

### All This and Love

### by

### J. Libby

All This and Love

J. Libby

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 J.Libby

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Acknowledgments

Joy DeLyria, Yoon Ha Lee, Angela Annette, and Donna Mazur provided invaluable advice and encouragement. Thank you, ladies, for reading drafts, holding my hand, and for being so gracious, generous, and kind. Thank you, also, to Tiffinee Bowen and Nicole Callihan, who also read drafts and helped me to figure out what I was trying to write and what I was not. All errors are my own. Last, but certainly not least, my BFF is totally made of win! Thanks, Donna, for the support, and for being all around awesome. I love you. I'll call you on the drive home.

Table of Contents

Copyright

Acknowledgments

this, too, like water and memory

fallen: a love story

like all the girls in the movies

to the water and the wild

all this and love

Story Notes

About the Author

this, too, like water and memory

In the World, the sky is clear for miles. A fat pearl moon hangs over the ocean, and Venus burns almost as bright. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of the tiny beach shack she shares with Sam, Briar stares out of the room's one picture window, a huge square of glass that looks out over a wooden boardwalk and beyond that surf frothing and white as it rushes up against the sand. Most nights Briar sits at the window mesmerized by the bright-full sky so different from the abysmal darkness spread out over the Sideways. An in-between place willed into shape and pressed out of the shadows by those who become lost, the Sideways has no stars and no moon. The hazy ill-defined landscape is capped by night and indigo twilight. Nothing more or between.

The phone rings at exactly three a.m. and Briar scoops up the handset immediately.

"I have a job for you, sweetheart." Loyal never bothers with hellos or goodbyes. Amity Grace says that it's a way of pretending indifference.

Briar doesn't think that Loyal needs to pretend anything.

"The sky is beautiful." She responds in kind, without saying hello. "There are so many stars."

"Pays good. Forty K for a few days."

"I can smell the ocean," she says, then looks back over her shoulder at Sam lying diagonally across the bed in the darkest part of the room. All she can see of him is the faint glow of his skin in the moonlight and the solidness of his calf and foot where his leg extends beyond the sheets.

A month since they met and the easy contentment has only just begun to erode, worn away by the coil of restlessness expanding in her chest. It's come faster than usual, the itchy need to run. It's been almost a year since she left home, since she's slept beneath a sky with no stars.

Briar likes Sam. He's a warm body and he feeds her breakfast in the morning. She likes that he doesn't snore. She likes that he doesn't ask her for anything she isn't willing to give, but a year is a long time to be in the World. If Briar has inherited anything from her mother besides her wide brown eyes and the kink in her hair, it is the compulsion to keep moving.

She thinks about staying or leaving and the money isn't even the point. "Where's the pick up," she asks, turning back to the window and the view of ocean and sand.

"Good girl." A smile curls warm and smug in Loyal's voice. "The pick up is in Aokigahara . . ."

"Twenty thousand more," Briar interrupts. A dense forest resting at the base of Mount Fuji, Aokigahara is haunted, cursed, and the second most popular place in the world for suicide attempts.

"Look . . ."

"Don't low ball me, Loyal. Twenty more."

"I might be able to do fifty, but . . ."

"I'm the best runner you have and there's no one else with as good a chance of getting in and out of Suicide Forest on time and in one piece. That's why you called me."

Loyal sighs. "You're a pain in my ass."

A ghost smile tips the corners of Briar's mouth. "Don't be cheap," she says.

"Alright," Loyal snaps. "Sixty thousand."

Briar finds a stub of pencil on the window sill. Sam had a habit of writing out the tides on the wall beside the window. "What's the job?"

"Are you writing this down?"

Briar glances at the stars one more time before turning away from the window. "What's the job, Loyal?" and she writes down the instructions Loyal recites. She thinks of the entry points and soft places that will be best for travel to Japan. She'll have to go into Aokigahara by foot. The spirits that haunt the forest infect everything, and over the centuries the breach places in the forest have become like molasses, sticky, opaque traps impossible to travel through.

Briar hangs up the phone and packs her things quietly. There isn't much: a few bits of clothing, her mother's cameo broach on a thin gold chain.

With her bag slung across her shoulder, Briar stands at the edge of the bed and watches Sam sleep. She won't miss all the sand that seems to dust the house no matter how much they clean. She won't really even miss the boy sprawled on the bed. She tells herself that in the end, he was just a lovely way to pass the time. The stars and the crash of the waves, the salt and rot smell of the ocean, those things have burrowed down into her bones. But, Briar is like her mother, even if she likes to pretend that she is not, and she is not made to stay.

***

Japan - 3 days later

Overhead, the canopy of leaves obscures the sky, blocking sun and heat, and leaving shadow and chilled air creeping along the ground. Along with the sun, the trees block GPS signals leaving Briar's fancy, expensive watch mostly useless. Even the compass Loyal had given to her, a fine delicate thing of filigreed silver bewitched to lead her directly to the shack, hadn't worked. It's something about Aokigahara. The Sea of Trees is haunted and cursed by the people who have died there.

The shack, when she finds it, is small, windowless, and crammed between tall, narrow trees. A ramshackle construction of weathered boards fading back into the foliage, she would have missed it if not for the unlikely chime of bells hanging over the lintel, and the tiny shrine resting at the base of the outermost tree.

Crossing the threshold and stepping from the mulchy-green-rot smell of the forest into the musty, airless shack is like stepping into the middle of a conversation. Pregnant with silence, the air reeks with the stillness of sacred and haunted places. Everything is arrested in the moment: scattered pillows and an overturned bowl of ramen, noodles spilled, drying broth leaving salt wounds in concentric circles on the table.

Briar digs a scrap of paper from the front pocket of her jeans. The ragged-edged corner of an envelope with five names crammed onto its blankness and fragmented by the envelope's seams-- five minor shaman contracted and paid in advance to summon and trap the souls she's come to collect. Kicking aside a wide pillow in the middle of the floor, Briar surveys the small, vacant room, then looks back down at the five names.

"In there."

Near the door, in a corner that was empty, a crouching old man dressed in rough brown robes tends a tiny fire. A cast iron teapot carved with dragonflies sits in the embers. Unlike his narrow, age-spotted bald head, the old man's face is a masterpiece of bushy eyebrows and a long thick white beard. He gestures, pointing across the room and Briar follows the skinny twig length of his arm with her eyes to a sliding bamboo door almost invisible against the wall.

"In there," he says again.

"Konnichiwa Ojisan." Briar pronounces the greeting carefully, feeling the unfamiliar syllables marble in her mouth. "Who are you?" She glances down at her scrap of paper, the names a casual notation on a hastily scavenged corner of her life. Directions on one side and five names on the other.

The old man cackles. "No one on that list." He watches her with coffee bean eyes, small and burning beneath his eyebrows.

"If you're not on this list, old man, you're not supposed to be here. Who are you?"

"If you think I'm an old man, then you're looking with the wrong eyes," he says. The old man flickers and bleeds out to something ancient and gnarled, withered and brown as tree bark.

"My apologies, Kodama Ojisan." Briar bows towards the tree spirit, hands pressed to her thighs. "What's your part in this?"

"I wait for you," the tree spirit says. "These charlatans have infected my trees. You must get it out."

Briar frowns as she straightens. "You've got the wrong girl. I'm just here to pick up a package."

The tree spirit laughs and it is the loud thunderous creaking of trees bending in a storm. "So you say. But we all have a part to play. Today, your part is to help clean out what they've brought into my trees. Other days you may have bigger fish to fry." It narrows its dark eyes and points at the door. "That way."

Briar's gaze sweeps the room, once more taking in the spilled ramen and the pillows. She recognizes the stability spells on parchment strips, ofuda, blessed and plastered around the door frame. The rest of the white washed walls are covered in kanji written in red paint.

"Doesn't seem like such a good idea . . . considering."

The tree spirit sighs as it takes the teapot from the fire with gnarled, bare hands. The iron glows hot and faintly red. "You're here," the tree spirit says. "Your job is ahead of you."

Briar takes a balisong, a folding butterfly knife, five razor-sharp inches from point to heel, from the inner pocket of her jacket. "If I'm not careful, it'll be all dodging bullets and running for my life," she mutters.

The tree spirit grins at her and winks. "I'll keep the tea warm."

The sliding door that was closed is now half-open, and Briar pauses for a moment to consider the invitation. It's not a good sign. She doesn't like the trick, but whether it's something to be worried about remains to be seen.

Pushing aside the latticed paper and bamboo reveals a second room almost identical to the first. Red kanji is calligraphed on the wall, except in this room the careful strokes are bisected by the dirty maroon of drying blood. Across the room, half a torso lies in front of a second set of sliding doors. The side of the dead man's face is scratched, congealed blood pooled in the talon slashes carved into his cheek. The spell inked into the doors has been shattered, defaced, and black characters have been hastily painted across the seam where the two doors meet. The truth of what happened, the quick, heavy snap of the sliding door, is there in the spider web of fractures in the door's bamboo frame. In the horrified oh, shit look in the man's wide eyes and gaping mouth, Briar can imagine the sharp crack of his spine being severed.

He died running and screaming.

In the center of the room a black case sits on a low table. The only thing that matters, despite what the old tree spirit said. That case and her deadline. Briar crosses the threshold into the room and sound hits her like someone somewhere hit the mute button. What she didn't hear in the other room, the raised voice, she hears now.

A girl in pink tights, pigtails wrapped in buns high on either side of her head, barks angrily into a cell phone. In her florescent tights and denim mini skirt, the angrily stalking harujuku wannabe could be fourteen or twenty-four.

Blood, a dead body, and a Technicolor toddler cursing into a cell phone. Briar shakes her head. What should she have expected? Aokigahara is a dreamer's death wish, old as the stars and ravenous.

It would be too obvious to say to the pacing girl, you're not ready. It would be rude to say, you're late, especially considering her own tardiness.

Briar clears her throat and the girl whips around. The old Grandfather in the other room said he'd keep the tea warm.

"I'll be outside," Briar says. "Let me know when you're ready."

The girl points at Briar, her bubblegum pink fingernail bright in the low light. Her mouth is chewed red and spotted with blood in one corner. "You. Stay."

Speaking sharply into the phone again, the girl listens intently before punching the phone's touchscreen viciously with her thumb to kill the call. She slides the wide device into her back pocket and crosses her arms. She stares at Briar without blinking.

Briar raises an eyebrow. Petulant 14-year old, she decides and stares right back. Briar knows a pissing contest when she's in one, and she's stared down bigger and badder bitches then this tiny, junior witch. Briar knows how to wait. She knows the mind-numbing stillness necessary to avoid predators and the patient quiet it takes to wait out prey. Her mother and sister taught her well.

The other girl blinks first.

Finally, "You're . . . the courier," the girl says, hesitates like she's about to ask, but then at the last minute, doesn't. She squares her shoulders, instead.

Briar smiles slightly at the girl's bravado, at how hard she's trying to keep it together. Briar licks her lips and catches the bitter stink of fear threading through the metallic blood-stench permeating the little room.

"I'm Rin," the girl says and leans in towards Briar like they're buddies, old friends. Like the blood and the bodies are no big deal. "Look. We've hit a bit of a snag and I'm gonna need your help to fix what I'm sure appears to be a major fuck up." The girl gestures at the room with the brief, shaky sweep of her arm. "Totally looks worse than it is."

"Somehow I doubt that," Briar says and shrugs. "But don't worry about it. I'm just here to pick up the case. What I think don't matter. Do whatever you have to. I'll wait outside."

Briar turns back towards the room she's just come in from, only the door that was there, the door that led to the first room with its scattered pillows and overturned bowl of ramen has become a blank, white wall. Nothing to mark the spot where she entered. She swears softly.

Taking a deep breath, Briar drawls, "Yeah, this is so not part of the job." She turns, gesturing to encompass the floor, the bloody walls, and the body by the only remaining door. "I pick up the package and I take it to where it needs to go. That's it."

"It's not me," Rin says shakily, closing her eyes. The girl takes a deep breath and clears her throat. When Rin looks up Briar is standing too close beside the table. Rin takes a step back and Briar steps with her. Head cocked to one side, she stares. Swallowing hard, Rin promises, "It's not me."

When Briar doesn't speak, just keeps watching and waiting, Rin starts talking, rambling as she edges around to the opposite side of the table. Briar follows her with her eyes. Her head turning slowly.

"The job was for three souls. We have two." Rin's voice trembles and her hands shake as she opens the case on the table. The box is lined with something like skin, stretched, withered leather the dark claret of dried blood. Two of the three depressions inside the box contain smaller boxes, tiny cubes marked and wrapped with black ribbon. "The third spirit . . . I'm not sure what happened. It's old, whatever it is. Very old and very angry. Even the shaman were surprised. I don't think that they were expecting anything like this."

Briar laughs at that, a sharp chuff of disbelieving sound. "You're hired to raise spirits in Suicide Forest, and you're surprised that you raised something old and angry?" Shaking her head, Briar snaps closed the butterfly knife she's been holding out of sight against the side of her leg. The clack of the folding metal makes Rin jump. "This place has been around since the angels fell. People have been abandoned here, killed themselves here for almost as long. Are you new? Or just stupid?"

