The Witchkin Murders Magicfall Book 1 by Diana Pharaoh Francis Genre: Urban Fantasy, Paranormal Romance
Four years ago, my world—the world—exploded with wild magic. The cherry on top of that crap cake? The supernatural world declared war on humans, and my life went straight to hell. I used to be a detective, and a damned good one. Then Magicfall happened, and I changed along with the world. I’m witchkin now—something more than human or not quite human, depending on your perspective. To survive, I’ve become a scavenger, searching abandoned houses and stores for the everyday luxuries in short supply—tampons and peanut butter. Oh, how the mighty have fallen, but anything’s better than risking my secret. Except, old habits die hard. When I discover a murder scene screaming with signs of black magic ritual, I know my days of hiding are over. Any chance I had of escaping my past with my secret intact is gone. Solving the witchkin murders is going to be the hardest case of my life, and not just because every second will torture me with reminders of how much I miss my old life and my partner, who hates my guts for abandoning the department. But it’s time to suck it up, because if I screw this up, Portland will be wiped out, and I’m not going to let that happen. Hold on to your butts, Portland. Justice is coming, and I don’t take prisoners. Add to Goodreads Amazon * Apple * B&N * Google * Kobo
Diana Pharaoh Francis is the acclaimed author of a dozen novels of fantasy and urban fantasy. Her books have been nominated for the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award and RT’s Best Urban Fantasy. The Witchkin Murders is the first book in her exciting new urban fantasy series—Magicfall. Website * Facebook * Twitter * Instagram * Pinterest * Bookbub * Amazon * Goodreads
Chapter 1
Kayla
THE SCAVENGE HAD proved more successful than Kayla had expected, and she’d expected a lot.
She’d come away with a treasure trove of difficult-to-find foods and spices, prescription and over-
the-counter medicines, tampons and pads which brought a premium price, and most important of
all, two cartons of cigarettes, three jars of peanut butter, and a stockpile of Mountain Dew, the latter
of which she’d have to get later. She was already practically bent double with the weight of the
backpack without the soda. It was too bad about the Skittles, but this was a good haul.
Going up into The Deadwood offered the chance to mine houses that hadn’t already been picked
over by a hundred other scavengers. Mostly because the rest of them liked breathing and so stayed
away. Kayla wasn’t so burdened with common sense. That, and she carried a gun, several knives,
and a couple of magical taser charms. Not to mention she was pretty decent at hand-to-hand.
Leftover habits and skills from her life as a cop. She could more than take care of herself against
people hiding in dark alleys.
Of course, The Deadwood was filled with a lot more dangerous beings than the ordinary street scum
that preyed on pedestrians back before Magicfall. Before the Witchwar. Before the whole world had
turned inside out and all the monsters in the closets and under the beds came crawling out of hiding.
Back when Kayla was just an ordinary human.
The Witchwar exploded within days of Magicfall—a worldwide eruption of magic that birthed The
Deadwood, changed Kayla, and set off an untold number of other bizarre transformations straight
out of fairytales and hallucinogenic nightmares. The entire world had been engulfed.
Right smack in the middle of all the chaos, witches leading armies of supernatural warriors and
creatures out of myth, legend, and nightmare marched against the human cities that had survived.
Humans were like termites eating up the world. They needed to be eradicated like roaches.
The war had gone on for a year or so when the attacks on the cities stopped. It still wasn’t clear
why. Maybe they figured enough humans had died, or maybe they figured out humans aren’t so
easy to kill. Over the last couple of years, an uneasy truce had developed between humans and
witchkin. Turns out, we needed each other.
Kayla hitched the backpack higher, bending forward to help balance it. Her lips twisted in self-
ridicule. How the mighty had fallen. From cop to scavenger. Before the shit had hit the fan, she’d
been a detective, a damned good one. Then she’d been infected with magic and game over. Bye bye
career, friends, and, worst of all, Ray.
A familiar ache bloomed in her chest. She missed him every day, even after everything he’d said,
everything he’d called her, when she quit.
Back then she’d had zero control over herself. Not that she’d improved much since. But quitting the
department had been a no-brainer. With the Witchwar and hatred of the supernaturals, she’d have
either been lynched when it got out, or else locked up in a zoo somewhere.
Leaving had been the right decision. The only decision. Regretting it didn’t change that. And Kayla
regretted it with all the fabric of her being.
She pulled her mind from the quagmire of memories and what-ifs that circled her like sharks,
chomping down whenever she didn’t keep her mind on task. Focus, she told herself. Forget about
who you were before. Staying alive today is all that counts.
The Deadwood lay west of downtown Portland inside the neighborhood that used to be Goose Hollow
and extending into the Southwest Hills and Washington Park. When the magic had struck, a sinister
black forest had grown up in the blink of an eye. The twisted, gnarled trees grew taller than the
houses, and were spaced far enough apart to allow a lot of the buildings to survive. Possessive
nettles and vines swayed and wriggled from the trees, growing over most of the houses. The
blowtorch hooked to Kayla’s belt had convinced them to withdraw and allow her access.
