Why hadn’t he noticed it before? There was that weird hissing of voices coming from inside, and no one was sitting in it. The car had lights on top, and they were alternating blue and white. “Awww,” Gunk said. He hoped he wasn’t too late.

The doors, of course, were shut tight, and the windows were down. He could hear human beings talking through the windows. He walked straight over to the glass and knocked once. “Hey, Hey, Hey. Any dead thing in there is mine!” He couldn’t believe that another human being was going to get to his prize first. The fat man was in there, he was sure. He walked stiffly to the window and craned his head as far as he could around the corner of the window frame. There was another man in the house. This man had a big leather belt and a bunch of jangly things hanging from it.

He had to get inside. Gunk looked around, and the very top window was open just a crack. Now, usually real creatures will not go anywhere there is not lots of sky, but this was an emergency, so he pushed through the crack and walked down to the edge of the stairs. He looked down and saw no one, so he risked flying down to the next stair landing. There he saw the fat man slumped in a chair and the other man with the creaky leather belt standing over him. The standing man was angry. The fat man had both hands on his lap. He had taken off his coat and it was resting just under his hands. It didn’t look or smell like there was fresh blood anywhere. Gunk could make out the faint smell of the old dead thing this stupid, wasteful man had rolled into the ocean back under the wharf. It gave Gunk hope that there wasn’t a new, lovely dead thing yet.

“Come on, Stan. It’s a little hard for me to believe that you just found the money on the sidewalk,” the standing man said.

“I don’t care what you find hard to believe. It’s the God’s truth.”

“Stan, you know you’re not under arrest. I’m here in your own house to ask you to tell me the truth. It will go a lot easier for you if you do. It will go a lot easier for his family if we recover his body. Where did you put him, Stan. Please tell me.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Officer.”

“So that’s your story then? You found the five hundred dollars you say he owed you lying on the sidewalk in front of his business?”

“It’s not my story. It’s the truth. Now I’m asking you again, either put me under arrest or leave.”

“Well, Stan, I’m going to leave for a minute anyway. But I have to tell you I’m going to have a lot more questions.”

“I ain’t afraid of questions,” the fat man said, still sitting in his chair, but with one of his hands now under the coat that was lying across his lap.

“Okay then, I’ll be going,” the standing man said, and he turned his back on the fat man with his one hand under the coat on his lap. Gunk noticed that the sitting man seemed a bit more relaxed, and that worried the hungry bird.

The standing man was almost out the door and Gunk could stand it no longer.

“Hey! Hey! Hey! Kill him. Kill him. Kill him,” Gunk screamed from the top of the staircase.

The sound scared the fat man, and he jumped out of his chair with a gun in his hand.

“Drop it… NOW,” someone yelled, and Stan looked for a long moment at Gunk on the stairs. He looked at him as if he recognized both him and what was coming next.

“Well somebody shoot, for crying out loud!” Gunk screamed, while the fat man turned with the gun still in his hand and two loud blasts came from the doorway. Blood spatter as lovely as summer-ripened raspberries sprayed across the room.

It wasn’t until the smoke had cleared and the chiming in his head had stopped that Gunk realized that there was music playing. The police officer pressed his hand down into the fat man’s throat and shook his head slowly back and forth. All Gunk could hear was the sound of a cello. The great fat man had been listening to Pablo Casals playing one of the Gamba Sonatas, and when the police officer left the room Gunk found himself quite alone with the corpse of this wonderfully abundant human being. It was nearly perfect. He was dimly aware of the sirens and footsteps outside, but Gunk didn’t care, even if he couldn’t see the sky or hear the treacherous cat padding down the stairs for her payoff.

“Lovely, lovely,” he said to himself, and as the sonata came to rest he waddled over to the dead man’s open eye and just before plucking it out he added one more time: “lovely.”

The Price by ANNE BISHOP

“Well, shit, sugar. Someone had a party and didn’t invite me.” And it was the kind of party I used to like. Nasty.

And yet, as I stood in the doorway, looking at what had been a nicely decorated sitting room, I felt edgy, uneasy. There’s no law against murder among the Blood, and if I’d come upon a room like this when I lived in the Realm of Terreille, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But in the Realm of Kaeleer, the Blood still live by the Old Ways, and the whole dance of Protocol and power usually works to keep confrontations from becoming fatal.

So what happened last night that ended with three men being hacked to pieces, resulting in a room now redecorated in a blood-and-gore motif?

And why did I think hacked? Using Craft and the power that makes the Blood who and what we are, a person could do just as much damage to a human body. But something in the room whispered to me that this was… not personal, exactly, but definitely a hands-on killing. There was a lingering sense of fury and hatred here.

I know those feelings well, and my past contained rooms just as messy. But there was something else here that I almost recognized but couldn’t quite name.

Of course, that could have been nothing more than annoyance with myself for being at the scene. If I’d stayed home this morning, I would have been tucking into breakfast right now. But I’d gone for a walk and ended up at this establishment because they serve a fine breakfast-and because this place was the closest thing to a Red Moon house in Kaeleer. So I’d come here to take a look at my past, which had contributed to my recently failed romance.

The Blood have a saying: Everything has a price. The price for my first attempt at a physical relationship with a man where money didn’t change hands was a bruised heart. Funny how the heart gets bruised when someone tells you you’re not what he wants-even when you already know he’s not what you want either.

But there’s nothing like a bit of slaughter to take a person’s mind off her own problems.

Using Craft, I stepped up on air so that I was standing a handspan above the carpet. I walked into the room. Three male bodies were splattered over the carpet, the walls, the furniture, and the painted screen that turned one corner of the room into a private area. I assumed there were only three because I found three left hands-and I found other body parts in triplicate.

“Lady Surreal?”

As I turned toward the doorway, I lowered my right hand and called in my favorite stiletto, using Craft to keep it sight shielded so it wouldn’t be obvious I had a weapon ready. A moment later, when I recognized the man in the doorway, I vanished the stiletto.

“Prince Rainier.”

Rainier was an Opal-Jeweled Warlord Prince from Dharo, another Territory in Kaeleer. I’d seen him a few weeks ago at a party here in Amdarh and, more recently, enjoyed dancing with him at a family wedding. I’d also noticed him in the dining room this morning, reading a book while he ate breakfast. A fine-looking man with a dancer’s build, fair skin, dreamy green eyes, and a mane of brown hair, he stood out in Dhemlan’s capital city, where the residents had the common coloring of light-brown skin, black hair, and gold eyes. Which was, actually, the common coloring of all three of the long-lived races.