Chey’s feet padded effortlessly across the broken ground, while behind her Pickersgill stumbled and cursed with every bump or irregularity of the stony earth.

Bobby’s helicopter stood motionless in the air, maybe half a kilometer away, maybe seventy meters up. The bubble cockpit was turned her way—was he watching her, was he watching Pickersgill march her across a field of broken stones? Was he wondering why she wasn’t dead yet? Maybe he wasn’t even inside. Maybe it was just Lester up there.

“Okay, head over to that utility pole,” Pickersgill said from behind her. He wasn’t taking a lot of chances—she had to keep her hands straight up in the air or he would jab her in the back with one of his pistols.

The field had been a parking lot once, she thought. It was relatively flat and it was interrupted here and there only by ten- meter- tall light poles, each crowned with a pair of long- broken Klieg lights. The poles were as thick as her arm and made of some metal that hadn’t corroded over the years.

“Listen,” Chey asked, “could I get a coat or a blanket or something? I’m freezing like this.”

He tossed her a pair of moth- eaten, grease- stained coveralls and she struggled into them. They were meant for a larger person than herself, but she was glad just not to be naked anymore. “I appreciate it,” she said. “Can we talk for a second? I’d like to—”

He didn’t let her finish. “Turn around and grab the pole behind you with both hands,” Pickersgill said.

Although Ana had closed the bedroom door, she could still hear the children’s voices shouting and laughing. On that Friday evening, they were hosting a double slumber party. In the spirit of equality and fairness, Rob had allowed both Michelle and Allen to invite their friends over for pizza and a sleepover. It was already past ten. Ana hoped that the kids’ energy level would go down, but no such luck. They were charged up like batteries, while she and Rob felt exhausted. To relax, Ana went online to check her email. She found five spams and three messages. Four of them advertised enlarging various body parts while the last one, by way of contrast, suggested liposuction. The three real messages came from people she didn’t know. Let’s see, Ana opened the first, with only mild curiosity. It was from an artist who wanted to know if she had an art agent. No I don’t, she replied. The second was from a man who claimed to have seen her painting of the two lovers. He wondered if she would be willing to do an idealized representation of him and his wife. Ana responded that she didn’t do portraits. The last note was from an artist who wanted her to recommend his work to her gallery owner. Ana replied that she’d be happy to, but she’d have to take a look at his art first.

As she was about to log off, she became aware that the house was unusually quiet. Back in the old days, when the kids were calm without adult supervision for more than a few minutes, it often meant they were up to no good. Once she even caught them making mud pies in the living room with the leftover fudge.

She found the boys in Allen’s bedroom, playing Nintendo. Ana headed next for Michelle’s room. It was empty. She checked the playroom and her studio, down in the basement. Nobody was there either. She proceeded to search in the front and back yards. Still no sign of the girls. “Rob?” she called out. “Where are the girls?”

Her husband was on the phone with a childhood friend. He winced at the interruption. “Don’t worry about it. They’re having fun.”

“But I looked everywhere and couldn’t find them,” his wife insisted.

“They’re probably playing outside.”

“At 10:30 p.m.? In the dark? By themselves?”

Jorac's an ordinary city constable in the city of Vaggert; he's allergic to magic but still takes the job of Wizard Constable, working for the city's overbearing, officious wizards. He encounters cutthroats, slavers, poison frogs, crazed wizards, hidden beauty, and much more - this is not stereotypical "epic fantasy", it's a fast-paced, fun adventure story. Support indie authors! You can buy the book on Amazon. E-book copies are also available on Kindle, B&N Nook , and iTunes Visit http://www.wizardconstable.com/neatorama.html for an index to all posts for this book, maps and related info, and special prices for Neatorama readers.

---

right here., or visit the Wizard Constable Website for chapter links + maps.

The wolf didn’t understand why the breath in her lungs felt rank and bitter. She did not understand why her skin crawled as she closed on her goal. She barely cared. The human stench was full upon her and a few toxins weren’t about to stop her.

She trotted out to the top of a sand esker, a long, low bar of sand atop slickrock that had been deposited by glaciers when true dire wolves still roamed the earth. She wanted to howl in jubilation and anticipation of the bloodshed to come, but she didn’t want to alert her prey to her presence just yet.

