by Eli Grant
“Sucked, as usual,” Aaron muttered, sitting down on the end of the couch near my feet. “I don’t know why I have to go to some bullshit Mundie school anyway.”
“It has the best magical after-school program in the city,” I recited from memory. We’d had this argument a couple hundred times. “And it’ll look really good on your mundane record when you apply to college.”
“I wouldn’t have to go to Mundie college if you’d just let me attend an Occult school,” Aaron reminded me. “You know, like every other witch I know and all my friends? Then I could apply to the High Circle University and actually do something important.”
I swallowed a guilty lump in my throat. Most magical kids, regardless of race, attended mundane public school followed by an after school program that taught us magic history and law and how not to reveal ourselves. Witches got a basic grounding in spell work, mostly just enough to avoid doing it unintentionally. But around high school witch kids usually transferred to an Occult school exclusively for witches that trained them in the more advanced applications of magic. At graduation they’d be given a magical aptitude grade, one to ten, and be registered formally as witches. Only the ones graded primary, secondary, tertiary, or quaternary could apply to the university. Everyone below quinary was out of luck. And me and Aaron, well... Let’s just say the chances of either of us getting into the university were about on par with the chances of snow falling on South Beach this afternoon.
I dragged my hand over my eyes tiredly. “Aaron...”
“Just because you’re nonary, doesn’t mean I am,” he pushed. “Maybe if I got some actual classes—”
He cut himself off, because he knew as well as I did that it wouldn’t happen. Neither of us was ever going to be able to cast spells. But I knew that was because, despite what the paperwork might say, I wasn’t a witch and never had been. Aaron just thought he wasn’t good enough, wasn’t trying hard enough. And I didn’t know how to tell him he was wrong, because I couldn’t answer the question that was certain to follow.
If we weren’t witches, what were we?
“Got any homework?” I asked instead. Aaron groaned.
“Too much,” he said. “Somebody told the teachers they have to assign an hour of homework every night.”
“All of them?” I asked, too tired to put together why that seemed wrong.
“Yeah,” Aaron confirmed. “Apparently, someone on the school board failed math. Six class periods for six subjects and six teachers assigning me a fricken hour of homework—I’ve got six hours of homework in my bag. When do they expect me to sleep? And that’s before the inane bullshit Mr. Rodaeo gave me for magic studies.”
“Maybe I can at least help with the last one,” I said, rolling onto my side in order to reach for the open binder he’d left among the debris on the coffee table. “What does he want?”
“Essay on the difference between practical immortality and true immortality,” he replied, taking the binder from me.
“Fuck,” I muttered, giving up immediately. “No idea. Immortality is immortality? Just means the bloodsucking bastards don’t die.”
“Language,” Aaron said, jabbing me with the binder. “And technically vampires can die. That’s what makes it practical immortality instead of true immortality. They don’t age or die of natural causes, but they can be killed. Only Fae are truly immortal. Try to kill them and they just change shape or jump bodies or get reborn fully formed from seafoam or some shit.”
“Well there you go,” I said with a yawn. “There’s your essay. I helped.”
Aaron sighed, and I could practically hear him rolling his eyes.
“Landlord was here when I got home from school,” he said after a beat.
“Noooooo,” I moaned, rolling over and curling into a ball with my face to the back of the couch, which smelled like stale pizza. I should have pushed for the two bedroom apartment. Sure I couldn’t afford this one and I was never home long enough to use a bedroom, but it would have been really nice to have a door to shut right now.
“He was pissed you weren’t here. He says you owe him for like two months of rent. I thought you said you talked to him about moving the day rent is due to later in the month so it lines up with when you get paid?”
“I did talk to him,” I said defensively. “I just didn’t say he agreed to it.”
“Are we gonna get evicted?”
“No!” I flopped onto my back, a hand over my weary, burning eyes. “Jesus, Aaron, no. I get paid in a couple of days. If I can get the restaurant to pay me cash for a couple of shifts we’ll be fine.”
