Copyright 2011, Annie Bellet
All rights reserved. Published by Doomed Muse Press.
This story is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and incidents described in this publication are used fictitiously, or are entirely fictional.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, except by an authorized retailer, or with written permission of the publisher. Inquiries may be addressed via email to doomedmuse.press@gmail.com. This story was originally published in Mirror Shards: Volume One.
Cover designed by Greg Jensen with image from © Stanislav Perov | Dreamstime.com
Electronic edition, 2011
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Ryska froze as the staccato of Kalashnikov rifle fire rang out across the abandoned office complex. The length of copper wiring she’d tugged free of the crumbling wall hung in her hands as she focused on pushing away the memories that threatened to overwhelm her and tried to pinpoint where the noises were coming from.
The rifle fire rang out again, this time accompanied by angry male voices shouting. Not too close, probably coming from across the wide, overgrown square and beyond the low storage buildings near the main road. She relaxed a hairsbreadth and coiled the wire quickly before stuffing it into her bag. Her graphene whiskers twitched as Ryska cued them to a different sensory setting. She’d been running the sensors on low, letting her fingers and ears do the seeing for her while she dug the valuable wire out of the walls.
But with men around, she’d need more than her ears to get free of this place. Ryska mentally kicked herself for not paying more attention when she’d heard the truck noise. She’d figured they were just driving on by.
And where would they be going to? The glaciers? She shook her head. She hadn’t seen anyone out here before and she’d gotten lazy. Lazy might have meant dead. Wasn’t a mistake she’d repeat.
The landscape turned from foggy grey to many shades of blue as her sensors kicked in and the topography was revealed. Further away things were more blue than closer things, and objects with more solidity had more texture, fine lines zigging across them. Her sensors helpfully mapped out the clearest path out of the building with a hazy yellow line.
More rifle fire. Closer. Ryska pressed herself against the wall and rubbed her chilled hands together slowly. Not her problem. She’d get to her cycle and then bamph from this place.
Somewhere, close, a young boy screamed and the memories that Ryska had fought off earlier came slamming home. For a moment she almost called out to him, he sounded so much like Luka.
Ryska let out a shuddering breath. She wasn’t in the lab outside Irkutsk. She was in the old city limits of Tynda. Safe. Free. Unlike Luka or Gregr or Misha or Iosif or... she slammed her fists into the wall, the vibrations emanated out in fine silvery lines as her whiskers picked them up but the physical pain dragged her away from that horrible night of fire and death.
Govna. More shouting, coming from the square, meant that the men with Kalashnikovs were between her and her cycle. She flicked her head to the right, picking up the scrabble of movement just as a small body, outlined by her whisker sensors in shades of red, rolled through the doorway and curled against the wall.
“Hello?” a small, timid boy’s voice whispered. “I need help. Is someone here?”
Ryska bit her lip. It was night, the building should have been too dark for him to see her. She studied the blue landscape around her, discerning windows in the wall facing the square. She didn’t think they had glass anymore and some had been boarded over judging from the lack of air flow and the solid blue coloring. The men outside might have electric torches and flashes could be illuminating the room. That was not good. She had to get moving.
“Please?” the boy whispered again, crawling across the floor toward her. “Help me.” He stank of fear sweat but his voice, his little red hand reaching out toward her, those things froze her.
Luka had reached the tunnel with her. If he hadn’t insisted she go first, he would have been the one safely away instead of her. She hadn’t been able to reach his hand. The damn tunnel had been his idea, he’d wanted to tunnel out of the lab so they could go find the bears rumored to live in the dead forest outside Irkutsk. He’d wanted to touch a bear.
They’d been so young. So stupid. Ryska shuddered but the decision had been made miles and years away. She slid toward the child and caught his hand, his fingers warm and slightly gritty in her own.
“Shhh,” she murmured. “Follow me.” The least she could do was get the kid away from the men with guns. Succeed now where she’d failed before.
