KHURZOG
The Aurora Rail groaned under me like an old beast forced to keep running. Dwarvish-built — half steam, half sun-charge — its heart ran on bottled sunlight sealed in brass plates under the chassis. Every pulse of that arc-current crawled through the bones of the train, through my boots, through my skull. I could feel it in my tusks.
I hadn’t slept in two days. Orcs could go longer than humans, but not when something inside them hummed wrong. The half-bond never went quiet. Always there, dull and aching, as if a missing limb trying to twitch.
The car smelled of steel, ozone, and too many people sweating under coats. Humans always said orcs smelled bad, but they stank of fear and cheap soap — all the same rot, just different names for it.
I sat in the corner seat, shoulders hunched so I wouldn’t scrape the wall. Hat pulled low, coat collar up. A human kid across the aisle stared at me until his mother caught on and pulled him close. Not scared — embarrassed. Like seeing me made her realize monsters still rode the same trains as them.
Didn’t bother me. I’d been a lesson since I was old enough to swing a fist.
Under my sleeve, the golden ribbon pressed against my wrist. Frayed now. Softened by sweat. I kept it wrapped tight — what was left of my witch. My fingers found it without thinking. Some men used prayer beads. I had this. A reminder. A promise. A punishment.
I caught my reflection in the window — amber eyes dulled, tusks chipped, skin gone a shade too pale under the gaslight. I even thought I saw a few gray strands in my hair. Looked like a stranger wearing my face.
The transfer wasn’t temporary. The Bureau made that clear. Chicago’s done with me, and I’m done with it — at least officially. If I set foot there again, the mob’s leftovers would finish me. After all, I took down their boss.
Still, I keep telling myself I’ll find a way. A weekend. A holiday. Some excuse to slip back west. Check one more name, one more alley, one more rumor.
Been saying that for half a year.
Every favor called in. Every contact burned. Even Ironhide kin stopped answering. Not because they turned their backs — they got tired of watching me chase smoke.
They told me, “She’s not orc. Not one of us. Let her go.”
They don’t understand. I can’t.
And I can’t make it public, either. An orc bonded to a human? That’s not a story you let out of your mouth. That’s a death sentence, or worse — a scandal.
So, I keep my head down. Keep the ribbon hidden. Pretend the ache in my chest is just bad sleep and bad trains.
I needed to move. Stretch. Get the ache out of my bones.
The ceilings on trains never fit an orc; all other species were shorter, so why bother? I had to duck through the doors, shoulders scraping the frame. The air between cars was colder, cleaner. Smelled of machine oil instead of people.
The Relic Engine sat in the middle car — the dwarves called it the heart of the line. Brass ribs, sigils etched in rings that glowed steady with stone-heat. The engine hummed low and even, a heartbeat that felt almost alive.
A dwarvish engineer was bent over the controls, goggles fogged, beard singed at the tips. He glanced up when I passed, gave me a small nod.
I stopped. Couldn’t help it. The hum of the glyphs crawled through the floor, up my legs, into my spine. Every pulse hit the same rhythm as the half-bond, off by just enough to make my teeth ache. It was comfort and torture at the same time.
The dwarf muttered without looking up. “Good sound, that. Still holds the old heat.”
I grunted. He was right. Machines like this had memory. They remembered their makers. They just didn’t talk about it.
For a second, I caught myself wondering how she would’ve looked at a thing like this.
Not that I knew her well enough to guess. One night wasn’t knowing.
But I could see it in my head anyway — the way she might tilt her chin, eyes wide, curious when she should’ve been cautious. The kind of woman who’d touch a live glyph just to feel its warmth.
She’d do it without thinking. I’d have to tell her not to.
Truth was, I didn’t know her. Not her laugh, not her habits, not what she dreamed about when she wasn’t pretending to be someone else. I’d spent months watching her work behind a tray, and one night undoing her — that was all.
Didn’t matter. Zhak’orr didn’t lie. The pull meant something real, even if I didn’t understand it yet.
I knew enough: she was too soft for the world we lived in.
If she was out there, she needed someone watching her back.
And whether she knew it or not, that someone was me.
I closed my eyes until her face stopped flickering behind them. Then I kept walking.
The hum of the train dropped to a lower note as the land flattened out, fields giving way to factory stacks and smoke. The windows caught the last of the light — a thin strip of sun bleeding over steel and soot. Everything out there looked tarnished, like the world had forgotten how to shine.
The air changed first. You could feel it through the glass — thicker, heavier, charged. City air. It wasn’t clean, but it was alive. The magic here always was.
The Aurora slid into the dwarvish tunnel under the Hudson.
