 
### B   
road Spectrum

The 2012 Broad Universe Fiction Sampler

<http://www.BroadUniverse.org/>

\- Smashwords ebook edition -

Copyrights

_Dance to Fend Off the Sky_ copyright © 2010 Deirdre M. Murphy. First appeared at TornWorld.net.

_Beast in Show_ copyright © 2012 Kate Kaynak. Reprinted with permission from Spencer Hill Press

_M.U.S.E._ copyright © 2012 Kimberley Long-Ewing. Reprinted with permission from Spencer Hill Press

_Soul Mates_ copyright © 2012 Jaleta Clegg

_Silver Moon_ copyright © 2012 Catherine Lundoff

_Non Si Muove_ copyright © 2011 MeiLin Miranda

_The Moth Collector's Daughter_ copyright © 2012 Ripley Patton

_Photo of a Mermaid_ copyright © 2012 Trisha J Wooldridge. Reprinted with permission from Spencer Hill Press

_The Right Asteroid_ copyright © 2012 Michelle Murrain

_Mind Over Mind_ copyright © 2011 Karina Fabian. Reprinted with permission from Dragon Moon Press.

_A Shower of Fireflies_ copyright © 2012 Ursula Pflug

_Quiz_ copyright © 2009 Nancy Jane Moore

_Beneath the Hallowed Hill_ copyright © 2012 Theresa Crater. Reprinted with permission from Eternal Press.

_Tsekil_ copyright © 2012 M.C.A. Hogarth

_La Divina Commedia_ copyright © 2012 Katherine Mankiller

_Lord Bai's Discovery_ copyright © 2012 Jean Marie Ward. Reprinted with permission from Dark Quest Books.

_The Lady of Seeking in the City of Waiting_ copyright © 2012 Jennifer Brozek. Reprinted with permission from Dark Quest Books.

_Heavens and Shadows_ copyright © 2012 KT Pinto

_Dilemma_ copyright © 2012 Marcy Arlin

_Seeing Things_ copyright © 2012 Kater Cheek

_Of Blood and Brandy_ copyright © 2012 J. Kathleen Cheney. Reprinted with permission.

_House of Em_ copyright © 2012 Lynda Williams

_Today's Promise_ copyright © 2012 Danielle Ackley-McPhail. Reprinted with permission from Dark Quest Books.

_Today There is No Pain_ copyright © 2012 Justine Graykin

_Bride of Tranquility_ copyright © 2009 Tracy S. Morris

_Threaded Through Time (Book One)_ copyright © 2012 Sarah Ettritch

_Drowning_ copyright © 2012 Katherine Sanger

_The Isle_ copyright © 2012 Sylvia Kelso

_The Souvenir You Most Want_ copyright © 2012 Sue Burke

_The Willimantic Frogs_ copyright © 2012 K. A. Laity

_Psyche's Search_ copyright © 2012 Ann Gimpel

_Matcher Rules_ copyright © 2011 Mary Holland

Publisher's Note

These selections are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors' imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

* * *

Cover art by Rhea Ewing

<http://www.RheaEwing.com/>

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Table of Contents

Dance to Fend Off the Sky by Deirdre M. Murphy

Beast in Show by Kate Kaynak

Non Si Muove by MeiLin Miranda

M.U.S.E. by Kimberley Long-Ewing

Photo of a Mermaid by Trisha J Wooldridge

Soul Mates by Jaleta Clegg

The Right Asteroid (novel excerpt) by Michelle Murrain

Silver Moon (excerpt from forthcoming novel) by Catherine Lundoff

A Shower of Fireflies by Ursula Pflug

The Moth Collector's Daughter by Ripley Patton

Beneath the Hallowed Hill by Theresa Crater

DILEMMA by Marcy Arlin

Tsekil by M.C.A. Hogarth

Lord Bai's Discovery by Jean Marie Ward

Seeing Things by Kater Cheek

La Divina Commedia by Katherine Mankiller

Heavens and Shadows by KT Pinto

House of Em (excerpt) by Lynda Williams

The Lady of Seeking in the City of Waiting by Jennifer Brozek

Of Blood and Brandy by J. Kathleen Cheney

Today's Promise by Danielle Ackley-McPhail

Quiz by Nancy Jane Moore

Today There Is No Pain by Justine Graykin

Bride of Tranquility by Tracy S. Morris

Mind Over Mind by Karina Fabian

Threaded Through Time (Book One) by Sarah Ettritch

Drowning by Katherine Sanger

The Isle Is Full of Noises by Sylvia Kelso

The Souvenir You Most Want by Sue Burke

The Willimantic Frogs by K. A. Laity

Matcher Rules (excerpt) by Mary Holland

Psyche's Search by Ann Gimpel

* * *

Dance to Fend Off the Sky

A Torn World Story

by Deirdre M. Murphy

Kunabei was tired of trying to keep her charges together. Each of the goats was certain that it knew the best way up the mountain. She was also tired of their friendly voices, tired of their squabbles, and very tired of swatting them away from nibbling at the fringe on her shirt or the grass stains on her boots, or, truth be told, everything she was carrying or wearing.

Most of the time, she preferred the company of goats to that of humans. The goats, at least, listened to her. Being goats, after listening, they did whatever they wanted. But first they listened, something her older sisters never did.

However, today she didn't want company of any sort at all, and especially goats. Still, she pushed onward. Her favorite haven was very close. She could hear the tiny waterfall that spilled out of the valley, and smell the water in the air. The goats could smell it too: they lifted their noses and stopped fighting her, moving forward eagerly.

Kunabei did a quick search for snakes or any other evidence of danger, the bells on her prayer staff chiming cheerfully as she walked. Then, she left the goats in the pretty little valley. After two days of sparse fodder and no moisture but dew as they climbed, even old Hat Trick wouldn't leave the ice-cold spring and fragrant flower-dotted grass. They'd all eat until their bellies protruded like pregnant women's, and then, just like pregnant women, they'd settle down for a nice, long nap.

This would be her first chance in days to spend a few hours without even goat snores interrupting the peace. Kunabei smiled. Now, she could finally enjoy the quiet which had drawn her to the mountains despite the danger of angry wraiths.

She scrambled up out of the valley, stopping every few paces to swing the prayer staff, tipped with sturdy metal bells. She raised it high over her head, swinging it with careful vigor.

She headed around the side of the rocks to the north of the valley. With the sun heading downward, she thought she would be able to see Affabreidalam in the distance. She thought, perhaps, she might see the towers that marked the University that all the teachers talked about. Instead, she found a carpet of clouds, puffy white with blue shadows, the higher edges starting to take on pink and gold highlights.

Kunabei exclaimed in delight. It was beautiful.

It was better than beautiful. The thick clouds, with drifts reaching higher than her head, meant it was safe to move around freely; if any wraiths were present, they would disturb the clouds. Teeth flashing, she planted the staff in the ground—it would be disrespectful to lay the metal bells on the ground, and wasteful as well, since then she'd have to re-oil them to keep them from rusting away.

She wandered over the rocks, peering at lichens and mushrooms, and carefully avoiding a blinkbird nest. Then, she noticed there was now a second waterfall, and the old bed where the stream had flowed off the plateau was dry. It was steep, but looked climbable. She'd wondered all her life what was up on that plateau. She ran back to grab the staff.

She scrambled up to the plateau, and waved her bells through the mist. It trailed after the bells like the ribbons attached to ball whistles for dances on the anniversary of Obo's return. Still holding the bells high, Kunabei looked around.

The plateau was flatter than she expected, covered in low grasses and wildflowers. There were rocks and boulders clustered at the edges of the plateau, and in the center, a wide, flat space about the size of the village dancing-ground. She moved forward, the low-lying clouds curling around her as she walked, alternately revealing and hiding the mountains around her. She placed the staff at the near edge of the flat area, and checked that both sets of ball whistles were tucked securely into her belt.

Kunabei started to dance, empty handed, rejoicing in the freedom of dancing quietly, like a child in the lowlands. She circled slowly at first, checking the ground for rocks, dips, holes, puddles and other potentially dangerous obstacles. Then, the ground mapped out in her head, she started to move faster, whirling and kicking, then leaping and tumbling.

The silence was intense, the mists curling around her as she danced, and drifting after her like an extra garment, grey and white slowly deepening into gold and purple and orange—all the colors of the sunset. Kunabei felt her spirit soar, and wondered what it would be like to fly high and free, like a wraith.

She shook her head. How could the wraiths be so angry at the physical world, when they could fly higher than anyone else—human, goat, or bird—could hope to safely go?

The silence was broken by a loud crack, and then the tumbling of rocks. Quickly, Kunabei reached for the primary ball-whistles tucked into her belt, carefully slipping two fingers on each hand through the soft leather handles and twisting to allow the long strap to move freely outside the fists that held the handles tight. Automatically, with skills born of years of practice, she kept the straps untangled, and sent the heavy metal balls whirling around her head and body.

Once she was safely surrounded by the sound of the whistles, she looked around. Where was the wraith? She wouldn't see it, of course—no one could see wraiths. But she had been trained to watch for the effects of wraiths on the physical things of the world.

She held back her urge to run and check on the goats. The crack she'd heard had come from her north, but it was low—almost as low as where she stood.

There—she spotted the sharp bright line of unweathered stone. It was close—too close. Just one hill over. Worse, there was a gap in the mist, coming toward her. Her heart raced as she spun the whistles faster, their shriek rising in pitch, keeping them carefully between her and the wraith. She had to be very careful—hitting herself right now, or tangling the straps, or doing anything else that could slow their spin would probably mean her death.

She couldn't easily retreat; she was at a far edge of her dancing-ground. The land to one side dropped off, and the other side held loose rocks and puddles. The wraith, as evidenced by the empty spot in the clouds, surrounded by an area of oddness—a few huge drops of rain splattering on the rocks and plants below, and an occasional odd sparkle in the air—moved steadily, if slowly, toward her.

Her mouth grew dry, and her heart raced. Her grandfather Kunono, who had taught her the whistle dances, had never actually encountered a wraith close-up. No one she had ever met had survived an encounter. The last priestess on record who had was her grandfather's mother, Rai-Konalei. Bright Konalei, who, after her encounter with the wraith, had been sought after to bless babies and lead tourists through the mountains. Her scorched and partially-melted ball-whistles still hung in a place of honor in Kunono's booth on market day.

Step by careful, slow step, Kunabei moved sideways and back, heading toward where she'd left the prayer staff. It marked the path back to the goats, and would provide some protection from the wraith if it tried to follow her past that point—if she could get that far.

She glanced that way—she had too far to go at her current pace. She started moving faster, her breath catching in her throat. Three steps, five, seven—she tripped, and twisted, stepping toward the wraith in her attempt to keep the whistles spinning separately, more or less between her and it.

There was a sharp crack and a bright light. Kunabei fell backward as a sharp smell like lightning filled the air, followed by the stink of burnt leather. One of her whistles spun crazily, then clouted her in the head. The other whistle fell to the ground in front of her, hot and smoking, the leather strap scorched almost to her hand. She'd killed a wraith.

"Goat dung!" She scrambled backward, leaving red streaks on the rocks, and pulled out her secondary set of whistles. Unsteadily, she stood, and started spinning the second set of whistles. The lore said that wraiths did not always travel alone.

As she spun the whistles in the simplest, basic child's pattern, she realized she was hurt. Her arm was bleeding, her back and butt were bruised, and one ankle throbbed in time with her heart's pounding. She searched the sky—the whole area. The mists were once again swirling naturally in the wind, for the moment. She stopped spinning the whistles long enough to tuck the whistle that clouted her in the head into her belt. Then, she picked up the still-hot whistle by hooking the cast loop with the tip of her knife, and spinning just one secondary whistle, limped over to the prayer-staff.

She gave the bells a ritual shake, still looking and listening for any evidence of a wraith. Everything looked safe, and she had to get back to the goats before her ankle stiffened too much to climb. She tucked the secondary whistles carefully into her belt and leaned on the prayer staff as she climbed back down to the peaceful, sheltered valley.

The goats greeted her sleepily, and Kunabei rubbed their ears and noses, very glad, suddenly, for their company. If people realized what had just happened, they'd be calling her Rai-Kunabei, and pestering her for blessings, for the rest of her life. She shuddered, and pulled one of her uncooperative, fractious charges into a rough, unsatisfying hug.

That night, her ankle bound in strips of her shirt and propped up on Sweet Eyes, she examined the scorched ball-whistle. It had the characteristic iridescence and jagged crackling that her great-grandmother's whistles still had, but bright and new. For a moment, she considered claiming she simply lost it. But no matter how much hassle might go with being Rai-Kunabei, there was honor too.

She'd faced a monster and survived. And more—she'd seen a rare truth, and now knew that despite all the honor given to the Empire's scientists, her illiterate, supposedly superstitious ancestors knew things that no scientist knew.

Rai-Kunabei looked thoughtfully at the whistle, its shape distorted and marked by soot where the reed had been. It was strange to think that the event that had silenced the whistle had given her a voice that would be not only listened to, but sought after, at least by her own people. And who knew—maybe now her voice could someday reach as far as the University.

* * *

Beast in Show

By Kate Kaynak

_Excerpted with permission from:_ UnCONventional: Twenty-Two Tales of Paranormal Gatherings Under the Guise of Conventions. _Edited by: Kate Kaynak & Trisha J. Wooldridge. Spencer Hill Press: January 15, 2012 (ISBN: 978-1-937053-00-0)_ http://www.spencerhillpress.com

*

"Kristen, I just hope you won't start acting like one of those Manhattan bitches."

I tossed Kelly a narrow-eyed look. Her chubby face paled as she shrank toward the window. I didn't need to add a snarl—she might pee herself or something right here on the train—so I softened my gaze after a second. "I'll do what I have to. I gotta get out of Jersey, and there's no way my dad's gonna spring for anyplace better than County College if I don't get a scholarship."

"But you know how the city weres can be. And The Show is a big deal to them. They're not going to be very happy when we just wander in and try—"

"The Show is open to any pack member in the tri-state area. It's tradition. They gotta respect tradition. And you know I've got a good shot at winning once the judges see me in coat."

"Yeah, you're so gorgeous." Kelly's smile turned worshipful, which was simultaneously reassuring and a little creepy. I'd rather drink a six-pack of silver nitrate than be as low in the pecking order as she was. Good thing I was high enough in the pack that my own obsequious need to please only came out with the alphas—who happened to be my dad and stepmom.

And only when they were actually around.

With her shyness, pudgy cheeks, and strawlike hair, Kelly was practically the omega in the Morristown pack. But The Show rules said I needed a "handler," and with her looks, at least she wouldn't take any attention away from me in the ring. I felt a little guilty that I only hung out with her when the other pack girls were busy—or couldn't be trusted not to blab. Kelly was loyal, and she'd been keeping my secrets since First Kill, back when we were seven. Thinking of that deer we'd taken down, on the pack hunting lands out in Dover, made my stomach growl; I frowned and squirmed.

When I was on two legs, I liked my meat a little less raw.

We followed a wave of people onto the escalator out of Penn Station and up to the street. The smells of spring in the City washed over us: people with questionable hygiene, car exhaust, and something warm and woody roasting—chestnuts? Pretzels?

Not important right now.

I smoothed my black skirt and adjusted my hair as I put on sunglasses. I then rolled my eyes and took them off, since we'd only had to go around the building to get to Madison Square Garden's entrance. The marquee flashed "Cruftsminster Kennel Club Dog Show." A little shiver of excitement trilled down my spine—if only the humans knew what we weres did at their fancy dog show each year.

Kelly and I both slowed, nostrils flaring, as we entered the main arena. Canine scents of all types filled the air, a vivid olfactory harmony—males, females, dominants, subordinates, all wrapped up in various chemical scents of disinfectant and dog shampoo. And underneath it all—like a low, pounding beat—was the scent of strange weres.

If I'd been in my fur, my hackles would've risen.

I raised my chin as I started forward. Kelly fell in step behind my right shoulder. I targeted a group of a half-dozen guys and girls about our age clustered in the seats, looking bored. At our approach, several sets of amber eyes turned. Jackpot. Eyebrows raised and nostrils flared. One of the guys gave me a smirking smile; another licked his lips.

The sleek blonde girl next to the smirker scowled as she moved to stand between him and me, and I caught the scent of jasmine mingled with her natural were-scent. She wrinkled her nose at us as she glared. "Ugh. What is that smell?"

I matched her glare; the bitch wasn't going to make me cower. "See, Kelly? That's what I love about coming into the City. Such charm."

She snarked to her friend. "Ah, the stink of bridge-and-tunnel."

A dark-haired girl with a pierced nose gave a snort as she moved to stand behind the blonde, mirroring Kelly's position behind me. "I think it's all the hairspray. Or, maybe toxic waste clinging to them."

One of the guys laughed, and our two adversaries both stood a little taller with the affirmation.

I dug my fingernails into my palms to keep from phasing claws and ripping the spoiled little pouts from their faces. A quick glance showed that the humans were out-of-earshot, but a werewolf ripping out of her clothes and mauling someone would probably draw a little too much of the wrong kind of attention. Part of the mystique of The Show was having it right under the noses of the unknowing humans. Doing anything to mess that up would bring shame, disqualification... and a call to my dad.

"V, knock it off. You, too, Jess."

A third girl—dark-complexioned and willowy—stood with the languid grace of a dancer. She seemed only a few years older than the rest of us—college-age, probably. Her amber irises flared bright yellow as she gave the other two a glance of hard disapproval. The eyes of the rest of her packmates followed her movements.

The Alpha—or at least the dominant female of this group.

My jaw tightened as I met her gaze. Behind me, Kelly gave a tiny whimper.

After a few seconds, she tipped her head and gave a small, knowing smile. "You here to take part, or just to watch?"

I started breathing again. "I'm entering."

Blondie snickered, but stopped when the dominant-girl frowned at her.

"Registration's up in one of the party suites." She gestured into the rafters of the enormous room. "The finalists will have their interviews up there afterwards, too. Bane?" A tall, muscled guy with the metro-styled dark hair and the chiseled cheekbones of a Norse god jerked his head up at the sound of his name. "Why don't you show them the way?"

Blondie's lips pulled back from her teeth a little, and she put a hand on Bane's arm.

I snorted and raised my eyebrows as I gave her hand a pointed look. "Geez, why don't you just pee on him, already?"

Blondie turned pink and released her grip. Bane reddened, as well, when the rest started to laugh. The alpha girl gave me a little nod of approval, though.

The thought that maybe I could actually handle this rolled over and showed its belly when I caught the hatred splashed across Blondie's face, as her would-be boyfriend led us away.

The worst of the tension slid from my shoulders as we left the other females behind. Bane loped up the stairs between the rows of seats. I kept pace without too much trouble, but Kelly was half-running to stay in my wake.

"So, what are we called this year?"

Bane turned and gave me a silent stare for an endless second. Finally, he gave a little huff, and his shoulders relaxed. "Carpathian Huntmasters."

I grinned. "Nice. Exhibition breed?"

"Of course. Can you imagine what would happen if we actually competed? What if we won?"

I laughed. "Best in Show?"

He shot a smile back over his shoulder. "Try 'Beast in Show.'"

"Hey, that's one way to pay for college."

"That's why you're here?"

I shrugged. "Why else?"

Bane's muscles stiffened, and he quickened his pace.

I frowned at his back. _What had I said?_

The top of the stairs seemed to practically touch the roof. We turned left and walked about a quarter of the way around the building before Bane jerked a thumb at an open door. "Registration's in there."

He ducked away down the nearest stairs before I could respond.

Kelly put a hand on my shoulder and bent nearly double as she tried to catch her breath.

I guess her supernatural ability is limited to scarfing down food.

Dammit, no! I wasn't going to be bitchy to Kelly. She couldn't help being more like a pug-dog than a werewolf. I filled out the paperwork and paid the registration fee in cash; I'd been saving up for months for this.

The weres working the table were all low-status and didn't set off any competitive vibes in me. As one tapped my information into a laptop, the other handed me an information packet and some wearable numbers. "We have the female changing room set up next door. Please be in coat and on the floor at least fifteen minutes before the scheduled start of the event."

I nodded to her and led Kelly along with me.

Once outside, I covered my mouth with my fingertips and took in the view. From up here, the show rings looked like diorama models; the people and dogs seemed like toys.

"I'm really here." My words escaped in a whisper. If I did this right, I'd be able to go away to college, start really living...

"Do you want to go change now?"

I frowned as Kelly's words interrupted my dreams of glory, but a glance at my watch made me gasp. "Yeah. Good idea." I rummaged through my purse. "Here, hold my wallet and phone, okay?"

The changing room was simply another party suite with the windows covered. I slipped off my clothes, leaving them in the plastic bin that corresponded to my number—thirteen. Two other girls were doing the same; we kept careful distance from one another as we stripped, since we weren't pack-members. Kelly waited with the other "handlers" outside; they didn't want to phase accidentally.

I pulled a makeup-remover wipe out of my purse and slid it across my face as the first girl started her shift. The scent—like a mix of blood and electricity—hit me and I stifled a moan. The other girl growled low and shifted before she'd even taken off her skirt; the fabric pooled over her hindquarters and she shrugged it off, along with a pair of hot pink, thong panties that really didn't go with her fur.

I forced myself to hold back, not to submit to the scent's pull to shift. Two sets of yellow eyes watched my every movement, so I tried to keep my hands from shaking.

I put my little purse in the bin, tucking it under my clothes to make it less obvious, and then met each of the were-girl's gazes in turn before reaching my arms forward and shifting into my fur.

The movies have it all wrong—shape-shifting isn't painful or gross. A thrumming energy filled my veins as I closed my eyes and let the change pull me like taffy. It was like doing an intense stretch before exercising—a stretch that reached all the way into my bones. I shivered as my fur sprouted and flowed across my bare back. My fingernails curled and thickened into claws; my jaws elongated and my ears lifted.

It was like coming alive—I always felt more _alive_ in my coat than in human form.

I also felt really, really beautiful.

The other two weres watched me with wide eyes and exclamation point tails. I tipped my head back and did a little spine stretch, stifling the giddy desire to howl. My fur finished thickening; it now covered me in a pale, lustrous silver.

With a backward grin at the other two contestants, I trotted to the door and gave a little scratch. A second later, one of the other handlers opened it. Her jaw dropped when she saw me. "Wow."

*

**Kate Kaynak** was born and raised in New Jersey--but managed to escape. After serving a five-year sentence in graduate school, she started teaching psychology around the world for the University of Maryland. While in Izmir, Turkey, she started up a conversation with a handsome stranger in an airport... and ended up marrying him. They moved to New Hampshire with their three kids a few years ago, where she enjoys reading, writing, and fighting crime with her amazing superpowers. Kate Kaynak is one of the founders of Spencer Hill Press and can be stalked online at http://www.Ganzfield.com.

* * *

Non Si Muove

By MeiLin Miranda

"Were you frightened when they sent you up in the rocket, Grandfather Yuri?"

"Oh, no, not for a moment, my dear. As long as the Motherland knows where her son flies in the sky, a pilot is never alone."

"Is space very black, Grandfather Yuri?"

"Very black, indeed, and the earth very blue. Wonderful blue, amazing blue."

"Did you see the moon? And the stars?"

"Oh, yes, darling child."

"And the angels?"

"All the angels among them, their shoulders against the celestial spheres."

"And how many angels push the moon, Grandfather Yuri?"

"Just the one, though He has two faces."

"And did you see His faces?"

"The light and the dark, yes, though only for a moment. He is terrible to behold, and one must not gaze at Him too long."

"Is that how you lost your sight, Grandfather Yuri?"

"...Yes, child. That is how I lost my sight. And that is why we send no more men up in rockets. Now, take me to the house. I believe it is time for supper."

*

**MeiLin Miranda** came back from the dead to write books. Her main series is the epic fantasy family saga _An Intimate History of the Greater Kingdom_. She lives in Portland, OR with her family, her cats and floppy dog, and far, far too much BPAL perfume. Find her at <http://www.MeiLinMiranda.com/> and wherever fine ebooks are sold.

* * *

M.U.S.E.

By Kimberley Long-Ewing

_The following is an excerpt from a short story of the same title appearing in_ UnConventional : Twenty-Two Tales of Paranormal Gatherings Under the Guise of Conventions, _edited by Kate Kaynak and Trisha Wolldridge, Jan 2012, Spencer Hill Press, ISBN 978-1937053000. You can read more of Kimberley's work at_ http://MysticSheepStudios.com _._

*

A wise person does not stand between the cliffs and the sea during a storm.

These words echoed in my head as I walked towards the hotel, the invitation to the MUSE association meeting folded in my pocket. I had avoided my sisters - all nine of them - for over two thousand years. I had tried to get along with them in my younger days, I really had. But some families are just too dysfunctional for my tastes. The Greek gods were among the worst, though Lakshmi tells me the Hindu gods are just as bad. I don't doubt her; I just know my own. I like my drama in stories and art, not my life.

I considered skipping this one; there would be another one in a decade or two. Then, I felt the other piece of paper in my pocket. I pulled it out - an obituary for a minor muse. This one favored drug induced hallucinations and painters. Cause of death was given as overdose. How does a muse overdose? No, it was a hit. I knew this one. Went by the name Lizal or Liel, depending on the artist being inspired. She was one of mine, a freelancer. The Guild couldn't stand us, but they tended to leave us alone. Something had changed that; more freelancers were disappearing every year. One of us must have stepped on someone's toes. I'm guessing it was me.

I walked past the Capitol Hotel, deciding to have a quick meal first. I tapped my gold serpent earring. It wrapped through my earlobe, then lazily draped around and over the top of my ear, as if whispering the secrets of gods and demons for me alone to hear. I had upgraded my emblem over the years to include functions such as phone, voice texting, and personal assistant applications.

I ordered, "Locate closest cattle."

The serpent answered, _Judge Benjamin Franklin, writer. Location : Franscico's Coffee and Tea shop._

It was using a sultry female voice. Time for a change. I ordered, "Switch to the David voice", and read Ben's current work.

Poor Ben. One of Thalia's daughters had taken up the cause of creative names, which meant comedic gold if you share her particular flavor of humor. Sadly, his parents - a lawyer and a quantum physicist - thought they were inspiring him to future greatness. So, Ben published under the _nom de plume_ J.B. Franklin. He was currently working on some sort of sci-fi adventure space opera involving computer programmers. It made for an exotic mix of creative juices. I listened to today's writing, savoring the metallic taste of blood and gun smoke with a slight aftertaste of adrenaline and Grade B movie cellulose.

The David voice was a rich baritone, perfect for Ben's work.

"There's nowhere left to run, Seth. Give it up." The assassin smirked as she sashayed towards her target, gun trained on his head. "Now, where did you hide the microdisc?" She smiled triumphantly as Seth reached up to tug at his earring. The gold snake curled through his earlobe and up around to hook over the top of his ear. "You have two choices. Give me the microdisc and walk out or I shoot you and take the disc, anyway."

Seth growled, "I'll take option 3."

"Can't count? How'd you ever become a programmer?"

"It's easy," he growled in his raspy baritone, "Find the alternative, when nothing else will work." Seth sprang up and threw a shuriken.

It flew past her head. "Ha! Some option. You missed."

The shuriken hit the closet door. "That's what you think." He dropped a fog bomb and used the cover to make a run for it. He slammed into the closet, retrieving the shuriken as he opened the door and pushed through...

...the door of Francisco's Coffee and Tea Shop. Glancing over his shoulder to be certain the assassin hadn't followed him through the portal, he nearly walked right into...

Interesting. The kid might be just the ace I'll need up my sleeve when I confront my sisters. I looked around the shop, following the narcotic scent of neurons firing through the creative cascades of steady production. That's my boy - working happily like a good little bee. This is ambrosia.

There were lots of artistic types to wade through, here. All the ones I saw bore the mark of one muse or another; an ultraviolet brand on the forehead, such as Thalia's comedy mask or Terpsichore's lyre. I passed a gaggle of textile artists brainstorming. The energy was spiky, and created quite the sugar rush. I love riding the wave of inspiration. Ideas fly around, wild and colorful. The hangover the next day is worth it, if it is followed by steady production. Their muses were too high to notice me; good thing. They all looked to be Guild. My appearance adjusted slightly as I walked; my pink mohawk darkened to magenta and drooped into my blue eyes, my leather jacket darkened and creased, my jeans faded and tore at the knee. Only my boots remained the same. There were paint splatters on my AFP t-shirt.

I spotted Ben. He was sitting alone at a table, engrossed in his writing. He was old-school for the first draft and notes, preferring a notebook and pen. His light brown hair was pulled back in a short ponytail. Black horn-rimmed glasses framed his green eyes. His t-shirt read, "It's light red, not pink".

Ben frowned at the notepad and muttered to himself, "Maybe Seth should go to the forest, next." He tapped his pen against his worn blue canvas tennis shoes.

"Excuse me?"

Ben blinked and looked up from his writing. "Hm...?"

"May I sit here? All the tables are taken." At his absent nod, I took a seat and asked, "You going to the Interstitial Arts Convention?"

Ben was staring at my earring. "Uh, yeah. You?"

I shrugged. "I think so. What's your bliss?"

"I'm a writer. You?"

I leaned forward on the table, resting my chin on my hand. "I'm a painter. The bigger the canvas, the better. You write anything I've read?"

Ben blushed slightly, and sank back in his chair. "I had a story published last month in _Serpent's Tale_ called 'The Storm'".

"I read that! Wait..." I dug around in my bag and conjured up a tattered copy of the mag. After checking it for signs of origin (there were no banana peels stuck between the pages or library labels on it), I held it up to him. "Sign it for me?"

Ben grinned, a rush of confidence flowing through him and on to me. Ah, so easy to get a quick fix. He signed it with a flourish. "Where might I have seen your work?"

"Oh, here and there. Mostly small gallery stuff on the west coast."

