Smilodon, page 14
Grandpa, Grandma, and Alistair walked straight to us when they passed through the event horizon of the illusion. When they stopped, Grandpa scanned the area as if looking for something, then turned to Grandma.
Grandma nodded. “Yes, I agree. The illusion needs to be expanded to account for all the recent additions.”
Grandpa handed the folio he carried to Grandma, then took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He brought his hands up to his chest and wove them as if rolling up a ball as he rattled off ancient Gaelic. At the climax of his recitation, he pulled his arms out to his sides, fingers spread wide. I felt something, but my senses weren’t fine-tuned enough to tell what it was.
“Oh, yes, dear,” Grandma remarked, smiling. “That will do nicely.” She turned to regard the Magi still clearing the road. “The illusion extends two hundred yards back now and seventy-five to either side. Let’s hurry and get inside it.”
The Magi stepped up their pace as Grandma turned back to us and returned the folio to Grandpa. I couldn’t help but notice the mischievous twinkle in her eyes.
Grandpa lifted the folio and thumbed it open. He cleared his throat and read, “Be it known to all concerned that the Magi Assembly has decreed that the rampant abduction of Magi children is an existential threat to Magi as a whole. In response, the Assembly voted unanimously to form this, the 7th Magi Expeditionary Unit since the Assembly’s establishment, and to commission Victoria Catherine Magnusson as its commanding officer. Do you accept?”
Vicki gaped at our grandparents, her eyes flicking back and forth between them as her jaw gradually slackened. Silence extended until she caught up to the fact that Grandpa waited for her response, and she stammered, “Y-yes.”
“Victoria Catherine Magnusson, you are hereby charged and directed to take command of the 7th Magi Expeditionary Unit for the purpose of tracing the perpetrators of the abductions to the full extent of their organization and visiting upon them such fate as you deem appropriate.”
Grandpa closed the folio and extended it to Vicki. I scanned the faces around me, and everyone looked on as if this was a major deal. I didn’t understand why, but I also felt like I shouldn’t speak up. Once Vicki accepted the folio, though she did so with trembling hands, Grandpa turned to me, and his expression softened into the understanding, patient, friendly grandfather I’d known my whole life.
“Wyatt, this is the seventh expeditionary force commissioned by the Assembly, as its name implies. The Assembly has existed for over two thousand years. Normally, we prefer to work behind the scenes or make the human governments aware of a problem and let them handle it.”
Oh. And my sister was going to be leading this? Wow.
And then Alistair stood at Grandpa’s side. “Wyatt, know that I argued stringently that you should be given command of our war party. After all, it seemed only fitting when the old wizard told me what the Assembly decided.”
“Uhm, no. I’m too new to all this, and… and… I’ve never managed or led anyone. You shouldn’t give me command of the shifter side of things, simply because my sister commands the Magi contingent. She’s been training her whole life for this, and I’m… what… maybe a week old? As far as the shifter community is concerned?”
Grandpa and Alistair shared a look. Grandma smirked and winked at me as Grandpa said, “Told you, Old Wolf. My boy has a good head on his shoulders.”
“Yes, you did indeed tell me,” Alistair agreed as he extended his folio to Gabrielle. “Gabrielle, the Shifter Council has decided that you shall lead our war party and coordinate with Vicki to ensure all persons behind this face a suitable fate.”
Just then, Hauser’s phone rang. She blanched at such a trite interruption to such a momentous moment. Witnessing the commissioning of a Magi Expeditionary Unit and a shifter war party? She wasn’t sure any other human alive could claim seeing such.
Before she could silence the call, Grandpa turned to her and stated, “You should take that call.”
Hauser keyed the command to accept the call and said, “Agent Hauser.” She listened for a few moments, then pulled the phone away from her head and thumbed a control on the screen. “Okay, sir; you’re on speaker.”
A man said, “Agent Burke, are you there as well?”
“Yes, sir,” Burke replied.
