by Jamie Davis
“Quinn, Quinn, please, you have to find my son.”
“Huntress, I need you to close the portal that just opened in my basement.”
“Huntress…”
“Quinn…”
“Please help…”
So many voices at once threatened to overwhelm her. Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore and shouted, “Enough!”
She hadn’t realized what she’d done until the room fell silent, and she noticed the wagon wheel chandeliers swaying from the force of her command. Quinn’s HUD had loaded on its own. She’d unconsciously drawn down her stamina and boosted her voice using an icon she’d never seen before. It looked like an old-fashioned megaphone.
Quinn started to click off the icon, then stopped. She wanted the people to hear what she said next. “Everyone listen. I want to help you, I really do, but let me get over to the bar and talk to my friends for a few minutes. I promise to hear you out and see what I can do.”
Across the room, Paddy O’Malley jumped up on a chair, pointed at the kitchen door, and mimed eating something. Quinn smiled and nodded.
“While you’re waiting, why don’t you get yourselves some breakfast? Paddy’s opened the kitchen early, so grab a seat, and the servers who are here will try to get your orders as quickly as they can.”
It took a few seconds for what she’d said to sink in. Slowly the crowd around her split up and moved to find a place to sit down.
“Nicely done,” Taylor said. “What was that spell you used to amplify your voice?”
“Not a spell, at least not in the traditional sense. It just showed up in my HUD. I’m not sure how I activated it.”
Taylor smiled. “You always find something new when you’re stressed. It’s like your brain knows how all this stuff works, even if your conscious self doesn’t.”
“I really wish we could find an instruction manual,” Quinn said. “I’m tired of floundering through it.”
Taylor tugged Quinn’s elbow to start her toward the bar. “You don’t seem to be having trouble innovating when it counts. I’d stop complaining. My guess is there isn’t a manual and your mind is making this up as you go somehow.”
Quinn could only smile. Taylor always dropped a perspective bomb on her when she needed it the most. She closed her mouth.
Clark, Naomi, and Miranda waited by the bar for the two of them. Quinn and Taylor joined them, and they all leaned in to talk.
“What’s going on?” Quinn asked.
Clark answered after exchanging glances with Naomi and Miranda. “Something happened last night to amp up the situation here in the city.”
“You heard about the attack, then?” Quinn asked.
Naomi nodded. “I told him about it before all this came up.”
“A single attack like you both faced is one thing,” Clark said. “These people report separate events, though, all over the city last night. It all happened about the same time you two were attacked or soon after, based on what I can piece together so far.”
Quinn glanced at the people in the bar. All were settled at or around the tables. A few groups talked among themselves, but every now and then, individuals would steal a glance toward Quinn. A mix of desperation and maybe a little hope showed in their eyes.
“Why did they come here, and why now?”
“I think I know why,” Taylor said, looking up from something on her phone. “There were lively discussions overnight on social channels about what happened. No one knew what to do about it until about two hours ago, then someone posted a message that said:
Quinn threw her hands up. “Why would anyone assume this was something I could fix? That’s insane.”
Clark chuckled. “Goes with the territory. You wanted to revive the clans. This is what it was like in the old days. When there were supernatural problems, people sought out the Hunters living among them to get to the root of the problem.”
Quinn twisted her head to look around. “Who are they all? They’re here at O’Malley’s, so they aren’t members of the normal human population.”
Naomi said, “There are people from all the corners of the supernatural community around the city. Judging by the variety, there hasn’t been a corner of Baltimore untouched.”
Miranda pointed at two groups nearby at adjacent tables. “Whatever has happened, it’s got them spooked. Groups are sitting together that should be trying to kill each other. There’s a group of Spanish Xana shifters sitting next to a western tribal Wendigo family. They’ve been blood enemies since the conquistadors landed in the American Southwest. It’s weird even seeing them in the same room.”
“All the more reason we need to get this resolved in some way,” Clark said. “Quinn, you have to talk to them.”
“Me?”
“Yes,” Naomi said. “It’s you they came to see. They’ve decided you can fix this, so whether or not it’s true, you have to make them think you’ve got a handle on it.”
“But you know I don’t. None of us do, at least not yet.”
Clark leaned close. “Lie to them. Then we can put our heads together and try to make sense of this. We can’t do that with the whole world here watching us.” He nodded to the side.
Quinn glanced that way and saw several people holding their phones up at the group. They were taking video or maybe live-streaming the whole thing. “Okay, that has to stop. It’s the kind of thing that could make all our lives difficult.”
“You have to do it,” Taylor said. “We tried to calm them when they showed up this morning. They wouldn’t listen to us.”
Quinn sighed. She was barely awake. She lifted her mug, took a long sip of her coffee, and made a face. Taylor had put too much cream in it. She set the coffee down and turned, raising her hands up to get people’s attention. As soon as she did, the murmur of voices petered out into silence. The only sound came from the occasional bang of a pot or pan in the kitchen.
“People of Baltimore, I want to help you. I’ve been aware of unusual occurrences around the city for a few weeks now.”
