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  Down to his bones, that kid was a killer. Even I, the perfect predator, had not needed to teach Jasper how to stalk.

  And Mommy didn’t need to know that her occasional sip of morning blood had come from a screaming vampire her cute progeny had caught and dragged home especially for her.

  He relished the screams, and he drained them into a teacup. Because it had to be fresh for Mommy.

  Silver platter and all, Jasper would carry it in with a smile. “Pretty Mommy, look what I brought.”

  Pretty Mommy would glow.

  On her silk sheets. In the palace I ordered built for her. Where live-in staff treated my erection as a castle.

  Yes, that was a penis joke.

  There were civilized parties. There was passion. There was a garden tended by the only human on the grounds. One strictly off-limits to our son. Not that he had not tried a time or two.

  Jasper was a real devil.

  And Pearl knew it… and loved him anyway.

  He brought her trinkets, sneaking out of his room while we slept. Amputated fingers, juicy leg bones… three times he tried to impress her with severed heads.

  Which even I did not know how he found.

  Because, once again, we lived on an island where there was none but us and those I knew were delivered.

  Jasper, my beautiful, sweet, angelic boy, was a world ender.

  One time, I cracked a joke that he was the antichrist.

  Pearl refused to speak to me for almost a week.

  She loved and she knew, fawning over her begotten monster as if the human jawbone he dug up that afternoon were a treasure.

  I mean, I made it a treasure when I had it dipped in gold and set with diamonds.

  I don’t think a more elated boy might have existed in the world when he saw it. When he presented it to his mommy.

  Who kissed him for it and playfully put it on her head like a crown.

  Unlike our son, I knew she cried after I’d taken the kid for a stroll.

  I knew she fretted.

  I knew that was why Yeshua sat at our table and smirked at me at least once a month. That was why Pearl asked him to be her tutor so she might no longer be ignorant.

  My son, my obnoxious son, agreed.

  She bloomed under his tutelage.

  She still didn’t like him.

  Who would? Her Jesus was a sanctimonious pain in the ass who refused to let a topic go, strangling the argument until there was nothing left but a carcass. He dumped way more dead things at my wife’s feet than the boy she had taken from the pens.

  The night Jesus dared offer her his wrist for dinner, I almost killed him. And that was not in the hypothetical sense.

  He and I battled for a week, bouncing from landscape to landscape. We rent, we purged, we fought like the truly elemental things we were.

  Until I heard my wife weeping from hundreds of thousands of miles away.

  Hand around the throat of the messiah, I dropped him to the cracked dust and flapped my wings.

  Jesus laughed, careless of the blood that dripped from his mouth. “You deserve everything that is coming to you.”

  Instantaneously, I found myself home, where women of my wife’s acquaintance had gathered to cheer her out of the gloom that continued to upend civilization. Our son, Jasper, rested at her feet, his beautiful head on her knee—behaving himself in a way I had never witnessed.

  Kicking free of his mother’s embrace, he shot up… the babe stalking me as if I might serve as dinner. Fist in my face, he hissed. His first hiss. “Never leave her this way again.”

  His first hiss.

  How could I not love this boy?

  Eyes wet with unshed tears, Pearl looked up at me and welcomed me home. Proud as the queen she had grown to be.

  What need had I of pride? Before the gathering of women there, I fell to my knees at her feet. Tired, focused, sorry. I prostrated where all those of rank in my presence would share the tale of the devil who loved an angel.

  The angel who drank me down like wine after forgiveness was lavished on my form.

  Dreaming of murder down the hall, Jasper smiled in his sleep. Diabolically entertaining, those dreams held my attention. I reveled in them.

  Once, I even made the mistake of telling Pearl the best parts of our son’s intentions.

  The world would burn.

  Terrified, she clung to me and begged that I might help him change.

  Creatures didn’t change, but I promised her I’d try.

  That was the first night she felt our baby kick.

  In one moment, her attention was on the vagrant. In the next, it was swallowed up by our baby.

  Jasper was twice as enamored with what grew in Mommy’s belly and fully in love.

  Obsessed.

  The ground shook, our son up to his normal tricks when he didn’t get his way should she brush his incessant prodding off. He practically tore down our house when the fetus didn’t respond to his songs.

  “This is mine!” he would shout.

  “She’s not yours.” Lips service I offered to appease his mother. Because I knew just as Pearl feared that he truly believed she was his.

  “Mommy, eat more. She’s hungry.” Jasper would rub that burgeoning belly. “Oh, and so pretty! We will be the best of friends. Her favorite color will be orange, and she will slurp down liver just like I do.”

  Jasper was not allowed to be present at the birth, the scamp unable to contain his excitement and far too distracting to the mother working to deliver. It was only the two of us while our son sulked in the jungle.

  I was the first to see or touch our daughter, Pearl exhausted yet smiling when I set the babe on her breast.

  Strength. Endurance. Intention.

  The little girl was her mother incarnate.

