When the Villian Comes Home

by Gabrielle Harbowy

  Alex’s resolve hardened. Jenny had already given up her life once. Alex wouldn’t let her do it again.

  She’d find another way.

  5

  Alex’s second kill was a neighbor who kept convincing the police to ignore the domestic abuse calls, even though they could see her husband slumping behind her in the doorway, cowed and bruised.

  Third: a policeman who’d raped a number of prostitutes after threatening to arrest them. Fourth and fifth: a sister and brother who ran a pyramid scheme that stole millions from the elderly. Alex killed the sister first. During the long seven days before the spell called for the brother’s soul, he lived in fear of the vengeful hand that had slain his sister. He wept when Alex found him. He promised her money. When that didn’t work, he vowed contrition. Still, she cut away his soul.

  The sixth death, the seventh, the eighth, all fell easily beneath her blade.

  Those were the easy weeks, the weeks when she felt no guilt, when the smell of blood wasn’t only the smell of magic and triumph but also of self-righteousness. She was a vengeful sorceress, cleansing the world of those who needed to die.

  Her first victims had come so easily that, when the time approached for her to take the next, she never doubted that an appropriate lamb would present itself for the sacrifice.

  None came.

  She spent her nights prowling. The alleys were full of shadows and strangers, none dark enough to invite her knife.

  In the final hour, she steeled her resolve. If she couldn’t find someone who deserved to die then she’d kill whoever she found.

  The victim walked straight up to her. A drunk boy, a little older than Alex, scrawny and bright-eyed. He leaned heavily on Alex as he asked her to walk him home. A college student. Philosophy.

  Afterward, when she unpacked his bag, she found poems written in the margins of his text books. Silly limericks for his sister and purple sonnets for his boyfriend.

  The expression on his face as he’d died had been one of confusion. He wasn’t shocked, wasn’t alarmed, was simply puzzled. His eyes seemed to ask: Are you really doing this? Why?

  His name was Aaron.

  When she got home, Alex locked herself in her room. Crying and shaking, she read his poems over and over again, trying to make some sense out of what she’d done. The pages wrinkled and his handwriting began to fade, but she found no answers. He was dead and she had killed him. There was no justification to be found. Those were the only things that mattered.

  Still, when the time came for her next kill, she ventured into the night.

  5

  After Alex excused herself from the table, she returned to the front hall to recover her messenger bag. She pulled open the flap and dug inside for her bespelled dagger.

  Her victims’ blood had disappeared into the strange, translucent blade. She held the knife up to the light and watched soul-colors shift beneath the surface as they sometimes did beneath her sister’s skin.

  When she’d possessed her magic, Alex had sensed the blade as a kind of cold, dark magnetism, pulling the heat and life from the room. With her magic gone, the blade was only ordinarily eerie. Watching it with only her mortal senses felt odd, as if she was trying to make out something without opening her eyes.

  Alex palmed the hilt. She crossed the house to her room. Noises came from the kitchen, her sister washing dishes and humming off-key along with the radio. Outside air crept beneath her window, filling her room with the scent of wet soil.

  Alex sat on her bed. She looked at the dagger in her hands. She no longer had the magic to lure an unwilling soul, but perhaps the spell would accept a sacrifice.

  And if it didn’t—so what? The magic had found Alex because she had no hope.

  The sacrifice would work or it wouldn’t. It was all she had left to give.

  5

  Victim eleven was an old woman living alone on the first floor of a run-down brownstone. She was a piano teacher, her rooms filled with dusty magic books and battered pianos. The magic whispered that her tissues were breaking down, that she only had a few years left. What was that against Jenny’s whole life?

  When she was finished, Alex surveyed the remnants of the life she’d taken. Framed photographs of former students lined the wall. One caught Alex’s attention: a smiling blonde girl with an upturned nose.

  Lyric.

  What followed was one of those moments that only makes sense in the context of magic, when the push and pull of dark forces against light creates what would otherwise be a staggering improbability. Lyric, coming on a whim to visit her old mentor, treaded lightly on the porch stairs, her hand twisting the doorknob, her face appearing in the crack of the opening door.