Ryska led the boy down a hallway, following the hazy yellow line toward another doorway. She had to get to her cycle. Once on it, she could slip down one of the dilapidated pathways and head into the city, dropping the boy off somewhere with a telephone.
Cold air hit her exposed cheeks beneath her goggles and pressed her whiskers back against her face as they reached the opening. She sent a quick command to the control board implanted in her chest and brought the sensors up to full power. Her kinetic battery would run down after less than an hour of this, leaving her blind again, but she needed to know exactly where the men were and what they had. To get that level of detail, her sensors had to run at capacity.
Even so, the fog of war, as Gregr had jokingly termed it, enveloped the world beyond twenty meters. Within her sensing range, four figures moved across the square. She hardly needed her whiskers to “see” for her with all the noise they made. Their electric torches were outlined in white as they stomped across the square, slashing at the tall, dying grasses with their rifles as though trying to flush out game.
The boy’s hand squeezed her own tightly, as though afraid she might let go. He must be the game. She didn’t know why men with rifles would hunt a little boy, but his fear of them was thick enough to taste. She ducked back into the room as one of the blobs of white flicked her direction.
“If we hide, will they give up and go away?” she whispered to the boy.
Red lines flickered about his head as he shook it. “Those are the mean men who took me. I guess they killed Sergei and his guys. He was trying to rescue me.” A sniffle followed this hushed disclosure.
Great, she’d ended up in the middle of a kidnapping, apparently. Or it had walked on top of her, in reality. The men hunting the boy must have felt comfortable leaving wherever the initial gunfight had happened, which meant they’d probably killed the rescue party just as the boy assumed.
Ryska searched the area beyond the door. There was another building, this one with multiple stories, just ahead. They’d have to dash across the open ground between, exposing themselves for a moment, but the yellow haze said it was the clearest way through and still somewhat in the direction of her cycle.
Crouched in the doorway, Ryska watched the red shapes move toward each other, grouping in the middle of square. Men’s voices drifted to her, too low to make out. No white shone in her direction. Time to go.
She pulled on the boy’s hand and darted out into the open, trying to move as quietly as she could. The boy followed on her heels, still holding her fingers in a death-grip.
Just before she crossed into the light blue of the doorway, Ryska tripped. Her foot slammed into a hard surface, catching on what was probably a cinderblock she’d missed in her dash. She swallowed the cry as she went down hard, barely catching herself with her left hand and skittering a foot across the gravel and weeds. The boy went down with her but she jerked him forward, half throwing him through the doorway even as she scrabbled to her knees.
Bullets bit into the wall as she rolled through the doorway.
“Go, go,” she hissed to the boy.
“I can’t see,” he said.
Ryska stood and grabbed at his arm again, pulling him along the yellow line. If it was too dark in here for the boy to see, it would be dark enough to hide them.
“Go around, but don’t shoot the boy, you dolboebs,” a man’s voice called out and she heard feet crunching on the gravel outside. The hunters were trying to flank.
One red blob appeared in the door just as Ryska and the boy ducked into another room. A shout meant he’d seen her.
Ryska took a deep breath. Her heart was racing, the control panel in her chest aching as it drew power for her sensors. It always felt like a wound just beneath the skin when she taxed it, but she needed the vision she no longer had. Vision the men hunting this boy wouldn’t have if she took their torches away.
She shoved the boy toward dark blue of the far wall and pulled her pick-axe out of her belt. Pressing herself against the wall, Ryska waited just inside the door for the red blob to cross the room.
Predictably for a sighted person, the man came into the room with his torch and gun first. Ryska didn’t bother trying to wrest the gun away from the big man. Instead she ducked low and swung her pick-axe into the white blob. Glass broke with an ozone-scented hiss and the man fell back, cursing and flailing wildly with his rifle.
Ryska dashed across the room and caught the boy’s hand again, half-dragging him away through the building. She slammed back against a hallway wall as two more men came through a far door and sprayed bullets across the crumbling drywall.
The only direction that was clear within her sensor range was a stairway going up just across the hall.
