Fiction River: Hex in the City
Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith
Series Editors
Kerrie L. Hughes
Editor
Copyright Information
Hex in the City
Copyright © 2013 WMG Publishing
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2013 WMG Publishing
Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing
Editing and other written material copyright © 2013 by Kerrie L. Hughes
Cover art copyright © Kriscole/Dreamstime
“Foreword: Puzzle Pieces” Copyright © 2013 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
“Introduction: Hexen & Magick” Copyright © 2013 by Kerrie L. Hughes
“King of The Kingless” Copyright © 2013 by Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
“Speechless in Seattle” Copyright © 2013 by Lisa Silverthorne
“Thy Neighbor” Copyright © 2013 by Nancy Holder
“Somebody Else’s Problem” Copyright © 2013 by Annie Bellet
“A Thing Immortal As Itself” Copyright © 2013 by Lee Allred
“Geriatric Magic” Copyright © 2013 by Stephanie Writt
“Red As Snow” Copyright © 2013 by Seanan McGuire
“Music’s Price” Copyright © 2013 by Anthea Sharp
“The Sound of My Own Voice” Copyright © 2013 by Dayle A. Dermatis
“The 13th Floor Problem” Copyright © 2013 by Dean Wesley Smith
“Dead Men Walking” Copyright © 2013 by Annie Reed
“One Good Deed” Copyright © 2013 by Jeanne C. Stein
“Fox and Hound” Copyright © 2013 by Leah Cutter
“The Scottish Play” Copyright © 2013 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Smashwords Edition
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Table of Contents
Foreword: Puzzle Pieces
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Introduction: Hexen & Magick
Kerrie L. Hughes
King of The Kingless
Jay Lake
Speechless in Seattle
Lisa Silverthorne
Thy Neighbor
Nancy Holder
Somebody Else’s Problem
Annie Bellet
A Thing Immortal As Itself
Lee Allred
Geriatric Magic
Stephanie Writt
Red As Snow
Seanan McGuire
Music’s Price
Anthea Sharp
The Sound of My Own Voice
Dayle A. Dermatis
The 13th Floor Problem
Dean Wesley Smith
Dead Men Walking
Annie Reed
One Good Deed
Jeanne C. Stein
Fox and Hound
Leah Cutter
The Scottish Play
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Acknowledgements
About the Editor
Copyright Information
Foreword
Puzzle Pieces
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Stories jumble in my mind. Once I read them, they become part of my life experience. I almost always remember where I read them first—an anthology series, a magazine—but I rarely remember which volume I read them in. As I prepared to write this foreword, I looked at the table of contents again, and each story jumped out at me—a full memory, enjoyable, wonderful, and grand.
Since I’m one of two series editors of Fiction River (along with Dean Wesley Smith), I read every story as it comes into the volume, and sometimes as it’s being considered. I read Hex in The City over several months, a drib here, a drab there. Most of the stories, I read at my computer after printing them up (as an editor, I read best in paper. Unfortunately, I was an editor in the dark ages of publishing, before we all read on the screen).
I read Jay Lake’s story near that computer, one page at a time as the story came out of the printer, and teared up. I read Seanan McGuire’s story, the first turned in, in the same spot and smiled with enjoyment. Nancy Holder’s little powerhouse made me gasp with surprise.
All of the stories here are wonderful and memorable, which isn’t something I can say about most stories I read. Kerrie L. Hughes put together a spectacular volume, one I’m proud to be associated with.
But I must say this: whenever someone mentions Hex in The City, my greatest memory of the volume is that of watching Kerrie in action, an editor faced with several great stories and trying (in vain) to fit them all into her word count.
She filled out this volume at a writing workshop WMG Publishing held in early March. The workshop had nearly three dozen professional writers, and they all wrote kick-ass stories. While some stories just plain didn’t fit this volume, others seemed perfect. Kerrie gave them all (and me) a reminder of how an anthology goes together. It’s not just that each story must be wonderful; each story must be wonderful in its own way. It shouldn’t exactly mirror another wonderful story, although it can echo that story.
We had four professional editors at that workshop—me, Dean, John Helfers, and Kerrie. We all got stories for Fiction River volumes from that workshop. (You can see some of John’s choices in the second volume of Fiction River, How To Save The World.) But Kerrie was the most vocal about loving a story and worrying that it didn’t fit. She put a lot of excellent stories on hold, then went home from the workshop and tried to assemble the anthology like a puzzle. The invited big names were the corner pieces. The rest, she assembled and reassembled until they formed this amazing issue of Fiction River.
I wish we had taken a video of Kerrie, sitting on a chair in front of a group of professional writers, manuscripts on her lap, others clutched in her hands, muttering to herself about how spectacular the stories were and how she wanted them all.
She had a wealth of riches to choose from, and she found the best jewels to share with all of you. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.
—Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Lincoln City, Oregon
July 22, 2013
Introduction
Hexen & Magick
Kerrie L. Hughes
Dear Readers of Fiction River:
Welcome to Hex In The City. My name is Kerrie L. Hughes, and this is the fifth issue of Fiction River. Hex In The City, as you may have deduced from the title, is paranormal urban fantasy.
If you aren’t familiar with the genre and are a bit squeamish about reading a collection filled with romance and sweet adorable vampires, don’t be: there will be none of that nonsense here. My playground of the paranormal involves ghosts, witches, zombies, and magick.
Why do I spell magick with a k? Because that’s the spelling I found on the cover of Giovanni Battista Della Porta’s, Natural Magick, first published in 1658. He was a true polymath who believed magick was a science and transcribed his knowledge for fellow scholars so they would know the difference between chicanery and facts.
The word hex is also a deceptive word; most people believe a hex is a curse, which is only partly true. Hex is actually an extension of the German word Hexen, which loosely translated means witch, or a caster of magicks. Therefore a hex can be any form of magick: good, bad, or indifferent, just like the caster.
As to cities: what better place to practice magick than in the city? Especially our modern cities where anything can happen and people are strangers, the stranger the better. Oh
look! Is that a vampire on his way to work at the stock exchange? Is that an elf at the coffee house wearing brightly colored clothing and drinking a latte? Maybe I’m actually a witch collecting stories from the talented bards I meet and compiling them into anthologies for my fellow paranormal siblings to read.
Anyway, I want to thank Kris and Dean for letting me play in their kingdom. Over the years I’ve collected many an enchanting story from them for my other anthologies and when they formed Fiction River they were kind enough to include me. I really do think of them as the King and Queen of Storyland.
I also want to thank their publisher, Allyson Longueira. She’s the Enchantress that makes everything at Fiction River come together on deadline and with proper formatting. Allyson has a special magick when dealing with people and writing, she throws tangles in the air and they come down as intricate Celtic knot work; a spell I must get from her.
Seriously though, I’ve been reading, writing, and editing paranormal urban fantasy for quite some time now, and this collection is the best one I’ve put together so far. I can’t wait to do it again.
Hags and Witches; (hugs and kisses, get it?)
—Kerrie L. Hughes
Green Bay, Wisconsin
July 21, 2013
Introduction to “King of The Kingless”
Jay Lake opens this collection with “King of The Kingless.” He has always seemed like the Enchanter of Weird to me. Probably because he lives in Portland, wears Hawaiian shirts, and Birkenstocks with socks. It may also be because he attracts a wide variety of magickal people. I’m sad to say he does have the very ailment that his wizard in the story has, and if the witch that can cure him does exist, I would like to get them in touch with each other.
Jay is working on numerous writing and editing projects in between stints as a professional cancer patient with five years’ experience with Stage IV metastatic colon cancer. His books for 2013 include Kalimpura from Tor and Love in the Time of Metal and Flesh from Prime. His short fiction appears regularly in literary and genre markets worldwide. Jay is a winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards, as well as being a recent nominee for the Nebula in the best novella category. About the story, he writes:
“I moved to Portland almost fifteen years ago, and have always been fascinated by the city's inherent contradictions. The relationships between the rivers, the railroads and the highways is very peculiar, as if laid out on purpose. I've written about this before, and so returned to my Portland wizard’s urban fantasy continuity to tell a story of a tired, indigent wizard with cancer. That last bit is sadly autobiographical.”
King of The Kingless
Jay Lake
In the Waning of His Days
Fauntleroy Chen lurked in a southeast Portland doorway and tried not to groan. The rain, always with the rain, this city was like living in a lawn sprinkler. In the dark of the evening it refracted the colors of the beer signs and stoplights until everything was glittering and bright as the dance floor of a rather tepid rave. Including his guts, unfortunately.
He’d been avoiding doctors for Very Good Reasons since he was about twelve, when the power had first found him. What that had meant back in the day was doing some trivial but surprising things with Magic the Gathering cards. What it had come to mean in the four decades since was… different.
Not that he’d live to see another decade.
Pain slid through him like the dull knife of an old friend. Familiar, those pathways, another form of the power. His kind thrived on chaos, injury, the ragged edges of society and technology and pain. They were not evil, for that implied a moral axis and a value judgment. They were not even destructive, for the world did plenty to destroy itself. Just living in the spaces created at the margins of existence.
Following that broken pathway, he’d traded away one kind of help for another when he’d been young and fit and stupid. Now he was middle-aged and dying way too soon. The bargain seemed a lot less attractive in retrospect.
Out on the Willamette River a horn blasted. The Portland Spirit, probably, another trip for the party boat carrying the latest round of aging debutantes or wannabe market makers for a booze cruise away from the watchful eyes of Liquor Control Commission inspectors and suspicious spouses. He mentally wished them well, then focused once more on his purpose.
