by Irene Gallo
* * *
At about two-thirty, Paige got to a phone.
She was panicking. “Can you hide the door to the basement? Make a secret panel or something?”
“A secret—”
“Deenie’s befriended some police who think lycanthropes are dangerous. They’re going for a grow-op warrant on the house. They’ll say they’re looking for pot and then—”
“Let ’em search, Paige. We’re not there.”
“Oh! Good. Is he okay?”
“Getting up his second wind. In fact, his little ears have pricked up. Say hello to Mommy, kid.”
Chase struggled to his paws. “Arrooo?” It came out a question; then he flopped again.
Her voice came through the speaker. “Hi, baby, hi, baby. Thank God.”
“Who told you about the raid?”
“One of the guards. Gloating.”
I’d been on the table for hours. Now I stood and stretched. Hell, Chase was torpid, and I had my boots on. I stepped down to a chair, then the floor. The littlest werewolf didn’t move.
“So where are you?”
“My place.”
“You took him home?”
“What could I do, take a pet suite at the Hilton?” I splashed water onto my face, ran a comb through my hair.
“What if they go there next?”
“They can’t get a warrant to search for pot here, in the dead of night, on the grounds that I’m your…”
“My what?”
Weighted pause. “Your friend, Paige.”
“All they have to do is shove their way in and bag him. They can apologize to the skies once they have video of him changing back at dawn.”
Bust in first, consequences later. She was right. “It’s not gonna happen. Paige…”
“Shit, my time’s up.”
“It’ll be okay.”
“Don’t screw this up, Jude.” She was gone before I could promise anything.
A scritch. I opened the bathroom door. The kid was there, tail thumping, couch upholstery dangling from his fang. He tried out a growl on me.
“Don’t even think it,” I said. Stomping past him, I found my work gloves. He wobbled a step behind, exhausted but game. “Tearing around takes it out of you, huh, kid?”
Bink-bink. Cartoon-puppy eyes. Cuddle me; I’m not dangerous at all.
“You’re not gonna bite me,” I told him.
Bending, I extended my gloved hands. He growled.
“No!” Deep voice: he did me the honor of looking awed.
I got him by the scruff and under his chest, holding him arms-out away from me. His body was hot, and I could feel the wham-wham of his heart through the leather as I carried him upstairs.
Then he shocked a bit, twisting.
The smart thing would’ve been to drop him; instead, my arms pulled inward, protecting. I felt hot puppy breath on my neck, a touch of nose. He was alert, almost quivering.
“Easy. Easy.” My mouth was cottony. I turned sideways, checking the mirror. He was staring bug-eyed up over my shoulder, through the skylight in my bedroom …
… at the moon.
“Aroo?”
“Aroo,” I agreed. For some reason I was near tears.
I set him down like a bomb, leaving him in the shaft of moonlight, up on my bed, in my loft with all my good stuff, everything I’d pulled off the ground floor that afternoon. I rescued the urn with my mom’s ashes, threw a last apologetic look at the fish tank. “Enjoy the change of locale, kid.”
Weak-kneed, I stumbled downstairs and started making calls.
* * *
The police didn’t turn up until four.
By then, I had thirty people downstairs. Saffron had awakened most of the local women’s chorus, and there was a big ol’ overtired koombaya going on in the remains of my living room. Alison was shooting the gathering in Super-8, while a baby dyke named Kathleen Ph34rless exhorted her to get into the digital age, man. Jennifer was doing henna tattoos on Freddie May, who was bare-chested and on his back on the table. Helena had swept the shreds of Camille Paglia off my floor. Raquel lay by the hearth with her one-year-old, Abby, and the baby’s father, the three of them half asleep, watching a Disney movie on an iPad.
Upstairs you could hear the occasional thunk, awoo, smash—Chase had gotten his second wind.
Long as he’s happy, I thought, as I answered the bang-bang-bang of the front door.
“Judith Walker?”
Showtime.
