The Curiosities Read online

  I barely tasted the whatever-it-was some celebrity chef had spent hours or days fixing up. Sean ate basically nothing too, and he kept trying to talk to me about TV shows he liked, books he’d read. Polite stuff, when all I wanted to ask him about was how he’d killed the dragon, and if he’d touched that soft spot on its nose.

  . . .

  We walked back up to his suite, which was only a floor above mine, holding hands. His fingers weren’t smooth, and I changed my mind about him being a fighter. It was possible he knew his way around a spear. His family was healthy middle-class these days, so it was unlikely he’d roughed up his hands with manual labor.

  I was so busy thinking maybe he wasn’t so full of shit that I didn’t notice at first when he leaned in and kissed my cheek. “Can I come inside?” I asked.

  Sean Hardy blinked and made a real expression for the first time all evening. He frowned.

  I just waited, slowly raising my eyebrows and putting on a tiny, polite smile.

  He pushed open his door, pulled me quickly in by the wrist, and slammed it shut in the faces of all those reporters.

  While Sean stripped off his coat, snaked free his tie, and went for the minibar, I leaned back against the door and thought about what in Hel I was doing.

  “Soda?” he asked.

  “Yes, god yes.” I didn’t move, though. The suite was shockingly sterile, given that I was pretty sure he’d been living in it for a few weeks. Vacuum tracks pressed into the carpet, the TV remote lay next to hotel brochures, the bed I could see through an arch was perfectly made. No suitcases, no half-full cups. Nothing but his discarded tie, curled on the carpet, suggested life. And that hadn’t been there half a minute before.

  Through the door I could hear frantic conversation, and I turned the bolt. Sure they could find a manager, but would they? If this was Sean Hardy’s final request?

  Sean poured a can of Coke into two glasses. Then he just stood there with one in each hand. The carbonation popped and fizzed. I walked to him, took one, and then sunk down onto the floor. The carpet was dark blue and thick, so I kicked off my heels and sat cross-legged. The skirt of my teal dress was full enough to fall into my lap and protect my modesty.

  I tilted my head up at Sean. He stared at me for a moment, then joined me on the floor. Whereas I sat with my back against the back of the plush sofa, Sean stretched out completely. He set his Coke next to my knee, then lifted his legs so he could untie the shiny dress shoes. His socks were striped green and red.

  I laughed.

  Then Sean Hardy slid me a grin so unlike anything I’d seen from him before I felt like not only had we known each other for years, but we’d planned this whole thing start to finish. Every step of the dance had gone exactly as we’d wished, every moment was a triumph.

  It was a nice fantasy, so I said, “Couldn’t have gone better if we’d planned it.”

  “Right,” he drawled, half his face scrunched, the other half skeptical. “I’ve wanted an awkward date with a girl clearly using me for my money at a closed restaurant the night before I’m basically guaranteed to die for so long.”

  That killed my smile.

  Sean winced. “Sorry. I’ll try to be less melancholy.”

  “Naw, no worries.” I shrugged and had to adjust the extremely thin shoulder strap so it didn’t fall off. “Melancholy is in. Totally sexy.”

  “Good. Be sure to tell...somebody. My mother. The newspapers.” Sean spread his hands out over him, as if displaying a front page headline. “SEAN HARDY: WENT OUT SEXY.”

  “You really don’t think you can do it again?” I leaned down so my elbows were on my knees, then took a drink so I didn’t have to look at his face. It suddenly mattered.

  I heard him shift against the carpet. After a pause he said, “Well. Maybe. I don’t know. Last time...” He trailed off, and I glanced up. He was watching me. When I caught him his eyes flickered to the ceiling. “Last time, Vera, I didn’t have weeks to think about it. I just saw the dragon, ran at it, killed it. There wasn’t all this brooding and stuff. When you don’t have time to be afraid, I guess it’s easy to be brave.”

  Pushing aside his untouched glass of soda, I stretched out next to him. From my side I studied his profile. He had nice lips, but probably by the time he was forty his nose would be too big. If he lived that long. My stomach tightened. I was hugely glad I’d barely eaten anything. “You didn’t actually make this your final request, did you?”