"Maybe you can show me your portfolio later." The music changed, and he made a painful face. "Sorry. I just... what happened to Flamingo Slime and the Molds? They used to be so cutting edge. Now they sound like, I don't know, a Lawrence Welk cover band."

I laughed at that. "Maybe they lost their muse."

He laughed too, but I was serious. Indie bands had been great sources of energy for me and my sister freelancers. It would go well until one of Euterpe's brats caught wind of them. The Erinyes would descend, driving off or killing the muse. Then, a Guild muse would take over. Humans that noticed the change would complain about the band selling out.

My serpent hissed a warning, _Erinyes approaching_.

I looked at the door in time to see a pair of Erinyes enter the shop, sniffing the air with long, beak-like noses. Clawed feet clacked on the stone floor, tattered black wings folded around their shoulders, and red eyes scanned the room. The other muses shrank back into the shadows. Even high, they had enough sense to avoid these monsters. I felt a knot in my stomach, as I froze with fear. I forced myself to look away before they managed to lock eyes with me. As far as I could tell, they hadn't seen me yet. I wanted to keep it that way.

I stood up. " I think the opening ceremonies are starting soon. You going?"

Ben nodded, staring at the Erinyes. "Ugh, panhandlers. I hope the police drive them off soon." He stood and gathered his things.

The Erinyes seemed momentarily distracted by the espresso machine, even ignoring a minor muse of inventive drinks hiding in the shadows under the counter. It gave me an idea.

"Ben, write this down, 'Panhandlers love mocha.'"

He raised a quizzical eyebrow and smiled lopsidedly. "Why?"

"It's an idea for a painting. Just write it down."

He shook his head and chuckled. "As you wish." He wrote it on a scrap page in the back of his notebook, then tore it out, handing it to me. "There you go."

"Thanks. Ready?"

Ben nodded. I followed him closely, keeping him between me and the hunters. The distraction was working; they seemed fascinated by the espresso machine. The poor muse under the counter finally edged out and quickly made them drinks. As Ben pushed open the door, I heard her explaining to them how coffee was made.

Ben and I made it back to the Capitol Hotel without incident. We found seats near the back for the opening ceremonies just as the convention chair was finishing his opening remarks.

"Interstitial arts fill the gaps between our respective disciplines, allowing us to bounce ideas freely back and forth in an astounding display of inspiration and creation. Please welcome our keynote speaker, Anita Korre. She is one of the founding members of the performance arts troupe, _Elephantes de la Morte_. Their current production, entitled _The Perils and Follies of Pursuing the Arts_ combines poetry, movement, light, video, music, and paintings."

While Anita waxed poetic on the joys of working in an interstitial arts troupe, I was watching the shadow standing behind and slightly to the right of her. I followed the patter of her speech like a trail of bread crumbs, to bring her muse into focus. She was definitely one of Melponmene's oldest daughters. I suspected she'd studied with Euterpe too. I admired the deft hand she used to pluck inspiration and creativity from Anita. She played her well ,indeed. The muse nodded ever so slightly in my direction. So they knew I was here. Good.

*

**Kimberley Long-Ewing** is a writer and photographer. Her work focuses on fantasy themes and finding the unusual in ordinary objects. She is the author of the graphic novel series _Urban Fey_ and _Revenge of the Nature Imps._ Her short stories include "Brahma's Missile" in the August 2009 _Crossed Genres,_ "Come Like a Tailor" in the anthology _No Man's Land_ (May 2011, Dark Quest Books), "Forensix" in issue 14 of _New Myths_ (newmyths.com) and "M.U.S.E." in _UnCONventional_ (Jan 2012, Spencer Hill Press). Additional stories and work can be found at www.mysticsheepstudios.com.

* * *

Photo of a Mermaid

By Trisha J. Wooldridge

Rose's grand plan for this conference cruise had been to look pretty in a bikini by the pool and, being an award-winning actress, to graciously pose for pictures, when asked politely by the attending photographers and journalists. She'd even consented to attend the speech by the guest of honor, Sir Luis Anthony DeBorges (Hunter's idol) last night—and enjoyed it. When not sunbathing, Rose fully intended on entangling her wife every second she wasn't in some photo workshop or dive shoot.

Actually joining Hunter and diving underwater? Absolutely not part of the plan.

But she had been pouted into it. It was horrid!

"You did good, really." Hunter handed Rose both a daiquiri and a Diet Coke and grenadine.

"I freaked when I put the mask on. I made a fool of myself!" Rose took a sip of the soft drink and handed it back to Hunter with a nod. This was a ritual that Hunter insisted on, to keep herself honest. Rose trusted her, but Hunter wanted the extra pressure. It had been just over two years since The Fight and since she'd sworn off the alcohol for good.

"I... could try a spell, maybe?" Hunter offered softly, glancing around to make sure no one was close enough to hear. "To make you less scared?"

"I'm not scared," Rose snapped, then felt bad for it. "You know I don't like having spells on me. And you always say you don't want to waste magic for something stupid. And me not wanting to go diving is stupid." Rose chewed on her straw between sips, letting her still-damp, chestnut hair fall into her face.

Hunter sighed. "You don't have to if you really don't want to..."

Rose immediately bounced up and dropped a kiss on her wife's lips.

"Hey, you two, could you just quit it with the PDAs? You're making people uncomfortable!"

"Funny." Rose smirked at the skinny, blond Greg, who was speaking in his most "fah-LAME-ing" voice as he pushed his partner's wheelchair over to their table. Colin, whose dark, muscled upper body probably weighed more than all of Greg, looked up and rolled his eyes. Rose continued, "Say, hey! Could you two, like, start snogging for me? I've never seen gay men be passionate in real life—"

"Oh, my God, I wanted to kill that guy last night!" Greg dragged a chaise lounge beside their patio table and flopped into it. Colin passed him one of the drinks he was carrying.

"If he hadn't walked away, I woulda decked him." Rose slid her chair closer to the other three, mentally noting yet another group of camera-bedecked men and women edging away from the "gay group."

"At least you have a cute accent and say things like 'snog,'" Hunter offered. Rose gave her a smile. Hunter was generally shy around new people... despite managing to do photo shoots, alone, in more countries than Rose had visited.

"I think 'snog' confused him," said Greg.

"I think it was more than 'snog.'" Rose smirked.

"You did good, though," Colin said, a grin lifting his deep voice. "Asking him if he wanted to snog his wife for you because you found straight people so fascinating."

"Goddesses." Hunter shook her head and sipped her soda as she cringed deeper into her chair. "Because just walking away wouldn't do."

"Loosen up, Hunter." Greg, glanced around, grinned at their semi-seclusion, and pulled a flask out of his beach shorts to offer.

Hunter froze, lips pressed together, as she stared at the flask. Rose saw the panic in her eyes.

"Meds," Rose said quickly, shaking her head. It was their go- to lie.

"Oh, sorry!"

"Pass that back over here; whatever rum this bartender is using is disgusting." Colin reached for the flask.

"And that's all he has!" Greg added another shot to his own drink for emphasis before handing it over.

"Rum is the historic drink of sailors, because they could toss a bunch of citrus fruits in the barrels to keep away scurvy," Hunter offered, keeping her eyes on her soda.

Colin looked from Hunter to Rose while slipping the flask into the backpack-sized camera case hanging diagonally across the back of his wheelchair.

"I call her my adorable walking Wikipedia," Rose said.

"We're living in the twenty-first century, on a cushy cruise ship so we can take pretty pictures, so I think we can live without fear of scurvy," said Greg.

"It goes wit' de whole Caribbean ting," Rose intoned with an exaggerated calypso accent. "Like dis excellent music dey got comin' from somewhere."

"What music?" Hunter asked.

"Whatever this Calypso whale song is. It's worse than crap rum." Greg shook his flask. "Glad I snuck on a gorgeous handle of Puerto Rican rum from this tiny distillery that I covered for Food Network Magazine."

"You can't even taste your rum, babe, with the crap you have in it," Hunter tsked, though her gaze stayed on the program book she'd pulled from her shorts. "It's an insult to good rum, smashing it with bananas and sugar-water and ice." She glanced briefly at the guys and answered the unspoken question on their faces, "I bartended my way through college and the first few years after graduation, before I started actually making money with the camera."

"Niiice!" Greg nodded appreciatively.

"Whatever, love. I like banana daiquiris. So, how long will the one handle last you two?" Rose raised an eyebrow.

"It's only a five day cruise." Greg shrugged. "Now, about your SCUBA-phobia..."

"It's not a phobia." Rose pursed her lips. "I just don't like it, is all. I like cruise ships, sun, pools, and with any luck, seeing my wife in a bikini—if she ever unpacks it."

"A bikini is impractical to pull a wetsuit over..." Hunter shook her head.

Rose sighed dramatically. "Just one string came undone. It was a plain suit, too!"

"I know you own at least one one-piecer," Hunter said.

"I'm on a cruise."

"You're at a photography convention taking place on a cruise ship."

"Like I said, I'm on a cruise."

"You two are precious," Colin interrupted. "How long have you been together?"

"Married a year this coming Tuesday, and together for almost six years before that," Rose said with a smile. "You guys?"

"Congratulations. We've been together twelve years." Colin looked over at Greg as if the subject was a touchy one. "We keep talking about taking that step... it just hasn't been the right time."

Greg said nothing, and wouldn't meet Colin's eyes.

"Twelve years?" Rose decided it might be best to avert the obvious tension between the two. "Were you two high school sweethearts or something?" Colin laughed so hard his wheelchair rocked. Greg sat up, ready to catch it if it moved, but he didn't have to.

Colin continued, "Honey, I'm forty-nine years old. Wasn't no way I'd have a boyfriend in high school back then."

"Well, you don't look forty-nine," Rose said.

"God bless you, girl. How old you think Greg is?"

"I don't know. Early thirties, like, my age, maybe?"

"Just turned forty last month. I'd say I guess you younger, but I can IMDB your birthday on my phone, and your wife put her graduation year in her conference bio."

"Fair enough." Rose laughed.

"So, Hunter, that shoot of the Canaries for Backpacker Magazine," Greg said. "Gorgeous. How was the hiking?"

"Oh... well." She blushed a moment before continuing. "We did part on bikes, which was a lot of fun, this one dumb kid ran over my 28-35 mm UV filter—I mean, he apologized and gave me a wad of cash for it on the spot, but still! Anyway, while I got that one cover shot sunrise, the other days were even more beautiful, and I just about cried that none came out right..." As she spoke about her photography adventures, Rose watched her wife relax. It took a bit to get her out of her shell, but she really bloomed— more beautiful than one of Sir-Guest-of-Honor's exotic flower pictures—when she let herself get lost in her passion. Rose was happy to sit back, listen, and watch Hunter talk and gesture.

Especially since the conversation didn't return once to her having to go diving.

#

Rose dropped a kiss on Hunter's wetsuit-clad shoulder as she climbed up from her second underwater shoot. She returned the peck without lifting her eyes from her camera's screen. Rose looked around her shoulder, then gasped. "Holy shit, is that... a body?"

"What, huh?" Hunter peered at the screen. "What are you talking about?" she whispered, but it was too late. A few of the other guests had overheard Rose's exclamation and crowded in. "And did you have to be so loud?" she hissed.

"Sorry," Rose didn't tear her eyes from the tiny picture and the empty eye-sockets of the woman who appeared trapped in weeds. "But... don't you see it?"

"Crap—should we call the authorities or something?" asked a ginger-haired diver.

"God, I wonder what happened?" cooed a blonde Rose vaguely remembered was named Annie. "That poor woman."

Hunter pulled her arms in close and pressed her body against Rose. The crowd was growing around them. "What are you all talking about?" She sounded like she was ready to cry.

"Are you joking?" Greg was behind Rose's right shoulder, standing on tiptoes to look over them both. In her peripheral vision, she saw him pull out a cell phone; he hadn't been on this dive, so he was still in board shorts. "We should call the authorities... does anyone have service out here?"

A few others pulled out their phones, grumbling negative answers.

"Seriously, is this some joke?"

Rose all but flinched from Hunter's glare. "What do you mean? You really don't see that?"

"You don't see it?" asked Fat Perv (the guy who'd wanted to see them make out last night). Rose bristled at his very presence and just stopped herself from slapping him for the tone he was taking with her wife. "You had to have been, what, less than five feet away for the picture to be that clear?"

Hunter didn't respond to the man, but met Rose's eyes in a silent answer. No, she didn't see it, and she was about ready to have her own panic attack from the pressing people.

*

**Trisha J. Wooldridge** is the current president of Broad Universe (http://www.broaduniverse.org), as well as a member of New England Horror Writers and the Worcester Writers Collaborative. She edits for Spencer Hill Press and co-produced the _UnCONventional_ anthology. Her writing can be found in the EPIC award-winning _Bad-Ass Faeries_ anthologies; New England Horror Writer's _Epitaphs_ anthology; _Corrupts Absolutely?_ from Damnation Press, and _Poetry Locksmith._ She also gets paid to review food, play with horses, and interview chefs, bands and people who make movies. http://www.anovelfriend.com.

* * *

Soul Mates

by Jaleta Clegg

Silence reigned in Teremun's tomb, as it had for a thousand long, dry years, since the last mummy had been deposited and the crypt door sealed. Sand filtered into the hot darkness, trickling over the sarcophagus in amber waves that piled on the stone blocks of the floor.

Munahmunah the rat longed to flick his ears clear of the sand, but the mummification spell held tight. He lay on the carved face of Teremun, one haunch resting on the Ankh of Termuthis. Munahmunah wished to die completely. The Ankh prevented his spirit from leaving his desiccated body. He would have sighed in frustration, had he breath.

Sand was the least of his irritations. Maibe, the virgin sacrifice, faced Naeem, the undead defender, across the chamber, two mummies locked in eternal longing, unable to touch, to consummate the desire born and nurtured in silent death. Munahmunah lay between them, their raging lust pounding in his bones.

The entrance block slid, grating on layers of dry sand. A thief slipped through the gap, a burning torch clutched in one fist.

The Ankh of Termuthis flared into heated life, the spells of protection invoked by the intruder lending movement to dry muscle and bone. Munahmunah the rat squealed, leaping away from the angry glow of the Ankh. The hair on his rump burst into flames. He launched himself in angry attack at the face of the thief. The man screamed, clawing the dead rat free as he fled the tomb.

The magic of Termuthis surged through the burial chamber. Munahmunah chattered his rage at the unjustness of death and accidental mummification.

Maibe shifted, her tightly wound form lurching from the wall. One hand tore free of her wrappings to beckon Naeem forward, seduction in the tilt of her head.

Naeem, a bundle of ancient rags, inched towards the object of his desire, through the sand drifts. His wrappings writhed as he worked muscles desiccated and decayed by desert heat.

Maibe hopped once, twice, gaining ground toward the object of her thousand-year desire.

Munahmunah showed his teeth, disgust wrinkling his lip. The dead flesh cracked, flaking away to leave his jawbone bare.

The newly animated lovers ignored the smoldering rat in the doorway. The Ankh glowed, shedding a greenish light in the tomb. Power throbbed, giving temporary life to the dead. Naeem's wrappings caught on the corner of Teremun's sarcophagus. He sprawled in the sand, tripped by trappings of his death.

"Ah." A faint breath of sound from Maibe as the defender sprawled, one abnormally short leg breaking free to roll across the sandy floor. Maibe's linen parted as she strained arms against ancient bindings. Her beckoning finger crumbled to dust.

Naeem rolled to his back. Maibe toppled, body pressed to his. A thousand years of watching, sensing his spirit, she would not waste this moment. Virgin in life, she would not remain so in death. Breathing a prayer of thanks to Termuthis for her Gift, Maibe tore at Naeem's linen wrappings with mummified hands.

Naeem arched his back, responding to her urging. His arms came free. She paused only a moment to note the shortness of his arms. Physical deformities did not matter, not to one who loved his spirit from afar. Until now.

His claws tore the linen strips prisoning her dead flesh. She shivered with delight as his skin touched hers. He pulled her closer, limbs wrapping her torso. Maibe ripped at the face coverings. She must look on her beloved, kiss his lips, feel their passion burning bright.

He grunted beneath her. She writhed, wishing only for a moment that she still lived in truth. She pulled the last of his facial wrappings free.

Naeem's long snout opened, fanged jaws crushing her skull. Both mummies crumbled as green magic exploded from Maibe's decapitated body.

The Ankh's light faded, taking life with it.

Freed of their mummified servitude, the spirits of Maibe and Naeem rose from the tangled bodies on the sandy floor.

"A crocodile?" Maibe's spirit voice echoed through the chamber.

Naeem snapped his spirit jaws in a reptilian smile.

"Virgin in life, virgin in death. Horus the Vulture-headed better have a good reward waiting." Maibe's voice faded as her spirit rose from the tomb.

Munahmunah gnashed his teeth as Termuthis gathered him to her Ankh. At least his eternity of sitting between unrequited lust and hunger was at an end. He had suffered for his inadvertent intrusion into Teremun's eternal rest. But now, peace filled his soul as his body crumbled to dust.

Silence reigned in the tomb of Teremun, as it had for most of the last thousand years.

*

**Jaleta Clegg** loves to tell stories. Hers tend to the fantastical - science fiction adventure to silly horror and everything in between. When she grows up, if she grows up, she wants to own her own Millennium Falcon. She already has a wookie. Find more at www.jaletac.com

* * *

#

The Right Asteroid

By Michelle Murrain

Chapter 1: To Mars

Lodan, April 2105

Today was the day. Lodan woke up, feeling warm in her blankets, but she knew that it would be a bitter cold start to the day. She relaxed in the warmth of body and blanket until she just couldn't anymore, and pulled the covers back, looking into her room. The glass of water on the end table had a layer of ice on the top, and there was frost in all of the windows. It was, so far, the warmest winter in the last 20 years, but the temperature hadn't gotten above twenty below zero in a week.

She hurriedly got up, put her slippers on, and threw on the coat she had next to the bed. She walked to the living room, and turned on the geothermal heat. After a bit, she could begin to feel a little heat from the floor. Soon, the whole cabin would be warm.

As her brain started to thaw, she thought more about what was in store for her today. The application for the new Mars colony had been an arduous process, but she was happy that it had come close to the end.

A few years ago, she'd relocated from her home town of Phoenix, Arizona to Massachusetts, where they were trying out some re-settlement. Living here had been much more difficult than she'd imagined—the mini-iceage brought on by the shut-down of the Atlantic Gulf Stream fifty years ago was just beginning to thaw, but the living was still difficult. The growing season was so short that only the hardiest vegetables, like potatoes and kale, could be grown outside. The rest of the crops had to be grown inside greenhouses. She was living with a few people in a compound, where they grew what they could, bred hardier and hardier varieties of crops to deal with the cold, and they were working to rebuild, so that people could begin to relocate out of the crowded southern part of the country.

She was nervous. She'd done great work over the past few years, and the initial application process for the new Mars colony had gone quite well, but somehow, she didn't really believe she'd be chosen. The new Mars colony was at Stage Three. There were greenhouses, lots of domes, and enough resources that a reasonably sized colony could begin the work of becoming self-sustaining. The earlier Mars colonies had been a success, and they'd even set up a university up there. But this new one, in a totally new area of Mars, was for trying new techniques, and the beginning of the true terraforming process.

She realized she was running out of time—she needed to catch the next bullet train to Washington, DC. As she gathered her things, said her goodbyes, and walked away from the community to catch a car to the train station, she knew that she was unlikely to return here. Either she'd make it into the program, or she'd probably return to Phoenix, and take the standing job offer at FoodTechSystems that had been waiting for her for the last few years. There weren't any other jobs out there for agronomists—the ones on the current colonies or the Moon colonies were all taken.

After the long train ride, she walked into the Mars Settlement office. She looked around at the people who were in the waiting room. One man, sitting in the corner, looked like he'd just come off a construction site—he wore dusty carpenter pants and a heavy jacket. A different man was wearing a suit that looked borrowed. She knew that many people in desperate straits were vying for the new colony. The avenues to get into the established colonies from Earth were few and far between, if you didn't have either connections, or a lot of education or expertise.

She walked up to the desk, where a young woman with dark hair and bright yellow shining contact lenses looked up at her.

"Hello. Do you have an appointment?"

"Yes. My name is Lodan Greenfellow."

"Just one moment, please...."

About 30 seconds later, a tall, uniformed man approached the desk from behind, and signaled her to follow him. Lodan walked around the desk, and into his office.

"Please, Lodan, have a seat. I'm Lieutenant Bob Jordan." He pointed to the chair in front of his desk. She sat down. He fiddled with his tablet, and then looked at Lodan.

"You've been approved for the new Mars Colony." That felt like a surprise to her.

"Wow, I'm glad to hear that. Thanks! I thought there would be a few more steps in the process."

"No more steps. We really need your expertise on Mars, now. And we're very sure of you."

She nodded, although she was sure her surprise showed. "OK ... what's next?"

"You need to have a briefing with Mission Commander Kelley. He'll fill you in on the details of the new colony mission. Then, you'll get on the next ship heading out—it's leaving tomorrow from VG1. There is something you should know, though."

"What's that?"

He paused, as if weighing carefully what he was going to say.

"The colony is in a bit of trouble. Well, OK, it's in a lot of trouble."

"What kind of trouble?"

"It's hard to explain—I'm not sure even I understand it. One of the issues is that the crops are failing."

She gulped, and nodded. This might be even harder than living in the ice age.

He picked up a tablet sitting on his desk, and touched it a few times, and then began to speak.

"Commander Kelley, Lodan is here. She's ready to ship out with you to Mars. Are you ready?"

A slightly tinny voice came out of the tablet. "OK. I'm just finishing up my briefings with the brass. I'll be over in about 20 minutes to pick her up."

He looked up at her. "You heard that?"

Lodan nodded. He got up from his desk, and showed her out of his office. He pointed to some seats toward the back of the outside office. "Please wait here. Do you need anything? Coffee? Water?"

"No, thanks, I'm fine."

"Alrighty, then. It was nice to meet you. Good luck on Mars."

"Thank you, Lieutenant." He shook Lodan's hand, and went back into his office. The woman with the contact lenses looked at her with some sympathy, it seemed.

Lodan sat down, and decided that it would be a good idea if she could find out any information about the current status of the new Mars colony. She hadn't heard anything about trouble, and she wondered how much of this was still secret from the public. She took out her tablet, and gave her AI instructions for what to look for.

After the first few articles the AI indicated for her to read, she could tell that the situation was still secret. The most recent article about the colony suggested that they had delayed emigration of non-expert families, which was telling, but there were no details about any problems. The absence of information about the new agricultural development processes was also telling. Lodan thought that, taken together, this was pretty indicative of serious problems.

Lodan kept reading what she found, and then got absorbed in reading a recent scientific article which investigated approaches used for growing warm-weather crops on Mars, when a voice in front of her surprised her.

"Lodan Greenfellow, I presume."

Lodan looked up to see a tall man, with a dark and somewhat wizened face, grey mustache, and a broad smile, looking at her.

"I'll bet you're reading the latest data from Mars, yes? You don't seem the type to pass the time on WayBack."

Lodan instantly liked Commander Kelley, and couldn't help but smile. Lodan got up, and extended her hand. "Commander Kelly, nice to meet you."

"Please, call me Josh. Everyone does, up in the new colony. Let's get going, I'm finally ready to get off this rock. I've been missing Mars, and briefing the big wigs kept my interest only so long."

He turned, and she followed him out after hurriedly shoving her tablet into her bag. He stepped around a small vehicle, just enough for two, and opened the trunk, indicating where to put her bags. They both got in.

He spoke to the AI in the vehicle's dashboard. "Dulles Space Port."

"Berth?"

"20."

"Acknowledged. Approximate arrival time, 15:20."

The car started to move, and joined the traffic heading toward the expressway.

"I've been following your work in the Northern Resettlement Project for quite some time—even before you even applied to join the new colony. I've been quite impressed by your applications of ancient agricultural techniques to solve modern problems. I've been especially interested in your anthropological approaches to applying the strategies of older civilizations to current agricultural problems."

"Thanks. I appreciate that—but to be honest, I'm not at all certain that ancient Earth agricultural techniques or anthropology are going to help on the colony."

"Well, you'll get a chance to be the judge of that, once you go through some of our data... and findings. These are findings we have not released to the public."

"I noticed you delayed emigration."

"Yes, we did. We have about 100 families on Earth that were slated to come with us on this trip, as well as several hundred from the other colonies on Mars. Of course, they are not at all happy. But there isn't anything we can do about it, for now."

"So, what's going wrong?"

"I'd like to wait until we get underway, so I can show you, and everyone coming up with us, all of the data we've got. I'm also pretty careful around what we say here on Earth—this information can't become public... yet."

Lodan nodded, but she couldn't for the life of her imagine what could be that big of a deal. Everyone knew that the efforts to terraform Mars were going to be risky, and not necessarily generate the results needed. And the new techniques they were trying out were certainly theoretically sound, and if they failed, there were the well-established techniques already available on Mars.

The first colonies on Mars had become self-sustaining fairly quickly. The greenhouses had been a roaring success, and the combination of water at the poles, mining for minerals and using solar power had made those colonies self-sustaining in a matter of a few years. They had even begun to raise chickens and goats in a few of the colonies.

But building out more colony space was extremely expensive, and VirginMars had expended a lot of capital to get the initial colonies going. No other corps wanted to take the risk of starting new colonies, so SolGov had to. Earth was too crowded, especially since the mini ice age that had made all of Northern Europe, and all of Canada, and a swath of the United States about 300 miles south of the Canadian border, basically uninhabitable.

The good thing was that the mini-ice age, which came upon the world so quickly, had been enough to get everyone extremely serious about dealing with global climate change. The Gulf Stream was eventually re-started with a gargantuan global effort, and the predictions were that in another 15 years or so, those regions would be back to the climate they had been in the 18th century.

Lodan was jarred out of her reverie by the car slowing down, ready to enter the spaceport gate. Josh opened his window, and flashed his ID to the guard, who waved them through. The car made a right turn, and eventually pulled up in front of a squat metal building, that almost looked temporary.

"OK, let's go."

*

**Michelle Murrain** is a science fiction writer who has written six novels, and independently published a trilogy, part of the The Casitian Universe series. Michelle also works as a nonprofit web developer, and has been a neuroscientist and professor. She lives in Oakland, California.

* * *

Excerpt from

Silver Moon

By Catherine Lundoff

Reprinted with permission by Lethe Press, 2012.

When she told Sheriff Henderson about the two strangers by the creek, Becca tried to make her tone casual but concerned. Just the facts, not her gut feelings. But she could see that he wasn't really paying attention; there was lots of nodding, not much eye contact.

He said the right things, though, "Sure thing, Miz Thornton. I'll have Lizzie stop by and check it out." He jerked his head at the deputy sitting behind him.

Deputy Lizzie Blackhawk was typing on a computer, her expression impassive. She glanced up at the sheriff's comment and gave Becca a long, unreadable stare. Then she raised one dark eyebrow and nodded before returning to the computer.

_Oh, well_ , Becca thought. _I've done what I can_. That didn't make it any less disappointing. But since Lizzie was Shelly's cousin, maybe Shelly could encourage her to follow up a bit sooner rather than later.

She kept telling herself that during her shift at the hardware store, but her nerves were on edge, fraying her concentration. She would have talked to Shelly about the strangers, but Pete said her mom wasn't doing well and Shelly was off helping out. Whatever it was, his tone made it sound serious, and Becca was a little ashamed of her petty fears and worries.

It didn't seem like a good idea to share her worries about the campers with Pete, though she was really wasn't sure why. Instead, she fretted until her whole body felt like it was strummed to the breaking point, accompanied by the occasional hot flash.

By the time she left work, she was a wreck. She dashed home and took a shower, then inhaled dinner in what seemed like five minutes. After that, she stared into her closet for what seemed like an hour. What did you wear to a mystery event attended by a woman you wanted to impress, even though you knew there was no good reason for you to feel that way? Her thoughts whirled and she wished she was out in the woods, running in the moonlight, letting the wind whistle through her hair. _Now where had that come from?_

Finally, she grabbed a matching dark blue top and slacks, instead of her usual jeans. Nothing too fancy, but loose enough that she would be reasonably comfortable in it, hot flashes, nerves and all. Plus, it brought out the color of her eyes. She put her hair up in a clip and studied herself in the mirror and wondered whether or not makeup would help. Her skin was breaking out again. _Damn._ It was like being a teenager all over again, and that hadn't been that much fun the first time.

The doorbell interrupted her and she dashed out to let Erin in. "You ready?" Erin grinned down at her, a disturbing light in her gold-tinted eyes. "My, you look good enough to eat."

Becca shivered all over and fumbled for a response. "Um...thanks. Guess we'd better get going," was all that came to mind and voice box. She grabbed her purse and pushed past Erin in her rush to avoid making eye contact. Erin led the way to her car without further comment.

The whole drive out to the Wolf's Point Women's Club was like that, at least from Becca's point of view. Erin chatted away about town gossip and projects she was doing around her house, like nothing was wrong. Becca stared silently out the window.

It was as if she could feel something huge and important hanging over them. Whatever it was felt like it was inside her too, running with her heartbeat until her skin felt like it was all that stood between her and some huge and monstrous transformation. Stage fright had never felt like this before. She rolled down the passenger window to get some air on her overheated face.

It didn't help. Becca almost bolted from the car when they got to the club. The woods on either side of the little red brick building beckoned, the inviting darkness under the trees called and the moon—when had she become such a nature freak? Sure, walks in the woods were fine in their place, but in the dark? Though, come to think of it, it wasn't that dark, even though the sun was down. She could see almost every twig in the darkness under the trees. Her fingers tightened on the car door as she struggled to keep herself from running into the woods.

"Later." Erin's voice came from way too close and Becca shuddered at the promise in her voice even as she turned and reluctantly followed her neighbor into the club.

