I’ve been working on edits for a relaunch of “Strangeling” and am at the point where I could post the whole thing as a serial or start collecting email addresses for ARC readers… or both? Let me know what you think in the comments. Why re-release? I’ve got a 7 book (at least) series planned and health complications kept me from ever promoting Book 1, resulting in a commercial flop. Also, I’ve now gotten a lot of feedback and worked with a developmental editor to make it all less confusing and better paced, and I think the rewrites really strengthen the book. If you’ve already read the first edition of “Strangeling”, the main plot basically stays the same, but all three characters have new or significantly different intro chapters, and Connor has 3 new chapters so he doesn’t just disappear for a third of the book. 

Current plans: release Strangeling as an online serial following Ilona Andrews’ model (my favorite author; Book Devouring Horde forever!), have a proofreader go over it, send out ARCs, then put it in Kindle Unlimited. After that, same with the prequel novella Valkyrie, though that will become a free reader magnet. I have the same sort of thing for Arthur, not yet fully realized, and haven’t decided what to do with that. Anyway, the second book, “Half Elven”, is currently about half done and I may release that as a serial too – we’ll see how this goes! 

So, without further ado: Aisling’s new first chapter.

 

Chapter 1: Up North

Aisling, March 2049

Near Grand Marais, MN

I was drinking moonshine in the back of my pickup when aliens buzzed Da Up Nort Saloon’s parking lot. It was a chilly mid-March night, my attempts to hook up with the Jumpin’ Jackalope’s guitar player had gone unspeakably wrong, and residual adrenaline from some illicit activities earlier still jittered through my system. Some copper-still whiskey seemed just the thing to take the edge off.

“So, dumbest sexual encounter of your life, huh?” asked the small raccoon drinking with me. His tribe had been irradianced – contaminated by those aliens’ contagious magic – twenty years ago. They’d developed sentience and now ran booze, dope, and bait operations in the northern Minnesota forests. Nacho was wearing a blaze orange camo vest and matching baseball cap, and was at least making an attempt not to be too judgmental.

My friends inside will just laugh their asses off.

I leaned back and stared up at the blazing stars. Wind blowing off Lake Superior’s ice blustered and gusted through hundred-year-old white pines. The parking lot’s lone streetlight flickered. The Up Nort had closed a while ago, and everyone but the cleanup staff and my bandmates had long departed. Even the canned music was slowly dying.

My friends would probably be a bit yet, so I had some time to kill. Rigs was fixing the bar’s mic system, and Coral had sounded like she was on the hunt. I crossed my legs and tried to get comfortable.

There was a distant thud of a gas tank exploding, approximately two miles north of us. Right on time. A waitress popped her head out to figure out what was going on and I shrugged and gave her a friendly wave. She nodded and went back inside.

“To freedom,” I whispered, raising my jam jar of booze as flames leapt up in the distance, far down the curving shore. We sat in silence for a moment, watching them grow. An old two-door Toyota whipped down the road, skidding slightly as it took the corner too fast. I saw the whites of the driver’s eyes, crazed and determined and desperate. The lump of blankets in back was probably covering his wife and kids. A minute later, the civil defense alarms blared, calling in the local volunteer fire department.

“You were saying?” Nacho asked when we could hear each other again.

“I needed an alibi to cover the twenty minutes I was away, and already know Mikey from the Jackalopes thinks thirty seconds is fifteen minutes, and five minutes is at least an hour,” I said. “So I told him early on that I’d be up for fooling around backstage after the show. Said I gotta finish some homework for my grad studies first. The Lumber Punks only played a couple of solo sets, then the Jackalopes’ bass player took over. I sat in a booth working on biochem equations the rest of the night. An hour ago I made some excuses about too much greasy bar food, hit the ladies’ room, and went out a window to run the op we’re really here for.”

Nacho tipped a bottle at me, and I held my jar out for a refill. 

“Got back, found Mikey backstage. He asked if I was feeling wild and pulled out a blindfold. I actually started getting hopeful. It’s been months, y’know? My batteries burned out ages ago, and I’m desperate. It’s hard for us small-town superheroes to get laid! Everybody knows everybody, and I can’t risk being discovered… I mean, just my existence is an automatic death sentence for most of my family…”

“Uh huh,” Nacho said, nodding as he sipped a bit of whiskey himself. “And what went terribly and predictably wrong?”

