Prologue
Detective Patrick Myles wasn’t an emotional man. But this crime was different. With this crime, all he felt was emotion – and that emotion was confusion.
Myles had never gotten an A in Science, but he knew there wasn’t something in the dry outer-Brisbane air that could cause a 12-year-old girl to disappear into it.
He lifted his coffee cup from the damp case papers beneath it and sipped, grimaced, then started rifling through the notes and print-outs. He could hardly read the notes, because whoever had taken them had obviously gotten their handwriting lessons from chickens’ toenails, but the midget mass of the file told a clear tale.
They didn’t know a damn thing. And they had a snowball’s chance of getting any new information.
“Uuugh.” Myles groaned and stretched his arms over his head. A corner of shiny paper stuck out from under his coffee where he’d placed it on the desk.
“Damn,” he swore. He pulled the photo out and tried to wipe off the ring of wet made by the base of the mug. It wasn’t even their photo; the force was supposed to return all original photos to the owner. He raised the picture to eye level and stared blankly at the figure in it.
A blonde girl with a shy grin looked out past the photographer with dark blue eyes, trying to contain her laughter at something beyond the border. Her long braid draped over her shoulder and past the bottom of the shot, looking dirty with the brown that perhaps excluded her from being a true blonde. This was who they were trying to find. Samantha Stizagailii. Myles turned the picture over to reveal the blank back for perhaps the twelfth time that day, then flipped it around again, searching the reluctantly laughing eyes of the victim. Not for the first time, he wondered, Samantha Stizagailii… where are you?
Balema Chapter 1 – Captured
Aphrodite was walking through the horse-shoe shaped street on which the hunters’ huts and lodges were stationed, the useful parts of a dead doe slung over one shoulder. She flicked a frock of brilliant red hair – red as blood – absently out of her vision, and tucked it behind one ear. As always, it refused to stay there, and flopped back into place to complete the shoulder-length mane. She glared at it and growled.
Her feet pushed up puffs of dirt as she skipped from one side of the deep tire-tracks made in the rough road to the other. Her calves hurt from so much walking, and carrying a heavy load at that, but she was pulled onwards by the thought of a simple dinner and a treat of mint leaves she knew her Uncle would have bought for her, as he did every hunting trip. Turning the last corner in the lane, she sighted a tall, blonde elf fixing a hole rendered in the palm-leaf roof of a pathetic little hut.
“Andrew!” she called, pleased. “It’s about time!”
“It’s not like you live here enough to care,” Andrew shot back.
“Well, it was faulty. Annoying. Savvy? And I don’t want my foster-uncle being rained out.”
“It would be just as wet outside!” Andrew exclaimed.
Aphrodite lifted an eyebrow at him. Andrew tilted his current tool thoughtfully.
“I see your point.”
Blonde, socially unchallenged and unsociably awkward. That was her uncle Andrew.
Aphrodite set the bag containing the deer meat down on a table standing next to the hut, and wiped her hands on the back of her pant legs, trying to figure out what it was that was bugging her, and the more she thought about it, the more it was evident there was something.
She looked over the hut again. An animal-hide canvas with rips for windows was stretched over an oak frame, which was in turn covering walls made of stacked mortal inventions reinforced with hard, dry mud. The screens glinted like dozens of eyes in the dim light of the afternoon.
With a sigh of annoyance at the nagging feeling that something was wrong, she started to make her way to the doorway of the hut when Andrew jumped from the roof to bar her way. Aphrodite stopped and looked at him, holding onto her patience by the fingertips.
“Uh – don’t yell, scream or shout.” he cautioned, and stepped to the side. Aphrodite raised a warning eyebrow and pushed past him. When she stepped into the living room, she gasped.
On a large armchair lay, unmistakably, a mortal – someone from another world, the world called Earth. But not any normal mortal.
Aphrodite yelped and jumped back into the hallway, peering through the doorway with hands clenched over the doorframe.
“Are you mad?” She shouted, spinning to face Andrew. She peered back into the living room. Andrew shoved a mug of strong-smelling tea in her face, but she smacked it away. She grabbed it again as an afterthought. “Darn it, Andrew!”
She blew on the cup testily, eyeing the mortal and testing her fingering on the wooden exterior of her ‘handcuffs’. Were those – were those cat ears? Aphrodite’s eyes widened.
“Aphrodite, we have to take her to Portall. You know this. You know this.”
“Yes, I know it just fine.” she whispered. “Just fine, thank you.”
Aphrodite sighed, and the two looked at each other.
The mortal stirred.
Samantha Stizagailii woke from a deep sleep, though she didn’t remember dozing off. A smell of dead cane toads was so strong she gagged. She lifted her head, and after the smell, the next thing she noticed was the size of the junkyard she was in. It went from horizon to horizon, with what might have been a fence in the far distance to her left and right. A clear, pure blue sky stretched out above.
Tufts of grass and weeds stuck out from between jumbled piles. A grandfather’s clock, a bookcase with encyclopaedias worth a fortune, and other things that, apart from their grubbiness and lack of care, were in perfect condition. She saw a van on its side, the door pulled open, and mouldy cardboard packaging featuring a grinning pineapple. A pool slide, with words written on the fibreglass that read:
EXIT GATE + MORTAL DOCUMENTATION ->
Suddenly, Sam knew she wasn’t on Earth anymore. She stumbled upwards and turned three hundred and sixty degrees, panic rising.
A figure was two meters away walking through the junkyard towards her. The figure, Sam thought, and wondered immediately afterwards what had brought this thought on.
“Samantha,” said a feminine voice. “I must tell you it’s an honour.”
The face of the person was covered by the shadows made by a wide-brimmed straw hat. A pair of red lips made a curved line that bared no teeth, but that was all she saw of the face. The woman wore a long-sleeved, loose shirt tied at the waist and made of some light fabric above pants skinny enough to be full-length leggings. Her hair was dark violet, shifting in the gusts of decay-smelling air. She looked no older than seventeen.
Sam hadn’t laid eyes on the woman for more than a second before she tumbled towards the ground from sudden fatigue. The woman swooped and caught her, laying Sam across her lap and bent knees.
“Sleep,” the figure commanded, with a faint twisting of the lips. “I can not do it with you awake. Sleep, Samantha.”
And sleep Sam did.
“Now,” the figure whispered. “Change.”
Sam flexed in her sleep, reaching for the sky, brow furrowed. Her fingernails changed to curved, black claws and dug themselves into new slits on her fingertips. Her hair rippled and turned black, while furry black cat ears were made of her hairless human ones. Sam’s new black cat tail curled around one leg as she relaxed. The unknown woman let her own weight fall backwards, and sat on the junkyard with legs out-stretched under Sam.
“Oh, Samantha,” Encarata mused. She lowered her head to look at the girl’s face, the shadows from her hat covering all but her chin. “You will get used to it.”
Sam growled softly and her ear flicked, as if in contradiction. Encarata just grinned with perfect, white teeth. She stayed with the girl for a while, studying the face of the ‘mortal’. Her shirt billowed in the faint wind, and she turned her face towards the cool breeze. Finally, she sighed, lifted the girl off her with strong arms and laid her down carefully on a patch of ground clear of junk and wreckage. Before long, her form was swallowed by one of the many swarms of flies floating across the junkyard. They swirled around her, and when they lifted, the goddess had disappeared.
Love, Durrs