Within the shadowed gloom of The Deadwood, hundreds of denizens lived and hunted. All too often,
folks who wandered too close disappeared, never to be heard from again. So people—human and
not—avoided the place, which suited Kayla just fine. The untouched houses made the forest a
scavenger paradise. If you could stay alive long enough to get out with your haul.
Since Magicfall and then the Witchwar, so many of the comforts of everyday American life had
stopped getting made. Sure, the metal infrastructure of the cities had protected them from complete
transformation and given birth to the technomages who worked with all sorts of technology, which
meant industry could still function. But shipping proved supremely expensive and dangerous, so
anything the locals needed either had to be made in Portland, or it had to be scavenged.
Tampons were popular. And chocolate. A lot of foods, really. Jeans, too. And silk. Some enterprising
entrepreneur had started a toilet paper factory on the east side, so that wasn’t much in demand
anymore, but pots and pans were. Medications, cosmetics, spices, CDs and DVDs, olive oil, guns,
ammunition, bows, arrows, toys . . . anything that couldn’t be obtained without a lot of money or
magic.
Most people didn’t like going to Spider Island—over where the Willamette had expanded into a giant
lake covering West Linn and Oregon City—to buy magic. That’s where witches and other
supernaturals had set up a bazaar to sell their skills and wares. Humans called it Nuketown, since
they’d have liked to nuke the place.
Humans had a love/hate relationship with magic. They liked the benefits, but feared the dangers,
not to mention all the mythological creatures besides witches that had crawled out of the woodwork
after Magicfall.
They counted the technomages as good guys since they’d fought on the human side in the war and
because mages made most electronics work again. People still couldn’t live without their cell phones
and video games, and it was damned nice to still have working modern hospitals and refrigerators.
Unlike witches, technomages had hard limits to their powers. They worked with industrial magic and
couldn’t heal or make charms or anything separate from wire, steel, electricity, and computers—or
what computers had turned in to, which was an amorphous semi-sentient cloud of information the
technomages called The Oracle. Every big city had birthed one. The mages were working on getting
them to talk to each other like the old internet.
That made Nuketown necessary and despised all at once. Most humans only went there when
desperate, usually preferring to buy from middlemen, a service that Nessa—Kayla’s usual buyer for
salvage—often performed. A few went for the thrill.
Kayla hitched the pack higher again and dodged around a glass bush. It chimed in the light breeze.
It marked the edge of The Deadwood and the return to civilization. She climbed up a bank to the
road, using the thick, wiry grass to help pull herself up.
The asphalt had buckled and cracked apart, leaving knee-deep potholes and long trenches.
Portland’s ubiquitous blackberry vines crawled across the road and sprouted out of the crevices and
holes. The city hadn’t gotten around to repairing this road yet. Maybe they wouldn’t, not with it so
close to The Deadwood.
It took her a little over an hour to work her way back to downtown. After that, it got trickier. Fog
had rolled in off the river again, smothering sound and sight. The breeze did nothing to dissipate it.
Kayla could only see a few feet ahead of herself before the walls of gray nothingness closed in
around her. She sighed and turned west.
The tule fogs rolled in once or twice a week. They didn’t usually last more than a day. They’d started
after Magicfall and didn’t seem to coincide with any weather phenomena. It tended to settle maybe a
mile wide on either side of the river. As annoying as it could be, Kayla couldn’t hate it. It had given
her cover more than a few times when the transformation had taken her and she’d no way to hide.
Tonight she had no need. Her shifter form wasn’t threatening. She decided to head uphill until she
was above the fog and go home for the night. She’d take her scavengings to Nessa in the morning.
A noise from the right sent the hair on the back of her neck prickling. A ring of metal, like a sword
being unsheathed, and muffled movement. A loud sound and the tang of something in the air—hot,
wet, stony, acrid. She recoiled as it coated the insides of her nose and mouth, feeling caustic.
Kayla’s cop genes ignited. She jerked forward a step then made herself stop and retreat. Not her
circus, not anymore. She’d walked away from all that. She should leave it alone, whatever was
happening.
She took a couple more steps toward home and stopped. Goddammit. Curiosity killed the cat, she
told herself, then slid the pack from her shoulders, setting it down against a fire hydrant. She
glanced around, seeing only cottony fog. Odds were nobody would see her pack and take it. Even if
they did . . . there were always more backpacks and more stuff to scavenge.
She drew her .357 semi-auto from her hip holster. All carry laws had been suspended after
Magicfall. Mostly because everybody ignored them. The blowtorch bottle bounced against her thigh
as she followed the noises.
She moved cautiously, placing each foot carefully to keep from tripping or worse. She nudged up
against a curb at the side of the road and stepped up onto the sidewalk. It shuddered and rippled
under her feet, and she began to sink. Kayla jumped back onto the solid asphalt. Her boots stuck to
the ground. She smelled the acrid stench of her rubber soles melting. Dammit. She liked these
boots.
Weird spots like this one popped up all the time. They all manifested different properties and none
particularly pleasant. The worst part was they could appear anywhere at any time, with no warning.
Once reported, technomages would get rid of them, but finding them was usually a matter of
stepping into one. Sometimes that was fatal.
