Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls (3 page)

Some things don’t.

Courtney Stewart was huddled in the shadows of the northeast corner. There was a rusty manacle around her right ankle, linked to a chain that had been anchored in the cave wall. Courtney was wearing an expensive-looking emerald dress that was
clean and dry, and she appeared well fed. She cringed at the sight of me.

“I’m a friend of Sarah White’s,” I told her. “She’s waiting for us outside.”

Courtney didn’t respond. I don’t know whether the words made sense to her or whether she believed them if they did. I crouched down and grabbed hold of the rusty chain, bracing the flat of my right foot against the cave wall. I am about three
times stronger than I should be, and the chain snapped easily.

A moment later, so did the fossegrim’s guitar.

“Come on, Courtney.” I made it a command, gentle but unyielding. “It’s time to go home.”

Courtney screamed when I pulled her through the falling water.

Cursing, I abandoned the rappelling gear and yanked Courtney over the rocks, taking her down to the base of the falls with
me. We hit the water, and I put an arm around her neck and pulled her back up to the surface, ready to choke her out if I had to, but she went limp.

I began to tow her to shore. I was moving faster than a normal human could have, but it wasn’t fast enough. We were perhaps twenty-five feet from the riverbank, in water that was slightly above our knees, when the fossegrim materialized between
us and the shore.

 It rose out of the water in a spout as if emerging from the top of a fountain. The water began to coalesce and mold itself into a human form, to assume colors and depth and texture. It became a man—an oddly beautiful and androgynous man, tall and well-muscled, with long brown hair trailing down to its hips. I assumed the jeans and blue T-shirt were affectations. His legs
ended at the surface of the water.

The fossegrim said one word, its voice liquid and melancholy. “Courtney.”

She began to scream again.

From the riverbank, Sarah White also yelled. She was wearing a wet suit, having adamantly refused to face death in a bikini. She was also carrying a holly staff with carved runes circling its length. Sarah raised the staff, and its end caught fire.

Fire is
the easiest element to summon and the hardest to control. It burns inside every atom, and it wants to be released. Sarah slashed her staff through the air, and a curving trail of flame arced out over the surface of the river and hissed into the fossegrim’s shoulders. It frowned. It was a small frown, but the anger in its eyes was unfathomable.

The fossegrim turned and channeled river water
up through its body and out its open mouth. The stream hit Sarah like a jet from a fire hose, snuffing the fire at the end of her staff and sending her sprawling backward.

I removed the mallet from my hip and surged forward while its back was turned, but the eyes and ears in the fossegrim’s head were merely ornaments. The surrounding water was its real sensory organ, the thing in front of
me more like a finger puppet being worn by an immense and hidden being than an actual human. It swayed out of the way and my hammer swished over the place where its head had been.

The fossegrim threw a punch that I blocked at the wrist. Actually, I smashed my forearm through said wrist and sent water splattering into the air around us, but the hand simply regrew and the arm kept extending,
smashing a fist into my shoulder as my body continued to turn.

It was like being hit by a small car. I skipped at least eight feet over deeper water like a tossed flat stone. Somewhere along the way I lost the mallet.

Then something unexpected happened. Isaac Roberts came at the fossegrim from behind, running over the surface of the water, and the fossegrim did not seem to sense him. Isaac
dived into the fossegrim and passed through it, but he seemed to be grappling with something that I could not see, and the fossegrim’s body turned back to a column of water and collapsed.

Isaac was still wrestling with something when he was sucked under the surface of the water by an inexplicably powerful force.

I didn’t waste any time. I dived and surged through the water and came up beside
Courtney, who had not moved.

“RUN!” I screamed and grabbed Courtney by the arm and hip, ignoring my aching shoulder, and hurled her toward the riverbank at least nine feet through the air. The last thing I saw was Sarah White running out into the river, the water up to her shins, and then I too was pulled under.

The thing had a body. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it as it pressed me
down into the river mud. The water was denser where the fossegrim’s being was gathered and concentrated, and the form it used was roughly man-shaped. Perhaps that was its real form, or perhaps that was its form because it thought of itself as a human. I really have no idea.

