Jim put the glass down and applauded. His face was a mask of pure delight.
“You know, we should have met ages ago. You could have taken Tomo’s place as emcee, easy, and we could have cleaned out twice as many homes. Girls for me, girls for you, and split the loot down the middle. Ah, well.” He rose and brushed some grass off his pants. “So. We best get this done, before my bride thinks I’m having it on with some tart, right?”
“I didn’t come alone.” I still just sat there as he moved in closer.
Jim turned his head to the green Mercer and yelled, in the merriest voice I’d ever heard, “Oi, Fiona! You can come out of the car now. This will go much faster that way, ya see.”
There was no movement inside Aoife’s Teutonic taxicab, at first. Then the boot slowly creaked open, and Fiona clambered out, carrying something heavy between her hands. She advanced toward us like those soldiers in tintype drawings, knowing they’ll die in the assault, chin up, eyes front. “Move away from her,” she said. “Do it!”
“Why does everybody in this town talk like Bronagh the make-believe cop? Put that thing down, or I’ll bleed you both slower than I need to.”
You see, that was the whole extent of my plan, all of it.
Brilliant, right? I hook the bait, and Fiona sweeps in and beats his brains in while we’re at it. Now do you understand why I didn’t want to share any of this with you? Christ, it’s embarrassing enough to look like one of Jim’s groupies. Preparing to die like one was even worse. Jim reached into the wicker basket one more time, and I knew he wasn’t offering any more chicken.
What happened next was either a magical sprinkle from Jim’s own stories or just the most solid proof I’ve ever had that love is stronger than fear.
Booom!
The sound made all three of us flinch and turn toward it.
My twin, glorious in that army jacket with the butterfly men painted all over it, pointed our father’s shotgun at Jim’s head. She quickly removed the spent cartridge and inserted a fresh one as she walked up on him from behind. I’d never seen her eyes look so alive until that moment, and her cheeks were as red as candy apples. It was like she was running on pure oxygen. Her hands didn’t shake, even when she stood three feet away from him.
“That’s enough picnicking for one day,” Aoife said. “Too cold, anyway.”
Jim was poleaxed; his shock at seeing the girl he had left a bloody, sobbing mess on the floor shone through his eternal charm. Because this was impossible. Me and Fiona couldn’t hide our surprise either. You see, Aoife was never part of my ingenious plan. And here she was, the cavalry rescuing the two Indian squaws who had screwed up and were about to be killed themselves. It was better than one of Jim’s stories, is what it was. A last-minute plot twist. The heroes laugh and the villains cry. Except our villain was a long way from crying.
“Yer brilliant, Aoife!” I said, feeling a lump in my throat.
The seanchaí soon recovered and poured honey on his next threat. “People heard that blast,” said Jim, keeping calmer than a mortician. “And even if they didn’t, they’ll know who killed me. I’ve spread enough stories about you three around town to fill two Italian operas.”
“Shoot him!” hissed Fiona, crying in embarrassment at having to stand there, doing nothing. Or maybe she hated herself for having loved him a little bit, too, not so long ago.
“Wait, let’s see what other goodies he brought along,” I said, feeling my hands come alive and duck into Jim’s wicker basket. There was a claw hammer inside, wrapped in duct tape. The last thing Tomo saw while he was alive, I thought. Him and several girls I could mention. I waved the thing in the air. “Out of chicken, are ya?” I asked him.
“Home decorating should be done at home,” Aoife said, gesturing for Jim to start walking toward the woods. “You should have brought silverware, instead.”
“Ever kill anybody?” Jim asked her, nodding at the gun barrel. “It’s messy.”
“Yer wasting my time; now walk,” she answered.
Jim had reached the edge of the woods when he stopped and leaned on a tree. A faun wouldn’t have looked half as good in the flecks of green sunlight coming through the leaves, and he knew that, too. “Admit it,” he said, “you’re just a little bit curious. About why all those women died. And you won’t put me in the ground until you hear it from me. Isn’t that right?”
“No,” said Aoife.
I didn’t say anything. By then, second thoughts were crawling into my brain through a hole in my heart that I thought I’d stopped with plenty of hatred beforehand.
