This didn’t have to be demons from hell.
Easing the clip back into the grip, I gently worked the slide to chanber a round and leaned back in my chair. Might be pure coincidence that a visitor came exactly at midnight and fog blanketed the city. Hey, anything was possible. I tightened my grip on the Glock, disengaging the safety.
Then again
. . .
The footsteps thumping along the hallway stopped right outside my door. There was a short pause, and then somebody politely knocked twice.
“Excuse me, I saw the light under your door,” a soft feminine voice said. “May I use your bathroom?” She sounded sweet and southern. Pure corn pone and hominy grits. A delicate flower of the South. “The one in the lobby is broken, and I really have to pee something fierce. Please?”
“Just a sec,” I answered cheerfully, aiming at chest level where the heart would be on a human being.
Yeah, she was from the South, all right. Straight down south. Near the core of the planet.
Hell.
—From “Falling like Gentle Rain” by Nick Pollotta
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Also Available from DAW Books:
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edited by Denise Little
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Isn’t it always more fun to be the “bad guy”? Some of fantasy’s finest, such as Esther Friesner, Tanya Huff, Donald J. Bingle, David Bischoff, Fiona Patton and Dean Wesley Smith, have risen to the editors’ evil challenge with stories ranging from a man given ultimate power by fortune cookie fortunes, to a tyrant’s daughter bent on avenging her fahter’s untimely demise—and by the way, rising to power herself—to a fellow who takes his cutthroat business savvy and turns his expertise to the creation of a new career as an Evil Overlord, to a youth forced to play through game level after game level to fulfill someone else’s schemes for conquest. . . .
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