“Uff… I let Mikey put the blindfold on me. Then I started goin’ down, and he was making all kinds of weird noises. The dude’s a certifiable idiot, but he was into it…” I took a grim drink from my jar. “Unfortunately, he can’t tie a knot to save his life.”

I stared away into the distance, seeing things in my mind even swamp whiskey couldn’t burn away. A firetruck went racing towards the flames.

Good. The forest is pretty soggy, but I don’t want that fire spreading. A burnt outbuilding sends message enough.

“The blindfold fell off,” I said, sounding distant even to myself. “Mikey had on hand puppets. Hand puppets! And was miming out his orgasm. Stop laughing! I will never unsee that!”

I tipped my jar back and chugged. Nacho snickered and started to speak.

My ears twitched. Something stretched inside me, yearning, as my landbound magic woke up singing. 

What the hell?

“Something out there?” Nacho whispered, hunching down as he saw my sudden tension.

“Dunno. When I swept some magic across the landscape to find the Runners earlier,” I answered, voice low, ‌”there was a second ‘radar’ ping. It felt, like, really fae, but was well outside tonight’s search range. But now… ah, I must be drunk, I can’t even move that fast at speed.”

A sudden hard wind slammed into us. It rocked the truck and knocked me backwards into a pile of firewood and the pickup’s gasifier barrel. Old snow, gravel bits, and rock salt sprayed up and dug into my skin. I inhaled whiskey, choked, and sprayed half of it down my jacket while the rest splashed all over Nacho. He launched himself into my arms and started hissing at the sky.

Did I get followed? What the hell?

I blinked crud out of my eyes, and the dark shadow over the parking lot came into focus. The alien starship floated in the air above us, maybe fifty feet up and deadly silent, elegant beyond anything Earth-built. The shocking beauty of its sculpted lines grabbed me by the throat and shook. Measured against its sublime grace, every detail of my life felt as worn and mortal as the rotting March snowbanks. Nacho cussed in chittering whispers as we flattened ourselves into the pickup bed, praying respectively to Valhalla and Big Bitey Gramma that the aliens wouldn’t vaporize us.

The faintest of running lights illuminated intricate patterns decorating its underside, some fantastical fusion of flowing Celtic knotwork and Art Nouveau design. Part went transparent, and a small crowd of beautiful people holding champagne flutes faded into view, their pointed ears making every line of their faces otherworldly fine. 

Elsecomer elves. 

I’m dead. 

A gorgeous elven man in a white and silver uniform, his face the sort it’d take a poet to convey, leaned against the window, examining me. His hair curled into artfully tousled blond locks, and when he shifted his weight, it was with the grace of a dancer.

Ping.

My mother had tried to describe the elves’ beauty, their ancient culture, and the sophistication of their society. In face of what they’d done to Earth, none of that mattered: they broke the world; wrecked most high tech; and cracked reality open, letting magic and monsters spill out. I’d been born of – and into – that unforgivable mess. 

Sea-blue eyes met mine. Something leapt inside me – recognition, longing, loss, rage, and an instinct older than all those things. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe.

An Elsecomer. Is. Staring. 

Directly. 

At. 

Me.

The ship hung in the air, tomb-silent, apparently unaffected by such pedestrian physics as momentum and gravity. Roughly the size of a couple of combine harvesters, but sleek as a manta ray, the craft whispered of elegance beyond anything left to us grubby Earthlings. 

A woman wearing a… garment, to use the term very loosely… of elaborately knotted golden strings touched the man’s arm and laughed‌. Her friends pressed beautiful faces against the windows, raising their glasses and pointing at Nacho and me. My heart ached and seethed at the same time; the elves were graceful and clean and cruel and perfect and so much more than anything from my world.

Do they see me, past my illusions?

I held the man’s gaze. There still wasn’t a sound, just the fading honkytonk echoing out of the bar and the wind sighing through the pines. The ship pivoted slightly, as if lining up to aim. At me. It’d already been a night, and I couldn’t think of a single smart thing to do, any action that might keep me in one piece and free. 

Fuck this shit.

