She stared at his pointed ears when he removed his cone-shaped hat. “The book sent you?”
“I’m Azzed, the book’s guardian. Only very special people can see me. People such as secret princesses.”
Maggie May stared at the book in her hands, a smile on her face. “I knew I didn’t belong here.”
Azzed bowed again. “You are Her Royal Highness Tiffany Ambrosia Regina IV, missing from the fairy realm since birth.”
“I don’t understand. There’s no Azzed or Princess Whatever in the book.”
“That’s true.” He smiled. “You are as smart as you are beautiful, Your Highness. After reading the book one hundred times, the spell is broken, and I’m allowed to appear to reveal your true nature.”
Maggie May lowered her feet to the floor. “Why me?”
“Another intelligent question. Haven’t you wondered how someone so far above the others could be raised in such squalor and poverty?” He looked around the attic with disdain. “You know in your heart this isn’t where you’re supposed to be.” Flattery sweetened the pot.
She nodded. “But I’m not a beautiful princess.”
“A simple enchantment, Your Highness, to hide you from evil forces.” This one was smarter than she looked. “When we reach the palace, you’ll resume your true appearance. The princes will fight to escort you to this evening’s coronation ball. The other princesses will be green with envy.”
She almost glowed with satisfaction. This would be an easy contract. “Will there be trials?” she asked.
“Trials?” Azzed was confused. Like with a judge? No, she only needed to sign the paperwork.
Maggie May held up the book. “Yes. There are always challenges and some great evil to vanquish before the princess finds her rightful place. Look at Annabeth. By honing her magical powers, she destroyed Grazel, the Evil Wizard.”
Azzed’s wig itched. “Of course, Princess. I didn’t want to frighten you with the details. Lizard men, the Dark Sorceress … Bellashade, barricades of thorns, and an enchanted prince.”
She jumped up, her eyes wide. “What magical powers do I have?”
Azzed stepped back. “Powers? Ah, when you break the prince’s spell with a kiss, he’ll give you the Mighty Sword of the Seven Happy Gods. With it, you’ll be invincible against Bellavanna the Terrible.” He fumbled in his pocket for the contract.
“I thought you called her Bellashade,” Maggie May said.
“She has many names. I fear saying them in case she hears and threatens our quest before it begins, Your Highness.” He glanced around as if the enemy might break through the wall at any moment.
Maggie May nodded. “Okay. What do I pack?”
“Don’t pack anything. Everything you’ll ever need will be provided. Do you have any friends or young relatives who might accompany us on this quest?” He might get lucky. He’d receive a bonus for extra recruits.
“No,” she said.
“Of course not.” Azzed sighed. They never had any friends. “Meet me at the school bus stop at midnight.” After she signed away her soul in a few minutes, she’d forget his visit.
Maggie May hugged the book to her chest. “I knew this would happen, but I’d almost given up hope after the last elf disappeared.”
“Your humdrum life is over,” Azzed said. “Wait. Another elf visited you?”
She laughed, and the cat crawled from beneath the bed. “Yes, but I don’t think he was really an elf. He kind of exploded when I showed him the star.”
Azzed had a sick feeling in his stomach. “Exploded? Star?”
“The star in the book, silly! You know the one Annabeth uses to defeat Grazel.” She held out the book. “Here. I’ll show you.”
Before Azzed could question her further, Maggie May took a piece of chalk from her desk and knelt on the hardwood floor. With a few quick slashes, she drew a large star over the faint lines already there.
Azzed stared at the markings around his feet. “That’s not a star. That’s a pentagram.”
Maggie May sat back on her heels and gathered the cat in her arms. “Funny. That’s what the other elf said, too.”
Sweating and unable to move his feet, Azzed unrolled the long sheet of paper covered in spidery text. “If you’ll sign here, Maggie May, I’ll give you the life you deserve.”
For the first time, he noticed a ring burnt into the floor inside the pentagram. He sniffed. Spyrax?
The cat meowed and jumped down.
“Oh,” Maggie May said, “I almost forgot the word.”
“What word?”