“Why didn’t you stop them?” a voice called.
“Because they were isolated and had no apparent cause. Last night was the first mass attack on the city. That’s bad in many ways, but it has one benefit.”
That brought a fresh swell of low voices as people tried to understand where she was going. Quinn wondered, too, but she kept talking. She was making this up as she went along.
“I know that doesn’t make sense, but whoever was behind this has made a mistake by spreading the attack so broadly last night. Someone somewhere had to see something that’ll be a clue as to who is behind this.”
Quinn gestured to her friends. “These are all members of my clan. You can trust them as you trust me. We’re going to talk to you all in small groups, so be patient. We’ll get to everyone. We want to hear your stories about what happened to you. Try hard to remember everything you can. You never know what small detail will connect with something someone else said. Anything could be the critical clue that ties all this together. While you wait for us to come to your table, enjoy your breakfast and don’t forget to tip your waitresses. They weren’t expecting all of you to drop in this morning.”
She turned and lowered her voice. “Everyone take a table. Ask them what happened. Take notes or record it on your phone if you want, but get a good description from each group. When you’re finished with a table, ask them to finish eating and return to their homes. We’ll meet back here at the bar once everyone leaves.”
Clark nodded. “Good idea, Quinn. Very much the plan of a clan leader.”
“We have to know what happened. This seemed like the best way to find out.”
“Let’s fan out from the bar,” Naomi suggested. “Move straight across the room from this point until all the tables have been covered.”
The others nodded and they split up, picking the tables closest to where they stood along the curved bar. Quinn headed to the table Miranda had pointed to with the Xana
and Wendigo families. She knew a little about Wendigos from an old TV show. Most of it was probably wrong, but at least that was a start. She had no idea what the Xanas were.
Both groups looked up from where they sat at the round table. The Xanas were all women, beautiful in long, flowing dresses, though each had dark circles under her eyes. The four Wendigos, men and women, clearly showed their Native American heritage. They, too, looked worried and gaunt, like they hadn’t had any sleep for at least a night, maybe more.
Quinn sat down and leaned forward. “I’m Quinn. Why don’t you have one from each of your groups tell me about what happened last night? Okay?”
Both sides nodded, and after glancing back and forth, each family chose an individual spokesperson. The tallest of the Xanas started telling her strange and harrowing tale about the pipes coming out of the walls and attacking them in their apartment. The oldest male in the Wendigo family occasionally interjected a comment after she started until the two families wove their tale together. Despite being from feuding clans, they lived in the same high-rise apartment building.
Quinn pulled out her phone and used her voice memo app to record what they said. Looking at all the expectant faces waiting their turn at the other tables, she realized they were going to be here for a while.
Chapter Three
By the time the members of the Huntress clan had finished interviewing the final groups and sent them on their way, it was after lunch. As Quinn returned to the bar, Paddy O’Malley, the leprechaun owner of the pub, stood on the raised platform behind the bar, counting a stack of bills he’d pulled from the register.
“Sorry, Paddy,” Quinn said. She leaned back on the bar and looked around. The place was a mess. Every table had dirty dishes and glasses on it. Juni and the other servers bustled about trying to clear away the debris.
“Sorry about what, me girl? I just did a week’s worth of business in three hours.” He giggled as he used a rubber band to wrap a bundle of bills and set it down next to several others.
“But Juni and the others…”
“Will be smiling once they see the count on the tips we collected. Don’t worry about them, Quinn. You focus on figuring out the source of this mess. Not too quickly, though. I could use a few more mornings like this one.”
“I’d like to avoid that if I can help it.”
Paddy let out a maniacal cackle and winked at Quinn while he scooped up the cash bundles he’d made and scurried to his office in the back. She assumed there was a hidden safe somewhere back there, but who knew where a modern leprechaun kept his pot of gold?
Taylor, Clark, Naomi, and Miranda sat on the barstools on either side of her.
Quinn glanced at them and shrugged. “Well, did anyone make any sense out of anything you heard? Because there seemed to be no connection.”
Naomi shook her head. “It’s as if each story I heard was an attack by a different person, no common themes or incidents.”
“I had an auto mechanic who had to lock himself in a storeroom all night at his shop,” Clark said. “One of the cars he’d been working on went Christine on him.”
When all he got was a blank stare from Quinn and Taylor, he said, “Christine? The Steven King story about the demon car?”
“So, it’s demons?” Quinn asked.
“Not sure it is,” Miranda said. The ghost shook her head and continued, “One of mine was a newlywed couple. They were in bed fooling around when everything turned into an elaborate musical song and dance number. Those two wanted to know how to make it happen again. That doesn’t sound like demonic magic to me. They enjoyed themselves and called it magical.”
“Maybe they’re destined for divorce,” Naomi suggested. “That would make a demon happy.”
“I don’t think so,” Miranda replied. “There weren’t any warning signs I could see about their relationship. I can spot auras easily now that I’m a spirit. Those two were definitely in L-O-V-E, love!”
“What did you learn?” Quinn asked her mother.