Blushing, Rin eases the case closed, flinching as Briar slides the balisong into an inner pocket. "Look, I didn't plan this. The shamans were like you, gaijin. Foreigners. Trust me, I know more about Aokigahara than you do, but I'm just a spare. Substitute. The bright minds that set this thing up didn't look for locals. But what they did need was a witch-guide who could get them in and out of the forest. That was me." Rin shrugs and turns toward the body by the only remaining door. "Top Half over there was particularly clueless. Now, we've got two spirits trapped and a third that's got us trapped."

The idea of being trapped chaffs at the edges of Briar's mind. Like her mother and her mother's people, she is a wanderer. Some people in her past have accused her of running away.

"Look, I'm just transport. That's it. I'm not even supposed to be in here. You're the witch. You have to have some kind of exit strategy."

"Exit strategy? Right! If we don't finish this job I will be exiting all-right. I mean we've already got half payment, most of it already spent. If I don't finish this job it's going to be my head on a plate." Rin's voice is breathy, shaky, strained high and thin with fear and panic."Are you going to help me or what?" She's breathing too fast and swallowing too hard. Her voice cracks and the girl pauses, hand pressed to her chest. "You know what," Rin says in her fluttery voice. "Maybe it won't even matter because whatever we raised is going to kill us anyway."

Rin, standing next to the small table at the room's center, watches Briar from beneath the blunt, razored fringe of hair falling across her forehead. Beneath the stench of fear and the blood, Briar can smell how young Rin is. Young enough to need help. Young enough to believe that there is a way out of dying, if she can just figure it out. Or maybe she already has a plan and just needs a little nerve to see it through. Briar thinks of surviving in the Lost Ways and how surprised they all were when they found her. Near death, blazed with fever, and stubbornly clinging to life with the determined stupidity of the very young. It would have been easier to just die, but she didn't. At the time she didn't know how.

Briar weighs this moment, unraveling the possibilities. The shack is warded; she is trapped. Finally, Briar sighs. "I don't get involved." But like the girl said, it may not matter. Briar has no intention of dying in the middle of fucking Suicide Forest. She pulls the messenger bag over her head. Dropping it on the table beside the box, she asks, "What do you need me to do?"

The girl exhales, her shoulders slumping. She opens a wallet purse hanging diagonal across her chest and pulls out an oblong strip of parchment.

"Ofuda," Briar says in disbelief. "Cause that makes everything so much better. I mean look how well they worked the first time." And she shakes her head, damned if she's going to die over some amateur anime hijinks. "Seriously, you're just going to slap ofuda on its forehead or something?"

"Don't knock it, gaijin. Look close and be amazed. This is some powerful magick. Anyway, the ofuda is just a way to transport the spell."

Characters on the parchment glow faintly gold, and at first Briar thinks it's the thread reflecting the low light in the room. It only takes her a moment to realize that the glow is emanating outward, steady and even.

"It seems a little too easy and a little too obvious."

"Well, yeah, sure, it's obvious. But it works. It's also not going to be all that easy cause it's not like I can just walk in there and make the magic happen. That's why I need you. I've still got to work the spell to get that thing into the box. You don't even really have to do much. Attract it, distract it, and try not to die."

"That simple, huh?"

Rin smiles.

"Right." Briar smiles back. "Like falling off a fucking log."

***

Briar drags aside the body blocking the only remaining door. She grabs the arms, the body surprisingly light until she recalls that he's only an upper half. Streaks of blood smear across the floor as she drags him to the side.

Behind her, Rin, all brass and crystal, fearless one moment and terrified the next, is hugged up so close that Briar can feel the toes of the girl's sneakers clipping her heels. Her fear is sour and metallic on the back of Briar's tongue.

"Ready?" Briar asks and reaches back. The tips of her fingers graze Rin's hand.

"Ready."

Voice steady and clear, Rin chants the same five words repeated without pause, syllables sliding easily one into the other and looping into a sing-song that begins to echo, Rin's voice doubles and triples, harmony and counterpoint until the sound of her voice starts to trail behind itself. The screen dividing the rooms brightens, light bleeding out as the spell pries open the cracks in the folded space the shack occupies. The black kanji, counter spells to repair the disrupted red, swell for a moment and then begin to sink back into the brightness, eaten up by the radiance.

Briar closes her eyes against the light and the echoing, circling sound of Rin's voice. She feels pulled, heart and body tugged in opposite directions. Her belly twists and heaves as she tries to hang on to the here and right now, tries not to lose herself, tries not to vomit

In the storm of wild magic, Briar can no longer feel her body, her hands, her feet, or the warm clasp of Rin tucked in along her back. She flounders. Briar's been lost before. Panicked, she dissolves. No hands, no mouth, no feet. And if she raised her hands, pressed her knuckles into her burning eye sockets, she wouldn't even know it.

Find a center, Amity Grace once told her. Lost is no place to be, my darling, but if you're stranded in the Lost Ways, find a center. Think of a place. Like how Peter Pan has a happy thought. Just think of a place. It doesn't have to be a happy place. Make a space for yourself.

There is light and motion, a dizzying whirlwind of sensation that she can't control.

Make a space for yourself.

Briar latches onto the memory of Amity Grace's voice. She thinks of the sea and stars, the tiny shack on the beach, and Sam's warm body curled around hers. She thinks of Amity Grace, her soft hands and glittering smile.

The spinning sensation increases. Unanchored, out of place and out of time, Briar free falls.

She thinks that she may be screaming. She cannot tell.

And then it stops.

No warning, just a cessation.

No light, no sound except the heavy buzzing of sudden silence. Briar blinks her eyes wide; she can't see anything.

Briar inhales and exhales. In through the nose and out again. She focuses on calming her rabbiting heart. Slowly, as her eyes begin to adjust, pupils dilating until she can just see a few feet in front of her, Briar starts to make out the details of the room. Empty and darker than a room with rice paper walls should be, the room is filled with a darkness that has nothing to do with the absence of windows. Her limbs slowly realize they're still attached and Briar reaches out, fingers sliding over her shoulder until they collide with the top of Rin's head tucked against her back.

"Rin?"

The girl sighs gently. "That was a roller coaster, wasn't it?"

Briar smiles. "You okay?"

"Just sorting out my hands and feet."

Briar isn't sure if her eyes are continuing to adjust or if the room is lightning when she notices the table in the middle of the floor. She can see the shadow of andon hanging from the ceiling and littering the floor nearby. Briar doesn't have to count, she guesses that there are probably one hundred.

One hundred extinguished lanterns, ghosts, and a mirror, glass side up on a table.

"Fucking Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai," Briar snaps. "No wonder this is such a clusterfuck. You used ghost stories to raise spirits? A fucking parlor game?"

"Not my idea," Rin whispers, edging around Briar to peek into the room. "It's a little too club over the head for my taste. It's like using a Ouija board. You throw matchsticks in the dark to see what lights up. It worked. Of course it worked. But they ended up with a lot more than they were looking for."

Briar takes a breath and suddenly she can taste it: anger squatting in the room, heavy and restless.

"Are you his lover?" The voice, a sigh and a wail when it comes, is not a surprise. Heartache and breaking glass, the voice is at once deeply sorrowful and shrill with rage. Briar slaps her hands over her ears, a reaction as instinctual as it is useless. The voice is as much in her head as it is in the room. It brings with it creeping panic, a flutter of nerves down her arms and across her shoulders. It's all that she can do to stand still.

This is your part to play. Your job to do. The voice of the tree spirit presses against the terror and the panic. Briar focuses on the dry leaf murmuring of its laughter, another anchor in the maelstrom.

Behind her, Rin jumps. Briar turns sharply, shaking her head furiously as the girl moves away. Rin freezes, hands over her ears, her eyes wide and wet with the beginning of tears. She's staring past Briar and into the heart of the room. Briar turns back and the thing, the ghost-woman, hovering in the room with its waterfall of inky hair and pale skin watches Rin like a cobra waiting to strike, a smile curving the edges of its blackened mouth. Briar recognizes the steady, patient pleasure. Remembers the same curve on Alice Ann's wide mouth.

It's hungry, she thinks. Few people come this deep in the forest, Rin is the most powerful one in the room, and the ghost is starved.

Briar thinks of the kodama waiting for her to clear his copse. She thinks of Mary Angel and Alice Ann. She thinks of Amity Grace and her room over the bar in The Between. Bait, it's all I gotta do. My job. My part.

"I'm no one," Briar calls an answer to the ghost's question.

She crowds Rin backwards, pushing the girl until she is hidden, huddled up between Briar and the wall. Rin's fingers dig into Briar's back, holding her in place, her forehead pressed into the shallow ravine of Briar's spine. She's shaking, fingers spasming, the fear ripe and thick and rolling off her in waves. Briar takes another step back, pressing Rin more snugly into the corner.

With Rin out of sight, the ghost shifts its gaze to Briar.

The ghost's silver eyes light up. It stares at Briar and peels back all the barriers Briar has erected. It scrabbles through her memories. When the screaming begins, it's anguish and rage built into a shrieking crescendo flushed with the memory of every disappointment, every misery, every broken heart she's ever had. She is thirteen years old again and Mary Angel is leaving without looking back. Briar wandered the Lost Ways for nearly a year before Amity Grace found her. Fell in and out of undefined reality for a year before Mary Angel finally came looking and only to leave her behind. Maybe Mary Angel had known that The Between was where Briar needed to be. Maybe she knew that Amity Grace would be the mother that Briar needed. In the end it didn't matter. Mary Angel did what she did best. She walked away.

Briar needed her mother even if she couldn't say it. The question that she will always ask herself is why didn't Mary Angel know that? Why didn't she know that the worse thing she could do was to leave Briar with the image of her narrow back and swaying hips walking away?

Her vision, blurry with tears, doesn't change the way that Briar sees the past. She calls her mother's name, calls her Mama. She wants her mother to turn. She wants to be enough. More like her mother than Alice Ann. Favored. Briar's chest is so tight with tears and anger that she can't breathe. She wants to explain, to say what this means. The memory can't change because it's ancient history, but still Briar feels compelled. She darts forward, her empty hands reaching. Mary Angel moves ever further away and Briar runs harder. Suddenly her empty, reaching hands are full, and when Mary Angel doesn't turn back, Briar buries the blade of her butterfly knife into her mother's back. Briar jerks sharply at the impact, at the violence so utterly breathtaking.

Briar stares at the image of Mary Angel lying on the floor in a steadily spreading pool of blood. "This isn't real," she whispers. She shouts, "this isn't real!"

Mary Angel walked away that day, and the gift of the balisong came years later. Maybe in the worse pockets of her loneliness Briar has thought of other ways that this moment could have gone, but this is not how that story ended.

Don't you believe it. Don't you believe any of it.

Maybe it's Rin's voice or the tree spirit or the memory of Amity Grace after Mary Angel left. Briar presses her hands harder over her ears as if that could block the lie playing out in her head like a movie reel. She sinks to the floor and Rin kneels with her, still hiding. Briar can feel Rin's solid weight against her back, feels the girl take a deep breath.

Before they entered the room, Rin had pressed the golden ofuda into the skin of Briar's chest. When Rin begins to chant the spell ignites the parchment and the edges of the ofuda begin to burn. The heat and pain cut through her shock, and as her shock recedes, the anger in the room swells a second time. Briar tries to breathe through the wave. Hot and stale, it pushes against her and there she is again, in the wrong memory. This time she lies collapsed on the floor, all of her beautiful insides spread out and Alice Ann up to her elbows in viscera.

"Paint and bay," Alice Ann sings softly. "Sorrel and gray. All the pretty little ponies." She leans in close, hands pushing deep into Briar's chest, and brushes her nose against her sister's. Pulling back Alice Ann admires the red thing pulled from her sister's chest and pulsing in her cupped palm. She touches Briar's cheek, smiles her crazy, tilted smile, and bites into Briar's heart like biting into a ripe tomato.

This memory is false, too, but Briar is trapped in it, feels the sharp stab of Alice's hands scrabbling in her chest and the butterfly brush of her fingers against her cheek.

This is what going mad feels like.

Kneeling, hands clasped over her ears, cheeks wet with tears, the screaming in Briar's head finally blossoms from her mouth.

"Are you his lover?" the ghost asks again.

Briar forces her eyes open. The ghost floats in the room, her long white robes and black hair whipped by a non-existent wind. She watches Briar with silver-coin eyes burning in her parchment face.

"I've waited for centuries. Is it you?"

Briar breathes deeply around the pain in her chest, shaking with the effort. The tears are itchy and hot on her cheeks. She gasps, "You know who I am. You've seen."

The ghost parts her ragged, blackened mouth, lips curled back over jagged, broken teeth.

Briar bends over again, hands still uselessly clasped over her ears. With her head pressed to her knees, Briar thinks of blessed release. She thinks of a slipknot and how easy it would be to step off the table in the center of the room. She imagines herself, body suspended and swinging from the rafters. The thought is almost sweet.

And then, a voice in her head. Soft, the echo of something someone once said: This is not real. Don't you believe it. It's something to hold onto, that voice. An anchor, a lodestone dragging her out of a memory that's only half true.

