Guns, knives, chains, bats; rosemary, salt, willow bark, menstrual blood, bible verses. Hung with spells, weapons, prayers and ammunition, we set out upriver to ruin somebody’s night. They kept me at the back of the pack (“Hoodoo’s gotta keep to the rear,” Markfeet said, “where nobody can fuck with you. You put the whammy on them and we’ll do the rest.”), hemmed in between bruisers and bullygirls, bodysweat and the electric crackle of magic.

We crossed the bridge on Maplewood that was the edge of our territory — it’s always running water that does it, although sometimes where there isn’t anything close you get overlapping zones where things go haywire. That’s always fun. Anyway, we crossed the bridge like I said and as soon as we stepped off the other side I could feel the other whammier looking around. So that was my first job, keep us hidden.

I’m good at that, so we made most of the way there before we were actually spotted in meatspace. Nothing I can do about that, and who’d expect me to? Gunfire, swearing, then we were waded in among them and it was fists and knives and broken noses and bones instead of bullet holes and bleeding out.

I could just make the other one out on top of a watertower. That was bad — that’s a lot of stored power in those things, but those are the breaks. I kept throwing more his way, the whole badluck potluck, just trying to keep him from whammying us. I lost track of where we were or how we were doing, but eventually one of the Razor twins grabbed me and we flew back down across the river, whooping and hollering the whole way.

Markfeet had grabbed a hand for me, which was excellent luck. Not a bad night, all things considered.