Hybrid Fiction, Issue 5

Copyright Š 2020 Hybrid Fiction. All material appearing in Hybrid Fiction is copyright. Reproduction in whole or part is not permitted without permission in writing from the editor. All characters and events are fictitious. The publisher bears no responsibility and accepts no liability for the work herein.

Hybrid Fiction August 2020

Table of Contents Cover: Hybrid by Ken Bastard A woman realizes she is a robot after all.

“Meriden’s Moonlet” by Jennifer Shelby ........................................................................................................... 3 On his last shift before retirement, a government sanctioned wizard questions his long career of binding lunar reflections into bodies of water. What could happen if one of those moonlets escaped?

“The Dreadful Wind and Rain” by Steven Mathes ............................................................................................. 5 A merchant of “nominally legal musical software” fishes a dead musician’s body out of the water and sells it to a firm that rebuilds the victim onto a cyborg capable only of playing brilliant music.

Project Auroral: Chapter 3 drawn by Marc Rene and written by Ben Pyle ....................................................... 11 The saga of superheroine Aryn continues!* “Snow’s Theorem” by Patricia Moussatche ..................................................................................................... 17 Mr. Prince’s fiancée is in the spotlight for developing a mathematical equation that explains what it takes to achieve a happily ever after. Unfortunately, someone who’s squandered their variables is out to get her right when a new gig should be boosting Mr. Prince’s career.

“Rattlesnake Tears” by Alexei Collier ............................................................................................................... 22 Rebelling against her mother's desire that she shed her humanity, a teenage rattlesnake shapeshifter befriends a raven shapeshifter, but her mother attacks him. To escape retribution, mother and daughter change into snakes and flee into the desert.

“Silver Scissors, Golden Ring” by Langley Hyde .............................................................................................. 30 Frantz, a celebrity hero, confronts Rasputin in order to win the ring for Princess Margaret's hand—and defies his handlers.

Baby by Graham Kennedy .................................................................................................................................. 41 An astronaut may just have found an alien infant! Or not.

After the Warding: Part IV by R. Z. Held ............................................................................................................ 42 Aurea only wants to protect her loved ones—she won't confess her feelings to the man she loves, for his own good, and she won't tell her friends about her plan to use the wild magic against their captors, to keep them from getting blood on their hands. She longed for direction in her life. But this path may kill her if she doesn't ask for help.† “A Midsummer Night’s Tinder Date” by Mira Domsky .................................................................................... 51 A young woman chats with her best friend about her Tinder date: Puck, the 500 year old British faery. Or it could be aliens.

About the authors and artists........................................................................................................................... 58

* †

See Hybrid Fiction, Issues 2 and 3 for Chapters 2 and 3 See Hybrid Fiction, Issues 2, 3, and 4 for Parts I, II, and III Hybrid Fiction August 2020

MERIDEN’S MOONLET

By Jennifer Shelby

It was Meriden’s last night as a wizard. After fifty years of government service, he’d given up the job with a formal letter and a sense of relief. He would miss the power, but there were other kinds of magic.

Dew drops twinkled in the moonlight, making constellations of the hay fields. Fireflies streaked past like earthbound meteors. Meriden slowed his gait and watched them from the rutted dirt lane, jealous of their reckless trajectories.

For the first, fresh decades of his career, capturing escaped moonlets mattered to Meriden. He thought keeping order in the universe made him a hero, an adventurer. Now, Meriden knew better.

He despised what he’d become, a hired goon, a bully of innocent moonlets.

A puddle appeared before him. The full moon which should have been reflected within it had escaped, but these renegade reflections never went far.

There, frolicking in the meadow, flirting with the fireflies. Silly, innocent thing. They did so love their freedom.

Meriden wished he could let the moonlet be, just this once, but the government’s rules were strict, and his pension hung in the balance.

With a twinge of guilt, Meriden whispered the words he’d said a million times before. Lunatung shivarium octanthus. His heart wasn’t in it, but a potent magic shivered in the dark matter between the words.

The moon’s reflection struggled against the spell, calling upon gravity, physics, and all the other moon magic at its disposal. If it had hands, it could drag its fingers in the dirt. If it had a voice it could scream, but none of that would help.

The moonlet sank into the murky water of the puddle, slow and helpless. Cool muck kissed the bottom-most curve, oozing past the Ocean of Storms, past the craters of Copernicus and Archimedes, the man in the moon all but drowned, the green cheese soggy with leftover rain.

The scent of stirred up muck mingled with the burnt gunpowder smell of the moon. Meriden Hybrid Fiction August 2020

Shelby

“Meriden’s Moonlet”

retched at the metallic taste it left in his mouth.

The moonlet struggled to escape, the puddle sloshing.

Meriden sighed. He hated this part.

At last the moonlet stilled, its wild, moon spirit breaking.

As the puddle smoothed to glass, Meriden glimpsed himself inside it. Tired. Old. Nothing more than the reflection of a wizard.

He set a final spell to hold the moonlet and tried not to loathe himself as he walked away.

Tomorrow, Meriden promised himself, he’d make things better.

But tomorrow he’d be out of magic.

He turned, the moonlet’s gravity too heavy to ignore. Magic tingled at his fingertips. Stars sparkled overhead, fireflies wove through the meadow, and Meriden took his chance.

He cast a fistful of magic at the puddle.

A violent joy surged in his chest as the moonlet launched from its prison. With the last of the night’s magic, Meriden dissolved himself into a cloud of shimmering stardust and leapt into orbit around the moonlet. Together, they rocketed into a universe of twinkling stars.

Hybrid Fiction August 2020

4

THE DREADFUL WIND AND RAIN

By Steven Mathes

When the bullet circled ahead to the windshield, I was already clinically dead. The bullet rapped at the glass until the car activated the wipers. It went to the side, right next to Miller Ratliff's head. It scritched at the armored glass. It dared him to open any door or window. Its detonator pulsed in and out of its nose like the stinger on a wasp. It was a bullet with a sense of humor. It was a bullet with patience.

You might ask about my mistake? At this point, perhaps my impatience, my naĂŻve refusal to cooperate. Clinically dead, I refused to walk through that last glowing door, cross that last river. I never thought of retribution, nor of any rights I might imagine a body has (not a truly dead body, not yet!), just for a little justice.

"A SWAT team has blocked Exit 44," said the car's computer. "Taking I-95 would be faster!"

"Thank you," Ratliff said. "Take 95, then."

"Happy to be of service!" the computer chirped.

I knew better than to hope. Ratliff was an Oligarch, a bespectacled, respected broker of what corporate types call "nominally legal musical software." The roadblocks would be for my almostmurderer, my brother Dan, not for Ratliff.

Ratliff put Moby Dick face down on the front seat and glanced out at the dreadful wind and rain.

He looked back at my body.

About the bullet? How was I supposed know? I was at the out-of-body-experience stage, and I was bitter about it. Just one more injustice.

"Check his brain," Ratliff said.

Hybrid Fiction August 2020

Mathes

“Dreadful Wind and Rain”

6

"Temperature up two tenths," the car answered. "Still optimally cool."

My brain was fine. It was cut off from any blood supply but bathed in engineered nutrient. It was refrigerated along with the rest of my body in a life-support bag. Maybe I thought about things too much given my flood of nutrient. I was a zombie in reverse. My soul lived on, but my body? Seriously, what is death, anyway?

What's the difference between a reverse-zombie and an angel? No Earth. No Heaven. No Hell, either, except for the Hell the reverse-zombie makes for itself. Nothing is fair.

I still hoped for miracles, though.

Ratliff had plans for my brain, not my body. As the car merged onto 95, he hummed Bach's

Partita No. 2. Specifically, the last movement. He cupped his mouth to make overtones approximating some of the double stops. One of my performance pieces: flayed by another capitalist.

"Your brother did this? Just so he could get that tiny vacation home?" he said to me—or to my memory. "Everybody gets food. Everybody has medical. Everybody has a place to live. A vacation home? Really? No morality in families. It's morally reprehensible."

Mere hours ago, Ratliff pulled me out of the Androscoggin River, and I regained consciousness too late, just as he slipped me into the body bag. My fumbling struggles achieved one thing. He knew I would've lived. My brainware was fresh, illegal to take, but that illegal part was impossible to prove. No morality in Ratliff. He loved me for my music and killed me for his love.

Meanwhile, the bullet continued to tap. I once studied Morse Code as a kid. Now I could recognize it, but not enough to remember the actual letters, except "SOS." I had no grudge against the bullet, which was just doing its job. Maybe the bullet tapped out accusations and taunts. I knew it was trying to communicate with one of us.

Ratliff picked up his book. He moved his lips a little as he read, two fingers pressed against his temple. Aside from the lip movement, he maintained the Zen-like calm of an organized crime professional.

"Fiddlin Fool Violin Music in Portsmouth is running a special!" the car said.

Ratliff frowned as he looked up. His entitlement irked my out-of-body sense of justice.

"Please don't disturb me with your ads," he said.

Hypocrisy. The music store was merely trying to make a criminal living, just like Ratliff.

"Apologies. I let this one through because you're running out of time, sir. Police have blocked 95 at the Massachusetts border."

"We'll get to Cambridge. Just keep going."

"Arrival at Klepp Luthiers in eighty-eight minutes due to the roadblock!" the car chirped. "Route 1 will be blocked soon. Back roads will be too slow."

Hybrid Fiction August 2020

Mathes

“Dreadful Wind and Rain”

7

Moby Dick went back down, folded shut, page lost.

"Eighty-eight minutes? Dear me, that's close."

"Even the corrupt have to make a token effort at compromise," said the car.

"Thanks for that."

"Happy to be of service!" said the car.

I had no grudge against the car, no more than the bullet. These robots had an appropriate attitude. Ratliff now drummed his fingers in neo-romantic swishes. The bullet picked up the rhythm, improvised with a jazz syncopation. It mocked Ratliff's frigid taste. The wind and rain buffeted the limo, and that added an irregular pattering. That bullet truly wanted to tell somebody something.

"Okay, you win," Ratliff said. "What can Fiddlin Fool offer me?"

"I'm currently sending an offer with the, uh, artist's full medical!" the car said. "Please wait..."

Ratliff paused everything. He always did when money was at stake. Money: what even the rich never had enough of.

"One hundred thousand," the car finally said.

Ratliff's eyebrows twitched up. Even I felt a little flattered. Like all artists, I knew how it felt to offer my soul for sale, only to have it rejected with a form letter. For once I felt appreciated.

"Agreed," he said. "Provided he doesn't ever play trash. He was a genius, but sometimes he played that bluegrass. Bluegrass is an American disgrace."

"Arrival at Fool's in five minutes."

The car arrived on schedule. The dreadful wind and rain flooded the parking lot. Floating debris bumped against our fenders.

It took half an hour to get the trunk of the limo aligned with an armored iris diaphragm. Finally, the diaphragm conformed to the rear of the vehicle without letting the bullet through. Water was pumped, then squeegeed away. The air was cooled in preparation for my surgery. Fiddlin Fool had a surprisingly professional operation—given the foolish name of the establishment.

You wonder why cops wouldn't know a crooked music store. But then you wonder why they let kids sell drugs on the street. Corruption? Stupidity? The law works in mysteriously unjust ways, so here I was.

You wonder why I failed to see the benefit of letting myself drift into eternity. Injustce? Maybe just stubborn.

A death certificate from a hurried coroner attested to my drowning. The coroner had forgotten his autopsy scanner, but I was blue and stiff. "Dead at the scene," and flailing ten minutes later. Once again: stupidity or corruption? Same question I always asked about my congressman.

Now here I was at Fiddlin Fool with only a few minutes left before I would start to spoil. They

Hybrid Fiction August 2020

Mathes

“Dreadful Wind and Rain”

8

opened an escrow, proving that they had the hundred grand. They sent an electronic affidavit— certification that I would never be allowed to play bluegrass. The special trunk of the car popped open. My refrigerated bag was dragged out. I was removed for visuals.

Money was transferred. Ratliff shot away.

Shot? Somehow the bullet got into Fiddlin Fool's showroom. It tapped at the armored one-way mirror looking out from the workshop. Was it trying to send me a message, or send me to the afterlife? My nervousness about being resurrected suddenly made this seem important.

Too late in any case. Fiddlin Fool had a brain case waiting. My body was decapitated; my brain gently cut out and transplanted. With minutes to spare.

