The bonds of love…The bonds of matrimony…The bonds between husband and wife…

Some bonds are made to be broken.

Here, for the first time ever, are four stories based on the classic idea of the “faerie tale wedding”—except this time, the damsels aren’t the ones in distress.

New York Times bestselling author Laurell K. Hamilton spins a story of a princess who decides to take her own destiny in hand and rescue a pampered Prince Charming from an evil sorceress in “Can He Bake a Cherry Pie?”

A selkie on the run from a century-old broken marriage arrangement has finally found true love—only to have the darkness from her past return to threaten both her and her dearly beloved in USA Today bestselling author Yasmine Galenorn’s “The Shadow of Mist.”

New York Times bestselling author Marjorie M. Liu tells the tale of a young princess who escapes betrothal to a warlord by entering a magical forest. But when an evil queen sends her on a quest to “The Tangleroot Palace” she faces dangers more perilous than marriage.

When a princess refuses her boring betrothed, the king holds a competition to see who will win his daughter’s hand. But in matters of the heart, is a winner truly worthy—or can a loser offer even more in national bestselling author Sharon Shinn’s “The Wrong Bridegroom.”

Excerpt

Weeks later, when she had a chance to put up her feet and savor a good hot cup of tea, Sally remembered something the gardener said, right before the old king told her that she had been sold in marriage.

“Only the right kind of fool is ever going to want you.”

Sally, who was elbow deep in horse manure, blew a strand of red hair out of her eyes. “And?”

“Well,” began the elderly woman, frowning—and then seemed to think better of what she was going to say, and crouched down beside her in the grass. “Here. Better let me.”

They were both wearing leather gloves that were stiff as rawhide, sewn in tight patches to reach up past their elbows. Simple to clean if you let them sit in the sun until manure turned to dry flakes, easy to beat off with a stick. Sally, who did not particularly enjoy rooting through muck, was nonetheless pleased that the tannery had provided her with yet a new tool for her work in the garden.

“You know,” Sally said, “when I told the stableboy to take care of my new roses, this is not what I meant.”

The gardener made a noncommittal sound. “There were ravens in my dreams last night.”

Sally finally felt something hard and stubbly beneath her fingers, and began clawing manure carefully away. “I thought we were talking about how only a fool would ever want me.”

“All men are fools,” replied the old woman absently, and then her frown deepened. “They were guarding a queen who wore a crown of horns.”

It took Sally a moment to realize that she was speaking of the ravens in her dream again. “How odd.”

“Not so odd if you know the right stories.” The gardener shivered, and glanced over her shoulder—but not before her gaze lingered on Sally’s hair. “Sabius is coming. Your father must want you.”

Sally craned around, but the sun was in her eyes. All she could see was the blurry outline of a bowlegged man, stomping across the grass with his meaty fists swinging. She glanced down at herself, and then with a rueful little smile continued clearing debris away from her roses.

“Princess,” said Sabius, well before his shadow fell over her. “Your father requests your . . . Oh, dear God.”

The gardener bit her bottom lip and kept her head down, long silver braids swinging from beneath her straw hat. Sally, gazing with regret at the one little leaf she’d managed to expose, leaned backward and tugged until her arms slid free of the rawhide gloves—left sticking from the manure like two hollow branches. Her skin was pink and sweaty, her work apron brown with stains.

“Oh, dear God,” said her father’s manservant again; and turned his head, covering his mouth with a hairy, bare-knuckled hand better suited to brawling than to the delicately scripted letters he often sat composing for the king. He made a gagging sound, and squeezed shut his eyes.

“Er,” said Sally, quite certain she didn’t smell that bad. “What does my father want?”

Sabius, still indisposed, pointed toward the south tower. Sally considered arguing, but it was hardly worth the effort.

She shrugged off her apron and dropped it on the ground. Smoothing out her skirts—also rather stained, and patched with a quilt work of silk scrap from the seamstress’s bin—she raised her brow at the gardener, who shook her head and returned to digging free the roses.

The king’s study was on the southern side of the castle, directly below his bedchamber, which was accessible only through a hidden wall behind his desk that concealed a narrow stone staircase. Not that it was a secret. Everyone knew of its existence, what with the maids scurrying up and down in the mornings and evenings: cleaning, folding, dressing, doing all manner of maid, and maidenly, things that Sally did not want to know about.

