by Rachel Aaron
“So,” Marci said, smiling at him. “I probably should have asked you this way earlier, but what’s your name? Unless you want this to be a secret contract, of course. Again, not judging. ”
“Not that secret,” he said, laughing. “And my name’s Julius. ”
She nodded. “Julius what?”
Julius faked a cough to buy himself time and grabbed his phone in his pocket, popping up the AR display only he could see right through the fabric of his jeans. It still took him a few seconds of fumbling before he was able to navigate the new menus to see what last name Bob had put on his residence ID. “Quetz,” he read, gritting his teeth. “Julius Quetz. ”
“Quetz?” Marci repeated incredulously.
“Short for Quetzalcoatl,” he explained, letting the phone go with a huff. “It’s an old family name. ” And Bob’s idea of a joke. Or at least, Julius hoped it was a joke. There was no other reason a sane individual would think using the name of the most infamous feathered serpent ever to terrorize the Americas as a cover alias for a dragon in hiding was a good idea.
“Wait, you shortened your last name?”
Julius missed a step on the uneven sidewalk, eyes wide. Was that not something humans did? “Um,” he stalled. “It was too hard to spell?”
That explanation seemed to fly, because Marci nodded. “I see. It’s too bad, though. I think Quetzalcoatl would have been a pretty awesome last name. ” She shrugged and flashed that infectious grin of hers at him again, stopping to put out her hand. “Well, Julius Quetz, I’m happier than you can know to be doing business with you. And speaking of which, I hope you don’t mind signing a standard U. S. contract. As I said, I just moved here, and I haven’t had a chance to get my DFZ paperwork in order, such as it is. ”
Julius shook her hand after only a slight hesitation. He was about to tell her a U. S. contract would be fine when Marci turned around and walked over to the dusty car parked on the sidewalk beside them. It was a beat-up old junker that looked a good ten years older than Marci herself, but it wasn’t until she walked around to the trunk and started wiggling the key—a metal key, not a wireless fob—into the ancient lock, that Julius realized this was her car.
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With that, the last of his fears that Marci was a trap set by another clan vanished. If there was any draconic trait even more universal than their love of plotting, it was snobbery. No dragon, no matter how cheap or desperate, would be caught dead using a human who drove a car like this. With that settled, though, there was only one question left. Why had Bob set him up with this mage?
He was still wondering when Marci finally got the trunk open. “I normally charge a flat hourly fee plus expenses,” she said, pulling out a stack of slightly creased papers. “But I promised you a discount, so I’m cutting my rate in half and waiving my retainer. ” Closing the trunk again to use its hood as a writing surface, Marci crossed several clauses off the top of the contract with an expensive-looking marker she’d pulled from her pocket. Once it was all marked through, she wrote in the new rates by hand before giving the contract to Julius. “Is that okay?”
Julius took the pages with trepidation. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen an actual physical contract, let alone signed one. The paper felt odd, too, almost tingly. “Is there a spell on this?”
Marci’s eyes widened. “Oh, I’m so sorry, I forgot to mention that. Yes, a minor truth spell, just the usual security against falsification. It’s all on the up and up, though, see?” She pointed at the top of the page where the paper had, indeed, been notarized by the State of Nevada Magic Commissioner’s Office. “Nothing nefarious. ”
Julius studied the seal for a moment, and then he glanced through the rear window of her car at the backseat, which was packed high with bags and boxes. There’d been boxes in her trunk as well. Clearly, Marci Novalli had left Nevada in a hurry. He wanted to ask why, but he wasn’t exactly in a position to pry, and with the discounted rate she’d written down, he was getting her services for almost nothing.
He felt kind of bad about that, actually, but he needed a mage, she needed work, and a paper contract would keep his name out of any databases that could come back to haunt him. So, before he could second-guess himself into paralysis, Julius took the pen she offered and signed his first name on the dotted line. Only his first name, since the truth spell would have outed his last as a fake. Marci arched an eyebrow, but she didn’t comment as she signed her own name on the line below.
