The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 5

by Jonathan Strahan

  They had also alerted the police for miles around, but the Queen dealt with that later.

  Peter stood on empty air about a foot away from the balcony, his head tilted insouciantly back, arms crossed over his chest.

  “You’ll grow up,” he threw out at Ashley, as if it was the direst threat imaginable.

  “You bet,” Ashley said. “You might, too.”

  There was a moment of stillness. Ashley remembered that instant of quiet at the evil fortress, and remembered him dreaming and weeping in Neverland.

  “Not yet, Ashley lady,” said Peter. “Not yet.”

  “You can’t stay on that island forever.”

  “Maybe not,” Peter told her. “I used to live in Kensington Gardens with the fairies. Dreams change. But there’s always another game.”

  Ashley raised an eyebrow. “The spy thing?”

  Peter beamed at her, beautiful and terrible, young and sweet.

  The monster her grandmother had feared, with all his first teeth.

  “You must admit, Ashley,” he said. “I am perfectly splendid at it.”

  “You’re all right,” Ashley said grudgingly.

  “You assisted me quite creditably,” Peter told her grandly.

  I do not think it will surprise you when I mention that Ashley was not overwhelmed by this tribute.

  “I don’t suppose…” said Peter.

  “What?”

  Peter smiled his most fascinating smile. “You might want to come on another mission with me?”

  Ashley studied the horizon. She shouldn’t. He was a creature of nightmares as well as dreams, and he had kidnapped her, scared her grandmother, driven her great-grandmother mad.

  Her great-great-great-grandmother had loved him, left him, and lived.

  “I’ll think about it,” Ashley said.

  Peter crowed and launched himself into the sky, utterly and blissfully happy, the bright triumphant sound trailing after him back to the balcony where Ashley stood.

  She squared her shoulders and opened the doors that would lead to her parents.

  Knowing Peter, the next time he came might be many years later. He might be coming for her daughter. In which case, Ashley was not going to bother with the pepper spray. She was going to make her child sleep with a taser.

  Of course, Peter had no sense of time, and he might get bored and decide to arrive next week.

  Ashley went into the house smiling slightly. She would have to look into acquiring that taser as soon as possible.

  Across a sky painted with the neon lights of a changing city, headed toward an island being destroyed as dreams grew dark, flew Peter Pan, who never grows up, except now and again—from the fairies’ baby in Kensington Gardens to the boy who ruled Neverland to the greatest spy in the Queen’s Secret Service.

  Times change.

  There is always another game.

  You don’t have to grow up yet.

  THE AARNE-THOMPSON CLASSIFICATION REVUE

  HOLLY BLACK

  Holly Black is the author of the bestselling “The Spiderwick Chronicles.” Her first story appeared in 1997, but she gained attention with her debut novel, Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale. She has written eleven “Spiderwick” novels, three novels inher “Modern Faerie Tales” sequence, including Andre Norton Award winner Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faerie, and “The Good Neighbors” series of graphic novels. She has also edited Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd (with Cecil Castellucci). Black’s most recent books are short story collection The Poison Eaters and Other Stories, novel White Cat (the first book in “The Curse Workers” series), and anthology Zombies vs. Unicorns (with Justine Larbalestier). Upcoming is new novel Red Glove and anthology Welcome to Bordertown (with Ellen Kushner). She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with her husband, the artist Theo Black.

  There is a werewolf girl in the city. She sits by the phone on a Saturday night, waiting for it to ring. She paints her nails purple.

  She goes to bed early. Body curled around a pillow, fingers clawing at the bedspread, she dreams that she’s on a dating show, a reality television one. She’s supposed to pick one boyfriend out of a dozen strangers by eliminating one candidate each week. After eliminations, she eats the guys she’s asked to leave. In her dream, the boys get more and more afraid as they overhear screams, but they can’t quite believe the show is letting them be murdered one by one, so they convince each other to stay until the end. In the reunion episode, the werewolf girl eats the boy who she’s picked to be her boyfriend.

