She took hold of my earlobe and dug her thumbnail into it, wringing a scream of pain from me. “The contract stated that it would be in the October issue,” she hissed, fury filling her eyes again. “The November issue is too late, you stupid fuck.”
I tried to shake my head, but the grip on my earlobe prevented it. “No, no, no. Please, I knew what I was doing. I swear! I . . . I wanted to help you. I told you, I’d figured out what you were.” And the truly stupid part of this was that I was telling the truth. I’d looked up the passage and found out that it was part of a ritual for calling forth a greater demon. But I hadn’t really believed it, of course. I’d just assumed that it was a big game to Rachel, and that it would be a fun thing to do for Halloween.
She released a fraction of the pressure on my earlobe. “What do you mean?” she demanded, eyes narrowing.
I took a shuddering breath. Maybe I would still survive this? If so I’d be the luckiest guy in the world. “Th-the publication schedule. The Halloween issue came out in September. That issue”—I jerked my chin toward the magazine that lay crumpled on the floor—“has been on the stand for weeks. It’s about to be taken off, because the November issue comes out next week. Most magazines are like that. Haven’t you ever noticed?”
“Gee, sorry,” she sneered. “I’ve had a bit of trouble getting magazines delivered to my address in hell.” She stepped back and put her hands on her hips, narrowing her eyes at me. “So . . . my story is in the November issue? And it will be out before Halloween?”
I gave a frantic nod. “Yes! Yes! I swear! It’s been printed and everything. And . . . it’s better for you this way,” I babbled. “I knew that putting it in the Halloween issue wouldn’t work for you. It would be too soon!”
A smile began to spread across her face—one that reminded me of my Rachel, not this demonic version of her. “Oh, sweetie, were you really thinking of me?”
Relief flooded through me. “I was! Please believe me.” It was true enough. I was thinking of her—the human version of her. “Rachel . . . I love you.” A pang went through me. I did love her. Okay, not so much the being tied to a wall and being tortured part, but she was still beautiful and sexy . . .
Hell, I could handle being boyfriend to a demon Rachel, too, right?
“I just wanted you to be happy,” I sighed. “I was going to ask you to move in with me.”
She bit her lip, then moved to me and gave me a long lingering kiss. “Oh, Jason, I . . . I don’t know what to say. You’ve made my dreams come true.” For an instant I thought she was going to wipe away a tear. “In just a few days, I’ll have a link to earth. I’ll take my place among the other demons who’ve preceded me. Genghis Kahn, Pol Pot, Bill Gates—”
What had I done? I gulped as sick fear coiled in my belly. “Are . . . are you planning to unleash a new operating system onto the world?”
She shook her head. “Oh, no, nothing like that.” Her smile turned feral. “E-reader, baby. Print will soon be a distant memory, and I’ll have total control over the world’s reading material!”
I breathed a sigh of relief. “Oh, okay. And, so, we’re cool, right?” I asked, twisting my wrists in the ropes.
She tilted her head. “Well, if it wasn’t for you, this never would have worked out for me.”
“Yeah, exactly!” I said, a measure of hope beginning to steal in. “I mean, I can understand that you can’t move in with me now . . . but, um, you’re not still mad at me, right? You can let me go?”
She gave a long sigh. “Unfortunately, your soul is still forfeit to me.”
I stared at her in confusion as I tried to swallow back the rising horror. “Wh-what? But how can that be? I helped you!”
She kissed me again. “Putting it in the November issue really was thoughtful of you, baby,” she said, “and I won’t forget that. But you really gotta pay attention to the fine print. The contract specifically stated it would be published in the October issue.” Her expression grew serious. “Love is love, but a contract is a contract. If I let you slide, it’ll kill my reputation.”
I was silent for several seconds, then took a deep breath. “In other words, in a way, you’re asking me to move in with you . . . ?” I gave her a tentative grin.
She let out a peal of laughter. “Oh, sweetie, that’s perfect!” She parted the ropes holding me with a fingernail, then cradled my face in her hands. “But won’t it bother you that I own your soul?”
