Lysander nodded and stood. The first step, he wobbled, but afterwards he walked smoothly once more. I rubbed my face. The plan could backfire, if anyone noticed that his aura had changed entirely and guessed what had happened. I returned to Cal’s room and scooped him up, light as a feather, in my arms. His legs and arms dangled, but I managed to cart him up the steps. I emerged into a spacious, high-ceilinged living room decorated in dark wood furniture. There was a foyer to my left, leading to a glass paneled front door.
Lysander was speaking to a confused-looking wereanimal. Judging by his distinct scent, he was the same man who'd spoken to me when I'd first woken in the box, probably the lieutenant of the territory—I still couldn't place his musky, rich smell. Coyote, possibly. He stared at me, bristling, but Lysander gestured us to the door with a smile. I nodded my thanks, ignored the glare stinging my back, and walked outside. Nerves sang under my skin. No-one called out for us; I was still on edge. We hadn't really escaped just yet. I jogged down the steps of the wooden porch and started out across the yard. The night air was balmy and pleasant. Our car, unharmed, sat in the driveway. I glanced back at the gorgeous mansion, all a-glitter with light and surrounded by forest, and wondered, briefly, how long the orders would hold. Sometimes they faded.
I fumbled the car open, trying not to bang Cal’s knees against the door. He grumbled at me as I laid him in the back and looped the middle seatbelt around his waist, buckling it so he wouldn’t fall if I braked too hard. The keys were still in the ignition. How had he even gotten caught? I started the engine and pulled away down the solitary lane. I had no idea where we were, but I would have to find an interstate, if I wanted to get clear of this territory in a timely fashion. The throb of a headache started in the back of my skull.
Cal came back to himself by inches, rolling around in the sheets I’d pulled up to his shoulders. I watched from the other bed in a darkened hotel room. It was as anonymous and far away from the territory we'd escaped as I could manage with a limited amount of time to drive. One hour before sunrise, as I started to ready my sleeping-bag, he sat up and shook himself. His fingers crept up to the bandage on his throat. I looked away.
“Where are we?” he asked, hoarse.
“You managed to get us both captured,” I said. “Though I wouldn’t blame yourself.”
“Shit, what?“
”What happened to you?“ I asked.
”I pulled up to a hotel and then—I don't know what happened. I got out of the car and passed out, I guess.” He looked troubled, as I probably would too if I were in his position. “Tranquilizer, since I don't remember anybody clocking me over the head. So where the hell am I?”
“The king was still very alive, and there was no dispute.” I held up my hand to forestall his questions. “He had been told we were coming to hunt him, and had also been fed information about you. How to drug you so you couldn’t use your abilities without killing you, for example.”
His face was bone-white, jaw clenched. “He did it. He really, finally did it. He tried to fucking kill me.”
“And you can’t prove it,” I said.
“I—what?” The tone of his voice fluttered somewhere between incredulous and panicked.
“How can you prove, definitively, that it was the man you think it was? Or that he was trying to kill you? You tell his superiors that he set you up, and he'll tell them that he was testing you, and you failed.” I paused, but the bleak expression on his face prompted me to continue speaking. “Cal—we did succeed in our assignment. The territory is stable. Contact whomever you need to contact to terminate your connection to him. You’ve freed yourself. ”
“But he’s not gone, and I can’t get rid of him,” he whispered. “I’ve got to walk around knowing that he's out there, watching me, and waiting to try and make a grab. Or just kill me.”
“He’s only one man,” I said.
“If I can’t kill him, he still wins,” he said. “He doesn’t forgive and forget, Hilde.”
I smiled. “Who says you can’t kill him?”
“I can’t,” he whispered. “I just can’t. So he’s still got me. He can still—“
Cal cut himself off with an anguished noise and punched the mattress, still weak. His shoulders trembled and he held in a hiccupping sob. I slipped off of my bed and sat on the edge of his, hands in my lap. I understood being trapped under a master who held so much power it was nearly impossible to see a way to escape him, but I also thought it likely that, one day, Cal would find the strength to win. He had to grow into it, like any young person.