She tried to analyze that feeling of dread as she walked into the Women's Club. Mostly, she just thought that she wasn't ready to talk about menopause with a bunch of women she clearly didn't know that well. That must be it. Night had just come on, and she wanted its darkness to hide her reactions, to hide whatever all these alien feelings were about. It was too weird to share. Somehow, the words to ask Erin if it had been like this for her wouldn't come to her lips, and she was left mute and quivering.

Once inside, things felt even worse. It was like she'd never seen the club before, though that was a ridiculous notion, since she'd been coming here for ages. It was just that she'd never noticed the way the place smelled like pine, or the little creaks and groans that the wooden walls made around them. Tonight, there was something new and sinister about the shadows, the lit candles on the tables, the expressions on the faces of her own neighbors. Why weren't the lights on? The candles gave the place a spooky look.

Even Shelly seemed mysterious and scary tonight. She gave Becca what seemed like a long-toothed smile, predatory, though clearly intended to be welcoming.

As Erin had promised, there was a cake and a couple of pitchers of what looked like margaritas on the table, along with some soda, but Becca no longer felt like it was a simple celebration. The atmosphere was charged, and while she was thinking about it, where was everyone else? The club had more members than this, and while she could hear movement in the next room, only Erin, Molly and Shelly were in the front room. Erin poured her a margarita and she gulped down half of it before she realized what she was doing.

Shelly sat on one of the padded benches and pulled her down to sit next to her. "Look, Becca, we weren't sure about what was going to happen tonight until a little while ago. Sometimes the Change is really sudden and we don't have a lot of time to prepare. It brings new feelings and...transformations, physical and emotional. I know you're going through a tough time and I'm sorry that we haven't talked about it. Between my mom's illness and the Nest coming back here, I haven't been paying as much attention and preparing you the way I should have."

Becca wondered if she looked as puzzled as she felt. What was "the Nest"? Did Shelly mean the "warriors" from the website? If they were the ones down by the river, that would make sense, given her general bad feeling about them. What didn't make sense was why Shelly would care about them. Did they pose some kind of threat?

Before she could ask, the front door opened and other women began trickling in by twos and threes. Shelly sighed and patted Becca's shoulder. "Don't worry about a thing. We all went through it our first time, too. It'll be hard to get used to, at first, but we'll help you." She stood and walked away to greet the others, leaving Becca staring after her in complete bewilderment.

It looked like Shelly standing up was some kind of signal. Molly ushered Becca into the other room and into a large, cushioned chair, surrounded by a circle of other chairs.

All the other women followed them in. Becca sat down nervously, the silence in the room making her twitchier by the minute. "So, am I being initiated or something..." her voice trailed off. Erin gave her a reassuring smile that made her think of a wolf's grin and it was all Becca could do not to run for the door.

She made herself look around as the others, all twenty or so of them, sat down. She recognized women she had seen around town, even though not all of them lived in Wolf's Point proper. There was Mrs. Hui, whose family ran the Chinese restaurant and Carly Simpson, the Baptist pastor's wife. Her neighbor from around the corner, Gladys Sherman, nodded from her seat. Adelía Rodríguez from the gas station on Central gave her a shy smile.

She didn't know the others by name, but all were women of a "certain age," as those stupid magazines put it, none under forty-five or so, but all hale and hearty. There was something else that they had in common, too, though she couldn't quite put her finger on what it was.

Erin set up a large mirror across from her so she could watch her own frowning, searching face and stiff body. This senseless gesture annoyed her and she found herself snarling a little in response. There, just for a moment, was the face that had terrified her the other day in her bathroom mirror and she flinched away, shivering. She didn't look like that all the time now, did she?

Despite her fears, she could feel that same wildness building in her. Something was clawing its way to the surface inside her, racing beneath her skin and preparing to break through. She wanted to run and hunt and feel the wind outside. The feeling made her feet and hands tap the floor and the chair in time to her pulse.

As if Becca's mood was contagious, Shelly glanced out the window, then cleared her throat and stood. She held a long red taper in her hand, the flame dancing on an air current as it crossed the room. Distracted from her troubled thoughts, Becca imagined that her boss looked like an old-time shaman in a painting, standing there with her long black hair flowing over her shoulders and her dark eyes looking out on forever. She had never seemed so beautiful or so much a complete stranger.

Shelly cleared her throat and said, "I think we're ready to begin. The moon is starting to rise and we'll need to be ready. Thank you all for coming to welcome our member, Becca Thornton, as she enters the Change that has taken each of us in our time. Let us help Becca embrace her own transformation and join with us to make the Pack stronger." She waved the candle in a strange pattern and sprinkled some substance on the floor as she walked forward and circled Becca's chair.

_What the hell was this? What was "the Pack?"_ Becca's thoughts were frantic now, her skin burning. She could feel the sweat trickling down her back and sides under her shirt, her heart racing so fast that she trembled with each beat. Her whole body felt odd, out of place, as if it belonged to someone else. Everything was too long, too short, too stretched. Too furry. _Furry?_

That put her over the edge. She closed her eyes against the sudden wrenching pain that shot through her, starting at her feet and working its way up. It was like being pulled in fifteen directions and unable to respond to any of them. Her hair was standing on end and she felt her hands tighten on the chair. From somewhere close by, there was the sound of tearing and rending, of wood snapping. Something very scary was going on.

The thought drove her to her feet, eyes open and body tensed to flee. Her movement showed in the mirror and she glanced at it, then froze. Her face was long, her eyes silver. Her hair seemed to be working its way down her forehead. She was crouched over, huge and menacing. Her hands were far longer than they should have been, with fingers that ended in claws. They were also covered with brown fuzz. The arms of the chair she'd been sitting in were matchsticks now, the stuffing trickling down to mound on the floor.

Becca Thornton opened her mouth to scream, but what came out was more like a cross between a howl and a yelp. She jumped forward, trying to get away from the monster in the mirror and found herself bouncing back from the surrounding air as if she'd hit a wall. She spun around the chair searching for a way out, clawing at nothing with hands that were no longer hers.

*

**Catherine Lundoff** is the award-winning author of _Silver Moon: A Women of Wolf's Point Novel_ (Lethe Press, 2012) and _A Day at the Inn, A Night at the Palace and Other Stories_ (Lethe Press, 2011) as well as _Night's Kiss_ (Lethe Press, 2009) and _Crave_ (Lethe Press, 2007). She is the editor of _Haunted Hearths and Sapphic Shades: Lesbian Ghost Stories_ (Lethe Press, 2008) and co-editor, with JoSelle Vanderhooft, of _Hellebore and Rue: Tales of Queer Women and Magic_ (Lethe Press, 2011). She periodically teaches writing classes at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and elsewhere. www.catherinelundoff.com

* * *

A Shower Of Fireflies

By Ursula Pflug

_This story_ A Shower of Fireflies _first appeared in the SFPA publication Star*line's prose poem issue, Free Falling, edited by Bruce Boston. SFPAPress. Ocala, Fl..: Nov. 2008, as a slightly revised reprint. Previously,it won a prize at_ flashfiction.co.uk _, an online subsidiary of DarkRegions Press. The imprint went belly up, however, before it was published._

They'd go days without bathing, wear the clothes they'd slept in. She wrote in the margins of the passing years, trimmed the wicks of the kerosene lamps. Was amazed in August by the Perseids, by congregations of moths. She remembers how, when they first arrived, her little son asked where the water fountain was. He couldn't differentiate between this drumlin overgrown with mullein, thistle and milkweed and the city park he'd left behind. Almost two decades later, he's still living at home. He's handsome and funny and helps out a lot; she wants to give him the world but she knows she'd miss him.

One summer she found a box of mason jars in the damp dirt basement, so old the glass was wavy and tinged with green. The boy and his cousin caught fireflies and put them in mason jars to use as flashlights on their late-night walks. In the morning, the candle ends on the old scarred picnic table would be full of moth wings. Moth bodies. Poems to mature later. She stayed home and nursed, listening for boys' voices coming home over the hill.

The new baby grew round and sturdy, could identify plants at three. She helped in the garden as soon as she could walk, but protested when her mother squashed broccoli butterfly larvae between thumb and forefinger. By midafternoon, the kitchen was lined with mason jars of the green worms.When Martha visited, she said, "Do you know the jars in your kitchen are full of butterflies?" So busy trying to find time to write and keeping the fire going, she hadn't noticed them hatching. Twenty years later the girl is gone. Martha said, "It's the wild one you remember more."

The fireflies lived in those glass jars, year upon year, winking in the bedrooms at night. The butterflies still line her kitchen. Sometimes she thinks they're not in jars at all, but in her throat, made, too, of green glass. Sometimes it swallows you up, all that green, and when it finally spits you out two decades later, you look around and say, this place has changed, and so have I. You have to know how to hold on to things, and you have to know how to let them go. Tonight they'll sit on the back step, she and her son. It's August again, just like it was when they first came. They'll open the jars and let them go. The fireflies will fly up to meet the shooting stars, soon become indistinguishable.

The butterflies will find her daughter and settle on her arms, sink into her skin. Become the tattoo that reminds her who she is.

She wonders what her own tattoo will be. Is glad she waited this long to get her own; maybe she's finally old enough to choose just the right one.

*

**Ursula Pflug** is author of the novel _Green Music_ and the story collection _After the Fires._ A new collection, _Harvesting the Moon, is_ forthcoming in 2013 from PS. She is also an editor, playwright, book reviewer, and creative writing instructor. Visit her at: http://ursulapflug.ca

* * *

The Moth Collector's Daughter

By Ripley Patton

Remember, remember when you were born.

When Ti-ti was born, the Aunties came to anoint her with their declarative magic.

"Oh, her fingers are so short she'll never play piano," said Auntie Rosalyn, a piano teacher.

"And look at that widow's peak," said Auntie May, who had one of her own. "She'll bury at least one husband, I'm afraid."

Auntie Angela said, "With a wrinkled forehead like that, this one is a thinker. Poor thing doesn't realize yet she's only a girl."

And Auntie Penelope, trying to be a bit more positive, said, "Look at that face! It lights up like the moon. This one has the glow. No one can quell that."

At the time, no one suspected that all the Auntie's claims would come true, Auntie Penelope's most of all.

#

Remember, Remember when you were young.

She was dreaming of not playing the piano when her father woke her.

"Pst! Wake up, little Ti-ti. Daddy needs your help."

Ti-ti sat up and rubbed her eyes with her fists, then hugged her Boop bear close.

"I don't wanna, Daddy. I'm sleepy, and Mamma said I don't have to."

Her father ignored her. He shoved her feet into slippers and wrangled her arms into her housecoat sleeves. Then he popped his motorcycle helmet over her head. Ti-ti knew what the sticky smudges on the wind screen were. She pinched her eyes closed so she wouldn't see them. She kept them closed as he pulled her down the hall by her wrist, her head wobbling on its thin neck like a jack-o'-lantern, her own breath a hot puff in her face.

"Pretend you're an astronaut going to the moon," came his muffled voice, when he'd positioned her where he wanted her in the yard. Ti-ti thought that was silly. You didn't go to the moon if you were the moon.

They waited, and Ti-ti kept her eyes closed. It only took a few minutes for the first tinks against the glass to come, small tinks, but not good enough for Daddy. He liked the big ones. Cold dew seeped through the thin soles of her slippers and Ti-ti suddenly needed to pee. She'd have to hold it. More tinks, faster tinks and heavier tinks, some almost like thuds. She opened her eyes to see the music of the battering bodies, her father dancing around her flourishing his gauzy nets, puffs of wing dust floating in the air like magic.

That night, he got an _Actias luna_ , and he loved Ti-ti very much.

#

Remember, remember when you were in love.

The boys were not drawn to her like moths to a flame. She was too odd, too pale to be beautiful by modern standards. The sun was in. The moon was out. But Ti-ti fell in love anyway.

The first words he spoke to her were, "You into goth or something?"

"No, I'm into moth," Ti-ti said, but he didn't understand.

He called himself a metalhead. Ti-ti imagined him a knight. He wore a spiked collar, had spiked hair, and he spiked her cola to take her virginity. In the dark, her unconscious face glowed like the moon and he thought he pleased her, even in her stupor. The moon waned and Ti-ti fell out of love. She fell out of love for a very long time.

Then, on her twenty-fifth birthday, her parents threw her a party. Ti-ti's father invited a colleague from the university, a first-year astronomy professor. He brought his telescope and set it up in the back yard.

"But it's the middle of the afternoon," Ti-ti objected. "What can we look at?"

"The moon," he said, pointing to the pale disc already rising in the bright blue sky. "She's not only for the night, you know."

They were married six weeks later.

#

Remember, remember when you were old.

Ti-ti tended his grave at night and that disturbed the locals. She was reported to the authorities as a ghost, a grave robber, a witch, and a UFO. Oddly, no one mistook her for the moon.

When she lay over him in the wet grass, only a few small moths came to flutter at her face. The big ones were dying out. The _Actias luna_ had become so rare that the university had commandeered her father's specimen long ago and sold it to a museum.

Ti-ti was tempted to die, but her forehead was more wrinkled than ever. She was still thinking, and that ought to count for something. And there was a new baby in the family, a little girl.

Auntie Ti-ti got up from the grave. There were still places to illuminate, still pianos to avoid, and children to anoint with declarative magic.

*

Ripley Patton recently moved back to Portland, Oregon after a five year jaunt in New Zealand. Her short fiction has appeared in over twenty on-line and print magazines and anthologies, and she received the Sir Julius Vogel Award for best short story 2009. She is the founder and current President of SpecFicNZ, the national association for writers and creators of speculative fiction in and from New Zealand. Her first novel, a YA paranormal, is currently out with agents. Ripley lives with one husband, one cat, and two very picky literary critics who also happen to be her children.

* * *

Excerpt from

Beneath the Hallowed Hill

By Theresa Crater

Something woke Anne. She listened for a sound, but heard only the ticking of an old clock downstairs. She rolled over and snuggled down under the duvet, but sleep did not return. Rather than toss and turn, she crept out of bed, careful not to wake Michael. In the closet among Cynthia's clothes, she found some old jeans and a shirt. At the window, the dark sky held a faint promise of light. Birds twittered in the apple orchard. The earth lay suspended in that silent moment before the tides swing toward morning.

Anne made her way down the stairs, avoiding the squeaky step, and found a woolen cloak and clogs next to the back door. She slipped them on and walked through the dark backyard. A rickety wooden gate opened onto the gentle green slope of the Tor. Above her, Anne could just make out the long finger of St. Michael's Tower. She climbed the wet grass to the steps running up the hill. She stopped to catch her breath at a convenient bench, waiting until the ache in her ribs subsided, then pushed to the top and sat against the old stone tower facing east, waiting for the sun to rise. She closed her eyes for a minute and sank quickly into deep silence.

From the west side of the tower, a lone voice lifted in a wordless chant. She opened her eyes and half turned to see who else had left their warm bed to climb the Tor and greet the dawn, but instead of the tower, she found herself leaning against a tall standing stone. Anne leapt to her feet and backed away.

"Good morning, Cynthia," a voice called from behind her.

Anne whirled to find an older man walking up the last slope of the Tor, his breath steaming in the chill.

The chant cut off mid phrase. Anne turned back to look for the singer and almost rammed her nose into St. Michael's Tower.

"You're up early," the man said.

"What the—" Anne turned back to the newcomer. He wore a woolen cloak, similar in make to the one Anne had grabbed from the back porch, but his was a darker brown, almost matching his hair.

"Oh, you're not— I thought—" He came to a halt.

"I'm Anne, Cynthia's niece."

He stood close enough now for Anne to see wisps of silver in his beard. She pointed behind her. "Did you hear someone chanting just now?"

"You heard chanting." It was a statement.

"Yes. And I thought—" She pointed to the tower, then shook her head. "Never mind."

"You thought?"

"The tower disappeared and I saw a standing stone."

He nodded. "Some people see a ring of stones, some just the one."

Anne gave him a closer look.

"When is Cynthia coming back?"

She hesitated. "You haven't heard?"

He shook his head. "Sometimes we are out of touch for months at a time, but we always seem to find each other again."

She took a deep breath. "I'm afraid Aunt Cynthia died late last year, in New York."

"Died?" He stepped toward her. "But, such a vital woman."

"It was sudden. A heart attack." No sense telling the world it had been murder.

The man stared at her, eyes wide. Then he shook his head. "Cynthia and I were . . . neighbors." He offered his hand and Anne shook it. "My name is Garth."

"I'm sorry to bring you this news."

He ducked his head and leaned on his walking stick. Finally, he looked up and studied her face. "Anne." He shook his head. "I don't recall—"

"She and my mother were estranged. Cynthia probably never mentioned me."

"Ah, so you're the one."

"Excuse me?"

"The niece she had so much hope for."

Anne stifled her surprise. "So I'm told."

"You've taken up residence?"

Anne nodded. "I inherited the house. We—my fiancé and I—we came to see about it. Visit Glastonbury."

"And you're an early riser?"

"Actually, something woke me. Probably jet lag."

"I felt it, too." He turned back to the east and gazed out across the downs. The bright curve of the sun lit the horizon. The fields greened under his gaze.

Garth turned back to her. "I hope you and your fiancé will come to dinner. I would like to hear more about Cynthia's passing. Perhaps I can help you know her better."

"We'd be delighted."

"It was good to meet you." He walked into the middle of the tower, his shoulders bowed.

_To read the rest of this story,_ Beneath the Hallowed Hill _can be purchased from Eternal Press on their website:_ <http://www.eternalpress.biz/book.php?isbn=9781615723652>_._

*

**Theresa Crater** has published two contemporary fantasies, _Beneath the Hallowed Hill_ & _Under the Stone Paw_ and several short stories, most recently "White Moon" in _Riding the Moon_ and "Bringing the Waters" in _The Aether Age: Helios_. She's also published poetry and a baker's dozen of literary criticism. Currently, she teaches writing and British lit in Denver. Born in North Carolina, she now lives in Colorado with her Egyptologist partner and their two cats. Visit her website at http://theresacrater.com

* * *

DILEMMA

By Marcy Arlin

DILEMMA I

There was once a woman who was caught between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. She couldn't swim and the Devil was, well, the Devil.

"Choose," said the Devil.

Being no fan of eternal torment, nor willing to drown at this point in her life, she said, "No."

"What do you mean, 'No'," demanded the Devil.

"No," she said. "Not you. Not the deep blue sea."

"You have to choose!" said the Devil, stomping his hoof. "You're supposed to!"

"Why?" she asked, having seen an early Star Trek episode.

"Uh...because." The Devil whined a mite anxiously, and stared at the sand.

The Deep Blue Sea, previously maintaining a discreet silence, thought about its quota of Bad Choices. It lapped tenderly at the woman's ankles.

"Flattery will get you nowhere," she remarked, kicking at the water.

The Sea sighed. The Devil sat on its haunches.

The woman went into a lotus position. No food, no water (drinkable), no sleep. She thought, "What the hell (oops), I mean, what the hey. I can only die and neither of them gets me."

Two days later, the Devil was getting antsy; the D.B. Sea kicked up a minor tropical storm. Three days later, the Devil was pissed; the D.B. Sea contemplated an illegal tsunami.

"I feel like a really thorough genocide," said the Devil, and hissed. "I haven't flooded Bangladesh in at least eight months," groaned the Sea. One more day passed.

"I'm dying and fuck you both," said the woman and she died.

"Curses, foiled again!" said the Devil. "C'est la vie," moued the Deep Blue Mer.

The woman's body withered into a Rice Crispie, but her soul soared to join the great cosmic oneness. She was reborn as a Great Horned Owl (protected). "Hoo," hooed the owl. "Life is grand." Then she swooped down upon a hapless rodent.

The Devil mumbled as it trimmed its left hoof into a fine sharpness. The Sea sloshed.They settled in for their next dilemma.

DILEMMA II

When it was her turn to be the Main God/dess, she was told that she could protect one Group forever and condemn one Group to nonexistence.

"What do you mean by a group?" she asked.

"A collection, an assembly, a coalition, a conglomerate, a family, a unity, an assemblage, an ensemble, an alliance, a bunch of similarities, a flock, a gaggle, a school, a party, more than three and less than everything," they answered.

"Hmm, that's a toughie," she mused. And she mused for a while. The gods got antsy.

"Make up your mind," they chorused. "We haven't got all day." Then they crossed their metaphorical arms across their metaphorical chests and harrumphed.

"Ok," she said, "give me a sec."

She thought that the protection part was easy, the animals from the humans. Done. It's the condemnation part that gets sticky. Who's to say who deserves condemnation? She pondered the question for quite a while.

"You're a god! Who cares who deserves it?! It's totally up to you!" the others proclaimed.

"Oy," she said.

There were lots of candidates, doers of evil, nefarious deeds, uselessness, cruelty, idiocy, greed, stupidity, worthlessness, guilt, blame, horror. Should she go the Christian route, the Jewish style, the Muslim theory, the Buddhist path, Taoist thought, the Shinto, Mayan, Dogun, you name it way?

Naah.

So, do you know who gets zapped?

You guessed it.

The gods. (which, by the way, included her).

Moral of the story: Be careful what you ask for.

DILEMMA III

She was standing neither here nor there.

It was a little disorienting, a tough place to be, but not too uncomfortable. The colors kept shifting, neither red nor blue, green nor yellow.

A nondescript voice came from somewhere. Neither loud nor soft, high nor low. Neither male nor female. Saying nothing much, but going on for some time. But not too long.

Sort of listening, she took a drink, which was neither sweet nor sour, hot nor cold. Her thirst was not really quenched but she wasn't parched either. She nibbled on what was either a cracker or a cookie, which was neither filling nor frustratingly too little.

She waited for a while.

Then she got up. And left. But thought about coming back.

Maybe.

DILEMMA IV

There was this guy who when she asked him if he wanted Italian or Chinese, he would answer, "Whatever." If she asked him whether he wanted to see a movie or go to a concert, he would answer, "Either, it's up to you."

And when she asked him if he thought their relationship was going anywhere, and he answered, "Sure, why not?" she decided to kill him.

The next time they went out to dinner and the waiter asked if he wanted red wine or white, and he said, "You choose," she took out a little bottle of arsenic and poured it into his water glass while he was looking around the restaurant to see if there was anything more interesting than her.

He drank the water and died.

Moral: If you don't make a decision, someone will make it for you.

DILEMMA V

When the aliens finally landed on Earth, everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief. Finally. we know that we are not alone in the universe.

They didn't do much actually. The aliens, that is. Earth people went a little nuts, what with alien T-Shirts ("Kiss me, I'm an alien", etc.), alien Barbie dolls (little fuzzy antennae, lizard suits), dire warnings of apocalypse from the usual types. But nothing really drastic. War went on, disease went on, in fact, the worldwide stock markets managed a slight uptick in the numbers.

After a few years, aliens started appearing as workers in fast food restaurants, Walmarts, Apple factory assembly lines, and the like. They seemed to love stupid, mindless, abasing work environments. Best of all, they sang while they worked.

What kept Southeast Asia and Central America from revolution over this loss of downscale jobs was the fact that the aliens gave everyone the money they made and nobody had to work. Everyone was fairly happy, especially the aliens.

For humans, the big mysteries about the aliens were a) what did they eat, b) why were they doing this, and c) how did they commute from these lousy jobs to their spaceships every day?

One evening, on the 6:30 News, a famous reporter was able to interview one of the aliens. Here is a brief transcript:

Interviewer: Can you tell us why you came to Earth?

Alien: "Xleqoi[z0bbcpam?"

Interviewer: And would you recommend Earth to your comrades back home?

Alien: "Vxn/tohucbå0y8888T8SM SZSZ,Tc,/z./zczv>, uiwyzizv!"

It was generally agreed that everyone learned a lot that evening.

Moral of the story: Aliens are as clueless as anyone.

*

**Marcy Arlin** is Artistic Director of OBIE-winning Immigrants' Theatre Project, directs and develops new plays, has taught at CUNY, Univ. of Chicago (her alma mater), Brown, Yale, and is Fulbright scholar to Eastern Europe. Her writing: the sci-fi play, "Oldish Woman Leaves Earth" (Man.In.Fest), a story in _Abandoned Towers_ , "Czech Plays: 7 New Works", and a blog on immigrant theatre artists. Member: Theatre Without Borders, League of Professional Theatre Women, Brooklyn Speculative Fiction, BU, Lincoln Center Theatre Directors. She's working on a novel about telepaths, dying seas, and alien invertebrates, and lives in Brooklyn with her Czech husband and some cats.

* * *

TSEKIL

An Excerpt from The Aphorisms of Kherishdar

By M.C.A. Hogarth

tsekil _[ tseh KEEL ], (adjective) -- sick; refers only to soul-sicknesses_

"Our lord is sick," the noble said, and added, "Speak."

"How did it begin?" I asked, my eyes focused politely on the House marking on her stole. She was our lord's sister, the quick wit and sharp edge to her brother's gentleness.

"He has been out too often," she said. "Surveying all that must be done in the district and conferring with others whose districts are unsettled. His mind is disordered... he broods." She sighed. "You are one of his favorites, Calligrapher. Heal his spirit."

I bowed to her, deeply, and told her what was needed.

The following morning, with a parcel beneath my arm, I walked to my lord's seat. There a somber _irimkedi_ conducted me to a perfect room: round with a golden wood floor and a high, windowed dome, intended for guests to withdraw and gather breath... a fitting space for my lord's new sanctuary. I unfolded my parcel, revealing brush and ink, rulers and compass, varnish and a slim book of wisdom tales. Earlier I had read the one I planned to paint, and with its words still sounding in my spirit, I began marking the circles with the compass.

An hour later I tied up my sleeves and set aside my over-robe, then knelt and began, painstakingly, to scribe on the wood, working outward in a spiral pattern.

Philosophy floors are rare, for it requires great skill to maintain their symmetry and beauty from center to edge. I have not often had the opportunity to create one... and for such a cause as my lord's health! The honor of it steadied my hand where it might otherwise have trembled.

As I was varnishing the day's work, a shadow fell over my back and stretched across the wood. I knew the silhouette and sat back on my heels, resting my hands on my knees... but my lord said nothing.

We continued this pattern as I worked my way slowly around the spiral toward the floor's rim. My back grew sore and my hands cramped, but the floor bloomed beneath my brush, a thing of artistry and gentle words, and each day my lord came and stayed longer.

I painted the last letter on a sunny day, and packed my parcel. There I abided in silence as the light from the high windows moved across the warm wood and dark ink. When the familiar shadow fell across the words, I closed my eyes and waited, listening to the hiss of silk as he paced the circumference of the room. He halted at the center of the floor, near the aphorism I had scribed as my last task, and there was silence.

Rest your eyes on what is divine and good, for you become what you contemplate.

Then I felt his touch on my shoulder. He spoke no words; he needed none. We were both healed by our communion over the philosophy floor and the message at its heart.

*

**M.C.A. Hogarth** is the author of over fifty stories in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, romance and humor, and also writes a business column for artists. She lives in Florida, where she is currently engaged in observing the growth of children, particularly her own.

* * *

Lord Bai's Discovery

By Jean Marie Ward

Lord Bai, White Dragon of the West, flicked a dismissive claw at the brindled sow. "Send it back."

The porker, penned in a rough wooden wagon which had seen better centuries, _oinked_ plaintively. Lord Bai took that as an unmistakable indication of assent.

Inevitably, the dragon's travelling companion disagreed. Old Lao shook his head, his long earlobes swaying beneath his bald pate. "I will not. This fine pig—" he rapped the side of the wagon for emphasis "—is the best the village has to offer. It would be beneath the dignity of such an august personage as yourself to refuse this honorable gift."

The dragon wrinkled his massive snout at the stench emanating from the honorable gift under discussion. "I suppose next you'll try to tell me it is suffused with a 'perfumed sweetness' no Empyrean Eminence could resist."

"I wouldn't dream of it, Lord Bai."

"Tell them I want oxen," the dragon persisted.

"They only have two, and they're needed for the plowing."

"Goats, sheep, chickens..."

Old Lao tugged the straggly hairs trailing from his chin. "I didn't see any sheep, and it would take more than a village full of chickens to satisfy your noble appetite. I'm surprised you didn't suggest the horses."

The dragon eyed the toothpicks yoked to the front of the cart. Since hauling their objectionable cargo from the village sty to this otherwise idyllic, flower-strewn meadow, neither horse had lifted its muzzle from the clover. The two of them together carried less flesh on their bones than Old Lao, and he was put together with sinew and spit. Besides, the bones would play havoc with the dragon's digestion. Lord Bai crossed his arms over his broad, scaled chest and shook his head.

"It's against my religion."

Old Lao's eyebrows pushed the wrinkles on his forehead to the crown of his head. "Since when did you become a Buddhist? And, what path permits you to eat an ox and not a horse?"

"Not Buddhist—Jewish," the dragon lied. "It's very common where I come from."

"And where is that, exactly?"

The dragon looped his tail in a vague westerly arc. "Very common," he repeated, determined to regain control of the conversation. "My family views pigs as unclean, and we are prohibited from eating horse or pig or any animal which neither chews cud nor walks on cloven hoof."

"And do those prohibitions cover people, I wonder?"

"Oh, people have lots of toes," Lord Bai said silkily, though it had been years since he'd eaten one. Not even a nibble. Not even anyone who deserved it. He did miss the good old days, sometimes.

Lao stared reprovingly at the dragon. Lord Bai stared back, and his eyes were bigger than Lao's entire head. Lao snorted. "I never said you had to eat the pig, Lord Bai, merely that it would be inconsiderate not to accept the gift in the spirit in which it was given."

"Fine. Fine. But if I don't eat it, what am I supposed to do with it? I am not placing my august personage anywhere near that stinking cart."

"Far be it from me to suggest such a thing. I was thinking of a sacrifice—a burnt offering to the Four Emperors for the success of our journey. Would your western gods object?"

