Nightshade (17 tales of Urban Fantasy, Magic, Mayhem, Demons, Fae, Witches, Ghosts, and more)

by Annie Bellet

  My name is Maggie MacKay. I live in a world called The Other Side. It runs parallel to Earth, but I’m pretty darn good at ripping holes through the dimensions and popping over whenever my job requires it. And my job requires it on a fairly regular basis. I have the dubious honor of finding the monsters who have overstayed their welcome in Hollywood and returning them to the loving arms of a gentle corrections officer. By monsters, I don’t mean Silver Lake hipsters who refuse anything that’s not craft-brewed. No, I mean werewolves, vampires, ghouls, Hugh Heffner, and various other subsets of the undead.

  “So is there any particular reason you hate childhood celebrations and happiness?” Killian asked. “Or is this just another one of your endearing qualities?”

  I chucked my eraser at Killian’s head.

  Killian is my partner at M&K Tracking. We share a sweet little office straight out of a noir film. Brown-bead paneling on the walls, slow ceiling fans circling overhead, even frosted glass in the door so that anybody coming for a consultation could throw a badass silhouette before entering. Handy when it behooves you to count the tentacles and extra heads before admitting visitors. There is a greengrocer below us who is happy to give us a lifelong free shopping spree in his bruised produce section in exchange for corporate protection whenever an ogre decides to come through and play pop-the-bubble-wrap with his melons.

  Killian’s a six-foot-something wood elf and he makes Orlando Bloom look like Quasimodo. Note: not all of that is entirely due to Killian’s natural assets. The wood elf wears the power of his people’s faerie glamour like a shirtless shop boy spraying Abercrombie & Fitch cologne. Nice if you’re a fifteen-year-old girl uncomfortable with what men actually smell like, but wears a little thin if you’ve gotta hang around in it all-day. Killian and I originally started working together when his big boss, the queen of the elves, informed us that my uncle and a bunch of vampire cronies were trying to collapse the boundaries between worlds, leading to the extinction of the human race, blah blah blah.

  We seemed to work pretty well together, so decided to make it a more permanent relationship. Working relationship. It’s like a girl can’t have a male co-worker without people thinking twelve hours a day is not enough to spend in each other’s company. And by “people”, I mean my mother.

  Aaaaand as if on cue… the phone rang.

  “M&K Tracking,” I said into the receiver.

  “MAGGIE!”

  I inwardly groaned. “Hey Mom…”

  “What time are you coming over for All Hallow’s Eve tonight?” she asked.

  I rattled the papers on my desk. “Oh man… we are just swamped… monsters everywhere. I don’t know if I’ll make it…”

  “Now, Maggie, you know and I know there is absolutely nothing requiring your attention tonight.”

  My mom is a psychic. It makes begging out of unpleasant family get-togethers a real pain in the butt.

  “How’s 9PM?” I offered weakly.

  “Perfect!” she said. “Swing over to Pasadena and pick everyone up, would you? And if you could come early, it would be so helpful to have an extra set of hands to help me set up. And try not to wear all that dreadful black. It’s a celebration! I’ll text you if I think of anything else. See you then!”

  I hung up, placed my forehead on my desk, and sighed. Mindy was my twin sister and she and her completely normal husband lived in a completely normal house in Pasadena with a little brownie named Pipistrelle. Pipistrelle made Martha Stewart look like a middle school Home Economics teacher and I had a feeling he was the real reason Mom wanted me to do a Pasadena pickup. Traffic getting from the Other Side to Earth was going to be the pits.

  “Who was that?” Killian asked.

  “My mother,” I said, not lifting my head.

  “What does she want?”

  “To remind me how much I hate this holiday.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Now, what could she possibly do to make this night unpleasant?” Killian asked.

  I sat up and took a flask out of my drawer. It was 9AM somewhere and I was feeling like I was ready to be a morning drinker. I poured a healthy slug into my coffee cup. “She runs a haunted house,” I said.

  “Oh,” said Killian confused. “That seems… I thought…”

  See, my mom, in addition to being a psychic, runs a psychic-eye tea shop. She also has the gift of the gab when it comes to conversing with the dearly departed. She specializes in crossing people over who’ve gotten stuck. And she gets cranky when the dead are used for entertainment purposes.

