Release(23)

“Not according to what I’ve heard about the Dutch.”

She play-slapped him. “My mom is Dutch.”

“Do you think we would have dated?”

She leaned down and looked into his eyes, so closely their eyelashes were almost touching. “I think we would have dated and married and made babies of average height. And then divorced when you realized you were gay.”

“I’m always gay?”

“In every universe.”

“That makes sense. Are you always short?”

“Except in the universes where I’m Beyoncé.”

“In some universes, we’re all Beyoncé.”





The town is not large, but even so. The faun repeatedly smells the air, hoping for some scent of her, but only after much frustration does he realize he’s been sniffing for his Queen.

When, of course, at the moment, she is someone else entirely.

He curses his foolishness and pulls his mind back to the body of the dead girl – though calling it a “body” is wrong. It is not exactly a spirit either, not in the way the faun knows spirits. The jealous, capricious spirits of the lake, for example, who sometimes chafe under the rule of the Queen. Would they fight to keep her? the faun wonders. Even if losing her meant their own destruction? An eternity of rule is perhaps an eternity too long for some.

No, surely not. They loved the Queen. And if they did not, they feared her, which is how it should be, how it always had been.

He would not allow her reign to end. He would not.

And the not-quite-spirit that had caught her had her own scent. One of this world, the world she had left. It had been a violent passage out of it, to be sure, but not the first that had been made through the lake, nor the first that had passed near the Queen.

But this spirit had refused. She had not known what or how she was refusing, but she had felt a pearl of blood calling to her – he knew, for he had smelled it, too, the scent of another’s destiny on the day it changed itself – and she had clearly decided to refuse her own. In that moment of refusal, she had turned the Queen’s head–

And the Queen had been caught and today, somehow, made flesh. When that happened, a spirit was only given until sundown to walk this earth one last time. Only until sundown.

He remembers the spirit, remembers her scent at the cabin.

He closes his eyes and inhales deeply again.

There. There she is.

He moves through the town at a speed unseen by its citizens, though not unfelt. There is gooseflesh at his passing, a shiver down the spine, perhaps a shiver that moves all the way to the loins – he is in the form of a faun after all, rude, lusty, recognized (wrongly) as a god, (rightly) as a fertility assist. There will be more than one baby conceived here this afternoon.

But these are only fleeting thoughts as he steps between the moments and seconds of these creatures’ odd and fractious little lives. He can scent her. There is a twist of her on the breeze, braiding itself in a helix too faint for the noses of all but the most attentive hounds and the faun himself.

He can sense she has stopped somewhere. She grows larger in the horizon of his senses. And beyond her–

Beyond her, there is a wall of scents like hers.

She has found her home. She has found her family.

The faun begins to move faster.





She has found her home. The home of this body, the family of it. There is such a pull here, strands of sorrow leaking into the air so dark and malevolent it’s a wonder these creatures can’t see them, see how they poison this house.

“How they will be its death,” she says, aloud.

Then she wonders, Am I that death? Is that how it shall happen?

She stands before a neglected front yard. Grass grows high over a derelict mower in one corner. Abandoned baby toys – whose? what baby’s? does she know? she does not – hide among the browning lawn. A chain-link fence surrounds it, so low she steps over it in one hitched stride, less keeping anything in than simply marking the space as owned. There is evidence of a dog – a chain, a collar – but Victor, the boyfriend before Tony, had taken a dislike to it, a mutt called Karl, and Karl had vanished one night. No proper explanation had been forthcoming from Victor.

“And yet I did not leave,” she says, bothered, unsettled.

She can feel the wound in her heart from Victor, one he kept fresh and bleeding, one in which he had placed a hook that kept her tethered to him. She was terrified of him. She could not leave him.

Until she did.

Oh, the day of it, the day she had left Victor. She had said her unhappiness. She had turned down the drugs he offered to make her stay. She had not blinked at the threats he made. She didn’t know why, that day of all days, but he railed and screamed and threatened and all she had seen was his fear that she was leaving him, leaving him alone with the demon in his veins that would surely kill him as it would surely kill her.

And then he had wept. And she had seen through it. The tears weren’t real. He was manipulating her. Again. And if they weren’t real, nothing else was real, nothing but his fear.

And that gave her the power.

“So I shut the door,” she says. And she had. She had walked Victor to the doorway, an almost kind hand on his back, and she had guided him out the front door – this door, here, the one before her now – and he had turned and said “Katie?” and she had just…