Badlands: Uncollected Anthology, #17

By Michele Lang

A time mage, a secret underground lab, and a pack of werewolves hunting in the Badlands…

Time mage Marcy Zimmerman wants to take the Internet world by storm. Her plans for world domination keep unfolding right on schedule. But when a cry for help draws her alpha wolf mate Lukas from Boston to the rugged western badlands, Marcy goes along to guard his six.

Marcy and Lukas walk into a tripwire of corporate shenanigans, a gigantic cowboy with problems, and an emotional tangle rooted in Lukas's tortured past…

This story is included in the Uncollected Anthology's Volume 17, Urban Western.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Five Tigers Publishing
• Release date: Nov 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386932697

Michele Lang

Michele writes fantasy, science fiction, crime, and romance, as well as non-fiction. Her Lady Lazarus WWII historical fantasy series was published by Tor Books, and her short fiction has been published by DAW, PM Press, WMG Press, and Running Press, among others. Michele is a recovering lawyer who has practiced the unholy craft of litigation in both New York and Connecticut. She returned to her native New York shortly before 9/11, and now lives in a small town on the North Shore of Long Island with her husband, her sons, and a rotating menagerie of cats, hermit crabs, and butterflies.

Book preview

1. Marcy

I’m a mageworker of the Internet Age.

For most wielders of the magical craft, the Internet and all the electronica associated with it is nothing but bad news, the worst. Electricity screws everything up, it tangles in the currents of human power and in some cases shorts it out completely.

But me…I was born for this time. I am pretty much a fuckup in regular life, in everything I’ve ever tried before, really. I was always kind of a weirdo, an outcast. But working spells, riding the magical currents…I’m your girl, baby. I am your huckleberry.

So that’s why when I got an email calling to my power, I was like so not surprised.

It was a crisp New England fall late-morning, but I was not ready to face it. Instead, I stayed in bed, stared at the email blinking on my laptop screen, and held back a groan. The noontime sun tried to sneak in through the bedroom blinds, but mostly the sunbeams got held back.

Lukas rolled over in the bed next to me, naked and asleep. I contemplated chucking my laptop and jumping his long, lean bones. But I had to concentrate on business.

My name’s Marcy Zimmerman, and I’m a time mage from Boston—Somerville, to be more precise. My teacher is Professor Quigley, policy wonk from Cambridge and wielder of the magical arts fantastic. I’m the co-founder of a start-up called Invision Infinity Arts, dedicated to bringing Internet-based magery to the masses.

My partner was the guy sleeping it off tangled up in the sheets next to me. He was a werewolf named Lukas, and (I’m sure you’ve got this figured out by now) he was also my lover.

Lukas and I had some pretty urgent shit to deal with if we were going to manage to make Invision a going concern. For one thing, we’d pissed off a rival mage crew, and for another, that crew worked with a guy named Tadeuz, a 400-year-old vampire who hated Lukas’s guts and was chasing him down from the old country in order to settle some ancient grievances.

That’s why my computer screen was giving me pause, and to be honest, a bunch of agita as well. The email staring me in the face was tangled up in all of this.

It was opportunity wrapped in chaos, soaked in danger, lobbed like a grenade into my business. It was make or break. The one thing I couldn’t do was ignore the message, hit delete.

A mage war was brewing, and Quigley had assured me that such a thing was ugly and couldn’t end well no matter what we did. Of course, that just got him even more stoked. Trouble was my teacher’s catnip. My teacher just wanted to watch the world burn…was looking forward to the conflagration, in fact.

But it was different for me. It wasn’t the war I was psyched about. It was the profit. War sucked, but at least we were going to come out ahead of the deal if we played our cards right.

I was convinced we could bring some gold out the chaos. Hey, during a war the people supplying the ammunition make billions, right? During the Gold Rush, it was the guys selling blue jeans and pickaxes that ended up making bank, or so I’d heard.

Lukas worried