Her father was just coming down the stairs when she entered his study; even more slowly than she had intended, having been stopped outside the kitchen by two of the cook’s young apprentices from the village; who, in different ways, could not help but try to clean her up. First with scalding hot water and crushed lavender scrubbed into her face, loose hair tugged into a respectable braid; while the other girl fetched a fresh apron from the kitchen, which was not fine, and certainly not royal, but was clean and starched, and certainly in line with Sally’s usual apparel. No use wasting fine gowns on long walks, or earth work, or even just reading in the library.

Her one concession to vanity was the amethyst pendant she wore against her skin; a teardrop long as her thumb, and held in a golden claw upon which half of a small wooden heart hung, broken jaggedly down the middle. Her mother’s jewelry, and precious only for that reason.

“Salinda,” said her father, and stopped, sniffing the air. “You smell as though you’ve been sleeping beneath a horse’s ass.”

“Do I?” she replied airily. “I hadn’t noticed.”

The old king frowned, looking over her clothing with a great deal more scrutiny than was usual. He was a barrel-chested man, tall and lean in most places, except for his gut and the wattle beneath his chin, which he tried vainly to hide with a coarse beard that was fading quickly from black to silver. He moved with a limp, due to an arrow shot recently into his hip.

Sally had been frightened for him—for as long as it had taken the old king to wake from the draught the doctor had poured down his throat in order to remove the bolt. His temper had been foul ever since. Everyone was avoiding him.

“Don’t you have anything nicer to wear?” he asked, a peculiar tenseness in the way he studied her that made Sally instantly uneasy. “I pay for seamstresses.”

“And I have fine clothing,” she replied cautiously, as her father had never commented on her appearance, not once in seventeen years. “These are for everyday.”

The old king made a small, dissatisfied sound, and limped past her to his desk. “I suppose you heard about the skirmish at old Bog Hill? Men died. More good men every day. Little weasel bastard Fartin throwing gold at mercenaries to test our borders. But”—and he smiled grimly—“I have a solution.”

“Really,” Sally said, suffering the most curious urge to run.

“Your darling mother, before we married, had a very dear friend who was given to one of those southern tribal types as part of a lucrative alliance. She bore a son. Who just so happens to be a very powerful man in need of a wife.”

“Oh,” Sally said.

Her father gave her a stern look. “And I suppose he’s found one.”

“Oh,” Sally said again. “Oh, no.”

“Fine man,” replied the old king, but with a glittering unease in his eyes. “That Warlord fellow. You know. Him.”

Sally stared, quite certain that bumblebees had just committed suicide in her ears. “Him. The Warlord. Who commands all the land south of the mountains to the sea; who leads a barbarian horde of nomadic horsemen so fierce, so vicious, so perverse in their torments, that grown men piddle themselves at the thought of even breathing the same air? That Warlord?”

“He does sound rather intimidating,” said her father.

“Indeed,” Sally replied sharply. “Have you lost your mind?”

“Amazingly, no.” The old king rubbed his hip, and winced. “I haven’t felt this proud of myself in years.”

Sally closed her eyes, grabbing fistfuls of her skirt and squeezing. “I think I’m losing my mind.” She had heard about the man for as long as she could remember. Warlord of this and that: colorfully descriptive names that were usually associated with pain, death, and destruction. Sally had vague memories of her mother speaking of him, as well, but only in association with his mother. He would have been a small child at the time, she thought. Nice and innocent; probably skinning dogs and plucking the wings off butterflies while suckling milk from his mother’s teat.

“What in the world,” she said slowly, fighting to control her temper, and rising horror, “could a man like that possibly want from a woman like me? He could have anyone. He probably has had everyone, given his reputation.” Sally leaned forward, poking her father in the chest. “I will not do it. Absolutely not. You are sending me to a short, hard, miserable life. I’m ashamed of you.”

Her father folded his arms over his chest. “Your mother’s best friend was sent to that short, hard, miserable life—and she thrived. Your dear, late, lovely mother would not have lied about that.” He turned and fumbled through the papers on his desk. “Now, here. The Warlord sent a likeness of himself.”

Sally frowned, but leaned in for a good long stare. “He looks like a dirty fingerprint.”

“Of course he doesn’t,” replied her father, squinting at the portrait. “You can see his eyes, right there.”

