Karen

I dressed sharp. Suit and heels. Skirt short but not too short. Classy but available. If you're lucky.

I checked the outfit against The Wall. My office wall, festooned with pictures, grainy printouts from security camera stills, all attractive women, all filmed in bars or clubs, or on the street. All dressed the same way I was.

I tore the photos down, but I lingered over the last one, the only photo of a male. In fifteen seconds I had memorised his face.

I burned the photos in the fireplace and went out to get some food.

I found the man by the waterfront, strolling alone amongst the last of the day-trippers and the first of the nightclubbers. With a flick of my thumb I lit a cigarette and followed him, a hundred yards behind.

He went into a pub with ideas above its station. I took a moment to fix my make-up and followed him in.

I found a corner in the shadows and watched as he worked the room. His easy, greasy smile did not fool the women he tried it on.

Until, of course, it did.

The blonde was a little too young and a little too drunk. The man bought her a drink, a double, and before she had finished it he bought her another. He made the girl laugh, and her head rolled back a little more loosely than it should, and when he asked her a question and she nodded and reached for her coat, I stepped out of the alcove, and was on them before they'd left the table.

"You don't want her, you want me," I said.

"What?" said the blonde, but the man had registered my looks. They always do.

"Really?" he smiled.

"Fuckin' prick," said the blonde, getting the picture. I didn't even look at her.

"Sorry, love," I said, "but I'm taking this one for the girls".

The blonde stalked off.

"I'm..." he began, but I cut him off.

"I don't care. Come with me."

I turned and walked away, trusting that he'd follow.

He did.

We walked together, without talking, back to my apartment. I let him in, took his coat, and showed him to the living-room. He took in the view over the city, but when he turned (the words "nice place" were, I was sure, on his lips, the unoriginal bastard) I cut him off by putting the music on. It doesn't matter what music. It was sweet, it was sexy, but most important of all, it was loud.

I slipped out of my jacket and walked towards him, swinging my hips.

"Dance?" I said, and he nodded, held out his hands, and we danced.

To my surprise, he wasn't bad. A little stiff, but he knew the moves, and I let him lead me around the floor for a few minutes that I could almost have described as... enjoyable. But the hunger overtook me, and I moved closer to him, arms around his waist, and I managed not to shudder as his hands slid down my back, towards...

"You've been bad, haven't you?" I whispered.

He barely heard me. "Mm-hmm?"

"I know what you've been doing," I said.

"Mm-what?"

He was starting to listen.

"I know what you did to all those girls," I said, louder now. "I can see it in your soul."

"You fucking what?!" he cried, realising that the seduction was over, or, at least, that it had not been the seduction he had intended. He tried to push away, but my arms were locked tight. And I am very, very strong.

"Get the fuck off me," he hissed, and I tightened my grip.

"LOOK AT ME!" I growled, and he heard the change in my voice as I let go, giving in to the animal inside, and his anger turned to fear.

A lock of hair fell over one of my eyes, but he looked in the other, and I gave him the glint, the fire in my eye, that tiny window to the very me. And as he gazed, the spark became a flame, as of a single candle burning bright, and he was transfixed.

"Who are you?" he gibbered.

"I AM YOUR DEATH," I said, and I knew my voice now seemed to him to come from the abyss, and he realised even as the oxygen in his brain ran low that he had heard me speak but I had not moved my lips.

I allowed the change to happen in me. I let go. My skin blackened, then cracked, revealing not flesh but flame within, and the fire burst through the cracks and engulfed me, and I held him tight in my embrace as first his clothes and then his skin burned, and he fought to break free, shrieking, but the screams died quickly as he ran out of air.

He slumped against me, and I knew that he was gone, this bad man, this hater of women, and I summoned the will to put the fire out. The flames died away, and I lowered the charred corpse to the floor. This time I had been able to keep the fire under control. But it had been harder. It was progressive. Some day I would lose it. After three thousand years living this way, a forgotten god alone amongst mortals, scraping a living amongst the pigs and the assholes, the fire was become more and more difficult to command. Soon the glory of it would consume me, and then the whole world would burn with me.

But not tonight. That magnificence would have to wait.

I strode to the fireproof closet and put on a robe, left the man smouldering, and went to the kitchen.

I came back with an electric carving knife and a silver platter. I stopped by the man's jacket, retrieved his wallet from an inside pocket. I flicked it open as I walked back to the middle of the room and stood over the carcass. The man's name was Nigel.

I threw the wallet away, kneeled on the floor, placed the platter down beside what was once Nigel, turned on the carving knife, and went to work.

"Sorry, Nigel," I said. "But a girl's gotta eat."

