Love Potion: A Valentine's Day Charity Anthology

by Graceley Knox

The thick brush fell away, and Tassen halted at the edge of a ditch. He removed his hat, dragged a hand down his chin, and crouched to sweep aside a layer of dried palm fronds, exposing something smooth and white. He flicked more leaves away. The smooth white thing was curved and hollow, large enough to fit in a hand.

  “Is that…” An eye socket?

  I scanned the edges of the ditch. Other bone-white objects protruded from the earth. The more I noticed, the more appeared, sprouting from the soil like mushrooms. The entire ground was scattered with bone.

  This wasn’t a ditch. It was a mass grave.

  “They’re old?” It seemed like a reasonable question. The bones had been picked clean. Old bones meant whatever had killed these people was long gone. “Maybe they were stranded here…” And dug themselves a mass grave?

  Tassen straightened. “Maybe.” He sounded as convinced as I was.

  “We’re leaving on the high tide, right?”

  He turned and hesitated, unspoken words holding him back. “This island ain’t on my map.”

  That look in his eyes, I’d seen it when I told him magic was real and I was neck deep in it. We’d both seen nightmares come to life and watched magic twist its victims into monsters.

  I sank my hand into my pocket and touched the blade. I might not be well traveled—this was the farthest I’d been from Brea in my entire life—but I knew not to ignore the icy shiver running through my veins. “We need to get the Lady Jane afloat before nightfall.”

  Blue

  The sisters observed my return to the Deep. The tips of their luminescent fins glowed as bright as their sharp eyes, lighting up the dark. Farther into the Deep, I tasted the dance of power and felt the excitement flow through my veins like an electric current. We all felt the lure pulling us tight, pulling us together, driving our hearts to race and teeth to grit. The Night of Bleeding Hearts would soon be upon us, and like all those who observed as I passed them, I’d rise from the dusk-blushed waves, at the mercy of the yearly song, and those men would fall as surely as all the men before them had fallen. Their songs would join ours below the waves for eternity.

  “Luine?” The cave I’d entered glowed around me. Multicolored polyps, their hundreds of fingers reaching, waved and then darted inside their tubes as my passing stirred the water. “Luine…” I called. “I must speak with you.”

  “Here.”

  I turned a bend, and Luine’s glow bloomed ahead. My heart seized at the sight of her, as it always did this close to one so blessed by Mother Ocean. Luine’s scales shimmered from gold to blue to green, and clasped in her hand, the coral trident glowed too. Hair, so green, fanned out in braided strands. Pearls glittered through her locks.

  “Ah, Blue, you have come at the right time… This one…” She lowered her hand and stroked the chin of my sister, Syriene before her. The siren’s scales had dulled, her fins lay in tatters, limp and useless against her tail.

  “Luine, what is this?” I asked.

  Luine smiled, showing her viciously pointed teeth. “Syriene here… poor, misguided Syriene…” She gripped my sister’s chin and lifted her face. “Her spirit is weak, for she believes we need not kill to glean the songs of men.”

  The thought alone had me recoiling in alarm. I circled around to drift beside Luine. Syriene’s eyes flicked over me, full of strength and defiance.

  “Remind her for me, Blue,” Luine suggested, “why mother Ocean has gifted us this Night.”

  “Syriene…” I said. “You know, stop this madness. The Night is almost upon us.”

  “She was overheard doubting Mother’s way. I cannot allow such indiscretions on this Night, of all nights.”

  “Their songs are their own!” Syriene shrieked.

  Syriene—my most trusted sister—looked at me as though she did not know me. But that could not be. For decades, we had hunted together as one. Fearless and ruthless, Syriene was the sister I always chose to take deeper into Mother’s embrace, where the ocean was wild and free, where we lured and sang their crews into our arms. Together, we had collected the songs of a thousand men. Why was she speaking these words?

  “What brought on this nonsense, sister?” I asked.

  “You cannot see!” Syriene smiled, and her fluttering gaze once more settled lightly on Luine. “She blinds us—”

  The trident’s prongs pierced Syriene’s chest and thrust out her back. Blood bloomed in a cloud around her twitching form.

