by Jim Butcher
He let out a groan as he kissed me again, and I felt him start to touch and then—
—and then I was sitting on the floor of the shower, shuddering, hot water pouring down around me.
Wait.
What?
What the hell?
I looked down at the water. The drain stopper was down, and it was seven or eight inches deep.
And pink.
Oh God.
I looked at my hands. My nails . . . my nails looked longer. Harder.
And there was red under them.
What had just happened?
I stood up and left the shower, dripping wet, not bothering to stop for a towel. I hurried back out of the bathroom and stopped in the doorway, shocked.
The room had been wrecked. The mattress was against the far wall—and the door. It had been torn in half. The lamps were out, and the slice of light from the bathroom lights provided the only illumination in a stark column. What I could see of the furniture had been trashed. Part of the bed frame was broken.
And Carlos . . .
He lay on the floor, covered in blood. One of his legs was broken, the pointy bits of his shattered shin thrusting out from the skin. His face was swelling up beneath the blood, his eyes puffed closed. He was covered in claw marks, rakes that oozed blood. He lay at a strange angle, twitching in pain, one hand clutching with blind instinct at his back.
His injured back. His weakness.
I stared down at my hands in utter horror, at the blood beneath my nails.
I had done this.
I had used his weakness against him.
“Mab,” I breathed. I started choking and sobbing. “Mab! Mab!”
Mab can appear in a thunderclap if she wants to. This entrance was much less dramatic. A light in the far corner of the room clicked on and revealed the Queen of Winter, seated calmly in the chair in the corner. She regarded me with distant, opalescent eyes and lifted a single eyebrow.
“What happened?” I asked. “What happened?”
Mab regarded Carlos with a calm countenance. “What will happen every time you attempt to be with a man,” she replied.
I stared at her. “What?”
“Three Queens of Summer; three Queens of Winter,” she said, that alien gaze returning to me. “Maiden, mother, and crone. You are the maiden, Lady Molly. And for you to be otherwise, to become a mother, would be to destroy the mantle of power you wear. The mantle protected itself—as it must.”
“What?”
She tilted her head and stared at me. “It is all within the law. I suggest you spend a few hours each day meditating on it in the future. In time you will gain an adequate understanding of your limits.”
“How could you do this?” I demanded. The tears on my checks felt like streaks of hot wax. “How could you do this?”
“I did not,” Mab said calmly. “You did.”
“Dammit, you know what I mean!”
“You have been gifted with great and terrible power, young lady,” Mab said in an arch tone. “Did you really think you could simply go about your life as if you were a mortal girl?”
“You could have warned me!”
“When I tried, you had no inclination to listen. Only to jest.”
“You bitch,” I said, shaking my head. “You could have told me. You horrible bitch.” I turned to go back into the bathroom, to get towels and go to Carlos’s aid.
When I turned, Mab was right behind me, and her nose all but pressed against mine. Her eyes were flickering through shades of color and bright with cold anger. Her voice came out in a velvet murmur more terrifying than any enraged shriek. “What did you say to me?”
I flinched back, suddenly filled with fear.
I couldn’t meet her eyes.
I didn’t speak.
After a moment, some of the tension went out of her. “Yes,” she said, her voice calm again. “I could have told you. I elected to teach you. I trust this has made a significant first impression.”
“I have to help him,” I said. “Please step aside.”
“That will not be necessary,” Mab said. “He will not be in danger of dying for some hours. I have already dispatched word to the White Council. Their healers will arrive momentarily to care for him. You will leave at once.”
“I can’t just leave him like this,” I said.
“That is exactly what you can do,” Mab said. Her voice softened by a tiny fraction of a degree. “You are no longer what you were, child. You must adapt to your new world. If you do not, you will cause terrible suffering—not least of all to yourself.” She tilted her head, as if listening, and said, “The storm is breaking. You have your duty.”
I clenched my jaw and said, “I can’t just leave him there alone.”
Mab blinked once, as if digesting my words. “Why not?”
“Because . . . because it’s not what decent people do.”
“What has that to do with either of us?” she asked.
I shook my head. “No. I am not going to be like that.”
Mab pursed her lips and exhaled slowly through her nose. “Stubborn. Like our Knight.”
“Damned right I am,” I said.
I’m not sure you can micro-roll your eyes. But Mab can. “Very well. I will sit with him until the wizards arrive.”
I turned to regard Carlos’s broken form lying on the floor. Then I hurried into enough clothes to be decent. I knelt over him and kissed his forehead. He made a soft moaning sound that tore something inside my chest.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. I kissed his head again. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know what would happen. I’m sorry.”
“Time waits for no one, Lady Molly,” Mab said. She had crossed the room to stand across from me over poor Carlos. “Not even the Queens of Faerie. Collect the tribute.”
I gave him a last kiss on the forehead and rose to leave. But I paused at the door to consider, to consult Winter Law.
I had never really considered what the tribute was. But it was there in the law. I turned slowly and stared at Mab in horror.
