The
Witchkin Murders
Magicfall
Book 1
by
Diana Pharaoh Francis
Genre:
Urban Fantasy, Paranormal Romance
Four
years ago, my world—the world—exploded with wild magic. The
cherry on top of that crap cake? The supernatural world declared war
on humans, and my life went straight to hell.
I
used to be a detective, and a damned good one. Then Magicfall
happened, and I changed along with the world. I’m witchkin
now—something more than human or not quite human, depending on your
perspective. To survive, I’ve become a scavenger, searching
abandoned houses and stores for the everyday luxuries in short
supply—tampons and peanut butter. Oh, how the mighty have fallen,
but anything’s better than risking my secret.
Except,
old habits die hard. When I discover a murder scene screaming with
signs of black magic ritual, I know my days of hiding are over. Any
chance I had of escaping my past with my secret intact is gone.
Solving the witchkin murders is going to be the hardest case of my
life, and not just because every second will torture me with
reminders of how much I miss my old life and my partner, who hates my
guts for abandoning the department.
But
it’s time to suck it up, because if I screw this up, Portland will
be wiped out, and I’m not going to let that happen. Hold on to your
butts, Portland. Justice is coming, and I don’t take prisoners.
Kayla
THE SCAVENGE HAD proved more successful than
Kayla had expected, and she’d expected a lot. She’d come away with a treasure trove
of difficult-to-find foods and spices, prescription and over-the-counter
medicines, tampons and pads which brought a premium price, and most important
of all, two cartons of cigarettes, three jars of peanut butter, and a stockpile
of Mountain Dew, the latter of which she’d have to get later. She was already
practically bent double with the weight of the backpack without the soda. It
was too bad about the Skittles, but this was a good haul.
Going up into The Deadwood offered the chance
to mine houses that hadn’t already been picked over by a hundred other
scavengers. Mostly because the rest of them liked breathing and so stayed away.
Kayla wasn’t so burdened with common sense. That, and she carried a gun,
several knives, and a couple of magical taser charms. Not to mention she was
pretty decent at hand-to-hand. Leftover habits and skills from her life as a
cop. She could more than take care of herself against people hiding in dark
alleys.
Of course, The Deadwood was filled with a lot
more dangerous beings than the ordinary street scum that preyed on pedestrians
back before Magicfall. Before the Witchwar. Before the whole world had turned
inside out and all the monsters in the closets and under the beds came crawling
out of hiding. Back when Kayla was just an ordinary human.
The Witchwar exploded within days of
Magicfall—a worldwide eruption of magic that birthed The Deadwood, changed
Kayla, and set off an untold number of other bizarre transformations straight
out of fairytales and hallucinogenic nightmares. The entire world had been
engulfed.
Right smack in the middle of all the chaos,
witches leading armies of supernatural warriors and creatures out of myth,
legend, and nightmare marched against the human cities that had survived.
Humans were like termites eating up the world. They needed to be eradicated
like roaches.
The war had gone on for a year or so when the
attacks on the cities stopped. It still wasn’t clear why. Maybe they figured
enough humans had died, or maybe they figured out humans aren’t so easy to
kill. Over the last couple of years, an uneasy truce had developed between
humans and witchkin. Turns out, we needed each other.
Kayla hitched the backpack higher, bending
forward to help balance it. Her lips twisted in self-ridicule. How the mighty
had fallen. From cop to scavenger. Before the shit had hit the fan, she’d been
a detective, a damned good one. Then she’d been infected with magic and game
over. Bye bye career, friends, and, worst of all, Ray.
A familiar ache bloomed in her chest. She missed
him every day, even after everything he’d said, everything he’d called her,
when she quit.
Back then she’d had zero control over herself.
Not that she’d improved much since. But quitting the department had been a
no-brainer. With the Witchwar and hatred of the supernaturals, she’d have
either been lynched when it got out, or else locked up in a zoo somewhere.
Leaving had been the right decision. The only
decision. Regretting it didn’t change that. And Kayla regretted it with all the
fabric of her being.
She pulled her mind from the quagmire of
memories and what-ifs that circled her like sharks, chomping down whenever she
didn’t keep her mind on task. Focus, she told herself. Forget about
who you were before. Staying alive today is all that counts.
