by Rachel Caine
“Just think maybe it’d go better if it wasn’t either of you,” she said, mainly to Maks. “’cause when you’re bent on doing good, doing bad—no matter why—don’t ever seem to help.”
He didn’t bother to nod, but Anapurna did it for him, so… good enough, Dee guessed. Pressed tight to her granddad’s clavicle, Ruhel covered her eyes with both hands and wept on, bitterly. And Dee reached into her sleeve, for real, this time—not knowing if Sami was watching, but sure as hell not wanting to check, either. Hoping Chatwin was, though, and attentively, as she cocked back and dug the the barrel into his fragile, rehumanized temple.
Been dead a long time, she reminded herself. “I’m sorry,” she heard herself tell him, nevertheless. To which he merely smiled, answering, with amazing self-control—
“I’m not.”
(So thank you, dear girl. Thank you.)
Over his shoulder, she saw Anapurna not quite close her own eyes because somebody had to stay on point, and thought, Damn, if you didn’t get the exact same training I did. We could’ve been friends, maybe, if not for this.
But that’s just me, right? Always the bad cop.
“Okay, then,” Dionne Cornish said, to no one in particular, as she pulled the trigger.
In the motel battle’s immediate aftermath, nobody but the surviving Maartensbecks was greatly surprised to discover that Allfair Chatwin had used the Professor’s death as distraction and run off while the getting was good, taking the easy-to-sell-for-travelling-cash Clavicule des Pas-Morts with her. Since Ruhel—icy veneer firmly back in place—was already on the phone arranging cover-up plus retrieval for her grandfather’s corpse, however, now finally set to occupy the tomb bearing his name at last, Anapurna was the one who offered the Cornishes a ride to the Canadian border, along with those fabled clean new IDs.
“Chatwin’ll be our next project, if I have any say in it,” she promised Dee, too.
“Good luck with that,” Sami replied, crossing her arms, not quite allowing herself to shiver.
Later yet, as the miles were eaten up beneath them and Dee stared at the back of Anapurna’s head, rubbing fingers still a little bruised from the recoil, Sami leant over to assure her she’d done the right thing—“the only thing, Dee, under the circumstances. He knew it. You do too.”
“Do I?” Dee shook her head. “Don’t feel that way. More like… well. Kinda—”
“—like it sets a bad example?”
A pause. “There is that,” Dee eventually agreed, so quiet she could barely tell herself what she thought about it.
CANADA: ONE HUNDRED FEET, the next sign said. Above, the moon hung high; Anapurna Maartensbeck tapped the wheel as she drove, beating out some tune Dee couldn’t identify. “So who’s this guy your—the Prof. kept on talkin’ about?” Dee asked her, falling back on business, for lack of better conversational topics.
“Juleyan Laird Roke,” Anapurna replied, not turning. “Wizard first, then graduated to vampire at the moment of his execution, during the Civil War—ours, not yours—through some spasm of ill will and sciomancy. Helped that he was a quarter fae on his mother’s side, with ten generations of hereditary magic-workers on the other… a rancid bastard, too, from all accounts. Doesn’t surprise me a bit that he left poor old Maks to rot, once he’d had his way.”
“Uh huh. So tell me, Miss M.—is some holler witch you barely know really at the top of your list, with this guy still on the loose?”
“Perhaps not.”
“Good luck again, then. Twice over.”
“And let’s hope the chase ends better for me than it did for my grandfather? Why, Miss C., I’m touched.” An expert swerve took them into the express lane, where Anapurna slowed to an idle. “Enough so to wish you the same, in fact, on your journey. Since, after all… ”
But here she broke off, maybe thinking better of finishing the thought, considering how Sami was sitting right there all extra-large as life, listening. Or how she already knew Dee had a gun.
Because: Some hunt monsters, Dee thought, and some become monsters, in their turn. But some are just made that way, with no say at all in the matter—collateral damage, already born fucked, just waiting for the worst possible moment to fall down.
Family as destiny, its own little ecology, forever struggling forwards, forever thrown back. But… it didn’t have to be a foregone conclusion, was what Dee believed, at the end of the day. What she had to make herself believe, to keep on going.
What’s the difference? she wondered, knowing there wasn’t much of one—that there couldn’t be, for any of it to work. And reached out, in the darkness, to take her sister’s hand.
