Songs of Love & Death

If she was still the succubus, one touch would probably turn me into mental mush, and her next meal. But there was no other way to find out.

I’d always been a risk taker. I took her hand, and energy flared between us like wildfire. Not succubus steal-my-soul-and-consume-my-life energy, though. This was ten years of caring and affection transmuting into fierce, true love. The woman I pulled into my arms was my Bethany, no doubts and questions, forever and ever, amen.

Our kiss wasn’t the affectionate peck on the check that is exchanged between friends, but a hot, needy lover’s kiss. “Bethany,” I whispered when I could breathe again. “I never thought we could be together. Not this way.”

“Nor did I.” She laughed a little. “It’s such a cliché to fall in love with a man who’s tall, dark, and handsome. But as soon as you showed up on my doorstep, I was head over heels. Proof that age doesn’t bring wisdom.”

I smoothed back her silky hair, touching her as I’d never touched her before. “It’s also a cliché to fall in love with a hot blond babe. The hard part was knowing that that babe was seventy years in the past.”

“Not anymore.” She rested her forehead against my cheek, her soft breath warming my throat. “I’ve always dreamed of a Guardian alchemical marriage. Two souls blended as one. I loved my first husband, but we didn’t have that. I thought I’d missed my chance.”

“Yet here we are.” I kissed her forehead. Her vibrant young body was a little taller than her old one had been. “I think we were meant to be together, but we got the timing wrong.”

“Time kept us apart—but the demon inadvertently gave us a chance to reset that timing.” She slid an arm around my waist and gave me a shining smile. “Let’s go home, David. I’m in a hurry for us to have some privacy.”

So was I.

Tanith Lee

Tanith Lee is one of the best-known and most prolific of modern fantasists, with more than a hundred books to her credit, including (among many others) The Birthgrave, Drinking Sapphire Wine, Don’t Bite the Sun, Night’s Master, The Storm Lord, Sung in Shadow, Volkhavaar, Anackire, Night’s Sorceries, Black Unicorn, Days of Grass, The Blood of Roses, Vivia, Reigning Cats and Dogs, When the Lights Go Out, Elephantasm, The Gods Are Thirsty, Cast a Bright Shadow, Here In Cold Hell, Faces Under Water, White as Snow, Mortal Suns, Death of the Day, Metallic Love, No Flame but Mine, Piratica: Being a Daring Tale of a Singular Girl’s Adventure Upon the High Seas, and a sequel to Piratica, called Piratica II: Return to Parrot Island. Her numerous short stories have been collected in Red as Blood, Tamastara, The Gorgon and Other Beastly Tales, Dreams of Dark and Light, Nightshades, and Forests of the Night. Her short story “The Gorgon” won her a World Fantasy Award in 1983, and her short story “Elle Est Trois (La Mort)” won her another World Fantasy Award in 1984. Her most recent books are the collected reprint of The Secret Books of Paradys and two new collections, Tempting the Gods and Hunting the Shadows. She lives with her husband in the south of England.

It’s said that each of us have one special person in the world that we are destined to love, and that to miss meeting that special person, to go through life without them, is perhaps the worst tragedy that can befall you. In the intricate, opulent, and lyrical story that follows, Lee shows us that if you miss your destined lover in one lifetime, it may just be possible to find them in another…

Under/Above the Water

PART ONE—TIME AND TIDE

1

GOING TO THE lake. Either in her head, or in the soft, hovering drone of the flybus, she heard this refrain, repeating over and over. Going to the lake—was someone singing it?

Zaeli refused to look around. All these people smiling at or talking to each other, or reading guide books, or gazing earnestly, hungrily, from the windows at the exquisite ghosts of ruins littered all over the tawny folds and featherings of landscape.

But all I can see—