Apex Magazine Issue 44 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Apex Publications
Published: 2013-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

II

Ten months later, Clea went all the way with Daniel for the first time. It wasn’t nearly as much fun as she had thought it was going to be, and afterwards she went to sit in her favourite spot with her back to the gum tree, listening to angsty music and feeling like her whole body could fly apart at any moment.

She didn’t need to be confused any more than she already was, and she really didn’t need a reappearance of Julius, not today, so of course there he was in his straw hat and his toga, tripping over that same tree root, and apologising for it.

“What is it this time?” she asked, more acidly than she would have on any other day, because really, losing your virginity to a boy who had no idea what to do with it was the sort of thing that allowed you to be in a legitimate bad mood for at least a fortnight. “Werewolves?”

Julius blinked as if she had said something quite absurd. “Actually, the last werewolves were killed in the nineteenth century,” he said.

“You’re older than you look,” Clea snarked. Not that she really thought he had been around killing werewolves in the nineteenth century. He couldn’t be more than forty. Maybe thirty-five.

“Yes, probably,” he said. And then, “How do you feel about gargoyles?”

* * * *

That was how Clea ended up spending her whole weekend clambering around on the roofs of Nova Ostia, pointing out every animal-shaped statue on every building, and helping Julius to discreetly shatter them.

“I always wondered,” she said. “They didn’t seem a very Roman sort of thing.”

“The creatures are, the statues aren’t,” he said. “They’re attracted to cities, especially the high parts, where they can see the stars. They climb up here and just ossify. Which is fine until they come to life during the full moon and start biting chunks out of people.”

“Why didn’t you smash them up last time you were here?” she asked.

“They weren’t here last time I was here,” he replied.

Clea argued he was wrong, that many of the gargoyles had been there since she was a child, and Julius argued that in fact memory-alteration was part of their self-defence mechanism, and what with one thing and another, she completely forgot about Daniel and how weird it was to let someone inside your actual body, and how she had been wanting to explode into a million pieces.

When the last gargoyle was destroyed, Clea and Julius stretched out in the shade of the aqueduct, on the flat roof of the Temple of Saturn. It was too hot to climb back down to ground level.

“Do you want to kiss me?” she asked him.

He looked surprised. “No thank you.”

“Are you gay?” she asked next. Apparently she was going with the personal questions this time around.

“No,” said Julius, still polite and friendly about the whole thing. No hint of embarrassment. “I’m just terribly old.”

Clea lifted herself up on her elbows, staring at him. “Did you really kill werewolves in the nineteenth century?”

“Among other things.

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