The Deadwood lay west of downtown Portland
inside the neighborhood that used to be Goose Hollow and extending into the
Southwest Hills and Washington Park. When the magic had struck, a sinister
black forest had grown up in the blink of an eye. The twisted, gnarled trees
grew taller than the houses, and were spaced far enough apart to allow a lot of
the buildings to survive. Possessive nettles and vines swayed and wriggled from
the trees, growing over most of the houses. The blowtorch hooked to Kayla’s
belt had convinced them to withdraw and allow her access.
Within the shadowed gloom of The Deadwood,
hundreds of denizens lived and hunted. All too often, folks who wandered too
close disappeared, never to be heard from again. So people—human and
not—avoided the place, which suited Kayla just fine. The untouched houses made
the forest a scavenger paradise. If you could stay alive long enough to get out
with your haul.
Since Magicfall and then the Witchwar, so many
of the comforts of everyday American life had stopped getting made. Sure, the
metal infrastructure of the cities had protected them from complete
transformation and given birth to the technomages who worked with all sorts of
technology, which meant industry could still function. But shipping proved
supremely expensive and dangerous, so anything the locals needed either had to
be made in Portland, or it had to be scavenged.
Tampons were popular. And chocolate. A lot of
foods, really. Jeans, too. And silk. Some enterprising entrepreneur had started
a toilet paper factory on the east side, so that wasn’t much in demand anymore,
but pots and pans were. Medications, cosmetics, spices, CDs and DVDs, olive
oil, guns, ammunition, bows, arrows, toys . . . anything that
couldn’t be obtained without a lot of money or magic.
Most people didn’t like going to Spider
Island—over where the Willamette had expanded into a giant lake covering West
Linn and Oregon City—to buy magic. That’s where witches and other supernaturals
had set up a bazaar to sell their skills and wares. Humans called it Nuketown,
since they’d have liked to nuke the place.
Humans had a love/hate relationship with
magic. They liked the benefits, but feared the dangers, not to mention all the
mythological creatures besides witches that had crawled out of the woodwork
after Magicfall.
They counted the technomages as good guys
since they’d fought on the human side in the war and because mages made most
electronics work again. People still couldn’t live without their cell phones
and video games, and it was damned nice to still have working modern hospitals
and refrigerators.
Unlike witches, technomages had hard limits to
their powers. They worked with industrial magic and couldn’t heal or make
charms or anything separate from wire, steel, electricity, and computers—or
what computers had turned in to, which was an amorphous semi-sentient cloud of
information the technomages called The Oracle. Every big city had birthed one.
The mages were working on getting them to talk to each other like the old
internet.
That made Nuketown necessary and despised all
at once. Most humans only went there when desperate, usually preferring to buy
from middlemen, a service that Nessa—Kayla’s usual buyer for salvage—often
performed. A few went for the thrill.
Kayla hitched the pack higher again and dodged
around a glass bush. It chimed in the light breeze. It marked the edge of The
Deadwood and the return to civilization. She climbed up a bank to the road,
using the thick, wiry grass to help pull herself up.
The asphalt had buckled and cracked apart,
leaving knee-deep potholes and long trenches. Portland’s ubiquitous blackberry
vines crawled across the road and sprouted out of the crevices and holes. The
city hadn’t gotten around to repairing this road yet. Maybe they wouldn’t, not
with it so close to The Deadwood.
It took her a little over an hour to work her
way back to downtown. After that, it got trickier. Fog had rolled in off the
river again, smothering sound and sight. The breeze did nothing to dissipate
it. Kayla could only see a few feet ahead of herself before the walls of gray
nothingness closed in around her. She sighed and turned west.
The tule fogs rolled in once or twice a week.
They didn’t usually last more than a day. They’d started after Magicfall and
didn’t seem to coincide with any weather phenomena. It tended to settle maybe a
mile wide on either side of the river. As annoying as it could be, Kayla
couldn’t hate it. It had given her cover more than a few times when the
transformation had taken her and she’d no way to hide.
Tonight she had no need. Her shifter form
wasn’t threatening. She decided to head uphill until she was above the fog and
go home for the night. She’d take her scavengings to Nessa in the morning.
A noise from the right sent the hair on the
back of her neck prickling. A ring of metal, like a sword being unsheathed, and
muffled movement. A loud sound and the tang of something in the air—hot, wet,
stony, acrid. She recoiled as it coated the insides of her nose and mouth,
feeling caustic.