  That’s the only way to get to do a second season, after all.

  When she wakes up, she’s sorry about the dream. It makes her feel guilty and a little bit hungry, which makes her feel worse. Her real-life boyfriend is a good guy, the son of a dentist from an ancestral line of dentists. Sometimes,he takes her to his dad’s office and they sit in the chairs and suck on nitrous while watching the overhead televisions that are supposed to distract patients. When they do that, the werewolf girl feels calmer than she’s felt her whole life.

  She’s calling herself Nadia in this city. She’s called herself Laura and Liana and Dana in other places.

  Despite going to bed early, she’s woken up tired.

  Nadia takes her temperature and jots it down in a little notebook by the side of the bed. Temperature is more accurate than phases of the moon in telling her when she’s going to change.

  She gets dressed, makes coffee and drinks it. Then goes to work. She is a waitress on a street where there are shirt shops and shops that sell used records and bandanas and studded belts. She brings out tuna salads to aged punks and cappuccinos in massive bowls to tourists who ask her why she doesn’t have any tattoos.

  Nadia still looks young enough that her lack of references doesn’t seem strange to her employers, although she worries about the future. For now, though, she appears to be one of a certain type of girl—a girl that wants to be an actress, who’s come in from the suburbs and never really worked before, a girl restaurants in the city employ a lot of. She always asks about flexibility in her interviews, citing auditions and rehearsals. Nadia is glad of the easy excuses, since she does actually need a flexible schedule.

  The only problem with her lie is that the other girls ask her to go to auditions.

  Sometimes Nadia goes, especially when she’s lonely. Her boyfriend is busy learning about teeth and gets annoyed when she calls him. He has a lot of classes. The auditions are often dull, but she likes the part where all the girls stand in line and drink coffee while they wait. She likes the way their skin shimmers with nervous sweat and their eyes shine with the possibility of transformation. The right part will let them leave their dirty little lives behind and turn them into celebrities.

  Nadia sits next to another waitress, Rhonda, as they wait to be called back for the second phase of the audition for a musical. Rhonda is fingering a cigarette that she doesn’t light—because smoking is not allowed in the building and also because she’s trying to quit.

  Grace, a willowy girl who can never remember anyone’s order at work, has already been cut.

  “I hate it when people stop doing things and then they don’t want to be around other people doing them,” Rhonda says, flipping the cigarette over and over in her fingers. “Like people who stop drinking and then can’t hang out in bars. I mean, how can you really know you’re over something if you can’t deal with being tempted by it?”

  Nadia nods automatically, since it makes her feel better to think that letting herself be tempted is a virtue. Sometimes she thinks of the way a ribcage cracks or the way fat and sinew and offal taste when they’re gulped down together hot and raw. It doesn’t bother her that she has these thoughts, except when they come at inappropriate moments, like being alone with the driver in a taxi or helping a friend clean up after a party.

  A large woman with many necklaces calls Rhonda’s name and she goes out onto the stage. Nadia takes another sip of her coffee and looks over at the sea of other girls on the
call-back list. The girls look back at her through narrowed eyes.

  Rhonda comes back quickly. “You’re next,” she says to Nadia. “I saw the clipboard.”

  “How was it?”

  Rhonda shakes her head and lights her cigarette. “Stupid. They wanted me to jump around. They didn’t even care if I could sing.”

  “You can’t smoke in here,” one of the other girls says.

  “Oh, shove it,” says Rhonda.

  When Nadia goes out onto the stage, she expects her audition to go fast. She reads monologues in a way that can only be called stilted. She’s never had a voice coach. The only actual acting she ever does is when she pretends to be disappointed when the casting people don’t want her. Usually she just holds the duffel bags of the other girls as they are winnowed down, cut by cut.

  The stage is lit so that she can’t see the three people sitting in the audience too well. It’s one of those converted warehouse theaters where everyone sits at tables with tea lights and gets up a lot to go to the bar in the back. No tea lights are flickering now.

