What Man Defies Read online

  What Man Defies

  A Novel of the Frost Arcana

  Clara Coulson

  What Man Defies

  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]

  To whatever force of nature decided to make it a hundred degrees for two weeks straight: you suck.

  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

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  To Be Continued

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  About Clara Coulson

  Chapter One

  Most of the time, when an angry woman threw an object at your head, you could reasonably assume you’d done something wrong. But when the woman in question was a ghost, and the object in question was a washing machine, that paradigm shifted from “Oh no, she found out I cheated on her” to “Oh no, I bungled a séance.”

  In this case, however, as said washing machine was barreling across the store toward me, my brain told me with absolute certainty that I hadn’t attempted to contact or otherwise summon the dead this week. Which meant the pissed-off shade of a blonde in a green winter coat screaming in the corner and telekinetically lifting washers and dryers off the floor wasn’t ticked off at me in particular. She was just ticked off in general. And sought to destroy everything in sight. As all good vengeful spirits did.

  I ducked. The washing machine sailed over my head and crashed into the wall behind me, imploding with a shriek as the metal crumpled under the force. I dove behind a line of dryers on the show floor as I sifted through all the spells I knew to banish a ghost to the afterlife. Most of them required a multi-step process replete with offerings and kind magic words to ensure a smooth transition from Earth to the Otherworld, but I didn’t have the time or the supplies to set up one of those right now. I’d have to make do with a messier option.

  Across the store, huddling behind the checkout counter, were the middle-aged witch and wizard couple who owned the place, and who were watching in horror as their months of hard work building magic-powered laundry equipment went down the drain. The woman in particular, gray haired and red faced, looked ready to throw a nasty magic punch at the ghost tearing up her store. But I knew she was a small-time practitioner, and this ghost was super angry and super violent. I didn’t want her, or her equally low-powered husband, to get hurt.

  After all, they’d been about to give me a big reward for recovering their precious music box from the stretches, before the ghost lady showed up. If they got killed, I’d go home with an empty chit bag. (And yes, I’d also feel guilty if two innocent people died on my watch.)

  Stripping away my third glamour, I summoned my magic from my soul and siphoned it into my palms. With a glance in the display window to my left, I found the ghost lady’s reflection, surrounded by levitating washers and dryers, drifting in the direction of the checkout counter. She wore a vicious sneer, and her blue eyes were alight with the fury and pain of a person who’d died in agony. Jesus, was she a murder victim or something?

  I wanted to ask her, but vengeful spirits were almost impossible to communicate with. And since she was strong enough to lift heavy objects and sling them like they were paperweights, I couldn’t risk an attempt at a friendly conversation. Someone could get hurt. Like me.

  I already had an iron wound in my shoulder.

  I didn’t need all the bones in my body crushed too.

  So I snuck around the end of the line of dryers on my hands and knees, popped up behind the angry ghost, and held out my palms toward her, discharging my magic energy. The ghost whipped around as frost crackled across the floor beneath her, the ceiling above her, and the washers and dryers hovering around her, my energy surrounding her on all sides. She lifted her arms, preparing to sling another deadly projectile at me, but the spell invocation was already flying off my tongue.

  The instant the staccato edge of the final syllable hit the air, a translucent cylinder of energy coalesced around the ghost. Immediately, the washers and dryers fell to the floor, a series of mighty clangs that hurt my ears and cracked the tiles. The ghost shrieked when she realized I’d cut off her power from the world outside her temporary prison and savagely beat at the walls of the cylinder. But it was too late to stop me now.

  The cylinder glowed a faint blue as the spell entered its second sequence, and then it began to shrink. The ghost, horrified, huddled into a ball, but it didn’t protect her for long. Her prison grew smaller and smaller and smaller, crushing her until she could no longer hold her humanoid shape. Her ghostly visage broke down from a see-through body into a swirling mist, the most basic form of a shade—and the weakest.

  The shade would regain her human form eventually. I hadn’t really harmed her. More like disarmed her. No more poltergeist activity for you today.

  Rendered harmless, I could release the shade from her prison. I dissolved the cylinder with a muttered word and walked over to the ghost as she sank to the floor. She now moved like an animal with no sense of sight or hearing, feeling her way along the floor with her wispy tendrils. I crouched next to her, sighing. “Sorry about this. But you were making a mess.” I traced a simple circle on the cracked tiles beneath her, a few quick frosty marks. “Let’s get you to where you belong, huh?”

