Street Magicks

by Paula Guran

  “Then get me to him,” I said. “Now.”

  The caterer might have been uncertain, but he wasn’t slow. We hurried through the growing crowds to one of the workrooms that his company was using as a staging area. A lot of people in white shirts were hurrying all over the place with carts and armloads of everything from crackers to cheese to bottles of wine—and a dozen of Mac’s empty wooden boxes were stacked up to one side of the room.

  My guide led me to a harried-looking woman in catering wear, who listened to him impatiently and cut him off halfway through. “I know, I know,” she snapped. “Look, I’ll tell you what I told Sergeant Murphy. A city health inspector is already here, and they’re already checking things out, and I am not losing my contract with the arena over some pointless scare.”

  “You already talked to Murphy?” I said.

  “Maybe five minutes ago. Sent her to the woman from the city, over at midcourt.”

  “Tall woman?” I asked, feeling my stomach drop. “Blue-black hair? Uh, sort of busty?”

  “Know her, do you?” The head caterer shook her head. “Look, I’m busy.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”

  I ran back into the corridor and sprinted for the boxes at midcourt, drawing out my blasting rod as I went and hoping I would be in time to do Murphy any good.

  A few years ago, I’d given Murphy a key to my apartment, in a sense. It was a small amulet that would let her past the magical wards that defend the place. I hadn’t bothered to tell her that the thing had a second purpose—I’d wanted her to have one of my personal possessions, something I could, if necessary, use to find her if I needed to. She would have been insulted at the very idea.

  A quick stop into the men’s room, a chalk circle on the floor, a muttered spell, and I was on her trail. I actually ran past the suite she was in before the spell let me know I had passed her, and I had to backtrack to the door. I debated blowing it off the hinges. There was something to be said for a shock-and-awe entrance.

  Of course, most of those things couldn’t be said for doing it in the middle of a crowded arena that was growing more crowded by the second. I’d probably shatter the windows at the front of the suite, and that could be dangerous for the people sitting in the stands beneath them. I tried the door, just for the hell of it and—

  —it opened.

  Well, dammit. I much prefer making a dramatic entrance.

  I came in and found a plush-looking room, complete with dark, thick carpeting, leather sofas, a buffet bar, a wet bar, and two women making out on a leather love seat.

  They looked up as I shut the door behind me. Murphy’s expression was, at best, vague, her eyes hazy, unfocused, the pupils dilated until you could hardly see any blue, and her lips were a little swollen with kissing. She saw me, and a slow and utterly sensuous smile spread over her mouth. “Harry. There you are.”

  The other woman gave me the same smile with a much more predatory edge. She had shoulder-length hair so black it was highlighted with dark, shining blue. Her green-gold eyes were bright and intense, her mouth full. She was dressed in a gray business skirt-suit, with the jacket off and her shirt mostly unbuttoned, if not quite indecent. She was, otherwise, as Burt Decker had described her—statuesque and beautiful.

  “So,” she said in a throaty, rich voice. “This is Harry Dresden.”

  “Yes,” Murphy said, slurring the word drunkenly. “Harry. And his rod.” She let out a giggle.

  I mean, my God. She giggled.

  “I like his looks,” the brunette said. “Strong. Intelligent.”

  “Yeah,” Murphy said. “I’ve wanted him for the longest time.” She tittered. “Him and his rod.”

  I pointed said blasting rod at Meditrina Bassarid. “What have you done to her?”

  “I?” the woman said. “Nothing.”

  Murphy’s face flushed. “Yet.”

  The woman let out a smoky laugh, toying with Murphy’s hair. “We’re getting to that. I only shared the embrace of the god with her, wizard.”

  “I was going to kick your ass for that,” Murphy said. She looked around, and I noticed that a broken lamp lay on the floor, and the end table it had sat on had been knocked over, evidence of a struggle. “But I feel so good now . . . ” Smoldering blue eyes found me. “Harry. Come sit down with us.”

  “You should,” the woman murmured. “We’ll have a good time.” She produced a bottle of Mac’s ale from somewhere. “Come on. Have a drink with us.”

  All I’d wanted was a beer, for Pete’s sake.