I flipped the aliens the bird with both hands. More hilarity. The blond man grinned at me, and my heart just about stopped. His magic leaped out and brushed against mine – silken, intimate in a way my one-night stands and backstage hookups never were.

*Hey,* he said into my mind.

There you are, some aching inner voice whispered. 

I shoved it aside, grabbed the loaded crossbow I’d stashed behind Nacho’s whiskey crate, and aimed straight at him. The Elsecomers could do whatever they’d do, but I’d get a shot off. An utterly futile gesture, but enough to make my opinion known. 

*Get wrecked, Elsecomer!*  I sent back. 

His smile went from stunning to blinding. The aliens with him just about collapsed laughing, pointing at me and chortling. One said something, and his grin turned rueful. 

He wiggled his eyebrows at me and winked.

I froze. My heart tried to beat free of my chest. 

Something oddly wistful crossed his face. Then the ship spun around and the pilot gunned it so hard that the resulting wind pulled my braids out of my knit hat and sucked Nacho’s cap right off his head. It went tumbling across the potholed asphalt. Rough grit from the parking lot stung my cheeks and eyes. Just before it went dark again, the spaceship mockingly blinked rear lights at us. 

For a moment, I just sat there gaping, feeling oddly… bereft. 

Then clarity sparked.

Those assholes are out joyriding!

“Fuckers!” Nacho yelled, shaking a furry little fist at the sky. “Go back to your own planet!”

Closing my eyes, I leaned back to enjoy having lungs and air that still moved in and out of them, blinking tears away as the reaction hit. 

“I don’t think the Elsecomers have one anymore,” I said eventually, standing up and rolling my shoulders, trying not to visibly shake. “That’s kinda the problem.”

“Fuckin’ tourists,” he grumbled, straightening his vest. “Heard an owlie say they come up here to ogle the forests and Lake Superior’s cliffs.”

Gee, almost like elves don’t actually do so well confined to stolen urban spaces, even if they came back to Earth with spaceships? I’d go nuts without wild land.

“Lots to see up here, you know,” I said, forcing my breath steady in an attempt to lower my heart rate. “If you haven’t grown up here, going slowly mad from boredom anyway. These cliffs contain some of the world’s oldest rocks, for starters. Formed in volcanoes 3.6 billion years ago, and there’s a Minnesotan fact for you.”

I pulled my winter cap down and stuffed my braids back up into it. Looking androgynous butch made my life easier, and right then, I needed every ounce of bravado I could muster. Nacho held his arms up and I picked him up and just hugged him, breathing the familiar smells of soggy raccoon, backwoods whiskey, and the Northwoods night. This was the closest we’d come together to biting it.

Sighing heavily, I inspected my mostly empty jar. The evening had been a shitshow before asshole aliens decided to buzz us, and who knew how much worse it could get. Probably time to sober up.

I hopped out of my pickup and grabbed Nacho’s hat out of a pothole. I brushed the late-winter crud away from the Bobbi’s Bait logo and ‌handed it to him, then looked up at the sky and sighed again. The spaceship had circled back and paused by the fire I’d set. Gods know what the firefighters and local law enforcement would make of that. 

Nothing good, fer sure.

Tracking them, I walked to the other side of the parking lot. The land beyond it dropped steeply down towards Lake Superior, where the inland sea’s half-frozen glory spread out under the stars. Ice still spread a hundred feet out from beach in the sheltered bay to my right, and shattered chunks were piled a dozen feet high along the rocks below, where the wind hit the shore directly. The Lady was singing her thaw songs, crunching and crackling the ice with every insistent wave. The chill breeze was raw and clean, and I stood there, watching, for a minute.

Apparently even arson was inadequate entertainment for jaded aliens, and before long the spaceship wandered off again. Human eyes couldn’t have tracked a dark ship with no running lights, but I… well, I’d been irradianced in the womb. I could follow it. If I loosened the choker on my neck and the chokehold it kept on my magic, I could track where they were through my connection to the land.

“Gotta be careful there,” Nacho said. “Your scent changes when ya do that. Goes all green and sparkly.”

