Ghost in the Cogs & Love Hurts Results

So I sent in "Mark of Bone and Salt" to the anthology Ghost in the Cogs and I sent in "Ouroboros" and "Broken" to Love Hurts. All three got rejected. Boo. :(

But I won't give up. "Bone and Salt," at least, is so amaze-bunnies I'm going to send it to another anthology and see if they like it. Wish me luck, my peeps!

CONTRACT!!! OH YEAH!!

I have to show off! The contract w/ Visual Adjectives arrived today and I filled it out (forgot to take a pic, tho, oops) and sent it in. SO HAPPY! Here's pics of the contract on the desktop.

EEEEEEEEEEEK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

OHMYGAWSHOHMYGAWSHOHMYGAWSHOHMYGAWSHOHMYGAWSHOHMYGAWSHOHMYGAWSHOHMYGAWSHOHMYGAWSHOHMYGAWSHOHMYGAWSHOHMYGAWSHOHMYGAWSHOHMYGAWSHOHMYGAWSHOHMYGAWSHOHMYGAWSHOHMYGAWSHOHMYGAWSHOHMYGAWSHOHMYGAWSH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's happened! One of my shorts got accepted for publication! For money this time! Yay-uh! Let me hear ya say, "Woot, woot!" Uh-huh, say, "Woot, woot!"

My short story inspired by 1001 Arabian Nights, "The Lioness of Afsana," got accepted into Visual Adjectives' anthology, New Legends: Fantasy. For $25!!! YES!!!

Go, LA! Go, LA!

OUROBOROS

He came out of the green mist of the wilds beyond the topside Ironworks, roses trailing along behind him trying to push through the ragged cracks in the broken pavement. No one told him that he had no power beyond the edges of his mother's Vale. No one told this prince, this child of summer and lordling of spring, that his magic would curl away and shrivel and die surrounded by the death-saturated smog where winter always ruled.

Because no one told him, he did not believe it. And belief was a powerful magic in its own right. One that could never be stripped from him.

She watched him from the shadows cast by the jutting iron spires, pretending to ratchet the gears and tighten the mechanisms that filled her free time. The iron glinted cold in the sick sunlight that managed to break through the heavy clouds overhead. Clouds nearly black as the fresh, rich earth still clinging to his bare feet. She was only a darker shadow amidst the tenebrous iron ghosts.

Erebus, they called her when they thought she could not hear. Darkness. Nyx, Queen of Night and Stygian Iron, Mistress of Rot and Maggots. So they named her in the world beneath the Ironworks, the steel and granite labyrinth below. Hers was a name even specters feared to murmur when dark fell on the world.

But here above, in the steam-silvered kingdom of noon-forged metal, she was just another woman. One who could bend the iron bones of the earth to her will, who could sing steel into argent lace as delicate as a spider's web…but still just another woman among the humans who found their love or their livelihoods in the Ironworks. Death was her dominion, but so was the earth and all its riches. And here she could revel in them without though to the carcasses waiting underground to be judged by Hades, Queen of the Dead.

Here she could watch the one thing she wanted most and could never have without fear the summer witch would see her. It had been centuries upon centuries since she'd ventured above in search of any sort of comfort or warmth without the warding guise of winter chill and humanity and metal. Every time she tried to set foot in this world without hiding, summer turned her back again with a scorching slap across her death-cold cheek and that blasting, withering blight against her own wintry power.

No, the sun roared with a burning silence that deafened. You will not take what history tried to surrender to you. You will not steal what is mine.

Hers. Demeter, Queen of Summer, terrible as fire and beautiful as dawn light after the longest night of the year.

But he didn't belong to her, anymore than he belonged to Hades, or to anyone. He, the one she watched, was all his own. He walked in his own strength.

Legends said she'd taken him away long ago. That their love had set the seasons to turning, sent the Lady of Summer scurrying back to her Vale in fear of the combined might of the Queen of the Underworld and her consort.

But those were only legends. It had been centuries, and she could only dare to dream in rare moments when he slipped from that witch's clutching grasp of smothering, choking mother love to wander close to the Ironworks.

Humans had once believed the earth turned and seasons came and went because of love. Now they thought it was science. Well, she was liable to believe it was because Demeter was playing a game with her. Taunting her with what she could never have.

After all, mothers never believed anyone could be good enough for their sons.

Despite the boiling heat of the Ironworks' forges, the ground crackled with otherworldly frost that rarely melted. Steam drifted through the air like fog but the wintry air leached away the heat. Yet where he walked, his steps melted ice and breathed warmth back into the air. Hades watched him, all powerful movement and dancing grace, all dark eyes filled with sadness and soft smile edged with pain.

He came, touching the walls of twisted, rusting iron and glittering steel. Through gaps in the portcullis that shielded the Queen of the Dead, eyes like rich warm earth met eyes empty and black. He pressed his palm to the cold steel. She lifted a hand to lay her palm to his, iron bars separating them by a mere breath.

She could rend iron, burst steel asunder. She could shatter the foundations of the earth if she chose. But there were rules to play by. She had followed these rules for centuries upon centuries upon centuries. And the rules laid down by her brothers forbade the breaking of the world. Even for him.

"She'll see you," she whispered. Where her breath touched, a blanket of hoarfrost crept across the metal. "You shouldn't have come."

"It's still early spring." His voice rustled soft as a zephyr in the grass. "She is weak now. For now, you are the stronger." He paused, teeth worrying at his lip. She had kissed those lips a thousand times in a thousand dreams but never in the waking world. His voice came soft as a lover's caress when he whispered, "I had to see you."

"Persis." She shaped his name like a prayer, like a song. His eyes drank her in, hungry as a starving ghost. "Persis."

