Ruby and Vida haunt a dry riverbed near the trailer park where they live, pretending to be magical beings, until a deadly encounter with an actual witch changes everything. Now magic is no longer a game of pretend, it's the only thing that will keep them alive. But first they have to find it.

This reprinted short story takes place in Santo del Vado Viejo, the setting of de Lint's acclaimed novels The Painted Boy and The Mystery of Grace.

Yirah Green has been working in a hidden arroyo on the Kikimi rez, secretly rebuilding an old dirt bike that belonged to her late Uncle Jimmy. Her best friend, Santana Corn Eyes, knows about the project, as does a ghost who visits her, silently urging her on. Yirah says the spirit is that of her departed uncle, but Santana is worried. Why would a ghost be crossing over to this world? Maybe it's not such a good idea to get a a dead man's motorbike running again. And if Yirah does succeed, will she be patient enough to learn how to safely handle it?

Set in the Painted Hills near Santo del Vado Viejo, this original short story is loosely connected to de Lint's acclaimed novel, The Wind in His Heart.

Young Thomas Corn Eyes sees into the otherworld, but all he wants to do is get off the rez. Steve Cole escaped from his rock star life to disappear into the desert and mountains. Fifteen-year-old barrio kid Sadie Higgins has been discarded once too often. Blogger Leah Hardin needs to leave Newford, come to terms with the loss of her best friend, and actually engage with her life. When these lives collide in the Hierro Maderas Mountains, they must struggle to escape their messy pasts and find a way to carve a future for themselves.

They don’t just have to learn how to survive. They have to learn how to fly.

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In this first collection of Newford stories, you can immerse yourself in the gritty fictional city—as much a character as Jilly who paints fey wonders, fiddle player Geordie seeking his stolen beloved, the conjure man and his Tree of Tales, or Paperjack revealing fortunes. Meet Gemmins who live in abandoned cars and Katrina, a mermaid so entranced by love that she’s left the cold dark water to walk in the moonlight. Visit the music clubs, the waterfront, and the alleyways where myths and magic spill into the modern world.

She’d been underlake when the sound of his voice drew her up from the cold and the dark, up into the moonlight, bobbing in the white-capped waves; listening, swallowing that golden sound of strings and voice, and he is so handsome and all alone on the shore.

This modern take on Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid reveals the aching beauty and peril of falling in love. A finalist for the 1992 World Fantasy Award, this novella was originally published as a limited edition chapbook by Axolotl Press (1991), and later appeared in de Lint's acclaimed first Newford collection, Dreams Underfoot (1993).

This short story related to The Cats of Tanglewood Forest features Lillian at 17 years old. Her discovery of a long-lost paint box in the forest, her love of making art, her very first kiss, and the draw of a magical world all combine in this bittersweet tale about having to make a difficult choice.

First published in The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest, edited by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling (Viking, 2002).

Nina and her cousin Ash don’t get along, but now have to share a room. Plagued by nightly dreams about becoming an animal, Nina fears that Ash, who dabbles in the occult, is responsible. More terrifying still, the nightmares start to invade Nina’s waking hours. But an ancient evil has marked one of them, and if either is going to survive they’ll have to stand united against the greater threat.

In Jilly’s journey from being the junkie street kid she was, to the cheerful character we know from later Newford tales, she navigates the perils of loyalty to old friends versus new ones. Facing hard choices, Jilly must decide whether she's worthy of genuine friendship, promises, and life itself.

Cat Midhir lives in a land of dreams, crossing nightly over the borders of sleep into a magic realm. A land where gnomes hide among standing stones and shelties dwell beneath the waves, where the harper Kothlen tells tales of the ancient days and the antlered Mynfel walks by moonlight…

When Cat wakes she weaves stories around the Otherworld. Her books are labelled as fantasy, but Mynfel's domain deems more real to her than the humdrum streets of the city.

Until a thief comes stalking—and steals Cat's dreams away…

Svaha means "the time between seeing the lightning and hearing the thunder—a waiting for promises to be fulfilled."

In 2094, protective technology shields Native Enclaves from an outer world devastated by pollution and corruption. Beyond those Enclaves, in the ruins between cities, a Native flyer has been downed and a chip encoded with vital secrets is missing. It's up to Gahzee to leave the Enclave and dare the deadlands to find it—walking the line between Dreamtime and Realtime, bringing his people's ancient magic and new science to bear on the poisoned world of tomorrow. Bringing hope, perhaps, for a new dawn…

Cover art by Donna Gordon.

Not far from the city there is an ancient wood, forgotten by the modern world, where Mystery walks in the moonlight. He wears the shape of a stag, or a goat, or a horned man wearing a cloak of leaves. He is summoned by the music of the pipes or a fire of bones on Midsummer's Evening. He is chased by the hunt and shadowed by the wild girl.

Greenmantle is not only a gripping thriller but also an introduction to the most profound philosophical issues in literature what stories are for and how they create us. …de Lint shows an awareness of what he's doing that makes his fiction not just a damn fine read but also a clear map of the road that fantasy follows through the human mind. …with Greenmantle, he shows that, far from being mere escapism, contemporary fantasy can be the deep mythic literature of our time.

Marshall Coe's shiftless, troubled life has led to tragedy. In this riveting novella, he's suddenly given the chance to go back in time and fix his one big mistake, but Marshall finds that altering history has unexpected consequences. Caught between worlds alongside a young woman with an equally difficult past, they discover that sometimes things happen for a reason.

"Riding Shotgun" was first published in Flights, edited by Al Sarrantonio (Roc Books, 2003). Copyright © 2003 by Charles de Lint.

Charles de Lint's readers have been asking him to put together story collections featuring their favourite Newford characters. The crow girls are among his best-loved characters, so de Lint obliged by gathering their stories all under one roof, so to speak. Some other members of the Newford repertory company show up here, but at the forefront of each story are these two little wild girls with their big personalities.

These stories have all been published before. "Crow Girls" is also available in The Very Best of Charles de Lint and in Moonlight and Vines; "Twa Corbies" in Moonlight and Vines; "The Buffalo Man" in Tapping the Dream Tree; and "A Crow Girls' Christmas" in Muse and Reverie. "Make a Joyful Noise," published in a limited edition by Subterranean Press, has not appeared in any of my previous collections.

Cover art by Tara Larsen Chang.

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