All Hallows

by W. Sheridan Bradford

  Maren kneaded the lump, palm-rolling snakes that would become arms and legs; a ball that would be a head—there was no time for a strong likeness, but a whack on the head shortened the lump, and the new proportions broadened the shoulders.

  “A hair, a hair… yes,” Maren said, pulling a long, silken strand from a glob of flesh that had stuck to her stole. “Not the usual three needed from a mane, but it will have to do. Wolves may be different than equines.”

  Uriah appeared at Maren’s elbow as though she’d teleported, panting and swearing. “I heard—”

  “—No yelling! You have a fear of angry canines, no?”

  “I told you I… do.” Uriah took a shuddering breath and a step as though she might disappear again. She looked at the pickup, the streetlamp, and continued to pant—strange, Maren thought, given Uriah’s fitness. “Is that wreck yours?”

  “An adjuster would try to call it mine. Lost my temper. I’ll pay for it any minute now.”

  “Why? Are there Dobermans in the cab?”

  “I have reason to believe Feri is coming. I don’t have a dead cat to give her this time, and once Feri smells—”

  “—You aren’t making any sense. Are you hurt?”

  “No, but give it a minute and… your Gorgon needle might—I have it! Do you carry a likeness of Suso Vilbaso de Manaro, by any chance?”

  “Who?”

  “Feri’s father. A good-looking man, even for a Spaniard. Transplanted here with his wife. Had a grant. This was two, three hundred years ago, I want to say?”

  “Why would I carry a picture of a random… did you hit your head? How do you know Feri’s coming?”

  “Just a hunch. That and the howling.”

  “Duh—but that’s… she’s miles away.”

  “She was. Ever see her on the trot? Uriah, I need you gone. I recognize we haven’t had a chance to… brunch is out. Sorry to cancel. I may as well tell you now what I undoubtedly would have been foolish enough to tell you later. I’d hoped to catch you sober.”

  “I haven’t had that much to…”

  Maren smiled sadly, her eyes emerald. “If I tell you, will you go?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Promise.”

  Uriah looked at the steaming pickup, her forehead wrinkling. “You think you’re going to die!” she yelped.

  “I assumed that much was obvious. It won’t be for the bounty. Feri fears nothing, but what she wants can’t be given. No, I have done this to myself. It’s not the first time. You should come back, once it’s over. Take a piece they can identify—this wrist would work. Get yourself something nice to wear on your—it’s on me.”

  “No way am I leaving,” Uriah said, and began to kick-off her boots, stumbling slightly.

  “What I wouldn’t give to force you. Oh, to own a tornado—remember that time in the Aeolian court?”

  “Pieces of it. That was a long night, and long ago.”

  “That it was. Three nights, actually. I thought I was unhappy at the time. I hate to be ejected, and it was cold in that unmanned trireme. I hadn’t a stitch of clothes, and I had you to blame for it.”

  “I know. It was my fault. If I hadn’t—” A roar shook the street.

  “We were never your fault, Uriah. That pronoun needed both of us. Listen, just this once. This last time. Go. Please.”

  Uriah scowled and pulled a broken shard of sword from a band around her thigh. “No dice. Together, we have a fighting—”

  “—No, we don’t. I’ve emptied my bag and found it wanting. Your needle will not cut her, and tachyderms will just… I won’t pretend to be pleased, but it would be unbearable if you were you to fall beside me.”

  “And if that’s what I want? You’ll say I don’t know. You’ll say I’m drunk. What would I do if I left?”

  “You’d live, that’s what.”

  “What sort of life?” Uriah’s hair undulated. “Why do you always push me away?”

  “This is different. You need to—look, here she is.”

  The wolf’s arrival was silent, but the tabby yowled from Feri’s mane—the pair had reached the lifted pickup. The werewolf swept the darkness; the tabby adding his circular lamps of yellow—not entirely symmetrical, Maren noticed. “Don’t scream,” she hissed.

  “Does she know you’re here?” Uriah shook her lip gloss. “We could—”

  “—She’ll see through warding gum. She knows I’m near. We… she doesn’t talk much, but we came to terms.”

  “But not about the bounty?”