  Alex darted aside, hiding in the shadow cast by a heavy, velvet curtain.

  Lyric ran toward the corpse. “Mrs. Mueller? Oh, no! Mrs. Mueller!” She knelt in the pooling blood. “What happened to you?”

  Alex crept toward the door, trying to escape while Lyric examined the body, but the noise of her shoes on the hardwood summoned Lyric’s attention. Piercing blue eyes went straight to her face.

  “Stop! Who are you? What did you do to Mrs. Mueller?” Lyric rose, all furious outrage, and then recognition dawned. “Alex?”

  There was no more point in hiding. Alex stepped forward, holding her dagger between them. The spell was very specific about when she had to make her kills—it would ruin everything if she took another soul now. But Lyric didn’t know that.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” Alex said. It was true.

  Lyric’s expression had turned from surprise to horror. “The blood on your hands when we met… it was human?”

  Alex tried to laugh. It was so ridiculous. Only Lyric could have been so convinced it was blood from a magical beast that she hadn’t even considered otherwise. But Alex had no mirth in her; the sound came out a dry husk.

  “Magic can be volatile…” Lyric ventured. “Sometimes it creeps inside you…overwhelms you…makes you do things you wouldn’t…”

  Alex backed toward the open door, waving the dagger in front of her. “I’m going now. Don’t follow me.”

  Lyric started toward her anyway. Alex tried to harden her gaze, to make it flat and murderous so that Lyric would be forced to see her as she was.

  “I’ll kill you if I have to,” Alex said.

  She could see what a struggle it was for Lyric to believe the worst of anyone, even with the evidence right in front of her, but fear won a moment’s hesitation.

  Alex ran.

  5

  Alex looked down at the dagger in her hands. She thought of all the bodies she’d bled. Would the spell accept her sacrifice without magic to guide her soul into the blade? Perhaps. Dark magic was like the shadows in the library: mocking, mercurial, cruel. It would like the chance to drink her life.

  She pressed the blade against her throat, but hesitated before it bit too deeply. A drop of blood ran down her neck. Its scent mixed with the rain, just as her sister’s had that day in the crosswalk.

  The last sensations of her life: blood and rain, her sister’s humming drifting from the kitchen, the empty ache of her missing magic.

  The blade trembled as her hand shook.

  5

  For her twelfth victim, Alex found a drug runner. The year before, he’d been peripherally involved in a drive-by shooting, riding as a passenger behind the guy who shot the gun. He didn’t deserve the death penalty, but better him than another college student or music teacher.

  She sent him a message proposing an exchange. They settled on a location: a deserted alley positioned between two massive brick buildings that stared, windowlessly, down at the dumpsters and cracked asphalt.

  The dealer leaned against brick. He was a skinny white kid with a cocky sneer. He kept glancing furtively in both directions, but concentrated on the
north, where the alley led to the back of a bar.

  Alex approached from the south. The fog-charm she’d cast silenced her footsteps. She kept her hand inside the messenger bag, fingers closed around the dagger’s hilt.

  Suddenly, the kid looked her way. She couldn’t stop the sharp intake of breath that seemed to echo from wall to wall. How had he known she was there?

  No, his gaze wasn’t settling on her; it swung further up, to the top of a neighboring building.

  A golden figure leapt down from the rooftop, trenchcoat streaming behind him. It was Dirk, twisting in the air so that he landed gracefully on his feet, directly between Alex and her prey.

  “What the hell?” the kid spluttered. He took in Dirk’s tawny fur, the glint of light on his naked claws. “What the fuck are you?”

  Dirk ignored him. “We know you’re here, Alex. Give it up.”

  Alex tried to think clearly despite her pounding heart. She was still wearing her fog-charm. Maybe she could escape without Dirk hearing her.

