Just A Little Wicked: A Limited Edition Collection of Magical Paranormal and Urban Fantasy Tales

by Lily Luchesi

  The monster’s eyes narrow, and it leans in close, sniffing me. Its enormous face blocks my view of the sky—I’m sad about that for some reason, though I can’t quite remember why—and it tilts its head.

  I see the moon reflected in its eyes.

  Moonlight and malice.

  The thought flickers through my mind, then fades away as the world goes dark.

  It was the last thing I thought for a long, long time.

  5. Evan

  An eternity later, I pulled in to find our encampment closed up tight for the night. About half the vehicles were already gone—the ones who didn’t have gear to haul a hundred miles and set up the next day.

  The rest of the carnies had probably headed out for a rare night off—hitting the bars here or in the next town, or simply taking the opportunity to get away from the extended family of the carnival, with all its petty bickering and constant surveillance.

  That, more than anything, had surprised me when I joined up. Everyone in the carnival crew knew everyone else’s business.

  Which made it even more unlikely that Kizzie could be hurt without everyone knowing it.

  She’ll be fine, I reassured myself.

  As I slowed down to make my way to the back edge of the vehicles clustered together, the clouds above parted.

  A ray of moonlight sliced through the air like a knife, landing squarely on Kizzie’s van, illuminating it like an arrow pointing the way to disaster.

  Like the Tower card—the disaster of a crumbling tower that could come crashing down and crush us all.

  I slammed on the brakes and threw the truck into park, grabbing the Tower card before opening the door and stepping out. The spongy ground beneath my boots muffled my steps, but the click of the door shutting behind me sounded like a gunshot in the silence.

  At first glance, everything looked peaceful.

  She’s fine.

  The clouds drifted over the full moon, and the light vanished, leaving me blinking to adjust to the sudden darkness. Once I could more or less see again, I circled around to the front of the van, testing the door as I walked by.

  The handle gave way.

  Unlocked? That was unlike Kizzie.

  I leaned in long enough to verify my girlfriend wasn’t inside the van. Moving to the front of the vehicle, I dropped my hand to the hood.

  Cold.

  The van hadn’t been started in hours.

  I didn’t see her until I circled around to the driver’s side.

  I might not have seen her even then, were it not for the distracting flutter of another of her cards by the back tire.

  I bent down to pick it up and found Kizzie lying under the van, tucked in behind the wheel well, facedown, her fingers still clasping clumps of grass from the churned-up ground under hands.

  Her long dark hair cascaded down over her face, and when I brushed it away to uncover her eyes, they were open, staring at me blankly. Her already pale skin had gone paper white, the bloodless color of death.

  A shout caught in my throat and all I could do was whisper. “Oh, no, Kizzie.”

  At the sound of my words, she blinked.

  “Oh, thank God. You’re still alive.” I knew I probably shouldn’t move her, but I couldn’t help myself. Dropping the Tower card I still held in one hand, I crouched down to reach under the van and pull her out as gently as I could.

  Once I had her all the way out, I realized the darkness covering her was blood that had soaked through her clothing.

  She groaned softly. “Don’t turn me over. My back—it’s hurt. I can’t feel my legs.”

  “I’ll get help,” I said.

  “No,” Kizzie croaked, her voice rough with pain. “Cards,” she managed to say softly. “I need my cards.”

  If she had her cards, could she do for herself what she had done for me? Could she heal her injuries?

  “I’ll get them,” I promised.

  How the hell am I going to find her cards?

  6. Evan

  Finding the rest of Kizzie’s tarot deck ended up being easier than I expected.

  Glancing around, I realized the moon had come back out. The cards glowed as if the light of the moon were picking them out individually, leading me from one to the next, the cards scattered in a rough semicircle around the van.

  It took several minutes to gather them all up, and I worried that Kizzie might be bleeding out even as I searched.

  “At least let me call 911,” I begged her.

  “Cards,” she reiterated, her hand fluttering weakly as she reached out toward me as if to take the ones that I had already gathered.