  “Didn’t come up. I think not. She didn’t kill me, and I couldn’t have stopped her then, had she wanted to collect. I gave her a dead cat and we called it done.”

  “She wanted a dead cat?”

  “Make that a revived cat. Feri hasn’t eaten him yet, so I’ll call it a win.”

  “How’d the wreck happen?”

  “The driver was collecting signs and citations, and he about took me out of my shoes. I threw a scissorwing at a fat tire before I thought it through. That, and I broke the front axle.”

  “That’ll do it. Are they alive? The people?”

  “It’s why I was staring. It won’t matter now. The driver should have used a lap-belt. If he had pulled-through, he’d have needed to be pulled-through. Any others are inside. The doors are stuck from the force of… had Feri not returned, they’d be right as rain.”

  “Will she help them?”

  Maren squinted skeptically as Feri’s hulking form parted the steam. The driver’s body jerked as it scraped free, half of the windshield following.

  Feri tore one of the driver’s legs away without visible effort. She took a large bite that ended at the knee, growling in pleasure, beating the hood with rest of the driver while she chewed.

  “That’ll be a hard no,” Maren said. “I’ve had an idea: find Slager. He knows his life is tied to mine. I’ve not done the math of pitting him against Feri, but he might be able to—”

  “—You just want me gone.”

  “Yes. I do. Now be a dear and go. Feri won’t overlook us together, but alone, I may be able to convince—”

  “—Liar!”

  Maren would have shushed Uriah, if shushing Uriah were possible, but Feri seemed content to take a second leg off at the shin, a feat made the more remarkable given the driver was wearing high-shaft cowboy boots. The bones of the man’s lower leg cracked, but he made no sound; Maren presumed he’d had the sense to die.

  Feri fed with deliberation, picking and carving delicacies from the body. It would have been good to talk, if talking had been able to distract them from the carnage, but Maren and Uriah stood on the curb in silence. Uriah balled a fist near her mouth as though she might be sick.

  “He had it coming,” Maren said without conviction. “If there are passengers, she might not—”

  Feri crushed the hood with a bound, crumpling it to the engine block. She smashed the remains of the man to pulp and roared. Snarling, the werewolf sent her claws through a jagged webbing of the remaining windscreen and heaved upwards. The pillars of the cabin stretched and groaned until the metal tore free.

  A woman’s scream rose above the noise.

  “Blast,” Maren said. “I am about done with hoping.”

  Feri leaped to the ground, the suspension rocking, and tore the passenger door from its hinges, throwing the panel out of sight like a toboggan. The wolf roared and strained, the seatbelt holding until the frame of the bench seat gave way.

  “She’s pregnant,” Uriah said.

  “I want Slager and Carmilla out of the binding,” Maren whispered. “No use killing more than I have.” She removed her mink and picked the colorful strips free. “Pinch the teeth out of me,” she said. “Mind they don’t get you.”

  “I don’t see why they get off the hook,” Uriah said, but she did not hesitate, bringing her nails together as though chasing oversized blackheads. The small fangs could have belonged to a Pomeranian.

  “Let me have those
,” Maren said. “Not the kind of thing to leave lying about for children to find.”

  “Or the police,” Uriah agreed.

  “I’d throw them into the storm drain, but I’ve seen movement there more than once,” Maren explained, and dropped the stubby fangs into her purse.

  “Can I still run?”

  “No,” Maren said, thinking that reverse psychology might work.

  “I have only to score a scratch with this… needle. My sister’s blood will do the rest.”

  “That is like saying the moon will shield us, if we can but crash her to our side.”

  “It’s better than—you never give up,” Uriah snapped. “Never-ever. It’s irritating. Don’t you dare do it now.”

  Feri tore a young boy from the bench seat, gripped him by the legs, and severed his shielding hands to the shoulder with her jaws.

  The pregnant mother at the boy’s side screamed as if she’d swallowed acid. Feri roared through a spatter of drool, the howl conveying cruel laughter. The wolf pressed-in, claws slicing. The boy’s spraying arteries filled his mother’s open mouth.

  Maren groaned softly. “I watched a Comanche put all he had behind a spear tipped in obsidian. A brave man, if foolish. The shaft was green willow, but it shattered anyway. Feri was unmarked.”

