The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told (56 page)

We split up the minute the Unicorn turned. His eyes were a startling shade of blue, clear and bright in the night sky. He looked beyond us, for just a moment; saw what must have been there—the gathering of his pack.

His hands fell away from the girl as he shoved her, hard, against tree-bark. Her hands gripped the tree as she tried to meld with it. Her eyes were dark, normal eyes. Her hair was dark and dishevelled.

He looked at Maggie.

He looked at me.

I held the dagger. I don’t think I have ever wanted to kill. He looked at Maggie.

He looked at me.

I held the dagger. I don’t think I have ever wanted to kill
anything
so badly in my life. He laughed. He could sense it.

But Maggie moved not toward him, but toward the girl. He wasn’t her concern. No, I thought, he was mine. Mother creates life. Crone sees its end.

I’ll stay until you get back
.

I lunged with the dagger as he lunged with his horn. He narrowly avoided losing it, and I side-stepped. I’m not much of a fighter, but I was fast enough; it’s kind of hard to really get into a tussle when your pants have dropped past your butt.

I wondered if this was what naked
men
actually looked like. Which was my stupid thought for the evening, and it almost cost me my arm.

The shadows were dancing at my back. The others were waiting. But they were a bit of a cowardly lot, when it came down to that; they knew what the knife could do, and they were willing to wait and see.

I could have despised them more if I tried really hard. But mostly, I was trying to stay alive.

Losing battle. What had my Gran said? She wasn’t a warrior. I wasn’t raised to be one either. His horn grazed my thigh, and the threads of my jeans unravelled at its touch, as if they were all trying to avoid the contact. I bled a bit.

He hit me again, and I bled more.

He wasn’t laughing, but his eyes were glittering with rage. I had denied him something, and he intended to make me pay.

I would have died there.

I would have died had it not been for Maggie. At least I thought it was Maggie who came for me, Maggie who touched my shoulder, my wrist, my dagger arm.

But when Maggie took the dagger from my slowing hands, I knew I’d been wrong. Because Maggie was the mother, and she couldn’t wield this knife.

The Unicorn’s blue eyes widened, and he lost his form—which is to say, he reverted. It was certainly easier to look at him. Harder to look at the girl he’d had pinned to the tree a few wounds back.

She wasn’t wearing much. But she didn’t need to. She was utterly, completely beautiful in the stark night, and her expression was one that will haunt my nightmares for years.

She didn’t speak a word.

Not a word of accusation. Not a word that spoke of betrayal. Nothing at all that made her seem like a wronged victim, or like any victim.

Crone sees life’s end?

Not like
this
. She used the knife as if she’d been born with it in her hands. And he bled a lot; she wasn’t kind. Or quick. Or even merciful.

But he was very much alone, in the end. Packs are like that.

Later, I joined Maggie. Or Maggie joined us. The girl was holding the knife and her breasts rose and fell as lungs gave in to exertion, which was very distracting. Maggie had taken a sweater from her shoulders, leaving herself with a thin, black t-shirt. She put the sweater around the girl’s shoulders in silence. Like a mother. Her hands were shaking.

They looked at each other, and then the girl looked down at the knife almost quizzically.

“It’s yours,” I told her.

“You’re giving this to me?”

“No,” I replied. “It was always yours.”

She looked at it, and I handed her its sheath. She looked at that two. Her hands were shaking. “Did I kill him?”

I nodded.

“Good.” And then her eyes started to film over. “You know, he said he loved me?”

I nodded quietly.

“And I believed him.”

Before I could stop myself, I told her—in as gentle a voice as I could, “You had to.”

“No, I didn’t.”

But she did. Because she was the maiden. I could see it in her clearly. Could see it; was horribly, selfishly glad that I would never be the maiden. I wasn’t certain that she would stay that way, either.

“He was a Unicorn,” I told her, after a pause.

“He was an asshole,” she said, spitting. Like a cat.

“That too.”

She gave me an odd look. “How did you know?”

“What?”

“That he was a Unicorn?”

“The horn was a dead giveaway.”

“He wanted me because I was special.” She was. I could see that.

“Yes,” I told her, and I put an arm around her shoulder. “But he wanted to destroy what was special about you. Don’t let him. Don’t forget how to believe.”

Maggie cleared her throat. “Your mother is probably worried about you,” she said. In a mother’s tone of voice. “And my kids are waiting for me. Why don’t you come back to my place? You can phone her from there.”

