Magic After Dark: A Collection of Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Novels

by Margo Bond Collins

  They kept moving, more carefully now, and quiet as night. Becca used her fingers to move branches out of the way and keep them from grabbing her, each motion careful and calculated, inch by inch rather than step by step. Billy was a fraction slower than she was, whether out of an abundance of caution or because she was more effective, she wasn’t sure.

  The ground finally got rocky enough that even the brush didn’t make it any more, and the stones underfoot were wet, now, with moss and lichen and seaweed. Billy lay on his stomach to watch for a minute, and Becca knelt next to him, keeping her head down.

  “Where do they live?” she whispered. “Are they out in the ocean most of the time?”

  “Depends,” he whispered back. He pulled a string out of his pocket and suspended a yellow marble from it, letting it sway until it had a predominant axis. He nodded along that path.

  “Look that way and tell me what you see.”

  Becca took the focus stone out of her pocket and closed her eyes, opening them to look, hard, at what was there at the shore.

  “Holes,” she said. “In the ground.”

  “Could be them,” he said.

  “Wouldn’t they flood?” Becca asked. He grinned.

  “Depends on how you build them.”

  “What do we do if they’re full of water?” Becca asked.

  “Let Bella worry about that,” Billy said. “Right now, you worry about getting the information we need.”

  She frowned and watched.

  The sea was not particularly high, here, and the beach was protected by two small spits of land that stretched out from the coast and ran out into the water, forming a ‘C’ around the spot where Argo said the finfolk would be.

  “There’s land out there,” she said. “Just enough to stop the waves.”

  “Probably built it,” he said. “Good sign they’re actually here.”

  She focused harder, watching the water, green gray as it rolled in, white with lines of foam that came in to sit on the beach.

  “I don’t see anything else,” she said. Billy pulled his feet in under him, sliding a sliver of gypsum into his shoe. Every little bit helped, keeping quiet. The tongs on Becca’s shoelaces were gypsum.

  They crept inward and then Billy motioned her down again and he pointed.

  “Through the waves there,” he said. She squinted and focused, waiting a long time before she spotted the sleek skin that only just crested at the next wave. Slate gray, like a wet rock, she would have thought it was just a boulder out in the water, except that it wasn’t there the next wave.

  “Could that be a dolphin?” she asked.

  “Could be,” he said, “but I doubt much sealife makes its way in here. Like wild deer showing up in your front yard.”

  “They do show up in my front yard,” Becca said. Billy had been waiting for this.

  “Yeah, but do they show up in your Uncle Sal’s front yard?”

  She grinned back at him at this. Sal had been known to shoot squirrels from his front porch. Deer took heed.

  “Wait for it,” Billy whispered. “Ought to hit the air any second.”

  Becca nodded, going all the way to her belly now to watch. Long seconds ticked by, then a woman’s torso lifted up out of the water. She pushed herself up on one arm as the next wave pushed her higher on the stony beach, dragging something dark under her other arm. There was a sense of pause, and then she pulled her knees up and stood, something like an armload of kelp the only thing obscuring her nudity. She dragged her load across the beach, and it wasn’t until the head dropped to the side that Becca recognized it to be a body.

  “Strong,” Billy whispered. Becca wondered that that was what he noticed. She felt a bit queasy, and was about to point out that that was a human body when he shook his head and put a finger to his lips, his eyes telling her that he knew. She put her hand over her mouth until the woman disappeared underground.

  “Well, that’s starting to look pretty conclusive,” Billy said

  “Why would she want a dead man in her home?” Becca asked.

  “Lots of evil magic you can do using the bits and dots from a body,” Billy said. “You can see that they’d probably prefer one that drowned.”

  She shook her head.

  “What do we do now?”

  “We keep moving forward,” he said. “We won’t be the only ones to have seen that, but not everyone will have, either.”

  They buried another pair of crystals and slid forward on hands and toes.

