Hex Appeal (P.N. Elrod) (Kitty Norville 4.60)

They stepped from the car onto a forest floor thick with five centuries of autumn. Adam stretched, testing his pixilated camo suit. It was loose enough to let him move quickly. The huge trees watched him in silence. He wished it were colder. He would be faster in the cold.

Siroun raised her head and drew the air into her nostrils, tasting it on her tongue. “Woodsmoke.”

Adam slid the short needle-rifle into its holster on his belt. It was made specifically for him, a modern version of a blowgun made to operate during magic. Siroun stretched her arms next to him, like a lean cat. Her camo suit hugged her, clenched at the waist by a belt carrying two curved, brutal blades. She pulled a dark mask over the lower half of her face and raised her hood. She looked tiny.

Anxiety nipped at him.

“Stay safe,” he said.

She turned to him. “Adam?”

Shit. He had to recover. “We’re only allowed three kills. You look on edge. Stay in the safe zone.”

“This isn’t my first time.”

She looked up, high above, where the rough column of a tree trunk erupted into thick branches, blocking the moonlight. For a moment, she tensed, the smooth muscles coiling like springs beneath the fabric, and burst forward, across the soft carpet of pine needles and fallen twigs. Siroun leaped, scrambled up the trunk in a brown-and-green blur, and vanished into the branches as if dissolved into the greenery.

Adam locked the van and dropped the keys behind the right-front wheel. The forest waited for him.

He headed uphill at a brisk trot, guided by traces of woodsmoke and some imperceptible instinct he couldn’t explain. Stay safe. He was beginning to lose it. Remember what you are. Remember who she is. She would never see him as anything more than a partner. To step closer, she would have to risk something. To open herself to possible injury, to give up a drop of her freedom. She would never do it, and if he slipped again and showed her that he had stepped over the line, she would sever what few fragile ties bound them.

The old trees spread their branches wide, greedily hoarding the moonlight, and the undergrowth was scarce. A few times a magic-addled vine cascading from an occasional trunk made a grab for his limbs. When it did manage to snag him, he simply ripped through it and kept jogging.

Forty-five minutes later, Adam stepped over an electrified trip wire strung across the greenery at what for most people would’ve been a mid-thigh level and for him was just below the knee. With the magic up, the current was dead, but he took care not to touch it all the same. Beyond the wire, the trees ended abruptly, as if sliced by the blade of a giant’s knife. The gaps between the tree trunks offered glimpses of the electric fence, sitting out in the open, and the Sobanto house, a dark shape beyond the metal mesh. He saw no guards, but the Red Guards didn’t stroll along the perimeter. They hid.

Adam went to ground. The fragrant cushion of pine needles accepted his weight without protest. He slid forward a few feet and saw the house, sprawling in the middle of the clearing. A gun tower punctuated the roof. Two guards manned it, armed with precision crossbows.

Adam craned his neck. Judging by the moss on the trunks, he was facing west. The west guard tower would be behind the house—he didn’t have to worry about it. He was at the southern edge of the house, so the north guard tower wouldn’t present too much of an issue either. Adam crawled another three feet and craned his neck to look left. A blocky structure wrapped in a cage of metal bars rose a few dozen yards away—the south guard tower and his biggest problem. The bars glowed with a faint yellow sheen. Warded.

Adam reached into his camo suit and pulled a small spyglass free. He raised it to his eye and focused on the house. The fence slid closer. A standard twelve-foot-high affair, horizontal wires, coils of razor wire guarding the top edge. The space between the wires was uneven. Something was pulling the fence inward, and that something was probably a ward.

The defensive spells came in many varieties. Some were rooted into the soil, some depended on external markers, rocks, sand, bones, trees … The most powerful ones required blood or a living power source. Judging by the distortion in the fence, this was one hell of a ward, very strong and very potent. Definitely fed by a power source.

Adam craned his neck, looking for the pipeline. He found it twenty-five feet above the ground. A long, green shoot passed through the south guard tower and terminated in a network of thin roots. The roots hung suspended in thin air, dripping magic into the invisible spell. The makers of the ward had found some sort of way to tap into the magic of the forest and channeled it to protect the house.

Adam frowned. The closest route to the house was straight on, through the fence, the ward, and finally through the s

olid-looking side door on the left end of the mansion. The fence didn’t present a problem, but the ward would prevent him from getting inside. His magic was too potent. To take down the ward, he had to sever the roots, but to get to the roots, he would have to take down the ward. A catch-22.

A faint scent floated on the breeze. Siroun. She was on the edge of the woods, to his left, probably right beside the south guard tower. If she took out those guards, she could reach the roots feeding the ward, but to do that she’d have to clear a stretch of open ground in plain view of the crossbows from both the house and the tower. He had to give her a distraction, the kind that would focus both the house and the tower on him.

No guts, no glory.

He put away the spyglass, backed away, and rose to his feet. The woods grew fast, which meant they would have to cut down trees at a steady rate to keep the forest from encroaching onto the property. Adam jogged through the woods, searching. There. A two-foot-wide pine trunk lay on its side, its wide end showing fresh chain-saw marks. Just the right size.

Adam strode to the tip of the tree and pulled out his tactical blade. Two feet long, to him it was conveniently sized, more a knife than a sword. He hacked at the thin section of the trunk. Two cuts, and the narrow crown broke off the tree. That gave him a few branches near the tip. Good enough. Adam returned the blade to the sheath, grasped the trunk about four feet from the bottom, and heaved. Small branches snapped, and the pine left the ground. He shifted it onto his shoulder and strode through the nearest gap between the trees, toward the fence.

A moment, and he was out in the open. The guards on top of the house stared at him, openmouthed. Adam waved at them with his free hand, grasped the tree, and spun. The thirty-foot pine smashed into the fence. Boom!

The effort nearly took him off his feet. The wires snapped under the pressure.

Crossbow bolts whistled through the air. One sprouted from the ground two inches from his foot. The fence was in their way.

Adam pulled the tree upright and brought it down again like a club. Boom!

The second bolt sliced his shoulder, grazing it in a streak of heat.

Boom!