He'd have to ask JJ sometime about mountain lions. For all he knew, they were just as bad.

  "What are you thinking about?" she asked him suddenly.

  "About how much more civilized we speedy cats are about courtship over all you other moggies," he said, grinning.

  "Oh, really now?" she mock-growled, smiling up at him.

  "Hey, I only got hit a few times, and there wasn't any bloodshed at all! Civilized, I tell you! Civilized!"

  Healy smiled as he laughed.

  "How did you end up in the Army? And where'd you learn to fly?"

  "Dad's a helicopter pilot, retired now. He's not a natural born, by the way. Anyway, he thought his kids should learn, so he taught us. Mom, who is a natural, thought we should all sign up and do our time."

  "Oh? Why's that?"

  "Because that's where she landed Dad. Said we'd find a better class of mate in the Army." She snickered then.

  "What?"

  "I told one of my norm girlfriends about that, back when I was only thinking about it, and she went on and on about the type of guy I'd find in the military. How they'd all be rude, crude, murderous brutes with only two things on their minds: Fighting and Fucking."

  "So of course you had to sign up," he said with a laugh.

  "Well, she made it sound like a lycan's wet dream. So yeah, of course I did!" she said with a laugh of her own.

  "What was it like, having norm friends?"

  "What, didn't you have any?"

  "Nope, not a one. Everyone was either a lycan, lion, dwarf, dark elf, goblin, magic user, or some combination thereof. I mean, there are norms living in Carson City and the surrounding area, but none of the kids I grew up with were. My grandmother comes close, but she's half-faerie."

  "You've never met a human?"

  "No, I've met lots of them, just never had one for a friend, unless you count some of the magic users I grew up with. One of my moms is a tantric witch, and another is a sorceress."

  "Ah, okay. Yeah, my mom told me, back when she was a kid, you never let any of the mundanes know you were a lycan. Then one of the lions outed all the lycans to the world because of the war that was coming."

  "That was my dad."

  "It was?"

  He nodded.

  Healy paused a moment, then shook her head. "That is gonna take a little getting used to."

  "What?"

  "Who your dad is."

  "You mean your father-in-law." He grinned.

  "Not helping! Anyways, she had a lot of mundane friends, because she went to public school, and there weren't a lot of lycans up in the part of Utah where she lived."

  "How'd they react when they found out?"

  "Well, she's still got a lot of mundane friends from school, so I don't think they really cared, and she didn't have any issues with sending us to public school because of that. She just made sure we understood if we hurt somebody, they wouldn't heal like we do."

  "I talked with Dad about it once, what the world was like before all this happened," Troy said, nodding in the general direction of the DEZ.

  "Oh, what did he say?"

  "That his problems were a lot smaller back then. He also told me that he wasn't a good example, to go ask Chad or Steven."

  "Chad? Steven?"

  "Two of my father's best friends."

  "Oh? What did they say?"

  "Chad said it was boring. Steve said it wasn't as much of a challenge."

  Healy laughed at that.

  "Anyway, let's finish setting stuff up, then do a search of the local area and see if anything interesting turns up."

  "When do we start searching for the lava tube?"

  "Right after the sun sets."

  "When the djevels are more active, right?"

  "Yup. Also, I want to use that thermal scope to see if I can find plumes of cooler air while the ground is still warm."

  "Well, then, let's get at it," Healy said and shifted back into full cougar.

  Shifting as well, Troy followed her out of the trench as they moved fifty or so feet apart and slowly circled their campsite. He didn't expect to find anything, but it was always best to be sure. Plus, he wanted to find a few good spots for after the sun set to make his observations from.

  "See anything?"

  "Nope," Troy said, scanning the area with the thermal scope. "Let's move to another spot and try again."

  "This would be easier if they were moving something through tonight."

  "Given the diversions we got hit with yesterday, I think they already did."

  "Maybe we should look for any trail they might have left?"

  "We just may have to, but that could take days."

  "So, you think one going and one coming back?"

  "Beats me," he said with a shake of his head.

  "You hear that?"

  Troy stopped. It had gotten silent. A lot of insects, and even some of the smaller animals didn't get quiet when a predator was around, because they knew it wasn't hunting them. Some of the larger ones would sound a warning to the others that might be in the area.

  Things only got this quiet when something unnatural was going on.

  They both slowly hunkered down and looked around them.

  "Get ready," Troy whispered.

  Healy nodded.

  Calling up his frameworks, Troy quickly went over his list of options, then settled on that annoying missile spell of his father's, and cast it out. The nice thing about it was, you didn't have to aim, it was pretty much self-guiding. The bad thing was, it'd probably kill some of the local fauna as well.

  The noise he heard coming from the small ravine below wasn't that of a wounded animal. It was more of a muffled grunt, followed by a whispered, 'What was that?' in demonic.

  "Eyes closed!" he hissed and immediately threw a fireball at the whisperer as he closed his own eyes. Reaching back, he grabbed his carbine to pull it around to the front as a very bright flash went off behind his closed eyes. Opening them up, he could see in the wash below were a dozen råge, each one leading a bonde. All of them were carrying packs and weapons, though the bonde were more heavily laden than the råge, who were carrying what looked like AR-15s.

