Fantasy Magazine Issue 41, August 2010

Table of Contents

Where Shadows Meet Light by Rachel Swirsky (fiction) The Wizard’s Calico Daughter by Eilis O'Neal (fiction) And the Blood of Dead Gods will Mark the Score by Gary Kloster (fiction) Stem, Stone, and Bone by Deb Taber (fiction)

Author Spotlight: Rachel Swirsky Author Spotlight: Eilis O’Neal Author Spotlight: Gary Kloster Author Spotlight: Deb Taber

About the Editor

© 2010 Fantasy Magazine www.fantasy-magazine.com Where Shadows Meet Light Rachel Swirsky

Princess Diana’s ghost emerges at night. There are other ghosts, presumably, but she doesn’t see them. She only sees the living. At first she haunted Charles and Harry and William, but eventually it grew too painful to think about her life. She even grew tired of the longtime pleasure she’d taken from blowing into Elizabeth’s ear while she slept, making the old woman’s dreams as disturbed and uncomfortable as she had made Diana’s life. She went overseas to America where she’d once visited the White House and danced with John Travolta in a midnight blue velvet gown that sold at auction for a hundred thousand pounds. This time, she traveled between ordinary houses, some white and others beige and mint and yellow. It was easy to find people she could haunt there, people who owned memorabilia with her face on it, but whose distance from the British Isles meant they didn’t know every detail of her reported life, giving her enough room to dwell and still keep her secrets. After all these years, the memorabilia remained strange. Coins commemorating her marriage to Charles. Serving bowls and sugar jugs and butter dishes. Rhinestone-rimmed plates. Dolls with plastic distortions of her smile, signed photographs, mint tins, magazine clippings. One family even owned Princess Diana paper dolls with all her famous dresses carefully cut out in miniature, abandoned in the toy box of some grown child who no longer played at being royalty. In a Florida condominium, she came upon a man whose dearest wish was to be her. She felt his desire hot in his mind when she drew forth from the shadows in his bedroom while he slept. It burned clearly through his dreams, a fervent call: to be Diana. She lingered. At first she assumed he was one of those men who want to be women, but after a few nights, she realized she was wrong. He wanted froth and silk and glamour, things that were feminine, but not necessarily female. He wanted the kind of dazzle that drew the heir to the throne. He wanted to wear spangled red silk chiffon and emerald georgette and white lace embroidered with silk flowers and sequins. He wanted photographers to capture his every angle. He wanted crowds to sigh when he crossed to the other side of the street. He wanted a wedding with thirty-five hundred guests and seven hundred and fifty million more people watching. He even owned the paper dolls—not cut out, but displayed in a cabinet above the dishes, along with a hundred other images of Diana’s face. Diana couldn’t observe him during the day—in the morning, she evaporated with the sunlight—but Jeffrey was a restless sleeper. When he woke at night, Diana followed him through the dark hallways as he paced the house. He was a fragile-looking man with white hair interspersed among the blond. He wore black silk pajamas with red and gold faux-Chinese embroidery, the jacket done up with frogging. White tabi socks warmed his feet. He was too chic for slippers. Jeffrey sat at the wicker table in the atrium and rested his head in his hands, staring morosely at the shadows that the palm fronds cast on the wall. Diana settled behind him, integrating with the shadows he cast on the chair, imagining she was tangible enough to comfort him. She’d comforted homeless children, landmine victims, lepers. She’d shaken hands with an AIDS patient, skin on skin, even when her advisers told her to wear rubber gloves. Now there was no skin on skin, no way to pat Jeffrey’s shoulder and say in the language of touch, whatever’s wrong, you’ll be all right. His sad blue eyes looked dusky beneath his pale brows. Easy lines folded around his frown, but she’d seen other lines shape themselves around his smile, suggesting that he spent most of his life doing one or the other. His face was easy to decipher, but his mind was a mystery— everything but the core of need that called her name. Why do you want to be me? she wanted to ask. Don’t you see what happened when I was me? After dark one night, Jeffrey’s husband came home late with a box wrapped in glittering paper. “Ooh!” Jeffrey exclaimed, coming to accept it. “Ray! You shouldn’t have!” Something in his high-pitched excitement sounded false, but Diana couldn’t discern what. “Happy birthday,” Ray said, extending the box. Jeffrey pushed his hands away with a gesture that was a touch too hard to be playful. “Sit,” said Jeffrey, pointing to the couch. “I’ll make drinks.” Ray settled, shifting a bamboo-print cushion out of his way. Diana wasn’t sure whether he was actually older than Jeffrey, but he looked older, fine wrinkles etching the bags under his eyes. He looked a little fat and a little tired in a pull-over and grey wool slacks. The latter were wrinkled, black and blue ink stains marring the pockets. Bustling behind the curve of the bar, Jeffrey was immaculate in white pants and a crisply ironed button- down patterned with navy diamonds. He held the bottle almost horizontally as he poured. He looked up at Ray over the stream of alcohol and flashed him a strained smile. He returned with two shot glasses, one with ice and one without. He handed the first to Ray and stood aside while he drank. He held out his hand for the empty glass. “Let me get you another one.” “I’m good,” said Ray, pushing past him to set the glass on a coaster. “Open, open.” The edges of Jeffrey’s smile vanished. He set his full glass next to Ray’s empty one and took the present. Beneath the glittering green paper, there was a plum velvet box. Inside the velvet box, there were two tickets. “To the national tour of Forty-Second Street,” said Ray. “Front row, center. Look at the date.” Stiffly, Jeffrey held up one of the tickets to the light. “Day after tomorrow.” “You can turn forty-nine at Forty-Second Street.” “Clever,” murmured Jeffrey, staring at the ticket. He turned it back and forth in the light, glossy paper shining, and then replaced it beside its twin. He traded the box for his drink and knocked it back. Ray frowned. “I thought you liked Forty-Second Street.” “I do.” “Would you rather go to another show? The college is doing Secret Garden.” “I like Forty-Second Street.” “I don’t get what’s wrong.” Jeffrey ran his fingers through his hair, ruining his careful styling. When he looked up at Ray again, he was smiling gently. “I’m just tired.” Diana watched while they sat, chatting, for another hour. Ray detailed an office farce centering on conflicting operating systems while Jeffrey poured himself another shot and then a third. Afterward, they ate stir-fried vegetables over brown rice, Jeffrey keeping their glasses full of citrus wine. Was that how other peoples’ marriages fell apart? Marriages that were between two people, without involving press and protocol and a mother-in-law who wields a sceptre? Afterward, Jeffrey went into the bathroom for a long time. Diana hid in the wall, listening to him weep. When he emerged at last, he went into the bedroom, checking to make sure Ray was asleep before he slipped between the sheets. Diana had come because she was intrigued by his desire. Now she found herself drawn by his sadness. Voyeurism diverted her from the griefs of her own life. These had only magnified after death. Sometimes she thought ghosts weren’t whole souls, only the saddest pieces. People had asked so much of her. She’d tried to give them what they wanted. She prayed, and paced, and purged. Still there were always more needy hands, more photographers, more commemorative plates rimmed with rhinestones. The next night, Jeffrey feigned illness and went to bed early, switching off the lamp to lie in pitch dark. He pretended to be asleep when Ray came in, lying still while he changed into his pajamas and slipped into bed. The second night, they dressed in single-breasted black wool tuxedos with handkerchiefs in the pockets. Jeffrey sighed over Ray, who continued to look disheveled no matter how many times Jeffrey straightened his jacket. They rode to the theater in a limousine. Diana coalesced in the leather seats. Ray poured champagne. They clinked, twining their arms to sip from each other’s glasses. At first Jeffrey looked anxious, but soon the bubbly began working. He laughed loudly and kept extending his empty glass. “What the hell,” said Ray, opening a second bottle. “This is what we got a chauffeur for.” Jeffrey was flushed when they arrived. Ray stopped to tip the driver while Jeffrey grinned at the crowd of smokers grabbing their last cigarettes before the performance. They went through gold-edged doors into the sweeping lobby where more theatergoers lingered, most dressed as if attending church, in floral-print dresses and polo shirts and slacks. Heads turned at tuxedos. Ray took his arm and led Jeffrey, regally, down to the usher who took their ticket. Inside the theater, Jeffrey squeezed Ray’s hand as his eyes darted between gold cornices. They made their way down a row of red velvet seats, Diana hiding in the shadows between arm rests. The theater thrummed with voices. Ray flipped through his program, glossy sheets rustling. Jeffrey sat on the edge of his seat, staring at the curtain. The theater went dark. The audience fell silent as the overture began, brasses taking up a merry beat. “Happy forty-nine,” Ray whispered in Jeffrey’s ear. Jeffrey batted him away, leaning toward the music. Silently, Diana counted years. Yes, she’d have been forty-nine, too. Her ethereal form thrummed with jealousy. The play began. Diana watched Jeffrey’s face instead of the show. His enraptured expression was more compelling than any performance Diana remembered. Still tipsy, he leaned in at the dramatic moments, laughing more loudly than he should when someone told a joke, and gasping when something went wrong. He tapped his hand silently against his armrest in time with the dancers’ heels clicking across the stage. He applauded with all his strength, almost propelling himself out of his seat. When Diana’s curiosity grew overpowering, she flickered into the shadows cast by the actors to watch the show up close. It seemed ordinary—ersatz glitz on over- worked actors, bright paint on well-worn sets. Afterward, as Jeffrey and Ray stood outside waiting for the limo to return, their tuxedo jackets draped over their arms, Jeffrey began to weep. Passersby turned to look, without interrupting their strides. Ray took Jeffrey by the shoulders and turned him so they faced each other squarely. “What is it?” he asked. “Can you tell me?” “I just wish I,” Jeffrey began. A sob caught in his throat. “I could have been, if I’d been someone else, I could have—” He stopped, sobs coming harder. “The world just wasn’t made for you,” Ray said, wrapping his arms around his husband. The world had made Diana think it was made for her once. Seven hundred and fifty million people watched her walk down the aisle in her puff ball meringue dress with its romantically ruffled neckline and twenty-five foot train. She’d been adorned by lace and sequins, hand- stitched embroidery and ten thousand pearls. The night before, she’d been crying, too. Was the world made for anyone? She followed them back into the shadows of their room. They switched on their bedside lamps and she swam under the bed to respect their privacy. It sounded like love. When the lamps were off again, Diana lifted back into the shadowed drapery of their quilt. Ray was asleep. Jeffrey stared at the ceiling, his eyes dry, his face sallow. “I’m happy,” he whispered into the nothing. You should be, Diana couldn’t say. “I have a good life. A good house. Good health. A good husband. I’m lucky and loved.” You are, Diana couldn’t say. “I’m forty-nine years old.” Diana could not say that she would never be forty- nine years old. “I’m never going to be the duck that turns into the swan. My foot will never fit the slipper. It’s never going to be all lights and cameras. It’s never going to be all action. No one is ever going to care who I am. It’s never going to happen. Not for me.” It had happened for her. The swan, the dress, the lights, and oh yes, the cameras. It wasn’t what she wanted. It wasn’t what anyone wanted, not really. She wished she could trade him—a forty-ninth birthday and a husband who wasn’t Charles—it seemed appealing. But then would she want that either? A life of wanting to be wanted and never being seen? Of desiring glamour and receiving anonymity? A little of each then. If only they could mingle, the way shadows bleed into one another, the way ghosts bleed into shadows. But he is neither ghost nor shadow. Not yet. He stares at the ceiling. His eyelids drift down. A blink, and then a second. He will fall asleep soon. Diana swims away.

