MAGIC TIDES

Chapter 2

“You don’t understand,” Thomas said. “They are…”

“Bad people. You’ve instructed me.”

The Barnhill brothers appeared skeptical. It was likely my winning ensemble of stained tank pinnacle and torn shorts.

My husband walked out of the north tower and jogged over to us. He was almost six ft tall, with blond hair and gray eyes, and he used to be constructed like a champion grappler in his prime. The two guys instinctively stepped apart to make room for him.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” I advised him.

“What’s going on?”

“Paul’s nephew has been kidn*pped through a nearby gang. About 50 people. I’m going to get him back.”

Curran grinned at me. “Will you be home in time for dinner?”

Paul and Thomas seemed at him like he had misplaced his mind.

“Naah. Eat barring

me.” I stretched my shoulders a bit, gave him a quick hug, and headed to our bedroom.

“Red Horn kills people,” Thomas said behind my back. “Your wife…”

“Will enjoy the exercise,” my husband said. “You be aware of what they say. Happy wife, comfortable life.”

Five minutes later I walked out carrying my work clothes: a pair of denims free sufficient to kick someone taller than me in the face, a grey T-shirt, and a pair of smooth boots. I wore a utility belt on my waist and a sword sheath on my back. The cope with of my sword protruded over my shoulder. I’d braided my hair, and there had been two throwing knives and a Bowie in the sheath on my thigh.

I gave Curran a speedy hug.

“Don’t forget,” he said.

“Low profile. I remember.” I turned to Thomas. “Let’s go.”

Thomas regarded at his brother. Paul spread his hands and shrugged. Thomas seemed at him, appeared at me, and fell in step.

“Did you bring a car?”

“I rode a horse.”

“Good. I like horses best.” They usually worked.

The world skipped a beat. Technology coughed and died, and magic flooded us in an invisible wave. Colors grew a little brighter, sounds became a little louder, and matters got here into sharper focus. For as lengthy as the magic held, weapons would now not fire, electric powered bulbs would continue to be dark, and monsters would spawn in the darkness. I seemed up at the horizon.

“I nonetheless assume this is a horrible idea, Mrs…”

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “Like Curran said, I want the exercise. And, please, call me Kate.”

Curran

As I watched my spouse ride away, I knew our life of quiet anonymity right here was once over. Despite her guarantees to the contrary, some thing she did would be loud and messy. It used to be time to find my son.

“What do you think she’s going to do?” Paul asked.

“She will locate the hornet’s nest and set it on fire. When the angry hornets fly out, she’ll poke them with her sword.”

“You don’t appear that worried,” Paul said.

“I’m not. She’s nearly as excellent as she thinks she is. Don’t tell her I said that. Seriously.”

We watched Kate and Thomas riding away some more.

“Why Red Horn?” I asked.

“Who knows?” Paul shrugged. “Mess with the bull, get the horns? They are a vicious bunch, I can inform you that.”

They’d have to be to steal a child.

“Okay. Umm,” he hesitated.

“What is it?”

“My family, we don’t have a lot of money…”

I waited and said nothing.

“I can give you a top deal on the renovation, maybe.”

“No need. We’ve already agreed on a honest rate for this.” I waved my arm to point out my fortress in progress. “That’s settled.”

“Well, is there whatever we can do?”

I locked eyes with him and put a little bit of weight into my stare.

“Yes. You can go and get your household and carry them here. Paul, listen carefully. When I say family, I suggest everybody. Your family. Thomas’ family. Close friends, humans you care about. People who should be hurt or threatened to get at you. Do you understand?”

He almost staggered back. I may additionally have overdone it a bit, however this used to be important.

“Yes. I can do that.”

“Good. Go and do it now. I’ll maintain Jason here. He can assist my son and I prepare.”

“For what?” he asked.

“A siege.”

“A what?”

“Paul, we don’t have a lot of time. Kate is going to do what she does. She’s going to ask some very dangerous human beings some very pointed questions about who took your nephew and why. People will get hurt; some might also die. Their pals will choose revenge. They will seem for her. And you. And your family. If you and yours are here, I can hold every person safe. Please go and get them. Now.”

He left besides any extra questions. Now I wished to locate Conlan. We had a lot of work to do, and I wanted to explain some things.

The wind was once blowing in from the sea. I accompanied his scent to a rope tied to a beached tree on the shore. At the other give up of the rope, about forty ft out, was a “boat” my son had discovered and repaired.

