by Melissa Marr
At the end of one day, only a fortnight after she arrived, she paused to look down the road that had brought her here, longing to know what came before, when the duke walked up behind her, catching her by surprise.
“Waiting for someone?” he asked.
Giselle whirled around. “Of course not,” she answered quickly, wiping her hands on her apron. “I’m not waiting for anyone. I’m just on my way to help Pauline with dinner.”
It was only the next day, standing in the same spot, that Giselle spotted a cart coming down the road. Children ran to meet it, shouting their excitement. Giselle hurried to the shadows of the stable to watch as it approached, fearful of the cart, which resembled the one she had arrived in. She could already hear the peddler boasting about his catch. “This one was easy. It practically fell right into my hands. The gargouilles may fly like the wind, but they are as dull as lead. I didn’t even have to unfurl my net. It only took two easy slashes to part this one from its wings.”
The creature thrashed in the cart. Like a beast, Giselle thought. Pauline came and stood beside Giselle, shaking her head. “What poor soul has been stolen away now?”
“But there are wings strapped to the cart,” Giselle replied.
“As there were when you came. Who knows where he really got them? The duke will not be pleased. He’ll send that poor excuse of a peddler on his way with the back of his hand.”
“No!” Giselle cried. “What would become of the one he’s imprisoned?”
Giselle’s tender heart endeared her to Pauline. “I’ll speak with the duke before he comes out to deal with the peddler. I don’t think you need to worry,” she told Giselle, and walked back to the house to find the duke.
It was as Pauline said. The duke was angry and sent the peddler on his way, but not before he forced him to unlock the cart and leave his victim behind. The peddler warily unlocked the cart and fled as soon as his prisoner jumped from it. The boy was stained with blood, as Giselle had been, but was stronger and had no arrow wound. He thrashed wildly at those who encircled him. The duke’s gardeners raised their hoes, ready to strike, but Giselle could see the fear and anger on the boy’s face. “Stop!” she yelled, and ran from the shadows to within feet of where he stood, in spite of Pauline and the duke shouting for her to stay back. The boy saw her and froze.
“No one’s going to harm you,” Giselle told him. “You’re safe now.” His gaze locked on to hers and his breathing calmed while Giselle’s heart raced faster. “My name is Giselle,” she said, and held her hand out to him. “Come with me. Please.”
His shoulders relaxed from their hunched position and he hesitantly took her hand. She walked him to the fountain, while all the servants and the duke followed, holding their breath at her boldness, but not wanting to break the spell she had cast over the boy. She held a pitcher under one of the streams of water and gave it to him. He greedily drank from it and then handed it back to her.
“Why am I here?” the boy asked.
It was the same question that had passed through her own mind in her first days at the château. She still had no answer. “I’m not sure why,” Giselle answered, “but you don’t have to fear anyone here. You’re among friends. Where are you from?”
The boy thought for a moment. “I—” He touched his hand to his temple, and his brows pulled together in worry. He looked back into Giselle’s eyes. “I’m not sure. I can’t—” His head shook in distress.
Giselle felt her heart aching for the boy. She couldn’t recall where she was from either and wondered at the dark magic the peddlers must have cast over them both. She heard a murmur flutter through the servants surrounding them and knew they noticed the similarity too. “Don’t worry about it now. Maybe after you’ve rested and eaten something—”
The duke stepped forward and the boy jumped at the sudden movement, ready to defend himself. Giselle noticed how agile and fit the boy was and, from the look of him, quite strong, and wondered how a bow-kneed peddler had managed to overpower him in the first place.
“It’s all right, boy,” the duke assured him, stepping back to give him more space. “It’s as Giselle told you. No one here means you harm. This is my estate. My valet can show you where to bathe and tend to your wounds. He’ll bring you food too. And then you may stay on if you like. I can use some help in the stables.”
The boy nodded slowly, as if he was still wary. He looked down at his filthy, bloodstained clothes. “Maybe I’ll stay for one day.” He glanced back to Giselle. “Or maybe two would be better.”
“As you wish,” the duke answered.
The duke’s valet led him away to bathe and to take care of the cuts on his hands and a gash on his head where the peddler had beaten him. She watched as he walked away and wondered at his past and who was waiting for him to return. Who was missing him already? What had he left behind? What made him wander from home in the first place?
That evening at supper she discovered that, just like her, the only thing he could remember from his past was his name. As soon as she heard the name, she repeated it quietly to herself. It was odd how easily it rolled off her tongue. After supper she went to the garden to gather some lemon balm and then took it to him in the stable.
“It will help your wounds heal more quickly,” she explained.
He took the leaves from her hand and she didn’t realize she was staring into his eyes until she blushed and looked away, but even as she rattled on about the lemon balm, she couldn’t get his eyes out of her mind. There was something unusual about them. Their light gray was the color of a pale moon, surrounded by a circle of black sky. The kind of sky you could get lost in, and she already had. She dared not look into his eyes again.
She turned abruptly and left, but when she was about halfway to the château, he ran out of the barn. “You’re an angel of the night, Giselle,” he called to her.
