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THE CALL OF THE FOREST

Jakub Mařík


When Stefan woke up, he could smell the scent of pine needles and damp moss. That surprised him, because he was pretty sure that kind of scent had no place in his bedroom. He thought he could hear someone’s voice too, but if anyone was there with him, they had gone silent. Stefan opened his eyes. There was a full moon where his ceiling should be.

“What the . . . ” he muttered, slowly standing up and looking around.

He was surrounded by trees. Lots of trees. And since that was the case, he leaned against one and tried to remember how he got here.

The last thing he could recall was sitting with his brothers. Tobias was furious that Stefan and Klaus had left him out of something. Did they sign some deal without him? Stefan couldn’t remember signing anything recently. Besides, it would have to be something about the house or estate because he wouldn’t need his brother’s signature for anything else. They must have been able to explain it to Tobias, because they opened a bottle of slivovitz, Tobias calmed down, and then . . . 

And then nothing.

Could this be that infamous blacking out drunk which he’s managed to avoid—despite his wild university years—to this day?

But then how did he end up in a forest?

“Hey, hey, hey, the dice are rolled, play!”

Stefan nearly jumped out of his skin at the sound before he realized it was coming from the pocket of his jeans. It was a cell phone; the alarm had just gone off. The phone was his, but he had no idea why he would set an alarm for 1:30 a.m. And that horrible pop song instead of a normal ringtone . . .  He turned it off before he’d have to listen to it a second time.

His brothers were definitely pranking him. They saw he was as drunk as a skunk and took him behind the house and into the woods. Now they were either hiding somewhere nearby or sleeping at home.

“Hey!” Stefan shouted, just in case Tobias and Klaus were hiding in the bushes somewhere, waiting for that stupid alarm to wake him up. “Where are you, you bastards?”

His only answer were the sounds of the night forest—before the alarm drowned them out again.

“Hey, hey, hey, the dice are rolled, play!”

Stefan angrily turned it off. He wanted to throw the phone away. Fortunately, he realized in time how stupid that would be. Opening his contact list, he dialed Klaus’s number. There was no ringtone, and when he checked the screen, there was an empty line where the signal strength indicator should be. Where had these idiots taken him that he had no signal? He shoved the phone back into his pocket.

“HEY, HEY, HEY?”

Stefan froze. Those weren’t his brothers. No way. It sounded like an animal, something between a bear and a Rottweiler, and it unerringly strummed the strings of his oldest instincts, which screamed at him to run and not stop at any cost. Stefan would have gladly obeyed them if he knew exactly where the sound came from. For now, he could only back up and hope he was heading in the right direction.

Maybe if he stayed quiet, it would go away . . . 

“Hey, hey, hey, the dice are rolled, play!”

Something howled deep in the woods and began to push its way through the bushes so loudly that Stefan had no more trouble determining where it was coming from. The moon offered enough light to keep him from tripping over the first root, so he ran as fast as possible. When the path tilted to a slope, he instinctively headed down.

The sounds behind him grew louder and closer. He didn’t know what was chasing him, but there must have been more of them, because the deep, hoarse hey-ing was joined by several other voices. Stefan’s phone encouraged them relentlessly, the trio of singers reliably guiding his pursuers. Hadn’t it been in his pocket, Stefan would have thrown the phone away.

The gentle slope suddenly became steep. Stefan cursed as his boots sunk into dusty dirt, desperately trying to keep his balance as he ran down. He made it all the way down without falling, but he was unable to avoid the massive tree. He crashed into the trunk, tripped over a root and ended up on his ass.

“Scheiße!” he cursed desperately and scrambled quickly back to his feet before he noticed three stripes on the tree trunk.

Two white ones and a dark blue one in the middle.

A hiking sign!

Stefan only now realized that he was standing on a trodden path. He had moved to Czechia three years ago and had already walked most of the nearby hiking trails. The blue trail led above Mikulášovice, but he could be several kilometers away from town. But maybe . . . 

He glanced around again, and then he looked up.

It was there.

The peak of the Dancer loomed above the treetops in the moonlight and couldn’t have been more than a kilometer away. If he made it to the stone lookout tower, he could hide in the restaurant. He’d been there twice before and didn’t recall it having bars on the windows. He’d get in, barricade himself in the restroom and wait for the owner.

Stefan started running again.

Something hit him so hard that he fell off the road and rolled down the slope until a few boulders stopped him. He must have broken his leg; something definitely snapped. Before he could check, the pain in his leg was overshadowed by a much worse pain in his chest as his pursuer jumped on him and broke half of his ribs.

The creature lowered its head, inspecting him. Its face was disturbingly human; only the nose was too flattened and the mouth too wide. Green eyes were so bright they almost glowed. Short grey fur covered its face and a long mane of hair as thick as horsehair crowned the head. Its nostrils flared as it took in the scent of its prey.

Stefan didn’t dare breathe. He doubted that playing dead would help, but there was nothing better he could do.

Five smaller creatures scrambled down the slope, perfect copies of the giant that had Stefan pinned to the ground, only their manes were much shorter and thinner.

“Hey, hey, hey, the dice are rolled, play!”

The creature jerked its head sharply and frowned at the pocket hiding Stefan’s cell phone. Apparently surprised, it cocked its head to the side, almost as if it was considering something. Then the creature tapped Stephan’s pocket with a claw and grunted disdainfully, almost as if it knew what was inside. The ringing didn’t stop, but the creature lost interest in it completely. It leaned toward Stefan, bared its teeth, and growled.

“HEY, HEY, HEY?”

Stefan swallowed hard and wheezed: “Hey?”

If he’d known that would be his last word, he might have said something wittier.

* * *

Richard Janda was sitting on the bench in front of the Dancer, frowning at the patch on his right shoulder. A picture of a hare returned his gaze defiantly. A hare . . . Why couldn’t his new team have a better sign? HE did his rookie rounds in Budějovice, where the local team used a patch with the White Lady in a classic pin-up girl style, wearing white bikini. He really liked her—who didn’t—but then he got transferred to Rezek’s team, where he ended up with a hare. True, it was a tough-looking hare with an eye patch and a cigar, but it was far from a proper hunting emblem.

“What, you don’t like our mascot?” came a voice from behind him.

Jaromír Klapka wore his hare proudly on the back of his leather jacket. With a grey beard and his hair pulled back in a ponytail, he looked like an old hippie who had converted to the Hell’s Angels. This impression was enhanced by his leather gloves, which he hadn’t removed since they first met. He must have been well into his sixties, but he also was that sinewy Eastwood type who wouldn’t admit his age until he was in his eighties. Jaromír pulled a flask from his breast pocket, took a small sip, and offered it to Richard.

“No, thanks,” Richard declined. “It’s not that I don’t like it, but a rabbit doesn’t really suit the Hunters.”

Jaromír choked a little. “Did you say the R-word? You want Boleslav to kick you off the team on your first day?”

“A rabbit, a hare, does it matter?”

“Damn right it matters. It’s his family crest.” When Richard looked at him in puzzlement, Jaromír added: “You didn’t check who your new team leader was?”

“When would I have the time to do that?” Richard sighed. “Yesterday evening I was enjoying a Budvar from a freshly tapped keg—you know, since Fantom saved their brewer, their beer’s free for any Hunter—and then I spent the night on the train. Didn’t even have time to pack.”

“Yeah, it happened fast with Hana, but I guarantee you that she’s more pissed about her inflamed appendix than you are. But Boleslav is cautious, he always sends at least three hunters, and there’s way too many of you guys in Budějovice anyway.” Jaromír gave Richard a questioning look. “You really don’t know anything?”

Richard just shrugged.

“In that case, it is my great honor to inform you that our team leader is a direct descendant of House Zajíc of Hazmburk, one of the oldest hunting families in Bohemia.”[4]

“Wait, wait. That medieval noble family? They were Hunters?”

“You bet they were. Zbynek Zajíc got Hazmburk as a reward for saving young Charles IV from a basilisk in Italy. Then when his great-great-grandson killed another one in Palestine, he had it stuffed and hung in Budyně. But it had to be replaced by a crocodile during the Josephine reforms, and that one nearly burned to the ashes a few years later anyway.”

“So Boleslav is a nobleman?” Richard turned to look at the leader of their little team. Boleslav Rezek was leaning against the van, fiddling with his phone and trying to coax information from local police. His old contact had recently retired and the rest of the local cops were intimidated by a recent call from the SRS.

“It’s complicated,” Jaromír said. “His ancestor . . . how shall I put it . . . was born out of wedlock, and his mother was supposedly not of an entirely human lineage. Which doesn’t change the fact that his family’s been hunting monsters since the Middle Ages, and his several-greats-grandfather was one of the founders of Fantom.”

Richard still had more questions to ask, but then he heard footsteps and someone cleared their throat behind him. He turned around. Boleslav Rezek of House Zajíc was standing directly behind him. He was in his early forties, tall with broad shoulders, short blond hair, and wore a long coat despite the early summer. His icy blue eyes were piercing.

“Sorry about that rabbit . . . er . . . sire?” Richard blurted out.

“See what you’re doing, Jaromír?” Boleslav frowned. “How am I supposed to work with the newbie after your little introduction?”

“I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true,” Jaromír objected.

“Really? And of what inhuman origin was my dear ancestor’s mother this time? A forest nymph? Or perhaps an elven queen?”

“Okay, I may have embellished a few details here and there but I wasn’t lying about your magic sword.”

Richard slid his gaze to a bulge under the long coat. Boleslav’s gaze shifted from piercing to an I’ll-slice-you-to-pieces one.

“Damn, I didn’t even get to that part, did I?” grinned Jaromír.

“Laugh for now, Jaromír, but when Libor raises the question of mandatory retirement age again, the number I’ll suggest won’t be so funny.”

“You wouldn’t betray me like that.”

“Maybe I would, maybe I wouldn’t. You never know with those inhuman genes of mine.” Boleslav finally looked at Richard. “And you, stand up.”

Richard stood up.

“Now hold out your hand.”

Richard held out his hand.

“I’m Boleslav,” his new boss told him as he shook his hand. “I’m no lord, sire, or whatever else this Judas will come up with. And to make it clear, nobody calls me any pet names either. Understood?”

“Yes . . . Boleslav.”

“Good. Now move, the crime scene awaits.”

