Once I played in a Savage Worlds supervillain game called Necessary Evil. Aliens had invaded Earth and slaughtered all the superheroes, leaving only the villains to form a resistance. I’m not often fond of assassin characters, but I thought Shen Xia Lin was interesting enough to run with it. Her journal of her origin and her account of the one thing we actually got through follows.

I suppose each of us must, at some point, describe our origins — American cultural imperialism, but I grow weary of fighting it at every turn. So for this, I submit. Besides, it’s not so very far from our way of telling stories. The ends are often different; Westerners want a tidy ending with all the threads of the story neatly tied off, and they prefer happy endings. In our tradition, we tend to praise stories that end well, even if that means that the hero dies horribly. If she’s gained enlightenment, death is of minor consideration.

Take the story of Fok Yun Gap [perhaps better known by the Mandarin version of the name, Huo Yuan Jia], the martial artist who helped found the Chin Woo Athletic Association in Shanghai. All the stories (text and film both) told of his life include his childhood, and his father’s refusal to teach him Wushu for fear of his fragile health. Young Master Fok learned anyway, by watching his father surreptitiously and practicing in private. He went on to become one of the most well-known Wushu practitioners of the early twentieth century and founded a Wushu society that is still one of the largest and best-regarded in the world. He died in his early forties, of causes that remain controversial even today. Jet Li made a movie loosely based on Master Fok’s life, though they slander the man terribly in depicting his early life — the character played by Mr Li was a drunkard and an oaf, and the actual Master Fok was neither. I suppose the transformation from drunkard to enlightened master is more impressive for the bad start, but the man’s life was compelling enough without having to resort to such crude melodramatics.

For myself, it’s simple. I was born with the ability to move myself from one place to another without travelling the space in between them. In English, it’s called teleportation, from the Latin for far and movement. Cantonese doesn’t really have a word for it, but I’m using the characters for instant and travel. I have to be able to see where I’m going to, or know the place very, very well to be able to do it.

I do not know why I should have this ability. My parents were quite ordinary people, my father and grandfather both working in the Hong Kong stock trade before its reversion to rule by mainland China. No one in our family had any unusual abilities, unless my father’s skill in selling short counts. We came from farmers and fishermen, not from monks or wizards or what have you. To the best of my knowledge, I was never exposed to strange chemicals, exotic radiations, or mystic rituals. I was just born this way.

The first time I moved myself, I was only four years old. Mother was in hospital — she was always sickly — and Father had taken me to visit. She looked awful, so small and gray and tired, and she was hooked up to so many machines. That person, that thing in the hospital bed could not have been my mother.

Father kept trying to get me to go hug that strange person, to kiss that horrible half-dead creature, and I was terrified. “No!” I screamed, and tried to run away. Father picked me up and carried me to the bed where Mother lay. She reached out for me and I screamed and screamed and screamed and wished I was home and suddenly — just before that person touched me — I was home and I couldn’t stop screaming. Grandfather was there and found me standing on the bed, screaming and crying my eyes out. He told Father, when he telephoned, that I was home and safe. Then he made me very sweet tea to drink and eventually got me to calm down.

When he got home, Father told me that I had made Mother cry, which made me cry more — of course I didn’t want to make Mother sad, but that… just wasn’t Mother. When I was older, when it was too late, I knew better, but then, I just wanted the Mother I knew back.

Father also told me that I must never, ever tell anyone what I did, or let anyone see me move like that. It would be dangerous. He didn’t try to explain the reasons, which I wouldn’t have understood anyway, just told me that it would be very bad if that happened. Whatever he imagined — becoming a test subject in some secret government programme, perhaps — I doubt he ever imagined what did happen when someone found out what I could do.

I got a job. I’m freelance now, but at first I worked for the Ghost Hand Tong in Vancouver, killing people who’d irritated them in some way, usually by stealing from them or testifying against them in court.

It probably should have bothered me more than it did. It would have bothered Father rather a lot, but Grandfather is a whole lot more practical than Father was. The way he sees it, and I agree, am that in the end someone was going to find out about what I could do and exploit me. Being an assassin, while it isn’t the most moral job in the world, at least provides a certain degree of independence. I wouldn’t have gotten that from a government agency. My only family left, Grandfather lives with me, takes care of the accounting, and tries to get me to eat more. I’m grateful to have him with me, and I try to make sure he knows it.

~`~

It’s not just that I can teleport, though that helps — I can get the drop on nearly anybody. I can teleport things, too. One of the biggest problems in killing people is getting to where they are with a weapon and getting back out again. Most of the people I’ve killed knew that someone was going to be coming after them and took precautions. Anyone carrying a gun wouldn’t have come anywhere close to the target. I don’t have to have a gun with me. I can call one from home with just a thought.

I absolutely love the expression men get when they find the delicate little flower they ordered for dessert is (though I am, admittedly, little and delicate-looking) suddenly armed and lethally dangerous. It worked even better when I made my reputation. In the world of Chinese organised crime, the Black Lotus is very well known indeed, though no one has a face to go with the name. (I’ve made very sure of that.)

Take Fat Ling, the last man I killed. Like nearly everybody I kill on business, he got greedy and thought he was smarter than the bosses in his Triad. Fat Ling was an accountant, in charge of making sure that the Triad got what was theirs and nobody was stealing from them. What better position to be in to steal from the Triad, right? He’d managed to funnel more than twenty million euro into his personal accounts before the other forensic accounting team found out about it.

The Triad might not ever be able to get their money back, but they could make sure that no one else tried to do what Fat Ling did. So they called me. (Actually, they called my business manager in Macau. I don’t deal with clients directly any more. Safer for everyone except my business manager, and he’s very well-paid. I’ve never had to threaten him. He knows better.)

Fat Ling had to die, of course. His family had to die too. No one benefits from stealing from the Triad. Well, I do, but I benefit from other people stealing from Triads. There’s a difference.

My target had gone to ground in a hotel in Bangkok, with his wife and kids thoughtfully installed on a different floor. Fat Ling liked his pleasures, he did, and wasn’t about to forgo them just because a lot of people wanted to see him dead. Especially not in Bangkok, which has earned its reputation for being the world capital of prostitution.

It took a little while to track him down, but with nearly unlimited funds you can find out anything. My fee does not include expenses, but I keep detailed records on what I spend in doing the job. The client gets an itemised statement including travel costs, payments to private investigators, bribes, and the like when the job’s done.

Anyway, I tracked down Fat Ling and arranged to be one of the girls sent to his room for the night. The other was a Filipina maybe half my age. Thirteen? Fourteen? Something like that. I could see fear behind the fog of heroin. Naturally Fat Ling’s guards searched both of us, taking the opportunity to grope us thoroughly.

Most of the time I don’t like to be touched. I really don’t like to be touched. But I was working, and when I’m working, I can do anything. That’s probably something else that should bother me, that my sex life is limited to masturbation and fucking my targets to get close enough to do the job. It does some. But what kind of relationship could I have? It’s hard to get close to people when I’m not working.

So I let Fat Ling’s goons grope me, ignoring their snickering about how old I was and what condition my cunt must be in after so long and distinguished a career. Okay, maybe I didn’t ignore it so well, but I was able to feign boredom and popped my chewing gum at them.

I won’t describe what happened for the next while. If anyone’s reading this, I’m sure your imagination is up to the task. Chinese gangster, opulent hotel room, drugs, booze, a pair of whores: do what you will with it. For myself I’ll just skip ahead until Fat Ling, the Filipina girl, and I were all naked and in his bed. He wasn’t a bad-looking guy, Fat Ling, just in his forties and a little podgy from a sedentary job. I may be in my twenties, but I look pretty damned good myself. I stay in good shape, my breasts never did get very big, and I had all my body hair permanently removed for my own reasons. There’s a dark brown birthmark the size of my palm on my left hip and a few moles scattered around, but otherwise my skin is clear, pale, soft. I can pass for nineteen easily, and seventeen with little trouble.

The Filipina was snuggled up to him, but I held myself back. “Come on, baby,” crooned Fat Ling. “Don’t be unfriendly. We’re all friendly here, right?”

Apparently the smile I get when I’ve finally got to the point where I’m ready to kill my target is pretty terrifying. The Filipina girl’s eyes got real big, and even Fat Ling’s Viagra-enhanced erection drooped a little when he saw it. “What the fuck are you smiling about?”

“I just love my job,” I told him, reached out, and suddenly I was holding a gun. The one I use for killing humans is only a .22 semiauto, a Hammerli SP20, but the suppressor makes up for its small calibre. It’s rather intimidating.

One of my calling cards appeared in my other hand. The look on Fat Ling’s face was indescribable, and utterly priceless. “Oh, shit. Shit. You’re her!” He tried to bribe me. They always try to bribe me. “Shit. I’ll give you everything I’ve got,” he babbled. “Just don’t kill me.”

“Sorry, Fat Ling. Can’t do that. You know, not stealing from the Triad means never having to say ‘Please don’t kill my children.’” This inspired whole new levels of fear, and piss dribbled out of Fat Ling’s now completely limp dick. “Go on, say it,” I encouraged him.”

“Please don’t kill my children,” he stammered.

“Can’t do that either, Fat Ling. It’s in the contract. I never break a contract. Say good night, Fat Ling.” The silencer coughed and a small black hole appeared in the centre of Fat Ling’s forehead, right where his third eye would be. I use a .22 to kill people for a couple of reasons. One, it’s much easier to silence a small-calibre round than it is to silence, say, a .357 Magnum round. (Not that a .357 isn’t a satisfying beast. Try firing one in a dark range some time. The muzzle flash is roughly the size of a Volkswagen minibus.) Another reason is that the .22 has enough power to punch through someone’s skull once. It won’t do it twice, so it just sort of bounces around inside like the mixer ball in a can of spraypaint. Finally, it’s very difficult for forensics people to get useful information from a .22 Long Rifle round. It’s rare that a bullet survives in condition to provide them with much.

The Filipina girl was praying in her best Sunday-school Latin. She knew, of course. Poor girl. She’s an innocent bystander in all of this, but I don’t leave witnesses behind me. I looked around the room, found a syringe and a vial of Fentanyl. Fat Ling had back problems, I suppose. Or some very bad habits. “I’m sorry,” I told her, meaning it. “Would you rather it be slow, or fast?”

“Please,” she whispered, looking up at me with tears just about to spill from her eyes. It was heartbreaking, but there were worse things I had to do that night. I leaned in and kissed her, soft, on the lips.

“Poor baby,” I murmured. “It’s not your fault. Just lie down, okay? It won’t hurt at all.” Fentanyl works fast. Her breathing slowed before I even got the needle out of her vein, and in a minute, she wasn’t breathing at all.

The bodyguards died next, each from a double-tap to the back of the head, and I’m afraid that I rather enjoyed seeing them realise that they’d been groping the Black Lotus Killer earlier. I put my clothes back on and one of Fat Ling’s silk robes to help hide the gun, just in case. He had the cardkey to his wife’s room, of course. His youngest child was a boy of six.

I don’t like killing children, and I cursed Fat Ling’s idiot soul, wishing him an eternity as slime mould for his stupidity. I killed them anyway.

Evidence left behind me? Not much. Bullets and brass casings. Fingerprints were taken care of by the spray-on gloves, and I took the glass I drank from with me, dropping it in a random trash can on the way back to my hotel. There might be some shed epithelial cells, but I always take a spa treatment and an exfoliating salt scrub before going to kill a target. There wouldn’t be many.

I left my card, so they’d know. So they’d all know. Everyone who needed to hear the message would. I’m like a fairy-tale monster for Chinese gangsters. Don’t fuck around or the Black Lotus will come for you.

I will. Depend on it.

~`~

Of course I know how many people I’ve killed in my career. I don’t dwell on it, but the news people do, putting together various (and nearly always inaccurate) estimates of the total number of victims fallen under the Black Lotus Killer’s guns.

Fortunately, I don’t work more than a few times a year. It gives me time I need now that the aliens have come. I’d make a wildly unlikely hero, and I won’t pretend to be one. Nevertheless, the aliens present a very clear threat, and they have to die. They all have to die. My planet has to be cleansed of them. Them and all their filthy diseases. So, Blink — not Black Lotus — is going after them.

We’ll see if I can’t make them fear this name too.

[Session Date 29 October 2006]

I don’t know how they found me. Maybe it was just chance. If someone sold me out, I will find that person and I will make them understand that it was a very, very bad thing to do. I believe I can find an effective way to communicate that.

However it happened, I woke up in a prison cell, wearing an orange jumpsuit. I tried to port home, but I was also wearing a pair of manacles that rather effectively shut down my powers. My muscles still twitched from the Taser pulse that took me down in the first place, and my bladder told me that I’d been out for some time, so I took care of that problem, rinsed my mouth out in the sink. For lack of anything better to do, I went back to sleep.

Guessing from the number of meals they brought, I was there perhaps three days. Grandfather was frantic with worry by the time I got home (see, I survive my first encounter with the enemy. Fear not.), and by the end of it had been unable to eat anything. He survived the last day or so by drinking virulently strong tea and smoking cigarettes constantly. I hate having to worry him.

Every so often, a set of drone and warsphere androids would come into the row of cells and remove a prisoner. They didn’t come back. I doubted that it was because they were set free. If someone had gone to the trouble of capturing people (and other things) with super powers, it wasn’t likely to be to our benefit. These weren’t the police. They might have been associated with the V’sori, but I didn’t see much sign of that beyond the weapons the drones carried.

I hoped this meant that my fingerprints, retinal scans, iris scans, DNA histological markers, and such weren’t flagged as belonging to someone dangerous. I still have to function in the civilian world as Shen Xia Lin, importer of Chinese and Southeast Asian antiquities. Grandfather and I started the company, Shen Lung Imports, Inc. several years ago to help explain my frequent travel around the Pacific Rim and launder the fees I got for killing people. I don’t want to lose that.

Finally they brought in a skinny man in his forties, shoving him into his cell with efficient, impersonal brutality. “I’ll get out before the rest of you will!” he taunted the rest of us inmates. At the time, seven of the eight cells were full. There was me, the skinny man, a brown-haired man who seemed to think he was living in some sort of video game, a large man with an unfortunate skin condition, a hyperactive youth with a shock of straw-coloured hair and hazel eyes, a black cloud of something unspeakably vile, and a truly bizarre-looking individual whose cybernetic parts had been mostly removed, leaving him missing an eye, an arm, and much of his torso.

“How nice for you,” I muttered, and tried to go back to sleep. I must have dozed off, because I remember waking up to a huge amount of noise. The skinny man’s cell now held a much larger man, whose manacles had shattered and fallen away. Now, that was interesting.

It got much more interesting when he took hold of the bars of his cell and pulled. It took him a little while, but he finally deformed his cell door enough to squeeze out. There was only a dim light in his eyes, and he simply went to the cell next to his and repeated the process of bending and removing the cell’s bars. If I had to guess, I’d say that he was simply following instructions left by his other form’s personality. “Get all the cells open,” he’d told himself and he was doing so, methodically and by brute force alone. Detail, improvisation, and finesse were simply beyond his capacity.

Of course the noise attracted notice. The door at the end of the row opened and a warsphere — a metal ball about sixty centimetres across with a pair of bladed arms — floated in. Oops. I watched to see what the men who’d been freed would do with this.

They actually handled it pretty well, dropping the thing in only a few seconds — before it could get any shots off with the laser attached to one shoulder. The one with the missing cybernetic parts found something inside it that disabled the manacles we were wearing.

Finally! I could have gone home just then, but it would have meant not finding out whatever might have happened next. Besides, I wanted the chance to repay these individuals for their unasked-for hospitality.

The door at my end of the hall opened into a room that conveniently enough held the things we’d had with us when we were taken. It was very poor security protocol, but there were other indications that these people were amateurs when it came to security considerations. They were wealthy, well-armed amateurs, but amateurs nonetheless. This could be exploited. After some argument about whether it was better to try to simply bash the safeboxes like so many piggy banks or to try more subtle means, they finally were opened and their contents distributed to their proper owners.

I’d been out scouting in a less than savoury part of Star City, not for anything in particular but just part of an effort to familiarise myself with my new home. They’d taken me in an alley, and when they’d Tasered me, I’d fallen into a puddle of something unpleasant. The duraweave armor and my boots were in decent shape, but the slacks and turtleneck pullover were ruined. So I skinnied into my armour, put the orange prison jumpsuit back on, and called my HeroKiller pistols from home. I left the card that came with them on the bed in my cell (the Blink cards are colourless translucent vellum, printed with a stylised closed eye in black) and put the extra magazines in my pockets.

John Lennon once sang “happiness is a warm gun.” I know a warm gun makes me happy. Having the twin hand artillery with me made me feel even better than having my armour back on.

Back out in the cell block, something was blinking red in the changeable man’s forearm. Suddenly a holographic image appeared, of an armoured figure. Doctor Destruction. I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at the name — it was so very American, right down to the Eastern-European country he or she dominated. It’s generally assumed that the good Doctor is male, but as no one’s ever seen him (or her) outside of the armor, I’m hedging my bets. It’s a pretty sexist assumption, that a woman wouldn’t be interested in or capable of taking over the world.

My own ambitions are more modest — I want mainly to be able to live comfortably and to be left more or less alone. I can’t imagine wanting to take over the world; the responsibility of being the Undisputed (Hah. Humans are an ever-fractious people. We’ll dispute anything.) Ruler of the Entire World would be crushing. I don’t want to have to deal with decision-making on that scale. Even with the deep-rooted sexism of Chinese culture and especially its underworld of organised crime, I could have carved out a nice little empire for myself. But I’ve seen what crime lords have to do. Not unlike the lords of feudal China or Europe, much of the lords’ time was spent in managing people, patting backs, shaking hands, dispensing favours, and making sure that any potential threats were defused before they became actual threats.

It seemed impossibly tedious to me.

Back to the thrilling escape from durance vile, though: the image of Doctor Destruction was rambling on about how we (and others like us) were the only people capable of removing the Earth from the clutches of the V’sori and their K’tharen minions. Of course the Doctor wanted to place the Earth firmly in his or her own clutches, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was removing the aliens and their filth and having a good hearty laugh at the idiot superheroes who had gathered like so many sheep to the slaughter.

We were being recruited. Or drafted. Whichever it happened to be, it suited my purposes. As lethal as I am, I’m nowhere near capable of defeating the V’sori occupation forces singlehanded. I need help. For our first mission, and our first test, we had to escape this facility. Excellent. That matched my plans exactly.

Should it prove necessary, I’ll come back with several kilos of MDX and reduce it to a smoking hole in the ground. In the meantime, I have that thought to keep me warm at night.

The gentleman who now had all his cybernetic parts reattached interfaced himself with the facilities’ security systems, confirming that an alarm had been tripped, and giving us a rough estimate of what we might face in opposition as we made our ways out. The last inventory showed some twenty drones, forty warspheres, and four hyperdrones, whatever those might be. The room past the cell block held a selection of keys for the cells, a warsphere docking station, and a corpse on a gurney with its head opened and the contents removed. Buddha’s mercy, I prayed. Let her be truly dead.

