’t have made it more obvious that he doesn’t want me meddling. If I’ve learned anything from my time at the school so far, it’s that trying to soothe people’s emotions when they don’t even want to admit they’re having them only makes the situation worse.
If he ever decides he wants to open up properly, it’s not like I’m hard to find.
As we approach the side of the house, my skin starts creeping. Scratch marks mottle the siding there, some thin and shallow, but others deep gouges.
Raze frowned. “It looks like something attacked the house.”
He marches ahead of me and sniffs the area with a flick of his basilisk tongue. The shake of his head gives away his disappointment. “It was too long ago for any significant scent to linger. At least a few days.”
I swallow thickly. “Maybe the creatures didn’t come back after he told the people in town about it.”
But where is Ted McGaffery himself?
I venture on into the backyard. A chicken coop stands next to a fenced area where the birds must have been allowed to wander around, but there’s nothing except scattered feathers on the grass now. When I get closer, splotches of dark red stand out against the scuffed earth.
I hesitate. “I think whatever came through here, they ate his chickens.”
Raze comes up beside me with a hint of a snarl. He motions to the patchy lawn around the chicken coop. “They tore up the yard too.”
More clawed spots show against the soil between the patches of grass. I can’t restrain a shiver.
Mirage and Jonah come around the other side of the house to join us. I point out the signs we’ve noticed to both of them.
Jonah’s eyes darken. “We don’t know for sure it was shadowkind creatures.”
Mirage cocks his head. “Are there any mortal creatures that would try to tear down a house?”
Our team leader grimaces. “Not that I can think of.”
Hail steps out from between the trees, his handsome face unusually grim. “Some of the tree trunks near here have been battered with claws and maybe spikes. It doesn’t look natural—in the mortal sense—to me.”
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Jonah exhales in a rush. “We have to be careful, considering how the creatures came at us the last time we encountered them. Raze, can you do a wider circuit through the woods and see if you pick up some fresh scent? Shout if you get any indication at all that shadowkind might be nearby. The rest of us will take a quick look inside the house.”
Raze is the only one he trusts to be able to defend himself fairly well if there’s a sudden attack. I can’t argue with his judgment, as much as I hate seeing the man I’ve come to care about so much lope off into the woods.
My heart gives a little squeeze, but I follow the others into the unlocked house.
We wipe our shoes on the doormat and pad carefully through the rooms. Ted keeps his home fairly tidy—a book is lying out on the living room coffee table and a mug sits by the sink, but just about everything else is in its place. Upstairs, his bed is made and his clothes hang neatly in the closet.
I rub my arms against my rising apprehension. “It doesn’t look like there was any kind of struggle in here.”
Hail scowls. “A human wouldn’t live off on his own like this just to spend all his time in his house. He must go out regularly. Maybe he’s simply taking a hike.”
But all kinds of things could happen to a human strolling around in the forest, even if there weren’t disturbed shadowkind creatures roving around.
Raze’s gruff voice carries through the bedroom wall. “Team! I’ve got something.”
He doesn’t sound worried, but I hustle down the stairs and out into the yard as quickly as my twinging feet will take me. Another holler brings us tramping through the woods to the east of the house.
Raze backtracks until he comes into our view and waves for us to follow him. “I caught one fresher trail. Something passed by here earlier this morning, I think—another one of those strange shadowkind scents.” He pauses. “Should we see where it went or where it came from?”
“Where it came from,” Jonah says immediately. “That’s what matters the most. And that’s the trail that’ll fade sooner. If it doesn’t get us anywhere, we can try going the other way.”
I smile more to try to raise everyone’s spirits than because I feel particularly upbeat. “That makes sense to me!”
As we set off through the forest with Raze at the lead, we quickly lapse into silence. The basilisk shifter sets as swift a pace as Jonah can keep up with on his mortal legs, and pretty soon I need to slip into the shadows to make sure I can keep up too.