Her eyes were not sufficiently keen to see the buildings a half kilometer from where she stood. She could make out some square outlines— unnaturally square, humanly square. She could not see the red and green pigments that painted the tops of the waters all around, but she could smell the heavy metals floating in great swirls like oil slicks there.

She could not feel the radiation that leaked upward like darkness from the very ground she stood on. She could not in any case have understood that the very land here was cursed with uranium, with radon gas, with the vast deposits of pitchblende and raw radium that gave the place its old name.

But she could tell the place was cursed.

Cursed, she panted, cursed, cursed. Cursed forever. She would have chosen another place if it had been up to her. Any other place. But she was a predator and she followed her prey. If they went to ground in tainted earth she would wallow in poison to get to them.

And they were nearby, she knew it. Even over the bitter wind, over the stinks of heavy metals and broken ore and disturbed earth and rusted metal and decayed plaster and crumbled concrete, she could smell the humans. The human. The one who had chained her and tried to drive her mad.

As the sun began to set she picked her way down from the esker and into Port Radium, and it was there she yelped and whined, for the change came too soon.

Ana stepped into the gallery which exhibited her artwork. She secretly hoped that an important art critic would drop by, see her work and whip up a sensational article on her paintings, which would instantly catapult her to celebrity. Not that she painted to become famous. She painted to express herself, as any artist does. But with fame came money, which, Ana felt, would shift the balance of power in her family. If she were more successful, Rob might treat her with more respect, like he used to back in college, when she was winning all those prizes and he saw in her so much artistic promise. In turn, Michelle would see that pursuing your dreams isn’t necessarily a waste of time. As for Allen, Ana was obliged to admit that her son’s attitude wouldn’t change much. He was the least judgmental member of the family.

Surveying the gallery, Ana noticed a woman with asymmetrical salt-and-pepper hair. She was examining her work down the sharp incline of her pointy nose, an impressive feat given that the paintings were hung above eye-level. She looks snooty, Ana assessed her. She then spotted a more promising prospect. A gentleman in a dark suit was contemplating her latest painting. It featured two naked lovers locked in an embrace: but not a happy one, God forbid. The figures’ tortuous positioning, the angular shapes of their bodies, the grayish tint of their sickly skin and the anguish reflected upon their pasty features, all suggested an attitude of suffering and despair. Well, I had to put a sexier painting in this show since Tracy asked me to, Ana justified to herself this concession to what she considered to be popular taste. Tracy, the gallery owner, had recently speculated that perhaps the reason why Ana’s paintings weren’t selling so well was because they were too somber: “When the economy’s bad, people want to look at something bright and cheerful,” she had suggested.

Jorac’s an ordinary city constable in the city of Vaggert; he’s allergic to magic but still takes the job of Wizard Constable, working for the city’s overbearing, officious wizards. He encounters cutthroats, slavers, poison frogs, crazed wizards, hidden beauty, and much more - this is not stereotypical “epic fantasy”, it’s a fast-paced, fun adventure story. Support indie authors! You can buy the book on Amazon. E-book copies are also available on Kindle, B&N Nook , and iTunes Visit http://www.wizardconstable.com/neatorama.html for an index to all posts for this book, maps and related info, and special prices for Neatorama readers.

---

right here., or visit the Wizard Constable Website for chapter links + maps.

That night Chey walked through the forest with the fatalism of the truly damned. Her feet hurt, blistered by the loose boots, and her body trembled with cold, hunger, and fatigue. None of it mattered. If she had thoughts in her head they were dark, earthy thoughts that crumbled like clods of dirt when she tried to grab at them. The landscape changed around her as she hiked, but she barely noticed as the trees grew thinner and shorter. The world got wetter, too, became a realm of swampy half- frozen muskegs where the tree roots dipped like bent pipes into dark water. Once she had to ford an actual river, a ribbon of brown water deep enough in the middle that she was forced to swim across its width. The chilly dip woke her upa little—enough to see the dead forest beyond the further bank.

The trees over there stood white as bones, pointing at random angles at the cold stars above. They bore neither leaves nor needles and their branches stuck out like broken ribs or were missing altogether.