"God, singular," Lord Bai corrected absently, as he sifted the old man's words through his mind, lifting their corners and flipping them over to study them from behind. Try as he might, he couldn't see anything wrong with Lao's proposal. That was suspicious in itself. Knowing Lao, there had to be a catch somewhere. "I can't see any harm in it."

Lao nodded and led the horses to the muddy wallow the villagers swore was a road. He unhitched the traces and, after repeatedly smacking the nags' flea-bitten rumps, persuaded them to amble in the direction of home. Clambering over the wagon like a senescent monkey, he dispatched the pig with two quick thrusts of his knife and one precise slash—suggesting he knew more about butchering than he let on. This was confirmed in the dragon's mind by the way he tipped the pig and nimbly avoided the gush of blood which accompanied its collapse.

While the blood yet steamed (and to be fair, the animal smelled better from inside than from without), Lao took up his ax and began chopping the wagon's top and sides, stacking the disassembled pieces between the wheels. He hacked the floorboards until wagon and pig crashed into the piled wood, then he gutted the beast as economically as he butchered it.

"What's called for, here," he chirped when he recovered the power of speech, "is a quick blast of extreme heat to light the wood, remove the hair and sear the skin. That will eliminate the odor you find so offensive. Then, we can proceed with the roasting. I would recommend the same method we used on the yak in Tibet."

"Wasn't this was supposed to be an offering?"

"The gods can share."

"Better them than me," Lord Bai muttered.

Old Lao's knobby face split into a snaggle-toothed grin of undiluted bliss.

The first flash of dragon fire, indeed, eliminated the stink of the sty—by replacing it with the stench of burning hair. Lord Bai was quite certain his nasal cavities would never recover. But over the course of the day, as the wood reduced to cinders, and the skin of the pig crackled and caramelized, releasing the delectable aroma of roasting flesh, he began to share something of his companion's excitement.

"Pickled tongue, braised cheek, crispy ears," the old man chanted under his breath. "Rib roast, blade roast, pepper-crusted loin. Hanging barbecue spareribs," he crooned.

In spite of himself, Lord Bai started to salivate. But his sensitive nostrils assured him the meat had not yet reached the proper doneness for a gourmet of his discernment.

"Glazed ham, boiled ham, tail stew. Hocks with cabbage..."

"We don't have any cabbage," Lord Bai pointed out.

Lao smacked him with the flat of his knife. "Cabbage we can get. Don't interrupt me. You don't want me to overcook this, do you?"

The dragon shook his head. It was getting hard to speak around the puddling drool. Lao flashed a superior smile. "Savory pork, five-spice pork, pork and noodles, pork dumplings...

"Potstickers, moo shu pork, red-cooked pork belly!" The old man's voice rose through his litany, until he was practically shouting. He elbowed an inconvenient length of dragon aside. "Put the fire out, will you? I have to test for doneness."

Following the old man's instructions as if in a trance; Lord Bai exhaled a blast of air, extinguishing the flames in an instant. Lao hopped from foot to foot, counting backwards from five hundred to allow the meat to rest. Lord Bai thought he would die of longing before the old man reached one. Lao scored the top of the ham and raised a slice of quivering, succulent, juicy, aromatic flesh like a battle trophy. He waved it in front of his nose. "Smells like..."

"Smells like," Lord Bai echoed, his coils twisting and writhing in a frenzy of desire.

"Smells like," the old reprobate repeated, his grin yet wider and more manic than before.

"Smells like," the dragon moaned, his yearning shaking the leaves of distant trees. His body quivered; his claws fisted as tight as his talons would allow.

"Bacon!"

"People!" the dragon caroled. "People, people, people, people! It's been so long since I've had people!"

With a single swipe of his extended claws, he detached the nearest ham and fell upon it like a ravening tiger. He wasn't a greedy dragon, though. Oh no! There was more than enough left for a second helping—or a fifth or sixth for his dear, dear friend and fellow traveler.

Who, for some peculiar reason, appeared to have lost his appetite. Humans! They defied all understanding.

*

**Jean Marie Ward** writes fiction, nonfiction and everything in between, including art books, novels (2008 Indie Book double-finalist _With Nine You Get Vanyr_ ), and short stories such as the 2011 WSFA Small Press Award finalist "Lord Bai's Discovery" (from the anthology _Dragon's Lure_ ) and "Personal Demons" in the award-winning anthology _Hellebore and Rue_. She edited the web magazine _Crescent Blues_ for eight years and now writes for other online venues, including Buzzy Mag. Her web site is http://JeanMarieWard.com.

* * *

Excerpt from

Seeing Things

Book One of the Seabingen series

by Kater Cheek

Morales had driven us to the slummier area of downtown. We were just north of Ipswich Park, in a section of town that had once been a prosperous commercial district, but had since fallen on hard times. The buildings were all historical, and couldn't be torn down, but no one had coughed up enough money to renovate the area, yet.

In a few years, some entrepreneur would probably toss millions at this old neighborhood and make it gleam with brass and leather, but right now only the squatters and dealers called it home. Morales wound the Caddy down poorly lit streets into an alley, which was empty, except for a parked car, and three still vampires who stood by the back door of a decrepit theater.

Palmer pointed them out as Morales slowed the car down. "The tall, thin one's Brown, the blonde woman is Norwicki, and the other one is Fain."

The last names thing made me think of them as soldiers. The black camo fatigues and scarcely concealed weapons that Fain and Brown wore certainly added to that impression.

Brown was tall and gaunt. Central Casting would probably have put him under the title 'funeral director', because he was dour and nowhere near handsome. Fain looked enough like me he could have been my brother, although he didn't resemble James, and he smiled happily, as though this were the best possible way to spend an evening.

"Did you get a human to come?" Norwicki asked, just before we stepped out of the car. She was wringing her long, pale hands. Norwicki was a delicate vampire with a mass of blonde curls. She wore a vintage brown velvet dress and more make-up than the situation called for. "Oh, thank God. Hurry. I can hear him, he's hurt."

"All we have to do is go in there, find him, and bring him out?" I asked. Was this some kind of a test? Was Holzhausen behind this?

Palmer nodded. "If anyone tries to stop you, beat the shit out of him."

"We'll be out here, in case you run into trouble." Fain had a gun drawn, and looked anxious to use it. Brown double-checked a semi-automatic, while Morales took his cue and brought out an extra magazine.

"You think anyone's in there besides your friend?" Guns made me nervous. You can't karate chop a bullet. Except for Norwicki, with her long fragile hands and slender figure, they all looked more ready for action than Rambo's drinking buddies.

"We saw them leave from the front of the building a few hours ago," Palmer said, "but you might want to be quiet, just in case,"

"How do we get in?"

"Back door." Morales handed me a flashlight and Fenwick a crowbar.

"Hurry," Norwicki said.

Fenwick nodded, and clutched the crowbar like a dear friend. He went towards the door they indicated, while the four male vampires fanned out to block both ends of the alley. Norwicki waited by Palmer, plucking her dress with nervous hands.

The door had a deadbolt above the handle. Fenwick pushed one end of the crowbar in between the door and the jamb and gave an enormous pull.

At first nothing happened, as though the door were too much for even Fenwick's strength. He shoved the crowbar in farther, and wrenched again. With a screech like the lid of a coffin, the door ripped open, with the deadbolt and latch still rusted to the jamb.

There went secrecy.

Fenwick and I tiptoed through the door into the darkness of the theater. The flashlight illuminated rickety steps as we descended into a storage area behind the stage. To the right, the storage area extended the width of the theater.

Miraculously, some of the ancient dusty screens and backdrops had not yet been stolen or vandalized by anything but rats and pigeons. Straight ahead was less cluttered, so we went that way, and ascended a short flight of steps to the backstage area.

Years of feet had worn brown paths through the black paint on the wood. It creaked beneath our feet, and in some places a leak somewhere up above had dripped down, creating a stalactite of wood rot and mildew. Fenwick had an allergy to mold, and began to sneeze.

"So, where do you think he is?" I shone the flashlight up above, as though expecting a vampire to drop on us any minute. The catwalk still had broken spotlights attached to it, and something small and furry scuttled about in the shadows.

"I smell something, something like blood, but I don't know where it's coming from," Fenwick whispered. "I'm going to search the wings. Why don't you check out the stage?"

I nodded and crept onto the stage, feeling more nervous and vulnerable than if the audience were full of bored spectators. Did someone lurk in the darkness? Up above us waiting to drop something on our heads? Behind the curtain with a knife, or gun? I scanned my flashlight over the empty theater, expecting to find ghosts watching us from the ratty velour seats. Nothing.

But wait. There was something there. Was that movement in the balcony?

"Fenwick! I think there's someone out there!" I whispered loudly, creeping towards the spot where I had heard his last sneeze.

Suddenly the stage sunk between my feet, causing me to leap back with my arms reflexively raised in a guard position.

"What?" Fenwick loped back, clutching the crowbar like a baseball bat. He sniffed and scraped his foot over the dust to reveal the square outline of a trapdoor. "Down there. That's where the smell's coming from."

And then a shot boomed from the audience and chipped off a chunk of wall behind us. I shut the flashlight off and dropped to the ground, rolling from where I had been moments earlier. Fenwick stomped on the trapdoor, and it swung open with the sound of splintering wood. I slithered into the open hole and swung down into the room below.

Fenwick dropped down next to me, swearing as the second gunshot hit metal above us. He sniffed the air. "He's here."

I flicked on the flashlight again, and fanned the storage room. Rotten, mice-ridden racks of clothing had been pushed against one wall. A table filled the rest of the room, its surface covered with boxes, baggies and a an electric scale, like the kind used for packages. I didn't see anyone living, but Fenwick pushed the table aside and leaned down to inspect a body lying on the floor.

"Can he climb?" I asked, pointing the flashlight at the hole to the stage.

"No way. Look at him."

I swiveled the light back around.

Someone had manacled the vampire's wrists and ankles together, ingeniously using iron stage props secured with padlocks. Even if he hadn't been chained, he wasn't going anywhere. The vampire looked ghastly, more corpse than living. The parts of his skin not encrusted with blood were as pale as freezer paper, and where his wrists weren't hidden by the iron cuffs, they bore the marks of cigarette burns.

"Jesus. Is he still alive?"

"Don't know, but let's get out of here. There must be a back way. Take this crowbar so I can get a better grip on this guy."

The gunfire above had stopped, which meant that whoever had been firing at us had either run out of bullets, come down to get closer, or called for reinforcements. The door leading to this room was newer, and secured with a bolt from the inside.

I opened it, shining the light down a short hallway with another door at the end. The next door was locked or jammed, but Fenwick kicked the hinged side and it ripped free, falling over like a drawbridge. We both winced at the noise.

"Sorry," Fenwick said.

"Had to be done." I shined the light so he wouldn't trip on anything. A short passage beyond the door split in a T left and right, with doors on either side, leading to storage and dressing rooms. Fenwick cocked his head and then loped down the right passage. The door at the other end was skewed off its hinges, and beyond that lay only a cluttered passageway, and a flight of stairs to the exit, and safety.

And then another gunshot reminded us that we were not alone in this theater.

"Go! Go!" I shouted, lighting his way with the flashlight.

Fenwick was already running. Another shot rang out, this one closer. Whoever I saw in the balcony must have climbed down and intercepted us by taking the other stairs. He was close enough behind that we heard his footsteps. When I stupidly turned to look, my toe caught on a loop of rope and I went sprawling.

Fenwick was already up the stairs and had handed off the comatose vampire to those outside. At the sound of my swearing, he turned back. "You okay, Kit?"

"Yeah, I'm fine, just--" And then a shot rang out. Fenwick fell through the open door and into the alley.

"Fenwick!" I screamed his name, a ragged terrified scream, and tried to scramble to my feet.

"Stay down!" one of the vampires ordered.

I flattened myself against the floor.

Apparently they could see in the dark. Three handguns blasted away into the theater, sounding like a machine gun on full automatic. I pressed my hands over my ears, and, as soon as the shots ended, I scrambled up the stairs, out of the pitchblack theater, to the semi-darkness of the alley.

Fenwick was lying on his back. A pool of blood spread on the asphalt around him, soaking his head, his face, his hair. I had never seen so much blood. Oh God! There was so much blood.

"Fenwick! Fenwick! Oh God. Fenwick, don't die!"

Morales and Palmer ignored Fenwick, despite the lake of red which now touched his shoulders. I ran over to Fenwick, but there was so much blood soaking his head that I couldn't tell where the wound was. Was he dead?

Palmer looked up to talk to Brown. "Status?"

How could they ignore the blood? All the blood. "There's so much blood. Oh God. Fenwick."

"The one inside is dead, but I heard him call for others." Brown was sliding new bullets into his spare magazine.

Fain stood up, licking some of Fenwick's blood off his fingers. "The two of us can handle it, but Morales should take the other human away before she gets hurt, too."

Palmer nodded. "Go with the others."

"I won't leave him!" Look at all the blood. Too much blood. Oh God, Fenwick.

"We called the paramedics as soon as we heard the shot. They'll be here soon. There's nothing you can do."

"Go, we've got this under control," Fain said.

Palmer nodded at someone behind me, and a pair of arms lifted me and carried me toward the car. It was Morales.

"I want to stay with him!" I fought vainly against Morales' arms, wanting to return to Fenwick's side.

Morales loped towards the car, carrying me as though I weighed no more than a sack of flour. "The ambulance will take him to St. Jude's. Now get in, and buckle up." He stuffed me in the car door, and slammed it behind me. We heard sirens approach. Sirens. They wouldn't use sirens if he was dead, would they? Oh God, Fenwick. Please don't die.

Morales sped the car out of the alley like a bat out of Daytona. I looked through the back window, and saw an ambulance pull into the alley behind the theater. They were fast. Did the ambulance drivers just camp out nearby, waiting for the next gang shooting? Please don't die, Fenwick, I prayed silently.

*

**Kater Cheek** is a graduate of 2007 Clarion. Her work has appeared in _The Living Dead_ anthology, _Weird Tales_ , and _Fantasy Magazine_ , among others. She is the author of the urban fantasy novels _Seeing Things_ , _Treemaker_ , and _Dayrunner_. She has an artblog at www.catherinecheek.com, a webcomic about chickens at www.coopdegrace.com and a book review blog at www.katercheek.com. When not writing, she practices Aikido, throws pots, gardens, and plays with molten glass.

* * *

La Divina Commedia

By Katherine Mankiller

INFERNO

Last time this happened, I was Orpheus.

Ethan was lost, pale, gone in a haze of Zoloft and Lithium and anorexia, and he assured me he was in hell, and I missed him so much that the rocks and trees wept. And when neither of us could bear it any more, I descended into the underworld and went to the King. I sang such a song of grief that I even moved the King of the Underworld to tears, and he said I could bring my Eurydice back to the light of day, if only I didn't turn back and look upon him. As I walked through the fluorescent halls and the smell of bleach and urine, I knew this was hell, and I couldn't bear the thought of my beloved locked away from the sun like this forever. So I led the way singing, and the janitors and nurses wept and cleared a path for us as we walked down the hall.

As I opened the front door, I turned. Ethan had a tic and couldn't stop moving his left arm. He threw his right arm over his eyes and screamed that my hair was on fire. Maybe I should lay off the henna. And then he was gone, vanished back into the underworld like smoke, and I was alone.

Apparently, being Orpheus doesn't work.

I don't imagine you would want to be my Eurydice anyway, my darling. I think you think of yourself more as a Lancelot, all shining armor and devotion to your lady fair. But there are no stories of Lancelot in the underworld, at least not that I know of. Lancelot was from the wrong part of the world for Dante's attention.

Perhaps I should be Inanna instead. I like that. Inanna is sexy. It fits, in a way; you and I have a lot more spark than Ethan and I ever did.

So I come and join you in the underworld, my love. I don't see how this has happened again, and this time, since I am not Orpheus, they won't let me in as a visitor. So, I come in the only way I can. At the first gate, they take my purse. At the second, they take my jewelry. At the third, they take my shoes. By the seventh gate, I'm wearing a simple shift, like an inmate. The rituals of the dead are ancient and cannot be questioned.

Your eyes, when you see me, are worth it. Before I know it, you're in my arms again, at last. You're warm and lucid, with hot lips and roaming hands. You're like the sun. You warm all the parts of me that are cold, clear to the bone, and you make me feel like the Queen of Heaven. I'm looking out of the corner of my eye for a relatively private place to take you, when dull, bored men in white tell us we aren't allowed to kiss and separate us.

The doctor is a woman with cold, dark eyes; she calls me words like "sick" and "codependent." I expect this. Inanna is a corpse in the underworld for three days.

I would suffer to get you back, but in those three days your eyes are cold, lifeless, dark. We are corpses together, my love, locked away from the sun. Inanna and Damuzi, together in hell. It's not the Christian hell; it's cold and dark, full of the dead and the smell of industrial cleaner and the metallic tang of what passes for our food, and we all rot together.

After three days, I smell. Not as badly as I would if I were truly a corpse, but my hair is stringy and sweaty and my eyes are sunken. When I lay my hand on your shoulder and say, "I did it for you," you turn.

"This isn't your story!" you say. Your voice is so loud, your face so red, you turn so quickly that I think for a moment that you might strike me, and in that moment I decide that Doctor Ereshkigal is right. I shouldn't be here.

"You're right," I say to you, and tell the Doctor, "Keep him." I turn on my heel and check myself out, feeling like I have condemned you to hell in my place, and think that I may never love again.

PURGATORIO

The world has gone grey, like a monastery.

"I just have some issues I need to work on," you tell me. You've lost weight, your color is bad and your eyes are haunted. You avoid looking me in the eye, like you're afraid I'll see through you, see into your heart.

I don't feel like Inanna any more. I don't feel sexy. I'm tired and my heart aches from seeing you suffer. I feel like Mary in the Pieta, only Mary was lucky enough to hold what was left of her beloved son and weep over him. But you're not my son. You're my lover, despite the way you're avoiding touching me.

In lieu of hugging you, I say, "I know, sweetheart."

"I just, I didn't get this way overnight, and I'm not going to get better overnight. I'm a work in progress." Your voice breaks, like you might burst into tears at any moment.

I want to cry. I want to wrap you up in a blanket and feed you soup. "I baked you cookies," I say.

"I don't deserve cookies," you say.

I want to grab you and shake you for being such a fucking drama queen. Shake you until your teeth rattle. But it's no use; this is your story, and forgive me, darling, but you're not the storyteller I am. One note, like plainsong. Pie Jesu Domine, dona eis requiem.

You're neither a monk nor an ascetic. I shove the bag of cookies into your hands and brush your hair out of your eyes.

You shudder away from my touch and almost drop the cookies. "I'm not allowed to eat sweets. I have to eat complex carbohydrates, like brown rice." You hand the bag of cookies back.

I grit my teeth and force my voice into patience. "You're not going to tell me what's wrong?"

You shake your head, a bit too vigorously. It's a little frightening, in your fragile state. You look like you might snap in half. "I can't. I want to, it would be such a relief, but I can't. I just... I need to work on some issues."

"Okay," I say. "I love you. Feel better."

And then you start to cry. Dona nobis pacem.

PARADISO

I don't have a happy ending for you. I suppose this is still your story, and you'll have to make your own happy ending.

But I have a story, too. I am Persephone, back from the dead. My mother and I go to the botanical gardens and admire the roses together, and I can't remember the last time I've seen her so happy. There are butterflies, and greenhouses full of orchids and cacti, and so many flowers. I reach up and run my fingers over the roses, petals like velvet. Soft, yielding. Sensuous. It's been too long since I've taken a lover, but I've shed old Mary's robes in favor of a gauzy dress and sandals.

Unlike Persephone, I don't intend to go back to you in the underworld. If you want me, you're going to have to come out of the underworld yourself and get me. Not like Hades with his dark chariot, like Dante. Like someone who doesn't plan to go back. I don't care how. Hell, you be Inanna for a change. Damuzi was the Sumerian Persephone, after all.

I don't care what story you pick. You're the author of your own story, after all. Just pick one.

When I see you coming out of the tunnel you're blinking, like you haven't seen the sun in a long time. "I am Lazarus, come from the dead, come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all."

My mother stiffens at the sight of you, and this odd speech of yours makes her shiver. But this is a story I know.

I hand you a peach. "We should go walking at the beach."

You look at the peach for a while, like it's going to bite you. Finally, you bite it, and, like Persephone in reverse, I feel it trap you in the here and now. We go to the beach, where you take off your shoes and roll up your jeans. I take off my sandals. The sand is hot. The water is salty cool and stings a little where my sandal rubbed my foot wrong. We talk about what it would be like if there really were mermaids, if we could hear them singing, each to each, and agree that they would not sing to us. With each step, you become more solid and real. With each bite of peach, you become less Hades and more J. Alfred Prufrock.

I'd like to say we live happily ever after, but this isn't that kind of story, is it?

*

**Katherine Mankiller** lives in Atlanta, a great city that happens to be surrounded on all sides by Georgia. Her short fiction has appeared in Electric Velocipede, Escape Pod, and ChiZine. Her greatest ambition is to rule the world.

* * *

Heavens and Shadows

By KT Pinto

Getting old sucks.

Now, before you start to commiserate with me about the 'good old days', if you can't tell me where you were the night Julius Caesar was killed, then I don't want to hear it.

I'm not talking plain ol' 'old' here - I'm talking ancient. Getting ancient sucks.

The main problem is that after a while, there's nothing new to do or see in the world. I mean, how many times can you hear Switzerland declare neutrality, or watch France surrender to someone?

Even the multi-cultural land of the United States lost a little bit of its purple mountain majesty after a few centuries.

Then I found New York City. A universe unto itself, Manhattan was this wonderland of lights and sounds and smells that I didn't think I could ever grow tired of.

And I didn't, for about five decades.

But there's this wondrous thing about NYC - along with Manhattan, there are four other landmasses called 'boroughs', something that I don't think can be found anywhere else on the planet. These boroughs are each their own different world, places that were so unlike from Manhattan, you wouldn't know you were in the same city.

So, after seeing yet another Broadway play and having what might possibly be my one-billionth dirty-water hotdog, I decided to pack up my things and move to Brooklyn.

Brooklyn is an amazing place, with its stoops and fire escapes, stickball and foldable pizza slices. A place where each block spoke a different language, yet every corner brownstone had an old woman yelling for her grandson to come home for supper.

It was in this multicultural hubbub that I started my lucrative – albeit decadent – business.

This kind of business was something I was very familiar with, and it didn't take long for me to have it pretty much running on its own, giving me enough time and money to do what I wanted.

What did I want to do, you ask? Well, that's the rub... I am a two-thousand-year-old vampyre. I wanted to do something _different_. But what could possibly be different for me when I've pretty much seen it all?

My answer came one night when I was standing on the roof of my building, watching the boats on the East River. I was leaning on the ledge, staring at the lights from the Seaport when I realized that I was no longer alone on the roof.

I felt him before I saw him, and turned in time to witness him emerge from the shadows.

No, emerge was the wrong term. He came up from the shadows, as if the darkness gave birth to him. He was thin, but muscular, with broad shoulders, a v-shaped chest, and legs that filled out his BDUs nicely. He was dressed in black and red, wearing a leather trench, with a red mask covering the lower half of his face.

And he had the most amazing green eyes I had ever seen.

Unfortunately, those eyes had a look in them that I had seen many times before: he was there to kill me.

I sighed and rested my elbows on the ledge behind me, looking upwards. "It's a beautiful night," I said to him, "Are the stars what brought you up to Tar Beach?"

His forehead wrinkled in confusion. "Tar Beach?"

I smiled slightly; so he wasn't a native New Yorker. "The rooftop luv... Tar Beach..." I looked back up at the sky. "So, if not for the stars, then maybe for some other _celestial_ reason...?"

He shifted slightly, trying to figure me out. I doubt I was what he was expecting from an ancient bloodsucking fiend. "You are Celeste DeCumpania, right?"

"You mean a picture didn't come with my dossier?"

His eyes narrowed. "I'm not a hired gun; I don't take missions for money."

"Then what are you?"

I noticed his shoulders straighten before he responded. "I'm a ninja."

I rolled my eyes. "Well, I've been to Asia often enough to know a ninja when I see one." I stared at his olive skin and amazing eyes for a moment. "Of course you're not like any ninja I've ever seen."

"Enough of this," he growled, "You know why I'm here."

"To kill me, I suppose," I replied, "Although I can't imagine why."

"You think I should just let you get away with murdering seven children?"

I laughed. "Children? My dear ninja, children are not as sought-after a commodity as they used to be." As I spoke, I inhaled his scent. He was human and... something else. I wasn't sure what. Interesting... "The reason children were such a treat way back when was because their innocence made their blood delectably sweet." I noticed his hands clench into fists as I continued. "But with cable television being piped into their brains at such young ages nowadays, there are very few that taste different from adults... and it's not worth the aggravation of hunting for the tasty ones." I saw his eyes flash. "Is this conversation bothering you?"

"Is this..." his voice got low; I had a feeling that this meant he was pissed. "You're standing here talking about eating babies, and you're asking if it _bothers me?_ Are you out of your fucking mind?"

"Yes." I answered simply.

I tried to figure out what was going on. Why hadn't he attacked yet? Was he sizing me up the same way I was him?

I was bored at this point. That's most probably why I struck first.

I sent the knives at him with less than my normal strength and speed, just to give him a fighting chance. His arms flew up in an X in front of his chest, and I felt a wave of power as an invisible shield formed in front of him. He stayed in that position for a couple of seconds, then looked between his arms when he didn't feel the impact of the blades against the shield. I let the knives hover in the air in front of him for a few moments, then had them disappear in puffs of smoke.

"Great thing, illusions," I said as he lowered his arms. "You never know what is real and what is not. This whole city could be a figment of my imagination and you would never know it."

He folded his arms across his chest. "How do I know that you're real then?"

I smiled. "I don't know... How do you?"

He melted into the ground, and I knew where he was going to appear. I took a step forward, so he'd have enough room, and an instant later felt his arms around me, pulling me tight against him. He was stronger than I would've guessed, but not stronger than me. I could've easily broken his grasp, but I let the boy have his moment. Besides, it felt nice being pressed up against him like that.

And then I felt the cold steel against my throat. It was an amazingly arousing moment.

"So kill me," I whispered, enjoying his mystifying scent, "I just hope another child doesn't die while you're wasting time with me."

With something resembling vampyric speed, he put the knife away and spun me to face him. "Prove it," he growled, "prove you didn't kill those children."

"You mean besides not knowing what children you're talking about?" I replied. His eyes flashed again. "Let's make a deal," I said, stepping closer to him. He instinctively stepped back, pinning himself against the ledge. I knew better than to think he was caught; half his body was covered in shadows. "I'll help you to find the murderer..."

"What if I already have?"

I smirked. "If you actually thought that, I have a feeling you'd be trying harder to kill me."

His hand wrapped around my throat; again, it was done with inhuman speed. If being choked hadn't been done to me numerous times by various creatures over the years (and if for the fact that I really didn't need to breathe...), I might have been impressed... even scared.

But being ancient jades you a bit.

I sighed. "Have you ever considered that I'm letting you win this little power play? That I'm not even using a modicum of my powers on you?" I locked eyes with him and smiled. "Do you know how many times you've looked me directly in the eye? Seventeen. Seventeen times I could've taken over your mind and make you my willing slave, do you realize that?"

He stared at me for a few moments, his eyes cold and hard. "No, you couldn't have."

I was impressed. The boy thought he had a chance of beating me. As cute as that was, I was interested in other things, and I knew he was not yet willing to hear about those naughty thoughts.

So I faded away... literally. Just another neat little trick from your friendly neighborhood vampyre.

"Like I was saying," I continued, appearing on the other side of the roof; I noticed he was slightly stunned by my disappearing act, "I'll help you find the murderer. Once we find him, you'll know it's not me, and I can go back to..." I smiled and looked him slowly over, "other pursuits."

"Forget it," he growled, "I don't fuck monsters."

I laughed. "You're such an innocent child..."

His eyes narrowed. "I am no child."

I couldn't keep the smirk off of my face. From what I could see, I would've guessed him to be in his mid to late twenties, so that meant I had about one thousand, nine hundred and eighty-five years on him... yeah, he was a child. "So, do we have a deal, or not?"

"And if we don't find this murderer?"

I narrowed my eyes. "Then you're not as good a ninja as you thought you were."

The morning stars came at me with a speed that was impressive. I guess that's why he couldn't hide his surprise when I caught them as if he had thrown me a baseball.

"Look, I don't have all night," I said, putting the stars in my jeans pocket, "I have a business to run and all... So either put some effort into killing me, or let me help you."

He stared at me for a few moments. I knew he had a lot more weapons in his arsenal - he wouldn't be a ninja otherwise. "Fine, but if you betray me..."

"You'll hunt me down and make me rue the day... yeah, yeah, yeah..." I headed towards the stairway. "All of this negotiating is making me thirsty. I have a full bar downstairs. Do you want anything?"

He shifted slightly. "Got any Rockstar?"

"Geez," I rolled my eyes, "you kids and your odd drinks..."

Even with the mask, I could tell he was trying not to smile. "This doesn't mean I trust you."

"You'd be an idiot if you did." I opened the stairway door, then said over the noise from below. "So ninja, what do I call you?"

"My name is Shadoboxxer."

I giggled. "Seriously?"

His eyes narrowed. "Yes, seriously." His hands clenched. "Do you have something to say about that?"

"No luv. If you say that's your name, that's your name," I started down the stairs, "Just don't expect me to call you that..."

And that's how the partnership started between Shadoboxxer and me. What can I say? Spending time with the young ninja could possibly make this old vampyre feel like a girl again...

