Blood And Magic

by Ann Gimpel

  Voices behind him made him stand and back up several steps. He turned to find his mother approaching, Kenzie behind her holding the baby. He kept backing up. Allison would get the comfort she needed from his family. He had no choice but to step away and let them take over. For now. His legs literally ached with each step, but he forced them to move. He met his mother’s gaze as she approached and pleaded with her to help his mate.

  She nodded, a wan smile that didn’t reach her eyes expressing her sorrow at his predicament.

  Words weren’t needed. Ashley would have told them what had occurred. And even if she hadn’t, any wolf would smell the mating call on approach.

  As his mother passed and took a seat next to Allison, Kenzie touched his arm with her free hand. He lifted his gaze to meet his brother’s mate. She had the same look on her face as his mother.

  He swallowed. “I’ll be at my place.” And he turned and walked away, desperately trying not to think about the fact that he’d left his heart behind on that porch.

  Gifted by David Bridger

  The road was a shining ribbon curling across rounded hills in the morning sunlight, and Jessica was enjoying the leisurely swish of her bike's tires on wet tarmac. She'd set out as soon as the rain shower stopped, leaving her grandparents still eating breakfast and allowing an hour for a ride over Dartmoor that normally took thirty minutes, max. She wanted to keep her mind relaxed for her last exam.

  She freewheeled down Leot Hill.

  No more science after today. Ever!

  Ten minutes later she was padlocking her rear wheel to the bike shed and squinting at sunlight reflecting off the school gym windows, when her regular daydream blossomed.

  She was standing on a flat rock buried in the riverbank, watching lazy water swirl into the pool where insects busied themselves in the green shade. Sunbeams shone like spotlights through the heavy canopy above. Water slurped against the log dam and slopped over it gently.

  Two deer approached the pool. They stared at her for silent seconds before dipping their heads to the water. She raised her gaze up the wooded hillside to the castle she'd thought of as home ever since she started daydreaming about it when she was little.

  The deer melted back into the trees, and she blinked herself back to reality.

  One more exam. Then she'd have the rest of the summer to dream.

  Two hours later, she was back at the bike shed, and the science exam hadn't been as painful as she'd feared. At least she'd finished it in the time allowed.

  Two pretty girls from the in-crowd hurried past. “Doppler effect,” one said. “Is that even a thing?”

  Which brightened Jessica's day a bit more. She rode hard to leave school behind forever and grinned with the exhilaration of it all. Ten weeks of freedom before she started at Art College in September.

  She was still gutted that Paula's family had moved to California last year. They'd been best friends since their first day of school and this long summer would have been brilliant if she'd been here. They still talked online, but it wasn't the same, and since Paula had gone Jessica had been a bit lonely in spite of all the other kids at school. They were okay, but no one knew her like Paula.

  Maybe she'd find a new best friend at Art College. Maybe even a boyfriend. One of her reasons for going was to be somewhere more grown-up than school. Which should include the other students. She hoped so, anyway. That would be good.

  Leot Hill was a long low-gear grind going home. The air was still. By the time she reached the top she was grunting and sweating, and the lovely, open view over the moor counted for nothing. She wobbled the handlebars dangerously as a chilling shiver trembled through her and got off to walk for a bit.

  Suddenly she felt sick and dizzy. Her ponytail hurt her scalp. She pulled it free.

  She dragged the bike off the road, leaned it against an old wooden fencepost, and sat in the rough grass with her head between her knees in case she threw up.

  Dizziness filled her world, as if a big net kept twisting and tangling her up, tighter and tighter. A hot flush spread through her chest. Her mouth tasted sour. Her heart throbbed in heavy, painful waves, making her arms ache and her fingertips prickle. Her neck stiffened. Darkness gathered at the edges of her vision and raced inward.

  She panted in pain and panic. She was dying.

  I'm only sixteen.

  She saw her dream home in dappled sunlight. The pool water chuckled and hiccupped over the dam. A big fish swam placidly just below the surface, watching her, and deer grazed the lawn in front of her castle. She was dying, and she didn't care because she was going home.

