Dark Duets

by Christopher Golden

  “Shit,” he said, and stopped walking abruptly. He was holding the device in both hands, had turned it over to inspect it and then started carrying it along, held by all ten of his ungloved fingers. “You dumbass,” he whispered.

  This was going to piss them off. He would hear holy hell about this, and even old Fish Sticks himself would get in the mix, because bitching at Watts remained within his jurisdiction, even if nothing else did. They’d all pile on him for tainting evidence, and, hell, he’d probably end up in the papers. Probably put a picture of him up, with some sort of headline announcing what a dumbass he was, and what if his girl at Chili’s saw that?

  Drop it, then. Just drop it back down and pretend he’d done it right, go over to the barn and tell them he’d found something of possible evidentiary value. That was the term. He’d say it all casual and cool and they’d expect nothing until he led them over here and showed them what exactly it was. Nobody would need to know how stupid he’d been.

  Until they ran the fingerprints. He was a dumbass squared now, his fix-it plan even worse than the first mistake.

  What to do, then? Hide it again? Someone would find it eventually, and if they got a print off it and it came back to him, he’d not only be in trouble, he might be mistaken for a suspect.

  That sent an uneasy chill down his spine. He’d been the first officer out here the day the woman was killed. They could look at him as a suspect.

  He stared down at the device and pressed the power button, as if it would somehow provide him with an answer. The screen lit up and a moon winked at him. He powered it down immediately—for some crazy reason he didn’t like the way the moon had winked like that. Almost as if it knew he was in trouble.

  “I need to get rid of this thing,” he muttered. That was the only option that didn’t end with him getting his ass reamed.

  It was small enough to fit in his pocket. He walked back to his cruiser and opened the door and shoved it under the seat. When he got off shift, he’d smash it up and toss it in a Dumpster somewhere.

  IT WAS THREE more hours in the rain before they let him go, and he intended to get rid of the GPS right away, but Chili’s was on his route home, and he swung in just to see if the cute bartender was there.

  She was. Not only was she there, but she wanted to talk, and the bar was basically empty, just the two of them in conversation as the waiters came and went.

  “Why so quiet tonight?” he said.

  “Not many people want to sit at the bar at Chili’s on Valentine’s Day.”

  “Shit, I didn’t even realize.”

  She gave him a sad smile, and she looked even prettier because it was sad, somehow. “Not many people want to work at the bar, either. Everyone else has a date, right? Well, not me. No roses, no chocolates. Not even a card.” She gave a little laugh and said, “It’s a dumb holiday, anyway, but it would be nice to get something on it. From someone.”

  “That’s why I’m here,” Watts said.

  “Oh, yeah? So where’s my gift?” She was teasing him, obviously joking around, but still it was the closest to true flirtation he’d gotten from her, and it was then that he had his epiphany. He had a gift for her, and he could even be slick giving it to her. He could say something cool, by God, and slick, cool lines were scarce for Watts.

  “I’ll go get it,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant.

  He jogged out in the rain and grabbed the GPS from his cruiser and carried it back in. She looked at it with one eyebrow raised.

  “Um, not even wrapped. You seriously just pulled that thing off your dashboard and carried it in here and expected me to believe it was a gift?”

  And here it was, the opportunity for the slick line, please, please, let it work.

  “If it’s wrapped,” he said, “you can’t use it to find my place very well, can you?”

  She smiled. Hesitantly, maybe, but she smiled, and then she reached out and took the GPS.

  “You’re serious?”

  “Of course. Will you come by?”

  She was eyeing the GPS warily.

  “If you don’t like it,” he said, “I can write out directions. Or just give you my number. Maybe it was a dumb idea. Sorry. Maybe—”

  Backfired, he thought, reaching for the GPS now and feeling like an idiot, realizing all the ways in which this was wrong, but she pulled back from him.

  “I love it,” she said. “That’s a sweet way to ask.”

  Holy shit.

