by Anthology
Or maybe she needed to stop equivocating and accept the fact that she needed to learn how to handle herself in a confrontation.
“You sure you want to turn me over to these knuckle-draggers?” Max asked as they got closer. “I know a little hideaway. We could get cozy.”
“Tempting,” Ariel said as she decreased their altitude. “Maybe give me a call when you give up your life of crime. And get out of jail.” She didn’t give him the dignity of lowering him all the way to the ground. She hovered about five feet up. “Jump.”
He gave her another grin. “I look forward to crossing swords with you again.”
As soon as he released her, she missed the warmth of his body pressed against hers.
He dropped gracefully out of her arms and landed safely, going down to one knee to absorb the impact. From the ground, he blew her a kiss. “I’ll see you soon, sweetheart.” His words didn’t sound like a threat, more like a yearning promise.
Police swarmed him a moment later.
“Thanks, miss,” said one of the nearby officers. “Any chance you’d like to come down and explain things?”
Ariel considered it. She’d been meaning to have a long chat with the police at some point. Shorter encounters had at least convinced them she wasn’t the enemy and was only there to assist. The first few times they’d been on the verge of deciding to forcibly interview her—although interview was just a friendlier term for capture—except she hadn’t done anything more questionable than evacuate children from a burning building. “Some other day.” She looked at all the damage. “It looks like there’s still work to do.”
The officer didn’t look pleased, but he didn’t move to restrain her.
Of course, she was still floating above his head, so it would have been terribly ineffective. Ariel caught a last glimpse of Max as the police stuffed him into one of their cruisers. A quiet sadness enveloped her for a moment. She’d liked him. Even though he was a deplorable criminal, he had charm and wit. Plus, he’d kissed the daylights out of her, and she desperately wanted more.
Resolutely, Ariel turned back to the scene of destruction. Tow trucks were arriving to take away the demolished, disabled vehicles. She touched down near one of the ambulances. “Can I be of any assistance?” she asked.
Two paramedics and a fireman stared. They had cups of coffee in their hands and had been chatting.
“Uh, thanks, but not really,” said the female paramedic. She was blonde and looked to be in her fifties. She also looked incredibly poised and confident. “It actually looks worse than it is. All those smashed-up cars and not a single person needed to go to the hospital. The worst thing we had was a bloody nose, and we got it stopped in a couple minutes.”
Ariel blinked in surprise. “Seriously?” She glanced back at the ruinous scene.
“Seriously,” the woman said. “Kind of amazing, isn’t it? Unbelievable, but true.”
“And a scraped elbow,” added in the other paramedic, a younger man with a square face. “That did need a bandage.”
“Nothing even caught on fire,” said the fireman. “It’s a demolition derby out there.”
“Oh. Okay.” Ariel turned to go. Her main mission had been to assist people, and there wasn’t a single person who required it. She felt very out of sorts.
“Hey, miss—”
Ariel looked back. “Yes?”
“Who are you? How do you—”
“Fly?” Ariel supplied.
“Yeah. How?” the woman asked. All three of them looked intently interested. “It’s fantastic.”
“I don’t know. I just can. Bye.” Ariel waggled her fingers in a wave and took to the air again, leaving them to stare. She went up high enough to get a good look at the entire scene. It seemed impossible there hadn’t been any serious injuries. There had certainly been a lot of damage. She spent a moment to consider the armored truck. The doors were open and nothing was inside it, but enough time had elapsed for the police to have removed whatever Max had been carrying. She wondered what it had been. She’d assumed money. But maybe she’d been too quick to jump to conclusions. He had been creating a lot of chaos and damage. But maybe the better question was why.
Deciding the authorities had things well covered and she wasn’t exactly needed anymore, Ariel left. She retrieved her backpack off the roof of the café and headed home. The whole thing hadn’t taken more than an hour. It seemed like she’d been out there for days, but she still had the entire afternoon ahead.