  Three of the råges and four of the bonde had been caught in the fireball, which had outright killed a råge and two of the bonde to either side of it. The others were injured, but even with that, that still left about nine of the råge and eight bonde to deal with.

  Troy started with the wounded ones, killing them first, as they'd be the easier to take down, and that would help the odds.

  Healy had started picking off the ones at the back, and had dropped two of the råge before they could get themselves organized. So Troy aimed towards the front of the line and opened fire as well, though by this time, the råge had brought their weapons around, and were shooting in the direction from which they were taking fire, while the bonde were dropping their packs and reaching for their own weapons.

  Changing tactics, Troy started shooting the bonde before they could add their weapons to the fight. He managed to get all but two before the råge got them hunkered down into cover. Reaching over to Healy, he tapped her on the shoulder. She stopped firing and looked at him. He pointed to his ear.

  She nodded and put on her headset as he donned his, and they turned on their radios.

  While this was going on, the five remaining råge and the two bonde had stopped firing, and were reloading their weapons, and looking around nervously.

  "Let's backtrack where they came from," he whispered into his mic.

  "What? What about these guys? We can't just leave 'em here!"

  "The whole reason we're here is to find the tunnel. Besides, with all the noise they just made, I'm sure someone's going to come around soon enough to investigate. Now, move out. Eventually they're going to think they killed us, and they'll either move on, or head back. What we don't want is for anyone to suspect we're on to them yet.

  "Also, there may be more wherever these came from, and we don't want to be here if they come looking for us. Or worse yet, seal up the hole so we can't find it."

  "I'll track, you cover," she said, and slinging her rifle, she shifted into her cougar form, then after they'd gone back up the hill a ways and were out of sight of the djevels, she jumped down into the wash they'd been traveling along and tracked them back up it.

  Troy kept his rifle ready and moved along just outside the wash, so he'd hopefully see any trouble before it saw them. After what seemed to be a fair bit of time, she suddenly stopped and shifted back.

  "Found something."

  Giving one last look around, he climbed down into the wash. Healy was pointing at something under a big rock.

  "Is that a nozzle?"

  "Looks like."

  Troy looked down the wash, then back up, then to the sides.

  "Well, that explains why we've never found this before. I guess they flush it out with water after each run."

  "Where are they getting the water from? There aren't any lakes around here!"

  "My guess is, they ran a really long hose all the way through the tube."

  "That could be miles!"

  "Yeah, but there's a lot of fire hoses, pipes, PVC, and other material inside the DEZ. I think some places even still have power from old solar power systems. Or maybe they use magic to power it? Djevel lords can do magic. Even the biskops can do some, and they have their own magic users as well."

  "Makes you wonder how long it took to set this up."

  "Makes me wonder how they got so clever. Or maybe it's just Basun?"

  "Well, how are we going to follow this? It's buried, and from the looks of it, they buried it years ago."

  "So it's not a fire hose; it must be metal or PVC. Let's move away from here and into some cover."

  Moving up and out of the wash, Troy got out his phone and dialed Craig's number.

  "What the hell, dude! It's late! I'm busy! With a friend! A cute friend."

  "Yeah, well, I'm on the clock. I need a spell that'll let me trace a pipe that's underground."

  "Can't this wait?"

  "No. And before you ask, I called you and Ian instead of Dad because if anyone has a spell for laying pipe, it's you two."

  "Oh, ha ha," Craig grumbled.

  "What's he need?" he heard Ian call out.

  "A spell to trace a pipe."

  "I'll send him the one we used when we remodeled Ryan's place!"

  "It's underground."

  "Tell him to turn up the gain. If it's not too deep, it should work!"

  "You hear that?" Craig asked him.

  "Yeah, it's better than nothing. How soon can you send it?"

  "Ian's forwarding it right now."

  "So tell me, are you guys in the same bed or something?" Troy teased.

  "Nope, but we're in the same room."

  "Sent!" Ian called out.

  "Now, if you'll pardon us?" Craig said and hung up the phone.

  "What was that all about?" Healy asked.

  "Ian and Craig are my evil twin brothers. They're Mom Peg's sons. I suspect they were having a little party with a couple of girls."

  "In the same room?"

  "I don't think they have personal boundaries when it comes to each other," Troy said and opened up the mail app on his phone. "They're kinda weird that way. Hella brilliant, and always up for a good time or raising Caine. They're identical twins, and I've often suspected that their brains overlap or something, because best as I can tell, they share everything."

  "Does that include women?" Healy teased.

  "More than once. Ah, here it is!" he said, opening up the email Ian had just sent him.

  "Wait, you can email spells?"

  "You can write 'em down, so it only makes sense that you can email 'em as well."

  "And how long is it going to take you to learn it?"

  "Not very. We Valens have a special way of writing our spells out to make it easy for us to share 'em."

  "Really?"

  "Actually, no," Troy said as he read what was really just a program using magic references, like all the spells they did, since his father had turned it into a programming language. "It's a lot more mundane than that, but every family has their own way of doing it, and we're not allowed to share."