  “We want to teach you a routine,” one of them says. A man’s voice, with an accent she can’t place. “But first—a little about our musical. It’s called the Aarne-Thompson Classification Revue. Have you heard of it?”

  Nadia shakes her head. On the audition call, it was abbreviated ATSCR. “Are you Mr. Aarne?”

  He makes a small sound of disappointment. “We like to think of it as a kitchen sink of delights. Animal Tales. Tales of Magic. Jokes. Everything you could imagine. Perhaps the title is a bit dry, but our poster more than makes up for that. You ready to learn a dance?”

  “Yes,” says Nadia.

  The woman with the necklaces comes out on the stage. She shows Nadia some simple steps and then points to crossed strips of black masking tape on the floor.

  “You jump from here to here at the end,” the woman says.

  “Ready?” calls the man. One of the other people sitting with him says something under his breath.

  Nadia nods, going over the steps in her head. When he gives her the signal, she twists and steps and leaps. She mostly remembers the moves. At the end, she leaps though the air for the final jump. Her muscles sing.

  In that moment, she wishes she wasn’t a fake. She wishes that she was a dancer. Or an actress. Or even a waitress. But she’s a werewolf and that means she can’t really be any of those other things.

  “Thank you,” another man says. He sounds a little odd, as though he’s just woken up. Maybe they have to watch so many auditions that they take turns napping through them. “We’ll let you know.”

  Nadia walks back to Rhonda, feeling flushed. “I didn’t think this was a call for dancers.”

  Rhonda rolls her eyes. “It’s for a musical. You have to dance in a musical.”

  “I know,” says Nadia, because she does know. But there’s supposed to be singing in musicals too. She thought Rhonda would be annoyed at only being asked to dance; Rhonda usually likes to complain about auditions. Nadia looks down at her purple nail polish. It’s starting to chip at the edges.

  She puts the nail in her mouth and bites it until she bleeds.

  Being a werewolf is like being Clark Kent, except that when you go into the phone booth, you can’t control what comes out.

  Being a werewolf is like being a detective who has to investigate his own crimes.

  Being a werewolf means that when you take off your clothes, you’re still not really naked. You have to take off your skin too.

  Once, when Nadia had a different name and lived in a small town outside of Toronto, she’d been a different girl. She took ballet and jazz dancing. She had a little brother who was always reading her diary. Then one day on her way home from school, a man asked her to help him find his dog. He had a leash and a van and everything.

  He ate part of her leg and stomach before anyone found them.

  When she woke up in the hospital, she remembered the way he’d caught her with his snout pinning her neck, the weight of his paws. She looked down at her unscarred skin and stretched her arms, ripping the IV needle out without meaning to.

  She left home after she tried to turn her three best friends into werewolves too. It didn’t work. They screamed and bled. One of them died.

  “Nadia,” Rhonda is saying.

  Nadia shakes off all her thoughts like a wet dog shaking itself dry.

  The casting director is motioning to her. “We’d like to see you again,” the woman with the necklaces says.

  “Her?” Rhonda asks.

  When Nadia goes back on stage, they tell her she has the part.

  “Oh,” says Nadia. She’s too stunned to do more than take the packet of information on rehearsal times and tax forms. She forgets to ask them which part she got.

  That night Rhonda and Grace insist on celebrating. They get a bottle of cheap champagne and drink it in the back of the restaurant with the cook and two of the dishwashers. Everyone congratulates Nadia and Rhonda keeps telling stories about clueless things that Nadia did on other auditions and how it’s a good thing that the casting people only wanted Nadia to dance because she can’t act her way out of a paper bag.

  Nadia says that no one can act their way out of a paper bag. You can only rip your way out of one. That makes everyone laugh and—Rhonda says—is a perfect example of how clueless Nadia can be.

