Free Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series) by Tanith Lee Page A

Africas. She had a gorgeous mouth.But her eyes were flat and yellow, like those of some kind of animal.
    As Picaro halted there, she turned and the animal irises shone at him. She said, “This is my son.”
    Her name was Simoon.
    Picaro’s father said, “Sure. He’s your son. But how would you know?”
    And then she turned her long neck and her yellow eyes fixed back on the grown man.
    And Picaro saw that his father was afraid of her. Just as the cat was. So then Picaro too became afraid.
    Later, much later, after she had gone, he said to his father, “She can’t take me, can she?”
    “Not legally,” said Picaro’s father.
    “Why does she want me? She left me when I was a baby, didn’t she?”
    “No. Was me she left. She said you were mine, and you are. Now she’s been spying, and she’s seen you’re not a baby any more but a human being. She’s interested. She travels around. She’d take you with her—”
    “I don’t want to go with
her
!”
    “No,” his father said again. “I don’t know what she wants. She be want anything. Things. Here is a bus ticket I sent for. Pack your bag and go get the bus over to your Aunt Ethella’s. Don’t argue. Do it. Before she comes back.”
    “She’s a witch,” whispered Picaro.
    “She is. I never lied to you about that. I’ve seen her put
shadow
on a girl, some girl she was jealous of. That girl she gets no luck from that day on, till she goes to Simoon with all her own long hair cut off, and lays it at your mother’s feet.”
    “Come with me,” said Picaro. “Ethella will like that.”
    “I’ll stay here,” said Picaro’s father. “I’ll stay here and talk it through with Simoon.”
    The cat had slunk away out of the window. (Picaro never saw it again.) Picaro got the bus and rode across to Ethella’s in the Red House District. And three weeks later, after he could never get through on the old-fashioned call-phone at the apartment, when he was going insane over that, and Ethella trying to cheer him, and saying to her man, “Get over there, you hear me, get over there and see to it—” and he saying “Not in a thousand years, baby. Not if
she
there with him—” and after this, then, the incoming call, Picaro’s father telling him, “We settled it. Come home.”
    But when he got off the bus, went up in the lift, put his hand on the apartment door and it let him in; it was almost back to the first scene over again.
    Only this time she was in the cane chair by the window, sitting there in a long, pale, cotton dress, shelling blue peas, singing to herself under her breath.
    “Where is my father?”
    “At the store,” said Simoon.
    She smiled. When she did that, he saw her mouth wasn’t gorgeous, it was greedy. But he had never made a mistake about her eyes.
    She cooked a meal, good food; it smelled marvelous if not as good as the things his father could make. There was a bottle of red wine on the table, and ice-cold cola for Picaro. But his father didn’t come in.
    “I’ll go look for him,” Picaro said.
    All that while, he had sat by the wall, on the floor, watching her moving about, watching her glamorous giraffe’s neck, the curve of her backside that would have moved him if she had been anything but his mother and an evil sorceress.
    Now when he spoke, trying for ordinariness, she only said, “Fine. Your dinner will be spoiled. That’s youraffair.” And she laughed. In one of her teeth was a blindingly green jewel, a peridot. His father had told him about that.
    Picaro left the apartment. Hungry and thirsty, he hadn’t wanted to take a bite or a sip of anything she had made, even touched. He ran through the hot sunless day, down to the store where his father worked, constructing lutes and sombas, sanding, polishing, twisting out the silvery strings on pegs of plastivory.
    Picaro found his father, where the others had already found him. No police or medics had yet arrived, but they knew they must not move him. He was dead anyway.