  As if he knew the moment his sister had taken her first breath, Jasper appeared and asked to hold her, the babe covered in vernix, mucus, and blood. His arms outstretched as if the only thing that might quench his endless appetite was soon to be delivered. Pearl made him wait, as the baby was learning to suckle.

  The boy might have sacked an entire community in his temper, but his mother called him forward when his tantrum grew outlandish. She let him lay a single touch on her head.

  A babe he longed would be his best friend.

  And I knew what coursed through his veins. I had suffered the same.

  Kissing my soul, I knew joy with my wife at the beauty of our child. Jasper named the babe—Beryl.

  And dared call her his.

  Pearl didn’t tolerate it, chastising our son. “She isn’t yours. She belongs to herself.”

  His soul, the mirror of mine, begged. “You’re wrong, Mommy.”

  Our pretty phenomenon, Jasper... an amazing child. A true devil.

  Who coveted, who hunted, and whom I found more than once standing over the cradle of my daughter, stroking her cheek and speaking of battles fought long before they were born.

  Five times he threatened to kill me if I dared deny him his due.

  So I did what had to be done.

  I cast Jasper out to wander, removing all memory of him from Pearl’s mind so she might enjoy her daughter without the constant worry over her son—a deadly son who had been born to run wild and was growing all the more manic caged by an island too small to satiate his whims.

  I told him this, honest when I dropped him at the doorstep of the Cathedral.

  He might have only been a boy, but he had the memories of a man. Until he grew into his body and learned to control his urges, he was not to be permitted near his mother or his sister.

  After all, eternity was a long time. What might a few dozen years mean in the scheme of things?

  Jasper didn't wail. He didn’t cling to me. Instead, he made an oath.

  To bring the world down in flames if his soul was not returned to him. Tussling his hair, I was so proud, knowing exactly how he felt, and glad I hadn’t had my Pearl in those hungry centuries where I wreaked
havoc.

  The kid would do well getting it out of his system. Then he might return to the flock, where he would find it was not his sister he was drawn to. It was the possibility for what might have been in her. Whoever he had lost and been reborn to find would not be delivered so easily.

  He’d have to search for her. Suffer for her. Learn to control himself so as not to frighten her with his greatness.

  And when he saw her, he’d know.

  There was no need for him to project what he saw in Mommy and Daddy.

  He’d know.

  The boy nodded, threw a rude gesture my way, and told me he would get even with me for this, before turning his back and climbing the steps of his new home.

  I believed him.

  That would be fun!

  “I’ll come visit tomorrow! Be a good boy!”

  Heaven help the woman he fell in love with.

  Chuckling, I returned to my wife, smiling to find her in such peace. Babe in arms, she danced around our room, humming in the sunshine, all the constant niggling worry over her beautiful boy lifted away.

  An indulgent smile paired with beautifully sparkling blue eyes. “Welcome home.”

  Kissing the top of Pearl’s head, I brushed the back of a claw down the smiling cheek of my sweet little girl. And all was right in the world.

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  SWALLOW IT DOWN

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  Dripping, swampy sweat had gathered between Eugenia’s breasts. Her mouth a desert. Knowing exactly how foul the act was, she delved dirty fingers between slimy mounds to bring the salty brine to parched lips.

  And she sucked them clean, ignoring the taste of road dust.

  Scrambling to cover exposed skin, cleavage was concealed. From head to toes, her body fully draped to protect from the relentless sun. That same protection half the reason she was melting alive in no man’s land.

  Sweat. Or burn and sweat. A lose-lose situation.

  Wide-brimmed hat, woven by hand and ugly as the day was long, kept the sun off her face. A bandana kept the dust out of her mouth. Layers of repurposed tee-shirts, badly sewn together animal skins, jeans, sneakers on the verge of losing their soles. Torn bits and bobs, a sea of safety pins and animal gut thread keeping her just as fashionably disgusting as everyone else since the world ended.

  And the goddamn sun was relentless, miles yet until she might reach where Fresh Water marked her map.

  It had been two days.

  Two days without fluids was enough to kill in this kind of heat.

  A lapping lakeshore—spanned by the raggedy stone bridge underfoot—was just another reminder that nothing could be trusted. Murky, undrinkable water taunted travelers. Water that had tempted many to take a sip. Eugenia had seen enough corpses on the road not to fall for nature's trick.

  Not to listen to the sweet splashes as she pined for a drink.

  It had once been so easy to grab a bottle of chilled water from the fridge. To not question the source or the safety. Food had been abundant and full of variety. People used words like organic, vegan, prime...

  Now? Not so much. Eat what you find or don’t eat at all. And that included the rare expired snack food that one would think might be exciting when the menu often included grubs, but really… the taste of before didn't come with a sense of nostalgia. It came with a knife of remembrance.

  The stone bridge. The water. The dead forest taunted her enough with what the world had been. A rare find of Cheetos just pissed her off.

  Humid air rustled through branches, but there was no whisper of leaves sighing as trees swayed. Only the bony noise of clicking, snapping wood.