“Stay low,” Ryska whispered to the boy, shoving her pick-axe back into its loop. She didn’t wait for his vibrating red nod but pulled him with her as she bolted like a crab across the hallway. White blobs and shouting almost overloaded her whiskers on the right side as she crossed the danger zone, but then the stairwell was in front of them.
The boy stumbled over the first step. “Stairs going up,” Ryska whispered, reminded again that he was blind in here.
The cold metal railing felt good on her scraped hand but the air was clogged with drifting light blue dust disturbed by their feet. The dust worried her. They were leaving tracks for the men to follow.
The stairs opened up into another hallway. The floors in here were clear of debris, so the whole topography had a yellow haze over it. Safe and easy to move around meant it would be easy to follow them. Ryska shuffled her feet and didn’t see the same drifting bits of blue that signified the thick dust on the stairs. That was something, at least.
Ryska pulled the boy along the hallway, running as quickly as she dared. The clink of boots on the metal stairs made her increase her speed. This wasn’t going to work. With the boy blind in the dark, she wouldn’t be able to outrun the men and now they were trapped in a building she’d never been inside before. There might not be another way down.
She crossed into one room and then another, searching for a way back to the ground. The doors to the rooms were long gone, probably salvaged for timber and metal. The sounds of pursuit had faded beyond her hearing and she slowed, letting go of the boy as he stumbled again. His gasping breath would give them away if she didn’t let him rest. Govno.
“What’s your name?” the boy asked, sinking down into a red puddle against one of the dark blue outer walls as Ryska paced the room, testing the boarded up windows and trying to think of a way free.
“Ryska,” she said softly. She heard a shout, but it sounded as though it came from further away. Good. The men were moving in the wrong direction, unless they’d split up. She froze, held her breath and listened.
The hushed rasp of the boy’s breathing was all she heard. Ryska slipped out her pick-axe and tapped the lighter blue section, a plywood sheet nailed across a door-sized opening on what she thought was the outer wall of the building. She managed to slowly pry away the edge and felt along the outside. There were the remains of a balcony out there from what her sensors were able to tell her.
“I’m Toma,” the boy said, though Ryska hadn’t asked. “Toma Turzakov.”
Ryska froze. Turzakov. It had to be a coincidence, but somehow she figured it wasn’t. “The Railway Demon?” she asked softly, easing the plywood back into place.
“That’s what some call my papa,” Toma said with a tremulous hint of pride in his voice, the sound of a boy who’d been teased about his papa.
A smile played at Ryska’s lips. Misha had used that same tone when they’d teased him about being the son of Trainer Kirakov.
The Railway Demon was not a man to tease, from what she’d picked up in her quick bartering forays into Tynda proper. He controlled a syndicate that ran the railways and kept a stranglehold on what little timber Tynda still had after the world had broken and turned its crown to ice. She berated herself for even thinking it, but rescuing this little boy could come with big rewards. No wonder these men wanted him.
She should leave the boy, the men wanted him alive, after all, so he wasn’t in real danger. With the darkness to her advantage, she could get away. Toma would be ransomed, though hopefully better than whatever had happened outside that got those other men gunned down.
“Ryska?” Toma said softly, as though trying to determine if she were still there.
She bent over him and slid one hand into his hair and felt him sigh heavily with relief. His hair was tangled but soft and smelled warm and human, a little like bread left in the sun. Her fingers conjured the memory of another boy, another soft head of hair.
“It’s blond. That means yellow, like butter.” Luka laughing as her fingers tugged on his hair.
“I remember,” she said, trying not to sound petulant. She did remember some things from before the virus took her eyes. The domes of Kazansky Church, like fluffy blue and pink-red candy rising up against a grey sky. She even vaguely remembered the sky, a huge expanse of shifting colors above, blinking with stars in the darkness, deep and cold.
“Now you’ll remember me, too.” Luka smelled like honey, probably from stealing packets from the Trainers lounge inside the Lab.
Remember. Her fingers curled tight and Toma gasped, pulling away from her hand. She couldn’t forget. Not with their ghosts living in her heart like bright after-images of the stars she could no longer see.
