by T. A. Pratt
The spotted rock burst apart, and light the color of Grace’s eyes shone forth, blazing so brightly that even when Zealand squeezed his eyes shut, he saw blue. After a moment the light faded, and Zealand opened his eyes.
Grace sagged against the railing, his whole body trembling, and when he spoke, his words were choked by sobs. “I have a daughter,” he said, and then began pounding his head against the deck railing, slamming his forehead down so hard that the wood audibly cracked. Grace looked up at Zealand, his forehead gashed, blood running into his eyes, and screamed “Finish it! Kill the body!”
Zealand lifted the axe again and brought it down between Grace’s eyes. The man’s forehead caved in, and the axe stuck there, embedded in Grace’s skull, trapped fast in bone as old as the mountains. Grace fell back on the deck, dead.
Zealand went inside for the tarps and the chains he’d need to sink Grace to the lake bottom. His hands trembled as he wrapped Grace in the heavy plastic. The dead man had shaped nations, seduced monsters, and lived to the outer extremes of experience, but he’d died like anyone, like so many others at Zealand’s hands—messily, and speaking only of regrets.
Zealand sat by Grace’s corpse, holding the dead man’s hand for a while, and contemplated the nature of immortality.
Zealand sat in the upper room of the tower at Cincaguas, holding an oblong piece of shaped marble in his hand. The stone was prepared according to Grace’s instructions, as a receptacle for Zealand’s life, and he could never make another—this was one-time magic, once and forever magic. Zealand heard the distant scrape and clang of weapons on the lower floors. He’d claimed possession of the tower with the pass phrase he’d learned from Hannah, and then he’d changed the phrase to one only he knew. But the guards were old, and Hannah knew her way around, so he was not surprised to see her limp in through the arched doorway. She apparently did have some starfish in her ancestry, because her leg had grown back, though it was knotty as coral, and a bit shorter than the other leg. She wore the slashed remains of a dark blue wetsuit, and she bled water from the wounds the guards had inflicted. Her teeth had grown back, too, though they curved off at strange angles, and some of them cut her face when she closed her mouth.
“You killed my father,” she said, her voice emerging from the air before her, a calm statement of fact.
“He wanted me to,” Zealand said. He didn’t stand up.
“I don’t care. Because of you, I never had a chance to talk to him, and make things right between us.”
Zealand rolled the marble egg between his palms. “He mentioned you in his last words. He said he had a daughter, and I’ve never heard such anguish.”
“He remembered me?”
“He remembered everything, and I think he wanted to die even more once he did.”
“I came here to kill you,” Hannah said, but she didn’t come any closer.
“I thought you might.” He held up the stone, so she could see it. “I’ve been up here for weeks, trying to decide if I should put my life in this rock. I’ve never been an indecisive person, but I’ve been balanced on the edge over this.” He glanced up at her, then away, and said “I’m sorry for the way I hurt you.” He set the egg on the stone floor.
Hannah sat down beside him. She smelled strongly of salt water. “My father never told me he was sorry for anything.”
“He wasn’t capable of being sorry, not while his soul was put aside.”
“I’m sure that made his life easier.”
“Mmm,” Zealand said. “Are you still going to kill me?”
“Perhaps. Did you love my father?”
“As well as I was able. But I may as well have loved a cloud, or the stars, for all the feeling was returned.”
“I know how that feels.” She picked up the marble egg. “I don’t think I’ll kill you. Not just now.”
“I almost want you to. It would take the decision out of my hands. I wish I knew where to go from here.”
She laughed, that harsh hyena sound, and Zealand realized that her laughter, unlike her voice, came from her own throat. “No one knows that.” She put the marble egg back in Zealand’s hand. “Not even my father knew where to go next. He just knew he was going to keep going on forever. Until you helped him find forever’s end.”
Zealand nodded. He stood and walked to the tower window, and looked down at the earth, far below. Hannah came and stood beside him.
“It’s a long way down,” Zealand said.
“Looked at another way,” Hannah said, “We’ve come a long way up.”
