Younger Gods 1: The Younger Gods by Michael R. Underwood Page A

fine, but a bus to the island was not. I fidgeted with worry for most of an hour as we made our way to Latourette Park.
    As we disembarked from the bus, I looked up at the park, which dominated the middle of the island, taking a seemingly circuitous but surprisingly rapid path through the buildings until we reached a hill where the trees raised high, a stand of nature that seemed to have resisted all modernity like a battered castle wall.
    “Where is this pack located?” I asked as we hiked up a path that grew rapidly steeper only twenty yards in. Antoinette picked her way forward, moving slowly, but with confidence.
    “Up this hill and then a few minutes into the forest. But they’ve already seen us.”
    “You’ve seen them watching?” I asked. I tried to match her footfalls as best I could, crouching to lower my center of gravity and maintain my balance. I’d never been an agile child, and as I inherited my father’s height, growing taller only served to distribute my clumsiness equally across my full six feet. It was dry ground, which was better than being on the churning, rolling mass of the ferry, but going from an upset stomach to tricky footing was a combination that promised several forms of disaster.
    I prayed that it would, in this case, fail to deliver said disaster.
    “No, but I can feel them watching.”
    “That is an extraordinary sense with which I am not familiar. Can you describe the feeling, so that I might be attentive for it?”
    “It’s not like that. It’s just that my skin is crawling and I feel like I’m being sized up for dinner,” Antoinette said.
    “Ah. I’ve been feeling like that since I realized my sister was back in town. Perhaps that is why I cannot tell now. Hmm. Isolating variable stimuli in preternatural senses. That reminds me of an essay I read in Alexander’s treatise on the phenomenology of night-dweller attacks. Or was that Hufford?”
    “Don’t care, Jake. Concentrate on not falling and dying.”
    I opened my mouth to respond, then slipped on a loose rock and tumbled fifteen feet down the hill, scraping, banging, and bruising my knee, side, arms, and ego on the way down.
    In a matching display of equipoise, I said, “Aaah!”
    I picked my head out of the dirt cloud I’d kicked up to see Antoinette sledding down the hill after me on her sturdy boots, plowing aside small pebbles before she jumped down to a patch of dirt next to me.
    “Are you okay?” she asked.
    I took stock, wobbling up to my feet. Red-hot pain cut like sandpaper across my knees and shins, and I felt something warm and damp at my face. My hands were raw, scored with dirtied cuts, so I wiped my face on my coat, stinging pain revealing that I’d been right about a wound at my cheek.
    “I will live. That serves me right for not being more attentive to your advice.”
    Antoinette smiled. “That sounds smart. Let’s take our time. A few minutes probably won’t be the end of the world, here.”
    Which was likely correct, though it was difficult to think of doing any less than my best at my fastest while Esther was on the loose. But it was the steady hand that plucked the quintessence from the fire.
    “Please, lead on,” I said, gesturing up the hill.
    Slower this time, we made our way up the incline. I set aside pride and climbed on all fours, leaning into the slope for better balance, scuttling up the hill in my most careful climb, keeping pace with Antoinette fairly well.
    When we reached the summit, I pulled open my bag and dug about for antiseptic and some bandages. I cleaned my knees and my face while following Antoinette into a stand of trees.
    “These are old trees. I didn’t think any this ancient remained in the city.”
    Antoinette walked by an ancient elm, patting it as she went. “The forest protects the pack, and the pack protects the forest. The nature spirits are stronger here than anywhere else in the city. The parks have some heavy hitters, but SI makes the rest of them look