Grim, page 29
“Men are less careful with their bodies. Unmarked flesh like yours...near priceless.” Helm walked to Locke and held out a glass of white wine.
Locke took it and downed it in one gulp. “Purity.”
Helm crossed the room to take the red wine from Doris. As he turned his back, Locke met Britt’s eyes and mouthed the word run.
Her heart pounded, equal parts terror and gratitude.
Locke tore away his gaze and reached for the red wine. “I’ll sacrifice for Britt but only if you spare her.”
Helm smiled. “You can hope I will, brother. But sacrifice is a moment, not a lifetime.”
“Do you want the golden now, sirs?” Doris asked, but she didn’t move.
“No.” Helm wanted to peel back Locke’s skin while he was alive.
Locke moved to the metal table. He pulled a switchblade from his own pocket and held it up. “Take it.”
Helm stared at the sharp blade. “You’ve used that knife plenty. Did your sweet Britt know when you tasted her flesh that you wanted to use your teeth?”
“You and Calen are the ones who make meals of your prey.”
“That’s what hunters do. Living off the sale of their skin doesn’t make you noble.” Helm reached out and plucked the knife away from Locke. “Does she know you tried to leave us because of her?”
“I’ve wanted to stop for a long time. She wasn’t the reason, but she was the deal breaker.” He’d found his humanity the night he met her.
Helm leaned back against the wall, his attention fully on Locke. “Give me an incentive to let her live longer than a day.”
Britt heard the swish of the blade, and before she could look away, Locke brought it down on his own hand. Blood dripped to the floor and crept toward the drain.
“That’s a start.” Helm smiled. “Doris? Leave us.”
The old woman shifted her position until she was in front of Britt. When she began shuffling sideways, Britt shadowed her. “I’ll step outside,” Doris said. “Strip the marrow from the bones.”
Britt lurched out the back door. She sucked in fresh air, averting her eyes from the bloody tarp on the grass. A jangling noise caught her attention.
Doris held out the keys to Locke’s truck.
Britt acted without thought, racing across the yard on her bare feet, hoping the slickness of the grass was dew and not something more menacing. When she reached the vehicle, she launched herself into the driver’s seat. Jamming the keys into the ignition, she started the engine and revved the gas. To get their attention. To stop Helm and the movement of the knife.
She prayed Locke would anticipate her intent. She shifted into Drive and crashed the truck through the window.
Headlights met glass.
Locke dove out of the way, while Helm stood frozen. The truck stopped moving. Locke pushed through debris, and Britt climbed out the passenger’s side. He pulled her into his arms, kissing her, running his uninjured hand over her skin to make sure she was safe.
“I’m fine.” She stood on her tiptoes among broken glass to kiss him back. “Your hand—”
She took it gently in hers. His ring finger was almost severed.
A deep groan sounded in the far corner of the room. Helm, impaled by a thick shard of glass. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth, tears from the corners of his eyes.
If Locke had any sympathy, he’d put Helm out of his misery. As things stood, he couldn’t find any to spare. He let Britt go. After picking his way through the wreckage, he took the switchblade from Helm’s hand, closed it and tossed it into the fire. He stared at the flames, watching the plastic handle as it began to melt.
Behind him, Britt trailed a curious finger through the blood on Helm’s chin. His last breath left him as she held it to her lips.
And licked.
* * * * *
BEAUTY AND THE CHAD
by Sarah Rees Brennan
The briars twined and climbed over the wooden frames to form an arch, giving the garden the feeling of a cathedral, hushed and golden and hung with roses. The thief walked so softly that the blades of grass barely bent underneath his feet.
Against the evening sky hung a single perfect rose. Its petals glowed, red so rich it seemed luxurious, conjuring up images of costly things like velvet and silk and blood.
The thief reached out to seize the rose, but something else seized him first.
The creature moved faster and quieter than a mortal man could. Its vast shadow fell on the thief only an instant before the creature itself did: he grasped the man’s shirt in his claws and lifted him toward the sky as easily as if he was a plucked flower.
The thief gasped, horror choking off his voice so it was little more than a rattle in his throat. Outlined against the evening sky was a vast horned and furred creature, terrible scimitar-shaped fangs glinting in the dying light.
“Dude,” said the Beast. “Who steals roses? That is so not cool.”
“And then what happened, Father?” asked Gabrielle, the oldest sister. “However did you escape?”
Beauty, the youngest sister, sat crouched by the hearth. She had been trying to be so good and sensible, asking for a flower, because she hadn’t wanted her father to spend money they didn’t have.
It had been wonderful since Father had lost all his money. Beauty, for all that people liked how she looked—hence the nickname—had been terrible at being a court lady. She could not dance or flirt with her fan or make idle conversation the way a lady should. It was sad for Gabrielle and Suzanne, who had been perfect ladies, but the small house that needed fixing up and the single elderly white horse that needed tending suited Beauty much better. Time had eased the memories of tripping over her elaborate skirts, saying something shocking and knowing her behavior injured her sisters’ chances of good marriages.
She had forgotten how it felt, to have made a terrible error which would hurt her family. She remembered now.