EDITOR BIOGRAPHY
Shannon Robinson’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Iowa Review, Gettysburg Review, Nimrod, Joyland and Joyland Retro, New Ohio Review, and has been anthologized in New Stories from the Midwest and Specter Spectacular: 13 Ghostly Tales. She holds an MFA in fiction from Washington University in St. Louis, and served as Writer-in-Residence at Interlochen Center for the Arts in 2011. Past honors include the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and a Hedgebrook Fellowship.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
Barbara A. Barnett is a writer, musician, graduate student in library and information science, intern in an orchestra library, Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, coffee addict, wine lover, bad movie mocker, and all-around geek. Her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Fantasy Magazine, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Shimmer, Daily Science Fiction, and Wilde Stories 2011: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction. Barbara lives with her husband in southern New Jersey and can be found online at www.babarnett.com.
Megan Lee Beals lives in Tacoma, Washington with her husband and one-eyed cat. She drinks coffee late at night and has three drawings tattooed on the skin of three people. None of which depicts a fly. You can find her online at www.beehills.wordpress.com.
Rachel Caine is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than forty novels, including Prince of Shadows and the Morganville Vampires series in young adult, and the Weather Warden, Outcast Season, and Revivalist series in urban fantasy. She lives and works in Fort Worth, Texas with her husband, fantasy artist R. Cat Conrad.
Adam Callaway’s Lacuna stories have been reprinted in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, nominated for the Million Writers Award, The Shirley Jackson Award, and named to the Locus Recommended Reading List. He lives in Superior, Wisconsin, with his wife and two dogs. You can find him on his website at www.adamcallaway.net, or on Twitter @Sensawunda. He is currently working on a novel set in Lacuna.
Kella Campbell is the nocturnal alter ego of someone who sits behind a publishing desk by day. She can usually be found in Vancouver, Canada. Her writing almost always has romantic/emotional/relationship elements, sometimes expressed as speculative fiction, and she’s drawn more toward exploring the edgy side of things rather than the sweet side. She’s on Twitter @kellacampbell and links to her blog and other places are collected and sorted at www.kellacampbell.com or about.me/kellacampbell.
Gemma Files, former film critic and teacher turned award-winning horror author, is probably best-known for her Hexslinger series (A Book of Tongues, A Rope of Thorns and A Tree of Bones, ChiZine Publications). She has also published two collections of short stories (Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart, Wildside Press) and two chapbooks of poetry. The characters of Dionne and Samaire Cornish and A-Cat Chatwin have previously appeared in Black Bush (Arcane, Nathan Shumate Books) and Crossing the River (Mighty Unclean, Dark Arts Press). She is currently hard at work on her fourth novel.
Joshua Gage is an ornery curmudgeon from Cleveland. His first full-length collection, Breaths, is available from VanZeno Press. Intrinsic Night, a collaborative project he wrote with J. E. Stanley, was recently published by Sam’s Dot Publishing. He is a graduate of the Low Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Naropa University. He h
as a penchant for Pendleton shirts, rye whiskey and any poem strong enough to yank the breath out of his lungs. He stomps around Cleveland where he hosts the monthly Deep Cleveland Poetry hour and enjoys the beer at Brew Kettle.
Lily Hoang is the author of four books. She edited the anthology 30 Under 30 with Blake Butler, and with Joshua Marie Wilkinson, she is currently editing The Force of What’s Possible: Writers on the Avant-Garde and Accessibility. She serves as Editor-in-Chief at Puerto del Sol and Editor at Tarpaulin Sky. She teaches in the MFA program at New Mexico State University and can be found virtually at HTML Giant.
Sandra Kasturi is a writer, book reviewer and Bram Stoker Award-winning editor. She is the co-publisher of the World Fantasy Award-nominated and British Fantasy Award-winning press, ChiZine Publications. Her work has appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including ON SPEC, Prairie Fire, Taddle Creek, Shadows & Tall Trees, several of the Tesseracts anthologies, Evolve, Evolve 2, both volumes of Chilling Tales, A Verdant Green, Star*Line, and 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin. Sandra managed to snag an introduction from Neil Gaiman for her poetry collection, The Animal Bridegroom (Tightrope Books). Her second collection, Come Late to the Love of Birds, came out in 2012. Sandra is working on a mythological noir novel and her third poetry collection. She likes red lipstick, gin & tonics and Michael Fassbender.
