IT HAD BEEN a long time, at least six years, since my last vacation, and I spent the first month in a haze. At first I couldn’t sleep through the night. I woke up every few minutes, sure I heard Grimm calling like usual. I’d make my way to the mirror like always. He never answered.
As the days of my forced vacation stretched to weeks I got used to being alone with my thoughts. Every day we ran at the track, Ari and I, and ate a salad lunch in the shade of the park.
I briefly took up hating Ari as a hobby. Briefly, because Ari didn’t fit the norms for a princess. That and the fact that I didn’t have anyone else to talk to made it hard to do a quality job of hating her. Sure, I might have trapped her in the building basement a few times, and I can tell you that a princess will definitely fit in a five-cubic-foot chest freezer, but you can only do that so often before it gets old. After that, she wasn’t interested in visiting the mausoleum or the bomb shelter. I pride myself on doing things right, even if it’s loathing someone I’m stuck with, so eventually I gave up.
We sat on a park bench as other runners went past. “So tell me: What’s it like being a princess?”
Ari gave me a smile and laughed. First time I’d heard her do that in a while. “When I was a little girl it was nice. My dad would take me to High Kingdom on holidays and we’d bow before a greater king, or watch the ogres on parade. When I was older it was uglier. I saw the politics behind everything. I listened to Mom and Dad argue.”
“Sounds normal from what I remember.”
“I knew something was wrong when they stopped fighting. I knew it. A few days later, Mom told me she was sick.”
We stood up to make a few more laps and call it done for the day.
“How come you never use your, uh, abilities?”
The look on her face was pure grief. “She never trained me. Mom always said it would be tomorrow, or next month, and then her tomorrows stopped coming. I can feel it, down inside, and sometimes I can see things. Like the things that follow you.”
I stopped short, hand on my knees. “You can see them?”
“Sort of. They move around a lot like pixie lights, but faster.” She ran off.
“Where are they now?” I asked as I caught up.
“It’s almost noon. They’re inside you, of course.”
I didn’t ask anything else, but my feet felt heavier with each step. As we walked along the sidewalk from the park, I got worried. For the last few years I’d been hunting things and hunted by things so often that I got used to the feeling. Today though, I knew something or someone was watching me, something considerably more substantial than a couple of blessings. I knew better than to ignore that feeling.
“Ari, how do your legs feel?”
“Tired. Tell me you aren’t suggesting another round.”
Her water bottle was nearly empty and she looked drenched. I didn’t look much better. “Not suggesting it, but we might have a problem.” I scanned the cars, the people, and I spotted him. A man crouched down behind a car, staring at us. I gave Ari a push and we ran for my building.
From the moment he leaped over the car, I knew he was a wolf. As he ran, he changed. His hair grew long. His stride changed from footsteps to bounds. I have no idea what the people on the sidewalk saw—probably convinced themselves it was a homeless man who hadn’t shaved, or a rabid dog chasing two women. We hit the entrance to my apartment building, and dashed to the elevator.
I held the Door Close button as we passed floor after floor. “If he knows where I live he’ll take the stairs and get there first, so be ready when the doors open.”
The elevator dinged one floor from mine and as it opened I nearly put a bullet into an old man with a beard. He held his hands up. “I’ll wait for the next one.”
I heard the wolf growling as we approached, and fired before the doors opened, driving it back into the wall. I didn’t have any silver bullets, so the worst I could do was hurt him. My neighbors were calling 911, but the smart ones would keep their heads inside their apartment. The wolf fell backwards, and I put a bullet into each leg.
“Give it back to them,” he said, oblivious to the pain and the blood. “Give it back or they’ll kill everyone.” His eyes were streaked with red, and spittle ran from his mouth.
“Give what back? We already returned the child.”
He shook his head and convulsed in pain as the wounds began to close. “We didn’t take it. You must have. Give it back, please.” He dragged himself away from me toward the stairwell.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I followed him, ready to raise his lead content if he so much as hesitated.
The wolf rose to his feet, blood dripping as the wounds sealed. The look he gave me wasn’t rage or hunger. It was despair. “Then we are all dead.”
Seventeen
IF I HAD a dime for every time I’ve heard “We’re all going to die” or “I’ll kill you,” I could afford a better apartment. You can only listen to so many threats of destruction, doom, or death before you start tuning them all out. So I followed the wolf out of the building, then went home. The first year I worked for Grimm, I treated every threat as personal, every invasion as imminent, and every apocalypse as inevitable. One evening, Grimm presented me with a bound book and pen, and asked me to keep a record of every time I rang the emergency bell. A year after that, we sat down and reviewed. Tyrannosaurs remained extinct. Intelligent apes completely failed to take over anything but the government. Several boy bands did rise to fame, but the only thing that proved was that there was no accounting for bad taste. So when I got back to my apartment, I penned the wolf’s words down right under the line that said “Bell-bottoms are the next fashion fad” and went on with life.
When I told Grimm to send me whatever else he wanted to by post, I expected a few more boxes. Judging from the mountain of packages piled against my door, either Grimm had shipped me everything in his private library or Ari had stayed up all night watching the Shopping Channel again. I hoped it was the Shopping Channel. One heft of the packages said most of them were books though.
Ari stood at the stove, cooking dinner, as I unwrapped. “What are all these?”
The girl could cook. Her dad had bought her chef’s lessons at the Culinary Institute for her fourteenth birthday. I figured if she was going to sponge off me, a meal or two wasn’t so much to ask. I tossed another book into the I-can’t-read-Ancient-Sumerian pile. “Grimm’s trying to keep me busy. It’s like school all over again.”
“I wanted to go to school, but she wouldn’t hear of it.” Ari stabbed a defenseless fried egg for emphasis. From what little she said about her stepmother, this was about normal.
“Community college is cheap, but don’t tell that to Grimm. He still acts like sending me was the greatest act of charity ever.”
“Dad would never dream of letting one of his children go to public college. It was Ivory Tower League or nothing. Better we nobility didn’t go at all than mix with the common folk.”
I poured a glass of wine for myself, and after a moment’s thought, a smaller one for her. “That him talking or you?”
“Do I look noble?” She gestured to herself. “My sisters looked the part, and they all took their places in the courts and the balls and did what Moth—, what Gwendolyn wanted, so things were okay for them. But she and I kept fighting. Arguing, yelling, screaming and . . .” She bit her lip so hard I was afraid she’d cut herself.
“She hit you.” I knew how words became fists, but I’d never thought that royalty did that sort of thing. The smell of burning eggs filled the apartment.