Eastlick and Other Stories Read online

  ~o0o~

  Well, at least the smell of vomit was gone.

  In here, though, it had been replaced by the deep and pungent reek of blood. Not just any blood: the terrible, sour tang of the old ones. Grant’s own, unless she missed her guess.

  Well, that was information.

  She stood just inside the front door, easing it closed behind her, keeping alert. Seeking. Listening, smelling, tasting the air.

  Her eyes showed her only the palatial and familiar house, beautifully decorated, unthinkably expensive. A veneer over an ugliness beneath, fooling nobody. The broad, high-ceilinged atrium in which she stood gave off into a double set of hallways. Leftward lay Grant’s private rooms, a focus of rumor and ignorance, the breath of fascination and the breath of terror intermixed. Karen had never been that way, and didn’t need to go there now. She could follow her nose into familiar territory, rightward, to Grant’s office suite.

  Her nose didn’t actually want her to go that way, wise nose; nor did any other part of her anxious, rebellious body. Her feet were very much against it.

  Still. Here too there was fascination, as well as terror. All her life she’d been drawn toward the screamingly dangerous; why else would she do this job? For Mike’s sake, she was meant to be working on that, but...

  Putting her pricked finger in her mouth, Karen bit down hard and tasted blood, fresh and vigorous. Salt is the taste of life, the taste of hope; salt and water are the prime constituents of the tale of blood; and water—well. Water has a memory of shape.

  Karen pulled an air of confidence about her and strode down the right-hand hallway toward Grant’s office.

  The door was closed. Oddly for such a private man, that was new. He used to keep his secrets within his skin. Now the heavy, fetid smell of death and possibility lay everywhere; the air was gravid with it.

  If she once let the door check her, she would never find the nerve to open it. She didn’t pause, then—just worked the handle and walked on in.

  Melanie stood behind Grant’s desk. Karen began to sigh with relief—Oh, only her—before she understood any of what else she was seeing.

  Grant’s body lay sprawled on the floor before the desk. The Kashmir carpet was history by now, to be sure; a great quantity of his dark oily blood had saturated it and was no doubt soaking down through the floorboards. And that was somehow easier to look at, easier to comprehend than the remade woman who was, no, not only Melanie, not that at all. Melanie entire, all falsehood stripped away: smiling at Karen, mocking her silently, glimmering almost with an aura of focused knowledge, of terrible strength.

  She leaned forward, resting the palms of her hands on Grant’s desk. Smearing it deliberately with the gray man’s blood, making it abundantly clear that she had slain him with her bare hands. Which meant that the ritual mattered to her as much as the slaughter, and maybe more. Which meant...

  “No,” Karen whispered—not because it could not be true, rather because it made all the sense in the world. All the sense in any world. All she really wanted to deny was her own naiveté: tricked by the apparent foolishness, the sudden eagerness to stand aside, the squeamish reaction to a little spray of blood. Why in the world—in any world—would Grant have employed such a woman on such a task?

  Karen had been too caught up in her own annoyance to see it. Stupid. Fatally stupid.

  “Yes,” Melanie said, enjoying herself thoroughly. Letting her own true self show through, a rippling power like Damascus steel at the core of her. If she’d only had the time, Karen could have run through the catalogue to find the place where Melanie fitted—night witch? necromancer? something on that order, surely—but time was a luxury, out of reach. Courage too, perhaps.

  Unless...

  Karen shook her head, banishing the thought. She would not throw her lot in with this ... woman. Some fates were quite literally worse than death.

  At least death brought an end to suffering.

  Sparing a moment of rank envy for Grant, Karen stared back at Melanie. The sorceress was watching her with faint amusement. “You might want to rethink that,” Melanie said, seeing altogether too clearly what Karen had not even dared whisper. “Working for me might not be pleasant, but it is certainly better than the alternative.” Her eyes flicked down beyond Grant’s desk, to his marauded body.

  It was that glance that decided Karen. Under Melanie’s rule there would be no benefit, no reworking of the power in the city ... no healing from these desperate wars.

