by Hugh Howey
Elora stood up, stretching slowly. Others in the room were opening their eyes, including the king and queen on their thrones. A drop of blood trickled from the queen’s nose.
“I killed the dark fairy,” Anders said.
The princess smiled. “Perhaps I’ll keep you and let you be king.”
Several people screamed. Elora’s parents started coughing and choking. Anders glanced at them, then gaped in disbelief.
Blood seeped from their eyes, poured from their noses and sprayed from their spluttering lips. Anders turned to look at the nobles and servants. They were all panicking as blood streamed from their faces.
Elora’s sudden laughter rang out like bells.
The king stared at her with bulging eyes, then toppled from his throne and lay still upon the floor in a growing pool of blood.
The princess stepped over him and sat down on his throne. She smiled innocently at Anders as her father’s blood soaked into her skirts. “Blood bane bark in the wine and the castle’s well,” she explained.
Horrified, Anders watched helplessly as the people bled and died. His father’s words echoed in his mind. Everything you touch turns to ashes.
Sarah L. Carter
lives in London, England. She has been passionate about reading and writing since a very early age. Fantasy is her preferred genre.
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Science Fiction
What I Wasn’t
Tony Bertauski
It started with a flash.
Like the Big Bang, an explosion that swallowed everything. The pain sunk deep into my head, and then was replaced with blurry colors. There were no edges to the blobs floating before a background of gray. The pinks and the browns and the silvers and the blues shifted in silence that was so deep and perfect, like floating in a pristine ocean.
And then the silence was gone, obliterated by the sounds of a tapping keyboard and a young man talking. His name was Ben. He just broke up with his girlfriend, said he was ready to spread his wings. You know, fly a little.
“What’s wrong with her left eye?” Madeline asked.
She was the one making the keyboard rattle. A colorful blob merged into my line of sight and then—SNICK—my left eyelid slid up. More colors.
“Hand me the drops,” Ben said.
The drops were cold and slippery. They burned my eyes. I blinked the world into focus. Ben’s hair hung over his ears and he hadn’t shaved in days. His eyes were green, like the green of new growth. The white collar of his lab coat was pulled up.
He flashed a bright light in my left eye. “How’s that?” he asked. “Can you see me?”
He spoke like I was deaf or old. I was neither.
“Give me something. Sing a song, belch…something.”
“Stop badgering her,” Madeline said. “She’s not ready to talk.”
An argument ensued. I was left staring at a gray ceiling with an attached rail that encircled us with a heavy plastic curtain. I realized, not until that moment, that I couldn’t move. My body was like wet metal shavings, the table hard and cold. Madeline made the keyboard dance while Ben fiddled with a tray of medical tools.
That’s when the memories came.
I remembered Christmas and my dog and the time Simon brought flowers to work and sang and I blushed. I remembered all the little good things and the little bad things, how they hurt and how they pleased. That’s when I smiled.
“There,” Madeline said. “Give her the mirror.”
Ben stuck something in my hand. He lifted my naked arm, wrapping his hand around my dead fingers. I saw my red hair spread over my shoulders. My skin was fair and my eyes were green, like emeralds.
“Heather.” I watched my lips move. That was my name.
Madeline kept tapping the keyboard. Ben danced around the table and rubbed my hands and legs. The feeling came back with pins and needles. The sensations came in dense waves, as if my body had fallen asleep. Ben massaged my arms and shoulders and feet. I sank into the incoming tide of memories to escape the discomfort, each one a jewel that reminded me who I was.
There was sledding and the time I learned to drive and a funeral and my first kiss. I remembered my life.
Ben was rushing to the other side when he slipped. Falling, he grabbed the curtain. The metal rings pinged as the plastic ripped away. We weren’t in a small room, not like I thought. I let my head roll to the side. I saw more tables like the one beneath me. On them were nude women with red hair spilled over their shoulders and fair skin. Their eyes were closed, but I knew they were green.
“Damn it, Ben.” The keyboard clattered at high speed.
And those sweet, sweet memories went away.
Tony Bertauski
During the day, I’m a horticulturist. While I’ve spent much of my career designing landscapes or diagnosing dying plants, I’ve always been a storyteller. My writing career began with magazine columns, landscape design textbooks, and a gardening column at the Post and Courier (Charleston, SC). However, I’ve always fancied fiction.
In 2008, I won the South Carolina Fiction Open with Four Letter Words, a short story inspired by my grandfather and Alzheimer’s Disease. My first step as a novelist began when I developed a story to encourage my young son to read. This story became The Socket Greeny Saga. Socket tapped into my lifetime fascination with consciousness and identity, but this character does it from a young adult’s struggle with his place in the world.
After Socket, I thought I was done with fiction. But then the ideas kept coming, and I kept writing. Most of my work investigates the human condition and the meaning of life, but not in ordinary fashion. About half of my work is Young Adult (Socket Greeny, Claus, Foreverland) because it speaks to that age of indecision and the struggle with identity. But I like to venture into adult fiction (Halfskin, Drayton) so I can cuss. Either way, I like to be entertaining.