“I told her I was staying at a friend’s house tonight,” the girl said. She hesitated, and then added, “I’m Simone.”

“I’m Irene,” I told her, extending a hand. “And you can stay at Maggie’s.”

Maggie nodded quietly. She held out a hand, and the girl took it without hesitation. Good sign.

We made our way back to Maggie’s house, but stopped at the foot of her walk. She looked at me, her eyes bright with moonlight. Simone was talking; she had started to talk when we had started to walk, and she hadn’t stopped. She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t—at least to my eye—afraid. Rescue has its purpose.

“I think you should go in first,” Maggie told me quietly.

I knew. I knew then.

“I’ll be up; I think Simone and I have a lot to talk about.” She hesitated, and then added, “We’ll be waiting for you if you need company.”

I nodded stiffly and made my way up the walk. Opened the door, which Gran hadn’t bothered to lock. Very, very little can get past Gran when she’s on the lookout.

She was in the kitchen, beside a pot of tea. She looked up as I entered, and the breath seemed to go out of her in a huff. As if she’d been holding it since we left.

“We found her,” I told my Gran. “In time, I think.”

“She’s an idiot?”

I frowned, and Gran gave me a crooked smile. “You understand.”

I nodded.

“Why it’s hard to be the maiden.”

And nodded again. “But Gran, I understand other things, too.”

“Oh? That would be a change.”

“I understand why it’s hard to be the crone. To watch. To know and to have to sit back on your hands.”

“Good.” She rose, pipe in hand. “I’ll be getting home, then.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“I don’t need company.”

“I do.”

She snorted. “You have company. Maiden and mother. I never thought—” She bit her lip. “I stopped hoping.”

“You kept watch,” I told her. “You remembered the old lore. You kept it for us.” I offered her a hand, and she took it; her hand was shaking. Old, old hand.

“You’ll be good at this,” she said, as she rose. “But you take care of my garden, hear?”

“I’ll take care of the garden,” I told her. It was really hard. “And the house. And the lore.”

“No television in my house.”

“Yes, Gran.”

“And none of that trashy garbage Maggie reads, either.”

“Yes, Gran.”

“And don’t think too much.”

I laughed. I walked her out of the house, and past Maggie, who stopped her and gave her a ferocious hug. No words, just a hug.

Gran snorted, and lit her pipe; Maggie, unaccompanied by her children, took it in stride.

And me? I waited. I bit my lip and I waited.

I walked Gran home. I took her up to the porch. I let her get comfortable in her chair. I even sat on the steps, because I wouldn’t be sitting on them again anytime soon.

I don’t know when she died. I know that she was talking; that she was telling me all the things that she thought I’d forget. That she
also
knew that I wouldn’t be forgetting them, now.

Because I was the crone.

And she was finished. She could be tired. She could rest. She said as much, and then drifted off into silence, the way she sometimes did when she was satisfied with the state of her garden.

The silence lingered, grew louder, grew, at last, final.

And when it had gone on for long enough, I closed her eyes, took her pipe, and emptied it. I kissed her forehead. I would have asked her to hug me, but public displays of affection had always made her uncomfortable. I hugged her only afterward, because it wouldn’t matter to her.

Then I made my way back to Maggie’s house, carrying Gran’s cane. The light was still on, and two thirds of my self were waiting for me to join them.

Kelley Armstrong is the author of the “Women of the Otherworld” paranormal suspense series, the “Darkest Powers” YA urban fantasy trilogy, and the Nadia Stafford crime series. She grew up in Ontario, Canada, where she still lives with her family. A former computer programmer, she’s now escaped her corporate cubicle, and hopes never to return.

Patricia Briggs is the
New York Times
best-selling author of the Mercy Thompson series as well as many assorted other books. She lives in Montana with her husband and a menagerie of animals and kids in a house that resembles a zoo crossed with a library. The horses have to stay outside. And people wonder where the ideas for her stories come from.