She jerked her boots free from where they’d cooled and stuck to the ground, and followed the curb,
listening closely. More noise came from the left. Kayla tested the sidewalk and found it solid. For
now, anyway.
Taking several quick steps, she scuttled across, finding herself at the top of a flight of steps at the
edge of a small park. The muted sounds of running water made her stomach drop. She’d stumbled
into Keller Fountain Park.
Taking up the entire block, the ziggurat-shaped fountain for which the park was named had been
constructed into the side of a steep hill. On the high side, an angular maze of wading canals
channeled water over a mashed-together collection of square-topped pyramids of various heights
and sizes. The blocky juts and peaks had always reminded her of an Aztec temple. The different
sizes created deep chimney insets in between, some fifteen feet wide and ten feet deep, others a
scant five. Water cascaded down each of the flat planes. No little fountains of neatly contained water
here.
She shuddered. Her worst nightmare. Now she really should leave.
She didn’t move.
Kayla drew in a slow breath. Something was wrong here. She could feel it. Her instincts had never
let her down before. She wouldn’t forgive herself if something awful happened because she was too
worried about herself to check it out.
She started down the steps, listening for telltale sounds, trying to hear through the splashing of the
fountains.
Then—
Guttural words—not English—spoken in a gravel-filled voice that rumbled through the air like
thunder. A cadence to the language, sort of chanting, but nothing musical about it. Weighted
silence, heavy and breathless. Movement. A rippling and clutching in the fog. A red glow washing
outward, turning the fog bloody.
Magic.
The wave of power hit Kayla like a club and sent her sprawling onto the shallow steps. The hard
concrete cut into her back and legs.
She lay still a long moment, her head reeling from where she’d hit it on the cement. Perfect.
Carefully she examined the sudden lump on the back of her skull with the fingers of her left hand. At
least her ponytail had kept the blow from knocking her out. She still clutched her gun in her other
hand. Old habits died hard.
She firmed her grip and sat up, glancing down at herself. A shiny white powder covered her clothing
and the ground all around. Kayla stood, dusting herself off with one hand. The powder clung to her
skin and clothing.
She licked her lips. Fine grit coated her tongue. It tasted like vinegar and something putrid. Worse
than the air before the spell. She grimaced and spit. If her fall hadn’t already alerted whoever had
set that spell, a little spitting wouldn’t give her away.
The sour grains clung to her mouth and then seemed to absorb into her skin. That couldn’t be good.
She resisted the urge to try dusting herself off again. She didn’t need to give the stuff more
opportunity to infect her, whatever it was. On the positive side, she hadn’t broken out in boils and
weeping sores. That was good.
She resumed her descent to the bottom of the fountains. Gray cement platforms layered over each
other like giant slices of bread stacked ten or so feet back from the angular, red fountain walls.
Between, a patchwork of rectangular pools collected water.
The splashing of the fountain covered any sounds there might have been. Holding her gun ready,
Kayla walked closer, heading for the central platform, knowing instinctively that it was the best place
in the park to cast a spell. Her feet found the first of the stacked cement sheets. Three others were
layered on the sides and in front of the base platform. She stopped again to listen, breathing
silently. Still nothing.
Adrenaline thrummed through her veins. She stepped up on the left platform and then to the highest
central platform. She expected to find a spell circle like the kind used by witches, but as she stepped
up, she found only cement coated in a sheet of silvery-white powder.
She circled the platform, angling inward until she came to the middle. Nothing. What was she
missing?
Her brows furrowed. Maybe someone had used an amulet or charm? A hex? Kayla didn’t know
enough about magic to make a decent guess.
A thought struck her, and she gritted her teeth. Son of a bitch. Of course. Things couldn’t just be
simple, could they?
She crossed to the edge of the platform where it jutted several feet above the catch pools and
squatted down. She could only see a foot or two out into the fog. A scum of white powder floated
across the top of the otherwise clear water, disguising the mortared river rock bottom.
Kayla rubbed her hand over her mouth. Was she really considering jumping in? This wasn’t her
problem, and anyway, who knew what this even was? Nobody would thank her for getting involved.
And if she went into the water—
She could only hold off a transformation for so long once she got wet. If she dried quickly, she could
keep it from happening, but wading into water? Risky. Too fucking risky and stupid.
Kayla straightened and turned away from the water and then stopped. Instinct fought against
instinct. The need to protect herself wrestled with the need to serve and protect the people of the
city. Being a cop was in her DNA, and leaving the force hadn’t changed that. God, could she be any
more fucked up?
Don’t tempt fate, she admonished herself. The universe never refuses that kind of challenge.
She pivoted back around. The water wasn’t deep. Mid-calf, maybe to her knees. That wasn’t so
much. She could handle it, no problem.
In your dreams, came the mocking voice of reality in her head.
“No one will see with the fog,” she said out loud, her voice paper thin, but steady with purpose. Her
heart, her soul, had already decided. Time for her brain to get with the program.
She gave a little hop and splashed down into the pool.
Follow the tour HERE for exclusive content and a giveaway! a Rafflecopter giveaway
