Terrestrial Magic (Jordan Sanders, #1) Page 2

  Tony refused to get out of the driver’s seat, as usual. That was just as well, since a chimera might decide to stalk us if it felt like it.

  I grabbed my notepad and pens. Then I got out of the car just long enough to climb up into the back, with Carter and Luca. It was a better vantage point for observations, and Carter had the binoculars. He wouldn’t need them now that he wasn’t scouting for wildlife anymore. Instead, he fiddled with his equipment, getting the right lens for the job. Meanwhile, Luca had set up a camera on a tripod. His job didn’t require a lot of brainpower, just the ability to shift the camera when the legimal moved out of view.

  My eyes kept drifting to the chimera, and I forced myself to assess the area. I decided quickly that my team wasn’t getting closer, not with the lack of cover. Then again, even if we had cover, the chimera could possibly burn it down. This was one of the fiercest animals in the world. We needed to gather information without endangering ourselves or upsetting the animal.

  But the seriousness of the situation aside, neither Carter nor I could suppress the grins on our faces.

  And my mind was going a thousand thoughts a minute. This wasn’t a subtle, easy-to-miss animal we were dealing with. If a chimera had somehow migrated here, there should have been signs. Its progress would have been tracked. It wouldn’t just be here, with no explanation.

  And that was exactly what had happened thirty years ago. The Boom. Legendary animals—legimals—were suddenly there. Everywhere. Creatures no one had ever seen before were all over the world, and no one understood why.

  It probably wasn’t a sudden population boom of rare animals, despite the name. We didn’t know of any factors that had changed enough to increase their numbers, especially this drastically. Most of these legimals were predators, and there wasn’t necessarily a large enough prey population to serve as their food supply—unless we counted humans, that was.

  If this mysterious chimera’s appearance in any way paralleled what happened thirty years ago, any hints about how it got here would be more than we’d known before. I could answer the biggest question humanity had: how had this happened to us?

  This was an amazing opportunity, on so many levels, and I needed it. I needed to see a chimera with my own eyes, here of all places. My parents—who had only ever wanted me to live a nice, fulfilling, safe life—would not have been proud of my attitude.

  But that nice, fulfilling, safe life wouldn’t have me sitting here, laying eyes on a chimera in the wild. It wouldn’t let me tackle the questions I could never get out of my head. It wouldn’t have been for me.

  Instead, here I was, with a world of possibilities at my fingertips.

  Chapter Two

  EVERYTHING I KNEW ABOUT chimeras came from articles, blurry photos, and ancient manuscripts with questionable documentation practices. Mostly the latter. The ancient sources were how we knew legimals had been more plentiful before, a long time ago—because of the similar descriptions littered throughout literature. Their authors had been living in a world alongside these animals for far longer than the thirty years we’d had.

  I raised the binoculars, using them to get a decent look at the chimera. The animal was feline, with a slight resemblance to a lion. Homer’s Iliad described it with three heads: one lion, one goat, and one snake. Personally, I only saw the one. A misshaped hump of some sort protruded from its back, but I couldn’t imagine it resembling a goat’s head even if I squinted. The chimera’s long and dexterous tail more plausibly reminded me of a snake, but still clearly wasn’t one. I chalked it up to creative embellishment.

  That was the problem with going back too far, looking for sources of information. There had been times when a good story mattered more than the truth. I scribbled my observations in my notepad. For a while, nothing existed except for me, the chimera, and all of the information floating about in my head. It was pleasant and peaceful.

  Luca, the guy I thought of as a placeholder instead of an actual member of my team, interrupted it by calling my name. Since I was technically in charge of him, I tried not to show frustration at being pulled out of a nice mental work zone.

  “Anything else in the area I should focus on, Jordan?” he asked, pointing to his camera, eyes fixed over my shoulder so he wouldn’t have to risk meeting mine. I blinked at him, confused. Why would he come to me for that stuff? When I didn’t answer, he made a small, annoyed grunt. “The link with Hayley cut off.”

