Keeping a wary eye on her, I knelt by the college kid and spread my hand out on his chest. After a moment, I said, “No permanent harm done. He probably won’t remember what happened when he wakes up, which is just as well.”
“So we succeeded in tonight’s mission, though the price was high.” Her vivid blue eyes caught my gaze. “What will it take to convince you that I’m really Bethany, not a demon?”
“I don’t know,” I said bluntly. “When the big battle went down, I sensed the powers of the demon and Lady Bethany, but there was also an intense, alien energy I didn’t recognize. What the hell was going on?”
She tied the belt of the trench coat around her slim waist with shaking fingers. “As I blocked the succubus’s death magic and turned it back on her, I used a soul-transfer spell to exchange our spirits.”
I thought back, trying to analyze the hurricane of power that had blasted us all. “So the unfamiliar magic was that spell?”
She nodded. “Very unusual energy, wasn’t it?”
I frowned. “Where the hell did you find a soul-transfer spell?”
She bit her lower lip. Her full, lush lower lip. She’d have to drop a bag over her head not to be alluring, and maybe even that wouldn’t work. “While you were taking Charles downstairs for a taxi, I followed more links on the succubus page. One of them led to a very ancient spell that supposedly would switch souls between two different people.”
I swore. “You tested an unknown spell in combat conditions? That’s crazy dangerous!”
“I didn’t have a lot of choice,” she said mildly. “I was going to die anyhow. This way I had a chance of surviving.”
Souls are eternal—every Guardian knows that. “I had the impression that Lady Beth had no fear of death.”
“I didn’t.” Her gaze caught mine. “I had other reasons for wanting to live longer in a young body.”
My heart began beating faster. “Why?”
“You know why, David,” she said softly.
The allure she radiated was a fire in my blood despite her being covered with a trench coat from her chin to her ankles. Demon magic, or was it pure Bethany? “You need to be … more specific.”
She drew a deep breath. “Ever since I met you ten years ago, when you were just out of the SEALs and paying a courtesy call on an old Guardian lady because your mother told you to, I’ve wished that I were a few decades younger.”
“You never said or did anything to suggest that you felt that way.” My throat was tight as my desire to believe warred with the fear that she was still a succubus and wickedly adept at convincing a man to believe in what he wanted to hear.
She smiled wryly. “It’s … unseemly to be a lecherous old woman yearning for a man young enough to be my grandson. I was grateful that we became good friends. How could we possibly be anything more? Then this demon showed up wearing my body.” Her voice hardened. “I thought she owed me something for that. Certainly she could not be allowed to stay in possession of it and use it to kill innocent young men.”
If she was acting, it was a brilliant show that she was putting on. Knowing that I needed the courage to risk my emotions as she was doing, I said haltingly, “It’s also unseemly for a man to be lusting after a sweet little old lady. So I didn’t. But I’ve never met a woman whose mind and spirit fit mine as well as yours. If you’re really Bethany, and not the cleverest damned demon in the universe!”
She’d been tense as the brick wall, but she eased into a smile. “I don’t think that succubi are particularly clever. This one was all selfish hunger.”
“Maybe she’s clever enough to know what I haven’t wanted to admit even to myself,” I said slowly.
“If you can’t be sure what I am by reading my energy, there’s only one solution, David.” She reached out a hand. “Touch me.”
If she was still the succubus, one touch would probably turn me into mental mush, and her next meal. But there was no other way to find out.
I’d always been a risk taker. I took her hand, and energy flared between us like wildfire. Not succubus steal-my-soul-and-consume-my-life energy, though. This was ten years of caring and affection transmuting into fierce, true love. The woman I pulled into my arms was my Bethany, no doubts and questions, forever and ever, amen.
Our kiss wasn’t the affectionate peck on the check that is exchanged between friends, but a hot, needy lover’s kiss. “Bethany,” I whispered when I could breathe again. “I never thought we could be together. Not this way.”