The burning in Briar's chest grows hotter then. Her breastbone feels like its melting and she remembers this is what Aokigahara does. It twists reality, opens old wounds, and makes you want to die.

"NO!"

Briar closes her eyes and reopens them, and the ghost is floating right in front of her.

The ghost watches Briar serenely; her mouth does not move. "Think of how sorry they will be? So sorry that they hurt you. So sorry that they killed you. Why won't you let me kill you?"

Briar breathes deeply, focusing, one breath in, and then out again. She has survived worse than this. Alice Ann never cut the heart from Briar's chest, but she tried. Briar carries her sister's mark, a scar over her heart, to prove it.

"This is not real."

"Mary Angel abandoned you, betrayed you. Your sister wanted to eat your heart, and your mother did nothing to stop her." The ghost closes her beautiful, terrible eyes. "You are so much pain," she sighs.

Briar knows about hungers. Her mother, a succubus, one of the Beautiful Ones, gifted craving in her DNA. For all of her father's humanity, hunger is also part of what Briar is. It is a lesson learned at her mother's knee, and tested in combat with her twin. Briar knows about hungers and she knows how to survive.

"It won't work," she says. "There's no point. It's not just my sorrow that you want. You want their pain, too. You're starving for it. But it doesn't work like that. There is no one to mourn me. No one to care for the loss." The truth of it is as bitter as her salted tears, but she's lived it so long its a nagging ache, the ghost memory of a severed limb.

Briar stares into the dead, silver eyes. "I am no one's darling," she says.

And because of what she is, because of the gift of her mother's blood, Briar reaches out and her cupped hands are solid against the dead woman's icy cheeks. Anger spreads across the room, this time so hot and so old that it burns cold.

Briar likes to pretend that she is nothing like her mother. The truth is that they are more alike than she will ever admit. For twelve years she learned the ways of her kind, even if she could never live among them. She may not be able to feed from souls, but she has learned other things, other tricks. Inextinguishable craving, it is part of what she is.

Leaning forward, Briar slides her tongue along the seam of the other woman's lips and breathes out. For the briefest moment, Briar feels her lungs seize, her heart stop. Her breath fogs between them in an arctic cloud, tiny icicles clinging to her mouth. Then the spell that Rin pressed into her chest swells up, fills her throat and as Briar blows, it slides into the hungry cavern of the dead woman's open mouth.

The ghost pulls back. Silver eyes wide, gaping mouth lit inside by the golden glow of the spell she's swallowed. The light in her mouth intensifies, fractures, and laces across her face and the length of her body. Seeping outward, the light bleeds together until she is burning radiance.

Briar turns away from the light and closes her eyes.

When it is quiet, when the wind has gone, Briar slowly raises her head. The darkness has been leeched away.

Unlike the first two rooms, in this room all four walls are made of shoji and the fading light from the forest seeps through the paper. The bottom half of the shaman is sprawled against the door, and three other bodies. One hundred paper lanterns hang from the ceiling and litter the floor. In the center of the room there is a table, a mirror, glass side up, on its surface. Beside the mirror is a small box sealed and wrapped with black ribbon.

Briar carefully pushes herself up from the floor, her knees stiff and aching. Rin remains on the floor.

"You okay?" Briar asks.

Dazed and shaky, Rin nods and points at Briar. "Your nose."

Briar touches her face and her hands come back wet with blood. Wiping her nose on her sleeve, she staggers towards the table and retrieves the box. It is hot to the touch and glows slightly golden in the dim light.

Such a small thing, she thinks.

Briar turns back towards Rin and the kodama is standing there, a translucent shadow in the dim room. He smiles, a shifting wrinkle of beard and cheek, and bows low. Then the old tree spirit fades.

There are things about the Sideways that Briar misses when she is away: Amity Grace, her room at The Between, and the silence of the shadow spaces. Then there are things that she does not miss: the sky without stars or moon, the danger inherent in traveling through the world's soft places, and jobs like these.

"God, I'm tired," she says and covers her eyes with one hand.

Rin is standing and shoving aside the door. "You can stay with me and my sister for the night, if you want." She darts a glance quickly up at Briar then looks away. Gently, Rin touches the back of Briar's hand. "You saved my life. It's the least that I can do."

Holding the box carefully, Briar thinks of Mary Angel and Alice Ann Song. She thinks of how she is not made to say, and then she thinks of making space, finding places to belong. Briar thinks about Sam and her last night on the beach, how big the sky seemed and how peaceful Sam looked when he slept.

"Maybe for the night," she says as she follows Rin out of the room. "Just one night."

fallen: a love story

Now

This time it's a motel room with mud brown carpet overlooking a parking lot. Sunset tints the sky, light bending through the window like spilled blood, and all Mia can think of is the razor blade resting on the edge of the bathroom sink. Higher up, past the sun, before the moon and stars appear, the sky bleeds out to cotton candy pink; it's so hopeful that she can't even look at it.

Mia sits on the edge of the unmade bed, wrapped in a stiff cotton towel. Folded over with her elbows braced on her knees, her fingers are curled over each other so tight the knuckles have gone white. Water drips from her hair and the tip of her nose, tap water and salt water mixing and falling into a puddle between her feet.

When Sariel walks in he brings with him the iciness of winter. There's no click of the lock unlocking or breaking, no splintering wood even though the door's been locked for days. Sariel has always had a way with locked things - rooms, boxes, Mia's heart: things that fall open when he touches them.

The last time Mia saw Sariel it was the spring of 1942, nearly one hundred years since the opera in Venice when they had argued over Violetta's good intentions. She found him huddled beneath a bridge in the shadows of Notre Dame. Ragged and dirty, an overcoat hung from his thin, bare shoulders, David's Star pinned to the lapel. Scrapped raw by the intervening years, he was all dull skin and wounded eyes.

"I am here," Mia had said.

Surprise flickered across Sariel's face then dulled into confusion. "Ghost," he whispered as he turned away. Mia: a phantom, out of place, out of time and no referent for her presence there beneath the bridge.

Mia scratched the length of his spine through the thinness of his coat and for a moment his body clenched. Everything about him was wound too tight, and Mia wondered if this moment would be the one where he broke beyond repair.

He sagged into her touch instead, shoulders slowly folding forward to expose the raised press of vertebrae disappearing into the ragged length of his hair. With the tips of her fingers, Mia gently brushed the nape of his neck. Sariel sighed, his head sinking down against his chest as Mia smoothed her hands across the width of his back, palms cupped and hesitating over the bony knobs protruding from his scapulae. The uneven bumps where once there had been wings were a violent, grotesque reminder of the Fall.

As if he could feel the ghost pressure of her hovering hands, Sariel turned and laced his fingers with Mia's.

"I can hear them," he cried out, and pressed their joined hands to the scabbed and seeping hexagram carved over his heart. "I can hear them. Their fear, their faith, their love. Where is He?"

Mia stared into his eyes. She did not blink. "It's irrelevant," she said. Mia no longer believed in being saved. "What will you do to save yourself? When will enough be enough?"

She coaxed him back to her apartments, a let in the fourth arrondissement with a view of the Cathedral he so loved. An unlikely pair, they walked the narrow streets drawing stares, Mia in her veiled hat and Sariel with his bare, dirty feet, so tragically beautiful even through all the filth.

Two months were all they had before the restlessness drove him from the city, before Rafle du Vel' d'Hiv when the police rounded up all the Jews in Paris and the old woman at the market disappeared. She used to give Mia peaches and courgettes. "Pour votre amant," she used to say, "because they are his favorites." Mia was glad that Sariel had not been there to see the old woman's empty stool behind the counter.

Now, Sariel kneels at her feet and he is more beautiful than she remembers. More solid and somehow more real, he smells like cold air and the brittle sharpness of snow.

"What will you do to save yourself?" he asks. "When will enough be enough?"

Sariel calls her by the name she has chosen for this century, Mia, and she flinches.

"Don't call me that. I am not that girl."

Gently, his voice pitched low, he calls her Naamah, and it's an endearment and her given name all at once. But Mia has lived hundreds of lifetimes since the Fall, and she is not that girl anymore, either. Still, something inside loosens like the melting of an iceberg and Mia catches her breath when Sariel reaches up.

It's been too long, and Mia has forgotten what it's like to be touched when it means something. Hollowed out and paper-thin, she is afraid of flying apart, all the bits of her caught and scattered by the wind. Jerking away, she draws back on the bed, away from the stretch of his hand. But she cannot avoid the inevitable because this is how they find balance. Skin to skin, sense memories re-orienting the drag of days.

Sariel rises as Mia pulls back. He perches on the edge of the bed and slides one hand up over the top of her foot. With his other hand he skims the curve of her cheek and she sighs as she turns into the press of his fingers. The breath she didn't even realize that she was holding rushes out. With Sariel's hand cupped around her ankle bone, Mia's thoughts about the blood and cotton candy sunset, the razor blade on the edge of the bathroom sink, begin to quiet.

"I am here," Sariel says and Mia thinks of the bridge and two hundred years before that, and five hundred years before that, and on and on and on. The same words echoed and repeated back and forth between the two of them.

Sariel slides his hand from her ankle to the sensitive space behind her knee. He cups her briefly there, then tugs her forward and kisses her. The taste of him is familiar, sweet as apricots and sucking candy. But just beneath the sweet Mia tastes something new. Pressing into the kiss, she licks at the bitterness laced across his tongue.

***

Six Months Earlier (3:00 a.m.)

Mia sat alone in the diner in the quiet between darkest night and breaking day. With her chin tucked low into the folds of her coat and her hands cupped around a ceramic mug she tried to recall her youngest sister's smile.

Not quite five years old when Mia left, Eliana had been born with their mother's eyes and their father's love for sweet things. Three thousand years later, and it was one of Mia's greatest regrets that she had not stayed to know Eliana. At the time, immortality was not a curse she could comprehend; she had always thought there would be more time. But time unwound and sped past faster than she could have imagined. Even when there was plenty of it people aged, babies were born and died, little sisters grew up and disappeared in the blink of an eye.

Mia smiled as she tried to reassemble her sister's image from the hazy fragments of her memory. Her smile faded as Uriel stepped out of the air. Tall and imposing, and like all angels, beautiful almost beyond comprehension, Uriel's presence in the diner was an omen as much as anything else. He sat in the chair on the other side of the table and Mia glanced quickly around the room. No one had moved. The waitress still watched a small TV mounted in a corner over the counter. A man in a trench coat slept collapsed in the corner booth, and a couple continued to whisper over a shared slice of pie.

Mia stared down at the table, at the cup cradled in her hands. She did not look at the angel.

Uriel folded his hands loosely on the table and told her that Sariel was devouring human souls to fill the gnawing, expanding emptiness hollowed out by the Fall from Heaven.

"You are not enough," Uriel said. "You never were." And he counted out all the lost souls her lover had stolen in a litany of unfamiliar names. "We are angels, Naamah, spirit incarnate. We have no soul, and Sariel hungers for all the ways that he can no longer be close to God." Uriel pressed a finger to the back of Mia's hand to ensure her attention and the cold burn between her knuckles spread into an ache in the fine bones of her smallest finger. "He has not fallen as far as the Lightbringer. He is not damned, but he will be."

With her chin tucked low against her chest, eyes angled down, Mia said, "And whose fault will that be? You cursed him for loving me. You cursed us both." She laughed gently. "We cannot be together, and yet when we're apart we go mad. In a century, maybe we have a few weeks. We hurt, but we do not die." Mia searched for the way to say what was true. "Sariel is . . . we are . . . we are wearing away."

Uriel cocked his head to one side, his gaze steady and unblinking. "The Daughter of Men are forbidden. Sariel was warned as all the Grigori were warned. How else did you think this would end?"

Mia continued to stare into her coffee mug. She did not look up and she did not answer because, of course, in the beginning she hadn't worried about endings. Three millennium ago she had been willing to risk anything; she was so in love. Mia closed her eyes, exhausted beyond soul and bone. "What do you want, Uriel?"

"Sariel has stolen lives and souls that he has no right to. Souls that belong to Our Lord. It cannot continue. Heaven is calling for judgement. Look beyond the window, Naamah, and see what will become of him if he does not stop."

Carefully, avoiding the angel entirely, Mia allowed her head to fall to one side and opened her eyes. Outside, pressed against the diner's windows, the fallen, once-were-angels like Sariel who had been cast out, stood huddled in the spill of light across the sidewalk. Their gazes were locked on Uriel. She had seen the same enraptured expression on Sariel's face whenever they chanced upon one of the divine. It pained the Fallen to look upon other angels, to be faced with what they had lost.

Just beyond the Fallen, the damned, angels who transgressed too far and were beyond redemption hovered at the furthest edge from the light. Still drawn to the angelic spark, they tore at their skin, talon marks carved into their flesh as they craved the very thing they loathed. Wicked, jealous, tortured creatures, the damned sought to destroy what they could no longer have.

"Sariel will become one of them if we do not stop him. Damned beyond redemption for what he has done. The Host can take him whenever we choose."

Mia turned away from the horrors beyond the window and focused on a smear of crystallized syrup on the wall, a clear amber drop missing its insect heart. "If you can take him whenever you want, then why are you here?"