The cloud of filth oozed its way into the room beyond that. The doors to it slid open with a hush, revealing a perfectly black space. The dark posed no hindrance to some — including the enemy, as was made evident when they opened fire on us. The darkness disappeared, showing a short corridor with two bladed spheres, and open doors at the far end partially hiding a pair of drones. Things began to happen — some of the men charged at the spheres.

blink

I was in the small room with the two drones (and a sphere I hadn’t seen before I moved myself there), pistols drawn and pointed square at the back of each. Each pistol spoke in rapid succession, blowing large holes in the androids. One fell to the floor, twitching; the other still stood but was, for the moment, unmoving. The sphere slashed at me, its bladed arms laying my back open. I hissed and shook it off; there would be time for weakness later. Two more shots and the drone and sphere were down.

The men in the hallway were having a bit of trouble with the last remaining sphere. I leaned against the wall, carefully taking stock of the pain in my back and deciding that I would be able to keep on with this.

Something like the steps of a giant shook the building, boom, boom, boom, boom. We would find out soon what caused it. But we didn’t have any more trouble until we got to the front doors to the building. It would be a perfect place for ambush, and no one wanted to be the first one through the door. Our dilemma was solved for us when the front of the building collapsed under concentrated laser fire. Some of our little group managed to avoid injury, but I was not one of them; a bit of falling concrete bounced off my leg, bruising me badly under the armour. I was lucky that no bones were broken.

There were three large things in the quad outside our building, glass bell jars on mechanical spider legs, with laser cannon mounted to either side. They might have been twenty feet tall. I could see no reason for the dome to be clear glass, but I wasn’t going to complain that my enemy had made herself vulnerable to me. Supporting the spider-domes were a pair of spheres and a half-dozen drones.

blink

I was behind two drones and out of most of the enemies’ field of fire. Excellent. Both drones fell to my guns. The one whose delusions placed him in an eternal video game came hurtling down to smash his hands into the dome of the spider thing nearest me, cracking it open.

blink

I was inside another of the spider-dome things and horrified to find it full of some kind of fluid. It tasted like blood. I choked down my rising terror and fired, killing the brain floating in the centre. Blaster fire slammed into the dome, breaking huge holes in it and sending me reeling. Someone killed the drone shooting at me. The other spider-thing had fallen, as had most of the supporting drones and all of the spheres.

blink

I had a perfect line of fire: Two shots, two dead drones. My total was now six drones, one sphere, and one glass spider-dome thing. Was it finally time to let go of my control and give in to the terror? I could feel the fluid that once filled the glass spider-domes seeping into my various wounds. Gods alone knew what sorts of filth it might be contaminated with.

No. Not time yet. Something that looked like an enormous ray (the fish kind of ray) came out of the sky, opened a doorway in its side and belched out a set of stairs. A pair of enormous, heavily armoured and armed people stepped out, followed by the even more impressively-armoured Doctor Destruction. As usual, the Doctor talked too much, taking a great many more words than necessary to say “Get in the damned bus, idiots.”

When we got to the lair, things were explained (those of us who needed it received medical attention during the expository lump — the medical tech who patched me up said I shouldn’t have but the faintest of scars from my adventuring). Doctor Destruction was pleased with our success and designated us the latest of the Omega Resistance Cells. The existence of others was implied, though not confirmed. We would work towards the Doctor’s ends. In return for which, we would get medical support, limited intelligence support, and (rarely) tactical combat support.

It seemed fair enough to me. I accepted the implant that they offered and went home. I’m not entirely comfortable with it: it will make medical support easier, but it will also give the Doctor and her/his minions a considerable amount of information about me. There’s not a great deal I can do about that, though. The V’sori occupation makes things dangerous for anyone with more-than-human abilities. It’s a fairly simple threat assessment. For now, the Doctor and company are less of a threat than the V’sori, the K’tharen, and their human collaborators.

I ported directly into my bathroom, into the shower. The water came on automatically, as it does, at a temperature just short of scalding. The fluid from the spider-brain-dome-robot-thing had dried to a sticky, vile goo, and I wanted it off me.

First the jumpsuit (which I would later feed to the incinerator), then my boots, then the armor, last my underthings. I was naked but for the zipper-centipedes holding the gashes in my back closed. Most of my right thigh was almost black from bruises, stiff and tender when I poked at it. There were minor cuts and bruises almost everywhere.

Maybe one of the eight billion gods knew what filth, what corruption, what disease was in me. I certainly didn’t. The hot water helped me cope with that, and the surgical scrub helped more.

I curled up under the hot water. Eventually I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up in my bed, my hair still damp. Grandfather was sitting in a chair near the window, drinking tea and watching me. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a while. “Nihau-ma, Granddaughter,” he said.

“Nihau-ma, Grandfather. I’m so sorry. I couldn’t call. Someone took me and put me in a cell, with something that took away my powers. I came home as soon as I could.”

“I know, Xia Lin. You’ve always been a good girl that way. So when you didn’t come home, didn’t call, I knew something was very wrong. Was it the police? The V’sori?”

“No. Definitely not the police. Human collaborators, I think.”

“You were hurt.”

“Yes. I’ll be fine, though. I was given good medical care. How are my fish?” I have a pair of catfish, Tsing and Zhang, in a large tank set into my living room wall. They’re older than I am, and have grown large in their years. Most people want a more affectionate pet (and one less slimy), but my fish, and the glass between them and me, suit me well.

Grandfather ignored my question, unwilling to be distracted from the topic of my health. “Even so, you’re very stiff. You need acupuncture treatment to remove that which impedes the flow of your chi. If you’re going to fight these invaders, your shen must be strong. It is your shen that moves, and your chi that moves you.”

“Grandfather,” I started to protest.

“Daughter of my daughter, you will do this thing. Humour an old man’s worries.”

I sighed. Grandfather rarely tells me what to do, but he’s usually right when he does. “Yes, Grandfather. All right. Call the acupuncturist, please.”

He stood, moving with a grace that belied his years. Grandfather sees the acupuncturist regularly, and has practiced Fok Wushu since he was small. Smiling, he came over and hugged me, careful of the sealed gashes on my back. “I am glad you are well, Granddaughter. Welcome home.”

I don’t like people touching me, but Grandfather has earned the right to many times over. I hugged him back and tried to not cry. “Thank you, Grandfather. It’s good to be home.”

This one’s from… oh, a while back. File metadata says it’s 01/11/2008 but that can’t be right. It’s years older than that. It was my first sword fight.

The weather was not cooperating.

Not that that was all that surprising. It was, after all, late summer, and no one but the scavengers seem to enjoy the City’s weather during the summer. Nearly everyone who can afford to leaves for cooler — or at least less densely populated — areas. The smell rising from the sewers is unbelievable. Flow through them depends on the river, which often drops to too low a level to keep things moving, so they just stagnate. The worst of it isn’t the shit, it’s the cooking fat that congeals into huge festering masses which provide that extra frisson which makes the summer air such a delight to breathe. Life in the City’s demi-monde provides many opportunities for education.

Some people, however, find that what the City has to offer in compensation is well worth the inconvenience. And then there’s the rest of us, who simply can’t afford to leave or have no place to go.

Like the children who have gathered to watch us play this morning. I don’t think the oldest can be any more than six, and they make me feel tired. My eyes didn’t look like theirs until I was twenty, and I counted my life fairly rough. Gods know what they’ve got to wager, but there seems to be a brisk trade in betting on the outcome of our little adventure. I am, unsurprisingly, not favored to win.

It had rained, just a little, the night before, and though it was barely after dawn the day was already stifling and sticky. The field was baked hard and slick with dead and dying grass only partly revived by the shower. Already the sweat rolled down my neck, between my breasts, into my eyes.

Yves, that thrice-damned bastard, does not seem at all affected by the heat. As always, he is urbane and elegant. He’s laughing, chatting with his seconds. They might be going to a tavern for iced wine, and not about to fight a very illegal duel in a vacant lot in one of the City’s poorest neighborhoods. Possibly his color keeps him cool: white-blond hair, pale blue eyes, skin that might have never seen the sun.

As if in deliberate contrast, I am short, softer and rounder than I’d prefer, and brown, brown, brown. Mamí always insisted that we were of pure Valencian stock, with not a drop of Moorish blood in our veins, but having met some few (Moors, not pure Valencians. I don’t believe such a fabulous creature exists.) I can no longer believe it. Where Yves’s silk blouse moves gently as he does, mine sticks to my skin, peeling away reluctantly as I tug at it. It’s unlikely that the way my nipples poke at the thin fabric will distract him at all; when I arrived, he took a glance, smirked, and went back to chatting with the Marshal of the Field. Discussing horses, from what little I could hear. His friends, though, find them highly entertaining. Glaring at them would only amuse them further, so I limit myself to sighing and lifting my eyes skyward.

Michel, my only second and truest friend in the City, lays a huge gentle hand on my shoulder and rumbles, “Couráge, cherie. You’re not so overmatched as all that. He’ll be overconfident, it will make him careless.” The first is true: I’m not unskilled with a blade. I’ve killed men before, but not like this, not so cold and deliberate. Also, I’m stronger than I look. Still, Yves has the advantage. With his height and longer weapon, he has the reach on me, and he has more experience on this field of so-called honor. He’s been careless exactly one time that I know of, and this is not that time.

I cannot reject my friend’s offer of comfort, so I pat his hand on my shoulder and say nothing.

One of Yves’s loutish seconds chooses this moment to call out, “So where’s your pervert lover, girl? Afraid of a little blood? She doesn’t want to watch her whore die?” I try to tell myself that he’s not worth reacting to, but I stiffen and flush at his taunt anyway. Why does Yves keep their company? Is it to look better by comparison? If so, it implies a deeper insecurity than I thought him capable of.

“She wishes only to avoid the heat and the sun, my lord,” I tell him, matching his mocking tone. “She’ll be here in time to see me kill him.” Yves’s second — Georges, I think — laughs and elbows his companion. The oaf. He wouldn’t dare face me in fair combat, I’d have his sack for a coin purse. An ugly small coin purse I’d have stolen at the first opportunity but still. It’s the principle of the thing.

A cold anger begins to spread just below my heart. Finally, I think. I’ll need that. It helps me stand a little taller. Apparently some of it does show in my eyes, because Georges stops laughing and gives me an odd look. Then my Lady does come, announced by the sound of hooves and carriage wheels. I hurry to greet her, bowing my head. “My Lady,” I whisper; it is all I can say. The anger is gone for now, replaced by the hollow feeling I get when I see her, hear her, smell her. It’s as though I were a vessel for her to fill.

My Lady lifts my chin with a finger, sending a shiver through me. She looks into my wide-open eyes as her lips brush over mine. “Don’t disappoint me,” she murmurs. I try to say ‘no,’ but no sound escapes my throat. She understands, though, and smiles. As always, the sight thrills me and I shiver again, twitching like a horse before the race.

So. It’s time, now. I return to the field (the vacant lot, mocks a voice in my mind) and give my sword to Michel, who presents it to the Marshal. Yves has done likewise, giving his sword to Georges. The Marshal glances at the swords, giving them the most cursory of inspections, and returns them to our seconds. He has an amazingly deep voice, which he uses to bellow, “My lord, my lady!” (He gives me the title as a courtesy; I don’t qualify for it.) “Please take your positions.” We comply.

“The terms are these: single combat, with swords only, until one or the other combatant yields, is incapacitated, or is killed. If either flees the field, she or he will be killed, having forfeited match, honor, and life.” Delightful. At least there’s no nonsense about resolving our dispute peaceably. These are serious people.

“Are you ready, my lady?” he asks me. I incline my head in assent. “My lord?” he asks, turning to Yves.

Feigning a yawn, he drawls, “Oh, I suppose.” How droll.

The Marshal lifts an eyebrow a fraction of an inch and steps back. “Draw. Salute.” We do. Mine is as crisp and polite as I can make it. Yves waves his sword vaguely. He may as well be dismissing a servant. He really isn’t this much of a fop; he’s just doing it to annoy me. And it’s working, damn his bartered soul.

“En garde. Commence.” The Marshal snaps the words out and steps back to lean against a wall, his arms folded across his chest. He watches with an utter lack of interest, wanting only for us to get it over with so he can leave to hide from the heat of the day.

Suddenly Yves’s fop act is gone, and he’s dropped into exactly the proper stance, feet arranged just so, arm protected behind his blade and the tangle of metal that forms the hilts and guard. His attention is now focused solely on me. But that’s all right; I’ve done the same thing barring half a thought spared for my watching Lady. He lets me move first, apparently wanting to draw it out. I oblige, probing his defenses with thrusts, blade-feints, body-feints. A half-smile flickers across his face, and he takes the offensive, pushing me back.

Around us, the children are howling abuse and encouragement, the former mostly at me. “Slice her tits off! Shove that sword up her cunt, fuck her with it!” Where did they learn such language? Where are their parents? Not relevant. I try to block them out, but one girl screams, “Cut his dick off! If you can find it!” I like her; the corners of my mouth twitch.

Step, shuffle, half-step. We dance with no rhythm, the sound of steel on steel providing a melody for us to follow. He’s good, very good, and I’m too slow. Again: My sloth is why we’re here entertaining the local children this morning. A line burns across my cheek; if I survive, I’ll have a nasty scar there. Another fire starts, on my off-arm, and my blouse darkens, sticking to me with more than sweat now.

I back off a few steps, trying to gain time to breathe and think, but Yves follows, pressing me. He’s better than I am.

He’s going to kill me. Fuck.

So, I think. Use that. Give him what he wants and take what I want. There’s even a chance I’ll survive if I do this right. It’ll hurt, certainly, but pain is no stranger. When my Lady had the chain soldered around my throat, the hot metal burned me, leaving a bright scar the size of a silver centime. Thinking of it makes me shiver again. Yves takes it for weakness, not pleasure. Let him. He presses me harder, his blade flashing against mine. I let my breath come heavier than I need and shake drops of blood from my fingertips, wincing. A hungry light burns behind his eyes. I know that look; he wants to hurt me badly. Careful, I tell myself. I press into his attack, making my actions just a hair too large, parrying with a fraction more strength than I need. Not too much, I mustn’t give away the game.

I’m about six feet from the edge of the ‘field.’ Yves is trying to herd me out of it, to avoid giving me the honor of dying in combat. If I step over that line, I’ll be shot down like an animal. The Marshal watches us, bored, his long pistol dangling lazily from his hand.

For a miracle the children are quiet now, but that might be just me. I can’t hear anything but the ring of our swords, the shuffling of our feet, and the rasp of my breath. The world goes away, leaving the two of us to our play.

Hah! I’ve made him sweat, at least. Droplets have beaded on his forehead; one trickles down towards the corner of his eye. When it reaches them, he blinks it away, annoyed. I step in, slicing at his shoulder.

Of course, he was expecting my attack then and he’s ready for it, knocking my blade away with too much force. I let it turn me, opening my body to him. He’s got a perfect shot at my heart. His eyes go cold and hard as he decides to take it. I can’t help but swallow, terrified. It seems a year could pass between one heartbeat and the next. How long can it really take for him to skewer me? I’ve been waiting forever.

He’s committed to it now and I lunge forward, twisting to take the point of his sword just above my left breast. If the slashes he gave me before were fire, this is ice, pure cold driving through my chest and into the air on the other side, draining all the warmth in me. The scrape of steel over bone is the most excruciating thing I have ever felt. My scream turns into a cough of pink mist; he must have hit my lung.

I can see the burning in his eyes. He thinks it’s over, that he’s killed me or will with his next thrust, and he turns his wrist to twist the blade before drawing it out.

But I’m committed too. My muscles know what to do here. My sword flashes in an arc towards his neck. Yves sees it too late, he tries to duck, to block it with his hand, but it’s no use. The blade shears through his fingers and into the side of his neck, half-severing his spine before it stops, trapped in the bone.

The light behind his eyes vanishes between one instant and the next and the world crashes in on me again. I can hear the girl who’d bet on me shrieking her triumph. Did it get cloudy, all of a sudden? It’s so dark. And all the colors have washed out of everything. How on earth did I end up on my knees? I hear men, shouting, but I’ve forgotten the language. It must have gotten cloudy. I hear thunder.

I’m so tired. It’s been a very long day. I think I’ll rest my eyes for just a moment.

Someone’s calling me. Morning already? With an effort I open my eyes again. Sky. On my back, but where? Memory flickers; I’m still on the field. In the vacant lot, bleeding into the dirt. There’s a shadow to one side, and I let my head roll towards it. My Lady is kneeling next to me, soiling her dress with more than just dirt. My blood has stained her clothes before but she’s usually the one who’s shed it. I try to sit up, but she holds me down with a hand smoothed over my forehead. “Shh, love. Rest now. You’ve earned it,” she tells me, and I obey.

“How~?” I croak. My mouth is filled with mud mixed from my blood and the dust of the field. “Not~”

“Oh, you did marvelously, my sweet. No, I’m not disappointed in you. Not at all.” A larger shadow looms into the edges of my sight, and my Lady speaks in her command voice. “Help us, Michel, carry her to my rig.” He takes hold of Yves’s sword and I scream again, white lights exploding in my head.

“Stop!” My Lady’s voice rings out and everyone stops. Except me, I’m still bleeding. The screams have faded to whimpers, and I can’t make them stop. “Don’t take that out. If you do that here, you’ll kill her. Unless you know what to do for a sucking chest wound?” Michel mumbles something apologetic, but too soft for me to make the words out.

Somewhere, about three hundred miles away at the edge of the lot, there’s a high-pitched argument. This amuses my Lady, and she says, “Oh, and Marshal? Do make sure that girl gets what’s coming to her. There seems to be some disagreement as to who’s won here.” I can hear the grin in his voice as he assures her that he’ll see to it.

Michel lifts me easily, cradling me in arms thicker than my legs. He’s crying; I can hear him sniffling, feel the jerking in his chest. He’s crying over me? How very odd. I want to tell him I’m sorry, but it’s too much effort. He lays me on the seat in my Lady’s rig and makes ugly wet noises. I can see him, barely; he’s staring at my blood on his hands and clothes. He’s probably never had to fight anyone in his life, being so huge. So he’s not used to this at all, and he isn’t looking very well.

“Please do join us at the house, Michel,” my Lady offers. “I’d take you with us, but there isn’t room just now.”

After a pause, she continues, more gently. “She’ll live if anyone can. She’s tougher than you think.” The carriage rocks gently as she steps up into it. There’s only the one seat, which I’m currently filling up, so she kneels on the floor next to me. Kneeling? wails a small voice in my mind. Oh, no, that can’t be right. Her fingers brush my forehead again, and she kisses me deeply, tasting my blood — and not for the first time.

“Live, my love,” she breathes as the world fades away. “Live and get well. I’m not done with you yet.”

To the little people who lived there, the kobolds, it was milk. The children drank it as their mothers and fathers worked the rich seams of ore, dug their tunnels, made their goods at forges whose fires gave heat, but no light.

Few things interrupted the eternal darkness. The little people had visitors, from time to time. Those who came by secret ways and strange, bringing riches from the world above to offer in trade for what the kobolds had to offer. They charged dear for their work, not because they craved things from the lighted realms, but because they felt that the fruits of the mountain belonged there, and it took much to persuade them to part with even the smallest emerald, the least grain of silver. The shining ones came often. The enemies of the shining host came also, and were given the same consideration. Once in a great while, a god would come to visit. They all came for the same thing, for all knew that the little people were smiths without peer, in their world or any other.

Eventually humans came, and they came not to trade, but to steal, bringing with them only light and noise and the stench of their bodies.

Like all visitors to the mountain of the little people, not all of them would return.