I grimaced, re-clasped the choker, climbed back into my pickup, and swigged a few last drops from my jar. Across the parking lot, one of the bar workers stumbled out, his arms around my bestie Coral. Both appeared completely oblivious of the obnoxious alien encounter that had just occurred.

“I still look human, right?” I whispered, ducking and checking my reflection in my pickup’s rearview mirror. Round ears, blond braids, old wool jacket, clunky Sorrel boots – my Northwoods chic was fully intact.

“Yuppers, you’re passing,” he said. “To anyone that don’t got a nose, anyway.”

“How can a scent be sparkly?” I asked him, keeping an eye on Coral and my voice low. She giggled against the guy like she was just as drunk as he was, something pretty much impossible given her toxin tolerance. She glanced at me, and her smile showed too many teeth. I sighed. This could take a while. “Or green, for that matter?”

Nacho shrugged his furry shoulders and pulled a joint out of his vest pocket.

“English don’t got the right words for it,” he said. “And we Rax haven’t figured out our own. Yet.”

“Yeah… Sorry I can’t spend more time helping you guys,” I said, my eyes following Coral. The man looked at her as if he wondered how her flesh might taste hot off a grill.

“Eh, it’s not your fault Grandma bit you and got irradianced,” he said, lighting his joint and taking a long drag on it. “Shit happens.”

“I was a dumbass little kid,” I said. “Really thought that finding a raccoon in the garage meant a cool adventurer like in Guardians of the Galaxy had come to befriend me, not that she was looking for a warm nest to have her babies. Didn’t know about my magic then, and I wanted talking animal friends so bad…”

We stared at the sky for a bit. Empty night stared back, stars blazing.

“Ya ever wonder where the ships go?” Nacho asked, taking a drag on his joint and blowing the smoke out through his little black nose. “Or where they’re coming from?”

“Probably the Stolen Cities,” I said. “Or somewhere further south.”

“Just ‘bout everything is further south from here. ‘Cept Canada. I mean, Out There,” he said, gesturing at the sky.

“Dunno. Mom said their old world is an asteroid belt now. Wouldn’t tell me more after she saw me getting into sci-fi, ‘cuz she thought I’d be too tempted to try making contact.” 

“If they find you, they will take you. And true monsters walk among them.”

I shivered at the memory of her words. Mom had taught me monster-hunting. She knew what she was talking about.

The man slipped an arm around Coral’s waist. She was relatively tall, 5’8”, with rock star looks, but seemed tiny and fragile against him. Her ability to look helpless and vulnerable, when it suited her, was unmatched. He brushed her hair off her shoulder and murmured, too low for human ears to catch, “C’mon, sweetheart. Let’s go down by the rocks. I wanna make you scream, and no one will hear you over the wind.”

I gritted my teeth and fixedly didn’t watch them.

The bar’s door cracked open, and the last two bar staff and our other bandmate finally came out. The girls headed for a shared cabin bike, basically a large enclosed tricycle, pushed it up to the road, and pedaled off home. Rigs walked over, awkwardly carrying his keyboard in one hand and Coral’s guitar in the other. I opened the passenger door and pulled the seat forward, and he heaved them into the minuscule back seat with my bass. DJ gear he hadn’t used that night filled the foot space, leaving just enough room for Nacho to have some space by the window.

“You see Coral come out?” he asked, glancing at me. Rigs mostly took after his Hindu grandmother, with black hair and big brown eyes, but had his Scandinavian-Minnesotan family’s cold tolerance: he was wearing sandals and an old plaid flannel over a Hawaiian shirt and long Bermuda shorts.

“She’s down by the lakeshore with some creeper,” I said. “Guess she got hungry?”

“The barback had a vibe. Admitted he strangled and ate three women over the winter when her whammy got him bragging,” he said. “A hitchhiker, a Native woman traveling up to Canada, and some grandmother living alone in the backwoods. His eyes looked like black holes when he told her.”

“Perfect prey, then,” I said. My friend mostly fed on a certain sort of monster, but had earned her serial killer name after a local cult leader incurred her wrath. A Jane Doe escaped the compound where he’d been trying to breed his way out of the apocalypse, dying of the ruptured ectopic pregnancy his beliefs wouldn’t let her treat. When she stumbled out of the snow, she had barely enough breath to say where she’d come from. 