"He is still our brother," Uriel answered. "There can be no forgiveness, but with your intervention there is a way to save him. We hope that you will help before it is too late."

"There is no forgiveness." Mia's laugh was sharp with bitterness. "You will damn him one way or another. Haven't you done it already? Sariel fell and he dragged me with him, but we were not even allowed the solace of each other. Instead we have been forced apart, repeatedly, for centuries. What makes you think that I would help you? He is all that I have, even if for only the briefest moments. I do not change. I cannot die. Can you even imagine what that is like?"

"I am an angel, Naamah. I am as I was born. And there are worse things. There are always worse things."

Mia picked at the shard on the wall with her thumbnail. The syrup gave way to the prodding and ricocheted off the edge of the table. She followed its arc with her eyes, her gaze accidentally colliding with the angel's. Unnerved by the unblinking pupil-less stare, Mia looked away. Of course there were worse things.

"Heaven's to blame in the first place. Why should I give him up?" Tired and reckless, she snapped, "This is your fault."

The waitress glanced over warily, a frown crowded between her eyebrows. She raised a half-filled coffee pot. "More coffee, hon?"

Mia shook her head and the waitress shrugged. No one else could see the angel sitting across the table.

Uriel laughed softly, a clanging, disjointed warning. "In the beginning Sariel made his choice and he paid for it. He fell, little girl, and that is no small trick for an angel. Now he is consuming souls and his hunger is because of you. Because he fell to be with you. Only you can fix this."

"You make him crazy," Mia whispered. She forced herself to look directly at the angel.

For a moment the angel looked like any other man might, but then light haloed out around him, divine and so coldly beautiful that Mia's eyes began to water. If she were to look long enough, her corneas would burn. She'd seen it happen before. The old mad woman who fed the pigeons on the steps of the New York City Library had one brown eye and one eye the startling blue of Lapis Lazuli, gold webbed around the pupil. Once the old woman said that she had seen an angel out of the corner of her eye and now that eye saw the future or nothing at all.

The light around Uriel sharpened into blinding incandescence and Mia finally looked away. Obligingly, she closed her burning, watering eyes.

"He is better than this, but he will be made to pay for what he has stolen. It will be worse than the occasional madness. You will lose him entirely."

With her burning eyes closed and Uriel whispering in her ear, in her head, the span of millennium stretched out behind her and years more ahead. "I am sick to death of price and repentance. This fucking hell on Earth for something that happened forever ago, and now this." Her voice broke on the swell of tears in her throat. "You speak of price, then what price Heaven?"

Uriel leaned forward, his feral smile bright as cut glass and blinding. "What price are you willing to pay," he asked.

Uriel pressed his thumb to the center of Mia's forehead and burned the terms of surrender into her brain. "So, what price Heaven?" A question for a question and nothing given away in the asking. "Are you sure?"

Mia massaged her temple, her head felt heavy and tender. "I love him," she said.

"You do, but that is not an answer."

Mia thought of all the girls Uriel showed her and what Sariel promised them before he gobbled up their lives and she wanted to weep. Once, Mia knew nothing about eternity or loneliness or the empty spaces that love does not fill. She did not understand the distance between me and us or all the ways love would force her to bend.

"Look upon my suffering and deliver me, for I have not forgotten your law. For Sariel," she said. "Yes." Mia peeked at the angel from beneath the fringe of her eyelashes and her eyes were singed for the effort. She dropped her head into the cup of her palms and pressed the heels of her hands against her burning eyes.

"You will save him?"

Mia rubbed at her watering eyes. "My soul for his," she whispered.

"Good." Uriel lunged across the table and grasping the collar of her shirt, he jerked Mia from her chair.

Briefly, Mia wondered what the other diners saw: the startling skid of her chair across the floor, her body hanging suspended in mid-air, feet not touching the ground. Or was she trapped in the space between moments where only the mad woman on the steps of the library could see?

Uriel dragged Mia across the table and the coffee mug, half-filled, shattered as it hit the ground. He pressed a kiss, hard and rough, against the curve of her cheekbone. "He will fight you. He may even curse you for your kindness." For a moment, regret softened Uriel's voice. "Hold him to you. Do not let him go, and give him this."

Uriel fitted his mouth to Mia's and blew something bitter and honey thick into her mouth. It filled her throat too fast and Mia panicked. Her fingers curled into the front of Uriel's coat and she pushed against him. Heart fluttering, she fought the hot, swelling, choking inability to breathe or swallow. Tears welled and rendered the world a blur of light and smeared color.

Her arms became heavy, her hands, fisted in the lapel of Uriel's coat fell away, and the moment her struggling eased, the bit of Heaven Uriel fed her burned its way down. It sank into her heart and Mia flushed with the heat of the leaden heavy swell settling in her chest, arms and legs spasming as she struggled.

Uriel let go of her shirt collar and Mia collapsed back into her chair. She clawed at her throat, coughing and trying not to vomit. "Breathe," he said. "And do not keep it for too long. Sooner or later that which you carry will kill you. It is not made for such as you."

Mia tried to nod, twisting her neck at the odd fullness in her throat. "He will find me now," she whispered, wincing at the raw soreness in her throat. "He will find me."

***

Now

Pulling back, Mia studies all the ways that Sariel has changed: his hair, longer and brighter than it was, and a ring threaded through the edge of his eyebrow. The burnish beneath his skin that dimmed with every century is now a radiance seeping out of his pores.

"Sariel," she whispers, brushing the tiny circlet of silver lacing his eyebrow with her thumb. This she must remember: the curves and angles of his face, his heavy-lidded eyes.

"You are well," Sariel says as if there is no razor blade waiting on the edge of the bathroom sink. He knows it's there, of course he knows. He also knows that she cannot die, but that she suffers for surviving.

He smiles, and Mia gently traces the scar on his chin, a wound inflicted by another angel during The Rebellion. Leaning in close, Sariel sips at her mouth, strokes the length of her tongue with his own and tugs at the towel knotted around her breasts. The air is cool and Sariel teases her pearled nipples. He knows all the best ways to touch her body: a kiss pressed into the curve of her neck makes her shiver, biting at the long vein curling beneath her ear almost makes her come.

"How beautiful you are." He kisses her forehead.

Sariel presses Mia down across the bed and straddles her hips. The look in his eyes is steady and familiar, but there's a distance there now, too. Something unnerving in the unblinking stillness. Once he was all sunshine and laughter. Now, it's almost like staring at a stranger. The truth is that maybe he is. The changes, the other souls, the slow erosion that will lead him to the demonic have changed him in ways that Mia does not completely understand. They are linked. Their fates intertwined and she loves him too much to let him fall any further.

What price Heaven? What price will you pay?

Mia opens her arms and with her hands and breath, she draws Sariel close, lulling him with the memories of all the times that this has happened. The easy, familiar spread of her thighs, her hand in the small of his back. This is an old trick. Before Eve there was Lilith. Some say she betrayed them all.

"Do you remember Paris," Sariel whispers. "You saved me." He shucks out of his jeans, pushing the heavy material down over his narrow hips. He is beautiful, and despite his cold eyes, every part of him is warm and full of light. Mia trails her fingers over the sculpted solidness of his chest, down across his narrow waist and hips, pausing only to press against the place where a belly button should be. Her hands slide further down to cup the heaviness of his penis and testicles. Her gentle squeeze elicits a growl deep from his chest. Sariel's eyes roll back as Mia strokes the length of him. He presses her back on the bed. Open like a flower, her arms and legs, Sariel fits perfectly into the space between her thighs.

"I missed you," he says and holds her still.

His hands cupped around her jaw massage the tightness there. He studies Mia as closely as she studied him, mapping the intervening years in the ways that she has changed. She cut her hair, once long mahogany to her waist, and now it just grazes her chin. Mia lies still beneath the perusal, savoring his weight and the warmth of his skin.

Mia curls her legs around Sariel's thighs and his tongue fills her mouth at the exact moment that his body breaches hers. It's been so long that the stretched invasion burns, riding the edge of pleasure and pain. Mia arches her back as Sariel levers himself up, his pelvis pressed tightly into the cradle of her thighs. He presses forward and withdraws, the pleasure twisting up from where he grinds into her. She loves the way he thrusts hard and fast, then holds himself still inside her for the measure of a heartbeat. The impact, the sudden fullness, makes her toes curl. He does it again and again, startling her, the tempo building as he rubs himself over and over some delicious spot inside her.

As her body warms, so too does the gift she carries. Hot, heavy and sour, the knot in her chest is a distraction to the pummeling her body is taking. It begins to pulse, an odd counterpoint to her heartbeat and the throb between her legs. When Sariel leans down to kiss her, his chest pressed to hers, as much as Mia wants to hold it back, the gift that Uriel has bestowed rises up, all honeyed light and heat and pain. But instead of rising from her throat, passed to Sariel within the kiss, it presses insistently against her breastbone.

Pressed chest to chest, the air between them fills with the heavy, nauseating sweetness of burning flesh. The pain outpaces the pleasure as the heat increases and the bit of Heaven tucked in her chest seeks the flesh of the man it was intended for. Fouled with her cresting orgasm, the sharp pain pulls her body away from the slick, irresistible curl of sensation winding tight between her legs. It melts through bone and muscle, and Mia screams. The sharp, panicked sound so at odds with the breathy moans of her orgasm makes Sariel jerk. He tries to pull away, but Mia, thousands of years old and his equal in so many ways, coils her arms and legs around him and does not let him move.

Despite her resolve, the pain has a life of its own and Mia twitches, her body resisting, wanting nothing more than to pull away, but the bond is finally been made, her flesh melted into his. When Sariel jerks sharply upward, tries again to lever himself away, Mia's entire body follows his. The crack of her breaking back is loud and startling.

Horrified, Sariel shouts her name and stops trying to pull away. He presses down with his body as if he can press her back together again.

"Love." With his lips pressed against the shell of her ear, he asks, "What have you done?"

There are no words for what this means, no name for the gift she is giving him. Uriel explained it all in the press of his thumb to her forehead. There can be no forgiveness, but a compromise, yes. Punishment. Payment. A bit of her soul to balance the absence of his. And from Uriel, an offering, the tiniest bit of Heaven, a fragment of his grace. Mia doesn't have Uriel's gifts, so all she can offer is the flood of her tears and her screams as the star that she swallowed melts from her chest, burrows into Sariel's, and ignites.

The stink of burning flesh gives way to the singe of hair and the charcoal smell of dying embers as fire licks across their tangled bodies.

***

There is no pain. Lying there, a shell of ash, wasted and ravaged, Mia is grateful for that. There is only darkness, and she realizes that her eyes are gone, burned away with everything else that she was.

Hollow, empty, Mia is curiously unmoved by the loss. For a moment regret nudges the edges of the emptiness, then fades away.

"Why?" Sariel's voice is terrible with the sorrow that Mia does not feel.

If she could, Mia would say, because I loved you and this is what was asked of me. Or maybe she would say, this was always the price, and this was always the end. Something must always be offered. Violetta's good intentions, remember? But Mia cannot speak, her lips and tongue have been burned away, too. Maybe that is for the best. If she could speak and if she dared to tell the whole truth maybe she would say: I love you, I am tired, and I wanted to die.

"Naamah, please."

"It is done, brother. You are both reborn." Uriel is there, somewhere above her in the room that she can no longer see. "Naamah has made this sacrifice. Honor it."

"I cannot."

"You must. She has done this for you. To save you."

"It was not her place to save me. I did not ask for this." Sariel's voice is thick with tears and a shadow of sadness passes over Mia. "Is she mortal again? Will she die?"

Mia can almost picture the tilt of Uriel's head as he considers the question. "A small fragment of her soul. A portion of her heart to mend your own. She will die, eventually. But she does not have to die now. Her suffering is sufficient."

"Naamah," Sariel says her name gently, a whispered amen.

"She can no longer love you, brother. That part of her has been burned away, and is now your burden to carry alone."

Sariel's voice is thick and slurred with the heaviness of his tears. "Am I to love her with no hope?"

Uriel hesitates to answer. "You will also come to Tarturus and serve on the edges of Hell." Uriel's voice is heavy and unrelenting. "You must accept this. The Fall was your choice, but she fell, too. Naamah has followed behind you for centuries. Every time you left, she waited. She chooses now."

"Beloved." And then Mia feels the ghost touch of Sariel's cool lips at the corner of her mouth. "Do not leave her like this, brother. Please."

There is only silence and then Uriel's thumb on her forehead. It does not burn any less this time around. The repair and stitch of her skin, the burned husk falling away is an agony. When Mia finally opens her eyes, the room is still enveloped in unrelenting darkness. She reaches up to touch her face and her skin is smooth and whole. She reaches out and feels Sariel's fingers curl around hers.

"Uriel," Sariel whispers, "her eyes."

"She is fine," Uriel says. "She sees nothing and everything."

Mia wonders if her eyes are the same odd blue as the woman who feeds the pigeons on the steps of the New York City Public Library. "I am sorry that I loved you so well," she says.

"Naamah," Sariel whispers. "Beloved." His voice thins out, fades into an echo and Mia knows that she is alone.

