I excused myself but made sure to knock back what was left in my cup before leaving. At that point, I knew what lay ahead could only be described as a torrent of work and preparation, but I had little appreciation just how much I’d underestimated things.

  When we set out two days later, not only had I not indulged Rowan’s wishes for my mental health, but I’d barely slept, Rowan had postponed that promised conversation, and I had a newfound appreciation for everything the supply and logistics boys did for us.

  Quiet and somber, the thirty of us covered the distance to the former Lord’s estate before stopping for lunch. When people started shucking the packs from their backs, I thought we were merely stopping for our first break.

  Before my pack met dirt, Fiachra stepped before the massive tree we’d stopped under, raised his staff, and rattled off something that sounded half-prayer, half nonsense. Foliage reacted immediately, vines retreating, low branches and roots curling away. In the space of a heartbeat, what had been a mass of underbrush and small boulders parted to reveal a passage narrow enough I wondered how anyone would make it through, packs or not.

  Aoife’s flame-colored hair caught the dappled sunlight as she turned to the column. “Samuel, Cailleach, Genevieve, with Fiachra if you would. We’ll guard the way.”

  Fiachra waited as we picked our way through the column but held out a warding hand when we neared. “Hold back a moment. The way may be open, but other than myself, I suspect only Cailleach can pass safely.”

  Somewhat confused, I cast my gaze toward the opening and realized the crevice’s walls were undulating ever so slightly, ever so slowly. With that minute observation, every instinct threw flags like a British soccer game run amok. Ever so slightly, ever so slowly, like a predator lurking patiently, gently coaxing prey into its waiting grasp.

  Fiachra approached the crevice, and Jenna drew in a sharp breath as the walls parted just wide enough to admit him only to collapse back to their original spacing after he passed.

  Cailleach then stepped up to the crevice. When she cautiously extended a hand toward the gap, the fluid undulation paused a moment before resuming once again. She looked over her shoulder and motioned to me.

  “What?” I asked as I joined her.

  “Do what I just did, slowly.”

  I replied with narrowed eyes. “Gauging which of us has more flavor?”

  She duplicated my reaction, but with less humor and a hand on her hip.

  “Relax,” I said with a smirk as I peeled back my shooter’s glove. When I say the living wood fled from my open hand’s approach, I mean the fleshy bits thinned in spots, like knuckles going white, in its effort to snap away before I could even near it.

  “Huh.” My gaze drifted to the Harvester beside me whose eyes held little beyond startled curiosity.

  When she gently pushed me back a step, the passage reformed, slowly, cautiously like a predator checking its surroundings before emerging after getting spooked.

  “Tomas,” Cailleach called out.

  “Aye, aye,” he gruffly answered. I stepped out of the way to give him room when he neared. “So, just stick my hand out, right?”

  Cailleach nodded.

  Peeling off one of his gloves, Tomas glanced to me with the sort of grin I’d only recently come to realize was a nervous one. “Nothing to it, right? Like another night in the pub, just stick it in and hope for the best.”

  As much as I wanted to chuckle or roll my eyes, curiosity overrode both. The living wood’s pulse quickened, deepened as his hand neared the gap, and the smooth walls slowly gained a subtle texture. The same instant that texture registered as fine hair, I shot a hand toward Tomas. Both Cailleach and I simultaneously jerked him back. The entrance quivered, seemingly disappointed, and as the texturing faded, dots of pale fluid dribbled down the walls.

  “Holy shit,” Tomas squeaked. “It tried to eat me.”

  I couldn’t help it. “And that, Tomas, is why you should always be careful about just sticking it in and hoping for the best. It might grow poisoned fangs and leave you with a stump.”

  Tomas rubbed the hand he’d held out and glanced at me. “I— I’ll remember that the next time I’m in a pub. So what now?”

  “Wait for the mage,” Cailleach noted quietly.

  And wait for the mage we did, which took all of maybe three minutes before the crevice shivered and widened. Fiachra appeared from the darkness not long after, looking pale and somewhat haggard.

  “You okay, Fiachra?” I asked.

  He sighed and gestured to the fissure with his staff. “Disarming the spell proved much harder than setting it, likely due to those I asked to patiently wait instead indulging their inquisitive natures. Whomever was last, never do that again. Cailleach, try not to antagonize our sentries. Their living form is not immune to emotion. They may be bound by magic, but those bindings are not all encompassing nor are they perfect.”

  Both Cailleach and I gave the mage a puzzled look.

  “Antagonize?” Cailleach asked. “The ward didn’t react at all to me.”

  This time it was Fiachra’s turn to don a puzzled mask. “There were three then? Not two?”

  Cailleach nodded. “I went first, since you suggested I might be safe.”

  Clearly unsettled, Fiachra’s eyes drifted back and forth between Tomas and me before settling on me. “Then you went next?”

  I shrugged. “Gauging what a hostile response looked like seemed reasonable to me.”

  Fiachra’s expression turned sour as he sighed. “Well, that’s another issue I’ll have to address before sealing this place again, I suppose. With me, all of you.”