  "Well, it's not like it'd mean anything to me," she said with a shrug.

  Committing it to memory as he learned it, he deleted it from his phone and stood back up.

  "Let's go."

  "Already?"

  "It's a simple spell," he said with a shrug. When they got down to the nozzle again, he cast it, touched the nozzle, and then changed what Ian had called the gain.

  "I don't see anything."

  "It's keyed to me as the caster, and I can definitely see something. Now, let's go see where this goes."

  Following the line in the ground was easy; the pipe hadn't been buried that deeply. When he got to the spot where it faded out as the pipe got deeper, he stopped and looked around.

  "Well, this is it," he said, looking at a pile of rocks.

  "So, do they just pile them up after each time they go through?" Healy said, bending over and grabbing one.

  "Hey, this glued in place!"

  "Interesting. Let's see if we can find some sort of release or handle."

  "Maybe it's only opened from the inside?"

  "Possible. Let me call SJ."

  Pulling his phone out again, he pressed the quick dial for SJ.

  "Evening, Troy. Ran, Dan, Cheryl, and Halyna are now plotting your demise."

  "Oh, having fun, are we?"

  "Worse, we're watching Gone with the Wind, and you called during the big ending scene!"

  "Sorry. I need a shaped charge, a big one, and a couple of fifty-five gallon drums of gas. Say, about fifteen minutes from now?"

  "Holy shit! You found it!"

  "I found the first one. I think there's two of 'em. Send out a reaction team, too, we had a small firefight with some djevels, and we didn't get all of them."

  "Where are you?"

  "About three hundred yards south of 50, just east of where it comes out of King's Canyon. They got some kind of door on it, which, if I can't figure out how to open, I'll just breech with a charge. After that, I was thinking of using the gasoline to start a fire inside it to make some smoke to help find the other end."

  "Guess I need to get the Air Force boys ready to drop some bunker busters to collapse the rest of it once you find it! Okay, I'm on it. I'll scramble an alert from the closest forts for the reaction team, and I'll task the closest group of engineers we got to help breach the entrance and figure out some way to fill it up with smoke."

  "We'll be waiting."

  "Thanks, Troy. Seriously, thanks!"

  "Hey, it's what we do. Bye."

  "Well, he sounds happy," Healy said as he hung up and put his phone away.

  "Yeah, he's been freaking out over this whole thing. He's in charge of cleaning up the djevels on the outside of the wall, and SJ is a lot like Dad; neither one of them likes anything that isn't moving us forward on winning the war."

  "I thought the war was over."

  "The main battle is, but until we get rid of the last djevel on the planet, the war won't be."

  "Really?"

  "It's a lion thing. Trust me; it really is a 'lion' thing.

  "Now, let's find a safe place to wait for the cavalry to show up with my explosives. Then we can signal them over here to land."

  "Don't you want to see if we can figure out how to open it?"

  "Not until I've got a lot more people with guns around in case there are any problems. Finding this was the hard part. Destroying it is somebody else's job."

  Just Rewards

  Less than ten minutes later, the first of several helicopters showed up. Troy had to laugh at that; apparently SJ really had lit a fire under somebody's butt. He used his flashlight to signal where he was, then got them on the radio. They told him the engineers were ten minutes behind them and asked where he wanted the reaction team dropped.

  He told them where they'd last seen the group of djevels they'd fought and sent them on their way. When the other one showed up, they landed in a nearby clearing, and a group of combat engineers—who were all honey badgers, unsurprisingly—humped their way over, carrying a lot of explosives.

  "What have we got here?" asked a sergeant Troy could see was a lot older than he was.

  "A door of some sort, with a bunch of rocks glued on it. Not sure if it's counterweighted, locked, or what. If you can't get it open, blow a hole in it."

  "How big of a hole?"

  "Let the pilot know if he has to move."

  "Got it. What's behind the door?"

  "Djevels, most likely. You got the other stuff I asked for?"

  "We were told you needed to generate a lot of smoke, right?

  "Yup."

  "We'll take care of it. What's all this ruckus about, anyhow?"

  "Not your need to know," Troy said then added, "Sorry," as he saw the frown on the sergeant's face.

  "And who would you be?"

  "Scout Troy Valens."

  "Valens? As in—"

  "As in Sean Valens' son, the lion in charge of all this. Make sure everyone here understands that they didn't see anything, they didn't do anything, they were never here. They're not to talk about this ever."

  "Or?"

  "Ever seen a pissed off lion?"

  The sergeant laughed. "Nope! But I've heard the stories! Not something I wanna experience firsthand, either!"

  "Trust me, the stories tone it way down. Let me know whether you gotta blow it or not."

  "Got it."

  Troy watched as they went to work. Someone must have found something, because after a few minutes, shovels came out, and they started digging like mad. Ten minutes later, they had the door open and off its hinge,

  Walking over, he looked at it.

  "Nuttin' all that fancy," one of the other engineers said. "Mainly it was the weight of the rocks holdin' it down. Once we found the inside latch, it was mostly a matter of breakin' it."