  He’d scored. He sat back on his stool and hoped his grin wasn’t too goofy.

  “I just might.” She pressed the power button with one red-polished fingernail, and the screen filled with its winking moon face. Now it didn’t seem hostile to Watts at all. It was a buddy to him, a lifeline. “That was a totally sweet way to give a girl a Valentine.”

  “Welcome to the StreetDreams2000,” the device said in a British accent. “And Happy Valentine’s Day. Where would you like to go today?”

  For a moment they were both frozen, and then she started to laugh, so he did, too.

  “How did you program it to say that?”

  “I’m slick like that,” Watts said, and he had a feeling he was going to be getting more than a little extra salsa tonight. Tonight was going his way. To think of the trouble he’d be in right now if he’d handed that thing over to the evidence techs, and instead, look at him now. It felt like there’d been someone watching over him today, and right now, whoever it was? He had to be smiling.

  No question about that.

  Sisters Before Misters

  Sarah Rees Brennan, Cassandra Clare, and Holly Black

  In the midst of a wild forest, at the edge of what had once been a town and was now ivy-bound ruins, there was a cave. In that cave lived three witches.

  They were witches bound to the service of a dark god and the relentless pursuit of evil. They sat from glowing dawn until deepest dusk, gloating over their past evils as they had once gloated over old bones of victims, until the bones had all worn away.

  They were sisters, though they could not remember their parents or the days of their childhood. It had been many ages since they made their offerings and bound their souls to the Dark Lord in exchange for power.

  The three sisters were called Hibiscus, Clytemnestra, and Scylla.

  On any day a traveler might wander into the forest and find them in their accustomed places. Hibiscus sat on a throne of stone and surveyed the ruins with endless satisfaction. Clytemnestra sat in a bower made of evil blooming flowers; her preference was for nightshade.

  Scylla liked to sit in a seat she had made of tree roots and the leg bones of long-dead deer, dreaming of romances she had read in books that had long since crumbled away and magazines with hot-pink covers that were no longer produced in their land. Scylla was the silliest of the witches, though her heart was just as black. When she was crossed, she never forgot, and she never forgave, and she never failed to find her victim and visit a hideous punishment on him. It was Scylla who invented boiling people in oil, and she was bitter she had not received any credit for it.

  “She’s silly because she is the youngest,” said Hibiscus of the raven hair and darkest imaginings. She was the eldest and the wisest, and the one who devised all their evil schemes. Hibiscus had toppled kingdoms and turned seas to blood in her time.

  “You might think after two thousand years such differentiations would be meaningless,” Scylla pointed out, sullenly.

  “She sulks because she is the youngest, too,” said Hibiscus. “It is the right of the youngest to sulk and the oldest to bully, while the middle sister is left only to complain.”

  Clytemnestra was not listening. Clytemnestra’s special power was over the minds of living things. Once she had made princes dance to their deaths for her amusement, and countless young maidens drown in their own tears.

  Now she had a large family of squirrels that she tormented. Currently she was forcing them to produce a play. It was awful torture, as squirrels a
re not naturally given to dramatics.

  “Please, O cruel and glorious mistress,” said one squirrel, whom she had gifted with the power of human speech for her own dark purposes. “Might I know what my motivation is in this scene?”

  Clytemnestra pointed to a tiny, squirrel-shaped Iron Maiden.

  The squirrel bowed his little, furry head. “Understood.”

  Clytemnestra had not spoken much in the last hundred years, but she always managed to get her point across.

  Scylla turned her single eye into the light, making the blue of its iris gleam. It was a part of the bargain with the Dark Lord that the sisters had but one eye between them, though that eye could see into the future and also shoot death rays from its slit pupil.

  “One day my prince will come,” she mumbled.

  “Good,” said Hibiscus. “I’m getting awfully tired of squirrel.”