  He sighed. “Don’t tell.”

  “What did you really want?”

  “Tickets to Australia?” He turned his head.

  I smiled a little. It wasn’t really funny, hearing the edge of fear in his voice. I reached for his hand and took it again. This time I asked, “You know how to use the weapons you need?”

  “I can use a sword. And spear. And pistol.” He used both of his hands to flatten mine, to splay it between his fingers. “But I think what I need is a bazooka. Or a tank. They won’t give me one of those.”

  “Not so epic,” I whispered, “if you kill a dragon with a tank.”

  “And that’s what’s important.”

  Not me, was clear behind his words. Not my life.

  The moment I’d hit send, entering this stupid contest, I’d been thinking of taking some pork out of the freezer to make for dinner. By the time I got home from school and Dad was back from work, it would be thawed. It was just a little, inconsequential thought to pair with pushing a button. I hadn’t cared about Sean Hardy, or the dragon, or the contest. I hadn’t expected anything from it, but I had expected to be alive to eat a pork loin dinner my dad and I grilled on the front patio.

  I rolled against him then, and kissed his earlobe where the trefoil tattoo darkened his skin. He didn’t move. I pulled it between my teeth and bit down, hard enough he grabbed my wrist. Hard enough that, when I leaned back, a small white line cut the tattoo in half. I watched it flood with color. Pink and then red. Like his tattoo was bleeding.

  Sean raised his hand and touched it. His mouth pulled into a frown. “That hurt.”

  “Good,” I said. I sat up. “Don’t die, Sean Hardy.”

  He sat too. I was close enough to him I could see the flecks of blue sprinkled into the gray.

  “If you die,” I continued, “I won’t be able to use this damn scholarship. And I really want to go to Cornell.”

  “I’m pretty sure they won’t retract the funds,” he said. His eyebrows pinched in just slightly, though he was trying to school his expression. I could tell because it was exactly like it had been at dinner.

  I didn’t respond. Just crossed my arms under my breasts. One of my shoulder straps fell, but I ignored it.

  Sean Hardy slipped it back into place, his finger skimming my skin ever-so-gently. “All right, Vera Joansdottir. I won’t die.” He smiled. “Just for you.”

  . . .

  I don’t know what people said that night as I sat on the balcony with Sean Hardy, waiting for the sun to rise. Waiting until they came for him.

  At the knock, we both stood up. Sean gripped the railing, and I touched his ear. I pinched it softly, and he whispered, “Ow.”

  “Want me to tell them you’re passed out? That I was too much for you?” I stared out at the indigo lighting the eastern sky between the silhouettes of black skyscrapers.

  He kissed my jaw, just beside my ear. “No.”

  I stood there alone as the sun crept up. As traffic and grease and daylight reached ugly fingers toward the balcony. I thought of the soft left nostril of the dragon and of my mark cutting in half the trefoil tattoo. At the last possible moment, I went into the suite, turned on the television, and watched Sean Hardy walk up the mountain.

  SCHEHERAZADE

  by Brenna Yovanoff

  Like I said in my introduction for “Ash-Tree Spell to Break Your Heart,” the authorial voice sometimes becomes invisible, and that is a very particular sort of skill. This story, however, is the opposite of that. This story is so very
peculiarly Brenna that by the time I get to “It’s nice, living alone,” I can hear Brenna’s voice narrating it. I always envied her precision, her way of neatly establishing both the deadly and the whimsical. —Maggie

  I adore stories that explore what brings two bad people together, as opposed to heroes falling in love. The evil soul mates and how they find each other. Brenna is especially good at this. I pretend she wrote this story [1]specifically for me. —Tessa

  The house seems wrong as soon I step into the front hall. I take off my boots and hang up my coat, smelling rain. And that’s fine, because it’s raining. Except the furnace is on, and the warm, dusty smell should cancel out everything else, and I closed the window before I left. I know this. I know I closed it. The breeze blowing down the hall from the kitchen is cold and brackish, straight off the river.

