Gods and Mortals: Fourteen Free Urban Fantasy & Paranormal Novels Featuring Thor, Loki, Greek Gods, Native American Spirits, Vampires, Werewolves, & More (131 page)

N
ice girls don't believe
in monsters. They're wrong.

Amateur photographer Beth Ryder is in trouble. She's taking pictures of things she can't see, things that aren't human. Beth has her own dreams, but people like her don't get to go free. She's seized by a dangerous organization dedicated to keeping Earth's shadow world—and its frightening inhabitants—a secret. Forced into otherworldly politics and uncertain whom to trust, Beth must come to terms with a radically altered future—one in which her own humanity seems to be slipping away.

Nolander
is the first novel in the fantasy series Emanations. The second novel,
Solatium
, and a short story, "Theriac," are also available.

I
have placed
a Glossary of Places, Terms, and Individuals at the very end of this book. For ease of searching, I’ve alphabetized people according to what the main character, Beth Ryder, usually calls them. For example, Andrew Duff would be found under “A,” for “Andy,” whereas John Williams would be found under “W,” for Williams.

T
he great beast
slid through tall, dead grass.

The wind had led him here. It wanted to show him something.

His once-paws sensed broken asphalt and the hardened earth of early spring in the northlands, the damp soil still mixed with particles of ice.

His crystalline coat moved as the evening breeze greeted it.

The wind was getting reacquainted with him, here. He had not visited the north during the most recent coming of the ice, when the storms scoured the surface of the glaciers, and the land beneath was pressed low and remade. When the ice drew back, the fresh place attracted him. He had spent many days here, of late.

The humans brought newness as well, of course — structures, vehicles, plants and animals from other places. But these things interested him less. They had all come so quickly. Surely they were ephemeral.

As were humans themselves, most likely.

The beast had interacted with them on several occasions. They called him
Ghosteater
.

The idea of being a sound was strange to him. A scent. A posture. A way of looking down and to the side. These were more proper. But he no longer knew creatures who could address him properly, so sounds would have to do.

He looked up at the gray clouds, watched as they pushed and crowded one another across the sky. A full moon would rise soon, but its light would be dim.

He lowered his eyes to the broken place that stood before him. In days past, humans had used it. Now other creatures came and went — bats, mice, coyote, an owl.

But tonight, the wind whispered in his ear, something here would change.

No, that wasn’t quite right. He sifted the wind’s strange language, seeking understanding.

Things would change, and that change would begin here, tonight.

The wind suggested it concerned him. He could not imagine how. Nevertheless, change was interesting. He settled down to wait.

A
nyone can take
a nice picture of something pretty. Being able to show the beauty in ugliness and the interest in tedium — that’s what makes you a real photographer.

The insight isn’t my own. I read it on some website right after I won a fancy camera in St. John’s Shingles, Fives, and Tens New-Roof Raffle.

I didn’t have much money, and I wasn’t a particularly eager church-goer, so I hadn’t planned on participating. But when dirty water is actually dripping on your church’s altar, the social pressure gets pretty strong, if you know what I mean. So I bought a raffle ticket. When Pastor Ezra called my name for the camera, I couldn’t have been more surprised. I’d never won anything before.

I had to figure out what to do with the thing, so I went online, and that was the advice I found: great pictures bring out what the eye wouldn’t normally notice.

In the time since, I’ve wondered what would’ve happened if I’d just stayed home that night, if Shingles, Fives, and Tens had gone on without me. You had to be there to win, so I wouldn’t have brought that camera home. Without the camera, I wouldn’t have started looking for what’s hidden in everyday things. So maybe I wouldn’t have started seeing monsters. Not right then, anyway.

But I
was
there to hear my name called, there to walk up and be handed that shiny new box, there to head back to my chair, blushing and smiling like a dork.

Can you blame me for being excited? I was twenty-three and stuck in a small town, employed but poor, unwed and pretty much undateable, not highly educated, and at least a little lonely a lot of the time. Winning an $800 camera was the best thing that had happened to me in quite a while.

I know that sounds pathetic. I guess I was sort of pathetic, back then.

In retrospect, I wouldn’t mind having stayed that way a while longer.

“
B
etty
! How you doing, sweetie?”

Fixing a smile on my face, I closed my porch door and waved at Suzanne Dreisbach, my next-door neighbor. It looked like she was just getting home from the store. She always shopped on Saturday afternoon. You could set your clock by Suzanne.

She waved back and gave me a bright smile, shifting the paper bag she was carrying from one ample hip to the other. Suzanne was a wonderful neighbor — the kind who’ll pull your trashcan out and back for you three weeks in a row, and not even mention it.

That said, I really hated being called “Betty.”

“I’m fine, Suzanne. How’re you today?”

“Can’t complain, can’t complain.”

Actually, Suzanne could complain like a champ. She was a big gossip and always seemed to know something new about everybody in town — with a focus on the titillating stuff. Listening to her “news” was one of my guilty pleasures. But I just wasn’t up for it at the moment. It was chilly, and the desire to take pictures was gnawing at me.

“Good, good. Hey, sorry, gotta get going.” I raised my camera. “I don’t want to lose the good light.”

Suzanne nodded obligingly and said we should get coffee tomorrow after church. That was nice. I was on my own, so my weekends got a little lonely, sometimes. I told her I’d come find her after the service.

I made the short walk to what we called our “downtown.” Despite what I’d said to Suzanne about good light, there really wasn’t any. The late afternoon sun was having a hard time breaking through the cloud cover. Everything looked sort of dismal. Early April is like that in northern Wisconsin — spring in name, but not in fact.

Downtown was a single street of stores, bars, and eateries. Dorf isn’t large enough to attract the big chains, so we mostly still had Mom-and-Pop operations. A lot of them were hanging on by a thread. The slightly rundown look of the buildings was sad, but it did make for good photos, so long as you could bring out the rootedness and persistence that gave the place its dignity.

I wandered down the street, taking pictures and greeting passersby. I knew most of them by name — Kathy, the dentist, whose little sister I’d gone to school with; Victor, a forty-something welder, out shopping with his son; Bernice and Frances, a pair of octogenarian “spinsters” who’d shared a home for fifty years, and whom the denser members of the community still hadn’t figured out were a couple.

That’s what it’s like when you grow up in a small rural town. There are only so many people, so many houses, so many jobs. Spend a few decades there, and you’ll be able to call the whole place up in your mind — not just the landscape and streets and buildings, but all the people, for better or worse. You’ll see their connections to one another in your mind’s eye. You’ll know their histories, stretching back like long, knotted tails. And you’ll be able to see their futures stretching out ahead of them with nearly as much certainty.

It was comforting. Safe. But also oppressive. The future Dorf had in store for me didn’t look too good.

I paused across the street from J.T.’s, the seediest of the three bars on Center Street, complete with dented metal siding, crumbling front steps, and ancient neon beer signs in the windows. To my eye, something about the place said,
I have been loved for a long time by people who would never admit it
. But I’d never managed to capture that feeling. In my pictures, J.T.’s always just looked like a sad old dive.

I composed a shot, but just as I took the picture, Jim Foley opened the door and stepped out. Stumbled out, really. I watched him weave down the sidewalk.

Poor guy
.

Everyone in town knew his wife had left him.

I wanted a picture of the bar alone, so once Jim was clear, I took another shot. Then I lowered the camera and studied the place.

It looked different.

I ran my eyes over the façade, but I couldn’t put my finger on what had changed.

Strange.

Really strange.

The hair on my arms went all prickly, and I found myself struggling to take a breath.

Oh no. Not here.

I sat down on the slushy sidewalk, stuck my head between my knees, and snapped the rubber band around my wrist. It did no good. My heart was beating impossibly fast, and a vise had tightened around my chest. My vision tunneled away to nothing.

“
B
etty
?”

I blinked up at someone’s face. It was round and very pink. A woman. My brain wasn’t working well enough to figure out who it was, so I just said, “I’m okay.”

That’s what I always said. It cut down on the ambulance bills.

I got into a sitting position and looked around. I’d been lying half on the sidewalk, half in the gutter. I touched my head. Ice and grit had worked their way into my scalp. A whole lot of people were standing around me.

Great. Just great.

“You have one of your fits, honey?” Pink Face said.

I stared up at her, trying to place her. I was certain I knew her, but I couldn’t come up with a name.

“Yeah. I guess. I’m all right, though.”

“You wanna try standing up?” a man said from behind me.

I looked back. It was Jim Foley, the drunk I’d been feeling sorry for not too long ago. He was looking down at me with an expression of pity. Talk about karmic retribution.

“Yeah. Thanks.”

A bunch of people hoisted me up.

I swayed a little, still feeling woozy. “Where’s my camera?”

“It’s right here, hon,” said Pink Face.

I took it from her and examined it. Miraculously, it didn’t seem to have gotten too wet. Just to be on the safe side, I pulled the battery out. If the thing broke, I’d never afford a new one.

I looked around at the crowd. Their faces had all kinds of different expressions — sympathy, embarrassment, fascination, repulsion. Not one of them was looking at me like I was a normal person.

I mumbled a “thank you” and started walking.

“You sure you’re okay to get yourself home?” Jim called after me.

“Yeah.” I didn’t bother stopping. “I’m good.”

I
rooted
around in the random-junk drawer in my basement, certain my mother had hung onto a bunch of those silica packets that come inside stuff you buy. And she had. They were in the back, in a large zipper bag.

I sat down at the old computer desk I’d put in the driest corner of the basement, across from the stairs, and took my camera apart. I stuck all the parts in the zipper bag with the silica and sealed it up. If any water had gotten inside, the silica should draw it out. Hopefully.

Then I sat there, feeling tired and down.

Panic attacks are a drag in many ways, but one of the worst was how they made me feel afterwards: exhausted, like I’d run a marathon, but combined with sadness and embarrassment instead of pride.

I’d been having them all my life, and I’d never understood them. Crowded places were bad, yeah, but sometimes they happened when I was alone in my house. Sometimes they woke me out of a deep sleep. There was no consistency, no predictability. It was some unknown thing that lurked just under the surface, and when it got hungry, it sank its teeth in and dragged me down. No treatment had helped. I’d certainly tried enough of them. Therapy, meds, strange diets, supplements — everything my mother could afford, and probably some stuff she couldn’t. Finally, I’d gotten to a doctor who looked over my history, shook her head, and told me that sometimes panic disorder just doesn’t respond to treatment.

It was a horrible thing to hear, but also oddly freeing: it released me from the effort of hoping for more. After that, I could see my life in Dorf stretching out before me, just like everyone else’s. My goal became accepting and appreciating what I had.

I climbed the stairs to the kitchen and turned the flame on under the kettle. What I needed was a cup of tea, a grilled cheese sandwich, and some tomato soup. And a good book. That’d give my camera time to dry out, and maybe take my mind off my embarrassment, too.

T
hat can’t be right
.

I was down in the basement, looking through the pictures I’d taken. But the one I had open made no sense. I closed the image and went back to the folder I’d downloaded from the camera. There were only two pictures of J.T.’s: the one with Jim coming out of the bar and the one without him.

But the one without Jim showed somebody else walking along the sidewalk. It was a short, slight person — probably a man, given the flat chest. He was sort of hunched over. After a few seconds, I realized what I wasn’t seeing: clothes. Weird. It’d be pretty remarkable to walk through downtown Dorf naked any time of the year, but in early April it was particularly bizarre. It’d been no warmer than the mid-forties that afternoon. It’s one thing to get arrested; it’s another to get arrested and freeze off your naughty bits at the same time.

Speaking of which …

I leaned into the screen, looking more closely, but the guy’s leg obscured his groin.

Feeling a little embarrassed at my own prurient interest, I sat back and tried to figure out who he was.

I knew he wasn’t from Dorf because his skin was very dark. Dorf had to be one of the least diverse places in the world. Only a few African Americans lived in town, and none looked like this guy. And I didn’t think any of them would go for a walk in their birthday suits, either.

Well, an unknown African American wandering around in the buff was sort of noteworthy, in the way any little thing is noteworthy when you live someplace where nothing happens.

I printed up the J.T.’s shots and brought them up to the kitchen to examine under good light. The stranger was very slender, but sinewy — I could see ropey muscles in his arms and legs. His posture was oddly stooped, as though he’d been trying to bend over and pick something up while he walked. He had a long neck with a pronounced Adam’s apple and was quite small, less than five feet tall, I thought. He had a tiny nose, a prominent mouth, and a weak chin. He seemed to be bald.

Who could he be? Dorf wasn’t on the tourist map. What through-traffic we got tended to be Wisconsinites traveling between Wausau and Eau Claire.

Maybe he was a hunter up here for turkey season. But no, a hunter wouldn’t streak in downtown Dorf. More likely a college kid on spring break making good on a dare from his buddies. That made sense.

But the more I looked at the photo, the weirder it seemed. The back of my neck started to feel prickly. After a few more seconds, I actually broke out in a nervous sweat.

I put the picture face-down on the counter and snapped my rubber band.

I didn’t understand my own reaction. Okay, he was a stranger, and he was naked, but he’d been walking right through the downtown, not skulking in alleys and peeking in windows. If he was a nut, the police had probably already picked him up.

I felt myself flush — maybe I was anxious just because an unknown black male had shown up in town. God, was I really that much of a racist?

Then again, he had walked right through the picture I was taking, and I hadn’t seen him. That was weird, right? Yep, downright spooky — it’d give anyone the creeps.

I decided to stick with that explanation. Better to be kooky than a bigot, right?

T
he next morning
, I slid into an empty seat next to my sister-in-law just as the processional was finishing. I was usually late to church, which annoyed Justine to no end. She expressed her irritation this time by pointedly not looking at me, though my brother, Ben, did shoot me a quick smile from the far end of the pew.

Ben was eight years older than me. We actually didn’t have the same father, but Ben still looked a lot like me — we both had Mom’s pale skin, dark brown hair, and gray eyes. Ben and Justine had been married twelve years. They had four daughters, ranging from Tiffany, who was on the verge of teenhood, to Madisyn, a squirmy three-year-old.

Ben and I got together sometimes for lunch, but I was rarely invited to his home because Justine didn’t like me. I came to church largely because that way I saw my brother and nieces at least once a week. I resented having to do it, though. I wasn’t much of a believer, and it rubbed me the wrong way to have to pretend otherwise just to see my own family. In contrast, Justine took her faith seriously. She must have known I was faking it. It probably made her dislike me even more.