  “You must have done really well in that final jump,” Rhonda says. “Were you a gymnast or something? How close did you get?”

  “Close to what?” Nadia asks.

  Rhonda laughs and takes another swig out of the champagne bottle. “Well, you couldn’t have made it. No human being could jump that far without a pole vault.”

  Nadia’s skin itches.

  Later, her boyfriend comes over. She’s still tipsy when she lets him in and they lie in bed together. For hours he tells her about teeth. Molars. Bicuspids. Dentures. Prosthodontics. She falls asleep to the sound of him grinding his jaw, like he’s chewing through the night.

  Rehearsals for the Aarne-Thompson Classification Revue happen every other afternoon. The director’s name is Yves. He wears dapper suits in brown tweed and tells her, “You choose what you reveal of what you are when you’re on stage.”

  Nadia doesn’t know what that means. She does know that when she soars through the air, she wants to go higher and further and faster. She wants her muscles to burn. She knows she could, for a moment, do something spectacular. Something that makes her shake with terror. She thinks of her boyfriend and Rhonda and the feel of the nitrous filling her with drowsy nothingness; she does the jump they tell her and no more than that.

  The other actors aren’t what she expects. There is a woman who plays a mermaid whose voice is like spun gold. There is a horned boy who puts on long goat legs and prances around the stage, towering above them. And there is a magician who is supposed to keep them all as part of his menagerie in cages with glittering numbers.

  “Where are you from?” the mermaid asks. “You look familiar.”

  “People say that a lot,” Nadia says, although no one has ever said it to her. “I guess I have that kind of face.”

  The mermaid smiles and smoothes back gleaming black braids. “If you want, you can use my comb. It works on even the most matted fur—”

  “Wow,” says the goat boy, lurching past. “You must be special. She never lets anyone use her comb.”

  “Because you groom your ass with it,” she calls after him.

  The choreographer is named Marie. She is the woman with the necklaces from the first audition. When Nadia dances and especially when she jumps, Marie watches her with eyes like chips of gravel. “Good,” she says slowly, as though the word is a grave insult.

  Nadia is supposed to play a princess who has been trapped in a forest of ice by four skillful brothers and a jaybird. The magician rescues her and brings her to his menagerie. And, because the princess is not on stage much during the first act, Nadia also plays a bear
dancing on two legs. The magician falls in love with the bear and the princess falls in love with the magician. Later in the play, the princess tricks the magician into killing the bear by making it look like the bear ate the jaybird. Then Nadia has to play the bear as she dies.

  At first, all Nadia’s mistakes are foolish. She lets her face go slack when she’s not the one speaking or dancing and the director has to remind her over and over again that the audience can always see her when she’s on stage. She misses cues. She sings too softly when she’s singing about fish and streams and heavy fur. She sings louder when she’s singing of kingdoms and crowns and dresses, but she can’t seem to remember the words.

  “I’m not really an actress,” she tells him, after a particularly disastrous scene.

  “I’m not really a director,” Yves says with a shrug. “Who really is what they seem?”

  “No,” she says. “You don’t understand. I just came to the audition because my friends were going. And they really aren’t my friends. They’re just people I work with. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “Okay, if you’re not an actress,” he asks her, “then what are you?”

  She doesn’t answer. Yves signals for one of the golden glitter-covered cages to be moved slightly to the left.

  “I probably won’t even stay with the show,” Nadia says. “I’ll probably have to leave after opening night. I can’t be trusted.”

  Yves throws up his hands. “Actors! Which of you can be trusted? But don’t worry. We’ll all be leaving. This show tours.”

  Nadia expects him to cut her from the cast after every rehearsal, but he never does. She nearly cries with relief.

  The goat boy smiles down at her from atop his goat legs. “I have a handkerchief. I’ll throw it to you if you want.”

  “I’m fine,” Nadia says, rubbing her wet eyes.

  “Lots of people weep after rehearsals.”

  “Weird people,” she says, trying to make it a joke.