* * *

The crime scene was located a few yards away from a path, marked out by police tape wrapped around four trees. According to the coroner, the body had been lying there for two days before it was found by a hiker who was not deterred by the miserable weather. For the past three days, violent storms have raged in the Šluknov region and the sky only cleared today.

Boleslav cautiously climbed down the steep slope. Pine needles were trashed around as if wild boars had been on a rampage here, and the trunks of all four trees were covered with blood spatter. Someone tried to scrub it, no doubt on the orders of the State Regulatory Service—which, as Boleslav informed them, had not yet arrived—but soon gave up.

“It wasn’t much bigger than a human,” Boleslav guessed from the bloodstains. “The victim was lying on the ground and the assailant was slashing him with claws for some time before finally ripping his throat out.” He looked at the trees again. “One killed him, but then others joined in. The smaller splashes will be them feeding on him.”

“That fits,” Jaromír confirmed. He walked around the slope, looking at his cell phone and studying photos which Boleslav finally managed to coax out of someone at the police station. “The pics are crappy, but the bites seem to be different sizes. At least three sets.”

“Can you tell what did it?”

“It was definitely not a werewolf; judging by the shape, the mouth was roughly human.”

“That doesn’t narrow it down much. Any mention of missing organs in the autopsy report?”

Jaromír quickly found the photo in question and squinted at the tiny letters. “No. They gutted him like a fish, but they were more interested in flesh than guts. There’s hardly anything missing except liver, but every other monster loves good liver.”

Boleslav grunted, dissatisfied. Picky monsters were easier to identify.

“Why he was there? I mean the victim,” Richard asked. He stayed on the path and was keeping watch. People might have been officially banned from entering the forest due to trees damaged by the storm, but the Hunters were still only armed with modified CZ 600 Range hunting rifles. Neither of the three looked like a typical hunter, but it was the most acceptable compromise for the sake of ‘not attracting attention,’ something the SRS loved to use as an excuse to bully everyone. Each of them also had a pistol hidden under their jacket, and if Jaromír wasn’t lying, Boleslav had a magic sword.

Boleslav looked at the pine needles as if the corpse was still lying there. “Stefan Haas, 31 years old, German, lived in Velký Šenov for the last three years. His father got some land in the Šluknov region in restitution, but he and his brothers had only returned to the Czech Republic recently. Single, no children, degree in economics. Alexandra is already looking him up.”

“Velký Šenov is on the other side of the hills, isn’t it?”

“Yup.”

“So what was he doing here last night?”

“Wait, the cops have a theory about that.” Jaromír took up the fight with his new cell phone again. He didn’t say it out loud so he wouldn’t have to listen to mentions about his age later, but he hated the smartphone and its stack of useless apps. If he had his way, he would still be using a Nokia brick. “There it is. When they searched the area, they found a doe cut down about a mile deeper in the woods. It’s been gnawed on worse than Haas, so they couldn’t tell if it had been shot before it was cut down, but they thought Haas was a poacher.”

“Was Haas armed?” Boleslav asked.

“Wait a minute . . . No weapons were found. If he had a rifle and a knife, he lost them on the run.”

Boleslav stood up and looked behind Jaromír. On the steeper slope above the road, Haas’ footprints were still visible. They wouldn’t find clear tracks among pine needles in the forest after two days’ worth of downpour, but they could still get a decent idea of the direction Haas had come running from. Panicking people stumbling through a forest don’t usually take many turns.

“The cops searched the place for less than an hour before the SRS pulled them off and started intimidating them. With a little luck, there’ll be clues that didn’t make it in the official report.”

They climbed the slope, went around the longer way where the road wasn’t so steep like the cops before them, and started retracing Haas’ steps in a wedge formation. Richard and Jaromír walked on the sides, keeping watch with rifles ready, while Boleslav walked in front, looking for tracks. Every once in a while, he bent down and pointed out the way to go. Richard didn’t usually see anything in the fallen needles, but then again, he grew up in the city and came closest to tracking anything when he was at a summer camp looking for arrows pointing to a treasure. On the other hand, the scion of one of the oldest hunting families in Czechia may have been tracking monsters before Richard’s parents first allowed him to touch an air rifle at a fair. More disturbing, however, was that all the tracks Boleslav has found so far belonged to Haas. Whatever had killed him moved through the woods carefully enough that the rain covered its presence.

“How long till the SRS shows up?” Richard asked. While talking would scare off regular game, talking now might instead attract monsters and save them some legwork.

“My guess is tomorrow morning,” Jaromír replied. “Boris isn’t the youngest anymore, and it takes a while to get him ready.”

“Boris?”

“You don’t know Boris? Oh, that’s right, you started in Budějovice, there’s not much work for him there,” Jaromír laughed. “Boris is the best agent the SRS’s ever had. Always ready. Never complains. He’s never said a bad word about the Hunters. And if you give him some whipped cream, he’ll even let you scratch his head.”

“Scratch his . . . what?”

Boleslav sighed again. Richard already noticed that this particular sigh was reserved for Jaromír. “Boris is a bear,” he replied without turning around. “Every time something happens in the mountains, the SRS brings him in and lets him run around a bit. Boris roars loudly a few times, scares off the mushroom pickers and takes a shit in the middle of the main hiking trail. The SRS airs a report about a bear sighting and the locals stop going in the woods for a few days. For the last couple of years, they’ve been also deploying a cougar that supposedly escaped from its owner, but that one runs away for real every once in a while.”

Richard shook his head in amusement. As he did so, out of the corner of his eye he saw something glistening in the moss.

“I’ve got something,” he told the others and went to inspect it. It was a cell phone. It looked expensive, but it was covered in so many scratches that its current price would be in cents by now. Richard picked it up and showed it to Boleslav. “Couldn’t it belong to Haas?”

Jaromír took the cell phone and turned it over in his hands. “I wouldn’t be surprised. From the scratches, it looks like it was held by something with sharp claws. It probably liked the way it glistened, but then it lost interest.” He tried to turn the phone on. The scratched screen displayed a German prompt for a code, and then the battery died and the phone shut down.

“Take it,” Boleslav said. “If we don’t find anything better, Martin can tell you how to crack it open. Maybe the guy took a picture of our monster before he realized he’d better run away from it.”

“Yeah, right,” Jaromír grumbled, shoving the phone in his pocket. He had no doubt that their techno-mage could get in it, but Martin was in Ostrava right now, which meant that Jaromír would have to do it himself while Martin would instruct him through a call. Martin, however, lived under the assumption that everyone understood his technical gibberish, and he could describe the simple hammering of a nail in such a crazy way that even a professional carpenter would stare at him cluelessly.

Boleslav led them another three hundred meters further before he stopped and got down on one knee. “Do you see it too, Jaromír?”

“Yeah,” Jaromír nodded, though he didn’t look like he would be able to expand on that sentence and add what he was supposed to be seeing. “How about you, rookie?”

“I don’t see anything,” Richard admitted truthfully.

Boleslav pointed to a tiny depression in the pine needles and moss. “Haas was lying there. On his back. See that dent? That’s where he leaned on his hand before he stood up. And then he took a few slow steps, so he still felt safe. Which leads us to an interesting question.”

Boleslav looked at Richard. He wasn’t surprised. It was only a matter of time before the new team leader started testing him. He outright dismissed the most obvious question: why Haas would be lying in the woods at night. It took him a moment to figure it out.

“We didn’t see any lost weapons. If he was attacked here, he must have lost them on the way to the Dancer.”

“Exactly,” Boleslav agreed. “Not only that, we didn’t even see that doe he supposedly killed. Either someone was here with him, or the doe was killed by someone else.”

“Another victim?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. We’d better search the place properly. They must be somewhere nearby. Haas would’ve run immediately if someone else was being murdered on the other side of the hill.”

Boleslav stood up, looked around again, and then pointed to some bushes in the distance. “Jaromír, go check there. Those branches look like they broke off recently, and some of those shrubs were uprooted. Richard, you go to the other side. I’ll try to find some tracks. That bastard must’ve left something behind.”

They split up. This deep in the woods, they could drop all pretense and, with the exception of the crouching Boleslav, advance with their rifles ready to fire. Richard walked around the pile of stones, stopped at the edge of the slope, and looked around. It was all spruce, moss and an occasional old fallen tree; the only bright color in sight were red toadstools. He didn’t even find that damn doe.

“I’ve got something.” Jaromír pulled a long hair out of the shrubs. Black, thick and good forty centimeters long. “And I see a few shorter ones.” He sniffed the hair lightly and ran it between his fingers. “Gentlemen, we have a winner. Only heykals have a mane like this.”

“A pack of heykals who’ve had a taste of human flesh.” Boleslav cursed under his breath. “Once they start, they won’t stop.”

* * *

There was a whole separate lecture about heykals during the training, although Richard thought they didn’t deserve such attention. They mostly stayed away from humans, had no special abilities, there weren’t many left, and the rewards TEFLON paid for them were among the significantly smaller ones. They were, however, an endemite of Czechia, and all Hunters loved stories about monsters unknown to other countries.

Officially, they were classified as Fey, a broad category of intelligent monsters that could often successfully impersonate people, but heykals were closer to animals than humans. The most popular theory was that the Fey had released them in the Bohemian Basin as an experiment during the ancient wars with elves, but that heykals turned out to be too uncontrollable. They ruled the night forests till Middle Ages, when technological advances stopped their rampage. Crossbows, and later firearms, slowly turned the tide in favor of humans, and the heykals, who could live up to nearly two hundred years, quickly realized that such armed people were best avoided. The last major clash between humans and heykals occurred in late 1920s, when an artillery range was established in Brdy Mountains, the result of which was complete extermination of local heykals.

These days heykals lived in the most remote mountain areas, sleeping in caves or dug-out burrows during the day and hunting overpopulated boars and deer during the night. When humans were attacked, it was usually by an old outcast or by an angry young male who lost a fight with his alpha and stayed alive. Then there were the rare cases when someone wandered through the woods at night and hollered “Hey!” which happened to sound just like a challenge to a fight that the highly territorial heykals couldn’t refuse. Under the communist regime, a few border guards paid the highest price for this.

But a whole pack attacking . . . that hasn’t happened in decades.

“Maybe they moved here after the forest fire in the Giants Mountains,” Jaromír suggested as they returned to the parking lot near the Dancer. It was too late to look for the heykals’ den; the sun would set in less than four hours. Hunting nocturnal creatures at night was too risky. “The pack must have moved on and now it’s consolidating its position in new territory.”

