Rachel Hawkins - Grim

It was settled so simply. Beauty could hardly think about the magnitude of the new bargain she had made, when she might have gone home instead. She squared her shoulders in her man’s jacket and started on her way up the stairs to choose a bedroom.

“One more thing,” said the Beast from the foot of the stairs.

Beauty tensed. “Yes?”

“This whole ‘Beast’ deal? Kinda hurtful,” said the Beast. “Call me Chad.”

Beauty chose the room whose door opened for her, though it gave her a nasty shock at first. She walked in and saw the gauzy curtains and the mirror decorated with golden roses, turned and tried to walk out. But the door slammed in her face.

“This is a very pretty room,” Beauty told the room, and the curtains fluttered like a girl batting her eyelashes. “But I am here in a disguise, and I will not be convincing as a man if I have a dressing table with a little lacy frill around it and a teddy bear on top!”

The room blurred, the mirror frame bending as if in a shrug. Then it resolved into a room once more, the gauzy curtains gone and everything in sturdy green, even the mirror. The teddy bear remained, half-hidden under the bed, but Beauty decided it was close enough.

“Thank you,” she said, and went downstairs to stable her own pony and meet the other horses.

They were not, as her father had said, infernal steeds. They seemed to be perfectly normal horses, of the sort you could ride out hunting or have pull a light showy carriage: there were three matched pairs of gray, chestnut and black. They were restless in their stalls, eyes rolling toward the castle, but as enthusiastic as puppies for Beauty, pushing their muzzles into her palms. She wondered how long it had been since they had seen a human person, and set about currying and calming them.

It was enough work that she did not even see the Beast for a night and a day: it was evening again when she stumbled inside, shoulders aching from hoisting a shovel.

As she opened the door of the castle, she was greeted by the smell of food, savory and sizzling and delicious. Beauty followed her nose to the dining room. She barely noticed the blue panels for walls and wedding-cake trim up at the ceilings—she was most concerned with the vast mahogany table creaking with food.

The Bea—the Chad was sitting in a vast chair, being served by a gravy boat that came toddling up to him, a flirtatiously twirling teapot and a platter that seemed to be tobogganing.

“Guys,” he said, gesturing with a fork that looked tiny in his huge paw. “Guys, guys, we’ve talked about this, it’s creepy, I don’t like it, you’re gonna spill stuff, I like my inanimate objects the way I like my coffee—inanimate!”

“The whole castle is filled with charms,” Beauty said. “It must have been created by powerful sorcery.”

The Beast twitched. “Ugh. I guess. I wasn’t really raised to believe in, you know, all that.”

“You don’t believe magic exists?”

Beauty had no idea of the relevant intelligence of beasts. She had assumed from the clothes and the way he could speak that he had the intelligence of a human, but that might not be true: now he was saying he didn’t believe in perfectly obvious things, as if he was a child claiming not to believe in the sky.

“I mean, okay, magic exists,” the Beast said grumpily. “Castle full of dancing sofas and some broad turned me into...this...on the steps of my frat house and sent me to live here. But Dad would have fits and say this was hippie communist garbage.”

“I am having trouble understanding your beast idiom again,” Beauty said. “All of it.”

The Beast raised his eyebrow, which was basically a shaggy shelf of extra fur. “Pull up a chair, dude. This food isn’t going to eat itself. Well, it might, but that’d be weird and you’d be doing me a favor if you did it instead.”

Beauty understood enough to know he was asking her to dine with him. She’d planned to spend as little time as possible in his company, since he was a beast and if he found out about her deception he could tear her to pieces, but the smell of the food worked as well as an enchantment. She drifted over to a chair at the shadowy end of the table, and a tureen of soup made its determined way in her direction.

“Guys? Guys, I’m not kidding around, quit it, I will not be the ringmaster of the teapot circus!”

“Thank you,” Beauty whispered to the tureen, and it wriggled with delight.

“No, dude, don’t encourage them,” the B—Chad said, sounding genuinely distressed, but as more and more plates whizzed toward Beauty, he gave up with a sigh like a furry bellows, propped his massive, teeth-heavy jaw on his curled paw and said, “So how are the horses?”

“Very well,” said Beauty. “They were just a little spooked. I got them calmed down.”

She almost jumped out of her chair, threw the chair at the Beast and leaped out of the window before she realized his bared teeth might be a smile. Instead she took a long drink of mead, and choked.

“You okay, dude?”

“Fine,” said Beauty, hitting herself on her bound chest, which hurt. “I’m very used to mead. It’s a manly drink. So of course I drink it frequently.”

The Beast shrugged. “I miss Jägerbombs.”

Beauty took another cautious sip and made the decision to ignore it when the Beast—Chad, Chad—said incomprehensible things.

“So, what’s your name?”

“Beauty,” said Beauty.

The Chad’s shaggy eyebrows drew together into a unishelf of annoyance. “Dude, I’m sorry. It’s uncool they called you that.”

“What?”

“Like, they did it to tease you, right?” the Beast asked. “Because, you know, you’re kind of pretty for a dude. No offense. And I don’t think you need to shave that often. Again, not throwing shade here, since basically I have to go at my whole body with the hedge clippers. And I might add that the hedge clippers, also weirdly alive, and I am pretty sure they’re judging me.”

Beauty frowned. She had not thought much about her name—that was what everybody called her, that was what people thought when they saw her. Nobody was trying to tease her.

And yet she thought she might like it, to have someone call her something else, because when they saw her they saw something else in her besides beauty.

Besides, now that Chad mentioned it, it was an odd name for a boy.

Which also ruled out her real name, Isabelle, and Belle.

“There are other things I could be,” Beauty allowed.

“So far you’re awesome with the horses,” Chad contributed. “We could call you Horsesome? No, that kind of sounds... Never mind that.”

“I thought you were calling me Dude,” Beauty said. “Is it an honorific in your land?”

“Think we’ve come up against that language barrier again,” said Chad. “No, bread basket, stay still and let me reach for you!”

The bread basket scuttled disobediently toward its master’s paw.

Beauty felt like she had finally deciphered one thing he had said, though the “Horsesome” issue had her completely puzzled.

“You said...someone put you under a spell,” she said. “Someone...something...broad?”

“Uh, I just meant a woman. Yeah.”

“And you were taken away from your home,” Beauty said. “Do you not wish to learn how to break the spell and return?”

It occurred to her that she could end her term of service sooner—and do a heroic deed—if she could help him find out about the spell.

Chad looked darkly at the bread basket, which butted against his arm.

“I know how to break the spell. The woman—witch, I guess? She told me. But it’s not an option. It involves kidnapping someone—which, dude, no, wrong—and then hoping they have a really bizarro fetish. I’m not doing it. This is my mess. So, I guess I’m stuck here.”