  Luine’s smile shone as the light snuffed out of Syriene’s gaze.

  This could not be real?

  Luine jerked the trident free, and Syriene drifted backward, the water gently laying her down down, and in her final moments, she rolled her eyes to me. A whisper fell from her lips.

  Luine had already turned away, blood trailing from the trident in her hand. “You were searching for me, Blue? What do you want? I have preparations to make.”

  I tasted my sister’s blood on my lips. Bitter and cold. It should not have been like this. My sister’s whispered words rang inside my mind—too loud to ignore. I had trusted her above all others. But those words could not be hers. Something must have happened to turn her away from our beliefs. And I would discover what.

  “The humans are readying their vessel,” I said, thoughts wandering. “They gather on the beach among flame.” My voice sounded different, as though another were speaking. Syriene’s whisper rang on and on in my mind, undermining my beliefs while also driving me to find answers. “They are expecting us.”

  “Let them prepare,“ Luine said dismissively. “The net is closing. It will make little difference. Was that all, Blue?” She faced me again and curled her long fingers around the trident’s shaft. Blood still trailed from its prongs. Mother Ocean would take Syriene’s body and blood, and she would become a part of us all once more.

  I bowed my head. “I will see you in the surf, sister.”

  Luine bowed hers in return.

  I left the cavern, but still Syriene’s whisper sailed through my thoughts. Their song was their own. But more than that, with her dying breath, she had told me, “Mother Ocean weeps for them.”

  Curtis Vance

  Molly stared out to sea where the sun bled along the horizon. The warm orange light sparked in her red hair, but that golden light would soon fade behind rolling dark clouds. A cool wind whispered over us. She hugged herself for warmth. A good man would have offered her his coat, but then I’d be cold. Besides, she would bark at me should I try to comfort her.

  “Do you know what day it is, Master Vance?”

  Hopefully not my last.

  On the ship, I’d told her to stop calling me Master, but Molly was a creature of habit. As the head housekeeper for a Brean lord, she’d taken to me like a cat takes to a rodent in its kitchen and had threatened to cut off certain extremities should any of her lord’s silverware go missing. We were of the same age, early twenties, but she had the spirit of someone much older. Our relationship had softened since we’d boarded the ship, though I still caught her watching me with suspicion. I was used to drifting around whorehouses, bars and inns, purloining a few gems from well-doers or attending the occasional party by way of an open loft. Molly had gotten the measure of me the moment she’d found me standing on her lord’s doorstep.

  On the beach behind us, the crew heaved on ropes as thick as my forearms and bellowed heave-ho, but though they had felled trees and placed the stripped trunks under the Lady Jane’s hull, the rotund vessel was no closer to the water, and that same water had stubbornly refused to meet her hull. It was clear we were not getting off this beach by nightfall. Crewmen were piling more driftwood high on the campfire, building it into a roaring pyre. Tassen had ordered torches be made and staked around the camp. I figured he hoped to keep out more than the dark when night fell.

  “It is the Day of All Hearts.”

  I smiled at Molly. “The one night of the year when Agatha’s whores earn more than any Brean well-doer.”

  The low li
ght made Molly’s scowl all the more scathing. “There’s more to tonight than women and men spreading their legs for gems.”

  The whores had been like family after the workhouse, after I’d killed my own. Those memories were old, from another life, another Curtis Vance. I brushed them off. “I helped lighten their clients’ pockets a time or two. That was, of course, before I became a professional thief.”

  “Stealing for others does not make you a professional anything.”

  I gasped theatrically. “Come now, Molly. I thought we’d gotten over our differences?”

  “I’ll get over our differences when you return my cleaver.”

  “Why would I take your cleaver?” I chuckled.

  “Because you’d steal the hat from Tassen’s head if you thought you could get away with it.”

  My laugh brought a tick to her lips into a smile she tried and failed to hide. Molly did not believe I’d taken her cleaver, and she was not standing on the sand with me to pass the time. She needed the distraction, as did I. As a housekeeper, she’d gotten great at watching and listening. She’d seen me and Tassen return earlier, seen our faces, and she knew that whatever we’d discovered in the trees was not pleasant. But she hadn’t asked, and I silently thanked her for that. Whatever happened after the sun fell behind the horizon, I’d do my damnedest to keep her safe. Tassen was on his own. Underneath all that roughness, Molly had a good heart, and there were too few of those left in this world. At least too few that I’d seen, my heart of stone among them.

