Free The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror by Paula Guran Page A

roll up the leg of my cargos and strip away the bandage. There’s just a pink mark that might have been a scar but fades as I watch. The katana is where I left it, and I pick it up, prick at my finger with its sharpness. Something silver oozes out from the cut and just as quickly the opening closes over.
    A great spout of water comes from the pool and a body lands not far from me, gives a displeased groan.
    Barry, whole again, tall and handsome and muscular and . . .
    And no longer pale as if he tries to tan beneath the moon.
    He rolls on his back, coughing, making a noise like an espresso machine. He breathes. I poke at him with the katana. A tiny drop of blood blossoms on his skin and he swears. Rich, fresh, oxygenated, living blood.
    “Oh, Barry,” I say. “You were right.”
    He sits up, runs his hands over his arms and legs, wondering, not understanding. “But . . . ”
    “It does give life, Barry. You’ve been dead a long time.” I can’t keep the laughter out of my voice.
    “But . . . Fuck!” He stands up, pacing. “Okay. I don’t have to outrun them, I just have to outrun you.”
    “Here’s the thing, Baz, I don’t think they’re going to be interested in me anymore.” I rise, do the thing with the poking and the quick silvery bleed. “Close as I can figure it, nature abhors a vacuum. The pond finished what you started, taking my blood and all, then . . . replaced it.”
    I start up the path, cast a look behind, “Long time since you’ve been meat. How’s it feel?”

There was something inside the music; something that squished and scuttled and honked and raved, something unsettling, like a snake in a satin glove.
    The Bleeding Shadow
Joe R. Lansdale
    I was down at the Blue Light Joint that night, finishing off some ribs and listening to some blues, when in walked Alda May. She was looking good too. Had a dress on and it fit her the way a dress ought to fit every woman in the world. She was wearing a little flat hat that leaned to one side, like an unbalanced plate on a waiter’s palm. The high heels she had on made her legs look tight and way all right.
    The light wasn’t all that good in the joint, which is one of its appeals. It sometimes helps a man or woman get along in a way the daylight wouldn’t stand, but I knew Alda May enough to know light didn’t matter. She’d look good wearing a sack and a paper hat.
    There was something about her face that showed me right off she was worried, that things weren’t right. She was glancing left and right, like she was in some big city trying to cross a busy street and not get hit by a car.
    I got my bottle of beer, left out from my table, and went over to her.
    Then I knew why she’d been looking around like that. She said, “I was looking for you, Richard.”
    “Say you were,” I said. “Well you done found me.”
    The way she stared at me wiped the grin off my face.
    “Something wrong, Alda May?”
    “Maybe. I don’t know. I got to talk, though. Thought you’d be here, and I was wondering you might want to come by my place.”
    “When?”
    “Now.”
    “All right.”
    “But don’t get no business in mind,” she said. “This isn’t like the old days. I need your help, and I need to know I can count on you.”
    “Well, I kind of like the kind of business we used to do, but all right, we’re friends. It’s cool.”
    “I hoped you’d say that.”
    “You got a car?” I said.
    She shook her head. “No. I had a friend drop me off.”
    I thought, Friend? Sure.
    “All right then,” I said, “lets strut on out.”
    I guess you could say it’s a shame Alda May makes her money turning tricks, but when you’re the one paying for the tricks, and you are one of her satisfied customers, you feel different. Right then, anyway. Later, you feel guilty. Like maybe you done peed on the Mona Lisa. ’Cause that gal, she was one fine dark skin woman who should have got better than a thousand rides and enough money to buy