Chapter Two #4
Summerwood reminded me of a mashup of the Magic Kingdom and Lord of the Rings.
It had the same whimsical architecture -- heavily carved posts, doors, and eaves.
A rainbow of flowers spilled from window boxes or hanging baskets, and a glance through restaurant windows revealed rustic tables and chairs, all colorfully painted.
Much of the work had been done by hand -- the kind of labor that wouldn’t disappear if the owner died.
And absolutely none of it bore any resemblance to anything on Immortal Earth.
I also picked up the distant sounds and scents of several hundred mortals, along with the ozone and metallic tang of small electric vehicles -- golf carts?
-- and the stink and rumble of diesel engines suggesting heavy equipment somewhere nearby.
Hanging over it all was the scent of magic from different races -- trolls, centaurs, banshees, brounies, werewolves, and Demisidhe.
It was rare to find so many races together like this without a war in the offing.
What I didn’t scent was active magic nearby, despite the distant roar of a pissed-off dragon, mixed with shouting, angry voices. Must be coming from the shoot Iona had mentioned.
But just because I didn’t sense anything didn’t mean she was safe. Invisibility spells could hide a killer standing two feet away -- I’d used them often enough myself.
“Looks clear,” I said over my shoulder. “But keep one hand on your blade.” At first glance, nothing on her police duty belt would do much to a magical being -- bullets just pissed us off.
But I could smell an enchanted sword on her somewhere.
My money was on the telescoping baton. Besides, her grandmother had forged magical weapons for my family for centuries. Of course, she’d equipped Iona.
Iona stepped out of the police department. There was nothing casual in her walk as her gaze flicked from side to side, wary and assessing.
“I don’t feel any working magic other than the film shoot,” she told me. As a demigoddess, her ability to sense magic was even greater than my own, despite everything Cachamwri had done to soup me up like a werewolf muscle car.
“Sounds like they’re shooting a combat sequence,” I told her, gesturing in the direction of the enraged dragon.
“Yep,” she confirmed. “And since almost everyone with any magic is there acting their little hearts out, I think we should go take a look.” Iona started down the street, and I fell in a little behind her and to her right.
I had to shorten my stride to match hers, though she wasn’t a short woman.
Probably a bit over six feet, muscular and solid.
Her power seemed to swirl around her, smelling of flowers, deep forests, and fertile black soil.
Gooood, the sword purred and quit biting my hip, as if it had decided I was finally doing my job.
We passed a small parking lot with police cars, motorcycles, and an armored SWAT vehicle, all of them showroom new. I jerked my chin at the vehicles. “Nice vehicles.”
She shrugged. “The mayor has never been stingy. Plus, we offer services no one else on Mortal Earth can duplicate, and film crews are happy to pay for them. Provides our own people with well-paying jobs they enjoy. And they have less to worry about when it comes to abuse by their own people.”
I glanced at her, interested. “Are your citizens mostly changelings, then?” Changelings -- who were half human and half something magical -- often encountered discrimination, though my father had repealed the laws that legalized mistreating them.
“Some are. Most had issues with their own people that forced them to flee to Mortal Earth. Others have been struggling to survive here for centuries.”
Which reminded me. “Where in the hell is all the magic coming from?” Magic didn’t exist in the Mortal universe.
When I’d visited my werewolf grandparents and cousins as a kid, it had always taken me a week to adjust to how magically dead everything felt.
“It feels like there’s even more available magic here than there is back home. ”
“There is. The mayor figured out a way to create permanent magical nodes that pull in power from other universes. There’s even a couple of nodes that draw on the Elementalverse.” Which was a universe where magic was even more powerful than in our own.
I blinked. “How the hell did she do that?”
“No idea. And do not ask her, because she gets pissy.”
If she was the same mayor I’d heard stories about… “We wouldn’t want that.”
“No, we would not. We had a guy from the Department of Defense show up once. He offered her a billion if she’d build a magical bubble like this for the United States. Gave her this whole spiel about how America needed access to magical weapons. The mayor said, and I quote, ‘Bitch, you have nukes.’”
I laughed. “I’ll wager he loved that.”
“Oh, yeah. After she kicked the bureaucrat the hell out of town, the mayor told me everybody from Arthur Pendragon to the king of the trolls would’ve had her head on a pike if she’d been dumb enough to build a bubble for that asshole.”
“I’m surprised he didn’t charge her with threatening a federal official.”
“We’re talking about the mayor.”
“We’re also talking about a Fed.”
“Fair point.”