by Paula Guran
He hears the words coming out of his mouth even as he thinks, This isn’t going to work. “I’m here to send you back.” Once one of the poor bastards becomes his job, there’s no “sending back.” His left arm is up, his palm turned out. He should fire.
The milkweed fluff rocks slowly backward. Her face is under it. Tiny features on an out-thrusting skull, under a flat, receding brow, so that her whole face forms around a ridge down its middle. Only the eyes aren’t tiny. They’re stone-gray without whites or visible pupils, deep-set round disks half the size of his palm.
She opens her little lipless mouth, but he doesn’t hear anything. She licks around the opening with a pale-gray pointed tongue and tries again.
“Eres un mortal.”
You’re a mortal. A short speech in a high, breathy little-girl voice, but long enough to hear that her accent is familiar.
He’s lightheaded, and his ears are ringing. He needs adjusting. Damn it, where’s Chisme?
Wait—he knows what this is. He’s afraid.
She’s helpless, not moving, not even paying attention. All he has to do is trigger the weapon, and she’ll have a hundred tiny iron needles in her. Death by blood poisoning in thirty seconds or less—quicker and cleaner than the coyote’s steel-jacketed rounds would have been. Why can’t he fire?
He tries again, in Spanish this time—as if that will make it true. “I’m sending you back.”
Something around her brows and the corners of her eyes suggests hope. She rattles into speech, but he can’t make out a word of it. He recognizes it, though. It’s the Indio language his grandmother used. He doesn’t know its name; to his abuela, it was just speaking, and Spanish was the city language she struggled with.
He can’t trust his voice, so he shakes his head at her. Does she understand that? His left arm feels heavy, stretched out in front of him.
Suddenly anger cuts through his dumb-animal fear. She’s jerking him around. She found out somehow where his mother’s family is from, and she’s playing him with it. He doesn’t have to make her understand. All he has to do is shoot her.
“You are not of the People, but you are of the land.” She’s switched back to Spanish, and he hears the disappointment in her voice. “You cannot send me back to something that is not there.”
“Whose fault is that?” Don’t talk to her! But he’s angry.
“I do not know who it was.” She shakes her head, less like a “no” than like a horse shaking off flies. “But the spring is gone. The water sank to five tall trees below the stone. The willows died when they could not reach it.”
Willows and cottonwoods mark subsurface water like green surveyor’s flags all through the dry country. He remembers willows around the springs in the hills behind his grandmother’s village. “So you’re going to move north and use up everything here, too?”
“¿Que?” Her white, flattened brow presses down in anger or confusion, or both. “How can I use up what is here? Is it so different here, the water and the land and the stone?”
There has to be a correct answer to that. Those who sent him after her probably have one. But he’s not even sure what she’s asking, let alone what he ought to answer. Nothing, you moron. And what did he expect her to say? “Sí, sí, I’m here to steal your stuff”? They both know why she’s here. If she’d just make a move, he could trigger the weapon.
“We keep, not use. How to say . . . ” She blinks three times, rapidly, and it occurs to him that that might be the equivalent, for her, of gazing into space while trying to remember something. “Protect and guard. Is it not so here? Mortals use. We protect and guard. They ask for help—water for growing food, health and strength for their children. They bring tobacco, cornmeal, honey to thank us. We smell the presents and come. Do the People not do this here?”
He tries to imagine that piece of blond perfection by the Chateau Marmont pool being summoned by the smell of cornmeal and doing favors for campesinos.
The word triggers his memory, like Chisme toggling his endocrine system. He recalls his last visit to his abuela’s house, when he was eight. She was too weak to get out of bed for more than a few minutes at a time. She was crying, yelling at his mom, saying that somebody had to take the tamales to the spring. His mom said to him, as she heated water for his bath, “You see what it’s like here? When your cousins call you pocho, you remember it’s better to be American than a superstitious campesino like them.”
