Street Spells: Seven Urban Fantasy Shorts Read online

  Street Spells

  ***

  Seven Urban Fantasy Shorts

  ***

  by Aimee Easterling, Tori Centanni, Rachel Medhurst, Dale Ivan Smith, Becca Andre, N. R. Hairston, and Kat Cotton

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  STREET SPELLS

  First edition. July 31, 2018.

  Copyright © 2018 Aimee Easterling, Tori Centanni, Rachel Medhurst, Dale Ivan Smith, Becca Andre, N. R. Hairston, and Kat Cotton

  Table of Contents

  Scapegoat: Aimee Easterling

  Dead Goblins and Overdue Rent: Tori Centanni

  Magically Hidden: Rachel Medhurst

  Siloed: Dale Ivan Smith

  Alchemy and Destiny: Becca Andre

  Dirty Magic: N. R. Hairston

  Run Away: Kat Cotton

  From the Authors

  Scapegoat

  by Aimee Easterling

  Chapter 1

  Sixteen years ago, I met a werewolf. Maybe? It’s hard to be sure when the memories are as fuzzy as seven-day mold grown on a nutrient-enhanced petri dish. Here’s what I recall:

  The strip club. Bare skin sliding across cool metal while I ran chemistry formulas through my head to make sure I had them right. I was cramming for an organic-chemistry final the next morning—that part’s a fact—and for one night I cared more about my actual grade rather than about making the bucks that allowed me to stay in school.

  Still, there was no pause button to let me study in peace. Instead, it was all pounding music and strobing lights, greedy eyes, a ten-dollar bill slipped into my g-string. I was used to the sensory overload, so that couldn’t be why the night turned into such a fairy-tale in my memory.

  The crazy part began when I left work, waved goodbye to fellow dancers before slipping out into the darkened alley that should have been empty...but wasn’t. A male figure leaned against the grimy concrete. Straightened as I approached. Reached toward me with fingers silhouetted against the dim street lamp.

  I clutched my mace canister, wishing I’d been smart enough to wait an extra hour to walk to the bus stop with Cindy—Chloe? Callie? If I can’t even remember my closest co-worker’s name, how can I believe this memory isn’t fiction but rather fact?

  The man’s words were lost to the adrenaline-fueled terror of the moment. But his hand print...I can still feel it around my bicep, can easily visualize the four pulsing finger marks that lingered there for days after the fact.

  My assailant’s breath stank of whiskey, the cheap kind that still cost enough to break the bank in a strip club. His intentions were clear.

  I froze. This part embarrasses me, makes the adult I am now wince for the nineteen-year-old I was then. A man grabs you in a back alley and you just stand there? Really, Sienna? You can’t just let the world do what it wants with you. Nobody’s going to save you except yourself.

  Only, that part’s not true. The wolf barreled into us out of nowhere, a blue-eyed beauty with teeth so sharp they grazed my skin even as the animal pushed my attacker down onto the asphalt.

  A dog, I know you’re thinking. Some policeman’s trained attack beast. Big and gray, looked like a wolf in a dark alley when you were scared out of your wits. It’s an easy mistake to make.

  It wasn’t a dog though. Later, after I earned my bachelors and moved on to graduate study, I learned to tell the difference. Tail held straight behind rather than curving erect. Densely furred ears. Eyes—okay, that part doesn’t make sense. But you’ve got to go with me here. I knew the beast between us was a wolf even as my attacker screamed, scrambled backwards, ran from that alley like the fires of hell were on his tail.

  I expected the wolf to pursue him. I mean, if I was going to be rescued by the big bad wolf, it should finish the job, right? I hugged my red hoodie closer in to my stomach, stood there with a throat so dry I couldn’t force out a single sound.

  And that’s when the memory goes cockeyed. I’m a scientist, I want you to remember that. Was already learning to observe objectively even during my sophomore year of college. I knew how to draft a hypothesis, to test that question with a well-managed experiment, then to accept the results I saw with my own eyes.

