Must Love Hellhounds

and headed out the door, before somebody decided to stop me.
     
     
     
    In our age, a woman could have a gasoline car, which worked only during tech, or a vehicle that ran on charged water, which worked only during magic. My Jeep was Order issue and equipped with an electric engine and a magic one, so it functioned during both tech and magic. Unfortunately, it didn’t function very well.
    The engine started on the fourth try. I hopped in and steered out of the parking lot, joining a steady stream of riders and carts heading west. Mine was the only hoof-free transport on the street. The rest consisted of horses, mules, donkeys, and oxen.
    The city lay in ruins. Heaps of dusty rubble and small mountains of broken glass marked the locations of once stately office buildings, ground to dust by magic’s relentless jaws. Atlanta grew around them. New apartment buildings, built by hand rather than machine, sprouted atop the carcasses of the old ones. Stone and wood bridges spanned the gaping drops of crumbled overpasses. Small stalls and open markets replaced Wal-Mart and Kroger. The old Atlanta might have fallen like the trunk of a great tree struck by lightning, but its roots were too strong to die.
    I liked the city. I wasn’t born here, nor did I come to Atlanta by choice, but now the city was my territory. I had walked its streets, sampled its scents, and listened to it breathe. Atlanta wasn’t sure about me. It tried to kill me every now and then, but I was confident we’d come to an understanding eventually.
    Forty minutes later I turned off the main road on James Jackson Parkway and followed it around the bend to Buzzard’s Highway. When magic was up, it flooded deep in this part of the city. Tall trees flanked the road, huge pines and dogwoods, still green despite the impending October. A twisted metal sign slid by: the white letters spelling out SOUTH COBB DRIVE, all but covered by BUZZARD scrawled in black paint. Pale wind chimes, made of turkey vulture skulls and string, hung from the tree limbs overshadowing the road. A cheerful welcome. Not quite sure what they were trying to tell me. My goodness, could it be some sort of a warning?
    My Jeep slid onto an old bridge over the Chattahoochee River. The old maps claimed that heading north would bring me into Smyrna and turning southwest would deliver me to Mableton, but neither any longer existed.
    I crossed the bridge and pulled over to the side of the road. A vast network of ravines lay before me. Narrow, twisted, some a hundred yards deep, although most were shallow, they tangled together and veered apart, like tunnels of a giant dirt-eating termite. Here and there remnants of the old buildings perched, halfway down the slopes, flanked by sickly brush. A highway cut through the ravines, running atop the cliff tops, interrupted with wooden patches of bridges. Above it all, black-winged vultures glided on the aerial currents.
    The locals called it the Scratches, because from above the place looked like a giant buzzard had scratched in the dirt. The Scratches came into being after the very first flare, when the magic returned to the world in a three-day wave of disasters and death. With every magic wave, the ravines grew a little deeper.
    Far to the south, the Scratches united into a gorge that eventually became Honeycomb Gap, another hellish magic spot. The highway itself served as the favorite drag-racing spot for idiot juvenile delinquents. Somewhere in this mess of soil and air was my green five, the shapeshifter in distress. Hopefully still alive and nursing a singed tail.
    Atlanta housed one of the largest shapeshifter societies in the country. The Pack, as it was known, counted over fifteen hundred members, subdivided into seven clans according to their animal forms. An alpha couple ruled each clan. The fourteen alphas made Pack Council, presided over by Curran, the Beast Lord of Atlanta. Curran wielded unbelievable power and ultimate authority. He was the Alpha.
    To understand the Pack, one had to understand the shapeshifters. Caught on the crossroads between animal and human, they could give in to either one. Those who surrendered to the animal side began the catastrophic descent into delirium. They reveled in perversion and cruelty and gorged themselves on human flesh, raping and murdering until people like me put them down like rabid dogs. They were called loups, and they were killed as soon as they were discovered.
    To remain human, a