Myths & Magic: A Science Fiction and Fantasy Collection

by Kerry Adrienne

  I’ll admit it: I was a real bitch back then. But part of me being human again was atoning for all the bad I did when I was the monster who went bump in the night.

  The other students shuffled out of the class, but no Justin. No worries. He had sat in the front of the class, so it made sense that it would take him a while to get to me. But when the auditorium went quiet, I dared a glance and saw that everyone was gone. Everyone including Professor Hayes. I was totally alone.

  Except for the kid from Africa, who stared at me from two rows down. Evidently, I wasn’t cute enough for Justin to stop and talk to me.

  Disappointed, I packed my stuff and stood up. As I did, the kid—who was totally checking me out, by the way, and not in a cute kind of way, but in a creepy-stalker way—kept his eyes on me. It felt like he was looking through me, rather than at me.

  I couldn’t take it anymore. I may be human, but I wasn’t helpless. I knew things—like where all the major arteries were and which nerves crippled your prey versus the ones that absolutely paralyzed them. Plus, in my travels, I studied a variety of martial arts. A lot. I figured that I was probably one of a handful of humans with such a wide range of styles, and I’d had hundreds of years during which to practice them. But despite knowing what I was capable of, my heart still raced when I met his gaze and said in the harshest tone I could muster, “What?”

  The guy didn’t flinch. He just sniffed the air and said, “You should have stood up.”

  “What? When?”

  “You know when.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m just a girl. A human girl.”

  “Sure you are,” he said.

  “I am,” I repeated as I slung my bag over my shoulder, leaving the room as fast as I could—and feeling his eyes on me the whole way.

  Out in the main hall, I saw Justin mulling about with his McConnell Hall buddies. They jokingly called themselves the Omega Omega Omega (O3 for short) Bros. Their little gang were legends on campus for throwing the biggest and baddest parties.

  I think they got their name because the Latin letter Omega is mistakenly associated with the Apocalypse. You know—God saying He was the Alpha and Omega and all that. And given that the gods leaving were an apocalypse of sorts, I guess they were tripling down on the rhetoric. I kinda wanted to tell them that Omega didn’t mean the end, but rather the concept of God being the Alpha and Omega was to give Him a cyclical, renewing nature. You know, circle-of-life kind of stuff. The gods leaving made that Biblical quote kind of meaningless, anyway. But these guys were teenagers on the cusp of adulthood—they were far more interested in the cool factor of the name than anything else. Who was I to burst their bubble?

  Besides—Justin made the O3s cool. He made everything cool.

  The O3 Bros were standing in a line, handing out flyers alongside an Incan apu who was in the history class with us. They were jostling each other, seeming to be having a good time. It seemed Professor Hayes’ warning that we should all get along was unnecessary. Here were three humans and an Incan apu—an Other belonging to a religion that was now ancient history—and they were getting on just fine.

  I tried to position myself so that Justin would hand me one of the flyers, but instead, I was intercepted by the apu. Apus were Incan nature spirits and were usually associated with a place—a forest, a river, even a town. These spirits were defenders. If you ever caused trouble in a place protected by one of these guys, you were in for one hell of a fight.

  Up close the apu looked like a normal human except for one, eerie difference: he was made of rock. I don’t mean like the Thing in Fantastic Four, nor do I mean he was carved from stone like a gargoyle. His skin was the color of a cave floor, like it was made from slate, with tiny ridges that swooped along his forearm, giving it a weathered looked.

  But that wasn’t the strangest or most captivating part of him. No, that was reserved for his eyes. It is said that the eyes are windows to the soul—but this apu’s eyes were more like actual windows to the outside. Like I was sitting in a tunnel looking outside to the clear blue, endless sky. Beautiful, eerie, intense.

  The apu handed me a flyer and our fingers briefly touched. His skin didn’t only look like a rock, it felt like it, too. Hard, rigid, like touching a moving stone. What’s more, he had dust on his skin, and as I took the flyer a little bit of sand rolled down its front. This guy flaked sand like some humans flaked dandruff.

