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

The Cambion girl’s puddle-gray eyes blinked, and she managed to slap away the one sudden tear, though not the furrow it left on her cheek.

“Kora, very little is known about how incubi or succubi reproduce, how they make more of themselves . But that wasn’t what was happening when they made you. You’re something nobody quite understands. But there are plenty of humans that nobody will ever quite understand…”

Kora tried a smile.

“Let’s hang your pictures,” Ramona decided.

They did hang the pictures, all in a row, with clothespins, so Kora could take them down and look at them whenever she needed. When they were finished, Kora was too afraid to ask her about Sant Ramon.

Ramona would be here a little while, anyway. And then…Kora supposed she’d really have to be a grownup.

“You wanted to see me?” Ramona poked her head in the open door of Bernadette’s tiny closet office.

“Oh, yes. Come in.”

Ramona took two steps inside. “Have you had the chance to look over my program design for Sant Ramon?”

“I have.”

So this would be a short discussion, then. Unless she made it an argument. “I’d love to know what your thoughts are.”

“I suspect you know what my thoughts are, Ramona.”

“I don’t, actually! I never do, about anything! Please enlighten me!”

Bernadette sighed a decidedly frustrated sigh. “It is a very good proposal, as was your commune hospital for the Trauco’s victims in Chiloe, as was your day care center in Vatican City for the mothers of Nephilim children. I have no doubt you could do it. But it would be a shameful waste.”

Ramona opened her mouth to speak, then shut it.

“These people in these faraway places you propose to help…there are people for them. The books in the libraries already know them as victims and beautiful wonders. I would have hoped that someone such as you would be able to see victims where others do not.”

Ramona stepped back, and stood in the doorway.

“‘ Salus pro totus creatura prognatus .’ Health, safety, salvation for all creatures born, is that not what we have learned to say in this place?” Bernadette handled her Saint Raymond medal; there was a plain silver cross there, too, that Ramona had never noticed. “The ones we hate and fear, Ramona, the ones we do not even want to try to understand, these are truly the least of our brothers. The Cambion must have someone to study her, someone who wants to help her understand herself.”

“Is this coming from the Dean?”

“If it must.”

“You can’t keep me here,” said Ramona. “I’m a certified, experienced midwife. I could go get a job at any maternity ward in New York handling their Superum babies for them. I don’t need your contacts for that.”

“I believe that you could,” said Bernadette, “but we are all three praying that you won’t.”

When Ramona reached her own office, she sighed into her chair, head in her hands.

After a moment, she stood up and rifled through the bookshelf for something Kora might like to read. Finding a nicely illustrated compendium of infernal creatures, she sat back down, smiling, and waited for her office hours to start.

Originally published in audio format by Podcastle

They were just some seventh grade kids who hung around the handball court and pretended to be playing all the time so no one else could use it. Nate had no idea why he’d told them about his griffin.

He just said it, out of nowhere, like it was something he had just remembered. “So, in the woods, behind my house? There’s a griffin.”

That was how these guys talked, Eric and Dash, and Jackson and all of them. They just started right in with anything that happened to them like it was something they’d just now found in their pocket : “I smoked the fattest fucking blunt yesterday…you guys should see the lazer tag arena I built in back of my dad’s house…you know I already got my pilot’s license? I don’t even need to learn to drive.” And then they’d smash a cigarette under the toe of their shoe, waiting to be challenged.

He had never talked about the griffin out loud before. He didn’t even think he’d had words to talk about her. She had always been something he’d go into the woods to watch, this silent, padding thing that sometimes stopped to cock her head at him, if he stood still enough, or took something he fed her into her curved black beak.

He had only touched her a handful of times, on the smooth, downy part at the top of her head, and she had watched him every time with hunting gold eyes, her lion’s tail lashing patiently. He’d never even tried to bring home any of her old scattered feathers or broken-off claws. He hadn’t even known, until he talked about her, if he thought she was real .

But he’d been hanging out at the handball court for two weeks, and Eric had started making jokes about how creepy it was that Nate just stood around laughing like an idiot and never saying anything. And Nate just didn’t have a story about how he had set fire to a car, or put out a car that someone else had set fire to, or made his parents buy him a glock…he’d never been that interesting.

So it was desperation that made him do it, mostly. Well, desperation and panic, because Princess Zelda had been walking toward them.

Zelda was a thin pale girl, with thin pale hair, and thin pale eyelashes, and no eyebrows, and fingernails she chewed down to the bloody quick. She smelled like Carmex, and like the Ricola throat drops she ate like candy. She had a spooky way of going too many seconds without blinking. And sometimes, when people called her Princess Zelda instead of just Zelda, she made a weird little sweeping bow.

Nate had never really minded her that much before. But one day, she lent him three dollars when he lost his lunch ticket, and Nate made the mistake of saying he’d buy her a Haagen-Dazs bar as soon as he found another one in the cafeteria freezer. She had shrugged, unblinking. “Whatever,” she said, and walked away.

But Jackson and Dash both decided this meant Nate wanted to stick it to her. And so now, whenever she walked by, they all did long, loud impressions of what Nate supposed it must sound like to stick it to someone, and Eric patted him hard on the back like he’d just put out a flaming car. Princess Zelda always turned her head to look, locking spooky eyes with Nate and smirking like she was in on the joke and the joke wasn’t all that bad.

Girls are immune to this sort of thing. All they ever do is hang around other girls. They never know how bad the joke really gets.

So this time, Nate had changed the subject before she came too close. “So, in the woods, behind my house, there’s a griffin. Like, a real one.”

Eric’s head turned, startled and lazy. “What?”

“I have a griffin. At my house. You know, like part lion, part eagle.”

“What in the hell are you talking about?”

“They’ve got a body like a lion, right?” said Nate. “And a head, and talons, and wings like an eagle.” Jackson and Dash stared. Eric stared. “And no one thinks they really exist. But mine does…mine does.”

“So it’s like a dragon?” Eric said after a blink. Dash started to chortle and snort, but Eric threw back an arm and smacked some part of him. Eric never let anyone shit on you until he’d decided to, and he hadn’t decided to, yet.

“No…” said Nate, “she’s feathered. She’s got feathers, and fur.” It was strange describing her like this, dissecting her into her “look-alike” parts, without any of the things that made her alive. The musk of her big cat haunches, the oily brightness of her black feathers, the soft tap-scrape of her talons when the ground was dry.