The ground at her feet was caked with ash. There must have been a forest fire here recently, she thought. Every step stirred up more of the powdery gray debris. What had happened? Surely the Western Prairie guys hadn’t been foolish enough to throw a lit cigarette butt into the underbrush. Maybe lightning had struck nearby. She knew that after a forest fire the smaller plant species—grasses, mosses, shrubs—came back quickly, but she could find nothing green anywhere.

Ana rushed to her car in the pouring rain, placing her purse above her head in lieu of an umbrella. She braced herself for the traffic she’d have to face on her way back to Ann Arbor. As she ran to the parking lot, she had the strange feeling that she was running away from something rather than towards it. She kept seeing Michael’s warm brown eyes gazing at her furtively, with shyness. She recalled noticing that, at some point during their conversation, the lower lobes of his ears had turned crimson and he looked away. That small gesture of disavowed attraction had sent a shiver of desire up and down her spine.

“Thank goodness I’m going back to my kids and my nice quiet life,” Ana told herself as she fished for the car keys in her coat pocket. Her fingers grazed a slip of paper. It was the one upon which Michael had jotted down his name and number with rounded, almost calligraphic letters. By reflex, an image of her kids flashed before her eyes. Michelle was delicate and high-strung. Though only nine, in some ways she was as mature and independent as a teenager. By way of contrast, Allen, who was a year younger than his sister, constantly sought the warmth and protection of his mother’s love.

Ana pressed the button to unlock her car. On impulse, she crumpled up the note Michael had given her and tossed it into the trash bin. Traffic was slow, but her mind raced. Lulled by the regular, back-and-forth movements of the windshield wipers, Ana thought of her husband.

She forced herself to look at Frank Pickersgill’s body. It was awful. She got up and stumbled away from him, staggered down the creek bed.

Forced herself to go back again.

She’d made her choice. She’d known, when she jumped out of the tower, that she was letting the wolf out as well as herself. She’d known what it was capable of, better than anyone.

Bobby, Balfour, the Pickersgills—they wanted her dead. They had accepted what she’d become and they were acting accordingly. She had to do the same.

She had to start thinking like a fighter. Like someone who was going to survive this, no matter what. If she was going to live long enough to get back to Powell, to explain herself to him, there were things she was going to have to do. Things she was going to have to learn to live with.

She managed to climb up on the far bank, a gentler slope. She rolled in the dead leaves and mud there and just breathed for a while, and thought of nothing. Then she went back to the body.

His coat was stained with blood in a couple of places. She pulled it off of his arms anyway and struggled into it. He’d been a giant of a man and she was an average- sized woman. The coat sagged across her, dangled from her arms and across her knees. It was still warm. She shuddered, but she didn’t take it off. It was better than being naked in that trackless
wilderness.

She rifled his pack. It felt like sacrilege. Evil, pure evil.

No.

It was the smart thing to do.

Her conscience stayed mostly quiet as she searched through his things. She found a packet of ketchup chips, which she ate with one hand while searching with the other. She found a mickey bottle of bourbon, which she put aside for maybe later. Though surely drinking a dead man’s liquor was enough to bring down heavenly wrath on her, if anything was. She found a box of silver shotgun shells and she took one cartridge out and held it in her hand. She unraveled the red paper wrapper and picked one of the spherical pellets out. It was perfectly smooth, but it felt like a piece of broken glass rubbed against her fingers. Blood welled in the whorls of her fingertips and she threw the pellet back into the pack.

Driving home after his encounter with Ana, Michael felt elated. Not so much because he thought that he had made an indelible impression upon the young woman, but because she, herself, had moved him. At the moment of his deepest doubt in his ability to fall in love, Ana had reawakened his faith in his own capacity for human emotion.

“Whoa! Let’s not put the cart ahead of the horse,” he reminded himself. Once he arrived at his apartment, he flung the keys on the kitchen counter. By association, he fell back upon a play on words, “Let’s not put the heart ahead of the whore,” to take the edge off his euphoria. No point in taking a little crush too seriously, he made a second attempt to bring himself back down to earth.

