Total pages in book: 51
Estimated words: 48407 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 242(@200wpm)___ 194(@250wpm)___ 161(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 48407 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 242(@200wpm)___ 194(@250wpm)___ 161(@300wpm)
The boys’ backs were turned to me, as they were staring out to sea and the adventures that waited there. I pulled the rope. Hard.
The boat rocketed back to land.
Conlan hit the sand before it did, landing in a crouch.
“Wow,” Jason exclaimed. “Your dad is strong!”
“And quiet,” Conlan said. “I didn’t know you were there.”
“I didn’t want you to know. We can talk while you clear the lumber in front of the fort.”
“Are you in trouble? I didn’t want to get you in trouble.” Jason turned to me. “I can go home, Mr. Lennart.”
I didn’t believe in lying to children.
“Nobody is in trouble, Jason. You’re staying here. My wife is going to find your brother. The people who took him won’t like it, and they’ll come back here tonight looking to even the score.”
A golden light rolled over Conlan’s irises.
“Yes, we’ll get to that,” I told him. “But if we’re having guests, even uninvited ones, we need to tidy up the place. The space in front of the wall is a mess.”
“We’re cleaning up for the bad people?” Jason asked.
Jason was young and had been through a lot recently, so I couldn’t blame him if he was having trouble keeping up. That was okay—my son understood me just fine.
“He means that there are plenty of places for the bad people to hide behind. He wants to see them sneaking up on us.”
Understanding dawned on Jason’s face. “My family…”
“Will be safe behind the walls. Your father is fetching them back here. Everything will be alright. Meanwhile, you can help us get ready.”
2
Kate
When humans had prophesized about the Apocalypse, we had always expected it would be fast. Oh, there would be war and natural disasters and other preliminaries that might take their time, but the actual moment when the world ended would be swift. A rain of fire, a nuclear mushroom cloud, a meteor, a catastrophic volcanic eruption… And when magic hit us for the first time, it had delivered exactly what we anticipated.
Planes fell out of the sky. Electricity shorted out. Guns stopped working. Ordinary, normal humans turned into monsters or started shooting lightning from their fingertips. Ravenous mythical creatures spawned out of thin air. For three days the magic had raged, and then it vanished, leaving a mountain of casualties in its wake. Just as the world reeled and tried to pick up the pieces, the magic came again, and the slow crawl of the Apocalypse began.
We called that first magical tsunami the Shift, and everything after post-Shift. Magic flooded our world in waves, without warning, smothering technology, gradually chewing skyscrapers into dust, and slowly but surely changing the very fabric of our existence. Landscape, climate, flora, fauna, people—nothing was left untouched. Nobody could predict how long the waves lasted or how intense they would be. Over the past half a century, we learned to live with it.
Wilmington had fared better than most cities. Certainly, better than Atlanta where we came from. For one, it was a century and change older. Being older helped. And it wasn’t nearly as built up as Atlanta, where the once-glistening office towers and high-rises lay in ruins. Magic had taken a solid bite out of the city but didn’t quite reduce it to rubble.
Wilmington hadn’t escaped unscathed. Some of the taller buildings had fallen. The Cape Fear Memorial Bridge was no more. It had collapsed in that first magic wave. The Murchison Building had slowly turned to dust until it finally imploded. The spire of the First Baptist Church, once the tallest point of the city, had broken off one day and crashed onto the street, killing several people. But the main damage had been done by floods.
The sea level had risen, partially due to pre-Shift global warming and partially due to magic issues nobody fully understood. Now parts of the city looked like Venice with bridges, sometimes solid, sometimes cobbled together with whatever was handy at the time, spawning canals, ponds, and marshes.
Thomas and I rode across one of those bridges now, the hoofbeats of our mounts thudding on the worn wood. He rode an old bay mare. I rode Cuddles. When Thomas first saw Cuddles, he gave her a side-eye. She stood ten feet tall, including the two-foot ears, and was splattered with random spots of black and white. She was also a donkey, a mammoth jenny, to be exact.
Horses had their advantages, but most of them spooked easily. I once rode Cuddles across a rickety bridge infested with magical snakes, and she stomped right over the hissing serpents like they weren’t even there and then pranced when we reached the solid ground.
Unfortunately, Cuddles failed to reassure Thomas of my badassness. Getting information out of him was like pulling teeth. He didn’t trust me at all, and as he rode next to me, his entire body communicated that he thought coming on this adventure with me was a very bad idea.