“I don’t think so.” Boleslav shook his head. “That fire in the Giant Mountains happened last year, so they would have had one wintering over by now. Something must have provoked them.”

“Or someone,” Jaromír added. “We still don’t know who killed that doe.”

They eventually found the gnawed animal near Haas’s semi-final resting place. It was lying in a shallow depression where it couldn’t be seen from a distance, but that didn’t stop the smell of blood from spreading. Even Boleslav didn’t find any traces there.

* * *

Of course, the team mascot had to be on the van too, although the painter decided to be more creative this time. This hare had muscles like it grew up in a bodybuilder’s nutritional supplement shop, was spitting fire and had a half-naked Amazon on its back to which even Frank Frazetta would nod approvingly. Richard suspected that Jaromír, rather than Boleslav, was behind this original concept.

Once they were in the van, Boleslav pulled out his cell phone and called Fantom.

“Alexandra, it’s Boleslav. I need you to do something for me.”

“You and all the other Hunters in the field,” Alexandra replied, still bitter that Libor made her the vice-president few years back, which was a fancy way to say that he’d dumped all of the company paperwork on her. “I’m assuming it’s not physical assistance.”

“Oh, come on, you know that if I ever need to blow something up, I’ll only call you. Did you forget about Kosov?”

“That was two years ago, Boleslav.”

“That’s true, but the locals were so impressed by your explosion that the mayors of all nearby villages have to keep reassuring them that mining won’t be resumed.”

Back then, a skalnik, essentially a naturally formed golem, took up residence in the abandoned Kosov quarry. Since shooting at a moving pile of rocks was pointless, Boleslav enlisted the help of Alexandra, a notorious lover of explosives of all types. The resulting blast was so powerful that gravel from the skalnik rained down as far away as Hradec Králové, a town situated a few miles away.

“Oh, the good old days,” Alexandra sighed wistfully. “All right, so what do you need from me?”

“First and foremost, I’m reporting that a pack of heykals is behind that attack. Since we’re near the German border, they might have their burrows on the other side, so I need a cross-border hunting permit for our newbie. Also, let the Grimms know we might show up there, so they don’t think we’re stepping on their toes.”

“I’ll take care of it. What else?”

“We found the victim’s smartphone in the woods. I need Martin to coach Jaromír on how to access it.”

“I’m sure Jaromír is looking forward to that conversation.”

“He is so excited that he’s not been talking about anything else for the last hour.”

“I’ll tell him to give Jaromír a call. Is that all?”

“And I need to find out which lands the Haas family owns or used to own around these parts in the last hundred and fifty years.”

Alexandra’s voice grew colder by another few degrees. “In other words, you’re asking me to dig through crappy scans of land registry from the Austro-Hungarian era.”

“Look, it’s not my fault. Haas was killed by a pack with one very large male, maybe even an alpha, so it must have been over a hundred years old. If it recognized Haas by scent as a descendant of a local land owner, they might have moved to the newly conquered territory. You know how territorial those bastards are.”

“Well, I’m looking forward to it about as much as Jaromír is looking forward to Martin’s instructions.”

“Look on the bright side. Since a whole pack was involved, we will have to wipe out an entire clan and destroy their burrows. I’ve heard they tend to be very deep, well reinforced, and require a lot of explosives to destroy.”

“Why didn’t you start with that instead of burying me in land books?” Alexandra cheered up. “I’ll try to find it for you as soon as possible, but I can’t guarantee it’d be today.”

“Thanks.”

Boleslav hung up and patted the driver’s armrest. “You’ll hear from Martin.”

“So no more phone calls for now?” Jaromír asked.

“For now,” Boleslav confirmed. Jaromír immediately reached for the player, but Boleslav stopped him before he could select a playlist. “But if memory serves me well, I’m choosing the music today.”

“Oh, come on. We listened to those little girls of yours all the way here. I’m sure the rookie would appreciate a little change too. Isn’t that right, Richard? Would you like some proper metal?”

“Don’t drag Richard into this, he can have his pick tomorrow,” Boleslav stopped him. “Put on Rock a Little by Stevie Nicks.”

“Girly rock,” Jaromír grumbled, but did as told.

Boleslav leaned back, listened in silence for a moment, and then he looked at Richard. “Are you just going to watch, or do you want to touch too?”

Richard tore his eyes away from Boleslav’s belt. “What? I . . . I didn’t mean to . . . ”

“See what you’ve done, Jaromír?” Boleslav sighed, though this time it sounded overly theatrical. “He can’t even talk to me normally.”

“Look, you’re already punishing me with the rocker here, so how about you guys work it out yourselves and leave me out of it?”

Boleslav unbuttoned his coat, unbuckled the sheath from his belt, and handed it to over. Richard was expecting a classic sword, perhaps with just a little extravagant hilt, but the scabbard was too wide for that and the hilt was made of plain wood. When he pulled it out, it turned out to be a machete. He noticed the symbols carved into the blade and burned into the smoothed hilt. Some looked familiar, but others he didn’t recognize in the slightest.

“Is it really . . . magical?”

“Define magical.” Boleslav shrugged. “My grandfather brought it from Cuba in the 60’s when something was killing Czechoslovakian workers building a cement factory there. The local soldiers and our government Hunters failed so spectacularly that the commies had no choice but to come begging to Libor’s grandfather because they didn’t want to embarrass themselves internationally. Fantom had been shut down for almost twenty years by then; the communist regime would never have allowed so many armed people with undesirable opinions. But he negotiated a special deal with them to unofficially restart the company under state supervision.

My grandfather, in his search for the source of the monsters, met a local houngan, a voodoo priest, who told him that he was hunting a baccoo, a half-wooden creature working for a vengeful Batista supporter, and even gave him a blessed machete, because that bastard pissed him too. I don’t know if it’s magical, but it worked on the baccoo. Two years later my grandfather had it blessed by a dervish in Syria and since then he, my dad, and I have added the blessings of twenty-one holy men and women from all over the world, and I’ve yet to meet something it couldn’t decapitate.”

With almost sacred awe, Richard tucked the machete back in its sheath and returned it to Boleslav. He was clipping it back onto his belt when the van came to an abrupt stop.

At the intersection, an old Škoda car pulled in front of them, its owner leaning out the window and yelling something at Jaromír. His words may have been drowned out by Stevie Nicks, who had just conveniently repeated that she can’t wait, but the content was easy to guess.

Jaromír listened to him for a moment before calmly pulling off his glove and showing the driver a middle finger so scarred it looked like a souvenir from a mummy. Early in his Hunter’s career, he had encountered a fayermon near Olomouc, and when he drowned it in a trough behind a cowshed, he got grave burns on both hands. The eyes of the Škoda driver bulged, and then he stepped on the gas and disappeared as fast as the thirty-year-old car could. Jaromír slowly pulled his glove back on, winked at Richard, and started off again toward Mikulášovice.

* * *

When they wanted to enjoy a long-delayed lunch in Mikulášovice, they were welcomed by such a hostile mood inside the restaurant that they opted for the outside seating. Either the driver of the old wreck managed to drive around the whole village and thoroughly slandered them, or the locals downright hated strangers who didn’t look like tourists. Richard felt like he was in one of those horror towns in America, where every outsider was seen as an intruder or a potential sacrifice to the local dark deity.

Were there cults that worshipped heykals? Richard hoped for the opposite, but human stupidity had no limits.

They were sitting by one of the outside tables for nearly twenty minutes before the waitress decided they weren’t leaving and came to ask them what they wanted to drink. Then she wrote down their order, reluctantly supplied a menu from which they picked something right away just to be on the safe side, and her departure marked the beginning of another long wait.

Boleslav, who meanwhile got an email with the first bits of information from Alexandra, began to mark the Haas’ lands on a map. Since the heykals would not move into fields, he focused on forests and marked six small plots in the vicinity of Mikulášovice, Velký Šenov and Vilémov. At first glance it was clear that the small bits of land scattered around weren’t all that the Haas family had owned in the past, but only the crumbs given to back them by a restitution court. Alexandra promised to deliver the older data soon, and as a consolation prize, she sent them the Haas brothers’ contact info. Boleslav called each of them three times, but neither answered.

Jaromír got an email too, though it didn’t make him happy at all. Martin was preparing for a mission and didn’t have time for a phone call, so he sent Jaromír an app of his own making and some “simple” instructions on how to hack the phone they found. Which meant that Jaromír has been spending the last twenty minutes threatening the two cable-connected smartphones and thoroughly cursing Martin, Haas, and the manufacturers of both devices.

“How’s it going?” asked Boleslav after another futile attempt to contact Klaus Haas.

“How can it possibly go?” Jaromír growled, tapping the touchscreen of phone furiously like it was a fishbowl with a deaf fish in it. “So far and I managed was to feed that thing half my battery, and Martin’s app keeps telling me to wait. Apparently, I’m not the first person to play with this piece of crap. Well, if I wait another half an hour, my phone will die and then the rookie can try it.”

The waitress came out of the restaurant, slammed three small, overly foaming mugs of beer on the table without a word, and disappeared before they could comment on the quality of her service.

“Are they always so hostile here?” Richard asked.

Boleslav shrugged. “So far we had no problems with anyone in the Šluknov region. I think we even stopped by to eat here before, and I don’t remember such attitude.”

“Maybe they’re all bothered by the closure of the Dancer?” Jaromír suggested, before checking that the cable connecting the phones was firmly seated in both sockets. “It won’t do the local tourism business much good.”

“I doubt they’d make such a fuss over—”

“You should be ashamed!”

The three of them looked in surprise at a scowling fat granny with pastel-dyed hair who had come up to their table and was pointing her finger at them menacingly. Two other women stayed in front of the seating area, nodding in agreement.

“What?” Jaromír blurted out.

The extended finger, as if it heard him, immediately pointed at his nose.

“Especially you, sir!” snapped the granny. “At your age you should be more mature!”

Jaromír narrowed his eyes. He hated reminders of his age. On the other hand, the decent chance that he was older than all the hags present gave him a nice excuse to ditch the “honor your elders” rule, which such lecturing grandmothers often relied on. He smiled brightly at her.

“But you and your squadron matured like milk forgotten in the sun,” he said loudly enough for her close support to hear it.

“What . . . what?!”

