Page 20 of Cast in Shadow
“Will do, but I’ll be down to one drone in a minute or two. The battery is almost toast on the other one. This is why I keep saying we need a couple of our own.”
Sure, except having our own drones wouldn’t have done us much good, seeing as he would have had to fly them all the way out to the south preserve to even start the search.
We made the rest of the breakneck drive in relative silence. As we rolled into the parking area, Nguyen pulled his gun out and checked the barrel. “Lock and load.” The other two agents followed suit.
“The attack happened in the camping area up on the right,” I said. “Stay sharp. If you see Navali, call in your location but don’t engage if you can help it.”
“What?” Nguyen cocked his head. “What the hell do you mean ‘don’t engage’?”
“Exactly what I said. That might have looked like Navali on the video, but we don’t know if she’s the one in the driver’s seat. Until we’re sure what we’re dealing with, this is a recon mission, nothing more.”
“You can’t be serious. You saw what she did to those people.”
Yeah, we all did. The slaughter of innocents was never something I took lightly, but those lives were already lost. I refused to add my people to that tragic list just because someone got a little hot under the collar. “You all have your orders. Eyes only. Keep your distance. But if she does get too close, make damn sure you shoot to kill. Got it?”
I waited for his grunt to the affirmative before checking the rearview. The other two agents gave me a sharp nod, and we all climbed out of the Jeep.
“Stay off the main trail,” I said, keeping my voice low.
The witch’s magic blanketed the area, clinging to the groundlike mist, but it was fading fast. And it was changing. When I’d seen her in the clearing two days earlier, the magic swirling around her had wisps of darkness, but the natural green of her power was still dominant. Now, it was noticeably darker, and those black threads were multiplying.
We crept through the woods toward the campground in silence. If I hadn’t been able to feel Nguyen’s magic a few yards to my left, I never would have known he was there. Bears had a reputation for being smash and crash predators, but they could move with terrifying stealth when the situation demanded it.
Before we’d even reached the site of the massacre, the sick, metallic tang of blood flooded my nostrils. I’d been expecting it after the footage we’d seen, but I still caught myself gripping my pistol tighter.
It wasn’t until I was standing next to a blood-soaked tent that I realized the full extent of the damage she’d inflicted. The bodies on the video were all there, just as gruesome as expected, but the camera had failed to capture the ones hidden inside tents and spread out beyond the rustically manicured grounds.
Pain contorted the faces of the dead, forever frozen in different states of agony. Some had been gutted. A few had gaping holes in their chests. And at least one was missing his head entirely.
The couple who’d tried to run had gotten the worst of it. At least, I was assuming that was what they were trying to do, since their mangled body parts were scattered near one of the trailheads that led deeper into the woods. With that level of violence, it couldn’t have taken long for death to claim them. Certainly no more than a minute. But it would have been sixty seconds of misery that I didn’t even want to begin to imagine.
Megan was changing the game. It wasn’t just about stealing magic anymore. She was testing her abilities, stretching her dark magical legs, so to speak.
I parted my lips and drew shallow breaths to help combat the growing stench of blood and intestines. “Dennis?”
“Awaiting orders,” he said.
“Is the cleanup crew on the way?”
“Yes. Dispatched right after you left.”
“Good. Let them know it’s worse than we thought. I count eleven bodies,” I said.
“Twelve,” one of the other agents added, lifting a sleeping bag and showing me the blood-smeared body of a boy who couldn’t have been more than ten years old.
“For fuck’s sake,” I hissed. “Make that twelve. And warn them one of the casualties is a child.” If Megan had been acting as their thirteenth, they would have had enough members to form a proper coven.
Silence spanned over the radio for a beat. “Dennis, you copy?”
“Copy,” he said, sounding a little out of breath.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I don’t know how you guys can stand being out there.” The muffled sound of retching followed, but all I could do was shake my head.
Did the scene make me a little queasy? Yes. Did it leave me questioning human nature? Again, yes. The attack was brutal and bloody, but it wasn’t the worst I’d seen by a long shot.
Dennis’s problem was that he wasn’t the kind of agent one would expect to find working for a paranormal shadow organization that had no qualms about putting down the worst of the worst. For starters, he was human. Barely a lick of magic in his blood. He didn’t have any real-life tactical experience when he started, but the guy was a certifiable genius with tech and hacking. He also had a surprisingly broad knowledge of the supernatural world. He knew all the kooky made-up crap, aswell as the reality of shifters and demons, and he could tell the difference between fact and fiction when he saw it.