Zealand squeezed the stone in his hand. It was cold, and hard, and didn’t yield at all under the pressure of his hand. He thought about irrevocable decisions.
Zealand dropped the marble egg out the window, and Hannah stood beside him as they watched it fall.
A Void Wrapped in a Smile
The supernaturally attractive lovetalker Joshua Kindler seduces and betrays Marla in Poison Sleep, which doesn’t work out well for him. I considered him a pretty vile character, but one of my Kickstarter backers on a later book asked me to write a story about him, and damned if I didn’t find myself sympathizing a bit with the guy.
I
Just before Naomi Kindler died, she told her younger brother Joshua, “It’s like you’re nothing but a void wrapped in a smile.” It was a terrible thing to say, though it was also true, at least some of the time.
In Naomi’s defense, she said many nicer things to her brother later, after she was dead.
II
Joshua Kindler came into his powers when he hit puberty. Before that, he was just a boy, though not quite an ordinary boy; an unusually beautiful boy. Beauty is no benefit in middle school, and his long lashes, high cheekbones, and large, expressive eyes made him a target for beatings and taunts rather than an object of desire.
When the change came, he was twelve years old, and he didn’t understand his own powers at first. One day, the teasing and taunting and bullying simply stopped—he was, for whatever reason, no longer perceived as a target, and was permitted to eat his lunch alone in a corner of the cafeteria without being bothered. A week later, when he walked down the hallways at school, heads turned to follow him as students and teachers alike watched his passage. After ascertaining that he didn’t have boogers wiped on his clothes or a sign reading “FAG” stuck to his back, he was unable to fathom why everyone was staring at him, and hurried to his next class.
That day at lunch, people—cheerleaders, jocks, band geeks, smokers, brains, drama kids, indefinable untouchables—drifted in his direction, some of them even sitting at his table, though they didn’t speak to him, and he caught boys and girls both stealing glances at him.
Paranoia was his reasonable reaction, especially since his family didn’t treat him any differently. His sister Naomi, from the rarefied heights of tenth grade, continued to tolerate him with an air of put-upon martyrdom, and his parents—both college professors so engaged in the life of the mind that they seemed to find bodily needs like sleep and eating inconveniences—were as absentmindedly fond as ever. Joshua assumed he was the victim of a plot: a vast school-wide conspiracy to humiliate him. But the humiliation never came. People who’d once ignored him, or, worse, paid vicious attention to him, now fought for the chance to sit beside him on the bus, but all they did was make awkward small talk or (if they were girls) tell him his hair looked really nice, or complimented his absolutely ordinary shoes or jacket. Even the teachers occasionally broke off in mid-sentence during their lessons to stare at him, either frowning or smiling dreamily; he couldn’t decide which expression was more disturbing.
The smartest kids in school offered to help him with his homework, by which they meant, do his home work, but it wasn’t necessary. By the last two months of school he was getting straight A’s, even when he deliberately put the wrong answers, and three of the most popular and prettiest girls at school had, at different times, pressed him against lockers or walls to kiss him, stare into his
eyes for a moment, and then run away. (One of them, an eighth grader, had even pursued him into the boy’s bathroom and caught him there for a kiss—fortunately before he started peeing.)
Joshua decided he’d had a wish granted, and it wasn’t even a wish he remembered making. Everyone loved him—except his family. They loved him, he knew, but only as they always had, not with the same hunger, devotion, and eagerness to please exhibited by strangers. For the first time in his life, he dreaded the end of the school year, because it would mean spending summer home with his sister and his mom, who was on sabbatical researching her next book, a pop science title in which she would posthumously diagnose various figures from myth and history with mental illnesses. (Most of the really famous successful ones seemed to have something called Narcissistic Personality Disorder.)
The problem was: at home, Joshua was still expected to take out the trash, help clear the dishes, mow the lawn, and do a thousand other tedious chores, and when he attempted to let some of the eager-to-please neighborhood kids do the chores for him, his parents intervened, more puzzled than angry, and sent the children away. They told Joshua the work was good for him, and expressed doubt when he insisted that he hadn’t offered to pay the other children anything. Life had gone from magical to tedious, and he marveled at the fact that now school was the pleasure, and vacation the slog. Was this how popular people felt? Apparently so, since he was popular, and this was exactly how he felt.