“You won’t be disappointed,” she promised as she snatched the paper up, tucking it into a plastic envelope, which she then slipped into one of the many pockets of her shoulder bag. “Now, what kind of illusion did you need tonight?”
“Well,” Julius said, walking around to the old car’s passenger side. “I need to get into this party. ”
Marci’s eyes widened in astonishment, and then, to his surprise, she blushed, her whole face turning bright red. “What kind of party wouldn’t let you in?”
He tilted his head curiously. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing,” she said quickly, hurrying around to the driver’s door to unlock the car. “It’s just, you don’t look like the sort of guy who has trouble getting in anywhere, if you get my drift. ”
Julius didn’t, but Marci was still blushing for some reason, so he didn’t push the issue. “Not this one,” he said, getting into the car. “It’s some kind of exclusive mage thing, and I’m not a mage. ”
“Say no more,” she said, tapping a destination into the flickering console that passed for an autodrive in this relic of a vehicle. “We’ll have you looking magical in no time. What kind of mage do you want to be?”
Julius winced as the car sputtered like an asthmatic old dog, but it made it out of the narrow parking space and down the road without dying, and he eventually relaxed into the threadbare seat. “What are my options?”
Marci’s enormous smile caught him completely off guard, but he had plenty of time to recover as she passionately recited the seemingly endless variety of magical vocations, with commentary, that he could choose from.
Chapter 3
Considering the sorry state of Marci’s car, Julius expected her to drive them somewhere truly scary, like one of those hourly Underground motels where they always found the body in DFZ crime movies. He was pleasantly surprised, then, when her route took them out of the dark undercity altogether, driving north away from the water and the skyways into one of Detroit’s few surviving historic neighborhoods.
By some miraculous happenstance, the old University District had avoided the worst of Algonquin’s initial wave. There was still visible flood damage on the rotting telephone poles, but most of the area’s quaint brick and stone houses with their odd little towers and arches were still intact. Unlike the heavily renovated buildings of the packed Underground they’d just left, though, there were no shops or vending machines or noisy crowds. There didn’t actually seem to be anyone out here at all.
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After experiencing the oppressive, cave-like atmosphere of living below another city first hand, Julius though people would be fighting tooth and nail to live out here where there was still sky and fresh air. The moment Marci had driven them out of the shadow of the skyways, however, the crowds had shrunk to a trickle. Even stranger, most of the nice houses here seemed to be abandoned. Some had even been grown over entirely by yards turned wild over years of neglect, which didn’t make any sense at all.
“Why is this place so empty?” he asked, glancing in the side mirror at the cliff-like edge of the two layered city behind them. “We’re only fifteen minutes from downtown, and there’s so much space. Why isn’t it all one giant suburb?”
“Those are all on the south side,” Marci said. “I mean, if you want to see the corp towns, I can totally take you later, but no one builds that stuff up here. ”
“Why not?”
She looked at him like he was joking and pointed out his window
. When Julius turned to look, though, he didn’t see anything but the same collapsing houses that had prompted him to ask the question in the first place. He was about to ask again when he spotted a glimmer of silver above the rooftops, and he realized he’d been looking too low.
About a hundred feet behind the houses lining the street on his right, a chain link fence topped with razor wire rose high into the evening sky. This far away, it was almost invisible, but now that he was staring straight at it, Julius could feel the faint hum of magic coursing through the air like electricity. “What is that?”