*

**KT Pinto** is a Heathen High Priestess arachnophile and a follower of Hecate, Lilith and Kali... Oh, and she's a writer of alternate history, alternate reality, and alternate mythology as well! For more information, go to KTPINTO.COM

* * *

Excerpt from

The House of Em

(an unpublished novella in the Okal Rel Universe)

By Lynda Williams

In His sixteenth year, the Radiant Amel was rescued from His life as a commoner, but the Golden Prince D'Ander had worldly designs on the Gelack Throne and did not restore the Divine Youth to the protection of the faithful. Instead, he took Him to his rebel ally, Perry D'Aur.

Chronicle of the Faithful, Okal Lumen

House Guest

Ayrium D'Ander D'Aur stuck her head into her mother's office and cleared her throat, "Uh, Mom?"

Perry D'Aur pushed aside the swivel screen she had been frowning at and frowned, instead, at Ayrium. "Let me guess: Amel?"

Ayrium nodded. "His Luminous Divinity, or whatever Dad is calling him this morning, has locked himself in his room again. I'd take care of it, but... " She held up arms streaked with greenish gray slime. "Sort of busy right now cleaning out diseased ship's moss before the bug spreads."

Ship's moss recycled oxygen in the reality skimming ships they relied on for trade, communications and protection, which meant Ayrium's priority trumped Perry's calculations of harvest tax, but she opened her mouth to trot out an argument, just the same.

"Besides," Ayrium forstalled her, and flashed a brilliant smile. She had her father's Golden Demish looks and sky blue eyes. "It's your turn."

Perry scowled. She wanted to avoid baby-sitting D'Ander's prize catch, Amel, who was the heir to so unlikely a collection of titles it was hardly surprising he had disappeared in infancy. In fact, only someone with as much affinity for trouble as her ex-lover and irregular ally, D'Ander, would have fished him out of the sex-trade after sixteen years, and only someone with D'Ander's exceptional thickness would have dumped him on her.

To D'Ander, she was Perry the mutineer, loose woman and amusingly spunky inferior; not an ex-vassal of the defunct house of Blue Dem, who got a pain in her chest whenever she remembered her part in its downfall. Perry had mutinied twenty-six years ago against the last highborn vassal of Amel's line, and while neither Amel's grandfather nor his father had lived up to her expectations of higher authorities in settling the matter, that didn't mean she had wanted to go down in history as the cause of her people's dissolution into leaderless chaos. Perry was acutely aware, of course, of how little her feelings mattered. Half the potentates of Sevildom wanted young Amel for purposes that spanned worshipping, crowning, breeding or exterminating. They weren't going to be impressed by Perry's ambiguous feelings, even if they took the time to let her explain them.

Yet here he was. Amel, the prince with the most amazing pedigree in all of Demish Sevildom, living under her roof, in the government complex she had taken over decades before, from a man who might have been his vassal if he had grown up at court, as he was meant to do.

It was, to say the least, uncomfortable. And it didn't help in the least that D'Ander kept going on about Amel being a living icon of the Golden Demish faith, Okal Lumen, either. As if the poor kid needed any more shocks. Or D'Ander's spiritual ardor wasn't wrapped firmly around a very secular ambition.

All this was the substance of Perry's frown, glaring at her buoyantly beautiful daughter, with her slime-streaked hands, who seemed amused by the whole business.

Ayrium could be as irritating, sometimes, as her father.

"What was it, this time?" Perry asked her daughter.

"Something involving a costume," said Ayrium, and chuckled. "Makes me grateful I've had nothing worse to contend with than Vrellish pirates, in the way of protocol. And to think I once wanted Dad to introduce me on Demora!"

"Huh," Perry grunted.

"So you'll...?" Ayrium prompted, flicking her glance upward.

"I'll see to Amel," Perry promised her, grudgingly.

"Make him feel at home," instructed Ayrium.

"He isn't home," Perry warned, more sharply than she had intended, and mended her manner, not wanting her daughter to guess what was bothering her.

A single thread of greenish slime slid off Ayrium's elbow. "Being nice can't hurt you," she concluded, and left briskly.

_That_ , Perry thought dully, _was all she knew._

Heavily, Perry got to her feet and left the mundane worries of the rather humble office she chose to occupy, on the ground floor of her liege's old palace. In the hall, the evidence of past grandeur was more noticeable. The carpet, for example. For the first time in years, she looked down at it as she trudged down the corridor. It was a Blue Demish story rug, too heavily influenced by Golden flourishes to move her as art, but maybe she should have made more of an effort to preserve it as an example of something hybrid. Like Amel himself, who had also gotten a little trampled underfoot.

_Hell_ , she thought, _it's not as if I could keep a liege in any semblance of style! D'Ander has a place for him to occupy._

She marched up the winding, tarnished staircase of what should be Amel's home on her planet, resolved to keep the interview short and within parameters.

On the second story landing, she found D'Ander pacing back and forth, gloriously blond, blue-eyed, and distraught at the moment. He turned to greet her, presenting a broad chest encrusted with Golden embroidery and a large head framed in wavy Golden curls that came down to just below his ears.

"He ran away from me," D'Ander appealed, looking stricken. "Me!" He struck his fist to his chest with a thump. "Who would die before I let any harm him come to him!"

"Maybe that's what scares him," said Perry, and sighed at D'Ander's bafflement. "Amel thought he was someone else last week. Someone very different."

"Exactly." D'Ander spread his big hands. "I've been trying to explain what it means to be heir to both the Golden Emperor and the Ava. And to be a Soul of Light, especially, born to lead the Okal Lumen."

"Oh, good," said Perry, in a mild tone. "I was afraid you might be overwhelming him."

D'Ander's big, handsome features contracted in a frown.

"I'll talk to Amel," Perry offered, and yielded to a wicked thought. "You go help Ayrium clean ship's moss out of the respiring boxes of the dozen fungi-blighted _rel_ -ships."

D'Ander blinked at her.

Perry turned away, thinking, _If he does, I'll swear to Amel and hold off the Empire, since, clearly, anything is possible._

Her master key let her into Amel's bedroom where the paragon lay face down on the bed in his underwear, shoulders wracked by silent sobs. A discarded robe sat propped on the floor, too stiff with embroidery to fall over.

"Immortality Amel?" Perry addressed the mop of feathery black hair spread over the pillow. "I request audience."

The youthful body on the bed froze.

Perry sighed. "Sit up," she ordered, instead, the way she might any sulking teenager.

The sprawled body re-organized itself into a cross-legged sitting position with a dispatch that was almost funny, until Amel raised his head, tossing his feathery hair back. His face packed a nasty aesthetic punch. He was black haired and gray eyed, courtesy of a Vrellish ancestry, with the finely crafted beauty of the Golden Demish overlaid with a vibrant sensitivity that was bursting to emote in all directions. The wetness in his crystal eyes shimmered.

_Golden looks and Vrellish coloring,_ Perry thought, grumpily _._

It made her feel better to recognize nothing Blue Demish in him. Her people expected more life, and less awe-inspiring fragility, in their highborns. Back when they still had some.

_But we still do_ , a traitorous corner of her mind protested. _This one._

_Who is heir to the Ava's empire, a Golden Demish icon and one of the empire's few remaining Purebloods of any variety_ , she followed up.

Birth ranks, like Pureblood, referred to how Sevolite a person was. As a Midlord, she was about 25% Sevolite, all of it Blue Demish. The rest of her genetic heritage was commoner. Amel, although pure Sevolite, was a patchwork quilt mongrel of races: 34% Golden Demish, 34% Vrellish, 6 % Lorel and 26% Blue Demish. Just one per cent more Blue Demish than her, if you looked at it like that. The notion helped to ground her.

"Why did you run away from Prince D'Ander?" Perry asked, in a gruff voice.

"I'm not what he--" Amel hiccupped. "What he thinks I am." His pastel lips pouted.

"No faith in our competence at genotyping?" Perry asked, crisply.

"No!" he cried. "I mean, I know I am what he says, physically. Only child of the empire's last Purebloods, descended from the Golden Emperor, and all that."

_You missed liege of Blue Dem,_ Perry complained, silently.

"So, you are Amel _physically_ ," she said. "What else is there?"

"My soul!" Amel blinked, spilling tears from both eyes simultaneously. "I don't think I've got the soul D'Ander says I have, because I can't be a Soul of Light fit to inspire Luminaries! I'm not even good!"

"Who is?" Perry snapped, and relented with a sigh. "You will find some people do, and some people do not, believe as literally as D'Ander in Divine Goodness. It is a matter of bloodlines for most, and you've already passed that test. I would not worry, too much, about your actual behavior."

"But, I believe in Souls of Light!" Amel cried, wet-paint eyebrows capping an appeal of anguished alarm. "So, I cannot be one!" He leapt up and clutched at her. "I am a bad person."

Perry detached his warm fingers from her arm. He yielded so graciously she saw how people never guessed at his strength before he was reclaimed from his life as a commoner.

"So," she repeated. "How do you figure that?"

"I betrayed my house," he said, with melodramatic force.

"Be hard not to betray at least one!" Perry said, and barked a short laugh. "Let's see. Your father's mother was the Golden Emperor's daughter, your mother is half Vrellish, and your parents shared a father who was the last Blue Demish Ava, but at least there is no house left to betray, there, since--"

She caught herself and stopped. He was staring at her with a blank look that showed signs of turning insightful.

"Maybe you ought to tell me what you meant," she said, embarrassed.

"The House of Em," he said, with reverence.

Perry knew, as only Demish knew genealogies, that there was no such line in all of Sevildom. "What?" she asked, thrown off.

"The House of Em," Amel repeated. "Em was Mira's mother."

"Mira?" Perry cast about for things she'd picked up about Amel's life as a commoner on Gelion. "Oh, yes. Your foster sister. The daughter of the man who brought you up."

"Em's daughter, too." Tears shone in twin tracks on his cheeks without a sound. For a moment, he seemed too ethereal to be breathing, then he shifted up onto his knees, looking eager. "Let me tell you the story of the House of Em," he begged her. "And about Jut and all the others. Then, you'll understand, and once you do, you can explain it to His Highness, Prince D'Ander. I--" He bowed his head. "I can't."

Perry thought, a little tartly, about the work she had to get done and her promise to herself to stay detached. But Amel, with a story to tell, touched a chord with her Blue Demish heritage. Blue Demish were the story people. A story with a moral, even. What could be more natural?

*

**Lynda Williams** is the author of the Okal Rel Saga and editor of the associated Okal Rel Legacies series, set a thousand years in the future, when bioengineered superpilots dominate the Sevolite Empire. The series follows personal dramas set against a backdrop of culture-clash and high stakes. Lynda holds two masters degrees. She works as Learning Technology Analyst for Simon Fraser University. Articles from thoughtful writers and readers of SF feature on her blog, Reality Skimming, http://okalrel.org/blog/ She also hosts The Writer's Craft on the Clarion Blog.

* * *

Excerpt from

The Lady of Seeking in the City of Waiting

By Jennifer Brozek

Reprinted with permission from Dark Quest Books.

Falling was not the whole of her being, but it was the first thing she recognized. She was falling. With that realization came terror, compounded by the sense she had no body; she was nothing more than a decapitated head, tumbling end over end, with no way to stop herself and no way to scream her fear.

As she tumbled into an imagined stygian hell, the light grew, beating against her closed lids. The light was too steady to be flame. Although she could not open her eyes, her ears picked up the sudden transition from silence into not silence. She had no time to ponder, consider, or analyze what she was hearing when her body returned to her and she hit the ground face first.

Stunned, in pain and confused, she lay there, unable to make her newly returned limbs obey her wish to turn over and sit up. Even when she heard the rush of light feet followed by booted ones reach her side, she could not move.

"Are you hurt?"

Someone was kneeling beside her. A female someone.

"Derax, gather her quickly, before anyone else comes."

As she was turned over, she made her eyelids obey her and open. A heavily muscled man—brown hair and brown eyes with a large nose, crooked from too many breaks—was staring down at her with a clear look of surprise.

"Derax!" the female voice urged. "To the house. Quickly. House Kora comes. They had watchers."

She watched as the surprised look on Derax's face morphed into the smooth no-emotion of a man on a mission. He lifted her, cradling her tightly as he surged forward. Closing her eyes, she heard the sound of many running feet follow her into the darkness.

#

"She's not hurt. Just bruised from the fall."

She became aware of lowered voices in conversation to the left of where she lay.

"The fall where she appeared in front of you."

It was a statement. Not a question. The speaker was male.

"Yes, milord."

The other voice was the woman who came to her side.

"In the circle of light?"

"Yes. She couldn't have fallen from more than your shoulder height."

"What do we know of her? Anything? Her name? Her origin? How she appeared?"

_My name is Jane_ , she thought, and was relieved to discover she did know something. A name was important; especially her own name.

"No, milord. I'm sorry."

Jane rubbed her fingertips against what she was lying on. Soft and smooth. Comfortable. She let her body relax, only realizing after the fact that it had been tense. For the moment, she was safe. _I am Jane_ , she thought, and let herself sink back into sleep.

#

Jane opened her eyes with a start, her hand flying to her throat to make sure her body was still there. Eyes darting about, seeking danger, she could see a beautiful room of dark wood, opulent furniture and heavy, emerald green curtains.

"All is well. You're safe."

She turned to the voice she knew, the woman from the street, and drew back in surprise and fear. Sitting on a chair was a gorgeous, lithe woman with ebony skin and impossibly white hair. Dressed in a king's ransom of jewels, she wore little else. While all the essentials were covered, the entire outfit was scandalous.

"Soft. Soft..." the ebon woman crooned as she reached out a delicate hand tipped with crimson nails. "I'm no danger to you. Soft, I beg you."

"What are you? Where am I? Did I die?" Jane asked, still clutching the bed sheets.

"I'm Shifra. As to what I am, I am a dark elf. Be not afraid. Though we're rare; only one household in the entirety of the city, we are not a danger to you." Shifra smiled, blue eyes twinkling. She stood and shifted herself onto the bed, moving with the slow, careful motions one uses to calm frightened animals or small children. "Where you are? You are in House Ender, home of Lord Moonshadow and Lady Fortune." She offered her hand, palm up, to Jane.

Jane stroked her fingertips over Shifra's palm. It was a light touch but enough to tell her that Shifra was real, and that her skin was not feverishly hot as one would suspect a demon's would be. Encouraged, she clasped hands with the pretty woman, ebony and ivory skin entwined. "My name is Jane."

Shifra smiled at that. "Jane. Lovely name. From where do you hail?"

Jane opened her mouth to speak, then frowned. Disjointed details surfaced: silver coins, broken glass, more gowns than she could ever want or need. But, nothing more than that. "I don't know. I don't remember. I know my name is Jane and I see small things in my mind, but I don't know."

Shifra squeezed her hand to reassure her. "Soft, lady. Soft."

The title hit a cord of recognition in her. It was familiar. Memories of being dressed in one of those many gowns flittered through her head. Jane looked up. "That's correct. Lady is correct."

"I knew you were noble. Although your dress was plain, it was of rich fabric and finely made. And your hair, though bound, is soft and cared for."

Although Jane knew that her hair was a reddish brown color, she pulled a lock of it forward to check and smiled when her memory matched reality. "May I have a mirror?"

Shifra did much more than that. With a few commands, there was a whirlwind of servants—human, dark elf, and some Jane could not readily identify—who set up a morning meal, prepared a bath, laid out clothing and helped Jane dress. All the while, Shifra, a dancer for the lord and lady of House Ender, it seemed, stayed and spoke with her. There was something calming about Shifra's presence and chatter.

While they ate, Jane took time to look at herself. Partly to make sure she was what she remembered, and partly to see if there was anything new. All was as it should be. Red-brown hair, caramel colored eyes and a light smattering of freckles across her cheeks. A simple beauty that had its own charm, even next to such a creature as Shifra. No scars to tell of a past trauma—though she could not get the memory of her arrival out of her head.

#

The two of them stood in the hallway before the lord's study. There was a house guard, another dark elf, watching them with obvious curiosity. Shifra threw the elf a wink but continued to speak to Jane.

"Don't be afraid. Lord Moonshadow is a kind man. He'll care for you."

"Is your lord like you, a dark elf?"

"Yes."

"What does he think of people such as I?"

"Humans?"

"Yes."

Shifra shrugged. "He treats all people the way they deserve to be treated, based on their merits, and not how they believe they should be treated."

"That must be interesting to watch."

"Oh, it is." She paused, "Are you ready?"

Jane took a breath and squared her shoulders as she turned to face the door. "I am."

"Just be you."

"I can be no one else."

Shifra nodded to the guard. He knocked twice and waited. Through some signal Jane could not detect, he received permission for the visitors to enter and opened the door for them.

Shifra moved before Jane, leading her in and giving her a few moments to look around the room to get her bearings before focusing on the man before them. The room was a testament to Lord Moonshadow's love of beautiful furnishings and his thirst for knowledge. Every wall was covered in bookcases, filled to overflowing with books. His desk was made of the same dark wood prevalent throughout the mansion, and the rest of the furniture looked comfortable enough to sleep on.

She watched as Shifra stopped before the desk and curtsied. "Milord, Lady Jane, as you requested."

When Shifra stepped back and to the side, Jane stepped forward and curtsied low, spreading the skirts of the silver and green gown she wore—now realizing these were the colors of House Ender. She held the curtsy until Lord Moonshadow spoke.

"Welcome to my home, Lady Jane. Please, join me."

His voice was softer than she had expected, but it still carried the weight of experience and command. Although she was aware he was a dark elf, she was not prepared to see just how black his skin was. Where Shifra's was ebony, Moonshadow's skin was darker than midnight, and blended into the rich black velvet fabric he wore. Only his silver hair and green eyes gave him color beyond his adornments.

Jane looked at the chairs in front of the desk and saw that Shifra had retired to the farthest corner of the room, as a servant would. Wishing the dancer closer, she sat in the overstuffed chair but took no real pleasure in its comfort. She glanced up at the lord and let her eyes be drawn to his pendant: a golden lion clasping a fluted green stylized 'E.'

"Would it make you more comfortable if Shifra were by your side?"

Jane nodded, interested in the fact that he had noticed her desire. "She's been my constant companion since I arrived. Hers was the first voice I heard and hers was the first hand in friendship."

"I remember when I first arrived." He gestured for Shifra to join them. She moved with a soft jingling of her chains and jewels to sit next to Jane.

"Where did you come from?"

His brief smile did not meet his eyes. "From far away. Shadeside is my home, until we can return."

"Shadeside?"

"This City of Waiting. Our prison."

Before Jane could ask anything else, the door to Moonshadow's study opened and an elvish woman with bronze skin and red hair strode in. From her leather clothing and tattooed collarbone, this must be Lady Fortune, Lady of House Ender and the lord's personal guard, as described by Shifra.

"They are calling for us, my lord. House Kora has challenged for the authority to sponsor the girl." Lady Fortune kept her eyes on her lord.

Moonshadow tilted his head, "By what right?"

"By the right that she is human and you are not."

*

**Jennifer Brozek** is an award winning author and editor. She has been writing role-playing games and professionally publishing fiction since 2004. She has won awards for both game design and editing. With the number of edited anthologies, fiction sales, RPG books and the non-fiction articles and book under her belt, Jennifer is often considered a Renaissance woman, but she prefers to be known as a wordslinger and optimist. Read more about her at her blog: <http://www.jenniferbrozek.com/blog/>

* * *

Of Blood and Brandy

By J. Kathleen Cheney

The skin of the submersible groaned, an eerie sound to hear while trapped inside its metal body. Oriana pressed closer to the viewing window. She would rather be out there, in the water.

Set every few feet along the walls of the submersible's viewing room, the white-painted casings of small round windows dripped water onto the fine teak decking, whether from leakage or condensation, Oriana didn't know. Even so, two dozen finely-dressed citizens of the Golden City pressed against those windows, straining to catch a glimpse of that great work of art, The City Under the Sea.

The man sharing her window, a gentleman she'd seen only at a distance before, craned his neck to look up toward the surface, far above them. Anchored to the seabed by mighty chains, two dozen houses floated upside down so that the shimmering surface of the water appeared to be a silvery street on which they rested. They made a scale replica of the Street of Flowers, each mansion faithfully imitated at a fraction of its true size, lined up in file--art that only those who swam could appreciate. Or those who observed from vehicles such as this, chugging and whirring through the calm waters of the bay.

Looking upward, Oriana spotted the replica of the Amaral household, its stately columns rendered in pale wood rather than white marble. On either side, the Pereira de Santos home and the Rocha mansion.

"Have you ever seen anything so magnificent?" her companion asked. The light, musky scent of ambergris floated with him when he leaned nearer.

Oriana shuddered, thinking of that columned house and the sitting room where Isabel waited, still. She drew back from the window and, without answering, returned to the gilt chairs bolted to the observation deck.

Gabriel Espinoza, the Artist who'd chained those houses to the seabed, had disappeared from society not long after beginning his great work. Oriana didn't care _why_ he'd vanished. She was going to find him and put an end to his work. She'd forced herself to come see The City Under the Sea again, thinking the sight would strengthen her determination.

Now that she'd seen it, she only wanted to escape this place.

They were coming about to head back to the dock, the captain announced, and requested that all his guests return to their seats. Oriana drew up the hem of her full skirts a bare inch--just enough to keep them from the water that flowed across the observation deck as the submersible canted at an angle. Ambergris Gentleman settled next to her. She clutched her empty purse with lace-mittened hands and favored him with a weak smile, not wanting him to tell others that she had no stomach for Great Art.

"They say the Artist will do the entire city, eventually," Ambergris Gentleman said, speaking of Espinoza.

"There would be no room for the fish," Oriana returned, without much enthusiasm.

"Ah, yes, the fish. I suppose we must consider the sea folk as well, and not encroach too much upon their waters."

Oriana lifted a lace-covered hand and tugged at the high neck of her cambric blouse. Usually, her hair could be counted on to cover her neck completely, but the humidity inside the vehicle caused her normally curling locks to lie lank upon her shoulders.

Ambergris Gentleman was named _Duilio_ , she recalled then, a nephew or son of one of the adventurers who'd served the Prince's father in days past. He had limpid brown eyes and a pleasing manner, which made Oriana believe he might be harmless. Hoping to evade further conversation, she settled for repeating a claim she'd read in one of the newspapers. "I imagine an entire city suspended from the bottom of the bay would pose a navigation hazard."

Duilio laughed, his head thrown back, displaying blunt-edged human teeth. "I had no idea you were a wit."

Oriana shifted uncomfortably on the delicate chair. She couldn't tell whether he meant that as a compliment or an insult. Even after two years of living among humans, she still misunderstood at times. Certain he expected a response, she ventured, "I am generally considered quite dull."

Dull in many ways, she knew. On land, her hair appeared a mousy brown with a mauve cast. Her cheeks had no roses in them, and her dark eyes seemed overlarge in her fine-boned face.

"I do wonder if people are mistaken about you." Duilio fidgeted with the fine silk scarf that hung about his neck, old gold against the somber gray of his frock coat. "May I ask, are you not Miss Paredes, companion to Lady Isabel Amaral?"

She would have preferred that Duilio-who-smelled-of-Ambergris didn't remember her. "I was."

He nodded, his eyes going serious. "I hear she's gone abroad. Do you know when she'll return?"

That sounded like an innocent question. Marianus Efisio had left town abruptly, and Isabel's parents believed their daughter had eloped with him. The two had indeed planned so, but everything had gone awry. And Oriana couldn't tell the Amaral family the truth; they would place the blame on her and put her under scrutiny she could ill afford.

"I'm no longer employed in the Amaral household," she said. "I'm afraid I'm not privy to their plans."

_All true_ , but Isabel with her midnight-black hair and alabaster cheeks would never return to the Golden City, for now she dwelled in The City Under the Sea. For a moment, Oriana's mind brought forth that image of Isabel's face, hair streaming about her in the water, her expression frozen between terror and resignation. Oriana opened her eyes and shook her head to drive the memory away.

"My mother has been searching for one for some time," Duilio was saying.

Oriana blinked, uncertain where his incessant words had taken him while her memories held her captive. She glanced up and found herself looking directly into his eyes. They were like a seal's, she decided--clear and guileless. "I beg your pardon?"

He patted the inside pocket of his frock coat and drew out a calling card. "Come by for tea tomorrow and meet her. She'll be expecting you."

"And what should I tell her?" a baffled Oriana asked, allowing him to lay the card on her mittened palm.

He smiled slyly, as if aware she hadn't been listening. "That you would like to be her new companion, of course."

Oriana glanced at the calling card as she tucked it into her bag. _Duilio Ferreira_ , it said, supplying a surname, at least. She made an effort to listen attentively for the remainder of the excursion, aware that his offer might be the only thing that would allow her to stay in the city. She was relieved, though, when he left her side once they emerged from the submersible onto the pier.

She had no reason to trust the man. She could remember little of his reputation save that he moved on the edges of society rather than the center of it, as Isabel had. Certainly, Duilio Ferreira's name had never figured in anything she'd reported to her master.

Her assignment had merely been to monitor the opinions of the nobility toward the sea folk and other waterfolk--a novice's placement, no more. She'd spent her first year working in a dressmaker's shop but then Lady Isabel had befriended her, drawn by the novelty of helping the sea folk's cause--the right of return to a city they'd once shared. So Oriana had spent the last year ensconced in the Amaral household, listening to gossip and reporting it faithfully, although she found little worth hearing there.

And while Isabel might have been capricious and self-absorbed, she had become a _friend_. For that reason Oriana defied her master, staying in the Golden City when he ordered her back out to the islands her people now called home. She _would_ find Isabel's killer--but her minimal funds were almost gone, and she would soon be on the street.

Therefore, the next day she dressed neatly and left her tiny rented room in hopes of securing that position. The Ferreira family lived near the end of the Street of Flowers, so she headed that way carrying her single bag, her heels clicking along the cobbled edge of the road. The autumn wind tried to pluck away her plain straw hat, so she unpinned it and tucked it under one arm as she walked.

The Ferreira mansion was a stately house, dark stone with an aged appearance, as if it had been there as long as the city itself. Oriana pulled the bell chain and then obediently followed an elderly butler through to the front parlor.

Lady Ferreira sat alone there, a wistful expression on her face as she stared out the window in the direction of the sea. Nearing fifty, Oriana guessed, the woman had her son's dark, clear eyes and brown hair. A great beauty, but if Oriana had ever seen her in society before, she couldn't recall it.

"My son told me you would come by," the lady said, once Oriana had introduced herself. "I've not had a companion for a long time. It will be nice to have someone to talk to."

Oriana nodded, surprised that it seemed decided already. The lady's eyes drifted back toward the window, a yearning in them Oriana understood all too well. Their conversation continued in curious fits and starts, as if Lady Ferreira struggled to keep her attention on her visitor. After a time, she rose in a cascade of brown silk and went to stare out the window.

The gray-haired butler came and touched Oriana's elbow. He bowed and softly said, "Miss, I've been instructed to show you your rooms."

Oriana curtsied and retrieved her bag and hat from the table next to the doorway. Lady Ferreira never seemed to note their departure.

#

Duilio Ferreira knocked on the bedroom door again and listened carefully for any movement within. The sounds of the house's pipes told him that his mother's new companion had run a bath, so he unlocked the bedroom door and slipped inside. He had questions that needed answering.

The room was too masculine for a lady's companion, perhaps, but it had a private bath, as did none of the other empty rooms. If he was right about her, she would appreciate that. He strode across the brown figured rug and pressed one ear against the door to the bathing room, but didn't hear anything within.

He flipped through his ring of keys, located the appropriate one, and unlocked the door. Once inside, he gazed down into the oversized porcelain tub. The jangling of the keys must have been muffled by the water, because Oriana Paredes still lay under the surface, her eyes closed.

For a moment, Duilio stared down at her, surprised by her water-changed beauty. Her hair spread about her head, the faint mauve cast transmuted to a burgundy glow. Her skin looked different through the water as well, the paleness of her face become an opal-like iridescence. Her thighs and belly glittered a shimmering silver. He had no doubt then why sailors believed the sea folk to have fish tails.

Her hands moved slowly through the water, no longer obscured by lace mittens. Translucent webbing showed between her long fingers--gloves would not be possible for her. Duilio heard faint humming, as if she sang to herself, the notes muted by the water. On each side of her neck, pink-edged gills vibrated with the sound.

That song could entrap him if she raised her head above the surface--it was said that men would throw themselves into the sea on hearing such a call. As the last thing he needed was to be enslaved to her, he discreetly tapped on the side of the tub with one booted foot.

Still underwater, her dark eyes opened wide.

*

**J. Kathleen Cheney** is a former teacher and has taught mathematics ranging from 7th grade to Calculus, with a brief stint as a Gifted and Talented Specialist. She is a member of SFWA, RWA, and Broad Universe. Her works have been published in Jim Baen's Universe, Writers of the Future, and Fantasy Magazine, among others. Her first novel, _Of Ambergris, Blood, and Brandy_ (the novel-length version of this story) will come out from Ace/Roc in the fall of 2013. Her website can be found at www.jkathleencheney.com

* * *

Excerpt from

Today's Promise

Book three in the Eternal Cycle series

By Danielle Ackley-McPhail

Reprinted with permission from Dark Quest Books, 2012.

The weight of the tension in the hall was oppressive; hushed and packed, with no unnecessary movement. Every member of the elven race the world over had been summoned. No, not summoned. Compelled. Kara had been swept along, driven to follow by an impulse deep within. Though not precisely included in the charge, her way had not been barred. More, she figured, because she'd gone unnoticed, than for any other reason. She made her way to where Maggie stood, careful not to draw attention to herself. Not that that was likely as the Sidhe all stood bound together by tension, every eye drawn to the Great Wall. More than architecture, more than art, that one wall represented the experiences of every Sidhe alive...and ever born. The intricate knotwork went beyond decoration; in color and shape, it grew and changed as the Tuatha de Danaan did. Smaller, isolated patterns she hadn't noticed before bracketed the main pattern.

Curious... She would have to ask Maggie about those later. For now, her eyes continued to take in the Great Wall, in awe of what it represented.

