In the Palace of Repose by Holly Phillips

Author:Holly Phillips [Phillips, Holly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy, short story, short stories, collection
ISBN: 9781607013853
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2012-10-25T16:00:00+00:00

ONE OF THE HUNGRY ONES

When Sadie entered the underpass between the Avenue and the park, she found Raz and a couple of his boys hanging out there, at one with the mold-and-urine smell and the insomniac sodium light. Raz, who somehow knew her name.

“Sexy Sadie,” the pimp sang, a line from an old song. “Sex-y Sa-die.”

She fixed her eyes on the tunnel end, where a flight of stairs led to the dusk of grass and autumn trees, and walked, her face stiff with a mask of no-fear.

“Hey, Sadie, are you hungry yet?” one of Raz’s boys whispered at her back. The tunnel magnified his voice, her footsteps, the growl of traffic overhead. “Are you hungry yet?”

“Sex-y Sa-die.”

As much as she hated the tunnel, she loved emerging into the freedom of the park. A dangerous place after dark, people said, haunted by rapists and crazies who treated insanity with alcohol and crack. Night was the time street kids came together to canvass the restaurant diners and movie crowd, and to share their scores in the cold of an abandoned store. Safety in numbers. But Sadie hated the press of dirty bodies, the mumble of drugged voices, the grope of unwanted hands—hated the pack and hated the fear that dragged them all together—so when the whisper had come her way, Mullein’s Park on Friday night, she had determined to come, Raz or no, shadows or no.

Under the trees the air smelled of burning leaves.

It was Rayne who had whispered in her ear. (How did Sadie come to meet them, Rayne and Leo and Tom? They must have spoken to her first, she was too shy, too wary to talk freely to strangers. But she had watched them since her arrival on the Avenue, spent weeks yearning after their cleanliness, their fierce swagger, their mysterious affairs. They were bright as firelit knives, shining as jewels.) Rayne, slip-thin and blond, had sauntered over to Sadie panhandling on the corner and whispered, promise or tease, Mullein’s Park on Friday night, and it was the smell of her, soap and new leather, that had conjured Sadie’s need. Need, not courage. Courage is a flame that requires fuel, and Sadie was too hungry to sustain that kind of fire.

Too hungry for that, not hungry enough for—Sex-y Sa-die—

A breeze scattered frost-dried leaves from the trees. The rustle made a screen for footsteps or voices. Sadie doubled her oversized cardigan around her and started down the gravel path. Mullein’s Park covered a whole block. There were a lot of tall lamps casting pools of light, a lot of trees shedding black skirts of shade. The three could be anywhere, if they were here at all, if Sadie wasn’t too early, or too late, or otherwise entirely wrong. She couldn’t think what she had done to earn this invitation.

Someone was running towards her, dashing from shadow to man back to shadow as he passed through a lighted space. Sadie caught a flash of his face—beard and weathered skin, eyes wet

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