SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Then came the worst dream of all.

“What if I was wrong?”

Jonas had found me on the floor of my cabin, sobbing like a farm girl over her spilled bucket. It was a measure of my terror that I was more scared than embarrassed. But he knelt down as though this was no different than any of our other conversations.

“Wrong about what?”

I could barely whisper it. “What if he wasn’t a demon?” In the nightmare, I had watched your father’s blood soaking into the earth and suddenly known that I had been wrong. That he was nothing more than a man. And I had murdered him.

Jonas looked around the cabin, and took in my meticulous preparations, down to the polished glass of the windows. “I don’t think you’d be wrong about that.”

I laughed bitterly. “There is no world in which I have not been terribly wrong. Either I killed an innocent man, or I bedded and then conceived a child with a demon. If I could do one, surely it is possible I could do the other.”

“But not both,” he pointed out, and rose.

I looked up at him, and he helped me to my feet. His hand was warm and solid, as callused as any fisherman’s. He let mine go.

“You are close to your time,” he said. “There are few people on this mountain, but there is a wise woman. I could bring—”

“No.”

“Do you want me to take you to—?”

I shook my head. I did not trust any wise woman of this mountain. I feared what she would do to you if she suspected your parentage. I feared what she would do to me as I lay depleted by childbirth. Something had kept me alive this far, either it would have me safely delivered of you, or it would not.

“Do you want me to stay?”

That question I could not answer. And so he left.

A day later I was cursing myself as a greater fool than the man who tried to sail his boat on shore. I had fled the sea, but it had finally caught up to me, and I found myself on hands and knees on my wooden floor as wave after wave passed over and through me, each one taking a little bit more of my strength back to the depths.

My own waters had left me hours ago, but you clung still, like a barnacle deep inside, unwilling to let go. I pictured you stuck; drying like a sea star deserted by the tide. Another wave passed, and I groaned to feel a surge pass from me. Not you. I looked down. The waters of the sea had turned red, like a sunset.

Whatever had kept me alive this long had abandoned me. I was going to die. And then, in the quiet between the waves, I felt you struggling, still wet and quick. I had to live. You had to live. Somehow.

I screamed for help until I was hoarse. I forced myself to stand and make my way to the windows, hoping to see Jonas there as he had been so many times now. But there was no one. My fists pounded the glass in rage and frustration. The sun was already low in the sky; its rays leapt from the panes back out to the valley, and…my fists stilled. I pictured Jonas watching for those flashes from the mountain. And I was certain that if he did not see them, he would come to find out why.

I beat against the glass over and over with my pain, until each pane, and I, had shattered, and the blood of my hands mixed with the blood coating my thighs, and I lay on the floor, screaming and cursing as the afternoon light crept over me, thrown back only by my glittering tears. You were harder and harder to feel, and as the room darkened, you slowed further, and I couldn’t tell if the world was dimming, or if I was.

And then the pain was gone. The waters receded, and there was Jonas. And there you were, warm and wet and alive.

“You lied to me,” I accused him, half dozing as you suckled. “You said you weren’t a demon.”

Jonas shook his head. “I said I didn’t think I was a demon. Do you think you are a human, or do you know?”

“That’s very technical.”

He shrugged. “I did warn you this place was haunted.”

Well, that he had. I tucked you closer in my arms, feeling the broken pieces of my soul knit together as I traced the shell of your tiny ear.

“Are you going to kill me?” I asked.

“I said I wasn’t planning to. I don’t lie.”

My mind was not entirely at ease, but as I tried to work out a way to ask if he was likely to kill me without having to plan it, he asked his own question first.

“Why break the glass, if you thought I was a demon?”

His voice had changed, or maybe it was only the way I heard it. But his callused hill man hands had not. The hands that had, only hours earlier, lifted you from me and placed you on my chest. “If you hadn’t come, I would have died. If you did, perhaps you wouldn’t kill me, and if you didn’t, what did it matter if you were a demon?”

He smiled, and I looked into his eyes, once again the comforting brown of buried autumn leaves after their fiery colors have faded, with just a hint of the green of new grass, and the tiniest glimmer of golden yellow.

As I drifted off to sleep, one last fear broke free, and I fought the current to wakefulness one last time. “Are you this one’s father? Have you come to take him?”

“No,” I heard him say as I slipped into the dark. “You were most thorough.”

By the time I realized he hadn’t answered my second question, I was already asleep.

When I woke, he was gone. But you were not.

I had cause to be glad of my autumn hoarding. Jonas had not lied; we were not in danger of freezing to death, and things grew through the winter, but I was tired, and weak, and you were demanding, and without my stores I would have reached spring in dire straits indeed.

You, I didn’t worry for. Once you had reached the world, and I looked into your eyes, golden like fire, I was certain that you would find a way to live. Without the threat of your father coming to steal your life to add to his own, you thrived.

In time, I found new glass for the windows. Even if it would not protect us, I still liked to sit in the afternoons with you in my arms, or rolling in the grass at my feet, and watch the light leaping off the panes like fishes. In time, word that the cabin was no longer haunted reached the mountain village, and I met our neighbors. I found I did not mind the occasional breaks in our aloneness. Others were not so frightening now. My shattered soul had healed, and I was no longer vulnerable to demons.

Jonas never returned.

So you see, little one. It is all as I promised.

My story is not a love story. It is a story of grief followed by death, exile, deception, and abandonment.

But love came to it. In the end.

Originally published by Serial Box Publishing as part of Bookburners, Season One

Sal had come to the Societas Libris Occultatem’s gym under the Vatican to lift weights, put in some treadmill time, and take out a little pent-up aggression on the heavy bag. All of those plans, however, flew right out the window when she found Liam with his shirt off, taping his hands and showing off both his physique and tattoos to very good advantage. Not that she wasn’t intimately acquainted with all of his ink already. Still, just because a girl was familiar with the scenery didn’t mean that she couldn’t appreciate the view.

He caught her looking and smirked.

“You come to work out, or just window shopping?”

“I can’t do both?”

“I’d hate for you to get hurt because you were distracted.”

Well, she couldn’t just let that pass, could she?

Despite being in a genuine roped-off ring, their sparring was more mixed unarmed combat than straight-out boxing. (Liam was scandalized to learn that New York police did not generally engage in recreational fisticuffs, at least, not since handlebar moustaches had gone out of fashion.) But they both had enough training to make for an interesting bout, and if one or the other of them periodically wound up flat on their back against the canvas, Sal wasn’t complaining. From the press of his body against hers, Liam didn’t object either.