This was the living history of the Sidhe Race. For Bran to be stricken from it for all time was testament to the severity of his offenses. The grave nature of what she was about to witness floored her. Kara's eyes grew wide as she took in the changes that had been made to the Hall.

On the dais in front of the wall, Goibhniu's massive throne was gone from its usual place. Where it had rested, an enormous forged-steel anvil stood ready, ancient, dark and unyielding, like the Smith that worked upon its surface. Here was a stark reminder that the Sidhe had absolutely no problem handling cold iron or its derivatives. Before them was the epitome of all blacksmiths, workers of iron. Goibhniu's expression was completely neutral, as was his voice when he finally spoke. Kara did not find that reassuring.

"Two things the _Daoine Maithé_ honor above all else: kin an' oath. To betray either is to be banned from the Land. To betray both is to be banished from all Lands. The Cursed One has added treachery beyond measure to his crime, betraying not one o' us, but all o' us. As ruler o' this Land an' first betrayed, I invoke the Unraveling."

The pronouncement was a part of the ritual. Though it was no surprise, another collective gasp sounded through the Hall.

"Who bears witness to this betrayal?" The words broke over the Court like a tsunami upon the rocky cliffs. They were echoed by others, each voice terrible in its own right. Kara could not blame them; if one of them could be banished, any of them could. It was natural that they would need the justification.

The collective rulers of the Sidhe Lands spoke.

Kara came forward in an unthinking haze, her feet compelled and her eyes on those now arrayed upon the dais. Some instinct told her to level her eyes down; to bow her head to these who the native people called gods, but they were not her gods and she fought the impulse. If they were offended, it did not show, and Kara continued on with respect and dignity.

As she crossed the Court, hands reached out to hold her back. She felt their outrage, but it did not stop her. There were whispered hisses of "human" and "waterkin" from the crowd and, in front of her, bodies moved to block the way. She lifted her chin and gave them a look completely foreign to the deferential girl she'd once been. For a moment her obstructers glared back, and tension of another sort filled the crowd.

The sound of shifting came from behind her as gasps and grumbles peppered the air. Kara did not look away from those at the fore, but she felt the restraining hands drop off and others replace them with the briefest touches of solidarity. She did not need to look to know the _Sidhe Fianna_ had her back. The tension compounded until the air itself trembled.

Then Kara laughed. She couldn't help it. A trill and a brush of fur about her ankles heralded a flood of kin-cousins invading the hall. They chuckled and cooed and brayed until the chamber echoed with an astounding ruckus. Each would-be adversary was beset by the faelings until they fell back in disgust. When the way was clear, the kin-cousins faded into the background.

From the dais the voices repeated once more, "Who bears witness to this betrayal?"

Kara met their gazes with a respectful nod as she stepped down the path grudgingly opened before her. The Sidhe gods nodded, and Kara continued forward of her own will with confidence and dignity.

"I, Kara O'Keefe, bear witness." Her voice was clear and strong and no louder than conversation. It echoed righteously through the Hall. "I watched as Bran raised the god-killing sword to strike down Goibhniu. With my own magic I yanked the blade from his grip before he could thrust it through Goibhniu's back."

The uproar was deafening. Kara blocked it out. She breathed steady and deep, her eyes focused unwavering upon the dais. Over the raging of the Court, another voice rose clear and unyielding, "I bear witness," Aí said. "From the battlefield I watched this take place."

On the tail of his words, ten others moved forward, the woman at their fore small and delicate, even by Sidhe standards. "The Seers bear witness, all graced with visions o' these deeds."

The crowd went hushed on an indrawn breath. Outrage faded, replaced by awe. Whoever this petite woman was, her word had considerably more heft than Kara's. It shouldn't matter, but Kara stiffened with resentment.

As one, those on the dais nodded. "By the word o' all these trusted witnesses," Goibhniu's voice rang out, "an' by the visions o' the Seers, judgment is called upon the Cursed One: the Unraveling."

The occupants of the dais echoed the last two words, as did the Court. Kara found herself mouthing them as well. She watched in fascination as the Smithgod picked up his hammer and a bar of cold, hard steel. After moments in his bare hand the bar stock glowed the cherry red of metal pulled fresh from the forge, though none was in sight. Stock was laid to anvil and hammer to stock. Over and over, Goibhniu brought down his hammer; _TAP TAP TAP_ as sparks flew from the god-heated metal. It was not long before the blade of a dagger took shape. The raw end of the bar became a crude hilt bearing the impression of Goibhniu's fist clenched around it.

The hammer made one final _TAP,_ and Goibhniu plunged the completed blade into the bucket beside him. The dais disappeared behind a billowing shroud of steam carrying the scent of hot metal. The Court hissed along with the doused blade. Goibhniu whipped the dagger through the air, held aloft for all to see and, though it hardly seemed possible, the silence deepened with a roar that told Kara what it would sound like for bare steel to split an atom. It was almost easy to believe the fury of a god was in that sound—felt more than heard.

Kara jerked in reaction, but her gaze remained fixed on the dagger. Though she stood no closer than halfway to the dais, she could sense a presence in that weapon. Somehow, it was familiar to her. Before Kara could puzzle out why, she was distracted. Her attention—along with that of every being in the Court—was captivated as Goibhniu moved.

Still holding the new-forged blade high, he turned and set the point upon a section of the massive knotwork engraving the Great Wall. Kara's chest tightened as she watched, and unexpected pity dulled the edges of her satisfaction. That knotwork was more than pretty decoration, certainly more than symbolic. The intricate engraving was directly linked to the life-force of every Sidhe, from the womb to the grave and back again. It documented each lifetime, for good or ill. Bran's was twisted and colored in sullen and malevolent shades, but still beautiful. Goibhniu traced the section with the blade tip, taking meticulous care, not missing one line, and never straying beyond where he intended. Kara felt a faint tingle as color began to leach from the pattern. When he completed the circuit, the blade was passed to the next upon the dais. Each of the rulers followed suit as the dagger moved from one to the other's hand. Gradually she noticed all the fae moved forward to form something of a queue. Some moved with conviction, others grudgingly.

Her body was abuzz as the Sidhe took their turns. She felt the urge to either flee all together or fall in line. Her choice was to step forward, but once more a hand restrained her. She jerked away and her head snapped around, heated gaze locking with regretful.

"'Tis'na yer place, love," Maggie murmured as the rest of the Sidhe steadily streamed by. "Only the _Daoine Maithé_ may take part in the ritual. Only kin can banish kin."

_But not waterkin,_ Kara's heart added into the uncomfortable pause; a seed of bitterness was planted.

This was wrong. Kara wanted to argue. Soul-deep, something told her Maggie was wrong. She couldn't even say which part of the statement was flawed, but the realization came with an edge of panic. Then her friend was letting go, moving past to join the procession herself. Kara's teeth ached as her tension grew. The urge to step forward was beyond a compulsion; it had the solid edge of conviction. There was something they had missed. But no...she was not permitted. Again she was left out, yet she was as much a part of this as any of them.

Though her nerves continued to scream in protest, she kept her place.

When the need to take part grew overwhelming, Kara glanced away, her gaze wandering the Hall. She was somewhat startled to note that she was not alone in her exclusion; scattered about the Court were a double handful of men and women with the features and essence of Sidhe, but something more of her world about them. All of them, including her, wore flowing tunic and loose, silken pants, with long, wide sashes crossing one shoulder before circling their waists; the only variance in the outfits was color. The style was not dissimilar to what many of the Court wore, lacking only the embellishment that set apart those in personal garb. None of them looked particularly comfortable in what most resembled pajamas, to her. Kara imagined her expression closely resembled theirs.

After a bit of thought, she knew who they were: the Cosaints. The Hidden Ones, the Sidhe raised as human, who were not a part of the main pattern on the Wall, making them full blood-kin, but not Kin. Likely if she were to count the smaller patterns she noticed earlier, they would pair with each of these people, barring one left over for the kidnapped Agnieszka.

There was one other outsider among the gathered. Perched on the tall base of a far column was one of the Rom, at his feet sat one of the faelings. A dark fellow wearing the form of a mostly black tabby. She shivered at the look on the gypsy's face, the intent way he watched her. He made her nerves twitch even more. Kara looked away, back to the Unraveling.

She shivered again and this time it had nothing to do with the gypsy man.

It was the way she imagined a spider felt when something tangled in its web. Her gaze focused on the Great Wall. The more Sidhe that traced Bran's pattern, the more Kara noticed that the colors drained away.

*

Award-winning author **Danielle Ackley-McPhail** has worked both sides of the publishing industry for over seventeen years. Her works include the urban fantasies, _Yesterday's Dreams_ , _Tomorrow's Memories_ , the upcoming _Today's Promise_ , and _The Halfling's Court_ , and the writers guide, _The Literary Handyman_. She edits the _Bad-Ass Faeries_ anthologies and _Dragon's Lure_ , and has contributed to numerous other anthologies.

She can be found on LiveJournal (damcphail, lit_handyman), Facebook (Danielle Ackley-McPhail), and Twitter (DMcPhail). Learn more at www.sidhenadaire.com.

* * *

Quiz

By Nancy Jane Moore

1. You are hiking through Virginia on the Appalachian Trail in mid-October. The leaves are turning, the aggressive red of the maples outshining the golds and browns. The air smells clean and fresh, and you can hear the geese as they pass over on their way south, so you let yourself think that you're really deep in the wilderness instead of a mile or two off Skyline Drive, where a steady stream of cars and campers is conveying thousands of people to view the fall colors.

At the top of a steep hill, you stop, ostensibly to admire the view but actually to catch your breath. There, just to your right, under a towering oak, sits a well-stuffed easy chair covered in rich brown leather. It comes complete with a matching ottoman and a side table containing a cut glass decanter, a brandy snifter, and a plate of chocolate truffles. Next to the plate is something that resembles a television remote control.

Do you:

(a) Pretend the chair isn't there and hustle down the hill to continue your hike?

(b) Pull out your cell phone and call the park rangers to come immediately remove this item that does not belong in the National Forest?

(c) Sit down on the chair, eat one of the truffles (noticing the rich dark flavor of the chocolate, the hint of almond), pour a little brandy into the snifter, and lean back to enjoy the view? And then, after a few minutes, pick up the remote control and wonder what might happen if you punch the channel selector?

2. You are walking down the street in the business district of a major American city, wearing your dress-for-success business suit (black, but with a daring red blouse), carrying a briefcase, headed for a meeting in which you must make a major presentation, complete with Power Point slides. You come to a small gap between two towering office buildings and see not the expected alley with garbage cans and perhaps a homeless person or two sleeping in cardboard boxes, but a tree, trunk perhaps five or six feet in diameter, extending as high as the skyscrapers around it. Big, thick limbs come off the tree every few feet, growing out to touch the buildings before redirecting skyward.

You look up, and see several tree houses among the branches. The lowest one is a simple platform – like a child might build in a backyard tree – but higher up you see one painted red and decorated with Chinese symbols in gold, and another covered with shingles that appears to go several stories. Several boards hammered into the trunk provide a crude staircase up to the first platform.

Do you:

(a) Pretend it isn't there and hurry off to get to your business meeting on time?

(b) Pull out your cell phone and call the mayor's office to get someone to come and do something about this at once?

(c) Put down your briefcase, take off your pumps, and climb up the steps to the Chinese platform, finding a pot of freshly made green tea and a device that looks like it might be an electronic version of an abacus? Sit on a cushion, pour yourself a cup of the tea, and pick up the abacus?

3. Your sister is hosting the family for Thanksgiving at her home in the suburbs. She's stuck in the kitchen with your mother, her mother-in-law, three aunts, and an uncle, meaning you'd just be in the way. The rest of the adults are yelling at football games on television. The teenagers are in the basement playing video games, and the younger kids are running through the house playing a game that seems to be more about screaming than anything else.

You slip out to go for a walk in the brisk November air. Your sister's street is a block of almost new brick homes with large, well-tended front yards and trim all painted the same basic white. At the end of the block is a playground, containing the usual mix of swing sets and slides. But in one corner stands a rocket ship made of dull gray steel, pointed toward the sky. It looks as if it belongs on the cover of a 1950s science fiction magazine. There is a rickety set of stairs leading to a door in the side of the ship.

Do you:

(a) Pretend it isn't there and walk quickly back to your sister's house to watch the football game?

(b) Pull out your cell phone and call the police to demand that someone come and remove this dangerous object from the playground at once?

(c) Climb into the rocket, find a spacesuit, put it on? Sit down in front of a control panel, fasten your seat belt, and study a complicated keyboard with any number of levers and switches and a big red button?

Results:

If you mostly answered (a), just move along. Nothing to see here.

If you mostly answered (b), you are to be congratulated for taking the time out of your busy life to fix all the problems you see around you. Though, it's pretty obvious why so many people think you're an officious busybody.

If you mostly answered (c), clearly your mind is not bothered by things that ought not be. Enjoy your excursions, but be forewarned. If you change the channel on the remote control, you might find yourself in the Amazon instead of on the Appalachian Trail. If you make adjustments to the abacus, you will find a completely different city when you climb back down the tree.

Someone with your willingness to try new things has probably already guessed what happens if you punch the red button.

*

**Nancy Jane Moore** 's most recent book is _Flashes of Illumination_ , an ebook collection of short-short stories released in August 2011 by Book View Café. Her other books include the collection _Conscientious Inconsistencies_ , published by PS Publishing, and the novella _Changeling_ , available in print from Aqueduct Press and in e-book form from Book View Cafe. Her short stories have appeared most recently in the military SF anthology _No Man's Land_ and the two _Shadow Conspiracy_ steampunk anthologies from Book View Café. She has studied martial arts for more than 30 years and has a fourth degree black belt in Aikido.

* * *

Today There is No Pain

By Justine Graykin

On Monday, June 23rd, Doctor Professor Uberman shut down his computer and turned off his cell phone. He left his iPad, lanyard and badge, wallet and keys on the table in the hall and went through the sliding glass doors, across the deck, and down into the back yard.

The weather was fair. It had not rained for several days. The ground was dry. He sat down on it. Today, there would be no pain.

The wind blew dust across the yard, raising particles of the dead from a hundred thousand years. Invisible waves passed through the air, through Uberman's body, ripples of electromagnetic radiation modulated into data. Voices, images, rumors of miracles, warnings of terror. His senses could not detect them; his brain could not decode them. He could imagine they did not exist.

The umbilicus was severed from the unending demands of Moloch. Today, Uberman would be unaware of messages, news, emergencies. Today, there would be no pain.

He lay on his stomach, flat upon the grass, feeling gravity hold him against the earth. Before his eyes, single drops of dew on the tips of tiny leaves refracted rainbows. He allowed his eyes to blur all else around, behind, ahead. There was just this prism of color, fleeting, infinite.

A small movement refocused his eyes onto a spider. Within the intricate chemical clockwork of that alien body were strands of genetic material that duplicated his own. Somewhere down that strobe-flash of incalculable days, a creature spawned siblings that would diverge, procreate, a million upon a million times over, to become someday, a spider and a man. They were distant kin.

Every righteous crusade, every rendezvous with destiny, all the thunder and drum of human achievement, was compressed by geological time into a wafer. Uberman looked into the eyes of the spider, an event equally important as any other human act.

Vibrations jarred the air and struck his ears, traveling the complex, organic Rube Goldberg machine inside his head to inform him that people had arrived at the house behind him. People who wanted his attention, who insisted he must care about their concerns. Today, he would not oblige. Today, there would be no pain.

The spider, with her tiny shared fragments of nucleic acids, moved closer. But she did not want his attention. She had found an insect with which to fuel her continued existence.

He thought, did once some monkish scholar do as I am doing? Helpless to make sense of the plague that raised mounds of the pious and profane alike, horrified by the wars claimed just and necessary by the princes, baffled by sanctified corruption in the holiest cathedrals, did he go out to work among the vines, to distance himself from it all, his mind perhaps focusing on the mysterious, infinite Divine? Might he, like St. Francis, have smiled fraternally at a playful squirrel?

Uberman stood up and began walking, away from the house.

He came across a brook and he stopped to contemplate the rushing of water, like moments, past him. He observed the shadows of bending trees moving over the surface of a pool, observed the drama of dragonflies, water striders, minnows and frogs, followed the swirl of liquid and foam over the rocks, marveling at its beauty, marveling at the staggeringly intricate mathematical formulae that governed its motion. The angle of the light changes; the atmosphere refracts the sunlight to infuse more reds and oranges. Such a glory!

Archimedes invented the catapult; Einstein invented the Bomb. There is no such thing as pure science.

But today, today, there is no pain. Today, he would not confront the arrogant faces who heard only part of what he told them, who understood none of the implications, only what was of immediate use to them. They would come and reconnect him, but not today.

Today, he would not serve Moloch. Today the flag would go unsaluted. Today, he would walk, then sit, then walk again, mindful of each eternity.

*

**Justine Graykin** is a writer and free-lance philosopher sustained by her deep, abiding faith in Science and Humanity -- well, Science, anyway – and the belief that humor is the best anti-gravity device. She's a copy editor for Broad Universe's _Broadsheet_ and produces the monthly Broad Pod, and is a contributing editor for _Reality Skimming_. She lives with 1 husband, 2 kids, 2 dogs, too many cats and a flock of chickens on 50 acres in New Hampshire, occasionally disappearing into the White Mountains with a backpack. Find her at justinegraykin.com.

* * *

Bride of Tranquility

By Tracy S. Morris

Bride of Tranquility is a murder mystery set in a haunted hotel during a Renaissance wedding. The book's main protagonist is Jake Coletrane, the only police officer in Tranquility, Arkansas. At the start of this scene, Jake is meeting his fiancée, Rachel, and his wedding planner for a pre-wedding planning session.

Rachel's wedding planner called himself Lord Valentine, but his real name was Bob. When he wasn't wearing tights and strutting around like a—man who wore tights for fun and recreational purposes—he pumped gas at the local gas station. But Jake wasn't fooled. Even when "Bob" was giving him a fill up and washing his windshield, Jake could see Lord Valentine peeking out.

The way Jake figured it, the real person inhabiting that Bob shaped hole in the world _was_ Lord Valentine. Bob was just a cover so that Lord Valentine could get by in the world when he couldn't wear his tights and have people address him as Lord.

Rachel found him the way a lot of desperate brides with fantasy wedding hopes found him: at the local Renaissance Faire. There, he put on a last-minute wedding each day for eight solid weekends— and collected enough referrals to keep him busy planning weddings the rest of the year.

Rachel got his card, and then dragged Jake to a "Lord Valentine Original" wedding. There, he saw plenty of women wearing corsets who had no business wearing corsets. Or rather, they should be wearing corsets, but under their clothes, where decent women wore their underwear, not out for the entire world to see, with parts of them spilling out everywhere.

Jake was still having nightmares about that. It gave new meaning to the phrase "poured into that dress."

Other than the expansive tracts of land, so to speak, Jake saw a very embarrassed young groom, who normally wore jeans with holes in them, get henpecked into a pair of tights, a speedo and something that Lord Valentine called a doublet. Jake wasn't sure what folks in the Renaissance had for wearing their underwear on the outside, but he planned to ask this Lord Valentine when he and Rachel met with the guy today.

The ballroom where the wedding was to take place was huge, with floor-to-ceiling windows along one wall and the same polished pine covering the floor and trimming every surface.

"Isn't it gorgeous, Jake?" Rachel asked.

Jake was more interested in all the people already in the room. Six of them. At one hundred dollars a person.

"Who are all these people?" He hugged the corner as he looked around the room like a bobble-headed doll.

"My retinue!" Lord Valentine said, with an expansive gesture.

"I thought you said there were three of them."

Lord Valentine stopped, counted on his fingers, and then counted noses of the people in the room. Then he smiled toothily at Jake.

"Ah, a mere trifle."

Jake shook his head.

"Let it go, Jake." Rachel cocked a hip and put a hand on it. "If Lord Valentine thinks we need all these people to help us, then who are we to argue?"

"Only the folks paying the bill," Jake muttered.

"La!" Lord Valentine clapped his hands. He moved to stand between a heavyset couple that looked, to Jake, like they belonged in a movie about King Henry VIII. "This is Lady Margaret, and the Duke of Earl."

Jake blinked. "Wasn't that—"

"Yes, yes! Moving right along." Lord Valentine's expression pleaded with Jake not to ask. Jake shrugged. As far as he was concerned, Val had earned a free pass with the carriage thing.

"Next, we have Lord Doug and Lady Elane." Lord Valentine stood next to a couple who looked like they'd just escaped from the set of The Three Musketeers.

"Lord Doug?"

"It's a work in progress," Lord Doug said. "I'm actually thinking of changing it to—"

"No time! Moving along." Lord Valentine cut him off with an impatient wave. He put his arm around a man in a pirate's hat. "This is Captain Morgan of the Jolly Parrot."

"Arrrr." Captain Morgan nodded to them.

Jake gave the captain a cautious look. "And he is?"

"The best bartender that ever lived," Captain Morgan said with a wink.

"You do know we live in a dry county, don't you?" Jake said.

"Arrr?" Captain Morgan looked surprised.

"And that I'm the town's cop."

"Not to worry, mate-y. I'll see that your wedding be dry. . . insofar as anyone would notice."

"Now, listen—" Jake said.

"And moving right along," Lord Valentine interrupted, before Jake could launch into a tirade. He pointed to a gentleman in a viking style, horned helmet. "This is Monk."

Monk leered at Rachel. "Pleased to meet you."

Jake pulled Lord Valentine aside. "He's part of your group?"

Lord Valentine gave him a look that said that he was definitely part of the group. "But, of course."

"Not very Renaissance-y, is he?"

"We need Monk for the heavy lifting."

"You're not going to wear the horns during the ceremony, are you?" Rachel asked him with a frown.

Monk looked offended. "They're traditional."

"Traditionally what?" Rachel crossed her arms.

Lord Valentine made a placating gesture with his hands. "We typically let Monk keep track of _les enfants_ during the ceremonies."

"You're kidding, right?" Jake looked at the behemoth in the Viking getup. "He watches kids?"

" _Oui."_ Lord Valentine said. "He is most effective with the ring toss. And if you tie ribbons to his helm, he is quite an enjoyable maypole."

"Okay," Jake said. "Maypole. Gotcha." Mentally, he made a note to remind Rachel to have Average spread the word around the diner: leave the kids at home.

"Just so." Lord Valentine nodded. "We should sit now, and go through the ceremony."

"Just a sec, Val." Jake held a hand up. He took Rachel by the arm and pulled her aside. "Honey, you sure about this?" he whispered. Rachel gave Jake a patient look. "We've been through this, Jake. Horace has you working down at the station right up until the day of the wedding, and between getting the vet practice ready for my absence and moving into the house with you and your boy, Tommy, I've got to have some help planning this thing."

"Yeah, but hon, he keeps tacking on these charges. I mean, six helpers? Who needs six helpers?"

Rachel raised an eyebrow at him. "Can't you just—I don't know—play lotto and come up with the cash?"

Jake pressed his lips into a thin line and exhaled slowly through his nose. "You know I don't like to abuse my luck that way."

"Oh, no!" She threw her hands up. "You like to save it for times when we're being shot at."

"Now, that's hitting below the belt, sweetheart!" Jake stabbed his finger at her.

Just then, a knock on the door interrupted their conversation.

"What now?" Jake turned to see Sarah, the hotel's manager, stick her head in. He noted that the fair-skinned girl seemed paler than usual. Instantly, the policeman in him kicked in.

"Sarah? What's wrong?"

"Jake, is Dr. Dave still here?"

"Still?" Jake asked.

"I gave him a tour of the basement, earlier," Sarah said. "They were headed back to town, but I hoped that he had come up here to say goodbye before he left, and that I could catch him. I need his medical services."

"We haven't seen him," Rachel said.

Sarah swallowed convulsively. Her eyes darted from Jake to Rachel with a measuring look. Then she looked at the motley crew of wedding planners. "Well, then, Rachel better come quick," she said. "A vet is better than nothing, at this point."

"What's going on?" Rachel asked.

"It's Mr. Prunella."

"What's wrong with him?" Rachel's voice rose an octave.

"He sat down on a chair over in the gift shop and fell asleep. Now, I can't wake him."

_To read more, you can purchase Bride of Tranquility from Yard Dog Press at_ <http://www.yarddogpress.com/Bride%20of%20Tranquility.htm>_, or from Amazon.com_

*

**Tracy S. Morris** lives with her daughter, husband and two dogs in Springdale Arkansas. The dogs used to be in charge, but the baby recently staged a coup. You can find her on the web at http:// www.tracysmorris.com

* * *

Excerpt from

Mind Over Mind

By Karina Fabian

Reprinted with permission from Dragon Moon Press.

"So, how did you know I was Catholic?" Joshua challenged gently, instead. "And don't give that 'I'm psychic' crap. I want to know what process."

"Big on process, aren't you?" The words were harsh, but his posture hadn't changed much. Certainly not to the tensed-up straightness Joshua had noticed when Ydrel was feeling defensive. Ydrel sighed and thought. Again, his pupils contracted and moved as he reviewed the memory. Joshua leaned forward. That was so weird.

"There was music," Ydrel started, then in a high tenor, sang, " _Panis Angelicus, fit panis nominum._ You were kind of sad because you weren't playing for the choir. There was this lady holding a gold cup—a chalice, I guess it's called. I don't think she was a nun or anything, but she was old. She said, 'Blood of Christ' and her voice shook. And the wine—I don't know, is it good stuff? It was awful strong and sour. A little...spicy?" Ydrel made a face. He shut his eyes. When he opened them, his pupils were back to normal, slightly dilated against the light of the room. "Good enough for you?"

Joshua's reply was hoarse. "Great." It was, in fact, a frighteningly accurate account of last week's communion—in Pueblo, Colorado. He began to understand the way Ydrel's aunt had looked at him today. He took a slow breath, trying to cleanse himself of the thoughts and feelings inside. He could sort out his internal signals later; right now he needed to be aware of the externals. "Uptime," Bandler and Grinder called it; being wholly aware and reacting to what was going on outside you, rather than listening to the internal messages. He noticed Ydrel had leaned forward, head in hands. His shoulders were tight and hunched. His breathing was shallow and a little fast. "You all right?"

"Yeah. I will be. I don't usually go into someone else's mind like that, not willingly, anyway. It makes me dizzy, being in two bodies at once. So, do you believe me now?"

"No idea." It was a totally unconsidered, completely honest answer. "But does it really matter? My belief isn't going to get you out of here—nor, for that matter, is my friendship."

"So hope isn't the cure?"

"Do you believe it is?" When he got no answer, Joshua continued. "I think hope helps, but it's neither necessary nor sufficient."

"So how do you cure a psychic?" Ydrel challenged, eyes still buried in the heels of his hands. The tension in his wrists seemed less, so Joshua met the challenge with a direct and honest answer.

"Same way I'd cure a schizophrenic, or someone with Dissociative Identity Disorder or phobias, or whatever: give them the tools they need to make it in society despite their condition. You can do it, and I can show you how."

Now Ydrel laughed. "Talk about arrogance! I've been here five years and no one's been able to—quote—break my illusion. What makes you so special?" His voice had a snide tone, yet he sat forward, and his face was alive with interest. Joshua felt a spark of excitement but ignored it, instead leaning forward, himself. For a while now, he'd been matching Ydrel's breathing, using the rapport they'd established to calm him. Now, he increased the pace of his own, bringing some enthusiasm into his posture as he did to his words. He sat up, waving a hand before him and setting it on his lap as he spoke.

"I'm not trying to break any illusion. It doesn't matter if you're psychic. It doesn't matter if you think you're Joan of Arc. What matters is being able to effectively handle yourself around people so they don't get this urge to toss you in an institution. I mean, there're lots of people who claim they're psychic. They have conventions, and everything. So why is it they're out there and you're in here?"

"They're fakes!" Ydrel suddenly exploded. "You have no idea what it's really like, when somebody's thinking or feeling something really strongly or you have several people feeling the same thing and you get so overwhelmed and you find yourself acting out their desires—only they can keep control and you're—I'm—just lost! There was this new teacher—gorgeous, really incredible—and on the first day of school, she comes in wearing a tight blouse and mini-skirt—I practically leapt a desk to get at her because that's what all the other guys were thinking about doing. That's what being psychic is."

"Really." Surprised, Joshua dropped the posture and breathing, but he managed to pay attention to the eyes. It happened so fast, but yes, it was there: that pinpoint contraction of the pupils. What was that?

Ydrel looked down, ran a hand through his long blond hair and pulled. "I was twelve. I didn't even know if I liked girls. I still don't. It took two students and a faculty member to pull me off. And it just got worse. I couldn't be around happy people without laughing hysterically. And if people were angry..." He took a deep breath and let it out in a gust. "After I—I tried to kill myself, my aunt and uncle brought me here." He gave a short laugh. "I guess I should be thankful. At least Malachai was able to teach me to put up some barriers."

"But they're not enough?"

"Obviously. Did Edith tell you about the one time they did release me? The first thing I did was smash all the bottles in my uncle's liquor cabinet because the butler—yes, Joshua, they have a butler—is an alcoholic and was obsessing on it, had been obsessing on it for years. It was that or drink myself stupid, just because _he_ wanted to. That was nothing. My aunt took me shopping. All those people, all those thoughts...It was like ants crawling in my skull. I was just managing to ignore them, and I felt this woman screaming—"

"'Felt?'"

"Yeah, felt. Inside my head. I couldn't help it. I snuck away from my aunt, followed the thoughts—she was so scared!—I found her in a part of the mall that was being renovated. This guy had her pinned. He was going to—" Ydrel broke off.

"What did you do?" Joshua asked.