“Nor did I.” She laughed a little. “It’s such a cliché to fall in love with a man who’s tall, dark, and handsome. But as soon as you showed up on my doorstep, I was head over heels. Proof that age doesn’t bring wisdom.”
I smoothed back her silky hair, touching her as I’d never touched her before. “It’s also a cliché to fall in love with a hot blond babe. The hard part was knowing that that babe was seventy years in the past.”
“Not anymore.” She rested her forehead against my cheek, her soft breath warming my throat. “I’ve always dreamed of a Guardian alchemical marriage. Two souls blended as one. I loved my first husband, but we didn’t have that. I thought I’d missed my chance.”
“Yet here we are.” I kissed her forehead. Her vibrant young body was a little taller than her old one had been. “I think we were meant to be together, but we got the timing wrong.”
“Time kept us apart—but the demon inadvertently gave us a chance to reset that timing.” She slid an arm around my waist and gave me a shining smile. “Let’s go home, David. I’m in a hurry for us to have some privacy.”
So was I.
Carrie Vaughn
Bestseller Carrie Vaughn is the author of a wildly popular series of novels detailing the adventures of Kitty Norville, a radio personality who also happens to be a werewolf, and who runs a late-night call-in radio advice show for supernatural creatures. The Kitty books include Kitty and the Midnight Hour, Kitty Goes to Washington, Kitty Takes a Holiday, Kitty and the Silver Bullet, Kitty and the Dead Man’s Hand, Kitty Raises Hell, and Kitty’s House of Horrors. Vaughn’s short work has appeared in Jim Baen’s Universe, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Subterranean, Wild Cards: Inside Straight, Realms of Fantasy, Paradox, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, and elsewhere. Her most recent books are Voices of Dragons and a new Kitty novel, Kitty Goes to War. She lives in Colorado.
In the clever tale that follows, she demonstrates that the line between dreams and reality can be a thin one—and that sometimes it’s hard to tell if you’ve crossed it.
Rooftops
The wires were obvious, strung with LED lights that switched on the moment the hero launched upward, illustrating the fact that no one had yet figured out how to get a real flight-capable superhuman to act in a play or movie or anything.
“Well?” Otto Veck, acclaimed director, looked at Charlotte.
The stage was a mess. A chain-link fence formed the backdrop, supposedly suggesting the shadows of a forest. A pile of stuffed black garbage bags made a castle shape. A woman in a white bustier, panties, fishnets, and a black garter with a cute little bow clinging to her thigh lay at the foot of the tower of trash as if she had just thrown herself off it, to her death. Nearby another body lay, a twisted man dressed in a three-piece suit with a tire iron sticking out of him, suggesting a sword at the end of a duel. The hero, a handsome man with a clean-shaven face, wearing an alluring amount of leather, had been kneeling beside the woman, hand to his chest, overcome by the wretchedness of the world. Then he flew away, straight up into the rigging overhead, vanishing into the heavens.
The scene was supposed to look a mess, but it didn’t match the picture Charlotte imagined. She winced. “Can we make it a little more … I don’t know … pretty?”
Otto tilted a thoughtful head, as if regarding the stage from a slightly different angle. It was Marta, the actress, who sat up, appalled. Fred, who played the fiendish villain/bureaucrat, stood and set
aside the tire iron as he stretched muscles and groaned. Harry, who played the tragic hero too late to save his lover, but not too late to exact revenge on the fiendish villain/bureaucrat, slowly descended, hanging passively in his harness as the stage crew lowered him back to earth. Out of character now, he looked tired.
“Pretty? You want this to be pretty?” Marta said. “What happened to the terrors of modernity? There’s nothing pretty about modernity.” She had her hands on her hips and glared with the air of an offended artist. The truth was, she looked good in the lingerie and knew it, and was probably afraid that “pretty” meant putting her in a floor-length gown.
Charlotte thought she had said something along the lines of wanting to recast classic Gothic narratives as a vehicle for alienation—the terrors of postmodernity expressed as the sublime. They had the terrors of postmodernity down pat but seemed to be missing the sublime.