  Ah. Hayley was my coworker, roommate, and best friend all in one. Not a field person herself, she still liked to join us remotely. That was the rationale behind hiring someone like Luca in the first place. He’d be her eyes, and she’d direct him—if there was a nearby pack of crocotta, she’d tell him which members to focus on. If she noticed a carcass, she’d tell him to zoom in on it so she could identify the prey for our animal of interest. If he inadvertently spooked an animal, she’d tell him what to do. For some reason, Hayley hadn’t backed out of this responsibility yet, despite the sheer number of times she’d had to train new people.

  Mostly, I didn’t have to care that much. Except for moments like this, when technology failed and the guy operating the camera turned to me for instruction.

  “No,” I told him. “Just keep shooting its behavior. Did you get enough of a close up to determine gender?” I wasn’t hopeful. The chimera was far away, and we’d need to look at Carter’s pictures later to figure it out. I doubted the video feed would have good enough quality.

  “No. But we’re going to go with female.”

  “Why?”

  “Carter flipped a coin.”

  I must have been more absorbed than I’d thought, if I’d missed them doing that not three feet away from me. On the bright side, that meant they weren’t distracting me from the chimera. Giving Luca a quick shrug, I shifted my gaze back towards the animal. True to our unspoken agreement to deal with each other as little as possible, he turned around and left me alone.

  Over the next little while, the chimera gradually shifted closer to us. Not enough to worry me yet, but enough for me to pay attention. Eventually, I decided it was time to back up a bit. We could pull out a little further, then set up again. Better safe than sorry.

  Once we all found positions that wouldn’t have us or any expensive equipment tumbling out the back of the car, I put myself back in the passenger seat. Tony gleefully turned on the ignition and drove us back down the dirt road, though I wasn’t sure why he was so happy about it. We were relocating literally within eyesight of where we were now.

  From the missing back window, I just barely heard Carter, eagerly explaining to Luca which biohazard suits and wraps would protect against basilisk fumes. Between Tony grinning next to me and Carter’s excited voice, there was this moment of contentment, as the vehicle rolled down the road and we shared this adventure together.

  I turned my head to gauge how far we were from the chimera, when a sudden jolt pitched me forward against the dash, the car stopped into place. My shoulder throbbed from the impact, and just like that, the contentment dissipated. Ow. What had Tony managed to crash into? We’d barely been going twenty miles an hour.

  I raised my head, looking for some explanation of how Tony had missed whatever was in front of us—and there wasn’t anything there.

  “Did we hit a ditch?” Carter asked.

  Tony hit the gas, and the car rumbled but didn’t move forward. Okay, weird. Darting a glance my way, Tony snapped, “Get my car moving. Now.”

  That was about as kind as he ever was, to any of us. I didn’t think that he actually disliked us personally—instead, it was the combination of a naturally surly personality on his part, and a lack of common ground on all of ours. Neither the scientists in our lab nor the non-scientists like Carter, hired to help with particular tasks, were his people. We were here for the legimals, or for the adventure. For Tony, this was a means to an end, a way to access our boss’ connections to several legendary Houses for his own anthropological research. He didn’t
understand what we were passionate about, and vice versa.

  So I let out a tired sigh at Tony’s unsurprising curtness, then proceeded to ignore his attitude. My eyes shifted to the chimera. She obviously knew we were there, but she hadn’t paid us any real attention yet. We’d notice any threatening moves from this distance. It was safe enough, for the moment, and we needed to get our car moving.

  I got out, followed by Luca and Carter. The wheels on my side of the vehicle were on solid ground. Nothing to explain why the car stopped. Backing up a bit to get a better vantage point didn’t reveal anything out of place, either.

  Keeping an eye out for any kind of obstruction, I started circling the front of the vehicle. My foot slammed into something hard as I came level with the hood, and my momentum kept my body pushing forward for another half-second—before the rest of me smacked into a firm surface, face first. The impact left my nose stinging, as water collected in my eyes. But as I blinked away the moisture to look at whatever was in front of me, all I saw was empty air.