  We ventured into the tunnel. The darkness quickly reminded me that the Syr could see much better in low light, considering how most of them winced when I toggled my Surefire flashlight on.

  “Sorry?” I muttered, clicking twice to dim the beam and directing it downward. “I can’t see shit in here. Human, remember?”

  Traversing the dark over the now curiously solid wood took maybe a minute and we hit a section where the weirdly wooden surface gave way to stone.

  Seconds later, a raised steel gate loomed through the darkness. When Fiachra passed underneath, he raised his staff and familiar light fixtures lining the walls of the much larger room on the other side sprang to life.

  I killed my flashlight as I followed up the rest of the group passing inside, looked down while stuffing it into one of my cargo pockets, and what I saw stopped me in my tracks. Unlike the rest of the group, every time my boot touched stone a wave of miniscule sparkling runes rippled away, like watching someone stomp on bioluminescent plankton at a beach.

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  “Uh, Fiachra?”

  The irritation in the elf’s face as he turned vanished into shock. “By the Lady, don’t move!”

  “Yeah, I figured that out before getting your attention.” I frowned. “What the hell is this?”

  “Something that should have stayed inert,” the mage muttered on his way over to me.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “If someone made it past all the chompy bits back there, this room’s supposed to get them to bunch together and do something like incinerate everything.”

  He glanced up at my face for a moment before circling, eyes on my boots. “Something like that, yes. Those boots, they aren’t magical, correct?”

  “Nope. Salomon doesn’t offer enchantments on their boots, but in hindsight, given how much I paid for them, they fucking should.”

  Fiachra’s face darkened and he reached into his robe. “Naturally, all my useful tools are back in my study, so I guess we’ll have to make do with this.”

  When he produced a small glass cube whose edges were lined with filigreed metal, I asked the obvious. “What’s that?”

  “Something I was going to give you later. This requires concentration, so be patient.”

  As I watched, the elf sank on down into a deep squat and held the cube a few inches off the floor. Inside the cube, faint pinpricks of blue and green light winked in and out, giving the faintest impression they were travelling upward, away from the floor. I quickly realized the cube was hollow, filled with a gray haze of some sort instead of my initial impression of the glass itself being hazy.

  Without taking his eyes off the cube, Fiachra quietly said, “Now, ever so lightly, raise one of your feet and step back down like you’re trying to not leave prints in snow.”

  Suddenly reminded of a conversation I’d had with an EOD tech on my first deployment when I found out the second to hardest way we’d wandered into a minefield, I did exactly what the mage asked, and I did it without breathing.

  The moment the muscles in my leg flexed, blue sparks stirred in the cube and the stirring became a flurry when my boot left the floor. When I gently set my foot back down, the familiar rune pattern rippled out across the floor and the cube’s contents shifted from purely blue to a mix of blue and red.

  Both of us let out our breath at the same time.

  “Is that good or bad?” I asked.

  Fiachra’s eyes narrowed. Instead of answering, he turned on his haunches and motioned at Jenna. As she approached, he shifted to hold the cube closer to her. The cube reacted as it had initially, a few faint sparks here and there, nothing more.

  Jenna eyed me curiously a moment before Fiachra’s standing snagged her attention. “Is that a, ah, cloud chamber?”

  The mage tilted his head, stared at her for a heartbeat, and nodded. “Aye. You’re familiar with them?”

  Jenna replied with an uncertain nod. “Our don’t have colors, though, so I don’t think I can say for certain I’m familiar with your kind in particular.”

  “Well, apprentice, if you had to guess based off what you’ve seen so far, what would you say is going on?”

  Jenna frowned. “Well, I couldn’t see much from over there, but hazarding a guess anyway, I’d say the colors are different kinds of magic.” She took a step back and eyed the floor while rubbing her chin between finger and thumb. “The blue serves as some sort of detector. You confirmed what Sam said about the trap incinerating things, so I’m thinking the red is part of the payload, the magic the blue sparks are supposed to trigger.”

  “And the green?”

  “Well, it wasn’t present closer to my brother, so that might be what links the blue to the red?”

  Fiachra nodded. “Now, were you in my shoes, what would you do next and why?”

  “I don’t think I’m qualified to answer—”

  “Humor me.”

  “O-okay. I’d hold the cube up next to my brother.”

  The mage’s face brightened ever so slightly. “Now, why is that?”

  “Well, you checked a decent distance from him so you have an idea what things look like outside of his area of influence. You’ve checked relatively close to see what the effects are, and you compared that to what happened when I came over here. Checking him directly might not be useful for figuring out what’s happening, but it might explain why it’s happening.”

  “I think you and I will get along splendidly.” Fiachra’s lips parted into a wide smile, and he moved toward me. That smile began to fade the moment he crossed within arm’s reach and vanished entirely when he held the cube out. Inside, the flickering held not only red and blue, but the rest of the rainbow as well.

