Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

“Shit, man,” Bobby said. “I’ll go. You stay here with him!”

Bobby ran in the opposite direction, puffs of dust rising behind him.

Harry got to his knees beside Uncle Amir. He had never felt a hunger like this before; it opened his mouth for him, wet his tongue. A long line of spit trailed from the corner of Uncle Amir’s mouth; as it moved down his cheek it crossed a line of dry blood. The beast hummed inside Harry, it pressed lips to the back of his frantic mind.

Harry leaned down. His nose brushed Uncle Amir’s cheek and his lips touched the line of spit and the flaking blood. Oh, what sweetness, what sugar! His tongue lapped out of his mouth and he soaked in the rest of Uncle Amir’s spittle and blood. He licked the face clean of dirt and sweat and the beast rejoiced with the flavors: the salt, the tang, the sticky sweet!

Harry pulled back. He was filled with the desire to take a bite—Amir’s cheek was so full, so fatty. The beast asked, then begged. Then it didn’t beg, it demanded. Pain ripped through his bowels like the sting of spider-killing wasp boring through his intestines. He leaned forward at once, opening his mouth—

—and pulled back. He couldn’t feed the beast, if this was what it needed. He couldn’t, and yet no tennis roll had ever look as soft and as perfectly firm as Amir’s licked-clean cheek. It was plump as a quail’s breast, and it smelled like ghee. He leaned in once more and fitted his teeth into the thin, soft flesh just above Amir’s jaw. He pressed in, his crushed nose breathing in the savory warmth of his Uncle’s skin: the scent of freshly fried pholourie. Amir’s blood seeped into his mouth, washed in along his gums.

“Amir!”

Harry pulled away from his Uncle’s face and wiped the blood off his lips. Abed came hurtling back down the road with Bhauji. She was a small woman who wore a purple-flowered headscarf that flapped at the nape of her neck as she hurried to keep pace. She was out of breath from running, and her words came through in spit-racked sobs:

“He done vex those mill men now!”

She dropped to the ground. Amir seemed to be coming to himself again; his right eye blinked open when he heard her say his name.

“Come here, boy,” Bhauji said to Harry.

“Come on!” Abed implored. He pulled at his uncle’s hand, trying to get him to sit up. “Help us get him up!”

But Harry could go no nearer. It was not the pain that stopped him, not the beast’s razor-toothed insistence that he return to the man’s broken body. It was the shame. It was the taste of Amir’s sweat and blood and spit still lingering in his mouth and the pleasure that came of tasting it. He couldn’t tell if it was the beast’s pleasure or his own.

“I’m sorry,” Harry said, backing away. “I’m so sorry.”

He started running in the direction Bobby had gone to look for the nurse. The storm was all above them now; the rain started with slow but heavy drops that cratered the dirt road. It started coming faster, harder, and he turned and was running along the river, back to the piers. He didn’t think about where he was going; the beast kept him from that. It had started growing inside him, swelling his small stomach, pushing into the surrounding blood vessels and yellow fat. It crowded his lungs and his breaths brought less and less relief with each step but he still kept running until he came to a pier where some fishermen were untying their boat, readying to set off.

“Hey!” Harry called, but his voice was lost as the rain crescendoed. He knew one of those fishermen—they were Arawak, and one was Alice’s eldest brother. He ran to the end of the pier. “Hey!”

But the men were already pushing off, their boat’s small motor kicking into life.

Harry looked back. Provenance was behind him: the nurse and the ferryman he didn’t know; Abed and Bobby and Bhauji, who he hardly even recognized; Amir, broken, bleeding. Beyond them was the compound, where Father and Mother were probably starting to worry, if they’d even noticed he was gone.

Harry heeled his shoes off, took off his pants, and jumped into the Demerara.

The beast howled. It ripped at soft, pink tissue; it sunk its teeth into flexing muscle; it wrapped its long tongue around his spongy lungs and squeezed. It did not stop to heal him.

Harry swam with the current. He tasted the blood that was coming up from his throat, but he could not see it as it mixed with the murk-brown water that filled his mouth. He couldn’t see where he was going for all the rain—it was driving now, cutting—but he knew the Arawak were somewhere downriver.

He swam until he couldn’t anymore, until the pain shuttered his vision blue and black. His muscles burned and his knotted stomach cramped and distended in ways he had never felt before. The water was starting to come over his head now; the silt stung his eyes and he felt himself begin to go under. So he turned onto his back and simply floated. The rain filled his mouth, and washed his dark blood out toward the sea.

A light broke the beat of the rain. The curved bottom of a boat came into view, and an Arawak man bent over the edge and reached a hand down. Harry took it; the boat tipped and righted as he scrambled on board and the hands of six and eight men pulled at his sodden clothes, his chilled skin.

The men spoke amongst themselves in their native tongue, and then—

“Where you from, boy? Where is your home?”

Here, in the middle of the river, Harry approached a place beyond pain. He wiped the blood and snot off his lips, and swallowed his senseless, ocean-deep craving.

“Please,” he said, “please let me come with you.” Then, louder, so the rain would not silence him: “I don’t have a home.”

The rainy season will come to an end, as it must: the rivers recede, the land dries, and the lungfish bury themselves. They open their gasping mouths and tunnel into the cool mud where the sun will not touch their earthbrown skin. They sleep these long months curled tight, swaddled in a film of their own dried mucus, their bodies slowly decaying as their muscles and fat are consumed to nourish what little is left to nourish.

Some will die like this.

But the rains will come again—with a brutal crack like the sky cleft open—and the land returns to itself: the rivers swell, the swamps fill, and the dirt is gorged, sated. The lungfish wake as their cauls dissolve, and they thrash themselves free of the clay. As they writhe their slick bodies across the storm-soaked land they are so consumed by hunger, by the nerve-deep need to return to the water, they will not remember that they had ever lived before.

It was a large, magnificent room with intricate patterns of ivy branches on the tiles, and a large mirror above a marble fireplace, the mantlepiece crammed with curios from delicate silver bowls to Chinese blue-and-white porcelain figures: a clear statement of casual power, to leave so many riches where everyone could grab them.

Or rather, it would have been, if the porcelain hadn’t been cut-rate—the same bad quality the Chinese had foisted on the Indochinese court in Annam—the mirror tarnished, with mold growing in one corner, spread down far enough that it blurred features, and the tiling cracked and chipped in numerous places—repaired, but not well enough that Thuan couldn’t feel the imperfections under his feet, each one of them a little spike in the khi currents of magic around the room.

Not that Thuan was likely to be much impressed by the mansions of Fallen angels, no matter how much of Paris they might claim to rule. He snorted disdainfully, an expression cut short when Kim Cuc elbowed him in the ribs. “Behave,” she said.