Rachel Swirsky’s short stories have appeared in a wide range of magazines and anthologies, and been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Locus Award, and the Sturgeon Award. Her first collection, a slim volume of feminist poetry and stories called Through the Drowsy Dark, is available through Aqueduct Press. Visit her website, rachelswirsky.com. The Wizard’s Calico Daughter Eilis O'Neal

Her father was a wizard, but nobody knew about that, just like nobody knew about the calico girl herself, or the goings-on in the gray gabled house where they lived. In fact, if any of the neighbors mentioned the house at all, it was only to say things like, “Didn’t the Smiths move out a few weeks ago?” or “I think old Mr. Jones is still puttering around in there” or “It’s rented out, isn’t it? By that couple from out of state?” The neighborhood cats knew, of course, but they weren’t telling. The wizard was quite old (though he didn’t look it), and he had spent a great many years mastering things like the names of all the stars, and where to find the soul inside a person’s chest, and how many decades one could travel back with a single spell. One day, he had decided he wanted a daughter, and gone about making one. (Whether it was in the usual way or not, she didn’t know.) The girl’s name was Anya. Was it her mother’s name? she sometimes asked. The wizard, her father, would never say. In fact, he sometimes said that she wasn’t his at all, and that she had no mother, and he had just taken her in out of pity when the cat birthed her. Sometimes he laughed then, to show that he was joking, and sometimes he didn’t. The wizard’s calico daughter, Anya, was not a wizard. Oh, she could do magic; in fact, she often helped her father with his work. But she didn’t want to be a wizard, and her father didn’t want her to be one either. He loved her, but wizards are vain, especially the best ones, and he worried, a little, that if she tried she might become a better wizard than he was. But mostly, he just couldn’t bear the thought of her becoming a wizard and leaving him. Which she would, if she had been a wizard. Wizards are good at leaving, much more than they are at staying. There were rooms in the house, many more than you could see from the outside. There was a room of grass, where she could lie and feel the wind blow over her calico skin. There was a room where her words came out as music, and another where tiny green and purple lizards lived, each with its own tickling tongue of flame. There was a room where it was always the same day, though the hour changed. There was a room of books, all the books in the world, which was very large and also very small, because all of the books in the world are—in some ways —the same. There were other houses with rooms in the world (though none as fabulous as her father’s), she knew, but she had never seen any of them, because she had never left her house. She had lived in the gray gabled house all her life, and she only knew it was gray because her father told her so, and because she could see some of the paint if she craned her neck up and back while looking out of her window. For a long time, she didn’t mind. And then, when she turned sixteen, she did.

***

For her sixteenth birthday, Anya’s father gave her a room. She had a bedroom already, with her bed, two bookshelves of her own, a trunk of old toys she couldn’t bear to throw away, a little blue pillow for the cat, and four tall windows through which she could see out and no one could see in. The new room was blank, with nothing in it except the door, not even walls, so that she could do with it as she pleased. “It’s great,” she said when he showed her that morning. “Really, Dad. Thanks a lot.” She hugged him, inhaling the acrid, smoky smell that meant he had been working on a difficult spell. “Anything you want in it, just let me know,” he said. “A roomful of cats, or a beach, or the plains of Mars.” “A garden of singing flowers,” she said with a laugh. “Or last Wednesday, or a ballroom of ghostly partners.” “Anything,” he agreed. “I’ll think about it,” she said, and they closed the door, and went to breakfast. That night, her father went to bed early. He had spent most of the day locked in his workshop on the top floor of the house and had seemed distracted and tired during dinner, only perking up when presenting her with a chocolate cake large enough to feed them for several days, even if they had wanted to eat nothing else. Afterwards, she kissed him on the cheek and promised that tomorrow she would help monitor the parts of the spell that were finished, while he worked on the parts that still needed tinkering. Then he went off to bed, and Anya helped herself to another piece of cake. Before going to bed, Anya stood outside the door to the new room, at the spot where the day before there had been only blank wall. She wondered if, for someone looking at the house from the street, it looked bigger, or had a strange new wing sticking out where the garden used to be. Probably not, she decided, because her father, though he was a wizard and wizards sometimes forget about such details when creating grand and wondrous spells, was careful. Especially, she thought with a little sigh, about things that might make people outside the house notice it. Back in her bedroom, the cat lounged on her blue pillow. Anya reached down and stroked her head, so that her eyes narrowed and her whole calico body rumbled with purrs. Then, turning on a single lamp, Anya went over to the standing mirror in the corner and looked at herself. She didn’t look any different than she had yesterday, when she had glanced hurriedly in the mirror and yanked a comb through her hair, she thought as she studied herself. The corduroy pants and green shirt she had put on that morning. A thin, slight frame, with tiny hands and feet and small breasts. Short hair, mostly brown with glints of red and soft black, cut by herself into little spikes so that her ears showed. The tiny upturn at the end of her nose. Green eyes. The calico markings on her skin, fainter on her face. A splotch of cinnamon across one cheek, a chocolate smear across her forehead, a murky black area swirling from chin to ear, a lick of bronze near her nose. The skin was quite pale otherwise. If she had taken off her clothes, she would have seen the way the markings deepened and covered more area on her torso and back and limbs, growing lighter and sparser again as they neared her hands and feet. “I’m sixteen,” she said out loud to the girl in the mirror, then felt faintly stupid. The girl in the mirror’s mouth tightened, curling inward on one side, and then Anya threw herself down on her bed, huffing. What’s wrong with me? she thought. It was her birthday. Her father had given her her own room; she had done nothing all day except what she wanted to do; she had eaten chocolate cake until she felt a little sick. She should be happy. Rolling over, Anya stared out the window, which faced the front yard. As she watched, a boy came around the corner, heading past the house and down the street. Tall and lanky, he had red hair, hair like a wet fox, which she could make out because of the streetlight on the corner, and because darkness had never really made it difficult for her to see. He carried a backpack over his shoulder and a hard-sided case in his right hand. He shuffled a bit when he walked, and just as he stepped in front of her window, he stopped, and bent down to tie his shoe. Anya had tried, once, to open the windows in her bedroom. She had been eight, and it had snowed, deeper than any snow she had ever seen, and she had wanted to go outside and run through it, to see if it felt as soft as it looked. So she had tried to open the window so that she could crawl out of it, but it hadn’t budged, no matter how she pulled and pushed. Her father had found her, several hours later, with tears wetting the calico places on her cheeks. The windows had a spell on them, he had explained, just like everything else in the house, and they couldn’t be opened. Then he had taken her hand and they had gone to the room with the grass and the open sky, where he had made it snow for days. She knew the windows wouldn’t move. But it was her birthday, and she felt strange and out of sorts in her own skin, and her father had gone to bed early, exhausted from magic. Like a cat, like a suddenly desperate girl, she jumped off the bed in a flash, went over to window, and shoved upward with all her strength. Warm, wet spring air seeped into the room as Anya pushed her head out of the window. “Hello,” she called across the front lawn.

***

The boy’s name was Travis, and he was sixteen, too. He went to the high school five blocks away, the one Anya had never seen, and he played the trumpet in the school’s marching band. He also sat on the debate team and sometimes had bit parts in the school plays, which made him “a geek, really, but a proud one.” Anya smiled when he said that, because she had read about geeks in the room with all the books in the world, but she had never met one. “So, are you home-schooled?” Travis asked. He was standing in front of her window, his trumpet case on the ground near his feet. “I mean, I haven’t seen you around or anything. Or do you go to St. Bernard’s?” “I’m home-schooled,” Anya said. It wasn’t a lie, even if it wasn’t the truth. “I’ve never even been inside a real school.” “Not even for the SATs or anything?” He shook his head. “Wow.” “I know,” she said. “I didn’t used to mind. There’s so much to learn here, and my father’s a good teacher. But lately, I don’t know. . . I wish I could go to a real school, just for a while.” Travis shrugged. “It’s not that great. And I like school, more than most people. But I used to beg my mom to home-school me back in sixth grade—not a good year for me. It was pretty dumb, though. She’s a lawyer, so how was she supposed to home-school me?” He rolled his eyes self-deprecatingly, then glanced up at Anya as if to make sure she didn’t really think he was stupid. She didn’t. She could have watched him all night, just to see the way he blew out a breath when he got nervous or sometimes cracked a knuckle, like it hurt from so much trumpet playing. They weren’t beautiful movements, or magical, or even all that interesting. But she had never watched a person her own age make them, and they made her shiver. “Where do you live?” she asked. He jerked his head eastward. “About two blocks down. You hang a left and it’s the first corner house. The one with the green roof.” Anya nodded, though, of course, she hadn’t ever seen the green roof. “How long have you lived there?” “Since I was five. That’s what makes it so weird, me never seeing you. Did you just move here?” “I’ve always lived here,” Anya said. “Weird,” he repeated, then blushed a little, so that his face seemed a paler version of his hair. “Why—why’d you call to me, then?” Anya thought about several answers. Wizards didn’t lie, not with their words. She wasn’t a wizard, but she had magic, and lying tended to gum it up. But she wasn’t quite sure she knew the truth, not yet. “I got the window open,” she said. ***

The window stayed open. That night, after Travis left, Anya went to the hall cabinet and found a ruler, a normal wooden one, and wedged it on the sill so that the window couldn’t quite shut. She worried, the next day, that her father would notice that the magic on the window was compromised. But he was still working on his spell, which she helped him with, and so he was distracted, and he didn’t. Besides, the window wouldn’t open all the way, just enough for her to look out of it, so perhaps the spell on it didn’t feel any different to him. Travis didn’t visit every night, but he did visit a lot. He told her about school, and his friends, and going to Colorado every Thanksgiving to visit his grandparents. He practiced his speeches for debate, something Anya could help with, because she had read all the writings of orators like Caesar, and Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, and even some men and women who hadn’t been born yet. They talked about books, and time periods they wished they could have lived in (Travis picked the ’20s for the big bands and Anya picked Regency England for the clothes), and their pets. Travis had a large brown mutt with droopy hound dog eyes named Cervantes, whom he brought once and who seemed not to notice the spells around the yard, something the neighborhood cats always noticed. Anya tried to get the cat to come to window so that Travis could see her, but she only watched from her pillow, her eyes like marbles of fire, and curled her tongue in a yawn. Once, Travis asked, “So, what happened? With your face, I mean.” Then he blushed, eyes going wide, and blurted, “Sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. You don’t have to tell me.” Anya only shrugged. “No, it’s okay. I was born like this. My dad calls me his ‘calico daughter.’” Travis smiled, a little weakly, as if still embarrassed by himself, but then he stepped closer. “I like that. Like you’re part cat. Do you ever get an irresistible urge to chase birds?” And once, on another visit: “So, I was wondering if you’d want to go to a movie with me. There are some good ones coming out this weekend. . .” He had just come from band practice, a late one, and his trumpet case lay in the grass by his feet, just like it had on the night they had met. Anya stared at the windowsill. “I can’t.” “You can’t, or you don’t want to?” “I can’t.” Forehead wrinkled, he shook his head. “You know, I’ve kind of liked this whole weird way of meeting. It suits you, makes you more mysterious. But I really don’t get why you can’t ever come out.” She wanted to say, “Because my father is a wizard. Because the cat might have birthed me, and because of how people will look at me. Because there aren’t any doors out of my house.” But she didn’t say any of those things, and, after a while, Travis said goodbye, and she shut the window down to the ruler and went to bed.