  Had Melanie merely been waiting for the lesser powers to wear themselves out destroying one another before stepping up to harvest what remained?

  Karen swallowed, trying to chase down the terrified lump in her throat.

  And tasted her own blood there, from her bitten finger ... and something else.

  Oh, she thought, Colin...

  Something of himself he had left in her. Residual, essential, seminal.

  Something to work with, that was not her own.

  There were two of them in this fight now, and that made all the difference.

  Water holds a memory of shape, and a man is mostly water, after all...

  Karen dropped her shoulders into a slump, dropped to her knees in ritual humiliation.

  “Hold, there.” Karen watched through her eyelashes as Melanie stepped out from behind the desk. The witch’s clothes were clean, unstained, though her hands remained ostentatiously blood-soaked.

  “There,” Melanie went on, standing over her. “Go ahead. I just wanted to watch you from here.”

  Karen lowered her body, arms spread out in a token of submission. She was hanging just above Grant’s sprawled corpse, the slick foul nastiness of him. Cold now, the blood, the fluids: she could feel that, so close she was. Too quickly cold, inhuman.

  She waited, breathing. Gathering.

  After a long, heavy moment, she felt the pressure of a hand on the back of her neck. Melanie’s sticky fingers pushed her down until her own hands had no choice: they had to lie in the gore of Grant’s spillage.

  Again that touch of something more, the memories of water. Three of them in this fight now.

  She wondered if Melanie would force her all the way down, rub her face in foulness: but not, apparently, or not today. The cold hand left her neck; the cold voice said, “You may rise.”

  Karen drew herself up, seeing Melanie’s satisfied smile, not a trace of anxiety around the corners of Melanie’s eyes. Confidence never thinks to look for betrayal: not until the blow is landed, the city fallen, the queen unthroned.

  Karen rose up, up and up; and the blood her hands were dabbled in, all the leakage of Grant’s death—all that chill wet came with her.

  Blood is mostly water, after all.

  Karen was given to the water, long ago. Only hours earlier, she had given the knife to the river, to the dark shapes stirring under city glimmer; given it with her own blood on the blade, and kept that small cut open, fresh and wet.

  Water holds a memory of shape. The knife was in her hands now, shaped of blood, all the weight of a man’s life held within it. Another man’s strength behind it, in her body, through and through; and her own power to drive it home, her will, her willingness to act.

  The blade of the blood-knife took Melanie in the gut, where she was wettest.

  ~o0o~

  Flesh is just a bridge above a river.

  Steel and blood, they are only expressions of water.

  Blood is a blade.

  Blade seeks the darkness, down and down.

  Something down there is waiting...

  ~o0o~

  A hot rush over Karen’s hands, liquid body, death exemplified. Melanie and Grant, foul together, dead together. Wet together, fluids intermingled: he’d keep the witch down if she tried to rise.

  ~o0o~

  Karen cleaned up as best she could, gave up as soon as she wanted to, took the van and was gone. The guards on the gate waved her through; she waved back meaninglessly. Driving home through the m
orning fog, she sucked on her finger and thought of a hot shower, thought of Mike.

  He was right. She really needed to get a different job.

  Embers

  Shannon Page and Jay Lake

  Another collaborative story. I wrote a lot of stories with Jay; I’ve included my favorites in this collection. Some day, I may write a novel (or a series...) in Magical Alt-History Renaissance Italy. Until then, here is “Embers”, which appeared in the anthology The Feathered Edge, edited by Deborah Ross, in 2012.

  _______________

  Firenze, 1498

  I peered around the rough-edged corner of the Palazzo Martelli, searching down the long, night-shadowed lane but seeing nothing save the muddy path to the river Arno below. The Ponte Vecchio glimmered in the distance, lit by a single torch at the near end. On my shoulder perched Fain; I hadn’t trusted him to this task, so he murmured and cooed his dismay in my ear.

  My nose caught the scent of lavender and the musk of men. Or rather, a certain man. Which made me curse quietly and draw back into the shadows.