Texas in the late 80s was having a hard time of things economically, what with oil prices being low and the telecom revolution was still a few years away. So my folks didn’t have much even with both of them working, what with three kids (I’m the middle one, thanks for asking) to feed and a mortgage to pay. Things got worse when dad left, even with mom working two jobs. The fucking bank took the house after mom couldn’t keep up with the payments, and we ended up in a one-bedroom apartment. Y’all would call it the wrong sort of neighborhood, but it ain’t, not really. It’s just poor. Mostly Mexicans come up to find work, legal or not. It always pissed me off when some cracker sonofabitch would think I’m supposed to be all racist and shit like him just ’cause I’m white. All my friends were brown, and most of them didn’t speak much English. Still does piss me off, come to that. And I ain’t much for keeping my mouth shut, even when I should.

I didn’t know shit about faerie then — not that I’m a goddamn authority now or anything — but I guess the signs were there if I’d known what they were. From the first I can remember it was more fun taking things apart than it was playing with them. Mom would beat my ass bright red every time she caught me doing it, but I just couldn’t make myself stop. It was like this voice in my head telling me what to do, how to do it. Sure, that’s crazy, but it could have been lots worse. The voice could have been telling me to start fires and shit. Instead, I took things apart. Anything I could get my hands on, too.

When I was six, I took the whole damn stove apart, had all the pieces spread out across the kitchen floor with my little brother and sister in the doorway watching me do it with her fingers in her mouth. Funny thing of it, I could usually put them back together pretty good too. After a while I didn’t get caught so much. Sometimes they worked better after I was done, even. The oven used to burn things on one side, but after I put it back together (with my ass glowing about as red as the burners on top of the stove the whole time) it worked just fine.

Even back then, the nocker in me was trying to come out, I guess. It took a while, but it worked out eventually.

School was not the greatest thing in the world for me. Not that I couldn’t do the work — I could, easy. Too easy, maybe. I was bored to death, from the very beginning. First thing they want to teach you is how to read, and I’d been reading since I was three. Mrs. Walter didn’t give a shit if I could read already, I was supposed to sit there and be quiet. Five year old kids are not good at sit there and be quiet. Even kids who are not someday going to be nockers aren’t good at sit there and be quiet. Mrs. Walter wouldn’t let me read on my own, which you’d think would be the obvious solution. So I’d spend five minutes on the assignment and then have to wait twenty minutes while everybody else finished up.

This did not work well.

Could I draw? Nope. Read? Already said no. Color? No. Read? Do you have trouble with the English language? Sit. Down.

I could fiddle with my lunch money. That got my lunch money taken away, with her telling me, in front of the whole class, that she was going to Baskin-Robbins after school with my lunch money. I don’t know if she ever did, but I didn’t get lunch that day.

For all I knew, I had twelve more years of this to look forward to. In between daydreaming about Mrs. Walters being ground up in the gears of a drawbridge — and no I do not know how I knew what the gears of a drawbridge looked like, maybe I saw it in a book or something — I entertained fond thoughts of walking in front of a bus.

Oh, don’t worry, I wasn’t really suicidal. Much. But I was hurt and angry and I wanted something to change even if I didn’t know what.

At first, the boys at the arcade gave me a lot of shit because I was a girl, but after I beat their asses a few times, I was just sort of one of them. “Who, Becca? She’s cool. She’ll kick your ass, dude.” Yeah, so I had to be better than the boys just to be accepted. So what else is new?

Then my tits started growing. It changed a few things. There were times I would swear they got bigger overnight. And they were always sore. Kinda. It was in a good way sometimes, and then I’d forget they were there and bang one on a door frame or something. Ow. Ow ow ow ow ow. And the boys I hung out with at the arcade forgot that I had a face. Whenever they were talking to me, their eyes were just fixed on the damned things. Or they’d ‘accidentally’ bump into them. Like when I was trying to land a good fatality in Mortal Kombat. That stopped after I hit a few of them back, though. A good punch even in a boy’s nipple hurts pretty good.

All those tokens cost money, too, which my mom didn’t have. And then there was mall food, clothes, a little TV and a Nintendo that I needed, all the games for that, a computer, a trick bike…. It adds up, you know? There wasn’t a whole lot of ways for a kid my age to make money, so I hooked up with the Buena Vista Kings as a runner. It didn’t pay a lot, but I didn’t have to do hardly nothing either. I’d make deliveries, run errands and shit, keep a lookout for cops or other gangers, and I’d get a hundred a week or so. They thought I was cute. I was thirteen, and looked about ten, and, not to put too fine a point on it, I was white. So the cops never even talked to me. Mom didn’t want to know about how much money I was spending.

I ended up giving her about half of what I made. She needed it more than I did. Not that it makes what I did okay, it’s not.

I got out of the ganger stuff after my little brother Michael got shot. He wasn’t in a gang or nothing, just was going to school and wanted to be a lawyer. But he just happened to be in the wrong place when the Norteños and the Crips (I dunno which ones, there’s like five gangs calling themselves Crips in San Antonio). Nobody saw shit, you know? He’s fine, the bullet went through his arm, put him in the hospital for a day or two, he’s got a cool scar to show off to girls.

Mom and I had a nice big talk — and by “had a nice big talk” I mean she beat my ass with a leather strap — and I decided that it might be better if I got out of the gang business before I lost a limb or something. She made me get a real job, too. Oh, the joys of living within the law. It pays a whole lot less, but there’s a far lower risk of my mom pulling my leg off and beating me to death with it.

At first, the humans did not fare well under the mountain. The air was often foul, there were pockets of gas that exploded when it came in contact with the fire the humans used for light, ceilings failed and fell in. Some of this was natural, the hazards that face all who dig under the mountain.

Some was not.

The little people did not care at all for intruders who came to their mountain to steal and brought nothing.

Eventually, some learned to come with more humility. To come with gifts. The miners left offerings in the tunnels. Small things, usually: a bowl of milk, a loaf of bread. Flowers. Sometimes something not so small: a child abandoned alive or sacrificed in ritual, his or her body covered in red ochre dust, for such was sacred to them.

The humans who brought no gifts died. Some died of things that could be laid to mischance. Others died because, if they didn’t see the little peoples’ bright eyes and bright grins and bright little knives glimmering at the edges of the dark, whose fault was that anyway?

Humans who brought gifts for the little people did not. Well, most of them. Some died, because they were mortal, and didn’t they always?

Since I wasn’t doing that any more, I sort of got back into school work just because there wasn’t nothing else to do. Besides, I wanted out of the barrio, you know? I wasn’t going nowhere if I didn’t do better in school. Except maybe to jail. And I’d known too many guys who come out of jail to want to go in there. It was pretty easy, when I actually went to class and did the homework and everything.

I got a reputation as a geek, but that was okay. I was a geek. Reading all the time, taking the hardest courses I could get into. I was the only person in the whole school who took electronics shop and AP English. Got A’s in both of them. Not that you’d know it from listening to me. Mister Brice, my guidance counselor, started talking about college, end of my junior year. Get real. Me? Little Becca Collins, former drug dealer/gangbanger chick, in college? No way.

Even if there was any way a college would take me, there wasn’t no money for it. Besides, I’d already been talking to a Navy recruiter. He said with my grades, I could pick my specialty, and get a twenty thousand enlistment bonus. Mom had struggled to keep us fed even in a good year, so it sounded like a lot of money. All that I had to do was finish out my senior year, turn eighteen, and I was good to go. I was going to be a fighter pilot.

Note to Rebecca. Recruiters lie. They all do, whether they’re recruiting for the Kings or the Navy.

So, no. I did not get to be a fighter pilot. The Navy in its infinite wisdom felt that my skills would be better utilized in other areas. Specifically they felt that they would be better utilized in avionics maintenance and repair. It’s probably for the best, really, given how things turned out, but still. It would have been really fucking cool to be a fighter pilot. I did get the enlistment bonus, though. So I went and bought a bike, figuring if they weren’t going to let me fly, I’d find my own goddamned speed. Besides, I could get a shit-hot Honda CBR600RR (black, or course) for half of what I’d have to pay for a halfway decent car. That it’s a vibrator with a top speed of somewhere around one-sixty does not hurt even a little bit.

The first thing they did was ship me off to Great Lakes for basic training, which did not include machine guns, to my everlasting disappointment. It didn’t include guns at all. What kind of military were they trying to run here? It did involve a whole lot of getting shouted at, bad food, nowhere near enough sleep, and running outside during the dead of winter. I just about froze my ass off. They did ’suggest’ that I shave my head, which was about the only thing I did expect from Basic. It would’ve been pretty cool, if I didn’t risk frostbite of the scalp every time I went outside.

Mom and Mike and Lucy didn’t make it up for graduation, which was too bad. But I sent them pictures. I knew exactly when they got there, too, because my phone rang. Mom was terribly, terribly upset that they’d cut all my hair off, and it took about twenty minutes just to get her calmed down enough that I didn’t have to hold the phone at arm’s length so I could listen without my eardrums bleeding.

After that, I went to more school. In Orlando, this time, which was lots, lots warmer than Great Lakes. I liked it there a lot. No, I did not go to Disney World. The classes were still pretty easy, but interesting. This one guy who’d gone to college for a couple years said the math was kind of fucked up, but I didn’t figure out what he meant until way, way later.

Anyway, there I was, a petty third fresh out of tech school, and headed for my first deployment on USS Harry S Truman (CVN 75), out of Norfolk. Since the Navy was paying for it anyway, I went home for a week to see everybody. Half the neighborhood must’ve turned out. I wasn’t the only person to join the service, but I was the only girl who did. It all felt really weird, like I was some kind of hero, and I didn’t like it. Little Mike — Lucy’s first kid — was in pre-school and growing like crazy. Lucy was looking more like Mom than ever, but she’d actually gotten married, and had another kid already.

I knew it all, from pictures and from talking to Mom on the phone, but it didn’t really hit me until I went and saw it. I got out of there as fast as I could.

It would’ve been nice if Harry had been in port at Norfolk, but she (Yes, she. All boats are ’she,’ even if they’re named after men. I have no idea why.) was in the Indian Ocean between Africa and India, so I had to fly out to Rammstein, Rammstein to Diego Garcia, and from Diego out to Harry. Long, long trip. Especially by military transport. It took weeks for the bruises on my ass to heal up. But I did get to make a carrier landing, which is pretty exciting, even in a garbage truck.

I got used to shipboard life pretty quickly. Having a petty officer (third class)’s stripe didn’t mean shit. Time served was more important. When the Marines wanted to get through a corridor, you got the hell out of their way. The watertight doors all had signs saying to keep them dogged at all times, but nobody believed that. An awful lot of fucking goes on aboard ship, mostly het. Rotating shifts are not fun. Showering and sleeping with thirty-odd other women gets to be no big deal after a while. We were very, very fortunate to not be in the Army.

And I fucking loved the airplanes. The ship, too. Did you know that that big-ass ship runs on steam? Okay, so she’s got nuclear-powered boilers and turbine generators for the electric motors spinning the wheels, but at heart she’s a steamship. Too fuckin’ cool.

But. I wanted to fly in a fighter jet, just once. There was a Marine lieutenant named Mendoza who drove a Harrier. I saw an opportunity there, and went for it. Or rather, for him. Not real subtle about it, either. I’d been fucking him for about two months before he mentioned flying to me. I swear, I didn’t say a word about it, it was totally his idea. I tried to sound kind of nervous about it, what if we get caught, all that sort of thing. I didn’t sound convincing to me, but I guess he wanted to show off to his girlfriend. So I let him talk me into it, and off we went.

Keep in mind that I had no idea there was any weird shit going on whatsofuckingever. None. Zero, zip, nada. The only thing I’d ever really noticed was that I had kind of a… feel, I guess, for machines, and especially for electronics. I knew when they were going to break, sometimes what to do to fix them. Once in a while, I could just yell at something, and it’d start working. But I thought everyone did that.

Turns out, they don’t. Or at least not most of them.

Anyway, it came kind of late, but that’s my Chrysalis. It started when the catapult threw us off the end of the carrier deck and up into the sky. Hell, I was wet just from strapping myself in. While it lasted, I knew everything there was to know about that airplane, every loose rivet, every blob of solder, how much wear time was left on the engine turbines, what it saw with its radar and cameras, everything. We’re lucky it wasn’t something more spectacular, or we’d probably have crashed. But Raúl felt something, definitely. I could still feel it fizzing in my bones when we got back to Truman.

The sex after that was the best I’ve ever had, before or since. I bit his shoulder so hard to keep from screaming that I drew blood. Lieutenant Raúl must’ve thought it was pretty good, too, ’cause we went up a bunch more times after that, and he gave me his second-favorite flight suit.

What, you thought he’d give me his best flight suit? He liked me, and we had a lot of fun in bed, but he wasn’t gonna divorce his wife and marry me or something.

Carefully, reverently, the old man knelt before the shrine. He laid a small bundle, swaddled in cloth, in the niche provided there and blew out the candle burning on it, symbolically giving the shrine and its contents back to the dark and to the little people who inhabited it. “Please, People of the Mountain, hear me. Give us leave to dig here, and help us return safely to the surface, to our families, our children. We thank you for your forbearance, and beg pardon for our intrusion.”

Knees creaking, back popping, the old man stood. Every month at the dark of moon (no one knew how the little people, who almost never went to the surface, knew the face of the moon, but apparently they did) he had knelt there, leaving his pleas and his people’s offerings for the People Under the Mountain. His father, and his grandfather, and his grandfather’s grandfather had been making these sacrifices for all their lives, keeping the miners safe and leading them to the best seams of ore.

His eldest, his only son, had no interest in superstitious garbage like this. The old man rubbed his jaw where the boy (and he would always, in the old man’s mind, be a boy no matter that he had survived thirty-some winters) had hit him the last time he’d tried to teach him the ritual. “There are no people who live in the dark, old man,” the boy had said. “And even if there were, the Christ would protect me from the children of Satan. What you do is heresy, idolatry, and I have no intention of burning at the same stake you do.”

The old man feared for his people, but it seemed that the boy was right after all. Eventually his aching knees would no longer carry him into the damp cold of the mine, so no offerings were made, no thanks given to the People Under the Mountain, only to the white Christ who lived in the sky.

Nothing happened. After the boy laughed his scorn in the old man’s face, he just gave up entirely. He stayed in bed, turned his face to the wall, refused to eat.

Within days, the old man died. The small shrine stayed empty, unvisited, forgotten.

The next day, things were different. Real different. How I looked, for one thing. I’d always been white, but I tanned when I went out in the sun, brown hair, brown eyes. Now, I was pale, chalky white with patterns in red across my cheeks and nose, white hair, with gray and orange eyes, like the glow from a barbecue when the coals have had time to burn way, way down. The weird part was, it wasn’t a surprise. This was how I was supposed to look, just like the other me was how I was supposed to look, too.

Had on this amazing outfit, too. It was like this black and gray leather jumpsuit sort of thing, with straps and buckles all over the place, and a zillion little loops and pockets for tools, big stompy boots with steel toes and this kind of armor stuff all down my left arm with pointed fingertips, like claws. I grinned at myself in the mirror, and my teeth were a dull dark gray and pointed too. And I had these bat wings, not real big, the same red as the skin everywhere else but my face, growing out from under my shoulder blades. They looked good then, but ended up being seriously fucking annoying later. I liked what I saw. I liked it a lot. I looked like some kind of fetish ninja demon out of a movie with a really good makeup effects department.

That was another thing. You might’ve heard someone say, ’swear to make a sailor blush?’ Shit, I managed to make a goddamned master chief blush. I couldn’t stop myself. Every third word was a curse. I damned near bit my tongue off trying to keep from doing it all the time, but it didn’t help. Almost lost a full grade for insubordination.

I tried, I really did. Since I changed, I knew more about that goddamned bucket of shit than CHENG did. I didn’t know why, or how it happened, but there I was. I could feel her all around me, all the airplanes, the bunker oil sloshing around in her tanks, the decay of her nuclear fuel, everything. I swear to God she was dreaming. Slow, dark, simple dreams, with brilliant flashes and sparkles like fireworks, impossibly far away. Now, I don’t claim to understand it, but I was there, and no shit, she dreamed.

But I wasn’t going to get to stay aboard her. She was the Navy’s, not mine, and they didn’t feel I fit in any more. We went around about it some, and they ‘offered’ to give me a medical discharge, rather than an other than honorable. The doctors decided it was some kind of late-onset Tourette’s syndrome. No, I did not tell them about how I looked, since nobody else seemed to be able to see me. Surely somebody would’ve mentioned it if they noticed the wings.

I’d get to keep some benefits, and I’d keep my grade (Aircraft Electronics Technician’s Mate, Second Class, if you must know), and I wouldn’t have to pay my reenlistment bonus back.

They were generous. Really generous. But I wanted to kill the whole goddamned review board when they told me what they’d decided. We’d actually gotten back to Norfolk by that point, so there I was, in the middle of a Navy town, and I wasn’t a sailor any more.

So I went and I stayed drunk for a solid week. It was the only reasonable thing to do. And in much better taste than having a rendering of her tattooed across my back, which was my other thought.

(Lieutenant Mendoza, bless his pointy little head, found another cute little E-rating to keep his dick wet for him. I didn’t care, by that point, and still don’t.)

Keep in mind that I didn’t know dick about what I was, what Faeries were, or any shit like that. I knew I was different, but I didn’t know there was anybody else like me out there. So it was something of a shock when this guy who looked like my twin brother found me on a barstool in Buffalo. New York. I have no idea how I got there, so don’t bother asking.

The first thing I did, when he got me back to his hotel room, was throw up. He told me in considerable detail what a stupid fucking bitch I was, and how much goddamned trouble he’d gone through to find me, and put me in the shower for a while. At least a day or two, until I sobered up enough to be worth talking to.

He said he was something called a nocker, and I was one, too. They didn’t have too many people in active service, but there were relatives of theirs that kept an eye out for people like me, and let them know when we were getting out. There was some kind of communications fuckup, and the guy who was supposed to have met me in Norfolk got there too late.

Yeah. So anyway, I had a choice, now. I could go with him and get an apprenticeship with the Bes Din, which he was an agent of, and learn more about what we were and what we were supposed to be doing, or I could go off by myself and get killed in a couple of months. Nice choices, there. It wasn’t like I was going to get any better offers, so I went along with it. Had to sign a long-ass contract, too.

But it was okay. They run a company, Global Technologies Consolidated, outside of Atlanta. It’s not publicly traded, but it’s all legal, incorporated in Bermuda. I was a ‘Research Associate Trainee.’ Almost everyone’s a nocker or nocker kin, with a few other kinds of people. Damned few straight-up normal humans. For good reason, you understand.

Employee orientation was a crash course on Fae history, recent and otherwise, some basics on etiquette and politics. And then they got us into the good shit. Gematria, Alchemy, Monad theory, Beginning and Advanced Contracts Seminars, Introduction to Mining… It almost made up for not being on board Harry any more. I got another reputation there, for being fucking nuts this time. Getting one for being a geek, there, would’ve been like getting a reputation for being able to swim, if you were a sperm cell.

We were a big hit at DragonCon, too.

