Roxie's POV
We watched it on a cracked screen in the command room, and I could not look away.
The human news played the same footage over and over. A highway at night. Police lights spinning red and blue across wet asphalt. A reporter in a thin coat speaking too fast about a string of strange deaths across three states—six of them now, then eight, then more by the hour. The bodies, she said, were so badly burned they had crumbled to ash where they fell. Animal attacks, the humans guessed. A pack of something wild and large moving down the country, leaving scorched ground behind it.
"They are not animals," Aldric said. He stood very close to the screen, his blind face turned to the sound of it, reading the world through his ears. "Listen to her describe the ash. The way it fell. The way
