Martin Greenberg: The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told

“What?”

“That he was a Unicorn?”

“The horn was a dead giveaway.”

“He wanted me because I was special.” She was. I could see that.

“Yes,” I told her, and I put an arm around her shoulder. “But he wanted to destroy what was special about you. Don’t let him. Don’t forget how to believe.”

Maggie cleared her throat. “Your mother is probably worried about you,” she said. In a mother’s tone of voice. “And my kids are waiting for me. Why don’t you come back to my place? You can phone her from there.”

“I told her I was staying at a friend’s house tonight,” the girl said. She hesitated, and then added, “I’m Simone.”

“I’m Irene,” I told her, extending a hand. “And you can stay at Maggie’s.”

Maggie nodded quietly. She held out a hand, and the girl took it without hesitation. Good sign.

We made our way back to Maggie’s house, but stopped at the foot of her walk. She looked at me, her eyes bright with moonlight. Simone was talking; she had started to talk when we had started to walk, and she hadn’t stopped. She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t-at least to my eye-afraid. Rescue has its purpose.

“I think you should go in first,” Maggie told me quietly.

I knew. I knew then.

“I’ll be up; I think Simone and I have a lot to talk about.” She hesitated, and then added, “We’ll be waiting for you if you need company.”

I nodded stiffly and made my way up the walk. Opened the door, which Gran hadn’t bothered to lock. Very, very little can get past Gran when she’s on the lookout.

She was in the kitchen, beside a pot of tea. She looked up as I entered, and the breath seemed to go out of her in a huff. As if she’d been holding it since we left.

“We found her,” I told my Gran. “In time, I think.”

“She’s an idiot?”

I frowned, and Gran gave me a crooked smile. “You understand.”

I nodded.

“Why it’s hard to be the maiden.”

And nodded again. “But Gran, I understand other things, too.”

“Oh? That would be a change.”

“I understand why it’s hard to be the crone. To watch. To know and to have to sit back on your hands.”

“Good.” She rose, pipe in hand. “I’ll be getting home, then.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“I don’t need company.”

“I do.”

She snorted. “You have company. Maiden and mother. I never thought-” She bit her lip. “I stopped hoping.”

“You kept watch,” I told her. “You remembered the old lore. You kept it for us.” I offered her a hand, and she took it; her hand was shaking. Old, old hand.

“You’ll be good at this,” she said, as she rose. “But you take care of my garden, hear?”

“I’ll take care of the garden,” I told her. It was really hard. “And the house. And the lore.”

“No television in my house.”

“Yes, Gran.”

“And none of that trashy garbage Maggie reads, either.”

“Yes, Gran.”

“And don’t think too much.”

I laughed. I walked her out of the house, and past Maggie, who stopped her and gave her a ferocious hug. No words, just a hug.

Gran snorted, and lit her pipe; Maggie, unaccompanied by her children, took it in stride.

And me? I waited. I bit my lip and I waited.

I walked Gran home. I took her up to the porch. I let her get comfortable in her chair. I even sat on the steps, because I wouldn’t be sitting on them again anytime soon.

I don’t know when she died. I know that she was talking; that she was telling me all the things that she thought I’d forget. That she also knew that I wouldn’t be forgetting them, now.

Because I was the crone.

And she was finished. She could be tired. She could rest. She said as much, and then drifted off into silence, the way she sometimes did when she was satisfied with the state of her garden.

The silence lingered, grew louder, grew, at last, final.

And when it had gone on for long enough, I closed her eyes, took her pipe, and emptied it. I kissed her forehead. I would have asked her to hug me, but public displays of affection had always made her uncomfortable. I hugged her only afterward, because it wouldn’t matter to her.

Then I made my way back to Maggie’s house, carrying Gran’s cane. The light was still on, and two thirds of my self were waiting for me to join them.

Kelley Armstrong is the author of the “Women of the Otherworld” paranormal suspense series, the “Darkest Powers” YA urban fantasy trilogy, and the Nadia Stafford crime series. She grew up in Ontario, Canada, where she still lives with her family. A former computer programmer, she’s now escaped her corporate cubicle, and hopes never to return.

Patricia Briggs is the New York Times best-selling author of the Mercy Thompson series as well as many assorted other books. She lives in Montana with her husband and a menagerie of animals and kids in a house that resembles a zoo crossed with a library. The horses have to stay outside. And people wonder where the ideas for her stories come from.

The fourth book in Lillian Stewart Carl’s Fairbairn/Cameron mystery series, The Charm Stone , appeared in November 2009, and the fifth, The Blue Hackle , is scheduled for November 2010. Her next short story (co-authored with Sylvia Kelso) will appear in Love and Rockets (December 2010). Eleven stories are collected in Along the Rim of Time and thirteen in The Muse and Other Stories of History, Mystery, and Myth . Most of her work, short stories as well as sixteen novels in different genres, is available in various electronic forms, including Fictionwise and Kindle. She is the co-editor (with John Helfers) of The Vorkosigan Companion , a nonfiction hardcover about the SF work of Lois McMaster Bujold. The book was nominated for a Hugo in 2009 and will soon appear in paperback.

Max Allan Collins has earned an unprecedented fifteen Private Eye Writers of America “Shamus” nominations, winning twice. His graphic novel Road to Perdition is the basis of the Academy Award-winning film starring Tom Hanks and Paul Newman, directed by Sam Mendes. An independent filmmaker in the Midwest, he has had half a dozen feature screenplays produced. His other credits include the New York Times bestsellers Saving Private Ryan and American Gangster . Both Spillane and Collins received the Private Eye Writers life achievement award, the Eye.

Carole Nelson Douglas’s fifty-some multi-genre novels include mystery and suspense, science fiction, and high fantasy. Most recent is her Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator noir urban fantasy series ( Silver Zombie , etc.) The first writer with a female protagonist sleuthing in the Sherlock Holmes world, Carole’s eight-book Irene Adler series debuted with the New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Good Night, Mr. Holmes. Her twentythree-book Midnight Louie feline PI mystery series blends traditional “cozy” and classic “noir” elements to offer both satire and substance. Set in a slightly surreal Las Vegas, it features four human crime-solvers unknowingly aided by a “Sam Spade with hairballs,” a big black alley cat whose first-person-feline narrations of his own investigations thread through the novels. Her numerous short stories include reprints in seven Year’s Best Mystery anthologies, and her writing has won or been shortlisted for more than fifty awards.