***

Anya walked around the entire house, looking for doors. The cat followed her, though she tried not to let Anya see that she was following, and instead pretended a sudden need to chase invisible mice and to make sure that she had rubbed her scent on each and every piece of furniture. There were many doors, and she went through all of them, even the ones that she knew led to boring places like the first-floor bathroom. She walked for miles in the room of grass and wind, but she never found anything but more grass and a few flowers, so she turned back. She watched the lizards for an hour to see if they ever left their room, but they only gazed at her and flicked their flamey tongues. She ran her hands along the house’s walls in places where there were no doors, to see if any the walls were really doors and were just pretending to be walls. But they weren’t. She stood in her room and glared at the windows. Out, she thought fiercely. I want to go out. But the house wasn’t listening. “When was the last time you were outside?” she asked that night at dinner. Her father, looking up from the book in front of him, the edges of which glowed softly, paused with the fork before his mouth. “I can’t recall right now,” he said. It wasn’t a lie, because of the “right now,” but it was close. Anya waited a moment, then said, a little testily, “Can you recall now?” Her father set the fork down. “I haven’t been outside this house in several years, and the last time I went out made me not want to repeat the process for twenty more.” “Why not?” “Because the world was just the same as it always is.” Anya licked her lips, fingers twisted together in her lap. “How is that?” “Unvarying.” Her father shook his head, gazing away from her, as if he could see through the walls of the house. “Almost all the people out there—they’re the same. The same joys, the same troubles. And they have been for as long as I can recall, which is a long time. Not even a wizard can change that, or them. It makes the world very tiresome.” “Surely not everyone is like that,” Anya said softly. His eyes shifted to her face. “No,” he said finally. “Very occasionally, you find someone who isn’t. But they don’t stay.” He looked sad, and he had never looked sad before, not for more than a moment. It made Anya want to stop, to talk about something else, but she couldn’t quite seem to. “But you do go outside, sometimes?” A long pause, a wizard’s pause, that made Anya’s skin itch. “Yes, I do.” “How? There aren’t any doors that lead outside.” “I don’t need a door,” he said before spearing a piece of chicken and placing it in his mouth. It was an end to the conversation, but Anya swallowed and said, “Can I go outside?” Her father didn’t stop chewing, but he went very still. “I understand about when I was little,” Anya said in a rush, “but I’m sixteen now. I just. . . I want to see what it’s like. Out there.” He did not ask, “Aren’t you happy here?” He did not say, “I’m protecting you, my daughter with your calico face.” But she saw it in his black eyes, the only part of his face that ever looked as old as he really was. She hunched her shoulders a little. “I’m just curious. There’s more to the world than just this house—” Those eyes hardened. “You’re right. There is. And I’ve seen it, for more years than you know. You want me to let you out into that world?” His eyelids lowered. “I want to keep you safe. You aren’t the same as they are, because you’re my daughter, and I want to keep you safe.” “You just want to keep me here,” Anya said, more loudly than she had intended, pushing her chair back so that it screeched across the wooden floor. “You’re just scared that if I step outside this house, I won’t ever come back. But I would. I just want to see things, experience them instead of reading about them. . .” She drew a breath, short and choppy. “This isn’t about the world, Dad, or about me. It’s about you. Why won’t you just let me go?” “No,” her father said, and he said it in his wizard’s voice. It rocked Anya back, like a gust of wind or door shut in her face. Then she turned and ran out of the room. The cat leaped from the far end of the table and raced to follow her, not caring if Anya noticed this time, leaving the wizard alone.

***

“ . . . so I rode off on a hippo, into the sunset.” Anya blinked. “What?” On the darkened lawn in front of her, Travis shook his head. “I knew you weren’t listening.” Sighing, she said, “I’m sorry. Tell it again.” “No, it wasn’t that great a story, anyway. What’s going on, Anya?” She bit her lip, then mumbled, “I had a fight with my dad.” “What about?” “The world. Me.” Behind her, the cat made a worried prr-up sound, but when Anya looked over her shoulder, she was just sitting with her legs tucked up under her on the pillow, her head cocked toward the ceiling. “We don’t usually fight.” Travis raised his eyebrows inquisitively. “Do you think he’ll give?” “I don’t think so. Things usually happen the way he wants.” The cat prr-uped again, a nervous, high-pitched trill at the end. “What?” Anya asked, turning around. The cat was staring towards the door, still and stiff, not even the whiskers on her face moving. Then she scrambled, fast as a furry waterfall, off the edge of her pillow and underneath the bed. Two things happened: The entire house rumbled, like a cat taken by the scruff of its neck and shaken, and the window slammed shut. And Anya felt the locking spell, the one that, in her preoccupied moroseness, she hadn’t noticed building, close around it. “Wait!” Anya cried as she whipped around. But the window had shut, the ruler snapped, half of it lying on the floor. Outside, she could see Travis. His mouth opened, spoke two syllables, but she couldn’t hear them. He stepped toward the window, hands cupped around his face, unable to see inside. His lips moved again, and he even lifted a hand and knocked softly on the glass. She didn’t try to push it open, or even knock back. Instead, she stood up from the chair she had been sitting in, jerked her door open, and hurried out of the room. The house was dark, and all the doors were shut. Anya darted through it, her chest tight with anger and desperation, up the stairs and down the halls, until she came to the one door in the house that stood open. Her father sat inside his workshop. A mirror on a far table shone with dim, reflected moonlight. In it, a red- haired boy stood on a lawn, his hands in his pockets. He shuffled around the side of a house, as if looking for a way in, finally stopping in front of one window. He peered at it, as if trying to see inside, and then, after one last attempt to look through the glass, left the yard. “Please,” Anya said quietly. Her father closed his eyes and, for a moment, he looked not quite like a wizard, but more like a very tired man. “No.” “Fine,” his daughter said, and turned away.

***

In the gray, gabled house, there were now two cats. One was older than the other, and the younger one was smaller than the first. Both had calico markings on their soft fur. One slept on a pillow in an empty room, and the other slept on the bed. It’s easy, mostly, to be a cat, except for the times when it isn’t. No one can tell a cat what to do or, at least, expect it to be done. Cats, after all, belong to no one, even when they live in houses. And time—time moves differently. More quickly, when a mouse is sighted or a dust mote commands attention; slower, when there’s nothing to do but find a high spot, or a shaft of sunlight, and tuck legs up underneath the body and sleep. The two cats did cat things together. Mostly, they were left alone in the gray house, though food could always be found in the older cat’s bowl. Soon a new bowl, also regularly filled, appeared beside it. Sometimes, a man came down from the highest floor of the house, from the room the cats never went into. At first, only the old cat would allow herself to be petted and stroked, while the young cat watched from under furniture. After a time, though, the younger cat would sometimes come out and, if the man sat at the table or in a chair, she would sit beside him. Sometimes she let him scratch behind her ears, in the place she couldn’t reach, and sometimes she didn’t. Time passed, though the cats didn’t know how much, and didn’t wish to know. One day, after what might have been a long time, the man came down and found the young cat curled up on the comfortable maroon chair in the living room. “All right. You win,” he said, before turning and going back upstairs. ***

“I know what I want,” Anya told her father the next day while they worked on the last details of his spell. “In my room.” Her father said a word, a sharp one, full of thorns. The spell quivered for a moment, then held. He smiled, a relieved smile, but it faded a little when he turned to her. “Do you love him, then?” her father asked. “That boy?” It took her by surprise, and Anya laughed. “Travis? I’ve only known him a month or so—I’ve never even touched him. And he’s the first boy I’ve ever met.” She shook her head. “I like him, but no, I don’t love him.” Her father sighed. “I just don’t understand, then. What else would make you want to go out there? There’s so much to learn here. I built this house exactly as it should be, to be the perfect place for a wizard.” Anya shrugged. “But I’m not a wizard. I want to go to school, Dad. I want Travis to take me to the movies. I want to see all the things I’ve read about, see how things work when they aren’t fueled by spells.” “It’s not as wonderful as you think it will be,” he huffed. “I know—I lived in the world for centuries.” “But I haven’t. Maybe I’ll go out and everyone will laugh at my face and I’ll come back and become an old wizard-woman and never leave the house again. Or maybe I’ll marry Travis and we’ll have a lot of trumpet- playing children. Or maybe something else entirely. Maybe I’ll go to college. I just want to be able to choose for myself.” Her father looked at her for a long time without saying anything before he turned away to tend the spell. It wasn’t a blessing, but it wasn’t a no, either.

***

The next morning, Anya waited in front of the room her father had given her for her birthday. She shifted from foot to foot, squatted down to pet the cat (who had at first pretended to have business in the hall but now simply sat near Anya’s feet), then stood back up and cracked her knuckles for practice. She felt like a metal tuning fork, as if her whole body vibrated with high pitched energy and nerves. She looked at her watch, checked the contents of the backpack on the floor, and had nearly decided to go in search of her father when he appeared at her side. “I don’t know what information they want at schools these days,” he said, a little grumpily. “It’s okay,” Anya answered. “I put a spell on a letter. When the secretary reads it, she’ll think I’ve given her everything she needs. By the end of the day, all of my ‘records’ will have appeared in the office.” Her father raised an eyebrow and she blushed. “Well, I don’t have a birth certificate, not that I’ve ever seen, or anything else they’ll probably want. But after this, I’ll do it properly— at school, at least.” After all, she was a wizard’s daughter, she figured, and it would be silly to go through all of life without magic, if you had it. “All right then,” her father said. He raised his hands, murmured a few words, and the door to the room glowed in answer. Then he set his hand on the knob and opened it. Inside lay a normal room. A sitting room, with three comfortable chairs, a small table with coasters on it, a few bookshelves (because there were always bookshelves, in the gray house), and a red and blue rug on the floor. But unlike any other room in the house, you could see in the windows as well as out of them, and there was a door set on the far wall. “Thanks, Dad,” Anya said. She stood up on her toes and hugged him, and the wizard hugged his daughter back. The cat took a tentative step into the room, then twitched her tail and leapt lightly onto the chair placed nearest the window, the one that gave the best view of the street. “See you after school,” Anya said. Then she reached out, opened the door and went through it. The first thing she noticed was that the dew on the lawn was heavier than the dew had ever been in the grass room. It made her sneakers wet, so she skipped across the yard to the sidewalk in six steps. Then she looked back at the gray gabled house that she had never seen from the outside. It did not, she thought, look like it held a room full of green and purple lizards, or fields and fields of grass, or all the books in the world. But it did look like someplace where you could go in and out, that you could leave and come back to. Anya grinned and did a little jig-step for the benefit of the cat, who still sat watching in the window. Then she waved and headed off to school.