  Her chest exploded. She wet herself, and the world went black.

  •●•

  Slowly, a lifetime later, she became aware that she was still alive. Her vision cleared, and she saw blue sky, purple moor, grey sheep, and dusty black tarmac.

  She saw everything in everything: the tiniest molecules in whatever she looked at. She stared into the red reflector light behind her bike saddle and saw every flaw in it. The liquid plastic flowed in an intricate pattern. She retreated from it and saw her eyes, saw the cells through which she saw. She looked into her heart.

  Good grief, she could see her heart, beating her back into the outside world.

  A web of gossamer threads covered everything in sight. She blinked hard to clear her vision, but it was still there. The web was everywhere, like a net linking everything. Golden traces glowed and stretched to infinity in every direction. She looked through it, concentrated on the moorland, and the everyday world returned to its normal focus. She relaxed and let the net glow again and saw deep into everything.

  A nearby gorse bush gleamed and pulsed with life. Patterns spread and contracted within its frame. The moor behind it remained three-dimensional while her gorse bush became its own vibrant world, tiny models of itself forming intricate combinations and multiplying throughout the whole: smaller and sharper, smaller and sharper.

  She shut her eyes and fought her fear.

  Epilepsy? Brain damage? Madness?

  She filed those possibilities away for later. What she needed now was to get up and walk. Maybe even ride. Wet shorts were the least of her problems.

  It was dusk before she managed it. Her phone went off several times, but she couldn't spare any attention to answer it. Cars swept past. Their occupants didn't see her slumped against the remains of an old fence set back from the road. They inhabited a different world.

  Finally, she was able to stand and push her bike, substituting its solid form for her unreliable strength. She wanted to go home, but she didn't know where that was, so she pointed her front wheel in the direction of Bag End Cottage. It seemed to be roughly the same way.

  Grandma was at the door, watching for her. “Where have you been? We've been worried sick!”

  She managed to stagger halfway from the lane to the front door before the ground tilted violently. Blackness swirled through her mind, and she heard Grandma's voice from a long way away.

  “Kevin, Jessica's ill!”

  •●•

  Doctor Gordon visited the next morning. She feigned sleep when Grandma brought him into her bedroom, and she listened to their murmured conversation on the landing when he left.

  “Don't worry, Mrs. Richards. She'll be fine.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “Emotional exhaustion from her exams. You must see it in your work sometimes. We'll get her in for a full check-up when she feels up to it, but don't be alarmed. I'm sure it's stress related. What she needs is plenty of rest and fresh air.”

  “The vertigo seems better this morning.”

  “Good. She'll be fine. I'm sure she'll bounce back easily.”

  Nervous breakdown. That's what he means.

  Well, it wasn’t, but it might become one if she didn't get a grip. She stretched and yawned, listened to the birdsong through her open window, waited for the doctor to drive away, and then got out of bed and walked gingerly to the top
of the stairs.

  The vertigo wasn't better. She was simply getting better at hiding it.

  And it wasn't really vertigo. It was sensory overload. Ever since yesterday, when everything had become so vivid, she'd had to strain and filter broadband information every waking second. And too much filtering created another problem.

  The picture on her bedroom wall, for example. Her great-grandmother's painting of a wooded valley with the low wall of a humpbacked bridge in the foreground. It had always comforted her in its similarity to her dream scene, but lost its value for comfort when it transformed into a riot of living atoms.

  She'd turned the radio on at dawn, only to turn it off immediately when it drew her attention to radio waves in the air.

  But her concentration was improving, and now she just had to convince Grandma that she didn't need any tests. It didn't take a genius to figure out where they would end. With her stuck in a psychiatric ward, probably, if she told the truth. Best to avoid them altogether.

  She paused on the bottom stair and watched Grandma shuffle across the kitchen with a pot of coffee, sit down, pour a mug of steaming black liquid, and push a sealed pack of Embassy cigarettes around the table with a forefinger, a blank look on her tired face.