  Fain burbled at this.

  “There is no humor here,” I muttered. “For someone who claims not to use our magic, he’s sore adept at getting to places before me.”

  The dove could not speak, not in the usually understood sense of the term; but as with many long-held familiars, our communication was subtle and unmistakable. And at the moment, Fain was clearly disagreeing with me.

  “All right,” I whispered. “You call me wrong. But if Piero does cast, then why has he been working against us?”

  Fain had no answer to that.

  I waited until the bells sounded for Lauds, the last of the night’s prayers. The man I sought did not reappear, and I dared not follow where he had gone. Only then did I slip through the first cold glimmers of dawn back to my small room in the rafters of the Palazzo Medici Riccardi.

  ~o0o~

  As it is sometimes easier to hide amid a crowd than on the deserted streets of night, I spent the next afternoon in the markets and piazzas of the city of my heart. Despite the best efforts of the mad priest Savonarola, Firenze remained a vibrant metropolis, full of traders bringing commerce from every land. These far-eyed men tempted all with silks and spices and fine-worked leathers and, to a lesser degree, glittering gold and jewels. I permitted myself the luxury of admiring the pretties for an hour or two as I searched for the man Piero, though in truth I knew he lurked closer to the Arno.

  Nestled in my bosom, hidden by the folds of cloth I had drawn around me to keep out the new-spring cold, Fain seemed to whisper, Last night you avoided him; today you hunt him. Or perhaps the dove merely slept, and those were my own thoughts.

  At any rate, the point was well taken. I was of two minds about this entire business, to be sure.

  Finally, as the late shadows pointed ever eastward, I made my way towards the river. I was forced to steel my sensitive nose against the assaults of the butchers who made their killings in the little shops lining the Ponte Vecchio. Why they perched here over the water was no mystery. Why folk downstream still drew from this river was the question.

  Of course, ordinary folk did not know of the bad magic of drinking water tainted with the blood and offal of murdered beasts. They blamed night humors for their various ailments, or the curses of the vengeful departed. They weren’t wrong in this, necessarily; those were certainly at work in the world as well. But the poisons in the Arno carried off more children and old women than any curse fomented by uneasy ghosts.

  It was no truck of mine, I supposed. And there were fewer people to die of starvation.

  Gathering my suitably bleak thoughts, I approached the foul waters.

  I stood on the packed clay of the bank a long while, staring into the moving path of the river, seeking to see anything of the bottom of it. Divination by water was a tricky art at best, and the winter rains had been formidable this past season. They were not finished yet, I was certain, though we were having a small respite these recent days. Merely mud, not deluge.

  His presence spoke to me from across the river long before I raised my eyes to him. Rising over the odor of the waters with the improbability of our kind, musk met my nose and I knew, yet I would not give him the satisfaction of my gaze. Not until I was ready.

  Finally, I looked up. Piero stood on the opposite bank amid a little forest of boats drawn up to shore, surrounding him like disciples ready to spread his message across the four corners of the world. He was too far across the rolling water for ordinary conversation. His black hair fell in curling waves to his shoulders, and it seemed as though I could see the light of his soul deep in his eyes, though even my powers were not so great. Especially not at this distance. In my bosom, Fain stirred, fluttering a soft wing against my breasts. I touched a hand to myself in order to gentle the bird as I spoke to the man across the water. My voice barely rose above a whisper.

  “You know this shall not pass. You conceal yourself away from me, yet we all know your game.”

  Piero smiled, catching every word, as I knew he would—just as I had caught his scent. “Lucrezia, your faith in me warms my mortal heart.”

  Your heart is not mortal, I thought. And my faith is as nails driven through flesh.

  But that he would even stand and speak to me, even across the width of the Arno: this was progress, to be sure.

  “You have been warned.” I raised my voice slightly as the wind rose to push it downstream. “Join with us, and we will make this right.” Prayers and the focus of my power rode upon the words.

  His smile grew, or perhaps that was just the glint of the westering sun on the water rendering odd shadows. “Sorceress, my path is clear.”