She turned and stared at him, the moonlight sprinkling silver on his dark hair. It was an odd way for him to say thank you for her kindness, but she liked the sound of it anyway. An angel of the night. She smiled.
“Tomorrow then?” he called.
Did she say they would meet tomorrow? He waited for an answer.
“Yes, tomorrow, Étienne.”
THE THIRD KIND
by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
“We have to go to San Antonio.”
My sister Kissy said those words with all the aplomb of someone announcing that they were fixing to drive down to the Sonic for a cherry limeade. Like she hadn’t just woken me up at four o’clock in the morning to deliver the statement in question. Like going to San Antonio was no big deal. Like I’d already passed my driver’s test and she hadn’t been forbidden to climb behind the wheel of a truck ever again, or at least until she turned thirty.
Forget the fact that San Antonio was a nine-hour drive from our slice of just-outside-of Grove, Oklahoma—big sis wanted to pick up and go, just like that.
“Kissy,” I said sternly. “We’re not going to San Antonio.”
I was the reasonable sister. That was my job. I figured I owed it to Kissy to keep us out of trouble, since it was my two-year-old self’s creative pronunciation of her name that had kept her from being a run-of-the-mill Kristy for all these years.
I deeply suspected that Kristy Carlton wouldn’t have needed nearly so much looking after.
“No, Jess. We have to go.”
I froze, suddenly aware of the fact that despite the aura of calm about her, my sister’s eyes were a pale sea-foam green, colored like stained glass with a light shining straight through.
“Well, crap,” I said.
Kissy and I both had mud-brown eyes—depressingly average—except when Kissy got the ’pulse, and then her eyes went stained-glass green, eerie and pale and borderline incandescent, depending on how long she’d been feeling it and how urgent the directive was.
“Do we have to go to San Antonio now?” I asked.
Kissy gave me a look that resembled the
expression on a dog’s face when it proudly dumps a dead bird onto your feet. “Yup.”
This was highly unfortunate.
It’d been years since Kissy’s last ’pulse, when I was twelve and she was fourteen. Three whole years since she’d woken me up in this very bed and told me, eyes shining, that we had to get out. Three years since someone had broken into our old farmhouse and killed our parents in their sleep.
“It’s not like last time,” Kissy said, following my thoughts with the ease of someone who’d shared my secrets and my room for fifteen years. “Nobody’s going to hurt us or Nana or Grandpa Jake. We just have to borrow the truck and drive to San Antonio, is all.”
Somehow, I didn’t think our grandparents, who’d moved in with us after Mom and Dad died, would consider this venture the teensy little thing that Kissy was trying to pass it off as. Which meant, of course, that we couldn’t tell them. And wasn’t that just fine and dandy?
“Don’t be mad.”
If I’d been the big sister, Kissy might have sounded vulnerable right then, but since she was older, the words came out bossy by habit.
“I’m not mad,” I replied, and I wasn’t, truly. Kissy couldn’t help getting ’pulses any more than I could help having twice as much hair and half as much chest as the other girls my age. I was flat as a board and had an unruly mass of gargantuan curls, and my sister occasionally woke up knowing that something had to be done, without having the least little clue as to why. I could hardly complain (about my sister’s quirk, not about the hair or boobs, which I complained about just fine), given that whoever or whatever sent my sister these strange compulsions—be it a misfiring in her brain or God Almighty—had already saved my life at least once.
“Fine,” I said, looking out the window and gauging how little time we had until Grandpa Jake rose with the sun. “I’ll get dressed, you throw us each a change of clothes into a bag. There should be some cash in my sock drawer.”
Just enough for gas, if we were lucky.
But as I stripped off my pajama top and eyed my sister and the irises I hadn’t seen looking back from her face in three long years, I couldn’t help but wonder if our luck had run out before we’d even hit the road.
San Antonio, here we come.
The two of us made it as far as Muskogee before the truck broke down, which wasn’t bad, considering Grandpa Jake’s Chevy was older than Kissy and me combined—and temperamental to boot.
“Think she just needs to cool off?” Kissy asked me.
I considered the question. “Did you go over forty miles an hour?”
My sister smiled serenely. “I think I hit eighty back on sixty-nine.”
“Then the truck needs to cool off.”
I leaned forward to get a glimpse of Kissy’s eyes, but she popped on a pair of plastic sunglasses before I could assess just how intense the situation had gotten.
I didn’t want to think about what would happen if the two of us weren’t quick enough—if the truck wouldn’t start back up, or we got lost, or the cops pulled us over for playing hooky.
I didn’t want to think about it, but I did.
I imagined Kissy seizing, her limbs twitching, the light in her eyes blinding her to anything else. Up until that night three years ago, Kissy’s ’pulses had been a regular thing, and I’d seen her with shining green eyes often enough to know that the more she resisted, the worse it got. Impulse didn’t even begin to cover the strength of this thing that took over my sister, telling her that she had to do this, that, or the other. Sometimes the this in question was a little something—walking to school instead of taking the bus, leaving a bottle of water at the end of a long dirt road, whispering nonsense words to a man she’d never met—and sometimes, it was big.