I reached into the pockets of my swim trunks and pulled out the concussion grenade that Isaac had appropriated from
the police station’s weapons’ locker. I punched the grenade into the torso of the thing that was holding me down and opened my hand, withdrawing my flat palm as the pressure closed in on it. I left the grenade behind.

I kept the pin.

The concussion grenade went off, knocking me head over heels, forcing water up my sinus passages, and rupturing my eardrums. My back hit a rock hard, and my
head broke the surface more by luck than anything else. My entire chest felt like it was made of stone as I pushed myself up to my hands and knees, then gained my feet and kept staggering toward the shore.

I could see Sarah there, waving her staff at me. She was probably yelling something, but I couldn’t hear it. I didn’t need to. The sight brought me all the way back to myself, and I began
running and jumping faster than any normal man could. I must have covered nine feet in standing, staggering leaps from water, losing my balance and toppling but quickly thrashing back to my feet.

I reached the bank and scooped up Sarah while she was still staring at me in shock, running as far and fast from the river as I could, not stopping until I reached a lit flare lying behind a cluster
of buckets filled with an oily black substance.

Courtney was there, huddled on the ground in a fetal position.

I turned and saw the fossegrim. It ran from the river in human form, but it didn’t move like a human. Its legs didn’t bend as if they had joints and its arms were slightly elongated. I grabbed one of the buckets and moved to meet it. My balance was off, some inner ear problem no
doubt, but even lurching, I managed to upturn the container and splash Greek fire over the fossegrim.

Greek fire is actually a crude form of pre-industrial napalm. The ancient Greeks kept its formula such a well-maintained secret that it has been lost to common knowledge over the centuries. But uncommon knowledge is the province of cunning folk, and ancient weapons are the province of knights.

Greek fire was such a devastating weapon in marine warfare because it was a liquid that burned even in water.

At first the oily black liquid coated the fossegrim, and then it was pulled inside the being as he tried to assimilate it. The fossegrim became a strange-looking humanoid with bubbling black patches on its skin, but it didn’t notice. It tried to grab me, but it had no inexhaustible
reservoir to draw upon now, trapped in the body that it had assembled. I evaded its arms and dived to the side. In theory, I rolled to my feet in a crouch. In reality, my balance was still off and I hit the shoulder that I had forgotten was hurting and flopped awkwardly onto my back, howling and scrambling.

Sarah took the opportunity to swing her staff, swiping its tip over the fossegrim as
if striking a match off of it.

The fossegrim ignited, and my eardrums must have started regenerating already because I could hear it scream. It was an inhuman burbling keen, and the fossegrim turned and tried to move back toward the river. At first it shambled, and then it imploded in on itself and turned into a burning puddle that was still bizarrely flowing forward, and then the puddle
broke into burning fragments, and finally the fragments stopped altogether and evaporated.

Someone said something behind me.

I turned around. Somehow, Isaac had gotten behind me.

Sarah White stepped forward. I couldn’t make out her words, but all knights can read lips. “You are no knight.”

“No,” I said. “Not anymore.”

“Isaac isn’t the only one trapped between worlds is he?” I could almost understand
her without watching her mouth. Her eyes were not without pity, but pity was one thing I neither desired nor deserved.

“Maybe not,” I told her. “But Isaac is the only one of us that you can help.”

She was beautiful. She was intelligent. She had courage and good intentions and self-discipline. And she wanted peace. I had no business being around her, not really. Not all of us have the ability
to make nice lives for ourselves.

Sarah made an irritated grunt. “You can come back to visit me if you need a friend. Just a friend, mind you.”

“See, that’s not how this works,” I explained. “This is the part where I say something cryptic and disappear, and then you pine for me.”

“I don’t think so,” she said reflectively. “But if you want to act tortured and mysterious, go ahead.”

I laughed
in spite of myself. It was maybe a little too loud and slightly edged with hysteria. I don’t laugh out loud a lot. I’m more the smile-on-the-inside type, but I had a lot of tension to release. “I don’t need your permission.”