“But then Róisín won’t get the answer to her question,” Jim said, picking a piece of bark off the tree. “Will you, little rose?”
“Shut up!” I said, moving toward him with the knife drawn.
“What’s he talking about, Rosie?” Aoife had forgotten about the weapon in her own hands. She looked at me with the slightest echo of doubt.
“Nothing,” I said, shame burning in my cheeks, waving the blade about. “Pull the trigger and be done with him. Or I’ll—”
“Wait,” said Fiona, out of breath, even if she had just been standing there, not moving a muscle. Her hand shook as she brought it up to her lips.
And Jim smiled, didn’t he? Grinned from there all the way to the coast of Donegal. Oh, but he was a champion at this, turning a dead-certain execution into a session of mental pinball, with himself as the guy causing the machine to tilt right before the bonus round.
“What d’ya mean, wait?” asked Aoife, shifting her feet in those shocking pink commando boots. Her healthy color had turned gray. She raised the gun one more time, pointing it at Jim’s pretty haircut. “Will someone tell me—”
“I just wanted to ask him something first,” explained Fiona, looking at us like someone caught at the SuperValu stealing food for her children.
“Except you don’t care about Sarah,” Jim said to Fiona, sitting down with his back to the tree and getting comfortable. “Do ya? Or Laura Hilliard, or Julie Ann Holland, or any other flaxen-haired soul that crossed my path. You really want to know about what happened to them? Say something any time.” Fiona looked away, for just a second, and he continued, driving that invisible wedge between us like a hot scalpel. “No, that’s not it. You want to know about me and you. Why I left. Why I picked little Kelly and your aunt instead. Right?”
Ker-lick! sang both hammers on our father’s trusty old shotgun as Aoife got ready to end the intermission and move on to the main event. “Everyone’s talking too much.”
“So which is it?” I heard myself asking the man I’d promised to kill with my own bare hands only the night before. “Love her or kill her? Or doesn’t it matter?”
Even Aoife stopped, blinking her eyes as her index finger tensed on the trigger. “Oh, this one, he kills,” she said. “I guarantee you that.”
Jim folded his hands the way a shaman would, cocking his head like he had just heard something wise whispered into his ear. Far behind him, at the edge of the beach, someone walking two German shepherds ambled our way, apparently unaware of the gunshot. One black dog leaped into the waves, retrieving a stick. Tick-tock, I thought. Time’s a-wastin’.
“Ten minutes,” he said, staring down the twin gun barrels. “I know I’ll die today. I may even deserve it. But if you let me live for just ten more minutes, right underneath this tree? I’ll tell you how the story ends. Prince Euan’s and mine, both.”
The dogs’ barking reached us in snippets. I imagined I could hear the wolf’s blood song in my own ears as Aoife appeared to think it over. Fiona nodded at her.
“Five minutes,” Aoife said, not lowering her gun. “And then time’s up.”
“Tough audience,” said the seanchaí, and pointed in the direction of an empty field sloping down toward us from town. “But fair play to ya. Now, let’s pretend the Fort of the Wolf stood on that spot right over there, standards snapping in the wind. It’s near evening, and you can look inside its grand
est tower.” His voice slipped into a hazy monotone that existed in some other time. “Then imagine you see a wolf standing in front of a beautiful woman who does nothing to defend herself. That’s Prince Euan, deciding between life as a hunted animal or as a human being who was never quite human. He’s been kneeling in front of the princess, but now he rises. And she can see her fate reflected in his eyes.”
“Can you feel it, cousin?” said Aisling, as she watched the man before her stagger to his feet like a beggar.
Yes, his feet, because the wolf’s body was changing even as he put the weight on his hind legs, feeling them stretch and bend backward. Prince Euan felt such searing pain he’d never imagined possible as he dared to kiss her on the lips for the first time. His gray coat, still thick and matted from foraging during the winter months, was peeling back from the muscles flexing underneath all by itself, and each hair plucked from his body. God had finally punished him for his wickedness, and he knew the final judgment was near. His full memory as a murderous pretender to the throne rushed back into his head, blurring his vision. Brother Ned and his poor father would no doubt be waiting for him on the other side, seeking revenge. He was afraid to live. Terrified of death. And unable to reverse the process he saw transforming his body as he smelled her perfume; his chest muscles convulsed and shrank down to half their size, and the knife-sized teeth he’d grown accustomed to having withdrew up into his gums with a sucking sound.
