I looked at the other nine ghouls.
They all wore similar expressions of confusion. Yellow eyes blinking in perfect unison. Bald heads cocked at the same ten-degree angle. Peeling gray lips loose around their long teeth. Their brains must’ve been running at half speed due to the hibernation they’d been so rudely woken from. The “extreme aggression lobes” that compelled them to rip people limb from limb hadn’t yet powered up and stuck a bull’s-eye to my chest.
Excellent.
I turned toward the living room again, gave a dignified nod to Nosferatu, and ran for my life.
Three strides in, when I was halfway to the couch, one of the ghouls hissed loudly, and like an echo chamber, the rest mimicked it. I bounded over the couch, propelled myself off the edge of the coffee table, and rapidly whispered the words that unraveled two more of my glamours. I landed four feet from the doorway to the bedroom I’d used as an entry point, the magic juices now flowing through my veins, wrapping around my muscles, reinforcing my bones. And just as the air parted behind me, the hairs on my neck rising, the nail of a long finger brushing the collar of my coat, the ghouls catching up in the space between breaths, super fast, super agile—I took off at ten times the speed I’d been moving before.
I crossed the bedroom in under a second, braced myself, arms up to shield my face, and propelled my body straight through the window, frame and all. Glass exploded outward, singing through the air. I soared over the entire front lawn, over the white picket fence whose paint had dulled to gray. My body, sense of balance heightened, corrected its position in midair. I landed in a rough but controlled roll and pushed myself to my feet in one smooth motion.
Nice, I thought.
Then my swinging satchel whacked me in the head.
“Goddammit,” I mumbled, rubbing the aching spot above my ear as I situated my satchel back at my side and…
Hisses cut through the quiet of the gloomy afternoon.
I spun to face the front of the house.
Ghouls were spilling out of the window. Their faces were contorted into the rage of a feeding frenzy, literally frothing at the mouth.
Yep. Time to go.
I sprinted full speed down the street of what had once been a cozy suburb of Kinsale, now row upon row of abandoned, sagging houses, dead lawns, and cracking sidewalks. I’d ventured to this particular suburb a number of times since I’d become a finder of lost things, and I knew its layout well enough to navigate it blindfolded. So while the ghouls were extremely fast, they failed to close enough ground to catch me as I climbed backyard fences, leaped across empty swimming pools, bounded over a couple of sheds, and jumped the gap between the second shed and the front porch of another house. I managed to cut across the entire neighborhood in under ten minutes, my woken magic now pulsing through me, strengthening me, a growing high I had to be careful not to court too long.
The northern half of the suburb terminated at a two-lane road that cut through a dense patch of woods to join the highway that led back to Kinsale. I usually avoided this road and took the eastern route home instead because it was surrounded by flatland and I could see in every direction—see anything that might be coming after me. But today, with the ghouls still in hot pursuit, hissing and spitting and occasionally shrieking to remind me they were not giving up until I was a bloated corpse, I chose to take a gamble.
I headed north. Toward the woods. Toward the shadows that hid what lived within.
Glancing over my shoulder, I calculated the rough distance between myself and the lead ghoul—which happened to be Nosferatu, interestingly enough, with its face still leaking green blood. About eighteen feet to work with. That meant I’d have to time this budding ploy of mine with only a second or two of leeway, given that all of us were moving at the posted speed limit. I’d be cutting it close. And if my ticket out of this mess ended up coming from more than one direction?
Let’s not answer that.
I pushed my legs harder, driving them against the worn asphalt under my boots, my magic urging me to call upon its entirety, to release my last three glamours so I could show those damn ghouls what a man like me could really do. I resisted the call, as I always did. Though it was difficult with my heart beating at the speed of light, sweat pouring down my face, the damp, cold air teasing me with winter’s touches, like it recognized a kindred spirit in my soul. I narrowed my focus to the road before me, the trees on either side growing closer and closer, the darkness between those trees even more menacing than usual. I ran over my hackneyed plan three more times, mouthing to myself exactly what I had to do to pull this off.