Eilis O’Neal’s YA fantasy novel, The False Princess, is forthcoming from Egmont USA in January 2011. Her short fantasy has appeared or is forthcoming in Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and others. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she is Managing Editor of Nimrod International Journal. She can be found online at www.eilisoneal.com. And the Blood of Dead Gods will Mark the Score Gary Kloster

I had a frat-boy stretched out on the table, a pink slab of drunken meat just itching for ink, when Huck blew back into my life and brought the blood trade with him. “Dead gods, Woody, this is the shit-hole you crawled into?” The shop was damn small, Huck was damn big, and the perfectly tailored black ass of his suit pants leaned against my desk before I’d even raised the humming needle from frat-boy’s hide. “I’m busy, Huck. Back off.” “Busy?” Huck pursed his lips, made a show of studying the stencil I’d taped across the customer’s shoulder blades. “Gettin you some ink, boy? A tribal? Something all spiky and black and awesome to show off to the bitches back home?” Huck’s deep voice slowly penetrated my customer’s drunken meditations, and his blood shot eyes rolled to blink back my ex-partner’s regard. “Who the hell. . .” The young man’s voice trailed off, the twitchy edge of drunken belligerence fading as he caught sight of Huck’s face. Huck smiled, and his smile stretched the pink rift of scar tissue that ran up from the corner of his jaw, across the twisted pit of his ruined right eye and onto his broad forehead. Before Nikolai’s betrayal, Huck’s face had been sternly handsome and the blood tatted into his dark skin had shone like lightning. That tat’s magic had made him beautiful and terrifying, like a storm rolling, and with a look he could make all the world his bitch. Now, left with just the scar and the spark of rage that still burned in the depths of his remaining eye, he had to be content with just scaring people shitless. “Tribals are crap, redneck poser ink. Do yourself a favor and piss off.” Two minutes after Huck banged in and my only customer that whole damn day was sulking out, a black dot of ink no bigger than a pimple hidden beneath his shirt. “Follow him out, Huck,” I said as the door rattled shut and I trashed the ink that I’d laid out for the job. “We’re done, remember?” “Woody.” He picked up my sample book, stared at my name splashed across its front in bright red graffiti style. “Dumb ass name. Nikolai helped you pick that, didn’t he? Did that cocksucker give you a wooden pecker to go with it?” My teeth clenched, locked back the curse I wanted to hurl at him. It’d always been so easy for him to control me, to drop a few words and make me flare up in rage. Or desire. But those days were gone. We were different people now. “Just go. Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it.” “You don’t want to hear it? Don’t even want to hear it?” Huck’s big hands flipped restlessly through the pages of my sample book, but his eye was roaming the cheap sample-art posters tacked to the lumpy plaster of the walls. “You rent yourself some space in a crappy little parlor on Hollywood so you could draw ugly tats with plain ink onto tourists, and so you don’t need to hear me out? You sure you can afford to say that?” Threat growled like distant thunder through his smooth voice, but I wasn’t going to let him shake me that way either. “I can afford to stay out of jail.” “Jail.” The scar shifted around his smile. “What was that to you? Four years learning to ink and picking out girlfriends. Jail must have been nothing for you. Tough guy.” Four years being the freak in a cage. That wasn’t nothing, no, not at all. I rubbed a hand over the rough bristles on my chin, shook my head, so sick of Huck and all those memories that rode his wake. “They weren’t my type.” Huck’s hands snapped my book shut, dropped it to my desk where it teetered and fell to the floor in a glossy heap. He pushed himself up straight to tower over me, the bright spot of spite in his eye burning down at me. “Yeah, and you ain’t my type anymore either, are you?” In his face, I could read the disgust, the anger he still had at me for what I’d done, for the truth I’d carved into my flesh. Flesh he once thought he had claim to. “So stop trying to play the big boy. There’s new blood in town, big god’s blood, and I mean to have it. So that means I need me a bloodhound. I need you.” “I ain’t your dog, Huck.” His hands were on me, yanking me into him, and suddenly all I could see was his bright, furious eye and its ruined twin. “You are my dog, Woody. You’re my bitch. Always.” He shoved me away and I hit the table behind me, stumbled and landed on my ass. From the floor I stared up at him, body shaking, anger and fear rattling through me. We’d been lovers for years before it all burned down, before Nikolai destroyed us. Years good, bad and chaotic, especially at the end when I had told him what I really was, told him that his pretty girl never believed she was a girl at all. And that I wanted to change. Through all of that, in all the twisted grotesquerie of what we had called our love, he had never touched me in anger, never dared name and claim me like that. “Get out.” “No.” He stared down at me, hands twitching, his ill- leashed fury hungry for release, but as I pushed my back slowly to the wall he reined it. “No. This isn’t just some score. It’s the score, the one that wraps this business up for all of us, you, me and Nikolai. This pays it all.” Nikolai. I close my eyes and let my head rock back to thump my crew-cut into the wall. Of course it was Nikolai. Of course he’d come back to LA, blood in his hands and a smile on his lips. “Oh gods, Huck, just give it up. He hurt me too, hurt me bad. Four years of my life are gone because of him. But I can’t steal those years back, and you can’t hurt him enough to bring back your tat. Cut your damn losses and move on. Going after Nikolai, getting back in the trade, it’s just a slow bullet through your brain.” “You think I can let this go?” His finger traced over the ruin of his face. “He burned me. He set me up and burned me, burned the blood of Zeus right out of my face. I’m never going to let that go. My balls won’t let me. How about yours?” A cheap shot and I gathered up my book and stood while I let the pain of its bite fade. “No Huck. No. I don’t want your revenge, and I don’t want your money. Find yourself some other dog. I’m done with the blood trade.” “I wasn’t offering money.” The softness of his voice made me look at him, but he was staring away from me now, through the neon and out at the tourists passing in the garish unnight. “What?” “He has Ungud.” “Fuck!” The book hit the wall, pages flying, the bright wings of butterflies torn away by a storm. The trap had shut, and I never even saw it coming. “Fuck me,” I whispered, and damn he was smiling at me, sympathy and satisfaction. “Not anymore, baby-girl. Not anymore.”

***

I watched them kill a god, once. My mother took me. She made me wear a dress, and I hated that. I hated the crowd, the heat and perfume stink of the people around me as everyone pressed close to glass so thickly etched with wards that the altar below seemed to float in a fog of incantation. I hated it all, but she made me watch. Mom thought they were saving the world, culling the idols of the infidels. Even then, I wondered if they were just making a profit. The god looked like a dirty old woman, senile and sick. It felt obscene, watching the priests stagger to the altar under the weight of their icons of protection, dragging her with them. While they made their prayers, she drooled and muttered. I watched, and couldn’t believe it would happen. Couldn’t believe that anything so sad, so contemptible, could be a god. Couldn’t believe they were going to kill that wasted old crone. Then they bent back her head and cut her throat. One quick flash of a knife, and the blood came. The black blood boiled out of her, writhed and splashed like a thousand snakes and the priests caught as much as they could. Caught it to seal up in sacred vessels and sell for the glory of their particular truth. That black essence of belief, sold by the ounce. Truth wins, chaos dies. My mother pointed to the sacred circle carved into the altar, stained black. The old beliefs were all going away, and the world would be pure. I listened, silent and horrified at the thought. A world where everything fit, just so. Where no one could be out of place. She pulled me away, content in her sanctimony, but I looked back and watched the priests trying to gather every last dark drop. And I saw them fail. It escaped them, slipped past them, ran away. Some portion of that tainted tincture of everything that the dead god’s worshippers had once invested in her ran back into the world. Escaped, to pool in graveyard shadows and on the wings of crows, in bottles of dark beer and in the eyes of sick children. No one could contain the blood. That was a truth I could believe in. So the blood of the dead gods gathered in the dark spaces, the secret places, and of course there were those stupid enough, crazy enough, to seek it out. We found the dreams of a million souls gathered in the curdled essence of a deity and packaged it into little glass spheres, convenient for sale. Of course the dealers were all fucked up. And I had fallen in love with two of them, and my hands had been soaked in the blood of the divine. It didn’t matter that I was a blood hound, one of those dubiously gifted few who could sniff out the blood where it hid, who could resist somewhat the madness it cast in its raw form. It still tainted my life. Trying to turn my back on it had been a stupid dream. Stretched out in my narrow bed, I stared at the peeling walls of my tiny apartment, tacked over with diagrams, photos, maps of the hills above LA. Five years of impotent rage hadn’t done much for Huck’s temper, but it had honed his cunning, and now my room was a shrine to his dream of revenge. For the past two weeks he had been force-feeding me every detail of Nikolai’s return. Dead gods knew where he’d gotten it all, or how he’d paid for it. But now it was my job to know it. Just like the old days. The good, crazy days. When Huck planned the scores and I pulled them off, riding his smarts through the job until I hit the point where the information broke down and I would just have to gut it through. Then Nikolai would line up the buyers and bring in the cash. That was when we were one tight little family, completely screwed up and seething but together, functioning somehow. Until it had all blown apart. I had tried to pretend I could turn my back on Huck and Nikolai and everything we had done to each other. Tried to pretend that we were over and done. A stupid mistake. We would never be over as long as all three of us still breathed. Huck was too furious, Nikolai too careful, and me. . . They both knew me too well to let me go. They knew exactly how to pull me back in. Ungud. The aboriginal god of snakes and rainbows and desire, a god who could be male or female, depending on its want. Who was what it was, what it wanted to be. A god whose blood could make me exactly what I was. Three days, and maybe this would really would be over, like Huck said, solved under a sky painted red and black by his rage. Three days, and maybe I or Nikolai or Huck might finally get what we wanted. Or maybe again all our dreams would just spill out and be lost to violence, like the blood of that dead god.