"How much longer do we have to wait, Hades?" Anguish turned the words sharp and brittle; desperation whetted their edges. "I can't bear this. She watches me almost constantly. She sends away my friends if they so much as mention anything beyond the Vale." Persis pressed his forehead against the cold steel. His voice came ragged and rough when he confessed, "Hades, I can't live like this."

"There are rules—"

"Damn the rules," he cried, grasping the icy bars. "Hades, you have lived by Zeus's rules for thousands of years, and for what? They cast you into darkness and call it Fate. They shun you, belittle you up there in their precious palaces on Olympus, and call it jesting. You are always fair, never cruel, never vengeful, and you refuse to ever bend or break their precious rules. For what?"

A tear spilled down her cheek. Straining, Persis pushed two fingers through a gap in the bars and brushed it away. Where the teardrop fell, a small green shoot burst through a crack in the pavement and uncurled a tiny, soft leaf. Even that small touch gave life to that which came from death.

"She won't let me use my powers, Hades," Persis whispered. He shuddered. "She keeps throwing out these little bits of magic and I can feel her power crushing me. She keeps pushing at me with her power. Trying to stifle me, to stop me from growing up. She won't let me breathe. I can't breathe in there anymore. It's been centuries since I could leave the Vale without having to sneak like some thief…"

Hades knew what it was, not to be able to catch your breath, crushed beneath the weight of expectation and demand. Of course she did. She was Hades. She was Queen of the Dead. She knew well the weight of what others would have of you before they were done and life was ended. It was the last thing she'd wanted for someone like Persis.

Honor had bound her since she and her brothers and sisters had cast the Titans down into Tartarus. Honor had compelled her to yearn for, but never seek out, the one she wanted most as centuries passed—Bronze Age and Iron Age, ages of legends and superstition, Dark Ages and Industrial Ages and on and on towards the ending of all things. Obedience to the laws she and her brothers had agreed on so long ago. Faithfulness to her oaths.

But had she not sworn him an oath once too? That though they could never be together, she would be his always, and he hers? An oath more precious than any other.

Obedience to Zeus, and for what?

She met his gaze, those dark eyes glistening with unshed tears and hope and hurt. He strained until the tips of his fingers touched her cheek. His callused touch was rough velvet, and so warm it burned her.

"Hades…"

"Give me six months, Persis." She couldn't work faster than that and still obey duty to the Land of the Dead. But if she were to have the strength to do something, she would need to see to the working first. "Six months to do what I must. And then I promise you…it will all be over. Everything will be well."

After a small eternity, he nodded. He would trust her. He had always trusted her. And now she would prove worthy of that trust.

A splash of gold caught her eye. She turned her head the smallest fraction and bared her teeth at a little sunflower just opening its petals some dozen paces away. She nodded to the pestilent weed. Persis didn't look; he didn't need to. He didn't even bother to sigh. Simply pulled away from the portcullis dividing him from her and drifted away, back toward the Vale. The flowers bursting from the earth in his wake began to droop after only a few seconds. The despair of a trapped wild thing withered them before they'd even fully bloomed. Hades watched him go, clutching the steel slats so hard they threatened to break through her skin and taste immortal blood.

In what perverse world, she wondered, did sunflowers represent the threat of imprisonment? And for who?

This world, cruel as it was, and only for the son of Demeter.

Well. It was still day, though the sun shone weak. Spring still carried a bite of winter's chill; night would be here soon, but not yet. For now, Hades thought, hefting a hammer, she had work to do. She was no Hephaestus, but the precious things of the earth were hers to command. And she knew exactly what she would need if she was to rescue Persis.

Because he was right: the rules be damned.

#

Sweat sizzled, dripping down Hades' face. She'd never worked so hard in all her long life as she did then at the forges, while spring's chill surrendered to summer's brutality. Her forge there in the hidden heart of the Ironworks, where winter and death still held sway every day of the year and the furnaces burned like funeral pyres—this forge tried to be willful. Tried to rage to be unleashed, to shape black steel and corpse-bronze and Stygian iron as it would. But she was Hades, Queen of the Underworld. Queen of the Earth. And the funerary fires that blasted through the Ironworks furnaces would obey her.

The heat blasted through her, hot enough to make her icy blood boil. She'd cut herself on pieces of metal, on jagged rock, on the edges of hammer and anvil; the drops had left ice crystals clinging to iron struts and cracked asphalt. Exhaustion beat at her, strong enough to wear down even a goddess. Even death.

But she thought of Persis, trapped in Demeter's Vale. Thought of the legends that whispered cruelly of forlorn hope. Myths that told of a Lord Hades—and where had the idea of Lord Hades ever come from?—and how he'd saved the trapped maiden Persephone from the clutching obsessive love of her mother.

Persis was no maiden, Hades no lord, but she would save him nonetheless.

Summer's brutal rage battered the earth, parching fields and drinking up rivers. The sun wheeled overhead and every day at dawn, Hades was at work at her forge. Boiling water flooded through steaming copper pipes to quench the heat in every rod and band she shaped in her fire. The screech of steam whistling overhead never managed to drown out the echoing silence where Persis' steps should have sounded. But it was high summer, the witch mother's time, and so Persis could not come to her, even for a simple look heavy and sweet with yearning.

Yet autumn was coming. And when the equinox came, and summer's power began to wane all the faster…Hades would see Persis again.

As her blood dripped into the fire, as the flames of her forge blazed white hot, she didn't care that her blood boiled and the cinders scorched her skin and her muscles screamed. She thought only of Persis, of shattering the bonds of his prison. Shattering the very foundations of the earth if needs be.