The granny was about to start a tirade in response when Jaromír pulled off his glove, flipped her a scarred bird, and derailed her the same way as he’d done with the driver they’d met on the road. The granny opened and closed her mouth like a half-choked fish a few times before turning around and quickly shuffling away. The remaining pensioners took her between them and led her away while trying to figure out a way to complain about someone who could no longer be called “a youngster these days.”

“Did you see that? Unbelievable.” Jaromír shook his head as he put on his glove.

At that moment, the waitress came out of the restaurant and threw plates with the food they ordered in front of everyone. Jaromír’s plate landed so hard that some of the sauce and rice splashed on the table; a meat roll nearly followed.

That was the last straw.

“That’s enough!” Jaromír exploded. “Would you kindly explain what is it you’ve got against us? Why does everyone here treat us as if we were lepers?”

The waitress pressed her lips together tightly and was about to retreat into the restaurant, but Jaromír’s behavior was clearly the last straw for her as well. “And what were you thinking? That we were going to welcome some techno heads here with open arms?”

The Hunters exchanged puzzled looks. “Techno heads?”

“Try that on someone else!” spat the waitress. “Everyone here knows about that little party of yours!”

“Miss, we’re no techno heads,” Richard quickly interjected, noticing that Jaromír was about to use his hand argument again. The last thing he wanted right now was to be thrown out of the restaurant when the steak he had ordered was finally in front of him. “We’re from the State Veterinary Administration.”

The waitress looked at Jaromír’s clothes and then at the van with its dragon rabbit painting. “The State Veterinary Administration?”

“Yes, exactly,” Boleslav nodded. “Maybe you’ve heard about the bear near the Dancer?”

“Yeah, the guys have been—” The waitress swallowed hard as she realized that the trio chased outside weren’t any quiet hours disturbers, but customers who would be deciding the size of her tip. “Oh. Gentlemen, I’m terribly sorry. I thought you were with them. I . . . would you like to order something else?”

“Nothing yet,” Boleslav replied soothingly, letting her retreat into the restaurant. A few regulars inside looked like they wanted to get up and throw them out, but the waitress quickly explained the situation and they calmly returned to their beers.

“Techno head . . . ” Jaromír frowned, as if bit into a lemon. “Do I look like . . . Yes. Yes! I’m in!”

The program from Martin finally broke through and let them into Haas’ phone. Jaromír immediately picked it up and started clicking on the icons.

“His last calls were four hours before he died, both outgoing, first to Tobias and then to Klaus.”

“His brothers,” Boleslav added.

“And there’s a text from Tobias. Well, my German is far from perfect, but calling someone a schweinehund doesn’t sound very brotherly. Apparently the brothers rented some land without his consent.” Jaromír left the safety of the familiar icons and tried the others that were on the top bar. “Hey, Haas got twenty-five alarms set here, three minutes apart. And the first one is at quarter to two at night?”

“That’s the lower end of the estimated time of death.” Boleslav thoughtfully skewered a potato and quickly chewed and swallowed it. “Twenty-five alarms . . . Jaromír, play the ringtone. You’ll find it—”

“I know where it is,” Jaromír lied, looked at the current time, changed the final six to a seven and entered the resulting number as a new alarm.

“Hey, hey, hey, the dice are rolled, play!”

Jaromír quickly turned the alarm clock off, and the Hunters looked at the cell phone for a moment as if a venomous snake was hiding in it. It wouldn’t be far from the truth.

“I guess it’s clear to everyone what happened to Haas,” Boleslav said quietly.

“Yeah,” Jaromír nodded. “This was clearly a murder. Someone knew about the heykals, dragged Haas off into the woods, and let them do the dirty work for him. That doe must have attracted them, and then this pop song whipped them into a frenzy, which I don’t blame them for.”

“But why so complicated?” asked Richard.

“If the killer knew about the heykals, they could have known about the SRS, and that the investigation would be taken over and frozen immediately,” Boleslav said. “Then they’ll put a car accident or a fall off a cliff on Haas’ death certificate and no one will look for the killer.”

“But that doesn’t make sense,” Richard opposed him. “I know their agents are far from geniuses, but if they found the cell phone, even they would figure out it was murder. And someone using monsters to kill, that would be reason for an investigation.”

“The rookie is right,” Jaromír supported him. “This phone is a smoking gun. The killer didn’t care that it would end up labeled a murder. It’s too complicated.”

Boleslav nodded in agreement and cut off a piece of fried gouda cheese. The waitress may have treated them like lepers, but if the chef thought he was serving some techno heads, professional pride prevented him from preparing a led than perfect fry.

“Maybe it wasn’t about Haas, but about the heykals,” Richard suggested. “Couldn’t he have been a sacrifice or something?”

Boleslav stopped chewing and swallowed the boiled potato almost whole. “I think you’re onto something.”

“Who would sacrifice people to heykals?” Jaromír asked doubtfully. “What would they get out of it? A heykal won’t grant your wish, and you don’t have to keep it away either, because it won’t even go near a human house.”

“No, I mean that it was about the heykals.”

Boleslav waved at the waitress when she was passing the door. This time she came right up and with a smile. “More beer?”

“No, thanks.” Boleslav pushed a map in front of her. “Could you show me where they’re planning to have that techno party?” When her smile faded at the suggestion that techno heads and the State Veterinary Administration might not be entirely mutually exclusive, he quickly added: “I thought we could maybe check the noise levels there, and if they would cross the limit, we could sic the police on them.”

“You can do that?” The waitress asked with hope in her voice.

“Don’t doubt it,” Jaromír said with a straight face.

The waitress tapped her finger on the wooded hills northeast of Mikulášovice. “Somewhere here, below the Fox Stones. Take a detour through Vilémov and at Šenov, then take a turn towards the outdoor forest pool. I’m sure you could hear them from there.”

“Thank you, and we’ll pay for food.” Boleslav took out his wallet and pulled out a thousand crowns bill. “Keep the change.”

As soon as the waitress, surprised to see a decent tip despite the initial misunderstanding, disappeared into the restaurant, Boleslav tapped the spot she had marked for them. It was located inside one of Haas’ marked lots. “We have a problem.”

“We might have a problem, but the techno heads are in deep shit,” Jaromír elaborated. “If the heykals move there, they won’t like the night disturbance.”

“They’ll definitely go there,” Boleslav said. “First that text message, and two days later a forest technoparty on his property? If any of you think that’s a coincidence, you should change jobs. Someone’s been sending those heykals after them, and I’m sure they made sure that the heykals would pick this particular piece of the Haas estate.”

“But who is that someone?”

“A local lover of peace and nature?” Boleslav shrugged. “As the three old ladies and our waitress proved, they don’t like techno heads around here. It wouldn’t be the first giant monster trouble caused by one hateful idiot.”

Boleslav got up from the table, folded the map and put it in his pocket.

“Wait, we’re going to leave right now?” Jaromír looked wistfully at his late lunch and dinner merged into one. “It’s not like the heykals are going to come out as soon as the sun goes down.”

“You should take a lesson from Richard here,” Boleslav grinned, gesturing to the newbie, who quickly tossed in a couple of croquettes and took the steak away in his hand. Boleslav then pressed the half-eaten fried cheese on its untouched compatriot, picked it up off the plate and took another provocative bite. “A wise Hunter only orders food that can either be eaten quickly or easily taken away.”

Jaromír looked at his departing companions and then at his meet roll drowned in a mixture of rice and sauce. “Fuck this job,” he cursed, fishing the roll out of the sauce and hurrying after them.

* * *

The van started from Mikulášovice, but instead of taking the detour recommended by the waitress, they picked a shorter route through the fields. Jaromír took the wheel and tried to prove to everyone that his van has the soul of a racing car. Richard and Boleslav sat in the back, checking their guns. It was getting dark slowly, but if their theory about the relocation of the heykal pack was correct, they would be on high alert around their new den in order to take on any intruders, especially if the singers or techno heads use the H-word.

Fortunately, heykals had only limited regenerative abilities and standard ammo worked on them; Hunters usually only needed a good aim or a few extra shots. Their biggest advantage was their thick skin, which could stop most standard hunting weapons, and their speed. So Boleslav pulled three CZ 806 Bren assault rifles and magazines of armor piercing ammo from the hidden space under the floor. These heykals were in for another bloody lesson in the advances of the arms industry.

Boleslav’s cell rang; Alexandra’s number appeared on the display. He accepted the call. It wasn’t Alexandra.

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me you were headed to a magical place? If I didn’t happen to see what Alex was looking up in the register, I wouldn’t even know about it!”

Petra, as a former teacher, usually operated in two basic modes—a kind source of information for inquisitive students, or the nightmare of rude teenagers having fun in class and spoiling the delivery of literary classics. Eight years ago, her strictness nearly cost her her life when she let three great-grandchildren of a gypsy witch repeat a grade. After vain attempts at persuasion, the witch tried to curse Petra in her office. However, Petra had been collecting dream catchers, crystals and talismans for many years, for which her office was nicknamed the cabinet of esotericism. These not only stopped the curse, but the spell was amplified by several crystals, the dreamcatcher with amethyst beads deflected it back at the witch, and to both women’s surprise, the witch’s being much greater of course, the ancient sorceress exploded and turned the room into a cabinet of carnage. And since there wasn’t much interest in a teacher blowing up students’ great-grandmothers and the SRS wasn’t entirely convinced that the whole incident was a coincidence and kept breathing down Petra’s neck, Libor eventually hired her as Fantom’s archivist, where she could study real magic.

Right now she was screaming at him as if he’d said that Poe’s most famous poem was called Robin.

“Hey, calm down, Petra. I wasn’t checking out any magical place,” Boleslav defended himself. “I just wanted to know what land belongs to our victim.”

“So the Fox Stones are just a coincidence?!”

“The Fox Stones?” Boleslav repeated. “But that’s just a local hill with a stone field. Or are there some fallen menhirs?”

“There aren’t,” Petra replied. “Or at least that’s what an online article said in 2020. And before that in 2014 . . . and 2007 . . . and 2001 . . . and 1996. And before that, I found newspaper articles from 1994 and 1989. I probably don’t need to explain what that means.”

If the SRS has been churning out such regular denial reports through the media, there must have been something far worse than foxes roaming around the Fox Stones at some point, and the SRS has never been able to clean the place up properly.

“Did you find out something in the archives?”

“There was nothing in the digital archive, and there’s no time to dig through the books. So I had to call Malenthiada.”