Mia lies on the bed and remembers the pink and gold sunset, and the razor blade on the edge of the bathroom sink. She wonders how long it will take her to die now. If she will age. If her hair has already turned white. None of it seems very important anymore. Not the sunset or the razor blade or all the lives she's lived from birth until now. There is a future, dim and flickering in the darkness behind her ruined eyes, sparks of green and yellow fragments that suggest what her life might be like. The thoughts are distant and lethargic, unanchored and almost unreal.

like all the girls in the movies

I. as it opens

The pack chases whatever will run.

Clay has long understood the benefits of waiting, of coiled anticipation heavy and low in his belly.

Crouched in an alcove, hands braced on the pebbled ground, Clay inhales the stink of sweat laced with the sour-copper bite of menstrual blood. Something sweet and light, the familiar scent of jasmine and vanilla floats almost unnoticed beneath the blood and fear.

Saliva pools in his mouth, and his eyes roll back.

Young and ripe, Hanna, he has craved.

His cock swells, and the wolf hidden behind his face pushes against the architecture of his bones.

II. panic, like air or water

Hana breathes hard, the erratic jackhammer of her heart nearly lost beneath the labored rasp. Clay just catches the rhythm, and his hips jerk down and up in time to the panicked throb.

Howls erupt in the distance, and Clay collapses low, face to the ground pressing out his need to respond. He focuses instead on the spike in Hanna's pulse and the skitter of rocks and bones shifting beneath her dancer's feet. Terrified, her balance is useless in the catacombs.

He breathes, a low curl of sound: "Girrrlll."

"Wh-who's there," Hanna cries, her voice a vibrato of nerves and wavering vowels.

III. by the dark, truth

"Here. In the wall."

At the sudden flash of sweeping light Clay blinks rapidly and pulls back as far as the alcove will allow.

Hanna swings the light across the opening in the wall a second time. "Where?"

Clay stands and closes his full-moon eyes. "The light," he says. "It's too bright."

"Sorry," she whispers.

When Clay opens his eyes, the light is gone and Hanna stands framed by the jagged opening in the stone. Skin like cream, golden hair. Her eyes, he knows, are the deepest green.

"I'm hiding," he says, low and urgent. "You can hide here, too."

IV. it has an end

Howls, sharp yips and angry snarls, echo closer than before. Hanna swings towards the sound, crying out.

Clay reaches for her. "Hurry. Turn off the light."

Hands shaking, Hanna fumbles with the flashlight. The light winks out and she feels blindly for the catacombs cool rock walls.

Grasping her seeking hands, Clay sighs at the softness of her palms.

He tugs her into the alcove, and with Hanna pressed into the wall, his thigh between hers, there is just enough space for the two of them.

Clay leans down and whispers into her hair, "Sorry, love. There's not much room."

V. all delicious

Clay brushes a kiss on Hanna's forehead and licks away the salt on his lips with the quick sweep of his tongue.

"I don't hear them anymore," she whispers. "Maybe we can leave."

"You caught her!" Amy's voice breaks the quiet. She's always so surprised. Of course he caught her. Clay has learned to wait. He has learned Hanna's preference for turning left instead of right.

Hanna looks up and tries desperately to pull away.

"Your teeth," she whispers. "Your eyes."

He bends low to kiss the corner of Hanna's mouth; she tastes like peppermint. Her name is a growl in his chest.

"All the better."

for Helen

to the waters and the wild

Thirty miles from Galway, before she reached the sea, Kay saw a girl waiting on a ribbon of grass at the edge of the road. The girl was beautiful, tall and pale with short, dark hair and a wide mouth. She stood with her face turned up to the sky, still as a sapling in a field and just as lean. An unlikely vision drenched in the sunlight from a momentary parting in the clouds, the girl's skin glowed translucent in the light.

As Kay approached, speeding along in the little rental car, the girl turned. Their eyes met and a smile blossomed across the girl's face as if she had been waiting all day just for Kay.

Startled, as much by the girl's unlikely presence as her wide smile, Kay slammed on the car's breaks. The car skidded to a stop, the back of the car fishtailing slightly. Looking up, Kay watched in the rear view mirror as the girl, a brown leather bag slung over one shoulder, loped towards her.

Kay bit down on her thumb, worrying at a loose bit of flesh along the cuticle as she wondered about the wisdom of stopping to pick up a stranger on a lonely stretch of road. It was a stupid, reckless thing to do, but she couldn't just drive away. Leave a lonely stranded traveler on the side of the road. A lonely, girl traveler. And there was something . . . something about that wide, glittering smile. Giulia would have said that Kay was too naive and eager to please, too apple pie and eyes in the sky. Of course a smiling stranger would make her stop. Of course, she'd have to give her a lift and get her self mugged or worse in the process. As if Kay were too stupid, too young, to know how to take care of herself. As if she didn't know exactly what she was doing or understand exactly what it could mean.

"Hiya," the girl said as she leaned down to the car's window. Her long, elegant hands curled over the window.

Kay smiled shyly and tucked her thumb into her fist. "Need a ride," she asked.

"I'd appreciate it." The girl slung her bag into the car's backseat then slid gracefully into the passenger seat.

Kay studied the girl with her ivory skin and cap of curling dark hair. She couldn't have been much older than Kay herself, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three. She had large, glistening newborn eyes. Eyes the thunderous blue-gray color of the sea before a storm, dark pupils almost too large in the low, peek-a-boo light created by the sun flashing through clouds.

There on the edge of the world, somewhere between Galway and the sea, with the road twisting ahead of them, she told Kay that her name was Aislinn.

"That's a pretty name," Kay said. Instead of blurting out you're pretty, she extended her hand. "I'm Kayla. Most people just call me Kay."

Aislinn leaned in close and took Kay's hand in her own. Her smiled widened, an incremental spread of lips and teeth across her pale face. Ivory-skinned and rosy-lipped, Aislinn's curling, too-bright smile recalled shark's teeth, brilliant and sharp."It's a pleasure to meet you, Kayla." Her head tilted to one side and then to the other as she examined Kay. "You're lovely."

Kay caught her breath and blinked hard. She shifted uneasily in her seat. "I'm not really much of a Kayla. Just plain old Kay is fine."

Kay tugged gently against Aislinn's warm, dry grasp. Aislinn held tight for a handful of heartbeats more before letting go.

"Where're you headed," Kay asked breathlessly. She slid her hands together, fingers tightly entwined, and tucked them between her knees. "I'm going to Inis Mor. For the day."

Aislinn continued to smile her wide, sunlit smile. "Oh, Inis Mor sounds just fine."

***

The drive to Doolin was quiet. Aislinn said little, staring out the window or at Kay who kept her gaze focused on the road. After a while Kay thought that Aislinn slept, until the girl reached over to gently touch the ring on Kay's left hand. A circle of silver made of hands, a heart and a crown turned outwards.

"This is very old," Aislinn said in her low, husky voice.

Kay swallowed at the gentle stroke on the top of her hand. "It used to be my sister's," she said. "An old boyfriend gave it to her. I kind of borrowed it."

Aislinn touched the ring again and hummed. "You know, wearing the ring with the bottom of the heart pointing away means you're free to be claimed."

Kay's eyes never left the road. "I heard something like that." Once, Giulia had told her the same exact thing, and for a year Kay wore the the heart pointed inwards. The moment she arrived in Ireland, angry and tired, Kay had reversed the ring's direction.

Aislinn stroked the ring once more before turning away.

***

In Doolin they took a ferry across Galway Bay to Inis Mor, the largest of the Aran Islands. They sat on the ferry's top deck and gasped at the speed, laughing into the spray of sea and salt. On the island, at the dock, they rented bicycles and followed one of the winding roads to Dun Aengus, past miles of stone walls, stretches of sandy beach, and the blue-gray sea.

Kay insisted that they stop often to take pictures with the camera that Giulia had given to her before she left Italy. Giulia had volunteered at the last moment to remain at the Biblioteca Riccardiana during the only break in her internship schedule, even though Kay had followed her all the way from New York on the promise that they would go away together, just the two of them.

"What's this," Kay had asked as Giulia handed her the camera.

Giulia had sighed. "It's a camera Kay. You take pictures with it."

"Really?" Kay turned away. "Cause it looks like a bribe to me."

Giulia pulled Kay close, arms tucked around Kay's waist, and placed a kiss beneath her ear. "I want to see all the fun you'll be having," she whispered.

Kay leaned back into the hug. "You think I'll have fun without you?"

Giulia squeezed her tight. "I know you will."

Kay doubted very much that Giulia had thought about her even twice since she had left for Ireland.

But then there was Aislinn, a surprise of a girl. Pretty, charming Aislinn with her bright smiles and easy touches. They took pictures of each other and, when someone would oblige, together, arms curled around each others waists. In one picture, Aislinn perched on a wall with Kay pressed and trapped between her thighs.

How's that for fun, Kay thought.

Aislinn pointed things out as they traveled across the island: white horses, the way the sky met the ocean, patches of bedrock, and purple flowers. She touched Kay constantly. A brush of her hand across Kay's cheek, a hand briefly on Kay's hip or the small of her back. Something low and warm in Kay's body contracted every time, loosening and then tightening when Aislinn smiled.

At one of the furthest points on the island, they left their bikes at the base of a hill and climbed to the top. They climbed to Dun Aengus perched on the edge of a cliff. The ancient fortress guarded a three hundred-foot drop and the ocean stretching outward, lonely and gray.

Arms thrown wide, Aislinn stood on the edge of the cliff and let the wind whip around her body and through her hair. It lifted the tail of her shirt and snatched her voice away. Kay stood further back, wary of the tumultuous wind. They had been warned by one of the docents that people were sometimes blown over the cliffs. Best to stay low, the young woman had advised. Kay finally got down on all fours and crawled along the broken limestone to lie on her belly at Aislinn's feet. She stared down the face of the cliff into the churning waves frothing at its base.

Aislinn stood in the arms of the angry wind and laughed.

***

They returned to Doolin as the sun dipped low over the ocean. They shared a meal, Irish stew accompanied by Guinness for Aislinn and Strongbow for Kay. They sat in a pub until nearly midnight and listened to the singers and storytellers. Shoulder to shoulder, Kay felt the warm press of Aislinn's thigh next to her own. Aislinn's creeping fingers traced the length from knee to the crease of her hip. Kay caught Aislinn's wandering hand in her own, and turned to Aislinn's curling smile and said, "I've got to leave early tomorrow to get back to Galway. I should probably get to bed."

They walked back to the bed and breakfast beneath a breathtaking blanket of night and jeweled stars. Kay kept her hands in the pockets of her coat, chin tucked down into the collar.

At the door to her room, Kay thought about going back to Florence and of Giulia. Leaning against the wall, the room key clutched tight in her hand, she thought of Giulia and said goodnight.

Aislinn's sharp smile dipped. "Are you sure," she purred.

Staring into Aislinn's glistening eyes, Kay was positive that the other girl could hear her pounding heart. "I had a lot of fun today."

Aislinn tilted her curly, dark head. "I guess that's that then." She stepped closer. Gently, Aislinn dipped her finger into the hollow at the base of Kay's throat. "Cailin alainn," she whispered and pressed her lips to Kay's.

There was a tingle. A startling zip of something sharp and sweet from lip to groin, and like every stupid girl in every stupid book she'd ever read, Kay's eyes drifted closed.

The kiss was easy as one of Aislinn's smile. A light, tickling caress, her darting tongue tested the seams of Kay's mouth. She tasted like Guinness, rich and dark. Kay sighed into the embrace, her mouth opening to admit Aislinn's seeking tongue.

Aislinn pressed deeper, her licking tongue sliding warm and slick against Kay's. With the opening of her mouth, like an invitation, the kiss changed. Grew harder, more labored. Aislinn's caressing tongue stabbed and swelled. Kay struggled to breathe and taste and lick, panicked and hungry all at once. Aislinn leaned in closer to Kay, her thigh between Kay's legs, her weight heavy as she pinned Kay there to the wall. Her roaming hands slid beneath the edge of Kay's t-shirt to stroke across her belly. Her fingers dipped low and skimmed the edges of Kay's jeans. Kay pressed against Aislinn's knee, riding the dull ache as it flared between her legs. She arched her hips forward, dragging the cleft of her body against Aislinn's jean-clad thigh

Aislinn pulled away first, breaking the kiss, bottom lip clinging "Are you sure you don't want me to stay, Kayla," she asked against Kay's mouth and pressed her knee up a little higher. Pressed up as if she could press out the answer that she most wanted to hear.

Kay shuddered, her breath catching. Giulia Giulia Giulia Giulia, she thought. A reminder, a prayer, the one and only important reason that she shouldn't. Kay loved Giulia. She had for years.

"I can't," Kay finally said, eyes still closed, afraid to see herself reflected in Aislinn's strange eyes.

Aislinn pressed her knee up one more time, then stepped away. "Goodnight then, little one," she said.

Her body flinching on the edge of orgasm, a shaky, breathless goodnight was all that Kay could manage.

***

Kay stumbled as she entered her room, head heavy and spinning from the cider she had at dinner and the interlude with Aislinn at the door. Splashing water on her face did not help.