“Hey, Officers,” I said, not too smartass, not too perky. Through the chain, I saw the female constable I’d seen that afternoon.
“We have a report of screams at this address.”
“Just a party.”
“Mind if we look around?”
“I do mind, yeah.” I spoke clearly, for the pick-up mike.
“I hear another scream now.” She gave me a push, trying to swing my door wide, only to get hung up on the steel-toed boot I’d accidentally-on-purpose jammed in it.
Her partner helped. The boot and the chain both gave, and I stumbled backward into my foyer.
One of the leather kids, Roman, caught me.
“Hey there, Officer,” he swished. “This a bust? Wanna borrow my cuffs?”
“What’s going on here?”
“Full moon party,” I said. “In honor of Pam Adolpha.”
She scowled. “Where’s the kid?”
“Do I look like a babysitter?”
Junior chose that moment to let go with a little “Aroo!”
“What the hell was that?” The female officer’s hand drifted to her pepper spray. Then she paused; Alison had moved in with her camera. The choir broke into four-part harmony, drawing her eye. They were parked on a couch I’d propped in front of the door to the stairwell. At their soprano edge, singing along while giving her best glower from a scary high-tech wheelchair, was the city’s best-known civil-rights lawyer.
You stay in one place for a while, you make friends. They make friends. They’ll dissect your love life and your dietary habits behind your back, but some days it pays off. That’s how it works in my neighbourhood. Most of my guests lived walking distance from here.
An “Aroo!” upstairs ruined the otherwise golden moment.
“I asked you…” The constable kept her voice calm. “What is that?”
“It’s the dog,” I said, straight-faced. “What do you think?”
She spent another second thumbing her pepper spray, weighing her odds—the film crew, the legal lioness, the sheer number of witnesses. Little Kathleen Ph34rless had her phone out, no doubt Tweeting events in real time.
The constable slumped. “Keep the noise down.”
Nobody was so dumb as to start cheering before they were gone. But we spent the next few hours giving each other sleepy high-fives, carrying on like we’d faced down the armies of Rome.
* * *
Paige showed up at my place about two hours after dawn.
“Your kitchen ceiling is dripping,” she said.
I’d just put down a bucket to catch the leak. “Baby boy got to my fish tank. You should’ve heard it.”
“And there are twenty women in your living room.”
“That many?”
“They’re semi-naked.”
“It’s hot out, Paige. By the way, you officially owe favours to every cool person in East Van.”
“Just tell me you haven’t slept with all of them.”
I pretended to count heads. “Only five. Well, six.”
She chose—conspicuously, I thought—to ignore my attempt at charm. “Where’s my son, Jude?”
“Follow me.”
Baby Chase was snoring in the wreckage of my bedroom. Paige squelched across the carpet, crunching broken aquarium glass, and scooped him into her arms.
“Oh, Jude. All your stuff,” she murmured, head down against his.
“It’s what they do, right?”
“Werewolves?”
“Children.
”
“You never wanted to be a mom,” she said.
“That was kind of a half-truth.”
“You weren’t wrong. He is a monster, and I am a basket case.”
“A victorious basket case.”
“Excuse me?”
“By next month they’ll have convicted that fucker Deenie, right? The sidekick’ll go off home and make trouble for someone else?”
“What are you saying? All’s well that ends well?”
“You’re not damaged goods, Paige. When you bit Robb yesterday, I realized. You’re anything but fragile. You’re tough. And that’s…”
“Yes?”
“It’s your strength I’m attracted to.”
She stirred the dampened shreds of my buckwheat pillow with her toe. “So no more bullshit?”
“There’s always more,” I said. “But not that flavour.”
“Your sales pitch could use some work.” She patted the empty space on my bed.
“You dig honesty.” I slipped into the nook, curled around the baby, and kissed her properly.
The kid waved a fist, belching fish.
“Da,” he said to me. Bink-bink. The hook sank deeper.
I faked a cringe. “Tell me he’s already said Mumma, once at least.”
“Nope.” She twinkled. “Gonna tell him to cut it out?”