“Very well. For any who may also be present and not know me, I am the Deputy Director for Paranormal Affairs, and no, you will not find my name, title, or department anywhere on my agency’s table of organization. Agents Hauser and Burke, I have spoken with your supervisors to let them know I would be calling you, as this is technically a breach of the chain of command, but the exigent nature of the situation warrants it. Effective immediately, the United States cedes all jurisdiction over the rash of children abductions to the task force assembled by the Magi Assembly and Shifter Council. The two of you will act as liaison between federal law enforcement and the task force and claim federal jurisdiction in any encounters with state or local agencies. Do you understand this directive as I have communicated it?”
“What of the perpetrators, sir?” Burke asked.
“The Magi and shifters will decide whether the perpetrators will face their justice or ours.”
Burke looked ready to say more, but Hauser shook her head in silence. Burke scowled but left her arguments unspoken. “Thank you, sir.”
“Very well. Agents, I expect glowing reports about how well you represented both our agency and government. Be safe out there.”
The audio clicked when the call ended, and Hauser looked to Grandpa.
Grandpa replied with a half-shrug. “Events escalated faster than I anticipated. Apologies that your search warrant is basically wasted effort at this point.”
“How is it wasted?” Burke asked. “We still need it to search the premises for the children.”
Hauser shook her head. “No, we don’t. This isn’t our case anymore. They don’t need a search warrant, just a formal hand-off of jurisdiction.”
Burke’s expression suggested she was less than pleased about that turn of events, but no one else seemed to care.
“Well, we’ll leave you to get this organized,” Grandpa said, stepping into the silence that edged toward awkwardness. “Care for a ride home, Old Wolf?”
Alistair nodded. “Why, thank you, Old Wizard. Don’t mind if I do.”
My grandparents and Alistair turned and left the illusion, then vanished. Remaining were around four hundred and fifty people, all staring at us as they waited for orders.
14
Three hours after sunset, we set off. To say a Smilodon and dire wolf drew odd looks when running with wolves, foxes, and a few different big cat breeds while several breeds of predator birds flew overhead was—perhaps—an understatement. It seemed the Magi spent almost as much time staring at me and Karleen as they spent focused on their objectives. When we neared the fence, Vicki had to remind the Magi with the lead elements to check for wards not even ninety minutes after we’d finalized the plan. I was tempted to suggest to Karleen that the two of us should go back to the vehicles, change back to humans, and retrieve our clothes before re-joining the assault.
And that’s what it was. An assault. There was no way it could be anything else when over two hundred Magi combat veterans and a like number of equally skilled and experienced shifters descended on the defunct Industrial Steel & Fabrication complex in the dead of night.
After conferring with both my grandparents and Alistair, Vicki and Gabrielle settled on using the unit model developed during World War II: one to three Magi rounding out a squad of shifters in their animal forms and one to three shifters rounding out a squad of Magi. And despite Karleen’s preference, she and I were not in the same unit; Gabrielle and Vicki both agreed that would be an inefficient use of such powerful shifters. Karleen’s puppy dog eyes in her dire wolf form were brutal in their sad pleading, but my sister and Gabrielle stood firm. Just to twist the knife, she added a sad puppy whine as she trudged off to her assigned unit.
Vicki and Gabrielle also laid down simple rules of engagement: prisoners preferred, except in cases of direct threat to life. My unit tested those rules not even fifty yards inside the perimeter fence. We set off to the left once we passed through the main gate, circling west or downstream to be the point unit in securing that section of the complex. Given my sheer size, I served as a kind of stealth reinforcement, doing my best to stalk through the tall grass that ringed the facility. As we neared the first building we had to clear and secure, the wolf on point ran into a roving guard… quite literally. The guard—a short, stocky guy who looked like he spent too much time in the gym using steroids—stood at the corner and turned to walk toward us just as the point wolf trotted around the corner and ran his snout into the guard’s crotch. The wolf let out a startled yip as the guard doubled over and groaned. The closest Magi lifted her hands to put the guard to sleep, but she was too late. I was already on the move, charging out of the tall grass at a tangent to the building; I shoulder-checked the guard into the block wall.