Boleslav whistled softly. Queen Malenthiada ruled a small community of Czech elves in the satellite town Háj near Prague. Her estate now consisted of just forty-two family houses she had wrested from the post-Cold War government when the Coexistence Treaty was renewed, and before that her clan crammed in a panel building on the outskirts of Kladno where the communists had shuffled them for fifty years, but she still acted as if her empire spanned five continents.

“Another unpleasant call?”

“Not at all. It started out as usual, but as soon as I mentioned the Fox Stones, she was suddenly as matter-of-fact as an Ikea manual. According to her, that hill used to be a Fey gathering place and a portal to their world. The elves shut it down and it cost them dearly. She indirectly hinted that this was the reason why the Czech clan is one of the smallest in Europe. But that’s not the worst of it, Boleslav. She didn’t even haggle about the price of her services. I wouldn’t be surprised if she packed her bags after hanging up, just in case.”

“I see. You’d better call the SRS. Someone is throwing a techno party under the Fox Stones tonight, which means a lot of witnesses at best.” Boleslav didn’t need to add that at worst they’d have to cover up a huge massacre. In magical places, even the more intelligent monsters lost their sanity, and heykals were half-animals. “I gotta hang up now.”

Boleslav cut off the call, sighed, and punched the driver’s seat. “Did you hear that, Jaromír?”

“I’ve heard enough.”

“Then step on it.”

“And what do you think I’ve been doing?” Jaromír grumbled, but still pulled a bit of hidden horsepower out of the tortured engine.

Richard bit his lip nervously. “So, a Fey portal?”

“Exactly.” Boleslav frowned at him. “Something come to mind? Then out with it now while we can do something about it.”

“Heykals are Fey. Lower and feral, but still Fey. If they massacre the techno heads there, couldn’t the portal see it as a blood sacrifice and open up?” Richard cautiously returned to his sacrifice theory.

Boleslav just kept staring at him for a few seconds while he thought that possibility over. Then he pounded on the seat again. “Did you hear that, Jaromír?”

“I heard and I’m stepping on the gas, but do me a favor and spare me any more good news or I’ll stomp that pedal through the floor!”

* * *

When they reached the forest, the sun was setting behind the distant mountains. The mud on the forest path was rutted and reliably guided them to their destination. Jaromír heard the music first. He opened the window and stuck his head out. “That’s not techno,” he grunted in surprise. “That’s metal!” Then he listened more carefully. “And crappy one.”

“I don’t think the heykals will care what style of music gets them out of their lair,” Boleslav replied. He’d already checked his rifle and was now turning his attention to his Laugo Arms Alien pistol. Richard already noticed that when it came to gear, Boleslav was a patriot.

The van’s lights pulled out of the shadows a roughly built wooden barrier and a stocky guy in a black T-shirt with yellow VP CREW print on it that looked like someone had made it recently. The security guard looked at the van with a picture of an Amazon on a hare, figured the right kind of people were coming, and let them pass.

Beyond the barrier, the forest gave way to a larger clearing. At one end stood a podium made of wooden planks, with a few speakers and a large light board, turned off for now, and a large sign reading VIIMEINEN PIMENNYS between two small Finnish flags. A few cars and eight minibuses were parked on the edges, including a mobile chicken grill, as some locals figured that since they already had techno heads here, they might as well try to make some money out of it. The fans had a few tents set up in front of the cars; one elderly couple had even set up chairs, had a kettle on a portable stove, and they were both nibbling on some pastries. Richard was surprised that they were so far from the stage, but judging by Jaromír’s disapproving expression, the metal band currently performing on the stage probably wasn’t very good.

“The opening act,” he commented. “And if not, no wonder they are performing in the woods.”

“Stay in the van with the guns,” Boleslav told him. “Richard and I will find out who’s in charge and try to convince them to cancel the concert.”

“If it’s not Czechs, try telling them you’re from the National Park Service,” Jaromír advised him. “The Giant Mountains are not far away, maybe they’ll fall for it. And if not, try it the SRS style.”

Boleslav and Richard covered their pistol holsters and climbed out of the van. Meanwhile, the band on the stage acknowledged that they wouldn’t find any fame for themselves today and cleared the area, which was followed by weak applause. The trio that replaced them were a different league. They all wore black leather suits, had their heads shaved and their faces blackened with an oval of white glow-in-the-dark paint on the edges. Their every movement showed that a stage was their life.

The singer spoke into a microphone. Richard couldn’t understand a word he said, but the crowd roared with excitement. That could be a problem. If the audience was full of Finns and panic broke out, it would be damn hard to calm them down and coordinate.

Boleslav led them around the crowd of fans to the backstage area. The failure of an opening act was getting off the stage and retreating unobtrusively to their tent. Richard tried to catch a glimpse of the promoter or the band’s manager, but he saw no one else around. Hopefully the Finns weren’t representing themselves. He didn’t feel like going on stage to see them.

The guitarist and drummer rocked it out, accompanied by enthusiastic cheers of the fans, and the singer joined them soon. His voice was hoarse, as if he’d spent all his life in a coal mine, and the foreign words gave Richard a slight headache. He shook his head and then bumped into Boleslav, who stopped abruptly.

“Oh shit,” Boleslav swore softly. “This isn’t Finnish.”

“You speak Finnish?”

“No.” Boleslav reached for his holster, and when he moved again, he walked noticeably faster. “But I’ve heard this language a few times, and for every bastard who used it we got reward from TEFLON afterwards.”

They were about five meters away from the stage when the light board came to life. Three words appeared on it, which even Richard could read with no problem. “Oh, shit,” he quoted Boleslav.

The fans did what their idols wanted and started chanting at the top of their lungs.

“HEY! HEY! HEY!”

And Richard could have sworn he heard a not-too-distant reply from the forest.

* * *

They ran behind the stage, and as soon as the audience was out of sight, they pulled out their guns. Boleslav went first, slowly ascending the stairs, when Richard stopped him and pointed to the edge of the stage. Carved into the edges of the planks was a string of runic symbols that glowed faintly, as if the wood beneath was rotten and luminous.

“I noticed. Must be a protective circle,” Boleslav said. The Finns were obviously making sure the heykals wouldn’t tear them apart as well. “We’ll have to get everyone in here and hope it works.”

Boleslav walked up on the stage and crouched behind a giant speaker.

“We’ll give them one chance to surrender, just in case someone is using them,” he told Richard. “But if they try anything fishy, we need to neutralize them quickly so the audience doesn’t have time to start panicking.”

“Understood.”

“You take the left side and I’ll—”

The guitarist turned around right then, noticing them. He tilted his blackened head to the side in surprise before his eyes widened in recognition. “Metsästäjät!” he yelled, dropping his guitar and reaching in his jacket with his right hand.

A concealed gun during a performance? That was enough of an admission of guilt for Boleslav. His Alien barked three times, the guitarist spun on his heel and fell face first on the floorboards.

Now that he was exposed, Boleslav turned to face the rest of the band on autopilot. The drummer dropped his drumsticks and picked up a short shotgun propped behind the drums. Bang, bang, bang. The drummer fell off his stool, fired skyward, kicked the drum with one foot, and clanked the cymbal with the galvanized toe of his other shoe.

The singer turned slowly and looked at the Hunter pointing a gun at him.

“Get down on the ground!” Boleslav yelled at him, nodding with the barrel towards the boards to cross the language barrier.

The singer smiled and shook his hands slightly. Short strings studded with bones and shiny stones slipped from his sleeves. Sparks skipped between the strings as they swung closer to each other.

Boleslav didn’t bother with a second warning and fired three shots.

Three flashes appeared in front of the singer’s chest, like small meteors entering the atmosphere and burning to nothing. The unharmed singer’s smile widened. He swung the strings, then threw his arms out violently toward Boleslav. The space above the stage rippled like air over hot desert sand. It would have been easy to miss if not for the cloud of splinters rising behind it. Boleslav ducked to the right, the blast of air missed him and shredded the tarp behind the stage.

Richard quickly came out from behind the speaker and fired his Beretta twice. Two hits to the head accomplished little more than some twitching, but the Finn stopped paying attention to the lying Boleslav and turned to his new opponent. Richard leapt on the stairs. A speaker hit by magic flew through the tarp in a shower of sparks. Richard peered cautiously over the edge of the stage.

The singer was laughing loudly, like a child who’d just discovered how a new toy worked. The sparkly strings twisted as if he held the severed head of Medusa in each hand. He was about to swing them again when gunfire sounded in the distance and several fiery flowers bloomed on his back. Jaromír climbed on top of the van and shot him with a Bren.

The magical aura protected the singer from the bullets, but some of the kinetic energy must have passed through because he flinched a little with each hit. The Finn turned, stretched his arms out and froze at the sight of the crowd of fans. Some of them had figured out something was wrong, but most were still shouting excitedly, thinking it was all part of the show. The singer took a step back as a shot from the Bren hit him in the chest, but he didn’t return the attack. Whatever he had planned for the audience, he clearly needed more of them than would be left alive after a magical attack over their heads.

“You want magic, you’ll get magic.”

Richard turned his head and saw Boleslav getting up and drawing the family machete. As soon as the blade appeared, all Richard’s doubts about its magical nature evaporated. Half of the engraved symbols glowed, irritated by the nearby burst of powerful dark magic, and the hilt pulsed blue under his fingers.

“Hey, bastard!”

The singer turned automatically, and Boleslav slashed him across the neck.

The machete collided with the protective shell, and the Finn was suddenly surrounded by a glowing scarlet web. The blade of the machete flared, penetrated the glittering threads, and slipped out the other side, coated in sparks and burning blood. The magical shield flickered and disappeared. The singer fell on his back into the audience. Concert instincts kicked in for a few spectators who caught the falling body, only to have the ones behind them being hit by a geyser of blood as the severed head fell between outstretched hands.

For a moment there was complete silence as even the most oblivious fans realized that this wasn’t a part of the show. Before panic could fully kick in, Jaromír sent a long burst skyward, and all the spectators instinctively crouched where they stood.

Boleslav picked up the dropped mic, tapped it, and when the appropriate response came from the surviving speaker, he addressed the audience.

“I’ll be brief. Monsters exist, and they’ve just been summoned here to tear you all apart. The only safe place is on the stage, so for your own sake, move on it quickly.” Then he repeated the whole thing in English.

Several people moved hesitantly towards the steps of the stage. The others just looked around in confusion, the crowd humming in muffled conversations as the more linguistically proficient individuals translated to the others what they’d just heard, though most of it was probably variations on, “Those freaks who shot Viimeinen Pimennys are babbling about monsters, and they’re definitely going to kill us too.”

