What Fate Portends

by Clara Coulson

  “It’s a date.” I gave her an exaggerated wink.

  “You wish, Whelan. Keep walking.”

  I ambled off with a smirk on my face, navigating through the complex maze of stalls until I found the white tent that housed Walter Johnson’s humble business. He was sitting at a small table in the tent, tinkering with a pocket watch. He glanced up at the sound of me moving the tent flap out of my way, and started at the sight of the courier he’d sent out into the stretches. I got the impression from the way the color drained from his face that he hadn’t really believed I’d come back.

  Not everyone knows you aren’t fully human, I reminded myself.

  “Did you find it?” He sat his tools and the watch on the table and rose from his rickety stool. “Was it intact?”

  I opened my satchel, slid out the scrapbook, and offered it to him. “Item as described. One scrapbook containing family pictures in fair condition.”

  He snatched the book from me and flipped through it, stopping only when he came to a page plastered with photos from a child’s birthday party. He ran his fingers tenderly over the plastic cover protecting a picture of his entire family holding up slices of cake. Judging from the date marked on the page in sparkly stickers, the photo had been taken the summer before the purge started. A few months before everything went to shit. The party was probably one of the last fun family get-togethers the Johnsons ever had.

  Walter Johnson blinked back tears as he closed the book. “It’s perfect. Thank you.” He clutched the scrapbook to his chest as he crouched to retrieve a box and a chit bag from under his worktable. As he stood back up, knees cracking under his weight, he offered both items to me. “I packaged your clock for you. And the bag contains the agreed-upon five hundred chits.”

  I tucked the box under my arm, then shook the bag to hide a subtle pinch of magic that let me count the exact amount of gem chits inside it. Five hundred exactly. And they were in big denominations, twenties and fifties, which made me think Johnson had taken out a loan. Because most small shop owners dealt exclusively in fives and tens, due to their less-than-rich clientele.

  I would’ve felt bad about leaving the guy’s wallet full of dust, but I had to make a living too, and I could only do three or four runs a month before my luck ran out and I ended up in a situation like the ghoul mess. I had to charge a risk premium.

  If I took too many trips outside, I really would end up dead.

  “Say,” Johnson muttered as he hugged the scrapbook tighter against his chest, “what did the house look like? Was it still in good condition?”

  I figured it would be a bad idea to mention a group of flesh-eating monsters had taken up residence in the basement of the house he’d lived in before most of his family died, so I replied, “A little water damage from the continual storms. But otherwise, I think it’s pretty much like you left it.” I also elected not to mention the window I destroyed. “Anything else you need?”

  “No, no.” He gave me his best attempt at a smile. “You can go, Mr. Whelan. Again, thank you so much for retrieving the scrapbook. It means a lot to me and Rebecca.” Rebecca was his only surviving child. She was fourteen, and he’d brought her along to our initial meeting in an obvious attempt to guilt me into lowering my prices. Didn’t work. “She’ll be so happy to see this,” he continued. “She took some of these pictures herself.”

  “Glad to hear that. All in a day’s work.” I backtracked to the tent flap and patted the top of the box as I slipped through. “Thanks for the clock. I’ll put it to good use. See you around, Mr. Johnson.”

  When the tent flap closed behind me, he was still hugging the scrapbook for dear life.

  Poor bastard. Him and all the others like him.

  Chapter Three

  Flannigan’s was lit with lantern light. It gave the place an “ancient pub” ambiance I enjoyed, and the deep shadows between the oil lanterns on each table made anonymity a breeze. So I strolled in, buffeted by another cold gale, and wound through the crowded tables toward the bar, where O’Shea was drying a few mugs and replacing them on the shelf near the taps. I took my usual seat at the very end of the bar, sat my clock box on the stool next to me, and tapped four times on the bar top. O’Shea perked up at the sound, then quickly finished with his current mug before he spun around to face me.

  “Well, look what the wind blew in,” he said in his deep rumble of a voice. “Was starting to think the stretches got the better of you today, my friend. You’re half an hour later than usual.”