She paced the room, checking the lock on the door three times. Digging the heels of her hands into her gritty eye sockets, tired from the sun and the long day, the beer. Tired and restless, unsure if she'd sleep as she finally slid between the cool sheets on the bed.

Lying in bed with heavy-lidded eyes, Kay recalled Aislinn's curling dark hair and her daggered smile. Kay lay very still, willing her throbbing, craving body to calm. She stared at the ceiling as her eyes grew heavy. She blinked and blinked again. The bed spun gently beneath her and Kay grasped the bed's edges to steady herself. She squeezed her eyes closed, head tilted back as she willed the nauseating vertigo to pass. When she opened her eyes, Aislinn stood in front of her, in the rain with one hand extended and a smile creasing her face.

Don't you wanna dance in the rain with me? Aislinn's mouth did not move when she spoke, but her voice echoed in the distance between them. There was meaning beyond the whiteness of her skin and the sharpness of her smile, the color of her mouth, redder than cranberries or cherries or fire engines, more red than Kay ever imagined the stain of blood to be. Her hair, a ripple of nighttime dark, was impossibly dry beneath the icy prick of rain.

Beyond Aislinn bent and naked trees raised branches like skeletal hands towards the thunderous sky. The wind blew and carried with it the scent of honeysuckle. Kay coughed, harsh and racking, as she inhaled. The cloying sweetness coated the back of her tongue and throat.

Something with flaming eyes prowled in the forest. The trees swayed and tried to part, to tear up roots and run.

Don't you wanna dance in the rain with me?

Aislinn, with her soft hair and ivory skin, was dressed in white satin and lace. Her feet were bare as she stood in the rain. Only it wasn't raining anymore and the forest was a ceiling that she laid back on. Kay lay beneath her on the bed, covered in sweat and, inexplicably, glass shards.

"Glass. Not good." Gingerly Kay shook the fragments of glittering light from the folds of the sheets.

"Careful of the goods, Kayla." Aislinn lay on the ceiling and inched the white satin up over her bent knees and naked thighs. Her half-lidded eyes swept the length of Kay's body. One hand slipped down across the flat plane of her belly to the shadow of hair curling at the crease of her thighs. Kay followed the same path on her own body, one hand slipping down between her legs.

How many licks? Aislinn's red, red mouth smiled.

Palm slick with sweat and the thick, sticky wetness between her thighs, Kay counted, her fingers worked steadily. Her chest rose and fell to match the rise and fall of Aislinn's above her. Sweat beaded on Kay's upper lip as she stared at the sly smile curving Aislinn's lips. She was so close, balanced on the edge of orgasm as she watched Aislinn.

The scent of honeysuckle shivered in the air and Kay arched into the sudden suction at the top of her thigh.

A body slid up hers, weight against her shins and knees; the briefest kiss across her pubic bone. Hands covered hers, long fingered and soft.

How many licks? Aislinn asked, smirking languorously from the ceiling.

And then a tongue dragged across the bundle of nerves nestled between Kay's legs. " Aislinn's hair, nightmare dark, was wet and wavy from the rain.

Kay strained into the steadily increasing pressure building against her clit. A tickle that blossomed into something heavier and more insistent. She chased the sensation, craved the delicious heat curling low in her body, the press of fingers and tongue. Her hips tilted up and she stretched her legs further apart. There was pressure on her belly and between her thighs. Then she was caught, a moment of surprise and everything was so sweet, so warm and wet that she couldn't breathe around it. Her back arched, spine bowed hard with the snap of release.

Kay opened her eyes to watch as Aislinn crawled up her body. No longer stretched back on the ceiling above her, now she leaned over Kay, one hand resting over her heart.

There on the edge of the world, she said her name was Aislinn. In Gaelic Aislinn means a vision or a dream. In other places and at different times Aislinn said that she had other names with other meanings. Sometimes, she said, she didn't have a name at all. Now, she was called Aislinn. She was still one of Eire's oldest daughters.

"That's a pretty name," Kay whispered dreamily, languorously thinking of green and growing things and how quickly they rot. She lay anchored and unmoving, bound to the wide bed, pinned beneath the fairy weight of a girl with turbulent eyes and dancing fingers.

"Kayla is a pretty name as well." Aislinn perched above Kay, straddling her chest. Her knees hugged Kay's ribcage, squeezing tightly with ivory thighs streaked by the shadow of blue veins. "A pretty name for a pretty girl." She smiled and the pressure on Kay's chest increased. Kay tried to return the smile, her drowsy eyes teared with pain.

"I can't breathe," Kay said. "Am I dreaming? Is this a dream?"

"I've dreamt of you for centuries, a runsearc. You are my salvation." Aislinn delicately licked Kay's lower lip.

"Salvation?" Kay's voice seemed to come to her from a distance.

"I suffer from want." Aislinn's shiny, blue-gray eyes darkened. Her wide, red mouth turned down into a frown. "I want to be touched, to be heard, to be seen. I want to be wanted. And this salvation." She kissed Kay gently. "I desire."

Kay blinked heavily, struggling to breathe beneath the weight resting on her heart. She wanted to writhe against the pooling desire, the itchy, hungry, heavy feeling that burned in her belly and between her thighs. But it stole her breath away, sapped her strength so that all she could do was lay there.

Aislinn licked along the edge of Kay's jaw, nipped lightly at her chin. Lithe, elegant hands peeled back the open collar of Kay's shirt. Kay, her limbs heavy and unwilling, did not resist. She starred up at the girl bowed above her with her wide, startling dark eyes, vermilion lips and coal black hair. Fingers suddenly longer and more delicate than they should be, stroked across Kay's collarbone, and plucked away her clothes until she was dressed in nothing more than the naked woman above her.

Aislinn settled more heavily. Her long fingers circled Kay's nipples, plucking and rolling the dusky tips between forefinger and thumb. Aislinn leaned down and licked at the taut peak, sucking and pulling gently with her teeth until Kay wanted to arch up into the caress, but her body refused to move.

Aislinn leaned up and whispered against Kay's mouth, "I will set you free." Her slick tongue darted forward.

The Guinness flavor was gone, and Kay's mouth filled with the bitter taste of ocean shores and shipwrecks. Aislinn tasted like sex and magic, like wild and free. Like rocky earth and storm-filled sky. She tasted of something like dreams, maybe, lies.

Tears filled her eyes as Kay lay unmoving, her jaw unhinged as Aislinn slid her tongue against the roof of her mouth and the edges of her teeth. With each pass Kay could feel the bitterness seeping and spreading. She choked on it.

A thought fluttered at the edges of Kay's memory, and she remembered something Giulia had once told her. It was before Florence when they were still in New York. Spring had finally managed to wrestle a day away from Winter and they had gone to study in Central Park. They had laid on a blanket on the Great Lawn, Kay with her head in Giulia's lap while Giulia scribbled notes and translated bits of the Malleus Maleficarum out loud for Kay to hear: the silly, improbable bits and the stupid, impossibly sexist ones.

Kay remembered the washed out sky and the thin, unsure sunlight. She remembered Giulia's laughing mouth curving around the translations she read, once in Latin and again in English. And of everything they said that day, the promises made and later forgotten, one word breaks through the veil of her memories, and she can almost hear Giulia's voice, see the way her heavy mouth curled around the word: succubus.

With a gasp, Aislinn pulled back and reared up. For a moment her satin, ivory skin darkened. Her sloe eyes were completely and totally black. Aislinn with her fearsome, too big eyes and inky hair curling around the barely there points on her ears, crouched dark and naked above Kay. Her skeletal hands stroked along Kay's collarbone.

Kay, unable to move, unable to breathe, thought of Giulia laughing in Central Park and in front of the Gates of Paradise, the light reflecting spectacularly from Ghiberti's golden doors on the Battistero di San Giovanni; she had been so excited to see them in real life. Kay thought of Giulia's long, curly hair and the frown that creased her forehead when she was deep in thought. The way Kay rubbed at the frown with her thumb always made Giulia laugh.

Strangled by the pressure on her chest and the bitterness crawling down her throat, the world began to dim. Breathless, Kay tried to scream around the swelling, choking fullness

"Breathe, sister," Aislinn whispered, a sibilant hiss from her crimson mouth. "Breathe."

The world dimmed further. Images of Giulia flickering out, drowned by the wash of darker shadows that seeped after the choking in Kay's throat.

Aislinn's eyes rolled back as she knelt over Kay. She writhed, her hands black where they pressed against Kay's chest. Her bright skin fluctuated with the shadowed memories that raced over Kay's skin. She devoured everything, the joy, the sorrow, the hurt; and left nothing. She drank away Kay's memories and emotions, then she came. Back arched, thighs spread wide and pressed down hard, she shivered and bucked. When the paroxysm passed, she sank down low over Kay, her head pressed over the other girl's heart.

The heaviness in Kay's chest began to abate, then, and she shifted beneath Aislinn as the fullness gave way to hollow craving. Kay stirred against the sensation, finally beginning to push up against Aislinn.

"Mine." Aislinn gently stroking Kay's increasingly pallid cheek. She slipped the claddagh ring from Kay's limp hand and let it drop to the floor as Kay's blue eyes darkened into thunderous gray. "Cailin alainn," she said, "they will call you succubus."

all this and love

"Hey, fucker! Trick or treat!"

Hiro turned, and a head arced towards him, bits of skin and hair separating from the rotting skull and shedding across the pavement. At the last possible second Hiro ducked and the head made a dull, hollow thud as it banged into the empty trash can behind him.

Tugging at the neck of his jacket and brushing at his jeans, Hiro shouted, "Jesus, Leon," and almost danced. He imagined a legion of maggots crawling up his pee hole like vampire fish from the Amazon, little punks swimming up his urethra looking for a warm body cavity to lay eggs in.

Leon, the wild, booming sound of his voice filling up the town's unexpected quiet, laughed until he was breathless. Until his legs gave out and he dropped his threadbare backpack, worn from carrying books and footballs, filthy from six months on the road and being used as a shield. Sprawled in the middle of the street, Leon held his belly and laughed as if watching Hiro freaked out and shaking his pant leg, worried about shitting maggots, was the funniest Goddamn thing he'd ever seen.

Leon's Grandmama, Godresthersoul, would have shook her head and sucked her teeth, lamenting Leon's disgraceful waste of his God-given talent. Of course, she hadn't lived to see Leon nail a zombie in the temple with a rock at forty paces. That skill of his, that killer aim and steady arm, had saved their lives on more than a few occasions.

Hiro peeled out of his red and gold Letterman jacket, and shook it a few times, watching for squirmy, white worms that might writhe across his shoulders, maybe crawl into his ears to lay eggs in his brain. Nothing fell off or came loose. The jacket was dull and stained and there wasn't a bit of white anywhere on it. When he peeked into the trash can, he saw that the head was old, dried up, and all the juicy bits were already eaten away. There was nothing left for a maggot to grow up on.

"Stop braying, jack ass," Hiro said. "It ain't funny."

Sitting up, Leon wiped tears from his eyes and coughed into his fist, choking as the laughter started up again. "Man, you should've seen your face." He raised his hands, forefingers and thumbs curling together into giant O's, and peered through the make-shift circles. "Your eyes got so big. You were so scared!"

Hiro kicked the sole of Leon's sneaker. "Jack ass! If I had twisted something, my ankle maybe, that would've been funny, right? You gonna haul my ass across town when some Creep comes lurching up the street cause you're hollerin' like a Goddamn hyena?" He kicked Leon again.

Leon shuffled his feet out of the path of Hiro's swinging feet and held up his hands. The palms, empty and pink, were a startling contrast to the rest of his midnight skin.

"Aw, man," Leon drawled, his voice maple sweet and apologetic. "I was just messin' around. A little Halloween prank." He smiled, his teeth brilliant in his dark face. "Who else am I gonna pull one on?"

Leon's Grandmama had also been fond of saying that Leon could charm the birds from the trees.

Hiro could only sigh and shake his head at Leon with his smiling eyes and easy laughter. "Yeah, who else. Happy fucking Halloween." He ran a hand through his hair, pushing the long inky strands back off his forehead. "Look, maybe you should focus on finding some place we can hole up for the night instead of fucking around."

Pushing himself up off the ground, Leon stretched his tall, long-limbed frame and brushed his hands on the legs of his jeans. "What're you worried about? There's nobody in this town. It's been dead quiet since we got here. No Creeps, no people, no cars. Hell, I ain't even heard a dog bark."

Hiro shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket, and kicked at the scattered bits of skin and hair littering the ground. "Maybe they're all inside. In the church maybe." And he thought of all the places they had learned to stay away from, the places people had gone for help: emergency shelters and hospitals. Home had been better. The familiar rooms and the pantry; the backyard surrounded by a high wooden fence, and his mother's vegetable garden.

Leon picked up his discarded backpack and slid his arms into the straps. "Fuck, man. You remember that middle school?" He peered into the trash can at the near-mummified head, and grabbed Hiro's backpack where it leaned against the trash can's side. "All those people."

Hiro didn't look into the trash can again. His hands fisted and punched deep into his pockets stretched the fabric down so that the inside of the pockets peeked just below the hem.

"Dead people," Hiro drawled.

"Just standing around . . ."

