VoodooMoon Read Free Page B

city limits. Now most of the buildings and homes were gone and the woods had overtaken everything. The nearest village was more than ten miles away. That meant the gang had to have a hideout or transportation nearby. Though they were young and stupid, I doubted they were attacking people close to where they lived, especially if they were providing for children younger than themselves, as I suspected.
    Horses were expensive and most petty thieves couldn’t afford them. But this gang had been preying on merchants for months. Reports said they had stolen dozens of horses, mules and oxen. It was likely they had sold most of their ill gotten gains, but odds were they’d kept some of the animals to get around.
    I tromped through the overgrown brush, my senses open to detect if there were anymore of the gang hiding somewhere. The reports consistently indicated there only being three of them, but I couldn’t be two careful.
    About a mile from the road, I felt the presence of three more beings. I knew immediately they weren’t human. I’d found the gang’s horses. The underbrush was too thick to ride through, so I had to lead their horses back to the road on foot. By the time I got back, it had started to rain again.
    “Well,” I thought. “At least the rain will wash away some of this mud.”
    As quickly as I could, I loaded the now awake gang onto the horses, tossing them over the saddles like sacks of grain. I tied their reigns together and then attached a longer lead rope. I climbed onto Mal’s back. Leaning down, I rubbed his neck.
    “Come on, Big Bad, let’s go get some of those crunchy oats.”
    He was off like a shot. This time I used magic to keep the rain off of me and Mal, and to light the way. I didn’t bother covering the gang.
     

TWO
     
    FIONA
     
    A little over two hundred years ago in the year of technology called 2012, the North and South poles shifted. Though the shift wasn’t exactly 90 degrees, it was close enough for East to become North, North became West, and so on. The shift caused a climatic cataclysm that pounded the world with storms, earthquakes, and other natural disasters for more than forty years.
    Damn Mayans.
    Whole cities were destroyed and governments crumbled. Famine ran rampant. Widespread panic caused wars which killed even more than the natural disasters and starvation. When the smoke and weather finally cleared, the world had changed drastically. What had once been the Eastern United States was now a peninsula called Appalachia made up of a range of mountains in the west and bordered by the Atlantic Ocean in the North and East as well as the newly formed Mississippi Sea in the south. Only two major cities, what had once been Nashville and Atlanta, remained partially standing. From those ruins rose the autonomous city-states of Nash and Atlanta. For more than fifty years after the start of the Cataclysm, every city, town, and community was at war with each other and internally. Finally, the Paranorm Council of Elders stepped in to bring peace and unity. While the two city states were completely autonomous in rule, they were allied under the Council of Elders along with three other city states; Okie City and Sanlou to the south, and New Winnipeg in the west. Many areas in the south and west had resisted the Council. Some set up legitimate governments of their own, but many others were ruled by warlords and tyrants.
    The city-state of Nash claimed jurisdiction over several small fishing and farming villages in the neighboring countryside, but the main part of it was built around the heart of the original city and separated into two main parts; Nash City and New Nashville.
    The walls of Nash City rose up out of the ground like a lumpy, gray fortress. Sentries marched along the top. The path and most of the materials for the walls of Nash City had once been a vast highway that looped around downtown Nashville. But when the Cataclysm began mages and other paranorms used it as the