  I read the flyer:

  * * *

  O3 cordially invites you to

  THE END OF THE WORLD

  When the gods left, they started an apocalypse.

  We aim to finish it.

  * * *

  The O3 party—the first big party of the semester—was two days from now on the anniversary of the gods’ GrandExodus.

  And I was invited.

  “So—you in?” His voice had an echo to it, like he was talking in a cave or something. It was a bit unsettling, because generally when one echo was present, all the ambient sounds echoed too. But here, it was only him. The general shuffle of students milling about was perfectly normal.

  “Your voice …” I said.

  He smiled, like his voice was something that got him a lot of attention from … well … the girls. I guess we all have a shtick—and his was to impress the impressionable with his resonance. “I’m a cave apu—caves have echoes, hence my voice,” he reverberated. “Actually I was one of the twelve sacred apus of Cusco.” When I gave him a blank look, he followed up with, “Cusco was the capital of the Incan Empire in the fifteenth century.”

  “Ahh, so a big deal. Five hundred years ago.”

  “Oh, yeah—very big deal five hundred years ago,” he chuckled. Sticking out his hand, he said, “I’m Sal.”

  “Oddly normal name for a guy like you, wouldn’t you say?”

  He gave me a shy smile and said, “My real name’s Salkantay, as in the highest peak in the Vilcabamba mountain region. You know—the Peruvian Andes.”

  I nodded. I’d been there. Granted, that was a hundred and eighty years ago, but still, I’d seen the place.

  Sal closed his sky-like eyes for just a second, but I swear it felt like night had suddenly fallen. Then, opening them, a light sky with big puffy clouds returned. “Anyway,” he said, almost embarrassed, “the guys thought it was best to give me a more, ahhh, human name. You see Nate over there—he came up with Sal.” He pointed at the shortest of the Bros, a kid with brown hair cut in a buzz, and I could see genuine affection in those impossibly beautiful eyes of his. “I think they meant it to be ironic. Something so average for someone who looks so different. But I can tell you that I am very honored to be given such a normal name. It means they don’t see me as an Other, but as a friend.”

  He’s right. The fact that those guys teased him by giving him such a boring name means they accepted him as one of them.

  “Boring name?”

  Damn it—talking out loud again. I could feel my cheeks flush with embarrassment. “ ‘Sal’ certainly isn’t Algernon or Constantine … so yeah, boring.”

  “Yeah, but these days I’ll take boring over the alternative.”

  “I suppose,” I said.

  “So, the party,” he said, tapping the flyer in my hands and sending another wave of sand down the paper. “It’s this Friday. Will you come?”

  “Maybe …” I said, throwing in as much coyness as I could.

  Evidently, the coyness didn’t take, because he said, “Great, see you then,” and went on to hand another flyer to three girls behind me.

  I folded the flyer and put it in my purse. I waved at Justin. He gave me a subtle nod as he continued to play wrestle with Nate without losing stride. If anything were to happen between Justin and me, it wouldn’t be now. And so, taking that as my cue, I headed out to the main campus, where I hesitated at the threshold. My foot nervously hovered just behind the line where the shade met the light. Like I said—old habits do die hard.

  I took a dee
p breath and stepped into the light. Even though I knew I was human, I still breathed a sigh of relief that I didn’t burst into a ball of flames.

  Yay, me!

  Chapter 3

  Beggars Evidently Can Be Choosers & Even Cool Kids Can Be Awkward

  The sun didn’t disintegrate me—so at least one thing was going my way today. I know it’s irrational for me to be scared of natural light, but you have to understand that I was a vampire one minute and then a human the next, while fang-deep in some vicar’s neck. It was like someone flipped a switch. On—vampire. Off—human.

  If the vampire switch could be switched off, for all I knew it could be switched back on just as suddenly. And if I happened to be outside … Great balls of flame à la moi!

