Elizaveta stared at me, gray eyes sharp as a harpy’s. Witches don’t have much trouble seeing in the dark either.
“She moved against what was mine,” I told her. “That made stopping her my business. I’m a wolf, ma’am. Not a cat. I don’t play around with my prey.” I had liked Nadia, the Nadia I thought she was anyway. It was better that I killed her quickly.
I reached out and handed her the ring I’d found in Nadia’s jewelry box. “This is Toni McFetters’s wedding ring. When you put out the body for the police to find, it will cause fewer questions if she’s wearing that ring. The clothes she was wearing are in a paper bag in the closet—a pink running suit. Maybe she should die of natural causes. I’m sure you can figure something out.”
She took it and sighed, her voice softening and the Russian accent gone. She sounded old. “You know, it is very difficult to raise a witch so that they do not self-destruct. I myself had six siblings and only two of us survived. My sister had no talent at all. The temptations are so great.”
She looked at Nadia. When she looked back at me, the accent had returned. “She had a crush on you, my little Texas bunny. Otherwise she wouldn’t have been so foolish as to do this where I might find her out.”
“She knew that I’m gay,” I told her, startled.
She laughed. “Forbidden fruit is the sweetest, Warren, my darling. She thought she could change that if you would just look at her. I imagine getting paid to kill your boyfriend was too much temptation for her to resist.” She smiled sweetly at me, waiting for me to understand that this was all my fault.
She cared for Nadia, I thought, but she cared more that I’d robbed her of the opportunity to get more power. Maybe she was also ticked that I’d seen what was going on under her nose before she did.
I hate witches.
“Nadia made her choices,” I said abruptly, standing up. “I need to get home.”
As I walked out of the bedroom, Elizaveta said, “Tell your Alpha that Nadia has decided that she wants to explore the world. She already has tickets to France. No one will much notice when she doesn’t come back.”
Meaning that Elizaveta would live with my killing Nadia and wouldn’t break the deal she had with the pack. When I’d called Adam to warn him what I had to do, he’d told me that was what Elizaveta would do.
I didn’t slow down or reply.
DESPITE WHAT I’D TOLD ELIZAVETA, I HAD ONE MORE STOP TO MAKE. FOR this one I would be the wolf. It took me a while to shed my human form for the wolf, longer than usual. Probably because I’d been shot; physical weakness makes the transformation harder for me.
The second-story window, the bedroom window, was open, and I jumped through it from the ground. I landed with a thud, but my victim, like Nadia, didn’t wake up. I needed this one awake. So I made more noise, letting my claws tick on the hardwood floor.
It wasn’t hard. I was very, very angry.
“Wha—”
He turned on the light, but I was already out in the hall. Just around the corner. I made a little more noise.
He grumbled, “Damned mice.”
He walked into the hallway where I waited for him.
I CRAWLED INTO BED, EXHAUSTED, WEARY TO MY SOUL.
“Warren?” He pulled me close. “Baby, you’re freezing.”
If he asked, I would tell him.
“Can you sleep?”
I nodded.
“Fine, tell me about it in the morning.”
I took the comfort he offered gratefully.
WE WERE AWAKENED BY THE AMBULANCE.
Kyle went out to find out what he could while I showered. He came in while I was drying off.
“Mr. Francis died of a heart attack last night.” He had an odd expression on his face. Hard not to feel some relief, I guessed—and harder not to feel guilty over it. “I guess we won’t be getting any more notes.” He frowned at me, then donned his lawyer face. “Warren?”
Among the health issues our neighbor had retired with was a weak heart. Much easier to explain a heart attack than death by wild animals. This was the twenty-first century after all, not the nineteenth.
“I’d have gotten more satisfaction if I could have sunk my teeth into him,” I told Kyle, rubbing the towel over my hair with a little more force than necessary. “Apparently he decided that you’d never be a neighbor he could cow properly. He hired Nadia, Elizaveta’s niece, to kill you.”