  I also noticed the sparks weren’t merely traveling away from me and then disappearing like they did from the sources for the previous tests. Some hooked toward the far side of the cube and returned, others started off traveling toward me to begin with, and as I watched, some of them even shifted colors.

  “That’s not good, is it?” I nervously asked.

  Fiachra blinked. And then blinked again. “I… don’t know.”

  A few heartbeats passed before focused concern replaced confused horror on the mage’s face. He turned to everyone else. “I’m going to need everyone but Sam to go back to the other side of the gate. We’ll hopefully have this cleared up in a moment.”

  Still having flashbacks to standing on an ancient Russian land mine, I helplessly watched everyone start to shuffle past me. In short order, I was the only person in the room.

  “Okay, Sam. I want you to slowly walk backwards toward the sound of my voice,” Fiachra said calmly. “Try to replicate how you walked in as closely as possible.”

  I took a deep breath. “Sure thing. Backwards, slowly.”

  Runes rippled away from my feet as I inched backward, waiting—expecting everything to go wrong. Sweat ran down my scalp, down my neck. And then hands grabbed me from behind, pulling me through the gate.

  I started to turn, intending to thank Fiachra. Instead caught a violent hug from Jenna that made my ribs creak. Eventually she looked up at me and I didn’t need more light to see her concern.

  “It’s okay, Jenna,” I said, returning the hug and patting her back. “I’m okay. You’re okay. We’re good, right Fiachra?”

  “Aye,” the mage replied. “Sorry, Samuel, but you’re going to have to stay with Aoife and the others outside. We don’t have time for me to figure out—”

  “Not a problem, Fiachra,” I said with a shrug. “I get it. Unexpected problem, tight schedule. These things happen.”

  The mage offered a conciliatory smile. I glanced at Jenna before heading back. “You stay safe, you hear?”

  Behind me, Jenna called out, “Yes, dad.”

  I emerged into the warmth of daylight and elected to take a moment to stretch my arms and enjoy the springtime air.

  “Something wrong?” a sweet voice asked quietly, almost in my ear.

  I turned, hand on my pistol, to find myself almost face to face with Aoife, who was giving me a curious, appraising look. I’d literally just walked past where she stood and there was no approach she could have taken without me seeing or hearing her, yet there she stood nonetheless. “Not wrong, per se. Change of plans.”

  Admittedly, I’d only seen three other elves this close, but it struck me when Aoife’s eyes focused and narrowed ever so slightly that she had a trail of faint freckles cheek to cheek under her eyes.

  “Oh? How so?”

  Unsure of if her closeness was some sort of test or dominance thing, I ignored the urge to take a step back. “It seems the spells left to secure the Lord’s manor react to my presence, even when deactivated. Fiachra decided it best I remain behind.”

  Aoife’s pupils widened the heartbeat before she stepped back. “Interesting, considering how the passage’s guardian reacted to you. Of all the ways I’ve seen the spirit-formed react to intruders, fear is not one of them.”

  “Spirit-formed?”

  Aoife looked away. “Living things made more by the infusion of magic and spirit. The tree itself stands guard over the Manor’s bolt hole; only those it recognizes are allowed to pass unscathed. If Tomas had strayed nearer, if you and my sister hadn’t intervened, there would be scant evidence left he’d ever been there to begin with. Scraps of whatever metal he had on him, perhaps. Certainly nothing even the most seasoned hunter would recognize as remains.”

  “That’s—” My jaw hung open on its own accord while I struggled to find the right word.

  “Monstrous? From some perspectives, certainly.”

  “And yours?”

  Aoife’s gaze returned to me, her piercing blue eyes steady and unflinching. “Necessary. As Harvesters, we are taught to respect and revere all life. Such transgressions against the natural order are not undertaken lightly. To refuse to use a weapon is to put yourself at the mercy of an enemy who likely would not think twice about using the methods you spurn against not just you, but those you stand in defense of as well. Best to incite wariness and fear in the enemy’s heart than invite attack by appearing hapless and weak. Even the dimmest predator understands that injury often means death and will seek easier prey.”

  I shrugged. “Even if I were so inclined, I couldn’t argue against that logic without condemning my own people.”

  Aoife’s ears twitched and an eyebrow rose. “Even if? So you agree?”

  “Agree?” I chuckled. “Hell, the best defense is a good offense and a long track record of victory. Where I come from, we went to great expense to secure the former.”

  Aoife’s head tilted ever so slightly. “And the latter?”

  I answered with a bitter laugh. “A soldier can always depend on the man to his left, the man to his right, but for others involved, the farther from the fight the less that becomes true. We won when it counted, and even when we didn’t, we gave our enemies pause.”

  A frown settled on Aoife’s face. “Why fight at the command of those you do not trust?”

  “Why fight at all?” I paused to scratch a sudden itch. “It’s an age-old question. The answer is different for everyone, but at its root: leaders come and go, but if your cause is Just, it stands above that doubt.”

  “And if it is not?” Aoife pressed.

  “Then you fight for the men beside you, and when you get to the other side you ask yourself what honor demands of you.”