  But this wasn’t what I had in mind. It was just wrong. I told myself very firmly that it was wrong. Even if Karrin managed, somehow, to make her gun’s shoulder rig look like lingerie.

  Or maybe that was me.

  “Meditrina was a Roman goddess of wine,” I said instead. “And bassarids were another name for the handmaidens of Dionysus.” I nodded at the beer in her hand and said, “I thought maenads were wine snobs.”

  Her mouth spread in a wide, genuine-looking smile, and her teeth were very white. “Any spirit is the spirit of the god, mortal.”

  “That’s what the psychic conduit links them to,” I said. “To Dionysus. To the god of revels and ecstatic violence.”

  “Of course,” the maenad said. “Mortals have forgotten the true power of the god. The time has come to begin reminding them.”

  “If you’re going to muck with the drinks, why not start with the big beer dispensary in the arena? You’d get it to a lot more people that way.”

  She sneered at me. “Beer, brewed in cauldrons the size of houses by machines and then served cold. It has no soul. It isn’t worthy of the name.”

  “Got it,” I said. “You’re a beer snob.”

  She smiled, her gorgeous green eyes on mine. “I needed something real. Something a craftsman took loving pride in creating.”

  Which actually made sense, from a technical perspective. Magic is about a lot of things, and one of them is emotion. Once you begin to mass-manufacture anything, by the very nature of the process, you lose the sense of personal attachment you might have to something made by hand. For the maenad’s purposes, it would have meant that the mass-produced beer had nothing she could sink her magical teeth into, no foundation to lay her complex compulsion upon.

  Mac’s beer certainly qualified as being produced with pride—real, personal pride, I mean, not official corporate spokesperson pride.

  “Why?” I asked her. “Why do this at all?”

  “I am hardly alone in my actions, wizard,” she responded. “And it is who I am.”

  I frowned and tilted my head at her.

  “Mortals have forgotten the gods,” she said, hints of anger creeping into her tone. “They think the White God drove out the many gods. But they are here. We are here. I, too, was worshipped in my day, mortal man.”

  “Maybe you didn’t know this,” I said, “but most of us couldn’t give a rat’s ass. Raining down thunderbolts from on high isn’t exclusive territory anymore.”

  She snarled, her eyes growing even brighter. “Indeed. We withdrew and gave the world into your keeping—and what has become of it? In two thousand years, you’ve poisoned and raped the Mother Earth who gave you life. You’ve cut down the forests, fouled the air, and darkened Apollo’s chariot itself with the stench of your smithies.”

  “And touching off a riot at a Bulls’ game is going to make some kind of point?” I demanded.

  She smiled, showing sharp canines. “My sisters have been doing football matches for years. We’re expanding the franchise.” She drank from the bottle, wrapping her lips around it and making sure I noticed. “Moderation. It’s disgusting. We should have strangled Aristotle in his crib. Alcoholism—calling the god a disease.” She bared her teeth at me. “A lesson must be taught.”

  Murphy shivered, and then her expression turned ugly, her blue eyes focusing on me.

  “Show your respect to the god, wizard,” the maenad spat. “Drink. Or I will in
troduce you to Pentheus and Orpheus.”

  Greek guys. Both of whom were torn to pieces by maenads and their mortal female companions in orgies of ecstatic violence.

  Murphy was breathing heavily now, sweating, her cheeks flushed, her eyes burning with lust and rage. And she was staring right at me.

  Hooboy.

  “Make you a counteroffer,” I said quietly. “Break off the enchantment on the beer and get out of my town, now, and I won’t FedEx you back to the Aegean in a dozen pieces.”

  “If you will not honor the god in life,” Meditrina said, “then you will honor him in death.” She flung out a hand, and Murphy flew at me with a howl of primal fury.

  I ran away.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’ve faced a lot of screaming, charging monsters in my day. Granted, not one of them was small and blond and pretty from making out with what might have been a literal goddess. All the same, my options were limited. Murphy obviously wasn’t in her right mind. I had my blasting rod ready to go, but I didn’t want to kill her. I didn’t want to go hand-to-hand with her, either. Murphy was a dedicated martial artist, especially good at grappling, and if it came to a clinch, I wouldn’t fare any better than Caine had.

