The neon sign buzzing outside the “Broken Spoke” flickered like a dying firefly, casting an erratic red glare across the cracked asphalt. South Mississippi in August wasn’t just hot; it was a physical weight. The humidity hung in the air like a wet wool blanket, thick enough to drown in.
I sat at the sticky mahogany bar, nursing a lukewarm bottle of something that tasted vaguely like hops and disappointment.
“This place is a health hazard,” Elvis announced.
He drifted straight down through the ceiling tiles, his translucent, sequined Vegas-era jumpsuit glowing faintly in the dim tavern light. He paused, inspecting a suspicious, dark stain on the floorboards next to my boot. “I’m a ghost, and even I think I might catch something in here. Tetanus, probably. Or despair.”
“It has character,” I muttered, not looking away from the grimy mirror behind the liquor bottles. I kept my voice low. Talking to thin air was a surefire way to clear the stools next to you, which was actually a tactical advantage when you just wanted to be left alone.
I was ninety-five years old, looked forty, and felt every single one of those hard miles in my bones. Being the Marshal of the East meant my jurisdiction stretched from the Atlantic all the way to this muddy river. It was a lot of ground to cover for one Battle Mage, especially one whose primary survival tactic was a two-second precognitive warning and a stubborn refusal to die.
The swinging wooden doors at the front of the bar blew open. A local guy in a sweat-stained trucker hat stumbled in. His eyes were wide, white all the way around the pupils, and he was gasping for air like a landed catfish.
“Hey!” the guy wheezed, leaning heavily against a wooden support pillar. “Give me a shot. Something strong. I just saw it. I swear to God, I just saw the Skunk Ape.”
The bartender, a weary-looking woman drying a pint glass with a rag that had seen better decades, didn’t even blink. “Take a breath, Earl. You’ve been drinking moonshine out past the logging road again?”
“I ain’t drunk!” Earl insisted, slamming a trembling hand on a table. “It was massive. Ten feet tall, easy. Hunched over, hairy as a bear, and fast. Snatched a wild hog right out of the brush and snapped its neck like a twig. And the smell... God, the smell.”
I set my beer down. “What did it smell like?” I asked, my voice carrying easily over the muted country music playing from the jukebox.
Earl turned to me, wiping a mix of sweat and grime from his forehead. “Like an open sewer. Rotting meat and stagnant swamp water. It made my eyes water from fifty yards away.”
“Great,” Elvis sighed, hovering over my right shoulder. “He didn’t see Bigfoot, Marshal.”
“I know,” I murmured.
Missing pets and strange sightings were usually the work of ghouls or scavengers crossing the veil. But that specific stench—stagnant water and rotting meat—belonged to something much worse. Trolls.
They were supposed to stay up North. The Canadian border was their usual stomping ground, where the cold kept them sluggish and manageable. But every few decades, a rogue pack would wander South looking for new territory, drawn by the heat and the abundance of easy prey. The locals always rationalized it away. Bigfoot. Skunk Ape. A really big bear. Mortals have an incredible capacity for ignoring the monsters living right under their noses.
I slid off the barstool and flipped my warded leather bomber jacket open just enough for a silver badge to catch the neon light.
You would be amazed at how people respond to it. Any kind of authority means they don’t have to worry, or at least be responsible.
“Earl,” I said, projecting the kind of calm authority that comes from a lifetime of enforcing magical law. “Show me exactly where you saw it.”
We took my battered Ford F-150 out to the edge of the county. The pavement gave way to gravel, and the gravel eventually dissolved into a rutted dirt track cutting deep into the Mississippi pines.
I left Earl locked in the cab of the truck with strict instructions to hide under the dashboard if anything larger than a squirrel bumped the fender.
“I hate the woods,” Elvis complained as we trudged past the tree line. The moonlight barely penetrated the dense canopy of Spanish moss and ancient oaks. “Bugs don’t bite me anymore, but it’s the principle of the thing.”