" . . . laying around, waiting around, and rotting."

And they both laughed, the sound sharp and echoing between the buildings until Hiro choked because suddenly he was thinking of Lucy spread out on the kitchen floor, her face covered in blood, and the side of her head caved in. After Lucy, home had been no good either.

With the sputtering, uncomfortable trail of his laughter, Leon slid his hand over Hiro's shoulder. He squeezed and held on. Hiro looked over at his best friend and his lips quivered at the corners as he fought the urge to cry.

Leon smiled the same easy, gentle smile as always, a dimple scooped out high in his left cheek. He gave Hiro's shoulder one more hard squeeze.

Distracted by the town's emptiness, lulled by the still quiet, and relaxing for the first time in what felt like forever, they didn't notice the figure in the distance. Someone watching them and then the quiet tread as the girl walked out of the golden glow of the setting sun.

"Hello," the girl said, her voice sweet and high.

Hiro turned sharply into the glare of light bending and reflecting off the glass in the windows lining the street. The handle of the hunting knife he kept on his belt was a sudden and solid comfort in his hand, the reflex to pull it like breathing. The light around the girl haloed out and he couldn't see her face. Her silhouette, thin as a razor blade, barely cast a shadow across the pavement. Startled, he stepped forward.

"Lucy?"

Hiro's hand around the haft of the knife grew slippery with sweat, and his thundering heart blocked out the sound of everything else. Hiro blinked and then blinked again, rubbed a hand across his eyes to scrub away sweat and the memory of Lucy and her snapping jaws, the straining muscles visible through the hole in the side of her neck. All it had taken was one terrified swing of Mom's maple rolling pin and her brains were splattered all over the kitchen windows.

This girl edged a little closer, stepping out of the glare of sun, and smiled at them, her thin lips spread wide and pulled back over her teeth. She couldn't have been any older than they were, maybe sixteen or seventeen. Her hair was bleached near colorless by the sun and held back off her face with a faded pink ribbon tied into a limp bow. There was something about how petite the girl was, something in the weight of her bones . . .

"I didn't mean to scare you," she said.

Hiro exhaled heavily, breathing out through his nose to calm his racing heart.

The girl picked up a bag at her feet, CVS stretched and misshapen across the side in red block letters, and held it out: a gift, a bouquet of flowers from one friend to another.

"It's a decent haul," she said. "Most people weren't interested in the candy aisle when they loaded up to leave. Took water, food. Some people took liquor, God only knows why. What good is being drunk at a time like this." She shrugged, and Hiro flinched at the smooth curve of her shoulder left bare by the wide neck of her thin, yellow t-shirt.

When neither of the boys reached out to take her peace offering, the girl eased the bag back to the ground. She stared down at the scuffed toes of her pink canvas shoes.

"My Aunt Esther," she said into the silence, "After her baby died, well my Mama said she crawled into a bottle of Merlot and stayed there." She peeked up at them through the pale fringe of her eyelashes and then looked quickly away. "I don't suppose anybody could really blame her."

Leon slowly straightened up, all tension and curled fists. "Where did you come from?" Leon asked.

Hiro could see the spooked look in the other boys face. A reflection of his own thoughts about ghosts and impossible ever afters.

The girl laughed. "I live here. I've always lived here." She gestured to the bag at her feet. "It's Halloween; I went to get candy."

"You live here? By yourself?" Hiro studied the shadowed doorways nearby through narrowed eyes. "We haven't seen anybody all day. We didn't think anyone lived here. No Creeps, either."

The girl shaded her eyes with the flat of her hand. "Creeps like meat." She laughed. "No meat, no Creeps. They still wander into town every now and again, though. But then they wander right back out." She gestured at the trash can. "A dog brought that head in. It's been lying in the middle of the street for ages."

Hiro nodded, still watching the girl from the corner of his eyes, gaze flickering between her and the abandoned stretch of road.

Leon uncurled his fists. "We were just messing around," he said and rubbed at the back of his neck. Hiro recognized the gesture. Leon's I'm-thinking-things-through gesture exactly the same as when Hiro dragged him from the room they shared in Hiro's parents' house. Leon's parents dead a month and not even zombie-bit. They were killed in a car crash, some panicked idiot blowing through a red light. Leon had asked once, and only once, about Lucy, all the noise downstairs, and the blood on Hiro's shirt. He saw the look on Hiro's face, rubbed at the back of his neck, and said, "Right. Okay." He'd grabbed their bikes from the garage while Hiro ransacked his mother's pantry. They rode away without looking back. They rode away and left Hiro's little sister laid out on the shiny linoleum floor, her brains spattered across the windows.

"Do you have a place to stay for the night? There's plenty of empty houses, but maybe you might want to come to my house?"

The girl stared at them expectantly, her wide blue eyes fixed and smiling. She said, "I decorated it for Halloween. Mrs. Garland always had the best decorations. She used to be a movie actress a really long time ago. In those black and white horror films with the monsters in like bad rubber suits. She was always putting all kinds of crazy stuff on her lawn for Halloween. I sort of borrowed them this year." The girl stepped closer. "She's not going to miss them."

Leon still rubbed at the back of his neck. Considering, thinking things through. Hiro watched him, waiting. Leon finally shrugged and smiled. He extended his hand. "I suppose. It's just been us for so long. I guess it feels kinda weird to be talking to other people."

"My name is Esmeralda." The girl took Leon's hand, her smile stretching wide across her face. "I'm named after my Great-Aunt Esmeralda. They called me Little Esmeralda for the longest time, even when I wasn't so little any more. Only now there isn't a Great Aunt Esmeralda, so I don't have to be Little Esmeralda. It's something of a relief."

Leon gently extricated his hand from the tangle of her fingers, glanced back at Hiro, eyes wide and one eyebrow arched high. "Riiiiiiight," he drawled. "I'm Leon." Jerking a thumb back over his shoulder, he said, "That's Hiro."

Hiro tucked his hunting knife back into the sheath on his belt. Brushing absently at his collar, he looked away. "If you were my little sister, I wouldn't want you just inviting random strangers into the house."

Esmeralda laughed."I suppose I should be worried cause there's no telling what kind of psychotic and inappropriate things you might be thinking of getting up to, but I think you're nice boys." She inched forward, hand outstretched, a bit of candy wrapped in silver foil nestled in the center of her palm. "Besides, my Granny always said there are no such things as strangers, only friends we haven't met yet."

Frowning, Hiro took the candy. It was soft, melted from the warmth of her hand.

***

Dusk eased across the sky as Leon and Hiro followed Esmeralda home, night chasing daylight behind the trees. They walked away from the locked down businesses lining the center of town into neighborhoods filled with tall, pastel Easter egg houses tucked behind verdant lawns grown wild, and cluttered with discarded tricycles and abandoned dolls. Unnerved by the displaced echo of their footsteps, Hiro constantly glanced behind them. With nothing but the wind, the entire world was infected with the eerie stillness of unoccupied places.

"This is it," Esmeralda announced, her arms thrown wide.

The house was a big, two-story Victorian squatting at the edge of a cul-de-sac, the lawn littered with Styrofoam headstones and plastic skeletons. Warped, narrow stairs led up to a porch wrapped half-way around its front. Rose bushes, shaggy and overgrown, crowded a laced iron trellis. The flowers were in full bloom, their huge butter-yellow heads blown wide and threatening to fall apart. The house was yellow, too, its cracked and peeling paint faded near-white by sun and time. Dark, narrow windows reflected the setting sun.

Leon grunted, and shifted the lollipop clenched between his jaws. "Maybe this isn't such a good idea."

Hiro glanced at Esmeralda, nothing the waning smile and her arms dropping limply to her sides. He smiled and leaned towards Leon."What's the problem," he asked, his voice a thin hiss between his teeth.

Leon turned away from the house and Esmeralda, stared out at the street and setting sun. "I don't feel so good about this. It's weird."

Hiro tried not to look at Esmeralda. "Seriously?"

"Look, I just don't think this is a good idea anymore." Leon pulled the lollipop from his mouth with a pop. "She talks too much and she keep smiling. Handing out candy. It's creepy."

"You don't . . .you don't want to stay with me?" Esmeralda asked, voice soggy and when he looked over at her, Hiro could see fat tears welling in her eyes.

"Well, it's not you . . .it's just that . . ."

Leon turned back, his shoulders squared, dimple flashing high in his cheek. "It's just that there was a house down the street," he said, cajoling and sweet, his very best why-don't-you-see-it-my-way voice. "One with a red door. It looked real nice. Had picture windows. It reminded me of home."

And the way he said it, the wistful softness in his voice, made Hiro think that might be nice, too. Sitting at a table in a room full of light with a view of a garden. Not like this house with it's tiny mean windows and cluttered lawn.

Esmeralda looked away. "Oh."

"We could stay here," Hiro said. Of course they could.

Leon grabbed Hiro's arm, his grip very tight.

"What's your problem," Hiro growled between his teeth.

"I know what you're doing." Leon shook Hiro gently, each word of his reply punctuated with a shake. "She is not Lucy."

Hiro glanced back and Esmeralda, head tilted down, stared at them, her eyes so very blue from beneath her pale lashes. Hiro turned back to Leon, trying his best not to think about his sister. "She's by herself," he said. "We can stay for a little while."

"Good," Esmeralda said, the corners of her mouth curved up sharply, her eyes thinning out as her cheeks puffed up. She grabbed Leon by the hand, tugging him through the gate and to the stairs.

Leon leaned back against Esmeralda's tugging hand, dragging his feet as the she pulled him past a wall of fake spiderweb, cotton tangled and littered with tiny plastic bodies.

***

"There aren't many Creeps in town, but sometimes they're attracted by the light." Esmeralda told Hiro as he pulled the heavy dining room curtains closed over the windows. "Granny Rose always said, there's no use in borrowing trouble."

At the table, Hiro lit candles while Leon carefully folded linen napkins using instructions from an etiquette book Esmeralda said she found in the library. Placed at the head of each setting, the napkins rose like tiny suns over each plate.

Esmeralda brought the stew in from the kitchen in bowls instead of her mama's tureen because it was easier to ration that way. She studied the napkins and the place settings, the candles glowing on the table, making a low noise in the back of her throat. "That's real pretty," she said.

The three of them huddled at one end of the dining room table, five more empty chairs stretching the length.

"How long have you been on your own?" Hiro asked.

"There was Daddy and there used to be Granny Rose. She got bit in the beginning. Creep got into the play yard at the school and Mrs. Mason's little boy got scratched. They must've missed it when they checked the kids over. Granny used to keep Scottie after school. He went down for his nap like usual, but when she went to wake him for lunch . . .." Esmeralda stared straight ahead, her unblinking eyes narrowed. "I couldn't get him to turn her loose. He was so little, but Jesus . . . like a dog with a bone." Her shoulders eased up into a tiny shrug. "Finally, I just cracked him in the head with one of Granny's skillets. Cast iron. I could barely pick it up. Blood and brains all over the bedroom. Took forever to clean up the mess. He was such a little thing. Just made it to first grade." Esmeralda slid one finger into her mouth and tapped one of her front teeth, fingernail clicking against the enamel. "His grown-up teeth were just starting to come in."

Leon with his elbows on the table, his spoon suspended and forgotten over his bowl, stared at Esmeralda. "That is fucked up."

Hiro's voice was sharp and too loud when he called Leon's name.

Leon rolled his eyes and went back to his soup. Digging in, head bent down as if he could ignore them both. As if he hadn't agreed to come, too, at least at first, and now that he'd changed his mind, Hiro should have just walked away.

"Sorry about your Grandmother," Hiro said to break the quiet. Leon slurped his soup and Hiro imagined Leon's Grandmama shaking her head, tongue clicking against her teeth.

"It's okay. Daddy says they'll find a cure and then she'll be fine."

"I thought you said a Creep got her," Hiro asked because maybe he'd gotten it wrong. Because with Leon slurping up his soup and muttering under his breath, maybe he didn't hear the story right.

"She did." Esmeralda nodded. "But Daddy says they're working on a cure and then everyone will be okay."

"Is your Dad here?" Leon leaned back in his chair. "I thought you were the only one."

"It's like an infection, you know. You get sick, and then you just have to, I dunno know, hang in there until you get a shot or something. Daddy was working on it. That was his job. The way to bring everybody back to normal."

"You know that's impossible, right?" Leon dropped his spoon into his soup with a heavy clink. "Creeps are dead, rotten, maggot heads. They can't come back."

"Well, Daddy said," Esmeralda stopped, jaw clenched, and then she looked away. "If you can keep them healthy . . . I mean, obviously, you don't want any parts dropping off or anything."

"Yeah, obviously." Leon snorted. "That's not gonna do anybody any good."

"It's better if you can keep them cool. You know, body temperature low and then it's like suspended animation. But not everybody can really do that. I mean, it's too warm here, but if you can keep them healthy." Esmeralda smiled, then, eyes down on the soup she stirred. "They're working on a cure."

Hiro slid his hand over Esmeralda's, halting the endless circling of her spoon in the bowl. "Esmeralda, are there other people in town? Normal, alive people?"