They installed my new brain case into a minstrel chassis. They glued finely carved inlays of my bones into the violin. From their talk, I learned that it looked like scrimshaw. I knew that blind musician cyborgs were popular, but giving me at least a single, small eye would have been a kindness.

They cleaned my long hair, my beard, and used them to decorate the minstrel.

When they booted me up, my out-of-body experience came crashing in. Despite being deliberately blinded for marketing purposes, I could still hear.

"The bullet keeps talking," said the technician. "I just wish we knew what it was saying."

"The coroner's paperwork is all in order," the workshop computer answered.

"The paperwork says yes," said the technician. "But the bullet says there's more to the story."

"Are you aborting?" the workshop asked.

"No, no! There's always more to a story. I already have a buyer. I just meant that this one has a tale to tell. Something fishy..."

"As in drowned?" said the workshop.

"Pun not intended."

The technician puttered with my new body, humming cheerfully to the tapping rhythm coming through the glass.

"The bullet only has ten seconds of fuel left," the workshop said.

"That's technology for you."

I almost mistook myself for living. I could hear, feel, and I had plenty of that one feeling that all the living share: physical pain. On the other hand, I could not walk or chat. I could not think clearly. I could hum tunes but not speak. Whenever I tried to flail my arms or legs, only my bow would move, making sweet tones on the violin. Whenever I tried to scream, only pure song emerged. The harder I struggled, the deeper and more beautiful the music. The cyborg software had come that far.

Yes, my damaged brain wanted only the forbidden bluegrass. My mastery of other musical

Hybrid Fiction August 2020

Mathes

“Dreadful Wind and Rain�

9

genres had vanished in a cluster of dying brain cells, thanks to my frigid float down the stormy Androscoggin. Fiddlin Fool quickly figured this and installed a Celtic workaround. The technician wept each time I played.

Before losing fuel, the bullet detonated into a vintage first-press vinyl of Paul Anka's "(You're) Having my Baby."

"That'll cost us," the technician said.

"Everyone's a critic," the computer agreed.

They sold me to a boutique hotel in Portsmouth and dressed me like Jerry Garcia. I was installed in the cocktail lounge. Ratliff came in once. I recognized his voice. My anger made me forget how my flailing and screaming would translate, and my music came out brilliant, heartrending. I felt both enslaved and liberated while trapped in my art. After a single song, Ratliff left in loud disgust. Always a snob, he did not recognize my barren, sad beauty.

My murderous brother did. He came in one night wearing a house-arrest ankle bracelet and recognized my distinct style. He wept at my sweetened rage, although for the wrong reasons. He could hear the pitch of my soul, he could recognize my pure tone, but he missed the dark resonance between my violin and his heart strings. He grasped the legality, but not the morality. Aesthetics were mere data for him.

"I got the vacation house," he said. "But I also got caught. I report for sentencing tomorrow. They'll reduce me from first-degree murder. I'm glad you're alive!— Well, more or less alive."

I could say nothing, but I sang and played my best ever.

"Good thing that bullet never got you," he added. "They could've traced it back to me."

My brother went to jail for a year, but only after years of house arrest as he played legal games about my state of semi-living. Ratliff dodged charges of illegal trafficking of cadavers. He had the lawyers. Money is justice.

Hybrid Fiction August 2020

Mathes

“Dreadful Wind and Rain�

What about me? Do I sound laconic, deadened, my pain focused on my only outlet? The Artistic Protection and Preservation Act of 2077 prohibited restoring me to full function. My brain was mostly mine, but my software, my soul, was the property of the hotel. My legal appeals found their way into the labyrinth of the courts, never to return.

What could a dead-but-living boy do, but sing his Celtic songs? It was a good night when patrons wept, sad but blissful. Entertainment to ward off the darkness. Something better than acceptance. Everyone understood the dreadful wind and rain.

Hybrid Fiction August 2020

10

SNOW’S THEOREM

By Patricia Moussatche

The first attempt on Snow White’s life made the headlines two months before our wedding.

She was out of the hospital and back in the classroom the next day. Her sore leg didn’t cripple her schedule; she was scarcer than intact glass slippers at the end of a premiere after-party. Not that I’d been invited to any recently. Maybe this new gig for Tinker Bell Studios would set my career back on track.

Snow blew off her incident as if it were a flying house. I wasn’t convinced Mr. Hunter was self-employed, so I went to the pros.

Dwarf Security dealt with celebrity cases, but I hoped they’d make an exception. I strode into the main office before the morning haze cleared and shook hands with the man peeking from behind the desk. Nameplate said Understone.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Prince?” His white Einstein hair looked professionally styled. I should hire his barber when I cast the Mad Hatter.

I took the chair across from him. “Did you see the piece about the mathematician who got shot on Tuesday? She’s my fiancée.”

His brow furrowed. “The one who figured out the happily ever after equation?”

“Yep.” “That case is closed. They’re sending the perp to jail until all the rose petals fall.”

I stooped forward, elbows propped on my knees. “There’ll be others.”

“You know who’s behind this?”

Hybrid Fiction August 2020

Moussatche

“Snow’s Theorem”

18

“I’m thinking the usual character. Snow’s father eloped a few weeks ago. Never met the woman. She owns Pomme Rouge Enterprises.”

Mr. Understone leaned back and tapped his chin. Intimidation 101, according to Snow.

“Motive?”

I followed suit, tipping my chair backward so the front legs left the floor. Beat that. “People are selfish. They don’t want to bake cake for their kids if they don’t get to eat it. Snow’s variables are all lined up. Some people don’t like that she got it right and they didn’t.”

“We don’t tail academics. Too many symposiums.”

I leaned further back. “Mr. Understone—” “Doc.” The chair tottered, but I slammed it forward onto its feet. “Come again?”

“Got a Ph.D. in Physics before learning my lesson.”

That explained the hairdo. Hex, I should cast him as Mad Hatter. But the festival wasn’t my current problem.

“I’m only asking for a couple of months. Until the wedding.” Not sure I could afford more than that, anyway.

He squinted his left eye. “Buying life insurance?”

“Snow’ll be out of the spotlight by then. Today’s Pinocchio Gazette reported on the race to build a time machine. Jack de Nimble is almost ready to jump. When people can change their once upon a time, they won’t worry so much about missing variables in Snow’s equation the first time around. It will be happily ever after for everyone.”

Doc Understone grunted. “I’ll put seven men on the job. But no promises.”

That was more than I could do on my own. We shook hands again, and I spent the next week lining up bands for the Wonderland Festival.

My phone beeped during cast auditions. Had to answer; couldn’t leave my father-in-law-tobe hanging. The image on my phone’s screen flickered to Mr. White’s ruddy face, sweatband and all.

“That daughter of mine is in the ER again.” He gave an inpatient huff. Maybe the news disturbed his tennis match. “Snow’s almost out of surgery. My wife’s already there.”

Dung, should have added the dwarves to the VIP call list.

I let Mr. White get back to his game and rushed to Palace General Hospital. The shorty in the waiting room wouldn’t stop sneezing. Good to know Snow’s stepmother was being watched.

Hybrid Fiction August 2020

Moussatche

“Snow’s Theorem”

19

The woman who approached me could’ve been on the cover of half a dozen glamour mags.

Rolling Stars would’ve had her wearing something more demure. Not a medical professional, but fit for anatomy lessons. If this was wife number six, Mr. White had more in the bag than his racket.

She extended her hand. “Lenora Queen-White. So glad to finally meet you, Mr. Prince.”

“Call me Al.” “Charming.”

I glanced around the stark gray hall. “Next time we gather the family, let’s meet for dinner.”

“I’m a daylight person. Need my beauty sleep.”

“It’s working.”

Her smile told me I scored.

“So, what happened this time?” I asked.

Snow’s stepmother shrugged and her dress shimmered. Mermaid Fashion, no doubt. Selling beauty products for hags must pay well. “An old woman came at her with a shoe. Some dopey little guy pushed Snow out of the way and into a window. All she got was a slashed arm.”

Not sure if that was a plus or a minus.

“I hired some bodyguards. But if they’re doing the damage, maybe I should reconsider.”

Her gaze sized me up. “I think Snow needs a sabbatical. You know. Get away for a bit before the big day.”

I ran a hand through my hair. “I have this festival I’m organizing.” First gig in almost a year and this woman wanted me to quit?

“That doesn’t mean she can’t go.”

“Not sure Snow’ll want to miss finals next week, but she might agree to grade remotely.”

Mothers knew best, but I wasn’t sure this one qualified. I decided to keep the dwarf detail even if I still had to figure out how to pay them. Maybe I could get a break for the window crash.

The next emergency call came while my set designer was showing me how they’d sprinkle the trees with glowing transgenic rice because it was cheaper than stardust.

I swallowed the dread knotting up my throat. “Hey, Doc, what’s going?”

“You’re not gonna like this, Mr. Prince. Left my guy quite grumpy.”

I arrived at the White’s penthouse twenty minutes earlier than the speed limit allowed. The living room was decorated with so many mirrors I could’ve had a party by myself. The glass case in the center would’ve been the perfect coffee table if Snow wasn’t using it as a coffin.

Hybrid Fiction August 2020

Moussatche

“Snow’s Theorem”

20

I fell to my knees but refused to play bawl.

“She’s not dead,” Mrs. Queen-White said from the lounge.

I had to follow her voice; there were quite a few of her around me. “I thought you were sending Snow to an island retreat.”

“Six weeks in there, and she’ll feel better than if she’d been at a spa.”

“What is it?”

“Pomme’s latest prototype. I call it Neverland. Stops the aging clock while you sleep.” Snow’s stepmother ran a hand over her bare arm. “The milky skin is a bonus.”

“What if it poisons Snow’s brain?”

“You wouldn’t ask that if she had a crooked nose and freckles.”

Half the celebrities these days had freckles.

I brandished a frown. “Get her out.”

“Timer is set for six weeks, not a hundred years. You can kiss her when she wakes up.”

Punching my future mother-in-law in the face might hit the papers, and Tinker Bell Studios hated that kind of publicity. I pocketed my pride and left Snow to her ageless slumber. At least nobody could shoot at her where she was. And I’d save my not yet earned money; no need to pay the dwarves anymore.

All the work for the Wonderland Festival did little to get my mind off the wedding day jitters, or my doubts that the bride would wake in time. But an hour before the nuptial bells were set to chime, Mr. White wheeled Snow, case and all, into Fairy Chapel. She wasn’t in her dress yet, so I talked him into letting me be there when she came out of hibernation. Six weeks, man, is a long time.

Hybrid Fiction August 2020

Moussatche

“Snow’s Theorem”

Snow yawned and stretched, like a cat but lacking the boots.

I kneeled by her side. “You ready to trade I-dos?”

Instead of wrapping her arms around me, her gaze snapped to the stopped clock on the wall. “How long do I have before the wedding?”

“An hour.” I wriggled my eyebrows.

“Good. Call a press conference.”

I sat back on my heels. “Come again?”

“As many reporters as you can. Tell them I made a mistake in my calculations.”

“You’ve been working this whole time?”

Snow stepped out of the glass case, pecked me on the lips, and wrapped herself in the skyblue robe draped over the mirrored vanity. “Lenora is a genius, too bad she’s in industry. Every faculty on the planet should have one of these. Set the timer and you can think without interruptions. I’m adding one to the budget of my next Lamp Foundation grant.”

How could I say no to this woman? I called the media, and the dwarves for good measure.

Snow gave her speech with as many letters as two alphabets could handle. I had no idea what any of it meant. Didn’t matter; her voice was music to my ears.

After the man and wife bit, kiss included, we shuffled into the car under a shower of sparkling transgenic rice. Snow’s dress was so puffy we might as well have been travelling in a pumpkin.

“So, what was wrong with your theorem?” I asked her while we waved to the odd characters gathered in the street.

“Nothing.”

“Then what was that alphabet soup all about?”

“More variables give people hope. And hopeful people will leave us alone until our grandkids have kids.”

We just got married and she was already planning a family?

Snow’s smile glittered like stardust. “It will take a century before anyone figures out that all the extra variables I just gave them cancel themselves out in the end.”

Hybrid Fiction August 2020

21

RATTLESNAKE TEARS

By Alexei Collier

Three years ago, when I was thirteen, my mother first showed me how to change into a snake.

She didn’t show me how to turn back until a week later. This wasn’t my first or even my harshest lesson. Mother has never made a secret of what happened to my father. She killed him. It wasn’t premeditated; it just happened. Snakes are not social creatures.