  “But my needle—”

  “—Try it then. I am simply being realistic.”

  “I’m stronger than any mortal man. I’ll—”

  “—How many times have I wished for my sword today? I enchant and hone it daily for thousands of years, and then I leave it in a box at home. If we escape, I plan to wear it openly; let the humans say what they like.”

  “Yours is keen, but it isn’t smeared with—”

  “—Mine isn’t here. That’s my problem. You are correct to say it would not kill Feri, and wounding her would just… I have tachyderms, but the same goes there. I hate to bring anything along I don’t plan to use, but I hate to waste hard work more.”

  “Loose the herd at her. If they grab her legs, that might give me the straight shot I need to—” Uriah covered her mouth as Feri hauled the shrieking mother from the seat.

  The werewolf looked directly at the witches, dark fur matted with darker blood. Feri pushed a claw slowly into the woman’s abdomen below the navel, ripped with an upward thrust; a turn of wrist and a sideways tear finished the mother with the precision of ritualistic suicide.

  “Gift!” Feri roared.

  She pulled the woman’s entrails and her last breath away together, dripping gore and bulbs of yellowish fat.

  The wolf raised a tiny purple body into the air, snapped the umbilical cord in gleaming teeth, presented the baby before the mother’s dying eyes, looked at the witches a second time, and crushed the fetus to slime on the pickup’s railing, denting the bed to the bottom. A tire exploded from the impact.

  “Gift!” she roared again.

  “On me,” Maren said, the tachyderms and candy bar forgotten in her hands. “That’s on me.”

  “Feri must not be a cat person,” Uriah said nervously. She whispered a brief invocation to her long-deceased sisters, the knuckles of her right hand bloodless on the pommel of her broken blade. “I take it back. Your sticky elephants will be in the way. She moves like water.”

  “My prism might burn her mane if I can make it go critical, but Feri would have to operate the stone. Catch it, at the least. Besides, I already know how the future goes.”

  “Warding gum would jump from her mouth, and she’d let it,” Uriah said, brainstorming.

  Maren nodded. “I carried a wolf whistle when I backpacked through Europe, but I can’t see Feri minding the sound. I’m half-deaf from her as it is, and she’s most of a block away. I have this mommet, but it’s incompletely joined. It’ll be weak at best.”

  Feri lapped with a rough tongue, swallowing gobbets of flesh with reptilian shakes of her throat and shaggy head. She howled with a bubbling sound, slashing along the pickup’s bed until she punctured the fuel tank.

  She roared in triumph, shaking the truck. A pool of reddish diesel formed at the rear—much brighter red had spackled the front quarters, but human blood was not flammable.

  The resurrected tabby was flattened against Feri’s tangled mane. The cat’s new master grabbed the woman’s twitching body and swung it against the mangled cabin: glass and flesh exploded together.

  A hairy forearm connected with the streetlight, which promptly fell like timber, its bulb shattering, electricity arcing. The pickup whooshed with a low flame of fuel, and Feri bellowed in preparation for a rush.

  “You are my other half, Maren.”

  “Yes, the comely one. Don’t slash. Put the tang against the bones of your lower hand. Try for the inside of her mouth. It might be—”

  “—And just who taught you to fight?”

  “I meant it as a reminder,” Maren said. “You’re the one who said not to stand in surrender.”

  “First days; she’s fast.”

  “Told you.” Maren placed the transparent mask on her face. Feri wouldn’t care how horrible she appeared, but Maren could conceal her dread. “I’ll try the mommet, for whatever good it might do. If she were not so—”

  “—I’ll have to be faster. Goodbye, my love,” Uriah said softly, and disappeared. Maren swallowed a bitter combination of relief and disappointment at Uriah’s abandonment—only to see the little witch streaking to meet the werewolf at incredible speed.

  “You sneak!” Maren spat and shuffled forward, feeling as slow as she was, the mommet bobbing.

  Maren hadn’t anticipated Uriah’s speed, but she should have. Uriah had lain in Atalanta’s low couch—a fateful choice that had sparked years of recrimination—and Maren suspected Uriah’s disappearing act was a result of the adulterous union.

