Page 4 of Hexes & Heartstrings (Shifters of Bastion Keep #2)

But revenants like him didn't stay down forever, and twice now Sergiy had caught whiff of his recent passage in the Umbral. Hence asking his priest for some way to better track him down, because like hell was Sergiy going to let the fallen lord attack his home twice .

"The goal is to find a trail," Sergiy began. "I'm not expecting to run into him headlong, but if that does happen, make sure you trainees hang back."

He heard Dorian grumble a few swears, but Ivar and Isabel seemed to take it in stride.

After sheathing his spear, Sergiy took point, shifting into his horse-sized drake form as he did so. His larger mass would better allow him to intercept any shadowlings that might shrug off a piercing spear, and for rest, he trusted his pack.

Ivar maintained a steady pace behind him in his human form, holding the lantern out with one hand, carrying an axe in the other. Auguste cast a forlorn look out as the rest of the pack began fanning out, but stayed close to his partner.

There hadn't been much rhyme to Sergiy's first Umbral searches.

In his early, fury-filled desperation, sometimes he'd run, sometimes he'd flown wide circuits, but the extra-dimensionality of the Umbral realm made things almost pointless.

Even ignoring the deeper layers, the terrain of the penumbra waxed and waned like the tides, and a grotto might be as shallow as a cupboard one day, or as deep as several city blocks the next, requiring multiple visits.

But over time, and after reading through the castle's history books and with the help of the two chance scents he'd come across, he felt like he was starting to think like Wintersbane. Always direct routes, even over obstacles. Maybe.

They encountered little over the next hour. A few shadowlings were spotted, most of which ran or sank deeper into the Umbral by ways the guardians couldn't follow, but several spirits weren't sapient enough to recognize them.

Three spirits of Babbling Anguish rushed their group, visible as ghosts of indeterminate race and gender.

It became immediately apparent that approaching one felt like a kick in the gut, an emotional attack that made one feel like they had committed the worst of crimes.

Dorian charged one himself, trying to punch it in the face, and fell to his knees as he touched it.

Ivar's arrows and Bridget's meteor hammer could keep them at bay while they experimented with tactics—their weapons passed harmlessly through the spirits, but it forced them to pause each and every time.

Weapon attacks, no-go. Attacks in their animal forms proved more effective, but forced the vomit-inducing consequence, so not ideal.

Eventually they discovered that shouting back disrupted the spirits, moreso when the guardians shouted together as a group.

Flickering and fading, the spirits fled, and Sergiy said not to pursue.

"So what in the fuck was that?" Dorian asked, taking Cadmus's advice and drinking from a water pouch. "They just shrugged off everything."

"A lot of the shadows and spirits in the Umbral are like limited computer programs," Sergiy said, gesturing for the group to resume their patrol.

"You have to fight them on their own level.

At their core, those spirits only exist to verbally harangue others.

Take away their voice, you take away their power.

Ear plugs would have worked too, I'm sure, but drowning out their complaints worked. "

Dorian frowned, and Isabel spoke up, wringing her hands together.

"Like how a mean person who bothers retail workers and waiters gets power by being the center of attention, maybe?"

Several guardians had a chuckle at that. As they left, Sergiy caught Dorian staring back at the departed spirits, then down to his spiked knuckles. Hopefully he'd learn a measure of caution from the experience.

They didn't want to encounter more of the spirits if they could help it, since the shouting had a chance of drawing unwanted attention, so they made a wide sweep around the area. But once they did…

"M'lord!" Ivar called out.

Sergiy tilted his head, listening, then flew back towards the center of their patrol group.

"Finally," Sergiy said, staring at the lantern.

The barest hint of color could be seen in the silver flame. A flicker of orange, sometimes yellow. Ivar experimented, walking a few yards in different directions, then pointed down the valley.

"That way, I think," he said.

Sergiy felt like he'd just let out a breath that he hadn't realized he'd been holding, and began giving out orders.

He and Bridget took point, weapons drawn as they moved.

He had Ivar hand off the lantern to Dorian, mainly to keep the brash guardian out of trouble, but it also allowed Ivar to free both his hands for his bow.

Auguste and Cadmus were sent to their flanks, sniffing out any surprises, and the rest of the guardians were pulled back into a tighter formation around the fresh recruits.

After ten more minutes of careful walking, their probable target became suddenly visible, appearing within Sergiy's sight like a scene from a pop-up book.

He called everyone together, and as a group they inspected what looked like a gargantuan, pitch black wall, hundreds of feet long or more it looked like, its top disappearing into the roiling sky of the Umbral.

The whole thing smelled like Wintersbane, and Sergiy's senses as a weredrake heightened, a white-hot flame just waiting for the real foe to appear.

Bringing out his wings, he tried soaring past the darkness. He flew twenty feet forward before glancing back, and found that he hadn't even stepped into the darkness at all.A second and third try by himself and Bridget netted the same nothing result.

More Umbral shenanigans.

"Time to fetch back-up, m'lord?" Cadmus asked.

Sergiy sighed heavily, tapping the butt of his spear against the ground repeatedly in his irritation.

"I hate to leave, but yes, and we'll all go together.

I'm not keen on leaving even a small group behind, not for the hours that they might be waiting, so we'll also need to make sure we can find our way back here.

