The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

face chin. Coarse salt-and-pepper hair curled from under the edges of a greasy dockworker’s cap. The same gray- touched hair matted the muscular forearms, but couldn’t completely conceal the traceries of faded blue tattoos. An old knife scar notched the back of one massive hand. His isolationist gesture seemed unnecessary; only a fool would approach a man like that uninvited.

I smiled, admiring the appearance he had chosen. The scar was an especially nice touch. He looked like an habitual drunk and an experienced brawler. I knew he was neither.

An antique mirror hung on the wall over his table. From time to time he glanced up and used it as I was using the glare-mirrored window beside me: to study the reflections of the other patrons in the bar. Once his eyes almost pinned mine as I stole a look around, but I let my gaze wander on. I wondered if he had guessed who I was, why I was there. It didn’t matter. Now that I had made it this far I knew he would let me make my play. He would be curious, if nothing else.

He lifted a finger to the bartender. I rose and drifted toward the bar with my empty mug. The barman was pouring a double Irish as I laid a hundred dollar bill on the polished wood. “Make it two.” My voice was pitched for his ears alone.

His gaze moved from the bill to my face and back to the bill as he thought it over. When he reached under the bar I braced myself for the riot gun, but he came up with another glass. I let go a silent breath and added another hundred atop the first. The bartender nodded imperceptibly and palmed the cash as I picked up the filled glasses. Whatever happened now, he would stay out of it.

My man didn’t bother to look surprised as I set a glass down in front of him and settled into the chair beside his. Perhaps my transactions at the bar had been reflected in the mirror. This time my hand was rock steady as I lifted my glass. I took a long swallow of the pale amber whiskey and felt Irish courage melt some of the ice in my belly. Careful.

He spoke as I lowered my glass. His tone was as flat and bored as his gray eyes. “I prefer to drink alone.” There was no menace in his voice. There was no need.

I shook my head. “I know who you are,” I said, watching for a reaction.

All I got was a raised eyebrow. The triteness of my words hung in the air between us like smoke. I flushed with anger as he reached for his whiskey.

I pinned his wrist to the table. He didn’t try to pull away. The knife I drew from the pocket of my jacket opened with an almost inaudible click. My back shielded us from view as I stroked the razor-sharp blade across his callused palm. The flesh parted widely, bloodlessly.

For a long moment we both stared at the cut, he as fascinated as I. A drop of clear fluid gathered in the deep furrow. I sighed and released his wrist, closed and pocketed the knife. He pursed his lips and considered me as he dabbed at his hand with a napkin. The cut was already closing. Exhaustion washed through me. It had taken so long…

“So.” It was a meditative rumble from that barrel chest. Then, gently, “Aren’t you afraid of me?”

I looked inside myself and found only a bleak, frozen determination. “No.”

The corners of his eyes crinkled with silent amusement. “Perhaps we should take this conversation elsewhere,” he suggested. I followed him out into the chill darkness.

We were somewhere near the docks. The air stank of salt and rotten fish guts, spiced with pitch. A few streets away the ugly orange of sodium vapor lamps blazed over industrial yards and loading cranes, but we turned our steps toward the darker byways. My companion seemed to have no particular destination in mind, and was in no hurry to speak. I kept pace and waited.

In some grimy alley he finally stopped and looked down at me. “What is your name?” I thought he was mocking me, but his face was serious.

What did I care for names anymore? But somewhere, way back when, I had had one. I groped, fished up a dim memory. “Maria.” Perhaps it was mine, perhaps not. It would serve.

“Maria,” he repeated, turning the name over on his tongue like the whiskey. He grinned. “You can call me David.”

I snorted, unimpressed.

“How long have you been looking for me?” he asked. His gaze had turned inward, and the battered features he wore had undergone a subtle shift. Now his profile looked somewhat classical, patrician.

I shivered as an icy thread of air worked its way under my jacket and down the back of my neck. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t looking for you. Maybe my whole life.”

“‘Follow me and I will make you’… what?” he mused. He focused on me again. “Others have found me, you know.”

It hurt to breathe. “How many?” I whispered.

“Twelve.” His gaze was clinical.

“Then I am the last!” I wanted to trumpet my triumph to the stars. His chuckle stopped me.

“If… if I choose to accept you.” He was grinning again, watching my reaction.

Rage flared. The thought that I might have come this far only to be played with and rejected… Despite everything I knew about him—proving, I suppose, that I didn’t fear him at all—I grabbed his shirt front, and with a strength only he could have guessed I had, I spun him around and slammed his back against the alleyway bricks. Others had died, instantly and without appeal, for lesser offenses, but I think he was still testing me, goading me. “You will not refuse me!” I hissed into his face.

His eyes had no depth, no color. I saw only my own reflection. “Show me,” he commanded.

Anger still fueled me. I yanked down the zipper on my jacket and shrugged it off. I wasn’t wearing a shirt. The chill raised goosebumps over my shoulders and back; it can still do that, even after all these years. The cavern beneath my left breast yawned dark and empty, silent and cold.

I had affected him at last. His eyes kindled, as austere and avid as a monk in rapture. I shuddered as his fingers traced the crisp, blackened edges of the hole. Then he pressed his whole hand inside.

I screamed. Sweat drenched me. Pleasure such as I had never known shocked through me and nailed me to the ground. Long ago, in some other existence, I had known sexual ecstasies; they were dim shadows compared to the transports I felt now.

David’s eyes were half-lidded with pleasure; beneath the crescents his pupils were red-hot tunnels into another universe. In such intimate connection I could at last see through the illusion in which he had wrapped himself to his true glory. Flames haloed his head; his face blazed like a hundred suns; vast, glittering wings stretched wide overhead. Electric-blue symbols of power writhed across his chest and arms. His beauty brought tears to my eyes—I, who had not cried since, since… I gripped his arm to keep from fainting. “Father!” I wept.

We were so consumed with our pleasure that we never heard the whispers and sniggers of our approaching audience. Only when a studded leather glove landed hard on my shoulder did I wake to this reality again.

“Hey, baby, how ’bout letting us in on this action?” The street indian leered beneath an iridescent mohawk; implanted scales warpainted his cheeks and forehead. He and his two fellow braves had decorated their biker leathers with feathers and shells in their gang colors. They looked like exotic plumed serpents incongruously placed in that dingy alley.

All they could see was a middle-aged working stiff copping a feel off a tart’s breast. Now they wanted to make it a gang bang. Their youthful arrogance assumed the three of them were more than a match even for David’s hulking build.

“Mohawk” frowned at my serene smile and tried to yank me away from David. He would have had more luck trying to move the alleyway wall. The serrated studs on his glove cut into my skin; the trickle of blood that coiled down my breast was as easy to read as tea leaves at the bottom of a cup.

Freedom: that was the boy’s key. A minor chord in his stormy eyes; a deeper, yearning wail in the blood that pulsed in his neck. I could feel David’s equal yearning to give the boy his heart’s desire. David smiled at the lad and reached a golden talon up to touch the center of his patterned forehead. Blood erupted from the boy’s eyes, nose, and ears. He opened his mouth to scream and choked as his heart burst into his throat.

The second boy was all frost: white bleached hair, white leather jacket, white-on-white warpaint; even the irises of his eyes had been bleached white. He was so beautiful I had to claim him for my own. I grasped his arm and pulled him close, smothered his protests with my lips. I savored the skunky taste of his despairing sweat; the sphincter-loosening bitterness of his terror; the metallic, salt spiciness of his blood. His cool exterior camouflaged a molten core: he burned with rages unvented, lusts unsated, ambitions unsatisfied. When I released him, he flamed