Were they the ones who called the monsters in Africa?

"Matt?" Uncle Mike asked.

"Do we know where any of these witches are?" I asked.

Aunt Julie and Colonel Black exchanged tense glances and Aunt Julie said, "Dr. Longtree, could you wait in my office, please? I'd like to meet with you after the briefing."

"Certainly."

Once she left, I asked, "What's going on? Something happen?"

Aunt Julie nodded. "The CIA has an operative in Australia. He thinks he has a line on the main coven, so we've asked to meet with him. They were reluctant to let him break his cover, but ultimately they realized this situation was beyond their control, so they're allowing me to meet him in Perth while the rest of the team is investigating the attacks."

"I want to caution all of you not to jump to conclusions." The colonel gave us a stern look. "We're not sure this Nocturna Maura has anything to do with the monsters or not. It might be unrelated."

I tapped on my fingers on the table, thinking. "Or it might be everything we've been searching for the last two years."

There was a long pause, and the silence grew so loud, it rang over the ticking of the ancient clock on the wall behind Lieutenant Nguyen.

Finally the colonel said, "Let's face one problem at a time. You'll fly out in two days, at fourteen-hundred."

"But we'll stay focused on the witches, right? Every time we go into fire-fighter mode, we lose the thread on this stuff," I said.

"That's why Captain Tannen is taking this trip," Colonel Black said. "Even the general agrees we need to dig into this."

It was a small victory, but I'd take it. "Thank you, sir."

"Let's hold our thanks until the end, Mr. Archer," Colonel Black said. "You might want to take them back before this whole thing is over."

"Yes, sir," I said. "I might."

Chapter Thirty-Two.

Multi-time zone travel always made me feel like a used sock that had been wadded up and forgotten in the corner of a gym bag. I cracked a giant yawn while Uncle Mike met with the Australian military contacts as a courtesy before we invaded their territory. Lucky for us, the Australians were totally on board with our mission and had allowed us to use an abandoned airstrip fifty miles away from a huge mining town as a staging point. They had reason to be helpful; two more "alien" sightings had been reported during our flight over, and one involved a casualty.

With this new information, Mike moved up our deployment timetable, while Aunt Julie took her team into Perth to meet the CIA contact. Instead of spending a few days there, though, Julie was going to bring him to base camp for a full debrief because the situation was too critical for us to wait around. The Australian Army was nice enough to give her a lift by helicopter, because Perth was five hundred miles west of the our base camp.

All along, I'd thought the monsters in the Outback had been close to Perth, lending some weight to my theory about that missing physicist. I'd come to find out, though, that nothing's close to Perth. Now I wondered if that theory had more holes than my oldest pair of gym shorts. Still, my gut told me it was important. I just had to figure out how Dr. Burton-Hughes disappearance fit in with everything else. And I had to do it while breaking in a new team.

Will's team had gelled pretty quickly on the way over, bonding over the box of cookies Millicent had provided for the trip, which Will shared with everyone. He quickly became the favorite guy on the plane, and I was glad he'd gotten comfortable with his guys so fast.

I didn't have any cookies to smooth things over with my guys. Dorland was back on ordinance, and Lieutenant Lanningham had been promoted to Uncle Mike's second-in-command since Johnson was now Will's CO, but that left two holes to fill. I watched the newbies load gear into one of the Humvees the C-130 had dropped off for us. I hadn't spent much time getting to know them. So far, three men had been killed backing me up. This time, I thought I'd keep my distance for a while, rather than get too attached. Just in case.

When I joined the group, Sergeant Greene nodded gravely and that was it. Sergeant Blakeney, on the other hand, gave me a fist bump and looked around the airstrip wide-eyed.

"I never been to Australia," he said, his accent thicker than the dust covering the lead Humvee's windshield. "It looksakind of like west Texas."

"Doesn't all of Texas look like this?" Lanningham asked and Dorland let out a chuckle.

"No, sir." Blakeney pointed out at the scrubby plain stretching toward the horizon. "Sure, a lot of the state is flat, but it ain't barren like this. West Texas is nothing but miles and miles of dusty prairie, though. My middle brother, Jimmy, used to say Midland wasn't the end of the earth, but you could see it from there."

"I hate to tell you, man," I said, "but until you see where we're going, you don't know the true meaning of the *end of the earth.'"

Mike waved me over, so I turned to go just as Blakeney asked, "Is it really that bad? Or is he just punking the new guy?"

"If it's anything like Africa, it's that bad," Dorland muttered at my back.

Uncle Mike was poring over a large paper map spread across his Humvee's hood and he didn't look up when I stood quietly at his right elbow. "Chief, this is going to be another bumpy ride."

