“The minute I saw you waltz in here I knew you were trouble.”
“Just the kind of trouble you need,” purrs Kitty Le BoomBoom. “My old man somehow got the idea that I’m friendly with the pool boy and now he wants us to be splitsville–but if he has a convenient mishap first, I’m still tops in the will. Whaddaya say, gumshoe? Sixty-forty on a million clams?”
“Fifty-forty,” growls Dammet, “and ten points sends your pool boy to Acapulco.”
“Deal,” grins Kitty.
It’s totally cool! Nothing bad happens!
They just get rich and have sex all the time!
“Strike here,” and Proserpina taps the first two knuckles of her fist, “even if you’re wearing gloves. Keep your off hand a little farther out, to act as a guard; that gives your better arm more extension distance, and that makes it more powerful. And for heaven’s sake don’t swing like that. Draw back a little, then uncurl your fist so it ends up straight–see?”
“Who taught you all this?” pants Radiane.
“A friend. Named Tom.”
“And why do you think you need it? To beat up girls in the lunchroom?”
“As if I’ll need to,” smirks Proserpina, “after you.”
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Dunyazad’s face was rounder than Cehrazad’s, cheekbones higher, eyes set more deeply. The carefully repaired glass mask doesn’t fit.
“Pity,” murmurs the King, handing it to an attendant. “There’s some resemblance. Have you other daughters, Lord Loong?”
“To be honest, Your Majesty, I’ve never bothered counting the children,” says Cehrazad’s father. “I have wives for that. But no one in my house would hide from you; feel free to search.”
Cehrazad is holding her sister’s face hard, but it flickers there. When the King glances back for a sharp moment, she feels she must be shimmering, like a hot summer road.
All the teachers in Borderlands Elementary are trained in basic quasidemon defense, but Mr. Rosenthal makes it a point of pride. Claws rake off his lesson planner; he blasts back with light from the overhead projector. Quasiflesh explodes with a smell like dust and Kool-Aid. Tamiquah and Billiam huddle with the other kids, ducked and covered, peeking out to watch.
“Kids!” shrieks the last remaining beast. “There’s only one book you really need to–”
“We’re going to have to clean this up again, aren’t we?” sighs Tamiquah, dodging a gurgle of ichor, as Mr. Rosenthal demonstrates how safety scissors aren’t.
The wind is like a shark; if it ever stops it becomes, well, dead air. Both are boneless, and deadly, and misunderstood. And neither has changed for a long time.
Mariah was summoned and bound to her name, given a quarry she never found. Her summoner’s been dead a thousand years, but she hasn’t stopped. The wind doesn’t know when to quit.
What people don’t understand is that those “Gusty Winds May Exist” signs in the New Mexico desert aren’t warnings or even quantum-mechanics jokes: they’re permission. Here, they say to Mariah, old and aching. Here, just rest, just be.