Charting the Unseen: Uncollected Anthology: Mystical Maps

By Kari Kilgore

Uncovering Hidden Worlds
Jamie knows buying real estate brings plenty of headaches, especially for a new business.
Endless inspections, unexpected problems, challenges large and small.
But Natasha knows the biggest trouble sometimes hides just out of sight.
Will her discoveries crush Jamie's dreams, or help them come true?

Part of Mystical Maps, an Uncollected Anthology

An excerpt from Charting the Unseen:

Unsuspected Influences All Around

Any other Mapper would struggle for accuracy with Natasha's papyrus, and she'd have the same problem with someone else's. The preparation bound the sheets to the Mapper so no other hand would succeed without an unreasonable amount of effort.

That didn't mean she'd succeed, of course. Only that others would likely fail.

She pulled the eyeshade into place and took a deep breath, drawing in the woodsy, sweet sandalwood. On her exhale, the distractions of the day faded out of her mind.

Natasha no longer sat on the floor of an empty warehouse level, with a flourishing neighborhood outside on a cold November day.

Her curiosity about Jamie's potential as a Mapper and her vague annoyance at his pushy realtor drifted away.

With another breath and exhalation, her consciousness balanced in the connection point where all facets of reality met, seen and unseen.

A magical junction she'd suspected as a child, so strongly she was sure she could touch it.

And as an adult, she'd learned to do not only that, but to venture forth from that nexus and explore the worlds around her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Spiral Publishing, Ltd
• Release date: Dec 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223432852

Kari Kilgore

Kari Kilgore started her first published novel Until Death in Transylvania, Romania, and finished it in Room 217 at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, where Stephen King got the idea for The Shining. That’s just one example of how real world inspiration drives her fiction. Kari’s first published novel Until Death was included on the Preliminary Ballot for the Bram Stoker Award for Outstanding Achievement in a First Novel in 2016. It was also a finalist for the Golden Stake Award at the Vampire Arts Festival in 2018. Recent professional short story sales include three to Fiction River anthology magazine, with the first due out in the September issue. Kari also has two stories in a holiday-themed anthology project with Kristine Kathryn Rusch due out over the holidays in 2019. Kari writes fantasy, science fiction, horror, and contemporary fiction, and she’s happiest when she surprises herself. She lives at the end of a long dirt road in the middle of the woods with her husband Jason Adams, various house critters, and wildlife they’re better off not knowing more about. Kari’s novels, novellas, and short stories are available at www.spiralpublishing.net, which also publishes books by Frank Kilgore and Jason Adams. For more information about Kari, upcoming publications, her travels and adventures, and random cool things that catch her attention, visit www.karikilgore.com.

Book preview

Charting the Unseen

Uncovering Hidden Worlds

Jamie knows buying real estate brings plenty of headaches, especially for a new business.

Endless inspections, unexpected problems, challenges large and small.

But Natasha knows the biggest trouble sometimes hides just out of sight.

Will her discoveries crush Jamie’s dreams, or help them come true?

Part of Mystical Maps, an Uncollected Anthology

For my father, who insisted I learn how to read a map

Yes, I always keep an atlas in my car

CHARTING THE UNSEEN

KARI KILGORE

SPIRAL PUBLISHING, LTD.

CHARTING THE UNSEEN

If Natasha Thatcher didn’t know she was near downtown Atlanta, she would have bet a mortgage payment or two that she stood on a windblown street somewhere a lot further north.

Philadelphia maybe, or New York, or even Chicago.

Sure, she saw the elevated track where silver Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority trains rumbled and clattered by only a couple of blocks away. And the pitiable purple and yellow pansies struggling to hold their heads up in a bright blue planter along the sidewalk would have long-since perished in a more hostile climate.

Even in November, delicate flowers like that generally managed to hold on. This far southeast, they might last well into December, sometimes January.

But these poor things were shriveled, bent nearly double against the fierce, unseasonably cold wind that howled between the row of renovated and revitalized brick buildings lining the busy street.

The mostly young people scurrying from scrappy startups to trendy shops to cutting-edge restaurants were equally bent and shriveled, clutching at jackets and scarves never meant to withstand temperatures barely in the double digits before wind chill. Even the enticing aromas of fresh coffee, baking bread, and roasting meat were muted by a gale that simply smelled of winter.

Natasha, on the other hand, found the abrupt chill a refreshing break from the balmy fifties and even sixties that had dominated all month long. She’d added a brown jacket to her usual autumn choices of jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt, along with a blue toboggan mainly to keep her curly black hair from getting hopelessly tangled in the wind.

Other than that, hands in her pockets kept her plenty warm enough.

After all, her own origins lay in lands far more familiar with water in solid form this time of year rather than saturating the air so much she wished for gills to help her breathe.

The sturdy hundred-year-old former warehouse in front