  In the kitchen, the window above the sink is flung wide, screen in tatters, rain trickling down the wall and pooling on the counter. With electric clarity, my gaze leaps to the magnetic utensil strip on the wall. The nine-inch chef’s knife is missing, and suddenly my heart is going a million beats a minute.

  “Turn around,” says a voice behind me. The tone is low, predatory, and makes panic race down the back of my neck.

  When I turn, a guy in a damp canvas coat is standing in the doorway.

  He’s my age, maybe a little younger. Tall, but with stooped shoulders. His hair is shaggy, wet from the rain. The missing knife is in his hand. The way he holds it is casual, easy. There’s nothing skittish about him, and that’s what makes my heart lurch in my chest—the easy way he holds a knife. I look at him and don’t say anything.

  When he smiles, it’s almost sweet. “Don’t you want to know who I am and what I’m doing here?”

  I shake my head, willing myself to look composed, but for a second my mouth won’t shut.

  “That’s okay,” he says, hefting the knife. “It doesn’t really matter.”

  “My boyfriend will be home any minute.”

  “No, he won’t.” And this time when he smiles, it’s hard and chilly and gets nowhere near his eyes. “His car’s been gone for two weeks. I don’t think he’s coming back.”

  “He was on—on a business trip, but he’s home now, he’ll be coming home tonight, any second. If he finds you here...” But the threat trails off, empty in the bright glow of the kitchen.

  He just nods, giving me a hard, scornful look. “Right. Where’s all his stuff then?”

  And I’m steamrollered by the knowledge that this is no accident, that he’s been watching me. That Dalton has been a done deal for quite a while and this guy knows it. His gaze is flat, without texture or depth, and I already know that something’s wrong inside him—a flipped switch that makes him walk into a girl’s kitchen and take a knife off her wall.

  He moves closer, unhurried, staring into my face, and I know for sure that he’s the textbook definition of dangerous. Not troubled or misguided. [2]He is a stone-cold psychopath.

  “Why?” I whisper, but I already know that the explanation, the reason will mean nothing and all I really care about is if it will hurt. How much it will hurt. How long this is going to hurt.

  “I want to know what it’s like,” he says, easing his thumb over the blade, testing it. “To kill someone.”

  “They’ll catch you,” I say, backing away from him. Two shuffling steps before the countertop presses into my spine and I go rigid and still. “Don’t you care about being caught?”

  For a second he doesn’t seem to hear. Then he grins, shaking his head. “How will they catch me? It’s a break-in, a burglary gone wrong. Happens all the time. Everyone will be so sad for you.” He smiles like the idea pleases him.

  “But there are so many things that could give you away. What about DNA? It’s almost impossible to kill someone at close proximity without leaving something behind. What if I scratch you? What if you leave a fingerprint somewhere, or clothing fibers under my nails? And you need a plan to dispose of the body. Unless you want to go down for first degree, you can’t stab me in my own home and then just leave me here—too much evidence. Do you have a car?”

  He throws his head back, incredulous, still smiling. “And you’re telling me all this...why?”

  “Because—” and my voice sounds shrill and much too loud. I take a deep breath, smile like I’m selling real estate or dishwashers and start over. “Well, because you’re doing this all wrong. If you really want to kill someone, it has to look so much like an accident that no one will even investigate.”

  For the first time, his smile wavers. His jaw is tight with something like rage. “And how do you know so much?” In his hand the blade looks very sharp, reflecting the glare from the overhead light. His expression is watchful, and I’m certain that he’s imaging my blood.

  I take a deep, shuddering breath and blurt out, “When I was twelve years old, I drowned my sister.”

  For a second he doesn’t respond. Then he moves closer, looking almost troubled. “Why?”

  The story rushes together in my head and I claw through the pieces, trying out answers and discarding them: because I was jealous of her beauty and her popularity, jealous of our parents’ affection for her, angry because she broke a toy that mattered to me or always teased me or never loved me?

  “Because I wanted to know what it was like,” I whisper, trying to look how he might think a child-murderer should look. Honest, but unrepentant. “Because I’m like you.”