"I guess it was too much to hope that they'd paved the whole Outback in the last eighteen months," I said. "We should get on the road soon. It's going to be hot out there this afternoon."

He nodded. "No doubt."

There was a whine, then a rush of wind as the helicopter's rotors started spinning at the edge of the airstrip, Aunt Julie came jogging over to usa"no easy thing in a skirted suit and heels, but she didn't miss a step. She and her men were wearing civvies today, thinking it would be better to pretend to be journalists rather than U.S. Army Intelligence specialists. I couldn't tell where Julie had concealed her sidearmsa"plurala"but I had little doubt she could reach them fast.

"Permission to leave, Major." Julie said.

Mike had his back to her, so she missed how he closed his eyes a second before saying, "Granted, Captain." He turned to her. "Be careful."

"Always." Julie's smile, while just for Uncle Mike, could've melted sand into glass and I felt kind of awkward for intruding on their moment.

A grin spread across Mike's face. "Uh huh. I seem to remember you getting into trouble the last time we were in Australia."

She touched his arm. "Not this time."

He was still smiling as she and her team took off, but when Uncle Mike continued to watch the helicopter grow smaller and smaller in the sky, I smacked him on the shoulder. "Sir, we're packed up and ready to go."

"Okay." It seemed to take him some effort to refocus on me. "Let's go hunt some monsters."

"I thought that was my line," I said.

"I think at this point, Chief, it's everyone's line."

I followed Mike to the small metal building where we'd parked our vehicles and gear. Calling this place an airstrip was an exaggeration: two old metal hangers, a dirt runway and a windsock didn't give me much confidence that a plane could actually land here without losing its landing gear. Thank God I hadn't seen it from inside the C-130 when we touched down. I probably would've had my head between my knees, praying that we didn't die.

Although we were barely on the very edge of the Great Victoria desert, the landscape had started to give way to scrub brush and reddish sand, and the sun beat down on our heads. It was hard to believe that a mid-sized town full of people who worked at a ginormous open gold mine was only fifty miles from herea"or that the town had trees and grass and old historic buildingsa"because "here" looked like Mars and felt about as desolate.

Hundreds of miles to the west lay Perth and to the east lay the Outback, but we still had a two-hundred mile drive to our primary camp site. The problem was, except for the coordinates for the "alien sightings," we had zero direction to go by once we were out there. If the hikers' stories didn't pan out, we'd have to canvass an area twice the size of Kansas to find any real leads. Now, a normal person wouldn't like those odds, but trouble would probably find me wherever I ended up.

The big eclipse wasn't for three weeks. Maybe Tink would be talking to me by then.

Chapter Thirty-Three.

Late in the afternoon, we found the spot Aunt Julie had staked out for our encampment. If it weren't for GPS, I'm not sure how we would've found ita"every mile had looked the same for the last two hours.

Australia was at the tail end of its summer, and the air shimmered with heat when we finally stopped. Eager to leave the Humvee behind for as long as possible, I hopped out and helped Greene, Dorland, and Blakeney unload our gear from the equipment truck.

It was nightfall by the time Greene and two of Will's new non-coms started ringing camp with razor coil. Exhausted after a quick MRE for dinner, I decided to pass out for the next ten hours; tomorrow we were going to plan out our search and I needed to be rested. When I got to the tent, though, Greene and Dorland were playing poker on one side and Blakeney was already asleep on the bottom bunk on the other side.

"Oops," I said. "Sorry, guys. I thought this was my rack."

I turned to go but Greene called out, "Archer, you're in the right place."

"No, I normally bunk with Will and Lieutenant, uhaCaptain Johnson." I picked up my duffel bag, wondering how I missed the memo about being moved to a different tent.

"It's not a mistake, man," Dorland said in his quiet voice. "You and Cruessan can't bunk together anymore. It's a liability; if monsters hit a tent, and you're both bunking there, we're down two wielders. If that happens, everyone here dies, and the rest of the mission is screwed."

My duffel bag hit the ground with a thump. I couldn't bunk with Will? "Does the major know about this?"

"Yeah," Dorland said, dropping a card and drawing another. He grimaced and dropped the entire hand before saying, "It was his idea."

I stood there for a minute trying to digest what they were saying. Now that Will was a wielder, would that mean we couldn't hang out together as much? I hoped that wasn't the case and this new rule only applied to bunks, but I wasn't too sure.

"Yeah, okay," I said without enthusiasm. "I hope you three don't snore."

As if he heard me, Blakeney made a noise like a rusty chainsaw and rolled over.

Great.