  I gestured to the tap behind him, which contained my favorite beer, produced right here in Kinsale. The brewery was one of the few businesses that hadn’t shut down during the war. Even when nukes were raining from the sky, and faeries were toppling world governments, people were still chugging beer by the keg. “Left a little later than usual,” I said as the bartender grabbed the same mug he’d just dried and filled it to the top. “I actually made really good time getting back. Though that was more a matter of necessity.”

  O’Shea slid my beer over to me and slung his white drying rag over his shoulder. His gaze focused on the left side of my face, where the cuts were, and he smiled. “Got yourself into a jam, did you?”

  “Also got myself out of one”—I took a sip of the delicious brew—“which I think is the more impressive feat.”

  He snorted. “What was it this time? More werewolves?”

  “Ghouls.”

  “Ugh.” He screwed his face into a sneer. “Nasty fuckers. They ate a cousin of mine a few years back, you know?”

  “Really?”

  “Yep.” He proceeded to tell me a story about his cousin “Paul,” who got killed during one of the big riots in Raleigh some months before the nuke leveled it. About eighty people died when the National Guard fired indiscriminately into the crowd, and in the aftermath, their bodies were collected by the authorities, likely to identify them in order to place their entire families on the “terrorist watch list.” Except the government never got the chance to exercise its authoritarian thumb. Because the warehouse where they’d stored the bodies got overrun by ghouls, who proceeded to eat most of the corpses. “Yeah,” O’Shea finished, “when his parents finally got his remains, it was only an arm, a leg, and his head. They had a closed-casket funeral.”

  “Did the parents survive the war?” I asked after taking a long chug from my mug.

  “Nope,” he replied. “Every member of my family except my sister and Uncle Manny died when the bombs fell.”

  “Sorry to hear that, pal.”

  He shrugged. “I got the same sob stories as everybody else. No point in dwelling on them. We can’t all stew in depression. There are too many jobs to do. Somebody’s got to keep the world spinning until the winter ends.”

  “I like your attitude. We need more of that.” I raised my mug in deference to him. “And I love the fact you think beer is vital to the restoration of human civilization.”

  “Is it not?” He smirked at me, then turned to serve another patron who’d shuffled up to the bar to order a pitcher for his table.

  When the patron ambled off with the goods in tow, I said, “Any news come through on the wire?” O’Shea had eyes and ears all over town, courtesy of being the guy everybody spilled their guts to when they were having a bad day. So whenever strange things started happening in the shady corners of the city, O’Shea was one of the first people to find out about it.

  He wiped off the bar top with his rag before he leaned close to me and spoke softly. “Been a few more disappearances than normal. People up and vanishing in the middle of the day. No witnesses. No suicide notes. No one spotted going beyond the barrier by any of the boundary guards. Haven’t noticed a pattern to it yet. Young. Old. Male. Female. A mixed bag. Only thing they have in common is they’re human.”

  Finishing off my beer with a long draw, I sat my empty mug on the bar top and replied, “I’ll look into it when I have a chance. Maybe something’s slipped through the barrier, started pickin
g people off the streets. If you get me a list of the missing, I’ll do a little digging, see if I can find some clues to drop in front of the cops. Get them sniffing so they’ll actually do their jobs.”

  “This city would be better off if you were still a cop, Vince.”

  I opened my mouth to retort, but O’Shea produced that hard, steady look he smacked you with when you were about to do something stupid. So I swallowed the bitter words and said instead, “I don’t disagree with you, buddy, but the status quo of that situation isn’t going to change, no matter how much wishful thinking you use to try and scrub the blood off the concrete.”

  O’Shea dipped his head. “I know. It’s just a damn shame is all. We need someone like you helming the force, not those cowards with badges who quake in their boots at the first sign of a paranormal criminal. They don’t have what it takes to police this brave new world.”