She smiled in acknowledgement. “I suppose you’ll want to be gone before the police and the press become involved.”

“If you could get Courtney to the Stewarts quietly, I
would appreciate it,” I said. “I could use a few hours’ head start.”

“You’ll have them,” she promised. “And I’ll take care of your friend.”

Apparently Sarah didn’t believe in long good-byes. She turned and walked over to where Courtney was still huddled.

“Tom?” Isaac’s voice was uncertain, but I could hear the words now.

“Stay with her, dummy.” I told him. “Can’t you see when you’re trading up?”

“I never thanked you,” Isaac said awkwardly.

“Let’s keep it that way. You’re going to be okay, Isaac.” I turned and started walking back to the river. I didn’t believe in long good-byes, either. “Just be more careful where you park your penis from now on.”

“You take care of yourself!” he called over my shoulder.

That’s what I was doing. Even at pawnshop rates, there was several hundred thousand
dollars’ worth of gold in that cave.

by Elliott James

John Charming isn't your average prince…

He comes from a line of Charmings—an illustrious family of dragon slayers, witch finders and killers dating back to before the fall of Rome. Trained by a modern-day version of the Knights Templar, monster hunters who
have updated their tools from chain mail and crossbows to Kevlar and shotguns, he was one of the best. That is—until he became the abomination the knights were sworn to hunt.

That was a lifetime ago. Now he tends bar under an assumed name in rural Virginia and leads a peaceful, quiet life. One that shouldn't change just because a vampire and a blonde walk into his bar…right?

Once upon a time, she smelled wrong. Well, no, that’s not exactly true. She smelled clean, like fresh snow and air after a lightning storm and something hard to identify, something like sex and butter pecan ice cream. Honestly, I think she was the best thing I’d ever smelled. I was inferring “wrongness” from the fact that she wasn’t entirely
human.

I later found out that her name was Sig.

Sig stood there in the doorway of the bar with the wind behind her, and there was something both earthy and unearthly about her. Standing at least six feet tall in running shoes, she had shoulders as broad as a professional swimmer’s, sinewy arms, and well-rounded hips that were curvy and compact. All in all, she was as buxom, blonde, blue-eyed,
and clear-skinned as any woman who had ever posed for a Swedish tourism ad.

And I wanted her out of the bar, fast.

You have to understand, Rigby’s is not the kind of place where goddesses were meant to walk among mortals. It is a small, modest establishment eking out a fragile existence at the tail end of Clayburg’s main street. The owner, David Suggs, had wanted a quaint pub, but instead of decorating
the place with dartboards or Scottish coats of arms or ceramic mugs, he had decided to celebrate southwest Virginia culture and covered the walls with rusty old railroad equipment and farming tools.

When I asked why a bar—excuse me, I mean
pub
—with a Celtic name didn’t have a Celtic atmosphere, Dave said that he had named Rigby’s after a Beatles song about lonely people needing a place to belong.

“Names have power,” Dave had gone on to inform me, and I had listened gravely as if this were a revelation.

Speaking of names, “John Charming” is not what it reads on my current driver’s license. In fact, about the only thing accurate on my current license is the part where it says that I’m black-haired and blue-eyed. I’m six foot one instead of six foot two and about seventy-five pounds
lighter than the 250 pounds indicated on my identification. But I do kind of look the way the man pictured on my license might look if Trevor A. Barnes had lost that much weight and cut his hair short and shaved off his beard. Oh, and if he were still alive.

And no, I didn’t kill the man whose identity I had assumed, in case you’re wondering. Well, not the first time anyway.

Anyhow, I had recently
been forced to leave Alaska and start a new life of my own, and in David Suggs I had found an employer who wasn’t going to be too thorough with his background checks. My current goal was to work for Dave for at least one fiscal year and not draw any attention to myself.

Which was why I was not happy to see the blonde.

