What Fate Portends Read online

  What Fate Portends

  A Novel of the Frost Arcana

  Clara Coulson

  What Fate Portends

  Copyright © 2018 by Clara Coulson

  Cover Design by Christian Bentulan at http://coversbychristian.com/

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  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locations is entirely coincidental.

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  For more information:

  http://www.claracoulson.com/

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  To contact the author, email [email protected]

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The Story Continues

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  Books by Clara Coulson

  About Clara Coulson

  To winter, whose dreariness inspired

  all the snark in this book.

  Chapter One

  Breaking into houses was the hardest part of my job.

  You’d think the werewolves would be the hardest part, but no. The brief chases back to Kinsale with sharp teeth nipping at my heels were never particularly pulse pounding. Because I knew if they got a little too close, I could wallop the lead wolf in the face with a well-timed punch and send him crashing back into his buddies, and they’d all end up in a pile of tangled, furry limbs, snarling and whining in embarrassment. The wolf packs out in the stretches had long gone feral, and being feral made them animal-like, and being animal-like made them predictable. I evaded their blood-stained maws the way I wiped my shoes on my front-porch doormat. With ease.

  The breaking and entering part was far more difficult.

  Because it was so goddamn depressing.

  I jimmied a window open like usual and climbed into a first-floor bedroom that hadn’t been used in seven years. Everything was coated in an inch of dust, and without air circulation, the recent cold rains had left the room muggy. The leak in the corner of the ceiling, water stains running down the wall, didn’t help the atmosphere either, and I clicked my tongue in annoyance as I slid the window closed so nothing else would think to slip in while I was here. Just once, I’d have loved to be sent to a house that still looked warm and inviting.

  Fat chance of that though.

  Since most of the houses outside the protected cities were, you know, abandoned.

  It was darker than usual in the house, thanks to the dense rainclouds still hanging in the sky, so I pulled a flashlight from my mostly empty satchel and clicked it on. Waving it back and forth, I searched for a scrapbook that matched the description I’d been given by my latest client. Pink. With flower designs on the plastic cover. Roughly eight inches in length and six inches in width. Contained over a hundred pictures of the Johnson family, the members of which were largely deceased.

  When I didn’t see the book lying around in plain sight, I checked the room in a clockwise order. First the bed. Nothing under it but shoes. Nothing beneath the mattress except a couple spiders. Then the desk. Bunch of wrinkled papers in the drawers, old bills and what not. Then the closet. Several soggy cardboard boxes stuffed with clothes, lots of mildewed dresses and suits hung up in stained bags, and a few plastic bins filled with an assortment of unique items. Trophies. Plaques. Books. Those appeared promising, so I emptied the bins out. Only to come up with zilch. There were three different cameras in the bins, but no scrapbook.

  Damn. The scrapbook wasn’t in this room.

  Walter Johnson had said he couldn’t remember where the scrapbook had last been, only that he’d seen it two days before the nuke went off in Raleigh and he’d fled with his wife and kids, and what little supplies they could gather in the short time they had to evacuate. Irony, of course, was that the fallout never reached this far, thanks to a little magical intervention from Our Lady of Eternal Winter.

  Johnson had run for nothing. And that decision had cost him nearly everything. His wife and two of his three kids had died in one of the refugee camps in Georgia during the flu epidemic. They’d have been fine if they’d just stayed put and moved to Kinsale when it gained protected status. But of course, hindsight was twenty-twenty. Most everybody had panicked in the same ignorant ways when the bombs started falling. Most everybody was still panicking now.

  I left the bedroom and followed a short hall to the living room.

  And here was the part of this job that always sucked the most balls.

  As I shined my light across the couch and loveseat, the TV and entertainment center and coffee table, my poor, shriveled raisin of a heart started to ache at the sight of a life forgotten. On the couch was a bag of potato chips. On the coffee table, a half-eaten bowl of popcorn. On the carpet in front of the coffee table were two controllers for the video game console sitting on the entertainment center; one of them was broken where someone had stepped on it as they ran toward or away from the bedroom I’d just left.

  Beyond the living room, it was even worse. There were plates and silverware set on the table in the dining room, plus a pitcher of what looked like tea adjacent to a row of dinner glasses. In the kitchen lay an island strewn with food prep items. Pots and pans. Mixing bowls. Large spoons and knives. A cutting board. Most of the actual food had rotted to nothing in the past few years, and all that remained of the final dinner the Johnsons never ate were a few stains here and there.

  I hated this shit.

