the heart that I hoped lay slightly to the left of center.
She gasped.
The moonlight shifted, giving way to clouds, darkening her face. Her wounds returned, and with them her dark and frightened eyes. “Lorcan?” She stared, accusingly, and then her color changed again, becoming almost luminescent. “Lorcan!” She grabbed my hand, squeezing until my fingers felt ready to break against the knife’s handle. Then she pulled the blade free and shoved me away, leaving me holding the weapon, its edge bright with silver blood. “Lorcan!” She growled my name, the sound deep in her throat, bubbling through the wound in her chest. “He got to you!”
“No. The choice was mine.”
“Really?” And then she leaped away, but more slowly than last night when she had followed me from my apartment to reveal herself in the alley. She had planted that tire skid on the street, placed those bits of taillight on the pavement, and left the shredded jacket by the sewer. Then she had waited for me to find her . . . just as she had waited for me to find her in that line of traffic before the Quicksilver show. Each time, she had lured me, manipulated me, drawn me into position. I wasn’t sure how she had done it the first time, but one fact remained: “I never get lost!” I shouted as she vanished into the darkness. “Never!”
But I wasn’t convinced.
Even then, after all that I had seen and heard, doubts lingered.
I drove until Quicksilver’s song gave way to the rush of traffic and the access road’s darkness became the ebb and flow of passing headlights.
I came to a bridge, drove partway across, then parked in the emergency lane and got out to stand against the rail. I was shaking, too unmanned to drive.
The river below me caught the lights from the bridge, drawing them into long shimmers against the black water, and not for the first time in my life I felt caught between things vast and unknowable.
Or maybe they were not completely unknowable, for on one level the creatures that had called themselves Quicksilver and Ariana had one distinctly human trait.
They get others to settle their differences. Keeps them from having to take out their own kind.
I got back into my car, dialed in a classic rock station, and for a long time I just drove, going nowhere, riding the rhythms, trying to lose myself in the pulsing darkness.
Lawrence C. Connolly’s music projects include Veins: The Soundtrack, an ambient-rock CD featuring soundscapes inspired by his novel Veins (2008); and Songs of the Horror Writer, a one man show that he performed for Reggie Oliver’s Gaslight Music Hall at World Horror in 2010. His collections Visions (2009), This Way to Egress (2010), and Voices (2011) collect his best stories from Amazing, Borderlands, Cemetery Dance, F&SF, Twilight Zone, Year’s Best Horror, and other sf/f/h magazines and anthologies. Voices was nominated for a 2011 Bram Stoker Award. Connolly blogs about storytelling, performance, and music at LawrenceCConnolly.com.
The Erl-King
Elizabeth Hand
The kinkajou had been missing for two days now. Haley feared it was dead, killed by one of the neighborhood dogs or by a fox or wildcat in the woods. Linette was certain it was alive; she even knew where it was.
“Kingdom Come,” she announced, pointing a long lazy hand in the direction of the neighboring estate. She dropped her hand and sipped at a mug of tepid tea, twisting so she wouldn’t spill it as she rocked back and forth. It was Linette’s turn to lie in the hammock. She did so with feckless grace, legs tangled in her long peasant skin, dark hair spilled across the faded canvas. She had more practice at it than Haley, this being Linette’s house and Linette’s overgrown yard bordering the woods of spindly young pines and birches that separated them from Kingdom Come. Haley frowned, leaned against the oak tree, and pushed her friend desultorily with one foot.
“Then why doesn’t your mother call them or something?” Haley loved the kinkajou and justifiably feared the worst. With her friend exotic pets came and went, just as did odd visitors to the tumbledown cottage where Linette lived with her mother, Aurora. Most of the animals were presents from Linette’s father, an elderly Broadway producer whose successes paid for the rented cottage and Linette’s occasional artistic endeavors (flute lessons, sitar lessons, an incomplete course in airbrushing) as well as the bottles of Tanqueray that lined Aurora’s bedroom. And, of course, the animals. An iguana whose skin