I reached out a tentative hand. He didn’t pull away when I touched his back, so I rubbed smooth circles over his spine as he wept. I, however, jumped when he grabbed me around the waist and burrowed close. I moved my hand to his hair and held him. His skin was burning hot under my fingers, feverish, alive. I must have gotten the job as his partner or he was still inebriated, because the man I’d met four days ago didn’t seem like the type to let anyone see him cry—or perhaps I had misjudged him, and I had more to learn.
“I need a shower,” he rasped after a long moment of quiet shivering.
“You do smell,” I said.
He snorted and sat back, avoiding my gaze. “How did you get us out?”
“You wondered what my ability was,” I said. He nodded. “I was a gifted psychic when I was alive. I had an affinity for all dead things. When I died, it intensified.”
“So you, what, mind-control other vampires?” he asked.
“In a word,” I said. “Yes.”
“Holy shit,” he said. A moment passed in silence. He touched the bandage again, pushing down on it, and winced. “So, I don't remember this. Was it—you? Or…"
He was putting a brave face on being unsure who had touched him, who had fed from his body, but he was so obviously unnerved. His attempt at a nonchalant smile was more of a grimace.
“It was me. They locked me in a box for three days,” I said as lightly as I could, which was not very. “If I hadn’t fed, I would have been too weak to capture the master, and we would have died there. I’m—sorry.”
“Fuck,” he said again, laughing in a burst of relief, and collapsed onto the bed like his strings had been cut. “I don’t care, what’s a little blood between friends when you save my ass like that?”
“Thank you,” I said. “I need to prepare for morning.”
He let the silence go on as I moved around the room, readying myself for the dawn, and then said, “Hey, Hilde.”
“Yes?” I murmured.
“Want to be my partner?”
“Of course,” I said. I walked back to the bed. “But I expect you’ll try to rescue me, next time.”
“You don’t seem like the kind of woman who needs a lot of rescuing,” he said, voice low. His eyes were still almost all pupil. Sudden tension, and the aftertaste of his blood in my mouth, made my breathing stutter and stop. When he spoke again, it was a whisper—“Honestly, I don't think I can get up again, so if you want to do this you better lean down.”
I held in a laugh and bent at the waist, balancing above his prone form with one hand beside his head. He waited until the last moment to close his eyes. I pressed the smallest of kisses to his mouth, a thank-you even if it never led to anything else, and rested my forehead against his for a split second. Dawn pushed heavy outside. I squeezed his shoulder and returned to my own bed, the safe darkness of my sleeping bag. I caught a last glance at him as I closed the zipper, our eyes meeting briefly. His held a hint of flame.
Copyright 2011 by Brit Mandelo
The Writ of Years, by Brit Mandelo
Few things can be as terrible as to get your heart’s desire.
There was once a quill that could not be held by any hand, or so the tale generally began. Some versions gave the quill to a wizard, and some to a peasant, and some to a prince. The first line was the only reliable bit of the story, wherever it appeared—that, and the endings, which tended toward gruesome wi
th some variance in execution. The bits in between were a hodgepodge, wildly different from variation to variation, century to century, dialect to dialect.
I had spent a big chunk of my life reading stories and writing stories, but I wasn’t a folklorist by any stretch. Still, the study of this one particular tale had become paramount. I needed to know.
I was digging through an estate sale in a creaky old bastard of a plantation home when I found the box. The cellar was cold and the air tasted of soil and dust; my rolled-up sleeves were smudged grey with a muddled mixture of the two. I was on my knees, flashlight in one hand, picking through a wood crate full of classic but ill-packed stationery items, mouse-nibbled envelopes, and rusty penknives. None of the lot was salvageable. Footsteps treaded over my head. I was the only one mad enough to tromp down into the cellar with only an electric torch to light the way, but it also meant that I would be the first to find anything good.
The box was unexpected under my fingertips, a shock of lacquered wood smooth and slick. I paused and fumbled it out from underneath the detritus. Black that caught and reflected the beam of the flashlight, with silver filigree around the edges and a tiny keyhole that looked like it would take nothing larger than a pin—just about the right length for a larger size of pen, or a quill. I fought a grin. I had never encountered a dull secret inside such a pretty treasure chest. I was certain it would be the best find of my day, in addition to a pile of books I’d put aside from the library.
