Death's Excellent Vacation by Charlaine Harris, Daniel Stashower, Christopher Golden, Jeff Abbott, Katie MacAlister, Jeaniene Frost, Lilith Saintcrow, A. Lee Martinez, Toni L. P. Kelner, Chris Grabenstein, Sarah Smith, L. A. Banks, Sharan Newman Read Free Book Online Page B

bothered and self-conscious with so many people in his privacy.
    He pads out in socks to find the red-haired girl in front of the fire, toweling her wet hair from mahogany back to flame. She’s wearing a green sweater that goes too well with her hair and jeans that fit her like a thin coat of paint. He realizes, embarrassingly, there’s a question he hasn’t asked.
    “My name is Lan,” she says.
    He winces.
    “I know,” she says. “Your wife’s name. I am sorry. My name is just Lan.”
    He pulls herself together. “That’s your Talent name?”
    She shakes her head, smiling. “Just my name.”
    “Funny name.”
    “Not as funny as the Green Force.”
    “Green,” he says. “Bill. Bill was the name my foster parents gave me. The last name changes, but I’m always Bill.”
    He looks into the fire, remembering streams of fire, falling, falling, gravity screaming around him, catching and shaping it in his pudgy hands, turning it into a cradle—
    “Bill,” she says. “Nice. Why do you want to die, Bill?”
    She’s probably twenty, twenty-five. Before he gets to know her, she’ll be dead.
    He’s told his own story a hundred times, seen it in the comics, until he almost believes that Mom baked pies for church socials and Dad drove a tractor round the farm. But he remembers the First World War and the Civil War and the Revolution, and before his name was Bill it was Will and Gwillhem and Willa-helm, and his parents were Mutti and Dadu.
    Demon, the villagers called him. The villagers tried to burn him, drown him, stone him. Fire flowed around him. When they threw him into the pond, he shaped air in a bubble around him.
He is your angel,
the priest said.
Call him Willa-helm, Protector. Do not be afraid of him.
    For a long time he protected them from a distance, like a guard dog, half-angel, half-wolf.
    Then he got involved.
    He had friends.
    He fell in love.
    Now he fishes.
    “Death is what people do.” Not so long ago, a moment ago in his long life, the other Talents showed up. Each of them unique, wild, strange. Together, a gang. Friends. And Lana. He thought he was people. They proved he was wrong.
    “What do those kids have for talents?” he asks.
    “Oh, one thing, another. They look after each other,” she says. “That’s talent enough.”
    Yeah. “They got long life?” he asks. “Is that one of their Talents?”
    She sits with the towel on her knees, looking into the fire. “No. I’ve known lots like them. The others are dead.”
    “What’s their story? Born with Talent? Made?”
    “Made.”
    “How?” Atom, an atomic explosion. Poor Elastic, a vat of chemicals. Himself falling like a star.
    And he has touched something. The Chinese girl stares into the fire, her eyes dead black and her mouth widening into a grimace. Her hands tighten around the towel.
    “I made them,” she says. “I cursed them. Me.”
    And she gets up abruptly and leaves.
     
    FOUR of them went on that long-ago fishing trip: Iguana Man, Astounding, Atom, and the Green Force, who kept the mortals safe and dry. In ordinary ice fishing you shine a light into the murk under the ice. At the bottom of the water, they shone Atom. They could barely see past the yellow ball of light that Atom threw. They were all wasted, laughing so hard they were falling down. Suddenly scales turned in the murk like ragged hands and a single dark eye glared at them before it flashed away into darkness. The world’s last monster, trapped in her lake.
    “
Shit
, boys,” Iguana said.
    “It’d be bad to be like that,” Atom said soberly.
    “No,” the Green Force said. “Not us. We won’t be like that.”
    He thought there was an
us
. They’d all live forever. There would always be big, colorful villains to fight, Nazis and Yellow Perils, and beings like himself to fight them. He had seen something but it took him years to know it: the Great Fish, trapped in her size and strength, with no path out; too big to get out; without the talent to