Four years ago, my world—the world—exploded with wild magic. The cherry on top of that crap cake? The supernatural world declared war on humans, and my life went straight to hell.
I used to be a detective, and a damned good one. Then Magicfall happened, and I changed along with the world. I’m witchkin now—something more than human or not quite human, depending on your perspective. To survive, I’ve become a scavenger, searching abandoned houses and stores for the everyday luxuries in short supply—tampons and peanut butter. Oh, how the mighty have fallen, but anything’s better than risking my secret.
Except, old habits die hard. When I discover a murder scene screaming with signs of black magic ritual, I know my days of hiding are over. Any chance I had of escaping my past with my secret intact is gone. Solving the witchkin murders is going to be the hardest case of my life, and not just because every second will torture me with reminders of how much I miss my old life and my partner, who hates my guts for abandoning the department.
But it’s time to suck it up, because if I screw this up, Portland will be wiped out, and I’m not going to let that happen. Hold on to your butts, Portland. Justice is coming, and I don’t take prisoners.
Visit her at dianapfrancis.com, and find her on Facebook.
Chapter 1
Kayla
THE SCAVENGE HAD proved more successful than
Kayla had expected, and she’d expected a lot. She’d come away with a treasure
trove of difficult- to-find foods and spices, prescription and over-the-counter
medicines, tampons and pads which brought a premium price, and most important
of all, two cartons of cigarettes, three jars of peanut butter, and a stockpile
of Mountain Dew, the latter of which she’d have to get later. She was already
practically bent double with the weight of the backpack without the soda. It
was too bad about the Skittles, but this was a good haul.
Going up into The Deadwood offered the chance
to mine houses that hadn’t already been picked over by a hundred other
scavengers. Mostly because the rest of them liked breathing and so stayed away.
Kayla wasn’t so burdened with common sense. That, and she carried a gun,
several knives, and a couple of magical taser charms. Not to mention she was
pretty decent at hand-to-hand. Leftover habits and skills from her life as a
cop. She could more than take care of herself against people hiding in dark
alleys.
Of course,
The Deadwood was filled with a lot more dangerous beings than the ordinary
street scum that preyed on pedestrians back before Magicfall. Before the
Witchwar. Before the whole world had turned inside out and all the monsters in
the closets and under the beds came crawling out of hiding. Back when Kayla was
just an ordinary human.
The Witchwar
exploded within days of Magicfall—a worldwide eruption of magic that birthed
The Deadwood, changed Kayla, and set off an untold number of other bizarre
transformations straight out of fairytales and hallucinogenic nightmares. The
entire world had been engulfed.
Right smack
in the middle of all the chaos, witches leading armies of supernatural warriors
and creatures out of myth, legend, and nightmare marched against the human
cities that had survived. Humans were like termites eating up the world. They
needed to be eradicated like roaches.
The war had
gone on for a year or so when the attacks on the cities stopped. It still
wasn’t clear why. Maybe they figured enough humans had died, or maybe they
figured out humans aren’t so easy to kill. Over the last couple of years, an
uneasy truce had developed between humans and witchkin. Turns out, we needed
each other.
Kayla hitched the backpack higher, bending forward to help
balance it. Her lips twisted in self-ridicule. How the mighty had fallen. From
cop to scavenger. Before the shit had hit the fan, she’d been a detective, a
damned good one. Then she’d been infected with magic and game over. Bye bye
career, friends, and, worst of all, Ray.
A familiar ache bloomed in her chest. She missed him every day,
even after everything he’d said, everything he’d called her, when she quit.
Back then she’d had zero control over herself. Not that she’d
improved much since. But quitting the department had been a no-brainer. With
the Witchwar and hatred of the supernaturals, she’d have either been lynched
when it got out, or else locked up in a zoo somewhere.
Leaving had been the right decision. The only decision.
Regretting it didn’t change that. And Kayla regretted it with all the fabric of
her being.
She pulled her mind from the quagmire of memories and what-ifs
that circled her like sharks, chomping down whenever she didn’t keep her mind
on task. Focus, she told herself. Forget about who you
were before. Staying alive today is all that counts.
The Deadwood lay west of downtown Portland inside the
neighborhood that used to be Goose Hollow and extending into the Southwest
Hills and Washington Park. When the magic had struck, a sinister black forest
had grown up in the blink of an eye. The twisted, gnarled trees grew taller
than the houses, and were spaced far enough apart to allow a lot of the
buildings to survive. Possessive nettles and vines swayed and wriggled from the
trees, growing over most of the houses. The blowtorch hooked to Kayla’s belt
had convinced them to withdraw and allow her access.
Within the shadowed gloom of The Deadwood, hundreds of denizens
lived and hunted. All too often, folks who wandered too close disappeared,
never to be heard from again. So people—human and not—avoided the place, which
suited Kayla just fine. The untouched houses made the forest a scavenger
paradise. If you could stay alive long enough to get out with your haul.
