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

His lady was no longer inert clay; she was living flesh. She writhed on the beach, her smooth, bare legs shimmering in the oak’s bonfire light, her thighs and sex still gleaming with his spent seed. He could see her beautifully formed breasts with their coral-colored nipples and the cascade of her blood-red hair.

But something was wrong. She clawed up her dress to expose her belly and screeched, back arching in agony. Her belly was swelling, doming, a vertical line darkening the flesh between navel and pubis. Dumbfounded, Sir Henry’s own legs weakened. He had brought her back, yes. But he had brought her back with child. His child.

Suddenly he thought about the tales of his father’s demise and a chill froze his heart. By the blazing tree, the girl held her swollen belly with one hand and coughed into the other, emptying her newly formed lungs of sand. Tiny crabs scrabbled from between her lips, and Sir Henry saw with dawning horror that one of those tiny, almost translucent crustaceans was crawling across the web of skin stretched between the girl’s left thumb and forefinger, its tiny appendages pausing, for less than a moment, upon the skull-and-crossbones insignia of the guild.

NO! Sir Henry thought as he shook his head from side to side. He would not be replaced. Not by some bastard child he had not meant to seed, child born of a murderess, a bitch of the guild. Kane had tricked him!

Lunging forward, Sir Henry grabbed the girl by the hair and dragged her toward the encroaching tide.

“They are coming for you!” he screamed hysterically. “They are coming for you!”

Flailing and screaming, the girl fought him. She grabbed the hand entwined in her hair and hammered the sand with her feet. At the circle’s edge, she bit his injured forearm, and with a spasm and a curse he released her tresses. As she scrambled toward the fire on her hands and knees, she swept the sand, searching for a weapon. As if by providence, her fingers brushed against Sir Henry’s knife.

Braying like a mad beast, he dove at her and grabbed her by the throat. As he shook her, trying at once to break her neck and throttle her, she raised the knife as high as she could and brought it down with all her strength.

A hiss escaped from Sir Henry’s lips, a hiss which quickly rose into a wail. The sharp blade had pierced the intercostal space between his ribs, just to the right of his breastbone, skewering his lung.

With a shocked, gurgling cry, he reeled backward, his lax hands releasing his Galatea’s neck. Mouth wide, he slapped the hole in his chest, as if he either couldn’t believe the blade’s edge had been real, or thought he could stanch the blood that now flowed everywhere. But it was too late. Gasping like a fish hauled onto the beach, he fell onto his side, desperately trying to suck air. His skin turned blue and great gouts of blood poured from between his lips.

Still clutching the knife in her left hand, the girl stumbled to her feet. But as Sir Henry gasped and crawled toward her, she danced back on the pretty toes he had shaped, eluding his grasp.

From somewhere on the cliffs above, a conch shell sounded three times, and the flames of the underworld oak flared up into the night, as if eager to eat the stars. Then, as if the oaken bonfire had seeded distant flames, fifty torches flared into life. A chanting began, carried out to the sea on the swirling winds.

Ave Mara, Salve Regina, Dea sancta… thou divine controller of sky and sea and of all things… winds, rains, and tempests thou dost detain, and, at thy will, let loose… . Deservedly art thou called Mighty Mother of Gods… divine one, queen of divinities, we invoke thee …

A great glowing wave rose up out of the sea and crashed on the beach in a glitter of phosphorescence, bringing with it a spill of bones and shells and long-lost jewels dredged from the deep. And then, as if rising from the seafoam itself, came the Ancient Ones.

They wore the bones of long-drowned lords and ladies, and of sailors washed overboard and lost at sea. Their robes were sea-green and sewn with pearls. Their crowns were of shells, woven with the purple blisters of sea wrack.

In the unsteady light of the burning tree, their faces flickered, now with the delicate beauty of mermaids and the hulking girth of mermen, then with skin like mother-of-pearl, and finally with the faces of sea-eaten skulls. They drifted forward with each incoming wave that crashed upon the beach, their silent robes sweeping the sand and stones and litter of broken shells which murmured softly as they were caressed by the foam.

A woman stepped forward, taller than the rest and both regal and terrible. Her hair was of kelp, her nails sharks’ teeth, and her lips pink coral. The jewels she wore must have belonged to a long-dead queen and her crown was a circlet of gold. Her eyes were two snails whose antennae moved back and forth restlessly as they surveyed the scene. From the cliffside, the prayer swelled again: Te, diva, adoro tuumque ego numen invoco, facilisque praestes hoc mihi quod te rogo… .

The queen smiled a small, mocking smile. Her teeth were white barnacles, finely made but razor-sharp. She gave an almost imperceptible nod and two drowned sailors, still partially fleshed, walked forward. Brandishing her knife, the heavily pregnant girl danced backward. But it was not for her they came.

Sir Henry’s head lolled to one side. He wanted desperately to beg for mercy but could barely drag a single rasping breath into his lungs, which felt like they were being crushed by his own thudding heart. His lips were as blue as those of the long-dead sailors who hauled him up. In some fast-fading recess of his mind, he recognized the weave of their pullovers, the particular pattern of stitches and knots that identified this shoreline. These were the ghosts of men who owed him their allegiance, but allegiance, it seemed, shifted with the tide.

Bowing to the pregnant girl, they dragged Sir Henry back into the water. From between his lips burbled one final belch of blood before his skin and muscle and integument—formed from the stuff of this beach and mixed with the blood of his father almost fifty years before—began to return to that from which they were made. Even as he struggled weakly, Sir Henry’s flesh fell from his bones in great chunks of sand, like a child’s castle built upon the shore and then demolished by the waves.

Though her pulse beat in her throat, the pregnant girl stood tall, as was right for one of such noble blood. The queen regarded her coolly, the snails of her eyes stretching forth. The tide had now drawn in enough to lap at the girl’s bare feet, and to occasionally splash at the underworld oak’s lower branches, making the flames hiss in that ancient animosity of fire and water even older than the world.

“What will you do with him?” the girl asked quietly.

“’Tis the night of the tithe,” the queen responded in a voice as raspy as the cries of seagulls but resonant as whale-song. “We shall suck his bones, as is our right.”

“And what of me?”

The queen gave another thin smile. “Serve us well, daughter mine. And remember, this land is ours.” As she turned to go, her mermen lifted her high, and her mermaids strewed her watery path with pearls.

“In seven years, then,” the queen said without turning, and her mermen transformed into kelpies, great water horses which bore her upon their backs. Then queen and retinue dissolved into a receding wave and were gone.

Alone on the beach, Lady Galatea fainted.

When she awoke, the Solstice was dawning. She lay upon the scree at the base of the cliffs, surrounded by seed pearls. The underworld oak was invisible beneath the waves, as it was on each day of the year, save one.