Myth-begotten A Marshal of Magic urban fantasy tale

CHAPTER ONE

This is when I realized she was a bitch.

I was between jobs, low on funds and counting pennies. I mean, I had a budget for rent and utilities and even a little scratch to take her out to eat.

Someplace on the border of being nice, but still cheap.

I’d call it quaint and try to make it romantic.

I had enough for food and iced tea, cause tea was cheap.

She ordered a martini.

It was fifteen bucks, top shelf liquor and she watched me while she ordered it, to see what I would say.

Nothing.

I said nothing.

I just skipped my meal, cause the bitch drank all my money.

It was the last warning sign in a long list of red flags.

Anyone who knows you are struggling, knows they can help out by ordering tea or a coke or hell, even water with lemon, and still spends your money on liquor has something wrong with them.

Then the complaining started.

Not from me, I was done with her.

And I think she could tell.

Instead of parting with some dignity, with a little grace, she lit in on a laundry list of everything wrong with the setting, with the food, and finally with me.

Her list was longer than my red flag bullet points.

I could have argued with her over the finer details, but there’s something I’ve learned in a little bit of living.

Arguing, about anything, is pointless.

No one wins debates, no one convinces the other side the brilliance of their position in anything.

When a conversation devolves into an argument, it’s over.

Not just the relationship, the conversation, the opportunity to learn.

And since my default position when someone starts to argue with me is physical destruction of their person, I avoid it.

Especially with women who drank my last dime and didn’t ask if I wanted to share their risotto.

Fuck ‘em.

“You’re not even going to walk me home?”

I bit back the f bomb lingering on my tongue, and handy directions to where she could shove her head.

“I’m going in the other direction,” I said.

“Fine.”

She stomped up the sidewalk.

I watched.

The stomping did interesting things to her heart shaped bottom sculpted from hours in the gym and I am a man.

One who could be called old fashioned by some or misogynistic by others, but hey, sue me.

I like a woman with a fine ass.

I like watching her move, watching the muscles at play.

It makes me think animalistic thoughts, and I could feel two things stirring.

One, you can imagine.

The animal part.

The other was regret, which sometimes seems to be a constant companion.

Maybe I should have just taken the abuse.

Maybe I didn’t deserve better.

She hit the corner and turned out of sight and both feelings eased up on their pressure.

Some.

I do have an active imagination and it was fueled by a few memories.

Then she screamed and I ran.

It was a scream of terror, of horror and hitched my heart up in my throat.

I’d heard noise like that before, from soldiers in dark woods a half a world away.

They screamed in battle as a monster from another realm ripped through them, tore them asunder and left a big bloody mess where a patrol once stood.

I skidded around the corner and tripped across her body.

It sent me sprawling on the sidewalk, concrete eating the skin off my bare arms as I tumbled twice and fetched up against the brick wall where it met the ground.

A dog stood over her, blood dripping from bared fangs and soaked muzzle.

Not a dog, I shoved up on my elbows.

Too big.  Too long. Too large.

A wolf.

It snapped at me and stepped over it’s kill, yellow eyes glowing with intelligence.

I pushed against the wall and tried to get my legs underneath me.

“What. Big. Eyes,” I huffed. “You have.”

I pointed and shot a bolt of energy straight at the glowing lamp like eyes.

It barked and dodged and seemed to grow three sizes larger as it stood up on hind legs and growled.

Not a big bad wolf.

A werewolf.

And we weren’t even in London.

“Grandma’s is back there,” I pointed.

The monster didn’t fall for it.

The growl rumbled like an approaching train and it stalked toward me.

I spread my fingers and called up willpower.

Fighting and arguing are the same in my book.

As soon as something reveals itself as a threat, destroy it.

Otherwise, it might do the same to you.

It’s a simple rule to live by, and one that’s kept me alive since those woods in Bastogne.

That, and I don’t fight fair.

I cracked off a light spell from the left hand that lit up the roadway like the light from an approaching train the werewolf was trying to imitate.

Then I smacked it with a ring of force from the right hand while it was distracted.

Guess I was pissed from the dead ex leaking on the concrete, cause my little smack ripped all the fur and skin off the body.

The wolf man took a glance at the meat that was left, standing in the sparkle like an anatomical chart of an eight foot tall canine biped.

It opened it’s snout to howl in agony, but the pain was too much and everything shut down as it collapsed in a heap.

A non-breathing dead heap.

I watched the shifter magic leave it’s body as it returned to the shape of a man, if not quite human.

The skin was still gone, which was going to play hell on the news the next day when it was discovered.

A dead girl in the street, a man skinned alive, but not a single sign of werewolf.

I tried to catch my breath and wondered how the hell I was going to explain it to somebody.

“Uh-oh,” Elvis whispered next to me.

Sometimes, in a fight, I forget I’m haunted.

I had the ghost of a watcher tethered to my person, the first time in recorded history there’s a record of that happening.

I mean, I could have been in the book of world records for something else, like drinking the most craft beer, or saving the world from demon incursions the most times, but nope.

I get remembered because somehow, when an Elvis impersonator got killed because of me, he connected his dead soul to mine and become my constant companion.

Not so fun on a date.

Definitely no fun when the date gets going with the hot and heavy action.