  “There’s another one,” Becca said.

  Billy paused, watching the waves. This time a large black tail split a wave and a man came up out of the water, followed by another, younger man. They were attractive, at this distance, well-muscled and graceful, but they dragged between them another body.

  As Billy and Becca continued in, another seven finfolk came up out of the water, and two more bodies.

  “Was the first one the leader?” Becca asked.

  “No clue,” Billy said, tense now.

  “What’s their normal structure?” Becca asked.

  “Did you not listen to me?” Billy whispered sharply. “They’re human. They’re going to do whatever the hell they want. Now shut your mouth before you get us spotted.”

  Becca could have swallowed her tongue. Billy had never before spoken to her like that. He’d encouraged her curiosity, answered every one of her questions with humor.

  He raised his head now, and Becca watched as Dawn came skittering across the rocks out onto the fine promontory. She ran along it on quick, bare feet, throwing something into the water at intervals.

  “Go,” Billy said. “Out the other one, fast as you can.”

  Becca didn’t question it, just leaping to her feet and running, her soft-soled boots sliding all over the rocks. She wasn’t sure bare feet would have been better, but there wasn’t time to think about it.

  At first, the land went perpendicular to the shore and she only got the odd slosh of water, but as she rounded out toward the far point, the waves started breaking over the spit of land, making everything slick and making it much harder to see where she was putting her feet.

  She kept on.

  Somewhere behind her, there was yelling. Dawn had gotten to the very point of her side of the water break and was waiting. Becca arrived a few seconds later and Dawn held up a bag the size of her fist.

  “One every few steps,” she yelled over the sound of the waves, then mimed a throw. Becca held her hands up, and Dawn re-secured the top of the bag, checking it one last time, then drawing her arm back, low, and throwing the bag underhanded across the gap, maybe twenty or twenty-five feet. Becca put her hands out, willing the bag into them, and for a moment she was afraid Dawn had thrown it short. She edged forward, trying not to fall or lose sight of the bag, and the yelling got louder. Somewhere closer, there was hissing. Becca didn’t look, edging another inch forward and losing her footing. She fell onto her butt on the rocks, but caught the bag, scrambling back to her feet.

  “In the water,” Dawn yelled and Becca nodded, opening the bag and drawing out a handful of pink semi-translucent stones. She threw one, then started back toward the shore, throwing another one and another, slower now, but still working as fast as she could.

  Something hissed and grabbed her ankle, and Becca jumped, scattering the stones and almost dropping the bag as a woman with dark green, scaly skin slid further up out of the water, trying to get her other foot. Becca thrashed, trying to get away, but the woman had a grip like a tree root. The pink stones rolled away in various directions, and part of Becca was trying to keep track of them so she wouldn’t lose them, even as the finfolk woman tried to drag her into the ocean.

  To drown her.

  That was a realization that brought her priorities into alignment. She grabbed her knife out of her boot and stabbed the woman in the arm. She shrieked like the sound of whalesong and grabbed at Becca’s arm, a lunge that Becca avoided, though she only narrowly avoided tumbl
ing backwards into the water. She stabbed again at the woman’s arm and the finwoman let go. Becca gathered up as many of the stones as she could see in a few seconds, then continued moving, throwing them to the side as she went, but watching for the finfolk woman again. Around her, the shrieking was getting louder, and she saw bodies and tails cresting in the water. On the beach, Makkai were closing in on the holes and finfolk were coming up out of the water, naked but unafraid, ready to fight.

  The Makkai were outnumbered, Becca realized, and she try to move faster yet. She hoped she had enough of the stones left, that Dawn had made it back in all right.