I was fond of books and pens and quills, because I wrote. Or, at some nebulous point before, I had written. I had written plenty, and well enough, or so people would have me believe. Then the poison had settled in, like a spider bite, a small irritable bump on otherwise healthy, hale flesh, and just like the worst kind, it had spread. The days rolled into weeks, the weeks grew into months, and the months hadn’t stopped slipping by. If it had been a real bite, I would have lost a limb already, or died. But it wasn’t. That sloshing lake of bile was all in my head, and there had to be some way of shrinking it.
So, I brought the box upstairs and bought it with the stack of old occult texts I’d put aside—because I was still fond of that particular sort of horror story where the luckless protagonist stumbles onto something eldritch, and I thought that with a little research, a little prodding, maybe, maybe. Maybe I wouldn’t waste the next three-hour date with my desk and a blank screen staring at an accusatory cursor, a blinking metronome to measure the pulse of my failure. The irony was ripe, rich like a peach about to tip over the cusp into rot.
I admit that I was drunk during the waning hours of that night, the slow, comfortable sort of drunk that follows an evening of steady consumption—not too much, not too little. The tick of the clock kept me company, whisking its way methodically past the first numeral, then the second, and finally the third. I watched lamplight glitter through the tumbled tower of ice blocks inside my glass, turned burnished gold through the whiskey I’d left unfinished. Sleep, despite my lassitude, remained distant. The lacquered box sat on my desk across the room, half-swathed in shadow. I wriggled my toes against the softness of my reading chair and sat up, unfolding my legs from beneath me. The rush of blood through my calves tingled. My first step was more a stagger, but I straightened and paced across the room. The carpet was chilly under my feet.
I put the glass on the desk, running my thumb absently around the damp rim where my lips had rested. The pen-case, because that was what it had to be, didn’t gleam in the dimness—it seemed instead to draw in the dark. I picked it up with clumsy hands, fingertips numb. Standing had increased the rush of blood to my head, inducing a careless dizziness. I pressed my thumb to the delicate latch and it gave with a click; no locking mechanism, after all. The lid gaped the slightest fraction. Opening it took nothing more than the touch of a finger.
Inside, nestled in a bed of grey, shredded fabric—passing strange, that it wasn’t crushed velvet or something delicate—lay a pen, as I’d hoped. The nib was blackened with the remnants of old ink and the shaft was pearlescent ebony, thick like the pinion of a vulture with the sheen of an oil-slick.
I became suddenly aware of my shaking hands, the dullness of sensation from my fingers, the tilting of the floor. My knee banged the desk as I bent forward against the hard wood, a pain less sharp than it would be in the morning, and I picked up the tumbler again. The ice clinked as I tipped it back for another swallow, hot and cold down my throat. The damp chill of the glass pressed to my temple was a welcome relief. I sat the quill-box down and moved to pick up the pen.
In the sharp shock of agony and the tumult of my reaction, addled and exhausted, I lost track of the glass. It shattered at my feet with an explosion like a roadside bomb, shards flying under the desk, sticking in the carpet like tiny knives. The smallness of my cry was in comparison like the whisper of a ghost. I stumbled away and the bite of glass into my feet felt like nothing more than cold, at least for a moment. Falling on my ass hurt less, and the shock of hot tears on my face more.
The hand I held to my chest was bleeding from a jagged rip down my index finger. The flaps of skin gaped like the box had a moment before, and I rolled on my side, gasping against the carpet. I fled in degrees, though the urge to run was overwhelming: first, picking the glass out of the soles of my feet, less than I’d thought I would find; and second, finding my balance again to shamble out into the pitch-black hall.
In the morning, I cleaned the bloody footprints and vacuumed the glass out of the carpet. The finger needed three stitches, which the ER gave me.
I had been drinking. I couldn’t be sure of my memory. All the same, I closed the lacquered box and put it away in the bottom drawer of the monstrous desk, where I was sure to forget it.