The last dress rehearsal was a little late to be rethinking the project. Was it too late to cancel the whole thing? It had all seemed so much more clever when she wrote it.
“Never mind,” she said. “It’s fine. It’s all fine.”
“Maybe the lighting,” Otto said, trying to be helpful. “More of a halo effect upstage.” He put on his headset. “Bob, is it too late to change that last lighting cue?”
She sat in her squishy velvet seat in the middle of the house and pondered. This was supposed to be her big break. Her jump from the bush leagues to the big-time, with a director like Otto, an award-winning actress like Marta starring, in a theater that didn’t seat its audience in folding chairs. Charlotte couldn’t help but feel that her career was already over.
Her phone rattled, and she dug in the pocket of her jeans for it.
The screen showed Dorian’s text: “Wrk late, won’t make dinner, sry, make it up to you.”
She quelled her disappointment and instead decided to admire Dorian’s dedication. An up-and-coming assistant DA like Dorian Merriman didn’t win cases like the one against the Midnight Stalker by going on dinner dates with struggling playwrights.
Otto and the three actors were all looking at her, and she might have blushed.
“Everything okay?” Otto said.
“Fine,” she said, putting her phone away.
“Are we done, Otto?” Harry said.
“We’re done. Call’s at five tomorrow.” Otto and the actors disappeared backstage.
Part of her wanted to curl up right here for the next twenty-four hours, until it was all over. Maybe she could sleep through it.
Instead, she found her coat and bag and went to catch a bus home. It was early summer, still daylight, still warm. She could have walked the whole way, scuffing toes on the sidewalk and thinking of everything that could go horribly wrong tomorrow night. She didn’t even have to go on stage and she was terrified.
As an alternative to going home and stewing, she decided to take herself to dinner. Just because Dorian couldn’t go out didn’t mean she had to stay home. She had to either celebrate the beginning of her career or mourn its incipient demise. She had a favorite place, a hillside café with a rooftop patio, perfect for watching the urban neon sunset. And it arranged its wine list by price, which she thought was postmodernly classy.
SHE DIDN’T PLAN for the jewelry store next door to the café to get robbed while she was there.
She had just ordered a salad and a glass of zinfandel. Something to take the edge off while she stared at the hazy city sky and reminded herself that she was lucky and she had a great boyfriend when he was around, and her dream was coming true and the play really was okay and no one was going to write wretched reviews calling her names. Everything was going to be just fine.
Alarms started ringing, clanging mechanically, vibrating through the floor. The police sirens joined a minute later. A dozen customers and waitstaff crowded along the patio rail to see what was happening. Charlotte was already sitting there and had a pretty good view of the street. But like many others, she also looked up and around at the sky and rooftops, wondering which hero would swoop in to save the day: Breezeway? The Bullet? Captain Olympus himself?
The police sirens approached, howling, then a half dozen Commerce City PD squad cars roared up the street and screeched to cinematic halts, skidding to angles that blocked the intersections. Uniforms bounded out and pointed guns at the building. Out came the bullhorn, and one of the officers called through it, “Come out with your hands up!”
Shouting echoed up the stairwell that led to the roof. Six men wearing purple Kevlar vests, fatigues, and ninjalike masks appeared. Two held heavy metallic briefcases, no doubt filled with something nefarious and stolen. Four held what had to be ray guns—plastic, streamlined, with parabolic dishes where the barrels should be. They made quite an impression.
They must have planned to jump to the next rooftop and keep running until they found a ladder to shimmy down while the police were still racing up the stairs after them. The police were a little too fast, and the thieves were a little too desperate, because they went for hostages.
Two of the gunmen pointed their weapons and yelled, “Freeze!” which nobody did. Instead people screamed and tumbled out of the way, covering their heads, falling to the floor, scrambling on top of each other. It was a pretty good strategy, because if they stayed in a mob and the gunmen fired, it would probably be somebody else who got shot.
Astonished, Charlotte just kept sitting there, back to the railing, instead of fleeing with the others. So one of the guys grabbed her, arm around her throat, and held her against the rail, purple parabolic dish to her temple.