  “Yeah. On this particular night, it’s an open house for all the spirits on this side of the border… any border… to come hang out at the MacKay house.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you hate ghosts.”

  “I FUCKING HATE GHOSTS!”

  I fucking hate ghosts. I’m not an unreasonable person. I’m a tracker. I deal with the living and the undead. Mom deals with the dead-dead. But the dead-dead didn’t get the memo that I can’t hear them, so as a kid, they would show up unannounced any moment of the day or night, just itchin’ for a chat. I had a hell of a time explaining to my first boyfriend it wasn’t his kissin’ that was making me cold, it was the ghost who decided to slip into his skin and replace his face. Made my heart go from pitter-pat straight into cardiac arrest.

  So, Mom throws these shindigs each year for all the ghosts to pop on by and pass along any messages they feel are important to get through. It’s a great big family affair. Whoopdittydoo. The highlight of the evening is a mass-crossing when the veil is the thinnest for anyone feeling like they’re finally ready for that eternal nap. I was feeling like I could use that nap.

  “Such an interesting holiday,” said Killian, sticking a cherry lollipop in one cheek. “The humans and their gifts of candy for everyone! What a celebration!”

  I looked at him with disbelief. “Have you ever actually experienced Earth Halloween, Killian?” I asked.

  “No,” he replied. “My people celebrate the passing of the autumn season and the beginning of winter days. We look on our bountiful harvest—”

  “—your people shop at grocery stores. They don’t harvest, Killian.”

  “Ahem,” he said, glaring at me. “We look at all the goods we have purchased from the Other Side grocery stores and count our blessings for the ease of our bounty when once hunger plagued us.”

  “Go on.”

  “Then we leave out treats for our fellow faerie friends who do not have the opportunity to shop at Other Side grocery stores.”

  “Oh! Is that why they’re SO less pissy come November?”

  “Someone has to remember the old ways…”

  I tipped my hat to him. There is nothing as miserable as waking up because some doxy has spent the night knotting your hair to the bedpost.

  “So never dealt with the human version of the holiday have you?” I asked.

  Killian shook his head and shifted his lollipop to the other side of his mouth. “No.”

  I smiled. “Oh Killian, you are most assuredly in for a real treat tonight.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “KILL IT, MAGGIE!” Killian shouted, pounding on my dashboard. “KILL IT! THEY ARE EVERYWHERE!”

  We were driving through Mindy’s neighborhood and the trick-or-treaters were out in full force. We had just passed by a crew of the most adorable little vampires and werewolves a girl could ever hope to stake.

  “They’re children,” I explained.

  Killian looked at the pack, aghast. “You mean they willingly dress up as the undead?”

  “Welcome to Earth’s Halloween.”

  “But why?” he asked, his voice filled with confusion and pleading. “Why would they willingly dress like…” His voice trailed off as we passed by a house, decked to the hilt. There was a graveyard in the front lawn and skeletons hanging from the trees. Eerie moans and clanking chains were being blasted from a loudspeaker. “I do not like this. I do not lik
e this one bit.”

  “Welcome to humanity, Killian,” I said.

  “They did not explain this thoroughly in Human Studies 451,” he replied, his eyes wide as saucers in horror of the horror.

  Killian, in addition to being ridiculously good-looking, was also sort of brilliant. He had an advanced degree in human studies, but kind of like how Earth tends to whitewash history a bit, the Other Side skipped over some of the more colorful aspects of human culture.

  “So they celebrate death this day,” he said. “Not the dead. But the actual death. Violent, gruesome, horrible genocide and slaughter.”

  “But you get candy,” I replied, patting his knee.

  “Are you not sickened?”

  “Listen, Killian,” I said, putting on my wise old owl voice. “We deal with this sort of stuff every day. We know the realities of washing ghoul guts out of your best pair of pants. Humans don’t. This is all fantasy. It is about as disturbing as if we were dentists and the whole world decided there was a national holiday where they ran around putting fluoride into each other’s mouths.”

  “There are severed heads on spikes across the street from an elementary school.”