  The thing about ruins is—as everyone knows—they are often excellent real estate opportunities. And lo, so it was that builders came to the ruins of the old town and began, slowly but surely, to construct a new town on top of it. First came men and women in suits who pointed at things and had servants running before them. Then came the trucks with supplies, the cement mixers and Dumpsters and Porta-Potties. And men, lots of men, who were healthy and loud and who appeared willing to take off their shirts at the slightest provocation.

  “They are so very loud,” said Hibiscus, playing idly with a vial of a poison so deadly that it not only killed whosoever drank it, but raised them from the dead just to kill them all over again. She sighed. “I miss the quiet. I suppose I will have to do something about that.”

  “Yes,” agreed a squirrel. “The sound of the jackhammer compromises the integrity of our performances.” Then, realizing he’d spoken out of turn, he ducked back into the knothole of a tree.

  “No, please,” said Scylla, who enjoyed sneaking to the edges of the forest and watching the workers. “Please let them be. I like to hear them. And soon we will have a whole town to toy with.”

  It seemed to Hibiscus, though, that Scylla was less interested in a whole town than one of the workers. He was slender and young, with a mop of corn-yellow hair and eyes the color of a fern and the annoying habit of singing under his breath while he worked. He also appeared to be the son of one of the suited men, although he worked as hard as anyone else. Scylla liked to take the eye all afternoon and peer down at him in the manner of someone who was about to take a captive and torture him until he couldn’t remember his own name, but only that he loved her. Which did promise to be amusing.

  “Very well,” promised Hibiscus, “but I can’t speak for Clytemnestra.”

  “I don’t see why not, since she won’t speak for herself,” groused Scylla, crossing her arms over her chest.

  Clytemnestra snorted, then went back to forcing a quartet of foxes to try their paws at acrobatics. It was going about as well as expected.

  “Nothing ever changes,” Scylla continued. “We never travel. I want to see the great cities and the oceans and the mountains. I want to wear big, sparkly dresses and go to the movies and eat popcorn until my fingers are greasy with butter. I want to be in love, real love, the kind where the boy is conscious.”

  That seemed ridiculous to Hibiscus, and she complained about it, as oldest sisters are wont to do, but Scylla was not listening. The next day she put on a dress made of silvery spiderwebs woven tightly together, and a sparkling eye patch over the hollow of her right eye, and climbed down from her throne to the forest floor.

  When the blond young worker, whose name was Marcus, saw her approach, he thought she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. She seemed to glide above the ground, and when she took his hand and led him away from the other workers, he was happy to go. She guided him to a copse in the forest where black flowers grew, and they sat in the grass and exchanged conversation. It had been years since Scylla had talked to anyone but her sisters, but fortunately Marcus was bedazzled by her golden hair and slender figure and seemed to think that her stories of squirrel torture and boiling oil were hilarious fables.

  “I have never met anyone like you,” he said, taking her hand. “The girls of the village are as dull in comparison as caterpillars to butterflies.”

  They kissed, and Scylla found his mouth soft and sweet. She wondered if the rest of him would be sweet as well if she cooked him, perhaps in a pot with vegetables.

  “Marry me,” he breathed.

  “I cannot,” she said. “For I am bound in service to a dark god, along with my sisters, and I cannot leave them. Without me, they would be blind.”

  “I know what it is like to have an overly dependent family,” Marcus said. “But surely you deserve freedom for yourself?”

  She gazed into his green eyes, and her heart melted. “Where would we run to?”

  Marcus seemed vague on that topic, but he was clear that they would be very happy there. He wove a wonderful tale of love, and flowers, and more love. Wherever they went, apparently, there would be an excess of beds. Scylla allowed herself to be convinced.

  It was clear to her, however, that if she was to venture into pastures new, she would need the eye. Scylla told herself that her sisters would hardly miss it, that they would want her to be happy, that it would be quite funny to take it.

  She told herself many things, and they all added up to her stealing away in the middle of the night, away from her sleeping sisters and into her lover’s arms.

  She did leave a note, but of course her sisters could not read it.