“Reclamation Land,” Marci said. “All the area east from here until the skyways pick up again by the shores of Lake St. Claire is designated for spirits. It’s sort of like a refuge. Spirits live a very long time, which makes them kind of curmudgeonly. A lot of them haven’t adapted well to modern life after the comet woke them up. Some people say that’s the real reason the Lady of the Lakes took Detroit in the first place; she wanted to give her fellow spirits somewhere safe to adjust to their new world. Personally, I think that’s giving Algonquin way too much credit for selflessness, but the Reclamation Land does seem to be a legitimately safe space. Humans aren’t even allowed inside unless they work for the Algonquin Corporation. ”
Julius looked at the fence again. He couldn’t see any spirits beyond it—just collapsed houses surrounded by trees and open fields—but after Marci’s story, he could feel their power stronger than ever. The magic here smelled of wild places, of forests and water and mountains. Magic like this did not belong so close to a city, and yet here it was, layered over the rundown homes and overgrown lawns like a blanket of wet snow.
“Anyway,” Marci went on. “That’s the reason this strip of land hasn’t been developed. None of the big companies wanted to build this close to the spirits, and no one else can afford to live here. The lots are spaced so far apart that there aren’t enough people to split the fees for roads, trash, and cops down to an affordable level, and that’s not even counting the wards you’d need. ”
“Wards?”
“That fence is to keep people out. ” Marci said, nodding at the Reclamation Land border. “The spirits don’t mind it at all. Plus, look at all this open land. Trees and grass and open ground attract supernatural activity everywhere, but this close to Algonquin, the pull is super charged. If you wanted to live in one of those houses, you’d practically need a mage on staff just to keep your property from being overrun. ”
Julius leaned away from the car door. “Overrun by what?”
Marci laughed. “Everything. Spirits, magical animals, feral dogs—you name it, it lives out here. I actually chased a water nixie out of a guy’s bathtub just this morning in exchange for breakfast. I should have charged him, but he was such a nice old man, and he was clearly dead broke anyway. It worked out okay, though. He made really delicious pancakes. ”
Julius was about to ask if chasing away spirits was how Marci made her living out here when the car’s automated route ended. Marci took over with a jerk, grabbing the steering wheel for the final turn into the driveway of a house that left him speechless.
“It’s only temporary,” she said quickly. “And it’s not nearly so bad on the inside. ”
Julius nodded dumbly, staring out the window at the ruin that had once been a Tudor style brick mansion.
If the neighborhood’s other houses were in decline, this place was nearing the bottom of a nosedive. Technically, it was two stories tall, but the top floor was caved in completely, the collapsed roof utterly overgrown with ivy. The bottom level didn’t look much better. The brick was cracked in several places, and one corner of the foundation was sinking, causing the whole structure to tilt. Given the state of the roof, it was probably even worse on the inside, but Julius couldn’t tell for sure since every window was blocked by huge, dusty piles of boxes and furniture pressed right up to the glass. Apparently, whoever had lived here before Marci had had a serious hoarding problem.
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The lot was just as bad. Though clearly once a fanciful garden full of benches, stone paths, and cutesy statuary, the side and front yards were now a jungle of ornamental plants gone wild. Bushes ten feet tall battled elephant-sized tufts of pampas grass for every inch of arable land, devouring the poured cement garden statues of cupids and angels until all that remained were their weather-stained hands reaching up out of the vegetation like victims of the Blob. And then, of course, there were the cats.
Julius didn’t normally see cats. Felines of all types had a natural nose for magic that could sense a dragon a mile away, sealed or not. Here, though, there were cats everywhere. Maybe they were too muddled by the thick magic of this place to notice his arrival, or maybe they just didn’t care, but everywhere Julius looked, there they were, hiding in the overgrown bushes and peering out through the ivy of the collapsed roof. Still more watched from the house’s dusty windows, their eyes bright with feral wariness as they followed Marci’s car around the back of the house where it eventually rolled to a stop in front of the collapsing back porch.
“I can see why you were desperate,” Julius said as they got out of the car.