***

A helicopter thundered overhead, hauling water east to the fire lines and that finally shut Huck up. “I know,” I said, before he could start up again when the noise faded. “I know, and if I don’t know it’s too damn late to worry about it. You’ve done your job, now let me do mine.” I watched his hands tighten on the steering wheel of his Tahoe, remembered how mad this made him. A control freak, placing his carefully crafted creation into the hands of an improviser. Five years of obsession hadn’t changed that. “The fire is rolling in faster than I wanted it too. They might be thinking of moving.” “Yeah, maybe. So what? I’ll deal with it.” My hands were slapping a quick beat over my body, checking pockets to make sure every piece of equipment was where I wanted it. “You wanted me, you got me, now let me go. I’ve got work to do.” “A real tough guy now, ain’t you?” “Always was.” His eye looked me over, and I could imagine him trying to picture me the way I was when we met, to see again the person I’d been when he’d wanted me. It made me itch, uncomfortable. “Were you really?” “Yeah. Why do you think you loved me, instead of all the other women you’d screwed?” And then I was out of the car, slamming shut the door and leaving him with that. As good a last line as I was going to get, if this all went to hell and I never saw him again. I started down the street, heading for the bike paths that would take me to the house hidden high in these dry hills where Nikolai and the blood were waiting. As I walked, I wrapped a black bandana across my face to block out the smell of burning. And wondered if things had already gone to hell a long time ago.

***

The wards were easy, always were. My nature makes me slippery, hard to fix with magic. And I had them marked on a map. The alarms were harder, but Huck knew my weaknesses and had drilled me on how to handle the ones that were still operating, the ones that hadn’t fallen when the fire took out the power and the data lines. The fire or some hired hand of Huck’s, using the fire for cover. Even the cell nets were almost useless, jammed with the panicked calls of property owners. I pulled myself up onto the bumpy tile roof of the house, giving thanks as I did to the testosterone injections that built the muscle that made it easy. It was a big place, some old money mansion built out in the wilderness before Santa Clarita had blown up in the valley below. It must have cost Nikolai a bundle to rent, and I was betting he wasn’t going to be getting his deposit back. If he really had the blood of ten dead gods down there, it didn’t matter how hard they warded the spheres that encased it. Power would bleed out, and the shadows of this house would crawl with nightmares for years. That, though, was the least of my ex-partner’s problems. I found the skylight I wanted and peered down into a room, empty and lit only with the ruddy glow of the approaching fire. An empty room, except for the brass bound box that gleamed below me. I frowned down at it. Clear the ward on this skylight, slip down and gather up the loot, then away. Just like Huck had planned. My fingers danced around the skylight’s edge, pasting in place the twists of iron and hair, spit and paper. Charms to break the ward without letting it know it’s been broken. Then I worked loose the alarm wire, slipped open the lock and tied off my rope. All in the plan. I swung myself in, quiet as a cat, and slid down. Adrenalin danced in my veins, waiting for the moment the plan went to hell. I could smell the blood, even before I cracked the case. I’d never been very gifted at sniffing the stuff out, had never been a good tracker. My bloodhound abilities lay more in my gift at resisting its gnawing effect on my sanity. But the scent was so strong here I could taste it, and I knew that there must be more blood in the case than I had ever seen before. With care, I lifted away the soft packing meant to prevent the psychic hell storm that would burst forth if one or more of the globes inside broke. And that was when the plan burned. Eleven spheres nestled carefully in velvet. Big crystal globes, and in the heart of each black liquid rolled and stirred, moving in tides that were steered more by my heartbeat than the moon. Eleven. Huck had said ten. Behind me, the door swung open and my job really began. “Woody.” “Nikolai.” Five years had barely changed him, but he was vain. Exercise to keep the belly away, dyes to tint the grey that was creeping in, injections and charms to smooth the nascent wrinkles. Still, he looked good. He stepped into the room alone, shut the door behind him. Didn’t matter. The guards would be on the periphery, waiting. “I like what you’ve done with yourself.” His grey eyes roamed me, flicked across my short hair and goatee, the muscles I’d added, lingered on the bulge in the black fatigues I wore. “You’re packing now.” “In more ways than one,” I said. But I kept my hands still, didn’t try to pull on him. Nikolai wanted to talk, and I was fine with that. “You like the merchandise?” “It’s interesting.” “It’s expensive.” Nikolai walked a little closer, stopped. With the box open, I knew he had to be feeling it, the buzzing edge of distortion that gave normal people the fits and left bloodhounds like me mostly alone. An advantage, since it kept him back from me. A little one. “South American, mostly. Huitzilopochtli. They mix a tiny drop of that with meth and slam it. Guys do that and they can dodge bullets. For a little while. Tezcatlipoca. Put a trace of it in the ink of a jaguar tattoo, and no one will ever lie to you again. And nine more. The trade’s been good to me, lately.” “I see.” Good. Eleven full globes, each the size of a damn softball, each one a pure god, each of them worth a fortune. We’d risked our lives for a globe of mixed blood a tenth the size of these in the old days. That case cradled more money and power than I’d ever seen in the trade. Power enough that I could feel it gnawing at my inborn protections. “I’m glad Huck persuaded you to come. I’ve been wanting to see you. I owe you an apology.” “You don’t owe me anything.” Friends, lovers, family, they hurt each other and had to apologize. Nikolai had been all of those to me, once, but he wasn’t anymore. Burning out Huck’s tat had been a too clever attempt at assassination, and if I hadn’t gotten spooked and ditched the blood I was carrying down a storm sewer, I wouldn’t have been doing four years for breaking and entering. Transporting even that little bit of unsanctioned blood would have kept me in a cage for life. Nikolai had tried to take both our lives when he decided to stop freelancing and left us to join the east coast family that was muscling in on the LA blood trade. When he betrayed us, he stopped being anything but an enemy. And enemies, they never need to apologize. Nikolai read the thread of my thought in my body’s tension. He nodded, and I knew he never expected any other answer. “I always thought I was the clever one. But you both were smarter than I thought. But this isn’t really smart at all.” He waved a hand at the spheres. “Who do you think fed Huck all the info that led you here? Who do you think his informants were really working for? And why do you think I made sure that he knew that I had Ungud? I wanted you to come, Woody. So I brought you a gift.” The spheres gleamed, shining soft in the red fire light. I reached down, slow, and plucked up the odd one out. In its depths, the black blood moved and flashed, brightened. There were colors there, every color, vibrant as a rainbow, and they twisted together into the form of a serpent, into a woman, into a man. Ungud. “A gift. Or a payment?” “What is he to you, Woody? What did he do when you told him what you really were? When you told him that his girlfriend wasn’t really a girl at all? He would have driven you out, thrown you away. I was the one who understood, who let you be what you are. Who loved you as you really are. Who let you stay. That was me.” He looked at me, blue eyes so sincere, and my hand gripped the sphere so tightly I wondered if it might crack. “Take my gift. Then lead me to him.” “So you can finally finish with him?” And here it was again, the real sick heart of our little family. It had always been about the struggle between these two, to find out who was really in charge, who was really the alpha dog. And I had always been a marker, part of the score. That’s why he hadn’t just let me take the stuff and followed me back to his ex-partner. He had to know that I was betraying Huck. That he had won, finally. “Fuck you.” “What other choice do you think you have?” Nikolai always sounded so sad when he had you right where he wanted you. When he thought you were his bitch. “What choice? Did I ever have a real choice, pinned between you two?” I looked out the broad windows at the distant hills, at the bright flames that stretched up into the darkness. Ungud’s sphere was tight in my hand. “Here’s my choice. Everything breaks, and everybody dies.” Nikolai was smart, but slow, too damn slow. He didn’t even have time to wipe that sad, smug look from his face before my hand was wrapping around the velvet, yanking it free from the box. In the air the dead god’s blood shone in their clear cages, beautiful. Then they slammed into the floor and shattered. I only heard the start of Nikolai’s screaming as the air broke around us, filled with ten thousand dreams of gods, dead and howling. In my head, I denied them, walled them out and fumbled through their passions for the rope that hung beside me. It was in my hand, the black nylon harsh against my skin, when they broke through and the whole world began to burn.

***

Around me, the ash fell like snow. Smoke rose, black columns that made the sun a sick pale circle rising slowly in the east. Closing my eyes blotted out that grey light, but the visions that had been burned into the darkness behind my eyelids gave me no comfort. I opened them again and watched the fires crawl across the distant hills until Huck came for me. “Woody.” He swung himself out of his truck, hand hidden beneath his suit jacket, waiting for an ambush. “What happened?” “What do you think?” I wiped my bandana across my face, tried to blink away the smoke and visions. In the ruins of his face, colors ran and danced like a broken rainbow, making my eyes burn. “It was a setup. It all went to hell.” “You didn’t get the blood?” I opened my hand, let the wan sun shine on the glass orb it still held. “Ungud. Only Ungud. I dumped the rest.” He grunted. “You dumped them?” “I broke them all. Broke them and crawled out through the chaos. It was the only way to get past the guards. And Nikolai.” I watched him twitch when I spoke the name. “I smashed them at his feet.” Huck stared at me, his one eye red and burning. “Then you did good.” I’d spilt out hell in that house and run away, and the screams of Nikolai and his men had echoed behind me until the fire finally swept over them. I’d bought a new life and Huck’s vengeance with the blood of dead gods and the screams of damned men. My dreams were going to be tainted with both, forever. “Good. Yeah.” In the globe, the blood trembled, stirred by the tremor in my hand. “I always do my best when your plans fail, and when chaos rules.” Holding the glass sphere tight, I made myself go on. “Huck, I need something.” “I thought we were done. I thought that was what you wanted. You did your job, and your payment’s in your hand.” “Huck, I don’t want your money. I want your help. We used to do that, sometimes, remember? Just help each other? When you still loved me?” He looked away, stared out at smoke and ruins, a big man with a rumpled suit and a scar. “What?” “I need a tat. With this blood.” “So you can finally become a real boy?” I ignored the stupid, useless bitterness in his voice. He could never believe that this had nothing to do with him. “So I can be what I am.” “A man,” he said. “That much blood, you could be more than that.” I turned the sphere and watched the colors shine in the dark blood. So much power, so much potential. “Yes. I can be every man. Young and old, big and small. All different, and all the same.” “A shapeshifter. A changeling.” The idea pleased me, so much possibility after a lifetime of being trapped. “I like change.” Huck’s eye came back to me, and the corner of his mouth moved, almost made a smile. “No lie there, baby- girl.” The words made me twitch, his name for me when we had been lovers, what he called me when we were tangled together. “You could even be a woman. Again.” I looked up and met his eye, and for first time ever he looked away. “It’s not for you, Huck. I’m not going to be your girl again. Ever.” “No. I guess not.” He pushed himself up straight, walked around the truck and stopped by the door. “This smoke is killing my eye. Let’s get out of here.” I stood, but didn’t step forward. “The blood?” Huck frowned at me, his scar darkening. Then he shrugged. “I know a guy. But he’ll want to get paid.” My turn to shrug, and I did it while walking toward the car. “Shouldn’t be a problem, for us.” His eye narrowed, and I smiled. “We just agreed not to screw each other anymore. Best basis for a partnership we ever had.” “Shit.” He shook his head, but then slid into the truck, popping the door for me. “Spilling that blood’s made you crazy.” “No. It made me sane.” In my hand, I clutched the blood tight, and in my head I held just as tight to the image of a serpent spiraling across my skin in every color of the rainbow. A serpent that could weave my flesh into a thousand shapes that made a greater truth. I would bear the blood of a dead god, and become what I’d always wanted to be. Myself.