The problem with me—and with most people in my profession, I would guess—is innate, idiot curiosity. Faced with haze-edged recollections of the incident with the pen and an empty afternoon to fill, I inevitably couldn’t resist. A writer with a cursed pen; really, it was perfect. The odds were that the whole thing was a mistaken impression brought on by the majority of a fifth of medium-cheap whiskey and unshakeable insomnia, but there was a chance, and that chance was plenty motivating.
Maybe I would write it out, if the story was worth a damn, I remember thinking—a touch of bitterness to it, and more than a splash of loathing. That deep-rooted terror and its attendant keening panic were what drove the curiosity, in the end: the hope that no matter what it cost me, it would be worthwhile if the sacrifice meant a fucking story. Those wretched protagonists didn’t enter my head for a second, and that was what made it idiot curiosity. Desperation made me blind—desperate not to disappoint friends and colleagues, desperate not to disappoint myself, desperate not to have my career collapse on itself like a dying star.
I sat in the office chair, tipping it back and forth with wheezy creaks for a moment before I slid the bottom drawer open. I daintily picked the box out of the clutter and put it square in the center of the desk. Daylight made the whole situation less imposing, the way it tends to. Coming through the picture windows, the brightness of the spring sun invaded every nook and cranny of the shelves, my imposing desk, and the now-stained carpet.
The stain brought a twinge of guilt, but no more than going out first thing in the morning to buy a replacement for the fifth I’d mostly finished on the night with the broken glass. There were things in my life I didn’t care to look too closely at.
The lacquer had a definite gleam in the bright light, less sinister by half. The silver filigree was pretty. Another press at the clasp opened the latch and I folded back the lid on its smooth hinges. The pen was unchanged, but for a spot of blood—my blood—dried on the quill, marring the wet-looking sheen. I tilted the box on the desk, careful to touch only the edges, and the pen rolled forward in its nest of scrap cloth. The sheen moved with it, like liquid, catching the light to glisten eerily. I tipped the pen out of the case; it clattered to the desktop and lay inert. For a long moment I stared, feeling
ridiculous but unwilling to touch it. The throb of my sutured finger inside its bandages and splint was reminder enough.
Using another pen from the desk, a regular one, I prodded at the quill. Nothing happened. Again, this time rolling it along the desk, and still nothing; I dropped the cheap Bic into the mug I used to keep them corralled and flattened both of my palms against my thighs. The wounded finger ached, a constant pressure. With a deep breath to fortify me I inched one hand across the wood of the desk, eyes on the oily polish of the quill. I extended my middle finger—why not keep the injuries all to one hand, and the puerile comedy of it appealed to me—and tapped it against the blunt end of the quill.
I registered the brief pain of a sting with what felt like a dropped jaw, but was just a slight parting of dry lips. I drew my finger back. A bead of blood welled on the tip, a small bud of ruby liquid. It hurt no more than having a sample taken at the doctor’s, but it shook me. A cold sweat prickled up my spine, followed by a wave of nausea. I used the Bic to scoop the shining pen back into its case and snapped it safely shut. As the shivers started, I shoved my chair back and fled the office. The daylight wasn’t bright enough after that little test. A cursed pen—really. I was less pleased and more disturbed than I’d thought I would be, but still, underneath it all, intrigued. Curses, after all, were meant to protect their object; what would the quill do, if I could circumvent the bloodletting to use it?
For the third time, as if it would stick had I heard it then: idiot goddamned curiosity.
The librarians of special collections knew a choice kind of magic, or at least had the skills to cover for it. Within three days of sending them a haphazardly worded email asking about cursed writing implements in stories, I was striding down the main hall of the library. It was cold and devoid of students; late spring, after the semester had ended and the summer had yet to begin, was a dull time for a university campus. I wouldn’t be teaching during the summer. Years past, I’d used it to draft novels, a stolen golden set of months to scribble and build. This one would be the same as the last, I suspected, unless the pen story produced something: dull, flavored with fatigue and restlessness in equal measures, avoiding the calls of agent and friends alike.
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 475