Since Magicfall and then the Witchwar, so many of the comforts
of everyday American life had stopped getting made. Sure, the metal infrastructure
of the cities had protected them from complete transformation and given birth
to the technomages who worked with all sorts of technology, which meant
industry could still function. But shipping proved supremely expensive and
dangerous, so anything the locals needed either had to be made in Portland, or
it had to be scavenged.
Tampons were popular. And chocolate. A lot of foods, really.
Jeans, too. And silk. Some enterprising entrepreneur had started a toilet paper
factory on the east side, so that wasn’t much in demand anymore, but pots and
pans were. Medications, cosmetics, spices,
CDs and DVDs, olive oil, guns, ammunition, bows, arrows,
toys... anything that couldn’t be obtained without a lot of
money or magic.
Most people didn’t like going to Spider
Island—over where the Willamette had expanded into a giant lake covering
West Linn and Oregon City—to buy magic. That’s where witches and other supernaturals
had set up a bazaar to sell their skills and wares. Humans called it Nuketown,
since they’d have liked to nuke the place.
Humans had a love/hate relationship with magic. They liked the
benefits, but feared the dangers, not to mention all the mythological
creatures besides witches that had crawled out of the woodwork after
Magicfall.
They counted the technomages as good guys since they’d fought on
the human side in the war and because mages made most electronics work again.
People still couldn’t live without their cell phones and video games, and it
was damned nice to still have working modern hospitals and refrigerators.
Unlike witches, technomages had hard limits to their powers.
They worked with industrial magic and couldn’t heal or make charms or anything
separate from wire, steel, electricity, and computers—or what computers had
turned in to, which was an amorphous semi-sentient cloud of information the
technomages called The Oracle. Every big city had birthed one. The mages were
working on getting them to talk to each other like the old internet.
That made Nuketown necessary and despised all at once. Most
humans only went there when desperate, usually preferring to buy from
middlemen, a service that Nessa—Kayla’s usual buyer for salvage—often
performed. A few went for the thrill.
Kayla hitched the pack higher again and dodged around a glass
bush. It chimed in the light breeze. It marked the edge of The Deadwood and the
return to civilization. She climbed up a bank to the road, using the thick,
wiry grass to help pull herself up.
The asphalt had buckled and cracked apart, leaving knee-deep
potholes and long trenches. Portland’s ubiquitous blackberry vines crawled
across the road and sprouted out of the crevices and holes. The city hadn’t
gotten around to repairing this road yet. Maybe they wouldn’t, not with it so
close to The Deadwood.
It took her a little over an hour to work her way back to
downtown. After that, it got trickier. Fog had rolled in off the river again,
smothering sound and sight. The breeze did nothing to dissipate it. Kayla could
only see a few feet ahead of herself before the walls of gray nothingness
closed in around her. She sighed and turned west.
The tule fogs rolled in once or twice a week. They didn’t
usually last more than a day. They’d started after Magicfall and didn’t seem to
coincide with any weather phenomena. It tended to settle maybe a mile wide on
either side of the river. As annoying as it could be, Kayla couldn’t hate it.
It had given her cover more than a few times when the transformation had taken
her and she’d no way to hide.
Tonight she
had no need. Her shifter form wasn’t threatening. She decided to head uphill
until she was above the fog and go home for the night. She’d take her
scavengings to Nessa in the morning.
A noise from
the right sent the hair on the back of her neck prickling. A ring of metal,
like a sword being unsheathed, and muffled movement. A loud sound and the tang
of something in the air—hot, wet, stony, acrid. She recoiled as it coated the
insides of her nose and mouth, feeling caustic.
Kayla’s cop
genes ignited. She jerked forward a step then made herself stop and retreat.
Not her circus, not anymore. She’d walked away from all that. She should leave
it alone, whatever was happening.
She took a
couple more steps toward home and stopped. Goddammit. Curiosity killed the cat, she told herself, then slid the pack from
her shoulders, setting it down against a fire hydrant. She glanced around,
seeing only cottony fog. Odds were nobody would see her pack and take it. Even
if they did... there were always more backpacks and more
stuff to scavenge.
She drew her .357 semi-auto from her hip holster. All carry laws had
been suspended after Magicfall. Mostly because everybody ignored them. The blowtorchbottle bounced against her thigh as she followed the noises.
She moved
cautiously, placing each foot carefully to keep from tripping or worse. She
nudged up against a curb at the side of the road and stepped up onto the
sidewalk. It shuddered and rippled under her feet, and she began to sink. Kayla
jumped back onto the solid asphalt. Her boots stuck to the ground. She smelled
the acrid stench of her rubber soles melting. Dammit. She
liked these boots.
Weird spots
like this one popped up all the time. They all manifested different properties
and none particularly pleasant. The worst part was they could appear anywhere
at any time, with no warning. Once reported, technomages would get rid of them,
but finding them was usually a matter of stepping into one. Sometimes that was
fatal.
She jerked
her boots free from where they’d cooled and stuck to the ground, and followed
the curb, listening closely. More noise came from the left. Kayla tested the
sidewalk and found it solid. For now, anyway.