“Ryska?” he said again, this time with a little fear in his voice.
The Lab was gone, their program shut down in a hail of bullets and screaming children. For a moment the skin behind her goggles burned as sealed tear ducts tried to bring tears to useless eyes that had long ago been removed. Her whiskers twitched and for a spare second the small red shape of the boy seemed to multiply and become two little boys huddled in front of her.
“I’m here,” she said, unsure if she spoke to Toma or to Luka’s memory. “Tell me, quietly and quickly, what happened to get you here.”
A shuddering breath from Toma and then she felt him shift and straighten, curling his knees into chest as he became an even denser red shape. She knelt beside him, her head turned toward the doorway so that she’d have maximum reception for her whiskers if the men came this way.
“I was at school and then when Dimah picked me up she was scared.” Toma took another breath. “There was a strange man with a pock-marked face in the car and he wasn’t Grigori, my usual guard. He made Dimah drive out of the city, to this warehouse and then...” Toma broke off in a gulping sob and Ryska could almost taste his tears as he struggled to go on.
“Dimah’s dead.” Ryska made it a statement, not a question.
She felt him nod as he continued, “They held me in this room, six of them I think. Then they said they were going to take me to my papa but they shoved me in this trunk and it was really cold and dirty and they drove forever. We got here I guess and then the men took me out of the trunk and I was happy because I saw that Sergei was here so I thought maybe he’d take me home but then the pock-marked man argued with him and then everyone was shooting so I ran and saw you.” He pushed it out in a rush, his voice rising and then abruptly breaking off as he reached the end.
Ryska rose to her feet. It was about what she’d suspected. No help would be coming for this boy anytime soon. The ransom or whatever it was had gone wrong.
“Toma,” she murmured. “I need you to trust me. I’m going to get you out of here and back to Tynda.”
“Why? Because of who my papa is?”
The question and his slightly suspicious tone surprised her. She revised her estimation of his age upward and felt something akin to respect for the boy. He’d followed her without question up until now, but was mature enough to recognize she had no stake in his survival.
She debated for a second and then told him the truth. “You remind me of...someone I loved.”
“Like your brother or something?”
“Yes,” she said with a sad smile, “exactly like that.” And because of who his papa was and the reward she might get, but Ryska felt that the boy might take offense to that and she dearly needed his cooperation.
“Okay,” he said.
She reached down and felt along his rustling parka to his hand. “Come with me,” she said. She showed him by touch where the opening in the plywood was. “Crawl through there. It’ll be cold out there, but stay against the wall and don’t move, no matter what you see or hear. I’ll come back for you when I’ve dealt with those men.”
“Are you going to kill them? You have a gun?”
“No, no gun. Leave it to me. Just go out there and stay close and quiet.” Ryska held back the plywood as he crawled obediently through.
Was she going to kill those men? She didn’t want to. The Trainers had always been disappointed in her when it came time for the hunting tests. She hated to even kill a rabbit and couldn’t imagine taking down a man like the Trainers said they’d have to someday. She hated the hot touch of fresh blood, the metallic taste of it, the slipperiness. She’d hunted out of necessity as she rode the railcars on and off making her away from where the destroyed Lab was to Tynda, hunting just to survive until she’d discovered she could scavenge for wire and scrap to barter for what she needed in the city.
She’d only ever killed one man. The man who’d tried to rape her on her first night in Tynda. She had his cycle now, thinking it, and his life, were fair payment for his crime.
“It’s so dark,” Toma whispered through the crack as Ryska let the plywood shift back into place. “How will you see?”
“I can’t,” Ryska said. “Shhh. I’ll be back for you.”
Freed of having to keep track of the boy, Ryska slipped out of their sanctuary room, carefully mapping out in her memory where she’d left Toma. She crossed the next room, heading back to the hallway and only the shuffle of feet warned her as one of the men stepped through the door, the white blob of his electric torch blinking into her sensor range.