  Nevertheless, they soon gathered what Scylla had done.

  “I am going to boil that brat until she is nothing but bones and broth, and then I will drink the broth and crunch the bones!” Hibiscus exclaimed.

  “What will come of my production?” Clytemnestra asked. “Without my guiding eye, who will see to the costumes? And who will beat the foxes when they miss a step? Everything will be ruined!”

  “Not to worry, I rather fancy myself a director,” said one of the squirrels, and Clytemnestra gave a low moan of distress.

  She was clearly becoming hysterical. This meant Hibiscus had to pull herself together and think. Hibiscus had known her sisters a long time. She did not need to peer into a dark future to know how this latest escapade would end.

  “Hush,” she said and passed Clytemnestra a live rattlesnake so she could suck on its head. “How does it usually end, when mortals are in our company?”

  “Death, pain, madness,” said Clytemnestra, her voice slightly muffled around the snake. “More pain. That rash of beheadings. The rain of mad chickens. Oh, and plague, of course. I can’t believe I almost forgot plague!”

  “Exactly. Patience, my sister,” said Hibiscus. “Patience, and then terrible bloody vengeance.”

  Meanwhile, Marcus and Scylla were walking hand in hand down the street of the next village over. They had not been able to travel far, because Scylla had turned the coachman into a beetle for insolence and stepped on him. Marcus had missed this, being in the privy at the time.

  “What a shame the fellow ran off,” said Marcus.

  Scylla coughed. “Indeed.”

  Scylla told herself that the course of true love never did run smooth, but she was beginning to think that perhaps her oldest sister was right—as she so often and so irritatingly was—and that men who were conscious were more trouble than they were worth.

  Just then, a small and charming tot raced down the street toward them.

  “Do you like children?” Marcus asked, sighing a gusty, soppy sigh, like a wet bedsheet hanging in the wind.

  “I do,” said Scylla, brightening at this evidence of a common interest. “They’re very handy for potions, of course, and very juicy and tender after a long day when all you want is a snack.”

  Marcus looked appalled.

  “I also,” Scylla offered, after some thought, “enjoy sucking out their youth and innocence and consigning them to eternity as imps in the service of my da
rk master.”

  This did not please Marcus any better, and Scylla’s black heart sank down to her cruelly pointed shoes. How long can any love last, if the man involved will not accept your true self?

  As it turned out, not long.

  She could make him forget her misdeeds with a little magic, but she couldn’t forget the way he looked at her each time she disappointed him, the fresh horror and the ridiculous shock—as though he’d never seen anyone pull wings off a butterfly before! Or attach them to a mouse! As though it wasn’t funny to watch the creature try to get off the ground! It was absurd, the way she had to act around him to make him happy.

  And where were they supposed to live? Scylla could get them plenty of money, but Marcus seemed against all her suggestions regarding how she might go about doing that. And when she described her dream of a cottage with a nice little garden of mandrake, deadly nightshade, opium poppies, and a few other necessities, he got very distressed. In fact, Marcus, despite his great beauty, was becoming a bit of a bore.

  But the final straw came when she caught him chatting up a shopgirl. She had been in the back, selecting a very fine length of black cloth that she thought would make an adequate wedding dress if she trimmed it out in bat fur, when she spotted Marcus holding a ladder for a blushing girl in the process of shelving soap. The girl told him that her name was Honey. He told her that such a pretty name suited her, being so pretty herself. Scylla was furious—both that she hadn’t previously noticed how criminally terrible he was at flirtation and also that he was directing those criminally terrible flirtations toward another girl.

  She left with him, pretending that she didn’t notice the longing look he shot back toward the shop.

  That night, while he slept beside her in their hotel room bed, she plotted her revenge. Perhaps she should change him into a lizard and feed him to a cat. Or maybe she’d curse him to have a limb fall off every six months until he was just a talking head. Or enchant him so that each of his lovers died the moment he kissed her.