Read Wayfarer: A Tale of Beauty and Madness (Tales of Beauty and Madness) for Free Online Page A

there, high on charmweed and feeling invincible.
    The long straight shot of Kelleston Avenue wasn’t the most efficient way to get to Perrault Street, but traffic had been terrible and Ruby had decided to swing out and take it. Now they’d found out
why
traffic was so snarled.
    The Semprena rocked to a stop. Stood shivering like a nervous horse, its engine uneasy as its cargo’s thump-knocking hearts. Inside the thin screen of metal and glass and moving machinery, Ellie’s skin came alive, scraped ever so lightly by a charmsilver wire-brush.
    “Holy
Mithrus
, do you
see
that?” Rube stared, her dark eyes huge and her knuckles white on the steering wheel.
    Ellie sucked in a deep, endless breath.
    This ribbon of two-lane pavement snaked down toward the industrial district, and the small shops on either side were closed up tight. Which they shouldn’t have been, since right after school’s-out was prime shopping time.
    Kelleston also ran up the slope of one of the smaller hills New Haven was built on, and the shadow hulking in the middle of the road was proof positive that it wasn’t exactly a
safe
street.
    If there was such a thing as a safe street. Lately Ellie had been suspecting that a whole lot less of the world was “safe” in any sense. If Dad could die and there could be tunnels under the city that would swallow your friends whole, what
else
could happen?
    Her hand flashed out; she almost broke the volume knob on the stereo with a savage twist, and the sudden silence was almost as stunning as the thing in the road.
    “Oh, God,” Cami moaned in the backseat, very loud in the stillness. “I’m afraid to l-l-look. Did she h-h-hit someone?”
    Oh, God. Don’t look at this.
“No,” Ellie whispered. “Cami, don’t you dare open your eyes. Ruby, turn the car around.”
    Kelleston ran parallel to zigzagging Southking Street for a while. And both of them passed dangerously near the core—the diseased heart of the city, where the Potential tangled and curdled, where anyone too poor or desperate to live anywhere else was trapped. Twist and jack gangs fought for territory inside the blight of the urban core—almost like a piece of the Waste except this was the Potential of too many people living all knotted together. Most cities had a kernel of disfigurement at their centers, left over from the gigantic convulsion of the Reeve after the Great War and just driven in deeper by the crowding of the poor.
    Any place old enough to remember the Reeve still held the scars. That was why most cities had
New
somewhere in their names.
    The thing lay slumped in the middle of the road, and no wonder the shops were bolted and barred. Thin Marus sunshine ran down the street like liquid, the inside of the car warming dangerously. Little prickles ran over Ellie, Potential flooding her nerve-rivers.
    “Is it dead?” Ruby whispered.
    “Oh M-M-M-Mithr-r-r-rus
what
 . . .” Cami’s teeth were chattering.
    “It’s not dead.” Ellie’s throat had closed to a pinhole, she had to struggle to produce a croak. The inside of her mouth was dry and slick as dusty glass. “They don’t die.”
Not until every bit of wild magic has run itself off. And if they get out to the Waste they may not ever die; who knows?
    There was a sharp sound from the back. Cami had looked.
    Ellie made a shapeless noise, too, and her mother’s ring crackled out a single blue-white spark. The old, shared urge to protect Cami must have spurred Ruby into action. The Semprena’s engine revved.
    The minotaur raised its heavy, graceless head, a blurring storm of Twisting charm-Potential swirling around it in a perpetual tornado of dust and waving fronds of wild magic. It must have been running for a while, because its flanks heaved as it poured up from its crouch, and you could barely tell it had once been human. A charmer, most likely, wandered too close to the urban core or full of hate or rage.
    Strong, bad emotions could Twist a charmer up. But it took