The guns had history, and I needed to find it. I could look in moldy books or try to find something accurate online. Or I could ask the guns themselves.
I didn’t want to ask the one with Ry’s tattoo wrapped around its grip. I wasn’t sure who or what would answer me.
And I didn’t want to find out.
So I walked back to my apartment, and got my gun down a second time.
Everyone describes silver as cold, but it’s not. Especially when it’s been indoors, and the endless winter continued outside. The gun was warm against my hand, the silver never needing polish.
I wrapped my hand around it, saw—
Ry, grinning as he watched me open the box…
I made that image disappear, saw—
Something huge and scaly, looming over a pair of sleeping boys, then a bright white light zinging out of the muzzle, and the huge, scaly thing exploding into a thousand little pieces…
I shook my head, smiled a little, saw —
Hands with two matching rings, clasped, each around the grip of a different gun. “With my heart, I hold you,” a male voice so like Ry’s said. “With my soul, I touch you…”
It was a hand-fasting ceremony, only of a kind I’d never heard of. With the guns in the middle.
Marriage, the old-fashioned way.
I rubbed my eyes with my thumb and forefinger. Then frowned, thought of an experiment, and decided to try it.
I set the gun on top of the box.
Then I went into my kitchen, and thought, Join your handfast partner at the gun itself.
After five minutes, it wobbled its way toward me, muzzle pointed at my heart, trembling like Ry’s gun had.
Find your box, I thought, and the gun wobbled its way out the door. I followed it, as it returned to the very place it had started.
I picked the box up and wrapped my arms around it.
Anniversaries had power.
I had thought the gun came to me at the anniversary of Ry’s death.
The gun had come to me at the anniversary of our love—the marriage he had tried to give me, ten long years ago.
* * *
With my gun in my shoulder holster, I went back to the office.
Ry’s gun was inside the safe, the remains of my favorite tattoo still attached to the grip.
First, I put my gun on the desk. Then, I opened the safe. Finally, gingerly, I picked up Ry’s gun.
He laughed.
I took my hand off the grip, shaking.
Then touched it again.
I don’t care how dark things get, he said. We’ll always have each other.
As if he hadn’t left. As if he were still here.
I set the guns beside each other, and they started to glow. If they were real guns—real as in the way Dane defined guns—I would be fleeing now, expecting some kind of weird explosion.
But I was curiously unafraid.
The guns glowed and locked to each other. The tattoo grew into an entire man.
Ryder.
See-through, but there.
“I missed you,” he said.
I didn’t care if he was real or not. “I missed you too.”
“I wasn’t sure you’d understand,” he said. “We never finished the ceremony.”
“I know,” I said.
He nodded, reached toward me, his hand going through my face. I felt nothing, not even a rush of wind.
And oh, how I wanted to.
“What happened?” I asked, because I had to, because I had a sense time was short.
“Demons,” he said, and his image flickered.
He glanced at the guns. The glow was fading.
“No,” I said.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you too,” I said. “Stay.”
“I wish.” His voice was faint. “Balance the scales…”
And then he was gone.
Again.
The son of a bitch.
* * *
I felt it—the batshit crazy. It was coming back, or maybe it had never left. I could go after everything, clean up everything, fight everything—and be consumed.
Or I could stand up.
Fight.
Figure it out.
The guns didn’t glow any more. The tattoo was gone.
I touched Ry’s gun. It was cool. So was mine.
Balance the scales.
Demons—and skin.
I let out a breath, grabbed both guns, and headed to the alley below.
* * *
No crime scene tape. No footprints in the snow. No tire marks where the crime scene unit had parked their van.
The brick was back in place.
I walked to it, touched it, felt edges, still there. The hiding place, still there.
Son of a bitch.
“Finally,” he said, his voice echoing between the buildings.
I turned. He looked bigger, eyes glowing ever so slightly red, Ry’s face covering his imperfectly, five tattoos glowing on his scaly skin.
Saw—in my mind’s eye—two boys, sleeping, a demon hovering over them, exploding in the dark, and scales raining down—on the oldest boy, the one closest to the door.
“Your parents took your magic away from you,” I said.
“They thought they could,” Dane said, his voice deeper, more echoey. “They took the wrong magic.”
They took the good magic, leaving the scales.
Balance them, Ry had told me.
“You killed him,” I said.
Dane didn’t answer me, but the tattoos glowed. The death hadn’t been intentional. I knew that, or Dane wouldn’t have crumbled like he had. They had had a fight—over the guns?
“What do the guns have to do with it?” I asked.
“One of them is mine,” he said.
“Why didn’t you take Ry’s after he died?” I asked.
“I couldn’t find it.”
“I offered it to you earlier,” I said.
His eyes narrowed. “Yes. Then I realized I could have both guns. They belong in my family, you know.”
I felt them humming inside my coat.
“Now,” Dane said, “give them to me
I had no other weapons. I hadn’t expected to fight demons tonight. I wasn’t really in the fighting and slaying business any more. Just the investigating, resolving business.
I pulled Ry’s gun out of my pocket. My hand trembled as I gave the gun to Dane.
