“Mr. Francis died of a heart attack last night.” He had an odd expression on his face. Hard not to feel some relief, I guessed—and harder not to feel guilty over it. “I guess we won’t be getting any more notes.” He frowned at me, then donned his lawyer face. “Warren?”
Among the health issues our neighbor had retired with was a weak heart. Much easier to explain a heart attack than death by wild animals. This was the twenty-first century after all, not the nineteenth.
“I’d have gotten more satisfaction if I could have sunk my teeth into him,” I told Kyle, rubbing the towel over my hair with a little more force than necessary. “Apparently he decided that you’d never be a neighbor he could cow properly. He hired Nadia, Elizaveta’s niece, to kill you.”
“Covington said she’d pay for half if we told her who hired someone to kill you,” I told him. “It was Sullivan who shot me”—Kyle looked at the red mark on my shoulder that was all that was left of the wound—“but he won’t be a threat to anyone anymore.”
Nadia broke Sullivan—but she’d aimed that magic at me, too. I wasn’t supposed to think about Kyle anymore, I was supposed to leave off the investigation with the feeling that everything would be all right. And I wasn’t supposed to remember the magic she’d worked to ensure that result. She’d spent so long teaching everyone to underestimate her, she’d overestimated herself.
Kyle frowned at me. “Tell me.”
So I told him about Sean Nyelund while I got dressed. I paced restlessly and told him about Nadia while he sat on the bench at the foot of the bed and watched me.
“Justice was served, Warren,” he said when I finished. “I’m sorry it had to be you who served it.”
“I’m not,” I told him. I’d only done what I needed to protect my own. I’d do it again.
He smiled a little as if he knew something I didn’t. “If you say so.”
“She was right,” I said.
“Who was?”
“Nadia. She said the red dress might be useful in finding out who’d killed Toni McFetters.”
He reached up and caught my hand, pulling me down to sit beside him.
“You liked her,” he told me.
“She had a prom photo in her house.” On top of the curio cabinet. “Toni’s husband had taken Nadia to her high school prom. That red dress Toni was wearing? It was Nadia’s prom dress; so were the pearls and shoes, near as I could tell. He’d taken her to the prom and hardly remembered her.” She’d remembered
“Elizaveta only objected that she’d exposed herself as a witch to the humans,” Kyle said. “If you hadn’t told her that, she would have left Nadia alone. You didn’t have to kill her.” He put his arm around me. “Tell me that’s not what you’re thinking now. Tell me that’s not what is bothering you.”
It wasn’t. Not quite. I was thinking that she had attacked Kyle and part of me would have been happier if I’d eaten her. It had taken more will than I’d thought I had not to eat the old man next door, who was even more to blame than Nadia.
I stared at Kyle. I know that the wolf must have been showing through, but he didn’t flinch, didn’t drop his eyes.
“She was escalating,” he said. “She killed for money and learned to like it. She killed Toni because Toni and her husband jogged past her house every day and they were happy. She tried to kill me because we are happy.”
He thought I was a hero. He needed to know better.
“I killed two people last night,” I told him. “Premeditated murder.” I swallowed, but told him the other part of it, too. “I enjoyed it.”
He kissed me. When he was finished, he told me, “You’re a werewolf—a predator. A skilled killer, but not an indiscriminate one. So am I. If my prey is still writhing when I’m finished, it doesn’t make me any less a predator.”
I looked at him and he gave me a crooked grin. “Ready to get rid of that apartment yet?”
I laughed and leaned into him.
“Maybe,” I said. “Just maybe.”
THE ADAKIAN EAGLE
by Bradley Denton
World Fantasy Award, John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winner Bradley Denton was born in 1958, grew up in Kansas, and took an MA in creative writing from the University of Kansas. He sold his first story in 1984 and soon became a regular contributor to
Here he takes us to the frozen, wind-blasted landscape of the Aleutians to join a group of soldiers guarding a barren rock during World War II—one of whom you might recognize—who must face sinister magic, and the even more sinister, and murderous, secrets of the human heart.
I
THE EAGLE HAD BEEN TORTURED TO DEATH.
That was what it looked like. It was staked out on the mountain on its back, wings and feet spread apart, head twisted to one side. Its beak was open wide, as if in a scream. Its open eye would have been staring up at me except that a long iron nail had been plunged into it, pinning the white head to the ground. More nails held the wings and feet in place. A few loose feathers swirled as the wind gusted.
The bird was huge, eleven or twelve feet from wingtip to wingtip. I’d seen bald eagles in the Aleutians before, but never up close. This was bigger than anything I would have guessed.
Given what had been done to it, I wondered if it might have been stretched to that size. The body had been split down the middle, and the guts had been pulled out on both sides below the wings. It wasn’t stinking yet, but flies were starting to gather.
I stood staring at the eagle for maybe thirty seconds. Then I got off the mountain as fast as I could and went down to tell the colonel. He had ordered me to report anything hinky, and this was the hinkiest thing I’d seen on Adak.
That was how I wound up meeting the fifty-year-old corporal they called “Pop.”
And meeting Pop was how I wound up seeing the future.
Trust me when I tell you that you don’t want to do that. Especially if the future you see isn’t even your
