Fiction River: Hex in the City

By Fiction River

Urban fantasy offers a diverse playground for some extremely powerful stories. Professional writer and editor Kerrie L. Hughes pulled some fantastic tales out of fourteen top writers for this fifth installment of Fiction River. Set in urban lands from modern Portland, to a future Detroit, to a wild Washington, D.C., and ending the tour in London, these top writers take the idea of "Hex" and stretch and twist it into stories with a magickal grip on the imagination.

"[Fiction River] is one of the best and most exciting publications in the field today. Check out an issue and see why I say that."
-Keith West, Adventures Fantastic

"Fiction River is off to an auspicious start. It's a worthy heir to the original anthology series of the 60s and 70s. ... It's certainly the top anthology of the year to date."
-Amazing Stories on Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds

"Editor Dean Wesley Smith has compiled an outstanding volume of time travel stories, no two alike. I highly recommend it."
-Adventures Fantastic on Fiction River: Time Streams

"A sugary Christmas treat for those who love romance."
-Publishers Weekly on Fiction River: Christmas Ghosts

"The beloved Victorian Christmas ghost storytelling tradition continues to thrive in modern day, and this multi-genre anthology of short stories is proof. Cuddle up next to a crackling fire with some holiday music playing softly in the background, and lose yourself in eight amazing Christmas stories by a gang of super-talented, cross-genre authors. Not only are they heartwarming, but they incorporate mystery, science fiction, romance and ghosts! A few tend to be more animated than others, but each one is special, and guaranteed to jingle someone's bells."
-RT Book Reviews on Fiction River: Christmas Ghosts

"In this latest volume of an anthology series from WMG's Fiction River imprint, best-selling authors (Mary Jo Putney and Carole Nelson Douglas) and rising stars (M.L. Buchman, Anthea Lawson, and others) present a wide selection of romantic stories, from Regency to romantic suspense to paranormal, all set during the Christmas season and featuring some form of a ghost. VERDICT This title offers eight original love stories that will give romance readers several satisfying happy endings."
-Library Journal on Fiction River: Christmas Ghosts

Fiction River is an original fiction anthology series. Modeled on successful anthology series of the past, from Orbit to Universe to Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, the goal of Fiction River is to provide a forum for "original ground-breaking fiction of all genres."
Each Fiction River volume will have electronic and trade paperback issues published by WMG Publishing, and will feature some of the best new and established fiction writers in publishing.
Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch are award-winning editors, as well as award-winning writers, and will act as series editors for the anthologies.
For more information about the authors or Fiction River, go to www.wmgpublishing.com.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WMG Publishing
• Release date: Dec 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310889547

Fiction River

Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch return to editing with a new anthology series featuring volumes that appear every two months. Each volume will have a different theme or genre, and often will have a different editor. Smith and Rusch will be the overall series editors, approving content. Fiction River will showcase some of the best fiction around, and will keep that standards that made their previous editing projects—Pulphouse Publishing and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction—the award-winning and genre-bending works that fans still discuss twenty years later.

Book preview

Copyright Information

Hex in the City

Copyright © 2013 WMG Publishing

Published by WMG Publishing

Cover and Layout copyright © 2013 WMG Publishing

Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing

Editing and other written material copyright © 2013 by Kerrie L. Hughes

Cover art copyright © Kriscole/Dreamstime

Foreword: Puzzle Pieces Copyright © 2013 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Introduction: Hexen & Magick Copyright © 2013 by Kerrie L. Hughes

King of The Kingless Copyright © 2013 by Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

Speechless in Seattle Copyright © 2013 by Lisa Silverthorne

Thy Neighbor Copyright © 2013 by Nancy Holder

Somebody Else’s Problem Copyright © 2013 by Annie Bellet

A Thing Immortal As Itself Copyright © 2013 by Lee Allred

Geriatric Magic Copyright © 2013 by Stephanie Writt

Red As Snow Copyright © 2013 by Seanan McGuire

Music’s Price Copyright © 2013 by Anthea Sharp

The Sound of My Own Voice Copyright © 2013 by Dayle A. Dermatis

The 13th Floor Problem Copyright © 2013 by Dean Wesley Smith

Dead Men Walking Copyright © 2013 by Annie Reed

One Good Deed Copyright © 2013 by Jeanne C. Stein

Fox and Hound Copyright © 2013 by Leah Cutter

The Scottish Play Copyright © 2013 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Smashwords Edition