“HEEEEEEY! HEEEEEY! HEEEEEY!”

A long howl brought the audience to the ground more effectively than Jaromír’s gunfire. Even the most rational ones instinctively knew that such a sound could not have been made by either animal or man.

At the farthest edge of the clearing, a massive figure with a black mane emerged from the forest. The alpha heykal walked on all fours, but when it stopped, it reared up on its hind legs, thumped its chest like a gorilla, and roared again menacingly. Behind him, other males, of comparable size and smaller, females with shorter manes and more mature cubs, came out of the forest.

There must have been more than fifty, maybe more than sixty heykals, and Richard suddenly realized why the Haas brothers hadn’t answered their phones. Both Tobias and Klaus must have been lying in a different Šluknov forest, chewed to the bone, while not one, but three packs of heykals moved to their new home under the Fox Stones.

“So what are you waiting for?” Boleslav shouted at the hesitating crowd.

The loud shout snapped most of them out of their stupor. The crowd scurried to the stage, people running for the stairs or trying to climb the wooden construction. Jaromír jumped down from the van and, festooned with Brens and a bag of spare magazines, raced after them.

The alpha heykal dropped to all fours, grunted hoarsely, and the first wave of heykals ran to the stage as well.

* * *

Boleslav and Richard stood in the corners of the stage so they wouldn’t be knocked down by the panicking crowd, and watched out for the first eight heykals. The massive males ran along the edge of the forest at first, and only began to approach the stage when parked cars and tents stood between them and the Hunters. Just as was mentioned in training, heykals knew all too well what firearms were. Jaromír had been cut off by the spectators swarming onto the stage, so for now they only had pistols and three spare magazines on their belts.

“Only shoot them when they get close to people!” Boleslav shouted over the crowd. “We need to save ammo until Jaromír gets here!”

The first heykal leapt on a parked BMW, heyed belligerently and jumped over the roofs of two minibuses before disappearing behind them again. Another ran between the tents, a quick shadow against the bright background. Richard followed them with the barrel of his Beretta, but his eyes were flitting to other cars as well. The heykals were provoking them, either knowing their guns wouldn’t be very accurate at this distance or they were distracting them from something else. The rest of the pack, including the alpha, kept near the edge of the woods.

A young blonde in the back of the crowd had fallen and the two heykals immediately seized the opportunity, jumped over the cars and ran on all fours towards the easy prey. Richard quickly fired twice, missing once, but the second bullet hit a heykal in the front leg. The male misstepped, fell in an unplanned roll and quickly retreated back to cover. Boleslav waited until the second heykal was almost upon the blonde and put a single bullet through its eye. The heykal’s legs buckled and it slid on its belly up to the blonde, who screamed, stood up, and raced to the stage.

Unfortunately, not everyone in the audience sought safety with the Hunters. While they were rescuing the blonde from two heykals, the other six were attacking anyone who tried to hide between the cars.

The owner of the mobile grill was just pulling the blinds down when a heykal jumped through his delivery window and hit him with such force that the small van flipped on its side. Screams echoed from the tent, where the opening band had retreated after its lackluster performance, and blood spattered the bright blue fabric. The guy with a shaved head and the same black makeup as the band jumped in a car. He only managed to go half the distance between the parking lot and the road before a huge heykal caught up with him, ripped the door off, dragged him out and threw him into the darkness. The rest of the heykals were bouncing around on the roofs of two minibuses, trying to get to the drivers.

There was nothing the Hunters could do for most of them, but the drivers still had a chance. They gave up on saving bullets—the minibuses were too far away for that—and emptied their magazines at the heykals around cars. One yelped and fell out of a minibus, but another, even with a bloody back, crashed in through a window. Hearing his colleague’s screams, the other driver ran out and raced toward the stage. Apparently he hadn’t noticed that the two Hunters onstage were in the process of changing magazines. He ran almost twenty meters before a heykal landed on his back and grabbed his neck.

Running, Jaromír turned and blasted it with a short burst from his Bren. The driver crawled out from under a limp paw and ran toward the rest of the crowd.

“Help! Help!”

The fat security guy, who’d been manning the barrier and was hiding behind trees after the first round of shots, finally figured out he would be safer on the stage and rushed toward the Hunters. The heykals among the tents noticed prey that would not escape them easily, and went after him.

Jaromír immediately aimed at them, but the guy ran in front of them, staggering from side to side. “Move aside, you idiot!” VP CREW didn’t hear him and continued to stumble along the same trajectory. Jaromír cursed, took careful aim, waited for the security guy to start staggering the other way, and fired low over the ground. A triple burst peppered the grass in front of the heykal, and one bullet smoothly blew off several of its fingers. The whimpering heykal limped into the woods on three legs. Then all the saints smiled at the security guy and sent a root hidden in the grass his way. He fell to the ground, the heykal ten steps behind him suddenly offered itself as if on a silver platter, and Jaromír rebuilt its face with another burst.

The VP CREW got up and ran to Jaromír. “Thanks, d—”

Jaromír thrust the bag with magazines in his hands. “Take it to the stage!” he shouted at him, backing up quickly, rifle ready to fire.

Metallic bangs echoed from the overturned grill, and indistinct shadows were moving between the tents and inside a minibus, but the other heykals retreated from sight. Richard looked toward the edge of forest. The line of heykals amongst the trees was nervous, the males in particular were angrily heying and shifting in place, but the alpha kept turning his head from side to side and growling to keep them in place.

What the hell was it waiting for?

By the time the security guy reached the stage, all other survivors were already crowded on it; there must have been over a hundred of them. Richard took his backpack from the last straggler and then helped him up. Jaromír arrived a moment later, tossed each Hunter a rifle and climbed onstage. When he turned around, from their elevated position he could finally see all of the heykals on the other side of the clearing.

“Well, that doesn’t look good. I’ve never seen such a big pack—”

There was a loud crash behind the stage, the lights went out, and the clearing was plunged into darkness, broken only by a light in the car with the torn off door and a fallen tent that had just caught fire from a stove. The full moon, which had been shining like a spotlight on the meadow till now, had of course decided to hide behind thick clouds a moment ago.

Boleslav immediately ran over to the back and shone a flashlight into a hole left by the blown loudspeaker. The generator was lying on the ground; the cables had been ripped out and the heykal whom Jaromír had deprived of his fingers was persistently pounding it with its good paw. Apparently firearms weren’t the only technology they were familiar with.

When the light hit it, it heyed and lunged for Boleslav, only to be stopped half a meter from the stage by an invisible barrier. There was a flash, the boards under Boleslav shook slightly, and the shrieking heykal bounced back, half of his majestic mane ending up burned to cinders. Boleslav finished him.

As soon as the lights went out, the rest of the heykals started moving. They were in no hurry, knowing damn well that humans, unlike them, could not see in the dark.

“You didn’t bring an NVD, did you?” Boleslav asked.

“And would you like to have a flamethrower too?” retorted Jaromír.

“I would, but you probably didn’t bring that either.”

Sudden shouts came from the cars. Several shouts. Someone stayed there.

Richard searched the dark and noticed the lights of smartphones in one car. However, one of the heykals from the first wave spotted them as well. It jumped on the hood and started pounding on the windshield. Richard pointed his flashlight at it, but the car was facing the stage, the heykal was just an indistinct shadow, and he couldn’t see the people behind him at all.

“Shit.”

Richard quickly unbuckled his flashlight and reached for his belt. Česká zbrojovka, same as the most of bigger arms manufactures, was not only familiar with the existence of monsters, but also ready to help the Hunters, who were regular customers, when their weapons needed a little modification; his CZ 806 Bren deserved a few extra letters in its name because of them. Thanks to one of those modifications, Richard could now fit an extra-long custom bayonet with a silver-plated lower blade that, with a little skill, could decapitate a werewolf, a vampire, and a host of other humanoid monsters in one fell swoop when it came to resorting to the old disposal classics.

“Cover me!” he shouted to Jaromír and jumped off the stage.

The fire spread from one tent to two others. Richard ran to the car in a slight arc so that any attackers would have to run in front of the burning tents to offer themselves to the Hunters on the stage. One tried it; by the limp it must have been the male he had shot before. Three bullets from a Bren hit it in the side and the heykal ended up right in the burning fabric instead of going around the tent. It screamed briefly, but couldn’t stand up again, and the flames really loved its thick mane.

The heykal on the hood didn’t even notice anyone running towards it, focused solely on the three young girls crouched in the back seat. Richard plunged the bayonet in its back. The heykal shrieked when Richard lifted it on its toes. With a hard pull, Richard forced it to turn sideways, and as he swung it away from the windshield, he twisted the bayonet to the left, aligning the barrel with the spine and shattering the thoracic vertebrae with a short burst. The heykal went limp and slid off the silver-plated blade.

The girls didn’t wait for prompting, they jumped out of the car and ran to the stage. Richard gave them a small head start before following them.

“Watch out, cubs!” Jaromír shouted at him.

Little heykals ran under the minibuses. Their manes were so short that they looked like a failed afro, and they were no bigger than a pit bull, but that did not make them any less dangerous than their adult counterparts. In the Middle Ages, they were just as feared as adults, but often considered a separate species because of their different attacks. They would usually run up behind someone, jump on their neck, and either strangle them themselves or keep them occupied long enough for an adult heykal to arrive, earning them the nickname the stranglers.

Richard could hear the shrieking heying as Jaromír hit one, but the tiny heykals were too fast for him to repeat it regularly. Richard heard one that couldn’t contain its excitement and heyed a bit right behind him. He immediately dodged to the left and blindly slashed with his bayonet. The little strangler practically cut itself in half in flight. Richard took advantage of the fact that he was already half-turned and blasted the two nearest cubs. Then he looked towards the minibuses and immediately regretted it.

The pack reached the cars, climbing over and under them, dozens of heykals rolling over the vehicles like a tsunami. The sight was enough for Richard to find reserves in his legs that he hadn’t known he had until then, and in the last twenty meters he broke all his previous speed records. Boleslav and Jaromír were shooting at the approaching mass, but the older metal fan who had first helped the girls stayed on the edge of the stage and pulled Richard onto it as well.