  “The thinking,” I explained, realizing maybe I needed to talk my friend down a bit, “is that you scare away evil spirits by being even scarier.”

  “Well… they are certainly accomplishing that goal,” he said, looking positively green around the gills.

  “Sometimes, if you’re privileged enough to not fear for your life every moment of your waking day, it’s fun to be scared in a safe and controlled environment.” We turned the corner and saw my sister’s house. I felt the bile rising in my throat and my blood run cold. “Oh god.”

  So, the brownie, Pipistrelle, who lived with my sister... He was a little magical man whose idea of a swinging Saturday night involved descaling a coffeepot. His people originally lived in the houses of cobblers, finishing up the shoes when everyone slept. Work has been slow since the invention of Payless. Pipistrelle helped me on my first case and had a great time chasing down my sister’s dust bunnies, so I managed to get him a permit to hang out for as long as he saw fit.

  Overwhelmed with gratitude, he took it upon himself to artistically express said gratitude through three-dimensional displays of his creativity.

  My poor sister’s house.

  It was purple. The entire house was painted purple and green. He had painted my sister’s entire Queen Anne Victorian house to look like a gigantic Hallmark witch house. He had taken mannequins and placed them in the yard in what looked like a glee-filled witch’s tea party. There were witches on see-saws and witches on turntables spinning around with joy under the light of the moon. There were picnic blankets with fake friendly cats and witches eating tea cakes. There were carved pumpkins lining the walk like Christmas luminaries.

  And a line of trick-or-treaters wrapped around the block.

  “Mindy must be losing her mind…” I said.

  “I rather like it,” said Killian sporting the first smile I had seen since we left the 134 freeway.

  “You would,” I replied, putting the car into park and yanking up my brake. “Wait here,” I said.

  I trotted to the front door and got me a couple of dirty looks from people thinking I was cutting the line. I hated to break their hearts, but I got to dress in black leathers and sport a Kevlar neckguard every day. Both come in handy when vampires decide to play bowling with your body.

  Austin, my sister’s husband, was at the door, rationing out the candy. “Hey Maggie!” he said, dumping a couple bars into the bags of a princess and a pirate.

  “So, I’m guessing you guys are bailing on the party tonight,” I said.

  He sighed, gazing out at the line. “Mindy is out for reinforcements.”

  “You win the best house on the block award!”

  He just shook his head. “Pipistrelle outdid himself.”

  You can’t bag on Pipistrelle. He cares SO much about making us happy that you didn’t want to break his fuzzy little heart. It’d be like yelling at a puppy.

  “MAGGIE!” came a squeaky voice from the kitchen.

  “Don’t come out!” I shouted at him. The quickest way to get Pipistrelle’s work permit pulled was to get him seen by a horde of humans. I pushed past Austin, slipped down the hall, and went into my sister’s perfectly-appointed kitchen.

  Pipistrelle was wearing a frilly apron and had two great big oven mitts on his hands. He was cooking something that smelled like pumpkin, chocolate, and butter. All of my favorite things.

  “TRACKER MAGGIE HAS ARRIVED!” he squeaked. “Hip hip hooray on this happy day!”

  “How you doing?” I asked, bending down to rub his bald little head. The smile on his face stretched from ear-to-pointy-ear.

  “I have just finished cooking a mighty batch of pumpkin cookies in case the children of this city run out of tasty treats.”

  If he found out parents were only interested in pre-packaged goods these days, he would have thrown himself in the oven, so I said, “You know what? Mindy ran out to get some treats, but my mom could really use them for her party. Is it okay if I bring them to her?”

  He looked at me like he was torn.

  I whispered conspiringly, “We’ll leave some for Mindy and Austin, just in case, but you would be helping me out.”

  Those were the magic words. Pipistrelle would do ANYTHING to help a person in trouble. Especially me. Like a good soldier being given death orders, he nodded resolutely in acceptance of his duty. “Anything I can do to aid Maggie MacKay in her time of need.”

  We plated up the cookies and I took one off the top. I almost moaned. “Pipistrelle, you did it again.”