Esmeralda looked at Hiro, her blue eyes bright and clear. She tilted her head and her always smile eased across her face, lips stretched tight over her teeth. "There's just me." She shook his hand away and went back to making whirlpools in her soup bowl. "But the lab is just outside of town. A lot of people went there. If they didn't leave altogether, they went there."

Like church or school or a hospital. Hiro glanced at Leon across the table. Leon tilted his head, a warning, and then the barest shake. Hiro dragged the edge of his spoon across his bowl, the sound loud and shrill."Maybe tomorrow we can go take a look," he said.

Leon mumbled something about staying too long in weird, empty towns with weird girls, and don't they know better by now then to go hanging around anywhere that people went to looking for help. Under the table, Hiro nudged Leon's leg with the toe of his shoe. Leon's eyebrows shot up as if to ask, What?

Hiro tilted his head towards Esmeralda. Don't be a dick, he mouthed.

Leon mouthed right back, Fuck you, and something that might be, This shit is crazy.

Esmeralda ignored them both, and blew gently across the surface of her stew.

***

Sitting in the shadow of the front porch with Esmeralda, Hiro tossed balled up candy wrappers over the porch railing. A Hunter's moon, fat and sodium orange, hung too close to the Earth, illuminating the street and a solitary Creep, starved and legless, scratching at the slates in the gate and moaning for entry. Hiro chucked the wrappers as hard as he could. Some of them flew far, bouncing off the Creep or arching high and coming down in the place where its legs used to be. Sometimes the wrappers didn't make it much further than the other side of the porch railing.

"You're making a mess," Esmeralda said as one more wrapper landed on the lawn halfway to the gate. The corners of her mouth tilted down, flattening out.

"I'll clean it up."

"When?" she asked and he looked over to see an honest-to-god frown crowded between her eyebrows. "You probably won't be here tomorrow."

Hiro, tired and lazy, sitting on a porch swing with a girl, drinking beer, and staring at the stars. It was the weirdest day he'd had in a long time. Leon had already succumbed to exhaustion, stretched out on the sofa with his feet hanging over one arm.

"Tomorrow," Hiro slurred. "Promise." He took another sip of beer, and sank further into the chair. "It's creepy how there's no one around. Surreal, you know. I mean, it's fucking Halloween. My brain knows that it's Halloween and I keep expecting to see kids coming up the street wearing costumes and begging for candy."

"They will."

And Hiro jerked a little at that. "'Scuse me?"

"Next year," she said. "Just you wait and see."

Hiro rubbed at his tired eyes. Esmeralda had started to blur, her platinum hair shining and haloed in the moonlight. Hiro closed his tired eyes to block the glow.

"Yeah, well," He mumbled because what would it hurt for her to believe whatever would get her through the day, and maybe her Dad and his buddies really were over in that lab looking for a cure, and nobody knew about it. Hiro took another gulp from the bottle in his hand, the beer warm and bitter."So, what exactly did your Dad do? What kind of lab was it?"

"Mostly research." Esmeralda's voice broke through Hiro's foggy thoughts. "Most everyone in town worked at the labs. Daddy was a geneticist. When containment failed people started leaving. Not my Daddy though. His job was to find a cure."

Hiro didn't move, couldn't speak. Containment. A memory blooms. Something about where they are and news reports before the broadcasts died. Vague and panicked reports about how the infection spread, and wouldn't it be just fucking perfect if after all the running he and Leon ended up at Ground Fucking Zero.

You would. Lucy's laughing voice was an echo. Hiro forced his eyes open a fraction, and there she was smiling down at him. Lucy with blood heavy and black across her shirt and on her teeth, the left side of her head a crater of broken bone. Hiro jerked back, eyes snapping all the way open as he slid sideways onto the swing. He tried to focus on breathing. Yoga breaths like his mom taught him. In through the nose, then out again.

He shook his head, eyes pressed tightly closed and when he opened them, Esmeralda, not Lucy, watched him expectantly, her wide perpetual smile curving up the corners of her mouth. Esmeralda winked at him like sharing a secret. "All I have to do is make them last."

Hiro tried to laugh, but the sound emerged a garbled tangle. Move, his mind screamed as Esmeralda reached for him. His body was slow, lifting his hand like pushing through honey. It didn't take much for Esmeralda to shove him off the swing. The world titled and Hiro landed heavily on his side.

Esmeralda leaned down to peer into his eyes. She followed the direction of his gaze to the Creep still scratching at the bottom edge of the gate. "They get like that when they're starved." she said arranging Hiro's heavy limbs. "Dried up and brittle, fragile enough to blow away in a brisk wind. Daddy said they need plenty of fresh meat to slow down the decay. So far, that's been pretty true. When the cure comes it won't do a body any good if it's all decayed away." Breathing heavily, Esmeralda paused to catch her breath. "Great Aunt Esmeralda was an exception, of course; I couldn't stand the old bitch."

Hiro could feel the scratch of the porch boards against his back as Esmeralda dragged him by the ankles. The beer bottle he dropped when she pushed him off the swing rolled into his line of vision and for a moment he imagined grabbing the long neck and swinging it like a club. It was so clear in his mind, the satisfying crack of the body against Esmeralda's shiny, blonde head.

Bracing with her legs and pulling back, Esmeralda slowly tugged Hiro across the porch. His head bumped noisily over the threshold as she dragged him into the house and down a long, narrow hallway. He could just make out the lanky stretch of Leon on the couch as they passed the rose filled living room.

"Leon," Hiro whispered, his voice low and thin, little more than a breath, or maybe really nothing at all. Help.

"I really am sorry about this." Esmeralda stopped at a door set just beneath the stairs. "I am. Even if you don't believe me." She stretched up for an old iron skeleton key hanging from a crooked nail embedded over the door. The lock made a heavy metallic clunk as it turned, and Hiro wanted to move, to drag himself away, but nothing worked and he stayed exactly where he was.

"Let's just get you down to the basement before the sedative wears off. It's always better that way," Esmeralda said. And then Hiro thought about the stew and the way Esmeralda pushed her spoon around and around the porcelain bowl.

The door didn't open easily; it caught when it was halfway open. Esmeralda leaned her shoulder into the door and pushed hard. When the door didn't move, she scooted lower against the door. Braced with one foot, she pushed harder and there was the irregular thump of something tumbling down stairs. Then he was being pulled again, tugged forward, and this time the slide of his body was interrupted by the uneven bump of stairs beneath his back.

"We gotta get this done before Daddy and Granny Rose have time to figure out which way is which and come up the stairs. They're slow, definitely not what they once were, but they're tenacious."

Esmeralda leaned close, then, and pressed a kiss to the corner of Hiro's slack mouth. "Thanks Hiro." As she hurried back up towards the light, Esmeralda chirped, "When that cure comes, Daddy'll be really grateful. We all will. To you and Leon both."

Hiro lay unmoving, staring up at the cobwebbed ceiling as the light from the top of the stairs slowly disappeared. From the darkness he could hear the dry gurgle of trapped air and blood in lungs that no longer work, and then the slow, uneven drag of something moving up the wooden steps.

A cold hand touched his wrists; icy fingers laced through his.

"Lucy," Hiro whispered, and imagined his sister holding his hand in the dark.

###

Story Note

Someone, somewhere, at some point, equated writing to riding a dragon, at least when it works. I thought it was Neil Gaiman, but I don't remember anymore. This anthology was not like riding a dragon. It was like digging ditches, carrying heavy stones, reading calculus and physics while standing on my head, and very occasionally, it was like unearthing fairy gold. Rare, that last one.

Regardless, I am glad that I made the attempt. I suppose I should say thank you to Agatha, the indefinable, ultimately unknowable personification in my brain who manages strikes of inspiration and the random coalescence of plot points, for wandering back into my life after a long hiatus. She abandoned me just after I wrote a short story in which a girl named Agatha, suspiciously similar to my Agatha, is accidentally killed by a tortured, broody vampire.

Go Figure.

Anyway, I'm glad to see my flirty, disloyal bitch-muse back at ye olde homestead.

***

like all the girls in the movies

My best friend's mom requested a story with werewolves. I am very certain that "like all the girls in the movies" is not what she had in mind. Originally a much longer story full of blood and betrayal, branding, obsession, and a murder or two (all by the light of the full moon), I had to shave the thing down for space. The story had outgrown the intentions for this anthology so I changed it to a kind of prequel, an introduction to Clay. Edgar Allen Poe's "Cask of Ammontillado" was on my mind when I started writing it, hence the catacombs. They play a much bigger part in the larger story (featuring a girl in a graveyard) that may still be written.

this, too, between water and memory

I have been haunted by Mary Angel, Briar Tracey, and Alice Ann Song since about 2004. They started out as separate stories until one day in 2005 or 2006. Agatha, doing what she does best, pointed out that these women are family, and a very dysfunctional one at that. Imagine one of the Beautiful Ones, a succubus, giving birth to a very rare set of twins. One girl is human and one is a succubus like her mother. There's a very specific mythology in place for this universe and I have twice started working on a novel length story. Briar is the key to the story that I want to tell, but Briar is a nut that I was having difficulty cracking. "this, too, between water and memory," was an opportunity to get to know Briar. A poor reason to draft a story, to be sure. To some degree, it has been helpful. I suppose we'll know how truly helpful it's been once I start drafting the outline for this year's NaNoWriMo project.

This is also a ghost story, and I thought about the things that we are actually haunted by, memory and honest-to-god ghosts. Briar is as haunted by her family as I am. I was introduced to Aokigahara, the Suicide Forest of Japan, in Caitlin R. Kiernan's amazing novel "The Drowning Girl." (If you haven't read it, you should go read "The Drowning Girl" and everything else that Kiernan has ever written, like NOW!)

The upside of this little journey is that I have a better hold on Briar than I've had before. That's a really good thing.

fallen: a love story

I once met a woman whose life was falling apart. She was an acquaintance of a dear friend. We were all spending a long holiday weekend down in Manhattan Beach, staying at a semi-crappy hotel not too far from the beach.

The woman, whose name I don't recall, radiated such profound sadness that I was simultaneously mesmerized and repelled. There was nothing that I could do for her. Nothing. I remember sitting in that hotel room with my hand on her ankle while she cried and questioned the universe.

Although there was nothing even remotely romantic or provocative about the moment, it remained firmly entrenched in my memory. I remember thinking that if I just held on to her, I could hold her together. Mia's genesis begins there.

Sariel had appeared in another story back in 2007 as an angry, bitter guardian in Tartarus.

"fallen: a love story" is about love. Obviously, it's about love, all the shorts here are about love, but it's also very much about loss, heartache, and weariness.

to the waters and the wild

Aislinn was the first succubus that Agatha dragged home to play. Obviously, she wasn't the last. That girl! Written for a lyric challenge, the rules for which are long forgotten, this story started off as a bit of fanfic that was quickly taken over by the OC (original character). Even when I didn't realize it, it was always all about Aislinn. I was also fresh off a trip to Ireland and I wanted to write something that reflected, in some small way, how beautiful the country was. Much of those details were culled in the re-write when I filed most of the serial numbers off the story. This year I revisited the story, fleshed it out, and added it to the collection. The title is from W.B. Yeats's "The Stolen Child."

all this and love

Angela Annette proposed an anthology for Halloween and invited me to participate. I am not a horror writer, and these were meant to be scary stories. "this, too, between water and memory" is the second story that I wrote for the purpose, "all this and love" was the first. Of course, me not being a horror writer, initially I struggled to come up with something to write. I was flipping through one of my quote books (self made grimmoires I fill them up with quotes that I find. I think we're at volumne 7 now) and on the first page I found this:

"When the Earth spits up the dead, they will come to suck the blood from the living." - Lucas, Zombie (Variety Film, 1979)

The next thing you know I had abandoned my El Pollo Loco lunch, and was scribbling the opening scene on the back of a napkin. It hasn't changed all that much despite the revisions.

"all this and love" went through many permutations. Hiro, Leon, and Esmeralda all got a chance to try and tell the story. Each version was wildly different from the last, which makes sense considering how very different the characters are. Hiro was the one who's story stuck. Maybe because he was the most damaged, maybe because of Lucy.

***

One thing that Neil Gaiman did say: "Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter."

So, that's what I did. I wrote the stories as I thought they needed to be written, and I told them as best as I could. For better and worse. Now, we'll let them out into the world and let them do whatever it is they're going to do.

It was fun. I hope that you enjoyed the ride as much as I did.

About the Author

Voted by co-workers as best choice to lead an army and most likely to survive the zombie apocalypse, J. Libby should probably be out playing survival games in the woods. She's not. She's usually lounging with her nose stuck in a book or chained to Mercedes, her slightly out-of-date laptop, writing. Addictive, frustrating, and exhilarating, Libby writes because she loves it, for better and worse. Sometimes it's deliciously rewarding, other times it's a wonder that she gets any sleep and hasn't pulled every last curly strand from her head. Other things she loves include Candy Crush Saga, books, school, movies, shoes, coffee, John Crichton, and traveling to places she's never been. A night owl with a 6 a.m. day job, Libby is chronically sleep deprived. She lives in Long Beach, California. This is her debut collection.

Check out my YouTube channel for my writing playlists. Other bits o' random visual inspiration can be found on Pinterest.

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