You got this, Whelan. You’re not that washed up. Not yet anyway.
Ten steps from the tree line, I yanked a flare gun out of my satchel, pointed it at the woods abutting the right lane, and pulled the trigger. A bright red flare burst out, shot through the air at a shallow angle, and passed perfectly between the trees for at least fifty feet before it slammed into a trunk close to the roadside and exploded in a blinding flash. The flash winked out after a handful of seconds, leaving only a rain of red sparks flickering among the shadows.
Twenty steps later, I passed the scorched tree.
Seven steps after that, the ghouls reached the tree.
At the exact same moment a werewolf leaped from the darkness.
The wolf rammed into Nosferatu with a vicious growl and snapped its powerful jaws shut around the ghoul’s head. The skull exploded with a sickening squelch, green blood and grayish brain matter spraying across the asphalt. The other ghouls, infuriated at the sight of their fallen comrade, lunged at the wolf as it landed on the road, not paying attention to anything else around them. Which was why they didn’t see the other wolves coming until it was too late.
An entire pack of werewolves raced out of the woods behind their leader and tore into the ghouls with abandon. Wolf teeth met ghoul flesh and flayed it from bone. Ghoul teeth met wolf flesh and ripped it to shreds. Bones cracked. Organs burst. Wolves cried. Ghouls shrieked. Gray limbs went flying. Patches of bloody fur fluttered up into the air. With so many bodies writhing in a mass of blood and gore, it was impossible to tell who was winning.
Good thing I didn’t care who won.
I fled from the skirmish so fast I would’ve been no more than a blur flitting beneath the shadows of the trees to any human who might have seen me pass. Not that I thought there were humans out here to see me pass. I didn’t spy a single one during my return trip. Not on the four-lane highway (unless you counted the skeletons in derelict cars). Not in any of the neglected gas stations and convenience stores and other small businesses I passed as I trekked down that highway. Not in the other two suburbs that branched off that highway, half a mile out from Kinsale proper. Nope. Not a single human soul had dared to brave the stretches today.
I didn’t blame them.
Not one bit.
Chapter Two
The headless horseman glared at me from atop his tall white steed. His head was sitting in his lap, beady eyes narrowed in suspicion, as his partner, an equally headless woman, waved her literal wand over my body to check for contraband magical items on my person. When her wand didn’t beep—or set me on fire, or whatever it did when it declared you guilty—the female dullahan shrugged, tucked her wand into its designated band on her belt, and climbed back onto her pretty black stallion. She’d left her head perched on the saddle, and when she swung around behind it, the head started talking.
“Looks like you’re clean, Mr. Whelan,” she said.
Her partner’s head snorted, and he added gruffly, “Surprised the wolves didn’t get you today, bréagadóir, so close to the full moon. They’re usually ravenous by this point in the month.”
I rocked back on my heels. “No, they caught some other unfortunate fellows in my place.”
He clearly assumed I meant humans, because he flashed me a haughty smirk. “Fools. Still think they’re at the top of this world’s food chain, don’t they?”
�
�I find it rather pitiful myself,” said the woman. “Considering how few of them were truly to blame for all this.” Her arms gestured to the slate-gray sky, the rolling clouds promising another chilly rainstorm sometime later this afternoon. The sky was always gray these days, but it was typically a pale gray that allowed limited light to pass through. Just enough light to make you believe the sun was still out there somewhere, playing hide and seek.
The male dullahan rolled his eyes. “Not being an active participant in a war doesn’t mean you aren’t complicit in some way.” He hawked a glob of spit at the ground, and it splattered on the degraded asphalt that probably wouldn’t be repaired for decades. Not from a lack of roadwork crews. But from a lack of traffic.
There were no more operational gas stations because there was no longer a trade in petroleum products, so even though free cars were plentiful, due to the whole “half the human population got wiped out” thing, you couldn’t drive them. They just sat there, slowly decaying. Like most things in the world.