  She was getting close to shore, but she had drawn the last two stones out of the bag. She estimated the distance left and split it up, leaving big gaps in between the last two stones, then drew her knife, looking for Billy. That was her job now, to stick to him. He was wrestling with a finfolk man, knife to claws and teeth, with a woman tugging at his arm, trying to get a second knife away from him. Becca drew another knife for her off hand, charging into the fight. She heard lightning and saw a storm rolling in from over the ocean and wondered if that was timing or Dawn, though she couldn’t guess why Bella would want them fighting in the rain. The finfolk already had enough of an advantage, given their affinity for water.

  Becca got the finfolk woman’s attention with a jab, and the woman turned to face her. Becca didn’t check on Billy again, assuming that, with two hands, he’d be fine in a one-on-one match against the finfolk man. The woman was fast and she was angry. She hissed constantly, even though she was in human form now, and she slashed at Becca with sharp claws where she should have had fingernails. Becca was not without training, here, though, and she kept the woman away, keeping track of how she moved, how she attacked, and looking for an opportunity to take advantage of a mistake.

  The finfolk woman stayed crouched over her toes, her feet strong, more like an animal than a human, and she moved on the rocks like they were native to her, where Becca had to be careful just to avoid falling down.

  She slashed at Becca again, trying to catch the underside of her arm, and Becca made a parallel attack with her other hand, trying to get the inside of the woman’s wrist. She heard gunshots behind her, and hissing from the finfolk changed to howls. The water behind her sounded like it was beginning to boil, and rain came down on them in a sheet, all at once. There was shrieking, and the finfolk woman crouched low, springing at Becca.

  Becca couldn’t get out of the way in time, she just wasn’t quick enough on her feet, and the knives were in the wrong spot to do anything more than superficial damage as the woman’s body came crashing down on top of her. Becca got her knees up as rocks jammed into her back, radiating pain, but she ignored it, keeping the woman up far enough that she couldn’t bite Becca. There was another gunshot and the woman went limp. Becca pushed her off to one side and stood, finding her back was worse than sore. She was having a hard time breathing.

  “Where is it?” Billy asked, at her side as black clouds started to ring in her vision. She put her hand on her back, and he slid a stone, wide, flat, and warm to the touch, down the neck of her shirt to the spot, pressing tape flat against her skin to hold it.

  For now.

  Dawn would have to look at it later.

  “Are you okay?” Becca asked, catching her breath.

  “Fine,” he said. “You have throwing knives. Use them.”

  She nodded and they joined the rest of the Makkai as they began to ring in the rest of the finfolk.

  “Did you get all of the stones where they were supposed to be?” Billy asked as he took a stance next to anther Makkai, lining up a shot on a finfolk woman who was running at them. He shot her and looked at Becca, who shook her head.

  “I dropped a bunch and ran out. There are gaps at the end.”

  “I thought so,” he said, looking out at the water. “There’s a weakness in the magic, there. Go find Dawn and tell her. Maybe she has more.”

  Becca nodded and dashed away, up to the line where the brush met the open stone shore.

  “Dawn,” she called. “Dawn are you here?”

  “Over here,” Dawn said, stepping forward out of her cover. “What is it?”

  “I ran short,” Becca said, pointing. “Do you have more?”

  Dawn shook her head.

  “That was all I had. A few of them may be able to get away.”

  “What do we do?” Becca asked.

  “You go back and help,” Dawn said. “I’ll find Bella and tell her what happened.”

  Becca nodded, going back down the beach and trying to see what it was Billy had seen that told him something had gone wrong. She noticed quickly that the water was unsettled, more than it had been before, and more than it should have been, even in the hard rain and the wind of the storm. She wiped her eyes and slicked rain off of her arms, looking out at the water. She didn’t know what Dawn had done, or how. That was what was so amazing about her. Her skill with the crystals was almost mystic.

  She got to the holes in the ground and she heard a wail that was unlike the sounds the rest of the finfolk were making. She approached slowly, knives out, trying to be ready for anything that might jump out at her, but she got all the way to the entrance to the short caves hand-dug out of the ground and nothing happened. Feeling foolish, but needing to see what was in there, she squatted, shuffling down the slope.