  “Have you had any sleep at all?”

  The shadows under Grandma's eyes answered Jessica's question, but her voice was bright. “Hello, love. Feeling any better?”

  “Yes, thanks. Have you been up all night?”

  “I dozed a bit. Grandad had to go into work today, so I won sentry duty. He'll be glad you're up and about. You gave us a scare.”

  That's three of us, then. “I'm much better. It must have been a twenty-four hour thing.” She observed Grandma's flickering eye muscles. “Now it's your turn to rest.”

  “I'm fine. Nothing another pint of caffeine won't fix.”

  “Right. Well, I need a bath.”

  She took Jessica's hand and kissed the back of it. “Have we put too much pressure on you, love?”

  “No way. Honestly, I would have told you if you had, but you haven't. You're wonderful, and I love you.” She gave her brightest smile. “I'm okay, you know. Why don't you go to bed for a bit?”

  “Forget it. Go and have your bath. I'll let Grandad know you're up.”

  An hour later she found Grandma asleep, head on the table, fingers still hooked through the handle of her mug of cold coffee. Jessica put the cigarettes away. Grandma had given up smoking two years earlier, and that sealed “will power” pack hadn't been out of the drawer for eighteen months.

  Once she'd guided her sleepwalking grandmother to bed she spent the rest of the day practicing with the net. She’d wrinkled her nose the first time she thought of it by that name, but it was as good as anything else, so it stuck. By the time Grandad got home, her confidence was high. She could maintain her balance with no visible effort and surprised him with the extent of her recovery.

  Also invisible, even to her, was the agony of yearning she felt for something, somewhere to the north. She felt like a compass needle. It reminded her of the hollow homesickness she'd suffered during the school hockey team's trip to France when she was twelve, but a million times worse.

  The yearning was for her dream home. She'd always wished she could find the place, but since last night her need had become a physical pain. She tried to block out the yearning, but the attempt caused more agony than indulging the pain.

  She trained herself not to glance out of windows—quite enough sensory overload indoors for the moment—and looked forward to darkness. But when night arrived the net lit up like a virtual reality landscape and she scorned her own naivety.

  She went to bed early and dreamed. The pool was busy with wildlife. The breeze fluted around branches overhead and led her gaze uphill to the castle.

  It was dark and empty. It was yearning for her. She stayed all night to keep it company, and promised she'd be home soon.

  1919 by Margeaux Otis

  July 2, 1919

  Rosalind exited the ward quickly, trying to pretend nothing was wrong, as if she hadn’t cast a glance across a row of beds and almost asked why they were bothering with number six—she’d be dead by morning. She pressed her fingers to her lips to seal the words in, then snatched them away again for fear someone would see her distress.

  She’d sat by many bedsides in France, when she’d had time to spare from her normal duties. Dying people were nothing new. More importantly, Jefferson Hospital wasn’t the 38. There wasn’t a severe staff shortage, or an epidemic, or an endless influx of wounded.

  An orderly hurried by her with a laundry cart, then a harassed-looking doctor followed by two civilians—visitors—in laborers’ clothing. Rosalind’s shift had ended. She really had no reason to be loitering in the corridor like this. In the ladies’ lounge, she removed her apron and cap and tidied her hair. Her feet throbbed and so did her eyes. She didn’t want to look at herself in the mirror. She ought to tell Matron she felt sick, that she couldn’t come in tomorrow.

  She signed herself out at the desk, turned, and saw Matthew Riekert in the waiting area, struggling to his feet. His hat brim hid his face but she could tell from his movements that he was in pain. She hurried over and asked, “Are you all right?”

  He braced his crutches more firmly under his arms and said, “I thought I’d walk you home.”

  Rosalind bit back a sarcastic remark. He was white-faced and tightlipped with pain, but he presumably knew his own limits. “Let’s go, then,” she said. She kept an eye on him as they left the building. He didn’t seem likely to fall. “Were you in for PT today?” she asked. “Physical therapy,” she explained, at his blank look.