  He covers the space between us in two steps, and suddenly I’m frozen, balanced on the point of my most expensive kitchen knife, chin up, head tipped back at an awkward angle. “Are you lying to me?” he snarls.

  The steel is cold against my throat. I shiver and breathe out but never look away from his face. “No,” I say softly. “No, I wouldn’t lie to you.”

  “Good. Because if you’re lying, I will gut you here and now.”

  “Look—I’m just trying to help you. If you want to kill someone, you should do it where no one will find the body. Or where people die anyway. Where it will look like a freak accident or a crime of necessity. I can help you,” I whisper, biting down on every word, horribly aware of how my pulse beats in my throat, thrumming against the knifepoint. “We could find someone really good—disposable, a lowlife who deserves it. Some people just aren’t meant to live. I can show you how to get away with it.”

  “Right.” He sounds disgusted. “Why would you do that? Why would you help me?” His face is close to mine, cheeks red, teeth bared, but anger is better than flat, affectless nothing. Flat means no remorse, no reasoning. It means one centimeter away from being stabbed to death in my kitchen.

  “Please, I told you about my sister. I told you a secret!” I gasp it, almost wail it, trying to sell the promise of camaraderie—that it will be me and him, two sick customers, partners in homicide. The promise that I am not lying.

  He nods, stepping back, looking dazed, and lets the knife drop from my throat. I go limp inside but don’t sigh aloud.

  “And if I walk out of here,” he says, sounding almost sad, “what’ll stop you from calling the police?”

  “You know about me. I could never turn you in—you’d tell them what I did!”

  He sets the knife on the counter, looking lost and pitiful, like maybe all he’s ever wanted is for someone to know about him.

  “We should make a plan,” I say, giving him a quick, sideways look. Almost flirtatious? “Meet downtown somewhere, do some recon. If we dress right, we can pass for vagrants or barflies. No one will remember seeing us. We need someplace with loiterers and lots of foot traffic—maybe the bus station? In two hours? Let’s meet behind the bus station.”

  My voice sounds wrong, a little forced, but his eyes are hopeful and he wants so badly to believe me.

  “You better not stand me up,” he says, shaking a finger at me. “I know where you live.” But he says it with a smile. On someone less homicidal, it would sound almost like he was making a joke. />
  I let him out through the back door and watch him go, waving from the porch steps.

  After he’s over the fence and out of sight, I go down into the basement and stand at the workbench, sorting through my supplies. It’s nice, living alone. I can leave things lying out now. Taser-plus-piano-wire is very efficient, but I like cyanide for strangers.

  The story of my sister was a risky move, hard to sound convincing. The memory is clear but featureless, gone over so many times I’ve worn the details off. I don’t even remember what it felt like.

  I didn’t want to do this so soon after Dalton, but the neighborhood seems content to take that for the heartrending tragedy it was—her longtime boyfriend, poor girl—and I don’t see any other way.[3] Some people just aren’t meant to live.

  PROMPTS

  One of the reasons we named ourselves the Merry Sisters of Fate was to play up the idea of mutual creation—the three women who spin the same “story” but each have different roles. The spinner, the weaver, the cutter. (We may have spent several hours near the beginning discussing who is who...) But each fate has a different specialty, different preferences, different weaknesses. To me, the common prompts exemplify this. We pick an image, a fairy tale, or some piece of folklore to use as inspiration, and each of us writes a story. They can be any kind of story, so long as it comes from the prompt. I’m always amazed at how different the stories turn out—the ways that Brenna and Maggie will find aspects that never occurred [1]to me. The prompt weeks have been my favorite since the beginning because it feels like a real chance to play—there’s characters and world and story already, so I don’t have to worry about them. I can twist and experiment and have fun. —Tessa

  The prompts are one of my absolute favorite aspects of Merry Fates. The idea of a common starting place is really exciting to me, because as a staunch supporter of the arcane, I’m always looking for the most obscure, mysterious, esoteric parts of a thing—the underlying theme or unspoken implications—and the prompts are the perfect venue to really dive into the core of a story. Not just the characters and the action of it, but what it means. Also, I am unapologetically obsessed with what things mean. —Brenna