Many Bloody Returns

by Charlaine Harris

  The raw pelts draped over the back of a chair had probably been worn when they took the girl. Perhaps as disguise. Perhaps as a way of working themselves up to the deed, reminding themselves of pleasures to come. Grace Alton had seen the evil. Had seen clearer than anyone had believed.

  “They’re just men.” But not even Tony sounded surprised.

  “There is no such thing as just men,” Henry growled, barely holding the Hunter in check. “Angels and demons both come of men. To say these two are just men is to deny that. Is to deny this. I want the girl safe first.”

  “I’ve got her. Just open the door.”

  Henry didn’t so much open the door as rip it off its hinges, rusted nails screaming as they were torn from the wood, the blood scent roiling out to engulf him.

  He sensed rather than saw Tony hold out his scarred hand and call. A heartbeat later the young wizard staggered back under the weight of the child and grunted, “Go.”

  Henry smiled.

  And the two men at the table learned what terror meant.

  Tony slid the boot onto Julia’s foot and lifted the sleeping child off the backseat of the car, settling her against his shoulder. As they drove back to Lytton, the drugs had begun to release their hold and, to keep her from waking, he’d sung her a lullaby from his laptop. It hadn’t seemed to matter that the words were in a language she’d never heard nor would probably hear again. She’d sighed, smiled, and slipped her thumb into her mouth. Now he wrapped them both in a Notice-me-not and carried her up the road to her parents’ house. Although it was just past two in the morning, all the lights were still on when he laid her gently on the mat and rang the bell.

  Rolling the ball bearing between his thumb and forefinger, he walked back to the car, listening to the crying and the laughing and wishing he could bottle it. The sound of hearts mending and innocence saved: that would make the perfect present for Vicki.

  “You think she’ll remember anything?”

  With the Notice-me-not wrapped around the car, Henry drove back toward Vancouver at considerably more than the legal speed, racing the sunrise. “I hope not.”

  “You think they’ll ever find the bodies?”

  He shrugged, not caring. “I expect someone will stumble over them eventually.”

  “You didn’t leave anything that would lead the cops back to you? I mean”—Tony slouched against the seat belt strap—“these were men.”

  Henry turned just far enough that Tony could see the Hunter in his eyes. “Would you have preferred we left them to the law?”

  “Hell, no.” He scraped a bit of mud off his damp jeans. “They hadn’t done anything to that kid yet but they were going to. It’s just, monsters are one thing, but those—”

  “Were also monsters. Do you have to throw up again?”

  It had been a reaction not to what Henry had done but to suddenly realizing just what they’d prevented. It had also been incredibly embarrassing, but the rain had washed the stink off his boots.

  “No.”

  “Good. It doesn’t matter if or when they find the bodies, Tony. There’s nothing that can link them back to us. To me.” His teeth were too white in the headlights of a passing transport and his eyes were too dark. “No one believes in vampires.”

  Tony stared at the face of the Hunter unmasked and shuddered. “Dude, we’re doing a hundred and fifty-five k. Could you maybe watch the road?”

  “All right, I still don’t understand how forty is any more important than one hundred and forty, but I think I’ve got Vicki’s birthday covered.” Henry pulled a jeweler’s box from his jacket pocket and opened it. “One pair half-carat diamond earrings.”

  Tony stepped aside to let Henry into his apartment, peered down at the stones, and nodded. “Good choice. Diamonds are forever and so is she.”

  “Now read the card.”

  “Ah, you’ve included a newspaper clipping about the miraculous return of Julie Martin. Very smart. Almost makes up for the pink, sparkly roses on the front of this thing. Blah, blah, blah, as you approach the most wonderful years of your life, blah, blah, young as you ever were, blah, in your name a pair of evil men have been sent to hell where they belong.” Tony looked up and grinned. “Man, they really do make a card for every occasion.”

  “I added the last bit.”

  “No shit? Seriously, Henry, it’s perfect. You don’t have to wrap it, she doesn’t have to find space for it, and you can’t beat the sentiment.”