She landed on the roof of the apartment building where she and Velda lived. In their last year of college, it was cheaper to live off campus. They had the top apartment, which meant it was easy to come and go from the roof without being seen.
Ariel exited from the roof into their kitchen. A bunch of bananas sat on the counter, and Ariel could hear the television on in the next room. She snagged a banana and wandered into the living room. Velda was there and the news was on.
Velda looked relieved. “He got away,” she said. She did a double take. “And you’re purple.”
“He shot me with a paint gun.” Ariel dropped into the closest chair. She peeled her banana and took a bite while she watched the television. The attack was all over the news. Footage of the bridge came courtesy of a news helicopter and a scrolling banner across the bottom announced the previously captured criminal had made his escape prior to being delivered to the station. Luckily, no officers had been hurt.
“What happened up there?” Velda asked. Behind her glasses, her eyes were huge.
Ariel blushed and gave Velda a well-edited version of the whole adventure. “What do you think he wanted?” Ariel asked. She finished her banana and dropped the peel into the waste bin.
Velda rolled her eyes. “To ask you out on a date.” She moved over to Ariel. “Want me to take care of that?” She pointed to the large purple splotch.
“Please,” Ariel said. She watched as Velda rubbed her fingers across the coloration. The purple paint peeled away as if it had never been attached. Velda’s particular ability was to unlock things. A door or a pass code didn’t exist that could stand against her. Dirt, grease, and grime also unlocked their grip from fibers at her command. It was a much more understated ability, but if Velda ever honed it, she would be far more powerful than Ariel.
“There. All set.” Velda chucked the rubbery paint after the banana peel. She perched on the arm of Ariel’s chair. “Do you think he might be one of us? That’s a whole lot of luck to not hurt anyone in the process. It’d make more sense if he had some kind of ability and was controlling the outcome.”
Ariel’s attention drifted back to the television. “And a whole lot of distraction. I keep wondering if he was diverting attention from something else. Something much bigger.” The thought was intriguing and made a lot of sense. She wondered if he’d plotted and planned for good or for ill. “As for the other….” Ariel touched her fingers to her lips, remembering the extraordinary kiss and Max’s uncanny farewell promise to see her soon. She looked forward to the encounter. “I’ll ask him the next time I see him.”
Glass Slippers, Hardly Worn
Bibi Rizer
Ashel tugged at the bindings on her hands, and nearly turned an ankle as the highwayman led her away from the carriage and into the dark forest. After everything she’d been through that day, it would be just her luck to be kidnapped on the way to the ball and forced to tramp through the wild in the most uncomfortable pair of shoes ever conceived of.
“My family won’t stand for this,” she said, more because she felt the declaration necessary than because it was actually true. “My footmen will free themselves and come after us. I expect them at any moment.”
“Your footmen? Miss, when I tried to speak to one of them, he squeaked. Your coachman mewed like a kitten.” The highwayman’s voice was as deep and mysterious as the forest that now rose all around them.
Ashel trembled at the sound of it.
“At any rate, my men will keep clos
e watch over them. I am confident we won’t be followed.”
He helped her step over a fallen log, their way lit only by the moon and the stars peeking through the heavy canopy above. His strong grip burned through the silk of her new gown, and when she stepped down from the log, he momentarily put his arm around her, protectively.
She wasn’t frightened exactly. The stories of young ladies being carried off by highwaymen nearly always ended in the ladies in question being robbed of their honor; since Ashel had no honor to lose, she felt strangely calm about this possibility. Her beloved father, her inheritance, her station in life, and yes, her honor were all long gone. What more had she to lose?
As she trudged through the dark, the highwayman’s strong grip on her never loosening, Ashel thought of honor, and the sweet-natured stable boy, Hobby, who had relieved her of hers over five years past. Only her late father’s horse master knew of this horrifying transgression. Ashel’s begging had saved the boy from the gallows, but nothing could save their love. He had disappeared in the night, and the horse master had concocted a story about his joining the King’s army. Then a tense month had passed while Ashel actually wished she might be with his child, but that was not to be. Hobby was never seen again.