Her shoulders burned with fatigue. She'd pounded metal long into the night. She hadn't slept in days. Her hands were blistered, the flesh cracked and raw and red because this was no mere mortal flame, but Tartaran fire—fueled by the blood of Hephaestus mingling with the cold, burning ichor of distant stars—and even a goddess was not immune to it. Soot smeared her scorched back; her face was dark with coal dust and char. Blood blisters purpled under her fingernails. Whenever she blinked, grit stung her eyes. Her chest burned from breathing in the smoke.

When she pulled the pieces from the fire, they shimmered like air wavering above a furnace. Iridescent sheen like rainbows, like light, like diamonds and breath, against the tenebrous void she loved so well. A gleam like oil in the winter sun.

Hades pulled the last piece from the fire, set it in the black water that bubbled up from cracks in the stone at her command. She listened to the steam hiss, watched steel rods and bronze wheels coming together with snaps like breaking bones, groaning and cracking like the breaking of glaciers.

When it was done, when her work stood before her shining dark and terrible, she smiled. Let this strike fear into Demeter's heart. Let this be a declaration to Zeus.

She was done being the obedient little sister. For herself, she would have accepted it, as she had these many centuries, but not now. Not when it held the power to hurt the one she loved.

No one would keep her from fulfilling her oath to Persis.

#

Persis dashed the sweat from his face, struggling to push his way through the thickening barriers surrounding the Vale. Summer rains had turned the earth to thick mud that sucked at his feet and ankles, dragging him back from the edge. Rough vines sticky with sap yanked on his arms.

Enough of this. He wouldn't be a prisoner in his own home. He wanted to see Hades. He needed to see her. The last time had been that day when she'd promised him…Six months, she'd said, the day before the spring equinox. Six months. Well, it had been six months and a day, and Persis wasn't waiting any longer. If Hades hadn't come, it was because she couldn't come. Because summer's power was still too strong here in the Vale. Because Demeter's power was too strong without its opposite to give it balance.

Everything needed balance. Persis had known this since he was a boy racing after his mother, before the earth had begun to quicken at his step. Before fresh, green life had begun to creep up out of the soil when he drew near. Everything needed balance—autumn to spring, summer to winter, death to life. It was all a cycle, like a serpent devouring its own tail. Even Demeter knew that, in some ways.

When it came to the seasons, Demeter thought herself Hades' opposite, her equal. But she wasn't. Summer wasn't new life. Summer was life in the living. It was a mother with her child, crops ripening in the field, the honey-sweet moons after a wedding. Autumn was the journey toward death, but it wasn't life, either. It was transitory. A time of harvest, summer clinging to the world while winter rose up in all its deathly and chill beauty. Summer and autumn were the transition from that first breath of life to the final gasp before death, from spring to winter. Nothing more.

But spring…that was Persis' domain. Spring was new life. The quickening womb, the seed bursting with fresh green, a newborn babe, the first blush of love. He'd learned that from the Queen of the Dead. Demeter wasn't her opposite or her equal.

Persis was.

But his mother wanted to stifle that. She wanted to remain the mother with her child, but he wasn't a child anymore. She had to let him grow, even just a little. He'd lived centuries. He'd learned to call forth his power. If Demeter had her way, he would never have known he even had any power. It was chance that he'd cut himself on his hunting knife one day and his blood had watered the earth, calling up tender green shoots trembling in the gentle breeze. Chance that Hades had seen what he'd done, what he could do, and realized it had nothing to do with Demeter's magic and everything to do with Persis himself.

Hades. Demeter had set wards around the Vale to stop Persis from leaving without her knowledge, and she didn't even know about all the times he'd snuck out to be with Hades. If the Lady of Summer ever learned what her son shared with the Queen of the Underworld…

Give me six months, Persis. Six months to do what I must. And then I promise you…it will all be over. Everything will be well.

If Demeter ever found out, Persis would be no match for her. Not at her full strength, in the grips of her rage. Would Hades?

He pushed with his power, and the scent of fresh-tilled earth and gentle rains flooded his nostrils. He caught at his magic, the sheer power of spring flooding the world with growing things. There was more strength in the ability to sleep through the gripping deathly cold of winter and wake again than most people believed, especially Demeter. More to pushing away the seduction of that chill embrace than simply popping daisies out of the ground. The earth shuddered a little as Persis flexed his power against Demeter's shield. Soil poured into the watery mud, thickening it until it no longer sucked at him like a giant, hungry mouth. The scratching vines jolted back from him when his power leapt into them, sizzling through them like a wildfire. But though his mother's traps retreated from him, the warding around the edge of the Vale didn't give an inch.

"Persis!"

He whirled, nearly fell to the ground as panic bubbled hot in his blood.

Demeter stormed up the pathway leading back toward their villa. Her gown flared, the same golden-red as ripe wheat in a bloody sunset. Her stride devoured the distance between them. He'd never seen such rage in her eyes as he did now, when they darkened to the tempestuous gray of summer monsoons.

She wasn't supposed to be here. She couldn't know what he was doing or she would stop him. She would wrap him up like a fragile porcelain doll and tuck him away on a shelf in the dark, stifled, and he would never be allowed to wander the Vale again, never be allowed to escape the lovely trap of it. Never be allowed to relish his power again…

Never see Hades again.

"Mother—"

"What are you doing?" Beneath Demeter's words a mother's fury shrilled like a cyclone. Zeus was king of storms, Persis thought, but his mother was mistress of summer and autumn, commander of rains to nourish fields or drown them. He could see it in her now. Feel it as the ground shook with every slap of her sandals upon the path. "Where are you going? You know it's too dangerous to step beyond the Vale!"