  “You think she’ll like it?”

  “Like it?” Tony snorted as he tossed the card onto his kitchen table. “I think she’ll want to collect the whole set. You should start thinking about what you’re going to do when she turns fifty.”

  “Fifty.” Halfway across the apartment, Henry froze.

  “Fifty. Sixty-five. Seventy-five. Ninety. One hundred. One hundred and twenty-seven.”

  “One hundred and twenty-seven?”

  “Kidding. You get her something really fine at one hundred and you’re probably good until at least one-fifty…”

  The Wish

  Carolyn Haines

  Carolyn Haines has written more than fifty books. The latest in her Mississippi Delta series is Ham Bones. She also writes single titles. Hallowed Bones and Penumbra were named one of the top five mysteries of 2004 and 2006, respectively, by Library Journal, and Carolyn received an Alabama State Council on the Arts fellowship. An avid animal-rights supporter, she shares her home with nine cats, six dogs, and eight horses. Because no minute should go unused, Carolyn also teaches fiction at the University of South Alabama. Her website is www.carolynhaines.com.

  It hasn’t rained for weeks, longer than anyone remembers. Each gust of wind carries tiny particles of dirt—soil shifting from place to place, fleeing across the borders of lawns, counties, and states. The land is on the move, as if it’s given up hope for America and is headed vaguely north, aiming to cross the border. It’s a long way to Canada from Mobile, Alabama.

  The weather is all the talk in the grocery and feed stores, the nurseries and post office, places where I carry on the business of my life. Old men, as weathered and crinkly as the grass, study the sky that looks like spring and feels like Minnesota as they stand outside the Hickory Pit and the tractor dealership. They see nothing good. The climate is changing, and the farmers are catching the brunt of it. Gamblers at heart, they have no clue where to lay the odds in this New South of hard drought and hurricane.

  Sitting in my pickup, waiting for a load of mulch and fertilizer while the heater blows ineffectually, I watch the dirt fly down Highway 45 in an orange cloud. Across the road, at the Stovalls’ abandoned nursery, a tulip tree sways purple against the clear blue sky of another cold, dry, windy day.

  The late February winds, unusually strong for south Alabama, pick up the fallen petals of the tulip tree, and suddenly I see her shape against grass that glistens with melting frost. The coffee cup I hold slips from my nerveless fingers and drops to the floorboard. I never hear the crockery shatter, nor the tinkling of the wind chimes abandoned at the nursery. My world goes mute. Again.

  She stands beneath the tree, beside barren hydrangeas and glossy green miniature gardenias that will permeate the April air with a scent as delicious as taste. How easily I’d assumed that spring was a season I’d experience—waiting has become my only game. I haven’t been to a doctor for fifteen years, but I feel healthy enough. Illness isn’t my destiny. She’s taught me that.

  She nods at me, an acknowledgment of our pact, and then she’s gone. The bruised petals fall softly to the thawing ground. Bosco, my old coonhound, breaks into a long, low howl in the backseat of the truck. He understands who and what she is. The enemy.

  Mobile isn’t the center of anything, merely a small port city on a bay where lazy rivers meet in one of the last untainted habitats in the Southeast. It’s a sleepy place with smiling, crocodile politicians one step removed from the horse thieves and slave traders who first took the land from the Choct
aw Nation. While the town is physically beautiful, it lacks the sophistication of New Orleans, or at least pre-Katrina New Orleans. The Moral Majority holds sway in Mobile, those prunelike faces set against the joie de vivre that made New Orleans so special.

  I should have left Mobile, but it’s because of her that I’ve remained here for so many years. Her and a certain ship’s captain who finds the empty downtown of old Mobile to his liking. No Disney creation, this pirate holds the answer to my dilemma.

  Anxious in my grief and unable to sleep one long night, I walked the empty streets. By happenstance that evening, I saw him plying his trade in a dark alley, and I made it my business to learn his haunts and habits. He is my field of expertise, the most important element of my future. The cobblestone alleys of old Mobile are a perfect hunting ground for him, and one he returns to regularly, because in the dark of the moon, anything that’s truly desired can be found in old Mobile.