He took it, looking surprised at the ease.
“Where’s yours?” he asked.
“The office,” I said.
“You gonna give it to me?”
“Yeah,” I said softly. “I’ve never used it.”
He studied me to see, probably trying to see the trick.
“I never realized you were this logical,” he said.
“You never knew me,” I said. Which was fair: I never knew him either.
And I had dismissed Ry. Ry, who had called Dane “The Enemy” right from the start.
Dane grinned. “I like you, you know.”
I nodded, as if I cared. He looked down at the gun, and weighed it in his hand, as if it were something precious.
Which it was.
Join your handfast partner, I whispered.
The gun in Dane’s hand trembled. He held it tightly. The tattoos on him—Ry’s remaining tattoos—glowed.
Then peeled off, one by one, each fastening itself around the gun.
For a moment, there were two men before me, one thinner, less substantial, the other glowing red, the gun between them.
My gun had found my hand as well—and I didn’t remember grabbing it. Then I realized it had heard the same command, thought the command was its.
I knew what kind of bullets demons took, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to shoot Dane—not with Ry fighting him for the gun.
They struggled, the ice melting beneath their feet, the heat of Dane’s evil warming the entire alley. The gun remained between them and
then—
Something popped as if a bubble had burst.
Ry staggered backwards, substantial, bleeding (bleeding!!!), and falling, holding his gun.
Dane, dripping scales, reached for the gun and without thinking, I imagined white light—bullets—heading toward him.
They did, shooting out of my gun and hitting his torso.
I reached down, grabbed Ry, pulled him backwards with me, away from the white-and-red glowing demon-man in the center of that alley. We made it behind a stupid snowplow-created pile of snow when Dane exploded, bits raining everywhere.
Except on us.
Balance the scales.
Not just the scales of justice. The scales of a demon, returning where they belonged.
I wrapped my arms around a bleeding, warm, living man.
“Ry,” I said.
“Took you long enough,” he muttered.
“You didn’t explain—”
“No excuses,” he said, and then he passed out.
* * *
I had no story for the ambulance attendants. I had no story for the cops. I pled ignorance, lost memory, frostbite…I don’t know. Those lies are gone, along with any trace of Dane.
Ry thinks Dane died that night ten years ago, and somehow his demon self managed to get to Ry, so that Ry’s power would keep them alive.
But I think—the magic suggests it—that Dane died a lot longer ago than that. Maybe the night of the demon attack, the ones the gun stopped.
Because demons can create hallucinations, images, visions, like the crime scene. How easy for one boy to die and feed a dying demon, keeping it alive, just barely, waiting for the right opportunity to grow into something stronger.
From the moment I met him, Ry said he distrusted Dane. I thought that brothers always talked trash like that. But it wasn’t trash. It was the man reacting to something he barely remembered from his own childhood.
Ry doesn’t agree.
But it doesn’t matter.
Because we’ve done purges. We’ve saged the entire alley. We’ve warded it and cleansed it. We invited old friends to do the same.
Dane’s gone.
And Ry’s here.
And it’s no hallucination or vision.
The most romantic gift anyone’s ever given me was a gun. And a hand-fast.
And a future.
Together.
At last.
* * *
USA Today bestselling writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch has won almost every award in science fiction and fantasy—or at least been nominated for them. She writes in every genre she reads (which is a lot of them), mostly as Rusch, although in paranormal romance she's known as Kristine Grayson, and in mystery as multiple award-winner Kris Nelscott, In 2015, she'll publish six books in her Retrieval Artist series, finishing a saga set inside the series. She'll return to her fantasy series, The Fey, after that. The former Hugo-award winning editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, the World Fantasy award winning publisher of Pulphouse Publishing, she now edits the Fiction River anthology series with her husband, writer Dean Wesley Smith.
Beware of Dog
Kevin J. Anderson
A Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. Adventure
1
The snarling whirlwind of fur struck a quiet drinking establishment in the Unnatural Quarter just after happy hour. Rampaging destructive hairy beasts weren’t all that unusual in the Quarter, however—especially on a Saturday night.
I wasn’t there in person, since my traditional watering hole is the Goblin Tavern, but witnesses described a tornado of claws and teeth. Luckily none of the patrons—neither monsters nor humans—were injured in the howling and smashing, but the New Deadwood Saloon was going to need a complete makeover.
Sheyenne, my ghost girlfriend as well as the person who manages the offices of Chambeaux & Deyer Investigations, heard about the incident on the police scanner. Only a few minutes later Officer Toby McGoohan called me to the scene. “Hey, Shamble, I could use your help.”
A bar disturbance didn’t seem like something that would require the services of a zombie private investigator, but McGoo is my Best Human Friend, and friends help each other out.
I tugged my fedora over the bullet hole in the center of my forehead (the formerly fatal wound that had left me a zombie detective instead of a regular detective) and donned my sport jacket with the prominently stitched-up bullet holes across the front. After tucking my .38 in its holster, I gave Sheyenne an air kiss (about all I could do with a ghost) and headed off to the New Deadwood Saloon.