Dark. Total for a few breaths. The sound shifted — muffled thunder, rails screaming metal against metal. The walls outside were carved with runes, faint green veins pulsing along the stone. Dwarvish craft. Kept the river from eating us alive.
The hum in the car deepened. Every time those glyphs flared, the light hit my tusks, and the ache behind them grew worse. The half-bond didn’t like the pull of this place. The city’s pulse hit wrong, too fast, too strong.
I could taste it — hot metal and ozone, the tang of arc discharge and sun-charge bleeding together.
New York.
Full of noise even before you heard a single sound.
My skin buzzed. My pulse doubled. For a second I could swear I felt her again — the echo of her magic brushing the edge of my senses.
Then the dark broke.
The train burst into the Grand Central vaults — glass, brass, and light everywhere. The dwarves had built it as a temple to their tech-magic, and the humans filled it like a hive. Reflected sunlight poured through mirrored panels overhead, scattering in gold and green shards across the floor. The air shimmered, warm from stored sun-charge.
People were already moving before the brakes finished whining.
Sound hit first when I stepped off — heels, shoes, screeching of baggage-cart wheels. Echoed against the marble, layered with chatter and the hiss of arc lamps. Then the smell — perfume, oil, iron, roasted chestnuts, sweat. All of it undercut by the metallic scent of overworked magic.
Elves glided through the crowd as if they owned it. Dwarves trudged in knots, toolpacks clanking. Humans swarmed everywhere — coats, hats, cheap laughter. A couple of orcs worked as porters, heads down, uniforms pressed.
Eyes followed me the second I stepped clear of the train. They always did. Too tall, too scarred, too green. Even dressed in human fashion, I looked like something people crossed the street to avoid.
A human clerk froze halfway across the concourse. He looked away too quick.
I’d been stared at for two centuries. You stop noticing after the first fifty years.
Then it hit — faint, sharp, familiar.
Soap. Lemon. A spark of magic under it, like heat before lightning.
Her.
My chest went tight before my head could stop it. I turned, scanning faces — hats, coats, strangers, strangers. Nothing.
Memory playing tricks again.
Hope stabbed sharper than any blade — stupid, impossible hope.
I dragged a breath through my nose until the scent faded. Told myself the same lie I’d told a hundred times: she’s gone. She ran from you, and she won’t just show again out of thin air.
I adjusted my coat, kept moving. No point in standing in the middle of the station like a fool sniffing at shadows.
The big clock under the glass dome read twelve-thirty-seven.
I was late.
Orders had been stamped three days ago — Report to the Arcane Affairs Division, New York City, effective immediately.
No hotel. No stopover. Just a train ticket and a “don’t get killed.”
They said they were saving my life, pulling me out of Chicago when I’m still alive. Truth was, they just wanted me gone. Too many headlines, too many bodies.
Didn’t matter. I didn’t want to leave. Still didn’t.
My tail twitched under the coat, impatient. I swore under my breath — the sound earned me a few more looks.
I shifted the suitcase in my hand. Everything I owned fit inside — shirts, revolver, Bureau badge, the torn scrap of a flapper dress.
The ribbon burned against my wrist, it knew I was lying to myself.
I stared up at the clock again. Thought about how long it’d take to walk back to Chicago if I started right then.
“Get a grip,” I muttered.
I wasn’t going back. Not now. Maybe not ever.
But I’d still find her. One way or another.
And until then, New York would just have to live with me.
The moment I stepped outside, the city hit me like a fist.
The cold had teeth. Sharp ones. Wind knifed between buildings. Snow slush piled up along the curbs, mixed with soot and arc-ash. The stuff crunched under my boots, black and gray with streaks of green glow where the arc-grids bled into the streets.
Streetcars sparked along the rails, their poles dragging against overhead arc-lines. Green light spat from contact points every few seconds, lighting up puddles and alley mouths like lightning strikes. The cars themselves were boxy, loud, and crowded — and already late, if the passengers’ faces meant anything.
Elvish sedans drifted by — smooth, sleek, silent. Machines that ran on bottled sunlight and half a lie. You never heard them coming, just caught the shimmer off their chrome and the stink of spell-glass when they passed. They had better places to be, obviously.
Dwarves worked the lamp posts, clustered at intervals like knots in the bloodline of the city. Their heads bowed over control panels leaking light. The lamps above them buzzed and flared — sun-charge one moment, flickering gas the next. Nothing stable. Nothing perfect. Just enough to keep the dark at bay.
And the voices.
Cabbies yelling across lanes. Horns blaring. A pair of elvish bankers cursing out a human girl for stepping too slow. A drunken couple dancing to a phonograph on the corner, coatless in the cold.
And the newsboys.
“WITCH MURDERED IN HELL’S KITCHEN!”