  Once I deliver the mulch and fertilizer, I’ll put my plan into action. By moonrise, I’ll find him, the man, or some would call it a thing, who will help me.

  To fully explain my story, I have to go back in time twenty years to a hot August day. Sometimes I forget that once I was another person. A wife and mother. A woman with dreams and expectations. To understand how I came to this point, the past has to be pulled out like so many wrinkled snapshots and examined.

  It’s an irony, really, because I hate remembering. In memory, the images are so sharply focused they slice through the layers of alcohol I’ve used to pad my pain. People tell me that I live in the past, like that’s an accusation of moral degeneracy. “You live in the past” in their mind equates with “You killed your children.” Hardly. We all have a past. We all have a present. But not all of us have a future.

  Once upon a time, I had a future. I had the family and job, the normal, boring things that Middle America takes so for granted. I also had a mortgage and a car note and nights when my husband and I made passionate love and forgot the dirty dishes in the sink, the piles of laundry waiting, and the spats about bills and babies. Today, none of those things trouble me. They’re all in the past, along with my heart.

  On a too-hot August morning twenty years ago, I woke up plagued with a fever of unexplainable origin. The day was sweltering, even for south Alabama, and the humidity lay on my skin like a wool suit. We were in dog days, when it rains each afternoon and Mobile takes on the foliage of the tropics, thick and lush and green. Dennis had a breakfast meeting, and even though I felt terrible, I took Kala and Kevin to day care. My intention was to return home, shower, and go to work. I had a client meeting that couldn’t be missed, a big account, a cash bonus.

  The antihistamine I’d taken in an effort to dry up my sniffles had left me feeling dizzy and disoriented. The twins, identical even in their moods, were quiet as I buckled them into the car seats and headed out, a cup of hot tea in my hand. The day care was only eight blocks away. Eight short blocks in a residential neighborhood shaded by live oaks that buckled sections of the sidewalk with gnarled roots.

  I was almost there—I could see the day care sign with the happy alphabet letters spelling the name—when I saw her in the Darcy yard. I thought I was hallucinating, and I slowed the car for a better look. Some would call her a wind wraith, a substanceless creature of twigs and leaves, but she isn’t. Nor is she a sprite or fairy or gremlin. I stopped the car, completely stunned at this creature formed of debris and spinning air currents who beckoned to me from the shade of the Darcys’ yard. I didn’t know it then, but I know now what she is. She’s an angel. A dark angel with a list of names. At the top of her list were Kevin and Kala.

  I never saw the Ozark Water delivery truck that hit me from behind. I never even had a chance to glance at my children in the rearview mirror. My seat belt stopped me from impaling myself on the steering column, but my forehead cracked the wheel, and I was knocked unconscious, or so they told me at the emergency room when I tried to tell the doctor what I’d seen. No one believed me, but it doesn’t stop it from being true.

  From far away I heard sticks and sand pelting the windshield. Semiconscious, I fought to wake up, to protect my babies. A man yelled at my window, but I didn’t pay any attention to him. I watched her, standing at the passenger side of the car. Her hands reached through the car, lovely hands, fine boned and delicate. Kala took her hand first, then Kevin. Each one so trusting.

  “No! No! Kala! Kevin!” I tried to call them back to me. “Don’t leave me. Don’t go.”

  She held my children’s hands and shook her head at me. “I’ll be back for you,” she said.

  “Don’t take them,” I begged. “Please. They’re only children. Take me instead.”

  “It isn’t your time.”

  Such a matter-of-fact answer for an event that would make me wish for death a million times over.

  “Take me. Let my children have a chance to grow up. Kala wants to be a veterinarian. She wants to make animals well. And Kevin—” My voice broke and I couldn’t continue. “Dennis will be a good father. They’ll be fine without me. Take me.” I held out my wrists, offering the veins to the broken windshield for a slashing.

