Inside, a labyrinth of churning and grinding machinery processed shipments of hardwood logs that the mill received each morning. Most of the machinery was automated and outfitted with laser-guided planing tools that mitigated the risk of injury to my employees, but there were still bodies on the floor to supervise, manually count and inspect, and operate machinery as necessary. The scent of sawdust was so strong it often tickled my nose into a sneeze but having spent my entire life around the lumber mill, the smell had become a comfort to me. Sweet, dry, dusty, tangy. The scent always varied slightly based on where the logs came from and what type of wood they were, but they all had that same earthy smell of nature that reminded me of my roots as a wild animal. A wolf.

Recently, one of our debarker machines had failed and we couldn’t determine what the cause was. It seemed the millwrights we brought in had gotten it operational again. I watched the machine hungrily take logs and strip them of their rigid brown bark, flinging the odd chip into the air before setting the naked log on a belt that would feed it to the next machine in the lineup. Satisfied with the repairs, I returned to the lobby with a fresh layer of sawdust on my shirt.

My receptionist produced the invoice for me to sign. She smiled sweetly at me, plying for some kind of attention, but my gaze didn’t rise until I’d scrawled my last name on the paper and pushed it toward her. “Thanks, Mr. March,” she said, taking it back.

“My pleasure.” Always a pleasure to pay for good work. I would do whatever it took to keep my business running smoothly.

After my quick visit to the mill, I would have joined Taylor on the perimeter check, but with the Mythguard in town I needed to make sure their operations were running smoothly too. I pulled up to a motel at the base of the mountains, the parking lot dotted sparsely with cars, and knocked on the door of the fifth suite. A lanky man with thinning brown hair and scruff on his cheeks welcomed me inside.

“So I received the case files pertaining to recent Lycan-related incidents,” said Sebastian Hicks, the Mythguard representative supervising the Gunnison packs. “I’ve been looking over them and, in each event, the damage has been… significant. It seems there isn’t a Lycan event in which the transformed individual in question hasn’t caused destruction. Then again, non-destructive events might not have been reported, but based on our knowledge of Lycans, it seems unlikely that a person can obtain their Lycan form and remain in control of their actions. It’s like the beast aspect of a shifter is amplified tenfold and becomes so dominant that it completely overwhelms human cognizance.”

“Even in a marked individual?”

“The marked condition prior to turning Lycan seems to bear no effect.”

I stood beside Sebastian in front of the table where he had spread out his case files. There were five incidents laid out before us from all over the world—one from Iceland, one from Thailand, and three from right here in the U.S. All of them reported some number of human deaths—and the Lycan involved had been euthanized every time.

“All of these individuals were dragons,” I pointed out.

“Yes. They’re the most notorious for seeking out the Lycan ritual. Ghouls tend to keep to themselves and vampires find strength in numbers, relying more on stealth than brute strength. Fae generally aren’t an issue, as we’ve found they and unicorns are far more benevolent than the aggressive shifter races. At times, wolves may dabble, but it’s primarily dragons that we have experienced abusing the blessings from their Sun God,” explained Sebastian. “We suspect it’s because the dragons feel the greatest effects of shifter oppression, being diurnal rather than nocturnal like ghouls and vampires. They don’t have as much freedom to hunt or embrace their beasts like wolves do, because dragons… well, most humans don’t believe dragons exist. Wolves are part of nature. Dragons are an anomaly that the Mythguard have worked for centuries to hide, to protect the delicate sensibilities of humans. I think humanity would suffer a collective mental break if they knew that there were giant flying reptiles prowling about.”

It made sense for dragon shifters to be most prone to acting out. “That was Lothair Javier’s leading cause, wasn’t it? While in the Mythguard, he was an advocate for the exposure and freedoms of dragon shifters.”

“That’s right,” said Sebastian. “He advocated for the slow introduction of dragons to humanity, but the Mythguard continuously rejected his proposals. Exposing dragons would mean exposing shifters, and the world just isn’t ready for that. The damage it could cause to shifter communities globally would be astronomical.”

In a way, I felt for Lothair. It couldn’t be easy being forced into the shadows when dragons worshipped the sun. But there had to be a better way than imposing the power of dragons onto unsuspecting humans. Mass death wasn’t the answer.

“How many unicorn shifters are under the protection of the Mythguard?” I asked.

“We have about three hundred in our system, but there has to be at least two thousand in existence. They’re the rarest type of shifter, with ineffectual Alpha lines that rarely extend more than two or three generations.”

“That’s because of their placid nature. There is a sense of violence intrinsic to the act of transforming a human into a shifter,” I mused out loud. “And because they’re so rare, they don’t often breed.”

“Interestingly, we’ve found that lately, the bottlenecking on Alpha lines is caused by the hybridization of unicorn shifters. They will breed with other shifter races in order to protect their offspring—a unicorn hybrid without a horn is useless when it comes to the Lycan ritual.”

The horn was an integral part of the Lycan ritual, a well of magic that shifter Gods fed off of. The Gods granted shifters magic, but it had come from their own reservoirs. The ritual was an offering, a form of thanks, a return of magic from where it came. The Sun God in particular had always been receptive of these offerings, as the sun itself was ever hungry for more fuel to burn, to consume.

“Is there any way a shifter can be blocked from performing an effective ritual?”

Sebastian caught my eye. “Not that we know of. If we could prevent Lothair and David from performing the ritual, we would. But as it is, we have no way of preventing it except for restricting their access to a unicorn horn. And with Muriel Vale being held in Grandbay, at such a close proximity to them… it’s only a matter of time before they get their hands on her.”

A long sigh streamed from my nose as I considered this. Gavin was insistent on protecting Muriel, but he was only inviting the inevitable. There was no way I could convince him to hand Muriel over to the Mythguard, especially since the Mythguard were the reason Muriel had been targeted in the first place. They had failed to protect her from Lothair accessing her files when he abandoned the Mythguard and went rogue.