Her father had tried to steal a rose for her, and a beast had attacked him.
“I’m surprised he didn’t eat you,” said Suzanne, who was of a morbid turn of mind.
“Of course I could tell that was what was on its mind,” Father said sagely. “One look and it could not disguise. It had hungry eyes.”
The three girls shuddered.
“I pleaded with the Beast, told it that I had a family, and the Beast offered me a bargain. He said that he needed a boy to serve him and care for his infernal steeds. I promised to send him my son.”
Beauty looked up from the hands twisted together in her lap. “What?”
Gabrielle and Suzanne were already smiling, the same smile they had worn at court, as if they understood something Beauty did not.
Her father was smiling, too. “Don’t you see?” he said. “I tricked the Beast. I promised him a son, and I have no son to give! The oath is void. Any dark enchantments he tries to cast will fail.”
Gabrielle clapped him on the back. “Oh, well done, Father.”
“But,” Beauty said. “But what about honor?”
Honor had been a watchword at court: to keep his honor a man could never cheat at cards, refuse a duel, break a betrothal or bear another gentleman’s insult. Above all else, he had to keep his word.
As a child Beauty had believed she had to keep to all those rules, as well, and had been scared to play card games with her sisters in case she found herself cheating by accident. Then she grew up and learned all a lady’s honor seemed to demand was that she not commit indiscretions with a gentleman. It was probably childish of her, but Beauty had still never told a lie in her life.
Suzanne laughed. “Do you think you’re a knight in one of those moldering old books you read?”
Her father snapped, “One does not have to deal with a beast with honor.”
“It’s your honor, not the Beast’s,” Beauty said. “Shouldn’t you have it all the time?”
Her father’s face shaded from displeased to actually angry, and Beauty stood up from the hearth, shutting her book and tilting her chin up defiantly.
Then her father laughed and turned back to his meal. “Oh, little Belle, my Beauty, why am I even trying to explain to you how matters of honor work? You’re a woman. You know nothing of honor.”
The dismissal stung more than his anger.
The next day, Beauty rose from her warm bed in the cold dawn and did not do her chores. Instead she cut off her golden hair and put on the old footman’s uniform that Gabrielle had been planning to pick apart and use to patch their dresses. She saddled Snowball the horse and rode in the direction of the castle.
It was not hard to find, though it was a long journey to get there. All Beauty had to do was follow the road south and keep riding, and soon she saw the castle outlined against the sky.
The sun had sunk behind the tower by the time Beauty rode into the courtyard. The courtyard was gray with the coming night, but Beauty suspected it might be gray anyway—there was an empty fountain with the briars of dead roses curled all around it, and gravel that had not been disturbed by carriage wheels in years.
Beauty dismounted and knocked on the tall gray door. The sound echoed in the silence, sending tremors down through her bones.
The door creaked open of its own accord. Beauty drew in a breath at this clear sign of magic, but she stepped through all the same. Above her, the chandelier tinkled, though there was no wind to stir it. A curtain drew back with no hand to assist it, revealing a portrait of a staring man.
The Beast leaped from the top of the curving flight of marble stairs to land crouched in the center of the floor. The tiles were already broken there, Beauty saw, crushed beneath his weight and his claws.
She looked at the tiles so she would not run or scream. She was here for her father, she told herself. She was here for her family’s honor.
She looked up, from claws to fur to fangs, and intent, terrifying eyes.
“I am the boy you wanted to care for your horses,” she said. She had intended to mimic a man’s voice, but in this moment, before the Beast, all she could manage was a low whisper.
“Dude,” said the Beast, “am I glad to see you.”
Beauty blinked. His eyes were light, light brown, almost amber: almost an animal’s eyes.
“Every time I go near the stables the horses freak out,” the Beast said. “I just feed them and run. It sucks because I like horses, you know? Before all this happened, I used to play polo.”
Beauty blinked again. “I apologize,” she said at last. “The tongue of beasts is not familiar to me. I do not fully understand your idiom. But I am here to serve, Beast, and happy to care for the horses.”
“Awesome,” said the Beast. “So come in. Pick a room. Oh, uh, and how much do you want to be paid? I’ll be honest here, this is kind of a buyer’s market, I’m desperate and I have piles of gold around. You can just pick up the stuff, basically.”
“I think I’m misunderstanding something, Beast. I actually thought you just said that you were going to give me piles of gold.”
“Well, in return for looking after the horses,” the Beast said. “Obviously not as, like, a present. We just met, dude. Maybe on your birthday.”
Beauty stared. “I am looking after the horses in return for my father’s life!”
“You what?” said the Beast.
“My father said you were going to eat him.”
It was hard to tell, with a visage that was mainly fur and those fearsome teeth, but Beauty thought she saw the Beast make a face.
“Whoa. I was not going to eat him. I’m not a vegetarian or anything, but I draw the line at eating people. I thought that your dad trespassing to steal flowers was a bit much, but I hadn’t talked to anyone in weeks and trying to make a help-wanted sign was getting embarrassing, what with the claws. All I did was ask if he knew someone who’d look after the horses for me.”