He crawled on top of his cousin, steadied himself on the headboard, and entered her. It was as if the men he’d slain now howled in his ears, and every killer instinct he’d felt collided in this moment, squeezing the last animal reflex out of him and into forever after.
“It . . . I’m dying,” he said, listening to his heart sounding a last rhythmic tattoo.
Princess Aisling just smiled and touched his smooth cheek. “No, only one of you,” she said, kissing him on the tip of his once again aristocratic nose. “The beast has to die so that the man may live. That’s what my soothsayers have foretold. But you must wait for dawn. Stay with me until the sun rises and your delivery is complete. And we can rule this kingdom as man and wife.”
Euan first rode her like a man who hadn’t ever been with a woman. It was clumsy and furtive, and he felt like a boy. The wolf memory still contained somewhere deep in his own skin bade him sever her arteries in one quick tear, but it was overcome with the warm sensation of her all around him and inside his head. As the night wore on, he was carried on a purple ocean of calm seas, leading him into safe harbor. It was a sensation he couldn’t equate with anything he’d ever felt before in his life.
Human beings would have called it contentment, trust, even feelings of love.
But to Euan, former lord of his father’s mighty fort, slayer of wolves become a creature of the forest himself, it seemed a trick of the mind. He closed his eyes and realized he had performed this act before, with many women, without ever attaining this unfamiliar sensation of belonging. It calmed his vexation. Aisling’s movements underneath him grew in strength until she gripped his newly slimmed-down forearms and lay quite still.
Euan found his own release just as the far side of the woods outside drank in the first pale ghost of morning. He held her and tried to recapture the image of a wolf, paws nearly silent on the ground, mere inches away from its chosen prey. But the vision fluttered behind his eyelids and faded as the sun grew stronger. He remembered playing with his father as a boy. There had been trumpets. And sweets.
All he recalled of his recent existence as an animal was the eyes of the wolf that had cursed him. “Only God and fortune know,” it had promised, threatening him with eternal damnation. And hadn’t he shown it how wrong it was, how utterly ludicrous? He had been in purgatory as a savage beast but made it back to safety, thank the Lord. As he fell asleep with sunlight stroking his new face, he kissed Princess Aisling’s neck.
Euan slept until the first bell for morning prayers.
Then he awoke, as if snatched from a nightmarish dream. It felt like his body was in the grip of a fever such as he’d seen the insane suffer. The blood in his ears thrummed like the battle drums that had accompanied his entry into manhood on the battlefield. It swished along the deeper, instinctual canal that humans cannot hear or even perceive. And there was no doubt what it needed him to do, despite his smooth pink-flesh costume pretending to clothe a human. It knew what really lay beneath, no matter what that creature be called by man or beast.
Euan looked over at Princess Aisling, curled up around his upper arm for anchorage, a mess of hair bleeding out over the silken pillows. He stared through the open window at the forest, where myriad smells of newly opened roses blended with the raw, musky scent of deer secreted onto trees for mating season. A dove fluttered by. The world expanded. His heart began to thump; yes, he believed it was even attempting to grow large enough to fit a roving animal once again, all by itself.
The young woman stirred, rubbed her nose, and began to open her eyes.
“Good morning, cousin,” she said, craning her neck for a kiss.
I made my choice long ago, Euan thought, knowing that the old wolf hadn’t told him everything. His real torment was contained in this moment. I was formed before I even murdered my brother and before I felt the red thrill at terrorizing women as I stole their last breath. Even in human form, I will forever remain what I’ve always been.
A predator.
Driven by the fear of what I’m chasing before me, relishing only in the kill.
“Cousin?” asked Aisling, sensing something shifting inside the body next to hers.