She flipped open the book and scanned the page. “It’s part of the trial. When Annabeth said the secret word, Grazel was vanquished. Here it is. Lezarg Combusto. Now, where do I sign?”
Azzed couldn’t speak. His collar grew tight and hot. The cat hissed. The contract burst into flames, and he couldn’t release it. As his skin crisped from the oils in his makeup, his last thoughts were of the quota. What would happen to the quota if every child learned that books were powerful enough to destroy demons?
There’d be hell to pay.
Tom Howard is a fantasy and science fiction short story writer living in Little Rock, Arkansas. He thanks his family and friends for their inspiration and the Central Arkansas Speculative Fiction Writers’ Group for their perspiration.
Wa-Ha-Ya (The Wolf)
JL Curtis
13 September 1943
Palermo, Italy, US military replacement depot
A grizzled, frazzled sergeant stood in front of the assembled soldiers in the cavernous warehouse being used.
“When I call your name, report to me and I’ll give you your assignment. Do not waste my time asking for something other than what I give you.” He yawned and wearily flipped the first page of the clipboard over. “Abercrombie, Joseph Edward, Private.”
A soldier stumbled forward, duffle bag over one shoulder, rifle over the other one. When he made it to where the sergeant stood, the sergeant demanded, “Dog tag.” The soldier lifted his dog tag from under his shirt. The sergeant nodded, made a check mark, and said, “Eighty-second. Out the door to the left.”
Joe Curry, half Cherokee Indian, eighteen years old, small and wiry, sat on his duffle bag leaning back against the wall of the warehouse that smelled of the sea and the funk of too many men in too close a space. The sergeant continued to drone down the list of names as Joe did the meditation his grandpa had taught him for calm, wondering where he would be assigned. This definitely isn’t Oklahoma, dummy! I don’t think I better try to do anything over here, he thought, other than grandpa’s meditation.
Everything he’d heard was that they were going directly into battle, replacing soldiers lost on the beachhead at Salerno. He finally heard the sergeant call, “Curry, James Joseph, Private.”
He jumped up, swung his duffle bag over his shoulder, and picked up his M-1 Garand, carrying it in a hunter’s carry. He popped to attention in front of the sergeant and said, “Curry, James Joseph.” As he extended his dog tag, he could smell the booze and cigarettes on the sergeant’s breath and managed not to recoil as the sergeant glanced at the dog tag.
“Where you from, son?” the sergeant asked, picking up on his accent.
“Lawton, Oklahoma, si … Sergeant!”
“You get along with Indians okay, son?”
Joe grinned. “Yes, Sergeant. My best friend is a Kiowa.”
The sergeant chewed his lip for a second, then scratched something out on the clipboard. “Out and to the right, son. You’re goin’ to the One-Fifty-Seventh. They’re from Oklahoma.”
“Thank you, Sergeant,” Joe said, tucking his dog tag back in his shirt. Hoisting his duffle bag, he walked easily out the door behind the sergeant and never heard the sergeant’s comment under his breath. “Son, I just hope to hell you survive.”
Seventy-two hours later, Joe was sharing a foxhole with a Cherokee corporal named Andrew Little as they ducked machine gun fire. He was cursing every time roun
ds spanged and whined off the rocks they had piled in front of the foxhole and would occasionally stick his rifle up and fire a few ineffectual rounds at the Germans.
Joe had been sitting quietly, only bobbing up once in a while and firing aimed shots, when Andrew started to get up again. Joe grabbed his pack and yanked him down just as another round of bullets ricocheted off the rocks. Andrew snapped, “What the hell did you do that for?”
Joe smiled at him. “Because he was due to sweep back over us. Change places with me. I think … I might be able to get him.”
Andrew scoffed, “Sure, you’re a boot. I’ve been up through Sicily, but you know more than I do about combat. Go right ahead, Boot,” he said sarcastically, but he did squirm out of the way, and Joe crawled over to the front of the foxhole, then shifted to the left side. Just as the bullets stopped hitting the rocks in front of him, he popped up and fired three times quickly, then dropped back in the foxhole, cursing. “Missed the other loader.”