And after a fight with a werewolf, with the blood pumping and the adrenaline flowing, no fun scaring me like that.

We both ignored the bolt of blue that shot out of my finger when he spoke and crackled into the brick across the street.

“Uh oh is right,” I said it like a curse. “Shit.”

“It’s deep,” said Elvis.

“Watcher’s have rules for this sort of thing,” I reminded him. “How to get rid of two dead bodies, especially when one is supernatural?”

“Sure thing, Marshal,” he assured me.

“Except your girlfriend isn’t dead.”

CHAPTER

Technically, she wasn’t my girlfriend.

We broke up.

And even before that, we were more casual than boyfriend, girlfriend.

I knew for a fact I was one of several in her harem of fun boys.

I’m not even a fun boy, just your every day average Marshal of Magic, which might have been part of the allure.

Not that she knew I was a magic man.

Cause I had to keep that part secret.

But she did know I was quick with a joke and fun to drink with, and when I was cash flush, a good time to go out with.

Hell, who knew what she saw in me.

A few weeks after being back in Memphis, I took a shot and asked her to lunch.

Lunch is one of those very safe meet up’s with no expectation of anything other than getting to know you.

She said yeah, and I charmed her pants off.

Not literally, cause that would be against magic law.

I’d have to arrest myself.

Plus having your own personal haunted spirit was better than a conscious.

If you’ve seen a cartoon of an angel on one shoulder and no devil on the other, whispering suggestions in the ear, then you know what it would be like to have a permanent watcher.

Lucky for my love life, I didn’t always listen.

Like at lunch.

I joked. I laughed. I brought my A game and a back up plan and six other kinds of fun, with zero expectation.

And we had that chemical thing, you know, the spark.

It happens when you meet some people.

They get you, and you get them and the pheromones flow until the air is heavy and thick with desire.

She told me she had a boyfriend and I prepared the bow out gracefully speech.

Then she said she had four boyfriends, cause she didn’t want to be tied down.

Unless I was into that sort of thing.

I don’t think Elvis watched.

Much.

There wasn’t more to the relationship that the physical, and that attraction wore off fast

For her.

It was the little things.

She was cruel to waiters.

Hated kids. I hadn’t seen her do it, but she probably kicked puppies.

All the little things kept adding up until they ledgers didn’t balance.

Mind blowing sex was one thing.

It just couldn’t stand up to the whole, not a good person thing.

She stirred and coughed up blood.

Now she wasn’t going to be a person.

If she survived.

“You need to call an ambulance,” Elvis said.

He floated over my shoulder on a six foot or so invisible tether that linked us.

“What’s the timeline on this?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.

Those woods in Bastogne had been full of Nazi SS Werewolfen, myths come to life from a Reich alliance with the Sidhe.

Elvis glanced up to the moonlit sky.

“Thirty days, give or take.”

I could just kill her.

A simple little shot of needle shaped willpower in the heart or through her temple as she lay sprawled on the grimy concrete sidewalk.

She would never wake up.

Never smile.

Never make men do their little monkey dance to keep her laughing and satiated.

I had no problem with killing.

In principle.

As the Marshal of Magic for the Eastern US, and most of the West until we found a new replacement for the old one, I had killed a lot.

I was a soldier before a Marshal and killed then too.

A body count from both jobs so high I couldn’t keep track.

What would be one more?

She was going to be a werewolf, and with her personality, probably not one of the good ones.

She would go on a power trip, revel in her newfound abilities and I’d have to hunt her down or turn her over to some of the other monster hunters I’d run across if I was too busy.

Except.

Except, she was just a mean girl.

She hadn’t killed anybody yet.

Maybe broke a few hearts, maybe teased a little to get free drinks and crushed spirits and did all the things that most people are supposed to grow out of once they were past the tenth grade in high school.

I guessed, since I didn’t go to a regular high school.

But still, she wasn’t evil.

Not yet.

And I couldn’t kill an innocent person.

“We need to get help,” I shoved up off the wall and sucked a little wind.

My elbows and forearms and forehead were scraped and scratched all to hell from the tumble I took and they burned.

Plus I was pissed I couldn’t have been faster and saved her, or if maybe we hadn’t called it quits, we would have walked in a different direction.

Then the werewolf would have nabbed someone else for a tasty late night snack.

I sighed and wondered how many future victims I was consigning to her bleached and veneered canines.

“It’s baby Hitler,” Elvis said.

He wasn’t a psychic ghost, we just spent a lot of time together and he was reading my face.

Watching the war go on inside.

“Still wouldn’t kill him,” I said. “I think.”

I bent over and scooped her limp body up. Thick blood drizzled on my clean dress shirt, but the wolf virus was starting to work on her. I could feel the heat of her body baking against mine, and she had stopped bleeding for the most part.

Skin would knit together, like a mutant healing ability, and she would wake up in a few days, starving for steak.

Rare.

I wiggled my fingers underneath her, a simple spell to erase her blood.

No need to make the cops hunt for a victim when a second blood type showed up on their crime scene.

Elvis trailed after me as I hustled out of there before someone stumbled across us.

“For someone who lost that loving feeling, you sure are going out of your way to help,” he said.

I didn’t answer.

There wasn’t a good one.