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 Page A
Authors: 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
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light of dozens of circling insects. She held it up to her eye, looking critically at the fireflies as they flew. Lightning flashed again overhead. She barely noticed.
“You’re big ones, aren’t you,” she said, tipping the jar a bit to give herself a better angle. “Must have been a good season for you guys. Never seen ones quite like you before . . .”
And the sky ripped open, and the rain came down.
A ll summers are unique to the places in which they happen. California summers are hot desert things, brutal in the daylight and cold at night. Florida summers are humid and wet, unforgiving in their unrelenting heat. Indiana summers are alight with storms and fireflies, the sky always the color of a bruise, from the angry green of the impending twister to the acid yellow tainting the edges of an otherwise perfect blue. Indiana summers never let anyone forget that they are wounds carved out of the flesh of the calendar, warm not because of the presence of the sun, but because they are still bleeding.
Lou ran through the rain, her feet squelching in the increasingly sodden grass, her jam jar full of fireflies clutched against her chest like some sort of talisman of safe passage through the storm. She ran, and the storm pursued, sending down torrents of water that threatened to sweep her legs out from underneath her and send hersprawling into the grass. The conditions weren’t right for a flash flood, she knew, but she ran all the same, because the longer she stayed out here, the more her mother would worry. Her mother seemed to worry all the time these days, and maybe that was another sign of how dangerous the impending storm at home was growing. The time between the lightning and the thunder had worn away to almost nothing, one lingering look at a time.
The motion seemed to be agitating the fireflies. They lit up a little brighter every time her foot came down, until she was carrying a jar full of light across the field, as bright as a fallen star, beating back the darkness as fiercely as it could. She could see the back side of her neighborhood from the hill, the lights on and glowing a little more gently than her captives. All the windows would be closed against the rain, she knew, and the back door with its bad latch would be locked to keep the wind from blowing it open. She was going to have to go around the front of the house and knock like a guest, begging for entrance to her own place. What if they didn’t let her in? The fear wasn’t new, but it was shocking every time it showed its face. She tried to push it aside, and it came springing back, twice as big. What if they said “ You want to be a storm’s child, go be a storm’s child, don’t bring any of your rain or wrongness here ,” and turned their faces away, and turned the porch light off?
No. No, and no, and no again. That was her home down there, nestled safe in its line of homes just like it, and it was always going to be hers, no matter how many bad looks she got from her drunken stepdaddy (and he was never going to be her father, no; her father had bled his life out on the Indiana highway, rushing home from work, and what was sacrificed could never be so easily replaced), no matter how many times her mother pretended not to see. That was her home. She was going home, and nothing was going to stop her.
Lou was so focused on where she was planning to wind up that she stopped paying attention to where she was. Her foot found arabbit hole in the hillside, already half-flooded, the rabbits either fled or drowned, and the sound of her ankle snapping was like a bolt of lightning, followed a second later by the dull thunder rumble of pain so big and so unheard of that it seemed to fill her entire body, leaving no room for anything else. She fell, landing hard on the jar in her arms, which shattered and drove glass shards deep into the flesh of her chest and throat.
There wasn’t time to scream, and it wouldn’t have mattered if she had, for
“You’re big ones, aren’t you,” she said, tipping the jar a bit to give herself a better angle. “Must have been a good season for you guys. Never seen ones quite like you before . . .”
And the sky ripped open, and the rain came down.
A ll summers are unique to the places in which they happen. California summers are hot desert things, brutal in the daylight and cold at night. Florida summers are humid and wet, unforgiving in their unrelenting heat. Indiana summers are alight with storms and fireflies, the sky always the color of a bruise, from the angry green of the impending twister to the acid yellow tainting the edges of an otherwise perfect blue. Indiana summers never let anyone forget that they are wounds carved out of the flesh of the calendar, warm not because of the presence of the sun, but because they are still bleeding.
Lou ran through the rain, her feet squelching in the increasingly sodden grass, her jam jar full of fireflies clutched against her chest like some sort of talisman of safe passage through the storm. She ran, and the storm pursued, sending down torrents of water that threatened to sweep her legs out from underneath her and send hersprawling into the grass. The conditions weren’t right for a flash flood, she knew, but she ran all the same, because the longer she stayed out here, the more her mother would worry. Her mother seemed to worry all the time these days, and maybe that was another sign of how dangerous the impending storm at home was growing. The time between the lightning and the thunder had worn away to almost nothing, one lingering look at a time.
The motion seemed to be agitating the fireflies. They lit up a little brighter every time her foot came down, until she was carrying a jar full of light across the field, as bright as a fallen star, beating back the darkness as fiercely as it could. She could see the back side of her neighborhood from the hill, the lights on and glowing a little more gently than her captives. All the windows would be closed against the rain, she knew, and the back door with its bad latch would be locked to keep the wind from blowing it open. She was going to have to go around the front of the house and knock like a guest, begging for entrance to her own place. What if they didn’t let her in? The fear wasn’t new, but it was shocking every time it showed its face. She tried to push it aside, and it came springing back, twice as big. What if they said “ You want to be a storm’s child, go be a storm’s child, don’t bring any of your rain or wrongness here ,” and turned their faces away, and turned the porch light off?
No. No, and no, and no again. That was her home down there, nestled safe in its line of homes just like it, and it was always going to be hers, no matter how many bad looks she got from her drunken stepdaddy (and he was never going to be her father, no; her father had bled his life out on the Indiana highway, rushing home from work, and what was sacrificed could never be so easily replaced), no matter how many times her mother pretended not to see. That was her home. She was going home, and nothing was going to stop her.
Lou was so focused on where she was planning to wind up that she stopped paying attention to where she was. Her foot found arabbit hole in the hillside, already half-flooded, the rabbits either fled or drowned, and the sound of her ankle snapping was like a bolt of lightning, followed a second later by the dull thunder rumble of pain so big and so unheard of that it seemed to fill her entire body, leaving no room for anything else. She fell, landing hard on the jar in her arms, which shattered and drove glass shards deep into the flesh of her chest and throat.
There wasn’t time to scream, and it wouldn’t have mattered if she had, for
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