Prince Euan’s head felt like it would explode. His skull distended and expanded downward, and the sharp yellow teeth descended from the roof of his mouth until the pain was too much to bear. He opened his jaw and saw gray hair appearing on his forearms faster than a fleeting thought. There was a brief carnal hesitation about ending the young life next to him.
Then he bit down on Aisling’s neck and shook it until he heard the soft crack.
The day watch out on the ramparts could have sworn they saw a wolf leap from the tower, land on the ground, and vanish into the trees.
Jim picked at his nails, humming a tune. He watched us stand there and continue to listen for a story that was long over. He grinned and patted his shirt pocket down for smokes. But it was me his eyes returned to more than the others. The knife in my hand was slick with sweat. Out by the sea, the man with the dogs was gone. I could hear my sisters breathing.
“You forgot to tell us how your own story ends,” said Aoife tone-lessly. The 12-gauge dangled from her gun hand like a gardening tool.
“What, do I have a spare minute left?” the storyteller wanted to know.
Fiona tightened her grip around something ugly and heavy. I noticed she’d picked up Jim’s own hammer. “You need to clear something up for me,” she said, sounding grim. But her eyes flitted around between me and Aoife too much for her to scare anybody.
Jim chuckled. I can still hear the sound. Like an uncle you don’t like, whispering a dirty secret in your ear at your parents’ party, that kind of laugh. Ya know?
“What’d ya really say to that Swedish fella?” Fiona’s voice sounded like someone held her throat in a vise.
Jim shook his head. “Use your imagination. What would make a man twice my size turn into a scared wee lad? No fairy tale, I guarantee you that.” He stared up into the sky as if he were going to fly a kite later on. “Told him I’d kill his girlfriend and let him watch. Are you really that naïve?”
“But those women,” Fiona persisted, breathing too hard not to cry as she asked the question. “Why kill them at all? They were no threat to you. Sarah, she—”
“Just got in the way, is all,” said Jim, sounding bored. “Overheard me and Tomo talking about our method. Poor Julie Ann Holland? She heard Tomo robbing her downstairs, so she had to go, while Kelly, whom I know you remember—well, she lived because she didn’t notice anything but m
e. Luck of the draw, really. If you want a mysterious answer from my deprived childhood, yer wasting time here.”
Fiona appeared to look inward, seeing something I could tell she didn’t care to find. When she stared at the seanchaí again, her eyes revealed more than she cared to about what lay inside. The real question finally escaped her throat. “Why didn’t you kill me, then?” she asked, trying not to ask why he hadn’t properly loved her, too.
Jim’s smile was neither rueful nor guilty. “You didn’t need killing,” he answered.
“So the wolf was powerless, just like you, is that it?” asked Aoife, fingers gripping the butt of the gun tighter than before. “A slave to biology, yeah? Built for speed and murder, even with ‘the love of a good woman’ right around the corner? Christ, but you’re pathetic. It’s not even a good ending to the story. Just another cheap male sex fantasy.”
Jim shrugged and crumpled an empty ciggie pack before tossing it away. The sugar coating his voice earlier had hardened and flecked off, leaving only rusty steel.
“I saved the ending for the three of you,” he said. “You deserved it. Never had an audience that willing to”—he grinned again—“participate. Come morning, I will still be alive, safe and snug in your aunt’s bed. And all three of you will wonder why you lost yer nerve.” He pointed at Aoife. “Come on! You would have shot me ages ago if you really wanted to, and that goes for your avenging fury sisters as well.”
My eyes met Fiona’s. Each of us waited for the other to do something. Anything. I’d never been more ashamed in my life. And nothing happened.
“But they catch Euan in the end, don’t they?” I asked him, gripping the knife so tightly even the handle drew blood. “The hunters? And then they hang his manky pelt from the nearest tree.”
Jim glanced at me in approval. An audience member who makes up her own ending, now, how about that? “Afraid not, my love,” he said. “Euan was never found, and all that wandering travelers ever saw of him was a gray shadow, calculating how best to track them down. And with Aisling dead, the Fort of the Wolf soon fell to the invaders, who left not a single stone standing. But they did let the defeated soldiers use the wood from the black gate to make a coffin for the princess.”
Darling Jim Page 21
