The orange light of evening fell into the truck, and Hawk and Teige's shadows stretched up across the back wall. Inside the truck were nine people--only nine, crowded towards the back of the truck. Some of them cringed at the sudden flood of light.

Six of them were human-shaped, though the pregnant woman on the left and the young child she was trying to shield had deep, rose-grey skin and ginger hair. One of the people was a large, greying wolf wearing a white dress. One of them knelt in the back corner, a sack over their head. One of them was a hulking red lion-like creature with massive tusks and vivid yellow eyes; this one's muzzle was tied to its forelegs. The girl next to it had torn open her stockings and sported a massive bruise on her upper arm, but only her hands were tied. To left sat a skinny, large red bird, with its wings tied to its sides and a cloth bag tied around its feet. The last two seemed to have been caught even while perfectly disguised as humans--a man and a woman, the woman with her knees skinned and her eyes cast down, the man with a bloodied and broken nose that had dripped onto his already grubby jacket.

Hawk stared; he had not, somehow, expected to see this. Teige flashed a weak grin. "Afternoon, everyone," he said.

He repositioned himself a bit, resting the edge of the door on his horns and squaring his shoulders. "I've got the door," he told Hawk. "Mind helping these folks out?"

"Y-yeah," Hawk mumbled, and ducked inside the truck.

The ginger woman had stopped snarling and now slumped against the wall of the truck. Her hair was a tangled mess, and she looked exhausted, but she nodded at her son as Hawk knelt and pulled his skinning knife from the bag at his side.

"Go ahead, sweetie," she murmured, and the wolf--clearly, it seemed, very old--to the child's left leaned forward, adding, "Bless your heart, young man."

All the people in the car had been bound with the same material--dark, leathery straps with little blue dots and dashes engraved into them. The boy's had rubbed into his wrists. Hawk held his arm carefully as he worked the knife under the straps, cutting through them.

Teige watched. "Look at that," he said, sounding disconcerted. "They're using proper magic-cancelling spells and everything."

The middle-aged man with the broken nose spoke up, thickly. "You boys wouldn't've seen another rain snake out there, would you?" he said anxiously. "A girl?"