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Table of Contents

Foreword: Puzzle Pieces

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Introduction: Hexen & Magick

Kerrie L. Hughes

King of The Kingless

Jay Lake

Speechless in Seattle

Lisa Silverthorne

Thy Neighbor

Nancy Holder

Somebody Else’s Problem

Annie Bellet

A Thing Immortal As Itself

Lee Allred

Geriatric Magic

Stephanie Writt

Red As Snow

Seanan McGuire

Music’s Price

Anthea Sharp

The Sound of My Own Voice

Dayle A. Dermatis

The 13th Floor Problem

Dean Wesley Smith

Dead Men Walking

Annie Reed

One Good Deed

Jeanne C. Stein

Fox and Hound

Leah Cutter

The Scottish Play

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Acknowledgements

About the Editor

Copyright Information

Foreword

Puzzle Pieces

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Stories jumble in my mind. Once I read them, they become part of my life experience. I almost always remember where I read them first—an anthology series, a magazine—but I rarely remember which volume I read them in. As I prepared to write this foreword, I looked at the table of contents again, and each story jumped out at me—a full memory, enjoyable, wonderful, and grand.

Since I’m one of two series editors of Fiction River (along with Dean Wesley Smith), I read every story as it comes into the volume, and sometimes as it’s being considered. I read Hex in The City over several months, a drib here, a drab there. Most of the stories, I read at my computer after printing them up (as an editor, I read best in paper. Unfortunately, I was an editor in the dark ages of publishing, before we all read on the screen).

I read Jay Lake’s story near that computer, one page at a time as the story came out of the printer, and teared up. I read Seanan McGuire’s story, the first turned in, in the same spot and smiled with enjoyment. Nancy Holder’s little powerhouse made me gasp with surprise.

All of the stories here are wonderful and memorable, which isn’t something I can say about most stories I read. Kerrie L. Hughes put together a spectacular volume, one I’m proud to be associated with.

But I must say this: whenever someone mentions Hex in The City, my greatest memory of the volume is that of watching Kerrie in action, an editor faced with several great stories and trying (in vain) to fit them all into her word count.

She filled out this volume at a writing workshop WMG Publishing held in early March. The workshop had nearly three dozen professional writers, and they all wrote kick-ass stories. While some stories just plain didn’t fit this volume, others seemed perfect. Kerrie gave them all (and me) a reminder of how an anthology goes together. It’s not just that each story must be wonderful; each story must be wonderful in its own way. It shouldn’t exactly mirror another wonderful story, although it can echo that story.

We had four professional editors at that workshop—me, Dean, John Helfers, and Kerrie. We all got stories for Fiction River volumes from that workshop. (You can see some of John’s choices in the second volume of Fiction River, How To Save The World.) But Kerrie was the most vocal about loving a story and worrying that it didn’t fit. She put a lot of excellent stories on hold, then went home from the workshop and tried to assemble the anthology like a puzzle. The invited big names were the corner pieces. The rest, she assembled and reassembled until they formed this amazing issue of Fiction River.

I wish we had taken a video of Kerrie, sitting on a chair in front of a group of professional writers, manuscripts on her lap, others clutched in her hands, muttering to herself about how spectacular the stories were and how she wanted them all.

She had a wealth of riches to choose from, and she found the best jewels to share with all of you. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

—Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Lincoln City, Oregon

July 22, 2013

Introduction

Hexen & Magick

Kerrie L. Hughes

Dear Readers of Fiction River:

Welcome to Hex In The City. My name is Kerrie L. Hughes, and this is the fifth issue of Fiction River. Hex In The City, as you may have deduced from the title, is paranormal urban fantasy.

If you aren’t familiar with the genre and are a bit squeamish about reading a collection filled with romance and sweet adorable vampires, don’t be: there will be none of that nonsense here. My playground of the paranormal involves ghosts, witches, zombies, and magick.

Why do I spell magick with a k? Because that’s the spelling I found on the cover of Giovanni Battista Della Porta’s, Natural Magick, first published in 1658. He was a true polymath who believed magick was a science and transcribed his knowledge for fellow scholars so they would know the difference between chicanery and facts.

The word hex is also a deceptive word; most people believe a hex is a curse, which is only partly true. Hex is actually an extension of the German word Hexen, which loosely translated means witch, or a caster of magicks. Therefore a hex can be any form of magick: good, bad, or indifferent, just like the caster.