  The response he would have to give, of course. But I had my own path as well, and my task. Again, I summoned my truest voice. “Three nights hence we meet under the full moon, atop Fiesole. Join with us.”

  He took a step back. I had kept my words casual, but if I spoke the command for him to join with us a third time, he would be compelled to obey.

  Piero reached for his pocket. The scent of his musk rose, blocking out the reek from the ancient bridge downstream. The aroma tangled the threads of my thoughts and caused my hand to slip within my robes, feeling for the softness of my own skin.

  A nip from Fain returned me to my senses.

  I opened my mouth to speak the thrice-uttered compelling words, but Piero was gone. “Join with us,” I whispered anyway. The wind carried the spell off harmlessly, compelling the boats to nothing at all.

  ~o0o~

  In a small forgotten room in the basement of Il Duomo, I met with the Lady. She had been my superior since the last turn of our order, and it amused her to meet here, in the cradle of the god of men. We sat amid bolsters of glittering silk and a great rack of gilded beams once intended for a festival altar, or perhaps a bishop’s folly. The room smelled faintly of incense, wine and sweat; surely odors brought in the last time these playpretties were folded away, before they had been banned.

  “The city is restless tonight.” She stroked the fur of her own familiar, a golden ferret she called Mani.

  I waited for her to continue. The Lady did not speak idly, though oftentimes her words journeyed a route opaque to my comprehension.

  “The man of San Marco stirs the mists in complicated ways.”

  Savonarola.

  Nodding, I let my mind trail back over the events of the past year. The mad priest’s passion had attracted the attention of our kind, for its purity and its fury. After his burning of the vanities, however, we’d lost interest. Just another zealot, riding the wave of his time.

  And miscalculating, ultimately. As they always did. So why did the man’s activities concern us, any more?

  “He has touched on something that we might wish to see to,” the Lady said, to my unasked question.

  I continued to listen. Fain sat on my shoulder, casting a suspicious eye on Mani while holding his peace.

  But the Lady stopped th
ere, instead asking of my meeting with Piero.

  “I do not know if he will come,” I admitted. “I was unable to bind him.”

  She nodded, her face a mask of pale beauty and dark power. “Try harder. You have two more days.”

  ~o0o~

  Whether from fear or inattention or over-confidence, I had wasted far too much time. I did not even know where Piero spent his waking hours, much less where he made his bed.

  Now I had to find him and bring him into our midst. No longer the luxury of avoidance for me, of ambivalence: the Lady had spoken her command. I complied.

  It was easier thusly.

  Or so I told myself.

  A return to the river would be a waste of time. Like the Virgin Mary, he would not appear in the same place twice. So I turned to magic.

  In a quiet alley intersection, witnessed by none but a nervous cat, I burned three sticks of rosemary and a twist of cinnamon bark under the blue cross of the sky above. I spoke the incantation into the scented smoke, then closed my eyes and followed my nose.

  Lavender. Musk.

  East.

  Fain clucked like a tiny agitated chicken. I steadied him as best I could with a trembling hand, then lifted him to his perch within my robes. “We go.”

  The bright sunlight of false spring shone as we walked, fast drying the mud of the streets. It was very nearly pleasant. Yes, something was certainly amiss.

  Eastward we went, following the scent of the man. The scent that tugged at the very heart of me.

  No: I would not harbor these thoughts. My path was clear.

  ~o0o~

  I found him in a field of grass outside the city, halfway to the Palazzo Pitti. He had spread a dark green blanket upon which he sat, sipping from a tiny porcelain chalice that steamed like a cup of sin itself.

  My heart thudded in my throat as I approached. His black curls glinted in the sun, bright from the natural oils and unguents with which he would anoint himself. A small spray of lace at his breast was mostly hidden by a blood-colored tunic. The eyeleted paleness was tickled by a few dark hairs peeking around the edges, the merest hint of a solid masculinity underneath. Fain kicked out with his claws, scratching the tender skin of my breast and sending droplets of warm blood down to my navel even as I walked.