Mirage is still bounding over the underbrush in the physical world, but Hail has shifted into his most ephemeral form too. I can sense him through the darkness, his presence like a slightly brittle chill.
Despite my earlier resolve, I veer closer to him. I don’t like the way our conversation ended last night.
“I know you might not want to talk to me right now,” I say as I dart forward alongside him. “But I’m sorry if I upset you even more last night.”
Hail’s response travels through the shadows in a mutter. “Don’t worry about it.”
I don’t think he means he’s actually fine, but I do have plenty of other things to worry about. Like whether we’ll encounter more beasts that’ve been commanded to attack us while we wander through the woods. Like what the sorcerer who commanded them is up to now.
As we keep pace behind Raze while he weaves through the forest, the sun reaches its peak and then begins descending to the west. Jonah swipes at the sweat on the back of his neck. I re-materialize to keep him company for a little longer and dip back into the shadows when my ankles are throbbing.
Finally, the basilisk shifter draws to a halt. He stares at something farther ahead of us, his stance going rigid. “That’s… I’ve never seen one like that before.”
I flit forward through the shadows. Before I’ve quite reached him, a current of energy tremors through my being.
That feels almost like—
I pull myself into physical form and find myself staring at the most formidable rift I’ve ever seen.
It’s true that I haven’t seen a whole lot of the portals that connect the shadow realm with the mortal world. I’ve only returned to my native habitat a few times since I first stumbled through into this one and realized how the emotions of the beings here invigorate me.
But all of the rifts I’ve passed through before were easy to miss if you weren’t specifically looking for a one. The hum of shadowy energy normally blends into the general thrum of mortal life. There’d be nothing really to see unless you squinted just the right way to make out the blurring of the terrain it stood in front of.
And they’ve all been up off the ground, not really accessible except through the shadows.
This one… With just a few more steps, the sense of the other world beyond it prickles right through my skin. The vast maw of haziness stretches up above the tree tops around it—but it also gapes all the way down to the forest floor.
It’s several times bigger than any of the rifts I’ve encountered before. You could toss Ted McGaffery’s entire house in there without it scraping the edges.
I peer at the trees around us as if they might offer some explanation. My gaze catches on a bit of thread snagged on a twig a few feet away from me.
The olive-green color makes my pulse hitch with a flash of memory—the suit jacket my former captor liked to wear, the same color of fabric stretching across his wide shoulders.
I inhale the cool forest air, willfully slow, and peer closer. When I consider the details, this thread looks like a bit of yarn from a sweater, nothing that would have come from a jacket like that.
I can’t keep jumping at scraps that mean nothing.
Jonah is still studying the portal in front of us. He lets out a low whistle. “Now that’s a rift. How could the shadowkind community not already know about this one?”
“Maybe it’s new?” I suggest, but that idea seems absurd considering how huge it is.
A shudder ripples through Mirage’s lean form. His fox ears pop from between the strands of his bright red hair. “It feels too big. Like it’s… pushy.”
Hail inclines his head in a slight nod, his dark gaze fixed on the rift. “All the ones I’ve come across in the past give off a neutral impression. This one makes my hackles go up.”
I hug myself. “What do we—”
Before I can finish my question, a shadowy figure tumbles out of the rift. It transforms into a physical body as it hits the ground just in front of the portal: a creature standing a little taller than my waist, with four bowed legs, a squashed face, and scales that lift into pointed tips.
Raze’s nostrils flare. “It smells like the other strange creatures.”
As if to confirm his remark, the beast spasms. Its legs shrink while its jaw juts several inches longer. Only mild emotions waft off it, like a thin soup.
“It’s curious and a little confused, but not hostile right now,” I tell the others.
Hail’s stance has gone rigid. “For the moment.”
Jonah’s mouth twists. He looks from the creature to the rift and back again. “I think we’ve discovered where the influx of new, unusual shadowkind are coming from. Now what are we going to do about it?”