Free Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror by Charlaine Harris, Tim Lebbon, David Wellington, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Dan Chaon, Brian Keene, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Kelley Armstrong, Michael Koryta, Scott Smith, Joe McKinney, Laird Barron, Rio Youers, Dana Cameron, Leigh Perry, Gary A. Braunbeck, Lynda Barry, John Langan, Seanan McGuire, Robert Shearman, Lucy A. Snyder Page B

hand on me, you little bitch?” The question was calm. The swing that accompanied it was not. His fist hit Mary in the eye, sending her crashing to the floor, where she huddled, sobbing. She was halfway inside the house, her feet still on the porch, her torso on the hallway floor.
    “Cow,” he said, and kicked her casually as he stepped over her body and left her where she lay. Mary didn’t try to move. She stayed where she was, and cried, and waited for the long, dark night to end.
    T he mud squished between Lou’s toes as she walked, black and viscous and sticky. She looked down at it and frowned, trying to remember why it mattered. A piece of glass caught her eye, protruding from the left side of her chest. She grasped it firmly and yanked it out of her body with a wet sucking sound, very similar to what her feet made every time she took a step. The edges sliced her fingers,creating long, bloodless cuts. She looked at the glass for a moment, dispassionately, before she threw it aside and kept on walking.
    She had been walking for miles now. Hours, even, across the city and down the rain-soaked sidewalks until she had reached the edge of the fields that extended behind her housing development. Then she had left the sidewalks behind, understanding on some level—even if it was a blurred, distorted one, still tangled with the sound of distant thunder—that she didn’t want to answer any questions about where she was going, or why she wasn’t wearing shoes, or why there was so much blood on the front of her dress.
    (Why was there so much blood? Why didn’t she bleed when she pulled the glass out of her body? Every time she’d cut herself before, there had been blood, but now there was only a faint tugging sensation and a momentary light, like one of the fireflies she’d lost in the storm was hiding somewhere in her skin.)
    The clouds were starting to clear, and the stars were coming out. They looked like fireflies hanging up there in the black. Lou walked on. She was going home. She knew that much. No matter how confused she was, no matter what else was going on, she was going home. She just had to . . . she just had to make it home.
    Fireflies began to drift up from the grass at her feet, swirling around her in a great, silent cloud. Lou stopped walking and held out her hands. The fireflies landed on her palms, covering them, until she could feel the weight of a thousand pinprick feet pushing down on her.
    “Hello,” said Lou.
    The fireflies took flight. They swirled around her, and it was like standing in the middle of a special effect, like something from a Disney movie, the moment where the servant girl becomes a princess or learns that she’s been a princess all along. Lou laughed out loud, and then gasped as the sound knocked something loose inside of her, some small, essential scab on her soul.
    She remembered lightning splitting the sky.
    She remembered the feeling of her ankle breaking.
    She remembered—
    “Who are you?” The man who appeared out of the cloud of fireflies was tall and thin and oddly pale, seeming to shine with the same soft, internal light as the fireflies. Most of them seemed to have vanished when he came; the few that remained alighted on his hair and shoulders, glowing dimly. “What are you doing out here, all alone? Where are your parents?”
    “I’m Lou,” she said. Speaking made the glass in her chest tug oddly. She pulled out another shard. This one was longer than the others, and there was actual blood at the tip, gleaming when the light from the fireflies touched it. She threw it thoughtlessly aside. “I’m out here because out here is between me and where I live. My daddy’s dead. My mom’s at home. She’s probably real worried by now. I’m going home to her.”
    The man leaned a little closer and sniffed at her. Lou blinked at him.
    “I don’t smell bad,” she said.
    “Child, you smell dead ,” he replied. “Do you remember what happened to you?”
    “I