  “Yeah,” he said. They stopped at the corner to let a succession of autos pass and he took a deep breath. “New exercises,” he said.

  “I imagine they told you to take the trolley home, or a cab,” Rosalind remarked.

  “Faster this way,” he said. “No waiting.”

  The right leg was the wounded one, she had noticed when she’d first met him at Camp Meade. She wondered what happened—bullet or shrapnel, most likely—but didn’t ask. She didn’t know how he would react to the question. She didn’t know him very well at all beyond their similar educational backgrounds and a rather puzzling irrational liking she felt for him. Perhaps that was because the first time she’d seen him, in Kearney’s photo, he’d been smiling. He’d seemed like a person one would like. She had never seen him smile as in the photo.

  Also, she remembered, she knew he was a terrible card player. She’d learned that his third night in the house. Even blind, Kearney was a better card player. But Matthew had been good-natured about the game. No posturing and, even better, no complaints about the cards he was dealt.

  She considered asking him if he wanted to rest as they crossed the street into Washington Square. Matthew halted at the first bench they reached and grunted.

  “No, I don’t mind if we stop here for a few minutes,” Rosalind said.

  “Hah,” he said. “Funny.” They sat and he removed his hat, wiping his face with his hand. “Knew you wouldn’t fuss.”

  “I suppose that means, you knew I would go along with your stupidity,” Rosalind said.

  “No,” he said, surprising her. “It means—” He winced and rubbed his thigh. She could see the muscle twitch as it spasmed. “—It means you’d let me be an idiot and not—ahh—”

  “Not what?” Rosalind asked, after giving him a moment to catch his breath.

  “Not treat me like I’m pathetic.” Matthew leaned back and stared up into the trees. “I hate that.”

  “You shouldn’t overwork that leg,” Rosalind pointed out.

  “I know.” He closed his eyes. “I thought if I fell, you wouldn’t…I thought you might be a good person to have nearby.”

  Rosalind sat in silence with him for a time. People passed by, engaged in their daily business, and three children ran around in the grass, yelling over who would get
the hoop next.

  Matthew looked at her. His eyes were a distinctive dark brown; they gave him an earnest look. He said, “I had to get away from there. And I wanted a friendly face.”

  Rosalind knew what he meant. The sounds, the smells, the pitying glances, the pain both experienced and remembered. She wasn’t sure what to say. She felt as if they’d just shared something appallingly intimate. She eyed him speculatively. Finally, she said, “I understand.”

  He smiled then, a flicker at one side of his mouth and the barest creasing at the corners of his eyes, but it was enough to stop her breath before it faded. Then he said, “Are you all right?”

  “Me? Perfectly,” she said.

  “When you came to meet me, at the hospital, I thought you looked—”

  “I had a long shift,” she said, not about to inflict her moods and doubts on him.

  A Death in Katy by Theodora Lane

  Martin pulled up outside 20459 Wild Griffin Drive and parked. He ran his hand through his hair, straightened his tie, and checked to see if anything was stuck in his teeth.

  Martin looked closer at the house. Nice house, nice neighborhood. Two story brick, detached garage, probably about three thousand square feet. Not one of the richest subdivisions in Cinco, but a nice one nonetheless. The yard was mowed and the front garden free of weeds. There was even one of those little flags people loved to hang from their houses. This one had a pumpkin and a cute black cat on it, in preparation for Halloween at the end of the month.

  In his mind, he calculated the price per foot of the house. Not that he could afford it on his detective’s salary. His house—one story, brick, three bedrooms, two baths, two-car garage, just less than two thousand square feet—was on the north side of the I-10, in a very modest, blue-collar neighborhood. He didn’t need more room, and after all it was just him. He’d bought it about five years ago, when he thought Bethany would marry him. She decided the investment manager she was fooling around with on the side was a better catch than a cop, and she dumped Martin the week after he closed on the house.