Her name was Isadora Wiegl, and she was a witch.
Since Fauntleroy Chen was a wizard, this did not especially surprise him. He was a water wizard, living in a water-claimed city, and this… stranger, this come-from-out-of-town hoyden, was something else. Fire, probably.
Everyone knew how fire and water got along. Especially if the water in question was the Willamette.
If she was not fire, then her power was surely rooted in air. Witches lived on a very different set of margins than did wizards.
Shadows shifted in an upstairs window of a warehouse that now boasted two bars, a sandwich shop and a Korean tailor on the ground floor. Fauntleroy set aside the writhing pain of his burgeoning tumor and his eternal annoyance at being waterlogged, focusing instead on the power.
She moves. Walking in an empty room. Dusty dry up there, no convenient roof leaks for his perceptions to follow. Still, enough mold lurks within the walls for him to leverage his vision. She moves, an undetailed form defined by her body’s own water and the faint, colored contrails of the power.
Fire. Surely Isadora Weigl was a fire witch. Even her name had come to him in light, when most such things came to him as patterns in the mud or the chop of waves or the trickle of raindrops on rippled, ancient glass. She was here to change things. Change them in a way that only women and witches could do.
“Not in my city, chickadora,” he whispered.
The cancer in his liver answered with another infusion of pain.
***
Once Upon a Time in His Youth
Fauntleroy Chen had been fifteen when he’d taken up with the homeless wizards, who at the time had mostly lived in the old Southern Pacific roundhouse at the multimodal rail yard just below Powell Boulevard in southeast Portland’s Brooklyn neighborhood. So many of his kind found their paths to the power through drink or dope that they tended to naturally blend in with the transient population. A shopping cart and enough layers to clothe three schizophrenics was perfect camouflage for the urban wizard on the make. The rest, who like Fauntleroy himself had traded away other things than sanity and sobriety for their power, often found it simpler to follow their brethren into the gutter.
At least they could find sympathetic company there.
He couldn’t stand being so grubby himself. But he learned a lot in the months he’d spent with that collection of dysfunctional, mostly older men.
“Them as is called to the power, they gives up a lot,” said Vladimir-with-no-last-name. To be more accurate, he mumbled the words through rotten black stumps of teeth embedded in a palimpsest of perpetual gum disease. It didn’t matter so much anyway. Vladimir repeated himself often enough that the unfavorable signal-to-noise ratio smoothed out after a while. “We gets more back, but it’s on the inside, doncha see?”
“Maybe…” Fauntleroy had already learned to ask leading questions and act like he knew even less than he probably didn’t.
“’S like a woman, right?”
That brought a mumbled chorus of agreement and several rounds of hawking and spitting from the assembled sages huddled in their grimy sleeping bags. And they stank, which always bothered Fauntleroy.
“I wouldn’t know,” he admitted. Women, mature or teen-aged or otherwise, were an utter mystery to him. At fifteen, his dating skills were not yet finely honed. Or even crudely honed.
“Wizard don’t need no woman. Files off the sharp bits, she does. Blunts the rusty poker. Takes wha’s on the inside and draws it out.” Vladimir jabbed Fauntleroy in the ribs, the old man cackling until he subsided into a tubercular cough. Playing to the audience, he called,
“Ain’t that right, boys?”
This brought another round of supportive phlegm.
“Not really an issue right now,” Fauntleroy admitted.
“Keep it that way, boy. You wants the power, you pays the price.”
He couldn’t help himself. He had to ask. “What do women with the power do?”
“Don’t you know nothing, boy? Men holds it in, women takes it in. They steals their power from the likes of you.” Vladimir thumped his own chest through an oil-stained Carhartt jacket. “Ain’t no woman ever going to be stealing nothing from the likes of me. Won’t let ‘em get near enough.”
“I can see that,” said Fauntleroy politely. He resolved to learn more about witches.
Unfortunately, he’d never really managed to learn the right lessons.
***
Slightly Later That Same Evening
He faded into the brickwork of an old wall across the street from the warehouse where Isadora Weigl was in the process of conducting her feminine misdeeds. The fading wasn’t a spell, not really—those tended to cost too much of his energies lately—and wouldn’t fool the witch for a second if she were seriously looking for him. But it would make him far less noticeable to a casual glance on her part. And damned near invisible to anyone just passing by.
Fauntleroy Chen was still there right where he’d been standing all along, but the little ‘notice me’ light that almost everyone carries to varying degrees was dead as a Baptist church when the bar down the street was having two dollar pint night.
She descends down the stairs, the vestigial water in the old wood of each tread counting out its changes as her weight presses down. The door awaits her coming, still breathless with the slick ease of her entry, handled as no one had handled it in several generations. Power follows her like fireflies on a Midwest summer evening.
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