The Ammonite Violin & Others by Caitlin R. Kiernan Page B

January, but I was sweating, nonetheless. And I had an erection. And I realized, then, that her breath didn’t fog in the cold air.
    “I’m a daughter of Lilith,” she said.
    Which is as close as she’s ever come to telling me her name, or where she’s from, or anything else of the sort. I’m a daughter of Lilith , and the way she said it, with not even a trace of affectation or humor or deceit, I knew that it was true. Even if I had no idea what she meant, I knew that she was telling me the truth.
    That was also the first night that I let her kiss me. I sat with her on the bench, and she licked eagerly at the back of my neck. Her tongue was rough, like a cat’s tongue.
    She smelled of fallen leaves, that dry and oddly spicy odor which I have always associated with late October and jack-o’-lanterns. Yes, she smelled of fallen leaves, and her own sweat and, more faintly, something which I took to be woodsmoke. Her breath was like frost against my skin, colder even than the long winter night. She licked at the nape of my neck until it was raw and bleeding, and she whispered soothing words in a language I could neither understand nor recognize.
    “It was designed in 1860,” she said, some other night, meaning the fountain with its bluestone basin and eight frosted globes. “They built this place as a turnaround for the carriages. It was originally meant to be a drinking fountain for horses. A place for thirsty things.”
    “Like an oasis,” I suggested, and she smiled and nodded her head and wiped my blood from her lips and chin.
    “Sometimes it seems all the wide world is a desert,” she said. “There are too few places left where one may freely drink. Even the horses are no longer allowed to drink here, though it was built for them.”
    “Times change,” I told her and gently touched the abraded place on my neck, trying not wince, not wanting to show any sign of pain in her presence. “Horses and carriages don’t much matter anymore.”
    “But horses still get thirsty. They still need a place to drink.”
    “Do you like horses?” I asked, and she blinked back at me and didn’t answer my question. It reminds me of an owl, sometimes, that slow, considering way she blinks her eyes.
    “It will feel better in the morning,” she said and pointed at my throat. “Wash it when you get home.” And then I sat with her a while longer, but neither of us said anything more.

    She takes my blood, but never more than a mouthful at a time, and she’s left me these strange dreams in return. I have begun to think of them as a sort of gift, though I know that others might think them more a curse. Because they are not entirely pleasant dreams. Some people would even call them nightmares, but things never seem so cut and dried to me. Yes, there is terror and horror in them, but there is beauty and wonder, too, in equal measure—a perfect balance that seems never to tip one way or the other. I believe the dreams have flowed into me on her rough cat’s tongue, that they’ve infected my blood and my mind like a bacillus carried on her saliva. I don’t know if the gift was intentional, and I admit that I’m afraid to ask. I’m too afraid that I might pass through the park late one night or early one morning and she might not be waiting for me there on her bench on Cherry Hill, that asking would break some brittle spell which I can only just begin to comprehend. She has made me superstitious and given to what psychiatrists call “magical thinking,” misapprehending cause and effect, when I was never that way before we met. I play piano in a martini bar, and, until now, there’s never been anything in my life which I might mistake for magic. But there are many things in her wide sienna eyes which I might mistake for many other things, and now that uncertainty seems to cloud my every waking thought. Yet I believe that it’s a small price to pay for her company, smaller even than the blood she takes.
    I thought that