  Before she could try, Lyric came blazing into the north end of the alley. The masked prophetess, Sabella, followed a step behind. Her finger rose, pointing straight at Alex’s heart.

  “The girl is there,” Sabella intoned. “She’s come to this place to kill, just as I saw in the patterns.”

  Dirk turned, tail whipping, and hissed at Alex.

  Alex stepped back. “Leave me alone.”

  Lyric shook her head. “I’m sorry, Alex.” Her blue eyes were infuriatingly more sad than angry.

  “Sorry?” Alex repeated. “I’m a serial killer. I killed your music teacher. Be furious. Be frightened. Be righteous. Don’t be sorry.”

  She pulled the knife from her bag. It rippled with the rainbow light of the souls she’d taken. Dirk hissed. Sabella held up her hand as if trying to shield herself from its aura.

  “One more life,” Alex said. “My sister raised me. I owe her everything. One more life will bring her back.”

  Slowly, Lyric shook her head. “No more lives.”

  Alex snarled. “If you kill me, then you’re just as bad as I am! You’re murdering my sister!” She twisted the knife in the air. “You know I won’t let you do that!”

  Lyric turned back toward Sabella. The prophetess nodded. “We have to,” Sabella said.

  Lyric sighed. Gathering herself, she strode toward Alex, blonde hair burning behind her like a golden flame, eyes cold and blue like the winter sky. Sabella flanked her. As they passed, Dirk fell into formation, teeth bared and eyes slitted.

  5

  The shred of light beneath Alex’s windowsill was a deepening navy. There was no more time to waste.

  Alex drew the blade across her throat.

  Nothing happened.

  There was no fireworks burst of pain, no red slashing her vision. She didn’t grow faint from blood loss. She didn’t die.

  She moved the dagger so that its point thrust under her chin. The sharp metal stung as she swallowed. She gritted her teeth and stabbed.

  Nothing.

  She threw the dagger down. It fell onto the rug, spinning like a bottle until its tip pointed toward the window.

  Alex touched her throat. No blood, no slash. Only skin. Her fingernail scratched the dried blood from the scratch she’d made earlier. The dagger had been sharp then, when she’d tried to slash but hesitated. It was as if it had only become harmless after she’d made her decision to die.

  That was probably exactly what had happened. The cruel, mercurial dark magic had decided it would rather see Alex suffer her sister’s death than savor Alex’s blood.

  She looked down at the dagger. Rainbow colors rippled across it, disconcertingly bright against the drab backdrop of her room.

  She’d had hope for a while. Hope that her sister would live.

  She should have known better. Dark magic was for the hopeless.

  5

  Dirk and Sabella pinned Alex to the ground. She watched the alley behind them, the way the grey of the cracked asphalt blended into the dirty bricks. The whole place was broken-down and dirty and abandoned; it belonged in the Dumpsters with the trash. Even the drug dealer had run off.

  Lyric bent over her and then Alex could see nothing but lashes fluttering open over an eternity of guileless blue.

  Lyric plunged her hand into Alex’s stomach. Her fingers penetrated flesh and organs. Alex clenched in pain. She tried to draw away, but she was pinned too tightly to move.

  Lyric’s fingers stretched and searched until, finally, they closed around something. Alex could feel what they held, but she couldn’t give it a name. It was something ineffable but essential, something she’d never be complete without.

  Lyric’s hand withdrew. Her fingers opened. The thing in her palm was black and wriggling. It writhed and spat as it tried to escape. Lyric pursed her lips and blew. Like an extinguished candle flame, it disappeared.

  Her soul’s magic. Gone in an instant.

  At Lyric’s nod, Dirk and Sabella released Alex. Lyric looked down, mouth half-open as if there was something she wanted to say. In the end, she stayed silent. The three light mages departed, leaving Alex mutilated and alone.

  After a while, when it began to rain, Alex retrieved her messenger bag and began the silent walk home.

  5

  Alex made it into the kitchen just in time to see the dish that Jenny was holding tumble through her hand and hit the floor.

  Jenny cursed and bent to retrieve it, but her hand passed through the shards.