Taking several
quick steps, she scuttled across, finding herself at the top of a flight of
steps at the edge of a small park. The muted sounds of running water made her
stomach drop. She’d stumbled into Keller Fountain Park.
Taking up
the entire block, the ziggurat-shaped fountain for which the park was named had
been constructed into the side of a steep hill. On the high side, an angular
maze of wading canals channeled water over a mashed-together collection of
square-topped pyramids of various heights and sizes. The blocky juts and peaks
had always reminded her of an Aztec temple. The different sizes created deep
chimney insets in between, some fifteen feet wide and ten feet deep, others a
scant five. Water cascaded down each of the flat planes. No little fountains of
neatly contained water here.
She
shuddered. Her worst nightmare. Now she reallyshould leave.
She didn’t
move.
Kayla drew
in a slow breath. Something was wrong here. She could feel it. Her instincts
had never let her down before. She wouldn’t forgive herself if something awful
happened because she was too worried about herself to check it out.
She started
down the steps, listening for telltale sounds, trying to hear through the
splashing of the fountains.
Then—
Guttural words—not English—spoken in a gravel-filled voice that rumbled through the air like thunder. A cadence to
the language, sort of chanting, but nothing musical about it. Weighted silence,
heavy and breathless. Movement. A rippling and clutching in the fog. A red glow
washing outward, turning the fog bloody.
Magic.
The wave of
power hit Kayla like a club and sent her sprawling onto the shallow steps. The
hard concrete cut into her back and legs.
She lay
still a long moment, her head reeling from where she’d hit it on the cement. Perfect. Carefully she examined the sudden lump on the back of her
skull with the fingers of her left hand. At least her ponytail had kept the
blow from knocking her out. She still clutched her gun in her other hand. Old
habits died hard.
She firmed
her grip and sat up, glancing down at herself. A shiny white powder covered her
clothing and the ground all around. Kayla stood, dusting herself off with one
hand. The powder clung to her skin and clothing.
She licked
her lips. Fine grit coated her tongue. It tasted like vinegar and something
putrid. Worse than the air before the spell. She grimaced and spit. If her fall
hadn’t already alerted whoever had set that spell, a little spitting wouldn’t
give her away.
The sour
grains clung to her mouth and then seemed to absorb into her skin. That
couldn’t be good. She resisted the urge to try dusting herself off again. She
didn’t need to give the stuff more opportunity to infect her, whatever it was.
On the positive side, she hadn’t broken out in boils and weeping sores. That was
good.
She resumed
her descent to the bottom of the fountains. Gray cement platforms layered over
each other like giant slices of bread stacked ten or so feet back from the
angular, red fountain walls. Between, a patchwork of rectangular pools
collected water.
The
splashing of the fountain covered any sounds there might have been. Holding her
gun ready, Kayla walked closer, heading for the central platform, knowing
instinctively that it was the best place in the park to cast a spell. Her feet
found the first of the stacked cement sheets. Three others were layered on the
sides and in front of the base platform. She stopped again to listen, breathing
silently. Still nothing.
Adrenaline
thrummed through her veins. She stepped up on the left platform and then to the
highest central platform. She expected to find a spell circle like the kind
used by witches, but as she stepped up, she found only cement coated in a sheet
of silvery-white powder.
She circled
the platform, angling inward until she came to the middle. Nothing. What was
she missing?
Her brows
furrowed. Maybe someone had used an amulet or charm? A hex? Kayla didn’t know
enough about magic to make a decent guess.
A thought
struck her, and she gritted her teeth. Son of a bitch. Of course. Things
couldn’t just be simple, could they?
She crossed
to the edge of the platform where it jutted several feet above the catch pools
and squatted down. She could only see a foot or two out into the fog. A scum of
white powder floated across the top of the otherwise clear water, disguising
the mortared river rock bottom.
Kayla rubbed
her hand over her mouth. Was she really considering jumping in? This wasn’t her
problem, and anyway, who knew what this even
was? Nobody would thank her for getting involved. And if she went into the
water—
She could
only hold off a transformation for so long once she got wet. If she dried
quickly, she could keep it from happening, but wading into water? Risky. Too
fucking risky and stupid.
Kayla
straightened and turned away from the water and then stopped. Instinct fought
against instinct. The need to protect herself wrestled with the need to serve
and protect the people of the city. Being a cop was in her DNA, and leaving the
force hadn’t changed that. God, could she be any more fucked up?
Don’t tempt
fate, she
admonished herself. The
universe never refuses that kind of challenge.
She pivoted
back around. The water wasn’t deep. Mid-calf, maybe to her knees. That wasn’t
so much. She could handle it, no problem.
In your
dreams, came the
mocking voice of reality in her head.
"No one will
see with the fog,” she said out loud, her voice paper thin, but steady with
purpose. Her heart, her soul, had already decided. Time for her brain to get
with the program.
She gave a
little hop and splashed down into the pool.