One June day Joshua sat under a tree in the front yard, surrounded by piles of pine straw he’d raked, trying to charm a squirrel down from the branches. No matter how he wheedled and flattered, it didn’t work. Animals seemed as immune to his new powers as his own family did. He’d spent the morning reading through the giant pile of comic books he’d received as his reward for getting straight A’s that year, trying to find some precedent for his ability among the four-color superheroes, but without success. There were people who could control minds, certainly, but he wasn’t doing that. People just… loved him. It wasn’t anything he did. It was something he was.
“Hey, dorko, want to go to the pool with me?” His sister Naomi stood before him, wearing a one-piece swimsuit and shorts, carrying a bag with sunscreen and towels and snacks and water bottles. She’d gotten her driver’s license the day after she turned 16, and had experienced moderate success with talking their mom into letting her borrow the car occasionally.
Joshua leapt up. “Sure!” He’d never been very close to his sister, because four years’ age difference was just a little too wide, but he loved spending time with her. Naomi was essentially the female version of himself, pretty and slender, but she had both a foul mouth and a big outspoken personality, which made her less of a popular kid than she might have been based on looks alone. Not that she ever seemed to care, a state of indifference which had bewildered Joshua when he was unpopular and still bewildered him now that he was worshipped.
“Well go get your trunks,” she said. “You’ve got two minutes, or else you’re walking.”
She drove him to the community pool, which was, predictably, packed. Naomi’s chief interest was lounging in the grass on a blanket out of splash-range chatting with her friends—who kept stealing looks at Joshua—and getting a little sun. After acquiring ice cream sandwiches from the little snack kiosk (given to him free, naturally), Joshua sat down and offered her one.
“Thanks,” she said, unwrapping it, and frowning at him. “Did you save somebody’s life and I didn’t hear about it? Or buy everybody in school a puppy? I keep hearing people talking about you—’Oh, look, Joshua’s here!’ What’s that about?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I made a lot of new friends this year.” Ransacking his brain for a plausible explanation, he said, “You know, it’s like mom said—I just needed to come out of my shell?”
“My brother, Mr. Cool,” she said, shaking her head. She pointed her chin toward the pool. “Isn’t that your social studies teacher?”
Joshua shaded his eyes and looked across the pool. On the far side, Ms. Grove sat rubbing suntan lotion into her skin. She was wearing a relatively modest one-piece black swimsuit, but the sight of her was still enough to give Joshua a by-now-familiar tingle in his swim trunks. Melanie Grove was fresh out of teacher’s college, with honey-blonde hair and a body lovely enough to make the older male teachers stammer when they spoke to her and the older female teachers glare at her when she wasn’t looking. Her class had been a real highlight of Joshua’s sixth grade year, and not because he was interested in being a good citizen. “I guess so,” Joshua said.
“She keeps looking over here,” Naomi said. “Teachers are so weird. I guess they have to go somewhere in the summer.” She shook her head and went back to her book.
Joshua kept looking at Ms. Grove. She pulled her sunglasses down, winked at him, and smiled.
III
The major mistake Joshua made was referring to Ms. Grove as “Melanie.” He didn’t think anyone was suspicious before that, but Naomi jumped on it.
“Melanie, huh?” she said, pausing with her forkful of mashed potatoes halfway to her mouth. “Getting pretty friendly with your tutor, aren’t you?”
Joshua shrugged, pushing peas around on his plate with a fork. He knew there must be a way to deflect this, to keep it from becoming a big deal, but he’d always been a terrible liar, and didn’t have any particular skills at manipulation. He didn’t need them, usually, but Naomi was immune to his charms. “Uh, I mean, it’s different, going to her house and everything, it’s weird calling her Ms. Grove when we’re not in the classroom...”
“Why do you need summer tutoring anyway?” Naomi said. “You got all As in that class last year. Which is weird, since you think Jim Crow is a cartoon bird and the war of 1812 lasted one thousand, eight hundred and twelve years, but still.”