  “Tell me of the original meaning for the Day of All Hearts, then. We did not celebrate it… where I come from.”

  She likely knew where I came from, or suspected it. The walled city within a city, the Inner Circle. The High Guard had walled us in to protect everyone else… from us. That Inner Circle was gone now, as was much of Brea.

  “The pebbles are tokens of love. Did your whores not show you the painted pebbles? They must have received many. The pebbles come from the beaches around Brean, an ancient custom to do with safe passage across the ocean.”

  I recalled well-doers dumping gifts of silk-wrapped ocean pebbles in bowls. As the stones were worthless, I’d taken no interest in the Brean custom.

  “Did nobody ever give you a painted pebble?” she asked, something sly shining in her eyes. The breeze teased a flame-red curl across her forehead.

  “No.”

  “Ah, Master Vance, you cannot tell me a handsome man like you has never been given another’s heart?”

  Talk of hearts and love tugged at my smile, dragging it down. The recent unseen wound in my chest threatened to tear open. As I rubbed at its burn an echo of the same pain throbbed low in my back, where another permanent mark had been etched into my skin. “Truth be told, I’ve never gotten close enough to anyone for such things.” And that was the truth. My profession had seen to it, but more than that, love and I had never been happy bedfellows, and after Brea, after… Shaianna… Well, fate had made it clear: I was not meant for love. She is not for the likes of you, thief.

  You’ll make the wrong choice. Your kind always does.

  I lifted my head to the sky and puffed out the ache. Leaving Brea had been meant to banish those memories. So far, all leaving had done was galvanize them.

  “Oh, Vance.” Molly’s gaze softened.

  More hurt twisted inside. I smiled the worst of it off.

  She grumbled like she often did when she discovered some foolish thing I’d done. “You’re a cad, for sure, but it ain’t right.” She knelt, raked her fingers through the sand, and came up with a flat pebble. Straightening, she grabbed my hand, leaving me with no choice but to play along, and dumped the stone into my palm. Her warm hands folded my fingers around the pebble. “There, now all is right in the world.” The fading light warmed her smattering of freckles and colored her cheeks.

  “Molly,” I purred, “I didn’t know you cared.”

  Her eyes darkened to the same color as the stone. “A gentleman would say thank you, graciously.”

  My grin broadened. “I’ve never been one of those.” I dropped the pebble in my pocket. “But I’ll keep your pebble, all the same.”

  With a huff, she thundered back up the beach toward the torches and fire. She really was too easy to rattle. Sinking my hand back into my pocket, I gathered the pebble into my fist. The wind was picking up, and out at sea, those rolling clouds had smothered the setting sun. Darkness would soon be upon us and with it whatever monsters had claimed this island as their own.

  I followed Molly’s tracks to the campfire, collected a makeshift torch made of bent driftwood and an oil-soaked rag, and lit my makeshift torch from one marking the camp perimeter.

  “Any gunpowder we had was lost to the waves,” Tassen said at my shoulder, keeping his voice low. “We’re down to blades. Are you armed?”

  I had my dagger with its gem-studded handle and the knowledge that the sorceress’s mark on my lower back was either a blessing or a curse. I shot Tassen a raised eyebrow and the man shrugged, then peeled back his long coat to reveal an impressive array of daggers and short swords clipped to his belt and boots.

  “We don’t know what happened here,” he said, “but it’s always better to be prepared for the worst.”

  Torches spluttered against the wind. I lifted mine and scanned the tree line and rocks beyond our fire-touched perimeter.

  Tassen touched the brim of his hat with his forefinger. “Reckon I didn’t survive a wildfire, collapsing tombs, rabid mages and one world-ending dragon just to die on a nameless beach with you, Vance.”

  As I should have died back in Brea, every breath I took was a gift. Maybe the mark on my back was the only thing keeping me alive, or maybe it was killing me slowly. I didn’t know. My world had been turned upside down in more ways than one. These days, I was certain of nothing, not even myself.