So there I was, I’d finally found out exactly where I belonged, and they kicked my ass out. I’d made myself a big-ass sword, which amused the hell out of me, at least at first. See, the thing with my wings was, they didn’t fucking work. Oh, sure, I could move them, and feel with them, and all that sort of thing, but I couldn’t fly. When I was on board ship, it was fucking awful. I couldn’t exactly cut holes for ‘em in my uniform, so they were all cramped up inside there. Not that they were in the same world, but anyway. It’s seriously fucking unpleasant. Frankly, a good set of cramps is a better time.

Anyway, I ended up looking like the world’s baddest motherfucking moogle, straight out of the Final Fantasy games, so I figured, why the hell shouldn’t I have a big-ass sword? Because big-ass swords are really fucking heavy, for one thing. Another is that I don’t know how to use a big-ass sword. So I gave it to the armory and built myself a goblin bow. I’m not much better with those, but they at least have the benefit of working a nice long way away from the bad guys. It’s not really a crossbow at all, having more in common with a railgun than a spring-driven weapon. The bolts are all metal already so that works. It doesn’t actually throw them any farther or harder than a spring does, but dude, I’ve got a motherfuckin’ railgun! It looks a lot like Kaneda’s laser from Akira, actually. Not surprising, considering how much anime has warped my tiny little mind. One of these days I’m going to build his bike. Not that it’s going to get me cute Japanese girls, revolutionary anarchists (were they anarchists? I could not figure out the politics in that movie) or otherwise, but I can dream, right? Yeah. Anyway.

That, along with my thesis on machine dreams and virtual dreamworlds was my apprenticeship project. My advisor told me I shouldn’t do it, but I figured, what the hell? What’s the worst thing that could happen? Nobody believes they exist, but the Aethernauts took me when the Toymakers wouldn’t. Though even they think I’m batshit. When Aethernauts think you’re crazy? Maybe you should look into that.

I signed another fucking contract, got my guild license, and they said, basically, “You’re a fucking journeyman now. Get your narrow white ass out there and fucking journey.”

“How come it’s not ‘journeywoman?’”

“Shut the hell up and get out already, Glitch.” Ah, discourse among the goblin-kind.

So I’m fucking journeying already. The Bes Din hooked me up with a computer store that needed a repair/build technician up in Denver, and for some reason they actually hired me. It for damn sure wasn’t my stellar interviewing skills. I went back to San Antonio for a week to visit the family. It’s nice to see them, though we don’t talk about certain things, like why the baby is afraid of me. Apparently some children, if they’re young enough, can see into the Dreaming, and mine isn’t the most soothing face ever. If you want that cheerful helpful shit, find yourself a boggan. If you want shit to get done, you call one of us.

So, Denver. It snows up there. I may have to buy a truck for the winters. It’ll work out. I can learn how to snowboard or some shit.

It’s not always dark out on I-10 in west Texas. Even at night there’s light from billboards, from all the little towns and truck stops along the freeway, from headlights, from the sky. You can see a lot more stars out there too, with not so much sodium-orange light pollution blotting out the dimmer stars. Out west of Ozona, look up on a clear night and you can see why the Romans called it the Via Lactea, the Milky Way. The stars really do look like milk spilled on black glass. It is a truly breathtaking sight, if you stop to pay attention.

The nocker known as Glitch has no intention of stopping to pay attention, or of stopping at all unless there’s a truck stop canopy in between her and the sky. Not that she’s agoraphobic, but her kind is given to a subterranean life, and having nothing at all between them and the sky makes them uncomfortable. But there’s a sense of danger (and a very real danger) in driving at night that just isn’t there during the day. A knocker has a bit of an advantage, being able to see far better in the dark than a human, but mule deer on the road are a problem for everybody, mortal or otherwise.

But out underneath the Milky Way, just for right now, there’s only Glitch and her bike and a hundred empty miles of Texas freeway. The suspension was tuned perfectly, transmitting every joint in the pavement directly to her spinal cord through her pelvis. Top gear and thirteen thousand RPM and wind rushing through her tightly-furled wings and Oh. My. God. she thought, if there was only a way to do this without the leather in between me and the bike I would never ever ever get off this thing except to piss. I would eat every meal with it idling between my legs.

Do we all feel this way about machines?

Do I care?

Nah.

Eventually even West Texas freeway runs out, but that was eventually. This was now, and there was the girl on her stomach over the gas tank of her bike and the closest thing to pure speed possible on this fallen imperfect Earth, mile markers blurring past every thirty seconds, each little more than a flash of green at the edge of the dark.

While this story was written as a background story for a Changeling game (as oh so very many of my stories are) I was careful to leave out anything that’s specific to Changeling and, therefore, subject to copyright and trademark law. It’s more ‘inspired by’ than ‘based on.’ It was fun to write, especially Mafut. Edited 5 October 2005.

At the western edge of the Sahara, long, long ago – before even the followers of the Christ arrived, never mind those of the Prophet Mohammed – there lived a maiden whose little sister was lost during a sandstorm. Back then, back before men forgot so much, everyone knew that sandstorms were caused by ifriti, and to go out into them was death. The maiden’s mother and aunts and older sisters wailed and tore at their hair and clothes, her father and brothers and uncles slashed their arms with hooked knives, and not one of them even thought of going out to try to find her. If the maiden’s younger sister weren’t dead already she soon would be, and it was suicide to go out during a storm. The maiden, whose name, alas, has not been passed down to us, was young enough and brave – or foolish – enough to not care. While her family was mourning, she wound a gauze veil across her eyes and a wool shawl across her nose and mouth, took up two bladders of water, and set off into the storm, determined to find her sister.

Most days, of course, the sandstorm would have stripped the maiden’s flesh from her bones and left them, like so many others, to bleach in the sun’s furnace. That day, however, the ifrit whose storm it was happened to be close by where the girl was stumbling through the howling wind and the sand that made noon-day as dark as a moonless night.

Curious, the ifrit created a small space where the storm wasn’t. The maiden, who had been leaning into the wind trying to stay upright, fell face-first into the sand. She pushed herself to her knees and began to unwind the veils from her head. When she was done, she was shocked but not surprised, to find the ifrit standing there in front of her. He was tall, dark-skinned, and his brass-feathered wings dripped fire to the sand of the desert.

He was also, she noted, very, very beautiful.

“Do you often go for a walk into a sandstorm?” he asked, and his voice was the clashing of brass, the roar of fire uncontrolled.

“Oddly, no. I can’t imagine why I never have before. It’s lovely out here, with the wind and the sand and every last bit of it all trying to kill me.”

“You’re not serious.”

“No, I’m not. Aren’t you insightful?”

“You’ve a wish to die? I can help with that.”

“Kind though your offer is, I’d really rather live a while longer.”

“And yet you came into my storm, knowing that it could cost you your life.”

“So I did.”

“Why?”

“My younger sister. She didn’t come back to us before your fine storm struck, and I feared her lost. So I came to look for her.”

“Why shouldn’t I kill both of you?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. Why haven’t you?”

“I was curious. It isn’t often a mortal walks into one of my storms of her own mind.”

“Mmm. And has your curiosity been satisfied?”

By this time, the maiden had gotten to her feet, and stood, afraid to her very core, but not showing it. And the ifrit was very beautiful, after all. He took her chin in his hand (her skin burned where he touched her, so that she wondered that it was not painful) and looked into her eyes. “Not entirely,” he said, and if the clashing of brass could be said to be soft, his voice was soft.

“What remains?”

“You are mortal, and yet you stand before me, unafraid.”

“I am not unafraid,” she told him.

“You hide it well.”

“Thank you,” the maiden said, bowing a fraction of a degree, though she never took her eyes from his. “Besides, I still must find my sister, and if I let myself be paralyzed with fear, I would fail.”

“Determined, aren’t you?”

“Oh, yes.”

“What will you give for her?”

“For my sister, alive and unharmed, I will live with you and lay with you and be your wife.”

The ifrit was startled by the maiden’s offer, enough that he took a step back. She was a comely young woman, with thick black hair, dark brown skin, and deep black almond-shaped eyes. (And his fingers still burned from where he’d touched her.) It was tempting. More than tempting.

Around them, the storm raged on. The ifrit stepped closer to the young woman and, turning her face up to his, kissed her. His lips were surprisingly soft, she thought, and so were the curls of his beard and moustaches. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth to him. His mouth tasted of cinnamon and pepper, and she drew at it as though she were hungry, and him the only food she had tasted for days.

And when they stopped for breath, she very deliberately stepped back and slapped the ifrit, hard. “I am not yet your wife,” she told him, stifling urges both to giggle at his expression and to apologize profusely. “Until I am, you will not take such liberties with me.”

The ifrit scowled at the maiden, his eyes hard as glass under flaming brows. She glared back at him, not giving an inch. Suddenly, his stormy expression cleared, and he grinned. “This is going to be very interesting,” he said. “By all means, let us be married.”

Scowling to keep from grinning like a fool, the maiden asked, “And my sister?”

“She is still alive, unharmed, burrowed into the sand like a beetle.”

“Good.” Just to be confusing, and because she’d liked it the first time, the maiden kissed the ifrit again. Impossible as it had seemed, the second kiss was even better than the first. The thought that if the pattern held she might die from pleasure flitted through her mind.

Together, they found the maiden’s sister and took her back to her family. Soon after the maiden and the ifrit were wed, and they fought almost constantly, each being more passionate than the other.

They were, despite – or because of – the fighting, deliriously happy together, and together they lived for a long, long time.

~`~

“Tahiyya Tahiyya Tahiyya Tahiyya.”

“Yes, darling?”

“Nothing. I just like saying your name. Tah-hee-yah. Linda is positively boring.”

“It isn’t either boring.”

“It’s like mayonnaise on Wonder Bread.”

“Darling, ‘Linda’ means ‘beautiful’ in Latin and most of the languages that evolved from it. It’s a very nice name and it suits you.” Tahiyya’s English was perfect, though not even vaguely American. She’d been born in Morocco, went to boarding schools in France and England, and sounds like an NPR reporter. She’s also gorgeous: six foot two, skinny at two hundred some pounds, hard to describe without talking about coffee and chocolate. My best friend. And, well.

You’ll see.

It was Friday, which meant that Tahi’s roommate was off for the weekend with her boyfriend (who had an apartment off-campus) and we were smoking the very excellent weed that she always seemed to have on hand. I’d happily listen to her read a Microsoft End-User Licensing Agreement. She was wearing a yellow gauzy long-sleeved shirt and old blue jeans with one knee out that made me want to poke a couple fingers in so I could see if the skin on the inside of her knee was as soft as it looked.

“If you say so.” Me, I was not gorgeous. I’d always thought I was fairly tall for a girl until I met Tahi – I grew like crazy when I was eleven and didn’t stop until I was five nine. I was pale and covered with freckles so close they could just about hold hands and be a tan, and my hair was about two inches, uneven, and cobalt blue over light brown. For the record, I was wearing a black t-shirt with “I Will Not Fix Your Computer” on it, tan cargo shorts, green socks with dinosaurs printed on them, and a really old pair of black Chucks reinforced with duck tape.

“I do say so. More tea?” Tahi always said it was uncivilized to smoke pot without tea, which usually meant green tea with mint and lots of sugar.

“You’re too kind.” She knew I wasn’t making fun of her with the exaggerated politeness but about three meta-levels up, something like making fun of making fun of people who make fun of people who are just naturally very formal the way Tahi is. She understands.

~`~

We’d met in an aikido class. Being the two largest women there, we got paired up a lot for tying-each-other-in-knots practice. It’s a good thing she’s so sociable – if it’d been up to me I’d never have said anything that wasn’t directly related to aikido. She started it. No, really. She got talking to me and got me talking, and by the time we were back in our street clothes I found myself saying, “Hey, do you want to get some coffee or something?”

Tahi smiled, and the world fell out from under my feet. Metaphorically speaking, of course. The actual ground stayed resolutely unmoved. “Yes, thanks. I’d rather like that.”

So we went and got coffee, and we talked. “Tell me about you,” I told her. I wanted to know everything.

“I’m one of my favourite topics, darling. What would you like to know?”

“Start with the basics, I guess. How tall are you, anyway? I was guessing eight feet, but that can’t be right.”

Tahiyya smiled and shook her head. “Not quite eight feet, no. I’m one eighty-eight, that’s, um. Um um um. Six feet is one eighty-three, and five centimetres is just about two inches, so six foot two inches?”

“Six two, seriously? God, you’re a giant.”

“Seriously. And I weigh ninety-two kilos. Call it…” Tahiyya frowned and counted on her fingers as she did the conversion. “About two hundred five pounds.”

“You’re skinny is what you are. I don’t care how much you say you weigh.”

“Well, I run a lot.”

“Filthy habit.”

Tahiyya grinned, sharing the joke, and I felt my stomach flip. I prayed that it didn’t show too much. “I know.”

“So what about you?”

“I don’t know exactly,” I lied. Two hundred sixty-seven pounds. And I’m five inches shorter than you. “It’s been a while since I was on a scale.”

I don’t think she believed me, but she let it go. “At least you’ve got curves, darling. I’m all straight lines and angles.” Personally I thought she had very nice curves, just subtle ones. My body is not in any way subtle.

“How’d you wind up here?”

“Daddy’s parents are in Colorado Springs. They wanted me to go to school there and live with them, and I wanted to go somewhere I’d be on my own. This was the compromise we worked out. Besides, the University of Denver has a perfectly adequate journalism program.”

“That’s your major?”

Tahi spread her hands wide in something like a shrug. Her hands weren’t pretty; they were big and knob-knuckled and scarred with blunt fingertips and short nails. I’d heard people muttering about transsexuals around her, but she’s not – she’s just very, very tall. Though she’s athletic, a very good runner and a decent soccer goalie (”football goalkeeper, love,” corrects the Tahi-voice in my mind), she does not play basketball and isn’t interested in playing it. “I haven’t officially decided yet. There’s that, or English Literature, or any number of things. You?”

“Electronic engineering,” I said. “I like math and I’m completely gadget-oriented, so it was a natural.”

“What do you mean, gadget-oriented?”

“Well, like this,” I said. Of course I had my cell phone with me – a Blackberry Pearl I got because it was neat (and refurbished), not because I really needed it. I pulled it out of my pocket and slid it across the table to Tahi. “On the stock model, the traclit thing here is white. Mine’s blue ’cause I took an alcohol marker to it, see?”

She looked a little confused, but was at least still listening politely. “I’ve a feeling I’m going to regret asking, but what’s a ‘traclit?’”

My ears got a little red and I couldn’t meet her eyes. “Um. It’s a combination of trackball and clitoris. ’cause it’s sort of shaped like one, and when you rub it things happen.”

Tahi looked like she was trying to stifle a laugh. “Oh, I see. Hm. I can’t think of anything to say at this point that isn’t innuendo.”

“I did start it,” I mumbled. “How about a change of subject, then?”

“Certainly. Your go, I think.”

“Back to the family thing. Where are your parents at?”

Tahi looked just a little sad and fiddled with her coffee, stirring it more than it needed. “Maman is in Iran taking photos of the more famous mosques. I think she’s in Qom right now, but it’s been a week since I’ve had word from her. Daddy’s in Ethiopia helping to open a new Hamlin Fistula Hospital in Harrar.”

“Seriously? I’ve heard of that hospital, they do amazing stuff.”

“Daddy is, to quote him, ‘an inveterate bleeding heart’ so yes, seriously. His parents are a bit on the conservative side, so they’re not sure whether they’re proud of him for doing what amounts to charity work for not much money or to be disappointed that he’s not making much money doing what amounts to charity work. It’s all very complicated, you see.”

“I do see. Did they split up or something?”

“Oh no, they’re still all woogly in love with each other. It’s just that their work is really really important to them, and it takes them all over the place. They see each other a few weeks a year. I think if they actually had to live in one place, together, they’d both go mad and kill each other in six months.” She looked wistful and fidgeted with her coffee. “So what about yours?”

I felt vaguely ashamed that my parents weren’t nearly as interesting as Tahi’s, and then worse for feeling ashamed of them. Oh, the joys of self-esteem issues. “Dad’s a bartender, mom drives a bus for the city. We’re very boring people.”

Tahiyya leaned across the table to poke me in the sternum, hard. “Ow!”

“Stop that. If you were boring I’d not be asking. So your parents were poor?” she asked, glaring at me.

“Uh, yeah,” I said, rubbing the spot where she’d poked me. Doomed, said the voice in the back of my head. You’re doomed. What do you mean doomed? I wailed. You’re in love with her already, and you’re afraid she won’t love you back. Shut up, brain, or I’ll poke you with a Q-Tip! Whatever.

“But they’ve managed to raise you – any siblings?”

“An older sister, a younger brother. Melanie got pregnant her last year of school – high school, that is – and she’s still living at home with the folks and her boy Tanner. He’s three now and Mel’s working on her GED. Brian’s still in school and wants to join the Navy when he gets out. I’m the first in the family to go to college.”

“See?” Tahi said, smiling. I felt actually physically warmer when she smiled, and I couldn’t help but smile back. Damned brain. “That’s an accomplishment right there. They raised three fine children, if your sibs are anything like you, and they’ve managed to send you to college.”

I had to duck my head and look away. Was I blushing? Yeah, I was blushing. Damn it. “I guess.”

“Trust me, darling.”

~`~

I did trust her. We started making a habit of getting together after aikido class, though we drank water as often as we had coffee. And then we started getting high on weekends and talking or watching movies or just reading. Which brings us back to where I started my story.

Tahi’s fingers brushed mine as she handed me back my teacup. I wrapped my hands around it for the warmth and closed my eyes. Deep breaths, I told myself. No hyperventilating. It’s not attractive. She had this gorgeous glossy black hair, but I’d never seen it loose – usually she wore it the way she did tonight, parted down the middle and twisted into a pair of small tight knots behind each ear. Or in a single bun or a French braid. “Thanks,” I said. The weed helped keep me from being too nervous. “You know, I’ve never seen you with your hair down?”

Tahi picked at the hem of her shirt and didn’t quite look at me. “Haven’t you? I suppose I do keep it up most of the time, don’t I?”

“How come?”

“It gets unruly, darling.”

“Would it be all right if I took it down? I’d love to see it that way.”

Tahi sucked her bottom lip between her teeth, then nodded. “If you like.” She turned around; I scooted in closer, and started to pull out the pins that held her hair (mostly) in place. The back of Tahi’s neck had short soft feathery hairs; she shivered as my breath moved them. I shivered too, and my nose bumped into the back of her head.

“Tahi?”

“Yes, darling?”

“Can I tell you something? It’s kind of important.”

“Of course, darling. What is it?” She started to turn around to face me, but I put my hands on her shoulders, not pushing, just resting there.

“Please, I don’t think I can do this if you’re looking at me.”

“Gracious. It must be important.” Tahi relaxed so her back was square to me again. “Do go on; I promise not to look.”

“I.” I swallowed, trying to push my heart back down where it belonged. My hands fell into my lap. “I love you, Tahi. I have since I first met you, I think.”

Tahi was quiet for what seemed like years, but was probably really only twenty seconds or so. She let out a breath and leaned back into me and pulled on my hands so I was holding her. “This is a tremendous gift you’ve given me, Linda. I don’t know what to say. Though I sort of wish you didn’t.”

“You don’t. I’m sorry. I. I won’t mention it again.” I could hear my heart breaking.

“Oh, Linda.” Tahi turned around so she was kneeling in front of me and took my face in her big hands, almost hot against my so-cold skin. “Darling, I’ll not make you look at me, but hear me, please. Do give me a chance, won’t you?”