The next morning, I stumbled out of the tent, blinking in the sunshine. Turned out all three of my roomies snored and when I did finally manage to sleep, I woke up several times with the vague feeling that something was watching me. That was never a good sign, but the knife-spirit hadn't piped up with any kind of warning, so I chalked it up to paranoia.

Will had already claimed one of the nylon folding chairs in the middle of camp and was chowing down on sausage biscuit MRE. He gave me a half-wave when I sat next to him to eat my boxed pancakes. Even though I could hear a few guys talking smack as they worked out nearby, the morning had a stillness to it that I didn't like. The wind would gust, then stop, then gust again without doing anything to cool things down. A bead of sweat ran down my neck into my collar and I swatted at it.

"You pick up some fleas out here?" Will asked, his mouth full of biscuit.

"You born in a barn, or do you just like showing me your food?"

Will gave me the finger before swallowing his bite. "They tell you why they split us up yesterday?"

I prodded my breakfast with my fork. "Yeah. Kind of sucks, huh? I never even thought it would be risky to keep us together, but now that I think about it, any time I've been out with another wielder, they stationed us at opposite sides of camp."

"There's something else," Will said. His forehead had wrinkled up until his eyebrows made a V. "I can't hear my knife."

"Can't? Or are they just being quiet?" I asked.

"Mine's never quiet," he said. "It's weird, man."

We finished our breakfast in silence, with me wondering why the spirits weren't talking to us. Sure, Tink was pissed with me, but this silent treatment made me uneasy. It was less like she was giving me the cold shoulder, and more like she wasaabsent.

The day passed slowly. Uncle Mike and Johnson spent most of the afternoon staring at maps and discussing routes out to the spot where the hikers saw their "aliens." The rest of us played cards, worked out, or invented games to keep from going crazy. My particular favorite was seeing who could launch an MRE container the farthest using only a spoon.

When the sun finally went down, the air got chilly and I wandered into my tent for the night. Blakeney had sprawled out on his bunk to watch a movie on his iPad. Dorland and Greene were still outside. Tired and bored, I said good-night to Blakeney and climbed up onto my bunk. Uncle Mike said we would take our first run out into the desert at dawn; tomorrow would be a hard day and I knew I needed to sleep. It wasn't hard to drift off, and I dreamed about Ella.

A few hours later, I startled awake. My heart raced like I'd been running a 5k in bed and sweat had soaked my t-shirt. Shivering in the cool desert air, I wrapped my blanket tighter around my shoulders, wondering if I was getting sick, or if something else was wrong.

That's when the screaming started.

A cry of agony, wrenched from someone's throat, rang through camp. The sound made the hairs on my scalp prickle and I grabbed my knife even as I rolled off my bunk. I shoved my feet into my boots and ran outside. A bodya"one of Will's guysa"lay in the path, his limbs splayed at awkward angles like he'd been thrown from a car. I didn't have to take a closer look to know his neck was broken.

The dead soldier had been one of the three guys on guard duty. I turned to check the perimeter of camp. A second bodya"one of the other guardsa"lay crumpled just outside the razor-coil barrier.

We'd been breached.

More screams rang out. I edged into the center of camp and saw that something huge had shredded a hole in the side of the support staff's tent and was plowing through it, carryinga I closed my eyes. Don't think about it. Don't think about what it's carrying. Just kill the damn thing before it does that to anyone else.

"Will!" I shouted, stalking across camp, hoping if I made enough noise, the thing would decide to tangle with me instead of the others. "Need some backup, man!"

"Already here." Will slipped from the shadows.

All around us, the camp was in complete pandemonium. Uncle Mike was barking orders, dressed in an untucked t-shirt, a pair of camo pants and unlaced boots, and guys poured out of their racks, sleep-drunk and disoriented.

"What is it?" Will asked, sounding grim.

"Too dark to see."

The monster hadn't abandoned the tent; from what I could tell, it had killed the guys in there and was waiting for us to come to it. All I could see was a hunched, giant shadow with tufts of furaor maybe those were feathers standing up on its shoulders.

"What we dealing with?" Lanningham asked in a raspy voice. In just his pants and a tank that strained across his massive shoulders, he lookeda"and soundeda"like a sleep-deprived Vin Diesel.

"Two guards confirmed dead," I said. "Not sure how many are in that tent, but at least two of them are dead, too."

"You sure?" Lanningham asked.

I shuddered, thinking about what I saw. "Positive, sir."

"Nobody alive in the tent then." Lanningham swore. "What do you need to take this thing out?"

"I think we only have one option. Flush and rush," I muttered, and glanced at Will.

"Just like old times," he said, lifting his knife.