  A few sentences later, it was done. The circle activated with a flash, and the woman’s diminished shade was sucked down into its center and pulled away from Earth altogether. I didn’t actually have to send her anywhere in particular, just to the void between worlds. Unlike living things, the spirits of the dead needed no guidance in the void. They were drawn either to their destined afterlife, or to the Endless Sea, if they were troubled enough. And if you ended up in the sea, Manannán mac Lir would fish you out and escort you to the right place.

  The magic circled deactivated. The woman was heading to her eternal home.

  I rose and broke the circle with a few swipes of my boot on the tile, then turned to examine the damage. A busted wall, a ruined floor, ten damaged washers and dryers, and one total loss, sticking out of the hole in the aforementioned wall. The owners, thankfully, were unharmed. They shuffled around the edge of the checkout counter and took in the sight of their wrecked store with tight frowns. I scratched the back of my head, not sure what to say.

  The ghost rampage wasn’t my fault.

  At
least, I hoped it wasn’t.

  “So,” I said at last, “about my payment for the music box…”

  The woman, Ms. McAdams, pointed to an intact washing machine. A cheap but efficient model that came with a one-year service guarantee. “We can have that one delivered on”—she surveyed the store again, determining how long it would take to clean up this mess—“Friday.”

  “Great, you have my address?”

  “Of course,” Mr. McAdams said gruffly as he poked at the bent washer hanging out of the wall. “If that’s all, Mr. Whelan, I think you should go now.”

  I shuffled out the door and down the sidewalk without another word.

  Heavy snowstorms had plagued Kinsale for the past three weeks, sporadically spitting half a foot of powder here and there. The streets were now piled high with dirty snow shoveled off the sidewalks, an inversion of the usual method of snow clearing that would’ve had people scratching their heads seven years ago. But this was the post-apocalyptic world, the reconstruction era, and there were no cars on the streets. We had no fuel to run them, so the asphalt sat empty, slowly degrading under the gray skies. Foot traffic, plus the occasional bicycle, was the name of the transport game.

  I didn’t mind walking too much.

  Unless I was in the stretches being chased by werewolves.

  The foot traffic thickened as I neared the central market, a shanty town of tarp-covered booths and faded white tents that stretched the length of what had once been a large park. I didn’t have any business in the market today, but there were new “shops” opening up all the time as more and more commerce trickled into Kinsale. New refugees with specialized skills were always pouring in, tradesmen and artists of all sorts, and the new electric grid was about ten months from being completed, based on the latest projections, a development that would bring technology back into the fold. That meant we had a lot to look forward to when it came to our local economy.

  Today, I stumbled upon a tent owned by a family of woodworkers, who had some beautiful handmade furniture on display. The stuff in my house was functional, but the styles were straight out of the seventies and covered in scratches that wouldn’t buff out. I could use a few new end tables, maybe a nice coffee table too. As I looked over the selection, I wondered whether the owners would be willing to barter for something out in the stretches—

  People screamed.

  I rushed out of the tent, only to get caught in a crush of a crowd fleeing from something to my left. Extricating myself and backing up to the wall of the tent, I rose to my tiptoes and hunted for the source of the disturbance. About forty feet away, an entire wooden booth had been hoisted from the ground and was now floating in the air. Right next to an angry ghost. A man in a shabby brown coat and worn work boots, who appeared every bit as furious as the female ghost at the laundry supply store.

  Another one? That can’t be a coincidence.

  Progress toward the ghost was slow as I skirted along the edge of the crowd, and I almost got trampled several times. Once, a guy’s elbow caught me in the jaw and nearly sent me sprawling over the top of a table. I ended up ramming the edge and knocking over several carafes of hot coffee. I profusely apologized to the owner—who was cowering behind a box of coffee cans—and promised to pay for those momentarily. Finally, the bulk of the crowd stomped past, leaving a sparse collection of slowpokes, and I was able to jog over to the affected booth.

  I slid to a stop on the damp brown grass and raised my hands toward the levitating ghost to pull the same cylindrical prison spell out of my bag of tricks. But before I was able to get three words off my tongue, a bright green sphere of magic energy materialized around the ghost. The big wooden booth suddenly remembered gravity existed, and I had to dive out of the way because it came down at an angle and collided with the ground right where I’d been standing. Stumbling back, I grabbed hold of a tarp support post to steady myself. Then I hunted for the source of the new magic.

  She was standing fifteen feet away. A human witch. She was Asian, maybe Chinese, and the practiced words of a sophisticated banishment spell were rolling off her tongue in low, guttural tones. As she finished the spell, the sphere she’d created around the ghost collapsed into three rings made entirely of energy, symbols and shapes etched into the air.