Kayla’s cop genes ignited. She jerked forward
a step then made herself stop and retreat. Not her circus, not anymore. She’d
walked away from all that. She should leave it alone, whatever was happening.
She took a couple more steps toward home and
stopped. Goddammit. Curiosity killed the cat, she told herself, then
slid the pack from her shoulders, setting it down against a fire hydrant. She
glanced around, seeing only cottony fog. Odds were nobody would see her pack
and take it. Even if they did . . . there were always more
backpacks and more stuff to scavenge.
She drew her .357 semi-auto from her hip
holster. All carry laws had been suspended after Magicfall. Mostly because
everybody ignored them. The blowtorch bottle bounced against her thigh as she
followed the noises.
She moved cautiously, placing each foot
carefully to keep from tripping or worse. She nudged up against a curb at the
side of the road and stepped up onto the sidewalk. It shuddered and rippled
under her feet, and she began to sink. Kayla jumped back onto the solid
asphalt. Her boots stuck to the ground. She smelled the acrid stench of her
rubber soles melting. Dammit. She liked these boots.
Weird spots like this one popped up all the
time. They all manifested different properties and none particularly pleasant.
The worst part was they could appear anywhere at any time, with no warning.
Once reported, technomages would get rid of them, but finding them was usually
a matter of stepping into one. Sometimes that was fatal.
She jerked her boots free from where they’d
cooled and stuck to the ground, and followed the curb, listening closely. More
noise came from the left. Kayla tested the sidewalk and found it solid. For
now, anyway.
Taking several quick steps, she scuttled
across, finding herself at the top of a flight of steps at the edge of a small
park. The muted sounds of running water made her stomach drop. She’d stumbled
into Keller Fountain Park.
Taking up the entire block, the
ziggurat-shaped fountain for which the park was named had been constructed into
the side of a steep hill. On the high side, an angular maze of wading canals
channeled water over a mashed-together collection of square-topped pyramids of
various heights and sizes. The blocky juts and peaks had always reminded her of
an Aztec temple. The different sizes created deep chimney insets in between,
some fifteen feet wide and ten feet deep, others a scant five.
Water cascaded
down each of the flat planes. No little fountains of neatly contained water
here.
She shuddered. Her worst nightmare. Now
she really should leave.
She didn’t move.
Kayla drew in a slow breath. Something was
wrong here. She could feel it. Her instincts had never let her down before. She
wouldn’t forgive herself if something awful happened because she was too
worried about herself to check it out.
She started down the steps, listening for
telltale sounds, trying to hear through the splashing of the fountains.
Then—
Guttural words—not English—spoken in a
gravel-filled voice that rumbled through the air like thunder. A cadence to the
language, sort of chanting, but nothing musical about it. Weighted silence,
heavy and breathless. Movement. A rippling and clutching in the fog. A red glow
washing outward, turning the fog bloody.
Magic.
The wave of power hit Kayla like a club and
sent her sprawling onto the shallow steps. The hard concrete cut into her back
and legs.
She lay still a long moment, her head reeling
from where she’d hit it on the cement. Perfect. Carefully she examined the
sudden lump on the back of her skull with the fingers of her left hand. At
least her ponytail had kept the blow from knocking her out. She still clutched
her gun in her other hand. Old habits died hard.
She firmed her grip and sat up, glancing down
at herself. A shiny white powder covered her clothing and the ground all
around. Kayla stood, dusting herself off with one hand. The powder clung to her
skin and clothing.
She licked her lips. Fine grit coated her
tongue. It tasted like vinegar and something putrid. Worse than the air before
the spell. She grimaced and spit. If her fall hadn’t already alerted whoever
had set that spell, a little spitting wouldn’t give her away.
The sour grains clung to her mouth and then
seemed to absorb into her skin. That couldn’t be good.
She resisted the urge to
try dusting herself off again. She didn’t need to give the stuff more
opportunity to infect her, whatever it was. On the positive side, she hadn’t
broken out in boils and weeping sores. That was good.
She resumed her descent to the bottom of the
fountains. Gray cement platforms layered over each other like giant slices of
bread stacked ten or so feet back from the angular, red fountain walls.
Between, a patchwork of rectangular pools collected water.
