I saw myself through his eyes, an old man stunned and confused in a trench coat and battered hat, staring up at him. He sent that image out in all directions. The elf knew I had the gun and knew I was in his power.
Then the lights flickered fast. Out in the dark amid the noise of the pile drivers there were cries and gunshots. Suddenly Bertrade was inside me: “My left-hand man!”
Under a spell my arm moved. The elf couldn’t stop it. That left arm was magic. He blocked my breath and sent a bolt of pain through my head, stopped my eyes from seeing. But the arm rose. I couldn’t see him, but I fired. Nothing. My head spun.
For an instant my sight cleared. I saw the elf. I squeezed the trigger as my sight went dark. Nothing happened.
Blind, I fired to the left and there was a scream. My breath came back. My sight returned. Up the gangplank, the elf grasped his shoulder. I felt him stop my heart, but I blew his jaw off and it started again. I shot him in the head before I passed out.
——
The morning was long gone and done when I came home. Mrs. Palatino had actually turned off her television, put on street clothes, and was headed out to Thursday-afternoon bingo at Our Lady of Pompeii Church. She gave me a look full of disapproval and shook her head.
I needed to go upstairs and change my clothes, stop around at the office. In my jacket pocket was a letter to the Beyers from Hilda, saying she was alive and well and thinking of them. Bertrade had brought that with her from the Kingdom beneath the Hill. Our business relationship was still intact.
We’d parted half an hour before. That night was spent at the Plaza: part of our reward for smashing the elf and his espionage crew. After he went down, three of his fellow Gentry had come out of the dark and surrendered to Bertrade and her friends. Culpepper and Mimi and a couple of other mortals the elves had recruited bore the body into the back of a panel truck.
That dream I’d half remembered had been sent by Bertrade. In the game of cat and mouse she and the big elf had played, some of his magic was stronger than hers.
“Askal is his name. We met in the Kingdom,” she said, “and he was able to read me enough to know how I felt about you. He wanted to use you to draw me. I wanted to use that magic arm Darnel and I gave you to do away with him.”
It seemed to me like the kind of game in which mortals were just breakable objects. Bertrade winced when I thought that.
Askal, of course, didn’t completely die. I heard him shrieking; saw his shadow moving around the pier after his corpse had been taken away in the truck.
It isn’t likely I’ll ever go back to that spot on the Hudson. And it isn’t likely I’ll ever completely trust Bertrade. What I feel for her may not be love. But I know that when I’m with her this mortal life of mine gets torn open by magic, and when she’s gone, that’s all I remember.
But when we parted outside the Plaza that morning and kissed, she told me she’d be back before long. And I look forward to it.
Tomorrow evening, Jim and Anne Toomey will be waked out in Brooklyn. Their connection with me is what killed them, and I’ll think of that.
My life may not run out of me into a big red puddle, but someday my life will run out. And before that happens in this world of bait and traps, I’ll see Bertrade again.
——
Richard Bowes has published five novels, two collections of short fiction, and fifty stories. He has won two World Fantasy Awards and the Lambda, International Horror Guild, and Million Writers Awards. Recent and forthcoming stories appear in Fantasy & Science Fiction and the anthologies Wilde Stories 2010, Nebula Awards Showcase 2011, The Beastly Bride, Blood and Other Cravings, Haunted Legends, Digital Domains, and Naked City. Several of these stories are chapters in his novel in progress, Dust Deviclass="underline" My Life in Speculative Fiction.
His web page is RickBowes.com.
Melanie Tem
—
A bevy of girls pushed past her, giggling obscenities, claiming the sidewalk. They smelled of sex, weed, booze, musky perfume. She was down with all that, except musky perfume, which gave her a headache. Piercings glinted in headlights and flashing signs, and their shoulders and chests and midriffs and thighs and smalls of backs were all tatted up. She went in for body art herself, but even if she’d let hers show and left the eyebrow stud in tonight, these chicks were her “sisters” only in theory.
The tall one practically stuck her tight little ass in her face, shoving her off the curb. A red snake coiled out of the butt crack up the downy spine, fresh and still hurting. Almost without thinking, she made it hurt a little worse.
One of them sneered, “Get the fuck out of our way, bitch.” They all screeched evil laughter and then they had a hilarious contest calling her things like “retard” and “runt.”
She was losing sleep and risking life, limb, and STDs to make the world safer for asshole kids like these, who didn’t even have fully developed frontal lobes—and why? She knew why. Same reason she was in social-work school. To make a difference.
She indulged in a moment of revenge fantasy. It’d be no effort at all to wriggle inside their vapid little minds and jack their thoughts, give them false memories or repress real ones, make them understand crap they couldn’t possibly understand like research statistics, or forget stuff they knew and needed like cell numbers of friends-with-bennies.
But she wouldn’t let herself be mean just to be mean. Morality sucked. Not using all your talents also sucked. But doing mean stuff just because you could was part of what made the world such a hard place. That and stupidity.
She couldn’t even journal about it for her Social-Work Skills class. That’d blow all her various covers, and anyway the stories were so outrageous people’d think she was totally psycho.
She’d just do her job here and get back to the dorm in time to finish the Policy paper tonight, never mind that she’d be totally sleep deprived for the eight o’clock class that put her to sleep anyway. A normal starvation-wage work-study job would’ve been a lot simpler. Just once in a while she’d like to do something normal and simple.
The gaggle of girls flapped and honked across the park. Although she’d learned in Human Growth and Development why part of her longed to be one of them, it still hurt that she wasn’t.
She went and sat on a swing where it was darker. Her feet dangled. She pulled Pinkie out of her Hannah Montana backpack and snuggled him into her lap. Not five minutes later the chicken hawk made his move. Already she could tell she’d hardly earn her fee with this one.
He crooned, “Not safe out here all by yourself, honey.”
It had taken her a while to learn to tear up, but now it was second nature. Or third or fourth nature, whatever. When professors talked about “conscious use of self, the basic social-work tool,” she doubted fake decoy tears were what they had in mind.
She clutched her pink bear and looked up at the man, automatically noting his squared-off hairline, black or navy-blue hoodie, bad breath, worse thoughts. Thing for girls and boys with no body hair. She whimpered, “I want my mommy. Can you help me find my mommy, mister?” The “mister” was either a genius hook or over the top.