The heykals crossed the clearing and crashed into the protective barrier like a flood into a rock. The wooden structure shook and the magical shield sparkled so wildly that the entire dome could be seen with the naked eye. The Hunters had to step back from the edge, lest they lose their balance and fall off. The heykals shrieked in pain upon contact with the barrier, their stream shattering, and the burned monsters quickly disappeared in the darkness at the edge of the clearing, where they heyed loudly and circled the magical shelter.

Jaromír walked closer to Boleslav and quietly remarked: “The stage cannot withstand another attack like this. It will collapse, the protective circle will break, and then we are all screwed.”

As if the stage had heard him, the boards disturbed by the magical attack creaked so loudly that the metalheads on them stepped away in fear.

“I know,” Boleslav replied as he searched the darkness with the barrel of his Bren. “Our only chance is to kill as many of them as we can as quickly as possible. They won’t fight to the last, even with that Fey portal nearby.”

“Thanks for the reminder,” Jaromír said. “Up until now I was only thinking about our lives and theirs, and now I have to worry about an alien invasion too. No stress . . . Watch out!”

A big heykal ran out of the darkness, crashed into the stage and disappeared before Jaromír could fire. The next one immediately repeated it on the other side. The collision with the barrier must have hurt like hell, but the heykals were too riled up to pay attention to such trifles.

“Let’s form a triangle!” Boleslav shouted, so that the more distant Richard could hear him. “We’ve got four spare magazines each, so don’t hold back. We’ll have to kill at least twenty of them before they give up, and the more males the better.”

The Hunters took up new positions and looked out for the heykals. The monsters continued to charge against the shield, the males alternating with the females, but this time the Hunters were ready for them, and after ten attacks, three heykals were left dead in front of the stage and two other limped off into the darkness. Their willingness to attack was waning, but they weren’t about to give up. For them, this was a battle for the forest below the Fox Stones, a new territory that they clearly fell in love with.

“Look, I don’t want to be Cassandra, but we’ve got another problem!” Jaromír yelled, nodding his head towards the parking lot.

The tents were all on fire now, and as a second wave of heykals ran between them, one flew off to the overturned grill. The small van caught in the flames too, and the heykal that had been hiding in it quickly jumped out with a mouth full of grilled chicken.

Richard didn’t know how big the propane tank inside was, but if it exploded, especially if the slain owner had a spare in there too, the shockwave would knock down the stage and the people on it like rag dolls. It was starting to look like they might make it, only for bloodthirsty fate to suck most of the sand of their hourglass.

“HEY! HEY! HEY!”

The alpha heykal, who had kept his distance till now, jumped on the car with the torn off door so that the Hunters could clearly see him. The whole pack around him came out of the shadows, standing on minibuses and in front of burning tents, keeping their eyes on the stage. The alpha thumped his chest again, heyed loudly, and pointed at the Hunters.

He was challenging them.

“Now that the snake has kindly shown us its head, we can finally blow it off,” Jaromír growled, pointing his gun at the alpha.

The pack heyed loudly, and Boleslav quickly knocked the barrel to the ground. “They know what rifles can do. Shoot that alpha after a challenge to a duel and it’ll drive the pack mad.”

“We might have no other option, because I’m not going to wrestle with him.”

The alpha heykal seemed to hear them, as he confidently puffed up his chest and goaded them to try and shoot him.

Boleslav bit his lip. “There is a story told in our family that when Vilém Zajíc hosted King Ludwig, they were ambushed on a hunt by a pack of heykals, forced to hunt during the day by an early arrival of winter. The heykals killed their horses and dogs, and most of the royal retinue ended up dead or wounded, so Vilém bet everything on one card and challenged their alpha to a duel. When he defeated him, the pack retreated and let them go.”

“And you think that because your ancestor could beat up a heykal, you can do it too?” Jaromír asked doubtfully.

“He didn’t beat him with his bare hands,” Boleslav corrected him. “He killed him with a boar spear, and if the heykals didn’t mind a spear in those days . . . ”

Boleslav stepped on the edge of the stage, unbuckled his machete and showed it to the heykal. A few of the younger heykals heyed again in protest, but the older ones silenced them with grunts. The alpha snorted contemptuously and jumped down from the car.

The challenge was accepted.

* * *

The alpha watched his opponent jump off the stage. The opponent . . . That man was weak. All humans were weak, even the Hunters. The days when they could wield swords and spears were long gone; these days humans relied only on metal-spitting sticks. He would kill him, and if his pack wouldn’t submit, he’d kill them too . . . 

No, he couldn’t let them go. He will not let them go.

He had to kill them. The new home demanded it. The rocks screamed it at him. The trees hissed it at him. There was a smell in the air he didn’t recognize, but something deep inside him knew it. This place belonged to him. He’d owned this place before he’d come here. Only ancient traditions prevented him from attacking the Hunter right away.

The Hunter drew his sword and tossed the scabbard aside. The blade sparkled with light and magic.

The alpha blinked in surprise. He realized he’d made a mistake.

The weapon the Hunter was holding was powerful. Weak people don’t carry powerful weapons they don’t know how to use. The Hunter would be a stronger opponent than he thought.

But he couldn’t back down, not today.

As he moved his pack to its new home, two more alphas claimed the same territory. The forest was too small for three leaders, and on the second night after the move, there was a battle for leadership over all packs. The alpha won, defeating and killing his rivals and then a young challenger who hoped that a tired and injured leader would not make it through the next fight. He was wrong.

The Alpha led the largest pack he had seen in his long life, but his position was still precarious. The males of his own pack wouldn’t dare disobey him, they knew him too well for that, but among the newcomers he noticed several strong heykals who would soon challenge him to a duel. So he sent them all in battle first, hoping the Hunters would take care of them for him, but nearly half of them escaped without a scratch.

He couldn’t retreat.

He had to fight.

He had to kill him and then all the others.

* * *

When Boleslav drew the family machete, the alpha heykal hesitated but quickly masked it with another battle heying. He approached Boleslav on all fours, baring his teeth and puffing out his chest, but caution flickered through the exaggerated confidence. When only a few steps separated them, the heykal snapped his teeth in a feigned attack.

Boleslav quickly ducked.

The alpha snorted disdainfully and repeated it.

Boleslav backed away again.

The alpha bared his teeth in a disturbingly human smile. Derisive heying came from the semicircle of heykals that surrounded the warriors. The alpha decided to try a third time.

Boleslav, however, didn’t move an inch and slashed at his throat in a lightning-fast move. Machete ran through mane, the sharpened blade slicing smoothly through matted hair, but it didn’t reach the neck. This time it was the heykal’s turn to jump away quickly. He had lost the lower quarter of his mane and was showing off his bald neck. Several females turned their heads towards their neighbors and heyed softly at them. The heykals had more in common with humans than met the eye.

The alpha was enraged by such unexpected humiliation. He snarled and charged towards Boleslav. The Hunter swung his machete at him, but the heykal ducked his head, ran under the whizzing blade, and, when he was behind Boleslav, kicked out with his hind leg and struck the Hunter in the hip. Boleslav was lifted in the air and crashed into the car from which a heykal had jumped out earlier. He hit the back door hard and fell to the ground.

“Screw it,” Jaromír growled, pointing his gun at the heykal.

“Don’t interfere!” Boleslav shouted at him, then quickly rolled to the side before the running alpha came crashing down on him. His shoulder slammed into the torn-off door. He lifted it in front of him and stopped another attack.

The alpha slammed his fist in the door, and if Boleslav hadn’t had his knee pressed against it on top of his hands, the improvised shield would have crushed him like a machine press. The second blow shattered the window and showered him with glass. The heykal was determined to squash him like a bug and pounded relentlessly on the door, while Boleslav’s tired arms sank a little lower with each blow. He knew that if he didn’t go on the offensive quickly, he wouldn’t be able to resist for very long.

As the alpha swung for another blow, Boleslav took a gamble, leaving the door propped with his left hand only, and slashed his machete at the heykal’s leg. This time he reached him. The blade went over his shin. With a startled yelp, the alpha jumped back, stood on his rear and examined the wound, thin smoke rising from the bloodied leg. Heykals might have been a Czech endemic species, but at least one of the holy men who had blessed the machete must have hated the Fey as a whole.

Boleslav took advantage of the alpha’s brief distraction as he looked at the disproportionately painful wound, picked himself up, and threw the car door at him. The heykal registered the movement out of the corner of his eye and instinctively caught the door in his outstretched hands. But by then Boleslav was already in motion, and with a leap he stabbed at the popped-out window. The machete ran across the heykal’s face, leaving a deep, smoking wound.

The alpha roared in pain, swung the door at the Hunter and threw him back against the car. Boleslav almost ended up inside it, but at the last moment he grabbed the frame of the torn-off door and pulled himself back up. The heykal threw the door away and touched his wounded face, in which only one eye now shone. He had either lost the other or it was completely covered in blood. He heyed angrily and ran towards the car.

Boleslav jumped up, pressed his back against the roof of the car, lifted his legs and quickly rolled aside. The alpha hit the side of the car and pushed it in front of him for a good five meters before he realized that he was only crushing the bodywork beneath his body. He looked around in confusion. When he looked up, he saw a kneeling Boleslav and a falling machete. The tip lodged between his shoulder and neck, and Boleslav pushed half of the blade into his opponent with both hands before the shrieking alpha pushed himself away from the car and staggered back a few steps, the machete still in his body. He looked like he was going to collapse on the ground at any moment, but found enough strength in himself to jump on the car roof. Boleslav didn’t have time to dodge and they both disappeared behind the car.

“Shit!” Jaromír ran the flashlight beam over and around the car. “Do you see him?”

“No!” Richard replied, but he thought he could hear muffled cursing from behind the car in addition to the heykal’s wailing.

Most of the heykals couldn’t see what was going on either, craning their necks like meerkats and trying to see behind the car.

The sounds of the fight died down.

The head of a heykal appeared above the hood, followed by Boleslav, who held its bloody mane. With obvious trouble, he scrambled up on the car, showed the trophy to the shocked heykals, and then, like Conan with Thulsa’s head, threw it at their feet before taking a deep breath and roaring mightily:

“HEEEEEEEY! HEEEEEEEEEY! HEEEEEEEEEY!”

At that moment, the propane inside the mobile grill reached critical temperature and the van exploded. The nearest heykals disappeared in a fireball and others were thrown several meters away by the explosion. Boleslav was swept off the van by the shockwave and rolled along the ground almost to the stage. The force of the explosion threw most of the metalheads against the tarp at the back of the stage, which snapped under their weight, and a clump of screaming, tangled people fell to the ground on the other side. The entire wooden structure creaked painfully and collapsed.

