“This ain’t right.” Carver wanted to seize the man and crush his throat in his bare hands, but that sting kept him from moving against the guy. “None of this is right.”
The bus screeched as it drew to a halt. Carver rose from his seat.
“Go,” the man said, tail poised to strike.
“I’m going to stop you,” Carver said. “Whatever you are.”
* * *
The rest of the day, Carver traveled by foot and by bus throughout the city. Will called his cell several times, but Carver ignored the rings. He was engaged on a higher purpose: identifying just how many Shadow People walked the earth and discovering what could be done about it.
That label, Shadow People, had just come to mind, and it felt right. These things looked like people, but the truth of what they did was concealed from the average person. Carver didn’t understand how or why he had received the ability to spot them, and wondered if there were others who shared his gift.
Although he might have been unique among regular folks, the Shadow People were everywhere.
They hung out in restaurants, office buildings, strip malls, coffee shops, and on street corners. They rode the bus, drove cars, and walked. They were young and old, black and white and every ethnicity in between.
But they all shared tails and tongues and the talent to manipulate. In a Wal-Mart, Carver had seen a child that could not have been older than three, using its sting on a woman who appeared to be serving as its mother. The woman was loading down her shopping cart with every whimsical item the child demanded.
He saw them using the portals, too.
Although he could see the doorways only within mirror reflections, he saw the Shadow People stepping out of them and going back in, as casually as a man might pass through a revolving door. Where were they going? Another dimension? Another planet?
The discoveries led only to more questions. It made his head ache.
But the remark from the Shadow Guy on the bus had stuck with him: Ah, you’ve been marked, I can smell it. Whose little morsel are you?
It brought him to Ashley’s door that night, with an intention far more serious than enjoying a romp around her bed.
The door was unlocked, as usual. Before entering, he made sure he had his switchblade in his pocket.
Inside, candle flames chased away the shadows. Carver went straight to the bedroom. The bed was empty, but he saw the glow of a cigarette on the balcony.
He pulled in a breath, and went to the door.
His eyelid was already twitching.
* * *
Standing at the doorway, Carver watched Ashley.
She wore a spaghetti strap dress that flattered her figure, like all of the clothes she chose. But Carver’s gaze was fixed on the blood-red tail coiled like a sleeping serpent between her slender ankles. The barbed sting was at least six inches long, black as her heart.
How many times had she stuck that thing into him? Pumped venom into him and filled him with a crazy fever that made him willing to perform acts that defied all logic?
Like kill a man without question?
He moved onto the balcony. But he kept his distance.
“Hey,” he said.
She glanced at him over her shoulder, exhaled a plume of smoke.
“Something is wrong?” she asked.
He noticed that her tail stirred. His stomach clenched.
“Why did you want me to kill that guy?” he asked.
She merely smiled. Her tail uncoiled. He stepped back to the door.
“I see what you are,” he said.
Her eyes darkened. She flicked out her tongue, that forked monstrosity, and with it, extinguished the simmering cigarette, which she then tossed over the balcony.
“He gave you his blood, eh?” She sneered. “He was a traitor to our kind.”
“I’ve seen your kind, as you put it. You’re everywhere. You’re using people. You’re moving in and out of those doorways. What the hell are you? Where do you come from?”
She shook her head. “It would have been better for you if your eyes had not been opened.”
“They’re wide open, and I want answers.”
“We are what we are. You are what you are. What is a man, a woman, a child?” She laughed. “Do you know what you are and where you come from, Carver Washington?”
He struggled to find words to respond. He was presently a mechanic, but he had been a killer, a robber, whenever it made sense to do such things. He didn’t know his parents. His grandma had died of diabetes and left him a ward of the state. He lived in foster homes where he was ignored or feared. He cycled in and out of jail.
Those were things that had happened to him, but was he the sum of his experiences? He had the sense that Ashley—if that was really her name—was suggesting a deeper question, and the answers eluded him. All he knew was that every molecule in his body urged him to stop her.
“Talk sense,” he said. “Don’t bullshit me.”
Her eyes glinted. “Does the wolf know why it is here and why it desires the gazelle? Does the gazelle upon which it preys realize its purpose? Most of your kind has been spared the discovery of the wolves that walk among you.”
“You’re one of the wolves,” he said. “And I’m dinner, huh?”
She inclined her head, and that was the only confirmation he needed. He rushed forward and clamped his hands on her arms. Her eyes widened, her tail lashing the air, the tongue darting from her mouth. He could have snicked his switchblade across her throat, but that would have been too merciful.
He lifted her as if she weighed nothing and tossed her over the balcony railing.
She screamed as she hurtled to the pavement seven stories below.
He didn’t wait around to hear the impact.
* * *
The Metra train stop was only five blocks away from his destination.
Carver pulled his knit cap tight over his head and left the station, heading out into the fierce Chicago winter. Although the day was frigid, with a cutting wind blowing in across Lake Michigan, he was warm inside, burning with the urgency of his purpose.
After a brisk walk through the icy streets, he entered the building and approached the receptionist.