He’d grown up believing that, until they found him, remade him, and sent him out to do their work. In that hot, moist room he feels cold all over. To hide it, he laughs. “Welcome to the Land of the Free, chica. No handouts, no favors, no fraternizing with the lower orders.”
Her eyes darken, as if a drop of ink fell into each one. Fear surges in him again. You should have shot her! But tears like water mixed with charcoal well up, spill over, draw dark gray tracks on her white, sloping cheeks. “Please—it is not true, tell me so. I have nowhere to go. The machines that are loud and smell bad come and tear the trees from the soil, break mountains and take them away. They draw the water away from the sweet dark places under the earth. Poison comes into the water everywhere, how I do not know, but creatures are made sick who drink it. I tried to stay by the spring, but the water was gone, and the machines came. There was no room for me.”
“There’s no room for you here,” he snaps. But he thinks, You’re so skinny, Jesucristo, you could live in a broom closet. There must be some place to fit you in.
She shakes her head fiercely, smears the gray tears across her cheeks with her fingers. “Here there are places where the machines do not go. I know this. The People here are inmigrantes from the cold lands—they must know how it is. They will understand, and let us help them guard the land.”
Already there are . . . empty spots, the blonde by the pool had said. But just this one little one? Would she be so bad?
No. All of his targets were each just one. Together they were hundreds. “They’re guarding it from all of you, so you don’t use everything up. Like locusts.”
She goes still as a freeze-frame. “Mortals use. The People guard and protect. Surely they know this!”
What is she saying? “The power. Whatever it is, in the land. It’s drying up.”
“The People let the magic run through us like water through our fingers. We do not hoard it or hide it or wall it in. If we did, it would dry up, yes. Who told you this lie?”
“They did. The ones like you.” Have you seen many who are just like me? he hears the blonde saying, in that voice that made everything wise and true.
She hasn’t moved, but she suddenly seems closer, her eyes wider, her hair shifting like dry grass in the wind. There’s no wind. He wants to back away, run.
And he remembers that night in his grandmother’s house, after the fight about the tamales. He remembers being tucked up in blankets on the floor, and not being able to sleep because it stayed in his head—the angry voices, his abuela crying, his mamá cleaning up after dinner with hard, sharp movements. Nobody’s mad at you, he’d told himself. But he’d still felt sick and scared. So he was awake when the tap, tap, tap sounded on the window across the room. On the glass bought with money his mother had sent home. And he’d raised his head and looked.
The next morning he’d told his mother he’d had a bad dream. That was how he’d recalled it ever since: a bad dream, and a dislike for the little house he never saw again. But now he remembered. That night he saw the Devil, come to take his mother and grandmother for the sin of anger. He’d frozen the scream in his throat. If he screamed, they would wake and run in, and the Devil would see them. If it took him instead, they would be safe.
What he’d seen, before he’d closed his eyes to wait for death, was a white face with a high, flattened forehead, gray-disk eyes, and a lipless mouth, and thin white fingers pressed against the glass. It was her, or one of her kind, come down from the spring looking for the offering.
“It is not true,�
�� she hisses, thrusting her face forward. “None of my kind would say that we devour and destroy. This is mortals’ lies, to make us feared, to drive us away!”
He is afraid of her. He could snap those little pipe cleaner arms, but that wouldn’t save him from her anger. It rages in the room like the dust storms that can sand paint off a car. She has to be wrong. If she isn’t, then for three years he has—He had no choice. Did he? Three years of things, hundreds of them, that should have lived forever. “Your kind want you kept out,” he spits back at her. “You don’t get it, do you? They sent me to kill you.”
He’d thought she was still before. Now she’s an outcrop of white stone. He can’t look away from her wide, wide eyes. Then her mouth opens and a sound comes out, soft at first, so he doesn’t recognize it as laughter. “You will drive us back or kill us? You are too late. Jaguars have come north across the Rio Grande. The wild magic is here. We will restore the balance in spite of the ignorant inmigrantes. And when we are all strong again, they will see how weak they are alone.”