God, what I wouldn’t give to be able to make these long-ass trips in a nice, sturdy pickup.
I adjusted my satchel on my shoulder and cleared my throat. “While this is a riveting discussion, I have somewhere to be, so if you two are done hassling me, can I go in now?” I nodded toward the faintly glowing line of large symbols about ten feet behind the dullahan pair. It stretched for a mile in both directions, then curved around the east and west limits of the city, before the two ends of the line met, forming a complete circle. The protective boundary that kept the nasties in the stretches from overrunning Kinsale and killing everyone inside.
The male dullahan shrugged his broad shoulders. “Sure. Go on in. Just don’t cause any trouble.”
“You say that every time I come back from a trip.” I kicked a loose rock his way. “You know I live here, right? I lived here even before the collapse.”
His detached head sniffed in a snobbish manner. “Doesn’t mean you’re not a troublemaker. You’re a bréagadóir after all.”
“Ah, the sweet smell of prejudice in the afternoon,” I drawled, marching past him. “Someone’s going on my naughty list for Christmas this year. No gift for you.”
Neither of them responded to that quip until I stepped over the boundary line, the tingle of insanely powerful magic washing over me like a dense blanket until I crossed the last of the symbols.
Then the female dullahan muttered to her partner, “What’s Christmas again?”
“Some human holiday,” the male horseman responded. “I think it’s religious. Something about a guy nailed to a cross?”
Scoffing under my breath, I left the duo behind and picked up my pace as I moved into Kinsale proper. Modest office buildings, both glass walled and brick, rose up around me, interspersed with closely packed neighborhoods of townhouses, duplexes, and the occasional apartment building. Despite the gloom, only the important structures—mostly government offices, libraries, hospitals, and grocery stores—had their lights on.
There was still a major electricity shortage in Kinsale, which wasn’t projected to be rectified for another eight to twelve months. Much of the power grid had been destroyed during the war, and it was a hassle to repair it when a lot of its vital parts were outside the city. In the stretches. Where the wild things lived.
Even so, we were making do. We still had plenty of batteries to go around, and you could use magic openly now, so lots of new products, like spell-powered lights and water heaters, were becoming common fare in the home supply shops throughout the city. After all, where there was a market for “alternative kitchen appliances,” there was a wizard capitalist ready to start mass-producing magic toasters. It had only been a matter of time before the entrepreneurs began popping up.
I passed by two such entrepreneurs as I drew closer to downtown, a mom-and-pop pair who I knew as a witch and a wizard. They were busy using a levitation spell to hang up a large GRAND OPENING banner from the roof of their new store, which was brightly lit with warm yellow light cast from magic orbs attached to the walls. The hand-painted signs in the display windows promised washers and dryers that would run on single spells for a year at a time, guaranteed or your money back. They did look to have some nice wares inside, so I made a note of the address. My house was a little lacking in the laundry department.
A brisk wind picked up as I reached the edge of the city’s main market, a tight cluster of wooden stalls and white plastic tents that stretched across four blocks of what had once been a park. The market had shut down earlier today, around lunch, after the first wave of rain and high winds swept through and drenched everyone. A few stalls had reopened, however, mostly food vendors nice enough to keep serving their usual customers, who relied on them for cheap meals.
I stopped at a stall worked by a friend of mine, Christie Bridgewater. She owned a teashop on Tillman Street but spent three days a week at the market filling canteens and water bottles with her best brews to keep people warm as they traversed the market. It was a massive loss to her bottom line, because she charged a single chit no matter the size of the container, but she did it out of the goodness of her heart.
Christie noticed me waiting as she finished up with a raggedly dressed customer, and she waved. “Hey, Vince. How’s it going?” She cheerily wished farewell to the likely homeless man as he trudged off, his quaking fingers rapped tightly around his coffee mug filled with steaming tea. When he was out of earshot and no one else was in range of the stall, Christie dropped her smile and placed her hands on her hips. “What’s with the cuts? Did you get into another fight while you were outside?”