“Trust me,” I said as I kissed her, “it’ll be no different from any other relationship I’ve been in.”
* * *
DIANA ROWLAND has lived her entire life below the Mason-Dixon line, uses “y’all” for second-person plural, and otherwise has no Southern accent (in her opinion). Despite having a degree in Math from Georgia Tech, she has worked as a bartender, a blackjack dealer, a pit boss, a street cop, a detective, a computer forensics specialist, a crime scene investigator, and a morgue assistant. She won the marksmanship award in her Police Academy class, has a black belt in Hapkido, has handled numerous dead bodies in various states of decomposition, and can’t rollerblade to save her life.
She presently lives in South Louisiana with her husband and her daughter, where she is deeply grateful for the existence of air conditioning.
At my request, she supplied this afterword to her story.
* * *
For some reason I feel I should state up front that I did not sleep with Mark Van Name in order to sell this story to him.
I mean, not that he isn’t a handsome and charming and terrific guy, but, well. . . .
Ahem. Anyway! The seed of this story came from a random conversation among publishing professionals, during which some were wondering if there really were some writers so desperate to get published that they would sleep with an editor. A common enough trope—the “casting couch” type of thing—right? But it got me thinking . . . What would be the consequences for the editor? And what if getting published wasn’t really the writer’s ultimate goal?
UNAWARES
SARAH A. HOYT
I remembered my name and the color red. My name was Serena Reis. Red had been dripping, dripping from—
Memory failed. I struggled. Under me the floor was gritty, hard. There was a smell of must and disuse, a smell of sweat and a smell of—
Blood. As the thought formed, I smelled it again, strong and tangy-sweet. I sat up before I realized I wished to, my hands pushing against cold concrete to impel my body upward, my head whirling suddenly. My head hurt and it felt like it swayed. I could only think slowly and as though through cotton wool.
“Easy,” a voice said. The sort of voice that makes one think of really dark chocolate, or of a hand running over black velvet. “Easy now. Slowly.”
I felt hands on my arms—warm, strong. Masculine hands, but very soft.
There is someone here. There is—I remembered someone. A group of tall, dark figures, gathered around a naked, bleeding corpse. My stomach shot towards my mouth and I bit my lips together. I opened my eyes, but everything was dark. I only knew my eyes were open because the darkness was more textured than the space behind my eyelids. I squirmed against the hands holding my arms, but all I got for my pains was, “Easy. You’ll be unsteady,” as the hands helped—forced?—me to stand.
“Who . . . ?” I started to say, but my voice came out raspy, hoarse. I knew the corpse they’d gathered around. I’d known it in life. I’d dated it for the last six months. “Phil.”
“Shh,” the man said out of the darkness, holding my arms firm and piloting me up what felt like a set of winding steps. “Shh. Not now.”
Just as he said that, he must have pushed a door with his back, because it opened and I was blinded by the scant light of a winter evening. Though there was no more lighting than the street lights—even the moon was obscured by heavy snow clouds—it felt like dazzling sunlight after the darkness of the . . . cellar? Yes, cellar, I thought as we came all the way out to stand on a broad side
walk, near the door we’d just left. The door was painted red, and it was the only bit of the building that looked to have had any sort of upkeep in the last hundred years or so. The rest of it—massive, red brick, with a broad, boarded-up front door and a boarded-up row of windows at second-floor height—looked like it had been abandoned decades ago.
The man let go of my arms, and I turned around to look at him. I don’t know what I expected. Probably one of the dark hooded forms I’d seen around the corpse. My heart pounded hard, and I thought I should run. But every movement brought a stabbing pain through my head and made me feel like I would throw up.
The man . . . wasn’t hooded, though he did wear a black leather jacket, which contrasted nicely with a lot of tied-back blond hair and the sort of features that romance cover artists would die for.
He smiled, a wry twist of his lips. “You’re perfectly safe with me.”