  He beamed. His last boss was a bit of a jerk, and he blossomed to kind words like a sunflower to the sun.

  “Okay, we gotta get you out of here and over to my mom’s to give her some help setting up,” I said, dusting off my hands. “I need to get you to my car, but I can’t let you be seen. Any chance you’re up for a costume?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I walked out of the front door with Pipistrelle’s hand in mine.

  “What a pretty, pretty princess!” exclaimed one of the moms. She then looked at me. “And how nice that you decided to get dressed, too. What are you? A gothic zombie biker woman? Did you use rice powder to get your skin that white?”

  Never leave the house without makeup. I smiled stiffly. “Just what I could find in the closet,” I replied.

  Pipistrelle, however, was eating up the compliments as he toddled along. My sister, along with the doilies and Victorian paraphernalia, had a collection of teddy bears dressed in satin gowns and hats. You think I’M the scariest member of the family.

  Austin got one look at Pipistrelle, hoisting up the purple skirts and balancing the large, feathered hat on his head, and gave a low whistle. “Mindy is going to KILL you.”

  “This is a public service I’m providing,” I shot back defensively. He was right. Mindy was going to KILL me.

  “She is so wee!” said another mom.

  I looked down at Pipistrelle and thought maybe I should have carried him. He was about as tall as a six-month old and had the old man face of a newborn, too. I shushed the mom. “He has a condition. Don’t stare.”

  She blushed bright crimson and averted her eyes like a good Pasadena WASP. I swung down and picked up Pipistrelle. He hugged me tight around the neck and then pulled away with his two hands on my cheeks. “This is an honor that I shall tell my grandchildren!” he announced in his little, squeaky voice.

  “How about we work on not shouting so loud that your grandchildren can hear it from here,” I muttered under my breath, getting Pipistrelle into the car and handing him the plate of cookies for safekeeping.

  “Shouldn’t he be in a car seat?” one of the parents asked as I stuck Pipistrelle in the back.

  “He’s twelve,” I snapped, shutting Pipistrelle’s door and climbing into the driver’s seat.
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  “That is an exceedingly fine dress,” complimented Killian, looking back at Pipistrelle.

  “The skirt goes out when I spin around!” Pipistrelle informed him with great pride.

  “We practiced,” I said. “Would you mind climbing back there and keeping Pipistrelle company? Perhaps he can show you the detail work of his costume.”

  Killian looked at me with confusion. I nodded pointedly at the houses down the street with the dismembered limbs and terrified cries and the overly sensitive brownie in the backseat. Killian got it. He climbed into the back, put his arm around Pipistrelle’s shoulders, and helped him buckle his seat belt. “And now, we shall be able to talk freely without having to shout over the car engine,” noted Killian.

  I shot him a grateful glance as I pulled the car out. Pipistrelle was rattling on about something-something braid and trim when we passed by the first house.

  “Isn’t that pretty!” said Killian, ‘accidentally’ moving his arm and knocking Pipistrelle’s hat forward and across his eyes. “Oh, my apologies, Pipistrelle. Let me get that for you.”

  For the next twenty minutes, thanks to Killian’s unnecessary wrestling match over hat placement, we managed to get out of the neighborhood without scarring the brownie. After Pasadena, the freeway hits Hollywood, then turns into a spaghetti system of roads, because why on earth would anyone traveling west have any need to, you know, have a freeway exit that led to one of the other major freeways in the city.

  The fact it was hard to work your way around the exits meant that the portal to the Other Side was a bit more complicated to find, too, which was good for keeping the civilians out (we’ve increased the safeguards considerably since that whole L. Ron Hubbard debacle.) Being a World Walker, I technically can tear a hole through reality if I really have to, but I’d need a nap, so the permanent portal was better. I drove the car up into the Hollywood Hills. The evening was stiflingly hot, as is always the case in Los Angeles on Halloween. Desert sage and dust scented the air. The lights were just starting to come up across the city, so from Mulholland Drive I had a perfect view of the Hollywood Sign and the downtown skyscrapers. I sighed as a peaceful contentedness washed over me. Killian and Pipistrelle continued their merry chat as I pressed my foot against the accelerator and drove the car over the cliff.