The place had batwing doors and an Old West feel—not surprising since the proprietor claimed to be the ghost of Wild Bill Hickock and could produce photo ID to prove it (complete with an olde tyme black-and-white photo on his driver’s license). Fake or not, he was a nice enough ghost with big handlebar mustache, leather vest, and bad ectoplasmic teeth from chewing too much ectoplasmic tobacco.
The proprietor had opened up the saloon shortly after the Big Uneasy, when a highly improbable alignment of planets and coincidences had returned all the monsters and legendary creatures to the world. Claiming to have mellowed as the world settled down, he now preferred to be called Mild Bill.
Now, standing outside the saloon and looking at all the destruction the hairy whirlwind had caused, the ghost put his hands on his hips. “Golly.”
The wooden siding had been raked to splinters, windows smashed, one of the batwing doors ripped off its hinges, and the sign over the door knocked askew so that it dangled on one bent nail. The painted letters said NEW DEADWOOD SALON, with an extra “O” added by hand to correct the embarrassing typo in the last word.
McGoo was already there in his beat cop uniform, notepad out, jotting down the reports of several witnesses: a half-unraveled mummy who looked as if he had tangled with the wild hairy beast, but on closer inspection I saw that he was just naturally disheveled; a dapper vampire, whose tuxedo vest was mis-buttoned by one and who looked as if he had imbibed too much Type AB negative mixed with Scotch; and a befuddled-looking human tourist in a golf cap who had obviously followed the wrong directions from his GPS.
McGoo looked up at me and tipped his blue policeman’s cap. “I already called it in, Shamble. A code 10623A, Monster on the Loose (Hairy Variety).”
I inspected the claw marks on the torn wooden siding, pulled out a few tufts of fur wedged in the cracks. “Nobody saw what it really was?”
“No, siree,” said Mild Bill. “The thing was moving so fast—it tore up the place then ran off howling. Came in here like one of those Tasmanian devils you see in the nature documentaries.”
“You mean in the cartoons,” I said.
“Yeah, the animated documentaries. I watch them all the time. Somebody better catch it and put it on a leash.”
McGoo pocketed his notebook. “We’re on it, Mild Bill. It’s not really my jurisdiction, but in the UQPD, the lines between animal control and law enforcement are a little fuzzy.”
“Yup, that thing was fuzzy all right.” The cowboy ghost looked at the damaged façade of his establishment. “Shoot, I’ve needed to get a new sign for years. You can’t imagine how much ribbing I get for the Deadwood Salon. Next time I’ll check the work before I hang the sign.”
McGoo was clearly done here. “Can you help me out, Shamble? We better catch this thing before it causes any more damage.”
“Sure thing, McGoo. The cases don’t solve themselves.”
2
A rampaging furball on the loose tends to draw attention. But no one saw the beast for the rest of the night.
Sometimes, though, an obvious lead walks right through the front door.
Next morning, I was in my office, looking over the files Sheyenne had put on my desk, while Robin Deyer, my firebrand human lawyer partner, met with clients in her office.
Robin is on a crusade to see that unnaturals receive justice, but despite the exotic clientele most of our cases actually turn out to be pretty mundane
. This morning, she met with a bickering ghost couple who wanted an easy, no-fault divorce. Robin intended to file on the basis that the “till death do us part” vow set a quantifiable time limit on the contract, and therefore made the marriage of two ghosts no longer binding. I could tell from their squabbling—which Sheyenne and I heard even through Robin’s closed door—that nothing about the divorce would be simple.
And then a real-life legend barged into our offices. He was a burly werewolf with thick dark fur starting to turn gray at the temples and around his muzzle. He wore a dark, shabby-looking suit and a thin black tie, something a government agent might wear, or a police detective.
Or a retired police detective.
Or a retired legendary, rogue cop who had become a folk hero in the Unnatural Quarter.
I had seen his furry face on the news, on a poster in the UQ Police Department precinct house, even on action figures and comics. It took me a moment to recognize him, then another moment to get over my surprise.
I lurched out of my office, embarrassed that I acted like one of those stumbling zombies rather than the well-preserved one I prided myself in being. I extended my cold hand. “You’re Hairy Harry!”
He bristled. “Yes, I am, punk.” His clawed hands clenched into fists, and his muscles bulged in his suit, but then the low growl faded in his throat. “I don’t like attention, especially after the . . . incident.” Hairy Harry had left the police force under the shadow of scandal, something terrible about the death of his rookie human partner, but I didn’t know the details. “I’m retired now, keep a low profile. Just want a normal life—but they won’t leave me alone.”
Beautiful Sheyenne levitated from behind her desk. “Could I get you something to drink, Mr. Harry? Coffee, tea, soda?”
“Got any bourbon?”
“Afraid not,” I said. “I’m a beer man myself, and I do my drinking outside of the office.”
Hairy Harry’s bristly eyebrows rose. “What kind of private investigator doesn’t have a bottle stashed in his desk drawer?”
“A zombie private investigator,” I said. “How can I help you?”
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