Janie’s Vengeance made sure his death took longer than the girl’s.

We both stared at the lakeshore for a bit, united in somber silence. She was escalating, killing more frequently. So far all her victims had more than earned their fates, but…

“So, op status?” Rigs asked, leaning against the pickup.He had an eidetic memory and would note everything for the Underhill Railroad’s encrypted records. I was a Conductor for the organization – a field agent – and he was the northland’s joint Station Manager and Postmaster, organizing ops and running things behind the scenes. “Did you find our Runners?”

Runners were the people fleeing death or enslavement. Those of us who could pass did what we could to help them. 

“Smooth enough, but had a weird complication,” I said. “Opened my landbond all the way to find the new fae. Had some unintended side effects.”

Landbonds were a magical connection between someone like me and the lands and people under their protection. Sometimes mine let me feel the fae and monsters across the area I guarded. 

“Oh?” he asked.

“I’ll get to it. My scan found the newly Changed family: parents with a baby and toddler, two miles up the shore. They’d been chained in a kennel behind the bounty hunter’s home, surrounded by iron and loose dogs. I glamoured the dogs and gave ‘em drugged treats. Thank your grandma for the biscuits, by the way; they snarfed them right up.”

“She put a full cup of bacon grease in ‘em,” he said, grinning. Rigs’ grandma had gotten stranded in Minnesota during a badly timed visit from India in early 2021. An attempt to overthrow the government that January became the first wave of Redcap Changes when the insurrectionists turned into cannibal trolls. Travel shut down, a couple years of civil war followed, and when things were finally starting to settle, the Elsecomers invaded and stole the world’s great cities. Rigs and I were both born around then. His parents later died in a redcap raid and his grandmother ended up raising him. Every kind of food she made was amazing; to Midwestern kids raised to think salt was a spice, her cooking, even lacking access to traditional flavors, was a revelation. 

“There were a couple vehicles on site,” I continued. “I found car keys for an old two-door Toyota, and a couple of portable fuel tanks in an outbuilding. I loaded up blankets, one tank, and as much food as I could scrounge into the car. Then I improvised some explosives and a fuse for the other tank, set that in the bounty hunter’s outdoor sauna, and slashed the tires on his Jeep. Figured that’d do as both a distraction and a warning. Unlocked the family and told them to leave as soon as the dogs fell asleep. They drove past here a few minutes ago. They’ll meet us outside St. Cloud Saturday evening. Oh, I found some work papers and a minor treasure in the garage, where the guy had his job stuff. An envelope was marked “urgent”, but I haven’t checked anything out.”

“Oh yeah?” he asked. I tapped the pickup’s welded-on lockbox, then pulled open a drawer that looked like it was just a seam in the welding.

“Here they are. I also took his law enforcement walkie-talkie and four consumer-grade backups, with double A’s and two solar chargers. They’re stuffed inside the passenger seat. Dibs on one set.”

“Fantastic. Oh, they’ve kept this hush-hush,” Rigs said, scanning the papers. “There’s some sort of stone giant up around the Brule River. The sketch is straight out of a book of Norwegian folktales. Says it crawled out of the Devil’s Kettle last week and it’s been hunting up and down the river gorge since. Ate a couple people two days ago. They’re organizing a big military thing – National Guard, Strangeling Brigade, and every local who can hit the side of a barn with his shotgun is coming up to hunt it.”

“Sounds messy,” I said, gritting my teeth at the thought of that prison labor brigade anywhere near people under my protection.

“What’s the Devil’s Kettle?” Nacho asked, eyes wide.

“There’s a waterfall on the Brule River where half the river goes into an underground cave,” Rigs said. “Nothing that goes in has ever come out. ‘Cept, maybe whatever this thing used to be.”

“Did it sound like a strangeling, or something from…?” I asked. Strangelings were humans turned fae by contagious Elsecomer magic, usually after eating Radiance-tainted food, like the family I’d just rescued. They Changed, warping into creatures from myth, legend, or general weirdness, and the process, or Cascade, sometimes awoke a Hunger in them. They were killed on sight or captured and made prisoner labor for monster hunting. Their kids… disappeared. The family was only a couple days into the process, but the irradianced jerky I’d left with them ought to hold them till they got to safety. Sometimes monsters just crawled out of caves or wandered out of the fog, though. 

