Kyro and the Lemonade Mage
He should have killed her the moment she fell out of the sky. Instead, Kyro brought the strange girl to his hidden courtyard, where she filled the broken fountain with flowers, conjured bottles of lemonade from thin air, and smiled at him like he was something other than a weapon.
There is an expanded novelette version of this story you can find here: The Lemonade Mage
When The Sky Opened Up
The job had gone badly in the way most jobs did lately—things got too loud and people got comfortably stupid.
A grimy city like this one swallowed any shred of light effortlessly.
Electronic signs flickered over slick pavement. Wind dragged discarded party flyers and cigarette ash through the alleyways.
Somewhere in the distance, boisterous music throbbed from a nightclub Kyro had no interest in entering but did so anyway.
Inside, a man prayed under his breath over a debt he would never be able to pay.
Minutes later, Kyro stepped out of the back entrance of the nightclub with blood drying beneath one cuff and a fresh ache pulling tight between his ribs.
The pathetic man had tried to put a knife in Kyro’s side. He hadn’t succeeded, but he had annoyed him enough to die for it.
Kyro lit a cigarette, took one drag, and decided he hated the taste of everything tonight.
He crushed it beneath his heel.
Above him, large clouds dragged low over the skyline, heavy and unnatural, but he barely noticed until the air changed.
It happened all at once.
The alley brightened with a strange glow.
A tear opened overhead with a sound like paper being ripped in half.
Kyro’s hand moved on instinct to his pistol.
The rift widened into a jagged oval of blinding gold and pale green, throwing fractured, iridescent color across brick walls and puddled asphalt.
Wind kicked down the alley hard enough to rattle the metal fire escapes.
For one second the city smelled pleasantly wrong—like fresh rainwater, crushed citrus, and flowers blooming.
Then something fell out of the sky.
Kyro stepped back as a girl dropped straight through the opening and crashed into a pile of broken cardboard boxes beside the dumpster.
The rift snapped shut above them.
Kyro stared at the sky in disbelief.
The girl sat up slowly, blinking as if she’d merely tripped in a garden rather than fallen out of nowhere into the dirtiest part of his territory.
Her hair was a pale, luminous gold—not the ordinary light brown kind, but something almost angelic, touched by brightness itself.
Her dress was strange, layered and soft, made of fabric that shimmered faintly when she moved.
One sleeve had slipped off her shoulder. She pushed it back up with absentminded dignity.
Then she looked around the alley, wrinkled her nose, and said,
“Oh. These are definitely not the golden gardens.”
Kyro said nothing, taking in her appearance.
She turned and noticed him at last.
Her expression brightened.
“Oh,” she said. “A person.”
His stare hardened with suspicion.
She climbed to her feet, and brushed the dirt off her dress.
Then she smiled at him like he wasn’t a man standing in a dark alley with bloodstains on his button up shirt.
“Hello.”