By the time Kissy was five, my parents had learned not to ask, let alone argue, because if Kissy couldn’t or wouldn’t do what the ’pulse wanted her to, things got ugly. In the three years she’d been ’pulse-free, I’d almost forgotten what it was like to know that my sister’s body might turn on her at any second. Fever, seizures, hallucinations—
We have to go to San Antonio.
Good Lord Almighty, I hoped we’d get there in time.
“You think you’d be okay grabbing breakfast while the truck cools down?” I asked Kissy, trying not to make her sound like some kind of invalid, because I was no fool when it came to my sister’s temper.
She took a deep breath and then nodded. “We can’t go anywhere until the truck cools down anyway.”
I got the feeling that it wasn’t me she was talking to.
“If we grab something to eat now,” Kissy continued, “we won’t have to stop later.” Having pled her case to the universe, she opened the driver’s side door, and I waited to see if she’d be able to do it.
First one foot out of the truck, then another.
“I’m good,” she called back.
I opened my door and joined her on the pavement. We’d broken down in full view of a McDonald’s, which was either lucky or not, depending on just how fond (or not) you were of Egg McMuffins. I came down on the not side, but Kissy had a long-standing love affair with grease, and far be it from me to stand in their way.
After giving the truck an encouraging pat on the hood, the two of us hightailed it across the highway, Kissy in the front and me on her heels, same as always. A few minutes later, I was drinking orange juice out of a little plastic container that felt about a million different kinds of wrong, and Kissy was chatting up the boy behind the counter, who had probably never seen something like her in his whole entire life.
Kissy was the kind of girl who could make sweatpants, mismatched flip-flops, and gaudy red sunglasses look fashionable. The shades hid her glowing eyes, but there was no masking the giddy energy vibrating through her entire body. Kissy always said the ’pulse felt like someone had hooked her up to jumper cables and given her a real good charge, and even just standing there, watching the boy watching her, I knew he could feel it too.
My sister was electric.
“You two related?”
I turned to see a new boy—one who hadn’t yet fallen under Kissy’s thrall—looking thoughtfully at me.
“You two,” he said again, jerking his head toward Kissy. “Are you related?” He had an accent, and not a Southern one, either. I tried to place it, but couldn’t, and I realized that thinking about his accent probably wasn’t good manners, when I could be answering his question instead.
“Sisters,” I told him.
The boy nodded. He was older than me, maybe even older than Kissy, like he was already in college or working full-time at his daddy’s garage. Taking a closer look, I thought that maybe he’d been out boozing the night before, because he looked real tired, and he was wearing a baseball cap pulled down over the top third of his face. His eyes—what I could see of them, anyway—were shadowed and bloodshot.
“Sisters,” he said thoughtfully. “At the McDonald’s at six twenty-seven.”
I wasn’t sure how one was supposed to respond to such a blatant statement of fact, so I went back to thinking about his accent and how his words sounded like they were coming from the back of his throat instead of the front.
That was when I saw the knife.
He held it loosely in his left hand. I was fairly certain this was a recent development, on account of the fact that I wasn’t that oblivious, and the knife wasn’t exactly what you would call subtle—the blade was nearly as long as my forearm and slightly curved. Its edge gleamed in the fluorescent fast-food lighting.
The boy flexed his wrist.
“I have to hurt you,” he said.
I tried to take a step back, but couldn’t seem to get my legs to move. “I’d really rather you didn’t.”
“I have to hurt you,” he said again.
He stroked the thumb of his right hand over the blade in his left, allowing the metal to slice lightly into his flesh. As blood welled up on his skin, he tilted his head to the side and took a ste
p straight toward me.
Not good. Not good. So not good.
A dam burst somewhere inside of me, and miracle of miracles, I was finally able to move. The first thing I did was start shrieking like a banshee in a yodeling contest. The second thing I did was toss the remainder of my McDonald’s orange juice right in his face.
The third thing I did was run.
“Jess!” I heard Kissy yell my name, and then there was a flash of gray and yellow and plastic-sunglasses red, and the next thing I knew, my sister tackled the guy with the knife. His baseball cap went flying, and for the first time, I saw his eyes, really saw them: black-blue and glowing, like lake water at midnight, like onyx.
Like Kissy’s unnaturally green eyes, only darker.
“I have to hurt you. I have to hurt you both.”
Now that I could see the boy’s eyes, his words took on new meaning, but he didn’t exactly sound torn up about whatever compulsions he was feeling. He sounded meditative. He sounded inhuman. He sounded hungry.
Kissy got him pinned down, her hands holding his to the ground, her knees digging into his thighs. Her hair fell into his face, and like a wild thing, she growled.
She was so small and he was so big that I didn’t know how she was holding him there. He fought her grip and angled the knife upward, closer and closer to her abdomen.
“I have to hurt you. I have to kill her. I have to stop this before it starts.”
With each word, the boy’s accent grew thicker, and the dark-light shining from his eyes spread outward from his irises until the whites of his eyes were pitch-black, reptilian and fathomless, like someone had drilled two holes straight through his head.