who knows

mmmm adult hpyu

these two are that couple who aren’t dating (yet) but it’s obvious that they are meant for each other

I’ve had some pretty wild depression the past couple years. I’m finally starting to work through it - with art. This is the first piece I’ve made for myself in around ten years, and… yeah.

“I’m sorry?”

“Personal assistant, not secretary.”

“Forgive me,” I said. “Still, not quite the meat of the question.”

She tilted her head at me, and there was an amused glimmer in her eye. “Nothing,” she said.

“What?”

“Nothing, nothing happens. Or rather there is generally some type of conversation and the outcome is I continue to do my job with no harassment.” She sipped at her wine, and her eyes were merry and amused.

“How does that work, exactly?” I had my theories, of course. She’s been kidnapped twice, had her life threatened a few times, and yet… she’s fine. The two times she was kidnapped, she was released unharmed without intervention.

“I don’t normally like to talk this much about work on a first date,” she said.

“Oh, well, I’m not trying to pry, I’m just curious. I thought you’d keep your job closer to your chest.”

“In general, I do. But you’re… very pretty.”

She winked, which made me actually blush, something I rarely do these days.

“You’ve got no idea what it’s like to be lonely,” the immortal in the backseat says. He’s already broken out of his cuffs, but that’s as far as he’s gotten. The crosses engraved on the windows and in the metal around him prevent him from using his strength to punch out of the car. “Not truly lonely.”

You don’t look back, focusing on the road. Your partner is dead next to you, throat torn out and head gently thunking against the window every time you hit a pothole. His hand is lying next to his leg,  blood filling his palm from where he tried to patch over the hole in his neck. You say, “Not a good enough reason for kidnapping seventeen innocent girls.”

The immortal raises a dark eyebrow. “If they’d been guilty, would that have been better?” The silence stretches and he scoffs when it’s clear you aren’t going to give him an answer. “Or maybe if I hadn’t been a vampire?”

“It’d’ve been better if you hadn’t broken the law,” you say. You take a left sooner than you should and, if your passengers notice the car picking up speed, neither mention it. “Or at least not done in my partner.”

“He surprised me,” the immortal says carelessly. He frowns out the window, eyes tracking the passing street signs. “Impressive stealth. I’m not easily surprised.”

You bet. According to the brief, he’s nearly two centuries old. You focus on the town’s perimeter coming up and reach over to prod your partner’s corpse. “Hey.”

“We,” the vampire says slowly, “are heading away from the station.”

You let the gas pedal touch the floor. The buildings melt away and the desert bursts out to either side of the car. Miles and miles of desert. You jab your partner with three fingers. “Hey, wake up. I’m gonna crash the car.”

The bar is old–not as old as you, obviously, but still really fucking old. Buried below the rumbling city, the roiling sewers, the catacombs of Paris. Below even the empire of the dead.

This is the land of the immortals, and there are only two of you left.

Hence, drinks. 

Your old friend (nemesis, lover, captain, whore, ruler, enemy) sits in the chair across from you, swirling their drink. Bourbon, probably, if their taste still holds from the Golden Age of Piracy, or champagne from the court of Versailles. They had looked stupid in a wig, but you had looked stupider. Or maybe it’s hot chocolate spiced with chili, the kind you used to drink together on cold Mexico nights, or homebrewed Viking mead from the half century spent raiding. 

You don’t know, and they won’t tell you. Their glass is opaque, as dark as the shadows cobwebbing in every corner of the bar, and they keep the rim tipped towards their chest. They don’t trust you not to poison them, not after 1300s Constantinople, and you don’t blame them. You don’t really trust yourself to refrain, either. 

Neither of you speak, for a while. It’s companionable, like old Macedonian nights spent stargazing, but there’s a speakeasy tension running electric underneath. Neither of you knows what will happen, not really. No one has seen an immortal die and lived to tell of it. You don’t know how it happens, only that it will. Tonight. 

One of you will die, and one of you will be the only immortal left in the world.

You’re not sure which is worse. 

@mango-pickle : im a pessimist too and yes it moved its leg earlier to its the garage thawing 👀

@hermionemonica its the WHAT

BUT. but the thing is. you how selkies/seal women was a pretty common variation of this? another really popular one was swans.

i just want you to think about that for a moment. swans. like…I get it, they’re pretty, graceful birds, certainly it’s easy to imagine them magically becoming pretty graceful ladies? but have you ever fought a swan. swans are awful. swans are the devil’s geese. imagine seeing a pretty magic lady and being absolutely enchanted by her, and stealing her magic feather cloak, and then you go up and say ‘hey i’m in love with you, let me make you my queen, it will be great, we’ll be so happy’ and she just looks at you for a moment and…

finally one day, a swan comes up to her and says ‘why don’t you come and swim with us? you always sigh so wistfully to see us on the water, and you would be most welcome to join our company, for you have always been a true friend to our kind’

and the woman says, ‘i can’t swim’

and the swan says, ‘we’ll teach you’

and the woman says, ‘literally i can’t swim, my husband stole my sealskin and should i venture into deep water i would surely drown’ 

and the swan says ‘your husband fucking WHAT’

the next morning the woman’s front yard looks like this. 

Also? Swans don’t have a lot of obvious physical markings that divide the males from females. So some idiot might be like, “damn, that’s a sexy bird, I wanna marry her” and then like. It’s a dude swan. You just transformed thirty pounds of angry aggressive bird into 200+ pounds of angry aggressive adult man, who will totally kick your butt. (Also I’m pretty sure that if you turned a lady swan into a human, you would not get a willowy little 5′0″ girl. You’d probably have a 6-foot amazon with biceps the size of your head. Swans are heavy birds and it takes a LOT of muscle to get them into the air. They are among the baddest bitches in the bird kingdom)

Choosing.