Said the wolf to the lamb, I thought, but was too nauseous to say. Besides, I wasn’t exactly equipped to fight for my life. For some reason it’s not something that often falls to students of classical literature to do. Frankly, I wasn’t normally even out alone this late. He looked behind me at the door and the smell vanished. “We should get away from here, though. Fast. Can you walk fast?”
I nodded, though I wasn’t sure at all I was telling the truth. But I was half afraid he would offer to carry me, if I said no.
As it was, he put his arm around my waist and half supported me, half pulled me, walking fast down Colfax Avenue, the longest, straightest street in the west, until it veered off to pierce the heart of Denver.
As might be inevitable in a road that long and at the center of a city that was a collection of neighborhoods, it changed every two or three blocks. One block—the one where the cellar had been—would be all warehouses. Two blocks later there would be bodegas and hairdressers with Spanish names. The next set would be lofts and gentrified coffee bars. I realized we’d left all those behind and entered what I thought of as “normal Colfax”—the part of town I thought of as real Denver, near the bend at Colorado College. Oh, somewhat gentrified, but not so much that it had run out the old diner at the corner of Colfax and Race, or the head shop across the street.
My companion had slowed down the last block, which was good because I really felt like I might pass out at any minute. Now he piloted me through the door of the diner, past a little vestibule. He nodded to the woman behind the cashier’s stand, and pulled me all the way to the back, to the corner booth, despite the sign over it saying it was reserved for parties of six or more.
No one stopped us, probably because the diner was half-empty. The clock on the wall said it was three o’clock and I frowned at it. The last I remembered was ten p.m.
I sat against the brown vinyl cushions, shivering a little, realizing I was wearing only a white T-shirt and jeans. Unless I’d lost months, as well as hours, it was January. Hell, I knew for a fact the snow had been about to fall, out there. What had possessed me to come out wearing summer clothes?
The blond man, still standing, pulled off his leather jacket and wrapped it around my shoulders, before sitting down across from me. With his jacket off, he looked, if possible, more intimidating. He also was wearing a T-shirt, but his bare arms had a wing tattooed on each of them. Beneath each wing, a single word: “Heaven” and “Bound.”
“Hello, Uri,” a waitress said, wiping the already clean table in the way waitresses do when ingratiating themselves with a big tipper. “What will it be tonight?”
“Coffee,” he said. “Black.” He might have been ordering naked odalisques on a bed of rose petals, the way he spoke. “And a slice of cheesecake.”
The woman looked at me. She was faded and forty—at least—with hair dyed an unlikely shade of red, and eyes underlined by far too dark a pencil. But she was looking at me as if I was the fright. Perhaps I was. The way my head hurt, I must be awfully pale.
“She’ll have tea,” Uri said, as if he’d known me all my life, and knew my drinking preferences. I opened my mouth to protest, then realized anything else was likely to make me throw up, and only added, “And sugar, please.” I’d read somewhere that hot, sweet tea was good for shock. And I thought I was in shock. Either that or very ill. And I hoped to all that was holy that I had imagined what I thought I’d seen in the cellar.
“How do you feel?” Uri asked, as the woman walked away.
“Dizzy,” I said. “Nauseous. Who—”
He slid a card to me, across the table. It was one of those cheap business cards you can buy in a big sheet and run through your laser printer when you need half a dozen cards and don’t mind the slightly serrated edge. It said “Heaven Bound” across the top, then “Uri Heaven,” in slightly smaller type. The bottom line, small enough to hide embarrassment at what it said, proclaimed “Psychic investigations.” At the very bottom of all, and in a smaller font still, was a phone number.
I picked up the card and ran my hand over the rough edge. “You’re Uri Heaven?”
“Uriel,” he said, and smiled dazzlingly. “Father liked names from the Bible.”
So what’s a boy with a nice biblical name like that, doing in a nightmare like this?
The waitress slid a cup and a plate of cheesecake in front of him, an empty cup, a bowl of various sweetener packages and a little teapot in front of me, and walked off to talk to one of the cooks at the counter. Uri took a sip of his coffee, put it down. He looked up at me, while I tried to avoid looking directly at him by ripping two packages of sugar open and dropping their contents into the cup.