  This is what I saw with my own eyes. Fur receding into naked smoothness. A body elongating, straightening. White-moon buttocks flashing me as a broad-shouldered man lurched erect.

  Or, not a man, but a teenager like me. A few years younger, if I had to guess. I even knew his name.

  Chase was one of those club-goers you could tell had shown up on a dare. His cheeks were beet red when he first entered my place of employment two weeks earlier and his eyes kept skittering off the endless array of bare flesh in the room. He remained innocent, too, while returning night after night. He listened as I talked about my classes, asked if he could walk me home.

  Chase wanted to be my boyfriend, but I couldn’t accept the kid’s infatuation at face value. I wasn’t stupid enough to confuse lust with love.

  Now, though, common sense fled along with the air in my lungs as a wolf turned into a grass-fed farm boy in front of my eyes. “You...it...what?” Or at least, I think my reaction went something like that.

  “Angel,” my rescuer started, reaching out to take one of my shaking hands in two of his. Irrationally, the skin-on-skin contact calmed me, never mind that the boy entwining his fingers with mine was buck naked, his family jewels brushing against the leg of my jogging pants.

  Maybe that’s why I told him my real name. “Sienna. It’s Sienna.”

  The smile on his face was as warm as the rising midwinter sun. And maybe that explains the confusion of my memory. Maybe I was the one dealing with a teenage infatuation sixteen years earlier. That could explain why the entire episode—getting jumped in a dark alley, being rescued by some kind of weirdo nudist—feels as warm and fuzzy as a napping kitten in my adult mind.

  “Sienna.” My name on his tongue drew me in closer until I was pressed up against his naked chest. Meanwhile, Chase’s ensuing words made even less sense than my own actions had. “My pack is leaving. I want you to come with us. I know all this—” he motioned at his bare skin “—is strange. But I promise we can make it work.”

  And here’s the deal. I was nineteen with no family to speak of, my after-hours job eating up whatever social time I would otherwise have enjoyed. I was tempted. The whole wolf thing...maybe I’d accidentally imbibed something I shouldn’t have earlier in the evening, never mind my rule to never drink from an open bottle while at work. Chase was a white knight, wanting to sweep me off my feet and carry me off into the sunset. For half a second, I wanted to be swept.

  But there was that pesky orgo final the following morning. My future boldly charted out before me. A good job, independence, making my own way in the world.

  I only realized Chase’s arms had come up to surround me when I tried to push myself backwards and found myself unable to push. For a split second, terror swamped me. You don’t hug naked strangers in dark alleys, I berated myself. How can I remember that mental rebuke so clearly and have gotten everything else so dramatically wrong?

  Whatever the meaning of this strangely clear memory, I know this part for a fact. Chase released me the instant my heart rate spiked into terror. Took one long step backwards, his neck bowing even as his heel scuffed against the pavement. “I thought you might feel that way,” he said, not even waiting for me to reject him verbally. “
But if you change your mind, email. Please.”

  The lined notebook paper he held out between us was folded and burr-edged, as if Chase had spent hours worrying it between finger and thumb. Maybe he’d carried it with him all week as we spoke in stolen moments during my various shifts. Had been itching to hand over his contact information every time I’d sunk down at his table for a break, sipping a cherry coke and chatting about our respective days.

  I wouldn’t have accepted the paper then, but I did now. Still, almost as soon as the information was in my possession, I stepped backwards, an apology I didn’t really understand tumbling off my lips. “I’m sorry. But I can’t go with you.”

  After all, I refused to be like my mother. Wouldn’t depend on a man then end up poverty-stricken, a single mother who succumbs to a heart attack while far too young.

  Wolf boy smiled at me sadly, and for half a second I doubted my own stiff-spined resolve. I ached to change my mind and run away with this white knight, especially when the May evening hugged me gently, promising that fairy tales just might be real.

  But if this was a fairy tale, then I’d create my own happy ending. So I turned on my heel and walked away into the night.