“I thought those were his nostrils.”

“Well, you’re not going to be picky, are you? At least he has a face.”

“Yes,” Sally replied dryly. “What a miracle.”

The king scowled. “Spoiled. I let you run wild, allow you teachers, books, a lifestyle unsuitable for any princess, and this is how you repay me. With sarcasm.”

“You taught me how to think for myself. Which never seemed to bother you until now.”

He slammed his fists onto the desk. “We are being overrun!”

His roar made her eardrums thrum. Sally shut her mouth, and fell backward into the soft cushions of a velvet armchair. Her knees were too weak to keep her upright. Terrible loneliness filled her heart, and sorrow—which she bottled up tight, refusing to let her father see.

The old king, as she stared at him, slumped with his arms braced against his desk. Staring at maps, and embroidered family crests that had been torn off the clothing of the fallen soldiers; and that now were scattered before him, some crusty with dried blood.

“We are being overrun,” he said again, more softly. “I know how it starts. First with border incursions, and petty theft of livestock. Then villages ransacked, roads blocked. Blamed on vandals and simple thieves. Until one day you hear the thunder of footfall beyond the walls of your keep, and all that you were born to matters not at all.”
He fixed her with a steely look. “I will not have that happen. Not for me, not for you. Not for any of the people who depend on us.”

Sally swallowed hard. Perhaps she had been spoiled. Duty could not be denied. But when she looked at the small portrait of the man her father wanted her to marry, terrible, unbending disgust filled her—disgust and terror, and a gut-wrenching grief that made her want to howl with misery.

Married to that. Sent away from all she knew. Forced to give up her freedom. No matter how fondly her mother had spoken of her friend, that woman’s son had a reputation that no sweet talk could alter. He was a monster.

The old king saw her looking at the Warlord’s likeness, and held it out to her with grim determination. She did not take it, but continued to stare, feeling as though she were going to jump out of her skin.

“I can’t tell anything from that,” she said faintly. “His artist did a terrible job.”

“Probably because he never sits still,” replied her father sarcastically. “Or so I was told. I assume it’s because he prefers to be out killing things.”
Sally grimaced. “You’re not seriously considering this?”

“Darling, sweet child; you golden lamb of my heart; my little chocolate knucklehead: I did consider, I have considered, and the deed is done. His envoy should be arriving within the week to inspect you for marriage, and sign the contracts.”

“Oh, dear.” Sally stared at her father, feeling as though she hardly knew him—quite certain that she did not.

And, since he was suddenly a stranger to her, she had no qualms in grabbing a nearby candle, and jamming it flame first into the tiny portrait he held in his hand. Hot wax sprayed. She nearly set his sleeve on fire. He howled in shock, dancing backward, and slammed his injured hip into the desk. He yelled even louder.

“And that,” Sally said, shaken, “is how I feel about the matter.”

Excerpt

PROLOGUE
The humans allowed Karr to wake up, which was their first mistake.

He opened his eyes inside a small, tight space where the walls were made of a heavy billowing cloth that flapped against a sharp wind. A tent. Except, the tent was rocking and bouncing like a wagon in motion, and the human men he glimpsed were seated around him on short benches. Eastern-bred, he thought. Dark hair, golden skin. Holding oddly shaped black sticks in their laps.

Weapons, whispered his instincts, reading danger in all the little details that had nothing do with the objects the men held. It was their cold, bored gazes, the uniformity of their youth, and their odd clothing. Karr knew soldiers when he saw them.

It took only seconds for him to make his evaluation, and less than that to realize he was strapped to a hard wooden plank too small for his body. The backs of his shoulders rubbed against a cold floor that felt like stone or metal, and thin leather restraints bound his chest, arms, and legs. He was nearly naked, and smelled like urine and dry bones. None of which was as disturbing to Karr as the fact that he was still alive. He had been quite clear about the matter. His friends had promised to murder him.

And so they had. He remembered.

Yet, here he was, breathing and conscious. Karr snarled, golden light swallowing his vision, burning him up from the inside until he felt as though the sun were exploding inside his chest. He heard shouts, but they sounded very far away, and he snarled as scales burst from his skin, his bones shifting, melting, his chest and limbs expanding painfully against their restraints. His fingers lengthened into long serrated claws.