I don’t care how fit you are or how protective your equipment is. Force always equals mass times acceleration, and I weigh upwards of a thousand pounds in my feline form. The guard’s head hit the wall hard enough to concuss a bowling ball, and he slid to his knees before falling forward… totally unconscious.
The Magi glared at me and leaned close to whisper, “I had that! You did not have to intervene!”
I gave her a flat look in response. If she did indeed ‘have that,’ why did I have time to run fifteen yards from the tall grass to reach the guard? I’m nowhere close to a cheetah. I’m a tank, not a race car. But unlike Smilodons, magic moves at the speed of thought. I held the Magi’s eyes for a few moments longer and attempted a contemptuous snort before I returned to the high grass.
The Magi and other shifters in my unit moved into the building, dragging the unconscious guard with them. They soon stepped back outside, and the Magi at the end of the formation wove a ward to seal the building and mark it as cleared.
* * *
Over the next hour or so, we moved through the eastern portion of the complex’s outer-most perimeter. We encountered five more guards, and I’m proud to say we handled them much more professionally than the first. We did not locate the barracks or the children, but honestly, I didn’t expect that we would. No one in their right mind would place high-value targets or buildings on the perimeter of their location.
We completed our assigned zone of patrol when we reached the river. While the company was in operation, they installed locks where their property touched the river, and as such, both riverbanks were in truth concrete structures much like loading docks, with the outer-most lock gates in line with the property fence at the eastern and western edges of the complex. And there, on the far side of the river, was our first anomaly of the night: three roving guards, even though there were supposedly no structures on that side of the river.
The Magi who failed her first test of the night stepped forward and lifted her hands. She rattled off a series of words that sounded like the language Vicki used to work magic and waved her hand from right to left as she completed the spell. The three guards across the river dropped, fast asleep, but the guard closest the river slipped over the edge and splashed into the water, some ten feet below. In his state of magically induced sleep, he’d soon drown, and for all we knew, he had crucial information we needed.
Every shifter in my unit looked to one another, and every feline promptly sat down. Tigers usually didn’t mind the water, but we didn’t have any with us. Besides, I didn’t even know if I’d float in my feline form. One of the larger wolves chuffed at us before making a running jump into the river. He paddled over to the sleeping form drifting downstream with the river’s current and worked at it until the guard was on his back. The wolf held him by biting the shoulder strap of his tactical harness, then pulled him ashore.
When the wolf emerged from the river on the muddy bank outside the fence, he released the guard once the man’s boots were clear of the water and then looked at the rest of us as if to say, “See? That wasn’t so hard.”
Heh… with my incisors, I would’ve killed the poor guy just trying to roll him over so his face was out of the water.
Gabrielle padded along at Vicki’s side, taking in all the sounds and scents her enhanced senses allowed. Her nose wasn’t as good as a wolf’s, but it was more than good enough for their task that night. She didn’t want to stray far from Wyatt’s sister, either. Granted, Vicki could take care of herself, but this wasn’t Gabrielle’s first raid. For Wyatt’s sister, she was fairly certain it was.
The faint sound of a boot scraping gravel reached her ears, and she patted Vicki’s foot with her paw. Vicki gave the hand signal to communicate a hostile contact. Gabrielle stalked forward and peered around the darkened corner. A lone sentry paced in front of the building’s door. She slinked around the corner and lunged at the sentry for a take-down. She was mid-lunge, lips pulled back from her teeth in a silent snarl, when the sentry turned. He froze, his expression a mask of fright. Gabrielle’s front paws connected with his chest, and she rode him down to the ground. His rifle clattered against the concrete but didn’t discharge. Before the guard could do more than piss himself, Vicki was there and put him to sleep.