She was already here. She could see no reason for the Beast to lie to her, no advantage to him in doing so.
She had never felt quite so stupid in her life.
“I suppose my father panicked,” she said eventually.
“I mean,” the Beast said generously, “I’d panic, if I thought someone was going to eat me.”
Her noble sacrifice was now basically ridiculous. Beauty could go home, she supposed, but she could not bear the idea of that long ride and how her father and her sisters would call her a stupid, stupid girl.
She looked at the Beast, and tried to see him clearly. He looked something like a wolf, and something like an ape, something like a jungle cat and even something like a man.
Looking past the long fangs and the other teeth distorting his jaw, she thought she could see an expression of friendly bewilderment. When he moved his pawlike hands, claws glinting, Beauty steeled herself for a blow, and instead his claws clicked together like dominoes and he looked down at them as though vaguely startled by the fact that they were there. He was, Beauty saw, wearing clothes, even if they were strange, ragged things: trousers of some rough canvaslike material that were simply shreds at the end, and something that might once have been a shirt and now was a scrap of fabric that stretched across his furry barrel of a chest, and an odd, brief collar that was nevertheless standing up.
He saw her looking, and she was fairly sure he misinterpreted the look when he said, with an attempt at gentleness, “You don’t have to stay here, you know.”
“Let us make a gentleman’s agreement,” Beauty suggested.
“Uh,” said the Beast, “okay.”
“To atone for my father’s crime, O Beast, I shall stay in this castle and serve you for a year and a day.”
That seemed the traditional length of time offered in Beauty’s books. The other options were seven years, which seemed a very long time, or a hundred years, at which point Beauty herself might as well volunteer to be eaten.
“Thanks, that’s very cool of you,” the Beast said, and his huge shoulders slumped with relief.
It was settled so simply. Beauty could hardly think about the magnitude of the new bargain she had made, when she might have gone home instead. She squared her shoulders in her man’s jacket and started on her way up the stairs to choose a bedroom.
“One more thing,” said the Beast from the foot of the stairs.
Beauty tensed. “Yes?”
“This whole ‘Beast’ deal? Kinda hurtful,” said the Beast. “Call me Chad.”
Beauty chose the room whose door opened for her, though it gave her a nasty shock at first. She walked in and saw the gauzy curtains and the mirror decorated with golden roses, turned and tried to walk out. But the door slammed in her face.
“This is a very pretty room,” Beauty told the room, and the curtains fluttered like a girl batting her eyelashes. “But I am here in a disguise, and I will not be convincing as a man if I have a dressing table with a little lacy frill around it and a teddy bear on top!”
The room blurred, the mirror frame bending as if in a shrug. Then it resolved into a room once more, the gauzy curtains gone and everything in sturdy green, even the mirror. The teddy bear remained, half-hidden under the bed, but Beauty decided it was close enough.
“Thank you,” she said, and went downstairs to stable her own pony and meet the other horses.
They were not, as her father had said, infernal steeds. They seemed to be perfectly normal horses, of the sort you could ride out hunting or have pull a light showy carriage: there were three matched pairs of gray, chestnut and black. They were restless in their stalls, eyes rolling toward the castle, but as enthusiastic as puppies for Beauty, pushing their muzzles into her palms. She wondered how long it had been since they had seen a human person, and set about currying and calming them.
It was enough work that she did not even see the Beast for a night and a day: it was evening again when she stumbled inside, shoulders aching from hoisting a shovel.
As she opened the door of the castle, she was greeted by the smell of food, savory and sizzling and delicious. Beauty followed her nose to the dining room. She barely noticed the blue panels for walls and wedding-cake trim up at the ceilings—she was most concerned with the vast mahogany table creaking with food.
The Bea—the Chad was sitting in a vast chair, being served by a gravy boat that came toddling up to him, a flirtatiously twirling teapot and a platter that seemed to be tobogganing.
“Guys,” he said, gesturing with a fork that looked tiny in his huge paw. “Guys, guys, we’ve talked about this, it’s creepy, I don’t like it, you’re gonna spill stuff, I like my inanimate objects the way I like my coffee—inanimate!”
“The whole castle is filled with charms,” Beauty said. “It must have been created by powerful sorcery.”
The Beast twitched. “Ugh. I guess. I wasn’t really raised to believe in, you know, all that.”
“You don’t believe magic exists?”
Beauty had no idea of the relevant intelligence of beasts. She had assumed from the clothes and the way he could speak that he had the intelligence of a human, but that might not be true: now he was saying he didn’t believe in perfectly obvious things, as if he was a child claiming not to believe in the sky.
“I mean, okay, magic exists,” the Beast said grumpily. “Castle full of dancing sofas and some broad turned me into...this...on the steps of my frat house and sent me to live here. But Dad would have fits and say this was hippie communist garbage.”
“I am having trouble understanding your beast idiom again,” Beauty said. “All of it.”
The Beast raised his eyebrow, which was basically a shaggy shelf of extra fur. “Pull up a chair, dude. This food isn’t going to eat itself. Well, it might, but that’d be weird and you’d be doing me a favor if you did it instead.”