For her part, the blonde didn’t seem too happy to see me either. Sig focused
on me immediately. People always gave me a quick flickering glance when they walked into the bar—excuse me, the pub—but the first thing they really checked out was the clientele. Their eyes were sometimes predatory, sometimes cautious, sometimes hopeful, often tired, but they only returned to me after being disappointed. Sig’s gaze, however, centered on me like the oncoming lights of a train—assuming
train lights have slight bags underneath them and make you want to flex surreptitiously. Those same startlingly blue eyes widened, and her body went still for a moment.

Whatever had triggered her alarms, Sig hesitated, visibly debating whether to approach and talk to me. She didn’t hesitate for long, though—I got the impression that she rarely hesitated for long—and chose to go find herself a
table.

Now, it was a Thursday night in April, and Rigby’s was not empty. Clayburg is host to a small private college named Stillwaters University, one of those places where parents pay more money than they should to get an education for children with mediocre high school records. This sort of target student—an underachiever with upper-middle-class parents—not surprisingly does a lot of heavy drinking,
which is why Rigby’s manages to stay in business. Small bars with farming implements on the walls don’t really draw huge college crowds, but the more popular bars tend to stay packed, and Rigby’s does attract an odd combination of local rednecks and students with a sense of irony. So when a striking six-foot blonde who wasn’t an obvious transvestite sat down in the middle of the bar, there
were people around to notice.

Even Sandra, a nineteen-year-old waitress who considers customers an unwelcome distraction from covert texting, noticed the newcomer. She walked up to Sig promptly instead of making Renee, an older waitress and Rigby’s de facto manager, chide her into action.

For the next hour I pretended to ignore the new arrival while focusing on her intently. I listened in—my hearing
is as well developed as my sense of smell—while several patrons tried to introduce themselves. Sig seemed to have a knack for knowing how to discourage each would-be player as fast as possible.

She told suitors that she wanted to be up-front about her sex change operation because she was tired of having it cause problems when her lovers found out later, or she told them that she liked only black
men, or young men, or older men who made more than seventy thousand dollars a year. She told them that what really turned her on was men who were willing to have sex with other men while she watched. She mentioned one man’s wife by name, and when the weedy-looking grad student doing a John Lennon impersonation tried the sensitive-poet approach, she challenged him to an arm-wrestling contest. He
stared at her, sitting there exuding athleticism, confidence, and health—three things he was noticeably lacking—and chose to be offended rather than take her up on it.

There was at least one woman who seemed interested in Sig as well, a cute sandy-haired college student who was tall and willowy, but when it comes to picking up strangers, women are generally less likely to go on a kamikaze mission
than men. The young woman kept looking over at Sig’s table, hoping to establish some kind of meaningful eye contact, but Sig wasn’t making any.

Sig wasn’t looking at me either, but she held herself at an angle that kept me in her peripheral vision at all times.

For my part, I spent the time between drink orders trying to figure out exactly what Sig was. She definitely wasn’t undead. She wasn’t
a half-blood Fae either, though her scent wasn’t entirely dissimilar. Elf smell isn’t something you forget, sweet and decadent, with a hint of honey blossom and distant ocean. There aren’t any full-blooded Fae left, of course—they packed their bags and went back to Fairyland a long time ago—but don’t mention that to any of the mixed human descendants that the elves left behind. Elvish half-breeds
tend to be somewhat sensitive on that particular subject. They can be real bastards about being bastards.

I would have been tempted to think that Sig was an angel, except that I’ve never heard of anyone I’d trust ever actually seeing a real angel. God is as much an article of faith in my world as he, she, we, they, or it is in yours.

Stumped, I tried to approach the problem by figuring out what
Sig was doing there. She didn’t seem to enjoy the ginger ale she had ordered—didn’t seem to notice it at all, just sipped from it perfunctorily. There was something wary and expectant about her body language, and she had positioned herself so that she was in full view of the front door. She could have just been meeting someone, but I had a feeling that she was looking for someone or something specific
by using herself as bait…but what and why and to what end, I had no idea. Sex, food, or revenge seemed the most likely choices.

I was still mulling that over when the vampire walked in.