“Da!”
“I’m gonna say keep it up, Chase,” I told them both, and planted a kiss on his little feral head as my hand wound into hers.
A. M. DELLAMONICA is the author of Indigo Springs, winner of the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, and its concluding sequel, Blue Magic. Her short stories have appeared in a number of fantasy and science fiction magazines and anthologies, and on Tor.com.
In the Sight of Akresa
Ray Wood
Claire’s lover has no tongue. A slave liberated from a heathen temple, Aya cannot tell the story of her stolen voice, or of their unfolding love. She cannot speak her pain, her joy, or her sorrow. And if she sees that which eludes the blind goddess of justice, she cannot bear witness. Edited by Carl Engle-Laird.
This is how they took your tongue:
There is a wedge, short and made of steel, used to prise apart the teeth. The skin on your lips splits as the slave-maker pushes it into your mouth. Hard Yovali hands hold you all over, keeping your arms behind your back, your knees on the ground, your face towards the sun. Metal crunches against your teeth, scraping, swiveling, pushing. Your incisors feel like they are bending inwards.
You part your teeth before you lose them and the wedge shoots in, followed by foreign fingers that hook into your cheeks. They taste of rust and salt. The blood-priest finds your tongue between his thumb and forefinger and grips it where it starts to fatten, near the root. He pulls. The slave-maker accepts a slender, silk-wrapped something from a loinclothed woman.
Saliva pools around your bottom lip.
The something is the haraad-kité, the voice-cutter. The slave-maker draws it with a flourish from its half-moon sheath and holds it high, his fingers curled around its spine. He is still, his tall, lean body blocking out the sun. Then, all at once and with a scream, he plunges. The blade dips into the meat of your tongue like a finger into water.
* * *
Cecil’s books are vague about the rest. I have lain awake more nights than one wondering about what must have followed: the blood pooling in your mouth; the hollow throb of pain; that terrible emptiness behind your teeth. The heat of the cauterising iron biting at the mess of open flesh.
Forgive me. This story remains the only one I have of you, of your life before me. You must know how it pains me that it comes from Cecil’s library rather than your lips—oh, your sweet, battered lips!—and that it would fit a hundred other slaves as well as it fits you. Perhaps none of the accounts that I have read are even true.
Oh, my love. I know so little of you.
* * *
We met on the second Sunday after Harvestfest, when the leaves were browning and the men returned from the Yovali lands. My mother and I watched from the wall as Father’s host approached, feeling the wind whip through our dresses. As the column of knights drew closer I could see the breath fuming from the nostrils of the horses.
We went down in our finery to welcome them. Father came in first, as was customary, with Garrick at his right. Their shields were splattered with mud. My brother seemed taller than he had before going on campaign: newly tanned and mountainous, with fresh muscle packed beneath his skin.
“Claire,” he said by way of greeting once they had dismounted and the ritual welcomes had been spoken. I saw Father looking over at us.
“Welcome home, Garrick.” I touched my lips to both his cheeks. “I hope there’s a gift for me among your spoils.”
“Oh, yes.” He grinned and beckoned a boy over to undo his armour. “These heathen treasures will make you doubt your eyes.”
The great hall was prepared, the fire lit; slopping wineskins were handed round above head height. A singer accompanied herself on a vielle. Father spoke to me briefly, in between carousing with his knights and sitting with my mother. “You’re a young woman, now, Claire,” he said. He drew back and looked me up and down as if my breasts were new developments.
“You sound surprised, Father.” The cheek he bent to me was warm and bristly. “It’s not been so long since you left.”
He nodded sadly and drew me in to walk beside him, his arm around my shoulders. “We brought back wonders,” he said.
Wonders indeed. The revelers were silenced; a circle was cleared in the middle of the crowd as the chests were carried in. Behind me, people jostled for a better view as one of Father’s richer knights knelt to open the first casket. The stones around the fireplace blasted heat into my back.