Richard, who had held on to the wreckage of the stage, scrambled to his feet and ran a flashlight beam over the heykals. He was ready to open fire as soon as they moved toward the civilians, but there was no need. Without their alpha and scared by blast, the heykals panicked, picking themselves up off the ground in a daze before running into the woods. Some had their manes on fire and Richard could follow them deep into the forest. A minute passed, and the only heykals that remained in the clearing were either dead or badly injured and stunned, a condition that the Hunters would soon reclassify as dead as well.

Angry cursing came from the human huddle. A battered Jaromír emerged from under the tarp and rushed to the lying Boleslav.

“Hey, Boleslav, are you okay?”

Boleslav raised his head and looked at Jaromír with contempt. “Couldn’t have start that question with a dumber word, could you?” he grunted, slumping back on the grass.

* * *

As soon as all the surviving heykals who couldn’t escape into the forest were finished, Jaromír retrieved a first aid kit from the team van and checked on Boleslav. He disinfected the cuts on his chest and arms, bandaged the larger ones, and helped him hobble to a seat in the van. It was clear to both of them that he also had several broken ribs, but there was nothing they could do about that now. The metalheads ended only with scratches and bruises, the debris from the grill fortunately not hitting anyone. Boleslav ordered them to stay on the ruins of the stage. The protective runes were extinguished after the explosion when the boards broke, but the metalheads didn’t know that, and with a little luck, neither would the heykals if a few suicidally inclined ones decided to come back.

While Jaromír treated Boleslav, Richard searched a van marked VIIMEINEN PIMENNYS on the side that was parked behind the stage. In addition to the things one would expect inside a metal band’ van, he found a lot of papers covered with runes and notes in Finnish. He discovered the real treasure in the glove compartment. One of the cultists not only kept a diary, but he even kept it in Czech; the group was obviously international. Richard brought it to Boleslav, who immediately confiscated it to distract his brain from his aching body by reading it until reinforcements would arrive. While he was being treated, he contacted Alexandra and she confirmed that the State Regulatory Service had taken their warning seriously for once and was on its way.

The SRS finally arrived two hours later, with the closest response team joining the convoy bringing Boris. The agents reached the clearing, found the heykals dispersed, and began attending to the witnesses.

Richard expected the usual intimidation by jail and suggestions that prison was the better option, but the agents were all smiles, reassuring the metal fans and generally being nice to them. It was so unexpected that he unwittingly placed a Bren in his lap in case the portal actually opened and some masked Fey arrived instead of SRS agents.

The agents checked all survivors and began rounding them up for “vaccinations” because they came in contact with dangerous creatures carrying many contagious diseases. When the first vaccinated person began to nod off, Richard finally calmed down. The survivors were being given a special cocktail of sedatives and chemicals that would reliably erase the last five hours of their memories. The SRS only used it rarely because witnesses with memory loss tended to question what happened during their blackout, but an illegal metal concert offered several sufficient possible explanations.

Once all the survivors were asleep, the smiles immediately disappeared and the agents got down to the real work. Because the best way to get people to accept a short memory loss was to make sure they didn’t want to remember the missing moments, the agents began to compete who would put the sleeping witnesses in the most embarrassing situation.

Selected pairs, ideally of a large age difference or of the same sex, were stripped naked and slipped into sleeping bags found in the minibuses. A middle-aged man who looked like a walking healthy lifestyle ad ended up leaning against the remnants of the stage, a tourniquet on one arm and an empty syringe in the other. More syringes, along with empty hard liquor bottles and stripped clothing, were strewn across the meadow. Richard watched in disbelief as one agent dragged a young man in shorts to the edge of the meadow, pulled on a latex glove, stuck finger down the witness’s throat with a perfectly indifferent expression, waited for the metalhead to throw up the last of his food, and then laid his head in a puddle of his own vomit. Then he looked at the man for a moment like an artist who just finished a painting, and after a brief moment of reflection, he pulled off the man’s shorts and underwear and threw both into the woods. When they were finished, the agents settled down on the stage and discussed the charges they would slap the metalheads with after they woke up and how many dead heykals would the collected fines pay for.

The SRS managed to bring the phrase “cynical beasts” to a whole new level.

While the agents were carefully setting up several mental breakdowns and many therapy sessions, a truck with a covered trailer backed into the meadow. The SRS section responsible for covering up monster attacks loaded it with the wreckage of a mobile grill, the cultists’ van, the most damaged minivan, and all the dead people, including the Viimeinen Pimennys trio. There would undoubtedly be a report about a tragic car crash in today’s news, and the SRS may even pay an “expert” to give a lecture on the dangers of mobile grills. The dead heykals were loaded into an unmarked van to be taken to a government lab where, after examination, they would be incinerated, and Boleslav personally oversaw that Fantom got a receipt for TEFLON for each carcass.

“I’ve got good news and bad news,” Boleslav announced to the rest of the team as he limped back to the van and slumped in a seat. “The good news is that I managed to read the diary and I know what happened here.”

“You read the whole thing in two hours?” Jaromír asked dubiously.

“I didn’t have to,” Boleslav replied. “The beginning was a classic about a misunderstood child, unloving parents and cruel girls. It didn’t get interesting until the end. Our drummer, Otakar Mach by his civil name, was born not far from here in Vilémov, picked up an interest in the occult in high school and at twenty decided to join a small Czech cell of the Condition in Pardubice. However, he only managed to make his first contact before that cell was exposed and exterminated.”

“Wait, wasn’t it Fantom who took them all out?” Jaromír remembered.

“It was, don’t interrupt me,” Boleslav said. “So Mach got scared and fled to the far north, to Finland, where he met Jani Korpela, the singer of Viimeinen Pimennys. As he demonstrated today, Jani knew a lot more about magic. According to Otakar, he was obsessed with the Fey, and during his research he came across an old ritual that could open a portal to their world.”

“And of course he had to do it right away, even though he had no idea what would be on the other side,” Jaromír grumbled. “These idiots are unteachable.”

Boleslav looked at him wearily. “Jaromír . . . ”

“I’m shutting up, I’m shutting up.”

“But Jani had a problem. Not only he did not know of any Fey portal he could open, but he needed real Fey to take care of the human sacrifices. And here comes our bullied-by-everyone Otakar to save the day. Having grown up here, he knew both about heykals and the Fox Stones. So Jani kicked out his old drummer, brought in Otakar, planned a small concert for selected fans near the Fox Stones, the Viimeinen Pimennys came to Czechia, and you all know the rest.”

“So they were lone gunmen? Yeah, that’s good news. I was worried we’d be tripping over SRS agents at every step for at least a year here because of them. And the bad news?”

“I talked to Alexandra. The SRS was pretty spooked by the threat of the portal opening, and they’re going to completely wipe out every heykal that was here today, just in case their proximity to the portal awakened memories of the good old days. And knowing the SRS, any heykals they will find in the woods, even those dead because of us, they’re going to declare their own kills and Fantom won’t get a dime for them, not to mention the bonus for destroying their burrows.”

“Wait, wait,” Jaromír interrupted him. “You’re telling me we have to go back to the forest?”

“Not me. Libor. We had over sixty heykals here, but there’s only what, nineteen corpses left? He didn’t like that outcome. He’s sending in a team from Ústí to help us, but in the meantime you’re to search nearby woods, claim all corpses and wounded stragglers, and if you have any time left, find their burrows.”

“You this, you that . . .  Why do I get the feeling you’re not going to trudge through the woods with us?” Jaromír said suspiciously.

“I have broken ribs, and according to company regulations, I can’t go into the field right now.”

“Yeah, right,” Jaromír snorted. “Suddenly the regulations come in handy. We’re going to hike this whole forest while you will be ogling nurses at a hospital.”

“Well, the pack is without an alpha now, so there’s also a good chance it will break up into the original ones and everyone will go back to their old hunting grounds.”

“So it’s not just this forest, it’s the whole Šluknov region?” Jaromír cocked his head and looked reproachfully at the stars. “I haven’t eaten properly all day, now I won’t even get any sleep . . . never quote me, but I’m really getting too old for this.” Jaromír leaned into the van and pulled out a spray bottle of whipped cream from his backpack. “Come on, rookie; let’s go give Boris a few pats, because that’s the only good thing that’s coming our way today.”



4) The Zajíc family (Hares in English) was one of the most influential noble families in the Czech Kingdom from the 13th to the 17th century.


JAKUB MAŘÍK (* 1981)


An enthusiastic writer with introverted tendencies who studied legal administration, but forced himself to sit in an office for only a few years. As soon as he could, he moved full time on to activities he enjoyed much more—translating and writing his own stories set in fantastic worlds.

He started as a short story writer, which earned him a reputation as a chameleon who enjoys switching between different genres of science fiction and fantasy. You can come across his stories in several anthologies—a detective urban fantasy in Mlok 2008 (Nová vlna, 2008), a ghost story in Rags of Shroud (Cáry rubáše, Epocha, 2013), a spy urban fantasy in In the Shadow of the Reich (Ve stínu říše, Epocha, 2017) or a military sci-fi in The Law of the Gene (Zákon genu, Epocha, 2023), but his work has long been connected with the magazine Pevnost, to which he has contributed with a historical fantasy short story Koboué (12/2008), a light cyberpunk story Red Fields of Elysium (08/2011), or a humorous series about Ming Duo, a captain of a space freighter (2017-2023).

His first book was part of a shared urban fantasy series Hammer of Wizards (Kladivo na čaroděje, Epocha, 2012-2018) where his Hard Dreams (Drsné sny, Epocha, 2014) generated quite the reader interest.

It took another six years for the author to take his next step. In doing so, he surprised once again when he plunged into space in the first adventure of the spaceship UTSS Salamis, titled In the Shadow of the Sun (Ve stínu slunce, Mystery Press, 2020), a well-received space military sci-fi laced with a decent amount of detective elements. It was followed by novels In the Embrace of Ice (V ledovém sevření, Mystery Press, 2021), In the Blood Belt (V Krvavém pásu, Mystery Press, 2022) and In the Dead Zone (V mrtvé zoně, Mystery Press, 2023). He is currently working on the final installment, In the Lion’s Den.

You can read about Jakub’s path to becoming one of the editors of MHF in the foreword. It should be noted, however, that even here he managed to pleasantly surprise us.



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