Free The Walking by Bentley Little Page B

stimulating aura.
    He walked slowly past the unmarked graves, the intentionally anonymous resting places of men and women who had once been vibrant individuals, who had been no more good or evil than the general population, but who had been condemned to death because they possessed abilities that most people were too frightened to even try and understand. It was happening all over, this killing of their kind, and if it-continued, soon there would be none of them left. They would be exterminated in America just as they had been exterminated in Europe.
    He stared down at a recent grave, one that still retained a slightly raised rectangular outline. Was this to be his fate as well? Did his future lie in an unmarked grave in a cursed and segregated graveyard?
    It was what had happened to his mother. He did not even know where she was buried. No one had ever told him.
    He took off his hat, wiped the sweat from his forehead. What kind of life was this? He stared up at the cloudless sky.
    Why had he been born a witch? It was the same question he always asked himself, and as always, he had no answer.
    He put his hat back on and walked over to his horse. Taking the reins, he grabbed the horn and pulled himself onto the saddle.
    As if the graveyard had not been enough of a deterrent, there was an explicit warning posted on a leaning sign next to the road leading toward town:
    WITCHES WILL BE EXECUTED
    William stopped the horse, looked at the sign, then glanced ahead, but the ramshackle huts that marked the outskirts of the settlement several miles down the road were obscured by watery heat waves stretching across the length of the plain.
    He wondered how long the sign had been in place, how many had ignored its warning, its promise, and continued on regardless. What they needed, he thought, was someplace of their own, land in which they were in charge and they made the rules, somewhere away from everything else where they could live in peace and be free from persecution.
    It sounded like a fantasy, a dream, but he'd heard that the Mormons were making for themselves just such a place, that their prophet had led them across the desert sands to a special spot their God had picked out for-them, a place where they could live among their own kind and be free to practice their own ways. His people could do the same. Such an idea was not inconceivable.
    But they were so hard to find these days. The ones who had not been killed had gone into hiding, fleeing like himself into the wilderness or keeping secret their true natures amid the normal residents of their communities. He looked again at the sign-WITCHES WILL BE EXECUTED
    --then bade his horse turn around. He was getting no concrete feelings from up ahead, but the graveyard and
    the sign were warning enough, and even without a definite reading he could tell that this was one town he did not want to visit.
    He would return to the foothills and then travel south through them until he was far enough away from this nameless community to once again head west. He would trade his pelts elsewhere, in a bigger settlement, one where he would be less likely to be noticed.
    Just in case, he cloaked himself in a protective spell, then pushed his horse into galloping back toward the hills.
    Now
    Muzak carols over hard-to-hear speakers. Decorations that were nothing more than products sold inside the stores they adorned. A skinny Hispanic Santa Claus kids could meet only if their parents paid to have their picture taken with him.
    Miles stood unmoving in the center of the jostling crowd. Christmas seemed cheap and depressingly pointless to him this year, its practitioners yuppified and smugly materialistic. Ordinarily, he rejoiced in the trappings of the season, but all of the joy had gone out of it for him. It reminded him of Halloween, a grassroots celebration that had been turned into a buying contest by the newly affluent.
    He was at the mall to purchase presents, but he realized that he didn't really