Page 4 of Sanctuary

The kid looked about fifteen, dark hair, pale skin, about five foot ten or so. Slight build. Not from starvation, but from that typical thinness adolescents get when they grow six inches in one summer. He hadn’t had enough time to fill out.

His clothes said someone took good care of him. His jeans didn’t show much wear, his sweatshirt was relatively clean, and he wore Mahrous boots. Most boots were now custom-made by small shops, but in Atlanta, Mahrous Bootmakers stood above the rest. A good pair of their boots would last years, and they came with a hefty price tag. Only a loving parent would invest that much money in something an adolescent might outgrow in a few months.

All in all, nothing stood out. Just your regular, typical kid, probably from a better part of the city. Didn’t look familiar.

The little black puppy curled tightly against the boy’s body, looking like an oversized doughnut of black fur. The puppy was female, probably a black German Shepherd, and checking her over didn’t reveal any obvious injuries. As soon as he’d set the puppy back down, she’d scrambled back to the boy and huddled against him.

Smoke swirled on the couch and congealed into Kor. The korgorusha twitched his long, tufted ears, and shifted his weight, resting his big body on his favorite blue pillow. His golden eyes shone with a soft light, half-magic, half-glow borrowed from the fire.

“Are we about to have visitors?”

The korgorusha purred. Vicious claws slid out of his soft black paws, pierced the pillow, and withdrew.

Figured.

Roman pulled the edges of the wound closed and made his first stitch. He’d have to wait until the rest of his misfit squad made it in for a detailed report.

At least the cut was nice and even. No ragged edges to trim.

The kid hadn’t asked for shelter. He hadn’t said, “Help!” or “I’m hurt.” No, he’d said, “Sanctuary.” That meant two things. First, the kid knew who Roman was and what he did for a living, and second, he was being chased.

Roman rolled his wrist, taking care to pierce the skin carefully. The fact that he didn’t recognize the kid meant nothing. There were roughly 10,000 Slavic neopagans in Atlanta and four times that number of other pagan religion practitioners, and that wasn’t counting people of Slavic descent and their friends and relatives who didn’t actively worship but would look for magic solutions when trouble came clawing at their door. He couldn’t possibly know everyone.

However, the fact that the kid showed up at his house at all was odd. Roman lived on fifteen acres in the woods, and the driveway to his property was a quarter of a mile long. His nearest neighbor was about half a mile away, a druid who wanted to nurture birds in solitude.

Very few people knew where he lived or how to get to his house. Most of the time petitioners came looking for his father or his uncle, sometimes his mother or sisters, and got passed down the chain to him. He was the last resort, called in either when everything else had failed or when things had gone so wrong from the start that nobody else wanted to touch the problem with a ten-foot pole.

How did the kid know where to find him? How did he get here? He’d had the nechist search the property, and they hadn’t found a vehicle, a bicycle, or a horse. They didn’t find a backpack or any bags and the boy didn’t have a wallet either.

Last night the tech had been up, and Roman had walked the inner perimeter of his wards the same as he always did before he went to bed. Which meant the kid had entered the property sometime after Roman had gone to bed, but before the magic hit. The boy had run through the woods, bleeding all over, with nothing except his dog and the clothes on his back. The tree where he’d collapsed was only thirty yards from the house. The boy had to have seen the house but hadn’t managed to get to it, which meant he’d been at his limit. The tree was as far as his body could go.

The cookie in his mouth came from a helpful kolovershi, who’d snuck into the house, depositing glitter and the boy’s blood everywhere, ate the cookies, and then took one to the human child, because humans liked cookies and it would surely make him feel better. The culprit was probably Fedya, the smallest one of the flock. It seemed like a Fedya thing to do.

All of that added up to desperation.

Roman frowned. Two months ago, a family had come to his father begging and crying that their fourteen-year-old daughter had disappeared, and they were sure some unclean monstrosity had carried their Masha off because there was blood in her bedroom, a broken window, and claw marks on her windowsill. Roman had taken that mess on as a favor, and he’d found the kid in two hours at a trap house. She’d had a severe drug habit and an older boyfriend the family disapproved of, so she’d faked the whole thing so her parents would think she was dead and wouldn’t look for her.

The boy on his blankets could be a runaway. In that case, he didn’t want to get involved. He could barely resolve his own family disputes, let alone someone else’s. Before he’d known about that fourteen-year-old, he would’ve said that a long trek across the woods while wounded was too drastic for a runaway. But Masha had run two miles in the freezing rain, wearing only her nightgown and slippers, before her scumbag boyfriend had picked her up—and she’d done it in the middle of the night during a magic wave, when anyone with a crumb of common sense would have stayed behind sturdy doors and solid walls. Teenagers thought they were immortal, and they could be both remarkably naïve and single-minded.

In the kitchen a window creaked, swinging open. The pack of kolovershi slipped into the room, arranged themselves on the floor in a ragged semicircle around him and the fire, and stared at him with glowing eyes.

He finished the last stitch, snipped the suture thread, set his tools down, and wrapped a fresh bandage over the wound. The kid didn’t even stir. Roman checked his forehead. No fever. No cold sweat. He tossed a blanket over him and the puppy and peeled off his gloves.

“Let’s see it.”

The kolovershi flittered to him, dropping things into his palm: a chunk of bloody snow, weird metal-looking hairs, some dirt, some thread, and a clump of chewed-up tobacco dip. Ugh. The glamor of the job. So much glamor.

Roman tossed the lot into the fire and spat into the flames, sending a punch of magic through the logs. The fire turned a translucent, cold blue. Within it, twelve people trudged through the snowy forest, making their way up the old, half-overgrown road. At the front, a short, beefy guy gripped the leads of two oversized dogs. They stood about thirty-five inches at the shoulder, barrel-chested, front-heavy, like overbred pit bulls, and covered with odd bluish fur. A row of metallic spikes ran along their spines. Both dogs had their noses to the ground. Trackers out of the Honeycomb.

Nothing good ever came out of the Honeycomb.

He studied the procession. The two guys in front—the dog handler and a thinner man with lime-green hair who stuck close to him—had to be hired hands. Their clothes were shoddier. The ten people behind them were a different story. They wore gray Three Season duty jackets, matching gray pants tucked into boots, winter caps, and assault vests. Three had chest rigs with deep pockets, fully loaded. Probably magic users of some kind. All of them carried a crossbow and a rifle.

They didn’t seem nervous. They weren’t in a hurry. They moved methodically through the snow, following the dogs.

Ten professionals and two trackers. Overkill for a runaway kid.

The group passed a tall hickory, singed on one side. It had gotten struck by lightning three years ago, but magic had kept it alive. Unless the kid’s trail led them in circles, they would reach the house in fifteen minutes.

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