She hates me because I have successful sun-born genes and can live in daylight. But Zeev, who can’t take even thirty seconds of the sun, doesn’t hate me for that. He. he doesn’t hate me at all.
“So will you go back to Severin tomorrow?” he said to me as we sat at the brink of the night.
“No.”
“Daisha, even when they’ve married us, please believe this: If you still want to go away, I won’t put obstacles in your path. I will back you up.”
“You care so little.”
“So much.”
His eyes glowed in the dark. They put the waterfall to shame.
When he touched me, touches me, I know him. From long ago, I remember this incredible joy, this heat and burning, this refinding rightness — and I fall down into the abyss forever, willing as the shining water. I never loved before. Except Juno, but she cured me of that.
He is a healer. His blood can heal, its vampiric vitality transmissible — but noninvasive. From his gift come no substandard replicants of our kind. They only — live.
Much, much later, when we parted just before the dawn inside the house — parted till the next night, our wedding day — it came to me that if he can heal by letting humans drink his blood, perhaps I might offer him some of my own. Because my blood might help him to survive the daylight, even if only for one unscathed and precious minute.
I’ll wear green to be married. And a necklace of sea green glass.
As the endless day trails by, unable to sleep, I’ve written this.
When he touched me, when he kissed me, Zeev, whose name actually means “wolf,” became known to me. I don’t believe he’ll have to live all his long, long life without ever seeing the sun. For that was what he reminded me of. His warmth, his kiss, his arms about me — my first memory of that golden light that blew upward through the dark. No longer any fear, which anyway was never mine, only that glorious familiar excitement and happiness, that welcomed danger. Perhaps I am wrong in this. Perhaps I shall pay heavily and cruelly for having been deceived. And for deceiving myself, too, because I realized what he was to me the moment I saw him — why else put up such barricades? Zeev is my sunrise out of the dark of the night of my so-far useless life. Yes, then. I love him.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
NATHAN BALLINGRUD lives with his daughter just outside Asheville, North Carolina. His stories have appeared in Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural; The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy; Lovecraft Unbound; SCIFICTION; and The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Two, and will be forthcoming in Naked City: New Tales of Urban Fantasy. He recently won the Shirley Jackson Award for his short story “The Monsters of Heaven.”
CHRISTOPHER BARZAK’s first novel, One for Sorrow, won the Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy. His second book, a novel-in-stories called The Love We Share Without Knowing, was placed on the James Tiptree Jr. Award’s Honor List. His stories have appeared in the young adult anthologies The Coyote Road, The Beastly Bride, and Firebirds Soaring. He is at work on his third novel and teaches fiction writing at Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio, where vampires have begun to fight for equal rights. You can find out more about him at www.christopherbarzak.wordpress.com.
STEVE BERMAN began writing and selling weird stories when he was seventeen. His novel Vintage: A Ghost Story was a finalist for the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy and made the Rainbow List for recommended gay-themed books for young readers by the American Library Association’s GLBT Roundtable. His favorite vampire movie is Near Dark. And if you email him at sberman8@yahoo.com and ask for more vamp-slaying adventures for Saul, he just may write them.
HOLLY BLACK writes bestselling contemporary fantasy for readers of all ages. She is the author of the Modern Faerie Tale series, The Spiderwick Chronicles, and the graphic novel series The Good Neighbors. Currently she is hard at work on The Black Heart, the third book in the noirish caper series The Curse Workers.
EMMA BULL grew up in California, Texas, Wisconsin, New Jersey, and Illinois. As soon as she finished school and headed out on her own, she started collecting more states and a Canadian province. She’s been writing since elementary school, when she discovered that turning in a short story when the teacher asked for an essay got her an automatic A.
She’s been in five bands, plays lame guitar, and likes to sing. She lives (for now, at least) in Arizona with her husband, Will Shetterly, and cats Toby (best cat) and Barnabas (worst cat).
CECIL CASTELLUCCI has published four novels for young adults: Rose Sees Red, Beige, The Queen of Cool, and Boy Proof, and a picture book, Grandma’s Gloves. She also wrote the graphic novels The PLAIN Janes and Janes in Love, illustrated by Jim Rugg, which were the launch titles for the DC Comics Minx line. She has had numerous short stories published in various places, including Strange Horizons, The Eternal Kiss, Geektastic (which she coedited), and Interfictions 2. Her books have been on the American Library Assocation’s Best Books for Young Adults, Quick Picks for Reluctant Readers, and Great Graphic Novels for Teens lists, as well as the New York Public Library’s Books for the Teen Age and Amelia Bloomer lists. Upcoming books include a graphic novel for young readers, Odd Duck, illustrated by Sara Varon, and two new novels, First Day on Earth and The Year of the Beasts. In addition to writing books, she writes plays and opera libretti, makes movies, does performance pieces, and occasionally rocks out. For more information, go to www.misscecil.com.
SUZY MCKEE CHARNAS grew up on the West Side of Manhattan when pizza was fifteen cents a slice. She escaped into the wider world by joining the Peace Corps fresh out of college, and was sent to Nigeria to teach. Home again, she taught junior high until she was lured away to write curriculum for a drug abuse treatment program founded on two ideas: that teachers should stop telling lies about drugs to students, since the students knew more about drugs than they did, so lying just made the teachers look ridiculous; and that teachers and students have a common interest in making school less boring, since they are the ones stuck in classrooms together for years on end.
She married in 1969, and she and her husband went to live in New Mexico (for the big blue sky and high desert horizons), where she began writing science fiction and fantasy full-time. Her books and stories have won her various awards over the years, and a play made from her best-known novel (about a vampire who teaches college) has been staged on both coasts. She lectures and teaches about fantasy, SF, and fiction writing whenever she gets a chance to, and blogs about everything on Live Journal. Her website is www.suzymckeecharnas.com.
CASSANDRA CLARE is the internationally bestselling author of the Mortal Instruments and the Infernal Devices series of young adult urban fantasy novels. She lives with her husband and two cats in western Massachusetts, where she is currently writing Clockwork Prince, the last in the Infernal Devices trilogy. She has always liked vampires.
ELLEN DATLOW has been editing short stories in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror fields for thirty years. She was fiction editor of OMNI Magazine and editor of SCIFICTION, as well as editing anthologies throughout those years and continuing to do so today. Her most recent anthologies include Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe; Lovecraft Unbound; Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror; Tails of Wonder and Imagination: Cat Stories; Haunted Legends (coedited with Nick Mamatas); The Beastly Bride; and Troll’s-Eye View (these last two with Terri Windling). Forthcoming in 2011 is Naked City: New Tales of Urban Fantasy. She coedited The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror for twenty-one years and has been editing The Best Horror of the Year for three years. Datlow has won multiple World Fantasy Awards, Bram Stoker Awards, Hugo Awards, Locus Awards, International Horror Guild Awards, and the Shirley Jackson Award for her editing. She was named recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award for “outstanding contribution to the genre.”