  There was a moment, for just one heartbeat, when I didn’t understand. I had felt myself crash into some sort of barrier, so why couldn’t I see it before me?

  As I slowly came to accept the reality—that I couldn’t see something which was plainly there—I started freaking out. Because there were not a lot of possible explanations here. I knew what this had to be, even as an instinctive part of me rose up in denial.

  The single good thing about losing my home was that I didn’t have to run into dangerous magic anymore. Dangerous creatures maybe, but nothing worked by people. The legends in this region of Italy had an unofficial non-interference policy with the human populations. They’d been doing their own thing for centuries already, so it seemed like a natural continuation. (Although, considering they’d settled lands that human communities had lost during the Boom, most people also figured they didn’t want to press their luck.)

  “Holy shit,” Tony exclaimed, from his vantage point in the driver’s seat.

  “What?” Luca asked.

  “Did we find the problem?” came Carter’s voice. He and Luca must have been too busy examining the car to see what happened, because that was the only explanation for the lack of total panic in their voices. I put my hand out, and felt a rough texture scraping across my palm. With that, my fears were pretty much confirmed.

  “Are you doing a mime impression?” Carter asked. Yeah, not funny.

  Tony reached over to the seat next to him—my seat—and grabbed one of my pencils. He leaned out of the car and threw it. It flew forward for barely a second, before bouncing off of nothing and landing in the dirt.

  “Whoa,” Carter said, his tone a bit more respectful this time.

  Not good. Not good at all. This was plainly magic, which meant that a legend of some sort had to be behind it. That was worrisome, but I had to push that thought aside for later. For now, I needed to think positively, to believe we could handle this.

  I didn’t really know the technicalities of magical things like these—most people didn’t—but we humans prioritized scientific and technological research for a reason. We absolutely wanted to make sure we weren’t helpless, at the mercy of the powerful. Or even at the mercy of nature. If I’d learned anything from growing up in America’s frontier, it was that magic wasn’t omnipotent or unbeatable.

  Although running into it was really freaky.

  Okay. I hadn’t encountered something like this in a while. I had hoped I never would again. But here I was. Closing my eyes, I tried to focus on how my home community had dealt with magical situations before.

  Call for back up first. It was a nice, obvious step to take, and I felt myself relax as I took out my cell phone. Getting that backup would be complicated, because it wasn’t part of the military police’s job to go after people who left the safety zone. But our boss, Dr. Berti, might be able to figure something out. She counted several local legends among her associates, and they were our best bet at getting around whoever had done this.

  It never even occurred to me that we wouldn’t be able to contact anyone. Given the tumultuousness of our post-Boom age, satellite phones were the norm. By my understanding, they weren’t that easy to disrupt. That had made me feel safe. It meant I never had to imagine being cut off from the rest of the world, unable to call for help or advice.

  Until I realized my phone’s signal was being jammed. I remembered then, that Luca had asked for my direction because he couldn’t contact Hayley on whatever frequency they used to communicate. Which meant something was preventing us from contacting anyone on the outside. We were on our own. A chill swept over me, as I realized this had to be deliberate. The invisible structure we’d run into, the inability to reach anyone—this had to be some kind of trap. And that didn’t make any sense.

  “No way,” Tony said, his hands clenching the steering wheel. “Jordan. Tell me you have a way to get us out of here.”

  Since I was the one in charge, there was nothing for it but to feign confidence. I turned to Carter, but thought better of it when I realized he was poking at the invisible wall in awe. Luca, then. My only option for any kind of assistance was the inexperienced guy I tried to pretend didn’t exist. Great. I really hoped I was wrong about him.

  Luca regarded me dubiously, but he wasn’t freaking out like Tony. Time to find out what he was made of. “We need to check if this wall has us completely closed in or not,” I told him.