  “It isn’t your time.” Her face was pale, the eyes dark and sad.

  “Make it my time. Trade me for them.” Panic had begun to build beneath my ribs. My heart squeezed, and I hoped it was the first sign that a deal had been struck.

  “You can’t bargain with death,” she said. “It’s either your time or not. This isn’t your time.”

  Against the pain in my chest, I struggled to free myself from the seat belt that held me. “No!” I fought, but the belt was tight. “No!”

  They backed away from the car. A shaft of sunlight touched Kala’s chestnut curls. Tears hung in her lashes. “Mama.” She held out her arms to me. Kevin bit his lip.

  “Please!” I ignored the man tugging at the driver’s door, his face showing horror and panic. “Please don’t take them.”

  “It’s their time.”

  “That’s supposed to bring me comfort?” I wanted to kill her. I wanted to tear her fleshless body with my teeth, rending her apart. Anything to protect my children.

  “Their purpose is done. Let them move forward.”

  The pressure in my chest became unbearable, and I knew it wasn’t a heart attack. Grief had set up lodging. My new boarder had brought his full accommodation of pain. “For God’s sake, I’d rather be dead. Please, take me!”

  She shook her head. “When your time comes, I’ll be back.”

  They stepped out of the sunshine and slowly dissipated in the shade cast by the oaks.

  “Please!”

  I was still shrieking when the man got the door open and Mrs. Darcy reached in to grasp my hands that clawed at the air. She tried to calm me until the ambulance came, but I could tell by the tears on her face that my children were gone. Just like that, gone. As quick as snuffing out a match.

  There was a funeral, which I don’t remember. For a year, Dennis tried to make a go of it, but he lost not only his children but his wife. No man should have to live with a zombie, and though Dennis tried, there was nothing he could do to bring life back to the husk of my body. I ate what I was forced to eat. I sat in the sun if someone led me there. I bathed if a bath was drawn. Mostly I sat in a rocker by the front window and watched for her. I knew I’d see her again.

  After Dennis left me, I cut my wrists in a bathtub of warm water. It’s a funny thing, but I’d always expected it to be painless. Bleeding to death is excruciating. The body demands to live, no matter what the mind or spirit says. My lungs burned for oxygen. My starving heart suffered anguish. I felt agony, but I knew soon it would be over.

  That’s when I saw her again. She stood in the doorway of the bathroom, a vague creature of swirling air currents and energy and bath powder. For a moment I saw the terrible beauty of her face as she shook her head.

  “It isn’t your time, Sandra.” She held out a scroll, and for a split
second, I thought I saw names written in blood. “Your name isn’t here.”

  “Fuck you.” It’s hard to be witty while bleeding to death.

  “You can’t cheat death,” she whispered. “And you can’t hurry it.”

  “Where are my children?”

  “Their destiny is no longer your concern. They’re where they’re supposed to be.”

  With those words, I knew Kala and Kevin were forever lost to me. Death would not resolve my loss. “I hate you! You won’t win! I’ll do whatever is necessary.” My voice weakened.

  She slipped closer and looked into the tub that was bright with warm blood. “It isn’t your time.”

  She disappeared and I heard footsteps pounding up the staircase. Dennis to the rescue. Why couldn’t he leave it be? He could’ve collected the insurance money and been done with the guilt. But no, he’d come back to check on me. I hadn’t looked good. He’d been worried, had a bad feeling. Feeling guilty over the divorce, he’d come back to make sure I was okay. But, of course, I wasn’t. I was far from okay.

  Two years later, the wounds on my wrists were hard to find. My new attitude—one of self-sufficient acceptance—had won my freedom from West Briar Estates, the place where crazies can get twenty-four-hour surveillance and legal pharmaceuticals to blur reality. Never make the mistake of telling a psychiatrist that you’ve had a conversation with Death; it’s a surefire ticket to involuntary incarceration. While under the watchful eye of the medical staff, I began to formulate my revenge.