The skin I use to change shape could have come from any ordinary snake, but Mother gave me my father’s skin. Not some cast-off papery leavings from a shedding, but a full skin: six feet from the shovel-shaped head down overlapping scales in cream, black, and umber, tiled in a diamond pattern tapering to the ivory tip of the tail. A thing of beauty. I gaze at it in my hands, admiring it, as I step out of the hut I share with Mother.

Mother is sitting on a deep red rock just outside, watching the sky and the desert horizon. Her dark hair is bound in a thick braid just like mine, trailing down her back.

She was the one who cut the skin from my father’s snake-body. No sense in letting a good skin go to waste. Sometimes I wonder why she killed him. Maybe it was because she was pregnant with me at the time, and her maternal snake-mind saw him as a threat. I’m not even sure Mother knows why she killed him, what set her off. She tells me she cried—afterwards. It was the last time she cried.

I wonder what I will lose, what I will kill or what will die in me, to become like her.

Mother turns her golden eyes to me. “For now you wear the skin, my daughter, but one day the skin will wear you,” she reminds me. “You will be subsumed in the snake. One day, you will lose all that is human in you to the snake.”

This is not a warning. Kin-shifters don’t strive to be human. We are born human already. My mother is only making a prediction as she often does. Tomorrow it will be sunny; one day you will lose your humanity.

Today, it is sunny. I wrap my father’s skin around my torso. I wind the tail down my arm and Hybrid Fiction August 2020

Collier

“Rattlesnake Tears”

23

fasten the rattle to the band at my wrist.

I watch Mother, poised silent and unmoving on the rock. Love for her pulses in my human-fornow heart. I think she loves me back in her way. I can see something in her eyes, beyond the protective instinct, some echo from the past, before I was born. Before she killed my father. It’s a frightening look, like gazing into the eyes of a dead thing only to find it watching you back. The ghost of her humanity. And yet I want it. More frightening, and shameful, that desire. A snake should not want to be loved.

“Don’t stray far,” Mother says. Her voice is flat, but this time her words are a warning: Stay away from outsiders. She must know where I’ve been going the past few days. Sometimes it seems like Mother knows everything.

“I won’t,” I reply. I twist my body and let myself flow into my father’s skin, sliding into my snake form. Then I am off into the desert, the scent of sagebrush on my flickering tongue as I taste the air.

The sand is warm, rough, and familiar against my scales. The colors of the landscape fade from my eyesight, replaced by new colors, the hue of heat shimmering where the sun touches sand. My world becomes the play of light and shadow, heat and cold, rock and brush, the distorted sounds filtering through my serpentine skull where my human mind retreats into a tiny knot of identity.

The campsite is empty when I arrive; the fire-pit cold and blackened. I change form and walk the perimeter, letting my human curiosity blossom. I trace the outline where the little cloth hut stood just the day before. It’s rare for people to visit our little patch of desert. They come one or two at a time and sleep on the ground in thick sacks or build little huts. They sit and talk or wander trails aimlessly, their feet shod in awkward, leather coverings. Sometimes they lie in the shade or the cool evening and do a mating dance under the sky, sliding across each other, into each other, like snakes entwining, like kin-shifters desperately trying to wear each other’s skins, to become each other.

Fascinating to watch, even through the senses of a snake, lying half buried in the sand.

I wonder where the people go when they leave. I always remain a snake when I see them, burying my curiosity, my desire to approach and ask them who they are, where they come from.

Mother would know if I ever did, just like she knew I’d been coming here to watch the outsiders. She must have followed me before. She has a way of masking her scent, so that I can’t detect or recognize her until she’s right next to me.

Time may scour away this human girl and leave only the snake, but Mother says outsiders will try to shatter the snake and leave only the girl. A fate far worse for any kin-shifter, she says. The camp is empty now, the people gone, so she won’t care if I come here. But there’s nothing left here for me either.

I coil softly down onto the sand. The shadows and shallows cut through the day’s heat, showing my path. I follow. Time slips away. I have to remind myself to check the position of the sun, the angle of the shadows, and not simply react to them without thought. But mostly, I just feel. I exist. I slide across the desert, into the desert. I become the desert.

The sun is high overhead when I catch an unfamiliar scent on the wind. Lingering human

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curiosity spurs me toward it through cool hollows and shaded underbrush.

In the gloom of a rocky overhang, a man hunkers down, waiting out the noon heat. Only he doesn’t smell like a man. Not quite. His back is to me, and the image of a bird looms black against his light vest, feathers fixed to fabric in a totemic shape of wings spread wide across his shoulder blades. It sends a thrill down my serpentine spine, some ancestral memory of predatory struggle. The man leans away as he reaches out to idly snap off pieces of dry brush blown into his refuge by some forgotten storm. The winged shape shifts with his body as if taking flight.

I draw nearer, puzzled by what I see, by the strange scent. The man spins, arm flashing out, weight descending on my neck as the forked stick in his hand pins my body to the ground. I twist and thrash but can’t break free. Panicked, unthinking, I return to human form, snapping the stick against my collar bone, and roll away onto my feet, out of reach.

The man watches me for a moment. Then he laughs, rising and stepping out from beneath the overhang. He wears a wide shade on his head, casting his features in shadow, but his face is young.

Close to my age, maybe a year or two older. His long hair is black, and his skin is the color of sand— lighter than mine, but darker than most of the humans I’ve seen.

“You shouldn’t sneak up on people,” he says.

I don’t know if I’ve ever heard the language before, but I understand it. The wisdom of the forked tongue, Mother calls it. Our people remember when all languages were one.

I shake my wrist at him, rattling. “Go away.”

The stranger folds his arms and cocks his head aside. “You’re viper-kin. I didn’t think there were any of you left. My grandfather said the children of Jörmungandr died out in Europe ages ago. My grandmother’s family always assumed the same thing had happened on this side of the ocean.”

“Viper-kin are strong,” I say. “Your kin are fools to think us gone.”

“Even kin-magic can only do so much against guns and smallpox.” His black eyes glitter in his shaded face. “My kin survived by being clever. Did yours survive by hiding out here in the desert? I’ve only ever seen coyote-kin around here, and few enough of them.”

I rattle at him again. “Coyote-kin are our enemies.”

“Ours too. Well... Sometimes allies, sometimes enemies. Call it a ‘friendly’ rivalry.” He pauses. “I’m Erik Muninnssen. Raven-kin.”

Half crouched, I watch him, ready if he makes any move.

“Aren’t you going to tell me your name?”

“No.” I know the power of names.

“Your clan, at least?”

“Diamondback.”

“Well, No-Name Diamondback. What are you doing out in the middle of nothing?”

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“This is our land. Leave, or I’ll kill you.”

He laughs. “Kill me? You’re shaking like a leaf.”

But I’m not shaking. I’m swaying, undulating my torso and neck to catch the eye and freeze the senses. Mother has taught me all the ancient magics of the viper-kin.

“That won’t work on me,” he says. “I’m a kin-shifter, like you.”

I stop swaying but stay ready to strike or flee. “You’re not like us. You smell human.” This is only half true.

He laughs again. “Must be my single-shaper girlfriend rubbing off on me. Don’t tell my family.

They don’t approve of fraternization. But I came out here to get away from her as much as them. She doesn’t know I’m a kin-shifter, of course, but I think she’s starting to get suspicious. I’m trying to decide how to break things off. Preferably without tipping my hand.”

I can’t follow most of this. His words are clear to me, but they’re words for things I don’t know.

“You live among… humans?” I say, a second tingle of fear-attraction running down my spine.

“Among single-shapers, yes. Sort of. We live on the outskirts of Phoenix. Most people think we’re just a Navajo enclave or a commune of harmless eccentrics. We keep to ourselves. Mostly.”

Phoenix. I’ve never heard this word before either, but it fills my mind with the image of a great bird rising from flames. I think of the burnt-black feathers spread across the stranger’s back, and I know his kin too must know the power of names, that they chose their home with purpose. Or perhaps it chose them.

“You’re not like us,” I repeat. “You are like the eagle-kin. Their matriarch sacrificed one of our own to consecrate her nest.”

“A city, actually, not a nest. Tenochtitlan. It’s called Mexico City now. But I’m not eagle-kin. And that was hundreds of years ago.”

“We have a long memory.”

“Yes,” he agrees, tilting his head in the other direction. “Long, but narrow. Very like a snake. You should come to Phoenix, hear some of my clan’s memories. How my grandmother’s kin watched the first humans emerge into this world. How my grandfather’s ancestors served the One-Eyed God. All the times we’ve tricked the coyote-kin. All the times they’ve tricked us. We’re not above laughing at ourselves. Whatever our faults, raven-kin always keep a good sense of humor.”

Another shiver runs through me. I’ve never seen how other kin-shifters live. It’s only ever been me and Mother. I’m frightened by how tempting his offer is. I envision the burning bird again, but this time a snake dances with it in the flames, and another new word enters my mind: Salamander.

Fire-serpent.

“That’s a lovely skin,” he says, nodding to my wrist, still upraised in warning. “Can I see it?” He opens one hand, asking to approach.

I rattle at him again. “You can see from there.”

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He barks another laugh. “All right.” He slips out of his vest, holding it toward me in one hand.

Leaving himself vulnerable, unable to change. A gesture of trust, of respect. “I’ll show you mine, you show me yours?”

My eyes fix on the black bird form again. The same tingle of fear and enticement dances through me, stronger now. I take a cautious step closer. He holds his arm out at full extension. I trace my fingers over the downy feathers, the glass beads where eyes once were, the smooth black beak.

“Soft,” I say, brushing my palm along the fringe of a wing, the word coming almost involuntary.

The corner of his mouth turns up. He swings his vest back around, scooping one arm in, then sliding in the other.

“My turn?” he asks. Not demanding, not pressuring.

I hesitate, then nod, holding my wrist out again. He steps closer—too close, but I won’t take my skin off and hold it out to him, so I tolerate it. His fingertips explore the rattle, then follow the tail down my arm. My insides and my skin—my human skin—are vibrating with warring instincts I can barely distinguish. He touches the snakeskin head, near my navel. “Beautiful,” he says.

He’s very close now. I should back away, run away, but I don’t. There’s something in his eyes, something like fire. Something human. It isn’t like the ghost in Mother’s gaze, but I fear it and want it the same, and more.

I don’t know if he offers escape from my fate, from the winding path of the snake—a fate I’ve never considered escaping until now. But there is something other in him. Better, or worse, I cannot tell, and it terrifies me. Is he ally or enemy that can never die, rising eternal from the ashes?

My mind is buzzing, my senses buried in a storm of strange emotions. I don’t see Mother until she’s just a few feet away, slipping nearly invisible between creosote-stalks and across sand dappled in leaf shadows. She is older than me, wiser in the ways of deception, and she fools the stranger’s senses where I failed. She launches herself from the brush, burying her fangs in his calf.

With a cry, he stumbles, scrambling in the gravel. The feathers on his back spread down his arms in spurts and fits, crawl down his spine and flare out at his hips. Through his agony he mutters warding words, strange and guttural, trying to stave off the venom. His body diminishes, until he hops on one clawed foot and takes to the air, vanishing into the distance with a throaty raven’s wail.

I turn on Mother. “What did you do that for?” I’m surprised at the anger in my voice, in my racing human heart.

She rises up and unfurls into human form. “Don’t worry. If the venom doesn’t kill him outright, he’ll die when he falls from the sky.”

I imagine a broken, black-feathered corpse rotting in the sun. Kin-shifters don’t change back to human form when we die.

“But why kill him?” I demand.

“He was an outsider. He would have taken your skin and burned it, forced you to be his wife. He Hybrid Fiction August 2020

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would have burned away all that is the snake in you.”

I recall the vision of the snake wrapped in flames, encircled by fiery wings—dancing, not burning, and yet….

“A kin-shifter would never do that!” I say, appalled. “He was like us!”

“He was not like us. You said so yourself. You saw it. Raven-kin are all thieves and liars, just like the coyote-kin. If we let him live, he would have led his kin here to destroy us, one way or another.”

I rattle at my mother, something I’ve never done before. “And when he doesn’t return to them, they’ll come looking for him—and for us.”

“They’ll find nothing. His bones will be stripped and scattered by scavengers as soon as night falls.”

“And what if he lives?” I say.

“He won’t. Remember what happened to your father. Even viper-kin can’t withstand viper-kin venom. A raven-kin never could.”

Some part of me wants him to be alive, even knowing the vengeance he will rain down on us.

“His people could save him.”

“He won’t make it that far,” Mother says.