  “Just a few more,” I promised.

  She let out a harsh, pain-filled breath, but nodded.

  “Here, sweetheart.” Once I had them all, I crouched down to place the cards in her hand, wrapping her fingers around them.

  She sighed in relief, and her hand dropped to the ground for a moment. “Help me,” she whispered.

  “What do you need me to do?”

  “Shuffle.”

  As I took the cards back from her, a final one caught my eye, stuck halfway under the van tire Kizzie had hidden behind, and tacky with partially dried blood. I wiped it off on my jeans and slipped it into the pack, running them through my hands the way I had seen Kizzie do when she used them.

  “What next?”

  “Draw one at a time.” Kizzie’s voice came out haltingly, with obvious effort. “Place it on my back. Tell me what they are.”

  I pulled the first card and laid it faceup on her ruined back, trying to act as if I were dealing onto a table and not the most horrific injury I had ever seen. “Death.”

  “Death is not death,” Kizzie said. “Clearing the old to make way for the new. That’s good.” Kizzie’s voice dropped so low I could barely hear her.

  When she stopped speaking, I set out the next card. “The Devil.”

  “Temptation,” Kizzie whispered.

  “The Wheel of Fortune.”

  The cards on her back began to glow a pale, bluish color in the faint light, almost as if the magic came from the moon itself.

  “Karma and change.” Kizzie closed her eyes.

  I placed the next card on her back—the one I’d been carrying. “The Tower.”

  “Upheaval and change.”

  The air around us began to thicken, the cards’ glow growing, becoming more and more white.

  My hand moved more slowly as I drew the next card. “The Fool.”

  “New beginnings.” Kizzie’s voice grew stronger. “Next will be the Hanged Man, waiting and introspection.”

  I pulled the card, blinking as I realized she was right.

  “The Moon,” she continued, speaking more quickly as I drew each card. “Anxiety and illusion. The Magician, skills and achievements. The World, completion or travel. The Sun, vitality and life.”

  I started to draw the next card, but she stopped me, reaching out to the side to grab my hand. “That’s all.”

  “Okay.”

  “Vitality and life,” Kizzie repeated. She grabbed my hand in hers, and a white-hot energy shot through me. It moved up my arm, spinning through my entire body before shooting back into hers.

  The cards glowed so brightly I couldn’t even look at them.

  “Life,” Kizzie whispered again. Her hand tightened on mine, and energy flowed between us, all the love and passion of our life together over the last two years filling us, completing us.

  Healing her.

  “I love you,” I said as Kizzie sat up, the cards falling from her back—all except the Tower. It stayed stuck to her clothing, as if glued there by the blood she had shed.

  “I love you, too,” she said, leaning forward to kiss me.

  That’s when the beast attacked again.

  It came from above. Growling in my ear, it shoved me to the ground, its claws digging into my back as it landed atop me.

  The sharp puncture of claws shocked me breathless for an instant, but Kiz
zie shoved it off me with a screeching shout of anger.

  I pushed myself up as the enormous mountain lion whipped around to go for Kizzie. And in that moment, a weird wind flashed through trees, picking up the tarot cards from the ground and flinging them into the air.

  One of them hit me directly in the chest. I grabbed it, glancing down as I moved to toss it to the ground, planning to throw myself atop the big cat currently stalking my girlfriend.

  But the card brought me skittering to a halt.

  The Magician.

  Magic.

  And suddenly, I knew exactly what to do.

  7. Kizzie

  I realized I had made a terrible mistake when the giant mountain lion began stalking toward me. I knew the kind of damage it could do, but I couldn’t let it hurt Evan.

  I backed away slowly, not daring to take my eyes off it.

  Under any other circumstances, I might have even thought it was beautiful—but terrifying. It was huge, bigger than any mountain lion I’d ever imagined, muscular and sleek its golden fur almost the same color as Evan’s blond hair.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Evan scramble to his feet, noticed the wind blowing my tarot cards in swirling eddies around the van. Part of me wanted to cry—my cards had saved me, just like they had saved Evan two years earlier. With the exact same reading, a detached, analytical part of my mind noted.