Grendel turned at my approach, noticed my face, and lay down in the boat with only his eyes visible. Grendel used to be a smarter-than-average dog. The boys’ backs have been turned to me, as they were staring out to sea and the adventures that waited there. I pulled the rope. Hard.

The boat rocketed lower back to land.

Conlan hit the sand earlier than it did, landing in a crouch.

“Wow,” Jason exclaimed. “Your dad is strong!”

“And quiet,” Conlan said. “I didn’t comprehend you have been there.”

“I didn’t desire you to know. We can talk while you clear the lumber in the front of the fort.”

“Are you in trouble? I didn’t desire to get you in trouble.” Jason turned to me. “I can go home, Mr. Lennart.”

I didn’t consider in lying to children.

“Nobody is in trouble, Jason. You’re staying here. My wife is going to find your brother. The people who took him won’t like it, and they’ll come returned right here tonight searching to even the score.”

A golden mild rolled over Conlan’s irises.

“Yes, we’ll get to that,” I advised him. “But if we’re having guests, even uninvited ones, we want to tidy up the place. The house in front of the wall is a mess.”

“We’re cleansing up for the awful people?” Jason asked.

Jason used to be younger and had been through a lot recently, so I couldn’t blame him if he was having bother retaining up. That used to be okay—my son understood me simply fine.

“He capability that there are lots of places for the horrific humans to disguise behind. He wants to see them sneaking up on us.”

Understanding dawned on Jason’s face. “My family…”

“Will be secure behind the walls. Your father is fetching them lower back here. Everything will be alright. Meanwhile, you can assist us get ready.”

Kate

When people had prophesized about the Apocalypse, we had constantly expected it would be fast. Oh, there would be battle and herbal disasters and other preliminaries that might take their time, however the true second when the world ended would be swift. A rain of fire, a nuclear mushroom cloud, a meteor, a catastrophic volcanic eruption… And when magic hit us for the first time, it had delivered precisely what we anticipated.

Planes fell out of the sky. Electricity shorted out. Guns stopped working. Ordinary, normal human beings grew to become into monsters or started taking pictures lightning from their fingertips. Ravenous mythical creatures spawned out of skinny air. For three days the magic had raged, and then it vanished, leaving a mountain of casualties in its wake. Just as the world reeled and tried to pick out up the pieces, the magic got here again, and the gradual crawl of the Apocalypse began.

We referred to as that first magical tsunami the Shift, and the whole lot after post-Shift. Magic flooded our world in waves, barring

warning, smothering technology, steadily chewing skyscrapers into dust, and slowly but simply changing the very material of our existence. Landscape, climate, flora, fauna, people—nothing was once left untouched. Nobody ought to predict how long the waves lasted or how intense they would be. Over the previous 1/2 a century, we realized to live with it.

Wilmington had fared higher than most cities. Certainly, higher than Atlanta where we got here from. For one, it was a century and alternate older. Being older helped. And it wasn’t almost as built up as Atlanta, the place the once-glistening workplace towers and high-rises lay in ruins. Magic had taken a stable bite out of the city but didn’t quite minimize it to rubble.

Wilmington hadn’t escaped unscathed. Some of the taller structures had fallen. The Cape Fear Memorial Bridge used to be no more. It had collapsed in that first magic wave. The Murchison Building had slowly became to dust till it finally imploded. The spire of the First Baptist Church, once the tallest factor of the city, had broken off one day and crashed onto the street, killing various people. But the essential injury had been executed with the aid of floods.

The sea level had risen, partially due to pre-Shift world warming and partly due to magic troubles no person entirely understood. Now parts of the town seemed like Venice with bridges, every now and then solid, sometimes cobbled collectively with anything was once handy at the time, spawning canals, ponds, and marshes.

Thomas and I rode throughout one of these bridges now, the hoofbeats of our mounts thudding on the worn wood. He rode an ancient bay mare. I rode Cuddles. When Thomas first saw Cuddles, he gave her a side-eye. She stood ten ft tall, which include the two-foot ears, and used to be splattered with random spots of black and white. She was once also a donkey, a enormous jenny, to be exact.

Horses had their advantages, but most of them spooked easily. I as soon as rode Cuddles throughout a rickety bridge infested with magical snakes, and she stomped proper over the hissing serpents like they weren’t even there and then pranced when we reached the stable ground.

Unfortunately, Cuddles failed to reassure Thomas of my badassness. Getting facts out of him used to be like pulling teeth. He didn’t have faith me at all, and as he rode next to me, his whole physique communicated that he notion coming on this adventure with me was once a very terrible idea.