The splashing of the fountain covered any
sounds there might have been. Holding her gun ready, Kayla walked closer,
heading for the central platform, knowing instinctively that it was the best
place in the park to cast a spell. Her feet found the first of the stacked
cement sheets. Three others were layered on the sides and in front of the base
platform. She stopped again to listen, breathing silently. Still nothing.
Adrenaline thrummed through her veins. She
stepped up on the left platform and then to the highest central platform. She
expected to find a spell circle like the kind used by witches, but as she
stepped up, she found only cement coated in a sheet of silvery-white powder.
She circled the platform, angling inward until
she came to the middle. Nothing. What was she missing?
Her brows furrowed. Maybe someone had used an
amulet or charm? A hex? Kayla didn’t know enough about magic to make a decent
guess.
A thought struck her, and she gritted her
teeth. Son of a bitch. Of course. Things couldn’t just be simple, could they?
She crossed to the edge of the platform where
it jutted several feet above the catch pools and squatted down. She could only
see a foot or two out into the fog. A scum of white powder floated across the
top of the otherwise clear water, disguising the mortared river rock bottom.
Kayla rubbed her hand over her mouth. Was she
really considering jumping in? This wasn’t her problem, and anyway, who knew
what this even was? Nobody would thank her for getting involved. And
if she went into the water—
She could only hold off a transformation for
so long once she got wet. If she dried quickly, she could keep it from
happening, but wading into water? Risky. Too fucking
risky and stupid.
Kayla straightened and turned away from the
water and then stopped. Instinct fought against instinct. The need to protect
herself wrestled with the need to serve and protect the people of the city.
Being a cop was in her DNA, and leaving the force hadn’t changed that. God,
could she be any more fucked up?
Don’t tempt fate, she admonished
herself. The universe never refuses that kind of challenge.
She pivoted back around. The water wasn’t
deep. Mid-calf, maybe to her knees. That wasn’t so much. She could handle it,
no problem.
In your dreams, came the mocking voice of
reality in her head.
“No one will see
with the fog,” she said out loud, her voice paper thin, but steady with
purpose. Her heart, her soul, had already decided. Time for her brain to get
with the program.
She gave a little hop and splashed down into
the pool.
Four years ago the supernatural world declared war on the
humans and magic rained down on everyone causing mayor changes for everyone in
its path. After Magicfall the world was never the same for anyone.
Kayla’s life changed drastically for her after Magicfall.
Kayla is now a witchkin something that is not exactly human anymore. Before
Magicfall Kayla was a detective a job she loved very much but after the war
changed her she left the department and now she can be found scavenging the
streets for anything of value to her that she needs to survive.
One day on one of her scavenging hunts Kayla runs up on a
crime scene with a couple of bodies on display. Kayla contacts her old partner
Ray. She is reluctant to do this with the way things were left between her and
Ray when she left the department but Ray is the only one she can trust.
After Magicfall Kayla and Ray both are harboring secrets
from each other and the world. Neither wants to accept what they are and are
afraid of the reaction of the other. They both believe if they push their
secrets far enough down inside of them hiding from themselves and the world
then maybe just maybe it would not be true. Both are afraid the other will hate
them if the truth comes out.
Kayla’s aunt and grandmother disappear leaving Kayla and Ray
to have to work together to find her aunt and grandmother while trying to solve
the murders before war befalls the world once again. Can they find her aunt and
grandmother before it is too late? Can they solve the murders in time? Can they
stop the impending war that lies ahead? Is the disappearance of her aunt and
grandmother tied in with the murders?
The Witchkin Murders is a very intense and intriguing read
that had me turning the pages wanting to more about what was going on with all
the magic and how it came to be. The magic in The Witchkin Murders is so coolly
imaginatively amazing. The Witchkin Murders is a very magically enthrallingly story
that had me hooked from the first page. The world building is brilliantly written
I loved it so much. The descriptions of the story, characters, world and the
magic are just beautiful I could see it all happening inside my head. I can’t
wait to see more of the Magicfall world in future books.
I would highly recommend The Witchkin Murders to all fans of
mystery, suspense, magic and the paranormal with a touch of romance.
Diana Pharaoh
Francis is the acclaimed author of a dozen novels of fantasy and
urban fantasy. Her books have been nominated for the Mary Roberts
Rinehart Award and RT’s Best Urban Fantasy. The Witchkin
Murders is the first book in her exciting new urban fantasy
series—Magicfall.
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