“Their children,” I whispered. “You want me to take their children.”
“Yes.”
“Their children,” I said. “You can’t.”
“I won’t. You will.”
I shook my head. “But . . .”
“Lady Molly,” Mab said gently. “Consider the Outer Gates.”
I did.
Winter Law showed me a vivid image. An endless war fought at the far borders of reality. A war against the pitiless alien menace known simply as the Outsiders. A war fought by millions of Fae, to prevent the Outsiders from invading and destroying reality itself. A war so long and bitter that bones of the fallen were the topography of the landscape. It was why the Winter Court existed in the first place, why we were so aggressive, so savage, so filled with lust and the need to create more of our kind.
“You’re filling me with a hunger I can never feed,” I whispered.
“We cannot expect our people to bear a burden that we do not,” Mab replied, her tone level, implacable. “You will learn to endure it.”
“You want me to take children,” I hissed.
“I am fighting a war,” Mab said simply. “Fighting a war requires soldiers.”
“But they’re children. Children like my little brothers and sisters. And you want me to carry them away.”
“Of course. It is the ideal time to learn, to be trained until they come into their strength and are ready to do battle,” Mab said. “It is the only way to prepare them for what is to come. The only way to give them a chance to survive the duties I require of them.”
“How long?” I asked through clenched teeth. “How long will they be gone?”
“Until they are no longer needed,” Mab said.
<
br /> “Until they’re killed, you mean,” I said. “They’re never going back home.”
“Your outrage is irrelevant,” Mab said. Her voice was flat, calm, filled with undeniable logic. “I have condemned millions of the children of Winter to a life of violence and death in battle, because it must be done. If we fail in our duty, there will be no home to which they can return. There will be no mortal world, safe and whole for your brothers and sisters.”
“But . . .” My protest trailed off weakly.
“If you have an alternative, I would be more than willing to consider it.”
Silence stretched.
“I don’t,” I said quietly.
“Then do your duty,” Mab said.
I opened the door and looked back at her. “I don’t yet,” I said, and I said it hard. “This isn’t over.”
Mab gave me the slow blink again. Then she inclined her head by a fraction of an inch, her expression pensive.
I turned and left the broken form of Carlos Ramirez behind me to steal away the Miksani’s children.
And I couldn’t stop crying.
SLEEPOVER
by Seanan McGuire
“Love is love. Species, gender, how long ago they may have died, none of that really matters. Love is love, and without it, we might as well be howling into the void.”
—LAURA CAMPBELL
A nondescript warehouse in
Northeast Portland, Oregon
Now
It was the last exhibition match of the season, and the Slasher Chicks were attacking the track with such vicious precision that they looked almost choreographed. Their captain, Elmira Street, was organizing some of the most efficient blocking I had ever seen, while their jammer—my cousin Antimony, skating under the derby name Final Girl—was running rings around the opposing team. Literally. I watched her star-spangled helmet circle the track, and I tried to find it in my heart to cheer.
Annie had worked hard all season, and she deserved the support of her family. Since her parents didn’t give a crap about what she did in her spare time and her siblings were both out of the state, and my sibling refused to leave his basement fastness, that left her with a cheering section of one. Me, Elsinore Harrington, the girl with the broken heart.
The cause of that broken heart was behind Annie on the track, caught in the scrum with the rest of the Concussion Stand. Carlotta, better known as Pushy Galore when she was in the rink. Up until a week ago, the love of my summer, and now the latest in my long line of ex-girlfriends. Or, as my mother liked to call them, the “Gosh, Elsie, maybe if you knew how to commit to a relationship, I wouldn’t have to keep picking up the pieces when you broke another one” girls.
My mother is not the nurturing type.
Anyway, what with Carly dumping me like last week’s phone case—complete with “It’s not you, it’s me, I can’t handle dating someone who isn’t human, you understand, it’s not a racist thing, I’m just not comfortable with this anymore”—I would have been completely within my rights to avoid the rink for the foreseeable future. Better yet, forever, since I kept falling for derby girls, dating them until they got tired of me, breaking up with them, and then having to deal with seeing them every time Annie had a practice or a game. It got old.
But Annie needed me, and not just for rides to the track. So here I was yet again, wearing my Slasher Chicks T-shirt, with a purse full of cookies and bacon wrapped in foil, waiting for my cousin to skate her way to glory.
Glory or a split lip, depending on whether or not she flubbed her next jump. Split lips were bloodier. I was hoping for glory, or at least for a lack of stitches.
The buzzer rang to signal the end of the game, and the Slasher Chicks took the bout by a respectable sixty-three points. Annie kept skating, thrusting her hands up in the air as if she had just been elected Queen Bad-Ass of Ass Mountain. The rest of her team swarmed around her, all of them clapping and hugging each other like a big family.
I was the one who’d brought her here, encouraging her to try out after she graduated from high school and had to stop being a cheerleader. This was where I used to go to blow off steam and pick up girls, not necessarily in that order. So why did I suddenly feel like the one on the outside?