But how far is the land of the burning bird, where the raven-kin roost? Does Mother even know?

“He told me his name,” I say, feeling this is important in some way beyond what I can express in words. I speak his name inside my mind: Erik Muninnssen. Knowing his name makes him more real, somehow. Maybe it will save him.

“Then he was a fool,” Mother says. “And he’ll be a dead fool soon.”

I am angry at Mother, but she is right: Erik Muninnssen was dangerous. But it was a danger I’d wanted to face. I’d wanted to dance in that fire, risk the flames, face that fear and wonder. Fire-snake.

Salamander. I shouldn’t want that, I know, and the shame only makes me angrier.

Mother says we should go separate ways and hide in the desert, because two snakes together would draw suspicion if the raven-kin do come looking for their lost brother. I agree, mostly because I’m angry. I don’t want to look at her in any shape.

I wind away into the desert, the scent of life dancing on my tongue—insects, lizards, a flowering cactus, the distant whiff of a hare. But no ravens yet. Nothing like the scent of Erik Muninnssen. I wander for days, or maybe weeks. I have trouble counting in my snake-mind, and the sun rises and sets, rises and sets, until I forget to count altogether. I wonder if I am becoming like mother.

I cling to the fire in my mind. I cling to words: Phoenix, Salamander.

I try to hold onto a name: Erik Muninnssen. It becomes a jumble of sounds I can’t recall.

Memories of words fade into meaningless murmurs, drowned out by the desert sounds humming in my bones.

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I forget what the sand feels like between my toes, and only know what it feels like against the scales of my belly.

I fight to hold onto images: a dark-winged shape; a man’s face in shadow; a woman’s long braid, the ghost of a smile in her eyes.

Thoughts shed from my mind, and the images slip away.

I forget.

I am a part of the ebb and flow of the desert.

The sun rises and sets, rises and sets.

Dark shapes flit in the bright sky.

Dark shapes, circling, searching.

I am afraid.

I flee into the desert.

I am tired, fleeing the shapes in the sky.

I crawl into a rocky crevice to hide, to escape.

Here it is safe, and cool, and the sky doesn’t yawn threatening overhead.

I flick my tongue out and smell something in my sanctuary.

Snake.

There is another snake here.

It rises up in the dark.

I strike.

I recognize Mother’s scent, masked with such art to hide from the sky-shadows—ravens, I remember ravens—Mother’s scent masked from me till now, too late, Mother—I remember Mother, I have a mother, I love her—too late, my head darting out, mouth gaping, scything through the dark— my fangs sink into her scaly body.

She strikes back, but I writhe aside, and her jaws close on air. I back away, give her room to turn human and speak some charm that will cleanse her blood, but she’s far back in the cramped crevice and there’s no space, no time to reach the open sunlight above. She thrashes in the dark, her long body seizing as the venom takes hold.

A moment later, she is limp. Dead.

I am a girl again. The walls of the crevice crush against my ribs. I pull myself out, scraped and bleeding, and stumble away into the desert, dragging my mother’s corpse by the tail. I think about leaving her, but I can’t bring myself to waste the skin. Mother always taught me never to waste.

I cry. Not because my mother is dead. Not because I killed her. I cry because I feel nothing—just Hybrid Fiction August 2020

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a hollow ache, a terrible void inside me, an emptiness worse than pain. The tears run down my face like a stranger’s tears. I realize this is the last time I will cry.

Mother told me one day I would lose myself to the snake. I just never realized it would hurt.

Shadows circle as I lurch across the sand like a sidewinder, still dragging Mother’s corpse—black shapes against the sun, spiraling high above. I watch as they turn and wing for the horizon, harsh voices ringing in the dry air. I wonder why they don’t descend and tear me apart. Maybe they are afraid. Or maybe Mother’s death was enough for them, their thirst for vengeance sated.

One raven remains, circling, its silhouette strangely familiar against the sky. One clawed foot hangs at an awkward angle as if injured. My gaze meets the raven’s shiny black eyes for an instant before it too turns and glides after its brethren. The raven recedes into a fleck of black and disappears into the pale sky, but the eyes echo in my mind. The ghost of a memory haunts me within those eyes, like embers from a forgotten fire. A name, a face, just beyond the edge of recall. I try to remember, and a tingle runs down my spine—but it’s dim, and dull, and far away.

Hybrid Fiction August 2020

SILVER SCISSORS, GOLDEN RING

By Langley Hyde

“You’re finished, pal,” said Michael Voitcher, Frantz’s most recent handler from Heroic Representation, Inc. “Merch sales are down. Your image among the youth has tanked. When was the last time you got a callback after auditioning for a quest?”

“Three years ago,” Frantz mumbled.

“That’s right,” Michael said. “Three.”

Frantz, known to the world as the hero William B. Drake, sprawled on a wing-back chair designed for his Teutonic frame. Plants rioted around him in the library of his Westchester mansion. Frantz had taken up botany and in spite of various management efforts, had refused to put it down again.

“Your greatest hit was in ’45,” Michael said, “when you closed that interdimensional rift. Five

years ago. You even remember Auschwitz?”

Frantz preferred not to remember Auschwitz. He preferred to consider begonias.

“After I saved the world,” Frantz said, “I wanted to retire.”

“What a joker!” Michael laughed. “You know how much you owe us? Outfitting a hero isn’t cheap! French armor. Japanese swords. English suits. All designed to be ensouled with your strength.

Hardly anybody can splinter off the primary aspect of their soul, and what do you do? Keep it in your hair!”

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” Frantz said.

“We don’t care about what you do and don’t want,” Michael said. “It’s not about you. We made

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you. We lifted you out of rural Nowheresville, and this is how you repay us?”

“I’m done,” Frantz said. “This time I mean it.”

“Is the fat lady singing?” Michael cupped an ear and pretended to listen. Greenery rustled. An electric fan whirred. “Every time you’ve fallen off the wagon, we’ve kissed your boo-boos better. You can fall off again. At any time.”

A threat. Perhaps Frantz ought to fire his cook? How did Michael plan to slip it to him? In his morning cocoa? Would he wake up on a plane with that wondrous lassitude dragging at his limbs?

On his last audition, he’d flopped because he’d been too muddled to swing a sword. Never again.

“Then there’s your contract,” Michael said.

“Fine.” Frantz waved a hand, tired of his own cowardice. “What’s the quest this time? Slay sea wyrm harassing fishermen in American Samoa? Fight a demon holding Texas schoolchildren hostage?”

“An open call,” Michael said.

“Oh great.”

“Princess Margaret of England imbued a ring with her love,” Michael said. “It was stolen. Anyone who recovers the ring wins the princess’s hand in marriage.”

“You want me to get married?”

“She’s twenty. Gorgeous to boot,” Michael said. “Americans love a royal wedding.”

“Who stole the ring?”

“Rasputin.”

“Rasputin, the devourer of souls?” Now Frantz understood Heroic Representation’s scheme. A royal wedding or death. Either way, he wouldn’t be their problem any longer. How was he supposed to kill a reputedly immortal sorcerer? The Russian aristocracy had tried. Repeatedly. So had the Bolsheviks. And look where that had gotten them.

Sadly, Frantz gazed at his plants. Would he ever get the chance to install the drip irrigation system he’d planned? He doubted it.

“How soon do I leave?” Frantz asked.

Michael smiled. “Jet’s on the tarmac.”  January 27, 1945. Photographers shot Frantz in Auschwitz. White snow hid the ground’s ugliness, shrouded the bodies of the dead. Liberated survivors filed past, background to his foreground, in the numbing cold.

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Frantz posed with his chin up, gazing into the gray distance. He’d get credit that others deserved.

A pretty face, his managers called him, pushed out to the front by a massive war effort. He’d only gained access to the camp because Russian soldiers had secured it. By Allied agreement, Rasputin himself had shown Frantz in, giving Frantz first crack at shutting down the Nazi ritual.

Reporters asked Frantz to pose with Hitler’s head. Frantz refused, even though he’d torn it off an hour ago. Himmler and Höss lay dismembered at his feet. Blood spattered him, had melted the snow around him, and frozen. Overhead the interdimensional rift sealed itself, the riven edges of reality crackling with blue lightning.

“How do you feel about killing Hitler?” a reporter asked. “About saving the world?”

“I—I don’t know,” Frantz said. He’d turned seventeen two weeks ago. He wanted to go home.  Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, awaited Frantz in the White Drawing Room of Buckingham Palace. A striking woman with deep blue eyes and sable hair, she sat on a canary yellow sofa, her hourglass figure set off by a navy dress. Frantz bowed to her, ignoring the reporters and photographers kept back by a red velvet rope. Michael ushered the media out.

Alone with the princess, Frantz seated himself across from her.

“You’re William B. Drake, the hero who ended World War II,” Princess Margaret said. “You have Britain’s gratitude for your heroism. You received a knighthood, correct?”

“Unfortunately, as an American hero, I couldn’t accept it,” Frantz said.

“You aren’t the first my father chose to find the ring,” Margaret said.

“I know.” Frantz admired the massive bouquet of yellow roses near the window. “Could you tell me about the night Rasputin stole the ring?”

“I was singing in a night club with my friends near a piano,” Margaret said. “The ring hung on a chain around my neck. Rasputin strode up. He wavered. Like a mirage in the heat. He seemed more real the closer he came. I fell silent. He reached out, snapped the chain from my neck, and disappeared. It took seconds.”

Margaret related this, toneless. Had her zest for life had been stolen along with the ring?

Frantz surprised himself by not envying her profound indifference. He had sought it for so long.

But only upon seeing it, did he realize he hadn’t ever wanted it.

“The letter came the next day,” Margaret continued. “It materialized on my father’s breakfast table. A demand. That I go to Rasputin. Or he will destroy the ring.”

Frantz’s skin prickled with sympathetic distress despite Margaret’s apathy. As someone who could splinter his soul, he understood the gravity of Rasputin’s threat. If Margaret’s ring, with all of her capacity to love in it, was annihilated at such a distance from her body, her splintered love would never be able to rejoin her soul. It would dissipate, lost forever. Shattered, her soul would seep from her body. She would die.

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Frantz kept his strength in his hair for this very reason. His hair, unlike swords and armor, couldn’t be stolen or damaged without him noticing.

To splinter her soul, Margaret must’ve been desperate to control her love. Frantz had splintered his own soul under extenuating circumstances. A child, he hadn’t understood the consequences. Only the benefits had mattered. He’d been able to draw upon his strength at will, no longer limited by his flesh.

“Why did you put your love into a ring?” Frantz asked.

“I am having an affair with Peter Townsend, my father’s equerry,” Margaret stated. “My father demanded it to stop. Captain Townsend is married.”

“Ah.” Frantz paused. “You’ll marry whoever recovers the ring?”

“Yes.” “I understand, Your Royal Highness.” Because he was a hero, Frantz promised, “I’ll do my utmost to recover your ring, even if it should cost me my life.”  On May 20, 1940, Frantz ran away for the first—and only—time. He was twelve.

His manager left him unsupervised on the balcony of the luxury Manhattan penthouse they shared. Frantz considered suicide. The drop would do it.

Instead he climbed down sixteen stories, rode the subway to Penn Station, and bought a ticket to Montreal. He exited the train in Upstate New York where he hiked into the wilderness. Three weeks later, he was caught trespassing in a barn. Police drove him back to New York.

“Why did you do it, kid?” his then-handler Porky Smith said. “What’s more, why did you come back? You wouldn’t have ever got caught if you didn’t want to be.”

Frantz had shrugged in response. Why confide in Porky?

Concerned by Frantz’s possible mental instability, Porky brought him to a psychiatrist who recommended barbiturates at night, amphetamines in the morning. Frantz took to these new chemical remedies. Even better, Porky learned Frantz couldn’t stand them being withheld. With a new hold over him, his managers signed him up to audition for quests around the country.

In the first year, Frantz scored seventeen quests. B-list gigs filed by private citizens or small businesses. He caught bank robbers in their getaway car and carried the Bentley to the police station.

But defeating a small dragon terrorizing Portsmouth, Maine with his strength-ensouled sword put him on the map. He worked his way up to the A-list, taking on quests filed by police departments, cities, and then states. Soon the Department of Defense put in requests with his management.

Between quests and photo shoots, signings and tours, Frantz could barely stay on his feet. Pills, Porky reminded him, help with nervousness. Frantz tossed a handful back before his interview with the Times. When the reporter asked what fifteen-year-old Frantz did with his friends when he wasn’t out saving people, Frantz slumped back into his chair and laughed.