And I’m a big fan of plot twists.
Tony Bertauski’s Website
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Science Fiction
Tongue Tied
Edward M. Grant
Sameer would never forget his twelfth birthday. It was the night he first saw the stars, through the twenty centimetre thick windows of the observation deck at Olbers Spaceport.
Only the starlight, and the faint glow of the spaceport’s emergency lighting shining through the windows, illuminated the rugged, airless surface of Vesta. The thermometer needle outside showed a hundred and forty below zero, and slowly falling. He had lived all his life in the tunnels of Olbers at twenty degrees, what could that temperature feel like?
“Do you like my dress?” Abhaya said, from one of the flimsy plastic seats behind him.
Sameer’s father didn’t believe in birthday parties, but Abhaya had convinced her parents to arrange one for him. She had bugged him all day, and cornered him near the end.
“I’ve got a present for you,” she had said.
“What?”
“The stars.”
He had looked at her blankly. Was she just playing another silly game?
“At the spaceport,” she said. “You keep saying you want to see them.”
“The spaceport is locked, unless a ship lands.” And, with only two hundred people in Olbers, ships were rare.
“Anand convinced Daddy to give him the security code. I found it written down by the terminal in his bedroom.”
And, just half an hour later, the stars were his. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, the black sky bloomed into a haze of grey, glowing dimly from horizon to horizon. Every one of the millions of dots above him a planet, a star, or a ship travelling the solar system.
Abhaya pulled herself out of the seat and bounced toward him in the low gravity, then grabbed the rail in front of the window. “Anand said I couldn’t go out after the party, I should stay home and study, but I didn’t want to study.
”
“Uh-huh,” Sameer said.
“I don’t think I should have to study if I don’t want to, do you?”
He could almost reach out and touch the universe, if the glass wasn’t in the way. Imagine living out there, floating between the stars, seeing that view every minute of the day. There were so many places he could go, so many things he could do and see, if he wasn’t stuck on Vesta.
Abhaya pulled herself along the rail toward him. “Are you listening to me?”
To the west, a thin, bright streamer of light shone against the stars. Could that be the beanstalk hanging from Sceleris Docks?
“You’re not, are you?” she said.
“Uh-huh.”
Another dot briefly flared near the end of the streamer. Was that a ship arriving at the docks? Or leaving?
Who was on board? Where else had they been? Where were they going? His father wouldn’t even let him have a terminal to access the Net, but he’d seen things on Anand’s that were far more exciting than a life running the family store in Olbers.
A cloth face with two glass eyes wobbled in front of Sameer’s face, interrupting his daydream.
“Do you like my doll?” Abhaya said, as she held it there. “It came in on the last shipment from Earth.”
Couldn’t she just go home?
But she’d let him in. He could hardly tell her to go away.
“Daddy had it flown all the way from India,” she added.
Sameer nodded, then pushed the doll aside and waited for his eyes to adjust again.
“I’m trying to look at the stars.”
The dot flared again. The ship was probably beginning a journey of millions of kilometres to deliver fissionables from Vesta’s mines. One day, he would do that, blasting away from this place on a stream of nuclear fire.
Abhaya pulled herself closer. “Anand says if you lick the glass you can taste the stars.”
“That’s silly.”
She smirked. “Are you scared?”
“It’s just silly.”
“Go on. Try it.”
He reached out his tongue and pressed it against the glass. Far from glowing flames, a tangy taste sucked the heat from his tongue wherever it touched the window. He pressed his nose against it, and sniffed in dust accumulated over many years. His nostrils twitched, and his head pulled back from the window as his body prepared for a sneeze.
Except his tongue, which was stuck to the freezing glass, his saliva turned to ice everywhere it was exposed to the cold.
“Mmf mm, mmm,” he said, as he tried to keep the sneeze in. He wanted to say ‘help me get my tongue off this thing,’ but, with his tongue stuck to it, the words just wouldn’t come out.
He grabbed his tongue between his finger and thumb.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Abhaya said.
He gently tried to peel it away from the glass, but winced at the pain, as though he was pulling the skin from the tongue.
“If you keep trying,” she said, “you’ll pull your tongue off. Now, where was I?”
The clock on the wall said eight. He was late getting home, and, in a couple of hours, his parents would start looking for him. In a few hours more, they’d decide to check the spaceport, because they’d checked everywhere else, and he couldn’t be in there, could he?
Abhaya played with the doll, making it walk along the railing. “Bahdra asked if we’re going to get married one day, and I told her that was silly, but she said no one else would have you, and she’s probably right, isn’t she? I suppose we will. What do you think?”
“Mmf.”
If she didn’t get tired of talking, it could be a long night.
Edward M. Grant
is a physicist and software developer turned SF and horror writer. He now lives in the frozen wastes of Canada, but was born in England, where he wrote for a science and technology magazine and worked on numerous indie movies in and around London. He has traveled the world, been a VIP at several space shuttle launches, survived earthquakes and a tsunami, climbed Mt Fuji, and visits nuclear explosion sites as a hobby.