  “You hear that?” Tassen’s dark eyes narrowed toward the rocks.

  I listened. Waves hissed against the shore. Fire crackled. “No…”

  He stepped forward. “You can’t hear it?” Another step. “It’s right there…”

  “No, nothing. Tassen…?”

  Another step. And another. He walked through the perimeter of glowing torches.

  “Tassen, hey…” What was the fool doing? I threw a glance behind me. Others milled around, none paying us attention. By the time I turned to face Tassen again, he was far outside the torchlight, his outline black on black. “Tassen, wait!” I started after him. “You damn fool, stay inside the torches.”

  He stomped on, head up, as though nothing in the night could touch him.

  “Tassen, dammit, man, what are you doing?”

  One foot in front of the other, and even when the sand tried to swallow his boots, he continued, eyes fiercely locked on the rocks.

  The firelight was far behind us, a feint glow at the far end of the beach. Still, the captain glared ahead.

  This was madness.

  I grabbed his arm. “Stop.”

  He shook me off, lips curling in a sneer.

  Planting my boots in the sand, I lifted the torch and scanned the rocks ahead. The waves hissed and snarled louder where they lapped and beat at the shore, drowning out all other sound. But still Tassen marched. I might not know him well, but he was not the type to abandon all sense for the sake of curiosity. He was no fool. Something had a hold on him. Something unseen. Perhaps the same thing that had killed those people in that grave.

  Switching the torch to my left hand, I pulled the jeweled dagger from my pocket. Its naked blade glinted. Firelight winked in the gem-studded handle, and something inside me snatched at my breath and squeezed my heart into stone. I knew anxiety—I’d lived with it every night in the workhouse, listening to the locks clunk and keys rattle—but this was something else, something not me. The sorceress’s mark on my back itched, and my hand tingled around the dagger handle. I could wonder what it meant when Tassen wasn’t about to disappear behind the rocks.
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  He was knee-high in the surf and wading deeper as I hurried to catch up with him. Flickering torchlight washed over wet rocks, sand and shallow surf, and sparked in the eyes of something my mind couldn’t comprehend. A woman, but not a woman. She rose from the surf, her long dark hair woven with strings of green flora. Her skin was a shimmering green, and a haunting song hummed from her parted lips, one that tried to pour in through my ears and wrap around my wandering thoughts. But her song wasn’t meant for me. Her eyes were on Tassen, and the fool kept walking toward her open arms.

  I lunged into the shallow water and thrust the torch at the beastly thing. “Away!”

  Her slim, sloping eyes flicked to me. Her lips peeled back, revealing needled-sharp teeth and a predatory smile. And then she laughed, and the sound was like a living, breathing thing. The pealing laughter circled me, looped tighter, and squeezed around me, as tight and unyielding as rope.

  Can’t.

  Breathe.

  I had seconds, no more, and no sorceress here to save me, no dragon to catch me, no Shaianna to steer fate away. For the first time in what felt like forever, my fate was my own.

  The jeweled dagger sang in my hand like the creature with eyes cutting into mine. I didn’t think, just lunged. Impossibly, I was closer than I’d been a blink before, and the blade sank in between the creature’s chest scales. Her song cut off, and she blinked once, as though torn from a strange dream to find herself pressed close against a man, his dagger in her heart. Briefly, it wasn’t this creature I saw, but another with eyes full of wonder and laughter, my dagger thrust into her heart too.

  “Vance, get back!”

  Tassen’s hand fell to my shoulder, and he hauled me behind him. He fumbled with his short sword and yanked it free, but the creature had collapsed in the surf, her empty arms falling open. As the waves took her away, a scaled tail—unbelievably smooth and rimmed with flowing fins as thin as silk—rose to the surface. It began at her hips and flowed downward, taking the place of any legs.

  I wouldn’t have believed my eyes if I hadn’t had the torchlight to see by, and even then, my mind tore at the image to remake it into something more probable. Perhaps she wore a gown, a costume of sorts. But that did not account for her voice—that terrible, crushing voice. Or the teeth—those rows of sharp, skin-tearing teeth. Or the eyes, wide and sharp and soulless.