“Cuts?”
She ducked down under the stall table and popped back up a second later with her purse. From it, she produced a small mirror, which she handed over to me. I held it up and viewed my face and neck. There were an assortment of thin, angry cuts on the left side.
“Oh, those,” I said. “Probably happened when I jumped through the window. No worries though. Didn’t even feel them.”
The ability to block out mild to moderate pain was a bonus of stripping my glamours. But the cuts reminded me I needed to reassemble the three glamours I’d dropped. My senses were still heightened to nonhuman levels, and my magic, though no longer frenzied, was still buzzing through my nerves, beckoning for me to call on it again. It took me about thirty minutes to rebuild each of my glamours though, and my full concentration—complex spellwork was hard—so it’d have to wait until I got home.
No big deal. I could still pretend to be human with my three base glamours intact. Those were the important ones.
Christie frowned. “You jumped through a window?” She dropped her palms to the tabletop and leaned toward me. “And why, pray tell, would you choose to do that?”
I faked a cough. “Well, there was the small matter of…the horde of ghouls chasing me through a house.”
“Vincent!” She whipped a stack of napkins off the table and swatted my head with them. “You shouldn’t be so reckless. One day, you’re going to venture into the stretches and not come back. And where will I be then?”
“Missing your Friday night Scrabble partner?”
“Precisely. We can’t win the tournament against Faraday and Peterson if you’re dead.”
“Your concern for my well-being is touching, Chris.”
She huffed, then reached for a small stack of paper cups she kept on hand in case someone didn’t bring one of their own. As she filled it with black tea from her insulated beverage dispenser, she said, “But really, Vince, you need to be careful when you go out there. I know some jerks mock the job you do, but it’s important to a lot of people in this town. They rely on you to retrieve the things they lost. It gives them hope, increases their morale. So you need to keep your head on your shoulders. Literally.” She offered me the cup of tea. “Also, I kind of like you as a person, so I’d be a little bummed if I had to go to your funeral.”
I accepted the tea with a thin smile. “Likewise. D
on’t get yourself killed by the tea bandit.”
“Last thief who came this way, I beat with the bat I keep under this table.”
“Oh, yeah. I heard about that.” I took a sip of the tea. I didn’t get cold, even with my glamours on, as a consequence of my heritage, but I still enjoyed a good cup of hot tea. “Didn’t you break his jaw?”
“And knocked out four of his teeth.” She poured a second cup for herself.
“Remind me not to piss you off.”
She downed the tea like a shot and slammed the cup against the table, crushing it under her palm. “How about you just don’t forget it?”
I laughed. “I’ll write it down.”
She grinned. “It’s really good to see you back in one piece. I mean it.” She gestured to my satchel. “Get the goods today?”
“Yup. Exactly as ordered.” I patted the bag as I finished off my tea. “I’m due for delivery in about ten minutes, so I best get going. We’re meeting over at the guy’s stall.”
“Oh? What’s he sell?”
“Watches and clocks. Used to be a jeweler, apparently.” I tossed my cup over the table and heard it land in the small trashcan she always kept in the corner of her stall. “Obviously, we don’t need much in the way of diamond earrings these days, so he’s switched over to timepieces. He’s got a lot of the traditional windup kind, from what I saw when we were chatting yesterday. Which is handy in a place where the electricity isn’t reliable.”
“Huh.” She wiped off the table with a rag she kept tucked in her apron pocket. “I might get me one of those.”
“My thoughts exactly. Half his payment for my service is a nice mantel clock. It looks like an authentic antique. Might be worth something thirty years from now, when the world has an actual economy again.”
“Ha! Now there’s a nice dream.” She made a shooing motion. “Off you go. Get paid. Earn your keep. You can show me the clock next time we have Scrabble night at your house.”
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