The ride out to the Chilterns was completely silent.
Nobody was relaxed this time. Nox stared out the window at the passing countryside. Lisa kept her eyes closed, not quite asleep.
The last time we had made this journey, Lisa had talked the whole way about a family that had decided she was a disappointment. Nox had refused to take his turn. I had spent most of it working out what it meant to have two people fall into step beside me without asking whether I minded.
This time, the three of us sat in a carriage with four empty seats around us, and nobody said anything for fifty minutes.
I watched the hedges go past and thought about the last time I’d been on a train heading toward a gate. Three years ago, a different line, a different name in my pocket. Colt had been sitting behind me, quiet like he always was before a job. I’d told him to keep his eyes on his feet and not stop walking. He’d listened. He’d always listened.
I hadn’t been able to stop him from being taken. I was going to find out why.
Lisa had the grimoire in her lap and didn’t open it. Nox had already counted the doors.
About twenty minutes out, she said one thing without opening her eyes.
“If it’s him again. The one in the woods.”
“It won’t be.”
“That isn’t an answer, it’s a preference.”
“Then it’s a preference.”
She let it go. Nox kept watching hedges go past in the dark and said nothing at all, which I had learned by then was his way of agreeing with her.
✦ ✦ ✦
We arrived just after sunrise, and the first wrong thing was the silence.
There should have been a checkpoint. Doyle had said as much the night before, in the vague outline Association paperwork gives you: checkpoints on the access road, hunters on rotation.
The actual scene was far more specific than his summary had prepared me for. A folding barrier, standing open. A banner with the Association’s crest strung across the road behind it. Trampled ground on either side of the barrier where two people had clearly stood for hours at a time, recently enough that the grass hadn’t sprung back.
A folding table sat under the staging tent with a sign-in sheet still clipped to it. Fourteen names down the left column, and a time against every one of them in the arrival box.
Nothing at all in the column for when they went home.
A thermos sat on its side. Two mugs rested on the wood, one with tea still in it, gone cold and grown a skin. Somebody’s jacket hung over the back of a chair, and the radio on the table still had its light on, the battery not yet realizing nobody was coming back for it.
Nobody else was there.
We stood at the treeline for a long moment before any of us said anything.
“That’s not what he described,” Nox said.
“No,” I agreed.
Lisa picked up the radio, turned the volume up until it hissed, and put it back down exactly where it had been.
“It’s open on the site channel,” she said. “If anyone had left in a hurry, they’d have taken it. If anyone had left in an orderly way, they’d have switched it off.”
“So they did neither.”
Nothing moved. No wind stirred the flap of the staging tent. Even the road we’d just walked off had stopped sending its noise after us. The whole clearing had the specific stillness of a held breath.
“Maybe they were never here to begin with,” Lisa said. “And all of this is staged to look occupied.”
“Why would anyone stage an occupied checkpoint and not occupy it?”
“I don’t know. I’m listing options and not liking any of them.”
Lisa crouched by the folding table, one hand hovering an inch above the cold kettle, the gesture she made when she was about to ask the ground a question she didn’t want answered.
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“Nothing died here,” she said after a moment, eyes still shut. “That’s the part I can’t make sense of. If something violent happened, this ground would tell me. It’s not telling me anything. It’s like the people were simply lifted out of the middle of their own morning and set down somewhere else entirely, mid-sentence.”
“That’s not better,” Nox said.
“I didn’t say it was better. I said it was different.”
Nox had gone round the barrier while she was talking and was crouched on the far side, reading the road.
“Fourteen sets of boots came up this track,” he said. “That matches the sheet. I can follow every one of them to about here.”
“And going back down?”
“There’s no going back down.” He stood and brushed his hands off. “Nobody walked out of this checkpoint. Not toward the road, not into the trees, not anywhere I can find. I’ve looked twice, because I didn’t like the answer the first time.”
I pulled out the phone Doyle had given me and made the call he’d insisted on.
“We’re at the site,” I said when he picked up. “There’s nobody here. Checkpoint’s set up and empty. Looks like it was staffed within the last hour, maybe less.”
A pause on the other end lasted longer than I liked.
“Without paperwork,” Doyle said, speaking to his windscreen first before turning to us. “Right. The Association doesn’t pull a full containment crew without paperwork. If there’d been a stand-down, I’d have heard. I haven’t heard anything.”
Another pause followed, long enough that I could hear him lighting a cigarette.