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“You all right, kid?” Porky asked from the sidelines.

“Sure,” Frantz slurred.

“Are you drunk?” the reporter asked, nonplussed.

Porky brought him to the hospital where a dose of bemegride and a nice stay set him straight again. Just in time, too. Frantz had a quest in Vermont lined up, and that magician stealing little girls’ souls wouldn’t defeat himself.  On the way to the drop point in Finland, Michael reviewed the quest specs with Frantz in the helicopter. Heroic Representation had tapped contacts among Swift & Co., who managed professional athletes. Frantz received a pair of Dassler’s running shoes—corporate sponsorship didn’t hurt his finances—ensouled with the speed and endurance of sixteen athletes, including two Olympic medalists.

“Five marathon runners, eight sprinters, two hurdlers, and one long jumper,” Michael shouted over the roar of the engines. “Use these wristbands, too. Each has the dexterity and coordination of a gymnast. The leather jacket has the discipline and toughness of seven hermits. Anklets, a dancer’s grace. This ear stud enhances your hearing. The other, your vision. Belt’s got a man’s health.”

Frantz examined his kit.

“What did heroes do before they had managers?” Michael lamented. “Remember, you bring these men’s split souls back, pal, or they’ll lose their lives.”

“Do they know I’m fighting Rasputin?” Frantz asked.

“They know they’re getting a pretty penny.” Michael winked. “You memorized the map?”

Frantz nodded.

“Good,” Michael said. “You’ll approach under the cover of Finland’s forests on foot. The marathon runners’ souls will carry you. We have freelancers positioned along your route with cameras. We couldn’t get anyone inside the Winter Palace. So for Chrissakes, stick to your route and fight outside where we can milk it for action shots.”

“Any intel on Rasputin’s defenses?” Frantz asked.

“At the Winter Palace? No.” Frantz had expected as much.

“The double’s flying into West Berlin,” Michael continued. “He’ll serve as a decoy to distract the press—and Rasputin’s agents—as long as possible.”

“Heroic Representation wants me to succeed, does it?” Frantz, because of his five-point harness, slid on the leather anklets with some difficulty.

“Hitler was a downer. But a pretty princess? You fail, you’re a martyr. You succeed?” Michael grinned, no doubt imagining his cut. “That’s marketing gold.”

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 In August 1937, Heroic Representation changed Frantz’s name. After the Great War and the rise of Nazi Germany, “Frantz Glick” sounded too unpatriotic for an American hero.

Frantz plunged into a hero’s training course. His scientific diet and strict regimen of bodybuilding, experts assured, would create a heroic physique. He learned numerous weapons, wilderness survival, and hand-to-hand combat. He was taught acting, diction, languages, dancing, and manners. He played football and baseball to gloss up his American image. His magic tutors taught him how to manipulate his soul.

Frantz asked to write his mother letters. Somehow his tutors never got around to buying him postage stamps. Although Frantz begged to see his mother, Gretta, on Christmas, his handler said sorry, no. She’d coddle him, undo all everyone’s hard work.

Each night, Frantz sagged into bed. He dropped this word into himself: Tomorrow.

A year later, his handler told him Gretta had died; a cousin had adopted his siblings. So he’d better stop sniveling, focus on his swordsmanship, and make his dead mother proud. His handler waved contract pages in Frantz’s face and reminded Frantz that he had to repay Heroic Representation for his education. He owed them thousands.

Over a thousand miles away, Gretta checked her mailbox, every day hoping for a letter from her son. Gretta had already asked her minister to read them aloud to her.

In court, Heroic Representation claimed Frantz’s mother had abandoned him. They won legal guardianship. Frantz’s official bio reflected a new truth: All heroes are orphans.  Frantz dropped into a hero’s rhythm as if he were seventeen again, running ahead of the Allied forces. A child, he hadn’t known his victory would create the Cold War, hadn’t considered what it would mean for his career. Now, an adult, he set aside the thoughts of ramifications, ignored the cameras, and focused on his task.

He ran until his feet bruised and his toenails blackened, until the friction of his clothes against his chest caused his nipples to bleed. Whenever his lungs constricted and his muscles burned, he reached out with that special sense that he, and only a few others, had. He tapped into the speed and endurance of other men.

He covered over a hundred and fifty miles that day.

On the outskirts of St. Petersburg, he waited for darkness and struck heroic poses for the distant photographers. At twilight, he dove into the Finnish gulf and swam through freezing saltwater. He remained submerged under the Neva River, which cut through St. Petersburg. He didn’t need to breathe. His body pumped with superhuman efficiency. He reached the Winter Palace Embankment.

With a gymnast’s ease, Frantz flipped himself out of the water. He soared through the air.

Cast bronze lions leapt on him, tackling him to the ground.

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Drawing upon the strength ensouled in his hair, Frantz threw the massive bronze lions aside. The living statues clanged into the embankment’s pavement and then charged. Frantz rent their metal bodies apart with his bare hands, revealing emptiness inside. The lions sighed and ceased moving.

Finished, Frantz turned.

A young woman watched him. Illuminated by the candlelight that glowed from the palace windows, her reddish-brown hair rippled across one shoulder over a white Edwardian dress.

Frantz tossed a field ration to her leashed Pomeranian. It gobbled the jerky.

The lady started, brought the Pomeranian to heel. The twitch of her chin asked Frantz to follow her. Then she stepped from the light, into the darkness.

Frantz concealed himself behind a broad oak’s trunk.

The lady glided over to him.

“You’re here to defeat Rasputin,” she said in German.

“Yes.” Frantz saw no reason to lie.

“So many heroes have come before you. One hundred and thirty-six.” The lady watched her dog sniff Frantz’s ankles. “The last eight have attempted to recover Princess Margaret’s ring. Have you, too, come for the ring?”

The lady turned her face toward Frantz and light struck its planes. A shiver eked up his spine.

Anastasia, the last tsarina. She could not be called the last living tsarina.

“I seek the ring,” Frantz admitted, uneasy.

“You will find the ring inside the heart of a dove. The dove is inside a rabbit. The rabbit, inside a boar, and that, inside a deer. The deer roams the courtyard garden. The minute you kill the dove, you will summon Rasputin, and he will kill you.”

Frantz’s best course of action would be to capture the dove alive. He could then bring it back to London. There he could kill the dove for the ring and summon Rasputin into a trap.

Frantz frowned. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Rasputin splinters other people’s souls,” Anastasia said. “He keeps their listless, living bodies in the palace, and he places the soul splinters wherever he wishes—in statues or even in people.”

Frantz remembered the sound the lion statues had made when he’d torn them apart. He’d murdered Rasputin’s guards without knowing it.

“He saved my brother that way, by pouring others’ lives to heal Alexis. It worked,” Anastasia said.

“For a time. And he’s saved me that way. If you can call it that. Should you win, should you slay Rasputin, I’ll be freed to take my family’s throne. If not… He will feed your life force to me. I’ll remain his prisoner, legitimizing his rule. But at least I will live on.”

“How will I know if he’s trying to split my soul?” Frantz asked.

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Anastasia’s smile chilled Frantz. “You’ll know.”

Frantz patted the dog in farewell. Then, drawing upon his ensouled powers, he leaped straight upward with the might of an Olympic athlete. He alit on a bough. He sprang from tree to tree until he neared the palace. He jumped onto the palace’s slanted verdigris roof.

Statues of Roman gods burst into unnatural life, ensouled with life forces Rasputin had splintered. Frantz fell into battle’s cadence. His body had forgotten nothing.

Murder was like riding a bicycle. Exhilarating. Yet oddly banal.

Frantz used the stupendous strength of his splintered soul to tear statues apart. He punched through bronze. He ripped off Nike’s limbs before she could bash her urn over his skull. He flung Jupiter into the Neva River where he sank into the waters. His fingers pierced Neptune’s eye sockets, and Frantz pulled apart the god’s head. Souls wisped upward to the stars.

When no more came, Frantz ran off the edge of the roof. He plummeted into the central courtyard. He landed with bent knees.

The deer’s hide shone like gold. A stag, frozen. Frantz lunged. It bound away. With his soulendowed power, Frantz leapt upon its back, seized the animal’s head, and pulled. Skin broke open, sinews popped, muscle fibers stretched apart, and blood so dark it seemed black gushed across the cobblestones. The deer’s dead eyes seemed to mourn his incipient death.

A black boar burst out of the deer’s chest cavity, massive considering where it had been concealed. It charged Frantz, swinging its tusks. Frantz dodged with a dancer’s grace. The boar charged again. Frantz flipped over it like a gymnast, kicking the animal in the back of its head. He broke its spine with that blow.

A white rabbit butted out of the boar’s mouth. It hopped free, zigzagging. Frantz snatched it up and broke it open. An unsullied dove flew out. Frantz yanked the dove right out of the air.

He had it. Alive. All he had to do was bring the dove back to London with him.

The dove cocked its head, viewing him with golden eyes. It clicked its beak.

“Frantz!” the dove cried out in his mother’s desperate voice. “Frantz, why did you abandon me?

Because you left, I died.”

Repulsed, Frantz released it.

With a triumphant laugh, the dove flew into the palace windows, dashed its own brains out. Red smeared the lit glass. It fell onto the cobblestones, dead.

Summoned by the dove’s end, Rasputin appeared. He hadn’t aged at all. His greasy hair parted along the middle and his full beard descended to his chest.

Anastasia leaned against Rasputin. Her dog ran forward to lap the stag’s blood.

“William B. Drake,” Rasputin said. A stink like a thousand corpses gust out of his mouth with each word. “You never did thank me for what I did for you at Auschwitz.”

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“No,” Frantz said, “I never did.”

“I warned you.” Anastasia, apparently not caring if Rasputin heard her, spoke as if she savored every word. “You’re doomed now, and Rasputin will feed your soul to mine.”

Rasputin reached out, his hands rigid as claws. He made a twisting motion in the air. Frantz’s splintered strength popped free of his hair. Frantz reached out with his special sense, tugging his strength back into him. Rasputin grimaced as he pulled Frantz’s strength toward him.

Frantz clenched his jaw. He grasped his soul splinter with all his will. His strength became visible due to the strain. Semi-transparent, the size of a nine-year-old boy, it quivered.

It slapped into him. His splintered soul became whole for the first time since his father had died.

Frantz gasped in shock. The gaping loneliness that had defined Frantz’s life ceased to be. Frantz hadn’t even known such relief was possible. He reeled.

Laughing, Rasputin sucked out Frantz’s entire soul.

Frantz dived after it. He splashed through its immaterial shape and slammed into Rasputin. Habit guided his hands to Rasputin’s neck. Frantz choked him, beating his head against the cobblestones.

He continued, grimly—until he proved Rasputin’s reputation as an immortal a falsehood.

Wiping his hands off on his pants, Frantz rose. His re-splintered soul settled back into his body, his strength into his hair. Somewhere, not far away, cameras bore witness.

“Thank you,” Anastasia said. “You have freed me. A Romanov will rule the Russian Empire once again.”

Frantz didn’t bother to reply to the tsarina. He scooped up the dove’s soft body and left.  “Every boy wants to be a hero,” said Mr. Mink, a talent scout for Heroic Representation.

July 1937. Frantz held his mother Gretta’s hand where Mr. Mink couldn’t see.

Mr. Mink placed a briefcase on his desk. “Five thousand dollars.”

Gretta gripped Frantz’s hand so hard that his knuckles ground together. Five thousand dollars.

Frantz had competed against grown men who’d lost their jobs to the Depression, his strength his only asset. Newspaper delivery, ten dollars per week, had supported his mother and six siblings. He knew money’s value.

“Frantz,” his mother said, “it’s up to you.”

A week before, Frantz’s neighbor, Mrs. Morgan, had been arrested. She’d only had two tablespoons of cocoa and a box of rat poison in her cupboards. She’d fed that mixture to her children rather than watch them starve.

Frantz let go of his mother’s hand and said, “I want to.” 

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“You did it, pal! I can’t believe it. Rasputin.” Michael slapped Frantz on the back. “Even better, we filmed it. Great footage.”

Frantz, bruised, crusted with Rasputin’s blood and filth, winced under Michael’s blow. Michael had refused to let him clean up, saying that the marketers wanted a “gritty, genuine photo” of the returning hero. It embarrassed Frantz to stink like this in Buckingham Palace.

“How do you feel?” Michael grinned. “Going to be a married man! There’s the lucky lady. A princess. Just look at her! Jesus. You’ve made me rich, pal.”