Ydrel shivered. "Beat him unconscious. Then I tried to knock myself out, too. See, he was so full of hate, and he wanted to— So I did, too. And the girl tried to stop me and I yelled at her and scared her all over again and I tried to run but the police showed up. So I ended up back here, where the environment, at least, is controlled, even if it isn't exactly normal. Even then, it's not always safe for me. Sometimes, Malachai puts someone in the room next to me...to study my reaction, sometimes to punish me." He looked up and his eyes were wide with fear. "I've got to get out of here, Joshua. It's not safe for me anymore."

Joshua was beginning to think it wasn't safe for him, either. The last thing he needed on his internship was to get caught up in some problem between a patient he wasn't supposed to be taking on, and the head of the institution—a friend of his father. Still...Earlier, when Ydrel had laughed at the idea of Joshua helping him, Joshua had moved his arm in a very deliberate way. Now he used that same motion to recall those feelings of hope and interest Ydrel had expressed. He waited as Ydrel calmed, watching him take a shaky breath and release his hold on his hair, his fingers running through the length, before he spoke again.

"We'll work on it, Ydrel."

The younger man nodded.

"OK. You have some barriers. You've said that they work sometimes. I want you to think about one thing that keeps you here that your current barriers don't protect you from." He couldn't see Ydrel's eyes, for the patient had shut them, but waited for other cues.

"When my barriers work sometimes, or not at all?"

"Your choice."

"The Miscria."

"You don't have to tell—the what?" Curiosity got the better of him.

"The Miscria. It calls me, and when it does, I can't help it—I fall into this trance. I can be doing anything, even walking, and just—boom. Then I have to tell it everything it wants to know before it lets me go with some new assignment, and for weeks I'm studying God-knows-what, until it calls me again."

"You've lost me."

"Information, Joshua." Ydrel opened his eyes and waved impatiently to the pile of books on his desk.

Joshua walked over and examined the covers. "The Miscria wants to know military history?"

"Tactics. Swordsmithing. Triage. Medieval fortress architecture. So I go cra—I have to learn everything I can about the subject, and it just wants more. At least we have a good librarian. He humors me, you know."

Joshua set down the book he was leafing through: _Eye in the Sky, A Warfighter's Guide to Space Reconnaissance_ , by Felix Monroe. "So this 'Miscria' calls you, you pass out in your oatmeal, and you tell it everything you know about whatever subject it's told you to study? So...ever refuse?"

Ydrel blinked. "I— But, it needs to know."

"Why? Ever ask it?"

Now Ydrel sat forward, dumbfounded. "I...It never occurred to me to ask."

"How about going inside yourself and asking it now?"

Ydrel shut his eyes, furrowed his brow. Joshua stayed standing by the desk, watching the young man first tense completely, then seem to relax every muscle, much the way someone under hypnosis would relax while remaining straight in their seat. Several minutes passed in silence before Ydrel shook his head. "I can't. It has to call me."

"Then that's your first assignment. When it calls you, try this: First, see if you can establish some kind of arrangement so that it doesn't call you at inconvenient times—you decide together what that means. Second, find out more about it, like why it needs this information so badly."

"What if it refuses?"

"That's really up to you. Myself, I'd hold out. Blackmail can work wonders."

Ydrel met his eyes in a steady gaze, not challenging and not trying to see into him, yet searching. "You don't believe me about the Miscria, do you? You think it's some weird part of my unconscious. You don't believe it's an outside entity."

Joshua moved his hand as part of a shrug. It was a visual anchor he'd used many times, and it was a natural movement for him. "It doesn't matter either way. The process works the same. Just give it a try. You don't have anything to lose."

*

**Karina Fabian** breathes fire, battles zombies with chainsaws and window cleaner, travels to the edge of the solar system to recover alien artifacts, and has been driven insane by psychic abilities. It's what makes being an author such fun. She won the 2010 INDIE Award for best fantasy ( _Magic, Mensa and Mayhem_ ) and the Global E-Book Award for best horror ( _Neeta Lyffe, Zombie Exterminator_ ). She's an active member of Broad Universe and the Catholic Writers' Guild, and teaches writing and marketing. When not writing, she enjoys her family and swings a sword around in haidong gumbdo. Learn more at http://fabianspace.com

* * *

Excerpt from

Threaded Through Time (Book One)

By Sarah Ettritch

Margaret paced the length of her bedroom, dreading the knock at the door that could come at any minute. Why did she feel this way? Her married and engaged friends were thrilled for her, and her single friends were envious of her. Mother looked as if she were having heart palpitations every time she spoke his name. Father's eyes shone every time the subject was raised at the dinner table. The only one who wasn't excited was Margaret. And she should be! She was about to receive what every young lady desired: a marriage proposal, and from Jasper Bainbridge.

Oh, the hearts that had broken when he'd invited her to the annual merchants' ball. That evening had been followed by the theatre, walks in the park, and quiet lunches in upscale cafés. When the invitation to dine with his family had arrived, she'd known it was only a matter of time. Then, one afternoon last week, she'd returned home from a carriage ride with Helena in time to see Father shaking Jasper's hand on the doorstep.

Helena's mouth had formed an "O", and she'd quickly ordered the coachman to circle the block. "Congratulations, Margaret," she'd crowed, her eyes bright with excitement. "I wonder what the engagement ring will look like. A diamond, surely. Lord knows, he can afford it!"

Margaret had hoped her answering smile didn't look sickly. She'd sat in silence as Helena prattled on about when Jasper might propose, whether they'd marry in the chapel near the Bainbridge Estate, and who would be on the guest list. "I wonder if you'll beat me and Teddy to the altar?" Helena had mused. Then she'd nudged Margaret's arm. "Aren't you excited? You're going to become Mrs. Jasper Bainbridge!"

Yes, her fate had been sealed by a handshake. Jasper would _ask_ her to marry him, but the question would be rhetorical. It would be scandalous to say no, and if she dared to respond that way, her parents would never speak to her again.

It wasn't that she didn't like Jasper. She enjoyed his company, shared his views on many issues of the day, and trusted him. But she didn't love him, and was starting to wonder if there was something wrong with her. She'd lied her way through all the breathless conversations with her friends about the boys, and then men, they'd kissed. To hear them talk, the kiss—touch—of a man produced some kind of delirious and pleasant state that couldn't be achieved through any other activity. Everyone always squealed in recognition as they listened to a girlfriend describe her bliss when her date had passionately kissed her good night. Margaret squealed and nodded too, but felt nothing but bewilderment. When she kissed a man, or accepted a proffered arm, she didn't feel blissful, or dreamy, or the titillating heat in her nether regions that Susanne always experienced on evenings out with Stephen. Nor did Margaret feel repulsed. She felt nothing. Nothing at all.

When she and Jasper kissed, her lips—and the rest of her—felt dead, and when she slipped her arm through his, she felt no different than when she slipped her arm through Grandmother's. It wasn't him; no male evoked the blissful state her friends raved about.

But she couldn't refuse his proposal. She was already twenty-three, and didn't want to delay marriage any longer. Jasper would be kind; he would take care of her, and perhaps allow her to study at university—after she'd provided the requisite heir to the Bainbridge fortune. She, in turn, would be a dutiful wife and take care of him. As for love . . . she had to believe it would grow between them. He was certainly more interesting than all the other men she'd dated, and they _were_ friends. Surely, that was a solid foundation for marriage?

When a footman had arrived yesterday with Jasper's card, announcing his intent to visit and asking for confirmation that she'd be home, Margaret had known what would take place. Mother hadn't been able to sit still all day, and as the Wiltons' two housemaids had dusted and polished in the drawing room, they'd chattered about the upcoming proposal and the celebrations that would follow. If only Margaret could feel as excited!

She turned to the full-length mirror and displayed a broad smile. "Why yes, Jasper, I would love to marry you!" Her smile wilted. But what else could she do?

Margaret tensed when she heard the expected knock. "Yes?" she called, then raised her brows when Mother swung the door open, rather than a housemaid.

"He's here," Mother hissed. She pressed her hands together as if praying, and studied Margaret. "Oh, my baby. My sweet, sweet baby." In a rare display of affection, she grasped Margaret's shoulders and pressed her cheek against hers. "Go on, now. Don't make him wait." Her eyes were moist when she stepped back.

"Yes, Mother."

Margaret descended the stairs to the drawing room, her heart sinking with each step. She briefly entertained the notion that perhaps she'd misinterpreted the handshake and the footman's visit, that everyone's excitement was misguided. After all, Father had never told her that Jasper had requested his permission to propose. But he'd told Mother, and her demeanour since then, especially her exuberant anticipation of Jasper's visit, had told everyone else.

One look at Jasper chased away the last shred of hope to which Margaret still clung. He normally exuded an air of confidence, but not today. He paced the drawing room, his hands clasped behind his back and his eyes on his feet. Not wanting to embarrass him, Margaret stepped away from the doorway and cleared her throat. When she entered the room, he smiled and stepped toward her. "Margaret."

She extended her hand. He gently held her fingers and brushed his lips against her skin. "So nice to see you," he murmured.

"And you, Jasper. Would you like me to ring for tea?"

"Not yet." His Adam's apple bobbed; his eyes closed as he gathered his courage. Margaret reminded herself that she couldn't refuse him. What would she do? She had no money of her own, and no desire to work outside the home. Father's property would go to her brothers. They'd likely see to her needs, but the stigma . . . the sense of failure . . . Mother and Father expected grandchildren.

Jasper opened eyes now bright. He shifted his weight. "Margaret . . . darling . . . ever since our first evening together at the merchant's ball, my life has been blessed. Lately, I find myself looking forward to our times together with an unbearable yearning. I admire your keen wit. You are pleasing to me in every way." Margaret's face flushed when his eyes left hers and travelled down her body, lingering an extra second on her breasts. He lifted his gaze, then dropped to one knee and pulled a small box from his inner jacket pocket. "Margaret, I would like nothing more than to have you as my wife." He lifted the box's lid and held the ring out to her. "Will you marry me?"

Her hand went to her throat; she stared at the glittering diamond. "Jasper—" A wave of nausea doubled her over. She clutched her stomach, surprised at the intensity of her physical reaction to Jasper's proposal. She felt as if she were being pulled in ten different directions, and shot out one hand to steady herself. Then, as quickly as it had begun, her discomfort passed. Gasping for air, she silently chided herself for being weak and childish. Jasper would think her mad! And be hurt. She must apologize, blame it on nerves, and accept his proposal.

"Margaret!"

She could hear the fear in Jasper's voice and raised her head to reassure him that she was all right. But . . . nothing was as it should be. Jasper had straightened and was wildly glancing around, his expression mirroring her confusion. What—

"Holy shit!"

Margaret turned toward the foreign voice. A wide-eyed and oddly clad woman sat in a chair, an open book on her lap. "Robin, get your ass down here, now!" she shouted.

Margaret shrank into Jasper and screamed.

*

**Sarah** **Ettritch** writes science fiction and fantasy stories featuring strong female characters. Her protagonists are often (but not always) lesbian.

Sarah Ettritch lives in Toronto with her lovely partner and their four cats. She's the author of the Rymellan series, _The Salbine Sisters_ , and _Threaded Through Time_.

In addition to writing, Sarah enjoys reading, playing computer games, and following publishing news. She belongs to several organizations related to writing and publishing, including Broad Universe and EPIC.

Find out more about Sarah at http://www.sarahettritch.com.

* * *

Drowning

By Katherine Sanger

I dreamed of water. A day at the beach. Building drip sand castles, then decorating them with shells. Running on the sand, trailing a blue and yellow kite that just wouldn't take off into the wind, no matter how hard we tried. The gulls crying and circling overhead while we eat our sandwiches - including the sand that inevitably got into them.

I dreamed of water. And I woke up drowning.

They attacked while I slept. Their blood was coursing down my throat as I awoke, and it felt like drowning, even though I couldn't drown anymore, just like I couldn't breathe anymore.

My body reacted to them on its own. I didn't even know I had been bothered. What made them come and hunt me down? What made me able to vanquish them so easily, so effortlessly?

Was I the first to change? I ponder it now, often. I am not sure, but it feels right to me. Something in me thrills to the thought that I was the first, and for a time, I was the only.

My change came about from a mistake. I'd excuse it as being a small one, but the outcome was so large that it seems almost a joke to try to pardon myself. I opened the door when there was a knock, and I believed the man in the uniform when he said he was from the gas company. I fought back, but it was too late. He wasn't what I am now. He was a carrier, a typhoid Mary in brown slacks.

I don't remember anything, except for waking up. My shoulder hurt -- more so than any other part of me -- my shoulder hurt. When I looked in the mirror, there was a bite, and while the clocks told me that I'd only lost two hours of time, it had already become engorged, and had the infected look of a wound days, or even weeks, old.

I am not proud of the night I went after my family.

The change happened while I slept. When I woke that morning, I had been driven down to the root cellar by some primal urge, and buried myself under a thin coating of dirt. I clawed my way beneath that hard surface, my nails brittle and breaking, my fingertips cracking and opening as I dug myself into a shallow grave.

I still sleep there, sometimes. There's something strangely comforting about going home again. And now, at least, my family has been spared this experience. Wasn't it a kindness, what I did? Instead of letting them turn into this.

I don't need to be hidden from the rays of the sun -- it doesn't burn my skin or render me incapable of movement, like in the movies and books I've seen of Dracula. And I eat my victims whole. There's no single-minded urges for blood or brains. Just this all encompassing hunger.

My mind is the same as it ever was. Processing, thinking, reasoning. But then, once the hunger hits, I snap, I change, and there's no going back. I fight it, like I fought him. But once it's upon me, I can't resist it. I can only forget myself, coming back later, when it's over, when I can no longer feel the flesh under my fingers and in my mouth.

I know I wasn't the only one like this. But the others have died again, their brains destroyed. They flickered in my mind as they disappeared, as if we were joined together while we were all monsters.

I envy them their transitory nature.

How many times have I woken up, covered with the blood and remains of someone who had tried to give me my end? How many times have I strayed too far from my root cellar home, trying to get lost, trying to get killed, hoping to finally find someone stronger, more able than I? Yet some how, some way, without understanding it myself, I always find my way home, full to the point of bursting, bathed in blood and gore, knowing I have more victims to add to my final tally.

I dreamed of water. A day at the beach. And I woke up drowning.

*

**Katherine Sanger** was a Jersey Girl before getting smart and moving to Texas. She's been published in various e-zines and print, including Baen's Universe, Spacesports & Spidersilk, Black Petals, Star*Line, Anotherealm, Lost in the Dark, Bewildering Stories, Aphelion, and RevolutionSF, and edited From the Asylum, an e-zine of fiction and poetry.

Her poetry has won numerous awards, including First Place in Byline's "Autumn Poem" contest, First Place in "Lucky Thirteen" contest sponsored by Sol Magazine, and Honorable Mention in: The Houston Chapter Award, The Hap Fulgham Prize, and The "Varoom-Varoom" Award.

* * *

The Isle Is Full of Noises

By Sylvia Kelso

Ferdinand was lost, sopping, half-deaf and wholly grief-stricken. He watched the storm-foam crawl round his hand in the surf's edge, and the wind off the sea sang bitterly in his ears.

" _Full fathom five thy father lies_

_Those are pearls that were his eyes . ._ ."

He struggled upright and trudged out of the sucking water, up the silvery crescent of beach.

#

A beautiful island, he admitted sourly, scanning dramatic jungled peaks as he sank onto the soft turf beneath unfamiliar trees. Their skinny trunks ended in a single knot of things like leafy oars, which flapped noisily, and growths showed among them, huge as a man's head, bare and brown as an aged skull.

He jerked his eyes away and concentrated on the plaints of his deprived stomach, the most pressing of ills that began with his shredded doublet and missing points and continued to his bruised ribs and shoeless feet. _Ah, my father_ , he thought, _if you were here, how little an empty belly would mean. If only, now, I could hear your beloved voice once more_.

Behind him, the island howled.

And screamed, and squealed, and yodelled like a manic Swiss on a mountain side until he fell headlong on his face, forgetting even to cross himself as he clamped both hands futilely over his ears. Lord, he prayed, only make it stop . . . But the cacophony went on, and on, slowly acquiring two voices: a pure, clear but blizzard-piercing soprano, stepping slowly but faultlessly up a scale, and a brazen-throated hullabaloo that trumpeted through, over and behind that, notes missed, notes clashing, notes falling in and out of phase. Then, with one last shriek like a maddened elephant, the uproar stopped.

After an indefinite hiatus, Ferdinand released his ears, rolled over, and opened his eyes.

The sun was behind her, just clearing a forested cape. It outlined the rounded arm outstretched to a tree-trunk, the daintily pointed advancing foot, the halo of spun-gold tendrils about a fine neck and suggestion of oval face. It also shone clear between her thighs amid brief but whipping folds of white that brought the blood to Ferdinand's appalled cheeks. Never in his life had he confronted a woman, of any age or station, in her shift.

A patch of shade filled in the silhouette. Her hair was reddish gold and her eyes perhaps hazel green. She was brown as a peasant, face, arms, legs. A very handsome peasant girl . . . She glanced up and jerked back and he waited for her to scream. Only a highborn maid would faint.

She did neither. Her eyes went wide, narrow, once up and down the beach. She coiled back a little on her shoeless feet. Then, softly, somewhere between hope and nervousness, she spoke.

"Habla Espanol . . . Senor?"

Ferdinand screamed.

A face had grown on her shoulder, just above her shift. A broad, dark-brown, male face, with a feather in its coarse black hair and a bone stuck through the nasal septum, it was cross-hatched from brow to jaw with black and sullen orange paint. The teeth were bared. The eyes glared like night-black coals.

The girl spun round, the face vanished, Ferdinand leapt to her aid and crashed down amid a tangle of broken points. The girl spun back and flung herself before him, arms wide, shrieking, "No!"

Vegetation thrashed, and stopped. In the boding hush Ferdinand gathered his sliding hosen and his dignity and clambered upright.

"Madonna," he used his purest Tuscan accent. "I speak Spanish." Thumb-screws would not make him mention the scream. "But I am Italian, myself."

"Oh!" It was half a cry and half a laugh. "Oh, madonna mia, I thank blessed God – I give you good day, messire –"

"I give you Ferdinand, duke of Calabria, at your service, lady." All thought of making a graceful leg vanished, as he lost control of half a dozen points. In any case, courtly bows would only scatter her remaining wits. "And plight faith to protect you, should the – the – creature return . . ."

"Oh!" This time, the shock was not at all maidenly. "T'is no 'creature', I assure you –" Then any trace of flutter vanished; she grabbed his torn sleeve and almost hauled him bodily forward. "Come you hither – this way – haste, make haste!"

Ferdinand abandoned all hope of trussing his plague-ridden points back to his doublet, and hopped gingerly in her wake.

#

"The Spaniards do name this isle Immaculata, and number it among the Leeward Isles." Her Italian was both fluent and polite. "Ware the rock, messire." Ferdinand swerved and a wet branch swiped his ear. "Betimes doth my father name it the still-vexed Bermoothes, though will he never say me why. We had word of a wreck, but yestereve. He bade me discover was any man cast up, and mayhap, still alive."

The path was narrow and muddy as a deer slot, squeezed between harlequin-green mats of tree, shrub and vine. Well to their left, a cluster of birds exploded in raucous emerald and purple clamour, and prickles crawled up Ferdinand's back.

"Your father? He hazarded you alone?"

"I have both French and Spanish, messire. Were mariners cast ashore, I could bespeak the most."

"Indeed, madonna – ah . . . ?"

"I am named Miranda, messire."

"A wonder, indeed." No peasant, to know three languages, atop her fine Italian. Who was this girl?

"No wonder, but mere maid, messire." She ducked suppley under a clot of vines. "Nor did I fare alone."

Leaves rustled, somewhere close. Ferdinand's hair crisped at memory of that alien, hating face. A savage, yet not her enemy. Her watcher? Her guard?

"You are acquent with the – savages – lady?"

"Messire, a word." She swung right round. "Y'are indebted for passage to the Kalinagos: the rightful masters of this isle. They do call it Wai'tukubuli. T'is no easy word for us, or I would have you use it, too."

"I crave your pardon, madonna. And the – Kalinagos' – also." Then, years of schooling in deceit and peril spurred his wits. "And yet – methought, on the beach – t'was I you forbade to move?"

"Perchance you had been Spanish, messire."

The path shot suddenly up a cascade of rocks only fit for mountain goats. By the time Ferdinand might have asked more, they had reached a crest, skirted a boulder outcrop gloomy and dramatic enough to grace the Alps, and the enveloping cloud and mist became thick white rising coils. A stench like a gun-factory assailed Ferdinand's nose. He gasped, choked, and had just identified steam, when the path swerved again. As the greenery opened, Miranda drew aside with a small flourish of her hand. "Here shall your answers be found, messire. My father's house." A sudden slight smile curled her mouth corner. "The Kalinagos name him, el loco cacique."

#

The voyage had supplemented Ferdinand's Spanish with Indian words. 'El loco caciqe:' _the crazy chief._ But at first he saw only the robes, threadbare, stained, yet gold trimmed, fur-collared, unmistakable as the flat black velvet hat. What, his reeling brain demanded, is a doctor of Padua University doing here?

Especially one whose grimy canvas trousers straddled the crude animal head of an even odder short-legged, sway-backed stone stool?

Then, he looked past patriarchal grey beard and brows into the hazel-brown eyes under the hat-brim, and that saturnine answering gaze drove a tiny cold dagger in his chest.

"Sir," Miranda was crying, "I have him! An Italian, sir, and he nameth him Duke of Calabria!"

The eyes narrowed. "Aye, doth he so?"

More good Italian, in a resonant voice, deep with composure and the habit of command as well as age. "Calabria? Were ye not clapped up, long since, a hostage in Spain?"

An uncontrollable chill went down Ferdinand's neck. How does a castaway on the other side of the world know _that_?

"Aye, sir. I was but seven years old."

That sardonic glint retorted, So what cataclysm has befallen since?

"Ye may know also, sir, I was warded in Barcelona. As pledge for my father, until he, too, was ta'en." He set his teeth. "By the French."

"I'faith, t'is no easy seat, on Naples' throne."

"Aragon had supported him. They tossed him away, then, like a pedlar's cape." Even now, it could raise a lump in his throat. "I learnt my book and my prayers in Spanish. But I did not forget."

Slightly, the grey brows rose.

"And this year – nay, these two years past – the Aragonese died."

The brows rose right up. "D'ye tell me Ferdinand is dead? Ferdinand of Aragon? At last?"

"Aye, sir." He put up his chin to hide the swallow. "Then came to me certain worthies, Neapolitans all. As am I half, by blood. They besought me venture to Italy, before the new king joined France with Aragon, and all hope of rising passed. They thought to set me on Naples' throne."

"Ah." It came very softly, on the ebb of a sigh. "So ye fled Barcelona? To sea, I doubt not? In some sieve of a boat?"

"T'was a fine hardy pinnace, sir. But barely past Cape Nao came a storm."

"And blew ye clear to the New World?"

"And left us off-shore of Algiers, sir. Athwart a corsair galleasse."

Behind him, Miranda sucked in her breath. In its wake he felt suddenly the utter, unnatural stillness of the empty clearing – the village? A steamy drift fluttered ribbons of cloth on some statue outside a hut. Six or seven long-sided huts stood left and right, dark brown weathered leaf bundles overlapping in walls and roofs. The same bundles formed a wall behind the mad cacique, though this house had a wooden porch. A sign of rank?

"And how slipped ye the Moors?"

"We did offer ransom, sir, wherefore they kept us close. Myself and – four others –" with shattering suddenness it struck him. She had said, _we saw the wreck_. If anyone else lived, they too would have washed ashore. What need, then, to conceal names now?

He made a jerky gesture with his free hand. "We waited a dark night, close outside Algiers, and stole their ship-boat. Seeking north by the stars, we hoped for Cartagena – Alicante – a ship in the tradelanes . . ."

The lips in their nest of beard sketched a smile. "And ye found a ship. A galleon, but outbound? And would not turn back?"

"We could not – I could not bring us off, and not name myself." This time he found the gesture was desperate. "Had I done that . . ."

"They had ta'en ye back, aye, in chains, and the enterprise clean shent." A definite smile, however sardonic. "So they had ye work passage, shoeless as a foc'sle lad." Ferdinand felt Miranda wince. "Clear to th'Indies. Where all went awry."

Ferdinand jerked his chin right up as the whole clearing blurred. _All went awry_. The plot, the hope of Naples. The dream of claiming my birthright. Of redeeming my wasted youth. Of recompensing my father, for the loss of his throne, for the memory carried like an arrowhead all those years. Of his distant, unmourned grave.

Let me not weep, he found himself praying as he rediscovered his feet, bruised, deep in mountain mud. Before this enigma, before the girl, before what must be a host of savages, let me not weep.

"Tell me, messire," that deep voice wondered, "what's your purpose now?"

Ferdinand bit his lip. "Deo volente, sir, I would reach Hispaniola. If I must . . . work passage home. Make shift to land in Naples. And then, see what may be done."

A hint of motion blurred his eye corner. People had filled the hut doors: children, mute as paintings, women, some holding utensils, all bronze-brown, black-haired, short-statured, their broad faces blank as masks. But painted, in white stripes or dabs, with pendants or nose-rings of polished stone, or – his heart bumped – gold. And none wearing a stitch beyond their ornaments and the occasional belt.

Kalinagos, he thought. At last.

"A fine fiery lad," Miranda's father was saying. "Knoweth Latin, and hath learned his book. Schooled in handwork, with a good strong back . . . I think you an impostor, sirrah."

"Sir!" Ferdinand cried.

"Father, no!" Miranda sprang forward. "He bespoke me well! He held himself mannerly –"

"Daughter, hush. Sirrah, I judge you a Spanish tool, sent hither to spy my guards and enterprises, my secrets, my –"

"You lie!"

It was out before Ferdinand thought, the lie direct, and to an elder, of higher rank. He did not regret it. His hand shot to where, once, he had worn a sword.

"Aye, think ye thus?"

The grey brows went up. The look was piercingly contemptuous. Then it switched to something behind Ferdinand's back.

They must have coalesced out of the jungle as they had shadowed him and the girl along the track. Ten, twenty, thirty men, stocky and bronze as the women, bare of all but belts and armlets, feathers, bones. Bearing bows, arrows nocked, or wooden spears, and these faces thick with paint.

Red, black, white paint, in key-pattern bands or Vs and bands of stripe, precise, inventive, spectacular decoration. But all the eyes were black, fixed and glaring as a tiger's stare.

Kalinagos, Ferdinand thought again, as the breath dried in his throat.

Behind him, Miranda's father said, slow and deliberate, "The Spaniards fear them worse than devils. Carib, they call them, mistaking their word _caribna_ , which meaneth a man, no more. Cannibals, they claim them, fearing they eat human flesh. T'is true, they are fierce warriors. And they hate Spaniards worse than anything on earth. D'ye see the fellow at the midst? Hierrima is ubutu – war-leader. Was once a slave. Slew two Spaniards, 'scaping, and now would slay them all."

Ferdinand stared at Hierrima, and Hierrima stared back. Ferdinand recognised the pattern of those stripes. He did not have to calculate his chance of reaching the clearing edge, let alone the beach.

Two others began edging forward, stealthy as panthers. Ferdinand gritted his teeth. Behind him that cool Italian voice observed, "Very wise, messire. Go you where they shall lead."

* * *

The Souvenir You Most Want

by Sue Burke

Miguel smiled at the tourist, a conspicuously glum young man. He had just stepped into the shadow cast by the thatched roof of Miguel's market stall in San José, Costa Rica. The plain merchandise, gray granite spheres, attracted few customers, so Miguel was pleased to see him and picked up a stone the size of a large grapefruit. The tourist looked at it but kept on his sunglasses.

"This," Miguel said, still smiling, "is a true mystery of the jungle, the thing you most want. Many tourists are happy to leave the market with common things like carved wood boxes or tee-shirts. But that is not why you have come. You want something special."

The tourist said nothing, but he took off his sunglasses. Miguel heard the young man's troubles in the same way he heard the voices of the stones. But the stones were happy.

Miguel set down the sphere. "You can touch it."

The tourist's fingers twitched, but he did not reach out.

"These stones," Miguel said, "are of the kind the Diquís Indians made for a thousand years. You have seen them in parks or museums, some as tall as you, no? And I will show you one more stone."

He reached into his pocket for a two thousand colones bill, a crisp new one he kept for this purpose, and held up the picture on the back of the money: in the Costa Rican jungle, a Diquís sphere too large for one man to lift rested among orchids as a jaguar prowled nearby. It was beautiful, and it might be real.

The young man brushed his fingertips against Miguel's stone as if it might sprout teeth and bite.

"Why did they do it?" Miguel said. "What can the spheres mean, that the Indians worked so hard to make them? The Diquís are all dead. We do not know."

The tourist's eyes narrowed. In another moment, he might turn away, and that would be a misfortune, Miguel thought, because the stones could do so much.

"We do not know," Miguel said quickly, "and yet it remains true, whatever they mean. These stones tell me they are the moon, and I think the moon is happier than the sun. The moon changes, she disappears, she moves in day and night, for she is free. You had hopes, but you think the jungle did not change anything for you."

The young man shook his head almost imperceptibly.

"It is not too late," Miguel said.

From across the market, a woman yelled, "John, would you hurry up?" The tourist closed his eyes, sighed and began to put his sunglasses back on, then stopped.

"This stone," Miguel said, "is twelve thousand colones, or fifty American dollars."

The tourist looked at the sphere, his lips moving silently. He stood up straight. He pulled out his wallet and counted out the cash, and Miguel solemnly handed him the stone. As the young man turned to leave, he waned into a quarter, then a crescent, and finally disappeared for a moment before he slowly came back into view.

*

**Sue Burke** bought a _copy_ of a Diquís stone during a visit to Costa Rica (she deplores the illegal traffic of archeological artifacts) for only US$6, and while it seems to have no special powers (although she would be the last to know), it does look impressively mysterious. She currently lives in Madrid, Spain, where she writes and teaches English to Spanish teenagers (an educational experience for them and her). You can find more of her writing at www.sue.burke.name

* * *

The Willimantic Frogs

By K. A. Laity

"Better be friendly when the frogs come 'round;

Say "how d'ye do?" or they'll swallow you down."