And now it’s time.

“That one,” he tells the two men he hired earlier this morning, pointing one long, ring-adorned finger at the most beautiful swan. “Bring her to me.”

The henchmen don’t ask questions. He paid them specifically so they wouldn’t ask questions.

Even so, henchmen A glances at henchman B from the corner of his eye.

“Dude,” he says when they’re far enough way from the cackling sorcerer that they won’t be overheard, “why the hell does he want a swan?”

Henchman B shrugs. “What do these sorcerer types ever want?”

They near the water’s edge. “Okay, but,” Henchman A says, “he’s not going to try and fuck it, right? Because I’m sort of uncomfortable with beastiality–”

“Oh my god,” henchman B groans. “Just grab the swan.”

It takes a bit of cursing, flailing, and begrudging team work to grab the swan. When they finally manage to tuck her wings against her sides and grab hold of her neck to prevent her from biting she goes limp, making the strangest, saddest sound that the henchmen have ever heard.

“It’s okay,” Henchman A tells her bracingly, feet squelching as they haul her from the muddy lake’s edge to the sorcerer. “He’s probably not into beastiality. Very few people are.”

Henchmen B coughs and averts his eyes. “Uh, yeah. Right. Hey, you don’t think this was too easy? I mean, the other swans are just…watching. Us.”

Henchman A glances over his shoulder. Sure enough, floating on the lake are about two dozen swans, all curving their elegant necks so they can watch the fate of the swan hanging in between them. Rather than seeming alarmed, they seem…amused?

Henchman A looks away. “Nah, I’m sure it’s fine.”

The sorcerer jumps from foot to foot when they approach, clapping his hands together. “Good, good! Now just hold her there, hold her!”

The henchmen watch as the sorcerer visibly reigns himself in, breathing deeply. He begins to mutter in tongues for a very long time, an awkwardly long time. The henchmen glance at each other with their eyebrows raised. Sorcerers, man.

Suddenly the sorcerer’s head snaps up, eyes glowing a blazing black. He points his bejeweled finger at the swan who has remained suspiciously limp between them and hisses a short, ominous phrase.

Henchman A fights not to scream as a bolt of blue lightning flies at them. Henchman B drops his side of the swan and Henchman A follows suit just in time. The bolt strikes the swan and there’s a blinding flash as the sorcerer begins to cackle again.

“Behold!” he screams to the sky. “My bride!”

The spots clear from the henchmen’s eyes and they gape at the swan. Or rather where the swan should be. Instead there’s a woman there, crumpled on the ground, in a white, soft dress that’s already muddy.

She slowly lifts her head, her face pointed towards Henchman A. Her eyes snap open to reveal a swan’s eyes, a deep unending black that looks… not right on a human.

“Oh what the fuck,” Henchman A says.

The swan woman levers herself up. And up. And up. And up until she towers over them. There are thick cords of muscle at eye level, thick arms and a broad chest that lead to a very strong neck . Most of her body is hidden by her dress, but it doesn’t take a genius to guess that she’s built like a fucking tank.

She is very, very swan-like, henchman A realizes.

“Oh what the fuck,” henchman B says.

The woman smiles, showing off white, small teeth. “Welcome to the thunderdome, gentleman.”

Her fist feels like steel when it connects with Henchman A’s face and he thinks he hears his cheek break. He falls to the ground hard and doesn’t even try to stay conscious after a hit like that. The last thing he hears is what sounds like laughter from the direction of the lake.

Henchman B tries to run, but the swan woman is fast. She grabs the back of his collar and slings him to the ground, hissing and spitting. She hikes up her dress, showing built calves, and brings her heel slicing down onto his stomach. He reaches and chokes at the same time, moving belatedly to cover his head.

He needn’t bother. The swan woman seems to be done with him.

The sorcerer’s still standing in the spot from which he cast the spell, mouth agape. “B-but, you– you’re a swan? Wha–”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” the swan woman says. Her voice is scratchy and growls like she’s swallowed glass. It sounds a bit like the hissing merriment happening on the lake. “I’m not a swan. I’m your wife.” She cracks her knuckles. “And it’s time for our honeymoon.”

The sorcerer picks up his robes and flees into the forest. The swan woman is fine with that. The swan who’d had to deal with this last week said that its more fun when they run.

Times are troubling and hard right now-but never forget, your Beet loving Grandmother loves you very very much and wants you to be safe.

Brittany Lavery is an associate editor at Graydon House (here is a link to the Twitter thread where she answers a lot of questions).

Here are some key takeaways:

They only publish Adult Fiction (no YA, middle-grade, or children’s)

Inkyard Press, their sister imprint, is going to be doing a similar open call in August for YA novels across all genres (link to Twitter thread)

No sci-fi, fantasy, horror, or nonfiction

It DOES include queer lit!

Romance/romantic women’s fiction can be sent to HQN Imprint who are doing a similar open call (link to Twitter thread), but the editors acquire manuscripts for both imprints and will make sure it gets to the right place

They are open to international Black writers + Black writers of any gender

While they will only make an offer for completed manuscripts, they still look at unfinished manuscripts and may request to see more material

According to Melanie Fried, editor at Graydon House, here’s what’s hot right now: