“Seriously,” Zoey said irritably, gesturing at the trash, “What are we paying for? We can’t go on like this.”
“You got a problem with the way I run things? Maybe you’d like to move to another neighborhood,” he snapped. She glowered at him. He knew she wouldn’t. She’d taken on responsibilities here, and she prided herself on being someone who followed through with her promises.
“Thought so,” he gloated. “Now show me your tits, and I’ll knock a hundred off next week’s share.” He flashed his big chiclet teeth in a loathsome smile.
Zoey instinctively recoiled. She could actually feel her lady-bits shriveling up and trying to hide. “Say that again, I’ll knock your veneers down your throat.”
His face scrunched up like an angry baby’s. “Just for that, a hundred dollar fine for the noise complaint.”
“Noise complaint?” Like anybody could hear anything from her apartment with the nightclub pounding away downstairs. “From who?”
“Me. From the noise you make when you flap your gums.” His mouth twisted in an ugly snarl.
“Worth it,” she taunted him, “And I have 30 days to appeal the complaint,” and then she walked away as quickly as she could with her butt-cheek still aching. She could feel Jordan’s gaze burning into her backside, and it made her want to take another shower.
As she made her way down the sidewalk, her spell phone rang, with the ring tone indicating it was her mother. She sighed. She’d need to stop at the spellectricity store to recharge soon.
She sent a text in reply, saying that she was at work and she’d call her mother back later and no, she had not been crisped by a dragon or eaten by a troll.
She was still kind of worried about the Blood Oath pack problem, and she wasn’t great at lying to her mother over the phone. Her mother would definitely have heard the stress in her voice. Her parents were already completely freaked that their oldest daughter now lived in a portal city.
Of course, they could have moved to Encantado with her. About sixty percent of portal city residents were human anyway.
Zoey wouldn’t do that to them, though. She had four brothers and sisters, the youngest of whom was twelve. Life in a portal city was too volatile, with magic changing things day by day, and nobody knowing what the portal was going to burp out next. A horde of flesh-eating ghouls? That was the most common threat. They seemed to proliferate in the chaos realm. Or trolls, or dragons. Or on rarer occasions, something cute like stone gargoyles.
Aside from the danger, Zoey’s brother and sisters were in middle and high school, they had friends, they were on sports teams, and her parents had excellent jobs and lived in a good neighborhood. Her father was an accountant and her mother was a real estate lawyer. They might not even have been able to find jobs in Encantado, and realistically, if they did, they’d almost certainly have to work for one of the larger criminal organizations that ran the city these days. The Blood Oath pack, the Bianchi pack, the Nightwalkers vampire clan…every section of the city was ruled by someone.
Not only that, but living in a city near a portal, where magic energy from the chaos realm leaked through, tended to change humans over time. A short visit didn’t affect people, so tourists could visit safely, but if they lived here, the odds were that their children would be born magical. Which meant they’d be stuck living in one of the dozen portal cities that were scattered across the country.
So her parents worried from a distance, while Zoey tried to play up the positive aspects of being in Encantado.
She sent them cell phone pictures of fairies flittering in gardens, and phoenixes flying overhead, trailing fire, and made it sound as if she lived in a magical fairyland, which was sort of true. When they visited, she only took them to the tourist area. That was the one in the south, where the family tourists went. In the southern district there were magic shows with real magic, and centaurs pulling carriage through fairy-tale style villages, and the humans bought harmless magically charged souvenirs which faded after a few weeks once they were removed from the magic zone.
Immediately to the north of the family area, there was the neighborhood where the kinky pervy tourists went. That area drew the people who wanted to bang shapeshifters or wrestle them in fake matches, or be bitten by vampires and half-drained. Or they went to watch cage wrestling matches where shifters would fight until they were nearly dead and then med-mages would bring them back, to do it all over again.
As she walked, her cell phone rang again. Her mother wouldn’t give up, so she answered it with a bright, fake “Hi! So, yeah, I’m about to deliver a package and – ouch!”
She’d gotten too close to the apartment building on the corner, and the gargoyle guardian had spat a pebble at her. The building owners fed him a regular diet of sand, and in return he discouraged intruders.
“What’s that?” her mother said suspiciously.
“It’s noth – ouch, ouch, ouch!” she cried out, dodging the furious little imp. She made the mistake of picking up a pebble and throwing it back at him – yeah, like that would hurt a stone guardian – and he responded with a machine gun barrage of tiny pea gravel sprayed right at her head.
She ran off shrieking, dodging around a corner – and then realized her mother was still on the phone.
“Fine! I’m fine! Everything is fine!” she
“What is happening?” her mother cried out. “Oh, lord, are you being eaten by one of those phoenix things?”
“What? Phoenixes are vegetarians!” she said, hurrying towards her apartment building. “I’m fine, I just sprained my ankle! Really, mom, I have to concentrate when I’m biking! I’ll call you back tomorrow, loveyabye!” And she hung up quickly.
“Move to an enchanted city, they said,” she muttered under her breath as she stomped up the stairs. “It’ll be magical, they said.”
She grabbed a bicycle and headed back downstairs. Twenty minutes later, she rolled to a stop in front of an old warehouse building. It was currently the residence of half a dozen homeless teenagers. Most of them, like her, were magical anomalies who’d been forced to relocate to a portal city. Outside of magic zones, it seemed to happen on average about one every few million births.
These were kids who’d been sent here when they were underage, and either ran away from their foster homes, or aged out.
The warehouse was old, and its busted windows stared out at the street like rows of dark, angry eyes. Weeds choked the parking lot in front, where Lorenzo was hanging out with the other teens, who were spray-painting body-parts onto the warehouse wall. Lorenzo was smoking a cigarette; she wheeled her bicycle right up next to him and gave him a look, and he quickly dropped it and squashed it under the heel of his sneaker.