Gary Kloster is a librarian, a martial arts instructor, a stay-at-home dad, and a writer. Never all at the same time, so far. He writes SF, Horror, and Fantasy, and has had stories previously appear in Jim Baen’s Universe, Writers of the Future 25, and Warrior Wisewoman 3. He occasionally adds to the internet’s clutter at garykloster.com. Stem, Stone, and Bone Deb Taber

From the time Jacinta was a little girl, toddling after her mother’s strong steps, she had worked in the cacao groves. As the beetles hatched out of the gourd-like growths on the sides of the gently swaying trees, Jacinta learned to catch them by the handful in her left palm. A stiff blade attached to her right thumb swiped with increasing deftness as the years went by, striking the frail legs and proboscises off the cacao beetles and giving a sharp crack to the broader ends of their shells, the crack that rendered them lifeless and as still as the beans that everyone outside the Shining City on the northern coast of Venezuela thought they were. But late at night, when the adults had cracked open the thick, hard shells and poured out the fat drops of black blood they fermented into wine, after they had gone silly with laughter and tears, Jacinta and the other children would slink out into the fields and capture the smallest of the beetles—the ones that had slid through their fingers at harvest—and trace mazes into the dirt for the beetles to race against each other for their prize: the sweet, clear moisture from the limelichens that grew from the rocks at their feet. The youngest of the children was Xoch, and he would always be the youngest, except for the stones. Even as they outgrew beetle games and wore the weight of each new year’s harvest on their adolescent, then adult backs, Xoch was the baby, much to his chagrin. Jacinta envied him, as she struck the legs off of a cacao beetle with her woman’s broad hands. He, at least, was someone. Something. The last of the children born in the Shining City, the glistening paradise that had risen again after the oil and ore had died. Jacinta, however, was nothing but Jacinta, a woman and a worker who could couple with the city men or a visiting stranger, and at the end of nine months, out of her belly would drop nothing but a stone. She’d done it only once, before forsaking the company of men entirely. Nine months of hope and discomfort followed by the wretched agony of a rock the size of a cacao pod ripping her insides outward to lie bloody on the end of her bed. Once was enough. Stem into bone, bone into stone, stone into stem. That was the way her world worked. Not the rest of the world, Jacinta had come to be sure, but in the city that glistened with steel and lime in the sun, life was what it was. The Mineral Men had turned their backs on oil and ore, proclaiming that the region had once been the chocolate capital of the world, that it would be again. They’d said they had magic. They were crazy old men. But their magic, or maybe their craziness, worked. The next crop of cacao beans didn’t wait to have the pods cut down—they ruptured in a milky stream of beetles straight from the tree. The Mineral Men gathered them with their own hands, just the once, and cut their legs and cracked their shells and fermented and roasted and ground until they had a single bar, more precious than gold. Everyone in the city remembered the day the gold bar was proclaimed a success; it was the day Marisela gave birth to the city’s first child of stone. After that there was no pretending things hadn’t changed. Seeds became beetles; leaf-pods became fat caterpillars creeping blindly on the wind. They floated gently to the ground and wrapped themselves in mud until their wing-branches unfurled and stretched into creeping trees. Stones broke down into seeds when cracked, or grew limelichens when left alone. Limelichens that glistened in the sun. People forgot whatever names the cities of the region once had. Collectively, they became the Shining City, the city of flowing chocolate and growing stone. The wheel had shifted: stone into stem, stem into bone, bone into stone. Yelping dogs gave birth to something resembling agates, and large chunks of jasper ringed the fields in spring, but instead of even mildly precious, cuttable, tumbleable gems, the human mothers gave birth to plain rock. Rock that was jagged and painful and grew up into nothing at all; rock the foreign traders looked at and then didn’t look again as they paid the price for the precious cacao beans. Beans, not beetles. No one outside the Shining City knew, because no one wanted or needed to know. So for most of Jacinta’s life, because she needed something to do and she needed the money that came from doing it, she had blistered her animal body in the sun, transforming beetles into beans. She bought herself an apartment high up in the Shining City, even though it meant a longer walk to the groves each morning. She loved the feel of the cool air, still tasting of night, how it ran up her nose and down the back of her throat. The air was still air and the water was still water. The sun was still sun and the moon, though ever-changing, was always the same moon. She could depend on them. Xoch was already in the cacao grove when she arrived one morning. He stared up at a pod that quavered slightly in a tree. Tattoos in the shape of mushrooms with multifaceted heads peered out from the collar of his shirt; flowers in the shape of mountains jutted out from the edges of his sleeves. He caught Jacinta looking and adjusted his clothing so the ink was covered again. “This one’s about to hatch. Will you help me catch it?” he asked. No one else was around yet, so Jacinta pulled her blade out of her pocket and strapped it to her thumb. The beetles usually didn’t hatch until the morning sun beat steadily on their cocoons—Jacinta couldn’t help thinking of the pods that way—but Xoch was right. This one looked ready. “Why flowers that become mountains?” she asked him. He glanced at her blankly, then turned his attention back to the pod. “Your tattoos,” she said. The blank look remained on Xoch’s face, but Jacinta could see that it was pasted there, and not very firmly at that. “What? You wish we had gone the other direction? That maybe we would wait here for the cacao plants to drop stones while a thorny vine tore its way out of my—” Jacinta chocked back her own anger, not knowing how near to her throat it had been. The stones were bad, but there were worse things than stone. At least it had seemed to be stillborn, not like the reptilian baby hyacinth-things that crept up to her windows from the flower shop at night and scratched on the glass with thorny claws. The look on Xoch’s face tightened, but she thought he cast her a momentary look of sympathy. He had probably fathered his own share of stones. “This will stop,” he said in a whisper, just as the pod broke open and a rain of beetles covered in milky fluid cascaded down. For the next hour, Jacinta was too busy catching, striking, catching, and striking the cacao beetles to wonder if Xoch believed what he said, or if he was just speaking because it was all he had left to do. Other workers came and filled the grove, all the groves along the coastline, as one by one the pods burst open and the milk-covered beetles escaped. In the early years, the children had scrambled to gather the beetles that escaped the first catching, but now there was no one young and lithe and low enough to the ground to do all of that. The adults still tried, but more and more beetles escaped. That was when Jacinta heard talk among the Mineral Men of bringing in new children. She didn’t know where they would get children from, but the thought made her sweat more than the day’s heat warranted, and she looked over at Xoch and saw that he, too, had heard. Anger was there on his face, but hope, too, whispered in his eyes. Hope was on the faces of many workers in her area. New children, new life. But not new life of their own, and eventually, after enough time among them, the outsiders would be turned by the spell’s wheel. It had happened to the stray dogs that wandered into town. Jacinta knew that if the children ever came, one day she would see more young women ripped apart by stones, bloodied on their beds, swaddling their lumpy offspring in a futile effort to bring meaning to the pain. She almost marched over to the Mineral Men right there and slapped their faces. She had never wanted to more, though the thought occurred to her every time they came to visit the groves. But the demand for Venezuelan chocolate was high, bringing in far more than the oil ever had. The rest of the world saw rich green trees and the workers being paid fair wages, and congratulated themselves for indulging in a treat that made the planet a better place. Jacinta wanted to spit cacao liquor in their faces. All of them. She felt as though her own body was turning to stone, but that wasn’t how it worked. The wheel only turned toward the future, not the past. “I don’t want to go backward,” said Xoch one day. She hadn’t spoken to him in weeks. There wasn’t much talk in the cacao fields at all, though sometimes, when they weren’t too depressed—or even more often, perhaps, when they were—someone would start to sing, and the rest would pick it up and carry it along. This day had been quiet. It took Jacinta a while to realize Xoch had spoken to her, and that he had meant her comment about his tattoos. “They aren’t magic,” he said. “Not like the Mineral Men did. They’re for balance. To remind me that I’m all three: bone, stone, and stem.” “Like hell you are. You’re a man. Bone,” said Jacinta. And though she hadn’t meant to, hadn’t felt it in years, a heat crept into her face, and then her thighs, as she looked at him and realized it was true: he was a man, and strong, and for all the time that had passed, still fairly young. “Don’t look at me that way, girl,” he said. She looked at him harder, forcing even more fire into her gaze than she really felt. “Don’t call me ‘girl,’ ” she said. He stalked off and Jacinta went back to work, but she had noticed a look in Xoch’s eyes, especially as they passed down her body; eyes that weren’t as flat as stone, that spoke more than he told, that said he wasn’t as disinterested as he claimed. That was good. Not for Xoch; Xoch was nothing but the youngest child in the Shining City. It was good for her.