But when he said, “What do you remember?” I couldn’t help looking up. His eyes were not actually black, as I’d first thought, but dark, dark blue. Where the lights on the distant ceiling shone upon them, you could sort of see a depth, like looking into a lake on an overcast day. They looked worried. Very worried.
“I saw a corpse,” I said. “And . . . and people around . . .”
He frowned. “I see. Did you know the corpse?”
“Phil,” I said. “I . . . we share an apartment, you see? I . . . I came . . . he left a note,” I said, finding my footing as I spoke. “Asking me to come to that address. At ten.” I looked at the clock again, and it was now three-fifteen, which meant it probably wasn’t a dream.
He inhaled deeply, then asked me the oddest question, “All right. Now tell me: were you wearing a jacket?”
* * *
An hour later, he accompanied me up the narrow staircase to my—and Phil’s—second floor apartment, frowning worriedly at me. “Are you sure you want to stay here?” he asked. “Not . . . not in a hotel room?”
The fact that I was a student and lived on carefully husbanded money that left no surplus for a hotel room was not something I wanted to discuss with a complete stranger. In fact, the place I would spend the night was none of this stranger’s business. Even if he had been a reasonable height—not towering over me by a good foot—and even if he hadn’t looked muscular enough to feature in magazine ads for miracle supplements. Even if he had no tattoos. Even if he didn’t wear a leather jacket. Or think he was a psychic investigator. Whatever that was.
I was starting to feel better, after the sugared tea, so it must have been mostly shock making me feel ill. And I was starting to come to my senses. I wouldn’t have let him accompany me home, if I could have helped it. But there had been no way to shake him, short of physical violence, and I wasn’t ready to do that. I’d managed to get away from him long enough to call the police from the old-fashioned phone in the hallway leading to the ladies’ room back at the diner. I’d given the police the address of the building and told them I thought there had been a death there, and also Phil’s name as the victim. If they checked—they were bound to check, right?—and found him, likely they’d come to my place and intercept us before he could do something funny like kidnap me.
But the hallway outside my apartment was empty, and the door looked locked and untouched. I took off Uri’s
jacket, handed it to Uri, told him, “Thank you so much, but I think I’ll be all right now.” I opened the door, rushed in, shut it and bolted it, in the practiced movements of someone who had gotten rid of many an insistent date.
I leaned against the door, breathing hard, thinking of what he’d said. That Phil had been a blood sacrifice by a cult of vampire-raisers. They were trying, my charming—and more than likely nuttier than a fruit cake—companion had said, to raise all the people who’d died of consumption in the city a hundred years ago and more. Consumption, or as we now called it, TB, made those who died of it likely to become vampires. And there had been a lot of deaths of tuberculosis all over the Rocky Mountains before penicillin. The place was known to be beneficial to sufferers of lung ailments. But still quite a few of them died.
But why would anyone want to raise vampires? I’d asked.
He’d shrugged and told me, as if this were the sort of thing everyone knew—perhaps through reading some Psychic Investigators’ Journal that I didn’t know about—that vampires were very strong, somewhat telepathic and endowed with a sex appeal out of proportion with what they looked like or who they might have been while alive. That these people intended to use them as something between executioners and a shock army.
I checked the locks on the door and looked around. Everything looked exactly as I had left it and as it normally did on a Friday night. There was the sofa that Phil and I had bought fifth-hand at the Goodwill store, seventies chic, in a curved design covered in fake brown leather that had seen better days. It had Phil’s economics textbook open on it, with his highlighter resting on top.
Last I’d seen it, there had been a note on the sofa, too, asking me to meet him at that address on Colfax. Funny, I didn’t remember taking the note with me, but it wasn’t there. I looked around on the sofa, and checked my pockets, but it was gone. Mind you, Phil wasn’t home, but then he often wasn’t on a Friday night. If we weren’t out, he often went off with the guys to see some movie I didn’t want to see, or to a game or something. Friday was the night we often did separate stuff, since we were together the rest of the week.
The Wild Side: Urban Fantasy with an Erotic Edge Page 11