As to cities: what better place to practice magick than in the city? Especially our modern cities where anything can happen and people are strangers, the stranger the better. Oh look! Is that a vampire on his way to work at the stock exchange? Is that an elf at the coffee house wearing brightly colored clothing and drinking a latte? Maybe I’m actually a witch collecting stories from the talented bards I meet and compiling them into anthologies for my fellow paranormal siblings to read.

Anyway, I want to thank Kris and Dean for letting me play in their kingdom. Over the years I’ve collected many an enchanting story from them for my other anthologies and when they formed Fiction River they were kind enough to include me. I really do think of them as the King and Queen of Storyland.

I also want to thank their publisher, Allyson Longueira. She’s the Enchantress that makes everything at Fiction River come together on deadline and with proper formatting. Allyson has a special magick when dealing with people and writing, she throws tangles in the air and they come down as intricate Celtic knot work; a spell I must get from her.

Seriously though, I’ve been reading, writing, and editing paranormal urban fantasy for quite some time now, and this collection is the best one I’ve put together so far. I can’t wait to do it again.

Hags and Witches; (hugs and kisses, get it?)

—Kerrie L. Hughes

Green Bay, Wisconsin

July 21, 2013

Introduction to King of The Kingless

Jay Lake opens this collection with King of The Kingless. He has always seemed like the Enchanter of Weird to me. Probably because he lives in Portland, wears Hawaiian shirts, and Birkenstocks with socks. It may also be because he attracts a wide variety of magickal people. I’m sad to say he does have the very ailment that his wizard in the story has, and if the witch that can cure him does exist, I would like to get them in touch with each other.

Jay is working on numerous writing and editing projects in between stints as a professional cancer patient with five years’ experience with Stage IV metastatic colon cancer. His books for 2013 include Kalimpura from Tor and Love in the Time of Metal and Flesh from Prime. His short fiction appears regularly in literary and genre markets worldwide. Jay is a winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards, as well as being a recent nominee for the Nebula in the best novella category. About the story, he writes:

I moved to Portland almost fifteen years ago, and have always been fascinated by the city's inherent contradictions. The relationships between the rivers, the railroads and the highways is very peculiar, as if laid out on purpose. I've written about this before, and so returned to my Portland wizard’s urban fantasy continuity to tell a story of a tired, indigent wizard with cancer. That last bit is sadly autobiographical.

King of The Kingless

Jay Lake

In the Waning of His Days

Fauntleroy Chen lurked in a southeast Portland doorway and tried not to groan. The rain, always with the rain, this city was like living in a lawn sprinkler. In the dark of the evening it refracted the colors of the beer signs and stoplights until everything was glittering and bright as the dance floor of a rather tepid rave. Including his guts, unfortunately.

He’d been avoiding doctors for Very Good Reasons since he was about twelve, when the power had first found him. What that had meant back in the day was doing some trivial but surprising things with Magic the Gathering cards. What it had come to mean in the four decades since was… different.

Not that he’d live to see another decade.

Pain slid through him like the dull knife of an old friend. Familiar, those pathways, another form of the power. His kind thrived on chaos, injury, the ragged edges of society and technology and pain. They were not evil, for that implied a moral axis and a value judgment. They were not even destructive, for the world did plenty to destroy itself. Just living in the spaces created at the margins of existence.

Following that broken pathway, he’d traded away one kind of help for another when he’d been young and fit and stupid. Now he was middle-aged and dying way too soon. The bargain seemed a lot less attractive in retrospect.

Out on the Willamette River a horn blasted. The Portland Spirit, probably, another trip for the party boat carrying the latest round of aging debutantes or wannabe market makers for a booze cruise away from the watchful eyes of Liquor Control Commission inspectors and suspicious spouses. He mentally wished them well, then focused once more on his purpose.

Her name was Isadora Wiegl, and she was a witch.

Since Fauntleroy Chen was a wizard, this did not especially surprise him. He was a water wizard, living in a water-claimed city, and this… stranger, this come-from-out-of-town hoyden, was something else. Fire, probably.

Everyone knew how fire and water got along. Especially if the water in question was the Willamette.

If she was not fire, then her power was surely rooted in air. Witches lived on a very different set of margins than did wizards.