The fourth book in Lillian Stewart Carl’s Fairbairn/Cameron mystery series,
The Charm Stone
, appeared in November 2009, and the fifth,
The Blue Hackle
, is scheduled for November 2010. Her next short story (co-authored with Sylvia Kelso) will appear in
Love and Rockets
(December 2010). Eleven stories are collected in
Along the Rim of Time
and thirteen in
The Muse and Other Stories of History, Mystery, and Myth
. Most of her work, short stories as well as sixteen novels in different genres, is available in various electronic forms, including Fictionwise and Kindle. She is the co-editor (with John Helfers) of
The Vorkosigan Companion
, a nonfiction hardcover about the SF work of Lois McMaster Bujold. The book was nominated for a Hugo in 2009 and will soon appear in paperback.

Max Allan Collins has earned an unprecedented fifteen Private Eye Writers of America “Shamus” nominations, winning twice. His graphic novel
Road to Perdition
is the basis of the Academy Award-winning film starring Tom Hanks and Paul Newman, directed by Sam Mendes. An independent filmmaker in the Midwest, he has had half a dozen feature screenplays produced. His other credits include the
New York Times
bestsellers
Saving Private Ryan
and
American Gangster
. Both Spillane and Collins received the Private Eye Writers life achievement award, the Eye.

Carole Nelson Douglas’s fifty-some multi-genre novels include mystery and suspense, science fiction, and high fantasy. Most recent is her Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator noir urban fantasy series (
Silver Zombie
, etc.) The first writer with a female protagonist sleuthing in the Sherlock Holmes world, Carole’s eight-book Irene Adler series debuted with the
New York Times
Notable Book of the Year,
Good Night, Mr. Holmes.
Her twentythree-book Midnight Louie feline PI mystery series blends traditional “cozy” and classic “noir” elements to offer both satire and substance. Set in a slightly surreal Las Vegas, it features four human crime-solvers unknowingly aided by a “Sam Spade with hairballs,” a big black alley cat whose first-person-feline narrations of his own investigations thread through the novels. Her numerous short stories include reprints in seven Year’s Best Mystery anthologies, and her writing has won or been shortlisted for more than fifty awards.

P. N. Elrod writes and edits, and is best known for
The Vampire Files
, where Bobbi Smythe hangs out with her undead boyfriend, vampire PI Jack Fleming. Elrod is a hopeless chocolate addict and cheerfully refuses all efforts at intervention. More about her toothy titles may be found at
www.VampWriter.com
.

Simon R. Green lives in the small country town of Bradford-on-Avon in England; the last Celtic town to fall to the invading Saxons in 504 AD. He is the
New York Times
best-selling author of the Nightside series (a private eye who operates in the Twilight Zone, solving cases of the weird and uncanny), and the Secret Histories series (the name’s Bond, Shaman Bond). He also wrote the perennially in-print space opera series, the Deathstalker books. He appears in open air Shakespeare productions, rides motorbikes, and once had a near-death experience quite unlike anyone else’s.

Nina Kiriki Hoffman has been writing science fiction and fantasy for more than twenty years and has sold more than 250 stories, plus novels and juvenile and media tie-in books. Her works have been finalists for the World Fantasy, Philip K. Dick, Sturgeon, and Endeavour awards. Her first novel,
The Thread That Binds the Bones
, won a Bram Stoker Award, and her short story “Trophy Wives” won a Nebula. Her middle school fantasy novel,
Thresholds
, will come out in 2010. Nina works does production work for
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
and teaches short story writing through her local community college. She also works with teen writers. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, with several cats, a mannequin, and many strange toys.

Norman Partridge’s compact thrill-a-minute style has been praised by Stephen King and Peter Straub, and his fiction has received three Bram Stokers and two IHG awards. His first short story appeared in the second issue of
Cemetery Dance
, and his debut novel,
Slippin’ into Darkness
, was the first original novel published by
CD.
Partridge’s chapbook
Spyder
was one of Subterranean Press’s inaugural titles, while his World Fantasy-nominated collection
Bad Intentions
was the first hardcover in the Subterranean book line. Since then, Partridge has published pair of critically acclaimed suspense novels featuring ex-boxer Jack Baddalach for Berkley Prime Crime (
Saguaro Riptide
and
The Ten-Ounce Siesta
), comics for Mojo and DC, and a series novel (
The Crow: Wicked Prayer
) which was adapted for the screen. His award-winning collections include
Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales
and
The Man with the Barbed-Wire Fists
. Partridge’s latest novel,
Dark Harvest
, was chosen by
Publishers Weekly
as one of the 100 Best Books of 2006. A third-generation Californian, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Canadian writer Tia V. Travis.