Summer 2007 (21 page)

Somebody moved in the darkness, the drifting night air
bringing me the rankness of tobacco and cheap bourbon and unwashed man. A lot
of bums slept in the Boneyard; it was safer than sleeping on the street. Until
I got to town, that is.

I thought about it for a minute. It would be clean,
easy. I could do what I had to do and get back on duty following those
ridiculously charming escapees from the idiot box around.

All right, it wouldn’t be clean.

And I was hungry, but I could still afford to be
choosy–and some down on his luck drunk wasn’t choosy enough for me.
Especially not when Jesse frowned at me translucently from the shadows,
disapproval plain in his expression though he was holding his tongue. Most
people in Vegas are prey, it’s true; the city’s got teeth. But I wanted
something that wouldn’t keep me up days feeling guilty about it.

I slipped into the walkway between the Sassy Sallie’s
sign and the chain link, jumped over, and caught a cab downtown, looking for irony
if I couldn’t find evil. Jesse didn’t follow, and I didn’t blame him. I’d only
get a lecture if he were there, anyway. There were a lot of people sleeping on
the street, all right. I only had to spend a few minutes hanging around the
courthouse and the bus station to get the feeling Vegas doesn’t offer much in
the way of safety nets. People slept rough on the grass or on park benches, or
moved around looking for something to eat now that the heat of the day had
pulled back a little. I killed five minutes watching happy couples being
panhandled as they left the courthouse with their marriage licenses in their
hands; the bureau’s open ’till midnight weekdays and twenty-four hours on
weekends. No blood test, no waiting, and all the papers on public record.

I could walk in there, pay a couple of dollars, and pull
my own marriage license application, if I wanted it.

Yeah. Plenty to choose from, and easy pickings. Jackie
kept his city clean of people like me. What he couldn’t keep out were the
people like people everywhere, because they made him as much as he watched
them. And I comfort myself that there are worse predators in the night than me.

It’s a lie, but I comfort myself.

There were still a couple of street preachers working
the crowd. The true Las Vegas wedding experience; pick your minister out of the
ones on the sidewalk shouting their wares, like hookers jostling on the corner.
“Hey, mister,” one of them said to me, as I wandered close, “do you want to get
married tonight?”

God forgives us the sins of our mortal lifetimes, if we
ask real nice. My religion doesn’t talk much about the ones committed after you
die. I turned around and looked him in the eye, and shrugged. “My fiancée’s
just run back to the hotel. You wanna come with me to get her?”

“Sure,” he said, and fell into step. Tall black man,
heavy set, his hair shaved close to the skull. We walked a few yards, and it
was easy enough to grab a wrist and snake him into the shadows. They make it
sound so pretty in the books. Tidy little puncture wounds, and orgasmic
pleasure spiraling into death.

It isn’t pretty. You wouldn’t want to know. Still,
plenty of blood in that one, and if I couldn’t find a record producer, a man of
God would do.

You figure they’ll get home safely, right? And if they
don’t, it’s their own damned fault.

I never could stand a
hypocrite.

Fiction:
Black is the Color by Elizabeth Bear

Black is the color of my true love’s hair

His lips are like a rose so fair

The kindest face and the gentlest hands

I love the ground whereon he stands

#

Sunrise light glazed the oblong cobbles along the north
bank of the River Clyde. The thump of music from a barge-turned nightclub had
ended hours earlier. Only the river–winding between stark industrial
buildings on the south bank and condominiums on the right–remained. The
river, silence, and the morning chill.

And a white stallion’s hunger.

He was not pure-white: rather a cobby piebald with a
black face and a mostly-white body, more black spotting his legs, streaking his
mane and tail and his heavy feathers. The red light scraped across the stones
stained his coat also, turning blue eyes unearthly. His hooves were unshod,
though old nail-holes could be seen around their fringes should one observe
with care.

The stallion stood beneath a bridge so low that if he
raised his head, he would strike it on stones–a human of average height
could have laid hands on the arch–and he cropped small white flowers of
hairy bitter cress from between the stones. Prehensile lips tugged the plants
loose, his teeth grinding them to gritty pulp, roots and sand and all.

The picture of morning contentment, he was waiting for a
girl.

Not one girl in particular. But not just any girl,
either. She had to be a special girl, brave and clear-eyed. Thirteen or
fifteen, innocently sociopathic, full of juice and life and solipsism. Wicked.
Worthy.

That was the girl for him.

The Clyde had many moods, and the stallion in his time
had waited through them all. He’d wait through more than rain and sun, dark and
light, if need be. He was a predator, with a predator’s patience. He’d wait a
long while for the right one.

This morning, he did not have to. The cold black river
silvered and then greened with sunrise, though the city slumbered on. And a
girl came walking, alone, swinging her book bag, her heels clicking on the
rectangular cobbles and her school skirt flaring around her knees.

It was early for school, though, and she didn’t walk
purposefully. She staggered as if with tiredness, and her high-collared
cardigan was buttoned over her throat, her left arm hugged tight to her torso
as if to keep in a little extra warmth, or as if her ribs hurt her.

The stallion had a way of going unseen, if he stood
unmoving. The light fell around him, draped him like green branches or window
curtains, and drew the eye past. But he wanted the girl to notice, and so out
of the nowhere from which he drew his clothing and caparison, he shrugged on a
saddle and bridle–old, creaking, oiled leather–permitted a bit of
hairy cress to protrude between his lips, and struck an unshod hoof on stone.

Lightly, lightly. He did not care to crack the cobbles,
or his foot. Just to raise a clatter, enough of a clatter to raise the girl’s
head.

She was a pretty girl. That was good; he liked pretty
girls best. She had long straight ash-fair hair and a pointed chin, and as she
turned toward him sunlight refracted through her irises for an instant so her
eyes seemed to glow.