“You don’t like girls,” I mumbled. How could my tears be so hot when I was so cold inside? “It’s okay, I should’ve known that, I’m sorry.”

“Damn you Lin, don’t you fucking go away on me,” Tahi said. She sounded angry and a little scared. I looked up at her and she looked so worried and I hated myself for making her feel that way. “And don’t you dare apologise.” She rested her forehead against mine and closed her eyes. “I don’t like girls,” she said slowly. “Not the way you mean. Rather, I haven’t thought about fancying girls. But I like you very much. Let me give it a try? Please.”

And then she kissed me. As kisses go it wasn’t all that great. I was still crying – and crying ugly, not the pretty teardrop rolls down the cheek thing but really crying with my nose full of snot and everything. Tahiyya hadn’t kissed a girl before and was a little hesitant about it. But that was all right. She went and got me some Kleenex and more tea (tea is her cure for nearly every ill) and stroked my hair until I finally stopped crying, got my sinuses to quit flooding, and gathered what was left of my dignity.

“Thank you, Tahi,” I told her. I didn’t quite feel like grinning, not just yet, but the faint smile I was wearing felt right.

“For what, darling?”

“For giving me a chance. For not being repulsed. For not going away.”

“Linda, you’re utterly adorable. And very brave, also. What you did took a lot of courage.”

“Thanks.”

“Darling, you’re entirely welcome. Weren’t you in the middle of something?”

“Huh?”

“You wanted to see me with my hair down?”

“Oh! Yes. Please.”

Tahiyya turned round again so her back was to me. “You’d best carry on then.”

Carry on? Carry on what? That’s my brain, always got my back. Oh, it means keep doing what you’re doing. Once I pulled out the array of bobby pins that held the buns in place, Tahi’s hair was a mass of heavy, warm, curly, black hair that fell halfway down her back. I combed it out with my fingers, taking my time with it. I couldn’t help putting my nose in for a sniff; she smelled amazing. “Holy shit, Tahi.”

“There is rather a lot of it, hmm?” Tahi agreed, sounding amused. She turned round (her hair slid through my hands like something living) to sit facing me. “So. What do you think?”

“Um. I think you’re fucking gorgeous.”

“Flatterer.”

Tahi grinned at me and I felt my heart stutter. “Oh, god.”

“Hardly that, darling.” Her grin faded to a smile, but her eyes were still full of mischief. “You know, I’m not sure I got the best impression the first time.”

“Huh?”

“That kiss. I don’t think I got you at your best. Maybe we should try again?”

I don’t remember crossing the space between us. It felt like one moment she’d just said I should kiss her again, the next I was there, one hand in her hair, the other on her waist pulling her to me and her mouth was open just a little and she tasted like sugar and mint tea and weed and her tongue was in my mouth and even the snarky voice in the back of my head that hates me joined the chorus of it’s real she’s really here she’s really real oh my god she feels looks smells tastes so good.

Finally I felt like I was going to pass out and I had to pull back, panting for breath. Tahi was breathing a little harder too. “Oh thank you thank you thank you thank you,” I kept saying under my breath.

“You’re welcome, love.”

“Hey, wait a minute.”

“Hmm?”

“What did you mean when you said you wished I didn’t, didn’t love you?”

Tahi sighed, picked up my hand in both of hers, kissed the palm, and held onto it loosely, as if she’d forgotten about it. “I didn’t mean.” Another sigh. “Well, I did mean. As if wishing changed anything. Darling, please do believe me, it’s not because I don’t like you. You’re just lovely and I could just snuggle down into the folds of your shiny shiny brain and live there happily. But I seem to hurt people who love me in the end and I’d rather not see you hurt that way. Especially if it’s me hurting you.”

“It doesn’t have to end badly, Tahi,” I said softly.

“No, but it does always seem to.”

“How many times is ‘always,’ anyway?”

That got a small laugh and a somewhat bitter smile. “Touché, love. Twice. Poor data, I know, but it’s all I’ve got.”

I leaned in and kissed her again. “It’s worth the risk, Tahi. You are worth it.”

We didn’t make love that night. We kissed a lot, held on to each other, and somehow managed to fall asleep tangled up with each other in Tahi’s narrow dorm bed. My mouth felt like there were socks in it when I woke up, but that was the only real side effect of the night before. It wasn’t the first time I’d woken up in Tahi’s room, but it was the first time I’d woken up in her bed. She wasn’t in it; I looked and found her sitting in a desk chair, wearing a ludicrously pretty grass-green robe over creamy white pajamas and pointing a camera at me. She took three quick shots and set it down. “Hi there.”

“Uh, hi. Morning. You been up long?” My bladder let me know that however long Tahi had been up, I’d been asleep a while, and I got up to hurry to the bathroom. As I went past, Tahi was starting to laugh.

“Oh, I wish I’d still had my camera to hand! The look on your face was just brilliant.”

“What?” I called through the door. Peeing is one of life’s great blessings. It’s almost better than sleep.

“The way your eyes went wide, it was lovely, darling.”

Mutter mutter flush scratch mutter. I don’t wake up well. To help deal with the socks in my mouth, I borrowed some toothpaste and scrubbed as well as I could with my finger. Much better. A little water pushed my hair back from my head, and I was almost presentable. Vaguely.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Tahi told me. She handed me a cup of black tea that turned out to have honey in it and waved me towards her bed. “I liked the way you looked while you were sleeping very much, and I wanted to capture it. If you want, I’ll give you the card so you can delete them yourself.”

The tea was too hot for me; I set it aside and looked at Tahi. It looked like she’d been up for a while. Her hair wasn’t as under as much control as usual, but she’d put it up in an untidy pile of curls on top of her head. Had showered, I thought. “It’s fine. But don’t show ‘em to anybody else without checking with me first?”

“Of course. Wouldn’t dream of it.” She got up from her chair, came over to where I was sitting on the edge of the bed, and pushed me back to climb up on top of me, on her hands and knees.

“Hi,” I said, looking up at her. I don’t know what my brain thought was going on, but my body sure liked her being that close.

“Hullo.” She kissed me, and I was very glad that I’d done something to make my mouth taste less like old socks. After that, I noticed two things: the robe was actual silk, and her body wrapped in silk was getting close to the top of my list of favorite things in the world.

“Um.” I swallowed. “That’s a nice thing to wake up to.”

“Oh good.” Tahi let herself relax so she was lying on top of me with her head on my shoulder. I could feel her breath on my neck. “I know I said I didn’t want to have sex right away last night. But this morning? I want you desperately.”

My eyes must have gone really wide just then. “You what?”

“Want you. Lust after you, darling. I don’t sleep much and spending the night that close to you, well. I had a lot of time to think.”

“Uh. What if your roommate gets back?”

“Are you trying to find reasons not to? You could just say no, love.”

“Oh god no! Nonono. I mean, yes. I want you. I just don’t want to be interrupted.”

Tahiyya grinned and kissed me again, got up, and put the chair in front of the hall door. “There. At least we’ll have a moment’s warning if she does come back, but I doubt I’ll see her until tomorrow evening.”

“Oh, good.”

~`~

The desert went on forever. I’m going to die, thought Tahiyya. She had no idea how long she’d been walking, and she was thirsty. Tahi had done drugs before, even had a few drug-fuelled hallucinations, but this was different, more real than hallucinations and less real than the baked yellow stone of the pyramids. On some level she knew she had stumbled into another world, the way Alice had stumbled and fallen through the looking-glass into an impossible garden.

By this time, she had forgotten what led her out into the sand. A voice? Music? A scent? She didn’t know, and was beginning to think it didn’t matter. Whatever it had been, it was gone now and there was nothing left but endless dunes and killing heat and the white sun overhead. And one tall brown girl, lost and afraid. She looked behind to see that within ten feet her footprints had completely disappeared. There was nothing for it but to trudge up one side of a dune and slide down another.

The day never ended. The sun never moved in the sky. There weren’t even mirages to break up the monotony of a world of sand. No bones, noted Tahi’s mind in a dry quiet voice. When I die here, there will be nothing left, nothing for my parents to bury.

“Fuck it,” Tahi said eventually. Her voice rasped in her dry throat. “I’m not doing this any more.” Her ass thudded into the sand. It was hot, but the landing didn’t hurt. “I’m not doing this bloody film shit where I stagger over the dunes until I collapse and crawl until I can’t any more and die with sand all over my face. If everywhere is the same as right here, what’s the point? I might as well sit and wait for whatever it is to come to me.”

Is there any real distinction between falling asleep and passing out? Under normal circumstances, surely, but “normal” did not include an endless vista of rippled sand and an unmoving sun in the burning sky. Whatever Tahiyya might have called it, it was not the desert and she fell gratefully into it, a stone in deep water.

Are you sure you want this one?

“Yes yes I’m sure. Mine, dog. I’ll piss a circle round her if you really need it. Don’t you have other things to do? Bones to dig up? Testicles to lick?”

There was a snarl like someone tearing linen, if linen were a gigantic prehistoric dog. It was weird enough that Tahi thought it worth the effort of opening her eyes. Or an eye at least. No sense going off half-cocked. The desert was gone, replaced by a very large room built from red stone. The ceiling was lost in shadow (or maybe night), and the nearest columns were at least a few kilometres away. Some people were standing nearby. Their number kept changing, fluctuating between two and everyone. At least they might’ve been people. It was hard to tell. The bodies were shaped like people, the heads weren’t. Cat, crocodile, jackal – that might be the dog – cow, warthog, hawk, owl, elephant, hare, hippo, baboon. Their voices rumbled in the background, and a part of Tahi’s mind wondered how she could understand them, since they seemed to each be speaking a different language.

One day you will go too far, cat.

“And then we’ll see whose teeth are sharper, won’t we?”

I look forward to it.

“Me too, puppydog. Don’t have too much fun without me.” Between one moment and the next, the number of people dropped and finally stablilised at one. The one that was left crouched down where she could see that she was a woman, naked, and wearing the head of a tawny-furred, black-eared cat “Hi. I bet you’re wondering why I asked you here today.”

“Not really. Takes too much energy. Pretty, though.”

“See, I told that dog he wouldn’t like you. He’d wouldn’t get that joke if I wrote it on the back of the sun’s chariot and he chased it forever.” An ear flicked; the cat’s whiskers pushed forward. “But I do. And I forgive you. Admirable, really, wit like that after an experience like you’ve had. A cat thing, though. Dog, not so much. Too literal-minded, dogs.”

“Well that explains everything,” Tahi muttered, letting her eye fall back closed. “I’m dying, and this is my brain entertaining myself in the process.”

“Odd you should mention dying. It’s not a sure thing, you know.”

“S’pose not,” Tahi mumbled. “What’s in it for me?”

“You can stop being funny now, walker girl. I already said I like you.”

“‘kay.” Neither of them said anything. Tahi got the idea that the cat woman would wait forever if she had to, or at least a good minute longer than she would. She opened her eye again. The woman was all cat now, not quite a metre of body and half that length of tail. “So. Why did you ask me here?”

“I’ve got a proposition for you, little walker. It’s a big old world out there, you might just see a lot of it, not all of it is going to like you. I can help with the parts that won’t like you, and I get to go interesting places and see people and talk to someone whose voice I haven’t been hearing for five thousand years.”

“Which explains why I’m here.”

“Well, you’re here here because you’re dying, you got that part right.”

“Because I’m fucking brilliant, I know.”

“Thing is, you’ve got a choice. One way, there’s a balance and a feather and the Eater of Souls. The other way is, well, the other way.”

“Back to the desert?”

“For a while. But the one you go back to has an edge.”

“I don’t want to go back to the desert.”

“You can’t stay here. Here won’t be here that long, and if you’re still here when it isn’t, you won’t either. Even the Eater of Souls is better than that.”

“Are you sure?”

A callused thumb peeled her eyelid back so a woman with the grey eyes the cat had had could glare at her. Two eyes against one didn’t seem fair, but she’d have to open the other one to summon reinforcements. “Yes I’m bloody sure, twit. I’ve been nothing. You don’t want to be nothing.”

“All right.” Tahi sighed. Things were getting to be way too interesting. “The other way. Not the balance and the feather and the Eater of Souls. They’ll be here when I get back.”

“Bet your narrow ass they will.” The woman – she was wearing her cat face again – bent and kissed her on the forehead. She felt better. No sand under her eyelids, in her sinuses, in places that didn’t bear thinking about. Her tongue wasn’t a piece of dry meat filling her mouth any more. “Get up and walk, walker. I’ll be right behind you.”

Tahiyya stood up and brushed sand off her clothes. They weren’t what she remembered wearing. Skirts, robes, keffiyah and veil, sashes, sandals. Very bright colors, none of them matching. “Don’t look behind me, yes?”

“You’ve heard this one before. But right. Go on and take the third left. There are some people there you’ll want to meet.”

“Who?” Tahiyya walked on, feeling the sway of her skirts, the heat of the red stone through her sandals, the rough texture of the wall as her fingertips brushed along it.

“People like you.”

“Would you please elaborate?”

“The Brass Sands Travelling Bazaar and Improbabilitorium.”

“The what?”

“It’s hard to explain with words. You’ll see when you get there.”

“So what people?”

“Two-souled folk. One human, one not, and the both of them in the same body. I imagine it feels rather odd. You might know some of them as Faeries.”

“Which makes me?”

“Faery. A walker. The ifrit’s daughter and one of Anansi’s get. It’ll get you into quite a bit of trouble, some of it very likely fatal, but you’ll like that.”

“Sounds terribly exciting.”

“Sometimes, yes. I’ll be there to help. For a price.”

“Ah. And if I don’t agree, it’s the feather and the balance and the Eater of Souls?”

“Nope. That choice was made already. This is something else.”

“What do I get?”

“My protection, healing when you need it, and my company. It’s no small thing, not on the road you’ve set your feet on.”

“Probably not. So what’s the price?”

“An oath, of course. I was once known for being a fast runner, so each day you’ll run for at least one atur. You’ll keep your body free from hair. And, hm. How do you feel about pork?”

“It’s all right, I suppose.”

“Okay, no more pork for you. Touch nothing that came from a pig.”

“Why?”

“Why not? I’m allowed to be arbitrary.”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“I mean yes, I agree. What’s an atur?”

“A measure of distance. I’ll show you tomorrow.”

“And why the hair?”

“I’m sure you can find out, clever girl that you are. Do some research.”

“Okay. What’s your name?”

“Names have power, ifrit’s daughter. Ask instead how I’m called.”

“How shall I call you then?”

“Call me Mafut.”

Me? It’s not like I always wanted to be a monster when I grew up, you know. I’m pretty sure I wanted to be a princess at some point.

No, seriously. With pearl-studded gowns and diamond tiaras and everything.

So, you probably want to hear about how dysfunctional my childhood was, how Momma was all distant when she wasn’t screaming orders and threats and beating us with whatever was closest to hand, Daddy drank up all the money, and I got gangfucked by hogs on a regular basis? That a tortured past warped my little mind like a board left out for a few years? Didn’t happen.

You know, telling a story this long can make a girl kind of thirsty, if you know what I mean.

Thanks. What? I shouldn’t have manners or nothin’ right? Cope. So where was I? Oh yeah, how my terrible, pitiful goddamned childhood made me the twisted wreck of a creature that I am today. Uh-huh.

You might have guessed that I had a brother or two. Six, actually. Me and Mom were the only females in the house. Not counting dogs, cats, or livestock.

Out in unincorporated West Buttfuck County Montana, where I grew up, there just ain’t a whole lot to do that doesn’t involve livestock. I am dead certain that each of my brothers lost his virginity to a ewe or a sow. Mostly because I heard them giggling in the middle of the night about how little Petey picked an ugly one. You got to love them flat states, baby.

Yo, that’s a joke. Lighten up a little, huh?

Credit where it’s due, though, my brothers did teach me how to fight. Or at least they got me started. Daddy really, really wanted me to be his sweet little girl, with pink frilly dresses and pigtails and shit like that, but the boys always seemed to have more fun. You know, they got to go crawl around in the mud, fix the pickups, ride horses, shoot things, castrate sheep. Learning how to cook was all right, and helping Momma feed all the hungry mouths in the house felt pretty good. The nearest girl I knew of was twenty miles away. She always sat in the back of the bus, reading something. Rebecca, that’s what her name was. She hated being called Becky, so everyone did.

Anyway, my brothers. I think I was five when Petey and Frank decided to give me a haircut, like I always did with my dolls. Frank, who was bigger, sat on my back to hold me down while Petey took Mom’s pinking shears to my hair. It hadn’t ever been cut, so it was almost two feet long. When they were done, the most I had left was this one bit over my left ear that was maybe an inch and a half. The rest of it was kind of patchy, down to my scalp in some places. Actually, I thought it was kind of cool later, but I cried like anything when I got a look at my head in the mirror. Momma had an absolute shit over it. Spanked the hell out of Petey and Frank, and then when Daddy got back in, he walloped them, too. I don’t think they were able to sit down for a week.

Now, that was some funny shit. After that, Michael started showing me how to hit back. Mostly it was an excuse to hit me, I think, but I got good at it. Not that it didn’t keep me from getting my ass kicked on a regular basis, since we’d fight over the stupidest shit imaginable, and the boys were all bigger than me, but at least I wasn’t the only one sporting bruises and fat lips.

So of course we had a ranch, because the soil out there ain’t good for much. Sheep are absolutely the stupidest creatures on the face of this planet, with the possible exception my oldest brother Steve. Mom must’ve been so surprised when he came out that she dropped him on his head. I spent more damned time untangling the things (sheep, not my brother Steve) from bushes, barbed-wire fences, or hauling them out of mudholes than I really want to think about. I fucking hate sheep. The boy stuff I fought so hard to get to do wasn’t near as exciting as it looked when I wasn’t able to do it, but by god I was going to do it and not complain. At least not where anyone could hear me.

I figure when I’m old, I can lie about having to walk to school through neck-deep snow, but I never actually did. You know, we had buses? With actual heating? Mom would drive us out to where the bus picked us up, and we’d sit in the van with the motor running until the bus came. God help you if you were late. It only took me one day going to school in February in my socks because I didn’t have time to find where Petey had hidden my boots to learn that when Mom said ‘We’re leaving now,’ she meant right now.

You know, thinking back on it, I don’t really think I ever thought there was anything too weird going on. I suppose there were signs that things were, like, not exactly what they seemed, but lemme tell you, the Dreaming out on the Canadian border looks pretty much the same way the Autumn World does. Flat, usually kinda brownish when it’s not covered in snow, lots of grass and little scrubby trees. No barbed wire in the Dreaming, though.

I was about eight when it happened. I had this little brown-and-gray mutt puppy with huge paws and floppy ears and a tail that wagged all the time, and I called him Prince, being a little short on imagination if you know what I mean. He slept in my bed until Mom made me put him out in the barn at night with all the other dogs. I bet you know where this is going.

Yeah, so one night in early February, I hear him howling like he’s lost, so I went out to the barn to check on him. No Prince. There was a nasty, blowing snowstorm going that night, and the only way I got to the barn in the first place was following the guide rope. Anyway. Like the dumbass little shit I was, I went out looking for my puppy, trying to follow the sound of his howling over the wind. To this day, I don’t know how I found him, but I did. Dead, and freezing stiff, and I wasn’t too far behind him.

It was kind of nice, at the end. I was warm, and sleepy, and comfortable. The wind was screaming, though, and I could almost understand what it was saying. I kept trying to pay attention, to figure out what it was trying to tell me.