“I’m here to donate,” he said, but his eyelid had begun twitching, and he realized why when the receptionist smiled at him.
Her forked tongue peeked from between her perfect white teeth.
She’s another one of them, he thought, walking into the clinic. Damn Shadow People are everywhere.
He smiled to himself when the nurse arrived, and he rolled up his sleeve for the needle.
But now, so are we.
* * *
Brandon Massey is the award-winning author of several novels in the horror and suspense genres, including Dark Corner, The Other Brother, Don’t Ever Tell, and Within the Shadows. He has served as editor of the critically acclaimed Dark Dreams anthologies, and contributed to the collection, The Ancestors, with Tananarive Due and the late L.A. Banks. His most recent supernatural thriller, In the Dark, was a Nook Top 100 bestseller. A native of Illinois, Massey now lives near Atlanta, Georgia with his wife and daughter. He can be found online at www.brandonmassey.com.
Hand Fast
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
The most romantic gift anyone ever gave me? A gun.
Valentine’s Day, ten years ago. Ryder. God, what a sweet man. Six-three, all tattooed muscle, black hair shorn off that year to accent his dark, dark skin.
We were on the roof of his place, trying to keep candles lit in the cold breeze blowing across the Hudson, eating take-out sushi with custom-made chopsticks clutched in our frozen fingers, sitting on lawn chairs wedged into the ice-covered snow.
Ry gave up on the candles midway through, decided to go to his apartment to get a lantern—he said—and did come back with one. Battery operated, large, already on. And in his other hand, a Tiffany’s blue box big enough for a cake, tied with the ubiquitous white ri
bbon.
Despite the box, he couldn’t afford Tiffany’s. Not even something small, and certainly not something that large. Even if we could have afforded Tiffany’s, we wouldn’t have bought anything there.
We were militantly anti-ostentation back then. It went well with our lack of funds. But we believed it, acted on it, maybe even looked the other way when someone in a silk suit and shiny leather shoes ventured into the wrong alley, stepping in only when that rich bastard looked to be in trouble for his life—never stepping in to save his wallet.
I opened the box with trembling fingers, stuck the ribbon in my pocket and stared at a small lockbox that looked old and well used.
Ry nodded. He wanted me to open it.
So I did.
And saw the gun.
It wasn’t any old gun.
It was custom-made, silver, and, I later learned, it glowed slightly when its owner touched it. It also designed its own bullets—silver for werewolves, holy-water-laced for vampires, and laser-lighty (filled with fire) for the unknown magical.
I long suspected—and never tested—that the miracle weapon could transform its bullets into whatever the owner imagined.
We hand-fasted me to the weapon. Ry claimed he had another one, but I never saw it.
Hand-fasting required the candlewax (he was planning ahead), a bit of mercury, a touch of burnt almond. And some other magical oil-based concoctions I’m not going to describe, just in case.
And yeah, hand-fasting—pagan term for wedding. But it also meant a bargain struck by joining hands. I thought then that applying hand to hand-grip was the same thing.
I had no idea where Ry had gotten the weapon or how he learned to control it. I didn’t understand why he gave it to me.
I’d love to believe what he told me that night: He gave me the gun because he loved me.
But that couldn’t have been entirely true, because who gave a gun out of love?
When I pushed the next day, asking the right way—what made you think of me when you saw this?—he said I was so much more talented than he was, I deserved the weapon, and the weapon deserved me. And then, the day after that, he admitted he had one too, and we’d go practice with them, just him and me, Upstate, the next time we had the dough.
There was no next time. There wasn’t even a day after that. Not for Ry.
Someone caught him in our alley, shredded him, took the tattoos as souvenirs. I found him, still alive, barely. But not alive enough to tell me what happened. Or alive enough to let me know he heard me when, stupid me, I told him I loved him for the first and only time.
* * *
Fast-forward a decade to the winter that never died. Press coverage that year pegged it as the coldest in two decades, blaming arctic air that should’ve lived in Canada but, like any other snowbird, decided to move south.
I had my own place by then, two buildings over, tall enough to get the occasional sunset glinting off the nearby roofs. I liked that: the dying sunlight reached the kitchen of my glorious apartment, just about the time (in the winter at least) I was having whatever it was I scrounged for breakfast.
My apartment: three rooms, hard-fought. Actually purchased when the building went condo just before the damn housing crisis. Now I was—as the pundits so euphemistically call it—underwater, and for once, I gave a damn.
Then I’d come to my place, warded and spelled, with most comfortable furniture I could find (mostly discards on garbage day, dragged up the elevator, refurbished and softened), and reveled in having a safe harbor, somewhere no one else ever breached. Not anyone, including the post-Ry lovers, the so-called friends, the clients and the hangers-on.
Just me and the silence I’d created, a place to refurbish myself after each day’s hard knocks and scrapes.
Somehow I stopped being militantly anti-ostentation. I was still anti-ostentation—no one would mistake the interior of this place for anything fancy—but I’d grown up enough to have financial entanglements and to adopt some of the trappings of a good citizen.