  “You’ll have to take your complaints up to management. Because I’m too low on the totem pole to effect that sort of change.” I slipped off the barstool and glanced at the tinted windows at the front of the room. The sky was spitting rain now, and the wind had picked up even more, bending the skinny trees planted along the sidewalks and whipping up paper trash from the gutters.

  “Too low on the totem pole?” O’Shea quirked an eyebrow. “You sure about that?”

  I halted with one hand halfway to my coat pocket, in which I’d stowed the bag of gem chits Walter Johnson gave me. Beer sat heavy in my unsettled gut as I met O’Shea’s eye. Lots of folks in this town knew I wasn’t fully human—many people had some nonhuman ancestry, as society had discovered during the purge, so it wasn’t a huge shocker—but almost none of them knew exactly what I was, and O’Shea wasn’t counted among the tiny number who did. Yet I could tell from the way he regarded me, a subtle accusation in the thin line of his lips, nothing malicious about it, just perceptive, that something I had said or done over the past few years of our frequent bar encounters had given me away.

  I shifted on my feet, discomfort roiling in my chest like reflux. “Look—”

  O’Shea held up his hand. “No apologies needed. And I won’t tell anyone. Just wanted you to know that I knew, because I get the sense you’re the sort of guy who likes to keep track of the people who really know him.”

  The anxiety wound tight around my ribs loosened a smidgen. I let out a haggard breath. “No apologies needed maybe, but I feel like I should give you one anyway. It’s not that I like deceiving people, it’s…”

  “I know how it is. No big thing.” He gave me a dismissive wave. “Though I do admit I’m curious about why you undersell yourself as much as you do.”

  “That’s complicated,” I said lamely.

  O’Shea smiled. “Isn’t it always?”

  A shrill gust rattled the open shutters on the windows.

  “You should get on home,” he added, snatching up my empty mug. “Looks like this storm is going to be a doozy.”

  I gave him my best grateful smile, which I assumed looked something like a shriveled worm on a sidewalk. “See you later, man. Stay safe.”

  “I always stay safe, Whelan. You’re the only madcap here.”

  “Nah, you got it all wrong,” I said as I backed toward the door. “I’m the most cautious person you’ll ever meet.”

  With that, I slipped out into the building storm.

  The shortcut home wasn’t my favorite route, but with a frigid downpour blowing in, black clouds on the horizon, I wanted to hurry along, lest my new clock get ruined before I even had a chance to use it. The reason I disliked the shortcut was because it took me past my old house, the cozy one-story with a cute front porch where I’d spent many a summer reading books and taking naps and sipping beers in the evening, waving to all who walked by. It was my ancestral home, my father’s place before he died of a stroke two years before the purge.

  I’d inherited the house just like I’d inherited his job.

  Unfortunately, I’d let both those legacies go to shit.

  As I cut a corner onto North Lily, the little house came into view. The white siding. The red shutters. The decorative fence. The mass of obscene graffiti that had been painted over all those once pretty features. The scorch marks on the panel siding from that time someone threw a Molotov cocktail at the living room window. The cracked brick along the bottom from where someone had taken a hammer to it. The ribbons that remained of the porch screening. Someone had even kicked the fence and bent it in a couple places.

  All that damage had occurred after I’d been outed to the public as a paranormal and forced to go underground. But I hadn’t found out about it until I emerged from hiding when the US government fell to the very creatures they were persecuting and faerie rule became the law of the land. I returned home to find my father’s pride and joy destroyed, inside and out. The mobs had broken in and ruined all my belongings too.

  The sight of that wrecked house always made my blood boil. Not because I cared about where I lived, but because the damage was the equivalent to spitting on my father’s grave. He’d been one of the most respected members of the Kinsale community, a decorated police veteran, honored by the mayor, a hero to the people. And they’d gone and defaced his memory as much as they’d defaced his house. All because his son had a nonhuman mother.

  One day, I would fix that house. When resources were plentiful again, and the weather wasn’t shit. I’d make it the prettiest damn house in the whole neighborhood. And I’d ward it to the teeth, so that anyone who so much as stepped on the lawn without my permission would get blown to kingdom come.