“As long as we eat ramen for the rest of the month, right?” Aaron crossed his arms over his chest. He really did look just like Mom when he made that disapproving face. I could stand to see that look less for a couple of reasons.
“Hell no,” I scoffed. “A forty-eight count box of ramen is like twenty bucks. I’ve seen you finish one of those things by yourself in a week. I can sneak out the burgers they throw away at the end of the day at work for free.”
“Gross.”
“You’ll live. Now go to bed. You’ve got school tonight.”
Aaron rolled his eyes, but let it drop, heading for the door to his bedroom.
I closed my eyes, just glad the argument was over and I could sleep. But Aaron stopped with his hand on the doorknob.
“Seriously,” he said. “Call me next time, okay? I already spend too much time worrying about you never coming home.”
I winced. The bedroom door clicked shut while guilt reached up to strangle me. I dragged the faded serape blanket off the back of the couch and over my face. Great. Now instead of sleeping I could just lay here feeling like shit for a few hours. Perfect.
chapter
3
I DID EVENTUALLY DOZE OFF for a few hours, but unsurprisingly, I didn’t sleep well. I woke around four with the smell of smoke in my nose and panicked for a half a second before I realized the scent wasn’t really there. Just a lingering fragment of the same shitty dream I’d been having for years. If I tried to go back to sleep now it would just replay again, like it always did. Whatever. I was used to going with less sleep.
I rolled off the couch, rubbing at my nose to chase away the charred smell, and stumbled into the shower.
I’d already called the burger place this morning to let them know I was going to be in late because of the police bullshit, so of course they’d told me not to come in at all. And it was the middle of the week so the restaurant wouldn’t have any work for me. I might be able to snag a couple of hours cleaning up at a local theater where I knew the owner, but at this time of day I wouldn’t make enough to pay for the trip up there. I was better off just saving my energy for Harvey’s. Assuming I still had a job there. I hadn’t heard anything yet, but I wouldn’t put it past Dwayne to wait until I showed up tonight to fire me. Or, more likely, just change the schedule so I was only working ten hours a week, spread out as inconveniently as possible.
I double checked that I’d locked the door before I left and sent a message to Aaron for when he woke up, reminding him to eat before he left for school. In the boiling afternoon heat I scrolled through job listings on my phone and trudged east towards Bayview, into wolf territory.
You always knew when you were entering packland. It wasn’t just the way any attempt by the city to maintain anything evaporated all at once, or the big ugly brutalist facades of the vampire-funded housing projects. It was the way everyone you saw moved in groups. You never saw anyone alone.
Humans loved the “lone wolf” thing, but anyone who’d met a werewolf could tell you it was bullshit. Just walking down the street at three pm on a weekday I could see at least three clusters of wolves, staying close, moving together instinctively. A group of middle-aged women, lingering in the doorway of a tenement block. Boys passing a battered gameboy back and forth. Three old men, gray-muzzles with sharp eyes, sitting outside a bodega, talking shit a
bout whoever passed in broken Lupine.
You only ever heard the old ones speaking Lupine anymore. Egalitarian lobbying from the witches had put an end to the vampires openly forbidding the wolves from speaking their own language, but after so long the damage was pretty much done. According to news on the Othernet, Lupine was expected to be extinct as a language within a generation.
The vamps had probably succeeded in killing the wolves’ language, but they’d yet to break them of the pack habit, and I doubted they’d ever manage. It was just too much a part of who the wolves were as a people. The vamps could buy up wolf land to break up packs and force them into single family housing projects, abuse child services to kidnap wolf kids and raise them in group homes that were basically brainwashing programs, lobby the mundane government to put legal restrictions on multifamily homes—but the wolves always found a way around it. It’s not like they had a whole hell of a lot else to cling to.