"Mother…" He trailed away. What were words? How often could you spill them into the air, offer them up like gifts, before they lost all meaning? How many times could he try to explain that she couldn't keep him prisoner anymore? "I…"

The earth still shuddered and Persis saw, as if in a dream, the first tendrils of diamond frost creeping across the summery vale. Frost spilled over the stones, crackled across the grass and the vines. Ice swept along the little streams and rivers.

Autumn had come to the Vale. And fast on its heels…

Now Persis glimpsed the fear behind the fury in his mother's eyes. She had known even before he had what was coming. Who was coming.

Six months had been her promise. Give her six months' time. And when six months and half a day had passed, here she was.

Demeter reached for him, but Persis twitched away and darted back, putting as much distance as possible between them. There was nothing to fear from winter. Nothing to fear as the earth where he'd been standing split. Dark earth geysered up from the fissure. Persis raised an arm to shield his face but he would not cower. Not from her.

When he looked again, the Queen of the Underworld stood before him.

Skeletal, black iron horses snorted and stamped the earth with razored hooves; their eyes glowed with winter fire as blue as the flames of corpse candles. They were harnessed to a chariot bristling with spikes. The wheel caps bore the image of a snarling, three-headed beast. And standing so at ease she looked nearly bored, clad in chitinous black armor that seemed to drink up every drop of light, stood Hades. She held the chariot reins loose in one hand; the other hand, she braced against her hip. Her hair cascaded out from beneath a grisly helm, the metal carved like a fanged, open-mouthed skull, to flow around her body like a dark cloak.

She didn’t even glance at Demeter. She had eyes only for Persis. Without a word, she held out her hand to him.

Somehow he found his tongue. "You did all of this in six months?"

The chariot that is fiercer and crueler than the one he'd seen her race centuries ago when their kind still played such games? The horses of black iron bones and Tartarus fire, forged in the blazing heart of the Ironworks where she'd hid from Demeter for decade upon decade? The armor, all shadow and spines and bite, to recast her image once again as the terrible warrior goddess that had long ago slain Titan and Earth-born alike when they rose up to wage war on Olympus?

A smile flitted across her face, there and gone like a star snuffed out. She doffed her helmet, setting it on a chariot post, and canted her head. "You'd be surprised what I can accomplish when I put my mind to it." Only then did she spare a single look for a speechless Demeter before focusing on Persis again. "Come with me, and I swear she'll never cage you again."

Demeter sputtered. "Cage him? I've never caged him! I've been protecting him from you, you foul-tongued—"

"And who will protect me from you, Mother?" Persis wondered how these words had sat so long in his heart, but never found the strength to fly from his lips. Wondered how he'd lived with the weight of them for so long. "I've done everything—begged, bargained, explained. But you wouldn't heed. You made the Vale a cage. For centuries you tried to protect me from the world, but you can protect nothing forever. If you try to keep a sapling in a pot, it will have no room to grow and it will die."

"You're not a sapling!" Demeter cried. "You're my son—"

"You are the Lady of Summer, queen of the harvest, mother goddess of all things that grow," Hades said. Her voice came soft as a sigh, but it was heavy with the weight of years upon years, and cold. "You are mistress of the transition from birth unto death. You know the cycle. This you have always known. It is your mastery, and you have maintained that cycle in all your doings but this one. How can you willfully ignore what you are doing to him?"

"Silence, you child-stealing bitch!"

Persis flinched, though his mother's rage had been flung at Hades with a sharpness like knives. Centuries upon centuries he had tried. When did you stop trying? When did you at last give up justifying and simply do what needed to be done?

Hades still stretched out her hand to him.

In the myths humans told, Persis knew that Lord Hades had snatched up Persephone from a field of narcissus amidst a grove of cypress trees and carried her to the Underworld with only her scream and the bugling of his chariot horses to mark their passing. And Demeter had flooded and scorched the world by turns in order to bring her daughter back.

But this wasn’t a myth, and there was no Persephone and no Lord of the Underworld. There would be no screams. There was only Persis and Hades. And while Demeter was strong, she was no equal to the Queen of Winter or her chosen consort. Hades would never let her do what the legends foretold she would. All she could do was grieve as her son took that outstretched hand and pulled himself into the chariot in silence.

He met Hades' eyes, and for one of those rare times they held warmth, but also sorrow. Hades turned to a stricken Demeter.

"Let us go without raising a hand to us," she said softly, "and he will return to you in the spring in six months' time—if he chooses. I will not stop him."

Demeter spat at her. "Lying whore. Queen of Rot and Maggots, I will never let you steal my son from me."

"It seems to me you have very little choice in the matter. And the only who does has made his decision."

Persis closed his eyes. Gripped the lip of the chariot with one hand so tightly his knuckles turned white as bones. His other hand he settled at Hades' waist. She covered the hand that rested on the chariot with her own. Her touch was cool, but not cold. Queen of Death and Winter she might be, but she loved him.

He turned his head and for the first time pressed his lips to her temple. The softness of her skin and the silken brush of midnight hair shocked him, cool against his face and sweet with the scent of narcissus.

"I'm sorry, Mother," he whispered.

He couldn't look at Demeter as a long, low cry welled up in her throat. He could only clutch tight to Hades as the ground split anew and chariot leapt down and down into the dark earth and billows of heat and silver steam. Demeter's wail of anguish followed them long after the earth had closed above their heads.

THE END

BROKEN

It was a safe haven, a paradise—one he'd made for the woman who was his very heart, amidst the last of the sacred wildwood forests, away from demon-savaged city. Unicorns slipped and shimmered like moonbeams between the trees, though they didn't come near the palazzo itself. Robins and blue jays, meadowlarks and goldfinches sang their songs for her; they weren't bothered by mindless screams late in the night or heartbroken weeping as dawn broke.