  I really should start walking around with an umbrella.

  Just when that thought occurred to me, my eyes were drawn to the large oak tree in the center of the quad, beside that GoneGods-awful statue of the university founder, where I spotted three human hockey players tormenting some homeless guy. Except, given his unearthly pale white skin and ruby red eyes, this homeless man wasn’t a man at all. He was an Other. A type of Other I’d never seen before.

  I was pretty hip with Others—able to recognize most of them on sight, thank you very much—but this one alluded me. He didn’t even have any of the telltale signs as to what religion or folklore he belonged to. There was no wispy mustache so typical of Chinese traditions, no protruding lower-jaw tusks most Japanese demons had and no animalistic and oddly two-dimensional attributes you found in most Egyptian Others.

  Instead, he—I think he was a “he”—wore baggy white pants that were scuffed and dirty but when clean would have matched his impossibly white skin. He had a long-sleeve dirty white shirt on that looked more like undergarments than a proper top. His hair was also the same white as his skin, and because the coloring matched so perfectly, it looked more like strands of skin on his head than actual dead-skin-cells-and-keratin hair. In fact, the only thing he had on him that wasn’t white was his cane—an oak-wood, crooked staff that looked too flimsy to actually support someone’s body weight. Not that he had much weight to him. He was absolutely emaciated. The term skin-and-bones didn’t do him justice. It was more like skin-sundried-on-bones. Poor guy must’ve been dying from hunger.

  The lead human—a largish guy with black hair and the kind of nose that looked like it had been broken, set wrong, then broken again—kicked the homeless guy. “Get out of here, you freak!”

  A second human—a smaller, skinny guy with blond hair tied back in a ponytail that, when he looks at pictures of himself when he is older, will be totally embarrassing—said, “Bad enough they let these freaks enroll in the school, but now we have to put up with their vagrants, too. Oh, hell no!” He emphasized this by spitting on the Other.

  That was the last straw. I ran down the steps of the building, over to the tree, and grabbed the skinny guy. Using a move I learned from a judo master in Kyoto some hundred-and-fifty years ago, I pulled him back so that he fell over his own feet and tumbled backward.

  I put myself between the other two humans and the Other and, summoning a real gem that I probably got from Degrassi: The Next Generation or Beverly Hills, 90210, said, “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?” Stupid really, because I was picking a fight with them, and all three of these guys were way bigger than me. I really had to work on my vernacular.

  The biggest one pointed at me and said, “Get out of our way, little girl. Otherwise—”

  I grabbed his finger and twisted. This wasn’t a move from any martial art I knew, but more something I used against my little brother when I was human—three hundred years ago, sure, but it still did the trick. The big guy cried out in pain and tried to punch me with his free hand. I pulled back and kicked his chin, forcing his left leg out and his right knee down. Then when we were about eye-level, I punched him. Hard. In the nose.

  There was a sickening crunch! Given how little power my punches usually packed—since I became human, at least—I must’ve been right about his nose being broken before. The thing crumpled like a paper cup. He dropped to the ground, blood pouring out of him.

  His friend, a slightly smaller version of him, sized me up and decided to charge.

  Using a move I learned from an aikido master in San Francisco (about forty years ago if you’re keeping track), I used his own momentum against him, guiding his body into the wall behind me. He hit face-first and dropped to his knees.

  The ponytail guy stood up, saw his downed buddies and ran. The other two managed to collect themselves from the grass, the bigger guy still clutching his blood-gushing nose, and followed their friend. I half expected them to say something like “You haven’t see the last of us!” or “We’ll get you, just you wait and see!” but I didn’t get any of those cliché gems as they ran away.

  Looking around to see if there were any other threats, I saw that a bunch of people were looking at me from all around the quad. And not just students. Professors, Others—heck, even Justin Truly was watching from the steps of the Arts Building across the quad. Suddenly, several of them started clapping, then hooting, then cheering.