  Pathetic last words, but worth muttering. “What I wouldn’t give for air conditioning.”

  The man plodding on at her side grumbled, “They got that up in city. If you’d just go to one, you can pay for cool air like everyone else.”

  John wasn’t the worst companion she’d met on the road. Of a similar age, strong enough to carry his own pack and contribute, he was the quiet sort. Only got handsy with her once. Learned his lesson and remembered the manners his mother must have taught him before nuclear war fucked up everything everywhere.

  “Need I remind you, John, this shortcut was your idea.” He'd strongly suggested this very route, leaning over her without so much as brushing her shoulder when they came to a crossroads and she had to decide left or right.

  With a slanted grin, he shrugged. “According to your map, this trail took two days off the journey to Fresh Water.”

  It wasn’t a trail if the road was paved, but there was really no point in correcting him. Especially since she had agreed. The reason she’d agreed? Because it also kept them farther from the marked settlements on her map.

  Even better, travelers avoided the dead woods under the false assumption that the forest was toxic. But there were no char marks or wilting. None of the telltale signs that hinted at radiation. The trees were dead, true, but they were also decaying. Irradiated woods didn’t decay, because they lacked the microbes responsible for recycling organic matter. These trees died after the bombs fell.

  Gypsy Moths.

  The forest died when, year after year, caterpillars decimated their leaves—damaging the tree’s ability to respirate and gather energy from the sun. Trunks fell and rotted like they were supposed to. Many lay in the road, slowly turning to sawdust.

  There were bugs to eat. There were animals to hunt. There were other things growing like weeds on a grave, which meant there was also rain.

  Not that Eugenia had enjoyed a sudden thunderstorm or the relief of water she might actually drink falling from the sky. From the look of the dried-out body face down in the middle of the bridge, that poor soul hadn’t felt the rain either.

  Rushing to pillage the corpse’s pack, John pulled the zipper and found… nothing of value. Eugenia could have told him that. If the person had water, they wouldn’t have died on the middle of a bridge, face down and mostly ignored by the wildlife.

  Let the man moan and curse.

  John’s frustration was hers; it was everyone’s in the dead world where nothing was easy and everything hurt.

  A world greedy humans ruined.

  A spoiled world in which Eugenia had been crushing her second year of med school. Harvard, full scholarship.

  Then the bombs fell; cities were wiped away in a blink. She’d been camping with friends. Friends who were all dead now, or being whored. Or died being whored. She didn’t know.

  Couldn’t think about it too hard. Just like she wouldn’t think about who the corpse might have been.

  Because whatever existed before was gone.

  The dark ages were back with a vengeance, and City. City was a cesspool. Didn’t matter which one. No sanitation, roving gangs always fighting for territory, the only way most women might make a buck was on their backs.

  And considering the extreme increase in violence against women once the world went to hell, there weren’t all that many women left.

  So fuck City. And considering the types she’d kept up with since the fall, fuck men in general.

  John wasn’t so bad. But if he looked at her with that puppy stare one more time, she just might pop him in the mouth.

  Leaning against a crumbling stone side rail, she watched John pick through the corpse's pockets, wondering when someone would be doing that to her. And boy would they be disappointed. She had nothing others would find valuable in her pack—the pack itself faded from the blue it had been when new
. Torn here and there. Empty of supplies. Heavy, because no matter how bad things got, both volumes of Nelson’s Textbook of Pediatrics went where she went.

  He flipped the corpse over to rifle through what rotting tatters might conceal, the body seeming to smile up at her.

  Eugenia didn’t smile back.

  “We need to get moving.” Or this was how she was going to die.

  On an endless stone bridge in dangerous, unknown territory, seeking water that was so close she could taste it. Going mad from the sound of tainted drink just a few feet away.

  No different than the other bodies they’d found on the road. The whole bodies, the bloated bodies, the dried bodies, and… well... the bits of bodies left after wild dogs found supper.

  Man’s best friend wasn’t so friendly once it started starving.

  Which was a pity. Eugenia had grown up with such a great mutt. She still liked dogs. And they liked her too… for a snack.

  Killing that first pup in self-defense had been harder than knifing a man trying to get into her pants.

  And they all tried.

  Which was precisely why she’d been forced to leave her former accommodation, again, and make her way south to new territory.

  Where she’d picked up John wallowing on the side of the road. Where she didn’t make small talk but shared her supplies.

  Everyone held on to something from the past.

  John’s seemed to be a sense of optimistic stupidity.

  Eugenia’s was sheer stubbornness and an undying sense of anger that—thanks to a shit president and a fucked-up world—all her dreams had been blown to ash. All her hard work, all the sacrifices she had made to achieve her goals… useless.

  Two years of med school did not make one a doctor. A medic, in theory. Which had been handy when there was nothing to trade. But a medic with tits wasn’t safe.

  She learned that lesson in the first disease-riddled settlement. AKA, the shanty town of Wellspring.

  Pretty name for an awful place.