***

Two days later, Jacinta went to talk to the Mineral Men. They hid in their offices in the Shining City most days, and they smoked strong cigars late at night in the outdoor cafes, handing out chocolates to the beautiful turistas who gave the candy more attention than the men. Tourist season was nearing its low—it never really went away—and the Mineral Men would be very frustrated by now. She would be sweeter to them than the finest chocolate in the world, confections that might as well be bricks after being passed from their hands all day. She had passed a salon on her way home, and had scrubbed and painted and practiced for two days until her hair piled on her head in a reasonable imitation of the glossy styles in the windows. Her eyes promised mystery and excitement from behind thick lines of kohl. Her breath was sweetened on mintmeats, and an opaline gem carved from the egg of an oilbird rested at her throat. It had been her mother’s last gift to her, many years ago. Before her attempts to give Jacinta a brother or sister to care for had torn her tenderest flesh from bone. Jacinta swallowed her thoughts and stepped through a doorway adorned with opulent gemstones born of the local bird population that dwindled with each passing year. She hardly noticed their gaudy sheen. She sat quietly in the waiting room and refused to go away when the Mineral Men’s assistant scolded her. She waited, trying to keep from poking at the uncomfortable upsweep of her hair, trying not to rub her tired face and ruin her painted eyes. She kept waiting for the Mineral Men to come out of their offices and speak to her. The assistant called security, but the security men laughed at him. If he needed their help with a skinny young woman—too skinny for their tastes, they were quick to tell—then perhaps he should take it up with his Mineral Masters, and they could turn her into a bird and place her in a crystal cage. They said this with bravado, but their eyes slid around the Mineral Men’s doors, and they grew quiet and left Jacinta and the assistant alone. Finally, because he had been brought up to be helpful, and because there seemed nothing else to been done, the assistant turned to the silent woman. “Would you like a glass of water?” Jacinta’s lips parted slowly, and she would have liked to say “yes,” but her throat tightened and she simply shook her head “no.” The no wasn’t for him; it was for the world that was all too much, for beetles that should have been beans and brothers who should not have been stones. The Mineral Men left their offices, finally, as the sky began to turn colors of fire. They looked at her curiously as they passed. They looked at the assistant, who shrugged. They waited for her to say something, but her tongue felt like sand in her mouth, and wouldn’t let her speak. You are a man. Bone. Xoch was a man, but they were not. She would not be able to seduce them into spilling their secrets with their seed. She was not going to be the Shining City’s savior. She was nothing but Jacinta, a worker and a woman, who had spent her whole life among the beetles and the groves. And yet I give birth to stone, she thought. She rose to her feet silently as the assistant turned out the lights. He held the door open for her, and she passed out into the night, breathing the air that she forgot to be glad was unchanging, ignoring the exchange of sun for moon. The next morning, she was back in the cacao grove. Her feet took her there as the sun came up, and there was Xoch, with his wishful tattoos, and she wanted to be angry with him—for being the youngest, for not being stronger, or maybe for being stronger than she was, for being what she wanted herself to be. But all she saw was a sad and lonely man, hiding the tattoos that cried to understand what had happened to the world he had barely come to know before it had turned. The wheel only went forward. With two more turns, would it bring them back to the way things had been? She doubted even the Mineral Men knew. Their eyes had been flatter than stones. Flat like coins, with only a dull glint of half-extinguished greed in the light. A fat cacao beetle crawled on a stick near Jacinta. Her first instinct was to crack it and scrape it as she had always done. But it was fatter than any she had ever seen, and it turned toward her hand as she reached for it, and it seemed to reach back for her with its whiskery legs. She let it crawl onto her palm, then inspected the stick it had been on more closely. Real wood, fallen from a cacao tree that, of course, had grown up before the turning. Its texture was similar to that of the beetle’s. She stroked the creature’s carapace and set it on the ground. The chocolate trade had created the Shining City, but the Mineral Men must have known it would fall. They, too, were unable to have children, and though they spoke again of bringing in others, from somewhere, they muttered and whispered and shook their heads at themselves. Even they could not bring themselves to turn more children into stone. Even they knew that when the cacao trees died, there would be no more to replace them. So they counted their riches and kept on counting. They gave to the workers because they had no one else to give to, and the world turned but the wheel stayed still. Jacinta picked up the beetle again, too fat to have escaped very far. She cracked it lifeless and split the brown body open and let its blood spill out onto a stone. Her stone. She had always known where it was, though she told herself all the stones looked the same. The smell of the cacao blood on warm stone brought a sting to her eyes. The rock that was made of her body and the once- wishful whispers of her soul drank in the sun’s warmth and held it close. The other stones, the other corpses of her city’s future, seemed to sing with the rising heat of the morning, the time when cacao pods burst open and tanagers pushed jade eggs out of their nests. She sat beside her daughter stone and cried, wishing that the blood and the tears would somehow reawaken the life she thought she’d once had. They didn’t. Her rock continued to hum with heat, and she noticed the sheen of limelichens beginning to grow on it. Were these her grandchildren? She laughed without humor and called herself “abuela” and tossed the emptied carapace away. No, she would not save the Shining City. Maybe the agate-breeding dogs would, one day. Maybe Xoch and his melancholic mushrooms would. She, Jacinta, was going to have another stone. Maybe this one would be round in her belly and smooth like the oilbird eggs. Maybe it would be pretty enough to keep. Or maybe it would be ugly enough and she would love it anyway because she wasn’t expecting a baby; she wanted what she could have. Something heavy and dirty and real. She felt a rise of warmth again when she thought of Xoch and the look in his eyes when she had called him “bone,” but none of the men she knew would willingly father the only kind of child she could bear. She pinned up her hair again and painted her eyes and swept into the Shining City’s streets. The men there were rough-voiced and soft-fingered, nothing like the silent workers in the fields, but she watched and she waited. She wanted to choose the right one. There was a man whose eyes glittered like the twists of banded mica that hatched from milk snake eggs. A shining beau for the Shining City? No, he was not the man for her. Instead, she chose one with soft green eyes, like the stems of the grasses that still grew to the south, out beyond the border of where the mineral spell faded. She knew. She had walked far into the night, as they all had, when she needed to see young things that were born and grew as they should. Baby birds with wide-open jaws and spotted tapir calves first gaining their feet. She dared not get too close, lest the Mineral Men’s spell be carried on. The green of the grass looked back at her through the face of the pale-skinned man. His hands were pliant and stained with nicotine, a dusting of yellow on sunburnt white, like a pollen stain on a speckled orchid. She sat in the bar for three nights before he was brave enough to speak. Then, he bought her a drink. She lowered her eyes and smiled a small smile, letting the heat of her need strengthen the color of her dark cheeks, letting him think it was shyness that sent the blush there. She drew him into one of the midtown hotels. . . not too fancy, but not low enough he would think she was for sale. She spoke to him in a language he only haltingly understood, saying words that would have made no sense even if he had. No, sweet, you are untouched by the wheel. Yes, you will make a fine stone. He was cautious, of course. She smiled and took the rubber sheath from his hand and placed it on him, but not before gently slashing it with the thumb-blade he didn’t know she wore. He didn’t notice. Instead, he looked at her and told her she had lips of ruby and breasts of golden marble and eyes of jet. He spread his pollen-stained hands over her and she sighed as the cut sheath slid in, thinking only of the stone to come, imagining his hands were wide leaves caressing her in the wind. When he left her in the waning night, she pretended to sleep through his groans of regret and apology. She curled over on her side and held her belly in one hand, wondering if his seed turned to stone as it quickened her egg, or if its animal properties were absorbed slowly, like food. She wondered how her blood knew to collect itself as dust, to divide into granite or sand instead of organ and flesh. As the weeks passed and her belly grew heavier, Jacinta sang in the groves and the streets and the fields, even when the other workers did not. She sang popular songs from the radio and the lullabies her mother used to croon. She sang loudly and terribly and let the other people stare at her in fury and in hope and in pain. When her belly grew too heavy to let her move freely, she lay in bed and Xoch brought her food, as she had known he would. He was the youngest, after all, the baby of the Shining City. The city had cared for him, and he paid it back in kind. He didn’t interrupt her as she sang, but once, he reached out to her swollen belly and felt the hard lump inside. Then his face closed down and he shook his head, and the next day someone else came with Jacinta’s tray of food. The woman didn’t speak, just set the tray down, and when Jacinta was finished, she cleared it away. The pains began in the midmorning heat, as Jacinta had suspected they would. She broke and she bled as she pushed her stone out, sweating and crying and keening alone. Alone but for the child that wasn’t even a child. Her stone was smooth and almost perfectly round, just a little longer in one direction than the other. It was smooth enough not to tear her as it slid out from inside, but it was still stone, not soft and pliable like an animal child. It broke her pelvis as it passed through her, an audible scraping crack of stone on bone. The pain was unreal. I am not real, Jacinta thought as the stone passed through. A mottled green like bloodstone with a speckling of red-crusted white bone caught her eye as she looked down, floating through her cracked and battered self as if she were clear as water. With what little strength she had, she reached out to touch her baby, because a baby it was, to her. She was surprised to feel that already the limelichens were growing on one side of the stone. Beneath her hand, they grew more quickly than she’d ever seen, for only a moment, then dried up and fell away. “Nieta?” she whispered. But stones didn’t give birth to plants. They were too much a part of the Mineral Men, who would never give birth to anything but the Shining City, and that through others’ hands. Stones never gave birth to anything. They broke down, dissolved, became dirt. And they cried. Dissolution into limelichens that glistened in the light. Tears for the loss of the cities before they became Shining, for the young milk snake micas that would never slither across the ground, for the cacao beetles that were bled and ground into paper dollars and gold coins, and for the woman who chose to love them for what they were—hard and unturning and unloving, and warm only when they were touched by the sun.

Deb Taber is a writer and editor lurking in the Pacific Northwest. Her story “The Summoning of Spirits Too Far From Home” appeared in Fantasy Magazine in October of 2008, and she has previous publications in Apex Digest and Shadowed Realms. Forthcoming work includes stories in the Art From Art anthology (Modernist Press) and the Dark Futures anthology (Dark Quest Books). She is the senior editor of Apex Publishing’s book division, and while her personal website is a work in very slow progress, it will arrive someday at www.inkfuscate.com. Author Spotlight: Rachel Swirsky William Sullivan

How did you choose Princess Diana for your story?

I didn’t do it consciously. I was going through a phase of trying to write flash pieces, and sometimes when I do that, the back of my brain starts churning out intriguing first sentences. One of them had to do with Diana, and that flowed into a story that was surprisingly easy to write—maybe because I actually own the paper doll book that’s mentioned in the story.

Why did Diana evaporate with the sunlight each morning? What limited her to the night?

The literal answer is I wanted to give her some ghostly features. I think a symbolic meaning emerged, but I’ll leave that to the reader.

Why is Diana, who spent so much time comforting the afflicted in her life, now in a situation where she can see so much suffering but can’t comfort anyone? I suppose it’s an open question whether or not she was able to comfort the afflicted in her life. Certainly, she spent a lot of time working with charities. But how much comfort does one actually gain from a visit from a princess? I suspect the money was more helpful, in most cases, than the symbol. (Except perhaps for the moment when she touched an AIDS victim ungloved—in that case, a symbol was needed.) The cultural discourse around Diana seems obsessed with seeing her (and the other members of her family) as a Symbol rather than a person, which I imagine was very hard to navigate.

“Voyeurism diverted [Diana] from the griefs of her own life.” Has Diana reversed her position from her lifetime, where she was once the object of so much voyeurism and is now a voyeur herself?

I wrote this story based on my memories and impressions of stories about Princess Diana, although I’m a bit young to have clear ones, so when I was first drafting, I found myself concentrating on the little I knew —her publicized wedding, her fashion, her death. Afterward, I went back and read biographies. One thing that struck me as I read a few of them—and I must note that these were obviously biographies written as sympathetic to Princess Diana, so I’m sure they weren’t great sources of objective information—was that the whole process of being royalty seemed to be harrowing and ruinous toward the actual individual people who were caught up in it. Diana, for one—who was forced to ask for permission to do things like bring her infant son with her on long trips. But also Charles himself who was unable to marry Camilla because of archaic rules, and who (according to one biography) grew up isolated from his parents’ affection. I don’t mean to imply these people aren’t desperately privileged; obviously, they are. But it seems like the cults of celebrity that are built around them are inherently damaging to one’s ability to live and thrive, at least in the terms of modern Western society; in some ways, it seems as though we, the audience, are eating up royalty. The analogy at hand for me as an American is rock stars—did Michael Jackson, growing up as a celebrity—ever have a chance at healthy identity formation? These people benefit enormously, but they also seem to lose. It seems ambiguous to me.

Is there anything else you’d like to say? Diana is a public figure and a symbol. One thing I encountered when I was sending this piece out to first readers was that everyone had theories about her. They’d picked details that appealed to them and assembled them into a personality with explanations and motivations and so on and so forth. Some of these were more supported by facts than others, and many of them were probably more realistic than mine. I wasn’t attempting to do a realistic portrait of Diana. This isn’t the real woman made prose, or even necessarily her press image made prose. It’s just one set of impressions, thoughts, digressions. And of course I know very little about the real individual Diana, who no doubt was significantly different, in important ways, from what the media was able to glean. I imagined a personality into the symbol, I suppose. If what I imagined wasn’t your Diana, then I hope she was interesting to ponder. The only thing I’m sure of is she wasn’t the real Diana.