Ryska dove straight at the dark red shape, slashing the torch with her pick-axe. These men might be bigger, stronger and more armed than she, but within the deep darkness of the interior buildings, Ryska had an advantage and she intended to use to its fullest.
The torch crashed to the ground, the white flickering and then going out. This man reacted better than the last had, leaping back and bringing his rifle up. Ryska dropped down and rolled to the side as the Kalashnikov crackled loudly. For a moment her sensors were overwhelmed by the close, loud noise and too-fast-to-track bullets that shook the air as they passed. She wanted to curl her arms around her head and scream.
The flash passed and the world resolved itself back into shades of blue. Ryska forced herself still, watching the red shape creep forward, his breath hissing in her ears. He smelled like sweat and motor oil and his breath carried the bitterness of tabac use on its puffing vibrations as they tickled her whiskers. He toed the area in front of him, searching for his torch, coming within a few feet of her.
Ryska swung her pick-axe into where she thought his knee should be and was rewarded with a scream as he crumpled forward. A sharp blow to his head stopped the next scream and the scent of blood filled her nostrils. She gripped his coat and pulled his body out of the doorway, listening carefully for signs that another was on the way.
Boots running down the hallway. Two sets. Govno. Two men. Ryska let her training take over and pushed away the fear. She’d killed one. Now she must kill two more. She could almost hear the Trainers’ voices in her head telling her that if she wanted dinner she’d have to find the bunny. Just a bunny. Just a little blood. Dinner will be good. You can find it. Use your sensors. Let your mind tell the muscles what to do.
The man had dropped his rifle and it showed up in her sensors in a helpful green color. The programs in her control panel remembered her training, even if she fought to forget. Skull still ringing, she remembered to command to the sensors to identify and dampen their reaction to gunfire.
Ryska plucked up the rifle and swung back to the door as the white of a torch appeared, trailing the red shapes of the men. Her finger found the trigger as the stock rested heavy against her shoulder. Gregr had always told her he found guns easy because he just thought of them as a game. Just a game. Just a bunny. If you aren’t the hunter, you’re the rabbit.
The white shape of the torch flashed into the doorway and Ryska stepped out, opening fire. She heard the bullets hitting the drywall with quick thunks as she blindly sprayed across the area with the red shapes. Then the bullets found bodies and the sound changed, wet thwacks that a sighted ear might not discern. A man cursed loudly and she stepped further into the hallway, firing another burst in his direction. The white blob blinked out. Both red shapes were on the ground, one unmoving, the other groaning and shaking.
Ryska moved cautiously forward. The yellow haze helpfully parted around the men, telling her that they were obstructions in her path and making them look like islands of blood in a sulfur sea. She gagged as the hot smell of ruptured intestines hit her. The man still groaning was gut-shot. She pulled the trigger and fired another burst into his body. It’s the merciful thing to do.
Stillness. Ryska dropped the rifle, feeling from its weight that the clip was almost spent. She found her pick-axe, a lighter blue, contoured shape on the deep blue of the floor, and put it away in her belt.
No sound of movement or life came from down the hallway. Toma had said six men took him. She’d seen only four within her sensor range out in the square.
If she was lucky, the firefight with Toma’s unfortunate rescuers had taken out at least two of the six. Which meant one more man, somewhere. She licked her cold lips and shook the tension out of her hands, torn between grabbing Toma now and heading as quickly as possible for her cycle, and hunting down the other man. She didn’t want to kill anyone else if she didn’t have to, but she didn’t want an armed man at her back, waiting to ambush her.
Ambush. The stairs. She sucked in her breath and crept forward, back down the hall toward where the metal steps were. That’s where she’d ambush. Cover the retreat of the men, prevent the boy from slipping away. Gregr and Misha would be so proud of her for thinking like her enemy, for remembering her training.
For remembering them.
It isn’t you I wanted to forget, it isn’t you I shove away. I just want silence. I want peace. There was no one there to see the words she mouthed, her fingers absently tapping out the code on her thigh.