“Council says coincidence — local say curse!”
“Two bodies in two weeks — spellwork or sabotage?”
My jaw tightened.
I didn’t come here to work murders. I run from being murdered myself.
But trouble didn’t care what I wanted.
I glanced up. Neon signs lined the buildings across the avenue — half of them gas-lit, the others sputtering on arc-wires and sun-batteries. The sky above was losing its color fast, caught between dusk and the glow of the solar grids. Clouds glimmered faint green from the reflection.
A group of human girls passed in a cloud of perfume and fur collars, their laughter bouncing off the stone. One of them caught my eye — just a glance. Long lashes, red lips, too much blush. She smiled, then realized what she was looking at. Her face dropped.
“Don’t stare, Mabel,” one hissed.
“He’s an orc, not a monster,” another muttered. Quieter.
“He has a tail!” one giggled behind her hand.
I kept walking. Hat low. Coat tighter.
The ribbon burned warm under the sleeve again. It had a way of doing that when I started thinking too much.
I muttered, “Get through to the first vacation. Do the job. Then go back.”
I’d said it enough times to make it feel like a plan.
Even if it wasn’t.
***
The cab turn the corner.
Midtown Belt. No-man’s-land. Too uptown for the good humans. Too south for the Hearth. The kind of place no one really claimed, which meant it attracted everyone who didn’t fit right.
Elves in stiff suits, humans in tired coats, orcs working behind glass counters. No one smiled here.
My cabbie — big orc — had kept glancing at me in the rearview mirror ever since I told him the address.
“Funny,” he’d said as we turned off Fifth. “Don’t get a lotta us asking to come here.”
His voice had a gravel roll to it, deep, and a little amused. He liked hearing himself think out loud.
I didn’t respond.
He snorted, unfazed. “Thought you’d be heading north. Hearthside. You got the build for it. Thought maybe you were one of Badrukk’s boys or something.”
I kept my eyes on the passing city. “No clan.”
He grunted. “Huh. Rare one, that. You solo, or just ashamed?”
I let the silence answer.
We turned a corner, and he spotted the precinct.
His smile twitched. Melted at the edges.
He went quiet for a second. “Ah. You’re Bureau.”
He shook his head and muttered low — more to himself than to me. “Damn. Thought maybe you were just rough trade. Didn’t think you were one of the ones that clean the blood up after.”
He pulled up to the curb. Didn’t ask for a tip. Didn’t say goodbye.
I got out without looking back.
The precinct loomed.
Black marble front, five stories, taller than any station I ever saw. Brass-framed windows lit from within. Sigils glowed faint along the seams in the stone, carved by dwarven hands, probably older than half the buildings around it. The place didn’t match the rest of the block — too proud, too solid. Everything else looked like it was built around it and gave up trying to keep up.
It wasn’t wide. Just tall. Heavy.
The sign over the main door read:
13th Precinct — Arcane Affairs Division.
Letters etched in ironwood and inlaid with orcish stonework. Someone spent money here. Probably not the city. Maybe the Council. Maybe somebody who wanted to pretend this part of town was under control.
The stairs up to the lobby weren’t long, but they felt steep. My knees didn’t like it after the train, and my tail was already lashing under the coat. I took the steps slow. No reason to look rushed. I was late already. Might as well look deliberate.
The doors swung open on hinges that didn’t squeak — dwarven design again. Of course. This whole place reeked of mixed blood and politics.
Lobby floors were polished obsidian tile, veined with pale green streaks like dried sap. Light came from overhead glyphs. The place wasn’t warm, but it was clean and dry.
I stepped inside. The door closed behind me with a soft click.
And just like that, I was here.
I set my suitcase down, shook the ache from my fingers. My tusks still throbbed. My jaw was tight. And the ribbon around my wrist pulsed.
The front desk was manned by an orc woman — older, broad-shouldered, gray streaks in her braids, tusks polished.
Grashira — her nameplate said.
Her eyes found me before the door even shut.
She sniffed once. Slight tilt of her head. Her nose twitched.
Then she asked, “You lost someone?”
I paused. Not the question I expected.
“Transfer,” I said instead. “Need to see the captain.”
She gave a low grunt. Amused.
“You don’t need Monroe.” Her voice had the rasp of a smoker and the weight of a mother who’d raised five sons and fought off six husbands. “You want Chief Inspector Vance. Fifth floor. End of the hall, left of the war board.”
She looked me up and down, creased her forehead, like a mother worried about her child.
Her voice softened, just a hair. “If you haven’t got quarters yet… I know someone in Harlem. Clean place. Clan-owned. You’ll be looked after.”
I nodded once. “Thanks.”
She nodded back, then went back to her papers as if nothing had happened.