We turn back toward the festival grounds, where Elias laughs at something Christopher has said, his joy bright and unguarded. The sight soothes me—and sharpens my resolve in equal measure.
Inside the wards, he’s safe. Outside them? I don’t intend to let him find out what waits there.
Not ever.
Bob doesn’t waste time.
That’s one of the reasons the Network still functions as well as it does. He thrives in motion, in momentum, in taking a thousand moving parts and forcing them into order through sheer will and charisma. The moment I finish telling him what I sensed, he pivots—not away from the problem, but deeper into it.
“Christopher,” he calls, already moving. “I’m going to steal Boone. Keep Elias busy.”
Christopher doesn’t even look up from whatever he’s explaining to Elias, just lifts a hand in acknowledgment. “Got it. Try not to start a global incident before dinner.”
Bob snorts. “No promises.”
We head for one of the temporary command spaces—less a tent and more a layered pocket of wards and reinforced air, stitched together by magic and engineering and a lot of trial-and-error over the centuries. Inside, the hum of the Network is tangible. Old power. New tech. Lines that stretch far beyond this park, beyond this continent.
Bob gestures me toward a stone slab etched with runes and half-embedded screens. “Start from the beginning,” he says. “Everything you felt. Don’t editorialize.”
I close my eyes, steadying myself, and recount it all—the pressure, the wrongness, the way the land recoiled from the thing. The absence of scent. The way it withdrew the instant Elias stepped back into my space.
I also explain in detail our confrontation, even though I’m not 100 percent certain they’re one and the same.
Bob listens without interrupting, his expression growing increasingly grave.
“That focus,” he says slowly when I finish. “That level of specificity… it wasn’t hunting randomly.”
“No,” I agree. “It was assessing. Testing boundaries.”
Bob’s feathers rustle, a nervous habit he rarely indulges. “All right. Let’s wake some ghosts.”
He activates the international channels. The response isn’t immediate. That, in itself, is telling.
Messages come back slowly, cautiously, from contacts who’ve not been asked to remember certain things in a very long time. Names surface, half buried in myth and obsolete classifications. Old warnings. Old mistakes.
Then one word appears on the monitor between us.
Neuri.
My gut clenches.
Bob swears softly. “That’s… that can’t be right.”
“It fits,” I say grimly. “Everything fits.”
We pull up what little remains of the records. Fragmented accounts from Eastern Europe. Pre-Christian Slavic folklore written down centuries after the fact. References in the Yeti’s earliest notes—not formal entries, just marginalia:Failed lines.Dangerous isolates.Do not attempt reintegration.
The Neuri Shade.
Believed extinct eight to ten centuries ago. Proto-hominid cryptids—upright, semi-humanoid, and profoundly wrong in movement and presence. Predators who moved too smoothly for their size, eyes that absorbed light instead of reflecting it. No recognizable scent trail. No bond to land or ley line.
Walkers without roots.
“They never settled,” Bob murmurs, reading over my shoulder. “Never formed territories. They just… passed through places and stripped them bare.”
“And then vanished,” I add. “Before the Network learned how to track them.”
Bob leans back, wings twitching. “Which means we don’t know how they went extinct.”