Princess Margaret, Frantz was distressed to see, had already been dressed in bridal white.

Reporters, pinned behind those red velvet ropes, shouted questions. Cameras flashed.

Margaret set aside her embroidery and rose to greet him. Frantz bowed over the princess’ outstretched hand. Shutters clicked. Several men in livery herded the reporters away to give the soon-to-be-married couple their privacy. Both seated themselves on opposite sofas.

Frantz held the ring out to Margaret.

“My father says you should keep it,” Margaret said, “as we’re to be married.”

Frantz cradled the ring in his palm.

“Put it on,” Margaret said. “I can’t help but love the man who wears it.”

On one side, yellow roses basked in sunshine. Someone had lavished love into those blooms, guarding them from blight, aphids, and thrips, from rose midges, scale, and spider mites. Frantz wished he had dirt under his fingernails instead of dried blood.

His fingers closed over the ring. Frantz drew on the strength ensouled in his hair to crush the malleable gold into a lump. The metal buzzed in his hand as the destruction of its shape released the princess’s soul splinter. Her love flitted back into her body.

As Margaret breathed in, her smile grew pained. Her pallid cheeks regained their color. She didn’t look happy. But she did, for the first time since he’d met her, look alive.

“Oh,” Margaret said. “Oh no.”

“It’s your love,” Frantz explained. “Not mine.”

Margaret blinked away tears. But when she spoke, her words surprised him. “You keep your soul’s strength in your long hair, don’t you? At least that’s what the papers say.”

Frantz, conscious of his dirty hair, nodded.

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“You’ve saved the world. Twice. You’ve saved me.” Margaret removed small silver scissors from her sewing box and offered them to Frantz. “Can’t you save yourself?”

Hybrid Fiction August 2020

AFTER THE WARDING Part IV: Solstice, 1 year after the century-warding

By R. Z. Held

Near dawn, Aurea strode off into the brush and fended off the sleepy captor who challenged her by countering with a demand for privacy to piss before the rising sun made a blindfold necessary for the task. True privacy was not forthcoming, of course, but in early morning, after a long day of travel, the guard folded back down to her seat on the wagon’s back step and allowed Aurea to pick a bush at a distance as long as her silhouette was still visible in the light thrown by the guard’s leylamp.

“Damn small trickles,” her brother’s voice murmured from a point beside her right ear. “Did you have a plan, or were you just establishing contact? I’m staring out at the darkness past the wardline properly cowed by our situation, but I assume they’ll object if you take too long to piss.”

Aurea stared out at the desert, fully illuminated by magic only she and the other Sixteen could see, and tried to laugh, but couldn’t. The shape of the plan in her mind had edges that sliced any humor to pieces. “When a wild magic current gets close, I’ll go outside the warding, reach back across, and you can use me to channel the wild magic into a new ley, right here. Through the camp.”

Her brother hissed an indecipherable curse. “That would kill anyone else in camp who’s not one of the Sixteen.”

Aurea was well aware of that. “They killed Caretakers to get us, and what are they going to do when we’ve made their little enclave? Set us free to run home and report their location?” Even saying it, even knowing it was true, it didn’t make contemplating their captors’ deaths not sit like acid in her chest.

“Who could even think of killing the Sixteen…” The volume of Dominic’s voice stripped much of the nuance from it, but Aurea could fill in his helpless anger anyway. Dominic granted the Sixteen all their due reverence and more, even with his intimate knowledge of the one who was his annoying Hybrid Fiction August 2020

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older sister.

She granted him silence for a space as he grappled with the idea, using the pause to pointedly straighten and adjust her pants for the guard. “I imagine we’ll get the current we need some time tomorrow night.”

“Can you warn all the others what to do over the course of the day? They’ll be watching me more closely than any of you.” Dominic’s whisper was businesslike now. “The more of you we can chain together, the safer it will be for you personally, at the interface with the wild magic. If we can get an even number on either side of you…”

“I’ll do what I can,” Aurea lied without hesitation. She couldn’t protect Dominic, but damned if she’d allow anyone else to get blood on their hands.

She would be just fine handling the wild magic alone.  A day spent blindfolded, huddled in the sharper shadows beneath the wagons, did not result in much sleep, which left Aurea sluggish when darkness released them once more. Juan pulled her aside soon after she’d finished her portion of the food and water grudgingly doled out to them.

“Before you start spinning me some tale about the precise circumstances of wild magic you need, know that we’re not going to wait forever. I doubt we need all seven of you to make a warding of the size we need,” he growled at her in the dusty-scented space of night among the scrub, well clear of the wagons.

“You only need me. And my brother, of course. I imagine the wild magic will run strong enough tonight.” Aurea had the satisfaction of seeing her bland agreement leave Juan flat-footed for a full breath. “And then you’ll let us all go, right?”

“Of course.” Juan’s smile was oily.

“Leave me alone, then. I want to apologize to the Ancestors.” Aurea tilted her chin up, up so she saw only the river-wash of stars across the sky, and listened to his steps recede. After a dozen breaths tasting the desert’s quiet, she closed her eyes. “I don’t see another choice,” she told the Ancestors should be they be listening to her. Would her voice carry to them more clearly now she’d been an instrument in their hands? Even if they listened, there was little reason for them to have anything to say. 

Wild magic in her, wild magic through her, nothing but the flood through the irrigation canal.

Did the canal fear the water, fear the one who set it to be filled? Did North Star fear the magic? She should not fear, should she? The Ancestors held her in their hands. She need do nothing but be.

Why was that terrifying?  “Do you still dream about the century-warding?” Sebastian’s voice cracked apart Aurea’s thoughts, letting the remembered sensations drain into the dusty soil. “I do.”

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“Less often now. It’s the times when I’m awake that really…” She curled her hand into a fist at the base of her throat, thinking of the memories seizing there and cutting off her breath. She turned to face him properly and was surprised to find no guard on his heels. “Are we allowed to plot amongst ourselves now?”

“Our friend Juan seems to be under the impression that you’re quite cowed, sobbing to the Ancestors. I think you’re meant to be begging me to fall in line.” He aligned his body beside her, taking in the same view, but not touching. Never touching for long.

Aurea considered the gold-green of the pine, the gold of the grass, and the black of the sky between the stars. Besides the blue sky, she idly wondered what colors she’d eventually begin to forget, different than those of the illuminated night and magic. “If anything, I feel like the Ancestors must be showing me that I don’t actually want what I was wishing for. I did want something to— happen, I guess. I’m not cut out for blessing shrines every night for the rest of my life.”

Sebastian huffed in reluctant humor. “Who among us is besides Beatrice?” Silence for a beat, then—“If I’d had children with Vicenta earlier, before… We’d be busy raising them now.”

Would they, though? “Raising them at the temple. I thought Vicenta didn’t like living there.”

“Vicenta… feels things very deeply,” Sebastian said, apparently without a trace of irony, which honestly made Aurea want to scream. She made some neutral noise of acknowledgment instead, and their conversation faded away.

When Sebastian took his leave, Aurea looked up the stars one last time. Fixed overhead… or floating, gently wind-borne seeds of light?

“Shit,” Aurea said despite all the reverence she tried to maintain, and then the Ancestors’ speech was all around her in a whirl like the lights. Whispers, thousands of whispers on the air of the night; words in languages she couldn’t understand, words in languages at the edge of her comprehension.

“Is my choice wrong, then? What would you have me do?” She shouted, but the words were ripped away, unheard, by the sheer pressure of the Ancestors’ speech buffeting her skin.

Tell them—Tell her— Tell him—Tell him— Tell them— “Tell them what?” Aurea whirled with the star-points of light, trying to find a point of focus, useless as she knew that was. If the Ancestors were determined to meddle in her life past the point of the warding, at least they could have the kindness to meddle clearly.

Clear enough she had no excuse to push aside what, in her heart, she knew. “We don’t need any of the others for the spell, just me. I’m willing to bear the responsibility, isn’t that what you originally wanted from me?”

And she was alone, stars above, dust at her feet.

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hitting it, somewhere close and getting closer. Whatever she did, now was her moment.

“Dominic!” she shouted, feet pounding the dust back along the path she’d broken from the wagons. How could she pull others into the spell now with no privacy to explain what they were agreeing to? No, it still had to be her alone.

Her brother’s path converged with hers, and she hated to see the shadows star- and moonlight cast under his eyes and along his cheeks. If she could have, she would have done this entirely alone and let him use the trickles of magic for healing, not speaking to her. She caught his wrist and towed him over as she watched the wild magic grow nearer through the warding; sharp twigs from bushes she was ignoring scraped along her legs even through the fabric of her pants.

“The others—” he panted, but she found her spot and stepped over the wardline. On the other side, the very air crackled with what was coming, and with her next breath that crackled inside of her

lungs.

She still had to speak with that air. “Stand to the side.” She laced her fingers together, arms outstretched, and slipped them back through the warding up to her elbows. Dominic needed space to touch her, but she didn’t want the ley to go through him. Whatever his reservations, which she couldn’t see through the coruscation of the existing spell, she felt his touch settle firmly, two hands on her right arm.

Then the wild magic was there, and she was a channel. Hollow, filling up, up, but not draining.

“Dominic—” She may have screamed, may have only thought of screaming.

Could he not take it fast enough? A breath, maybe more, and it would fill up the space around her heart, around her lungs, and there would be no life beyond the wild magic in her, and no life after it left.

One breath to realize she couldn’t do this alone.

Tell them. Give them their own choice.

In, in, in. Aurea threw herself through the ward, as if her entire body had been pressed through cloth, leaving not only the wild magic but something of breath and heartbeat behind as well. If Dominic hadn’t caught her, she would have fallen full on her face, choking.

Overlapping voices again, but in words she knew this time, the full consternation of the other captives who’d gathered around them. Privacy, they needed privacy. “Tell Juan they have to stay back. I might have brought some wild magic in with me.”

Aurea tried to listen for Juan’s reaction as Casilda did so, as her eyes weren’t focusing very well at the moment, but then Sebastian was there, taking her from Dominic’s hold, hands tightening around her elbows. “What was that, Aurea?”

“Hurry up and finish the damn spell then!” Juan’s voice came from a sufficient distance that Aurea took the risk to answer.

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“Dominic and I were trying to get the wild magic to make a new ley through camp,” She closed her eyes and leaned her forehead into Sebastian’s shoulder—as the nearest stable surface—to try to gather herself.

“It was too much!” Dominic’s voice was stretched thin. “Far too much for me.”

“Of course it was. Without any intercardinals or secondary intercardinals to step it down,” Sebastian snapped. “Do you have a death wish, Aurea?”

No, she was attempting to do the right thing, and she wanted a little credit for it. She pushed back, managed to stand straight, though she couldn’t break his hold on her elbows. “Sebastian, it will kill all of them.” She twitched her chin toward Juan and their other captors. “If I can protect anyone else from having to have that on their conscience—” “The North Star is not the leader of the Sixteen.” Sebastian had to pause and grit his teeth so his volume didn’t rise and reach their captors. “She’s the one who draws in the wild magic slightly before the other three cardinals, and she’s shit at actually making it usable because that’s not her function.

Just about as shit as she is at respecting others. You don’t get to make the decision about whether we are ‘protected’ from anything. We do. For ourselves.”

“I’m in,” Casilda said, pushing up to both of them. “We should hurry before we lose this current.”

By the same token, Martin edged back. “I’m not sure I—I think it might be better if I don’t—” “Which is fair. But she still should have asked,” Sebastian growled. And then he was organizing them all, leading the way he’d said Aurea wasn’t allowed to, but someone did have to, and her head was swimming. Hollow things like her, with that hole scraped clean of wild magic, were not good for much beyond standing upright on their own.

But for this channeling, standing was enough. North Star at the point, two of the Sixteen on either side of her, Martin and another abstaining. They joined hands and braced, and Dominic stood once more to the side and placed his grip on two arms, across the pair of joined hands.

Aurea stepped out of the warding to her elbows once more.

It hurt less this time, to open herself fully and allow the wild magic free, trusting the others to shield her brother. She hadn’t realized it hurt before—it was a kind of pain she had no words for, as she had no words for the colors of magic, but she certainly recognized its absence.

It wasn’t a surrender, she realized with what was left of her around the wild magic flowing through her. It was reliance. Rely on her friends. Different than being in the Ancestors’ hands. Harder and also easier. Her choice.

She could imagine Sebastian’s exasperated response: having a choice was nice, wasn’t it?