Nancy Kilpatrick, award-winning author, has published 18 novels, about 200 short stories, and has just edited her 13th anthologies. She also published the non-fiction book The Goth Bible: A Compendium for the Darkly Inclined (St. Martin’s Press). Her two most recent titles are (as editor) the anthology Danse Macabre: Close Encounters With the Reaper, and her sixth collection of short stories, Vampyric Variations (both from Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing). She lives in Montreal with her cat Fedex, but travels frequently. Check her website for updates: nancykilpatrick.com, and join her on Facebook (Nancy Kilpatrick, Writer and Editor).
Carrie Laben is originally from New York and now lives in Missoula, Montana, where she recently obtained her MFA from the University of Montana. Her work has previously appeared in such venues as Clarkesworld, Apex Digest, Camas, and anthologies including Fantasy: The Best of the Year and Shades of Blue and Gray. When not writing, she can usually be found staring at birds or enjoying the local microbrews. Her father once saw a tree struck by lightning, but no one in her family has ever been attacked by vampires.
Christine Morgan works the overnight shift in a psychiatric facility and divides her writing time among many genres. A lifelong reader, she also writes, reviews, beta-reads, occasionally edits and dabbles in self-publishing. Among her most recent novels are Murder Girls, about college housemates who decide to become serial killers, and The Horned Ones, in which a disaster traps tourists in a scenic show-cave. Her stories have appeared in more than two dozen anthologies, ’zines and e-chapbooks. She’s been nominated for the Origins Award and made Honorable Mention in two volumes of Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her husband is a game designer, her daughter was published in a zombie anthology at fourteen and plans to major in psychology and film. A future crazy-cat-lady, Christine’s other interests include gaming, history, superheroes, crafts, and cheesy disaster movies. Lately, she’s discovered a love for Viking-themed horror and dark fantasy, with several such stories already written and a blood-soaked novel called The Slaughter in the works.
Daniels Parseliti has been writing fiction and non-fiction for the last fifteen years. He holds a BA in philosophy for Wesleyan University and an MFA in fiction from Washington University in St. Louis. His fiction has been published in The Brooklyn Rail and his nonfiction in The Subway Chronicles: Scenes from Life in New York. Dan grew up on the east coast, but now calls St. Louis his home. He pays the bills working in the wine business, and reads philosophy in his spare time.
Cat Rambo lives, writes, and teaches by the shores of an eagle-haunted lake in the Pacific Northwest. Her 200+ fiction publications include stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld Magazine, and Tor.com. Her short story, Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain, from her story collection Near + Far (Hydra House Books), was a 2012 Nebula nominee. Her editorship of Fantasy Magazine earned her a World Fantasy Award nomination in 2012. For more about her, as well as links to her fiction and information about her online classes, see www.kittywumpus.net.
Mary A. Turzillo’s novel An Old-Fashioned Martian Girl and Nebula Award winning novelette Mars Is no Place for Children are recommended reading on the International Space Station. She has been nominated for the Rhysling, the British Science Fiction Association Award (Eat or Be Eaten, a Love Story), and the Pushcart (Your Cat & Other Space Aliens, vanZeno). She has recent and forthcoming work in Asimov’s, Paper Crow, Analog, New Myths, Strange Horizons, Bull Spec, Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Ladies of Trade Town, and Stone Telling, plus an authorized Philip José Farmer sequel story, The Beast Erect, in The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 2, Meteor Press, 2011. Her latest book, Lovers & Killers (Dark Regions), has been nominated for both the Stoker and the Elgin.
Paul Witcover is the author of the novels Waking Beauty, Tumbling After, Dracula: Asylum, and The Emperor of All Things. A fifth novel, Eternity in Love, is forthcoming. He is also the author of a short-story collection, Everland and Other Stories. His work has been a finalist for the Tiptree, Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy, and Nebula awards. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
EASY MARK
THE WHOLE OF HIS HISTORY
MUNGO THE VAMPIRE
THE LIGHTNING TREE
FOLLOW ME
ONLY DARKNESS
FLIES IN THE INK
THE HUNGRY LIVING DEAD
JOSEPHINE THE TATTOO QUEEN
STABILIZATION
A VIRGIN HAND DISARM’D
SUMMER NIGHT IN DURHAM
HIS BODY SCATTERED BY THE PLAGUE WINDS
FROM THE HEART
SIDEPONYTAIL
HIS FACE, ALL RED
EDITOR BIOGRAPHY
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