  Carter, proving that he was still listening, moved away from the wall, picked up a rock, and threw it as high as he could towards the wall—which was really damn high. The rock soared through the air, not meeting any resistance.

  “I meant horizontally,” I muttered. But my brain latched onto the new information and began running through how we could use it. For now, we knew we weren’t sealed in, and that was a start.

  Tony snorted. “So what are we going to do, fly?”

  I reached out slowly, feeling for the wall in front of me. Awkwardly, not knowing when I would make contact. “No, we’re going to check if the wall has us enclosed on all sides or not.” There were ruins nearby. If the wall passed close to them, we might be able to use them to climb over it.

  My fingers grazed against the rough surface. We’d find a way out of here. And then we’d have the luxury of worrying about how an invisible wall had appeared out of nowhere.

  IT CHAFFED AT ME TO admit it, but what happened next depended solely on the chimera. She could while the day away, oblivious to anything going on around her. Unaware that she might be as trapped as we were. If that kept on until we’d figured out how to get out, all our nerves would be for nothing. But if it didn’t...

  Maybe she wasn’t even trapped. Maybe the invisible barrier was just a tiny segment we could easily get around, some benign thing a local legend had left lying around. That had appeared directly in our path. While we were near a chimera. At the same time that someone jammed our communications.

  Still, no matter how this had happened, it wasn’t actually dangerous unless the chimera made it so.

  I wasn’t planning on getting close enough to the legimal that the sound of the engine might disturb her, so I had Tony drive alongside while I gently dragged my hand along that wall, trying not to lose too much skin. My fingers trailed over regular indentations. Carter was in charge of watching the chimera, since he was going to do that anyway. Luca decided to ride in the car and videotape the whole thing. I was trying to decide whether that was a coping mechanism or a complete denial of reality.

  “Uh, guys?” Carter said. “The chimera just found the wall.”

  Damn. I slowed enough that the front of the pick-up wasn’t obstructing my view. There she was, pawing at something in front of her. Muscles rippled under her skin with every shift of her flank, and the power of this animal struck me. It should have been glorious, but I wasn’t observing her from a safe distance anymore. I’d lost control of the situation. And all I could think of was how helpless I’d be if
all that strength was directed at me.

  The chimera stalked forward, stopped short, and strained against something we couldn’t see. A pit of nervousness opened up in my stomach as she backed up, hesitating. A few tense moments passed, as we waited to see what she’d do next. Her paw reached out in front of her, in a gesture eerily similar to how I’d first felt for the wall.

  The best we could hope for was that she’d back away and forget about it. I held my breath, waiting for it, hoping for it—but then she roared, long and loud, with a force that reached inside of me and shook my bones. With a sudden burst of motion, she reared and rammed herself against the invisible wall.

  A jolt of alarm thrummed through me, at the display of aggression. It seemed like such an extreme reaction. Was that normal behavior for a chimera, in the face of a challenge the powerful animal wasn’t accustomed to? Or was something else going on?

  “As a side note, now we know the wall reaches all the way over there, too,” Carter pointed out, trying to muster his usual levity in the face of danger. And not quite managing it, which didn’t compute in my mind. Carter was never rattled.

  We needed to get out or find cover. The chimera was clearly distressed, and I didn’t know what she’d do. “We’re almost at the ruins,” I told my team, as we neared the two stories of cracked red bricks. “Worst comes to worst, we’ll be out of the open there.”

  But as we got closer, I realized the problem with my plan. The invisible barrier started slanting away from the ruins. With every step, doubt grew that the ruins fell inside the wall at all. Until I finally gave up hope and resigned myself to reality. There was nothing we could potentially use to climb out.

  “Shit,” Carter said, with a strain that made me turn in his direction—to find a spray of fire shooting out of the chimera’s mouth towards the wall. It stopped short only a few feet out, billowing out along the unseen surface and singeing the surrounding grass. With that, the danger level skyrocketed.