There was screaming in a distance, she recognized vaguely. And then there wasn’t.

Tugs on her wrists brought her stumbling back inside, and Sebastian caught her when she would have collapsed, touch very much retaining the flavor of his earlier exasperation.

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of the new ley, skin shimmering with magical threads across its surface as he finally healed himself properly.

“Here, sit.” Sebastian escorted her to one of the wagons, settled her on the back of the bed where all that filled her vision, straight ahead, was the desert. She twisted to watch him consult with her brother, only her gaze got snagged on a cluster of humped silhouettes, quite still, knocked to either side of the blaze of the new ley. Like some child’s abandoned dolls collapsed on their sides when robbed of their animating force.

She forced herself to look, really look, count those still lumps until the shaking that had begun in her hands made its way upward into her chest and she couldn’t breathe properly. Then a deep, deep breath, holding her lungs open until the shaking subsided, and she straightened back to the desert.

She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the weathered wood of the side of the bed.

Footsteps crunched behind her, and Sebastian came to lean his hip against the wagon bed beside her knees. “Are you all right? Without any of the other cardinals—” “I’m fine. All of them are—?” Who was she fooling, avoiding saying the actual word?

“Yes.” He didn’t say it either. “We’re going to move the wagons as far as we can before sunrise.

See if Dominic can get close enough to speak to anyone at a distance. Otherwise we can keep driving tomorrow night.” A pause, then—“Why didn’t you tell us? Why didn’t you tell me?”

Like the Ancestors’ words—only question instead of command. She supposed Dominic had spilled the beans to add that particular “me” to all the rest. “You’re not over her, Sebastian, even if you won’t admit it to yourself.”

Sebastian froze, lips slightly parted. “…What?”

Then it was a race, pitted against each other to map the implications. If only Aurea hadn’t been so exhausted and hollow, she never would have made the mistake in the first place. “I mean—Forget I said that—” Sebastian’s jawline hardened. “No. Tell me how Vicenta comes into this.”

“I assumed Dominic must have said something, otherwise I wouldn’t have—” No, no more dancing around it. Tell him. “I know this is hardly the time, but I’ve had… feelings for you. For a while.

But I know you probably don’t—” Sebastian’s bark of a laugh sounded as if it hurt him as much as it did her. “Damn right.” And he strode off to the other wagon.  Over the next three months, Aurea did a lot of apologizing—to the Sixteen, to Sebastian personally—and explaining—to the Caretakers, to her family, to the reporters and others still hanging on the Sixteen’s every breath to record it for posterity. She explained how they’d made a new ley, she explained how she thought she and a small team could make others, she explained how that might open new land to more than poor grazing, if magic from a ley could help sink wells and provide better transportation.

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It was the reporters who swung it for them in the end to her mind. The woman Casilda was currently delicately flirting with beside the leytrain tracks especially. And she was even coming with the team to provide updates from the scene, much to Aurea’s envy. They were young and sweet, and Aurea supposed it was unlikely to last, but then again it might, because looking right into Casilda’s black eyes with no diminution of delighted laughter.

Inside, the leytrain was too compartmentalized to allow Aurea the space she wanted to lay out her plan for the team, so she’d borrowed two empty packing crates, stacked, for her table and set up beside the leytrain instead. She lifted her stuffed ledger book, then had to immediately replace it to hold down the corner of the large map that had sprung free.

Everyone was still gathering; there was no reason for her to hover here. There must be

something she could find to check for a third or fourth time among their supplies already loaded on the leytrain to be transferred to a wagon from a station out toward Firstpost. She remained where she was, however, eyes tracing the lines of adobe walls over and around them, the city embracing the leytrain station. They weren’t far enough into autumn for truly cool weather, but the breeze did rouse itself to nibble at her fingertips.

And then a familiar figure strode onto the platform, a bag slung over one shoulder. She’d invited Sebastian along with everyone else—she wasn’t going to be accused of assuming without asking that he’d want to stay in Centerpost to hang around Vicenta— though, of course, he’d shown every sign of wanting to stay in Centerpost, so she didn’t understand— But he was here. She would have to say something in a moment, Ancestors knew what. “Hello,” she managed, finding every point she knew so well in his face and body, black eyes to solid shoulders. “Are you coming with us?”

“This has turned into quite the expedition you’re leading.” He came to a stop before her, slinging his bag to the hard-packed dirt. “I was sure you’d never convince the Caretakers to allow us more than ten steps out of the temple again after what happened.”

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the reporter was her

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Aurea winced. Should she take this as a prompt to apologize more? Where was the line where it became too much, an excuse to claim his attention? “Someone reminded me once that they’re supposed to answer to us, not the other way around. But I wouldn’t say I’m the leader. I’ve always liked—the logistics of planning such things, you know? I’m just here to explain it to everyone and keep track of the details as we work. Tell people what to do next.”

Sebastian dropped his head, scrubbed a hand at the back of his neck. “I was wrong, you know.

There are leaders and there are leaders. The—patronizing aspects of withholding information for someone’s own good, that made me angry, but a lot of situations do need one voice giving direction. That’s different.” His eyes lifted to hers and he dipped his chin to seal the connection. She echoed the gesture automatically. “I know you left the city to get away from everyone looking to the North Star, and then after we were captured, we all looked to you ourselves.”

Aurea had to twist her body away to gaze at the adobe walls once more, the intimacy of the conversation too much when combined with the intimacy of proximity as well. “I don’t understand how you have such insight into people, yet—” “Yet managed to maintain a particular blind spot the size of the Warded Lands?” Sebastian reached for her hand, arresting her disengagement. She didn’t know how to—stand, or even be, at all, in this moment. After a beat of silence, he continued. “After”—after the warding—“I didn’t know what to be either. I suppose that’s why I clung so hard to ‘husband.’”

“And neither husband nor leader served.” Aurea found a lopsided smile for him and finally turned her hand to hold his in return.

And for her one cautious step, he vaulted utterly into uncharted territory by cupping his hands along her jaw. “Do you want to try something different?”

Oh, Ancestors, please. There was one last thing to be honest about, though. Tell him. “I can’t imagine ever wanting something more. But—you should know, it’ll have to be all or nothing—I can’t take it slow, or any other mature course of action you might be suggesting…”

Sebastian rumbled a laugh. “So noted.” And he leaned down for the kiss his hands had promised.

Some undefined space later, someone coughed—Casilda, maybe? Not Dominic, though he was certainly there, grinning wide. Content to watch and smirk. “So where are we going exactly?” her brother asked, making up for his expression by offering her a smooth path out of her embarrassment in front of the team who had finished accumulating during her distraction.

Their distraction. Sebastian seemed less flustered and shared his grounding with an arm across her waist. With a deep breath, Aurea opened her ledger, ran her finger down the names of small towns and family ranches. “Obviously, we can’t put a new ley every few meters along the wardline; there isn’t enough wild magic to feed that many. But we also need to consider which land has enough water to be productive and space to build. There’s no point creating ley that would mostly cross sheer cliffs for the benefit of feral goats. I’ve been writing to everyone I can think of, trying to get a picture through local knowledge.” She flipped to the back of the ledger and ruffled the folded letters she’d stored there. “But to a certain degree, I don’t know who I need to talk to until I get out

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After the Warding

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there. That’s what we’ll be doing first. Surveying, essentially.”

“Just the kind of shit you love most.” Far from being teasing, as Aurea would have expected, her brother’s voice was warm as was the laughter that rippled around the team.

Aurea lifted her chin, letting the euphoria that began when Sebastian kissed her grow richer as it settled into a deeper place. “Yes.” What she was good at; something to do. Something to be.

Hybrid Fiction August 2020

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S TINDER DATE

By Mira Domsky

[Chat Log/April 15 2019] (6:17PM) AngelaDontCare has signed on (6:18PM) AngelaDontCare: Dude, I think I just went on a date with Puck.

(6:20PM) Tashabobasha: Finally! Also, what? Puck who?

(6:20PM) AngelaDontCare: Puck, the mischievous faerie. From a Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Remember that Tinder date I said I was going to at the botanical gardens?

(6:21PM) Tashabobasha: ??!! Are you actually trying to tell me you went on a date with a 500-yearold British fairy?

(6:22PM) AngelaDontCare: No. A 500 year old British FAERIE. But he didn’t look 500. He said he was 26.

(6:23PM) Tashabobasha: Really. This is my skeptical face. Wasn’t that the Rasta looking dude? Did you smoke something?

(6:24PM) AngelaDontCare: No! I mean yes, it was the Rasta dude, but we didn’t smoke anything.

(6:24PM) Tashabobasha: Uh huh…

(6:25PM) AngelaDontCare: There might have been some shrooms. I don’t remember. But I still think it was Puck.

(6:27PM) Tashabobasha: …

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(6:28PM) AngelaDontCare: I’m telling you! Just listen!

(6:28PM) Tashabobasha: Listening…

(6:32PM) AngelaDontCare: Okay, so we met at that little cafe next to the gift shop. He has these long dreads tied back in a ponytail and silver rings on most of his fingers, and like a hemp necklace.

He smells kinda like lilacs or something when he hugs me, which is weird for a dude, but he’s got these mesmerizing eyes, so I’m like, why not? At least he’s nice to look at.

(6:32PM) Tashabobasha: Mesmerizing eyes?

(6:33PM) AngelaDontCare: Yeah, they looked hazel at first, but then they kinda seemed to shift to greyish lavender, or maybe pale green? It’s hard to remember, but they were beautiful. Never seen anything like it.

(6:35PM) AngelaDontCare: Anyway, he says he’s a folklore grad student. He buys me coffee and he gets tea, and we start walking through the botanical gardens. He leads me down this overgrown path and it’s like walking through a sun dappled green tunnel. We come out into this clearing I’d never seen before and it’s like spring threw up all over. Pink and blue flowers everywhere, little shrooms, mistletoe hanging like curtains. And there’s a hemp hammock between two trees. Magical.

(6:36PM) Tashabobasha: What kind of tea do British faeries drink?

(6:38PM) AngelaDontCare: Don’t be so sarcastic! And it was Irish breakfast tea. ANYWAY. We were sitting on the hammock and talking about the nature of belief and love and shit. Then this tall, thin lady comes riding up on a white horse. The lady is beautiful in a kinda scary way with a lot of sharp angles in her cheekbones and nose and shoulders and stuff. And I see that the horse is chewing at the bit and it has huge canine fangs.

(6:39PM) Tashabobasha: Hold on. A horse? In the botanical gardens? With FANGS?

(6:41PM) AngelaDontCare: Yeah. And the tall lady is all “Trickster, thou art messing about with mortals again,” or something. And Neil, his name is Neil btw, is like “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and the lady is like “Thou art impertinent and thou will pay.”

(6:44PM) Tashabobasha: Hold on. The mystical faerie says his name is Neil? Neil is like, the name of a cashier who’s always late to work because his D and D game ran too long, not the name of a mischievous immortal being!

(6:47PM) AngelaDontCare: Well that’s the name he gave me, okay! I can just call him Puck if you want. Anyway, he starts arguing with her, and I get fed up. So I clap my hands at them and I’m like “Hey! Who the hell are you?” And she looks down her nose at me from way up on that horse and says. “I am Lady Imelda, daughter of Oberon, blah blah blah.” And I’m like, “cool, now can you leave?” And she goes on with a whole bunch of how dare you blah blah blah and she’ll see me dance until I die. And I’m like, whatever bitch, I’m not dancing unless you buy me at least two drinks. And Hybrid Fiction August 2020

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then she challenges me to a duel.

(6:48PM) Tashabobasha: What? A duel? Are you even hearing yourself? Either a scary lady is challenging you to a duel, or your Rasta dude spiked your coffee. Either one of those is a serious red flag. You should NOT date this Neil guy.

(6:50PM) AngelaDontCare: I knooowwww, I’m getting there. But he really is a great kisser.

(6:50PM) Tashabobasha: Wait, there was KISSING?! GIVE! (6:59PM) AngelaDontCare: I’m getting there! So I tell Scary Lady that I’ll take that duel as long as it’s in Mario Kart, and she’s like, I was thinking of swords, and I say how about Smash Brothers, and she just stares at me like I’m speaking ancient Sumerian. So Neil/Puck is like, now you’ve done it.

Then for a second everything around us blurs and I get dizzy. Suddenly we’re in this grove that I’m pretty sure isn’t even in the botanical gardens, and there are a bunch of beautiful men and women just lounging around in flowy outfits on blankets and cushions, and a guy on a throne made from a living tree and he’s wearing a crown with antlers. And the antler guy is like, “A challenge has been given and accepted. You may choose your weapons.”