It's out of the way of any of our anchors, so—Ivar, really? "

The werewolf had his back to him, but the splashing sound was unmistakable, as was the immediate scent of urine. After a moment, the archer lowered his kilt, took his bow back into his hands, and then shrugged as he rejoined the group.

"Should be easier to find a mark like this, yeah?" he asked, and Sergiy was begrudgingly forced to agree.

After four other guardians similarly marked the area—"Come on, now, not so much that we're wading in piss!"—Sergiy took flight to lead the way back to their anchor, mentally mapping the terrain.

They hurried back, howling along the way, and once they arrived Sergiy immediately shifted back into the natural world to radio the keep.

They took a water break while they waited, and in the meantime, Sergiy informed the other pack leaders what they'd found. In turn, Marka and Yacob updated him on their scouting; a dozen shadowlings scared off, but nothing else noteworthy.

Eventually, Sergiy spied Roland charging up the trail. The High Priest of Bastion Keep was a large black wolf with white around his muzzle, and he panted as he approached. The man was in his late forties, and Sergiy suspected that he had galloped the entire ten miles to their position.

Sergiy looked Roland in the eyes, noting the resolution.

"Let's get this over with," he said, shifting once again into the Umbral.

Yacob and Marka took an eager lead. Any shifter could follow a scent trail, but canines could do it better than most, and of course Sergiy wasn't about to tell two bull-headed alphas to hold back, not when they were this close.

Flying above the charging packs as they neared the site of the wall, Sergiy was the first to notice the problem, and it took effort to hold his tongue as he landed.

"Fucking godwhore!" Cadmus swore in his stead.

"It was here?" Yacob asked, sniffing the air around the marked terrain.

"It was."

Instead of a massive black wall with the hint of a structure behind it, there was now just a patch of black shadow, extensive and perfectly circular.

Roland approached its border, shifting into his werewolf form as he did so. He pulled a candle out of a pouch at his side, whispering a few words that set it alight. It, like the lantern that Ivar was waving about, only had a silver glow.

"Sorry, my lord," he said. "It was here an hour ago, I can say that much, but now?"

"Why don't we just go after it?" Dorian asked, about to step forward.

Sergiy thrust his spear to the side, blocking his passage, and pushed out the command through his alpha senses.The young pup froze in place.

"Look a bit closer," he growled. "That's not a shadowy path you're seeing. It's a damned sinkhole.

Roland stepped forward. "Aye, my lord, you have it right."

As the three packs of guardians watched, Roland doused his candle, used a claw to inscribe several glyphs into its wax surface, and then plucked the wick.

There was a spark of silver flame, like before, but now there was also a golden thread connecting the candle to his hand.

The priest tossed the candle forward, and it fell into an abyss.

The candle shrank from view as it fell, but never quite seemed to go out, a flickering glimmer. Seconds passed as Sergiy and his warband stared into the chasm, each person taking a turn at the front, but always staying well clear of the demarcation on the ground.

"It seems that Lord Kerry has his own domain in the Umbral, and one that moves," Roland said at last, snapping his fingers and dismissing the golden cord. "I strongly advise against leaping in. I suspect that you'll be eaten by swimming shadows long before you reach the bottom."

"If we'd managed to force our way through the barrier earlier…" Auguste began, then trailed off uncertainly.

"Then we'd be inside that domain right now, ten layers deep in the Umbral and without an easy way to resurface," Bridget finished. "That'd make for some hard fighting."

Yacob hefted his maul, growling. "We should dive in. Our warband has three packs. We can manage whatever's down there."

"If it were just shadowlings and spirit kings, I'd agree," Sergiy said.

"But even assuming we find the place again, what's to stop Wintersbane from immediately moving it to a different layer?

Plus, fighting a powerful lord on his home turf is as dangerous as it gets. There are better ways, right Roland?"

Sergiy watched as Roland knelt on the ground, then seemed to grab a handful of the shadowy pit. He motioned for Ivar to approach, then took the lantern from him, pouring the darkness into the oil reserve. The flame turned from silver to blue, before Roland doused the lamp, saving its fuel.

"Aye, my lord, I catch your meaning."The priest straightened with a grunt and a crack of his knees. "When we get back to the keep, I'll start preparations for an extended dive into the deeper Umbral. Could take a while, especially if you're planning on taking all five packs with you."

"Thank you, and yes, assuming our new garrison forces are ready by then."

Sergiy pointed his spear back towards the anchor, and most of his warband immediately turned to bound that way, others following more slowly, casting glances back.

Sergiy and Roland remained, staring at the darkness.

In his head, Serigy could feel a white flame.

His drake senses, recognizing a foe, close enough that he could taste it, but impossible to get to.

Roland put a paw on his shoulder, and Sergiy lifted his snout.

"I know you're itching to dive down and confront the bastard, my lord," he whispered. "Pay him back for the ones that the spirit kings hurt when he invited the shadows into our home. But now is not the time."

"I know. Too many ways it could go wrong, it'd be like venturing into the arctic without any supplies.

" Sergiy turned his back, then began following his warband.

"First we'll prepare. We'll gather supplies, and wait until we're more organized both here and at the keep.

Tap you and our witches for charms, too. But we'll be back."

"Aye, young lord, we'll be back."