“Keep your eyes peeled,. Trolls are ambush predators.”
I let my magical senses flare outward, feeling for the greasy, heavy signature of Troll magic. The air grew thick with ozone and decay. I unholstered my .45. The warded silver rounds packed inside wouldn’t kill a Troll—their hide was too thick and their earth-magic too regenerative—but the kinetic impact could buy me a precious second or two.
I didn’t have a wand. The Judge trained his Marshals to cast with our minds and our hands. It required brute willpower and a direct line to your core emotions. For me, that meant tapping into a well of simmering, cynical rage.
The stench hit me like a physical wall of heat. We stepped into a small clearing near a stagnant creek bed.
It wasn’t just one Troll. It was two.
They were hulking monstrosities of knotted muscle, matted hair, and dirt-encrusted tusks, huddled over the shredded remains of a wild boar. They didn’t look like the cute, gem-bellied toys from the eighties. They looked like walking nightmares.
I pulled the heat from my blood, channeling my will down my left arm. The air around my hand warped with thermal distortion.
“Hey, ugly,” I barked.
Both Trolls snapped their massive heads toward me. Their eyes burned with a feral, yellow malice.
My precog flared, a sharp spike of ice at the base of my skull. Two seconds.
I dropped to one knee just as the larger Troll launched itself across the clearing with terrifying, impossible speed. Its massive, clawed hand swiped through the space where my head had been a fraction of a second earlier, shattering the trunk of a pine tree like a toothpick.
“Ralph!” I shouted, throwing my left hand forward.
I hit the leaping Troll point-blank in the face with a localized nausea hex. It’s low magic, dirty and undignified, but effective. The Troll’s eyes crossed mid-air. It hit the dirt at my feet and immediately began violently vomiting black, foul-smelling ichor.
“Behind you!” Elvis screamed.
The second Troll flanked me, rushing in on all fours like a silverback gorilla. It unhinged its jaw, lunging for my throat.
I didn’t have time for a complex incantation. I pivoted, brought the Colt up, and emptied three rounds into its chest. The warded bullets exploded with bright flashes of silver light, staggering the beast, but it didn’t fall. It backhanded me.
The blow caught me in the chest, lifting me clean off my feet and throwing me twenty yards through the air. I crashed through a wall of briars and slammed into an oak tree.
My ribs screamed in protest. I tasted copper.
The Troll roared and charged to finish the job.
I thought about the empty side of my bed. I thought about the endless, cold trails I’d chased trying to find my missing wife. I took all that hollow, agonizing grief, wrapped it in pure rage, and shoved it into the palms of my hands.
“Burn,” I whispered.
I thrust both hands forward. A concentrated bolt of blue-white lightning erupted from my fingertips. The electrical discharge cracked like a cannon shot, illuminating the woods in blinding daylight.
The lightning caught the charging Troll dead center. The raw elemental force blew a hole the size of a watermelon straight through its chest. The creature’s momentum carried it forward, tumbling end-over-end until it collapsed into a smoking, charred heap at my boots.
I pushed myself up, wincing as my warded jacket smoked from the impact. The first Troll was still on its hands and knees, recovering from the hex.
It looked at its dead companion, then looked at me. The blue lightning was still arcing between my fingers, humming with lethal intent. The Troll made a very fast, very primal calculation, turned on its heel, and crashed away into the deep swamp, fleeing for its life.
Silence rushed back into the woods, broken only by the crackle of burning brush.
“Well,” Elvis said, floating down to inspect the smoldering corpse. “That escalated quickly.”
I spat a glob of blood onto the pine needles and holstered my gun. “Call the cleanup crew, Elvis. Tell them we’ve got a Code Three near the border.”
“What about the one that got away?”
“He’s running North,” I muttered, turning back toward the dirt road and my waiting truck. “He knows what lives down here now. He won’t be back.”
Good old Marshall