Valentina

It started the day Valentina tripped and did not fall.

She was coming down the steps from the verandah into the garden, carrying a gateau with more candles on it than she cared to think about, and her toe caught on a cracked tile. She pitched forward, desperately trying to avoid dropping the cake (and ruining everything, as the voice in her head quickly cried), and succeeded in keeping it on the plate. Only when she was sure the cake was saved did she notice that she hadn't yet hit the ground. Knees that should have been scuffed and bleeding were fine, and the party dress that should have been dusty from the path was not.

She looked down, and when she saw that she was hovering eighteen inches above the garden path she got a fright, and this time she did fall. She arrived at the table cake-less, her knees scuffed and bleeding, her party dress dusty from the path. Her friends laughed the cake disaster away, and mistook her preoccupation for much of the rest of the evening as being about the falling cake, when the truth was it was about what had happened just before the falling cake.

An hour into the evening she decided it must have been a mistake of some kind, that she had imagined it, or dreamt it, or that during the fall she had had a burst of mental acceleration that had made it seem as if time had stood still, she shook free of the preoccupation, and resolved to enjoy the party. She did, and at the end of the night her friends left her with hugs and kisses and promises that they would go out and this time actually eat some cake. Valentina laughed, said her goodbyes, and when the house was empty she went to bed.

In the middle of the night she accidentally walked out the window.

When she did not fall to the flower-bed below she realised she was dreaming, and hovered for a moment before moving herself, without being sure how, out over the railing and into the road. Fifteen feet above the road, to be exact. She flew down the road at that height, skimming under the leaves on the long avenues, dodging electrical cables and phone wires, straying in and out of the pools of light cast downwards by the intermittent streetlamps. She took a turn onto another road, and when that went well she flew all the way to the city centre, until the bright lights there spooked her and, fearing she would be seen, she glided home. She drifted through her window and touched lightly down on the carpet. She sat on the bed, smiling wide, and waited to wake up.

But she didn't wake up. And, after a while, she realised that the reason she hadn't woken up was because she wasn't asleep.

This puzzled her, because she knew that people could not fly, and yet she had flown, while awake. (Or so she was coming to believe.) She stopped smiling and asked herself, with her most serious face, if she had really flown, fully awake, around town.

And the answer was yes, she was sure that she had, and the smile returned as, filled with joy, she took a step towards the window, and the step turned into a walk, and the walk turned into a run, and with a single jump she bounded onto the window-ledge and leapt into the night sky.

This time she did not restrict herself. She flew straight up, pirouetting as she went, tumbling and rolling, dancing in the heavens. When she looked down she could see the whole town laid out before her, and she realised she was cold, but the cold did not dampen her joy. It drove her to move again, and she rose higher, chasing the clouds, driving through them, feeling them soak her like invisible rain - and then she was through them, above them, watching the moonlight on the mallowscape below her, and still she rose, high even above the clouds now, the cold bitter but her heart unstoppable, and she found herself marvelling at a slowly dispersing airliner condensation trail, that seemed to glow phosphorescent...

The 747 when it went by below her was faster than she would have thought possible, and even as the shockwave from its passing sent her tumbling the thought finally went through her head.

"Valentina," it said. "Of course you cannot fly".

And she realised that the voice was right. Who was she to think she could fly? She was human, after all.

She stopped flying.

At that altitude, or any altitude, the act of stopping flying is exactly the same as the act of starting falling, so that's what she did.

She plummeted.

Down through the moonlight and into the soft caress of the clouds, but they did not hold her and she fell through them, breaking the surface below, with the lights of the city separating and growing brighter at a rate that was really rather alarming.

Her stomach rolled and she clawed at the air, but because humans cannot fly she could gain no purchase, and as she fell the last few hundred feet, attracted at terminal velocity to the planet on which she had stayed firmly rooted for as many years as there had been candles on her cake, she resigned herself to dying, and steeled herself for the end...

And at this point the realisation came to her. "But I flew."

She opened her eyes. A streetlight above her buzzed idly in the humidity of the early summer's night. She breathed in, and allowed her hand to fall behind her.

Her finger-tip touched the hard concrete of the street, eighteen inches below her. She wobbled, but did not fall, and carefully she willed herself to pivot, until her feet touched the road. With a stumble she righted herself, and in a moment she was standing in the street, right outside her house, in soaking-wet pyjamas.

She looked up. Far above, the lights of a passing plane blinked.

Valentina closed her eyes.

She watched the kaleidoscope of blood coursing through her eyelids as her brain tried to make sense of the data her rods and cones were sending her.

Then a grin spread across her face.

She flew back in the window, changed her pyjamas and went to sleep, eighteen inches above her bed.