Jack was looking in the window of A Wink and A Smile when he first heard that sing-song verse. A tin zeppelin in the toy store's display had caught his fancy and he was gazing through the glass, palms cupped, trying not to breathe and fog the window. He heard the old woman's words before he saw her skulking in the dark doorway. "Better be!" she repeated, lurching forward, one hand outstretched to latch onto Jack's arm like a red-tail's talon. Her single milky eye seemed to glare into his soul, and Jack swallowed uncomfortably. But she careened past him, her work seemingly done. Off to warn the next one, Jack supposed. With an involuntary shudder, he turned and hastened his steps toward the pub.

He shook his head as he walked through the door, brushing a few snowflakes from his hair and bringing a little of the crisp night air with him into the smoke-choked cacophony of the bar. Jack wondered anew at the ever-present smell of onions and scanned the nearby tables for his friends. He spotted them in the corner, Angela waving and shouting something impossible to hear. The old post office building sucked up sound like a bag of marshmallows. Conversations floated straight up to the Lego-lined ceiling, along with the curls of cigarette haze.

"I said, what took you so long?" Angela clarified, obviously noticing his bemused look.

Jack grinned and shrugged off his jacket. "I saw something in a window I needed to get—and then this crazy lady started spouting some gibberish at me."

"Wacky stuff?" Frank said. "Like aliens are reading her mind? Probing her at night?"

Jack shook his head, then craned his neck to get a look at the drink specials board. "No, it was like a fairy tale poem."

"Fairy tale? Like Cinderella?"

"No, something about frogs. Or is Cinderella the one who kisses a frog?"

"No, that's, um...some other princess," Angela tapped her chin. "Maybe she doesn't have a name. It was the frog who was a prince—once she kissed him, you know."

"Oh yeah. It was kind of like that. Nothing about wearing a crown though."

"I know what you mean," the normally quiet Darcy piped up. "'Better be friendly when the frogs come 'round. Say howdy-do or they'll swallow you down.' Is that it?"

Jack nodded, surprised. "Yeah, I think so."

Frank laughed. "I know that, too. My Grammy Juno used to say that to us when we were kids. You know, the whole Willimantic frogs story. How they used to come down from the hills and fight and you would just find hundreds of dead frogs in the morning."

"No," Angela corrected, "It was just the one time, I think. And it really happened, too, it was written up in, like, history, town records or something. The newspaper, maybe."

"Yeah, and that's why they put the frogs on the bridge, you know," Darcy added. The huge bronze statues had been the talk of the town since their arrival. Perched on giant concrete spools of thread, the foursome faced the cars streaming across the bridge, into town and out. Their eyes picked up the glare of the red traffic lights and seemed, at times, to follow the passers-by.

"I guess I knew that," Jack said, "But I really didn't think about it. You know, just sort of an interesting thing to add a little character to the town."

"I thought it was stupid," Frank offered.

"Yeah, but what's it all about? I don't get it." Jack laughed. "I mean, they're just frogs, right?"

Darcy shook her head, hesitated, then spoke. "They're not 'just frogs.' There are stories...old stories. All those frogs are around here for a reason. The powers that be, the mayor and such, they know about it, and that's why the bridge has those big bronze statues."

"Oh, come on!" Angela cut in, rolling her eyes heavenward. "You're starting to sound like some loopy conspiracy nut. Next, you'll be saying the frogs sabotaged the thread mills and drove them out of business."

Darcy shrugged, "It's not impossible." They all laughed at that, but for once Darcy did not retreat into silence. "You don't understand. This goes back further than the mills, or the settlers, or even the original tribes."

Angela shuddered. "Now, you're giving me the willies."

"One of the first frogs, one of the oldest, she lives here still. That's why the others are drawn here—"

"The first frog?!" Jack chuckled, and Frank clapped his shoulder, laughing too.

"One of the first frogs," Darcy continued, quite seriously. "Very old, very wise—and very, very big now. The first frog—she has a lot of power. Those who know offer her things. Like the honor of the frog bridge. And on midsummer night, there are the bonfires. On midwinter night, too."

"Oh yeah!" Angela said, with surprise. "We always had a big bonfire around the Fourth of July or sometimes earlier. Always. I remember from when I was a little girl."

"I think this is dumb," Frank muttered under his breath, but even Jack ignored him.

"Of course, there are much worse stories—you know..."

"Like what?" Angela asked, her eyes grown large in the dimness of the pub corner. They all leaned forward expectantly. Even Frank was quiet, though he sat with arms folded, a smirk in place.

Darcy shifted in her seat, trying to find a more comfortable position. The pub had the most terrible chairs—small, hard, and too short. "The worst stories...well, you can guess. Kids disappearing. Older people too, but mostly kids. Because they were mean to the frogs. She doesn't like that."

"She? The big old frog?"

"Doesn't she have a name?" Angela asked.

Darcy shook her head. "No, no, something that old, why—it's before naming. I think the Nipmucks called her Grandmother, but you know, that's just kind of, what? A title, more like, than a name. To be respectful."

"So people were careful to show respect, if they didn't want to get swallowed by the giant frog?" Angela smiled. "I like that. Mother Nature strikes back!"

"The frog queen reigns supreme!" Jack said, raising his glass. "All hail the great Frog Goddess!"

Angela and Darcy laughed and clinked their glasses together, but Frank huffed indignantly. "I think that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."

Darcy smiled. "Better be nice, Frank."

"Say 'Howdy do' or the frogs are gonna getcha," Angela said too, digging into his ribs.

"Just foolish," Frank muttered to himself, clearly annoyed by his friends' high spirits. But when he headed homeward in the wee hours that night, Frank felt a chill that didn't come from the midwinter air, but from the knowledge that he had to walk across the bridge. He had to face the frogs. Had to decide how much he believed of that fairy story Darcy had told. "Fairy tale!" Frank repeated out loud, as if, somehow, that would make him feel more confident. The thin sound of his voice in the night barely rose above the echo of his footsteps on the concrete as they scraped away the light dusting of snow.

The frogs loomed ahead of him in the dark. The flashing traffic lights gleaming upon their smooth bronze bodies, the flesh turned an icy blue in the frigid night. Against his will, Frank's steps slowed as he reached the monuments. He looked up.

Just a statue, don't know why I expected anything else, Frank told himself crossly. He looked across to the opposite one, then back. He jumped. No, just a trick of the light. It had not moved. Really. _Get a grip_ , Frank growled to himself. It had always looked down and not across down Jackson Street. He didn't look back to the frog across the street to see if was in the same position. No, Frank was not going to take his eyes off this one until—

—until he decided what he was going to do.

It was a simple thing. Just say the words. No one would know. He could laugh at them all tomorrow and swear he had done no such thing, that he hadn't believed, that he had looked into those golden eyes and laughed. If it weren't so late, but—the thought came to Frank, out of nowhere—it was the hour when silly campfire stories worked their magic. In the dark, more things seemed possible. In the late night quiet you find yourself wondering whether giant frogs might, indeed, get offended. It would be easier just to mutter the greeting, even if you didn't think you believed. In the bright daylight tomorrow, he would not. _Oh, this is just stupid!_ Frank thrust his hands deep into his pockets. "I'm not afraid!" he declared to no one visible, and with a determined look he walked past the frog without another word to continue across the bridge. "What kind of idiot would believe hooey like that," he muttered, trying vainly to fill up the snow-quiet silence with something more than his muffled steps. Good to get home and get in a warm bed and sleep late tomorrow morning and watch cartoons.

What was that?

It sounded like...what? Something underneath him, under the rusty arch of the trestle, something very large, turning over—as if its sleep, disturbed by an unpleasant dream, had come to an end. Frank tried walking faster for a couple yards. Not that it mattered. He knew he had to stop, knew he had to look down toward the river and see what was under there.

She came out from under the bridge and her skin was the cold milky blue that the statues had taken on in this winter night. She was covered in warty knobs and bumps and a thousand scars that living had given her. Her forelegs' flesh sagged like that some venerable dowager's arms and her hunched back featured stripes, gold and white, that seemed to shimmer in the pale moonlight. Her movements were ponderous, but deliberate, as she dragged herself slowly forth with an accompaniment of little splashes.

And she was enormous.

The bronze cartoony figures were large, but Frank could not have contemplated the hugeness of this being, this primordial amphibian. And he knew without question, without any doubt whatsoever, that Darcy was right. This was the first frog. She had grown over thousands, over millions of years. She had tasted of bugs, of minnows, of flesh. She had eaten and she had known. She knew. And she expected acknowledgement. She demanded respect. And he hadn't given it. Frank tried to swallow, but his throat was too dry. She twisted her neck ever so slightly and rolled her cloudy eyes up until she saw him. Frank froze. Her gaze took him in, chewed and digested him. She knew him, knew what he was, what he had done—what he had not done.

She leapt. Her mammoth body was suddenly airborne in a fluid arc, turning as gracefully in the air as any ballerina, and landing on the bridge with a colossal thump that shook Frank loose from his rigid pose and brought him to his knees. Up close, he could smell the swamp's decay from the brackish waters, the briny tang from her soggy skin. Those eyes—they fixed him with a stare so ancient, so knowing, that Frank felt dwarfed more by their stare than by her massive body.

He could only gape in awe, true awe, at this first among frogs. She was magnificent. Her presence opened a door in Frank's mind, a door to the wonders that such an existence guaranteed. To see the life of the planet in one gargantuan being—it changed everything! Suddenly Frank understood. _We're all one_ , he thought _, all one_. Her mammoth jaw dropped as if to speak and the stench from her mouth carried a memory of everything she had eaten, all through the years, the centuries, the millennia. Her gullet exhaled a ripe sigh of time, of everything she had seen come and go, of the people, the lives, the creatures, the buildings that had grown and lived and died, all under her impassive gaze. Her tongue, coiled in her baggy throat like a harmless spiral of rope, suddenly sprang to life and shot out of her jaws to wrap around Frank, as if to try the taste of this mere human who dared to scorn her magnificence. Frank's eyes goggled and he forgot to breathe. And then, as she had done countless times across the span of her numberless years, without a thought, without concern, the tongue snapped back into her mouth and she swallowed him down.

So you'll want to remember as you walk through this town, to recall those words Frank never quite found. And you had better be friendly when the frogs come around, because if you don't say something nice, they might just swallow you down.

*

All-purpose writer, Fulbrighter, uberskiver, medievalist, humourist, flâneuse, techno-shamanka, scripter of the comic JANE QUIET, Broad Universe Social Media Maven, and Pirate Pub Captain, **K. A. Laity** is currently anchored in Galway, Ireland. She is the author of OWL STRETCHING, PELZMANTEL, UNIKIRJA and a wealth of stories, plays, essays and articles on a wide range of subjects from medieval literature and culture to the digital revolution. Visit her website, www.kalaity.com and find her on Facebook, Twitter and various blogs.

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Excerpt from

Matcher Rules

By Mary Holland

The valley was a natural amphitheatre. They'd left the aircars on the other side of the ridge, in the deserted fair meadow. The drivers and their various staff aides stayed with the cars, and only the Elders walked toward the Matcher. They were wearing formal council robes and Nyt carried the red robes of the Solo. They came up over the rise, Tom Forr puffing, leaning on his cane, and being helped by Joe Manne, and they could see the seats arcing away on either side, circling toward the Matcher at the other end. The Matcher, itself, was invisible in the darkness, although Maxim Bari thought he could see it outlined against the stars. The Elders stopped at the bottom of the path winding between the seats. Whispers carried. "Take the glow light, Thomas. Are you sure you don't want to reconsider?"

At the back of the group, hidden in the dark and careful to keep his light away from his face, Max sneered. As if Tom Forr would turn this down. Turn down the chance to be a Solo, have his name memorized by thousands of schoolchildren, turn down the chance to have all eyes on him, to hear the awed murmurs of 'Yes, Solo' every time he farted. Tom had been maneuvering for the past decade to be Solo, and Maxim had been supporting him for the past three years, long enough to undermine other hopefuls and to be sure that, once the fool was in place, he understood who had put him there. And was properly grateful.

Now, Forr was moving slowly over the ground toward the Matcher. The Elders huddled together, watching as the old man hobbled away from them. Max knew that this ceremony used to be public, with the stands full of interested watchers, and the entire Council out there in front of the Matcher. Absurd, leaving something like this to chance and to the whim of a...a thing. Max's mind shied away from consideration of the Matcher, and instead concentrated on the wisdom of the preceding Councils, to move from a group selection to a candidate presentation. There had even been a group clamoring for a completely open selection: giving the Matcher a wider choice from among the colonists. Fools. It was so much wiser to pick the correct candidate and to give the Matcher no choice. Now, if there was some way to make sure the Solo determined the upcoming affinity matches based on rational criteria....Max frowned.

Maxim Bari had been the Elder for District One for 15 years. He was, in everything but name, the head of the Council and the man to go to for favors, patronage, and influence. Born in District Eight, he'd moved with his Quad to First as their transport business expanded. Two of the other three members of his affinity came from Quints, and they had worked transport also; organizing wine tankers and coffee cargo holders, shipping Stilton up from the south. They were still nominally involved, but when people said 'Bari Transport', they meant Max. He had become a central node in the colony's economic life, and found he enjoyed the power and the respect; moving into politics was a natural next step.

On paper, all twelve Elders were equal, and important issues were decided by majority vote. But the shuttles and cargo carriers to Novi's only space station were based in First, and the Elder for that district had always been an important personage. When this was combined with mastery of the export transport, Max had found it easy to build a controlling block of votes on the Council. Exports were up, credits from the Compact were growing; Max hoped to see Novi grow from a colonial backwater planet to a full Compact member in the next ten years. When that happened, they'd send a representative to the Compact Assembly. Visions of galaxy-wide trading cartels danced in his head.

Forr was halfway to the Matcher, his glow light a tiny point in the night. The Matcher remained stubbornly dark.

"Shouldn't it have started by now?" asked Silvio Re, the Eighth District Elder.

"Paul had to get quite close, as I remember," said Alivia Jonn. "Much closer than Chen."

"Does that mean anything?" asked Re. Alivia didn't answer. She had a trick of ignoring questions, making the questioner feel stupid. There was a silence as they all peered across the valley.

Max wished the thing would hurry up; he had meetings scheduled early the next day, and then he was taking the Council aircar to Forr's old district, prepping his chosen candidate for election as Forr's successor to the Council. He didn't expect more than a token opposition, but it was best to take no chances.

When it had become clear that Stanis Paul, the previous Solo, was ailing and was unlikely to survive his last illness, Max had considered letting Alivia win the Solo nomination. Solos were not Elders and had no vote. Alivia Jonn as Solo would fragment her faction on the Council and Max's group would be unopposed, at least for a short time. But Solos had enormous influence outside the Council, and Max disliked handing any weapon to a sworn enemy. Besides, he had another plan: a longer-range plan.

Down at the far end of the valley, there was a brief red flare. It went out. The Elders shifted uneasily. "Was that it?" Re demanded. He sounded like a disappointed child. The Elders waited tensely, and then relaxed as they saw the pinpoint of the glow light starting back. It paused once, wavering, then moved on.

When Forr was within twenty feet, Max pushed through to the front. He held his own glow light up and peered at the band on the old man's left forearm. At first, he thought something had gone wrong, then he saw the red mark of the Solo, and relaxed. The Elders bowed and murmured, "Solo."

The old man gestured vaguely in response; he looked exhausted, and Manne stepped up to give him his arm for support. The Solo waved him away, leaning on his cane. The Elders formed around him for the walk back, but he was gazing about. "Where are my robes?"

Nyt started, then hurried forward with the scarlet robes, and he and Manne draped them around Forr. The robes were new; Forr had insisted on designing them himself and they had a short train that dragged on the ground. Forr started slowly back toward the aircars, the two Council members as reluctant, embarrassed trainbearers.

Back in First, they escorted the Solo to the Solo Palace, on the opposite side of the main square from the Council headquarters. Five attendants lined the stairs to the main door, and bowed in unison as they approached. The Solo moved forward and climbed the stairs slowly, acknowledging the bows, an expression of great satisfaction on his face. The attendants filed into the entry behind him. He gestured at them to shut the door, and the Elders, left standing in the square, exchanged glances and started for the Council building.

Max's way was blocked by Alivia Jonn. She looked furious. "He's been Solo for one hour and already thinks he's God. Those robes! Bari, I hope I live to see you regret this."

"That's unlikely, my dear Alivia. I so rarely regret anything, and I am twenty years younger than you." A cheap shot, but he couldn't resist. He watched her swell with fury, and then she turned on her heel and strode after the other Elders. He moved to follow, and then changing his mind, walked quickly around the corner of the Palace and down some inconspicuous steps to a small side door. It opened to his key, and he went through the deserted service area, and took the lift to the living quarters. "Where is he?" he snapped at the closest attendant.

"Sitting on the throne in the reception hall," smirked the attendant, who happened to be on his payroll. Max glared, and the attendant scuttled off down the hall, his smile vanishing. Max took the lift back down a level and found his new Solo, as advertised, seated regally at the end of a long narrow room used for receptions and the Solo Court. It wasn't exactly a throne, although the scarlet robes pooled around Forr's feet added to the effect. Stanis Paul had been a short man, and sensitive about his height, so the carved chair was raised slightly higher than the surrounding ones. The Solo didn't move as Max entered; he was gazing abstractedly at nothing.

"Shouldn't you be resting?" Max asked. The old man came back to himself and slowly turned his head toward Max. He did look tired, although his expression was haughty.

"You will address me as Solo."

"And when we are alone together, I will call you whatever I want. You forget, Tom, who put you here. Your family enjoys some very favorable contracts. It would be a shame if the contracts had to be renegotiated."

The Solo opened his mouth, and Max thought for a moment he was actually going to say 'you dare threaten me', to which the answer would have been, prosaically, yes. Instead, he munched his mouth closed, as if he was chewing on something nasty, and said nothing. Satisfied for the moment, Max poured two glasses of northern wine from a carved decanter on a side table.

"So, what's it like?" Max gave him a glass, and pulled up a chair. The old man looked away.

Max persisted, "I've always wondered why Solos were so uncommunicative about the Matcher. Does it tell you to keep quiet, or stop you from talking about it, or what? I asked Paul a few times and he ignored the question." And you have to answer me, he thought with satisfaction.

The Solo sighed. Now, he looked less like an old man pretending to be king, and more like his usual doddery self. "It's very hard to describe. It's not human."

Max gave his rare, true laugh. "Man, it's a piece of rock! I know it's not human."

"No, it's not a piece of rock." The Solo shivered and sipped his wine. Then he said, "When I walked back to you all, up by the Matcher, I could see your affinities — or at least see that you were in affinities. I can't explain how I saw it. But now, looking at you, I can't see as clearly. It's harder, away from the Matcher. It might be..." he hesitated.

"What?"

The old man looked uneasy. "Your Quad isn't complete, and that may affect how I see your affinity, that's all."

Max stiffened in reflexive anger, then visibly forced himself to sit back. He had his tame Solo, he'd been working toward this for years; he couldn't rip the old man's head off for mentioning a fact everyone knew, merely because he hated being reminded of Dennis's death. He had ways of showing his displeasure with personal remarks, and everyone who dealt with him knew this.

_If you've enjoyed this excerpt of Matcher Rules the full ebook is available from_ <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/96923>

_A paperback version can be ordered at_ <http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/matcher-rules/18607395>

_Or visit my web site:_ http://www.mary-holland.com

*

**Mary Holland** writes fantasy and science fiction. _Matcher Rules_ , her first novel, was published in 2011 and she recently released her second novel, _The Bone Road_ , a fantasy about revenge and fertility. She lives in the Santa Cruz mountains in California with her husband and three cats. She can be found at www.mary-holland.com.

* * *

Psyche's Search

By Ann Gimpel

Chapter One

Doctor Lara McInnis began the day clinging to a slender island of solace. Hours later, waves of patients, errands and phone calls had pounded against that island till it was nothing but a rubble heap. Rubbing wearily at her eyes, Lara finally gave up and closed them. For a moment or two, she thought she might get away with it, but then an image of Arabel, her long time receptionist, lying in a pool of her own blood rose out of some subterranean reservoir. The grisly scene was so real, Lara's stomach clenched. And then, like an unwelcome tape loop, it played again. And again. Opening her eyes didn't help one whit. Arabel was just as bloody and just as dead.

Lara collapsed into the chair generally reserved for her patients. Outside her western window a scarlet sunset streaked the Seattle skyline, adding its bloody motif to the one already playing in her head. Disgusted with herself, Lara got to her feet and began pacing the length of her spacious office, burning a track in the Oriental rug. She knew she should be boxing up client files, but couldn't force herself back to a task she was ambivalent about—at least not until she could get her emotions under better control.

The doorknob rattled. It startled her and Lara's heart jumped into overdrive. In her current state, the familiar sound was like a reproach. "How could I not have locked it with everything that's going on?" she muttered as she rushed into the outer office. Arabel's desk, another Oriental rug and ornate Victorian furniture with floral upholstery flashed past the edges of her vision, but she was focused on the door as she watched the knob slowly turning.

_This is ridiculous_ , she told herself. _It's probably a pharmaceutical salesman thinking I'm a psychiatrist._

_Or that demon that's been dogging you,_ a darker, inner voice insinuated.

Since the only other option was throwing herself out a second storey window and hoping for the best, Lara crossed the few feet to the door and yanked it open. A decidedly overweight woman jerked her hand away from the doorknob and eyed Lara balefully out of rheumy, blue eyes. Pale brown hair, going gray, was gathered into an untidy bun, and fat rolls bulged over too-tight jeans and under an inadequate T-shirt.

"Missus Stone." Lara tried to smile as she coaxed her heart back to a normal rhythm.

"Hmmmmph, surprised you remember me."

"Of course I do." Lara stepped aside, gesturing for the woman to enter. The last thing she wanted was another patient visit, but it would verge on the unethical—never mind the rude—to ask Myra Stone to go away without at least finding out what she wanted.

Lara waited while Myra stalked past her, looked inside the inner office and circled back to stand in front of Lara, hands on her hips. "Guess she's not here," Myra snapped, as she sat down in one of the reception chairs.

"If you're looking for Caren, no, she's not," Lara agreed, mystified. "Is your stepdaughter missing?"

The woman grunted. She still had an expression on her face that could curdle milk, but she knotted her fingers together and said, "How about if you sit down, and you and me can have a little talk."

"Okay." Lara kept her voice as neutral as she could, pulled the office door shut—taking care to lock it this time—and rolled Arabel's chair out. Her butt had barely grazed the seat cushion when the woman started talking.

"I don't think spending time here is helping Caren. Nope, not at all," Myra complained in an unpleasant, nasal twang. "I never know where she is. She's still taking what doesn't belong to her, and that father of hers, well, he's not any help at all. So, it's just me." Accusatory eyes drilled into Lara. "All my _real_ kids turned out fine. This one, she's just a bad seed." Rooting around in a battered handbag, Myra pulled out a cigarette. "Do you mind?"

"Uh, yes, I'd prefer you didn't smoke," Lara managed, struck by the gall of the woman and offended to hear her belittle her stepdaughter so blatantly. Caren had said Myra hated her, but Lara had assumed it was just teenaged hyperbole.

Myra stuffed the cigarette into her T-shirt pocket and pushed her bulk upright. "Not much reason for me to stay," she muttered. "Really thought she'd be here. You're the only one she ever says anything good about."

_If she felt like one of your_ real _kids, maybe she'd say good things about you—or feel safe enough to love you . . ._ Discouraged by the woman's callousness—after all, Caren had been through hell in her sixteen years—Lara stood, too. Trying for a positive spin, she said, "You must be concerned, or you wouldn't have come looking for Caren. Would you like to make an appointment, Missus Stone? I already told you on the phone I'm closing my practice, but I'd be glad to find a time slot for you in the next couple of weeks. We could talk about some of the challenges of step-parenting and how hard it is for abused children to learn to trust—"

"Nah." Myra waved her to silence. "Hell, my uncle did me and I didn't turn out like her. I didn't cut school or steal stuff. Or carve on myself." Shuffling over to the door, she pulled it open and stalked out into the hall, the tiny chink in her armor replaced by a brittle, defensive anger.

"Well, think about it," Lara persisted, addressing the woman's back as Myra headed for a stairwell. Drawing the door shut behind her, Lara retreated to her office thinking that Myra could do with a smattering of psychotherapy herself. _Yeah, like about ten years' worth._ Crimson from the sunset bled through stained-glass windows, casting her familiar furniture in an eerie light. Lara wrapped her arms around herself, seeking the warmth of her own body for comfort.

_That poor child... From abusive kin to a stepmother who doesn't want her._ Sorrow for Caren replaced the Arabel tape loop as color faded from the room. Lara decided it was an improvement, all in all, and she kicked a box over a few inches so she could open the lower drawer of her filing cabinet. Pushing her long, red hair back over her shoulders, she proceeded to dump banded files into the banker's box without any particular regard for order.

The outer door of her office rattled again. This time, though, it was a key sound.

"Lara?"

"In here, Trev," she called back, straightening to greet her longtime boyfriend.

Trevor, his usually buoyant mood notably subdued, held out his arms. "'Lo, Lara. Sorry I'm a bit late but . . . well, never mind, it will keep." He scanned the room with his intensely blue eyes, taking in her half-finished packing job. "How much more . . ." he began tentatively as he put his arms round her for a hug.

Shooting him a look that was laced with pain, she shook her head. "I don't know. I'm doing this as fast as I can, in between seeing patients who want a last session or two. Thank god Arabel started calling all of them before . . ."

His arms tightened around her. "Doesn't matter, love. It'll be done eventually." Blond curls brushing against her face, he kneaded her shoulders with both hands. "Bloody hell, you're wound up tighter than a spring." The familiar clipped tones of his British accent washed over her like a balm.

"Feels heavenly," she breathed. "I didn't realize how . . ." Her voice trailed off. "Well, maybe I did, but I've been forcing myself not to pay attention." She pulled away, sinking onto the floral couch spanning part of one wall. Exhaustion dragged at her as she dropped her head into her hands, rocking slightly.

Pushing a couple of boxes out of the way, Trevor joined her. "I miss Arabel, too, you know." There was a catch in his voice that he tried to clear away. "Any of those ready to take home?" he asked, pointing at the half dozen boxes littering the floor.

"Yeah, those three." She jabbed her index finger at a corner of the room. "They're records from patients I haven't seen in at least a couple of years."

"What are you going to do with the others?" His voice was gentle, but he placed a finger under her chin, forcing her to look at him. "What are you saving them for?"

"Guess I can't very well keep any of them," she muttered. "It's not like we're even going to be here after a little while."

"No," he agreed, solemnly. "It's not. And we're not."

Pursing her lips into a thin line, she found her feet. "Okay, then," she snapped, angry with the universe that seemed to be stealing her life away. Pulling open file drawers, she grabbed a few charts and dumped them onto her desk. "I need these since I'm not quite done with these people, but all the rest can go."

Nodding, Trevor joined her in front of the twin horizontal files, and together they began to move twenty years worth of Lara's psychology practice into the waiting cartons. "You'll need more boxes," he noted after a few minutes. "Lots more."

"Thought we could fill these, dump them at home, and then I'd just bring the empties back tomorrow and begin all over."

"Ah, brilliant. Of course, that's the obvious thing to do." Grunting, he shouldered a box and headed for the door. "I'll be back directly for another."

"Right behind you," she said, picking up a box. "I do feel better when I'm doing something other than wallowing in my own misery."

"That's my girl," he shot back over his shoulder.

The minute Trevor opened the door of his old Mercedes convertible, Gunter, their eleven-week-old German shepherd lunged out of the car, making a beeline for Lara. The little black puppy yipped, whined and launched himself at her, pulling at her wool skirt with his claws. "There, there, little man," she cooed, putting her box down so she could unhook his feet from the fabric of her skirt. "Yes, yes, I've missed you, too."

As she fondled the puppy, she glanced at Trevor. Dressed in faded blue jeans, a green chambray shirt and a tan corduroy blazer, his tall, lanky frame exuded its usual casual elegance. "How'd your day go?" she asked.

"Not bad," he replied, shoving his box of files into the car's small trunk and reaching for the one she'd set on the sidewalk. "We'll have to put the rest in your car, love. No more room in here." He slammed the car's boot. "I started really taking stock of what's in our house . . . and making lists. Went down to the waterfront, too." His lips curved wryly. "Didn't find much in the way of antique farm equipment, but I did get some leads. Bloke at the flea market looked at me as if I was daft."

She flashed him a weak smile. "Well, dear, I suppose it's not every day they get customers hunting for scythes, or whatever it was you asked for."

"Let's get those other boxes down here. Then we can walk the pup before we go home."

Lara inclined her head and turned to go back into her building _Lucky for us the electricity's not on the fritz. It's almost dark out here._ Power outages had been hit-and-miss. More often than not, she'd had to use a flashlight to find her way out of her building. Back in the office, she continued throwing files willy-nilly into the boxes she'd bought earlier that day. An orderly part of her rebelled when she looked at the files, no longer alphabetized, lying on their sides like beached whales.

*

**Ann Gimpel** is a clinical psychologist with a Jungian bent who practices in a very isolated area high in California's Sierra Nevada Mountains. Her avocations include mountaineering, skiing, wilderness photography and, of course, writing. A lifelong aficionado of the unusual, she began writing speculative fiction awhile back. Since then, she's had two novels, _Psyche's Prophecy_ and _Psyche's Search_ released by a small press. The third, and final, book in that series, _Psyche's Promise,_ is due out this summer. Twelve of her short stories have appeared in a variety of webzines, magazines and anthologies.

* * *

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