He had been an awkward boy, his head perpetually shaved by the cruel horse master who had a paranoia about fleas and lice, his nose often peeling from sunburn, his underfed frame gangly and thin. But Ashel had loved him just the same. Loved his gentle ways, his laughter, his kisses, the multitude of loving nicknames he gave her: Ashputtle, The Queen of Hearths, and her favorite, Ashelina. She had loved giving herself to him that fateful night, their naked bodies wound together in the hayloft.
Hobby had cupped her small breasts reverently, pinched her aching nipples, and cried her name as he spent his seed inside her. Then he cradled her and kissed and licked away the stinging that her deflowering had left. It had been his first time too; how he knew what to do so expertly, making her moan and writhe under his tongue, she never found out. She had no complaints though. Until the master had burst in on them, The encounter had been like a dream. But then, like a dream, her darling Hob was gone.
Ashel had swallowed her sadness as her stepsisters teased her about Hobby. “Oh do you miss the little horse boy? Do you miss his smell? I could make a sachet of manure for you to put under your pillow.” And in her dusty little corner of the woodshed, she had dreamed of Hobby’s hands and other parts of him that were not so little. And she had chafed at the unfairness of it. To be treated like a servant in her father’s house, yet denied the pleasure of love, maybe even a marriage, with another servant because that was beneath the daughter of a nobleman, even a dead one. In between their mooning over the king’s insipid son, she endured merciless teasing from her stepsisters about that, too. “Who would marry someone who smells like a tinder box? You’ll die with your dusty little hole unpoked, Ash-pot.”
If only they knew what a magnificent poking Hobby had given her that night. Sometimes Ashel smiled to remember it, despite her stepsisters’ cruel words.
Then one day, fed up with their years of mockery, Ashel had decided she would marry their feckless fop of a prince just to spite them. A silly impulse from a silly young girl she now realized, and she chided herself for wasting her meager savings on the scheme. If she hadn’t worked that witch’s spell—that she had paid handsomely for, too—and called up that ridiculous fairy with her pink cloud of magic and lace, she wouldn’t be in this predicament. Festooned in gaudy jewels, dragging a heavy silk gown through brambles and thorns, gasping from a corset that was almost all bone, and her feet! Slippers made of glass! It was not to be borne.
“Wait,” Ashel finally said. “These infernal shoes. Let me take them off. I beg you.”
The highwayman’s eyes twinkled below the rim of his black hat. “How will you walk without shoes? The ground is rough and thick with bristles and pine barbs.”
Did he smile under his scarf? Ashel attempted to cross her arms, stubbornly, a gesture she had seldom made since her father’s death. But of course with her hands bound in front of her, the effect was more comical than stubborn. The highwayman actually laughed, a low grumbling laugh that evoked something warm in Ashel’s heart. The sound reminded her of the purring of a barn cat.
“Perhaps if you tell me where we are going,” Ashel said. “And how far away it is, I can imagine if I might bear it. My feet are not delicate lady’s feet, despite what you may think.”
“I have a better idea.” The highwayman lifted her easily into his arms and, cradling her, continued through the trees.
Ashel was inclined to struggle and protest at first, but something about the highwayman made her feel oddly safe. She lay her head against the coarse wool of his cloak and, with her next breath, inhaled the warm familiar scent of someone who lived in close company with horses. Straw, horse sweat, and faintly, but not unpleasantly, manure. Either this was a stolen cloak or the highwayman was a horseman. Again Ashel thought of Hobby then and blinked back a tear. This was not the time to show weakness. Though she was increasingly resigned to her fate, she planned to be at least somewhat in control too.
“Why did you not take my horses?” Ashel said. “If you’re a rider as I suspect you are, could you and your men not use fine horses like them?”