“Mr. Francis?” Kyle said incredulously. I pulled the towel off my head to see him standing slack-jawed. “Mr. Francis hired a witch to make a zombie to kill me?” After a moment, he shook off his shock. “I thought for sure it would be Nyelund.”
“Covington said she’d pay for half if we told her who hired someone to kill you,” I told him. “It was Sullivan who shot me”—Kyle looked at the red mark on my shoulder that was all that was left of the wound—“but he won’t be a threat to anyone anymore.”
Nadia broke Sullivan—but she’d aimed that magic at me, too. I wasn’t supposed to think about Kyle anymore, I was supposed to leave off the investigation with the feeling that everything would be all right. And I wasn’t supposed to remember the magic she’d worked to ensure that result. She’d spent so long teaching everyone to underestimate her, she’d overestimated herself.
Kyle frowned at me. “Tell me.”
So I told him about Sean Nyelund while I got dressed. I paced restlessly and told him about Nadia while he sat on the bench at the foot of the bed and watched me.
“Justice was served, Warren,” he said when I finished. “I’m sorry it had to be you who served it.”
“I’m not,” I told him. I’d only done what I needed to protect my own. I’d do it again.
He smiled a little as if he knew something I didn’t. “If you say so.”
“She was right,” I said.
“Who was?”
“Nadia. She said the red dress might be useful in finding out who’d killed Toni McFetters.”
He reached up and caught my hand, pulling me down to sit beside him.
“You liked her,” he told me.
“She had a prom photo in her house.” On top of the curio cabinet. “Toni’s husband had taken Nadia to her high school prom. That red dress Toni was wearing? It was Nadia’s prom dress; so were the pearls and shoes, near as I could tell. He’d taken her to the prom and hardly remembered her.” She’d remembered him, though. I’d expected to have to search her house for Toni’s missing belongings or, if that hadn’t worked, wake Nadia up and question her. She’d made things easy for me.
“Elizaveta only objected that she’d exposed herself as a witch to the humans,” Kyle said. “If you hadn’t told her that, she would have left Nadia alone. You didn’t have to kill her.” He put his arm around me. “Tell me that’s not what you’re thinking now. Tell me that’s not what is bothering you.”
It wasn’t. Not quite. I was thinking that she had attacked Kyle and part of me would have been happier if I’d eaten her. It had taken more will than I’d thought I had not to eat the old man next door, who was even more to blame than Nadia.
I stared at Kyle. I know that the wolf must have been showing through, but he didn’t flinch, didn’t drop his eyes.
“She was escalating,” he said. “She killed for money and learned to like it. She killed Toni because Toni and her husband jogged past her house every day and they were happy. She tried to kill me because we are happy.”
He thought I was a hero. He needed to know better.
“I killed two people last night,” I told him. “Premeditated murder.” I swallowed, but told him the other part of it, too. “I enjoyed it.”
He kissed me. When he was finished, he told me, “You’re a werewolf—a predator. A skilled killer, but not an indiscriminate one. So am I. If my prey is still writhing when I’m finished, it doesn’t make me any less a predator.”
I looked at him and he gave me a crooked grin. “Ready to get rid of that apartment yet?”
I
laughed and leaned into him.
“Maybe,” I said. “Just maybe.”
THE ADAKIAN EAGLE
by Bradley Denton
World Fantasy Award, John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winner Bradley Denton was born in 1958, grew up in Kansas, and took an MA in creative writing from the University of Kansas. He sold his first story in 1984 and soon became a regular contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. His first novel, Wrack and Roll, was published in 1986, and was followed by Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede, Blackburn, Lunatics, and Laughin’ Boy. He’s perhaps best known for his series of Blackburn stories and novels about an eccentric serial killer, but he won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for his novella “Sergeant Chip.” His two-volume collectionA Conflagration Artist and The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians won the World Fantasy Award as the year’s Best Collection, and his stories have also been collected in One Day Closer to Death: Eight Stabs at Immortality. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Here he takes us to the frozen, wind-blasted landscape of the Aleutians to join a group of soldiers guarding a barren rock during World War II—one of whom you might recognize—who must face sinister magic, and the even more sinister, and murderous, secrets of the human heart.