If you want to know the truth, I think I died out there. Or she did. That little girl who wanted to be a princess. Maybe she died, and the cold hungry screaming wind came in and took her place.

That is, I did. Me. The monster.

Old Man Paulsen found me there, curled up in the snow and sleeping like I was dead. He’d felt the Glamour over the storm and came looking. No dog. I’d ate him, while I was still mostly asleep. The first thing I remember when I woke up is being hungry, and then rage, cold and howling like the storm wind.

The next thing was Old Man Paulsen’s fist slamming into the side of my head after I tried to bite his arm off. Down I went. Again.

Paulsen lived by himself in an old two-room shack out in the middle of nowhere, even for West Buttfuck County. Which is saying something. He was the local boogeyman, he’d shoot at kids who trespassed on his land, and we all told stories about kids who disappeared. The grown-ups all said that they ran off to the city, hitching a ride with a trucker or something, but we knew better. Old Man Paulsen got ‘em. He ate kids. Especially dumbass teenagers.

Turns out we were dead right.

At least about some of them. Probably some kids really did run off for the big city, but a lot of them ended up on Old Man Paulsen’s stove.

I don’t know how much later it was, but I woke up in Paulsen’s shack. It was a little warmer than the outside, but with all the loose shingles and tore-up tar paper, the wind screamed even louder than before. He didn’t have much, just a bed, a table with one chair, an old chest of drawers, and a woodstove in the room that didn’t have the bed in it. He also had a whole lot of books, stacked up on shelves on the walls. There wasn’t a whole lot to do in the winter except read, when there wasn’t anything around worth hunting.

Most of the table was full of his reloading equipment. He had a positively ancient Winchester lever-action .30-06 rifle and a nasty-looking .357 revolver with no sights and the thumb grip on the hammer filed off. He’d wrapped the butt of it with cloth tape. They weren’t his only weapons, though. He had a scythe that only we could see or touch, and a pair of gloves that came up to his elbows, all covered with rusted nails, broken glass, barbed wire, and snow tire studs. And a few yards of rusted chain with a towhook on one end that he kept in the bed of his pickup.

The old bastard himself wasn’t much to look at. He was about six and a half feet tall, skinny, but built like he was made out of baling wire. He didn’t look like he was as strong as he was. Blotchy gray and black skin. Little piggy black eyes set deep in his head, no lips, and a fucking disaster of a mouth. Huge nasty yellow teeth like a shark in dire need of an orthodontist.

He always, always, always wore the same hat, no matter what else he was doing. Flat crown, wide brim, and a leather band. It was bright shiny red like new blood, but dry to the touch.

I didn’t look any better. Same skin, same eyes, same teeth. Only difference was I was smaller, and had more hair. I even still had all my fingers and toes. Not much of my ears left, and a flat nose.

And I didn’t have the red cap. Yet. I was dressed in salt-stained ratty brown leather and rusted mail, and a grayish-white watch cap about the color of dirty ice.

First thing he did was hit me again, not hard enough to knock me out, but enough to make my eyes cross. “Okay, kid, I had the bad fucking luck to be the only one around when you woke up, so I guess I’m stuck with you. But you do what I say, when I say it, and we’ll get along fine. You got that?”

I’d never heard a grown-up say ‘fucking’ before, so that impressed me even more than the way he looked. I nodded, and mumbled, “Yeah.” So he smacked me across the head a third time. My ears started ringing.

“Let’s try again. You got that?”

“Yeah, I got that.”

He glared at me, and let me tell you, Old Man Paulsen had a world master-class glare. “Good. Now let’s get your scrawny ass home before your parents have half the county looking out for your corpse.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Yeah? Get used to it.”

He called me kid, or you little fucker, or just bitch. I called him boss. Tried sir once, and got the shit beat out of me. Which pretty much defined the relationship. He figured bruises taught better than anything, and I got a lot of them. He was careful to keep them where nobody could see them. That is, I could see them, and he could, but nobody else. The same way they couldn’t see my new good looks. Which is probably a good thing. I don’t think Mom would’ve liked to have a frostbitten corpse sitting at the breakfast table.

Speaking of breakfast, I was always hungry. Still am. I ate everything I could get my hands on. Mom, used to cooking for a whole lot of men and boys, was shocked at how much I ate. There was never leftovers. Not that I got fat or anything, it all just seemed to disappear as soon as it got to my stomach. Yeah, yeah, I know, we can eat anything that fits in our mouths, but it’s not like we like eating pig slops or hay or garbage or Buicks or whatever. Unless someone’s watching. Then sometimes it’s funny, watching them turn green.

One thing about being known to hang out with the local boogeyman, it gives you a reputation. The kids at school didn’t like me, but they didn’t give me a whole lot of shit either, so that was all right.

Old Man Paulsen taught me about fighting, serious fighting, the history of where Redcaps in particular came from (and don’t think you’re gonna get any of that out of me. I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you. Not that you don’t look tasty. Settle down, I’m kidding. Mostly.), and where the Fae in general came from. About the War, and how the goddamned elves fucked us with iron knives when we sat down to negotiate, a few centuries after they’d fucked us by slamming the doors to Arcadia shut in our faces. But you knew about that part already.

Taught me how to hide so no one could see me until it was too late. How to track someone or something with a will-o’-wisp. How to hunt monsters, which is pretty damned good practice for hunting anything else. There’s a lot of seriously bad shit out there, and more popping up all the time. Things straight out of nightmare.

Which is cool, ’cause so are we. There weren’t any heads or anything on his wall. You eat what you kill. First rule.

And them folks at the packing plant say they don’t waste nothing. Heh.

Second rule. Don’t let the humans know what you are. Not that there’s anything wrong with people knowing there are monsters in the world, ’cause there are, just don’t let people know that you’re one of ‘em. Third rule. If you can avoid it, never, ever, stand up and fight. You fight smart, and leave fighting stupid to Smurfs and elves. If you got no choice, then give it everything you got. Fourth rule. Glamour tastes better with fear. Fifth rule. If you can take it, you deserve to have it. If you can’t keep it, you don’t deserve to. It’s funny, how much of it all seemed like I already knew, but just needed to be reminded.

I spent a few years learning from him before I got my first solo kill. It was some kind of lizard thing, about the size of a combine, covered in plate-sized scales. It spit this acidic gel stuff; I watched it dissolve a cow once while I was tracking it. If I was some dumbfuck troll, I guess I’d have gotten my biggest axe out and gone out to just chop the thing up, but I ain’t. So I took a whole bunch of rusty leg traps the old man had hanging on the wall of his shack, and baited ‘em with a couple of sheep. Alive and squallin’ their damn empty heads off.

See, what you do is you take a two-foot stake and drive it into the ground, and there’s a chain running from that to the leg trap. Then when it snaps shut, whatever it’s attached to ain’t going nowhere for a while until it gets the leg chewed off, ’cause the trap’s teeth are clamped into the bone. I found it while it was still working on that, and snuck up with that scythe that the old man had. The fucking thing was still faster than it deserved to be, and smacked me across the ribs with its tail. Broke a few of them. But I got lucky. I managed to hold on when it smacked me, and clamped my teeth onto the base of the thing’s tail like I was another leg hold trap. It kept writhing and jumping around, trying to get me off, and if it could’ve rolled, it would’ve worked, but that leg trap got all kinds of things fucked up. Which is what they’re for in the first place.

So I made my way up its back until I got up right behind its head, and that’s when I went to work. I chewed my way down through the thing until I got to its spine, and then bit the fucker clean through. Bam, down it goes. It’s still a lizard, right, so it takes a while for rest of its body to figure out that it’s fucking dead, but I ain’t in no hurry, so I go looking for the scythe. Old Man Paulsen’s standing there with one of his goddamned hand-rolled cigarettes — smell like he rolled them out of old rope — holding the scythe. “Looking for this?” he asks, and slaps me across the head with the butt end of it. I didn’t say nothing. “C’mon, kid, you ain’t done yet.”

“The fuck I ain’t. It’s dead already.” Bam. The butt end of the scythe hits me again, in my busted ribs this time. I cough, spit blood. Some of it’s mine.

“Get your ass over here.” So I went. He’s got the still-twitching lizard sliced open and its ribs pulled apart by the time I get there. Its heart is still beating. The old man hands me a knife and says, “Get it out.” So I did. The thing’s still beating, in my hands, and bigger than my fucking head.

“Take your hat off.” I do, one-handed, the lizard heart in the other hand, and he puts his hands over mine and squeezes. Blood gushes out, soaking my hat, and the ground at our feet. Sneering, he takes the hat out of my hands and pulls it over my head. It feels completely dry. There’s blood on my chin and clothes, but that’s already starting to go brown and crusty. The blood on my hat looks like it was just spilled a heartbeat ago.

“Eat it, it’s good for you.” I ate the heart. It took the two of us a couple of hours to get the rest of the lizard eaten, except for some of its skin, to make gauntlets for me and a new jacket. For the first time since I wandered out into that snowstorm, I’m almost full. And somehow, I know what my Name is. Paulsen hits me again, damn near breaking my jaw this time, and says, “Welcome to the family, kid.”

Mom and Dad didn’t like me hanging out with him much. They didn’t believe any of the stories about him eating kids or nothing, but he was still a seriously creepy old fucker, and not exactly a fine upstanding citizen. All they knew was that he kept to himself out on his land, had never been married, and spent most of his time hunting. Probably a drunk. Not a good influence on their baby daughter.

They noticed some changes, of course. My brothers figured out real fast that it was a bad idea to push me too hard. When they’d fight each other, it was at least part playing. They weren’t seriously trying to hurt each other. I was. This one time, I had Frank down on the ground, and it took everything I had not to bite his ear off. It showed. They were at least a little afraid of me. Momma and Daddy didn’t know what was making me like this, but we weren’t much for talking about feelings and shit. I wasn’t gonna get sent to a therapist or anything. They just told us to stop fighting, and swatted us when we did. No big. I got hit worse than that every time I rode over to Old Man Paulsen’s place.

It took some of the school kids longer to get the message, though. Some boys thought they were tough, smoking cigarettes in back of the gym after school, carrying knives, getting in fights. Bullying the littler kids. And I wasn’t ever all that big, you know? I wanted big muscles like Dad had, that would show, so I wouldn’t have to put up with as much shit, but they just never grew like that. I got stronger, no mistake, but I wasn’t big.

Anyway, so this ‘gang’ heard about my little reputation I had going, and decided to make some dumbass point or other, about how much tougher they were than this tomboy dyke chick. This was when I was in the sixth grade, mind. I still hadn’t dyed my cap, though it wasn’t too far off. They grabbed me after school one day and dragged me out behind the gym. Tony, the oldest and biggest, asked me if I thought I was tough, so I spit at him. Then he told his guys to get my clothes off, he was gonna show me what a real man was.

They were still trying to get my jeans off when Tony pulled his dick out, it was skinny and long and hard already. So I kicked him in the nuts, as hard as I could. That just pissed him off. His face went all purple and blotchy and he pulled out a knife. He got one slash across my face, just under the eye, before I got an arm free, and another on my arm, and that was about all. I slammed the guy holding my other arm in the forehead as hard as he could, splitting my knuckles open. Kicked the guy who’d been holding onto my arm in the knee, and went after Tony.

I’m still not real clear on how it all happened. But when the deputy sheriff finally showed up, they found me kneeling on top of Tony, still driving my fists into his face. I remember timing it to match my heartbeat. One, two. One, two. Ba-dump. Ba-dump. His knife was somewhere off in the grass. Elmer was kicking me in the ribs, trying to get me off his bud, but I wasn’t paying any attention. I didn’t stop hitting Tony until the deputy nailed me with a Taser. Thing felt roughly like getting kicked by a horse.

The final score: I had five broken ribs, no skin on my knuckles, three cracked knuckles, and a couple of knife slashes. Gary had a dislocated knee, Elmer had a bruise the size of my fist on his forehead. Tony had a broken jaw, a broken cheekbone, a crushed nose, three broken fingers, a detached retina, a concussion, and lost seven teeth. I’d say I won.

Since his dick was still hanging out when they got to us, they believed that they’d started it, but made me a deal. If I wouldn’t press charges on the assault and attempted rape, they wouldn’t charge me with attempted murder for putting Tony in the hospital. Which was bullshit, it was self-defense on my part, but it’s West Buttfuck County. Besides, Tony’s dad was the county sheriff. So I said okay, and that was about all the trouble anybody gave me for a good long time. Even if they did all think I was a dyke, none of them said nothing. Which suited me just fine.

When Daddy came to get me from the courthouse, he didn’t say a word until we got home. Then: “Are you okay, Katie? He didn’t-?”

“No, Daddy. He didn’t.” We both knew what we were talking about, but he didn’t want to say it, and I didn’t want to make him.

“Good.” He stared out the windshield, his hands still on the steering wheel, and nodded once. “Good.” He sucked on his moustache for a while and then said, “Nice job, Katie.” Then he turned the engine off and got out.

So that’s about it, really. I finished school, took all the shop classes they offered, helped out on the ranch, and saved up my money. I wasn’t sticking around West Buttfuck any longer than I had to.

Oh. There was one thing. That old sonofabitch Paulsen went and died on me before I could kill him myself. Inconsiderate fucker. Nobody knows what it was, he just didn’t wake up one morning. That’s all. The coroner checked him out, said it was just old age.

He left me his land, his truck, his shack, and everything in it. No money, he didn’t have any. But everything he had, I got. Books, guns, all of it. Except for the gauntlets, and his armor. He wanted them to be burned along with him, Viking style, so they went on the fire. Besides. It’d be like wearing somebody else’s hat. You just don’t do that.

I was the closest family he had.

Don’t get me wrong, I still hate the bastard. If I could, I’d bring him back to life so I could kill him myself.

Where’m I headed? I got me some money saved up. Didn’t bother trying to sell Paulsen’s land, my land now. It ain’t worth much, so I still got it to go back to. It might make for a nice retirement, being the Boogeyman of West Buttfuck — but I want to see a little more of the world. Check out the big city. So I’m headed for Denver to see what that’s like a while. There’s got to be something I could do down there. Drive a garbage truck maybe. Kill people.

You look a little chilly, friend. Maybe you should head south. Winter’s coming. I ain’t worried though. I already survived winter, up in Montana. Yeah. Good luck to you, too.

Here’s what she looks like as a human.

Only her daddy would ever call Katie pretty. Even ‘handsome’ is a stretch. She’s unremarkable, tending towards homely. About average height and all bones and muscle made from baling wire, weatherbeaten, looks a little older than her twenty-some years. Her hard brown eyes are set too wide, creased at the corners from squinting against the glare of the sun. It looks as though her nose has been broken at least once, flattened against her face. Thin lips frame her too-wide mouth and her discolored, crooked teeth. A thin very straight scar runs across one cheek, just under her left eye. Her light brown hair has been clipped very short, no more than half a centimeter, most of it tucked away under an old black knitted toque like sailors wear in black and white movies.

She’s not much for fashion. Her boot-cut brown jeans are clean, faded, starched and pressed to within an inch of their lives, held up by an embossed leather belt. Yes, there’s a big belt buckle too, about the size of a fried egg with brass showing through the silver plating in spots. Her old blue work shirt has been washed enough times that the collar is starting to fray at the edges. Like the jeans, it’s scrupulously clean, starched, and ironed. Its sleeves have been rolled up a ways exposing tan, muscled forearms with a light furring of hair. Her ropers have seen a lot of use, worn down at the heel, though the tan ostrich hide is tough enough to outlive her.

And what she looks like as a redcap.

Redcaps are not known for their beauty. It’s dead certain that Katie Messier will never be known for hers. Five and a half feet tall with muscles formed from baling wire, she has the complexion of someone who’s died of frostbite — dark gray and blotchy, patched here and there with lighter gray and black. Bloodshot eyes are set deep in shadowed sockets, under shaggy black brows. She’s got a strong, square jaw and almost no nose, little more than nostrils set in the middle of her face. Likewise, her ears aren’t much more than nubs on the side of her head.

Her mouth is a horror: a wide, lipless slash across her face, filled with yellow teeth like some creature hauled up from the deep sea. Several of them show even when her mouth is closed.

She might be a medieval footsoldier, raised from the dead and set to harry the living. A tattered, bloodstained tabard of patchwork leather covers a mail hauberk with its hood pushed back off her head. It’s seen better days itself, with rust stains and links missing. Her boots are in better shape, with thick hobnailed soles and rusted steel caps over the toes. The gauntlets covering her hands and wrists are something out of nightmare, leather set with overlapping metal plates, and studded with rusting blades, hooks, jags of broken glass, coils of barbed wire. When she moves her hands, they make a sound like bones snapping. And yes, she does wear a red cap. In her case, it’s a knitted wool stocking cap the deep red of heart’s blood. It looks wet.

World of Warcraft isn’t a very good medium for role-playing, but it’s pretty good for inspiring fanfiction. A very dear friend made me a rag doll of her, complete with a crescent-topped staff and glow-in-the-dark eyes.

The story begins, as it must begin, with tragedy. Cruelly, it first seemed to be triumph: the armies of Lordaeron had beaten back the undead armies of the Lich King under Kel’Thuzad’s command, saving their city from destruction. The humans of Lordaeron celebrated their victory, reveling in the streets, and cheered their soldiers.

The first symptoms appeared within the week. What began as coughs and chills was followed by nausea and fever. Later stages caused the skin to break out in painful, oozing, festering sores. The healers and holy ones were helpless to stop the progression of the disease. No herbal preparation gave the slightest comfort, prayers of health and healing went unanswered, even quarantine was useless — the plague was everywhere at once. No one who contracted the plague survived it. There were no recoveries, no remissions, no miracles.

Lordaeron became a charnel house as most of its population fell to the plague. The few people who had somehow not contracted the disease went numbly mad from it all, dragging carts through the unquiet streets to collect the dead for burial in mass graves.

It did not take long for the true horror of the plague to show itself. Those who had died of it began to rise again, clawing their way out of the ground with flesh-stripped hands. They had suffered the ravages of death and burial and rebirth, and it showed clearly. Flesh had been stripped to bone, eyes had been eaten by beetles and maggots and crows, skin showed the sickly colors of decomposition. Their minds were twisted, diseased, evil.

All who rose from the grave shared certain qualities: rage and hunger were the strongest. Most fell under the sway of Kel’Thuzad, the Lich King’s officer on Azeroth. The humans that survived the plague itself fell to its victims, torn into gobbets of flesh and eaten. The city fell into ruin, the waters beneath it poisoned, tainted, unwholesome.

Some few had free will, the Lich King’s domination over them severed by the rogue banshee Sylvanas Windrunner as she rebelled against him. It’s hard to say whether this is a good thing (for those with free will) or not. With free will came a sense of self-preservation, a desire to go on unliving. Having died once, the free dead had no desire to do so again. Facing enemies on many fronts in both the humans and their allies and the undead still dominated by Kel’Thuzad, the free undead (who had begun calling themselves Forsaken) sought allies and found them in the loose Horde confederation led by the orc war leader Thrall.

The woman who didn’t yet call herself Castiza was aware of little of this when she woke for the first time after her death. She was understandably confused to find herself alive (in a sense) again, and horrified to find herself still in the mass grave she’d been buried in. She screamed, the sound muffled by dirt and the corpse pressed against her face.