Crocuses pushed through the earth in bursts of gold and purple and lilies filled the air with their fresh, sweet fragrance—it blanketed the subtle sting of blood that sometimes hung in the air. There were no roses, though the heavy rainbow of blooms would've comforted Juliet. Romeo could not risk roses. Not after what she'd done the last time with the thorns.

For a moment, all he could see were white roses stained with crimson. Her skin, so very pale, stained with that same crimson.

He shook the memory away.

Prince Romeo—oh, yes, he was sovereign of their fair city now; all had been forced to bow before the sorcery that had won him the crown of Verona—Prince Romeo strode up the soft earthen path lined with blue larkspur and pale primroses.

His guards marched behind him, careful not to damage or otherwise disturb the flowers. Not after what had happened the last time, when Juliet had screamed and wept over a broken patch of marigolds and been inconsolable for days. Every one of Romeo's footsteps suddenly seemed to take a Herculean effort. The earth was yielding as flesh beneath his black leather boots.

The marigolds, he thought, were for someone she loved. The shade of Tybalt returned to haunt them yet.

Wherefore villain did you kill my cousin?

Portia, Juliet's nurse, bowed low to him even as she opened the front door of the sprawling palazzo. She'd been the head of this small, sequestered utopia for the last two years, ever since Romeo Montague had swept through Verona like a vengeful ghost and taken control.

Even now he could hear the howling of the wolf-shades he'd set to hunting the Capulets. It mingled with the phantom screams of the dying.

Romeo pushed the sound away. Such nightmare-memories had no place here. This was Juliet's haven. He could not let the charnel-house shades find their way here.

"Portia," he murmured, inclining his head. The nurse fell into step beside him as they moved down the corridor; the shadow of her fear hovered close. Romeo's eyes slid over the tapestries and brightly woven wall-hangings that added color to the hallway. "How is she today?"

"She appears lucid, for the most part, milord," Portia said softly. "Yet her memory has slipped from her grasp again. We caught her digging in the garden again early this morning near dawn, yet now she will not let us near. She has asked for you."

"Has she eaten yet?" It was midday, he thought, but sometimes Juliet did not eat for days at a time, depending on how long her lucidity lasted. And sometimes, when she was fairly lucid if amnesic, she would only eat with him.

Portia shook her head. "Not yet. A meal waits for both of you in the garden. She has been walking there for most of the morning."

Romeo found Juliet in the garden, just as Portia had said, beneath a stand of cypress trees. She wore no shoes. Mud caked her feet. It was spring, and it had rained the night before. Clutched in one muddy hand was a bouquet of snowdrops white as bones. The hem of her simple blue gown was torn and damp. Her hair hung down her back in a tangle. Yet when she turned her head and found his face with her sloe dark eyes, the joy that lit Juliet's face threatened to crack his very heart in half.

"Romeo!" She ran to him. He could do nothing else but hold out his arms to her. When she threw herself into his arms and he enfolded her, he felt her bones pressing into him through dress and easily-bruised skin. Tiny particles of earth sprinkled his black velvet sleeve as she clutched the bedraggled nosegay of flowers. "Oh, you're here! You're here. They won't let me leave," she said, frowning. She pulled back to look up at him. "Why won't they let me?" She always asked him that.

His throat ached and his eyes stung from holding back tears. There was none of Juliet's familiar light in those eyes. Something was missing from her gaze. It hurt him, made him despise himself, yet when she remembered and the light returned it always terrified him. At least when her eyes were dull and soft and brown, she didn't hate him. Couldn't loathe him nearly as much as he loathed himself.

"It is for your safety, cara mia," he murmured, and waited to see if she would understand, or at least accept. Waited to see if his words would trigger her memory, or a psychotic episode. It took so little to send her from mostly-lucid to shuddering with madness.

In the end, she merely nodded.

"What's that you have there?" He asked, forcing a smile that felt as if it would crack his face. He cupped the hand holding the flowers.

"For you," she said brightly, like a child presenting a gift. She held up the flowers. The roots were still attached, slender white veins yet gasping for the nurturing darkness of the earth. "Do you like them? I wanted to do something to cheer you up. You've been distracted lately. Sad. Do you like them?"

If he gave into weakness, she wouldn't understand why he wept, Romeo thought, and it would only distress her, so he forced himself to bear up.

"I love them," he murmured, and took the little bouquet. "Very much." Knowing he could not bear to see that beaming smile for too long without breaking, he asked, "Have you eaten?" When Juliet shook her head, he suggested oh so casually, "Perhaps we could have lunch." He gestured to a little pavilion draped in airy white a bit nearer to the palazzo.

"Alright." Juliet slipped both arms around one of his, heedless of the dirt.

As he'd expected, Portia waited by the pavilion's large white wicker table and chairs. A large bucket of water sat at her feet. A bar of soft amber soap set on a cream-colored dish rested in her hands and she held two washrags and two hand-towels draped over one arm. Romeo laid the bouquet of flowers on the edge of the table and rolled up his sleeves. He glanced at Juliet. She stared at the water, head cocked to one side, eyes vacant.

"My lady," Portia murmured. "If I may—" Juliet jerked back, eyes narrowed . She shook her head. In a gentle, placating voice, Portia tried again. "Come, now, milady…"

"Give me your hands, Juliet," Romeo said. His lady turned to him. He held out one hand, surprised it didn't tremble. "I'll help you get the mud off."

She blinked. Her brow furrowed. "I can do it."