  Until that far-off day though, I’d have to let the fury smolder.

  I trudged down the sidewalk with heavy steps, forcing myself to look the other way, at all the other derelict houses in the neighborhood. With the number of refugees trickling into Kinsale, most of these houses would be inhabited eventually, but…

  A flash of white in the corner of my eye caught my attention. I paused and looked to the bent fence in front of my old house. Someone had taped a piece of paper to one of the fence poles. Within the last couple hours, it must’ve been, because the paper was still dry.

  I crouched down to get a better view of the complex array of writing scrawled in blue ink across the small square. And I immediately recognized it for what it was: a magic charm. Not just any magic charm either, but a conflagration charm.

  Those tended to create a ball of flame roughly the size of a horse.

  With half my glamours down, I could see the tiny threads of magic sewn into the paper, sparkling like a spider’s web in bright light. The charm was armed much like a grenade, and if someone triggered it—by touching the fence—they’d get consumed by a superheated blast faster than they could scream. It was extremely dangerous, reckless, and stupid to leave such a powerful charm sitting out here where anyone could bump into it by accident.

  I had no idea why someone would put a charm like this on the fence, considering the house behind it was clearly abandoned, and frankly, I didn’t care. I couldn’t leave it here. So I called up a few tendrils of my own magic and directed them to encompass the square of paper.

  My energy ghosted across the inked symbols, leaving trails like curls of frost. The charm sensed the intrusion into its construction and attempted to ignite, but it was too slow. My spell gummed up the “gears” of the charm before it could do any harm, and it ended up in a frozen state, unable to explode, unable to abort—unable to dispel the magic signature embedded within that would allow me to track it back to its source.

  Charm contained, I plucked the paper off the fence, folded it up, and tucked it into my coat pocket. Some witch or wizard in this town is going to get a stern talking-to—another vicious gust shrieked through the neighborhood and nearly blew me over—sometime tomorrow, when there aren’t any gale-force winds in the forecast.

  I continued down the street and cut diagonally across four more blocks, a direct path to my “new” house, the house I’d lived in f
or the past six years. It had once been an antique store with a second-floor apartment, and it’d been owned by a sweet elderly couple who died in the collapse. I’d bought it for the bargain price of free, because the mass exodus from Kinsale in the immediate aftermath of the Raleigh nuking had left even the nicest homes in the city standing vacant. And most of their original owners had never returned.

  The house wasn’t large or luxurious, but it was sturdy, clean, well insulated, fully furnished, and already had a storefront built into it. Which was exactly what I needed.

  I deactivated my wards, unlocked the front door, and slipped inside just as the first wave of torrential rain crashed into Kinsale. I shut the door behind me, relocked it, and reactivated my wards, which would electrocute anyone who tried to set foot in my house by force. Couldn’t be too careful these days, with headless horsemen guarding the city and ghouls running wild in the stretches and assholes trying to steal doorknobs from the box of spares I had near the front of the store, thinking the metal could be traded for gem chits.

  The entire store was filled with stuff. It was a stuff store. Tons of odds and ends on every shelf, in every bin, piled high everywhere I could fit anything that someone might want to buy. I had hinges to go with the doorknobs, mirrors to go on your walls, about three hundred flashlights of varying sizes, and enough batteries to work them all. I had blankets for sale, pillows and comforters too, most of them still in their original packaging. I had books and old magazines. CDs and CD players. Radios of all shapes and sizes. If it was something you’d need to replace in these trying times, I probably sold it.

  And yes, I’d stolen everything. From Walmart and Target and Lowe’s and every other big-box store in a twenty-five mile radius of Kinsale. But, you see, people didn’t get to judge me for “looting” because I’d taken it all from the stretches. Which they were too scared to enter because there were thousands of things roaming around out there that liked to eat people. So they paid me reasonable sums to replace the things that they could no longer easily buy, since every big-box store had gone out of business when countries started slinging ICBMs at each other.