I
THE EAGLE HAD BEEN TORTURED TO DEATH.
That was what it looked like. It was staked out on the mountain on its back, wings and feet spread apart, head twisted to one side. Its beak was open wide, as if in a scream. Its open eye would have been staring up at me except that a long iron nail had been plunged into it, pinning the white head to the ground. More nails held the wings and feet in place. A few loose feathers swirled as the wind gusted.
The bird was huge, eleven or twelve feet from wingtip to wingtip. I’d seen bald eagles in the Aleutians before, but never up close. This was bigger than anything I would have guessed.
Given what had been done to it, I wondered if it might have been stretched to that size. The body had been split down the middle, and the guts had been pulled out on both sides below the wings. It wasn’t stinking yet, but flies were starting to gather.
I stood staring at the eagle for maybe thirty seconds. Then I got off the mountain as fast as I could and went down to tell the colonel. He had ordered me to report anything hinky, and this was the hinkiest thing I’d seen on Adak.
That was how I wound up meeting the fifty-year-old corporal they called “Pop.”
And meeting Pop was how I wound up seeing the future.
Trust me when I tell you that you don’t want to do that. Especially if the future you see isn’t even your own.
Because then there’s not a goddamn thing you can do to change it.
II
I FOUND POP IN A RECREATION HUT. I HAD SEEN HIM AROUND, BUT HAD never had a reason to speak with him until the colonel ordered me to. When I found him, he was engrossed in playing Ping-Pong with a sweaty, barechested opponent who was about thirty years his junior. A kid about my age.
Pop had the kid’s number. He was wearing fatigues buttoned all the way up, but there wasn’t a drop of perspiration on his face. He was white-haired, brown-mustached, tall, and skinny as a stick, and he didn’t look athletic. In fact, he looked a little pale and sickly. But he swatted the ball with cool, dismissive flicks of his wrist, and it shot across the table like a bullet.
This was early on a Wednesday morning, and they had the hut to themselves except for three sad sacks playing poker against the back wall. Pop was facing the door, so when I came in he looked right at me. His eyes met mine for a second, and he must have known I was there for him. But he kept on playing.
I waited until his opponent missed a shot so badly that he cussed and threw down his paddle. Then I stepped closer and said, “Excuse me, Corporal?”
Pop’s eyes narrowed behind his eyeglasses. “You’ll have to be more specific,” he said. He had a voice that made him sound as if he’d been born with a scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
“He means you, Pop,” the sweaty guy said, grabbing his shirt from a chair by the curving Quonset wall. “Ain’t nobody looking for me.”
Pop gave him the briefest of grins. I caught a glimpse of ill-fitting false teeth below the mustache. They made Pop look even older. And he had already looked pretty old.
“Cherish the moments when no one’s looking for you,” Pop said. “And don’t call me ‘Pop.’ ‘Boss’ will do fine.”
“Aw, I like ‘Pop,’ ” the sweaty guy said. “Makes you sound like a nice old man.”
“I’m neither,” Pop said.
“You’re half right.” The sweaty guy threw on a fatigue jacket and walked past me. “I’m gettin’ breakfast. See you at the salt mines.”
Pop put down his paddle. “Wait. I’ll come along.”
The sweaty guy looked at me, then back at Pop. “I think I’ll see you later,” he said, and went out into the gray Adak morning. Which, in July, wasn’t much different from the slightly darker gray, four-hour Adak night.
Pop turned away from me and took a step toward the three joes playing poker.
“Corporal,” I said.
He turned back and put his palms on the Ping-Pong table, looking across at me like a judge looking down from the bench. Which was something I’d seen before, so it didn’t bother me.
“You’re a private,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes, sir.”
