Page 54 of Family Found

“Call up some fog now.”

I did, and the land provided it straight away.

From my outside view, I saw a wispy fog rise from the ground. It quickly gathered into a sound-eating blanket. The land left our group in a fog-free bubble, making it so we could see each other.

The land shuddered with unease when we got to the wide field at the top of the Hill. There were humans there, two of them, just walking.

“What’s this fucking weather?” one of them asked. He sounded English, not Irish, and I heard a lighter click. He was smoking.

“Dunno. Maybe it’s ghosts. Dave said there’s ghosts around here.”

Vergis had his gun ready. He aimed it at one of them. His death vision seemed to have engaged, but he stopped just short of shooting.

The other Raikengana slowed, keeping away from the human voices they could undoubtedly pick up, and edging closer to Kinnek and me.

Kinnek took a tighter hold of my bicep. We were ten steps away from the Stone, eight, five.

One more step, another. Before I knew it, I had my hands on it, the rough surface digging into my palms and the tips of my fingers.

The humans were still on the Hill with us.

“Do you reckon we’ll find that shaman soon? Or maybe the monsters will. Bloody hell, can you believe how eager Mitch was to fuck one of them horned ones? I mean, where’s the appeal?”

“Some people don’t much care about so long as the hole is warm and soft,” the smoker said. What a certifiable a-hole.

I did my best to tune them out and concentrate. Kinnek stood behind me, close, and put his hands over mine.

They will know. There will be song, the land said.

I looked around with my outside-of-me sense. Vergis was so ready to get a few shots off. The other Raikengana were taking up positions around the Stone. This was happening. There’d be a fight. It would be fine though. It had to be.

I exhaled, and just like Kinnek had taught me, I dispensed like nobody’s business. The land poured power toward the magic, a lot of power, more than I had ever handled.

The Stone sang.

The guards heard it. “What the⁠—”

Vergis’s first shot went straight for the smoker’s head, his second hit the non-smoker in the throat. Blades were pulled free of their sheaths, the sounds merging with the Stone’s song like an orchestra’s crescendo, and the Raikengana stood firm, waiting to protect. Nokim pulled things out of his bag—several small glass vials.

The noise was not something anyone could have missed. The church doors were flung open, the mages inside came toward us at a run, and they were armed and angry.

“Focus, sweet pea,” Kinnek said in my ear.

He was right. I forced the outside awareness out of my head and was left in the dark, surrounded by fog, my guys, and the other Raikengana.

“Better.”

Kinnek started doing something, started working with the remnants of the spell that had happened here two and a half years ago. He began to unravel and reverse it, part of it.

I helped. It wasn’t as easy or straightforward as turning a bowl of water into ice. If this magic was like Kinnek painting the walls with beautiful murals, I was the guy with a too wide brush and only two colors. I did my best.

“There. The Lagasar,” he mumbled, and I felt it, more so through the Stone and the senses of the land. There were openings—cuts, really—all over the place. Not just here, but everywhere on the planet. It was like a sieve.

Except…not exactly. Unlike with Aër, most of the tears that connected the beasts’ world were one-way, allowing the beasts to come here but not allowing humans through. When I had gone there with Vergis, it had actually happened because I’d used extra magic, I could see that now.

We hadn’t expected there to be that many openings to close. We’d thought it could be done in one fell swoop, like the spell that had made the Lagasar, but even as untrained as I was, I could see things wouldn’t be that simple.

Kinnek, undeterred, was attempting to close these openings, and it was working. The land moved around in my mind, relieved by his skill and anxiously watching for him to close all the connection points.