The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2018 Edition by Rich Horton

The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2018 Edition by Rich Horton

Author:Rich Horton [Horton, Rich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: anthology, fantasy, science fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Science Fiction And Fantasy, year's best
ISBN: 9781607015291
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2018-08-12T16:00:00+00:00


Cupido

Rich Larson

As Marcel rounds the corner he sees the woman stepping into the elevator, pulling the curlicued grille behind her with one manicured hand.

“Detengalo, porfa,” he calls, muffled through cotton.

She obliges, holding the grille open so he can slip through, giving him a slightly odd look for his flu mask.

“Tengo gripe,” Marcel explains.

“Que pena,” the woman says sympathetically, then is drawn back to the glow of her tablet like a moth. Her name is Daniela and she is beautiful in the sevillana way: slender and immaculately dressed, with straight dark hair and lips slicked red. Marcel feels his pulse speed up, his chest twist tight. Not because she is beautiful, but because of the tiny canister concealed in his sleeve. He still gets nervous every job. Even though he has never been caught, and there is no law against what he does, not yet, not here.

Marcel pulls the grille shut, and the elevator starts to descend. He watches Daniela in his peripheral. In a way he knows nothing about her, in a way he knows everything. He knows the intricacies of her DNA, her odorprint, the shape and composition of her unseen bacterial cloud. She taps at her screen with a hard white nail, frowns at it.

Slowly, furtively, Marcel slides the canister from his sleeve and sprays the primer. He gives a loud cough as he does it, which disguises the nebulizing hiss but also makes her take an automatic step backward. But she breathes enough of it in. By the time they reach the ground floor, her pupils have started to dilate and there’s a flush under her skin. Marcel is still holding his breath and staring straight ahead.

“Venga, adio,” he mutters, hurrying out of the elevator.

“Adio,” she says vaguely.

Marcel crosses the hallway to the exit, passing his client on the way. Augustin is trying to look casual and confident but doing neither, even though his haircut is lined off with laser precision and his trousers are new and he practically reeks with the target pheromone Marcel so painstakingly tailored to Daniela. Marcel can smell cologne, too—idiot. He told Augustin it would only dilute the pheromone.

Augustin has been trying for weeks to work up the nerve to ask Daniela out for a caña. He’s a couple of years younger than her and a head shorter when she wears her usual heels, and normally her eyes slide right off of him as if he’s not there. But not today. Today, there will be something different about Augustin.

Marcel told him no eye contact, either, but Augustin still gives him an anxious wide-eyed stare on his way by. He looks like he might shit himself, so Marcel gives a covert okay sign behind his back as he pushes through the door. Augustin will probably fuck it up anyway. They often do—if not today, then in a week or a month. But Marcel already has Augustin’s 382 scraped-together Euros sitting in his account, and now he needs to prepare for the next job. A cupido’s work is never done.



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