Read Online 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 - Free Book Online

light was fading fast.
    Night was coming.
    And with the night, an answer to the child’s cries.

SOMETHING LOST, SOMETHING GAINED
SEANAN M C GUIRE
    L ightning lashed across the summer sky, coloring it with the purple-black of a fresh hematoma. It was followed by a roll of thunder some three seconds later. No rain, not yet, but the air was heavy with the taste of it, a heady, electric smell that promised downpours yet to come. Lou picked her way along the bank of the creek, mud squishing between her toes, keeping a wary eye on that sky. Summer storms were the best kind for watching and the worst kind for getting caught in. They were unpredictable, temperamental, like her stepdaddy when he had a couple of beers in him and his eyes started to wander along the curves of her sundress.
    Lou stopped for a moment, clenching her fingers a little tighter around the jar in her hand as she shook off the memory of his eyes and breathed in the clean scent of yet-unfallen rain. Those were thoughts for another time and place, huddled under her blanket and listening to the shouts from downstairs. She was thirteen: old enough to understand that she was what her mother and her stepfather fought about half the time, and nowhere near old enough to understand why it had to be that way. She sometimes thought that she would never be old enough, that “old enough” was the sort ofidea that came only to frightened thirteen-year-old girls, waiting for the doorknob to turn. It hadn’t happened yet, but she saw the way he looked at her, and she listened to the way the other girls at school talked sometimes in the locker room, when the teachers weren’t around. She knew what came after the sundresses and the shouting.
    (There was a smell in the locker room sometimes, when the teachers were away and the girls started talking. It was a sharp, hot smell, and it made Lou think of storms on the way, even though there were no clouds in the locker room, never could be; even though they were safe, small, contained when they sat in that room. Maybe girls and storms weren’t so different after all.)
    She resumed her pacing along the creek bed, eyes flicking from the fresh-bruised sky to the black branches of the trees that grew beside the water. Lightning flashed again. This time, the thunder was only a second behind. It was time to go back, time to get home before the rain came down and she got another lecture about behaving like a child. She started to turn—
    Lights appeared in the branches of the nearest tree, as unsteady as birthday candles, flickering luminescent green through the darkness. Lou’s cheeks stretched into a grin as she uncapped the jam jar she’d been carrying all this while.
    “Gotcha,” she whispered.
    Catching fireflies was an art form. Most of the girls her age had already lost whatever skill at it they’d once possessed, trading the steady hand on the collecting jar for a steady hand on a mascara wand. She didn’t see anything wrong with that, exactly—everyone had to grow up to be who they were going to be—but she sometimes felt like there’d been a bell rung over the course of the past two years, one that all her classmates could hear, while she couldn’t hear anything but the siren song of the creek and the woods and the promise of summer fireflies.
    When she went back to school in the fall, she would be a high school student, expected to buckle down and fight for her future. What’s worse, she would be a little deeper into her teens, and those sidelong glances from her stepfather would no longer have as much reason to be coy. She couldn’t say exactly what she feared would happen; she didn’t have the words for it, any more than she had the words for the smell that accompanied an impending storm. She just knew that she was afraid.
    But that was a fear for later. Right now, it was just her, and the storm, and the fireflies that she swept, one by one, into her collecting jar, until it glowed with the will-o’-wisp