Andrew just looked at him. “You’re saying you got two of them?” Joe nodded, and Andrew continued, “How the hell?”
“It’s a pattern. My grandpa taught me about patterns. Everything has a pattern. His was ten, maybe fifteen seconds. He’d sweep the front, and when he crossed us, four seconds later he went back the other way. That meant I had between six and ten seconds to get off a shot.” Joe grinned. “And it worked.” A fusillade of bullets hit the front and right side of the foxhole, and Joe said, “Looks like the other gunner isn’t real happy with us right now.”
As darkness fell, Joe had managed to take out another set of loaders and another gunner. The word was passed to withdraw, and once it was fully dark, they eased out of the foxhole and back down the curve until they were out of range of the random firing. Sergeant Kincaid, the squad leader, grabbed them as they got back to the muster point. “Good shooting, Little. You got a couple of them, but we’re still stuck. The old man is up at HQ trying to talk them out of doing a frontal assault at dawn.”
Little said softly in Cherokee, “I didn’t, the boot got them. He figured out their pattern of fire. He probably saved my life, too.” Joe started to say something, but didn’t, not knowing if it would be smart to let them know he spoke Cherokee, especially since he was considered a half-breed since his dad was white. When Kincaid looked sharply at him, he managed a questioning look back.
Kincaid said, “Nice work, Boot.”
Joe nodded. “Thank you.”
The platoon commander, Lieutenant Martin, walked out of the darkness. “Sergeant, squad leader meeting at the CP, now. Send runners to the other squads.”
“Yes, sir. Shoemaker! Macon! Go roust out the other squad leaders.” Switching to Cherokee, he added, “Corporal Craft, you’re in charge. Get ’em fed and watered. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Craft nodded and said, “You heard the man. Little, take a couple of troops and get us some chow.”
An hour later, Joe had just finished policing up the area when Sergeant Kincaid returned. “Gather round!” Once the squad was assembled, he said, “The One-Fifty-Seventh will continue to be the point of the spear again tomorrow. We’re supposed to be moving up the road to get north of Salerno. Bravo company will continue to hold our positions tomorrow until Alpha can circle around this damn roadblock and get behind the Germans, forcing them to fall back. First platoon, second squad has security tonight, starting at twenty hundred. We’re supposed to man at least three foxholes spread out across the road and approaches. Two-hour rotations. Three rounds rapid fire is the alert signal. Challenge is New York, response is Yankee.” He glanced at Joe. “Corporal Little, you get to pull the first watch with the boot to instruct him. If you feel he can handle it, he can pull his second shift by himself. Y’all are in the far-left foxhole.”
Little nodded. “Grab your rifle, Boot. Let’s get out there.”
Joe’s third watch of the night started at 0400 and it was all he could do to stay awake. He hadn’t tried to do anything spiritual since he’d left Oklahoma, but he knew he had to do something, so he meditated, slipping into the trance state between sleep and awake as he took on the masque of the Wolf totem. He knew his vision lost colors as the darkness of the night receded. His other senses became sharper, especially his senses of smell and his hearing. An added bonus was that the cold seemed to recede. What he couldn’t see was the dim shape of a wolf surrounding his body or the appearance of a wolf’s ears and muzzle covering his head.
He sniffed and smelled the soldier on guard in the next foxhole, almost fifty yards away. He sniffed again and sorted out the odors of gun smoke, the latrine, and a faint smell of sausage coming from the north, along with the smell of the dead. He gazed back and forth over his assigned sector but didn’t see any movement. He went to move his M-1, but it felt as if he was trying to grip it without thumbs. He settled for sliding it over the lip of the foxhole, between two of the larger rocks.
An hour later, as he watched, he heard a tink of metal on a rock off to his left. Turning and sniffing, he smelled a much stronger odor of sausage and some kind of odd tobacco smoke. He looked intently in that direction, a growl starting deep in his throat. He picked out three, no … four Germans moving stealthily down the ditch beside the road with some kind of packs on their backs.
He knew he couldn’t shoot them because he couldn’t control the rifle in his trance. Then he saw a brighter patch just down the ditch from them and willed himself back to full consciousness. Slipping behind the M-1, he carefully sighted on the lighter patch of ground and waited.
