'A Kiss With Teeth', 'Younger Women'

[fiefoe]

Max Gladstone's story is tartly sweet, Karen Joy Fowler's is just tart.

• Blood, he remembers, oceans of it. Screams of the impaled. There is a sound men’s breaking sterna make when you grab their ribs and pull them out and in, a bassy nightmare transposition of a wishbone’s snap. Vlad knows the plural forms of ‘sternum’ and ‘trachea,’ and all declensions and participles of ‘flense.’
• They live in a crowded city of towers and stone, a city that calls itself new and thinks itself old.
• they walk through the problem together, step by step. Then Paul does the next, and Vlad practices meditation, remembering cities rise and fall.
• Ten years ago she shone in starlight filtered through cracks in the castle’s roof. He could have killed her and hid again, as he had before. Remained a leaf blown from age to age and land to land on a wind of blood.
• Thunderclouds cluster overhead by the time he leaves the building. Heat lightning flickers on his walk uptown. Fear shines at each flash from the eyes of the peasants he passes. Peasants: another word he has not thought or used in years.
• After sunset the crows stop hiding. In masses they descend on the city and croak prophecy in its alleys. Currents of crows rush down Broadway, so thick pedestrians mistake them for a cloud, their wing-beats for the rumble of traffic or a train. Bats emerge from their lairs, and rats writhe on subway steps singing rat songs.
• “I miss.” Those two words sound naked. He struggles to finish the sentence. “I miss when we could be dangerous to one another.”
• She looks into his eyes. They embrace, once, and part. She kneels to lift the rifle case.   “Here,” he says. “Let me get that for you.”

__  Two weeks ago, he called to tell Jude he was going to be a father again.  “Again? Like you stopped being a father in between?” Jude asked frostily and turned the phone off.
__ She finds it a bit evil, really, offering her immortality under the guise of civic service when the world has such a shortage of civic-minded vampires in it. And she came so close to falling for it.