Which way was up? It was hard to tell, even though she could — somehow — see in the utter darkness of the charnel pit. The view wasn’t very exciting: insects, putrid flesh, decaying cloth, dirt. The woman picked a direction on impulse and started to claw through the obstacles in her way.

It took a small eternity, but she finally found the surface. When she’d finally pulled herself free, she collapsed, rolling onto her back to look up at the night sky — memory told her that she should be gasping for breath, but her body didn’t need to breathe. She wasn’t even particularly fatigued. Her fingertips were naked bone, the skin and flesh worn away during her climb out of the grave, but she could still feel with them. The woman felt her face carefully; it seemed that it was mostly intact, though her eyes were gone and bone clicked on bone in a few places.

She was still there looking up at the sky when the gravetender came along. She saw the glow of his lantern first, then the rest of him following soon after. His clothes were little better than rags, and the rest of him was a horror. His hands were bony claws like her own, the joints of his limbs stripped clean, his teeth bared in a permanent grimace, and his eyes! His eyes were gone and an unholy light glowed in the pits left behind.

He laughed when he saw her. “Aren’t you the cutie? Good to see you awake.” The absence of lips didn’t seem to hinder his speech much. “It’s my job to watch over the graves here an’ make sure anything that crawls out of ‘em is friendly-like.”

The woman sat up slowly and combed a hand back through her hair on some faint instinct telling her to make herself more presentable. “Uh-huh. You probably hear this a lot, but… what happened?”

The gravetender cackled again, this time with a sharp unkind edge to it. “Girlie, you dead. Plague got you, or you wouldn’ be here talkin’ to me. An’ you an’ me, we free dead. Dunno if you know, but mos’ dead ain’t free — the Lich King, he run the show with mos’ dead. But the Lady, she got us shut of him.” The man paused to dig a fingertip into his ear, pulled out a squirming maggot, and popped it into the wreck of his mouth. “Sorta. He ain’t happy ’bout it, as you might imagine, and he’s always got somethin’ comin’ after us.”

“I prayed to the Light,” the girl murmured. “I remember that.”

“The Light ain’t here now, girlie. It’s part of why we call ourselves Forsaken, if you catch my meaning.”

Except for the rustling of trees, there was quiet. “No. No, it’s not.” She turned her gaze from the sky to the gravetender again. “Forsaken, you say?” she asked, brushing grave mold from her clothes as she stood.

“Ayup.” The gravetender belched. “You got a name, girlie?”

Quiet again while the woman thought about it. Alisandre drifted through her mind, but seemed to belong to someone else. There were dim memories of dark robes, stained glass, and prayer. “Castiza,” she said finally. “You might as well call me Castiza.”

“Pretty name for a pretty girl.”

“It’s an old word for chastity,” she explained.

The gravetender laughed raucously, pounding his thigh with a fist. “Chastity? Girlie, ain’t none of us virgins, not no more. We all been fucked.”

Castiza gave him a level look until he finally stopped laughing. “I’m aware,” she told him.

“Oh. Huh. You got a sense of humor already. Not bad, virgin girl.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Yeah. You get used to that after a bit.”

“Really?”

The gravetender looked like he’d be grinning, if he had the face to do it with. Clearly he was having fun with her. “Nah. Not really.” He gestured with his lantern; Castiza could see the lights of a small town through the trees. “C’mon, girlie, let’s get you somethin’ to eat. An’ there’s people wants to see you.”

“Me?” Castiza frowned. Who could know her already? Apparently the gravetender could see her confusion. He clapped a bony hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t sweat it, cutie,” he said. “They wanna see everybody new when they come out. That’s why they send me out here, to watch.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Later, Castiza looked into a tarnished mirror by the light of a candle. She’d been right with her first impressions — her face was mostly intact, and even the missing bits looked like decoration more than decay. I’m even sort of pretty, she thought. Still dead, but pretty.

There was a cracked glass full of pale red wine on a side table; she picked it up and sipped thoughtfully. “The Light has forsaken me,” she told her reflection. “I prayed to it every day of my life — dedicated my life to its service, in fact — and it is gone, gone, gone.”

Her reflection had no response. Castiza sighed (sighing has nothing to do with needing to breathe or not) and took another drink. “The weird part is that I still pray. I pray to nothing, and nothing answers. I call for light, and light burns my enemies. I ask for healing, and it is given, knitting together dead flesh as well as it does the living.

“What does this say about people who still live, and still believe? Are they fools, deluding themselves into thinking that there’s something out there that listens to their prayers, something that actually cares about them? If it answers my prayers the same way it does theirs, can it possibly be good?”

“Am I the fool? Do I still believe?” Castiza tossed back the rest of her wine and threw the glass at the mirror as hard as she could. The glass shattered; the mirror fared a little better with only a minor spiderweb of cracks.

“Not something I’m going to answer right now. Right now, I’m tired,” she told the multiple Castizas reflected in the broken mirror, wagging a finger at them, mock-stern. “And I’m drunk. And I’m going to see if I can still sleep now that I’m dead.”

The room held a bed, a four-posted affair spread with moth-eaten brocade. Dust rose in a cloud as Castiza fell onto it. Somewhat to her surprise, she fell asleep quickly and dreamt of deep, cold water.

It’s a horror story — our protagonist is dead, a zombie raised by the plague that had killed her — but it’s not gory. Our Castiza’s tale is more a personal horror than an external one.

It was unseasonably cold. Snow falling in big wet flakes enforced a chill white hush throughout the valley. One thing moved through the snowfall, a hunched figure wrapped in tatters and rags. The only sound was the crunchsqueak of snow underfoot.

No breath steamed from the traveler’s mouth; the dead woman felt the biting cold but was not discomfited by it. For one who has felt the cold of death, mere weather is easily ignored.

The dead woman, who called herself Castiza, stopped to look up the valley at the ruins of an abbey named for Saint Eulalia and dedicated to the Light. It had once been a small, vibrant community of sisters, a place for contemplation and service. It had once been home.

Castiza sighed. Most of the abbey still stood, though time and the elements had taken their toll. From a half-mile away she could see the damage: holed roofs and shattered windows, though the snow hid some of the wounds the abbey had taken.

She tried to remember her last days here. Surely some had survived, hadn’t they? Not everyone had fallen to the plague. That much she knew. Had they just left as the dead started to rise from their graves?

The chapel was wrecked, the pews battered into piles of splinters, the altar stone shoved aside and cracked in two, blasphemies in several languages scrawled in soot on the walls. In the bell tower, the stone steps still wound up to where the abbey’s trio of iron bells hung.

And something else. Even the dead woman’s sight couldn’t make it out in the shadows, but four things hung from the rafters of the bell tower, not three.

Snow and ice on the steps made the footing treacherous. Castiza made her way up the tower, slow, careful, watching her step. So it wasn’t until she was near the top that she saw the thing that was not a bell. It was a woman, dressed in a nun’s habit, hanging from a rope by her bound wrists. Her belly had been sliced open and her intestines pulled out to dangle, a grisly parody of a bell rope. That was the only visible wound. If that had been the only one, it must have taken her a long time to die.

Scavenger birds had already been at her, taking away the eyes and the soft flesh of the face. She must have been one of the dead woman’s sisters, but who was she?

Castiza looked for the end of the rope holding her sister and found it tied off to a cleat. It wasn’t long enough to lower her to the ground. She didn’t want to just let her fall; she’d suffered enough indignities already.

The dead woman judged the distance and jumped from the walk around the bells, catching the rope holding the nun’s corpse with one hand. She cradled the body to her with her other arm and waited for the motion to slow and stop. Murmuring the words almost silently, she called power to sever the rope.

It was fifty feet to the floor below — a long drop but a survivable one for the dead woman. Castiza landed with a thump and the sharp crack of bone breaking. At least three had snapped from the fall; the added weight of the dead nun made her land harder than usual. But they were all fusing themselves back together, faster than living bone could ever mend itself, and the pain was minimal. She carried her sister into the chapel and laid her out on the floor.

The dead nun looked no better in the brighter light of the chapel, though the snow falling through the roof started to soften the wreck of her face. Castiza’s hands moved over the body, looking for something that might tell her who this woman had been.

On a chain around the woman’s neck hung a starburst pendant (in silver — their order required a vow of poverty and held ostentatious decoration to be less than godly). Castiza lifted it, ignoring the smoke rising from where it touched her plague-animated flesh. One of the star’s rays was dented, bearing tooth marks. She knew then who the corpse had been.

“Oh, Frances,” she said, mourning. They had been novices together and friends after that, back when Castiza was alive. The dead woman strained her senses, physical and mystical both, trying to find some trace of her sister that still lingered, but there was nothing. Empty flesh and tarnished silver, no more. She carefully put the pendant back on Frances’s neck, settling it just so between her breasts. Her green-tinged skin had turned black where the pendant touched it, leaving an eight-rayed burn in the palm of her left hand.

Castiza gathered the remnants of the pews together, building them up into a pile some eight feet long, four across, and three deep. She laid her sister out on the pyre, tucking the rope of intestines back into the body cavity, and covered her with a tapestry found among the debris.

Closing her eyes, Castiza lifted her hands to the heavens and called fire. The ancient wood of the pews, iron-hard and polished with centuries’ worth of bees’ wax, burned bright and hot and clean, giving off little smoke.

The dead woman watched the pyre burn until night fell. She walked away, back down the valley from where she’d come, and did not look back.

There were no ghosts behind her.

Have fun.

“Mommy?”

“Mommy, wake up.”

“Mommy!” The girl climbed up on the bed and started shaking the lump under the covers. “Mommy, you have to wake up!”

The lump said something unintelligible. The little girl kept shaking. Louder, this time, and clear enough to be understood. More or less. “‘m ‘wake.”

Awake now, Alice sat up and blinked at her daughter, her eyes red and sticky. “I’m awake,” she repeated. “Sorry, baby. I didn’t sleep well last night.”

“It’s your birthday, isn’t it?” the girl asked, her eyes wide.

“Yeah,” Alice said. The invitation was on the night stand, next to the alarm clock. She tucked a strand of her daughter’s hair behind her ear. “It’s my birthday.”

“I don’t have to have a birthday yet, do I?”

“No, sweetie, you don’t. Not until you’re twelve. That’s years away.”

“Oh.” The little girl thought about that, her face screwed up in concentration. “How many years?”

“You’re five now?” Alice thought briefly about making the question a lesson, and having her daughter do the arithmetic, but it didn’t seem worth it. Not today. “Seven. Seven years.”

“Are you going to run away?”

The question, and the look that came with it, broke Alice’s heart. She crushed the girl to her in a fierce hug and kissed the top of her head. “No, sweetie. I’m going to go.” There wasn’t enough time, not nearly enough. “You’d better scoot, big girl, or you’ll miss the school bus.”

Alice’s daughter kissed her on the cheek and whispered, “I hope you have a good birthday, mommy.” Then she ran for the door and the stairs beyond it, scooping up a bright pink backpack along the way.

Alice fell back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling, not looking at the card on the night stand next to her. “I hope I do too.”

~

On the train downtown, no one would look at her. They knew, somehow. Maybe it was the way she stared at them, rude and challenging. Whatever it was, they knew, and they acted like she didn’t exist. She was just a random bit of space that couldn’t be walked through.

Alice sighed and rested her forehead on the cool metal of the bar she held on to. She wished that someone, anyone, would look at her. They didn’t have to say anything, just acknowledge that she existed. She wished she didn’t do exactly the same thing whenever she saw someone else on the train who was having a birthday.

~

It took Alice nearly an hour to inch her way through the line to the counter. The young man behind it looked supremely bored, not looking up from his monitor screen when she got to him. “Invitation?” he asked, sounding exactly like he asked the same question several hundred times a day, six days out of every seven. He was pale, and the glow from his monitor made him look like some sort of underwater creature installed in a civil service post.

In a way, it was even worse than the train, Alice thought. Everyone waiting in line here had a birthday today. No one talked to anyone else. If you saw someone you recognized, you pretended you didn’t. When you waited in line at the motor vehicles office for a driver’s permit, at least you had a good reason.

At the census bureau, everyone was there for their birthday, and wished they weren’t.

Wordless, Alice slid the card across the counter. The young man fitted it into a slot in his terminal, waited for a moment for his monitor to refresh. “Look here please,” he told Alice, tapping the iris-pattern scanner on its flexible arm. The politeness didn’t mean anything. Not here. Not today. Not ever. Alice tried not to shiver as the soft rubber fitted itself to her right eye socket, intimate and invasive. The flash of the device left her blinking and temporarily blind.

“Room eight twenty-seven,” said the young man. He looked at Alice, handing her a brightly colored paper hat with an elastic to go under her chin. His eyes looked directly at hers, and she couldn’t see anything in them, not even her own reflection. He smiled, and his eyes never changed a bit. “Happy birthday, miss.”

Alice stared for a moment, took the hat, and left for the elevator banks. The bright cones of the party hats stood out, cancerous in fluorescent light against grayish skin and grayish clothes and nicotine-yellowed institutional paint on the walls.

An elevator arrived and released its cargo. Alice made herself look, made herself see them. One woman had a stain on her blouse, a smear of chocolate, and the look of someone who’d just had a birthday party. It was too much, too raw, and Alice retreated, filing into the elevator and watching the changing lights of the floor indicator, just like everyone else.

Room eight twenty-seven was just like any other birthday party room. The center was well-lit and the edges shadowed, not quite hiding the figures in black that leaned against the walls. There was a round table, twelve chairs, twelve plates, twelve glasses, twelve forks, twelve helium balloons each tied to a chair with a thin ribbon. Alice and the eleven others who shared her birthday found their seats and did not look at each other. Some years, she knew one or two of the people at her table. This year they were all strangers. All, like Alice, were thirty-four today.

After enough birthday parties, everyone was a stranger.

When they’d settled, the figures in black started to move, placing a single piece of cake in front of each person, filling each glass with milk. It was chocolate, three-layered with buttercream frosting and a rose done in white icing. Each slice the same size, each with a single lit candle. The cake was always chocolate. I don’t like chocolate drifted through Alice’s mind and failed to connect to anything.

In unison, the birthday boys and girls blew out their candles and began to eat their cake. It was moist, sweet, and might as well have been wet concrete the way it stuck in Alice’s throat.

You always knew when it happened, when the person who had the bean in his or her slice bit down on it. When Alice was younger, sometimes that they would try to get up from their chair, try to run. No one her age did any more. Most just froze, looking terrified. Some cried. Some prayed. One woman had looked relieved, whispering, “Finally.”

It was over in just a few seconds. Two of the shadowed black figures grabbed the woman who’d bitten into the bean. Another put a black bag over her head and pushed her down to the table. That person drew a pistol and shot her in the head. The double explosion of the unmuffled pistol was very, very loud in the small room and made Alice’s ears hum with a pure piercing tone. She knew that later, her daughter would ask if she had a good birthday, and she had no idea what she’d tell her.

The dead woman’s blood was already soaking into the white tablecloth as the survivors began to sing. “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you�”

If these things disturb you, perhaps you should be somewhere else.

You Have Been Warned.

It was a Sunday afternoon and unseasonably hot. Nothing in Portland was air conditioned. At least not anywhere Ruth could afford to live. The cats had stretched out to their full length, luxuriating in the heat. Watching them, the young woman envied their hedonistic pleasure in simply being warm.

“Little monsters. You wouldn’t last a minute in real heat.” Only one reacted, and that one only to lift his head from the floor, look at her, and yawn cavernously before lowering it back to the floor. His long, pointed teeth resonated with something usually kept well-hidden within her. “Hmm.”

Wearing only a t-shirt, a pair of boxer shorts and white socks pushed down around her ankles, she was still sweating. On an ill-defined whim, she padded into the bathroom and peeled the t-shirt off, looking at her breasts in the mirror. Her cream-coffee skin was dotted, here and there, with small, much darker moles. As always, the left one was noticeably smaller than the right. Not that that’s saying much, she thought. They’re both small. Cupping one in each hand, she lifted them a little and let them fall, watching the way they move as the settle back into place.

“Mmm.” Ruth’s small, dark nipples were very slightly crinkled. It would be too much to hope for to be cold, even cool is out of the question. But the tiny breezes in her apartment did lift a little of the sweat giving a sheen to her skin. Leaving her t-shirt crumpled on the floor, she went into the bedroom and squatted down in front of the bookshelf. There we go. Best Lesbian Vampire Erotica. Oh, yeah.

The bed hadn’t been made since she washed the sheets last; Ruth pushed the blankets aside and flopped onto the bed, bouncing slightly. The book almost fell open of its own accord to her preferred place. Holding the book in one hand — fortunately, it’s a trade paperback; a hardcover would be too heavy for this– she put the other between her breasts, feeling the warm skin slick with sweat, not quite feeling the heart beating beneath skin and bone, and began to read.

“I’ve been watching you,” the human girl said. Her name was Sarah, or Susan, or something like that. She’d told me, but I couldn’t remember. They say the memory starts to go eventually, but I’m much too young for that. It’s just not that important. As was my habit for the past few decades, I was looking rather butch. Salt-and-pepper hair clipped down to a shaggy Caesar cut, charcoal gray men’s suit just slightly too large, starched white band-collar shirt, with French cuffs down almost to my knuckles. My jet cufflinks are older than this city. It’s all camouflage. For the hunt.

She was still talking, looking at me with those big, dark eyes, leaning towards me, so earnest. I could taste her arousal, and her fear. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I know what you are.”

There wasn’t nearly enough fear.

“No, you don’t,” I told her, my voice flat and slightly chill. “You don’t have the slightest idea of what I am. If you did, you wouldn’t be talking to me right now.”

Deep breath. Ruth inhaled, her chest rising, relaxing on the exhale. “Ahh.” Her hand, just brushing her skin, curved under her breast, fingertips tracing slow spirals centering on her nipple. Another deep breath pressed it up against her cupped palm. She kept it there, pressing harder, feeling the aureole beneath crinkle, the nipple harden.

For the first time, she moaned. Not loud — it was more of a whimper, really, a small sound in the back of her throat. She thumbed through a couple of pages and smoothed her hand over the curve of her belly to the waistband of her shorts. “Damnit,” she muttered, putting the book face down on the bed, using a fold of comforter as a bookmark. Its spine was cracked anyway, from repeated readings.

Wriggling, Ruth pushed the shorts down over her hips, tucked her legs up to get them off completely, and dropped them over the edge of the bed. She still had her socks on, but nothing else. Letting her breath out in a huff, she fell back into the bed and reached for her book again.

The alley near the nightclub was not well lit; only the sodium-vapor streetlights down the block cast any light into it at all. It was almost perfectly suited to our little transaction. The human girl’s fear and arousal jumped as we turned into the darkness. Rather, it was dark for her — I could see perfectly. (Incidentally, her name was Susan. I had overheard one of her friends wishing her a good night as we left the club.)

None of the human detritus that typically inhabit such spaces were present here. I made sure of that. After several of the creatures simply disappeared, word spread that my alley was not a good place to sleep if you wanted to wake up. Every once in a while, one of them, more stupid, more mad, or simply ignorant than the others, would huddle behind the dumpsters wrapped in their layers of dingy flannel. They didn’t stay long.

There was a chill to the place, to those sensitive to such things. The very young, the mad ones, the drunkards and other addicts. The spoor of a predator. The masses, in general, felt nothing but the mild revulsion granted all such places.