A minute or so later, he saw one, then a second shadow cross the patch. Aiming low, he triggered off three quick rounds, then heard running feet and fired a fourth round higher. There was a large explosion, temporarily blinding Joe, and he felt something hit him in the cheek as he belatedly ducked down. The crackle of rifle fire echoed up and down the lines on both sides, with at least one of the German machine guns firing sporadic bursts. He started shaking, tears in his eyes as he realized he’d just killed men. Then he remembered his grandpa’s last words to him before he shipped out, “A warrior kills only when necessary, and only enemies of his people.”
The next thing Joe knew, Little was shaking him, hard. He took a deep breath just as Sergeant Kincaid eeled his way into the foxhole after giving the appropriate countersign to Little’s challenge. “What the hell did you do, Boot?”
Joe’s ears were still ringing, but he replied, “I think I got two … maybe three Germans. I don’t know if I got them for sure. I shot a little high in case the fourth one was running—”
“Three? How the hell? Are you telling me you can see in the dark?”
Joe pointed to the lighter patch in the ditch. “I saw something moving over there, and I knew it wasn’t one of our guys. So, I took a shot.”
“You took three shots! That was the alert signal! Now everybody is up and wanting to know what the hell is going on. You better hope you were right, Curry!” Kincaid crawled back out of the foxhole and disappeared toward the rear area, leaving Joe sitting there wondering if he’d said too much about his ability.
Macon slithered into the foxhole. “They want you back at the CP. Guess they’re sending out a patrol to see what you did or didn’t do.”
Joe crawled out of the foxhole without saying anything and jogged back to the Command Post, saluting when he saw Lieutenant Martin, the platoon commander, standing there impatiently. “Private Curry reporting as ordered, sir!”
“Now that you’ve deigned to join us, lead the way to whatever the hell that was that you started this morning, Private.”
Joe gulped. “Yes, sir.” He almost saluted again but remembered the instructions not to on the line. “I think we should go around to the left of the foxhole I was in, sir.” The lieutenant made a shooing motion and Joe turned and led them past the foxhole after Rutherford challenged them. Joe realized he’d forgotten to challenge Rutherford and figured he’d hear about that later.
Fifte
en minutes later, they stood over the bodies of three Germans, all shot through the body, and a smoking hole in the ground with a boot still standing up in it where the fourth had been. All three of the bodies had packs, and the lieutenant whispered, “Get their packs. We’ll take them back and see if they have anything in them intel might be interested in.” He peered back toward the line of foxholes, then added, “That’s a helluva set of shots in the dark there, Private.”
Joe was wrestling one of the packs off as two troops from second squad got the other two. “I took … I took a chance, Lieutenant. I saw movement over this lighter patch.”
A German machine gun started stuttering and everyone ducked. “Back to the lines, no lights. Lead on, Private.”
A bald-headed major stood at the entrance to the Command Post as they walked in. “What ya got, Lieutenant Martin?”
“Four dead Germans, sir. Brought their packs back.”
“Let’s see what they have, shall we?” The major turned to Curry and the others, “Bring them in here.”
Joe stepped in and took the pack off. As he did so, the major stopped him under the light, then turned and yelled, “Medic up!” He pushed Joe toward a folding chair and said, “Sit down, son. Let’s get the medic to look at you.”
Joe realized his cheek was still hurting, and he started to reach up and scratch it when the major grabbed his hand. The medic came in, took one look at Joe, and whistled. “You got lucky, Private. Another inch higher and you’d have lost the eye.” He reached up and tugged on Joe’s cheek, then held up an inch-long piece of metal. “Want a souvenir to go with your purple heart?” Joe held out his hand and the medic dropped it. “Now this might sting a bit.” Whatever he swabbed the wound with definitely hurt, and Joe’s eyes started watering.
Suddenly they heard the major exclaim, “Holy crap! This pack is full of potato mashers! Be careful with those others. I think we know what the explosion was now. Damn!” The medic led Joe out of the Command Post before he heard anything else.
Unmasked Page 13
