before he followed us here.” Billy grimaced. “They’re getting smarter.”
“Not smart enough to use it before asking questions, though.”
Mahasti jerked her thumb over her shoulder, towards the rear of the house. The white lotus and babe, blurred on her wrist, shone in the dark. She felt different. Maybe. She thought she felt different now.
She said, “What about them? If there are any more hunters they will be able to answer questions.”
“We could take them with us. Hostages. The Impala’s got a six-body trunk. It’s cozy, but it’s doable.”
“Fuck it,” Mahasti said. “They’ll be a load. It’ll be a long fucking drive. Leave them.”
“Fine,” Billy said. “But you got what you needed from the kid. I still have to get a snack first.”
He met her on the concrete stoop two minutes later, licking a split lip. Smoke curled from his fingers as he pulled his hat down hard, shading his face from the last crepuscular light of the sun. “Cutting it close.”
“The car has tinted windows,” she said. “Come on.”
Traffic thinned as the night wore on, and the stark, starlit landscape grew more elaborately beautiful. Mahasti read a book by Steinbeck, the lotus flashing every time she turned a page. Billy drove and chewed his thumb.
When the sky was gray, without turning, she said, “Pity about the kid.”
“What do you care? He was just gonna die anyway.” He paused. “Just like we don’t.”
She sighed into the palm of her hand, feeling her own skin chilling like age-browned bone. There was no pain where the needles had worked her skin—but there was pain in her empty arms, in her breasts taut with milk again already. “Mommy’s going to miss him.”
Billy’s shrug traveled the length of his arms from his shoulders to where his wrists draped the wheel. “Not for as long as I’d miss you.”
They drove a while in silence. Without looking, she reached out to touch him.
A thin line of palest gold shivered along the edge of the world. Billy made a sound of discontent. Mahasti squinted at the incipient sunrise.
“Pull over. It’s time for you to get in the trunk.”
He obeyed wordlessly, and wordlessly got out, leaving the parking brake set and the door standing open. She popped the trunk lid. He lay back and settled himself on the carpet, arms folded behind his head. She closed the lid on him and settled back into the car.
Her unmarred brown left arm trailed out the window in the sun. Tonight, somewhere new, they’d do it all over again.
Once in a while, Billy was right. Nothing changed them. She could touch the world, but the world never touched her.
The Impala purred as she pulled off the shoulder and onto the road. Empty, and for another hour it would remain so.
FROM THE TEETH OF STRANGE CHILDREN
Lisa L. Hannett
Lisa L. Hannett has had over fifty-five short stories appear in venues including Clarkesworld, Fantasy, Weird Tales, ChiZine, the Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror (2010, 2011, and 2012), and Imaginarium: Best Canadian Speculative Writing (2012 and 2013). She has won three Aurealis Awards, including Best Collection 2011 for her first book, Blue-grass Symphony, which was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award. She coauthored themed collections Midnight and Moonshine (2012) and The Female Factory (2014) with Angela Slatter. Her first novel, Lament for the Afterlife, is being published by CZP in 2015. You can find her online at lisahannett.com and on Twitter @LisaLHannett.
Hannett’s Mister Pérouse is, like the archetypal vampire, an evil creature—but he and his not-at-all-merry band are also quite original …
What do ghosts look like?
The whisper cracks my voice, but I know he’s heard me. He takes a hesitant step forward and drops his rucksack inside the entrance. Dust lifts off the bag, settles onto the scuffed floorboards. Then he stands there, half in the daylight, half in the dark of our lampless, curtained sitting room. He clears his throat and fingers the house key like he’s amazed it still works. As though Ma was the one who’d left, not him, and changed the locks on her way. I couldn’t have been more than nine when his pack last disappeared, leaving nothing but a few scratches in the doorframe to show where he’d dragged it out behind him. Eight years later, he’s got a truck to carry most of his things, more white in his hair, and an expression so downcast I can’t yet tell whose father he is. Mine or Harley’s.
“Ada,” he says, nothing more. No questioning lilt to the way he