“Spoils won from the Yovali in the name of King Lucian XXI, awarded by His Majesty to His Grace the Duke of Rouchefort!”
Treasures shone like sugared fruits. The first chest was full of gems and gold, the second bronze and porcelain. There were bulky crescent bangles stained with dye, discs and trinkets patterned after constellations, plump ornamental pots and jars. Another casket held a nest of looted weaponry. Endless spoils were revealed and marveled at: big flasks of wine that smelt of foreign spice; great oiled pipes with bowls like ladles, and the herbs meant to be smoked in them; a set of ceremonial masks; what looked like the bones of some vast lizard dipped in gold. My interest in them shattered the moment you were brought into the hall.
“Liberated by His Grace himself, and granted to his service by His Majesty the King, one slave of the Yovali. Her tongue was ripped from her mouth to prevent blasphemy against their heathen blood-god.”
The last statement drew a collective gasp. My chest was suddenly too tight for my heart; I stood up on my toes as a knight stepped sideways and blocked my view. Shadows danced among the roof beams.
Shall I tell you how you looked to me, that first time? I was expecting a hunched, shrunken creature, grubby head bowed as if in shame at the emptiness behind your mouth, but you stood with your shoulders back. Your mass of unwashed raven hair fell several inches past the base of your neck. Your skin was tanned. I remember how you held your hands: clasped in front of you as if you were in church, in what would have been your lap had you been sitting down. Your breasts pushed against your tunic.
Torches burned behind your eyes.
“… shall live in the castle as your equal.” Father was addressing the assembly, his hand resting on your shoulder. You looked toned and lean enough to knock him flat, if you so chose. “She is now a free Lucean woman, and free to labour for her bread upon De Rouchefort lands as long as she may live.”
“A whore without a tongue,” Garrick murmured in my ear under the ensuing applause. His breath was spiced with wine. “Now there’s a treasure for you, Claire.”
The hairs lifted from my neck.
* * *
Aya. I heard my father call
you Aya.
The name burned in me like a flame those first few days. I realised later that it could not have been your real one, but even now it remains the only one I have for you. When I used it for the first time, you simply stared at me for a moment and then dipped your head back to your work, as if it didn’t matter what I called you.
Of course, I wondered how my father chose it for you. I did not like my conclusion—that those were the first, desperate syllables that flopped from your tongueless mouth when he first bore down upon you, sword in hand, believing you Yovali—but what else was I to think? He would not tell me where he found you. Had he plucked you from some heathen temple? A blackened, back-breaking mine? The reeking pleasure bed of some Yovali blood-priest? Each was an abhorrent thought.
Not yet having Cecil’s library at my disposal, I obsessed over the mystery of your missing tongue. Had it been ripped out whole, or did some misshapen stump remain for you to gag on? What became of the missing flesh once they took it from you? I examined my own tongue in the glass while Letia brushed my hair. I flexed and wiggled it—strange, throat-filling worm that it was—as I imagined histories for you.
I saw you again three days after the men returned, when Father called a Justice Circle. I suppose you had not been to one before, but they held no novelty for me. Every second month my father and his trusted council would hear testimony and evidence of all the crimes and grievances committed on De Rouchefort lands, and come to an impartial verdict. Attendance was mandatory for all. This time was much the same as any, except that morning I made Letia take extra care with my hair and spent the first two cases writhing in my seat to see if I could spot you.
I picked you out eventually among the stable hands, near the foot of the Akresa statue. I must have seen the marble likeness of the justice goddess a thousand times, but I had never wondered, until I saw her next to you, what lay beneath the sculpted crinkles of her blindfold. Were her eyes meant merely to be closed, or were there gristly, scooped-out hollows in their place?
You had washed, and your dark hair was sleek and lustrous. I stared at the back of your head, willing you to turn around and meet my eyes. I did not look away until Garrick stood to speak for the good character of the accused. One of Father’s lesser knights was standing trial for the rape of a peasant girl. When judgement had been passed and the girl was being led away, I saw Garrick squeeze my father’s shoulder.