(7:03PM) AngelaDontCare: And I’m like, wut? And a cute kid with pointy ears drags like a treasure chest over and opens it. There’s swords and knives and a bow with a quiver of arrows and all kinds of pointy weapons. There’s even a mace. And I’m like, I don’t know how to use any of these, I want different weapons. And the antler guy is all “Like what?” and I’m like, “Mario Kart?”

(7:07PM) AngelaDontCare: The antler guy looks confused. “I do not know Mario Kart,” So I explain: “It’s a Nintendo game. You race.” The antler guy’s eyes kinda glaze over a bit, but he says “Very well.

Sprites, fetch us Mario’s cart and his intender game and we shall consider this race.” So the kid with the pointy ears just disappears and I look around the grove at all the pretty people and we stare at each other kind of awkwardly. And then I turn to Neil and I’m like, “It’s Nintendo, not intender. Neil, the hell have you gotten me into?” And he’s like, “No worries, babe. Imelda’s never played a video game, she doesn’t stand a chance.”

(7:08PM) Tashabobasha: BABE?!

(7:08PM) AngelaDontCare: I KNOW, RIGHT!

(7:15PM) AngelaDontCare: So then the kid comes back carrying two copies of Mario Kart. He sets one on the grass in front of me, and he sets another one on the grass in front of Imelda and she just looks at it like a hair in her soup.

“The weapons have been chosen and distributed! Let the duel begin!” Says the antler guy. So then I’m like, wait we need a TV and an electrical outlet to make the game work. And a game system with

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controllers, like a Wii or a Gamecube. The antler guy makes this face like, “okay, fiiiine.” And he tells the sprites to fetch an “electical” outlet, TV, and a “cube of games.” The little kid with the pointy ears has a worried little baby crease between his brows as he leaves. “Gamecube!” I shout after him. Then I turn to Neil and I’m like, you owe me. This is the weirdest date ever. He just wiggles his eyebrows at me. He’s not fazed by any of this.

(7:17PM) Tashabobasha: I completely hate this guy.

(7:20PM) AngelaDontCare: I’m not done yet! Then another little kid with pointy ears and cute little fairy wings comes over and offers me a plate with super shiny apples on it. Neil takes the plate away before I can touch it and walks it over to Imelda. He shoves it at her and says something like “nice try, but no cheating.” Imelda’s face gets all blotchy and red and I can practically see the steam coming out of her ears as she grinds her teeth. Neil just strolls back over to me and leaves Imelda holding the tray.

(7:21PM) Tashabobasha: you mean Puck.

(7:32PM) AngelaDontCare: Yeah, Puck. Whatever, stop interrupting! Anyway, the first pointy-eared kid comes back all red faced and breathing hard with a TV, Gamecube, controllers, and an extension cord that disappears into the forest behind him. I help him set up the Gamecube and sit down on the grass. I pat the grass next to me and Imelda sulks over, but won’t sit too close. The kid hands her the other controller.

“Now can the battle begin?” asks the antler guy, but like, really sarcastically. And I say yeah, and pick Yoshi and tell Imelda to pick her character. She picks Peach, and we race, and I beat her. Then Imelda says she wants the best out of three, and all the beautiful people gather around to watch while I beat her again. She bares her teeth and her face gets red and blotchy again and she stands up and raises the controller over her head like she’s going to throw it at me. But Neil/Puck plucks it out of her hand and gives it to one of the other beautiful people crowded around. The woman he hands it to smiles like the sun and sits down in front of the TV. “The duel is over. You lost, Imelda,” says Neil/Puck and he takes my hand and leads me out of the grove. I look over my shoulder once and I can see Imelda seething and that antler guy has the second controller now, eyes glued to the TV. (7:35PM) Tashabobasha: This is the longest story ever. Where’s the kissing?

(7:40PM) AngelaDontCare: Ok, ok, geez! So we leave the clearing with all the faeries and walk through some trees back onto a path in the botanical gardens. Which is weird because I don’t remember leaving the botanical gardens in the first place. He kisses me on the forehead outside the visitor center and says something about how I’ll be safer if we don’t see each other again because Imelda won’t forget that I made a fool of her, blah blah blah. And I’m like, dude, this was a weird

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date, I don’t know if I wanna see you again either. And he’s like okay, that’s fair, but can I kiss you goodbye? And I’m like sure. So he kisses me and I close my eyes because it’s a really good kiss, but then he pulls away kinda suddenly. I open my eyes and he’s gone. Just completely gone.

(7:42PM) Tashabobasha: That’s it? What an asshole.

(7:43PM) AngelaDontCare: I guess. But I still miss him.

(7:45PM) Tashabobasha: Don’t miss him! He’s an asshole who got you high and then ditched you.

Like nothing about this makes any sense. A horse with fangs, a guy in an antler crown, faerie duels…

What kind of phone does a faerie use? Why is he in Seattle instead of England? And more specifically, WHAT IS HE DOING ON TINDER?!

(7:50PM) AngelaDontCare: I can’t help it! I know it doesn’t make sense, but it’s still what happened.

Also it was an iPhone, and dude, how should I know? Looking for some sweet mortal booty?

(7:52PM) Tashabobasha: Dude. Also how come you waited so long to message me? You were supposed to let me know when you got home.

(7:52PM) AngelaDontCare: I did! I AM messaging you!

(7:53PM) Tashabobasha: Dude, your date was on SATURDAY. It’s MONDAY. I was getting worried.

(7:54PM) AngelaDontCare: wut?

(7:55PM) AngelaDontCare: It’s still Saturday though.

(7:55PM) Tashabobasha: No it isn’t, dude.

(7:56PM) AngelaDontCare: shit, I missed work.

(7:56PM) Tashabobasha: Are you telling me you lost time?

(7:57PM) AngelaDontCare: Yeah, I guess so. Shit, I just checked my messages and work called to see why I didn’t come in. I don’t know what to tell them.

(7:57PM) Tashabobasha: But you’re saying you lost time.

(7:58PM) AngelaDontCare: Yes. Geez, no wonder my cat was so hangry.

(7:58PM) Tashabobasha: You know what causes people to lose time, right?

(8:00PM) AngelaDontCare: Being kidnapped and taken briefly to the land of Faerie for a duel? A brain aneurism? Narcolepsy?

(8:00PM) Tashabobasha: No. Alien abduction.

(8:00PM) AngelaDontCare: Uh huh…

(8:02PM) Tashabobasha: I’m serious. They wipe your memory so you lose the time.

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Domsky

“A Midsummer Night’s Tinder Date”

(8:05PM) AngelaDontCare: Really?! Aliens?! This is MY skeptical face.

(8:07PM) Tashabobasha:Yes! I saw it on the History Channel!

(8:08PM) AngelaDontCare: I gotta go get something to eat. Later.

(8:09PM) AngelaDontCare has signed off

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57

Until next time...

When you’ll read…

“Bodark” by Ryan Norman‡

Project Auroral: Chapter 4 drawn by Marc Rene and written by Ben Pyle “Machines in Motion” by Benjamin C. Kinney§ “Ampu-Chic” by Michelle F. Goddard** “Heroes Don’t Really Die” by Rickey Rivers, Jr. “Skin Deep” by Jasmine Arch

When Gods Sleep: Part I by Marco Cultrera “The Law of Conservation of Baseball” by Stephen Case

‡

Chosen by readers on Hybrid Fiction’s “What do you want to read?” poll. Future fiction + ancient beings + romance

§

Chosen by readers on Hybrid Fiction’s “What do you want to read?” poll. Steampunk + history + magic

**

Chosen by readers on Hybrid Fiction’s “What do you want to read?” poll. Body modifications + fantasy + scifi Hybrid Fiction August 2020

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About the authors and artists…  Ken Bastard: Artist, Writer, Musician, Carpenter, Janitor, Cook, Dishwasher, Caretaker, Guard Dog, Student, Father and Son. Lives in the paradise that is Western Massachusetts in Berkshire County with his Faithful Companion, his dog Ripley. He is a reasonably happy guy.  Jennifer Shelby hunts for stories in the beetled undergrowth of fairy-infested forests.

She fishes for them in the dark space between stars. As part of her ongoing catch-and-release program, these stories have recently appeared in Short Édition, Metaphorosis, and now here at Hybrid Fiction. Contact: Twitter @jenniferdshelby and online at https://jennifershelby.blog/  Steven Mathes lives a little over a mile from the nearest pavement. There was a time before the pandemic when he thought his reclusive nature was a bad thing. He has published a little over twenty stories and his short fiction has appeared in dozens of other publications. He has also published a couple of articles about computers. Contact: stevenmathes.com  Ben Pyle’s prose short stories have appeared in Literary Yard, Ariel Chart, Page & Spine, and Scarlet Leaf Review. His comics with artist Renan Balmonte have appeared in My Kingdom for a Panel from Arledge Comics, Elsewhere by Unlikely Heroes Studios, and Monster Mashup by Grit City Comics. Ben and artist Marc Rene have worked together on comics for years and will soon debut their comic Slugger. Contact: bspyle@crimson.ua.edu or Twitter @bspyle

 Marc Rene is a self-taught artist with a background in design. His mentors include noted artists J.H. Williams III, Darick Robertson, and Steven T. Seagle. Rene’s credits include work for Cartoon Network, Disney, Creative Juices Design, the San Jose Sabercats, Public Speaking Los Angeles, the National Forensics Association, Fry’s Electronics, COGnitive Gaming, NACL eSports, and comedian Sammy Obeid. Rene has worked on several graphic novel projects: NICE from American Gothic Press, Slugger by Ben Pyle, and iHolmes by Michael Lent. Contact: Instagram marcrene_art, Twitter @marcusRhill, or Facebook www.facebook.com/marcreneart  Patricia Moussatche was raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, but only started appreciating sunny beaches after she moved north. She has a B.A. in Biology from Bard College and a Ph.D. in Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Florida, which she put to good use while working with science-fiction in test tubes. She escapes stress through a scrapbook or novel and writes speculative fiction to quiet the people in her head.

Contact: Twitter @patchi_writes  Alexei Collier was born in sunny Southern California, grew up in a house his family moved into on his very first Halloween, and went to school in a creepy old mansion. Many years later, powerful forces flung him deep into the heart of the Midwest, where he now lives across the street from Chicago with his wife and their cat. His short fiction has appeared in Flash Fiction Online, Cosmic Roots & Eldritch Shores, Cicada, and Ideomancer.

Contact: alexeicollier.com.

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 Langley Hyde’s short stories have appeared in If This Goes On, Unidentified Objects (vol. 6 and 7), Podcastle, and Terraform. Her debut novel, Highfell Grimoires, was named a Best Book of 2014 in SF/Fantasy/Horror by Publishers Weekly. She volunteers her time at Dream Foundry. Currently, Langley Hyde lives in the Pacific Northwest. Contact: langleyhyde.com Graham Kennedy has been a professional illustrator for nearly 30 years. His mediums of choice are marker pen and coloured pencil (with some Photoshop embellishments).

Whilst he can, and does (!) work digitally if the job requires it, he still prefers to work “traditionally”—and he continues to see a place for hand painted art even in this digital age. In his words, “You only have to look at the art of the great Drew Struzan to appreciate that!” Contact: GKillus@aol.com or https://www.facebook.com/GrahamKennedyIl lustration

 R. Z. Held writes speculative fiction, much of it in the apparently disparate subgenres of space opera and weird western. Her Silver series of urban fantasy novels was published under the name Rhiannon Held. She lives in Seattle, where she works as an archaeologist for an environmental compliance firm. At work, she uses her degree mostly for copyediting technical reports; in writing, she uses it for cultural world-building; in public, she'll probably use it to check the mold seams on the wine bottle at dinner. Contact: http://rhiannonheld.com/ or Twitter @RhiannonHeld  Born and raised in Tempe, Arizona, Mira Domsky never developed the cold tolerance necessary to leave the desert. She has a BA in creative writing and a masters in library science from the University of Arizona. She can be found reading, baking, drawing, practicing martial arts, attending conventions, and table-top gaming. She is a full-time librarian by day, writer and artist by night. Her main religion is chocolate; although, she also believes in the healing power of glitter.

Plagued by an overactive imagination, she hides from the blinding orb in the sky with an accidental cat and a small dragon.

Contact: https://mdomsky.wixsite.com/mirado msky

Hybrid Fiction August 2020