Shadows shifted in an upstairs window of a warehouse that now boasted two bars, a sandwich shop and a Korean tailor on the ground floor. Fauntleroy set aside the writhing pain of his burgeoning tumor and his eternal annoyance at being waterlogged, focusing instead on the power.

She moves. Walking in an empty room. Dusty dry up there, no convenient roof leaks for his perceptions to follow. Still, enough mold lurks within the walls for him to leverage his vision. She moves, an undetailed form defined by her body’s own water and the faint, colored contrails of the power.

Fire. Surely Isadora Weigl was a fire witch. Even her name had come to him in light, when most such things came to him as patterns in the mud or the chop of waves or the trickle of raindrops on rippled, ancient glass. She was here to change things. Change them in a way that only women and witches could do.

Not in my city, chickadora, he whispered.

The cancer in his liver answered with another infusion of pain.

***

Once Upon a Time in His Youth

Fauntleroy Chen had been fifteen when he’d taken up with the homeless wizards, who at the time had mostly lived in the old Southern Pacific roundhouse at the multimodal rail yard just below Powell Boulevard in southeast Portland’s Brooklyn neighborhood. So many of his kind found their paths to the power through drink or dope that they tended to naturally blend in with the transient population. A shopping cart and enough layers to clothe three schizophrenics was perfect camouflage for the urban wizard on the make. The rest, who like Fauntleroy himself had traded away other things than sanity and sobriety for their power, often found it simpler to follow their brethren into the gutter.

At least they could find sympathetic company there.

He couldn’t stand being so grubby himself. But he learned a lot in the months he’d spent with that collection of dysfunctional, mostly older men.

Them as is called to the power, they gives up a lot, said Vladimir-with-no-last-name. To be more accurate, he mumbled the words through rotten black stumps of teeth embedded in a palimpsest of perpetual gum disease. It didn’t matter so much anyway. Vladimir repeated himself often enough that the unfavorable signal-to-noise ratio smoothed out after a while. "We gets more back, but it’s on the inside, doncha see?"

Maybe… Fauntleroy had already learned to ask leading questions and act like he knew even less than he probably didn’t.

’S like a woman, right?

That brought a mumbled chorus of agreement and several rounds of hawking and spitting from the assembled sages huddled in their grimy sleeping bags. And they stank, which always bothered Fauntleroy.

I wouldn’t know, he admitted. Women, mature or teen-aged or otherwise, were an utter mystery to him. At fifteen, his dating skills were not yet finely honed. Or even crudely honed.

Wizard don’t need no woman. Files off the sharp bits, she does. Blunts the rusty poker. Takes wha’s on the inside and draws it out. Vladimir jabbed Fauntleroy in the ribs, the old man cackling until he subsided into a tubercular cough. Playing to the audience, he called, Ain’t that right, boys?

This brought another round of supportive phlegm.

Not really an issue right now, Fauntleroy admitted.

Keep it that way, boy. You wants the power, you pays the price.

He couldn’t help himself. He had to ask. What do women with the power do?

"Don’t you know nothing, boy? Men holds it in, women takes it in. They steals their power from the likes of you. Vladimir thumped his own chest through an oil-stained Carhartt jacket. Ain’t no woman ever going to be stealing nothing from the likes of me. Won’t let ‘em get near enough."

I can see that, said Fauntleroy politely. He resolved to learn more about witches.

Unfortunately, he’d never really managed to learn the right lessons.

***

Slightly Later That Same Evening

He faded into the brickwork of an old wall across the street from the warehouse where Isadora Weigl was in the process of conducting her feminine misdeeds. The fading wasn’t a spell, not really—those tended to cost too much of his energies lately—and wouldn’t fool the witch for a second if she were seriously looking for him. But it would make him far less noticeable to a casual glance on her part. And damned near invisible to anyone just passing by.

Fauntleroy Chen was still there right where he’d been standing all along, but the little ‘notice me’ light that almost everyone carries to varying degrees was dead as a Baptist church when the bar down the street was having two dollar pint night.

She descends down the stairs, the vestigial water in the old wood of each tread counting out its changes as her weight presses down. The door awaits her coming, still breathless with the slick ease of her entry, handled as no one had handled it in several generations. Power follows her like fireflies on a Midwest summer evening.