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Urban Fantasy
Indy-San
Misti Wolanski
The gray tabby kitten purred as its warm tongue rubbed rough on Indigo’s fingers. It was a cute little thing, old enough to be weaned and know it liked water, but young enough that Indy’s scent didn’t worry it.
The ignorance of youth. Sometimes, he missed it.
“San-san?” He didn’t bother raising his voice, even though his wife was meters down the path and a waterfall thundered nearby. San would hear him.
“Hmm?” Sanura’s lazy tone meant she felt okay, even with his Japanese play on her name.
The trip through the park for some fresh air had been a good idea, then, even with the boy they were babysitting: a fawn, as those with magic called a human child.
Indy smiled and stroked the kitten along its side. “Think I could raise a kitten without you eating it?”
“Sure!” San chirped.
He froze. A happy wife was good and all, but certain types of happy… were not so good. “You feeling okay?”
“Terrific!”
Uh-oh. He turned slowly to look towards her, and sure enough San was leisurely walking towards him on her own legs, wheelchair left somewhere around the bend. She swung her bag as she walked.
The too-short child-sized jacket she wore to fit her shoulders and not her torso was ripped. And bloody.
He swallowed. Where was Ian, the fawn they were babysitting? …San?”
“Mm?”
“You haven’t eaten anyone, have you?” Indy would never forgive himself.
She frowned, her tongue pressing against one fang. “Why wouldn’t I do that?”
Indy guided the kitten off his lap and hoped it would have enough sense to avoid attracting San’s attention. If it survived the next few minutes, perhaps the fawn’s family might take it.
“San,” he said gently. “It’s illegal to eat humans.”
San tugged one of her dark curls, still frowning. “But Ra’s daughter has me do so.”
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Ra’s daughter joined her father, San.” By your teeth, my dear asp.
San’s nearly white gaze drifted. “She bade me—”
“Sanura!” He gripped her by the shoulders. “You renounced all that…long ago.” How could he remind her of the present when she was mired in a past distant enough that he had no idea what it must’ve been like? Indy had seen a few centuries; San had survived for more than a millennium.
Her puzzled look chilled him.
Indy was never letting anyone talk them into babysitting fawns, ever, no matter how long his wife had gone without a relapse. At least vampire and werewolf children could bite back.
“Look, just… sit, here.” He guided her to a stone and hoped to God that she hadn’t eaten the boy they were watching for the day. He loved her, but if she’d finally snapped entirely…
“Sit here,” he repeated. “I’ll be right back.”
He headed down the path to where she’d been. Where was Ian?
Sanura tugged her ripped and intentionally bloodied jacket. Indy must’ve been panicked, to not notice the distinct scent of groundhog.
The kitten he’d been playing with swatted her foot, and she caught it by the scruff of the neck. It hung limply, obediently. Innocently.
With a final sniff, she sighed and let it drop to the ground.
“Want some more?”
She glanced at the fawn, who’d cut through the underbrush to rejoin her on the path. He looked wan, the kerchief tied around his wrist would likely stain, and he still offered her more of his blood. Brave boy.
“Don’t be so eager. Too much, and I might forget myself.” Sanura well knew the dangers of drug-induced hazes. She’d killed while in them more than once. Old dogs like her didn
’t readily learn new tricks.
The fawn’s reply of a grin told her why his parents didn’t mind him keeping lunatics like her company: he fit right in. “I’m a minor. I can’t be arrested for feeding you.”
“Lovely. Add corruption of a minor to my rap sheet.” Sanura hadn’t survived as long as she had by flaunting that vampire rules didn’t apply to her, not technically.
She flexed her fingers, the usual pain eased by the boy’s donation. She felt the claws and fur inside, longing to come to the surface with the moon…
Longing, but as trapped as if the moon were always new or eclipsed. Her jaw easily produced a mouthful of sharp teeth suitable for ripping, and that was as far as her shifting could go. Even the teeth did her more harm than good, since her body preferred blood over flesh.
All handicaps that Sanura had accidentally given herself by expecting problems when her magic matured. She wondered if that was the source for her fibromyalgia, as well, or if she would’ve had that anyway.
“Sure you don’t want more?”
“Don’t offer the addict opium,” she warned.
“It’s a painkiller,” he said, admitting that he’d noticed her stiffness.
She frowned. The last person to comment on that had ended up with a snapped arm for his trouble.
But then, that werewolf had tried to rip up a young vampire friend, a werewolf’s wife. If she recalled correctly, that vampire’s husband and this boy’s father were cousins, which was how the boy knew her to begin with. Sanura reminded herself that only bad things would come of eating him.
“Blood’s your morphine, Madame. I—“
“Enough!” Did he have a death wish?
She scowled at him. He cringed.
At least the boy was more foolish than stupid.
“I never should’ve let you talk me into this.” Even now, his blood called to her, promising relief from the pain and a break from the memories. She shivered.