I’d met Thomas’ kind before. He stored things in. In the chaos of the magic and tech mad dance, Thomas was a calm rock on which his household ought to usually rely. He handled his issues on his own, except any fanfare. Except now his son used to be taken, and he couldn’t resolve this trouble on his own. A lot of human beings would be frantic, with their emotions spilling over, however Thomas went even deeper inward, all the way down. He was once a hair above catatonic. Sooner or later, he would explode. It would be higher if that came about sooner, earlier than we got to the place we have been going.

I had run throughout all sorts of human scum, however traffickers had been at the very top of my s**t list.

“How did it happen?”

“They came in a car and took him off the street,” Thomas said.

“What was he doing at the time?”

“He was playing soccer with his friends.”

“And they solely took him? Not any of his friends?”

Thomas nodded.

This smelled like a focused grab.

“Is Darin specific in any way?”

“No.”

“Does he have any enemies?”

“No.”

“Is he handsome? Is anyone obsessed with him?”

“No.”

“Does he have any magic?”

There was once a small pause earlier than Thomas answered. “No.”

Right. We would have to work on the trust bit.

“Have you tried the Order?” I asked.

Thomas sighed.

The Order of Merciful Aid was once a knight order that functioned as a private regulation enforcement organization. They took petitions from the public and charged on a sliding scale. Their services were reasonable. Their definition of “aid,” no longer so much. Their definition of “human” was additionally instead narrow.

“We have a small chapter in Wilmington,” Thomas said. “There are solely three knights. They are busy.”

True, however the k********g of a baby would be a priority even for the overworked knights. There was some thing about Darin that Thomas desired to maintain hidden. Pushing him about it would get me nowhere.

That was once fine. The day was nevertheless young.

“What form of individual is Darin?”

Thomas became and seemed at me as if I’d punched him.

“What sort of child is he?” I asked.

“You prefer to comprehend what variety of person my son is? I’ll tell you. Jason has a friend who comes down here all through the summer to go to his grandma and grandpa. Last summer season they went down to the seashore after a storm. Jason told him no longer to go into the water, but the boy thought he was once a properly swimmer and the boy’s grandfather said it used to be best as long as they didn’t go out too far.”

That did now not sound good.

“The boy obtained caught by a riptide, and it pulled him out into the ocean. Jason ran to get Darin and by way of the time they made it returned to the beach, you couldn’t even see him anymore. Nothing however ocean. Darin went in after him. Somehow, he found the boy. They washed up three miles down the shore in the marsh, and then Darin carried that exhausted baby all the way domestic through the marsh filled with leeches and God is aware of what. That’s the sort of man or woman my son is.”

Thomas seemed me straight in the eye. “But even if he was once a lazy, horrible kid, I would still be out here, looking for him, because he is my son. My child. I don’t recognize why you’re doing this. Maybe it’s a electricity time out for you, maybe you can surely help. But if you can’t, don’t waste my time. Don’t waste my son’s time, because I don’t comprehend how a lot he has left.”

Curran

My eight-year-old son hoisted an whole pallet of lumber with a seem to be that asked if it used to be enough.

Beside him, Jason regarded slightly shocked. He was gamely struggling with smaller person boards.

“Yes, very impressive. Carry it inside the massive gate and then meet out here with the aid of the doors. Jason, you’re doing fine. I’m just going to borrow Conlan for a minute.”

Conlan deposited his burden, trotted back, and stood a respectful distance from me. Waiting. He was once my son, however he used to be additionally a shapeshifter standing earlier than his alpha.

“Well?”

“Jason is my friend, and his brother was taken. Right off the street. Nobody will assist them. Everybody is afraid of these guys.”

“Did you ask your mom to find him?”

He hesitated. “Not exactly.”

“No. But you knew if you introduced Jason to her and referred to it, she would drop what she was once doing and go fix it.”

“Yes.”

“You manipulated her. I wonder the place you learned that?”

Conlan’s face became barely defiant. “He likes you. He says you’re powerful.”

“I’m certain he does. Your grandfather says a lot of things.”

“He’s very old. He knows about a lot of things. He used to be a king.”

“He was once that.”

“He wanted Mom to be a queen, to rule with him.”

No, he didn’t. “Do you suppose he capacity it?”

Conlan seemed to think it over. “No. He wouldn’t share his power. Ever. With anyone.”

“Good. That’s the most necessary component to understand about him.”