"Let me," he insisted gently. "Please." After a long moment, Juliet nodded and gave him her hands. Romeo pulled off her wedding ring and set it on the wicker table beside the flowers.

As he carefully and gently washed away the caked-on earth, he found some damage to the delicate appendages. A torn fingernail. Cuts from sharp stones that had gone unnoticed while she dug up the flowers. Dried smears of blood were dark brown beneath the lighter brown of the mud.

Blood had been the instrument of Verona's demise. Juliet's blood, he'd thought. Tybalt's blood mingling in the street with Mercutio's. Romeo's own spilled by the blade that had cut down his new-sworn kinsman and ripped all asunder. With that blood, he'd summoned a conflagration that swept through the streets to burn them clean, a pack of wolves, a legion of demons to purge Verona of all who bore the blood of Capulet.

All but one.

When Juliet's hands were at last clean, the cuts cleansed and the short, raggedly-bitten nails white and free of earth, Romeo insisted on washing the dried earth from her feet. Because he was the one to ask, she acquiesced, though he could see she didn't understand why mud on her feet was a problem. He found pale gray-blue bruises marring the soft soles of her feet, and a few scratches. When he was done, she donned her ring again and sat down to eat.

He had to coax her to eat. Not because she wasn't hungry—at least, he didn't think so. More that her mind, anchorless and unable to stay in the present, forgot to keep having her feed herself. She'd become so thin…

So he did his best to coax her through the simple meal of bread, fruit, and cheese, calling her back with soft words every time her mind wandered down some new avenue of insanity and her eyes drifted away to gaze unseeingly at the forest beyond the garden walls.

"One more bite, cara," Romeo murmured near the end of the meal. Juliet jumped as if he'd stuck her with a pin. Her eyes met his. She frowned. Looked down at her plate. The raspberry custard was the last of the food on her plate. He'd managed to get her to eat the rest of it. He knew her nurse couldn't get this sort of result. Keeping that fake smile plastered on his face, he added, "Just one more bite and we'll do something else. How does that sound?"

Juliet scooped up another bite of custard. Stared at the creamy burgundy dessert.

"It's red," she said softly. "It's not supposed to be red." She set the spoon down, staring at it in consternation. "It's supposed to be yellow. I don't know where the yellow is. It's supposed to be yellow but I've lost the colors." Chewing her bottom lip, she glanced around. Turned confused eyes to Romeo. "Romeo…do you know where they are?"

He didn't know where he managed to dredge up the words, or the strength to say them to her. "Amore mio, you haven't lost yellow. It's supposed to be red."

She shook her head vehemently. "No. No, it's custard. Custard is yellow. Like the roses you gave me." The roses with their thorns that had torn her bruised skin the last time she'd remembered what he'd done. "I lost the yellow and I don't know how to get it back." She nibbled on the edge of her thumb. Frowned at her plate. A tear spilled down her cheek. "How could I lose yellow? If I lose yellow I lose sunshine and your roses and—"

"Juliet." It hurt to say her name. How it hurt. Hurt to see her sorrow and her bewilderment. This was his fault—her alarmed confusion, and the madness that had created it. "Juliet, yellow isn't lost. The custard we usually eat is yellow, but this time it is red. I wanted to try something new. It's raspberry, sweetheart. Raspberries are red, remember?"

A frown twisted her mouth. "Raspberry?" She looked up from her plate. For a moment, the cloudiness in her eyes faded a little. "You prefer lemon. It's your favorite. We always have lemon."

"I wanted to try something different," Romeo replied. I'm sorry, he added silently. I'm so sorry, cara.

"Different?" She frowned more fiercely, brow furrowing as she struggled to understand. All at once, her expression cleared. She nodded. "Raspberry. Raspberries are red. I didn't lose yellow. Yes." She nodded again. "Of course." She picked up the spoon again. Took a bite.

Her mind is so broken, Romeo thought, fighting to swallow the custard. Such little things upset and confuse her so much. Raspberry custard instead of lemon. Washing the mud from her hands. Marigolds accidentally crushed beneath his boots. She'd screamed herself hoarse over the dead flowers, he remembered. Screamed as if she were dying. It seemed Tybalt's name had torn from her throat to shatter the world.

Mi amore, my beloved, he thought. He wanted to say the words but they sat heavy as lead on his tongue. Oh, my love…

"I had a dream last night," Juliet whispered suddenly, pulling him from the poisonous sea of his remorse. Overhead, thunder rumbled. "It was horrible."

A stone seemed lodged in his throat. A dream… Every time she had an episode, every time she remembered the truth of what had happened, it was prefaced by a dream, a nightmare of killing and bloodshed and carnage.

"It was only a dream, Juliet."

She shook her head. "There was fire. Screaming. Blood ran down my window like rain." She glanced from the spoon to him. Another tear fell. "The streets were rivers of blood and the dead were everywhere. Dead children. My family. Corpses in the street." The spoon fell to the plate with a harsh clatter. She hugged herself. "And there were monsters. Wolves with devils' eyes and shadows with teeth and roses tearing across throats with their thorns. Monsters butchering innocent people."

Romeo was at her side in an instant, sliding his arms about her. His heart beat mercilessly against his breast. Please, he prayed, not for the first time. Please, don't let her remember. Don't let her remember that day. If I had known…if I'd known the truth, I would have never…

But aloud, all he said was, "It was a dream, Juliet. Only a bad dream."

"Tybalt was dead," she whimpered.

Romeo closed his eyes as grief tore through him like claws. Tybalt. Her cousin who was like a brother to her. And Mercutio, dying in his own blood, fallen at Tybalt's feet…

Turn and draw! Madness fueling rage in the eyes of the man who had been his kinsman but an hour. His sword limned by the light of the setting sun, which had transformed the steel to blood for an instant.