He whickered, low and hesitant, and she limped a
half-step forward, her black nylon bag dragging on the dew-damp stones.
“Hello,” she said, when her eye fell on him. “You’re a big one, aintcha?”

He made another sound, a breathy whuff, and mirrored her
half-step. “Oh,” she said, and let go the strap of her bag so it slumped
against her ankle. She held out a hand, palm-up. “I’m sorry. I haven’t an
apple.”

He minced another step, gravely, head bowed and neck
tucked, reins dragging between his forelegs. Her narrow chest swelled as she
drew in a breath and held it.

He paused, waiting for her to speak again. The trick was
to make them think they were coaxing you.

“Come on, Boss,” she said, and clicked her tongue.
“What’s your name, big fella? Did you lose your rider? Is that why you were
hiding under the bridge? I know, it feels safer there–”

He tossed his head and stepped forward and then back.
His hoof came down on the reins; he thought he even made it look accidental.
And then the head-toss again–this time arrested by the tension on the
reins–and the flattened jingle of bit swivels.

The girl’s eyes widened. They were translucent, green,
the color of the Clyde in a different mood with the sun high above it. “Shh,”
she said. “Shh, shh.”

She moved more purposefully now, worried for him, but
still cautiously and in increments, edging away from her book bag and talking
low nonsense. He watched, ears forward and forelock fallen across his eyes,
waiting for her touch.

She surprised him. She let him lip her palm, fingers
flat, and then she touched his neck, low and away from his face, making his
skin jump and shiver. Cautiously, she ran the hand along the crest of his neck,
scratching under the heavy mane, and then slid her palm down his shoulder along
the grain of the hair. She crouched, slowly, her hand still trailing down his
leg, and grasped the fetlock just above the hoof. Burrs matted the dense coarse
hair of his feathers and her hand wouldn’t close around his ankle. But she
tugged, and he lifted, freeing the reins.

She caught them in her left hand and pulled them clear,
winding the worn leather around and around her palm as she stood. “Good boy,”
she said, as he settled his hoof again.

She scratched his cheek. He leaned into it. “I wish I
had an apple.”

She had something better, of course. The smell of her
was maddening. He rested his chin on her shoulder and lipped her neck, and she
scratched harder.

She tasted of salt and unwashed girl. He was right; she
had been out all night, and still in yesterday’s school clothes. She was his,
all his, whenever he wanted her.

He could afford the joy of anticipation.

“Hey,” she said. “That tickles.” She pushed his muzzle
away, strands of unbrushed hair sticking to his lips and nostrils. “You’re
pretty sweet for a stallion,” she said. “And no shoes either.” She looked down
at his hooves. He clattered them on the stone, neck arched, inviting.

The saddle was right there, the stirrup a summons. She
touched the cheekpiece of the bridle instead. “Aren’t horses always supposed to
know their way home?”

He snorted warm air softly across her cheek and brushed
her with his whiskers. She smelled of blood, rich and tantalizing; perhaps she
was on her menses. The bit made him froth at the corners of his mouth when he
salivated.

“Yeah,” she said. She cupped a hand over his eye, and he
let her. “I know my way home too. And I don’t want to go there either. I can’t
ride you in a skirt, Boss, and I don’t know where to take you.”

He wondered what she would do if he spoke, if he let
himself slip into human form and gathered her in his arms. A calm girl, a brave
girl, a sensible girl. One who knew a little about horses, maybe just from
reading, maybe from trips out to the countryside.

He liked this one, her furry red smell and her voice
with the hitch in it. He pressed his face into her palm and waited.

And she looked at him, sad and strange, and pulled her
hand back and pressed it to her neck as if to keep her heart from rising up her
throat. And then she looped the reins over the fence, turned away, scooped up
her book bag by the strap, hauled back, cocked her arm, and pitched it spinning
over the bright aluminum rail.

It fell with a splash and bobbed only once before it
sank, recollected by ripples and then bubbles. “Right,” she said. “I guess
that’s that, then, innit?”

She hadn’t done much more with the reins than a gesture.
Perhaps she half-hoped that when she turned back, he’d be gone. A wisp of
dream, burned off with the morning mist rising from the river.

Stately, careful, the stallion stepped out of the shadow
of the bridge. The sun was high enough to catch in her tawny hair and warm the
crest of his neck now, and he paused in the light so that when she looked up,
she would see him. But she stood at the rail, staring, and so he came to her,
and breathed across her neck. She shuddered and turned back.

“So,” she said, “where to now?”

He whickered again, tickling her ear with his whiskers.
She leaned her cheek against his neck.

And then she turned, suddenly, tossed the reins over his
head. She came under his neck and stepped crisply along his near side. He felt
her hand on his shoulder, his mane. She grasped the pommel of the saddle and
lifted one leg with complete immodesty, revealing a dab of crimson on her
panties, her foot a testing weight in the stirrup. The scent of blood and iron
dizzied him; he shook froth from his lips. And then she was on his back, knee
socks and clunky black shoes, and he could hear her thighs sticking to the
leather of the saddle as she settled herself. Living flesh on dead, adhering.
She shifted her weight in the saddle, and he waited until she was seated, both
feet in the stirrups.

“I know who you are,” she said. “You don’t fool me,
pony.” And then she patted him on the neck and said, “And I don’t care.”

He craned his neck, pulling against the off rein, and
she moved her hand to give him that freedom. She leaned down to push his
forelock out of his eye as it came within reach, making him shake his head and
send it tumbling down again. She laughed and drummed her heels against his
side. “Well then, run off with me, Kelpie.”

He wondered when she’d known him. The eyes, perhaps: the
eyes often gave him away. And those he could not change. Every Fae who
transforms has some mark that stays with him in every shape, and the stallion’s
was china-blue irises.