The flight across the fields was dizzyingly fast and filtered through a hundred pairs of eyes. It was like her entire body had learned to see and was looking at the world for the first time. Lou would have laughed with delight, but she no longer had lungs or a throat to laugh with; all the parts of her were strange, from her uncounted wings to her bristling legs. She flew, and the sky was hers, and no one was ever going to take it away from her again.
There were words in the sky, in the buzz of wings and the flash of glittering bodies. The adze are older than this nation, if not older than this land; we came when the settlers came, nestled in the holds of their ships, hidden in the shapes of their slaves. You would not have known us, child, but you would have felt our touch all the same.
Memories then, memories that were not hers, or had not been until this moment, for the swarm was a single organism, and what the man knew, she knew also: what he had seen, she saw, broken and reassembled through so many swarms just like this one, over so many hot summer nights.
Saw the children who were found dead by their mothers, bloodless and unmoving.
Saw the women who were burned as witches while the adze walked free, indistinguishable from anyone else.
Saw the bukwus of this new world meeting the vampires the Europeans had brought with them, and later, the jiangshi of the Chinese and the patasola of the South Americans. The night was a bloodbath, and only the fact that creatures who did not breathe moved slow and lived long kept the world from being washed red. Through all of this moved the adze, who reproduced only rarely and fed only when the summer sky was dark with storms and the trees were ripe with fireflies.
Saw herself running along the creek toward the place where the swarm had paused. Lou felt more than heard her new companion’s understanding: he had not realized before that she and the girl who had chased his component fireflies all through the summer were one and the same.
But why? she asked. My face is still my face.
You were alive before, and now you are not, he replied. That which is living can never truly resemble that which is dead. Something is lost.
Lou was silent.
Ah, child. Something is gained; something is always gained. Only believe me, and let us go home.
The swarm spiraled downward, toward the backyard of the house where she had lived all the short years of her life.
Too short. The fireflies swirled a few feet above the ground, shaping themselves into two human figures. The holes in Lou’s dress were gone, and the bloodstains were gone as well; she no longer needed them. The man—whose name she still did not know—watched impassively as she ran for the back door. She was going home. It was a thing that could happen only once, and so he waited, allowing her to have her moment.
He could wait until the screams began.
Lou tested the back door and, finding it unlocked, let herself inside. The thought that she might need permission to enter never crossed her mind. She wasn’t a vampire, after all. She was just . . . she was just a dead girl, coming home to the place where she would always be welcome. If her flesh was bloodless and filled with light, what did that matter? This was her place. This would always be her place. Her father had promised her that, before he died and left her and her mother alone.
She walked through the kitchen to the front room. The door was closed, but she could taste violence in the air, a bitter sense-memory of the moment when her mother struck Spenser and Spenser struck her mother. There was something else there as well, a hot, stormy scent, like bright copper pennies. She walked forward, toward the shape of Spenser sitting motionless in his chair. It was time to tell him why he didn’t belong here. Then he would go away, and it would just be her and her mother and the fireflies. Surely her mother would welcome the fireflies. Surely her mother wouldn’t mind when they tangled themselves together and became a man. Surely.
Lou stopped when she reached Spenser’s chair, blinking as she looked at him. He was red all over. He had always been a florid man, but this was something different, this was scarlet and carmine and the slow darkness of burgundy. This was blood, everywhere blood, so much blood, all of it spreading from the knife that was buried in the center of his chest. She reached out and touched the handle. It was stuck in so deep that she didn’t think she could ever pull it loose.
It was disappointing, to realize that she wasn’t going to kill him. To realize that someone else got there first and took the chance away from her.
“Mom?” She turned to look at the stairs. The hot storm smell continued up the stairs, up to the bedroom her mother had shared with her father, once, before the world changed. “Are you there?”
No one answered. Lou began to climb the stairs, slowly at first, and then faster, and faster, until she was taking them three at a time.
Silence.
Mary was not a religious person. If ever she had been, that urge had died the moment the state troopers came to her door and said, “There’s been an accident,” and began the process of putting the best man she’d ever known into the ground. But she sat on the floor of her bedroom, looking at her bloody hands, and prayed for an angel to come and take this horrible night away. Her little girl was dead, and her body was lost. Her second husband—who hadn’t been a good man, not for one moment, but he had never claimed to be, and for all his faults, had never lied to her—was dead, by her hand. She needed a miracle. She needed the world to be kind.
“Mom?”
Mary raised her head and beheld her miracle.
To anyone else, Lou might still have looked like a normal little girl. To her mother, who knew her better than anyone in the world, she was a stranger. Her flesh was too smooth, too pale, and glowed with a soft inner light that wasn’t human in the least. When she spoke, her lips moved around a mouthful of teeth that were too long and too sharp, designed to pierce flesh.
“I came home, Mom,” said Lou. She stepped into the room. “I came home.”
Mary made a small keening noise.
“Did you kill Spenser? I would’ve done it for you. You made an awful mess.”
Mary pressed herself back against the bed.
Lou looked at the blood on her mother’s hands. “I can clean that up for you,” she said. “I’m so hungry. I didn’t know I would be this hungry.”