Protective coloration, really.
I’d needed it.
Back in the day, me and Ry were a team, and he was the stronger. We’d partner up, go after the shadows, fight till dawn, screw till noon, sleep a little, and start over.
Then he died, and I went full-moon batshit crazy searching for his killers, never sleeping, the edges of the world growing jagged and dark, finding clues where none existed, missing clues that’d probably been there, going, going, going until I ended up face-down in an abandoned subway tunnel and no memory of how I got there.
I had to choose, with my face pressed against the oil and the decades-old piss, whether I’d keep going or whether I’d just let it all end.
And weirdly, it was Ry who saved me. Ry, with his crooked half-smile and his embrace of anything dangerous. Ry, who had a tattoo on his left bicep of a bright yellow smiley face holding a sword in one little gloved hand and a dripping scalp in the other, with the word Onward in gothic letters underneath.
That tattoo always made me grin, especially when he flexed it, making the sword move up and down as if the smiley face were marching at a parade.
I saw that tattoo as clearly as if it were in front of me and, instead of regretting the method of its theft, I let out a tiny laugh. That moved the dusty dirt in front of me, and almost made me gag on the stench. Which, for some reason, I also found funny.
I was exhausted and spent, and in some ways, ruined. Completely different than I had been before.
I sat up, then stood up, and staggered my way out of the tunnel, heading back into my life. Which I rebuilt—alone—bit by bit. In the places that had never functioned alone, I built—I trained, I learned, I became.
* * *
And then the winter of our discontent. Valentine’s Day wasn’t a bright spot for anyone. Yet another storm had arrived the day before, canceling flights, snarling traffic, and delaying the all-important flower deliveries to shops that relied on them. By the time the actual holiday rolled around, the City was enveloped in sleet on top of two feet of snow.
I rented an office near the alley where Ry got attacked. The office wasn’t much—third-floor walk-up with a frosted door, frosted windows, and a radiator that clanged to its own tune but kept the place warm. I had an actual desk which I got from an office five doors down—a blond wood monstrosity that smelled like old cigarettes, giving the office a slightly musty air, something I actually liked. In keeping with the thirties motif, I kept an open bottle of Scotch in the bottom drawer, although I rarely touched liquor. Any more.
I cribbed an old leather sofa from that same abandoned office, and found two matching desk chairs in the garbage behind my apartment building. The only money I actually spent on furnishing the place was for my chair, which was the most high-tech thing I owned. It had more levers and dials and options than the first (and last) car I ever drove.
The office had no computer or phone or anything remotely resembling office equipment. I don’t write reports. I collect funds up front, and don’t give paper receipts. If I need more money from my clients, I ask them for more. If they refuse to pay, I refuse to work.
I’m not one of those private detectives who works pro bono because the case interests them. I work because I need the money—and if I didn’t work, I’d go back down that crazy subway tunnel.
It’s not even fair to call me a private detective. I use the title sometimes because it’s easier than explaining what I do. What Ry and I used to do. What I never stopped doing, after he was gone.
I shove the magic back where it belongs.
Sounds easy, but it’s not. And there are only a few of us that can do it.
By now it should be clear: I wasn’t sitting alone in my office on Valentine’s Day because of the snow. I hated Valentine’s Day with a bloody passion. I tried not to. It wasn’t the fake holiday’s fault I was also so miserable at this time of year.
I usually tried to tell myself that Valentine’s Day had
peaked for me that night on the roof, with the lantern and the Tiffany box. And sometimes that worked.
But not on the tenth anniversary. Not as I slogged my way through the snow and sleet, watching inane couples in their finery get out of cabs or stumble out of the subway, pretending the day (night) was perfect after all. Maybe it was the combination—wind, snow, Valentine’s—that caught me.
Or maybe I was finally feeling my age for the first time.
Whatever it was, it convinced me to haul out that open bottle of Scotch the moment I collapsed into my high-tech desk chair. Me, an open bottle, sleet tapping the frosted glass like werewolf claws. I thought I had the night all planned—when the gun appeared out of nowhere.
The gun. You know, the one from the Tiffany’s box.
Or so I thought at first.
Well, not entirely true, because you don’t think about where a gun came from when it appears right in front of you, business end pointed at your face, trembling as if held by an unsteady hand.
And nothing else.
I set the bottle of Scotch down, then made myself calmly and deliberately screwed the cap back on. I would have put the bottle back in the bottom drawer, but the gun’s trembling got worse, and I really didn’t want to get shot just because I was being a neat freak.
I wondered what kind of bullets were in that thing—silver, holy-water dipped, flaming hot. Damn near any of them would kill me, since I’m just good old-fashioned flesh and blood. I stared at the wobbling muzzle of that gun, then realized I had some control.
We’d been hand-fasted after all. The weapon belonged to me and I to it, which was probably why it couldn’t go through with the shooting.
I held up my right hand and said in my deepest, most powerful voice, Come to me.
The weapon’s trembling increased, but it didn’t move. My heart moved enough for both of us, trying to pound its way out of my chest.
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