Bayside is pretty much the poorest part of San Francisco. Everybody says the Mission and the Tenderloin are more dangerous, but the Mission gets more gentrified and touristy by the day and it’s already creeping into the Tenderloin too, and the people displaced from those neighborhoods tend to end up in Bayside. It was the same for the non-human community. Which meant the majority of the city’s wolves lived in the area, plus a handful of goblins that had managed to slip past the troll barricade around SoMa, and pretty much every changeling in the state.
As I moved north, leaving packland behind for the more mixed part of the neighborhood, I walked more quickly and purposefully. Despite the incident last night, wolves were generally only dangerous when a vampire was giving them orders. Changelings were a whole different thing, and way less predictable. Dropping Domino’s name would stop maybe half of them in their tracks, but the other half? God only knows. There was only one thing all changelings got from being part Fae, and that was being crazy as hell.
It had something to do with the way Fae magic reacted to being attached to a mortal body. I didn’t understand it, no one really did. But changelings always ended up at least a little bit off. A little too intense or a bit too aloof. They moved weird and thought weird. And that was the lucky ones, the ones that could more or less pass for “normal.” The unlucky ones ended up on the street, or beneath it if they also had visible Fae traits and couldn’t afford glamours, living in the sewers with the trolls. The really unlucky ones got declared a risk to the secrecy of the magical community and were disappeared to some offshore facility the vampires supposedly had. A lot of people thought the facility was a lie and the vampires just killed them. Based on what I’d heard about the facility, I wasn’t sure which was worse.
I started spotting Domino’s tag among the graffiti soon enough and waved to the tweaker on the corner with the cheap glamour looking like a clunky black bracelet on his skinny, blemished wrist. I had a vague idea of where Domino was hanging out these days, but I didn’t need a precise location. Once his people let him know I was in the area, he’d come to me.
He was waiting for me on the first good corner with a view of Potrero Hill in the distance, under the shadow of an overpass that kept the sun from baking him the way it was baking the pavement around us, sending up shimmering mirages.
Domino was half lucky, for a changeling. If he’d been really lucky, he’d have been swapped for the child of some rich human or witch family that would have been willing to keep him. Half lucky meant he’d been dropped on a bunch of dirt poor wolves who had dumped him the minute they realized he didn’t smell right. Most changeling kids ended up in the system once their families realized something was wrong. Some of the families blamed the changeling for snatching their real kid. Others just didn’t want to have to deal with a crazy half-Fae crossbreed who would never hold down a job.
But Domino’s host family being wolves meant he could pass as mostly human from a distance. Changelings tended to stay looking mostly like their “adoptive” families. Mostly. Something Fae always bled through no matter how lucky you were.
Domino was human shaped and his Fae traits weren’t too extreme, so the glamour he needed to pass in the mundane world was cheap at least. But then you get what you pay for with a glamour. As he looked my way it flickered just for a second. I had a brief impression of skin like ink spilled on canvas, and eyes that burned like molten gold. He just grinned at me, teeth sharp. Not like he was stressed about me seeing under his disguise. I’d seen a lot more than glimpses, not that long ago.
We’d grown up together, attending the same mundane public elementary school and the same magical afterschool program. He’d stopped attending both by sixth grade.
When his glamour settled he was only a little taller than me, built stout and solid, eyes sharp among the blunt angles of his brown face. In a simple white t-shirt and jeans, skin conspicuously absent of tattoos, he didn’t look like the leader of the biggest gang in Otherside. But then changelings practically invented the saying that looks could be deceiving. At the moment, the sight of him just pissed me off.
“Was wondering when I’d see you around here again,” he said as I approached. He was smoking a bent cigarette and offered me one from the battered pack. I waved it off and he shoved the pack back into his jeans with a shrug.
“I’m not here because I want to be, Dom,” I said, trying to reign in my anger. It wouldn’t do me any good to start a fight, as much as I wished I could smack that smug grin, cigarette and all, off of Domino’s face.
“Shame,” Domino said with a shrug. “Here I was hoping you’d finally come to your senses.”