She hovered at the entrance to the steps, but they were too long for her to sense the full length. Nothing moved that her whiskers could pick up and the yellow haze pointed the way as unobstructed. No tripwires, no broken glass to make noise, nothing that looked like a quick trap set to catch a little boy and his mysterious helper.
Ryska felt a warning twinge as her control panel notified her with a sharp vibration that it was going to need to shut down and collect energy for its battery soon. With all the running and fighting she’d been doing, it would charge pretty quickly, but her sensors would be down, only the touch ones up from her whiskers, no helpful overlay or color mapping to show her the world. She hadn’t run it down to nothing in a couple years, but Ryska figured on having ten minutes left, if she was lucky.
She slipped down the stairs carefully, lifting and setting each foot down with minimal noise. Her footfalls sounded hellishly loud in her ears, but her rational mind knew that her hearing was far better than any sighted man’s.
There. Red flickered in her sensor range through the pale blue opening into the bottom hallway. The man was lying in wait, hovering behind the protection of the wall. Slowly Ryska slid her satchel off her body with one hand as she pulled out her pick-axe.
The rustling of her bag drew his attention and Ryska threw the sack of wire through the doorway before the man could flick on his torch and expose her. As she’d hoped, he turned the light on the bag, following the sound of movement. Time enough for her to leap forward off the last few steps and tackle him.
He’d half-turned toward her, quicker than she expected and her body slammed into a raised rifle. The metal dug hard into her ribs, knocking the air out of her but her bodyweight and momentum was enough to bring them both crashing backward.
Ryska tried to hit him with the small axe, but she was too tangled, too close. The man started a stream of curses as she rolled away from him and went for the white blob of the torch instead, kicking it in a spinning blur down the hallway until it spun away, out of her sensor range.
“Sooka, little cow,” the man swore.
Ryska lay still, not daring to move or even breathe as the man stood, rifle ready. Her ribs ached and she tasted blood where his shoulder had shoved her lip into her teeth, tearing it.
Come toward me, she willed him. Nothing is here. Just darkness. Come for your light.
The man fired a burst down the hallway, the bullets flicking by a meter above her head. Then he seemed to stop and listen. Ryska lay flat and breathed shallowly, her heart pounding like an angry fist, so loud that even this man must hear it.
He took a step forward. Listened. Step. Listen. Another step. Ryska tensed, her pick-axe ready. She shoved away everything but this moment. She didn’t want to be the rabbit.
The red shape stepped closer. In range. She swept up into sitting position, her legs striking out to tangle his forward foot as she swung the pick-axe through the haze of yellow and blue.
The man screamed and brought the rifle down, cracking her hard in the head, but she swung again and shoved herself away, her ears ringing as the control panel pinged again and shut off. The world went dark but the man was in range of her whiskers, the thin, slippery graphene telling his position as he brokenly tried to crawl away and raise his rifle.
Ryska threw herself onto the man, using her sore body to crush the rifle against his chest. Her whiskers brushed his face as she brought the handle of the pick-axe against the man’s throat. For a moment, she could almost see his features with the brush of the whiskers. His face felt strangely uneven, his beard prickly. She hadn’t touched a human face since the Lab.
Almost with regret, Ryska brought her bodyweight down into the axe handle and crushed the man’s throat. Blood sprayed from his mouth, sticking to her cheeks and audibly spattering her goggles. He tried to throw her off and then something cracked in his throat and he stopped moving.
Four dead. Ryska crawled to her feet, tucking the pick-axe into her belt more on habit than through want. She rubbed at her face with one sleeve, glad the blood wouldn’t stick to her whiskers. They were finer than human hair. She still wanted a hot shower and an aspirin.
Toma. She had to get him. Get to her cycle. She wasn’t sure how long her control panel would keep the sensors off-line. Too long to be useful immediately. She needed to get moving. Luka had compared the kinetic batteries to being like a shark. Stop moving and you’d die. It wasn’t quite that dramatic, but without movement, she’d be unable to run the programs that let her function.