  She found that there was light ahead, after she got down a little way, and the sound of voices. She kept her knives out, slowing and making sure that her footfalls were inaudible, but the floor of the dugout was smooth, once she got below the level of the rocks overhead. She had no idea how it wasn’t full of water, but it didn’t appear that that was about to change any time soon. She rounded a gentle bend to find a small, warm underground room where a woman was curled naked on the floor around a child, less than a year old, who lay against her chest with green scales and a tail.

  The woman looked at Becca fiercely, and Becca dropped her hands.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  The woman sprang at her, racing across the room hands and feet, and Becca took a step back, unwilling to defend herself. Not against this. Not against a mother with her infant child.

  There was a gunshot and the baby screamed, first the same shrieking noise Becca had heard outside, and quickly morphing into the sound of a baby crying.

  Becca looked over her shoulder as Billy came down the narrow hall behind her.

  She shook her head, at a loss for words, and he nodded.

  “It isn’t like it is in your head,” he said. “All glory and faceless violence. These are real people.”

  “You killed her,” Becca said, “in front of her baby.”

  “To save you,” Billy said, “and because she was killing men.”

  “You don’t know it was her,” Becca said. He nodded, going to pick up the baby. He handed it to her.

  “Can you keep her dry?”

  “I’ll try,” Becca said, picking her heavy overskirts up over her head the way they were intended to do and cozying them around her shoulders. She held the baby close and, while the girl continued crying, the pitch dropped.

  “Dead man’s breath,” Billy said. “What do you know about it?”

  Becca shook her head.

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Hard to catch,” Billy said, “but the last time a man breathes out before he dies, that breath is potent for a lot of things. One of the ways to get it is to drown him.” He let that sink in for a moment, then nodded. “You have to decide you want to be a shifter, that you want to be finfolk. Babies and children can’t do that, so their parents usually take time away from an active community like this one to raise them. It looks to me like they decided not to, and they found a way around it. Made the baby finfolk. I bet there are children in at least one of the other holes, when we look, given the number of bodies there are in the one at the end.”

  Becca winced. As
he said it, she could smell the stink of rotting flesh even here. He nodded again.

  “It made them feral. You can see that, can’t you? Magic is dangerous, and when you use it wrong, it leaves a mark on you. They’re more animals than people right now. Not all shifters are like this.”

  She nodded, pulling the baby closer as its wails became little coughing cries.

  “What are we going to do with her?”

  “Leave her with the authorities,” Billy said. “If she has family, they’ll find them and get her to them. If not…”

  He shrugged. Becca felt her heart break.

  Abandoned. Orphaned.

  “It isn’t like it is in your head,” Billy said. “It’s a shame this was your first one. They aren’t all like this, but this is the real world. Sometimes it just sucks.”

  She felt frozen, watching after him as he started back up toward the surface.

  “Come on,” he said. “We need to get everything cleaned up, and then we’ll go back to camp and celebrate.”

  “I don’t want to celebrate,” Becca said.

  “We beat the evil and we’re still alive,” Billy said. “You’re celebrating whether you like it or not.”

  She licked her lips and frowned, still destroyed at the thought of leaving the baby in her arms with some faceless bureaucrat, but she followed.

  It wasn’t like she’d imagined it would be.

  “Magic is innate to the world. It is in everything around us, and while many fear it or disbelieve it, the Makkai have always known better. It is fundamental to us, and we understand our magic in ways unlike anyone else who has ever lived. It was not always this way, though.

  “When the children of Makkai went out into the world, dismissed and disowned by their mother’s people, they wandered for some time, tending their flocks and making a life for themselves outside of the rest of society. They had children, and their children had children, and while the world was still young and in awe of such things, they did not fear magic as the world does today. They had small magics, normal ones that many others in the world had, and while they may have been strong in their magic because of their forefather Makkai, they were not unlike many alive in that time.