The men hit him with the blunt ends of their black weapons. Karr ignored the pain. He twisted violently, throwing himself upward, and the plank he lay on crashed down hard against the floor. He did it again, and the wood splintered as his body continued to shift. He cut himself on the leather restraints. Blood trickled down his chest and arms. He howled with rage, and hearing his own voice again was a terrible, sickening thing.

The plank broke. Karr’s arms swung free. A small blunt object slammed into the side of his head, but he had already begun to turn, and in that small space his long reach and claws arced across soft, startled faces and throats. Blood sprayed. Men screamed, falling backward against the wagon’s cloth walls. Karr glimpsed sunlight.

He leaped wildly against the wagon walls, tearing at the heavy cloth with his claws. Hands tried to pull him back, but he could taste the heat of the wind and desert, and the need to feel the sun on his skin was so powerful, so terrible, he thought he might choke on his own heart if he did not break free.

He managed to burst through, and was momentarily blinded by the sun and a sky so blue his throat ached with nameless longing. He glimpsed large moving objects, glittering and shining, and then jumped away from the wagon with one powerful lunge.

Karr hit the ground hard and rolled. Loud bleating sounds filled his ears, and he sensed something large roaring toward him. He threw himself sideways again, and great dark wheels passed him in a blur, moving faster than anything he had ever witnessed. Everything was fast, he realized, struggling to stand, dazed by the assault on his eyes as he stared at squat square wagons, fully enclosed, moving without the aid of horses or men. Inside, faces. Men and women, staring out at him, wide-eyed and startled. He stared back, just as surprised. Beyond, as far as the eye could see, rose a metropolis, golden brown and white, shimmering in the sun. It stunned him breathless.

And then the wind shifted and he smelled her: a shape-shifter, pure-blooded and wild.

Too late. Pain exploded against his shoulder, and he turned, staggering, reaching back to find a long smooth object jutting from his body. Not a knife. More slender, rounded.

Karr’s vision blurred. He saw the shape-shifter, but not her face—just a glimpse of short blonde hair as she darted around him. He tried to follow but his knees buckled. Darkness fluttered. Voices shouted, but he understood nothing that was said.  He tried to fight. He tried with all his power, staring down at his clawed hands, skin rippling with golden scales.

The shape-shifter’s scent made him sick. She said something to him, but it was nothing but a buzz in his ears. Karr collapsed on his side and closed his eyes, hoping for just a moment that he would not open them again.

CHAPTER ONE

It had been a long time since Soria had found herself in a crowd, and so she supposed she could be forgiven for having a case of the jitters, even when something as harmless as a staring child proved enough to make her hand shake.

She was in the Minneapolis airport, leaning against the counter of a small island Starbucks. It was early, not quite seven in the morning. She had paid for orange juice and happened to glance sideways, to her right, just as the cashier was carefully placing change into her palm. A child was tugging on his mother’s hand. Staring at Soria. A tousled, sweet-looking boy, maybe four or five. Nothing wrong with what he was doing. Kids were always curious.

But it took her off guard, and her hand trembled—so much so that the change slid and clattered to the counter, bouncing down on the floor around her feet. It should have been a small thing—it was a small thing—but it was also loud and awkward, and drew unwanted attention. Soria was very much tempted to grab her drink, leave the scattered nickels and dimes, and run.

She bent, her face hot, and glimpsed from the corner of her eye the long line of men and women fidgeting impatiently behind her. For one moment as her purse swung awkwardly from her left shoulder to hit the floor, she felt herself trying to reach out with her missing right arm to pick the change off the tile. All she got for her trouble was excruciating pain, a phantom echo where her limb should be, and another dose of humiliation. Bitter loneliness smashed through her heart like a fist. Her ghost fist, maybe, as stubborn about dying as she had been.

Beside her, someone knelt. Large, sinewy fingers enclosed her hand, and loose change was carefully deposited into her palm. The contact was brief but fiercely warm, and it sent a tingle through her. She had not been touched by anyone in a long time.

Soria poured the change into her purse, grabbed the juice from the cashier, and stepped away from the counter to make room for the next woman in line. Flustered, sweating, she finally gazed into the face of the man who had helped her. He was handsome, which was just her luck. His face was paler than his hands, but just as sinewy and spare. Light green eyes glinted with sharp intelligence, and his neatly trimmed dark red hair appeared skimmed with golden threads under the overhead lights. He was tall, with broad shoulders straining against a forest green cashmere sweater that hugged the lean muscles of his chest. A silver chain glinted around his neck, disappearing beneath his clothing.

