Little Gods by Tim Pratt

pulling him to his feet.
    She's a witch , he thought, with that same, intellectual fear.
    “Would you like to kill the Boy, and win the Girl?” she asked.
    Kill? Rocko had a certain interest in the subject, but killing anyone would be so messy in the particulars. Just like beating someone up—he didn't much enjoy that, though he often desired the consequences. That was so often a problem; to achieve a certain end, he had to resort to ugly means. If only he could skip those intermediate stages, wave his hands and have someone die, or put them on the ground writhing in pain.
    He looked at the woman (he had no choice, he couldn't even blink, but now he looked ). She'd pithed him like a frog without even saying a word, and he suspected that she didn't need to hear him speak, because she could read his mind. Maybe he could learn power like that from her. The power of ends, and the circumvention of clumsy, inelegant means.
    “Kill?” he said, and now his voice worked. The idea of killing lacked emotional color, too. He could kill someone easily, if he felt like this while doing it. “Sure. I could do that."
    She grinned. “A will to kill is a wonderful thing. It means you always have a last resort. But you really just want the Girl, yes?"
    Rocko grunted. He didn't want the girl to think he was nothing, that was for sure, and he couldn't stand to see her with a dogshit like Cory.
    “So the best thing to do would be to humiliate the Boy, somehow, and let her find out about it, maybe even witness it. Then she'd know he's nothing, and that you're clever, and brave, and much more worth her attention. Yes?"
    Rocko could feel her eyes boring into him from behind her black glasses. “Yeah. Yeah, that would do it."
    “You and your little friends can come up with something, can't you? Something suitable?"
    “Something suitable for a shit like him,” Rocko said, getting an idea. Of course. Everyone had to use the bathroom sometime, didn't they? “I think so."
    “Good,” she said. “It's better than murder, at least for now. If you've never buried a body, you don't know how much trouble it can be."
    “Cory!” his mom called. “You have a visitor!"
    Cory looked up from his homework—just a worksheet on ecology, boring as mud—and frowned. Who could—
    Oh. His throat tightened a little. Could it be Heather? Already? “Coming, mom!” He stopped in front of the mirror, raking his fingers through his shaggy brown hair, then gave it up as a bad job. Heather'd seen him at very nearly his worst this afternoon, and she'd seemed to like him fine then.
    He hurried downstairs, into the living room.
    He hardly recognized the girl he found there. Heather had been sweaty, grass-stained, red-cheeked and mussed before. But this girl—she could be one of the prettiest girls in school. She had blue ribbons braided into her hair, and wore a plain white t-shirt tucked into khaki shorts. Her sneakers were clean, too, not the scuffed ones she'd been wearing before. He could faintly see the lace of her bra under the shirt, and he looked away, blushing.
    “Heather tells me you met at school today,” his mom said.
    “Yeah,” Cory said. “She just moved to the neighborhood."
    “Welcome to town, Heather,” Cory's mom said. “I'll have to go meet your parents sometime."
    “Sure,” Heather said. “My dad's not here yet, he's driving in another truck full of stuff. He'll be around next week, though."
    “I'll make a point of introducing myself,” she said. “There's brownies in the kitchen, if you guys want a snack. Would you like to stay for dinner, Heather?"
    She glanced at Cory. He shrugged. Heather rolled her eyes at him. “Sure. That'd be great!"
    “I'll leave you two alone,” Cory's mom said, glancing at Cory with a small, secret smile—a smile that meant she'd be asking him about this nice new girl later on. She went into the kitchen.
    “She bakes brownies and she makes dinner?” Heather said. “What, did you win the mom