The highwayman let out another low rumbling laugh. “Fine horses? One had whiskers, the other scales. I recognize enchantments when I see them, lady. Those are no more horses than I am a prince.”
That made Ashel think of the ball she was missing, and all the fine food and drink that might be found there. Her stomach rumbled at the thought. “Well then, are you not afraid I will enchant you too? Maybe turn you into a mouse and myself an owl to eat you?”
“I might enjoy being eaten by you, lady,”
To her horror, Ashel laughed. And such a vulgar image popped into her head that she felt her whole body flush with heat and embarrassment.
“You have a lovely laugh,” the highwayman said. “I hope I can make you laugh again.”
Ashel wasn’t of a mood to indulge him. She pressed her lips together and thought of tragic things until the urge to giggle subsided. “I regret to share this news with you,” she finally said. “But my jewels are enchanted too. At midnight, they will turn into pumpkin seeds and peppercorns.”
“Is that so?” He didn’t sound very concerned.
“Yes. So unless you plan on selling the jewels before midnight, I offer little worth to you.”
They stopped in a clearing, the bright moon high in the dark sky above them. The highwayman tilted his head down and gazed into Ashel’s eyes with an intensity she felt to her core. The corset dug into her as she gasped, her hard nipples pressing painfully into the stiff linen.
“You have great worth to me, lady,” he said.
With one hand still holding her, he threw down his satchel and loosened his cloak, shaking it out and laying it on the bed of moss and pine needles at his feet. Then he gently set her down.
Her feet in the glass shoes sank into the soft ground beneath the cloak.
The highwayman knelt, carefully removed first one torturous shoe, and then the other. He set them on a nearby log, where they twinkled in the moonlight. “Are those enchanted too?”
Ashel regarded the hateful shoes with scorn. “No. You may feel free to sell those whenever you please. They were forged by a witless glassblower, the son of the witch whose spell I bought. He thought if I wore them to the ball every woman in the kingdom would suddenly want a pair. Thought they looked lovely on my feet, even though he made them a size too small.”
The highwayman tugged Ashel’s hands until she sat across from him. “You do have lovely feet, lady. May I?” He took one foot and began rubbing away the pain and ache.
Would he ask permission for everything he took from her? That didn’t seem very highwayman-like. What kind of rogue was this? Just her luck to meet a rascal who was too polite to ravish her. But his hands on her f
eet, which were sore not just from the glass shoes but from the hours she spent sweeping and cooking and washing and dusting, were sheer heaven. She let herself fall back on the cloak and sighed with pleasure as the muscles of her feet and ankles softened and warmed.
When she felt his lips on the top of her foot, Ashel almost pulled away. If she resisted, would he stop? If he didn’t stop, would that ruin things? She suspected it would. But she hadn’t been touched by a man since Hobby, and what better way to ease her needs than with a scoundrel in the dark woods? No one would know. If he let her live, she could walk back to her home and visit the witch again tomorrow for a spell against his seed. Her life would continue as normal, not changed but for the two years’ worth of coin she had wasted on her idle fancy about the prince’s ball. Paying the witch again would gall, but getting with child by a highwayman would ruin her just as easily as by a stable boy.
Ashel sighed again as the highwayman’s lips travelled slowly up her calf, pushing the ruffled dress out of the way. When he reached her knee, she became self-conscious of the bruises that hours of scrubbing the hearth had left. But the highwayman only nibbled there lightly, trailing his fingers over her skin. She looked down to see he had untied the scarf from his face and removed his hat. In the fading moonlight, she could barely see him but for long thick curls of dark hair and those dark eyes under heavy brows. There was a seriousness in his expression as he looked up at her from where he crouched by her knee, though his lips were curled into a smile.
Well, he’s handsome anyway, Ashel thought, and strong. And his lips are so…ahhhh…soft. She longed to feel them in more intimate areas, longed to feel those curls of hair tickling places other than her knee.