“The wreckage is on the way, Jacquelyn. Can’t we just make a quick detour to save time?” Florian asked from his seat in the shotgun seat of the pickup truck. The girl glanced over at him, giving him the stink-eye.

“Miss Faye gave me orders, wizard. We’re heading to Dover first, where you’ll make good on your promise before you go gallivanting off looking for your family or whatever.”

Florian tried his best to use the secret technique of his younger brother: the forbidden puppy-eyes maneuver. Alas, while it got a snort out of Jacquelyn, it was to no avail. “I’m sure you know what it feels like. I’ve been in this country for years longer than I should have, and I have no idea if my family is alive. Now that I have a clue – a starting point – I need to take a look.”

Jacquelyn didn’t answer for a moment, the pickup bouncing along. Her tone, usually playful in that childish manner, was all of a sudden very, very serious. “Are you sure that you’d want to know?”

“What do you mean?” he asked, stunned. “What kind of question is that? Of course I want to know!”

“Even if your family was gone?”

A pregnant silence, then. Florian didn’t know how to respond to that. It made sense that he might learn that his family had died in some cataclysmic event, if he learned anything at all. But not knowing would be worse. “Even if my family was gone.”

“Well, then.” Jacquelyn’s cheer returned as abruptly as it had left, even though it felt that there was something that she wasn’t saying. It reminded him, oddly enough, of Kayla and whatever haunted her. “If you promise that you’ll make good on your word, we can stop at the wreckage first.”

“I promise.”

Jacquelyn lead the other three pickup trucks full of armed traders and cargo down a side road and eventually between the trees, a change in course that one of the other traders noted through their shouting. But the new course was set, and so Jacquelyn ignored the other driver, focusing on evading trees as they zipped by.

It took surprisingly little time to come across an artificial clearing created by the ruined mass of bomber in front of them. It looked like something out of a sci-fi movie, a bomber that Florian was unfamiliar with. That said, Florian didn’t know the first thing about military aviation. Still, he knew enough to know that the wings should have been attached to the main body of the airplane. Instead, they were flung about all over the place. The frame of the aircraft was damaged all over, and if Florian wasn’t mistaken, he thought he saw some scratches on the metal.

“We’re going in for a look!” Jacquelyn called, stopping her truck and slinging a shotgun over her shoulder. Florian followed her lead, hanging Bludgeon on his belt and holding onto his spear as he clambered out of the vehicle. A few of the traders were berating Jacquelyn by the time Florian caught up to her, and when he did, it seemed that the conversations died.

“What would I be looking for?” Florian asked, indicating the wreckage with the tip of his spear.

“We’re looking for any kind of written files. Remember, most computers don’t work anymore,” Jacquelyn shrugged, making her way toward the plane. She waited for him by the glass cockpit, indicating that he follow. “If you could cut through this, we’d save a lot of time.”

Cutting through the glass or the metal around it would take a long time with his spear, even if it were enhanced. Times calling for a new solution, Florian imagined a like arc of wind in front of him vibrating like a saw. It was an idea that was more at-home in cartoons, but soon enough, Florian had a blade made of wind hovering in the air in front of him. He went to work immediately, but the magic cut off halfway through the job.

This time, for the first time in a long time, it hadn’t been his Control that had given out on him. Rather, it was his focus. He couldn’t actively maintain the image of the blade cutting through the cockpit, and his thoughts were beginning to wander with images of his family. It was time for a breather. Stepping over the wreckage to see the other side of the clearing, Florian felt his heart pound.

Gazing at the scene in front of him, he found himself remembering the leather-bound journal that had sat upon Taylor’s nightstand. Now that he was here, he could see that the man had been honest in his request; the commander and his men had made a last stand by the bomber, their skeletons wearing the tattered remains of what might have once been recognizable as the Dover standard.

They died in a circle around a small, blood-stained manila folder. Florian wanted to recover the folder immediately, but he dreaded wading into the macabre field in front of him. Hesitating, Florian watched as Jacquelyn stepped past him and claim the files herself without so much as a word.

She smiled a faint smile at him as she returned to the downed bomber’s cockpit, handing him the folder. “Go on, then. Tell us what’s in those files.”

At any other time, Florian would have been overcome by curiosity over the folder, but another kind of curiosity stayed his hand. Just how many times has she seen this?

And then it wasn’t curiosity that stayed his hand. He heard growling from the trees around them, the kind of characteristic half-growl, half-hiss that the lizard-wolves made. Slowly but surely, two dozen wolves stepped out from the shade that the trees around them provided, their golden scales dazzling in the morning light.

This was most definitely not their active time, and yet they had appeared before the sun had even begun its descent. Something was wrong with these Hellwolves, and if Florian had to guess by the gaunt look of the creatures around them, they were hungry.

And it just so happened that food had delivered itself right to them. Florian put the folder down on the metal he stood on, enhancing his spear with the mana sheathe. Two dozen wolves might have scared him once, but he was with ten people armed to the teeth. And this just so happened to be the equivalent to an easy hour on the walls of Leeds. The Hellwolves leapt.