“I just... want to get a headstart on next year,” he said.
“I think it’s nice that Joshua wants to take on extra studies at his age,” his father said, squinting at his children as if alarmed at how old they’d gotten. “Maybe he’ll be a historian like his dad.”
Naomi rolled her eyes and went back to eating, and Joshua thought the danger was past. He was wrong.
IV
When Joshua came out of Melanie’s front door, tucking in the front of his shirt and lost in a haze of memories of the immediate past, he found Naomi waiting in his mom’s car, parked right out front.
He stared, his mouth open, and Naomi beckoned to him. Joshua walked to her car, slowly. “Get in, kid,” she said.
Joshua numbly got into the passenger seat. No no no, he thought, but, of course, it was yes, yes, yes.
“I wasn’t sure,” Naomi said, putting the car in gear and driving, not toward home, but just on a meandering journey through their suburban streets. “I mean, I saw the way she looked at you at the pool that time, like you were a pork chop and she was a starving man, but I just couldn’t believe it.... Joshy, you just turned 13. I mean, sure, maybe you fumble around with a girl behind the gym, make it to second base, maybe even go farther, whatever. That’s fine. I was 13 myself not so long ago, I know what it’s like—and it’s not as different for girls as you might think, those feelings. But this is a grown woman, Josh. The stuff you’re doing is illegal. For starters.”
“We didn’t do anything,” Joshua mumbled, looking down at his lap.
“She didn’t even close the blinds, bro,” Naomi said. “I saw... enough.”
Now he looked at her, a sharp lance of hate tearing through him: “Peeping in windows is against the law, too.”
“Great. Let’s both go turn ourselves in.” She sighed. “Joshua, I don’t want you to get in trouble, but she’s taking advantage of you.”
“I like it!” he said.
“Of course you do. You’re a horny thirteen year old. But, okay, child abuse aside, she’s your teacher, so there’s a whole power imbalance there, that’s messed up, and she’s an adult, and you’re just a kid�
�you don’t know what you’re doing, what the consequences could be, but she does, she knows better. Joshua, I love you, and you’re usually pretty smart for a stupid kid, but you can’t consent to a sexual relationship, even if you think you can, you’re just not old enough, do you get that?”
“We’re in love,” Joshua said.
Naomi stopped the car, did a three-point-turn, and started driving the other way.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“To that bitch’s house,” Naomi said. “And telling her if she so much as looks at you in the hallway again, I’ll ruin her life.”
“Naomi!” Joshua wailed. “You can’t do that—”
“I have to,” she said. “This has to stop, but I don’t want it to be public. You’d be... everyone would talk about you, Joshua. You don’t want that, do you?”
Of course I do, he thought.
“Or would you rather I tell mom and dad?” Naomi said, and just like that, Joshua started crying. It wasn’t fair, Melanie made him feel amazing things, and maybe they weren’t really in love, fine, but he was in love with the things she did for him, did to him, and for Naomi to destroy all that—
But it was better than mom and dad finding out.
Joshua stayed in the car while Naomi went and knocked on Melanie’s door. She went inside, and stayed there for twenty minutes. When she came back out, her face was expressionless, and she started driving home without a word.
“Well?” Joshua said. “What did she say?”
Naomi didn’t speak until the next stop light. Then said, “She told me she was planning to run away with you, Josh, and live with you in a cabin in the woods. She said you’d live on love alone. Josh... that woman is insane.”
“So what now?” Joshua said.
“What do you think?” Naomi said.
V
After the police got involved, Joshua’s parents pulled him out of school and started homeschooling him, “to spare him the embarrassment.” Joshua did all he could for Melanie, but while he was capable of charming individual members of the legal system, he couldn’t charm the system itself, and too many decisions were made by people who never laid eyes on Joshua. His mom destroyed all Melanie’s letters unread, and tried to destroy the one informing them that Melanie had died, though he fished that one out of the trash, and tried to cry over it. He managed to squeeze out a few tears, but mostly, he felt hollow.