“It is to me. Thank you.”
Ryder swallowed down an awkward lump of emotion. “Sure. Whatever.”
“So, what now?”
Three months later, Ryder followed the call of the Beacon to a small, sandy Nevada town no one would really miss.
The low, nearly inaudible pulse of the Beacon’s heart thrummed nearby, coming from the town’s only grocery store. He wasn’t sure who the Beacon would be this time—man, woman, old, young—but it hardly mattered to him. Not anymore.
His grandfather’s dented plate mail rattled as he walked into the store. He knew he looked ridiculous, but that was okay by him. Lying in a hospital bed again wasn’t. This time, he’d come prepared to do battle. Another one of the Terraphages was going to die tonight. The rifle strapped to his back would help. The explosives would help ev
en more.
There were ten grenades dangling from his waist, and he was going to need every one of them. And then some.
Shannon K. Butcher once spent a summer chasing tornadoes with the National Severe Storms Lab in Oklahoma on an undergraduate research project. A former engineer, she now writes full-time. She lives with her husband and their son. Vist her at www.ShannonKButcher.com.
EVEN A RABBIT WILL BITE
by RACHEL CAINE
I got a letter from the Pope in the morning mail. Handwritten. I was inclined to shred it, along with the credit card offers and the pleas from charities, but I felt a little guilty. Not because of the sender, but because of the quality of the envelope. They sure don’t buy the Holy Father the cheap stuff at Wal-Mart; this was crisp, beautiful linen paper, probably made by hand by some revered, tottering artisan, and there was an embossed crossed-keys seal on the flap. Too nice to shred.
He probably knew that. Which was why he’d sent it and not some officious underling with a cheaper stationery budget.
I shut the door to my small apartment against the fierce Phoenix heat and shuffled over to the kitchen table, next to the window. I moved aside the Dragon’s Eye and sorted through things until I found my reading glasses, perched them on the end of my nose, and then ripped open the envelope with a dagger that had once belonged to some king or other. The fat, homicidal one? Well, that described most of them.
Inside, the folded sheet of paper matched the envelope. Another embossed seal on the page and somewhat messy writing that I worked out bit by bit. My eyes aren’t what they used to be, and I don’t get to use my Italian much.
Most honored Lisel, it read. Forgive me for not paying you the courtesy of a visit, but it isn’t as easy to slip away and pass anonymously these days as it used to be, in the days before television and the Internet.
Actually, I was just glad he hadn’t tried it. The last thing I needed was an ineptly disguised pontiff trailing a mile-wide caravan of paparazzi to the doorstep of my little retirement community.
I have been informed that you are shortly to step down from your post as Dragonslayer, after so many centuries of service. I, and the entire world, remain in your debt. You have been a good and faithful servant of the Church and God, and I offer you my personal blessing and thanks as you lay down your glorious burden and pass this mighty responsibility to a new generation.
There were several things wrong with this. First, I wasn’t retiring, I was being made redundant—and thanks, God, or whoever was running the machinery out there, for making me feel even more useless than I already did. Second, it was hardly a “mighty responsibility.” Maybe it had been when I’d taken the job seven hundred and forty-two years ago; in those days, there had been many dragons alive, all of them deadly and cunning and determined to exterminate as many humans as they could, with whatever means they could find.
Today, there was one dragon left. One. And he lurked out in the sands of the Egyptian desert, comforted by the heat in his bones for the same reason I’d retired to Phoenix. He was old and tired, and he had outstayed his welcome in the world.
Glorious, it was not. It never had been.
I sneered at the Holy Paper and crumpled it into a ball, then threw it at the kitchen trash can. It bounced off the side and skipped across the faded linoleum floor, where it startled my old gray cat, Fidget, into opening both eyes. Fidget batted the papal bullshit around for a few seconds, then yawned and went back to sleep.
I felt exactly the same.
I drained the rest of my first pot of coffee and pulled the Dragon’s Eye back to the center of the table. It was a red-tinted crystal ball on a plain wooden stand. It looked like something you could buy in any new age shop, but take my word for it, there’s not another like it in the world. I didn’t know the origin of it, and I didn’t want to know; there was something that deep in my still-superstitious soul I mistrusted.
It knew too much, this orb. It saw too much. I sometimes wondered if there was something on the other end, looking back—if it exposed me as much as the thing I observed.
With a quick, practiced gesture, I put my hand on top of the smooth, warm crystal and felt a hum rise up inside. The crystal clouded, then showed me a flickering confusion of images—vivid ocher sand, hot blue sky, the glitter of crystals in shadow, a burst of flame. Always the sand, blowing, whispering in dunes. Nothing to be seen except the sand, as if he stared at it for hours, mesmerized in much the same way that modern feeble humans stared at their television sets.
So, that duty was completed. Karathrax was still in the desert, as he had been for the past hundred and twelve years and handful of months. I checked every day, but it was pro forma, the work of thirty seconds, and then I went on with my life, such as it was. There’d be no last great epic battle between the two of us. We were old, cranky, and tired, and it was a fucking long trip to Egypt. Or to Phoenix, for that matter. I couldn’t see either one of us summoning the will to make it happen.
I started the morning rituals—made more coffee, drank more coffee, sat on the toilet for a while (what? like you don’t?), read the morning paper in all its stunning sameness. I don’t know why they call it “news.” There’s nothing new about what happens in this world on a daily basis—I’m not talking about scientific discoveries; those are moderately interesting and a constant source of amazement. No, I’m talking about human nature. As a species, we seem to be unable to learn the lesson of history. When a dog bites us, it’s still a shock that dogs bite. Or that man will murder his brother. Or that greed and self-interest and blind hatred are built into our very souls.
I despair.
I was clucking my tongue over the lurid, breathless accounts of crime when the doorbell rang. Son of a bitch. The kid was early. I should have gotten my ass in gear instead of moping around the house like a bitter old woman.