Anne Ursu - The Shadow Thieves

She said, "Hi!" He couldn't believe it. Hi means Hello, and Hello means, well, Hello! It means… Greetings!… Salutations! It means, I know who you are and I wish to acknowledge your presence. In fact, I salute you!

Zee watched the girls disappear into the crowd, contemplating hi and all its myriad wonders. Grandmother Winter watched him watching them and smiled softly "Who's that?" she asked casually.

"Girl from Feldwop," Zee said.

"Very lovely," she said.

"Yeah," Zee shrugged, then added with a strange laugh, "You know, half the Feldwop girls are hoping to marry one of the princes."

Grandmother Winter tilted her head. "I don't know," she said thoughtfully. "She doesn't look as horribly dull as all that."

She grinned at Zee, who grinned right back. His body unfroze, and he laughed. "Let's hope not."

"Come on," said Grandmother Winter. "Let's go look at shirts."

That night Zee sat awake in bed and thought about the entire hi incident. She knew him. That amazed Zee. Of course, she'd seen him play before and they'd been at events together, but that was no reason for her actually to know him. To have noticed him.

He maybe could have said something back. Something like "Hi." Or "Hi, Samantha." But that might have been too much. And who knew what she would have thought then.

Zee didn't know what to do. Clearly he couldn't keep walking by the fields pretending not to notice her. He would have to find another route.

So he didn't see Samantha for another week, and he began to relax a little. The week was busy anyway-his parents had arrived, and his father had a strange love for tourist sites. So they visited all the standards again, this time without the irony, and they didn't pretend to be Americans because his father actually was one.

On the next Saturday, Zee had a match. His parents came to the game to cheer him on, but Grandmother Winter stayed home. She'd been feeling a little off for the last few days, and Zee told her it would be all right if she missed one game.

So his parents sat in the bleachers and watched, and right in front of them sat three girls, one of them with chocolate-colored hair.

Zee didn't even notice her until late in the second half, which was good because otherwise he might have fallen on his face. As it was, he was having a good match-he'd scored a pretty nice goal to tie it up in the first half. By the time he saw the chocolate hair, he was too exhausted to freak out in any way, shape, or form. And when the three girls approached him when the match was done, he didn't even run in the other direction.

Samantha smiled at him. "Hi."

"Hi!" Zee said. That went very well, he thought.

"Um… I'm Sam Golton. I'm at Feldwop too."

Zee coughed. "I'm Zachary Miller," he said.

"I know!" She laughed. "Hey, we're going to the Grecians match next Saturday. Do you want to come?"

"Um… yeah," Zee said.

"Brilliant. We'll meet you at the gate."

Zee nodded. He no longer trusted himself to speak. He might start babbling, or he might refuse out of fear, or he might introduce Samantha to his parents, who were standing off to one side pretending not to be watching the entire thing.

When he got home, Zee ran up to Grandmother Winter's room and told her what had happened. Grandmother Winter, who had arranged herself so she looked awake and well when she heard the family come in, winked at him. "See? I told you she wasn't dull."

And then everything changed, and Samantha Golton did not matter anymore.

The next day when Zee got up, his grandmother was not in the kitchen making sausages or pancakes or omelets. She was not outside gardening, and she was not in her big green easy chair reading the paper or a book. And Zee knew. He did not know how he knew, but he knew.

"Where's Gran?" Zee demanded of his mother, who was sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea and staring blankly at nothing.

"She's having a lie in," she said quietly.

"She is?"

"I went in twenty minutes ago. She's still not well." A flicker of something passed over his mother's face. "I'm going to check on her again in a few minutes… to see if she needs anything."

Zee bit his lip. "Do you think we should… call the doctor?"

"She said not to."

He gulped. "Do you think we should anyway?"

His mother put down her tea and sighed heavily. She closed her eyes for a moment and then looked at him and said, "Maybe you can talk to her?"

"I'll go," he said. "I'll go."

But twenty minutes later there was no doctor on the way and no ambulance, either. There was just Grandmother Winter in her bed, resolute and strong in her dying. It's time, she said. They cannot help me, she said. It is my last wish to be here, like this, with my family, she said. Are you going to deny an old woman her last wish? she said.

Grandmother Winter had a way of getting what she wanted. So the Millers sat in her bedroom, not calling the doctor, not calling an ambulance, not able to do a single thing to stop what they had known would someday have to happen, that they had hoped so fiercely would never happen. Zee's mother sat by the bed and held her hand, while Zee sat next to her with his hand on his grandmother's shoulder, and Zee's father stood behind them, touching his wife's back.

She spoke with them all, quietly, lovingly, caresses of breath against the dark. And Zee waited his turn and tried with all his might not to run from the room, from this moment, from the utter certainty of what was about to happen. He tried so hard to keep his hand on her shoulder, firm and true. He tried so hard to keep from dissolving completely, so his grandmother would see him solid and present and strong.

And then she beckoned him closer, and he leaned toward her, and she smiled a little and told him, firmly and truly, "I will always watch over you. Never doubt that."

He did not doubt her, not one bit. You never doubt Grandmother Winter. In that moment Zee-who had never considered an afterlife, and even if he had, certainly would not have believed in it- felt with his entire body, from his toes to his tearfilled eyes, that she was telling the truth.

Grandmother Winter took a big breath in, a loud, urgent breath-and then Zee saw something flash in her eyes, and what he did not know was that his grandmother was having her last premonition. Her face darkened, then she turned to her boy, her beloved Zachary, and pulled his ear right to her mouth.

It would be her last breath, and with it she said two distinct syllables to Zee. But he did not understand them and would not for several more months. How could he? For when he leaned in close to her, close enough to smell the floury, powdery, lotiony smell of her, Grandmother Winter had whispered:

Me-tos.

FOR A VERY, VERY LONG TIME KING HADES-KING OF the Dead, The Unseen One, The Illustrious, The All-Knowing, The Receiver of Many-ruled the Underworld in peace. In the beginning there were some mishaps- the Persephone business and the whole Heracles to-do-each and every one caused by some rupture of the world of the Living and that of the Dead. No more, though. Hades learned his lesson quickly enough. There would be no more journeys into his Underworld for disoriented vagabonds with pretensions to myth or muscle-bound, snake-wrestling goons with delusions of grandeur. There would be no more sorrowful supplications from pretty-boy amateur musicians, no more frat-boy bride-stealing pranks, and (yes, he took responsibility too) no more bursting the earth open to kidnap pretty, young maidens. "Let them have their world and let us have ours," he would say to the Queen. "Never the twain shall meet!"