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 blowtorch bottle 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 really should 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.