Fauntleroy Chen watched the witch step smoothly onto the rain-slicked bricks of the street. Water pooling in the old railroad tracks sung her presence to the rusty, narrow walls damming it in place. The wizard envied Isadora Weigl’s confidence, her air of nonchalant belonging. His sort sidled through life, slept on bus benches, hid themselves beneath grubby layers of clothing. Witches, he’d always been told, were afflicted with shameless pride.

Except on this witch that shameless pride looked like something to envy rather than to scorn. And she walked like someone who had never known pain. More envy blossomed in Fauntleroy, radiating from the hot core in his abdomen where his liver was busily nurturing his wayward adenocarcinomic children.

Even the rain wondered who she thought she was, sizzling in syncopation to his unexpected burst of wounded passion. Isadora Weigl paused in mid-stride and looked around her.

The very water in the air cloaks him, deferring the eye and swallowing reflections, making of its master nothing more than another foetid street puddle.

The witch shook her head and walked away. A block behind, Fauntleroy Chen followed her with the peculiar shuffle of the hungry and the homeless, which was itself invisibility of an entirely different kind.

***

When He Was a Young Man

Feminism? ’S just a stalking horse for them witches.

Fauntleroy knocked back another mouthful of stale beer and nodded along. There wasn’t much point in arguing with Vladimir when he was in one of his moods. So far as the younger wizard knew, Vladimir had been in one of his moods continuously for the past several decades.

Ain’t no call for all that unrest and upheaval and kitchen bitchin’. Vladimir let forth an enormous belch, seasoning the air under the Burnside Bridge with the rich, mellow tones normally associated with a brewery that has gotten hold of some very bad yeast indeed. All the fuss and muss gives ’em cover to do their work. He leered at Fauntleroy. The work of corrupting us wizards.

Chen had been a wizard, or at least a wizard’s pupil, for the better part of ten years now. He still wasn’t sure what the work of wizards was. All that stuff about keeping dark forces in balance was baloney from the minds of fantasy novelists and Hollywood scriptwriters. Even the most drug-addled drunks among Vladimir’s coterie knew that the first rule of wizardry was that the world simply is. There was no good, no evil, no balance. Just the inevitabilities of thermodynamics and entropy’s slow progression.

Wizards drew their power from the chinks created by eddies of negative entropy. The entire phenomenon of life itself was little more than an archipelago of islands of negative entropy, after all.

So they lived their own individual lives in the maximal entropy achievable in the modern, urban world—drunk, stoned, hungry and cold. Monasteries were too structured, hermitages in the state of nature too fecund. Streets suited wizards best.

Which had always led Fauntleroy Chen to wonder if there had been wizards before there were cities. Perhaps they had been called into being when the first foundations were laid along the earliest streets, creeping into existence as the random chaos of nature congealed into the focused, controlled functional chaos of civilization.

Vladimir launched into his next stanza before stopping abruptly. Thing about a witchy woman is…

Traffic rumbled overhead, while gulls wheeled and cried on the Willamette River. After moment, Fauntleroy realized this was his cue. Mmm?

He didn’t expect any particularly useful answers. Learning from Vladimir was like panning for gold in a public fountain. Every now and then you found a wedding ring, but the raw stuff was never present.

Thing about a woman is… Now Vladimir’s eyes narrowed, his inebriation lifting like fog on a summer morning. They’re the opposite of us. Witches, like they’re pregnant with the world. We wizards eat shadows. Them witches make light. They try to make right and clean what was meant to be all dark edges.

That might have been the most important thing anyone had ever said to Fauntleroy Chen about the art and practice of magic. Even in the moment, he realized this. He also knew he’d spend the rest of his life trying to figure out what the hell it actually meant.

***

Dawn Breaking Like Fire on the Mountain

Huddled in a doorway at the unfashionable end of northwest Portland’s former industrial district, the wizard awoke with a start, groaning. His liver was hurting bad, sending shoots of pain to colonize the entire right side of his abdomen

Reviews for Fiction River

[tldegray-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Solid anthology.

[myntop · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

*This review is only for the InCryptid portion of the anthology at this time.*

I am so happy to have been able to read a short from some of the Cryptids points of view! I've always enjoyed Istas and her relationship with Ryan, so seeing them on their own without Verity was refreshing. I love seeing how Istas thinks and how well her and Ryan get along regardless of the fact that they are two different species. Congrats to McGuire for surprising and delighting me again!