“Dunno. It already ate two people,” he said.

I hadn’t experienced the Hunger myself, being born what I was, and Rigs had gone technomancer with his Change – he’d spent a while sucking on live electrical wires and bathing in radio waves. We weren’t sure what had triggered his slow Cascade, but it was already starting when we met in 8th grade. Coral’s dad had force-fed her something that triggered her Change. And me? My mom had been soaked in elven magic before I was born, so contaminated by it I was born able to shape its flows and even the Change itself. We could all pass for human because of that – me as a lanky blonde Northern chick; Rigs as a skinny half-Indian nerd; and Coral a crimson-haired siren, her heritage a mix of Irish and something from sultry climes and turquoise waters. Her Hunger was more complicated than any other I’d helped manage. She needed music like it was oxygen, and sang with groups ranging from Celtic trad sessions to our dive-bar punk rock, and even a Catholic choir. 

And a few times a year, she had to eat the magic of monsters.

“Brule River… isn’t there an owlie tribe up there?” I asked. The man on the shore had one hand slowly closing around Coral’s neck. My ears twitched as she started thrumming, a hum too low for human ears to hear. She whispered something, glanced at us, and they stepped out of view behind the saloon.

“Yeah, Stone Nest Tribe, I think,” Rigs said, glancing after Coral and shuddering. “So. Shall we?”

“Sure, why not. Got cash? We might need to buy some more firewood for the truck on the way back.”

“Yep, no prob. We had a good crowd tonight.”

“Oh, we’ll need some major look-away magic running. The complication I mentioned? An Elsecomer ship buzzed the parking lot a few minutes before Coral came out, then went and stared at the fire I set. They’re probably still zooming around. I think that ping I sent through the land magic caught their attention.”

“There was an actual spaceship out here?” he exclaimed. “I had the oddest feeling for a minute. And you didn’t call me to come see it!?!”

“Oh yeah, come on outside, Rigs, let’s get vaporized together!”

“A spaceship, Dusty! Up close!”

I used different nicknames with virtually every group I was a part of. A neighbor kid started calling me “Dusty Books” in my teens, when I told her I’d rather read than play team sports; it had stuck with my friends.

“You would have done something dumb like try to glitch the ship so you could molest the wreckage,” I shot back. “Don’t even try to argue.”

“We could learn a lot from some nice wreckage…”

Elsecomer tech was seriously different from what we still clung to locally, but Rigs and his technomancer network were doing their damnedest to figure out every scrap we could get our hands on. 

He pursed his lips and crossed his arms. 

“Well, if you just had a UFO encounter while drinking in your pickup with a raccoon,” he said, “you never get to argue again when I call you a redneck.”

The raccoon giggled, then smothered it.

“Nacho, can I get a refill?” I asked while glaring at Rigs.

“Comin’ up!”

“So… was it some sort of scout ship?” Rigs asked, sighing with longing as he glanced up at the sky.

“Looked like a party cruise. Fuckers parked right over the bar and sat in the air laughing at us while Nacho and I freaked the fuck out. They had champagne and fancy clothes and everything. One guy was in a Freeport Guard uniform, but the rest just looked like rich assholes.”

Elsecomers took Minneapolis and St Paul, along with most of the world’s major cities, during the invasion. They remained occupied, with a fifty-mile radius no-go zone surrounding them, the Edgelands. They didn’t allow humans or modern weapons in, but strangelings were allowed if they followed the no-firearms rule. A couple of Freeport Guards had once stopped Coral and I over a flare gun in her backpack, but didn’t want to deal with our canoe full of strangeling kids and let us off with a warning. My glamours had held then too. 

And part of me had wished they’d failed then too.

Owlies said the Twin Cities were now called the Freeport of Many Waters. We out-staters just called them the Stolen Cities.

There was a scream from behind the saloon. The man Coral had lured fled down the shore and out onto the ice. He was fifty feet offshore when it gave out. She followed him, movements leisurely, predatory, inhuman, the frozen sheet perfectly solid beneath her feet. He raised an arm out of the water, reaching for help. His winter clothes started saturating, pulling him down. When his fingers were scrabbling at the edge of the ice, she knelt over him, as if going for a kiss. Her mouth almost touched his as she inhaled his last breath.