“Getting clear of you and your bullshit was coming to my senses.” The bitter note in my voice only made him laugh.
“It was a vampire, Eva,” he said, the affectionate nickname stinging like the sweat in my eyes. “I couldn’t exactly say no.”
“You could have given him someone else,” I pressed. “Someone still in the game. That leech showed up at my work trying to get me in on some job, talking about my bills, my brother. Shit he said you told him.”
I expected more excuses or apathy, a shrug and a stupid grin, not the confused expression that crossed Domino’s face.
“Evie, I didn’t give him your name,” he said. “I sure as hell didn’t tell him anything about your brother. You know I wouldn’t put Aaron in danger, vampire or not.”
I pulled back, caught off guard and not liking the ripple of worry that sent through my guts. An insect singing in the heat resonated with the ringing in my ears. A car swept past us, casting a temporary hot breeze into our faces and a little tide of litter around our ankles.
“The leech, Dante, he showed up at my place the other night, talking about a job. Some big ass heist. But I didn’t suggest you. He did. Requested you by name. When I said you weren’t about that anymore, he said he’d talk you into it. Wanted to know where to find you.”
It was simultaneously a relief to know Domino hadn’t been handing my name out, and a much bigger worry. How the fuck did that bloodsucker find out about me? I scoffed, trying to convince myself it didn’t matter now anyway.
“So you figured if a vampire asked me to work with you again, I couldn’t say no,” I summarized.
This time he did grin. “A win-win. I get you back on the crew and you get enough money to stop working at that shit bodega.”
“Well, you figured wrong.” I leaned against the concrete support of the overpass, the stone hot through the back of my shirt. “I told the leech to fuck off. I’d rather deal with a pissed off vampire than risk Aaron ending up alone.”
“Sounds like the same thing to me,” Domino replied, watching another car shoot past. “This Dante guy means business. I tried to sell him on someone else, but he won’t do the job without you. I don’t think he’s going to take no for an answer.”
That thought settled like an ugly downtown fog around my shoulders. I chewed on the inside of my cheek, deliberating my options. Domino stared out towards the city
proper and I followed his gaze towards Potrero Hill.
In the mundane world, it was just an upper-middle-class family neighborhood, albeit one with a weirdly high rate of disappearances and kidnappings. But on the Otherside, the whole damn thing was a fairy mound. The only semi-permanent portal to the Fae realm was there, and the earthly residences of the Summer and Winter courts. But one thing you’d never find on the hill was a changeling. It turned out the Fae weren’t terribly fond of their abandoned bastard children. Changelings weren’t treated as Fae or bound by Fae law, or even mentioned in it. The general policy was to pretend changelings didn’t exist at all. A changeling could stand right in front of a Fae, shout and wave their arms, and the Fae would look right through them and act like there was nothing there. There was only one law the Fae followed when it came to changelings, unwritten but zealously enforced: no changeling could enter the Fae realm, ever, under any circumstances. For a changeling, even getting too close to a portal was an instant death sentence.
“Why do you hang around here,” I asked Domino, looking away. Even looking at the hill left a bitter taste in my mouth. “You could move down towards Hunter’s Point at least, so you didn’t have that place over your shoulder all the time.”
“Why didn’t you move out of the city when your folks died?”
The blunt question stung like a slap and I clenched my teeth on nothing. He knew the answer.
Domino dropped his cigarette and stepped on it, breathing out smoke. His powers caught it, raising the hair on my arms, and pulled it into a serpentine shape. A dragon, twisting away into the sky like a ribbon caught in the wind.
“We all got things we hold on to,” he said as we watched it fly towards the hill, only to be scattered by a crosswind before it was even out of sight.
He took a deep breath before he looked towards me again.
“Want to get a drink?” he asked. I shook my head.
“I got work in a few hours.”
“When don’t you? You could take fifteen, catch up. The guys have been asking about you.”