William Sullivan is a writer, computer programmer, and musician living in Austin, Texas. You can find his website at enkrates.com. Author Spotlight: Eilis O’Neal Jennifer Konieczny

What inspired “The Wizard’s Calico Daughter”?

The title came to me first, but for a long time, I didn’t know what it meant. I had this image of a girl who had the coloration of a calico cat, and I had a vague idea that her mother might or might not have actually been a cat, but I didn’t know anything else. So the title sat in my notebook of random ideas for probably half a year. Then one day I was sitting around just mulling it over, and I suddenly knew that she lived all alone in this gray gabled house with her father. After that, the rest of the story came out really fast, but it was the house was what really clenched it for me.

If you had a room in the wizard’s house, what would you want in it?

Hah . . . That’s tough. But, if I had to pick, I think I’d pick the room with all the books in the world in it, even the ones that haven’t been written yet. Of course, then I might never leave it . . . In both “The Wizard’s Calico Daughter” and your forthcoming YA fantasy novelThe False Princess, the protagonists’ sixteenth birthdays mark important changes for them, particularly the time to go out into the world. What do you like most about writing teenagers? What is the most difficult part?

I liked writing about teenagers because that seems like the time when people are most changeable. When they’re making choices and starting to decide on who they really want to be. The False Princess particularly centers on a girl trying to figure out just who she is, and who she wants to become. I like that quality of sitting right on the edge of life, where you might tip off in a lot of different directions. One of the harder aspects of writing teenagers —especially if the setting is current—is getting the voice right. I’m very sensitive to books where the teenage voice sounds somehow false, and I really try to avoid that.

You also have several short stories and a YA fantasy novel published. Could you tell us about your writing processes for both forms? Did you find your short story experience was helpful in writing the novel?

For short stories, I either have an idea grab me and shake me around until I write it, or, as with this one, I have the germ of an idea floating around for a while that finally takes root. What’s frustrating is when I have an idea that seems really cool, but I can’t get it to transition into an actual story idea—my notebook is full of those, and trying to push one into becoming a full story rarely helps. For novels, I usually get the beginning and end worked out first, and then I have to go back and figure out the middle. I’m a terrible outliner—I’ve tried and I just can’t do it, and it’s hard for me to write a synopsis even when half the novel’s finished. Probably because, mainly, I write novels by feel. I know where I want to end up, but I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to get there. I like writing that way, because I sometimes surprise myself by coming up with something awesome that I really didn’t know was going to happen, but it can be terrifying, too. As for how writing short stories and novels intertwine, one of the biggest things is that writing short stories has let me experiment with a lot of different voices. And that’s been very helpful for getting the various characters voices in a novel to sound unique.

In addition toThe False Princess,what is next for you? I’ve got a couple of other short stories that I’m excited about coming out soon. And I’m working on a new novel, though it’s still in the drafting phase.

Jennifer Konieczny hails from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. An alumna of Villanova University, she now pursues her doctorate in medieval studies at the University of Toronto. She enjoys working with fourteenth-century latin legal texts, slushing for Fantasy Magazine, and scanning bookshelves for new authors to read. Author Spotlight: Gary Kloster T.J. McIntyre

What inspired “And the Blood of Dead Gods Will Mark the Score”?

A glass paperweight, Hollywood in August, and sleep deprivation. I was a winner in last year’s Writers of the Future Contest. So last August I got to fly to Hollywood and spend a week in a writing workshop with K.D. Wentworth and Tim Powers (and a lot of other great authors). One of the traditional assignments at that workshop is the 24 hour story. Each writer is given a random object, told to go strike up a conversation with a stranger, and is then allowed some library time for research. Using those three things, you have to write a story in one day. This is the story I wrote. Mostly. I did run it through a few more drafts to clean it up.

Tattoos are an integral symbol throughout your narrative. In the story, people gain the essence and power of dead gods through having the blood tattooed into their skin. Why tattoos?

Because I’m an introvert. The part of the 24-hour assignment that freaked me out the most was the stranger interview. I’m not very good at socializing with random people on the street. Especially not random people in Hollywood during a massive heat wave. So I cheated a little. There are a bunch of tattoo shops on Hollywood Boulevard, catering to the tourists. I went in to a few and chatted up the artists who weren’t busy, asking them about the trade, looking through their samples. It ended up being pretty fun. And tempting. . . but I still can’t decide what kind of tattoo I would want.

The protagonist of your story, Woody, seems to be transgendered. What kind of research did you do prior to writing to prepare for writing from the perspective of this character?

My biggest help for that was from an author friend of mine, Keffy R. M. Kehrli (who had a story with Fantasy in May). He read “Blood” and gave me some great advice about Woody. Along with a nice idea about smoothing out the sacrifice scene. Woody wants the blood of the Australian shape- shifting god, Ungud. This is fitting for several reasons. Where did you first hear about Ungud?

Well, I’ve covered the object I was given, and the interview. Now here’s the research. My original idea, looking at the paperweight K.D. gave me, was doing some kind of story about a black market trade in mythological animals. For some reason, I thought of centering it around a Bunyip, so I tried to research them. Problem was, the neighborhood library we went to didn’t have very much about Bunyips. But it did have some things about spirits and gods. So I started thinking along those lines, and back at the hotel I hit the internet and found Ungud, who turned out to be perfect for the story that was shaping up in my head.

When Woody remembers the first time she saw a goddess led to the slaughter, the goddess remained unnamed. Who was this unnamed goddess?

Ah, a very important one. The goddess of convenient plot devices. I wish I had a better answer, but while I had that specific scene in mind, I didn’t have a specific god. It’s funny thinking back on writing “Blood.” Normally, it’s not easy for me to remember all the sources of a story. But because of the circumstances surrounding this one, I can remember a lot of the things that inspired it. A paperweight, a tattoo artist, and some googling. And more. The sharp dressed guy in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater. The city, with its crowds and heat. The person with the perfect goatee and the amazing cleavage laughing with friends outside the nightclub at the Roosevelt Hotel. The pall of smoke over the whole valley from the wild fires in the hills. It makes my writing process sound so prosaic—take a few random things, mix them together, make a story. But I think of stories as mosaics, made up of all the little things I find around me. People, places, bits of conversation, half-thought out ideas, other stories. It all comes in and I carry it around until some of those pieces start to fit together, making a pattern, making a story. That’s what happened with Blood. It just happened a bit more quickly.

What’s next for Gary Kloster?

Professionally, I have another story out right now called “Mayfly.” It appears in the Warrior Wisewoman 3 anthology, and it’s about life extension, fairness, and terrorism. This fall, my story “Sympathy of a Gun” will appear online in the Intergalactic Medicine Show. That one’s about alien invasions, unwanted pregnancies, and Florida. Non-professionally, I’m currently trying to survive an interstate move involving two young children and high humidity. And as long as I don’t lose the laptop in the chaos, more writing.

T.J. McIntyre has seen his short fiction and poetry published in numerous publications including recent appearances in Everyday Weirdness, Ruthless Peoples Magazine, andScifaikuest. He is a member of various writing organizations, including the Science Fiction Poetry Association (SFPA), and serves as a moderator for the Lobo Luna and Western Writers writing communities on LiveJournal. Until earlier this year, he published Southern Fried Weirdness, an anthology and web zine celebrating speculative fiction and poetry with a Southern perspective. He lives in a busy household in the muggy heart of rural Alabama with his wife, two young sons, an aging Doberman mix, five tiger barbs, and three salt-and-pepper catfish. Author Spotlight: Deb Taber William Sullivan

Is the Shining City based on a particular place or event?

The Shining City is (very) loosely based on Caracas and the surrounding areas in Venezuela. Venezuela really was once known for its chocolate production, but the oil industry took over the economy once oil was discovered there, and agricultural exports dropped.

Why are the “Mineral Men” called that?

The theme of the story is based in the triad of animal/mineral/vegetable. I imagined the Mineral Men as embodying the characteristics of mineral (stone) far more so than of animal (bone) or vegetable (stem). I also imagined them as being alchemists, of a sort, so their magic is very earth-based, which also lends to the mineral aspects. I see the term as a name the people of the area gave them, rather than a name they chose for themselves, so it shows how the people of the area see them—hard and emotionless, but somehow necessary. “The stones were bad, but there were worse things than stone.” Considering what Jacinta had lost because of the stones (a sibling and a child), what would have been worse for her than the stones?

Jacinta sees that humans seem to have the worst end of the deal when it comes to stones—other animals give birth to gemstones or smooth, round rocks while the human mothers have what they see as worthless, painful lumps. Jacinta suspects it would have been the same with plants, and that had the women of the city started giving birth to plant life instead of mineral life, the thorns she mentions to Xoch would be worse than the scraping of stone. She also internally notes the “reptilian baby hyacinth things” that have come from the plants, and in my mind, she is disgusted by but also feels sorry for these creatures, who have lives that are stilted and so different from what they should have been, making the tragedy of the living creatures worse than the seemingly stillborn stones to her. She identifies with their confusion— particularly those specific creatures, as the name “Jacinta” means hyacinth.

Why did Jacinta decide to give birth to another stone? I really think that is something the reader really needs to decide for him or her self, and I would actually be very interested in hearing other people’s interpretations of the choice. However, in fairness to the question, here’s the short answer: Jacinta is making the decision to live within the new way of being rather than wish for things to go back to the way they were. I’m a big fan of stories that don’t have “happily ever afters,” but instead force the characters to come to terms with a new level of reality. Jacinta is doing that.

How should we understand Xoch’s reaction to feeling the stone inside of Jacinta?

Xoch still believes that something might change, that things can go back to the way they were. He believes it all the harder because he remembers it the least, and has the fewest solid ties to it; he is a dreamer who has only heard the idealized fantasies of what it was like when human babies were born. When he feels that Jacinta carries just another stone, not a return to what he had been told all his life is normal and good, his dreams and hopes are trampled—not entirely crushed, but still severely damaged. I also think that he partly blames her for not fixing the problem.

Do you have anything else you’d like to tell us?

I’ll probably be posting a bit more about the background inspiration for the story on my blog next week at www.inkfuscate.com, so anyone who is interested can learn more about the story and my other upcoming publications there. Thanks for having me back at Fantasy Magazine. It’s always a pleasure to be on these (virtual) pages. About the Editors

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 popular online writing classes, see www.kittywumpus.net.

Sean Wallace is the founder, publisher, and managing editor of Prime Books. In his spare time he has edited or co-edited a number of projects, including two magazines, Clarkesworld Magazine and Fantasy Magazine, and a number of anthologies, including Best New Fantasy, Japanese Dreams, The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, People of the Book, Robots: Recent A.I., and War & Space: Recent Combat. He lives in Germantown, MD, with his wife, Jennifer, and their twin daughters, Cordelia and Natalie.