He scowled, his eyebrows pinching together in a sharp V. “Then you should know better than to call another enlisted man ‘sir.’ You generally shouldn’t even call him by rank, unless it’s ‘Sarge.’ We’re all G.I.’s pissing into the same barrels here, son. When the wind doesn’t blow it back in our faces.”
“So what should I call you?” I asked.
He was still scowling. “Why should you call me anything?”
I had the feeling that he was jabbing at me with words, as if I were a thug in one of his books and he were the combative hero. But at that time I had only read a little bit of one of those books, the one about the bird statuette. And I had only read that little bit because I was bored after evening chow one day, and one of the guys in my hut happened to have a hardback copy lying on his bunk. I wasn’t much for books back then. So I didn’t much care how good Pop was at jabbing with words.
“I have to call you something,” I said. “The colonel sent me to take you on an errand.”
Pop’s scowl shifted from annoyance to disgust. “The colonel?” he said, his voice full of contempt. “If you mean who I think you mean, he’s a living mockery of the term intelligence officer. And he’s still wearing oak leaves. Much to his chagrin, I understand. So I suppose you mean the lieutenant colonel.”
“That’s him,” I said. He was the only colonel I knew. “He wants you and me to take a drive, and he wants us to do it right now. If you haven’t eaten breakfast, I have a couple of Spam sandwiches in the jeep. Stuck ’em under the seat so the ravens wouldn’t get ’em.”
Pop took his hands off the table, went to the chairs along the wall, and took a jacket from one of them. He put it on in abrupt, angry motions.
“You can tell him I don’t have time for his nonsense,” he said. “You can tell him I’m eating a hot meal, and after that, I’m starting on tomorrow’s edition. I’m not interested in his editorial comments, his story ideas, or his journalistic or literary ambitions. And if he doesn’t like that, he can take it up with the brigadier general.”
I shook my head. “The general’s not in camp. He left last night for some big powwow. Word is he might be gone a week or more. So if I tell the colonel what you just said, I’m the one who’ll be eating shit.”
Pop snorted. “You’re in the Army and stationed in the Aleutians. You’re already eating shit.”
He tried to walk past me, but I stepped in front of him.
He didn’
t like that. “What are you going to do, son? Thrash an old man?” He was glaring down at me like a judge again, but now the judge was going to throw the book. Which was something I had also seen before, so it didn’t bother me.
“I’d just as soon not,” I said.
Pop glanced back at the poker players. I reckoned he thought they would step up for him. But they were all staring at their cards hard enough to fade the ink, and they didn’t budge.
“Did you see the boxing matches yesterday?” I asked.
Pop looked back at me. His eyes had narrowed again.
“There was a crowd,” he said. “But yes, I watched from a distance. I thought it was a fine way to celebrate the Fourth of July, beating the snot out of our own comrades in arms. I hear the Navy man in the second match was taken to the Station Hospital.”
I shrugged. “He dropped his left. I had to take the opportunity.”
Pop bared those bad false teeth. “Now I recognize you. You K.O.’d him. But he laid a few gloves on you first, didn’t he?”
“Not so’s I noticed.” Thanks to the colonel, I’d had two whole weeks during which my only duty had been to train for the fight. I could take a punch.
“So you’re tough,” Pop said. His voice had an edge of contempt. “It seems to me that a tough fellow should be killing Japs for his country instead of running errands for an idiot. A tough fellow should—” He stopped. Then he adjusted his glasses and gave me a long look. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet. “But it occurs to me that you may have been on Attu last year. In which case you may have killed some Japs already.”
I didn’t like being reminded of Attu. For one thing, that was where the colonel had decided to make me his special helper. For another, it had been a frostbitten nightmare. And seven guys from my platoon hadn’t made it back.
But I wasn’t going to let Pop know any of that.
“A few,” I said. “And if the brass asked my opinion, I’d tell them I’d be glad to go kill a few more. But the brass ain’t asking my opinion.”
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