  “Damn it,” Jenny grumbled, her confusion audible beneath the frustration.

  Alex stopped a few steps away. She’d automatically extended her hand, ready to wave Jenny away and go for the broom, but it was pointless to pretend that this was like any other mess. She couldn’t clean this up. Broken things were broken forever.

  Jenny frowned as her fingers failed to close on a triangular wedge. She tried again. On the third pass, as her fingers became transparent, she made a choking noise and jumped back, as if it was the glass that had caused her to become intangible.

  She looked up, searching for an explanation. Her eyes lit on Alex. They were no longer bright green, but some muted, shadow shade.

  The pale, rippling rainbow colors of the stolen souls passed through Jenny’s translucent form, shining like the iridescence on a soap bubble, and bled into the air.

  Alex’s tongue felt numb in her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I tried to save you, but I couldn’t. I’m so sorry.”

  She was hoping she’d see something in Jenny’s eyes before she died, some moment of understanding or forgiveness, something other than the confusion and fear that clouded her expression in the last moments before her body lost all definition, becoming only a silvery translucence, like a vaguely woman-shaped drop of rain.

  All at once, Jenny’s essence lost coherence. The glistening outline shattered. She broke against the ground.

  It was too late. It had always been too late. Too late for them to move to another city. Too late for Jenny to start college. Too late for Alex to love someone who wouldn’t leave her.

  She crumpled onto the floor, shoulders shuddering, wishing she could make herself so small that nothing could see her, so small that she couldn’t even see herself. Her skin tingled with the strange feeling that comes with being watched. She wondered what she would see if she still had her magic. The crooked man, leaning against the wall? The shadows, leering and laughing?

  How much had they done? Had they lured her to the spell only because it amused them to watch her fail? Had they been involved before that? Had one of shadows wrapped itself around the driver’s foot on the gas pedal, goading him to go faster and faster?

  Lyric had said there was a magical world overlaying this one like a mirror. All one had to do was press one’s nose against the glass. But what
if what looked back wasn’t elves and angels and dream-mages, but something dark and howling?

  Alex wept. There was nothing else left.

  RACHEL SWIRSKY holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her work has appeared in Tor.com, Subterrnean Magazine, and a number of other venues, and been nominated for the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award. In 2011, she won the Nebula Award for best novella. Her first collection, a slim volume of poetry and fiction, Through the Drowsy Dark, came out from Aqueduct Press in 2010.

  THE MISCIBLE IMP

  Tony Pi

  Treg’s new bottle was tall, narrow, and square, and he hated it. It was cramped inside, and the thick flint glass distorted his view of the outside world. But Myrina had been adamant: he must ride inside this bottle or not come at all. “I hain’t carrying a prissy vial that’ll break from a sneeze, and if it’s round it’ll roll underfoot when I set you down,” she said. “You don’t want to spill, do you?”

  The magic that gave Treg life came with a curse that trapped his essence inside bottles and jars. Within the confines of a glass prison, he could possess and animate any liquid it held, but he could never hold thought or shape beyond the vessel’s mouth. Therefore he needed Myrina to retrieve Old Man Reeve’s notebook from its hiding place; without notes, he’d never learn how his former master made him. If he had the formula, he might discover how to halt the strange decline of his genius. To live simpleminded was a doom worse than death to Treg, and Myrina was living proof.

  Let her have her small victory, Treg thought. Without his counsel, she’d still be scum in the gutters.

  Myrina slipped out of the shrubbery and held his bottle up so that he could see Alchemy Hall. “Which window, Yer Impship?”

  Treg pressed a liquid eye against the glass. He hadn’t seen his first home since he and Apprentice Leech fled the university two years ago, and the sight of it made him uneasy. Was it remorse over what they did to Old Man Reeve, or just his potion-body reacting to moonlight? Nerves aside, the ivy-covered building was still the most majestic at the University of Norwesternesse. Yet under the gibbous moon it acquired a menacing cast.