  Now we were both going to die, and my cards were going to be scattered by the wind, left to rot on the ground until the kudzu vines swallowed them, just like they did everything else.

  But then Evan froze, clasping a card to his chest. He glanced down at it, and then he began racing in a circle, chasing the cards, gathering them up much more quickly than he had when I had been actively dying on the ground, right before he’d healed me.

  “Kizzie,” he shouted, “get ready for another reading!”

  His yell brought the beast in front of me to a halt, and it swung its heavy head back and forth, staring from one of us to the other.

  From the pile of cards in his hands, Evan pulled one out and shouted at me, “Strength!”

  And in that instant, I knew exactly what he was doing.

  Hell, the card gave it away. I could picture it in my mind, a man in a loincloth wrestling a lion.

  “Strength, power, the ability to overcome any situation,” I called back to Evan, my grandmother’s lessons in card reading falling effortlessly from my lips.

  Evan drew another card. “Six of Wands,” he yelled.

  “Confidence and knowledge of a job well done,” I replied. “Overcoming obstacles.”

  The same power I had felt when the magic of my cards had healed me began to surge through me again.

  “The Emperor,” Evan called out.

  The mountain lion resumed its slow, stalking stroll toward me. But this time I held my ground. “Absolute control.”

  “And the Empress.” Evan actually laughed aloud. “That’s you and me, Kiz.”

  The mountain lion crouched down, wiggling its butt in that way cats have right before they pounce.

  “The Lovers.” This time, Evan flicked the card directly toward the beast, diverting its attention.

  I concentrated on the power inside me, closed my eyes and let it fill me.

  “Let it go now, sweetheart,” Evan said.

  With both arms, I pushed out in front of me as if throwing a heavy ball and let the magic course through me, exploding from my fingertips in a white-hot lightning bolt. It rushed through me, and I could feel more power coursing from Evan to me by way of the cards,.

  The bolt of electricity snapped out at the monster in front of us. It leaped into the air toward me—but too late. My power slammed directly into its chest and its head snapped back with a crack that I could hear even over the staticky sound of my magic sizzling through its body.

  It dropped to the ground, twitched once, and then lay in an unmoving heap.

  The afterimages still sparkled in my vision as Evan raced to me, picking me up and swinging me around in a circle, laughing wildly.

  All around us, the other carnival workers’ RV doors began opening, and lights flickered on throughout the encampment.

  “What the hell is going on out there?” Crazy Jimmy shouted grumpily.

  But Evan and I were too busy kissing to answer.

  8. Kizzie

  “It is one of The Kindred,” Granna said the next morning, frowning as she sat in the back of my van, doors open, and watched Dad, Jerry, and Crazy Jimmy heave the monstrous body into a makeshift grave. “They’ve come to find us again, to steal our magic. To hunt us until we’re all dead.”

  “The Kindred?” Evan leaned on the shovel he’d used to help dig the hole. Mama handed him a water bottle and he murmured his thanks before taking a swig.

  “Again?” I asked at the same time.

  “Shapeshifters. From Europe.” Granna’s accent grew thicker as she spoke, her deep voice gruff with emotion. “Creatures created by the church to destroy what they called witches. Monsters to hunt us, track us, kill us.” Her voice dropped. “Beasts with one purpose. To annihilate those with magic.”

  “But it didn’t kill me,” I protested. “It left me for dead, but I didn’t die.” I paced back and forth, too wound up to stand still.

  “Only because your Evan returned for you.”

  Evan glanced at me. “I don’t think that was me,” he admitted. “Not really. Something woke me and I knew I needed to get back. When I got into the truck, one of Kizzie’s cards was there.”

  Granna nodded sagely. “Magic finds a way.”