  The ghost thrashed around inside the rings, but couldn’t free himself. Then the witch clapped her hands three times, one for each ring, and they activated. The writhing ghost simply poofed out of existence, sent off, I could tell from the spell construction, directly to his destined afterlife.

  The rings fizzled out into green embers a moment later.

  The embers vanished before they hit the ground.

  I did a quick spot check to make sure no one was injured. Besides the broken booth and a few scattered pieces of homemade jewelry, there didn’t seem to be any significant damage. Whoever ran the booth had fled. So I trudged over to the witch as she was rolling her shoulders to loosen her muscles and come down from the adrenaline spike of a spell. She glanced at me approaching, disinterested, before she caught the scent of my own magic permeating the air around my body. Fae magic.

  “Something I can help you with?” she said, a wary edge to her voice. “Don’t think I broke any faerie laws—just now.”

  “I’m not an agent of the faerie government, so I don’t give a shit if you broke one of their laws or not.” I jutted my thumb toward the place in the air where the ghost had been. “I was just going to say, ‘Nice save.’ That was a nifty banishment spell. Very complex, yet you cast it in no time at all. You must’ve spent a while practicing that. You do banishment work before the collapse?”

  The witch frowned, suspicious. “What’s it to you?”

  I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. Human practitioners always thought the fae were trying to trick them, even during a casual conversation. And while it was true that the higher fae considered manipulation an art form, even they could chat about mundane topics in a friendly manner, when the occasion called for it. “The skill itself?” I replied. “It’s nothing to me. Your intel, on the other hand…”

  “Intel?” She crossed her arms. “What intel do you think I have?”

  “I banished another ghost myself down at the new store owned by the McAdams family. Just thirty minutes ago. Same deal. Angry, floating spirit showcasing its best poltergeist skills. If you’re as well versed in banishment as you seem, then I figure you might’ve caught wind of a new trend in ghost activity.” I gestured to the broken booth slowly sinking into the mud behind us. “There something going down? A disturbance in town preventing shades from passing on after death? Some ongoing conflict or strife that would draw the Sluagh to Kinsale?”

  The Sluagh were the spirits of the restless dead. They tended to congregate in a general area during disasters, times of great hardship and suffering. Usually, groups of Sluagh were people who died as a consequence of those disasters, but not always. Occasionally, they were people who’d died violently around the same time, and the negative energy surrounding the disaster area drew them in. Thing was, the last “disaster” I knew of in Kinsale had been the destruction of Abarta’s base out near the edge of the city three weeks back. Too long ago and too far from here to have attracted the Sluagh.

  The witch eyed me as she considered whether or not to answer my question. I felt her magic subtly probing my aura for any obvious hint of deception. When she found none, she said, “There have been some disappearances lately. Humans vanishing off the streets at all times of day. People turning corners and seemingly ceasing to exist. Don’t know how many. Don’t know if they’re getting snatched or outright killed. Don’t even know if these ghost incidents are related or not, but it’d make for a funny coincidence, in my opinion.”

  Disappearances. I remembered O’Shea saying something about that before the whole Abarta incident went down. I’d told him I would look into it, but I’d spent the last few weeks taking it easy—today I’d done my first stretch job since Walter Johnson�
��s run—so I could recuperate from the stab wound in my shoulder. It was still healing now, but the pain had ebbed, and I’d regained full use of my left arm. So, growing as restless as the ghosts, I’d ventured outside the boundary line again. Stretch scavenging usually wasn’t too risky for a half-fae like me.

  A mystery inside the boundary line, on the other hand? My last one hadn’t ended so well.

  Did the rash of disappearances get even worse during my down time? I wondered. O’Shea hasn’t said anything recently, but he might have held his tongue so I wouldn’t walk into danger while I was already hurt.

  “Are you looking into the disappearances?” I asked the witch.

  She tucked her hands into her coat pockets. “I’ve been spreading the word through my practitioner network to be on the lookout for dark magic or dangerous creatures. If anyone figures out who’s to blame, the info should spread like wildfire. The cops will pick it up, maybe, and try to get a handle on it.” She cocked an eyebrow. “Or maybe our faerie leaders will finally lend us a hand?”

  “None of my business, I’m afraid.” I shrugged. “Police work though? That used to be my gig. I’ll ask around myself, see if I can snag a few leads and point the ‘real’ cops in the right direction. Last thing we need is the city getting overrun by vengeful spirits. Don’t you ag…?”

  The witch’s expression had dipped into full suspicion mode again. “You used to be a cop?”

  “Uh, yeah? Back in the day. Before the collapse. Why?”