She moves. He thinks she’s standing up, all in one smooth motion. But her head rises, her arms shrink and disappear, her bent legs curve, coil. He’s looking into her transformed face: longer, flatter, tapered, serpentine. The flyaway hair is a bush of hair-thin spines. Rising out of it are a pair of white, many-pronged antlers.
Their points scrape the ceiling above his head. The cloud of tiny iron needles fills the air between him and her and he thinks, Did I fire?
But by then she’s behind him. There’s a band of pressure around his chest. He looks down to see her skin, silver-white scales shining in the street light, as the pressure compresses his ribs, his lungs. She’s wrapped around him, crushing him.
Chisme will know when he stops breathing. When it’s too late. The room is full of tiny stars. She’s so strong he can’t even struggle, can’t cry because he can’t breathe. He wants so much to cry.
The room is black, and far, far away. He feels a lipless mouth brush his forehead, and a voice whisper, “Duermes, hijo, y despiertas a un mundo mas mejór.” The next world is supposed to be better. He hopes that’s true. He hopes that’s where he’s going.
He lies with his eyes closed, taking stock. His ribs hurt, but he’s lying on something soft. Hurt means he’s not dead. Soft means he’s not on the floor of that office in the jewelry district, waiting for help.
He listens for the names. Nothing. He’s alone in his head.
He opens his eyes. The light is low, greenish and underwatery, and comes from everywhere at once. He’s back in their hands, then.
At the foot of whatever he’s lying on, a young guy looks up from a sheet of paper. Brown hair, hip-nerd round tortoiseshell glasses, Oxford-cloth button-down under a cashmere sweater under a reassuring white coat. For a second he thinks he was wrong and this is a hospital, that’s a doctor.
“Hey,” says the guy. “How do you feel?”
Come on, lungs, take in air. Mouth, open. “Crummy.” He sounds as if his throat’s full of mud.
The guy draws breath across his teeth—a sympathy noise. “Yeah, you must have caught yourself a whopper.”
This one’s remarkably human, meaning damned near unremarkable. But the lenses in the glasses don’t distort the eyes behind them, because of course, they don’t have to correct for anything. He’s never seen one of them so determined to pass for normal. Is there a reason why this one’s here now? Are they trying to put him at ease, off his guard?
“Actually,” he answers, “it was a little kid who turned into a big-ass constrictor snake.”
“Wow. Have you ever gotten a shape-changer before?”
Bogus question. The guy knows his whole history, knows every job he’s done. But there’s no point in calling him on it. “Yeah.”
A moment of silence. Is he supposed to go on, talk it out? Is this some kind of post-traumatic stress therapy they’ve decided he needs? Or worse—is he supposed to apologize now for screwing up, for letting her get by him?
The guy shrugs, checks his piece of paper again. “Well, you’re going to be fine now. And you did good work out there.”
Careful. “Any job you can walk away from.”
“Quite honestly, we weren’t sure you had. Your ‘little kid’ put out enough distortion to swamp your connection with us. As far as we can tell it took almost thirty minutes for it to dissipate, after you . . . resolved the situation. Until then, we thought you’d been destroyed. Your handlers were beside themselves.”
Handlers—the names. He wonders what “beside themselves” looks like for Chisme and Biblio and Magellan, or whatever those names are when they aren’t in his head. He’s never heard emotion out of any of them.
He stares at the young guy, handsome as a soap-opera doctor. He starts to laugh, which hurts his ribs. Has he dealt with shape-changers before? Hell, which of them isn’t a shape-changer? However they do it, they all look like what you want or need to see. Except the ones, bent and strange, who can’t pass. “I wasn’t sure I killed her.”
The young guy winces. Killed is not a nice word to immortals, apparently. “The site was completely cleansed. Very impressive. And I assure you, I’m not the only one saying so.”
“That’s nice.” He’s never failed to take out his target before this. He doesn’t know what punishment it is that he seems to have escaped. For this one moment, he feels bulletproof. “I talked to her, before I did it.”