  I hated looking at children’s shoes discarded near back doors from when they’d come inside after playing in lush yards that were now frozen and dead. I hated seeing full hampers, full dishwashers, full sinks, the stark reminders of chores no one would ever return to finish. I hated seeing piles of unopened mail on countertops and side tables, the companies that mailed them no longer in existence. I hated finding half-packed bags, clothes strewn over floorboards, where people had been forced to haphazardly choose what precious things to take as they abandoned their homes for good.

  I hated being forced to confront what had been, what no longer was, and what would never be again. Normal life—

  I paused with one foot in the kitchen and frowned.

  “Jeez, Vince,” I muttered to myself. “Lighten up, will you?”

  With a shake of my head, I beat back the dark, broody cloud hanging over me and resumed exploring the ground floor until I located the stairs. It took me two more tries—two young children’s bedrooms whose faded wallpaper and stuffed animals made me cringe—but I finally located the master bedroom, where, as I suspected, someone had safely stowed the scrapbook away. It was sitting on the top shelf of a short bookcase. Johnson’s wife had likely placed it there after adding a new picture or finding it discarded downstairs.

  Crouching, I plucked it from the shelf, then tipped it open to a random page and pointe
d my light at it. Some of the pictures had suffered damage, while others had been sealed well enough to maintain the bulk of their features. There were even a few that looked pristine.

  I tried very hard not to register the actual contents of the photos as I quickly flipped through the whole book to make sure most of them were intact enough to satisfy Johnson. They were. So I flipped the book shut, tucked it into my satchel, and made to head back downstairs at the exact pace warranted by—

  A floorboard creaked.

  Not exactly a rare occurrence in rundown houses. But there was something heavy to this creak, as if it was the result of added weight and not the subtle shifting of warping boards. Over the past few years of working this gig, I’d gotten pretty good at picking out the houses that only seemed abandoned, because squatters tended to leave little clues, like footprints in dust and objects moved in ways that made rooms feel inhabited. However, I hadn’t seen any of those clues on the ground floor of this house. Which made me think either someone had followed me inside, or something had been waiting in a place I hadn’t explored.

  I flicked off my flashlight and stowed it away, then quietly crept over to the bedroom door. I’d left the door open a crack, so I was able to peek into the hall without making a sound. My eyes took a few seconds to adjust to the lack of light, but even when they did, I didn’t find anything lurking outside the room. So I shoved my hand under the collar of my shirt and grabbed one of the star-shaped charms on my necklace, mentally whispering the words to dispel the magic I’d stuffed inside. It escaped from the charm with a subtle blue puff, like mist, and immediately, one of my glamours disappeared.

  My senses sharpened fourfold.

  Closing my eyes, I focused my hearing, concentrating on noises downstairs, since the top level was totally silent beyond my own pulse. At first, I didn’t hear anything on the ground floor either, not even the skittering of bugs. But then, as if something had been waiting for me to pay attention, I heard a faint scraping noise. Like a nail gliding lightly across a chalkboard. Slowly. Methodically. An obvious rhythm. Too precise to be the house settling.

  A chill slithered down my spine. I wasn’t alone in here.

  One quick glance over my shoulder told me I wouldn’t be escaping out the bedroom window. Because there was a sheet of plywood nailed over it. Busting it open would make an awful racket, and the ground below was a good distance away. My gaze dropped to the floor instead, where there was an obvious water stain that I’d bet ten gem chits corresponded to the leak in the ceiling downstairs.

  Stepping away from the door, I tested the integrity of the waterlogged floor. It sank under my weight pretty easily.

  If I applied the right amount of force, I might be able to break straight through to the other bedroom, lower myself down, and make a mad dash for the window I’d used to enter. Close to the ground. No risk of a twisted ankle.

  But that tactic would be even louder than ripping off the plywood and would immediately garner attention. Whether I’d make it out in time depended on what was lurking below.

  If it was a vampire, I was fucked. They were faster than me even when I stripped my second glamour.

  I checked the squishy floor one more time. Nah. Too clunky.

  The direct approach it was then.

  Back at the door, I peered out into the hall again, only to find it as empty as before. The scraping sound was still going strong, however. I tucked a finger around the edge of the door and coaxed it open, praying no rusty hinges betrayed me. When the door was nearly open wide enough to let me through, there was the slightest squeak, but it happened to occur at the same time as a scrape, so I didn’t think it gave me away. The scraping continued undeterred. And I continued out into the hall, severely deterred, but I couldn’t stand here being a wimp all day long.

  So down the stairs I tiptoed, internally screaming all the way.

  At the base of the stairs, which thankfully hadn’t creaked too much either, it became apparent the scraping noise was coming from the kitchen. The kitchen that had been totally empty about twelve minutes prior, when I was searching the ground floor.

  Oh, I didn’t like that at all. Either this thing had been in the house all along, probably watching me from the shadows, or it could enter buildings with the grace of a cat. Both possibilities indicated very bad things were about to happen.