  “Wait a minute,” Mama said, her usual no-nonsense tone full of disbelief as she moved to sit beside Granna. “Are you telling us the Catholic Church created magical monsters to hunt witches because witches used magic?”

  Granna gave something between a shrug and a nod. “They were perhaps inconsistent, no?”

  Dad snorted, holding out his hand for Evan to pass him the shovel. “I don’t care where they came from. If there are more of them out there, we need to get out of here.”

  “That won’t work, will it?” Evan asked, watching Granna’s reaction carefully.

  My grandmother shook her head. “They have tasted her blood, felt her power. They have her scent. More will come.”

  My stomach sank, a hard knot of anxiety weighing it down. The last thing I wanted to do was go up against another one of those things. Even thinking about it made my back ache in remembered pain. “Shifter?” I finally caught up with the idea that had been niggling at the back of my mind. “Does that mean it’s a person sometimes?”

  “It is.” Granna folded her hands atop the table.

  “So it’s like a werewolf?” Evan asked.

  “Can we shoot it?” Mama, ever the pragmatist, asked.

  Granna let out a bark of laughter. “Of course. But that will not kill it.”

  Mama huffed in irritation.

  “Silver bullets?” Jerry asked. “Isn’t that supposed to kill werewolves?”

  “The Kindred are not werewolves.”

  “Looks like a plain old mountain lion to me,” Crazy Jimmy scoffed. Everyone ignored him, and he shrugged before going back to covering the body.

  Dad dropped another load of dirt into the hole. “What can kill it?”

  Granna waved her hand at the grave. “Magic, apparently.”

  “Magic always comes with a price.” I murmured, quoting one of Granna’s earliest lessons to me.

  Evan’s gaze flickered to me. “So this is, what? Some kind of price you have to pay for doing magic?”

  “Kizzie saved your lives with her magic,” Granna said. “But our curse is to be hunted for using magic.”

  “Are you saying that somehow Kizzie created this thing by using magic?” Mama asked.

  “Not created—but perhaps her magic…activated it.” Granna shook her head. “The Kindred do not respond to small magics—reading the cards, moving small items, minor trickery, those thi
ngs will not disturb The Kindred’s beasts. But when Kizzie brought you back from the dead, The Kindred were awoken.”

  “You mean I created this thing?” I demanded.

  “So what happened when I healed Kizzie?” Evan asked at the same time.

  “You knew this was coming, and you didn’t warn me?” I glared at my grandmother accusingly.

  She gave a placid shrug. “I could not be certain. It’s been a very long time since anyone in our family has possessed enough magic to alert The Kindred.”

  9. Evan

  A horrible thought crossed my mind. I spun to face Kizzie’s grandmother. “When this thing is a person, does he even know what he is?”

  “I am uncertain.”

  “Seems like there’s a little too much that we don’t know.” I had to swallow down the fear in my voice as I stared at Kizzie. “How can I even protect you from something like that?”

  She moved to me, wrapping her arms around my waist and dropping her head on my shoulder. “You don’t. We protect each other.”

  “How can we recognize these things when they’re in human form?” I asked Kizzie’s Granna.

  Again, she shook her head. “I do not know.”

  “Can we track it down?” I was willing to do anything—whatever it might take to protect Kizzie from another attack.

  “The Kindred will come looking for us.” Somehow, the words sounded even more ominous in the old woman’s rough voice and heavy accent.

  “What do we do until then?” Kizzie asked, dropping her hand to clasp mine, threading our fingers together.

  “Nothing,” Kizzie’s father said as he and Jerry pulled a strand of kudzu over the new grave to hide it from casual observers. “We go to our next site and set up as usual.”

  Granna nodded. “The Kindred will find us. You will not have to hunt for them. We must stay together and be prepared.”

  Kizzie and I glanced at each other and she squeezed my hand. “Will you drive the van?”

  “Of course.” I leaned down and kissed her lightly before stepping away to help load up the last of the supplies into the back of Jerry’s pickup.