And that let her drive the cycle. Ryska decided to deal with that problem as soon as she found Toma.
“Toma?” she called as she finally got back to the room at the end of the upper hallway.
“I’m here.” Ryska heard scrabbling as he pried open the plywood and climbed into the room. She guided him carefully past the bodies and had him pick up the still lit electric torch that had slid into another room on the lower floor.
“You have goggles and blood on your face,” Toma said.
“Worry about that later.” Ryska shrugged. “I need your eyes. I can’t see right now, so you’ll have to guide us.” She explained where she’d left her cycle, trying to find the words to describe the area in a way that Toma could understand.
He was a good guide, patient with her. She only stumbled once. There was no noise other than a soft evening wind rustling the weeds and dead grasses of the square. Ryska moved through the open space, letting her fingers trail along the grasses, anxious for something to orient her in the darkness.
They found her cycle and she helped Toma up in front of her, flicking on the headlamp and praying that it worked since she only bothered with it inside the city where she rarely went at night.
“We’ll go slow, but you have to steer,” she told Toma.
“You really are blind? You didn’t seem blind before.”
Ryska lifted her goggles and showed him the empty sockets behind. He gasped but didn’t shrink away from her. She felt his head turning back to the front.
“Oh. Okay. I’ll steer.”
It was a long trip back into the city. Ryska flexed her fingers and wiggled her toes, tapping her tongue against the roof of her mouth, hoping it was enough movement to charge her battery.
“There!” Toma spoke after a long time and steered them left. “Stop,” he called and Ryska hit the brakes, letting the cycle idle.
“Public phone?” she asked. She’d told Toma to find her one.
“Yes. I can call papa now. He’ll reward you a lot.” Toma slid off the cycle but turned and threw his arms around Ryska, surprising her.
She leaned into him, letting his hair tangle in her whiskers for an all-to-brief moment. This close, his hair smelled of lemon soap and wheat and she let herself pretend that she was holding Luka or Misha or...her closed ducts burned again with tears she could never shed.
“Thank you, Ryska,” Toma whispered.
“Thank you,” she whispered back, not expecting him to understand. She still remembered. She still loved. She’d thought her heart had been buried with the blackened bones beneath the demolished Lab, but she carried it still. It was time to move on and feel again. With Toma’s warm arms wrapped tightly around her aching body, Ryska thought that maybe she finally could.
* * * * *
Want to read more by Annie Bellet? The first book in the Chwedl Duology is now available in trade paperback and all ebook formats.
In an ancient Wales that never was...
The twin brothers Emyr and Idrys are cursed to live as hounds; Emyr by night, and Idrys by day. The twins believe they will be trapped this way forever until they meet the fierce and curious Áine, a changeling woman born with fey blood and gifts struggling to fit into a suspicious human world.
Áine unravels the fate of Emyr and his twin as all three of them fall in love. To free her lovers from the curse, she embarks on a journey to the realm of the fey where she confronts her own unique gifts and heritage. Ultimately, she must decide where her heart truly lies and what she’s willing to risk to get what she desires most.
* * *
Also by Annie Bellet:
The Gryphonpike Chronicles:
Witch Hunt
Twice Drowned Dragon
A Stone’s Throw
Dead of Knight
The Barrows (Omnibus Vol.1)
Chwedl Duology:
A Heart in Sun and Shadow
The Raven King
Pyrrh Considerable Crimes Division Series:
Avarice
Wrath
Hunger
Envy
Lust
Inertia
Vainglory
Short Story Collections:
The Spacer’s Blade and Other Stories
Gifts in Sand and Water
River Daughter and Other Stories
Deep Black Beyond
Till Human Voices Wake Us
Dusk and Shiver
By Spell and Sword
* * *
About the Author:
Annie Bellet lives and writes in the Pacific NW. She is a Clarion graduate and her stories have appeared in magazines such as AlienSkin, Digital Science Fiction, and Daily Science Fiction as well as multiple collections and anthologies. Follow her on her blog at “A Little Imagination” (http://overactive.wordpress.com/)
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