  Chapter 2

  The radio at my hip crackled, drawing me out of the sixteen-year-old daydream I’d enjoyed far too many times before. Work had become old-hat over the last decade, which was likely why I was reliving past fantasies as if they were fact.

  “Hello? Are you there?” my boss repeated. Rather than answering the call of duty immediately, however, I inched forward across the smooth rock ledge and peered down to check on my charges below.

  Yep, still there. Only after reassuring myself that no wolves had been injured due to my inattention did I unclip the radio and raise it to my face. “Sienna here. What’s up?”

  What was up was more of the usual. An angry rancher certain wolves were slaughtering his livestock. A request for a kill permit. One chance to change the vigilante’s mind before he was given the legal right to start shooting innocent wolves on sight.

  Beneath me, female 257 cocked her head and peered upward, watchful as ever despite my distance from her pups. Her mate was off hunting, which tended to make her more protective rather than less so. But she didn’t bare her teeth or growl. Just angled her body to block my view of the youngsters tumbling all over each other on the tender March grass.

  And, for one split second, the cant of this very real wolf’s ears reminded me of my memory-turned-fairy-tale. Thick fur beneath urban moonlight—had I added a full moon to the memory later to amp up the romance quotient of what had lost its scientific veracity years before?

  Shaking off the image of Chase’s lopsided smile, I noted down the address and directions my boss rattled off for me. Then I turned away from the animals who acted nothing like the media-driven terrors ranchers were so afraid of...and, at the same time, nothing like the wolf boy who existed, I was sure, only in my daydreams.

  It was time to carry out the less fun part of my day job. Keeping an eye on the state’s wolf population also meant determining when a member of the pack had to be put down.

  “I HEAR YOU, SIR, BUT this doesn’t look like the work of wild animals.”

  The man in front of me was red-cheeked and blustering, the evidence of carnage in his farmyard impossible to deny. A blood trail led up to the porch steps, three tiny goat heads draping over the edge of the metal roof to peer down at us with death-clouded eyeballs. Something awful had happened here in the not-so-distant past. But it looked less like wolf damage and more like human pranking...assuming I could take Joe’s protestations at face value, that is.

  “All I know,” the rancher began for the fourth—fifth?—time, “is that something’s killing my livestock. And if it doesn’t stop, I’m going to stop it...if you know what I mean.”

  I knew exactly what he meant. The rifle clutched in his hands made the potential future vividly clear within my mind. Wolf pups drowned like unwanted kittens. Their parents skinned, gutted, and tacked up against a wall.

  Sure enough, when I swiveled slightly, I could make out the splayed shapes of three raccoons and one mink curing against the faded pine slats of a woodshed. No way was I giving this rancher a kill permit. He might have slaughtered those goat kids himself. After all, an unwanted buck youngster wasn’t worth much more than ten dollars, but a good wolf pelt could go for upwards of a couple hundred bucks....

  I was nearly convinced Joe was trying to bamboozle me. Still...wolves worked cooperatively, and I’d found the same tack often soothed a rancher’s riled demeanor. “Sir, I can’t hand out kill permits without evidence that a wolf is responsible for the damages. Do you have a photograph? Tracks? Scat? Anything I can take to my boss?” I widened my eyes and slumped my shoulders as I spoke, hoping my words came across as more of a plea and less of an attack.

  Unfortunately, my current client wasn’t particularly malleable. He took two steps forward until the buttons of his overalls brushed up against my arm, the scent of manure rising off his skin in waves. “This is kidding season, missy. I’m out at all hours making sure my goats survive dropping twins and triplets. I don’t have time to scour the grounds in search of wolf shit. If you want evidence, go find it yourself.”

  Just the invitation I was waiting for. With the buddy-buddy approach a clear failure, I moved on to calling his bluff. “I have a tent in my truck,” I assured him. “I’ll set it up behind the barn, why don’t I? Then, if something drops by at midnight, I’ll personally see what it is.”