And then the depths dragged him under. 

A couple minutes later, Coral strutted up to the parking lot, wiping her mouth. I took one look and handed her my jar of ‘shine. She took it gratefully, sipped, swished a mouthful around, and spat in the snow.

“So, all good?” Rigs asked. “Mermaid hungers satisfied?”

“Yep,” she said, smiling, her teeth gleaming bright. “No cleanup necessary. Like the song says, the Lady holds tight to her dead.”

Nacho’s ears pinned back.

“’Superior’s too cold for bacterial decomp,” I explained. “Bodies sink and don’t come up. Fish and eels will take care of the rest. Okie dokie, gimme a minute to get the gasifier going.”

I hopped back into the pickup bed and stirred up the coals in the gasifier barrel, then started feeding in firewood. The know-how to get a pickup running on the gases let off when wood turns to charcoal was first developed back in World War 2, and now powered a lot of trucks around the Northland. Modern tech was erratic these days; the Elsecomers blocked all wireless beyond public TV and radio channels, and a shit-ton more got damaged in their initial invasion.

The Millenium Partridge was first assembled in 1977, but was mostly replacement parts now. My ride had all the Falcon’s mechanical problems, but absolutely nothing in common with a swift bird of prey. Driving uphill, it made weird pounding sounds similar to a ruffed grouse in mating season, and frequently froze up just like an idiot forest chicken. Fuel was cheap, though, since I could chop it myself.

“You wanna drive?” I asked Rigs. “I’ve got a bit too much whiskey on my breath if we get pulled over.”

He rolled his eyes, took my keys, and hopped into the driver’s seat.

“If you’re too drunk to drive, maybe you’re too drunk to hunt a troll?” he said.

“Eh, I’ll be sober by the time we find it,” I said, boosting Nacho into the back seat and clambering in the passenger side after Coral. “Curse my fae liver. Let’s do this.”

Coral scrunched into me as Rigs shifted gears and pulled out of the parking lot.

“You sure?”

“My sex life just hit its lowest low ever back in the bar’s green room. A monster hunt will remind me I have a purpose in life beyond enabling freakin’ idiots. On a side note, I think I’ll go back to banging only girls for a while.”

“Please, no,” Rigs said. “Your taste in women scares me.”

I grinned.

“What happened?” Coral asked. “I saw Mikey leave all flustered and then you came out and swigged a quarter bottle of vodka. Fae liver or no, that can’t be good for anyone.”

“I shouldn’t kink shame…” I started, then shook my head. “Fuck that. Mikey’s into puppets.”

“Oh my gawd, what?” she exclaimed.

“Besides singing for the Jackalopes, Mikey now has a side gig doing children’s birthday parties. Had one earlier in the evening. Anyway, when my blindfold fell off, he was miming things with a hand puppet. I laughed so hard I think his dick inverted.”

Rigs turned and stared at me.

“This is why I choose to stay single,” he said. “My granny’s multi-armed gods, but you two make me glad I don’t date.”

“No one’s dating here,” I said, far too aware of how dangerous romantic liaisons could be for all three of us. “But a girl’s still got needs. Like right now, I need to kill that giant before those asshats in Strangeling Brigade come up here and start rooting around for anything fae or Else or whatever. Nobody should have to live in a prison and hunt their own kind, and those fuckers are way too industrious about it.”

“They’ll probably be chasing us in a couple days anyway,” Rigs said. “Oh, got another call for help through the grapevine. Beyond the family you saved tonight, we’ll have at least one more Runner for some daring outlaw renegades to sneak into the Edgelands on Saturday.”

“Woohoo,” Coral said, grinning. “Let’s be bad guys!”

“We need more intel on their team,” I said. “That guy in Strangeling Brigade with magic like mine? While he’s busy chasing us, I want you to hit any computers they have in the Box and get everything on their personnel.”

“Will do,” he said.

“Cool. Say, got any speakers along that run on batteries?”

“Sure. Does the Northland’s very own redneck superhero need some beats while she’s fighting trolls?”

I grinned, anticipation buzzing in my veins.

“You betcha.”

____

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