My father’s had been more singularly focused. He was capable of great feats, of wondrous things, but he had his limits.
“I’m not like you,” he’d told me once, and I wouldn’t understand until I was older that he said it with a mixture of envy and irony. “Magic tends to manifest itself in odd ways. I can feel the pack. Sometimes I think I can hear them in my head. But you… you’re different. There’s never been one quite like you, Gordo. I can pass down the secrets. I can give you the tools, the symbols needed, but you will do things with them that I cannot.”
The raven took three months to finish. The pain was immense. It felt like I was getting stabbed with a butcher knife that conducted electricity. I begged him to stop hurting me, I was his son, daddy please stop, daddy please—
Abel held me down.
Thomas put his hand in my hair.
My father bent over me with the tattoo gun, the ink in the jars on the table bursting in bright colors.
When the raven was finally finished, I felt more focused than I ever had before.
The first time it moved, I accidentally lit a tree on fire.
The wolves laughed at me.
My mother cried.
And my father?
Well.
He just stared at me.
THE WARDS felt thick and strong. I pushed my hand against them and they lit up, large circles with archaic symbols carved into thin air. They were all green, green, green.
My father had taught me how to make them.
But I had learned to make them more.
No one would be able to touch them.
I’D TOLD Ox once that magic was real. That monsters were real. That anything he could think of was real.
The wards were designed to keep the worst of them out.
But sometimes they kept the worst things in.
I BLINKED in a dark room, the remnants of a fading dream of a secret smile and ice-cold eyes still clinging to my skin. I turned my head, almost expecting a strong body stretched out next to mine. But he wasn’t there, of course. He hadn’t been for years.
My phone rang again, the screen glowing white.
I groaned before rolling over and reaching out for it.
I put it against my ear. “Hello.”
Silence.
I pulled it away and squinted against the light of the screen.
UNKNOWN.
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