  Flush against the wall of the hallway, I inched toward the edge of the kitchen entryway. I could’ve made a run for the back door, which was in the utility room at the end of the hall behind me. But if I turned my back on whatever was in the kitchen, and it heard me trying to get out, the extra second it took me to whip around could cost me my head. Literally. So it was best to take a gander at the thing I was keeping company with, see what it was so I could gauge its abilities, and then run away with my tail between my legs in the way least likely to get me killed.

  I reached the kitchen doorway. The scraping was loud enough now that my muscles tightened in time with each repetition, a deep sense of unease skittering up and down my spine. Heart sputtering under my ribs, I had to take a deep breath to compose myself, to still the subtle quaking in my fingers, calm the pounding in my temples. I stared at the still and empty living room across from me for five long seconds. Then I poked my head past the edge of the wall.

  Nosferatu was in the kitchen.

  It was seven feet tall, with ash-gray skin, a bald head, a severely angular face, a hooked nose, bulbous yellow eyes, and long, pointed ears. Sticking out from its ragged, soiled, robe-like clothing were two hands that each had fingers nearly eight inches long, and one of those fingers was running its chipped black nail through a moldy stain on the surface of the kitchen island, which I assumed was all that remained of some veggie Ms. Johnson had been chopping up for dinner that fateful night.

  “It” was a freaking ghoul. And it looked exactly like it had stepped out of a terrifying horror classic. Down to the crowded rows of sharp teeth nearly two inches long, that I knew from experience could bite through bone like butter. Last time I’d seen a ghoul, it had ripped a guy’s arm off with those teeth while it strangled him to death with those spider-leg fingers.

  Boy, that had been a bad day. I really hoped today didn’t end like that.

  I ducked behind the wall again, my teeth biting into my tongue as I was forced to stifle a whine. Not because I was afraid of a ghoul—if I stripped off a couple more of my glamours, I could drum up enough power to take a ghoul in a fight, no problem—but because I was afraid of ghouls, plural. You see, ghouls had this funny tendency to travel in packs, so if you ever stumbled upon one ghoul, you could be sure that several more were in the immediate vicinity. And since ghouls were extremely aggressive when they fought as a pack…

  A floorboard creaked behind me.

  It was the exact same sound that had originally alerted me.

  This time, I knew where it came from: the floorboard in front of the door that led to a room I hadn’t entered. The basement. I’d opened the door to the basement when I was searching the ground floor but had elected not to go down because Walter Johnson told me the basement was for junk storage and they didn’t keep anything important in there. Mentally rewinding back to the moment of that decision, I saw myself glance briefly into the darkness at the bottom of the basement stairs before I continued down the hall to see if there were any other relevant rooms on the ground floor.

  I hadn’t closed the basement door. I’d left it wide open. And in so doing, I’d woken something from its midwinter hibernation.

  Several somethings.

  Slowly, I peered over my shoulder. There were nine ghouls standing in the hallway behind me. All of them were blinking those creepy yellow eyes, no pupils, no whites, at the hapless man before them. Three of them were chomping their pointy teeth repeatedly, and when I took a hard look at their mouths, I realized they were chewing on some kind of gristle. Leftover bits and pieces from the last people they’d eaten before they’d huddled into the basement for an ex
tended nap.

  One good thing about the dreary climate shift was that a lot of supernatural creatures didn’t like cold weather, so many of them had gone dormant when the long winter started. That made the stretches between the protected cities moderately safer to traverse. As long as you didn’t stumble into the den of something nasty and wake it up on the wrong side of the bed. Like my dumb ass had just done.

  These things probably hadn’t had a meal in months, maybe years. And there I stood, just under six feet of skin and chewy muscles, bone and squishy organs, like a fucking buffet. And sure, ghouls preferred half-rotten, maggot-filled corpse meat, but they had absolutely no qualms with creating the corpses that meat came from. And—

  The scraping in the kitchen had stopped.

  I whipped my head back around.

  Nosferatu was standing right in front of me.

  I gawked at the ghoul for two-point-five seconds. Then I punched it in the face.

  Its head snapped back with an audible crack, its hooked nose imploding into mush, dark green blood gushing from its wide nostrils. It bobbled, back and forth, back and forth, on its gangly legs, for what seemed like an awkwardly long amount of time, before its monster brain finally decided to send it tumbling down. It slammed into the hardwood floor with a thump that rattled every board in the living room. Then it lay there, unmoving, sluggishly blinking its big yellow eyes, like it couldn’t understand I’d just sucker-punched it so hard I’d nearly broken all my fingers. (And yes, my hand was throbbing like a bitch, but I had bigger problems.)