The building behind the guard turned out to be an operations center of sorts. Gabrielle couldn’t see too much from her position, but she saw maps tacked to a corkboard on one wall. Vicki seemed rather elated. The rest of their unit fanned out to clear the building while Vicki plundered the area for whatever looked even vaguely important.
At one point, Vicki leaned close to Gabrielle, and her whisper was as close to a cheer as Gabrielle had ever heard while still being a whisper, “This is everything, Gabrielle! Everything!”
Gabrielle tried to share her excitement. She thought she would once she was able to see everything. Instead, she chuffed her agreement and padded off to do a circuit of the building. She didn’t want any roving guards to interrupt them.
Karleen padded along with a squad of Magi at her tail. The rest of the teams worked their way through the facility, while she had one goal and one goal only: find the children. She remembered enough of her sister’s friend’s scent to use that as a base for locating one of the children. A ‘normal’ canine couldn’t do that, but wolf shifters weren’t wholly canine even in their lupine form. Unlike the ‘lesser cousins,’ wolf shifters could invoke higher reasoning and cognition. A faint breeze blew through the facility from the mountains in the distance, and Karleen froze. There. It was faint. Just a hint. But the scent was close enough to that of the city wolf so Karleen had no doubt. She felt her muscles tense in preparation for the long, loping stride of a wolf on the hunt. Then froze. She wasn’t alone this time. She couldn’t just dash off into the night. The constraint made her want to growl and take off anyway, but the thought that she might need the Magi when she reached the children held her back. She lifted her right paw and made a very unnatural motion of swiping at the air, doing her best to mimic the human ‘come on — this way’ wave, before she set off at a trot.
* * *
By this point in the night, the facility felt largely deserted. It wasn’t. But Karleen didn’t know how far the other elements of the assault force had progressed in securing the facility. No one would make a sound until she howled that the children were safe. The scent she followed grew increasingly stronger until she stood at a small storage building. One wall was a shop or garage door, and each wall also had at least one human-sized door. In her circuit of the building, she passed a section of the wall that fairly reeked of the city wolf that was her sister’s friend, and she knew. The children were just on the other side of the wall. She trotted back to her Magi and led them to the door closest to where she’d picked up the strong scent and pawed the air in front of it. She didn’t want to paw the door itself or try to open it herself. If anyone was in there with the children, that might give them away.
The Magi in charge understood, though, for she approached the door and tried the knob. It was locked. But that didn’t stop her. She placed her hand flat against the door with her thumb curled around the shaft of the doorknob. A quick recitation in a language Karleen didn’t know, and her lupine ears picked up the faint click of the lock releasing. The Magi then grasped the knob and turned. The door opened.
As soon as there was enough room, Karleen surged forward and shouldered the door wide. She stood in a tiled entryway of the small warehouse, dust and dirt thick on the floor with shoe prints betraying the abductors. It was a simple matter to follow both the shoe prints and the scent to what looked like an office door on the side of the warehouse. She stopped a foot away from the door again and pawed the air.
The Magi who’d stayed right on her tail came forward and tested the knob. It opened. The light in the room came on as the Magi swung the door wide, and three children huddled together on a ratty mattress, their hands and feet tied. Other Magi stepped into the room and untied the children while the team lead assured them they were safe now. The children free, a Magi lifted one each into his or her arms while the team lead opened a portal. The Magi carrying the children stepped through and were gone. Karleen pivoted and charged back to the door leading outside. It was still ajar, so she turned her muzzle away and hit the door at full speed with her shoulder. The door flew open and slammed against the wall as Karleen ran some ten feet outside, then skidded to a stop.
She lifted her muzzle to the night sky and howled her triumph for all to hear.
I turned my head when the howl split the night. The wolves in my unit turned their muzzles skyward and added their own. Then, more howls joined. And still more. Soon, the whole facility bathed in the exultant song of our wolf shifters.