Naomi said, “Not much of use. Three different stories, none of them linked in any way.”
“What time did all this happen?” Taylor asked. “Maybe if they happened sequentially, we can track down the locations where the attacker moved through the city.”
“That’s a good idea,” Clark said. “Can you pull up a city map so we can pin down each location?”
Taylor grinned. “Piece of cake. Come on down to my lab.”
Taylor skipped across the pub to the storeroom door. Quinn and the others followed her. This idea seemed like the best option so far. Maybe it would yield results.
Taylor was already behind her triple monitors when the rest of the group entered her makeshift workshop down the long underground hallway behind the club. Quinn tried to move around behind her to see the screens.
“Oh, go back over there,” Taylor said, waving Quinn away. “Don’t all of you try to fit back here. There’s no room. I upgraded the system with some leftover VirSync office equipment.”
She turned on a power strip next to her screens and a small projector mounted behind the center monitor switched on, shining on a plain white sheet tacked to the far wall by the door. Quinn hadn’t seen it when she entered.
Soon the makeshift screen filled with a map of the city, and Taylor looked up from her keyboard. “Okay, call out your encounters with time and locations as best you can. Start with you, Miranda.”
The ghost started listing the information from her encounters. Then Naomi, Clark, and finally Quinn passed along what they knew.
Taylor pointed to the screen after she finished tapping something on her keyboard. “Here are the markers for each of you, along with the four groups I interviewed.”
Quinn checked the projection on the wall. A series of map pins dropped into place, each with a text flag listing time and the name of the person who had given it. She had trouble making sense of it. There were over twenty pins across the map. The incidents ran from down by the harbor to a few blocks from O’Malley’s.
Naomi walked over and tapped her chin. “Taylor, can you link them together so we can see them in chronological order, starting with the first encounter?”
“Sure, give me a sec.”
The tech witch tapped on her keyboard for a minute or so and said, “Look at it now.”
Clark pointed at the first pin in a chain linked by a glowing line. “That one. Whose was that?”
“Quinn and me,” Naomi said. “That was our encounter with the giant squirrel and the slug.”
“Ew!” Taylor groaned. “I stepped on a slug barefoot once. It squished between my toes. Made me throw up.”
“You wouldn’t have been able to step on this one, T,” Quinn said. “It was the size of a small car.”
“Sheesh, that’s even worse.”
Quinn walked over to stand next to Naomi. Something about the path from the clubs down at Fells Point back to here at the pub seemed familiar.
Naomi glanced to the side at Quinn. “See it yet? I just noticed the pattern.”
“Oh, my God. Whoever it was must have followed us home, or close to it.”
“It sure looks that way,” Naomi agreed.
Clark walked up beside them, staring at the projection on the wall. “Think back. Did you see anyone on the street or anything unusual on your way home? There couldn’t have been that many people out and about at that time of night.”
Quinn and Naomi looked at each other. Both shrugged and gazed at Clark.
Quinn said, “We were alone as far as I could tell. We walked all the way back here.”
“It pisses me off someone tracked us like that without either of us knowing it,” Naomi said. A hint of a growl sounded low in her throat, and she bared her fangs.
Taylor said, “They’d have to be pretty good to cause this much trouble along the way without either of you catching a glimpse of them.”
Miranda floated over to stare at the map. “What if it was nobody?”
> “That doesn’t make any sense,” Clark said. “Someone had to have orchestrated this.”
“Not necessarily,” Miranda said. “It would have taken someone with extraordinary power and magical resources to do even half of what we heard about this morning. On top of that, some of these things would have required a spellcaster’s constant attention. Once they moved on to follow you two, the spell would have ended. How could they have been boosting the newlyweds’ musical libido here for two hours and be six blocks away with the wino who nearly died from the never-ending bottle of Mad Dog 20/20?”
Naomi nodded. “They couldn’t. You’re right, Miranda. There’s no way, especially not when you factor in all the other incidents.”
Quinn asked, “Could there have been a whole gang of them?”
“And neither of us saw any of them all night?” Naomi asked. “Not likely. This would have taken how many mages or witches, Miranda?”
“Judging from the stories, at least ten.”
“Ten?” Quinn asked. “There’s no way ten people followed us all the way home. It has to be something else.”
Miranda turned back to face them. Quinn swore the ghost looked paler and more transparent than usual. “There is another explanation, but you’re not going to like it.”
“What?” Clark asked. “If there’s some sort of conspiracy going on, we need to know about it right now.”
“I don’t think it’s any of the things we’ve come up with so far. It’s far worse than that.” Miranda paused and realized everyone was waiting for her to continue. She sighed and said, “It’s wild magic.”
“Oh, crap!” Clark exclaimed.
“I’ll second that,” Naomi added.
Taylor smiled. “Awesome.”
Quinn looked at all of them. “Mom mentioned that last night. I still don’t understand how magic isn’t inherently wild?”
Miranda shook her head. “Magic in normal circumstances is quite orderly and follows natural rules very closely. That is how spellcasters can manipulate it; they understand how the rules work and the orderly ways they can bend them.”
