Free Inked by Eileen Wilks, Karen Chance, Yasmine Galenorn, Marjorie M. Liu Page A

“Potion supplies?” he asked, not missing a beat.
    “Excuse me?”
    “It’s one of the main reasons your type comes down here,” Dieter said, as the vendor started pawing through his mobile shop. “It’s either buy contraband, hire an assassin or find a good time. And you look like you could do your own killing.”
    “What about the good time?”
    The vendor suddenly thrust something into my face—something brown and scaly, with a gaping maw of teeth. I put two bullets in it before I realized it wasn’t moving. It landed on the floor a few feet away, spinning slowly on its curved shell.
    “If you ask me, you could use one,” Dieter said, swallowing. “You’re real tense.”
    “You shot it, you bought it,” the vendor added, picking up the still-smoking carcass.
    “What the hell is it?”
    “Dried armadillo. Keeps evildoers out of your home.”
    “Too late.”
    I forked over a ten rather than waste time arguing, which turned out to be a mistake. As soon as the pale concrete wall rolled back, I found myself mobbed by a line of hawkers selling the magical equivalent of snake oil. I barely noticed. Because stretching out behind them was a sight designed to make anyone’s jaw drop.
    I’d expected something along the lines of the previous drain—gloomy, smelly, depressing, dangerous. I’d expected a bunch of little dirty caves filled with huddled, desperate people. I’d expected a low ceiling, bad air and vermin. I hadn’t expected an enchanted forest.
    But that’s what spread out in front of us in a dazzling expanse. Softly glowing branches shed a delicate white light over a huge cave. They draped the booths that filled the space, crisscrossed above footpaths and climbed up stone support pillars. Some people had even stuffed twigs into colored glass jars, making lanterns that spotted their booths with watery puddles of amethyst and plum, turquoise and jade, ruby and amber.
    My brain finally supplied the name—hawthorn. I recalled a few basics—originally from Faerie, burns brightly with the application of a simple spell—but that description left a lot to be desired. The branches threw gently waving shadows on the walls, ceiling and floor, shadows with leaves and berries, neither of which the dried branches had.
    “This way!” Dieter was tugging on me, obviously embarrassed to be seen with the gawking tourist.
    I followed him through a maze of cardboard and plywood shanties. Inside, medicine women, folk doctors, astrologers, fortune-tellers and cut-rate sorcerers plied their wares. Dogs and children ran underfoot. People laughed and bartered around the shops, or called to each other across the aisles. After the deadly quiet of the drains, it felt like a madhouse.
    Dieter skirted the main aisle, heading for a narrow path where animals bleated and squealed from cages on either side. Most were nothing out of the ordinary, but the same couldn’t be said for the smell. I stopped, gagging at the most offensive odor I’d ever encountered. “Is there another route?”
    “Not unless you want to go by yourself. I’m not supposed to be here, remember?”
    My eyes were already starting to water. What the hell was that? “And the dwarves don’t come this way?”
    “ Nobody comes this way since they moved in the bonnacon.”
    He nodded at a huge shaggy animal with small curled horns pacing back and forth in a nearby pen. Unlike the other large animals, this one wasn’t in a barbed wire cage. Instead, pieces of corrugated aluminum had been nailed haphazardly to the sides of a wooden frame, creating a pen that was almost six feet high. Maybe the height was to help block the smell, but if so, it wasn’t working. I’d encountered poison gas that didn’t reek like that.
    “Do I want to know?”
    “You really don’t,” Dieter said as we edged around.
    A large black nose with a ring through it poked over the top of the pen as we passed, and a low, menacing sound issued from behind the metal. “I don’t