Mary’s scream was a bolt of lightning lashing through the summer night. In the bedroom, Lou’s body exploded into fireflies. In the backyard, the man who no longer needed a name nodded to himself and dissolved into a sparkling cloud of insects that flew through the open door to join the feast that was beginning upstairs.
After the lightning, the thunder.
ON THE DARK SIDE OF SUNLIGHT BASIN
MICHAEL KORYTA
It was in the year before the great fire, the one that consumed half of Yellowstone and turned the nation’s eyes toward Montana and Wyoming, when Joe took the man named Medoc from California out hunting. They were after bighorn sheep, and what Medoc had been told—that Joe was the best guide in the area and also the cheapest, because he didn’t work for an outfitter—was true enough, and what Medoc promised—cash on the barrelhead—was good enough.
They’d been out for two days without any luck when the wind shifted and began to blow hard out of the north and Joe warned that snow was chasing it. That was no reason to call off the hunt, but by then he’d had plenty of time to learn that his Californian was softer than forgotten butter at a picnic and that the likelihood of their taking a bighorn in any conditions was slim. Joe had considered doing the shooting himself—he wasn’t above that if it guaranteed the bonus that Medoc had promised—but the Californian was so slow and bumbling and so damn loud that he’d begun to think even his own odds were poor.
“Might get rough out here,” he said, looking at Medoc in the flickering lantern light. “Shooting a white sheep in a curtain of driving snow? It’s not easy.”
Medoc was a tall, angular-faced man with a tendency toward nervous tremors—he’d spilled his water three times
already on the trip while trying to free it from his pack—that wasn’t inspiring any more confidence in his shooting ability. He seemed in pain, which made sense considering the shiny new boots he was wearing, probably fresh out of the box.
“We’ll give it a try,” he said. “I’ve got buddies at home who are going to have a field day with me if I show up empty-handed. I said I’d have a sheep above the fireplace, and I laid some bets on it.”
Joe figured that his buddies were country club types and that they’d already taken plenty of money from Medoc in various bets over the years.
“Besides,” Medoc said, “that’s why I have you, right? To get me through the weather? You people, you’re supposed to be the best.”
You could add racism to the kindling pile that was burning within Joe as they wasted days out there without coming close to getting a kill. Medoc tossed offhand remarks about Indians around in a way that suggested he suspected Joe was either too greedy to care or too dumb to notice. The man seemed to think his money bought a lot more than guiding expertise.
“The best,” Joe agreed, and then he unzipped the fly of his tent. “We’ll keep at it, then.”
Before he slept, Joe vowed that he’d walk the man into the ground the next day.
The snow blew in around dawn, and they drank coffee standing up. Joe ate oatmeal; Medoc declined, saying he wanted to get moving. Joe was happy to oblige.
They’d been hiking for five hours and the pace had slowed to a crawl as Medoc stopped to apply moleskin bandages to the various blisters he was gathering. The flesh on his feet was as white as the snow he sat in as he awkwardly applied the bandages and Joe stood and watched.
“You want to help me, or you just gonna stand there, Tonto?”
Joe didn’t answer this immediately. He spat into the snow and looked north and saw the craggy face of mountains that he knew held no sheep. They’d have moved down and east by now, and the mountains to the north were lined with abandoned old mines and sheer rock faces. It was difficult climbing in good weather, and in the snow it would be hell. He pointed at them.
“We hurry, we find sheep up there,” he said, trying his best to give Medoc the expressionless face he seemed to desire in his guide. For the first time on the hunt, Joe was enjoying himself.
“We damn well better,” Medoc said, and then he pulled his long hunting sock on in such a fashion that it promptly peeled the moleskin off his foot and bunched it up near the toes.
Joe turned back into the wind to hide his smile.
They never should have seen a sheep. The point was to make Medoc suffer, and so not only was Joe leading him toward an area he never would have hunted on his own, but he was paying no real attention to the possibility of an encounter. There was a stream crossing to be done before they reached the base of the mountain and began to climb, and he was eyeing the water and trying to determine the deepest spot to cross, one that would guarantee Medoc would fall on his ass and get soaked from head to toe, when the black wolf appeared out of the snow.
It was big, bigger than most Joe had ever seen, in fact, big enough that he slung his rifle around and let his hand drift toward the trigger even though he did not fear wolves and knew well that they wished to avoid him if at all possible. Here, it was very possible.
The wolf lingered, though, watching them through the snow, and behind Joe, Medoc came stumbling up, out of breath and oblivious to the grand animal ahead of them. Joe was just about to call his attention to it when the wolf broke and ran, and Joe followed him with his eyes only, his body motionless, and then he saw the second wolf, this one more gray than black, and then he saw the kill.
The bighorn was down just on the other side of the stream, and the gray wolf was covered with blood, her fur stained ruby red from the muzzle all the way through the chest. A third wolf flitted away and vanished into the snow, more troubled by the human presence than the other two seemed to be.
“I need a break. These damned boots . . .” Medoc fell silent for a few seconds, staring ahead, and then said, “Holy shit!”
