Little Better Than a Beast

By T.A. Pratt

Marla picked up a letter opener shaped like the grim reaper’s scythe. “So I was supposed to get this a week or ten days ago?”

“Thereabouts,” Granger said, head bobbing, happy they were in agreement.

If I could fire him, or have him committed… But Granger was a powerful magician, in his way, and even if he wasn’t much use to the city’s secret shadow government of sorcerers, he mostly stayed out of the way in the park, and his elementals had been formidable warriors in last winter’s battle against the nightmare-things. She considered reprimanding him for not bringing the letter on time, but it would be like hitting a puppy fifteen minutes after it pissed on the carpet — the poor thing wouldn’t even understand what it was being disciplined foor.

Marla used the letter opener to pry up the wax blobs and unfolded the envelope, which wasn’t an envelope at all, but just a sheet of paper folded in on itself. The message wasn’t very long, but it said everything it needed to.

She came around the desk, shouting “Rondeau! I need you!” and clutching her dagger of office. This was going to be a bloody afternoon.

The Tonsor’s Son

by Michael John Grist

I knew from the moment I saw him that his beard was full of evil.

He walked into my shop carrying a copper-hilted cane, clopping its burnished tip smartly on the hair strewn tonsory floor with his every step. He wore camel-hide gloves with the hair turned inwards, so his hands seemed a milky mother-of-pearl white, as though agapornic. His eyes were a sharp hazel-brown, intelligent, intent upon the tonsory around him, absorbing the details, finally settling on me.

He walked flush up to me, busy as I was sweeping lopped brown locks into a scuttle, and smiled tightly, extending one of those sickeningly pale hands towards me. His thinly sliced moustache bristled as his upper lip curled back, and I knew the evil was in there too, peering out at me from each follicle end. I could feel the waft of his past deeds emanating from the light down of his cheeks.

The Yew’s Embrace

by Francesca Forrest

We could still see the old king’s blood in the cracks in the flagstones beneath the new king’s feet when he announced to us all that this was a unification, not a conquest, and that we had nothing to fear from the soldiers that fenced us round. The new king said that my sister the queen would become his wife and that he’d make the old king’s baby son his very own heir. That’s how much he loved and honored our people, he said.

A month later, on a stormy day when the rain blew in at the windows and puddled on the floor, and we were huddled round the hearth, spinning by the light of oil lamps, the king burst in, soaking wet. Eyes a-glitter, he told my sister that he had caught Lele, the wet nurse, down by the stream at the edge of the grove of the gods, drowning the baby prince.

“She said she wouldn’t permit him to grow up under my authority,” he said. “I tried to save him, but I was too late.” He held up his dripping hands. River weed clung to his arms above the elbows.

“She’ll be punished, though,” the king continued, and you could see his whole body trembling like a struck bell as he spoke. It was anger, red anger, that caused him to shake. None of us dared to move. “I’ve ordered her flayed alive in the grove of the gods. It will stand as a lesson,” he said, catching us each by eye, one by one, lingering on my sister. “No one may cross me. I will show no mercy to those who oppose me.”

Hand of God

by Erica Satifka

From the roof of his house, Andrew can see everything in the town of
Pandora. Right below is his yard of wispy yellow grass that breaks at
the touch. A little ways down is the dead creek, a stinking, mucky
place. And above him, always, is the hand of God. Briefly, he trains
his flashlight on the underside of the hand, studying the lined,
grayish flesh. Then he stares back toward the outskirts of town,
peering through his binoculars at the mushroom farmer’s trailer.

The farmer makes a drug. Andrew’s not supposed to know about the drug, and he certainly isn’t supposed to take it. But the farmer’s daughter goes to school with all the other kids, so word gets around. He must have mixed a new batch. The townspeople are lined up all the way back to the old Sunoco station, their headlamps making a broken ant trail in the ever-present dusk.