Page 63 of Untethering Dark

The forest rangers watched her quietly as she circled the scene, carefully weaving in and out between each grisly display. They were out of their depth and desperate for answers. Outside Suri’s bimonthly dinner parties, Johanna had introduced Astrid to her fellow rangers as an “occult specialist,” and they seemed to accept that explanation. Johanna’s professional credibility went a long way, and growing up in the shadow of the forest also begot a degree of belief in the supernatural. The stories they heard as children, the fairy tales, had to come from somewhere.

There were three corpses, just as Johanna had said, posed and triangulated around the remains of a massive bonfire. The scorch marks were easily six meters wide. Whoever built it went through a lot of trouble to get it that big. It would have takena considerable amount of fuel, and yet, there was very little charred wood or cinders left behind.

Astrid had a hunch it wasn’t made by natural flame. But that was only one piece of this unsettling puzzle, and not the one turning her stomach over.

The animals had been flayed, each stretched across a tanning frame, limbs nailed in opposing four corners forming an X. Their backs had been split down the center, bone exposed and arranged in a...blood eagle.

Closing her eyes, Astrid pressed a hand to her middle, and took a deep breath, counting backward.Zehn, neun, acht, sieben...

Then, holding her breath with a glove pressed firmly over her nose and mouth, she peered into the open body cavity to see if anything was left behind. A worn leather pouch nestled inside.Hex bag. Plucking it out, she quickly stepped away and found a clean patch of snow to crouch down on.

It was a ritualistic slaughtering, that was plain to see, but what kind she wouldn’t know until she examined the hex bag’s contents.

She unrolled a long mat, one of the supplies she brought, and laid it out on the snow. To the left, she laid an encyclopedic tome of spells and rituals. To the right, she carefully shook out the hex bag.

“Do you want us to see if there’s another one of those in the other bodies?” Johanna asked.

The spell bags would be identical, so looking at their contents would be redundant, but the forest rangers were pacing and shuffling around. Lost. Anxious. Wanting to help but not knowing what to do. This would make them feel useful.

“Yes please,” she answered with a small smile. “And collect snow and ash samples from around the site, too, if you would be so kind? I’ll need to examine those, too.”

The rangers sprang to action, taking the small jars she offered them from her knapsack.

While they worked, she poked around the hex bag’s ingredients with a stick, identifying the various components by matching them to things listed in her book. Item by item, the puzzle pieces were coming together, and as the larger picture began to take form, Astrid’s stomach soured with dread.

It was a summoning ritual, she was sure of it, and she had a hunch about what was being summoned. But until one of the forest rangers brought her ash samples, she couldn’t know for sure.

“I found something!” A ranger called. Astrid looked up from her work and watched Johanna hurry over.

“Custom brand,” the ranger said, rotating it between two pinched fingers. It was hard to tell at this distance, but it looked like a cigarette butt.

“I recognize that,” Johanna replied, sounding more energized than she had just moments ago. They’d found a lead. “In the reports of poachers up north, they found cigarette butts like this, too. It could be a coincidence, but I don’t think it is.”

Astrid and Gudariks’s mutual acquaintance.

Though playing it masterfully cool, Johanna already knew about him.

“Think any DNA can be pulled off it?”

“I have no idea, but let’s bag it, and see if the Polizei can get anything.”

Snow crunching beneath approaching footsteps pulled Astrid away from the conversation Johanna was having with her colleague. The other ranger was coming over with snow and ash samples.

Astrid thanked him and started with the ash, emptying it onto her palm, praying her suspicions were wrong.

At first, she didn’t feel anything, prodding at it with her magic. And that’s how it should be if it were a regular fire. She waited, giving it more time to react. And it did. The skin touching the ash began to feel warm, getting hotter and hotter, until she yelped and hastily brushed it off her hands.

It was as she feared.

A caustic fire from another plane.

The poachers were trying to summon something from the Otherworld.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Snow sifted through Astrid’s fingers. The presence of ancient human magic was much stronger now. Whenever she tried pinpointing the heat signatures left behind by footprints, sharp, searing pain lanced the back of her eyes. Something was blocking her magic.

She and the rangers combed the area outside the ritual circle for tracks the old-fashioned way but found nothing apart from their own. Scanning the trees for elevated hideouts proved fruitless, too.

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