Ellen Datlow - Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

The world above is dark. The trees are black and bare. Creatures shiver, and shelter where they may.

My lord explores my body, kissing, biting, tasting the length of me. I need to see him. He will not undress. He will not let me touch him. I know that he is beautiful; I can feel that beauty as my body lifts to press itself against him. Naked now, my thighs tremble and open. The fourth seed is eaten.

In the world above, frost traces white patterns on brown leaves. The last of the summer fruit returns to the soil beneath the sleeping trees.

I catch my breath as my dark lord parts my thighs. His fingers touch me, there, gliding on the juices of my passion. His tongue, questing, thirsts for me, tasting me even as I taste the fifth seed upon my tongue.

The world above lies dormant, frozen. A creature caught by the cold, harsh air curls and sleeps, stiffens and dies.

He looks into my eyes, my lord, and slowly unlaces the robe he wears to taunt and tempt me. It falls to the ground. He stands before me, proud manhood beautiful. I long to take him in my mouth, to close my lips around that hot, strong flesh, taste the milky jewel glistening at its tip. He smiles as he puts instead the sixth seed to my lips. He gathers me to him; I twine my legs around his waist and open to his manhood. It thrusts deeper and deeper, taking me further into my lord’s dark realm. The last seed bursts cool upon my tongue as my lord’s seed bursts hot within my body.

The world above lies still as death, waiting for the spring to come. Hollow promise. Who can know how hard that promise is to keep?

I have always loved the taste of pomegranates.

YOU STUDY YOUR DATE’S fingers intently when you give her the flowers, because you read in a magazine once that women on loup have unusually wide knuckles. You don’t know the exact dimensions of a normal woman’s knuckle, though, so you don’t learn much. Her fingers are long and slim, and you’ve heard that’s a good sign, but the nails look awfully strong, and they curve downwards a bit at the ends.

You remember when it all started, how men were warned to watch out for hair growing in unusual places. But women had been shaving their bodies for years, so that wasn’t much help. Men might not even have known what an unusual place was, back then; they might have thought an armpit was unusual. Linda’s hair is as black as the night, and if she changed and it covered her she would blend into the night and you would never see her coming.

The fact is, there aren’t any signs. The fact is, if a woman is taking loup you won’t know it until it’s too late, until she’s already ripping your chest open and swallowing your heart. The fact is, as Linda takes your flowers and admires them and goes to the kitchen for a vase, her freezer might be filled with parts from a dozen dates, ready to be thawed out for a late-night snack. The fact is, you thought you were sure about the last woman, and you were wrong.

You try not to think about that as she comes back with her handbag and leads the way to the parking lot. She’s small, a lot smaller than you, but mass doesn’t count for much anymore. Pete Wilhelm at your new job weighs twice as much as his wife, but all summer he came into work wearing long-sleeved shirts. Sometimes there are bandages on his face, and he claims that he cut himself shaving or fell through a window. Sometimes he doesn’t come to work at all.

You were fifteen when you first heard about loup. It started with athletes, you think: some kind of steroid that worked a bit too well. They’ve studied it for years, but they still don’t know exactly how it works or where it comes from. All they know for sure is that it doesn’t work on men. Something about chromosomes and estrogen and the phases of the moon.

There is a brief quarrel over whether you’re going in her car or in yours, but you give in after some token resistance. She opens the passenger door of a silver Porsche. As you sit down you check the velour seat covers for fur or blood.

Tom Schneider was a kid from your hometown—your age, but from a different school. You’d never met him. He hitchhiked home from an away game one night, and no one ever saw him again. You joined the hunt, moving as straight as you could across a meadow, peering in clumps of grass and bushes, bored and scared at the same time. They found a shinbone with tooth marks on it, and that was all they ever found.

You made sure to tell your roommate exactly where you would be, exactly when you expected to get in, who to call if you were late. You wish you could say that you took no chances, but if that was true you would have stayed at home.

At the restaurant there is an awkward pause. You were brought up to offer to take a woman’s coat. That’s not the custom anymore, and for a moment it looks like she’s going to try to take yours. Finally you each awkwardly shrug off your own, and then you take them both to the coat-room while she sees about her reservations.

New customs are hard. New customs—an oxymoron. On the freeway she was listening to the Cleveland Howlers against the Green Bay Pack. Sheila Breen, Cleveland’s best runner, had carried the bag to mid-field when the Pack caught up with her, and between them they tore the bag to ribbons. It was the fifth new bag of the game. Sometimes you miss football.

“So tell me about yourself,” you say when you sit down, and she happily goes into her story. She’s on the fast track at an ad agency—a campaign for those new quadrupedal workout areas. Your roommate Karl didn’t tell you much about her when he set the two of you up. He just said you’d been moping around too much, you needed to get out more. Only a few women do the stuff, he said, and most of the ones who do aren’t dangerous. Most of them are nice. And of course you know that, except for deep down in your gut where you remember heavy paws on your chest, where you remember hot hot breath and saliva and pointed teeth grinning inches away from your face.

Still, you let him make the date for you, because you hate it when it gets cold at night and the only warm place in the bed is the place where you are. She seems nice enough, stopping to ask you a few questions and sounding as if she’s interested in your answers. Oh the other hand, she orders the steak. She’s carving it up and popping chunks into her mouth and chewing heartily, and suddenly you feel your supper shifting inside you. She catches your look and asks you what’s wrong.

The first time you left your wife, you called a friend to come pick you up in the middle of the night. She changed back to her trueform then, standing on the lawn apologizing and begging as you drove off. She was so beautiful that you almost told him to turn around, but you could see your blood on her fingernails in the moonlight as you held your bandaged arm.

She must have rubbed some of the blood on one of the tires in the confusion. You can’t think how else she could have traced you to the hotel, later that night. She had to pay for eight hundred dollars in damages to that room, and you went to the hospital with a broken rib.

The next time, you planned your exit more carefully. You left work early, went to the bus station, and never looked back. No, that’s not true. Sometimes you miss her so much it burns; sometimes you would go back and serve her your liver on a platter, if only she would eat it and smile and tell you it was good.

Linda is very kind, she’s holding your hand as you tell her the story, and she’s telling you how sorry she is you’ve been hurt. She asks if you still want to go to the movie, and you say not really, you’d rather go home.

She parks in the street behind your car, outside her apartment. Then she leans on your hood for twenty-five minutes and tries to persuade you to come inside. I won’t pressure you once you’re in, she says. Truly I won’t. I just want somebody to talk to. I want to hear your story.