“Yeah, well, a roof’s a roof,” Marci grumbled, walking around the tree sized azalea bushes to the dug in cement stair that led down to the house’s basement, scattering cats as she went. “Mrs. Hurst was my first customer when I got into town. I took care of a spirit that was giving her trouble, but she didn’t have the money for my fee. We were still working it out when her son heard about the incident and sent his mother a plane ticket to come live with him in Chicago. So, since she wasn’t going to be here anymore, the old lady said I could stay rent-free in lieu of payment until they sold the house. Free was about my price range at the time, so I took it. Not exactly the Ritz, I know, but something’s better than nothing, right?”
Not always, Julius thought, casting another skeptical look at the house’s sagging foundations. He didn’t want to be insulting, though, and it wasn’t like he was going to be living here, so he followed Marci down the steps and into the basement without a word.
Given the state of the house above, he’d braced for the worst, so Julius was shocked when he stepped through the basement door into a neat, well-lit space. It was still a basement with a cement floor and ground-level windows set high on the cracked brick walls, but unlike anything else he’d seen in this place, it was immaculately clean. Or, at least, part of it was.
The basement was as huge as the house above it, but only half of it was nice. The half by the door was bordered by a strip of yellow plastic caution tape covered in spell scribbling. On their side of the plastic line, it was a clean, orderly space that smelled faintly of artificial lemon. On the other side, it was chaos.
Beyond the line made by the yellow tape, filthy, sodden trash lay in huge piles. Julius couldn’t even see far enough back to spot the stairs that led up to the house itself. His view was blocked by mountains of discarded boxes, old clothes, broken furniture, stacks of old magazines, and cats. Uncountable cats, their eyes gleaming from the shadows as Marci clicked on the tall parlor lamp sitting on top of the mini fridge in the corner.
“Don’t worry,” she said, nodding at the caution tape. “The cats can’t get through the ward. It keeps out the smell, too. You would not believe what this place was like when I got here. ”
Julius believed it just fine. “Free or not, why would you live down here?”
If he’d thought better of it, he wouldn’t have put the question quite that way. Fortunately, Marci didn’t seem offended.
“It fit my needs,” she said with a shrug. “My father died suddenly Tuesday night, and I ended up having to move in kind of a hurry. I haven’t had time to pick up my Residency ID yet, and I don’t have a stable source of income, which makes it kind of hard to get a lease even in the DFZ. I’ve just been trying to roll with the punches and make do. ”
She’d certainly done that, Julius thought, looking over th
e tiny island of order and cleanliness she’d carved from the vast, disgusting sea of trash and cats. In addition to the mini fridge and the lamp, she’d acquired a couch and a gigantic wooden wardrobe that looked like it might contain Narnia. There was also a large, open square of floor off to the side that was covered in chalk casting circles, which he assumed must be her workspace. Not bad at all for someone who’d only been here…
“Wait,” Julius said. “Tuesday? Like, three days ago?” When she nodded, he cursed himself for an insensitive idiot. “My condolences for the loss of your father. ”
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Marci’s face fell for a split second, but then she was right back to business, throwing open the doors of the huge wardrobe to reveal, sadly not fur coats and a snowy forest with a lamppost, but a neatly organized collection of magical paraphernalia, which was far more useful at the moment. “Thanks,” she said. “I miss him a lot. But hey, at least I haven’t had time to dwell on it, right? Hard to be sad when you’re under an endless siege of cats. ”
Her voice was bright and cheery, but Julius’s ears were tuned for dragons, and he could hear the falseness of her words clear as a bell. But it was neither his problem nor his place to call out her deception, so he let it go. He had to, anyway, because Marci was shoving an intricately carved wooden box into his face. “Hold this a sec. ”
He did, using both hands when the box proved much heavier than it looked. It was also vibrating slightly, the little motions making the paper seal on the lid flutter like a flag in a high wind. Julius grimaced and moved the box to arm’s length. Family competition aside, this sort of creepiness was the other reason he’d stayed away from serious magic.
“So,” he said as Marci climbed up into the wardrobe to grab a meticulously labeled box of multicolored casting chalk off the top shelf. “You’re from Nevada?”