Yet the ruse of cynicism proved ineffective. That night, he couldn’t fall asleep. He lay with his head propped up upon two pillows, contemplating his recent encounter with Ana. He went over their conversation, her glances, each gesture she made, his own overtures and reactions. He recalled how when he looked into her eyes, he felt like for the first time he saw a woman in Technicolor, as it were. Everything else he had experienced, every other woman he had met before, now seemed like a faded black and white photograph compared to the kaleidoscope of emotions that had burst within him the instant he saw her.

She’s the one, Michael told himself. Then, once again, he tried to find a joke or at the very least a pun in his own observation, embarrassed by his premature sense of conviction. This time, however, the joke was on him. There was a freshness and fire about this woman that disarmed him of the artillery of hackneyed phrases he usually deployed in his encounters with women. A vision of Ana appeared before his eyes. He imagined caressing the curves of her breasts over her modestly buttoned-up blouse, incapable of resisting their soft invitation. She had told him about the death of her parents, about her difficult childhood as an orphan. But was she happy now, with her own family? Was her husband good to her? Above all, he wondered, has this woman ever tasted the pleasure of falling madly in love?

She swung around, her massive mouth wide open, and pulled the human into her jaws. His weapon fell to the ground and he screamed and her blood sang. She closed her jaw like a vise and twisted and pulled and tore and his leg bones snapped inside her head. She could hear them thrum against her upper palate. She could taste his blood on her tongue.

His body surged with pain and fear and it made her rejoice. She shook in convulsions as she tore at his flesh, as she swallowed chunks of him. He rattled and wailed and fell away from her and part of him tore free. His leg tore open in her mouth, and he toppled backward like a felled tree. She gulped down his blood and meat and lunged forward for the rest of him. Bloodlust scattered her senses—all she knew was to press forward, to press the attack. She did not see his arm come around, would not have guessed he had any strength left, and when his closed fist smashed into the top of her head, crushing her sensitive ears, she yelped and dropped to her side.

Light swirled in her eyes. Her mouth was full of nothing, full of air, of air—her paws beat at the carpet of pine needles and dead leaves. What had happened? How had—how had he hurt—how had—

He pushed away from her, scuttling into the darkness like a pill bug, his hands pushing at the snow and the rocks. She shook herself, trying to throw off the dullness, the ringing numbness in her head. When she recovered he was not there. She cast about, threw her forelegs down and touched the earth with her muzzle, sniffing for him. He couldn’t have gotten far. She knew she’d wounded him badly.

She took a step forward, another, another. She smelled water and breeze, cold air like the trailing hem of a ghost’s gown flapping in space. Another step and—no. She stood on a precipice looking down at a sunken stream bed. Far below her, down a raw slope of disturbed earth, he had crashed to the bottom of the trickling water. He was down there moaning and bleeding and still alive.

Michael gazed outside and, despite the religious setting, cursed under his breath when he saw that it was pouring buckets. In just nine months, I’ll leave this wretched Midwest to bask in the sunshine of Arizona, he consoled himself. As he was about to brace himself for the downpour and dash out of the church, his glance was caught by a young woman who stood before a lit candle. Her lips moved slightly, in a quiet murmur that sounded like an incantation in a foreign tongue. He examined her profile. Her wavy black hair reached down to the small of her back and thick bangs covered her forehead. She was dressed in a brown skirt cut just above the knees and a modest white blouse with an old-fashioned rounded collar. Feeling the intensity of his gaze upon her, she turned, her dark eyes quizzing him.

Uncharacteristically, Michael didn’t utter a word. He just stood there, enthralled. The sight of the young woman made his heart skip a few beats. His throat constricted, making it difficult to breathe. Apnea, a physician might have called it. But as he attempted to regulate his breathing and strike up a conversation, Michael recognized a coup de foudre when he felt it. He was drawn to her not because of her modest attire and feminine grace, but because there was something so tender and expressive in her features. He was struck by the straight, thick line of her bangs, by the paleness of her cheeks against the background of those waves of dark hair and by the rigidity with which she stood holding the candle in her hand, contradicted by the uncontainable drama of her eyes. She reminds me of a Georges De La Tour painting, he thought, captivated by the angelic innocence of her face, illuminated from below by the soft candlelight. It occurred to him to say, “I’ve never seen you in this church before,” but that sounded too much like one of his cheesy pick-up lines. It would be practically a sacrilege to use it in church, Michael thought, momentarily forgetting that he had engaged in far more sinful behavior in that very context only a few moments earlier.