Surprise—and alarm?—on the young guy’s face. “By the green earth! Are you nuts? You must have been warned against that.”
“She said her kind—your kind—aren’t a drain on the local resources. Or aren’t supposed to be. She implied you’d forgotten how it’s done.”
The soap-opera features register disgust. “Just the sort of thing one of them would say. They’re ignorant tree-dwellers. They have no idea how complex the modern world is. You know what they’re like.”
He doesn’t, actually. He’s supposed to kill them, not get acquainted with them. “Her folks were here first,” he says, as mildly as he can.
The young guy frowns, confused. “What does that have to do with it?” He shakes his head. “Don’t worry, we understand these things. We know what we’re doing. You can’t imagine what it would be like if we let down our guard.”
Pictures come into his head—from where? A picture of jaguars, glimmering gold and black like living jewelry, slipping through emerald leaves; of blue-and-red feathered birds singing with the sweet, high voices of children; of human men and women sitting with antlered serpents and coyote-headed creatures, sharing food and stories in a landscape of plenty; of the young white-coated guy, on a saxophone, jamming with the piano player in the Koreatown bar while a deer picked its way between the tables.
“You’ll be fine now,” the young guy repeats. “Get some sleep. When you wake up you’ll be back home. I think you can expect a week or two off—go to Vegas or something, make a holiday of it.”
Of course, “get some sleep” is not just a suggestion. The guy makes a pressing-down motion, and the greeny light dims. He can feel the magic tugging at his eyelids, his brain. The young guy smiles, turns away, and is gone.
It’s a good plan—but not Vegas, oh, no. He’ll wake up in his apartment. He’ll get up and pack . . . what? Not much. Then he’ll head south. Past the border towns and the maquiladoras, past the giant commercial fields of cotton and tomatoes scented with chemicals and watered from concrete channels. He wonders if they’ll be able to track him, if they’ll even care that he’s gone. For them, the world must be full of promising, desperate mortals. He’ll lose the names, the senses, the fastlane, but he’ll be traveling light; he won’t need them. Eventually he’ll get to the wild places, rocky or green, desert or forest or shore. Home of the ignorant, superstitious peasants. That’s where he’ll stop. He’ll bake tortillas on a hot, flat stone, lay out sugar cane and tobacco.
Maybe nothing will come for them. Maybe he won’t even be able to t
ell if anything’s there. But just in case, he’ll tell stories. They’ll be about how to get past people like him, into the land where the magic is dying because it can’t flow like water.
Then he’ll move on, and do it again. Nothing makes up for the ones he’s stopped, but he can try, at least, to replace them.
Sleep, child, she’d said, and wake to a better world. He’d thought then she’d meant the sleep of death, but if she’d wanted to kill him, wouldn’t he be dead? He relaxes into the green darkness, the comforting magic. When he wakes this time, it’ll be the same old world. But some morning, for someone, someday, it will be different.
Emma Bull is a science fiction and fantasy author whose best-known novel is War for the Oaks, one of the pioneering works of urban fantasy. She has participated in Terri Windling’s Borderland shared universe, which is the setting of her novel Finder. Her post-apocalyptic science fiction novel Bone Dance was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. Bull and her husband, Will Shetterly, created the shared universe of Liavek, for which they have both written stories. There are five Liavek collections extant. Her most recent novel is Territory. Bull and Shetterly live in Minnesota.
The City: An American city where there are animals in need of rescue. In other words: any American city.
The Magic: Malou loves animals, but she makes a connection with one lost dog that’s truly magical. Unfortunately, she only has three days to find the canine’s master . . . or else.
STRAY MAGIC
Diana Peterfreund
You can’t have this job unless you love animals, but if you love animals, it’s hard to have this job. We’re a no-kill shelter, but all that means is that there are some animals who are stuck here for life, wasting away in their little cages. And sometimes we’re too full and we have to turn animals away, knowing they’ll be taken to the county shelter, where they’ll be put down after seventy-two hours.