  I flung myself back out of the room and into the corridor beyond before Murphy could catch me and twist my arm into some kind of Escher drawing. I heard glass breaking somewhere behind me.

  Murphy came out hard on my heels, and I brought my shield bracelet up as I turned, trying to angle it so that it wouldn’t hurt her. My shield flashed to blue-silver life as she closed on me, and she bounced off it as if it had been solid steel, stumbling to one side. Meditrina followed her, clutching a broken bottle, the whites of her eyes visible all the way around the bright green, an ecstatic and entirely creepy expression of joy lighting her face. She slashed at me—three quick, graceful motions—and I got out of the way of only one of them. Hot pain seared my chin and my right hand, and my blasting rod went flying off down the corridor, bouncing off people’s legs.

  I’m not an expert like Murphy, but I’ve taken some classes, too, and more important, I’ve been in a bunch of scrapes in my life. In the literal school of hard knocks, you learn the ropes fast, and the lessons go bone-deep. As I reeled from the blow, I turned my momentum into a spin and swept my leg through Meditrina’s. Goddess or not, the maenad didn’t weigh half what I did, and her legs went out from under her.

  Murphy blindsided me with a kick that lit up my whole rib cage with pain, and had seized an arm before I could fight through it. If it had been my right arm, I’m not sure what might have happened—but she grabbed my left, and I activated my shield bracelet, sheathing it in sheer, kinetic power and forcing her hands away.

  I don’t care how many aikido lessons you’ve had, they don’t train you for force fields.

  I reached out with my will, screamed, “Forzare!” and seized a large plastic waste bin with my power. With a flick of my hand, I flung it at Murphy. It struck her hard and knocked her off me. I backpedaled. Meditrina had regained her feet and was coming for me, bottle flickering.

  She drove me back into the beer-stand counter across the hall, and I brought up my shield again just as her makeshift weapon came forward. Glass shattered against it, cutting her own hand—always a risk with a bottle. But the force of the blow was sufficient to carry through the shield and slam my back against the counter. I bounced off some guy trying to carry beer in plastic cups and went down soaked in brew.

  Murphy jumped on me then, pinning my left arm down as Meditrina started raking at my face with her nails—both of them screaming like banshees.

  I had to shut one eye when a sharp fingernail grazed it, but I saw my chance as Meditrina’s hands—hot, horribly strong hands—closed over my throat.

  I choked out a gasped, “Forzare!” and reached out my right hand, snapping a slender chain that held up one end of a sign suspended above the beer stand behind me.

  A heavy wooden sign that read, in large cheerful letters, PLEASE DRINK RESPONSIBLY swung down in a ponderous, scything arc and struck Meditrina on the side of the head, hitting her like a giant’s fist. Her nails left scarlet lines on my throat as she was torn off me.

  Murphy looked up, shocked, and I hauled with all my strength. I had to position her before she took up where Meditrina left off. I felt something wrench and give way as my thumb left its socket, and I howled in pain as the sign swung back, albeit with a lot less momentum, now, and clouted Murphy on the noggin, too.

  Then a bunch of people jumped on us and the cops came running.

  While they were arresting me, I managed to convince the cops that there was something bad in Mac’s beer. They got with the caterers and rounded up the whole batch, apparently before more than a handful of people could drink any. There was some wild behavior, but no one else got hurt.

  None of which did me any good. After all, I was soaked in Budweiser and had assaulted two attractive women. I went to the drunk tank, which angered me mainly because I’d never gotten my freaking beer. And to add insult to injury, after paying exorbitant rates for a ticket, I hadn’t gotten to see the game, either.

  There’s no freaking justice in this world.

  Murphy turned up in the morning to let me out. She had a black eye and a sign-shaped bruise across one cheekbone.

  “So let me get this straight,” Murphy said. “After we went to Left Hand Goods, we followed the trail to the Bulls game. Then we confronted this maenad character, there was a struggle, and I got knocked out.”

  “Yep,” I said.

  There was really no point in telling it any other way. The nefarious hooch would have destroyed her memory of the evening. The truth would just bother her.

  Hell, it bothered me. On more levels than I wanted to think about.

