Free Hero is a Four Letter Word by J.M. Frey Page A

hair out of his eyes, quiet and numb, Liam gives a cry and scrabbles at his head.
    “What is it?” Jennet asks.
    “A grey hair!” He turns in the tub, looking up into her face, and holds her tight, water-slick skin flush against hers. “Jen! Grey I’m free! Oh, my hero! My lover! Marry me!” he crows. “Take your prize, you’ve saved your damsel!”
    “On two conditions,” Jennet says, kissing his giggles into her own mouth. “First, tell me you love me for me. Not what is or isn’t inside of me.”
    “Jennet, my Jennet,” he whispers and smears kisses and promises against her neck. “You saved me, you saved me, and I am yours, forever. I love you, I love you.”
    Jennet grins, a smile curling on her face to match the stretch of scar on her stomach. “And the second: do think your Fae Queen knows what a hysterectomy is?”
    “No,” Liam, Tam Lin says. “So let’s go to bed and get a start on making that first child for her. Earnest effort will have to go into the endeavour.”
    “It’s a deal,” Jennet says, and takes him by the hand and leads him out of the waters of the bath, and into life; glorious, wonderful, messy life.

Maddening Science
    by J.M. Frey
    First published in “When The Villain Comes Home”
    Edited by Gabrielle Harbowy and Ed Greenwood
    Dragon Moon Press (August, 2011)
    Bullets fired into a crowd. Children screaming. Women crying. Men crying, too, not that any of them would admit it. The scent of gun powder, rotting garbage, stale motor oil, vomit, and misery. Police sirens in the distance, coming closer, making me cringe against old memories. Making me skulk into the shadows, hunch down in my hoodie, a beaten puppy.
    This guy isn’t a supervillain. He isn’t even a villain, really. He is just an idiot. A child with a gun. And a grudge. Or maybe a god complex. Or a revenge scheme. Who the hell cares what he thought he had?
    In the end, it amounts to the same.
    The last place I want to be is in the centre of the police’s attention, again , so I sink back into the fabric, shying from the broad helicopter searchlights that sweep in through the narrow windows of the parking garage.
    If this had been before, I might have leapt into action with one of my trusty gizmos. Or, failing that, at least with a witty verbal assault that would have left the moron boy too brain-befuddled to resist when I punched him in the oesophagus.
    But this isn’t before.
    I keep my eyes on the sky, instead of on the gun. If the Brilliant Bitch arrives, I want to see .
    No one else is looking up. It has been a long, long time since one of … us … has donned sparkling spandex and crusaded out into the night to roust the criminal element from their lairs, or to enact a plot against the establishment, to bite a glove-covered thumb at ‘the man.’ A long time since one of us has done much more than pretend to not be one of us.
    The age of the superhero petered out surprisingly quickly. The villains learnt our lessons; the heroes became obsolete.
    A whizzing pop beside my left ear. I duck behind the back wheel of a sleek penis-replacement-on-wheels. The owner will be very upset when he sees the bullet gouges littering the bright red altar to his own virility.
    I’ve never been shot before. I’ve been electrocuted, eye-lasered, punched by someone with the proportional strength of a spotted gecko and, memorably, tossed into the air by a breath-tornado created by a hero whose Italian lunch my schemes had clearly just interrupted.
    Being shot seems fearfully mundane after all that.
    A normal, boring death scares me more than any other kind — especially if it’s due to a random, pointless, unpredictable accident of time and place intersecting with a stupid poser with the combination to daddy’s gun drawer and the key to mommy’s liquor cabinet. I had been on the way to the bargain grocery store for soymilk. It doesn’t look like I’m going to get any now.
    Because only the extraordinary die in