“Do not go in assuming that’s good news.”
“Wasn’t planning to.”
“I mean it. Empty isn’t the same as safe. Empty is sometimes what safety looks like right before it stops being safe.” His voice had gone flat. “I could pull you back right now. But you’d probably still go.”
“Probably,” I admitted.
“Then at least do it slowly. Whatever’s out there emptied a guild containment site without a fight. That’s not something you rush at.” A long breath rasped over the speaker. “You said you’d check in when you arrived. Check in again in one hour. If I don’t hear from you, I won’t send a search party.”
“You send everything you’ve got. I remember.”
“Good. Be careful. All three of you.”
The line went dead. I put the phone away.
“He’s scared,” Nox said. It wasn’t a question.
“I can understand him.” I looked at the empty checkpoint, the cold kettle, and the banner hanging in the windless air. “I think I am too.”
Whatever had emptied this site hadn’t just cleared a checkpoint. It had removed a full Association containment crew without so much as a struggle worth reading in the dirt. I didn’t know yet whether to be more afraid of whatever was waiting past the treeline, or of the fact that nothing official had even noticed it happen.
Neither feeling was especially useful right now. I put both of them away.
“We could turn around,” Lisa said. She said it like she knew none of us would take her up on it, but felt obligated to put the option on the table anyway. “Doyle would understand. An empty containment site with a whole guild’s crew missing is exactly the kind of thing that’s supposed to get reported, not walked into.”
“We could,” I said. It was true, and it changed nothing about what happened next.
Nobody moved toward the road.
“That’s what I thought,” Lisa said, and started walking toward the trees instead.
✦ ✦ ✦
We walked past the barrier. Nobody stopped us, because there was nobody left to do it.
The access road gave way to the old dirt path a few hundred metres in, right where I remembered it, the canopy closing in overhead almost immediately. The morning light thinned to something grey and filtered, and the air grew colder with every step. The same heavy pressure from the dream settled over the back of my neck like it had been waiting for my arrival.
I had walked this path once in the dark, not knowing what lay at the end of it. Walking it in daylight, knowing exactly what was there, turned out to be the worse of the two.
Fifty yards in, Lisa stopped and put her hand flat against a trunk.
“The wood’s wrong,” she said. “Not dead. Dead I could work with. This is a tree that has been told to stop.”
“Told by what?”
“If I knew that, I’d be a great deal more use to everyone this morning.” She took her hand back and stared at her palm. “It goes further out than last time. Whatever it is, it isn’t staying in the ring anymore.”
That was the moment to turn around. All three of us knew it, and all three of us kept walking.
“The birds have stopped,” Lisa said after a while.
She didn’t need to point it out. All three of us had noticed the woods going unnaturally quiet again, just like our first visit.
Whatever is wrong with this ground, it has grown worse since you last stood on it. I can feel it from here. It is not finished changing.
“Worse how?” I muttered under my breath.
I do not have a cleaner word for it than worse. It is the difference between a wound that is healing and one that has decided not to.
“When we clear the treeline,” Nox said quietly, “I go wide left. Lisa holds the centre. Whatever’s waiting for us gets a triangle instead of a line.”
“You think something’s waiting?” Lisa asked.
“I think an empty checkpoint and three nights of the same dream aren’t a coincidence, and neither are you,” Nox said, not looking back at me. “I think whatever this is, it already knows we’re coming, the same way it already knew last time.”
Nobody argued.
We cleared the final line of trees.
The gate was worse than I remembered, even worse than the dream had shown me. What had been a dull, sick green the last time now ran with a dark rot threading through the light. The ring of scratched marks around it had deepened further still, cut so far into the earth that the boundary looked less like a symbol and more like a wound.
The dead grey ground stretched further than it had a week ago. It reached almost to the treeline now, close enough that the last few feet of grass under our own boots had gone the same colourless shade.
And a figure stood in front of the gate, back turned to us, exactly where the dream had placed him.
I stopped walking. Lisa and Nox pulled up a half-step behind me.
The figure hadn’t moved.
Nox drifted wide left without being told, executing the flank he’d set on the road. Lisa took the centre. The triangle assembled itself around a man who hadn’t yet turned his head, and I understood as it happened that he was letting us do it.
He wore a dark blue robe, heavy and long, hanging perfectly motionless in air that carried no wind at all. On his face was a small bull mask with no stars painted on it, its horns swept back along the sides.
He didn’t turn around immediately.