Aye, Tybal was dead. Tybalt, and Mercutio. Rosaline, and Benvolio who had tried to defend her from Romeo's demons. From Romeo's madness that had blazed from Mantua to Verona, fed by his manservant's report that Juliet—sweet, dear Juliet, his wife and his lady—was dead, too.

Another crack of thunder. Juliet didn't seem to hear.

"A monster in red velvet stabbed him through the chest. There was blood. Red, red. Like the raspberries. He fell. He fell," she mumbled, beginning to rock back and forth. "Fell, and wherefore villain did you kill my cousin? Romeo, Romeo—"

"Juliet," he murmured as she rocked and rocked, eyes empty and vague, "Juliet. Mi amore. It's all right. It was only a dream. It is all right. It was only a dream."

"No," she said, "no." She reached up and tugged at a tangled wisp of her hair. Pulled the limp curl straight. "No, it wasn't a dream. Not a dream. Real. It was real. Tybalt fell and his blood stirred the thirst for more, and you…" Thunder cracked violently. She yanked on the lock of hair. "You killed him! Juliet screaming and it's not a dream, Tybalt slew Mercutio, Romeo slew Tybalt, vain vengeance, and you murdered my cousins and my mother and my father and—"

"No, Juliet," Romeo said, fear icing his veins. She rocked faster. "No, that's not what—"

"You killed Tybalt," she gasped the words and it was as if they were fists striking her body. Her voice rose in pitch. The anguish twisted her expression. "You killed Tybalt. You killed everyone. You… you…I remember. I remember! Everyone is dead, Tybalt and Livia and Helena and Rosaline and Sampson and you killed them all, my family, all the Capulets, you Montague wretch—"

"I thought you were dead," he protested. He tightened his grip on her. "Juliet, they told me you were dead—"

She shook her head, keening, struggling feebly against Romeo's hold. Though it felt as if it would kill him to do it, he let her go. She lunged to her feet and scrambled away from him, still making that awful keening wailing sound.

"You murdered my family!" She cried it, sobbed it. A jagged white bolt of lightning struck one of the cypress trees. The mad vague emptiness cleared from her eyes and there was a terrible clarity left in its wake. "You murdered my family!"

He closed his eyes, unable to look into her stricken face. That sin, more than any but Mercutio's death—for was it not Romeo who had come between his friend and his kinsman to part their blades and end their battle? And hadn't Tybalt seized the chance to cut Mercutio down?—weighed on him like a millstone around his neck. To have lost Mercutio and then to have done this to Juliet…

"I'm sorry," he whispered.

"Monster!" She screamed it. The word slapped him across the face, left him hollow. A single tear carved its way down his cheek. Overhead, the sky ripped open. Rain smashed down on the white canvas of the pavilion. Juliet staggered backward into the downpour. "I hate you! I'll never forgive you!"

She turned and ran back toward the sprawling house. He saw her slip in the fresh mud and fall. She was back on her feet in seconds, mud darkening her skirts, blood running down her legs from where she'd cut her knees on garden stones. Romeo started after her. Called to her above the sheeting roar of the rain. Juliet didn't look back; just ran inside. The door slammed.

Romeo stopped at the door. Braced his hands on the frame and took a shuddering breath. Rested his forehead against the smooth rowan wood. He could hear her words ricocheting around in his skull. Murderer. I hate you. They throbbed in his skull. I hate you. I'll never forgive you.

"I am so sorry," he rasped, though she wasn't there to hear him. The rain plastered his clothes to his body, his hair to his skull. It mingled with the single tear that had escaped his rigid control. "I am so sorry, Juliet. I didn't know. I'm so sorry."

He'd thought they'd killed her. The Capulets. In the haze of pain and grief, the single conviction that Lord Capulet had done this to her had burned in him like hellfire.

She hadn't been dead. Juliet had woken to him, to Romeo, ere he could taste of the apothecary's sweet poison. Woken to gladness and tears and disbelieving hope and his embrace, to tenderness and the breaking of the terrible brittle conviction in him.

She had woken to hellhounds and demons licking up Capulet blood from the flooded streets and feasting on the corpses of her kin.

Romeo swallowed back salt and the sting of tears. Opened the door and strode inside. He knew where to find Juliet.

His lady was in her bedroom. She shivered on her bed, water rolling down her face from the rain, blood from her scraped knees smeared across her legs to stain the ivory and gold rug beneath her feet. Her dress was soaked through. The bedclothes were damp. She'd wiped the mud from her hands on her skirts.

Romeo stepped inside. Closed the door. Juliet looked up. Tears rolled down her cheeks the way the blood spilled down her legs.

The agonizing grief in her eyes flared hot with loathing and betrayal as she lunged off the bed, launched herself at him. He caught one fragile wrist, but not the other as she cracked her palm across his face. Blood flooded his mouth. Then he let her go to allow her to pound against his chest with her fists as she sobbed, "You monster, you monster! I hate you!" Her voice was too weak to scream but it felt as if her words crashed against his ears. "You killed my family! You killed them!"

Juliet collapsed against his chest, exhausted. Romeo ached to hold her, to comfort her, but he knew she wouldn't allow it. Not yet. Instead, he murmured, "I would bring them back if I could. For you."

She wrenched away from him. Stumbled to the bed. When her knees buckled, she sank down onto the mattress. Her eyes found his face. "Tell me it isn't true," she begged. The light of true lucidity was in her eyes now. So was a crushing grief. "Tell me it is a lie. Romeo…tell me it didn't happen."