Of course, the human girl felt it as well. For her, though, it was simply a delicious frisson, adding to the mood. “It’s not quite the romantic setting the Victorians imagined,” I murmured. “But that age is long since passed.”

“Were you alive th-?” Embarrassed, Susan cut her question short by biting her lip. The flush that rose to her cheeks was rather fetching.

I laid a fingertip on her lips. “Shh. It is a natural enough question, but to answer you, no, I was not. I was born the first time during that period, but in this country. I had no direct experience with the era, and by the time of my death and second birth, it was over.”

Sighing, she relaxed. A little; back to her previous state of fear and lust. “Oh,” she said. “I thought you were older than that.”

Impatient, Ruth thumbed through the next page without reading it. The good parts were farther along. Pressing hard against her skin, her hand slid down her belly to the tightly curled, coarse hair between her legs. She gasped, taking in a sharp breath as her fingers curled over her pussy, pushing hard against the pubic bone with the heel of her hand and her fingers pressing flat over her still-closed lips. The hair in the middle was very slightly moist already, just starting to seep out. Her hips lifted from the bed, rising to meet her hand; she pushed them back down with a soft grunt.

Oh, yeah. There we go: the good stuff.

At the end of the alley, far away from even the dim light at the mouth of it, I pushed the human girl back against the rough bricks of the warehouse wall. Not hard enough to do any damage, but enough that she felt it, enough that if it weren’t for the cushioning of hair between the back of her head and the wall, it would have hurt quite a bit.

For us, this was foreplay. Her pupils dilated further, desire opening them past their need for more light. As her breathing quickened, her chest heaved. Very nice. One hand flat against the wall next to her ear, one hand on her breastbone, I held her there and kissed her, hard. A willing girl, Susan’s soft, warm lips parted easily under the pressure of my rather thinner, cold ones. The pointed tip of her tongue stole into my mouth, searching for the fangs.

She was not disappointed. The canines of a vampire are, of course, quite sharp, and retractable, like the claws of a cat. Mine had extended fully with my own hunger. She nicked her tongue on one, just a little, causing her to gasp and rewarding me with the bright, hot taste of first blood.

According to human cliché, blood tastes coppery. It does not; it tastes of the ocean, salt and filled with life. Though perhaps it does taste of copper to them. My memories of my time as a mortal are dim, compared with the bright burning of the second life. Much of the time, when I am not playing at being human, I do not breathe. First blood, though, rekindles old reflexes; I gasp and shudder with it as well, and suck her lower lip into my mouth, hard enough to bruise, though I draw no more blood yet. It will come, in due course.

“Shit,” Ruth said, her voice low, throaty, eyes rolling upwards to the back of her head. With an effort, she brought them back down to focus on her reading. Her middle finger slipped through the tangle of hair, parting her lips to expose the soft, warm, wet folds beneath them. “Oh, God yes.”

She turned to the next page, having to rest the book on the bed to do it. Her back arched as her fingers slipped into her cunt, curling up hard, pressing against her clit from both sides. Another moan. It was difficult, now, to focus on what was going on in the story, imagining that cold, hard mouth on hers, the so-sharp fangs trapping her tongue and lips there.

I reached up under her skirts to find her panties already wet. This one was enjoying herself, for certain. As was I. Clenching my fist around them, I ripped them away. The waistband parted under protest; it would leave a mark for some days. The girl stifled a scream. Three of my fingers slipped inside her sex; my thumb pressed against the flesh near the pearl of her pleasure. Holding her so, I lifted her so that her toes just touched the ground, and pulled the neck of her dress down, baring her breast. “Oh, god.” Her voice was pitched low, purring her satisfaction.

Another common misconception is that vampires prefer to feed from the jugular vein. This is almost rarely the case; it is far too easy to puncture the carotid artery. The flood from that vessel is too much for even the most ravenous to consume. Only a little is drunk; the rest is wasted. Some prefer the bend of the elbow, others the wrist.

For myself, I prefer the veins of the breast. In most women, these run close to the surface, and are easily found. And there is the sexual aspect. My lusts are no longer entirely human ones, but a hunter must know the habits of her prey.

My mouth, wet with my own desires, sucked at the soft flesh of her breast. Her nipple hardened as I took it between my teeth. Above me, Susan moaned as I bit down harder. “Yes,” she whispered, repeating the single word over and over, breathing it into my hair. “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.” Her hands clutched at my short hair, wrapped around my head, pulled my face into her breast as she pressed hers into the top of my head. I was able to fit my entire hand inside her, curling it into a fist, gloved in soft, warm flesh. My other hand went to the small of her waist to help support her weight as her hips rocked against me.

It got really hard to keep hold of the book. Every so often, Ruth had to put it down, let her hand drop to the bed, as tremors rippled through her body. Shaking, she lifted the hand at her cunt to her mouth, licking the taste of her from them. A small sound, a whimper escaped her as she slid the hand down her body, back to her pussy, leaving trails of her wetness that quickly dried on her skin.

Though no one was between them, her legs spread wider apart as her fingers sought and found her clit, pressing down hard. She moaned, louder this time, and pushed her hand down so that the tips of her fingers were just at the mouth of her cunt.

It was time. Susan let out a strangled cry as my teeth punctured her flesh. Skin makes a crunching sound as one bites through it. As her blood flowed into my mouth I stiffened, transfixed by my own pleasure.

“Fuck!” Ruth dropped the book over the side of the bed. Rolling onto her stomach she put both hands between her legs and pressed hard. Her clit, swollen to almost half again its usual size, pressed back, while her cunt opened to the slightest touch. Rising to her knees and forehead, her back arched like a cat’s.

Images from different fantasies flashed through her mind. Long, sharp teeth bite into her throat. Many hands hold her down on a pool table in a crowded bar. Naked. And being fucked where everyone could see. She struggled and cried, but it did nothing to stop it. Kneeling, hands clasped behind her back, at the feet of a strong woman. Her words gone, she moaned, panting for breath, fucking herself until she finally came. She nearly bit through her lip trying not to cry out loud.

Hands still on her wet cunt, Ruth knelt there, chest and shoulders heaving as she gasped for breath. After a little while, as her breathing slowed, she rolled over to lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling without really seeing it. “No wonder I can’t keep a girlfriend,” she muttered. “God, I’m fucked up.”

It is always a struggle, ceasing to feed before the vessel is empty. But it is a poor hunter who kills every time she feeds. Not only is it wasteful — a living human will replace the blood taken, given time — but it is also dangerous. A trail of corpses is too risky to leave leading to one, in this age of technology. And it is not difficult to find willing donors.

Susan was spent from loss of blood and repeated climax. There was a wet, sucking sound as I take my hand from inside her and lower her to the ground. She could not support her weight at that moment; my arm around her waist kept her upright. I licked my hand clean. This fluid does not nourish the way blood does, but it is something to savor nonetheless. It mingled well with the taste of her blood.

“Oh, shit. That was fucking amazing,” Susan breathed, having found her words again at last. “Thank you. Thank you thank you thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” I looked at her again, her eyes heavy-lidded and unfocused. “Close your eyes a moment,” I told her. Nicking the tip of my forefinger with a tooth, I drew a sigil on her forehead with the clear fluid that flows through my veins. It will be visible to me, and to others of my kind, marking her as part of my herd. It is a warning. And it will also encourage her to conflate what happened this evening with fantasy and dream.

When the time comes, she will see me again.

Even at four-thirty in the morning New Orleans in August was still hot and sticky and not particularly inclined to sleep. There were bars open for the truly hardcore drinkers, but Rain was just grateful that all-night restaurants still served cold beer at this hour. They wouldn’t in Texas. She’d finished eating; the waitress had cleared the table and brought her a second bottle of Rolling Rock.

Only one other table in the restaurant was occupied, by three older men drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes almost continuously. After an initial assessment — Rain was the only white in the restaurant — they decided she was neither a threat nor very interesting and didn’t pay any attention, and the waitress did only when she waved her over.

None of seemed to notice the man who stood at Rain’s booth. “May I join you?” he asked, his voice rich and velvety-smooth.

Rain looked up at him and the scowl on her face melted away as soon as she met his eyes. All the reasons why she should say no flashed through her mind and failed to connect with anything. “Sure,” she said, marking her place in her book (Candace Jane Dorsey’s Black Wine) and setting it down. Before she finished saying the word, the man was sitting on the other side of the table, his hands folded delicately in front of him.

A tiny part of Rain’s mind noted that her agreeing to this was more than a little weird. So was the fact that she couldn’t possibly describe the man sitting in her booth. He took up space, he spoke, he was compelling in ways she’d never encountered before, but she had no idea what he looked like. Not skin color, not hair, height, weight, clothes, nothing. Was he beautiful? She couldn’t tell.

Rain herself was not what anyone, including (especially) herself, would call classically beautiful. At five feet five inches tall and a hundred eighty pounds, she was considerably heavier than was the standard for beauty in contemporary America. She had henna-red hair in Willie Nelson braids, unplucked dark brown eyebrows, and heavy-lidded gray eyes.

Her tattoos — all in black — stood out well against her pale skin. There was tribal scrollwork at the back of her neck and around her right wrist, the silhouette of a frog skeleton on her left wrist, and probably more where they couldn’t be seen. Small barbells pierced her right eyebrow, a pair of fat, heavy steel curved barbell rings hung from her earlobes, smaller rings pierced the cartilage of each ear, and a long barbell cut across the top of her right ear in an industrial.

Having come from a gig, Rain was actually dressed fairly well in a gray pinstripe men’s suit (the jacket folded over the back of her seat, at the moment), a faded red Clandestine t-shirt, a belt with two rows of chrome grommets running its whole length, and her favorite black/cherry red Doc Martens. A heavy chrome chain dangled from her belt to the wallet in her back pocket.

“My thanks,” the man murmured. He looked like he had always been sitting there across the table from her, as if he had never done anything else.

“Hey, no problem.” Without taking her eyes from his — she couldn’t have if she’d wanted to — Rain found her beer and took a long drink. “Can I help you?”

The man smiled and Rain felt a warmth low in her belly that had nothing to do with food or alcohol. “As a matter of fact, you can,” he said. “I’d like it very much if you’d tell me about yourself.”

A last, lingering part of Rain’s will stirred itself enough to ask, “Why?”

“There are those who have taken an interest in you, my dear. It falls to me to interview you, to find out more about who you are.”

That would have been worrying, if Rain still had the capacity for worry. “Oh,” she said, simply accepting the man’s words at face value. “What did you want to know?”

“Let’s start with the basics, shall we? What’s your name?”

“Reina Ivanova Vishnevskaya,” she told him, the Russian polysyllables falling easily from her tongue. Her accent usually placed her origins in east Texas, but when saying her name, she might have been from Saint Petersburg. “But most people call me Rain.”

“It is quite a mouthful,” agreed the man across the table. “Do you speak Russian?”

“Some. My Russian’s not as good as my English, but some,” Rain explained with a self-deprecating shrug. “I read it okay, and I read Russian newspapers on the net to keep in practice. I like being able to read Dostoyevsky without having to read him in translation. D’you mind if I smoke?”

“Not at all.” The man waved a hand (did he have long fingers?) in a gesture of indulgence.

Rain picked a brown-papered cigarette out of its cardboard box, lighting it with a skull-adorned Zippo. The smell of cloves almost overwhelmed the tobacco. She relaxed visibly, letting out the first lungful of smoke with a happy sigh. The man sharing her booth smiled and refrained from commenting on the health risks of smoking.

“How old are you?” he asked, returning to his interrogation.

“Thirty-two,” she replied.

“Where are you from?”

“Houston, originally.”

“And where do you live now?”

“I’ve got a place in the Dillard neighborhood.”

“Do you rent or own?”

“I own it.”

“Tell me how you came to have a Russian name and an East Texas accent. It’s charming, but you must admit, a bit curious.”

“I guess. Dad came over in the early seventies as a petrochemical engineering student and decided he liked the States better than the Soviet Union and asked for political asylum. He and mom met at UT and moved to Houston after he got done with grad school. I grew up there.”

“And your parents are?”

“Ivan Dmitriyevich and Mary Ellen.”

“Do you have any siblings?”

“I’ve got an older brother, Pyotr. He goes by Pete.”

“Are you close to your family?”

“Not really.”

“Why not?”

“They don’t approve of some of the choices I’ve made.”

“Do explain.”

Rain took a long, last drag on her cigarette and crushed it out. Strangely compelling men or no, this was uncomfortable territory. She sighed and toyed with her lighter, spinning it on the table. “I quit a promising and lucrative career to play bass for a living. It doesn’t pay well. It’s not exactly a respectable profession.”

“Why did you?”

“Short version? Because I decided I wanted to be Amy Lee when I grew up.”

“Who?”

“Lead singer for Evanescence. She doesn’t play bass, though.”

“What’s the longer version?”

Rain pursed her lips. “A few years ago I was a CPA with Deloitte in their corporate auditing division, doing a lot of traveling. I’d been promoted to a supervisory position, so I was making pretty decent money. My folks were happy about that, but I was miserable and getting worse. With all the traveling, I didn’t have a home, I just had an apartment in Dallas where I kept my stuff. I didn’t know anybody, not really. Even at work I didn’t know that many people. There’s always a lot of turnover in public auditing, so my team changed faces a lot. I didn’t have a lover, I didn’t have friends, I didn’t even have a cat.

“When I saw my folks, all they ever asked about was my job. ‘How’s the job going?’ ‘Have they promoted you yet?’ ‘Are you networking the right people?’” Rain rolled her eyes and lit another cigarette. “I don’t want to be the kind of person that uses ‘network’ as a verb.”

“Do go on,” the man said, encouraging.

“I was in Chicago on yet another audit when I got in a real bad car wreck. The guy who hit me was drunk as hell, had a big-ass Chevy to my little rental Toyota, and he hit me just about head on. Even with the seat belt and the air bag I got knocked out, got a nice concussion, broke both my legs, and generally felt like hammered shit.”

“I can only imagine.”

“So yeah, that sucked. What sucked more was someone from work bringing me a new laptop — mine got trashed in the wreck — so I could still work. From the fucking hospital.” Rain glared at the end of her cigarette as if it was the thing that offended her. “I had a lot of time to think while I was learning how to walk again, and I decided that I really didn’t want to die an accountant.”

Rain’s scowl softened into a faint smile. “I’d played bass while I was in school, so I went back to my parents’ and got my bass and the equipment out of the attic. I got my cello while I was there too, just for the hell of it. Traded in my Lexus and got a truck with a camper shell that I could lock, and thought about where I’d like to live. Growing up and going to school in Houston, I’d pretty naturally spent a lot of time in New Orleans, coming for carnival for a few years. It seemed like a good place for a wanna-be Goth rocker chick to be. My insurance settlement just about covered the cost of the house, and the rest came out of my savings.”

“But you play jazz, too. Like tonight.”

“Well, sure. I play whatever gig is paying.”

“You don’t have a band you play with?”

“Not yet. I’ve auditioned for some, but never got the job.”

“Do you make much?”

“Not really. I’ve got a day job at a Starbucks out in the suburbs. That pays the bills — well, mostly it does — gives me health insurance even though I’m part time, and I’ve still got my retirement from Deloitte sitting in an unmanaged S&P 500 index fund. I add to my Roth IRA when I can.” Rain laughed, a little, and added, “There’s still some accountant left in me. I can’t help but try to plan ahead like that.”

“What kinds of music do you like?”

“Wow.” Rain settled back in the booth and let out the smoke in her lungs in a thin stream. “I like pretty much everything, really. Metal, jazz, hip-hop, classical — when I feel really shitty I like to put ‘phones on and blast the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth into my head — some country, Afro-pop, Euro-pop, electronica, opera, chorals, experimental, gospel….”

The man at Rain’s table smiled and gestured with one hand. “I think I get the idea.”

“It has to have an edge, though. I don’t like safe music. So Eminem would be edgy, being a white guy in an overwhelmingly black genre — and he’s funny, which I like — but all the gangsta thug dudes all kind of blend together after a while. Snoop’s got his own sound, so he’s cool. And the old-school guys that made the scene in the first place: NWA, Public Enemy, Wu-Tang Clan.”

“Yes, I understand completely.”

Rain grinned. “Yeah, so I like music. I like to talk about music. It’s like an ATM. Push button, get babble.”

“Are you religious?”

“Not particularly. Unless music counts as a religion. The Soviets didn’t encourage people to go to church much, and mom and dad couldn’t agree on where to take us to church. Mom was a Methodist, dad was sort of Russian Orthodox without a whole lot of conviction in it. We ended up not going to church a whole lot as kids.”

“Where did you go to school?”

Rain looked faintly embarrassed and shrugged. “I went to private schools through high school, then got a BS with a major in accounting from Rice.”

“Why are you embarrassed by that?”

“It’s such a whitebread life. I mean, I had the plaid kilt schoolgirl uniform, black and white saddle shoes or penny loafers, the whole bit. I feel like such a poser coming from a background like that.”

“Everyone walks her own path, Rain,” the man said. Rain felt better about herself without knowing why, except that the man’s approval was more important to her than it should have been.

“How’s your love life?”

Rain laughed again, though without much humor, and shook her head. “Grisly. I broke up with my girlfriend about a month ago. I have cats.”

“So you’re gay?” The man didn’t seem to care if the answer was yes or no — it was just another bit of information to him.

Rain’s forehead wrinkled in a slight frown. “Oh, mostly, but not quite. I like men too, some of them.”

“Bisexual, then?”

Rain flashed her teeth in a grin. “I like to think of myself as versatile.”

The man laughed, and Rain felt a rush of warmth at having pleased him. She found herself biting her lip, hard. And blushing, damn it all. The man across the table had the grace to not notice. “Fair enough, Rain. So what do you do when you’re not working?”

“Different stuff. I practice a lot, of course. I read—”

“What do you like to read?”

“Science fiction, fantasy, comics. I try to stick to women writers, but they’re few and far between in the comic industry. I want to have Grant Morrison’s babies, though. And Jhonen Vasquez’s. Johnny the Homicidal Maniac made me laugh till my ribs hurt the first time I read it.”

“What else?”

“Hmm?”

“What else do you like?”

“Oh.” Rain smiled and fidgeted with her lighter. “Playing cello naked. Watching movies with lots of explosions in them. Seeing how big I can stretch the holes in my earlobes. Yoga. Cruising for someone cute to break my heart with. I have a thing for suits and ties. I like doing all the stuff the owner’s manual says to do to keep my truck running, changing my own oil. Trying to fix up my house. I have about a dozen home improvement books by this point. You know, stuff.”

“I see.” The man was quiet for a while, and so was Rain. “Yes, I do see. Rain, dearest?”

“Yeah?”

“Would you do me a very big favor?”

It never even occurred to Rain to refuse him. “Sure.”

“Please forget our conversation. Forget I was ever here. You ate your supper, alone, and went home. If you must remember me, remember that you dreamed me.”

“Okay.”

And there was only Rain, the three older gentlemen at their eternal gin rummy game, and the waitress. Rain had a vague feeling that she’d missed something, but couldn’t for the life of her think what. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be that important, could it?

Nah. She was just tired, that’s all. Time sometimes got a little bumpy when she was that tired.

“You need anything else, cherie?” The waitress, having noticed that Rain’s beer was empty, had come over to the booth.

“Huh? No, just the check, thanks.”

“How was everything?”

“Good. Everything was real good.”