Her captor shouted the obligatory “Nobody move!” She thought the other gunman was standing at the top of the stairs, pointing his weapon at the oncoming cops, preventing rescue. So much for a nice evening out.
Staring back at the gun, which had become very large in her vision, she wondered if the weapon would incinerate her or simply make her vanish in a stream of light. She wondered which one would hurt more. Maybe she wouldn’t have to go through opening night after all. Maybe Dorian would avenge her, after standing forlornly over her poor broken body. Would he feel guilty for missing dinner with her?
The tableau froze: heroine and villain, random crowd huddling like a Greek chorus, henchmen wreaking chaos. Time stopped, her heartbeat stilled to a moment of perfect silence, a universe holding its breath.
She didn’t know where the newcomer entered from, but the gun left her head and pointed at something else, and there he was in the middle of the patio, hands on his hips. He was also wearing a mask, and that may have been what set the gang of jewel thieves most on edge. One more variable must have been too many to handle.
The thieves had an out, and they took it: Her captor tipped her over the railing.
Charlotte gasped a breath as the sky spun past her feet. She was falling—then she wasn’t. She jerked to a stop, hanging two stories over the sidewalk. She didn’t even have time to scream.
She wasn’t sure how it happened, but she could see how it ended up: The masked man, the hero, gripped her hand and held her dangling thirty feet up. She swayed and came to rest against the concrete wall. His other hand held the railing. He must have dived over the edge as she fell, faster than a heartbeat, faster than a blink. He must have grabbed her, grabbed the railing, and stopped her mid-plunge. Her shoulder throbbed with the pain of being wrenched. His must have felt worse. Now they hung there, looking at each other.
“I’ll need you to climb up,” he said, voice tight with strain.
“What?” she squeaked.
“I’m fast. Not all that strong,” he gasped.
He lifted her partway until she could grab hold of his jeans, then his shirt, then his shoulder, panting and panicked, too shocked to be scared, unbelievably remembering not to look down. She used him as a ladder, until she put her arms around his shoulders. He swung his leg up to hook it over the railing, shrugged to hint that maybe she should make her way to the railing as well. Sh
e meant to dig her fingers more tightly around his shirt, but she got the muscle of his shoulder. He only flinched a little. She managed to slide over, hook her elbow over, then her leg, and the two of them rolled onto the patio together.
The ray gun–toting thieves had used the distraction to flee.
Charlotte and her rescuer looked at each other. He was nondescript, but the mask made all the difference. Without it, she’d have glanced at him once, maybe admired the muscled shoulders under the almost-too-tight T-shirt. No uniform, just T-shirt and jeans, plain black boots, well worn. But he wore a mask, a length of black cloth with eyeholes over his head and tied in back. She stared at his eyes, brown, rich. With the mask, it was like looking at someone through a window. She wasn’t sure she could really see him. He held her arms—maybe she looked like she was going to faint, falling backward, making him rescue her all over again.
Imagine it—her, rescued at the last second by a real-life hero! Just like one of her plays. Unbelievable. Thrilling.
He was breathing hard. The feat hadn’t been easy for him; sweat shone on his neck.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“I should be asking you that,” he said, smiling. He had a very nice smile.
“No … well, yes … but you—that was amazing.” She sounded a little breathy. “I’m fine. Are you?”
“Just fine,” he said. He never stopped smiling.
Then, just as a crowd of police trooped up the stairs, he ran—and yes, he was fast. He sped to the other side of the roof, to the back of the building, where a fence gave him a chance to jump off, climb down, flee, and vanish—all in seconds. She couldn’t see movement, arms and legs pumping, just this shape that flowed away. Then it was dusk, and she couldn’t see anything.
“AND YOU HAVE no idea who he was?” the detective asked again.
“No. I have no idea.” When she arrived at the police station, someone put a blanket over her shoulders and a cup of coffee in her hands. Then she started shivering. She hadn’t realized she was cold.
Songs of Love and Darkness Page 3