He drew a breath that hurt. "It happened. It's true." The words were jagged stones that left his tongue bruised and bleeding. "Verona is mine. Your family is dead at the hands of my legion." He watched the silent tears come faster, listened to the first muffled sob. "All of them," he said tonelessly. "By my order."

The last bit of her composure crumbled and she dropped her face into her hands and sobbed as if she would rip apart. Romeo could bear no more. He went to the bed. Sat beside her. When he slid his arms around her again, she twisted and struggled for a moment before collapsing against him. Her tears soaked his shirt. He stroked her hair and fought against weeping as she wept. He had no right to weep. This truth had driven her mad—that by her husband's order, her family had been killed. Vengeance, he'd thought. All blood justified. But no. And now…now…

Juliet lifted her head to look up at him with shattered, tearful eyes. Every tear was a drop of Romeo's heartblood and he felt himself slowly bleeding to death. There was a plea in those eyes—a plea to make it all unreal, to undo it, to turn back the sands of time and bring her family back from oblivion.

"I'm sorry," he whispered. How often had they had this conversation? Too many times. She never remembered. It never stopped hurting. "I'm sorry, Juliet."

She stared at him. He knew what she would do next. What she always did next. She might hate him, might even fear him a little now…but he was also still the man she loved. Even the blood on his hands hadn't been enough to shatter that. So he wasn't surprised when she kissed him, a kiss that begged for some kind of comfort, fleeting though it might have been.

His lady was crying as he shifted to lean her back against her bed. She wept silently even as she pressed close and kissed him with savage desperation, needing something, anything but reality, to hold onto. Tears trailed from the corners of her eyes to wet her temples, soak her hair and the damp pillows, while her shaking hands went to the buttons of his doublet, and the hand Romeo wasn't using to hold himself above her went to the laces of her bodice.

It was the same as it always was when she remembered—a frantic, desperate thing, though it wasn't quick. His submission to her silent plea to give her something to drown her memories in. His mouth on hers, kisses that tasted of grief and salt tears and remorse. His hands on her body, rousing a fire she could never resist, even now. Juliet's own hands in Romeo's damp hair, twisted in his half-open shirt, her ragged nails scraping down his back. Tiny beads of blood welled up.

He welcomed that pain as his lips whispered across Juliet's cheeks and mouth. He welcomed the bite of nails and teeth. Did she welcome the soft blue bruises that would shadow her thighs tomorrow? The marks of pale rose, tender to the touch, that his mouth left on her skin? Was this punishment as well as comfort, for her and for him? How long would she remember this before madness smothered the memories?

In the aftermath of passion, in the heartbroken silence after Juliet cried out his name and he whispered hers, as their eyes met, he saw forgiveness and pain and heartache and fear and love in those beautiful eyes. Romeo saw her love for him, saw that it remained unbroken despite how he'd broken her. Unable to meet her eyes any longer, he drew back from her enough to help her completely out of her wet clothes before she caught a chill. Then he led her to the soft fur rug before the fireplace in an attempt to warm her.

He drew the small knitted blanket from her chair beside her window and draped it around her bare shoulders. She huddled beneath it, shivering anew. Romeo realized he was shivering, too. His clothes half-hung from his frame, and they were soaked by the rain. It was Juliet, eyes vivid with memory and sorrow, who helped him out of his wet clothes and silently offered him a place under the black knitted blanket beside her. She laid her head on his shoulder, and a piercing ache shot through him, red-hot and thin as a burning wire. He made a small sound.

"I never wanted to hurt you," Romeo whispered. His cheek rested on her slowly-drying hair. It was the first time he'd spoken anything but Juliet's name since before their joining. "I never wanted that."

She didn't speak for a long time. Finally, she asked, "Have I ever remembered before?"

"You always remember when I visit you. Always."

"But you keep coming."

He looked down at her. "I love you." It hurt to say the words. They were bitter as poison and sharp as an iron razor. Romeo thought he could feel his heart bleeding anew. "I need you, cara. I miss you…so very much."

Juliet gazed up at him, and her expression softened a little more. She touched his cheek, the scarlet mark she'd left with her slap. "I shan't remember any of this, will I?"

Romeo shook his head. She always asked him that. She had never remembered for more than a few hours.

"You must believe me," he whispered. "I thought your father had murdered you for marrying me. I…I went mad when I heard you had died, I…I'm sorry. I am so very sorry, Juliet—"

She touched her fingers to his lips. He fell silent.

"I forgive you," she whispered. The words lanced him. Sometimes she forgave. Sometimes she didn't. It was the one thing that changed. He could never know which she would choose, so he could never know if she'd truly forgiven him or not. Still, the words were a soothing balm against his raw spirit when she whispered again, "I forgive you, Romeo."

"How could you possibly?"

She cradled his face, turning more fully toward him. "Because no matter what you've done, I love you. I will always love you."

He gazed down at her, stricken. She had never said that before while still lucid. Never whispered her love for him in such a sweet murmur while her eyes drank him in as if she would never seem him again. And she was still lucid. He could see it in her eyes.

Overcome, he brought his mouth down on hers. Tasted her grief in the kiss. Then he laid her down upon the silky fur rug and made love to her twice more—once, gently, trembling more than a little, drowning in her, his face pressed against the warmth of her neck while tendrils of her damp hair clung to his cheek; and again, fiercely, while she clutched at the broad strength of his shoulders and pressed her face into the hollow where his pulse beat at his throat, and he was left gasping and grasping for her as they continued to drown in the torrent of grief and need and love and regret.

And when it was over, he laid his head upon her breast, and as she ran her fingers through his hair he wept like a heartsick child for both the pain that would never leave Juliet's eyes and the broken mind that would never truly heal.