While Eve marched off with Ruth and Merri Lee, Monty called Burke to let him know the HFL had declared war on the Wolves, if not all the terra indigene.

• • •

Jester rushed outside as the BOW pulled up. Hadn’t the human pups caused enough trouble? Why did the adults have to be stupid too?

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he snapped.

Eve Denby reached across Merri Lee, who was driving, and said, “Give that to Simon or the Wolfgard bodywalker.”

Jester took the folded sheet of paper. “What is it?”

“I heard . . .”

Caw!

Jester looked at Jenni Crowgard and growled.

“. . . that Simon has a girl and a puppy covered in puke. I wrote down instructions—what I would do if I had to deal with it. You can give it to him or not, but if I was in his shoes, I wouldn’t want to go very far with them in that condition.”

“Oh.” Jester looked at the paper. “Good point.”

“I told Vlad we would clean up Meg’s office and air it out, so that’s what we’re doing now.”

Merri Lee put the BOW in gear, did a five-point version of a three-point turn, and headed back to the Liaison’s Office.

Jester put the instructions in a small cloth bag that had wooden handles suitable to be held by teeth, stripped off his clothes, and shifted. Then he ran to the place where the Wolves were still pondering how to get Meg and Sam clean without anyone having to touch them.

• • •

Rage became a scent in the wind, a taste in the water, a heat that rose from the earth. It rushed across Thaisia as fast as the news reports spilled out of radios and televisions.

Beneath the rage, these words shivered through the wild country: This is what it means to be human. This is what humans do.

To: Pater

All eyes are focused on the central part of Thaisia. Strike now and the human race will triumph on both sides of the Atlantik.

—NS

To: Erebus Sanguinati

It is not prudent to kill Nicholas Scratch at this time. He is too well protected, and striking at him now would make the humans in Toland vigilant to other kinds of attacks. However, I don’t believe he will stay in Thaisia once Namid’s teeth and claws respond to the deaths of hundreds of Wolfgard in the Midwest and Northwest regions. Ocean is rising in preparation for striking the East Coast of Thaisia, especially the cities that sent out the ships responsible for poisoning fish and killing some of the Sharkgard. The Sharkgard have guaranteed my safety from Ocean’s wrath if I remain near the Toland docks and tell them when Scratch sets sail for Cel-Romano.

—Stavros

CHAPTER 38

Watersday, Juin 23

All the weapons and machines that had been built and tested in secret, and all the men who had been conscripted from all the nations that made up the Cel-Romano Alliance, headed for the borders that separated human land from the wild country.

When the airplanes flew overhead, carrying the weapons that would make this a swift war, the men who came from the big cities cheered at the metal promise of more land, more food, more space. But the men who had been conscripted from the villages that touched the wild country looked at the airplanes and whispered to their comrades, “You don’t know. You don’t know.”

Bombs dropped from the airplanes destroyed the terra indigene settlements, those simple dwellings that provided a gathering place for the Others who watched the borders. The men and machines flowing up the roads in the wake of the bombs’ destruction killed the wounded and the weak and the young. And they killed the terra indigene who turned and tried to fight to protect their wounded and weak and young.

It quickly became clear that the humans now had weapons that the shifters couldn’t fight. So the gards fled in advance of this enemy.

For a full day, men and machines moved up the roads, killing and conquering. Then they stopped because there were no roads, and the machines could not move forward on the narrow game trails.

The leaders looked at the conquered land and declared the human race victorious.

That night, no one but the men who came from small villages on the border noticed the odd, and terrible, silence.

• • •

In all the Cel-Romano nations, old men and women slipped away from their villages and followed trails into the wild country that had been made by generations of humans. Or they slipped away to isolated places where the land met the Mediterran Sea. There they set out traditional foods that were given to families during a time of mourning.

“They were our friends,” voices whispered to the night. “We share your grief. They were our friends.”

Nothing answered them. Nothing stepped out from among the trees, or rose from the sea, to accept their mourning gifts. So they returned to their villages, and their neighbors asked the question: “Do you think it will make a difference?”

And they answered: “We will know soon enough.”

• • •

They watched the two-legged predators. And they listened, not to the upstart species but to the world itself.

The humans had broken the boundary between the land Namid had given to them and the wild country that belonged to the terra indigene.

No boundary now. Not in this part of the world. And when there was no boundary, Namid’s teeth and claws knew what they had to do.

• • •

Anger sharpened the wind as Elementals called Air raged through Cel-Romano, uprooting trees to form barriers across the roads. Anger quietly rumbled along the skin of Elementals called Earth, who tested the ground beneath the places that had built the flying weapons. Anger rained along the coastline and fell into the Mediterran Sea, drawing the attention of ancient Tethys, the Elemental who watched over the sea.