Like fungus after a rain the white tubes stuck up out of the earth around the tower. They stank of men. They stank of timber wolves, and of silver. The wolf moved around one of them, uncomprehending. She studied it, inspected it with nose and ears and eyes. She licked the outside of it and felt it thrumming, felt the tension inside of it like the fear in a field mouse’s belly. She licked the edge, tasted oil there, tasted wolves. Timber wolves—not her pack. Not even her nation.

Still—

She snuffled around the edge of the pipe. It was no mere curiosity that drove her, nor was it the tantalizing smell. This was a man-made thing, and therefore, she hated it. Hated it, hated it, hated it. That was the law, the iron margin of her existence. She hated it, without further reason or meaning except that it was touched by human hands, that it was part of their world. Yet it didn’t move or offer any resistance. So she took her time.

The top was open and dark. She looked inside, but her eyes weren’t her strongest sense. She put a paw up on the edge.

Then she twisted around it and sank her sharp teeth into the yielding, cracking whiteness of it, dug in deep and then yanked backward with the powerful muscles in her neck.

The pipe slid up out of the ground with a noise like thunder. Something fast moved past her cheek, flew into the darkness. She cast the pipe away from her and danced backward, her ears stinging with the noise it had made.

Her mouth snapped open and her tongue came out, tasting the air.

What was that, was that, was that, what was that?

Michael returned home exhausted. He plopped down on the couch, propping his feet up on the coffee table. He turned on the T.V. and flipped channels. Not finding anything of interest, he turned it off. Truth be told, he missed having a woman he could count on in his life. Not necessarily Karen, but a woman he could call his own nonetheless. Since they had broken up, he’d been going out on the prowl, bar hopping every night. At first, he enjoyed being free to do whatever the hell he pleased, hooking up with whoever caught his eye. But after awhile, even absolute freedom began to bore him. There was nobody to fool, nobody to cheat on, nobody to manipulate. It was kind of like pushing hard against something that offered no resistance.

That evening had been particularly unproductive. After a mind-blowingly tedious conversation with a stuck-up blond, Michael returned home empty-handed. That’s how he’d been rewarded for his patience! He had listened to Janet, Janice or whatever the hell her name was talk about her divorced parents. She also told him that she focused all her energies on her studies and had no time for commitment. Which would have been fine with him had she stopped the conversation right then and there. But she went on and on. Michael listened to her drivel, hating to quit, hoping to score. He didn’t even roll his eyes when she bragged about her near-genius IQ, which wasn’t in evidence that evening. He graciously indulged her in a dialogue about her business major. He even nodded approvingly when she told him that she wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps and go “like, into advertising,” minus the late hours, working on weekends and extramarital affairs. For Michael, the most challenging part of the conversation was focusing on her face as opposed to the low cut, V-neck sweater, which exposed a fine pair of boobs. He had trouble coping with his impatient erection, which seemed to be humming the Elvis song which called for “a little less conversation, a little more action please.” To move things along, he inquired with strategic vagueness: “Wanna go somewhere else?”

“It’s at least thirty meters down,” Chey said, looking out into the darkness. She had one shutter propped open, but the moon was down (of course it was, she thought, otherwise she’d be in her wolf form) and she couldn’t see anything beyond the branches of the nearest trees. She couldn’t, for instance, see the ground below her. She thought if she could see how far the drop was she might be more afraid than she was already. In the pitch dark it might be possible to climb up on the sill and jump out. The idea still made her stark raving terrified. “That would kill me.”

“No, it wouldn’t.” Dzo leaned out and looked down. “You’re a shifter, remember? It’s just going to hurt like a bitch.”

Chey licked her chapped lips. “I’m not sure if I can do that. I’m afraid.”

Dzo shrugged mightily. “You asked if I knew a way out of here. You’re looking at it. Don’t blame me if you wimp out.”

“You’re not human. I don’t think you’re alive, really. You’re more like a ghost or a spirit. Can you even feel pain? Have you ever felt pain?”