  I guess standing up for this Other was a … good thing?

  I realized something, blushing as my peers and professors clapped me on the back. I may not be the bee’s knees or smooth or even the cat’s pajamas, but I was heroic … and in this new GoneGod world, that seemed to count for a lot.

  After I gave a few bows and enthusiastic thumbs up, people went about their usual business. I turned to the homeless Other, fished through my bag and pulled out a granola bar that had been sitting at its bottom for weeks. I handed it to the guy, half-expecting him to eat it cellophane and all.

  But he didn’t. Instead, he read the wrapper in detail and, breathing a sigh of relief, handed the unopened granola bar back. “Thank you,” he said.

  “You can have it. I mean—eat it.” I tried to hand it back.

  The strange Other looked at me with a confused expression on his face. “I already did.” He groaned. “Not very good.”

  “OK …” I said with trepidation. I had to admit, though, that this guy looked a little better after having read the package. I was beginning to wonder if this weird Other didn’t eat granola. Or oats. Or whatever this supposed nature bar was made of. Made sense—after all, you would no more give a rabbit steak than a lion a carrot. For some Others, eating mortal food was deadly. Maybe that’s why this poor guy was so emaciated. Human food just didn’t work for him.

  “So, no granola?”

  He shook his head. “No granola,” he whispered.

  “So what can you eat?”

  “The truth?” The poor guy was so weak that he was having trouble speaking.

  “Yeah, the truth,” I said, trying to throw in as much empathy as I could. It was possible that this kind of Other ate something very unappealing to humans. Kappa ate algae. Pixies considered maggots a delicacy. And succubae ate— Well, succubae drew nourishment from sex. Besides, who was I to judge? For three hundred years I lived entirely off of human blood. Let she who is without sin cast the first stone. Stones firmly in pocket.

  Being a bonified Homosapien and law-abiding citizen meant there was no way I could have sustained myself on pig and cow blood. Believe me, I tried, and it nearly killed me. But that’s another story. As for these newly mortal Others, algae, maggots, and sex weren’t something you could get at your local grocery store or farmer’s market, so kappa learned to eat kale, pixies substituted nuts for maggots and succubae bought naughty mags for a quick snack. It must have been a rough existence, and there is rarely a day that goes by that I don’t silently thank the GoneGods for taking their magic and turning me human again.

  I looked down at him with an understanding smile, waiting for his answer, but the strange Other just groaned in response. OK—so be it. I took a mental picture of the guy, determined to figure out what he did eat and said, “I’ll be back
tomorrow. With real food. I promise.”

  His eyes glistened with gratitude.

  I looked at my watch and saw that it was quarter past one. My next class started in fifteen minutes—no real chance to go to the library now. Especially because I had no idea where my next class was. I was really, really, really starting to regret not going to the orientation meet-up, but it was at eight in the morning—and I hadn’t seen that ungodly hour in over three hundred years.

  My map was a mess, especially because I had no idea where I was and there was no convenient “You are here” mark, no “Oak Tree Quad” conveniently labeled. Just when I was resolving myself to missing my second class on my first day, a hand snatched the map out of my hands.

  “Hey,” I said, getting ready to kick someone in the shins … until I saw who had grabbed the map. My demeanor immediately changed and I tried not to swoon too hard. “Hey, Justin.”

  “That was pretty amazing of you,” he said.

  “What was?”

  “How you kicked those guys’ asses. Total jerks, by the way.”

  “Oh, that. They were being bullies. I hate bullies.”

  “Me too.”

  Oh, great. Something we have in common, I meant to think—but wound up saying out loud. Girl, get a grip!

  “Yeah, we do, I suppose,” he said, eyeing me curiously. “I take it that outside of being scared of light, you’re also a bit quirky, too.”

  “You could say that,” I blushed. “Is that a bad thing?”

  “No,” he said, “I like quirky. And I like cats … so, we’re good here.”

  I felt my blush darken three shades.