  I expected him to back down. Expected to be told to get the eff off his farm.

  But, instead, I thought I caught the faintest flicker of relief in Joe’s eyes as he answered. “Suit yourself.”

  Then he left me there alone with slaughtered goat kids and the sinking suspicion I was hunting more than I could handle. What if this carnage really had been produced by an unhinged and far too wild wolf?

  Chapter 3

  Terrified goat screams sound astonishingly similar to those of a human. So I was out of my sleeping bag and running before bothering to pull on my shoes. Good thing I’d slept in my clothes and possessed feet as tough as leather.

  Only after reaching the wide double doors of the barn did I realize that the night was completely silent without so much as an owl to break the stillness. Was I spooking at my own shadow, letting the rancher’s unusual behavior send me spiraling back into a nearly forgotten world of fairy tales?

  I shuffled bare feet through dewy grass, shivering in the late-night chill. Even if the scream had only been present in my imagination, I was here now. Might as well step inside and look around, reassure myself that the danger existed only within my dream.

  The heavy door creaked on its hinges, alerting sleeping goats who nickered a question my way. One rose and snuffled at my palm in search of treats but none fled at my midnight appearance. Could Joe really have raised such well-adjusted livestock then hung slaughtered goat babies over the edge of a porch roof? The supposition made less and less sense.

  “Am I looking at this problem sideways?” I whispered, picking my way between recumbent goat bodies while trying not to step on the hard pellets of their turds. My hands trailed across warm backs in passing, and one goat rubbed her hornless forehead into my palm like an arching cat begging a caress.

  Then, from the back of the barn, a strange sort of whimper. Or a wheeze. Whatever it was, the sound drew me like a magnet even before I remembered Joe’s gruff tour the previous evening. Expectant mothers were locked in stalls overnight to prevent newborn kids from falling into a water trough and drowning. So the back of the barn was full of the herd’s weakest members, the perfect spot for a predator to strike.

  I’d slid up the latch on the first kidding stall when the scream was repeated. A high-pitched shriek so harrowing the uninitiated would have thought somebody’s throat was being slit.

  Only, that wasn’t the problem at the present moment. Instead, as I stepped in
side, moonlight laid out the scene as if the hour was dawn instead of midnight. Fresh straw blanketed the ground. A doe lay on her side, hind feet spread as she attempted to push out an ugly black thing that I knew was a baby still encapsulated in its birth sac.

  There was no nose visible, however, just the roundness of the tail end. A breech birth. This goat was screaming because she was attempting a kidding that was unlikely to end in life.

  Good thing I’d interned with a country vet the summer after my junior year, before changing my major to wildlife biology and embracing the wild. I dropped to my knees, waited for a lull in contractions, then pushed the baby back inside its mother without a moment of hesitation. Slick fingers against amniotic fluid made it hard to adjust the kid’s appendages, but these goats were Nubians—large enough for me to just barely fit one hand inside.

  I felt blindly, closing my eyes to better focus on my fingers. Ah, there it was. Two hard hooves, spindly ankles. All that was required was to guide the feet out the exit then this kidlet was ready to be born.

  The baby popped out in a gush of overpowering excitement. This was true magic. Near misses melding into new life. Reality was too stunning to overlook by losing myself in daydreams....

  “Thanks.” The rancher’s hand landed on my shoulder, his eyes blurry from loss of sleep. “I heard it through the baby monitor,” he explained, motioning toward a plastic object I hadn’t noticed sitting on the window ledge. “But I appreciate you getting here first.”

  There was another kid emerging from the mother now. A little girl, if I didn’t miss my guess. This one slid out easily without assistance. Then the doe was licking, licking, licking. Struggling to her feet so her twins could nurse.

  “What’re you gonna name them?” I murmured, only realizing that Joe and I had pushed in close together when his sleeve brushed up against my bare arm. To my surprise, the proximity was neither distasteful nor overpowering. Instead, we were united in the wonder of watching new life.