Joe was silent, watching the wolves in wonder. He’d always felt closer to them than to most of the animals he encountered in these mountains. The black wolf in particular was inspiring. He was standing there staring at them, his breath fogging the air, when Medoc lifted his rifle.
“Don’t,” Joe said, but Medoc fired anyhow.
The shot never had a chance. The wolves were no more than sixty yards ahead, and with the caliber and scope Medoc was using, they should have been easy enough targets, but he was a terrible shot, and the first miss only rattled him into taking the next in an even greater hurry, the bullet winging harmlessly into the rocks just before Joe slapped him in the chest. It wasn’t hard, designed only to get his attention and get him to stop firing, but Medoc still stumbled backward and fell on his ass in the snow and the muzzle of the rifle tracked right across Joe’s face. If the Californian had accidentally fired, Joe would have been dead where he fell. A surge of real anger took him then.
“What in the fuck is the matter with you?”
“The fuck is the matter with you? I had a chance to shoot a wolf, and you—”
“First of all, you don’t have a wolf tag, you idiot. You’d be poaching. Second, you didn’t have a chance to shoot them, and you just proved it. If we ever did see a sheep that wasn’t smart enough to clear out from all the damn noise you make, you’d still never hit it.”
Medoc scrambled back to his feet, his face hot with anger. Joe was ready for a fight but realized once the man was upright that he was closer to tears than he was to blows. He looked away from Joe, out to the place where the wolves had abandoned their kill during the gunfire, and said, “Okay, Tonto. We’re going to get that sheep.”
“Like hell. And you call me that one more time, you’ll be extracting your rifle from your small intestine.”
“I came for a bighorn,” Medoc said. “It’s clear you aren’t going to be able to find one, so I’m taking that one.”
Joe had little use for the spiritual teachings of his people, but the feeling that washed over him then was carried from someplace far in the past.
“You don’t mess around with a sheep that was killed by a wolf, Medoc. You just don’t.”
“They’re not coming back for it. Not while we’re here. And that’s a damn nice rack.”
“The rack doesn’t matter. The wolves coming back don’t matter, either. What I’m saying is, is . . .” He stuttered to a stop, unable to give voice to the fear.
“What?” Medoc said. “For the love of Christ, just say what you mean.”
Joe didn’t want to say what he meant. He didn’t believe in it himself, had no intention of repeating the words to anyone, let alone to this white man, this arrogant prick of a white man who believed he could just buy someone like Joe, truly buy him. But still . . .
“You don’t tamper with a sheep that’s been killed by a wolf,” he said. “It’s the way I was raised, understand? If you do . . .” He fought for the right words, and for an instant he thought he saw the gray wolf again, the one with the ruby-colored stains on her muzzle. “If you do, you run a risk. Those sheep, they’ve been marked. And not for us, okay? Not for mankind. You tamper with them, and you’re . . . you’re going to want blood.”
“Want blood?” Medoc’s face was incredulous.
“Yes. Not just want it, but need it. You’ll fear the sun even though it gives life. You’ll crave darkness and you’ll crave blood and you’ll fear the sun and you’ll—”
When Medoc started laughing, it was the loudest sound he’d made on the entire hunt. Seemed louder than his gunshots even, which had scared the wolves away.
“Goddamn,” he said. “I got myself the real deal, don’t I? I wanted an Indian guide because it would tell well, back home. It would tell better than any other story. But this? This is beautiful. You’re saying I’ll turn into a vampire? That the idea?”
“That’s a white man’s term.”
“Yes,” Joe said. “It’s the idea. You’d do well to keep on this side of the stream. And one of those wolves, the one you didn’t see, it was a black wolf, and I think that means worse things, I think that means—”
“Christ,” Medoc said, and laughed again. “I don’t have time for this, but once I get that sheep’s head, I’ll listen to whatever you want to tell me, provided there’s a fire and some booze to go along with it.”
“Don’t,” Joe said, grabbing his arm as the taller man started for the stream. “You don’t understand. It’s not just about the wolves. It’s . . .”
“What?”
Joe searched for words. His own breath was coming faster now.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Leave that one be, and I’ll get you another. I swear it.”
“What’s your problem? I’m claiming something I found. No game warden is going to give a shit if—”
“It’s not the wardens, and it’s not the wolves.”
“Then what is the problem?”
Joe licked ice off his lips. “It’s bad luck,” he said. “Beyond bad luck.”
“You’ve got to be shitting me. The vampire crap is funny, but bad luck? No.” Medoc stepped away from him and into the stream, nearly losing his balance again. He recovered, though, and began to wade toward the carcass with the curling horns and the wash of blood in the snow. Joe watched him and recalled the way the wolf had looked, dressed in blood, then remembered a voice that may have belonged to his grandfather or maybe to someone else’s grandfather, he couldn’t specify, knew only that it was there echoing around in his brain and his heart, and he turned and walked away from the stream.
“Where in the hell are you going?”
Joe didn’t answer. He just kept on walking. He still had his rifle in his hands. Medoc’s next call to him was a scream of outrage.
“I will see you put in jail for this, you son of a bitch! You can’t walk away from me. I paid you!”
Seize the Night Page 7