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)
It was a lower-middle-class neighborhood, with brick ranch houses set back on large lots. The surrounding neighborhoods of Forest Hills cushioned it from every side, so Lincoln Forest didn’t bother with a communal defensive wall, leaving fortifications to individual homeowners.
I surveyed the large ranch house. It sat a good distance from the street at the end of a longish driveway. Magic hated high tech buildings, but it loved trees, and the two oaks flanking the driveway looked like they had been growing there for half a millennium, their massive crowns spreading all the way over the street. Three cars waited by the garage, a black Ford truck and a couple of sedans with bloated hoods, modified to run during the magic waves. Modifications like that were expensive. The stolen kid trade must’ve been profitable.
No defenses, except for the usual bars on the windows and a solid door. No wards that I could feel. Nothing out of the ordinary except for a cow’s horn, dipped in bright red paint and stuck onto a metal stick by the driveway, announcing the house’s ownership.
“Why Red Horn? Why not Red Blade or something like that?”
“I don’t know,” Thomas said.
I dismounted. There was no need to tie Cuddles. She wouldn’t go anywhere.
“I know that you think you are tough,” Thomas said. “But these people, they are violent. Very violent.”
“Do you have a picture of Darin with you?”
He reached into his wallet and pulled out a large folded missing poster. On it a lean, dark-haired teenager smiled into the camera. He looked a bit like Thomas and a lot like an older version of Jason.
“Hold on to that.”
“They are going to kill you. They’ve killed people before who came looking for their kids.”
“Let’s try not to get killed then. I’m going to knock on their door. You can come with, or you can wait here.”
Thomas dismounted and tied his horse to the mailbox post. His face told me that he really didn’t want me to go in there. He looked around, went to the nearest oak, where someone had sawed a branch off and left it in pieces, picked up a good size chunk, and looked at me.
“All set?”
He nodded.
I walked up the driveway. On the door, someone had written RHN in blood. So good of them to identify themselves. I’d hate to get the wrong house.
I tapped the door with my foot.
It swung open, and a beefy guy in his twenties with ruddy skin and a skull tattoo on his neck peered at me.
“What the fuck do you want?”
“To come inside.”
“No.”
Most people aimed for the head when they punched. Unfortunately, heads were hard, because our brain was precious, and we’d evolved durable skulls to protect it. I punched him in the solar plexus. He was beefy but not fat, so he didn’t have much padding, and since he was a head taller than me, the solar plexus presented a convenient target.
Whatever the guy was expecting, my left uppercut wasn’t it. I punched him very fast and very hard. I could remember not being able to read, but I knew how to punch even in my earliest memories. I had over 3 decades of practice.
The gang’s doorman folded to the ground. I kicked him in the head to make sure he stayed down there, stepped over his body, and walked inside. Thomas took half a second to come to terms with the body on the ground and followed me brandishing his log.
The house opened into a long rectangular living room that stretched to my left. Directly in front of me a doorway led into the kitchen. There must’ve been a hallway here at some point, separating the entry hallway from the living room, but the house had been remodeled, and some of the walls had been taken down for a more open floor plan. On my right was another door, which remained closed.
In the living room, two men and a woman lounged on the couches. The coffee table in front of them held a cleaver falchion, which was basically a machete with a cross guard, a mace, and a shotgun. Behind them, at the far wall, four large cages waited, stacked 2 x 2. The cage on the right in the bottom row was full. A little boy with dark hair and a tear-stricken pale face huddled in it, curled into a ball.
If Julie were here with me, I wouldn’t have had to lift a finger. She’d been a street kid before she became my ward. The sight of that child in the cage would have been enough to send my kid into a tailspin, and when she came out of it, everyone in this house would be dead.
The three gang members stared at me. One was tall and lean, in his forties, with dish-water blond hair, stubble, and a lantern jaw. His left index finger and pinkie were cut off at the middle phalanges. The other was shorter, stockier, and younger, with olive skin, dark hair cropped down to almost nothing, and a patchwork of tattoos across his neck and arms exposed by a sleeveless black T-shirt. The woman was in her mid-twenties, with a round face, pasty makeup, and light blond hair worn long. Soft, like she didn’t swing a weapon for a living. Stylized flame tattoos ran from her wrists up her forearms. Probably a firebug, a fire mage.