Magic Tides (Kate Daniels: Wilmington Years #1)(5)

“Will be safe behind the walls. Your father is fetching them back here. Everything will be alright. Meanwhile, you can help us get ready.”





2


Kate

W hen humans had prophesized about the Apocalypse, we had always expected it would be fast. Oh, there would be war and natural disasters and other preliminaries that might take their time, but the actual moment when the world ended would be swift. A rain of fire, a nuclear mushroom cloud, a meteor, a catastrophic volcanic eruption… And when magic hit us for the first time, it had delivered exactly what we anticipated.

Planes fell out of the sky. Electricity shorted out. Guns stopped working. Ordinary, normal humans turned into monsters or started shooting lightning from their fingertips. Ravenous mythical creatures spawned out of thin air. For three days the magic had raged, and then it vanished, leaving a mountain of casualties in its wake. Just as the world reeled and tried to pick up the pieces, the magic came again, and the slow crawl of the Apocalypse began.

We called that first magical tsunami the Shift, and everything after post-Shift. Magic flooded our world in waves, without warning, smothering technology, gradually chewing skyscrapers into dust, and slowly but surely changing the very fabric of our existence. Landscape, climate, flora, fauna, people—nothing was left untouched. Nobody could predict how long the waves lasted or how intense they would be. Over the past half a century, we learned to live with it.

Wilmington had fared better than most cities. Certainly, better than Atlanta where we came from. For one, it was a century and change older. Being older helped. And it wasn’t nearly as built up as Atlanta, where the once-glistening office towers and high-rises lay in ruins. Magic had taken a solid bite out of the city but didn’t quite reduce it to rubble.

Wilmington hadn’t escaped unscathed. Some of the taller buildings had fallen. The Cape Fear Memorial Bridge was no more. It had collapsed in that first magic wave. The Murchison Building had slowly turned to dust until it finally imploded. The spire of the First Baptist Church, once the tallest point of the city, had broken off one day and crashed onto the street, killing several people. But the main damage had been done by floods.

The sea level had risen, partially due to pre-Shift global warming and partially due to magic issues nobody fully understood. Now parts of the city looked like Venice with bridges, sometimes solid, sometimes cobbled together with whatever was handy at the time, spawning canals, ponds, and marshes.

Thomas and I rode across one of those bridges now, the hoofbeats of our mounts thudding on the worn wood. He rode an old bay mare. I rode Cuddles. When Thomas first saw Cuddles, he gave her a side-eye. She stood ten feet tall, including the two-foot ears, and was splattered with random spots of black and white. She was also a donkey, a mammoth jenny, to be exact.

Horses had their advantages, but most of them spooked easily. I once rode Cuddles across a rickety bridge infested with magical snakes, and she stomped right over the hissing serpents like they weren’t even there and then pranced when we reached the solid ground.

Unfortunately, Cuddles failed to reassure Thomas of my badassness. Getting information out of him was like pulling teeth. He didn’t trust me at all, and as he rode next to me, his entire body communicated that he thought coming on this adventure with me was a very bad idea.

I’d met Thomas’ type before. He kept things in. In the chaos of the magic and tech mad dance, Thomas was a calm rock on which his family could always rely. He handled his problems on his own, without any fanfare. Except now his son was taken, and he couldn’t solve this problem on his own. A lot of people would be frantic, with their emotions spilling over, but Thomas went even deeper inward, all the way down. He was a hair above catatonic. Sooner or later, he would explode. It would be better if that happened sooner, before we got to where we were going.

I had run across all sorts of human scum, but traffickers were at the very top of my shit list.

“How did it happen?”

“They came in a car and took him off the street,” Thomas said.

“What was he doing at the time?”

“He was playing soccer with his friends.”

“And they only took him? Not any of his friends?”

Thomas nodded.

This smelled like a targeted grab.

“Is Darin special in any way?”

“No.”

“Does he have any enemies?”

“No.”

“Is he handsome? Is anybody obsessed with him?”

“No.”

“Does he have any magic?”

There was a small pause before Thomas answered. “No.”

Right. We would have to work on the trust bit.

“Have you tried the Order?” I asked.

Thomas sighed.

The Order of Merciful Aid was a knight order that functioned as a private law enforcement organization. They took petitions from the public and charged on a sliding scale. Their services were reasonable. Their definition of “aid,” not so much. Their definition of “human” was also rather narrow.

“We have a small chapter in Wilmington,” Thomas said. “There are only three knights. They are busy.”

True, but the kidnapping of a child would be a priority even for the overworked knights. There was something about Darin that Thomas wanted to keep hidden. Pushing him about it would get me nowhere.