“Which one’s yours?” The voice was unfamiliar. Low alto, with a little bit of a Northern buzz to it, like the owner had grown up somewhere in Nova Scotia.
“The brunette with the pigtail braids,” I said. Annie was following her team into the victory lap, shaking hands with every member of the Concussion Stand. I paused, reviewing the voice and the question it had asked, before adding hastily, “She’s my cousin. I just come to support her.”
“Oh,” said the voice. “I see.”
“I’m Elsie,” I said, and finally turned to see whom I was talking to. I was promptly glad that I had gotten the pleasantries out of the way before I lost the capacity for rational speech. That, too, is me: Elsinore Harrington, the girl who sometimes gets slapped silent by beauty.
I am told that someday I will become smooth and easy with the ladies. I am pretty sure this is a lie.
The voice’s owner was sitting next to me on the bench, looking at me with amusement. She looked about my age, mid-twenties, with long, wavy hair that might have been blond once but was now all the colors of cotton candy—pink and blue and purple and white. It matched her makeup, which was overdone in that awesome “my makeup isn’t for you” way that always made me want to follow people back to their mirrors and learn all their secrets. She was wearing a Scream Queens league tank top and a black pleated skirt over striped tights, and as was all too often the case with me, I immediately wanted to know her better, even if that meant doing whatever she said.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hello,” she said, and smiled. “I’m Morgan. So, Final Girl’s your cousin, huh? How does that feel?”
“Like I should buy stock in Band-Aids,” I said. She laughed. It was a low, husky sound, sweet as the candy her hair resembled. I wanted to make her laugh again. I hadn’t known her five minutes before, and now making her laugh felt like the most important thing I could possibly be doing with my time. “No, it’s good. She really enjoys derby, and I enjoy watching my cousin kick the crap out of people twice her size.”
“But you don’t skate.”
“I don’t skate,” I said, with a small shake of my head. “I’m a wuss.” Well, that, and my blood was a natural narcotic that very few humans had any resistance to. Roller derby was a mostly safe place for me: more women than men, and little in the way of things that could stress me out and make me start sweating through my monster-strength antiperspirant. But being half succubus means never being able to say “oops” when you get a bloody nose. I’d be way too busy saying “No, no, please don’t grab me, ow, that hurts, you don’t really want to do that,” and that was no fun for anybody.
Morgan rolled her eyes. It was a deeply sarcastic gesture, and it just made me appreciate her laughter even more. “Oh, please. They’ve been feeding you that party line about how ‘pain is growth,’ haven’t they? Give me a nice, cushy seat in the stands and a box of popcorn any day.”
“Besides, the view’s good.” I tried to make the statement sound casual, even as I was watching Morgan for her reaction. Most of the people who come to roller derby are laid-back enough not to respond to a gentle expression of interest with flung objects and pejoratives, but I’ve learned to be careful, especially when my heart has been recently broken.
Morgan responded by looking me slowly up and down, eyes lingering on the pink tips of my hair and the matching laces in my shoes. She smiled. It was the languid smile of a cat that had been locked in at the dairy and now had access to all the cream. “I think the view’s just fine here in the stands.”
My cheeks burned red. Well, that answered the question of whether or not she’d be okay with me flirting
with her. “I, uh, like the view okay too.”
“Looks like they’re finishing up down there,” said Morgan, with a nod toward the track. The Concussion Stand was taking their final trip around. They’d be loose in a few seconds, and I’d have to start playing everybody’s least-favorite game, Will I See My Ex? No matter who won, I was going to lose. “Does your cousin need you, or can you run across to the food trucks with me? Maybe get something to drink, find another view to admire?”
She was going pretty fast, considering that we’d met only five minutes ago. But she was hot and I was lonely, and my head was still filled with all the hormones and heartbreak of my split with Carly. I looked at the track one more time.
Annie could get a ride home from Fern. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d left in the middle of a bout, when I found something more interesting and less sweaty to do.
“Sure,” I said, and slid off the bleachers and followed her to the door.
Let me just preface this by saying that I’m not a total pushover. I’ve taken self-defense classes with the best (in other words, my cousins), and I know how to handle myself in a crisis. Also, I always carry pepper spray in my vast monstrosity of a purse. Also-also, I am a strong, competent succubus in the modern age, and I don’t need people to take care of me. I can take care of myself.
Also, she was really cute, and I think I should get some slack for that.
The evening air was cool and moist and tasted like roses—perfect Portland weather, in other words. The empty lot across from the warehouse had been converted into a temporary wonderland of assorted cuisines by the food trucks, which flocked all over the city during daylight hours and sought out events like roller derbies in the evening. Watch a couple girls eat track, and then stroll across the street for a grilled cheese sandwich made from all-local, all-organic ingredients. Or a hamburger made from ground-up pigeons and sold to you by a man named Doug. Whatever you wanted. We didn’t judge.
Well, a lot of people would judge. Portland was full of people who liked to judge. But I wouldn’t judge, and I was the one who mattered.