Teeth_ Vampire Tales - Ellen Datlow [139]
“So will you go back to Severin tomorrow?” he said to me as we sat at the brink of the night.
“No.”
“Daisha, even when they’ve married us, please believe this: If you still want to go away, I won’t put obstacles in your path. I will back you up.”
“You care so little.”
“So much.”
His eyes glowed in the dark. They put the waterfall to shame.
When he touched me, touches me, I know him. From long ago, I remember this incredible joy, this heat and burning, this refinding rightness—and I fall down into the abyss forever, willing as the shining water. I never loved before. Except Juno, but she cured me of that.
He is a healer. His blood can heal, its vampiric vitality transmissible—but noninvasive. From his gift come no substandard replicants of our kind. They only—live.
Much, much later, when we parted just before the dawn inside the house—parted till the next night, our wedding day—it came to me that if he can heal by letting humans drink his blood, perhaps I might offer him some of my own. Because my blood might help him to survive the daylight, even if only for one unscathed and precious minute.
I’ll wear green to be married. And a necklace of sea green glass.
As the endless day trails by, unable to sleep, I’ve written this.
When he touched me, when he kissed me, Zeev, whose name actually means “wolf,” became known to me. I don’t believe he’ll have to live all his long, long life without ever seeing the sun. For that was what he reminded me of. His warmth, his kiss, his arms about me—my first memory of that golden light that blew upward through the dark. No longer any fear, which anyway was never mine, only that glorious familiar excitement and happiness, that welcomed danger. Perhaps I am wrong in this. Perhaps I shall pay heavily and cruelly for having been deceived. And for deceiving myself, too, because I realized what he was to me the moment I saw him—why else put up such barricades? Zeev is my sunrise out of the dark of the night of my so-far useless life. Yes, then. I love him.
About the Authors
NATHAN BALLINGRUD lives with his daughter just outside Asheville, North Carolina. His stories have appeared in Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural; The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy; Lovecraft Unbound; SCIFICTION; and The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Two, and will be forthcoming in Naked City: New Tales of Urban Fantasy. He recently won the Shirley Jackson Award for his short story “The Monsters of Heaven.”
CHRISTOPHER BARZAK’s first novel, One for Sorrow, won the Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy. His second book, a novel-in-stories called The Love We Share Without Knowing, was placed on the James Tiptree Jr. Award’s Honor List. His stories have appeared in the young adult anthologies The Coyote Road, The Beastly Bride, and Firebirds Soaring. He is at work on his third novel and teaches fiction writing at Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio, where vampires have begun to fight for equal rights. You can find out more about him at www.christopherbarzak.wordpress.com.
STEVE BERMAN began writing and selling weird stories when he was seventeen. His novel Vintage: A Ghost Story was a finalist for the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy and made the Rainbow List for recommended gay-themed books for young readers by the American Library Association’s GLBT Roundtable. His favorite vampire movie is Near Dark. And if you email him at sberman8@yahoo.com and ask for more vamp-slaying adventures for Saul, he just may write them.
HOLLY BLACK writes bestselling contemporary fantasy for readers of all ages. She is the author of the Modern Faerie Tale series, The Spiderwick Chronicles, and the graphic novel series The Good Neighbors. Currently she is hard at work on The Black Heart, the third book in the noirish caper series The Curse Workers.
EMMA BULL grew up in California,