  “Well, Bassarid vanished from the hospital,” Murphy said. “So she’s not around to press charges. And, given that you were working with me on an investigation, and because several people have reported side effects that sound a lot like they were drugged with Rohypnol or something—and because it was you who got the cops to pull the rest of the bottles—I managed to get the felony charges dropped. You’re still being cited for drunk and disorderly.”

  “Yay,” I said without enthusiasm.

  “Could have been worse,” Murphy said. She paused and studied me for a moment. “You look like hell.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She looked at me seriously. Then she smiled, stood up on her tiptoes, and kissed my cheek. “You’re a good man, Harry. Come on. I’ll give you a ride home.”

  I smiled all the way to her car.

  Jim Butcher is the New York Times bestselling author of the Dresden Files and the Codex Alera. The Aeronaut’s Windlass, the first book in a new nine-book steampunk series, Cinder Spires, was published in September 2015.

  The streets of Atlanta surround a neglected city park in which there lies an artificial pond. Neither would be particularly notable . . except for an ancient bewitchment and the strange aquatic being that lives there.

  Bridle

  Caitlín R. Kiernan

  It’s not a wild place—not some bottomless, peat-stained loch hidden away between high granite cliffs, and not a secret deep spring bubbling up crystal clear from the heart of a Welsh or Irish forest where the Unseelie host is said to hold the trees always at the dry and brittle end of autumn, always on the cusp of a killing winter that will never come. It’s only a shallow, kidney-shaped pool in a small, neglected city park. No deeper than a tall man’s knees, water the color of chocolate milk in a pool bordered by crumbling mortar and mica-flecked blocks of quarried stone. There are fountains that seem to run both night and day, two of them, and I suppose one might well imagine this to be some sort of enchantment, twin rainstorms falling always and only across the surface directly above submerged, disgorging mechanisms planted decently or deceitfully out of sight. In daylight, the water rises from the cloudy pool and is transformed, going suddenly clean and transl
ucent, a fleeting purity before tyrant gravity reasserts itself and the spray falls inevitably back into the brown pool, becoming once again only some part of the murky, indivisible whole. There are gnarled old willows growing close together, here and there along the shore, trees planted when my grandmother was a young woman. They lean out across the pool like patient fishermen, casting limp green lines leaf-baited for fish that have never been and will never be.

  No one much comes here anymore. Perhaps they never did. I suspect most people in the city don’t even know the park exists, steep-sided and unobtrusive, hidden on three sides behind the stately Edwardian-era houses along Euclid Avenue, Elizabeth Street, and Waverly Way. The fourth side, the park’s dingy north edge, is bordered by an ugly redbrick apartment complex built sometime in the seventies, rundown now and completely at odds with everything else around it. I wonder how many grand old houses were sacrificed to the sledgehammers and bulldozers to make room for that eyesore. Someone made a lot of money off it once, I suppose. But I’m already letting myself get distracted. Already, I’m indulging myself with digressions that have no place here. Already, I’m trying to look away.

  Last spring, they found the boy’s body near the small stone bridge spanning one end of the pool, the end farthest from the brick apartment complex. Back that way, there are thick bunches of cattails and a few sickly water lilies and other aquatic plants I don’t know names for. I’ve seen the coroner’s report, and I know that the body was found floating face up, that the lungs were filled with water, that insects had done a lot of damage before someone spotted the corpse and called the police. No one questioned that the boy had drowned, and there was no particular suspicion of foul play. He had an arrest record—shoplifting, drugs and solicitation. To my knowledge, no one ever bothered to ask how he might have drowned in such shallow water. There are ways it could happen, certainly. He slipped and struck his head. It might have been as simple as that.

  No one mentioned the hoof prints, either, but I have photographs of them. The tracks of a large unshod horse pressed clearly into a patch of red mud near the bridge, sometime before the boy’s body was pulled from the pool. You don’t see a lot of horses in this part of town. In fact, you don’t see any. I’m writing this like it might be a mystery, like I don’t already know the answers, and that’s a lie. I’m not exactly a writer. I’m a photographer, and I don’t really know how one goes about this sort of thing. I’m afraid I’m not much better with confessions.