  Atalanta had been married-off soon thereafter—to a man—having finally lost a footrace; Maren had never found the chance to question the miserable girl on the topic of her missing quickness.

  Stepping lightly over chunks of asphalt, a part of her still mindful of her new neon shoes, Maren dared to hope in earnest.

  Between the blurs of movement, Uriah danced in flawless choreography, her movements visible in the way of long-aperture photograph of a child with a sparkler.

  Pavement cracked under Uriah’s feet from the forces of her acceleration, folding like a throw-rug; she launched at the charging wolf from right to left, the needle just visible in both hands.

  Maren flattened the mommet with a punch, which—as far as she could tell, did absolutely nothing aside from pull at Feri’s mane.

  Uriah’s blade did not bury to the hilt, but Maren thought it must have pierced any armor. It would have, had the wolf not spun aside. Feri caught the blade on her claws with a horrible rasp, snapping at Uriah’s face, unswallowed gore flying.

  Maren yanked on the single hair of the mommet, asking for inches—this, at least, she got. Feri’s head snapped back, saving Uriah from decapitation.

  Why Uriah didn’t continue to press her attack, Maren couldn’t see—her angle was in a direct line behind the two, it being the fastest route to the conflict.

  Maren groaned aloud as the short sword clattered to the pavement. Her mane locked in an unseen grip, Feri launched a backhand into Uriah’s chest, the sound that of a pine falling from a logging rig. The little witch flew twenty feet in Maren’s direction: unarmed, unconscious, and quite possibly dead.

  Feri shook her head and advanced to finish Uriah Lee. Maren willed herself to move as she could have seventy years ago: fast and strong, young and violent. She dropped the mommet into her bag without looking.

  Uriah would be savaged, her body desecrated. Maren remembered the wolf’s taunt about the gift, felt her knee twinge, and felt something else surge from a dam in her chest, releasing an ugliness she had not known could exist in such concentration.

  Hot and hating, Maren screamed a challenge that burned her throat. “Feri! Unthinking beast! Father’s shame! Ea
ter of sheep! Face me! I’ll replace my mink with your ragged mane!”

  Whether her words had any effect, Maren could not know; her sight had clouded to pinpoints. Her heart pumped a substance other than blood; her limbs were alive with adrenaline and unholy rage. She heard herself speak in a language she did not recognize, and the candy bar hardened in her hand. Her bracelet of scars dazzled with red light.

  Feri whirled to face her second opponent, slaver dripping. The werewolf wrinkled a contemptuous muzzle; the tabby buried himself to the ears in Feri’s fur.

  Maren did not think, nor question, nor care; she pushed the well of anger into a single purpose and slashed the candy bar across Feri’s wrist, delivering all the force one might expect from a warm bar of chocolate.

  The werewolf howled in shock and pain, nerveless claws clicking. Maren slashed again, scoring a line of scarlet across three of Feri’s bare breasts.

  “Be double-damned by your speechless God!” Maren screamed, and brought the bar down like the flat of a longsword. Had she been in her right mind, she would have marveled at the weight and sound of the blow, which connected solidly with Feri’s wet, black nose.

  The wolf scrabbled to the side, snorting and falling on all-fours. Maren punched with all the force her right hand could muster at what might be a soft midsection.

  The force cracked bones in Maren’s hand, numbing her to the elbow; a border-roll put the improvised weapon into her left hand. Maren spun in her neon shoes and slashed again, her masked face a rictus of rage.

  “Stand with me, cur, and I’ll feast on your liver!” Maren screamed, Uriah’s body behind her now. Feri fell back, claws scoring the pavement; the tabby swung from her mane by a single paw, mewling.

  Spent, Maren threw the limp bar of chocolate at the werewolf, and when her vision cleared sufficiently to face death, Feri was gone.

  21

  “You saved my life,” Uriah Lee said, her lower lip trembling.

  “I did nothing of the kind. I intervened. Thought you might kill Feri.”

  Uriah barked with shrill, humorless laughter. “Liar!” She rose to her feet and slapped Maren on the shoulder. The rest of Uriah’s lithe body followed, irresistible as a blind koala, clawing and climbing and wrapping around Maren until the older woman carried the weight of both, her knees creaking in protest.