“Thanks,” Soria said, feeling rather numb and scatterbrained.

“You’re welcome,” replied the man smoothly, and held out a thin folded airline envelope. “This dropped out of your purse when you bent down.”
It was her plane ticket. Soria wanted to kick herself. Again, she felt her brain tell her missing right arm to reach out—such a hateful sensation—and the pain that echoed through her head was nauseating and dull.

Soria awkwardly dumped her juice bottle into her purse and took the ticket from his outstretched hand. “Good thing you saw that.”

“Yes,” he agreed, not letting go of the ticket.

Soria hesitated, staring into his eyes, and all his attractive features faded into a blur. Uneasiness rolled through her stomach, into her lungs, into the lurch of her heart. Not simply because of his reluctance to release the ticket, and not just because the glint in his gaze suddenly seemed irredeemably cold. The man had switched languages on her. English to Welsh, she realized. And not just any Welsh, but an old dialect, practically medieval, and most certainly dead. And she—like an idiot—had responded without thinking. In the same tongue.

The man stepped back, still holding her plane ticket. Soria licked her lips, and in very careful modern English said, “Who are you?”

“Roland sent me,” he replied, still speaking ancient Welsh. “He needs you to come home, Soria.”

Home. Not just a place.  Home was people. Home was old dreams.

Soria turned and walked in the opposite direction. Never mind her plane ticket; she could buy another. Never mind the job interview in New York with the U.N. If she missed that, there would be others.

She felt the ghost of her missing arm swinging from her body, that phantom limb, replete with an itch where her wrist should have been. She ignored the discomfort, wished she had some chewing gum to take the bad taste out of her mouth. Airport crowds passed in a blur, but she felt gazes flicker to her empty sleeve and then dart away. She did not know what was worse: those brief embarrassed glances or the people who pretended her disfigurement did not exist. That she did not exist.

You exist for someone now, she thought grimly, quickening her pace. Goddamn it, Roland.

Ahead, an impossibly slender girl stepped into her path, facing her. She was Asian, clad in a pink plaid miniskirt so short that if she had not been wearing cropped gray tights underneath, she might very well have been arrested for indecent exposure. A pink hooded sweatshirt clung to her torso, and her glossy black hair, streaked pink, was pulled up in pigtails decorated with plastic Hello Kitty beads that clacked when her head tilted. She wore a mockery of tennis shoes: hot pink and silver, raised up on an inch-thick sole. A messenger bag covered in yet more Hello Kitties slung loose over her flat chest.

Men stared. Women looked away. Soria stopped walking, light-headed. The girl’s age was impossible to determine—anywhere from thirteen to twenty, though her dark eyes were old as dirt and the set of her mouth was lethal. Soria herself was thirty years old, but she felt ancient and used when she looked at the girl, old eyes or not. She was no better than some grizzled gunslinger, too long alive in the world.

Heat settled in her chest, old instincts, raw and battered. She was not ready. She had retired. Everyone had agreed.

Soria turned her head, slightly. The red-haired man was behind her, close enough to touch. His gaze was assessing and cold. Like ice.

“We should talk,” he said, in perfect Gaelic; and then, in a Persian dialect that was just as old as his Welsh, he added: “If you please.”

Fear tingled through her. Intrigue, as well. Curiosity, she admitted, was what had gotten her into trouble in the first place, and here it was again, that same intellectual itch that was dangerous as a gun to her head. A puzzle. A linguistic riddle.

“What,” she asked slowly, “does Roland want?”

“Your time,” the man replied in English, as a sea of travelers passed around them. The terminal was a long, winding hall of upscale shops surrounded by golden wood and the occasional elaborate sculpture—no doubt meant to imitate the warmth of some lodge, easy and comfortable. A good scream would draw hundreds of eyes.

But that old curiosity kept her silent, as well as nostalgia … and loneliness. She sensed that slip of a teen girl swaying closer, and stepped sideways so that she could keep both her and the man in sight. Cold amusement flickered through his eyes.

“My name is Robert,” he said. “My associate is Ku-Ku.”

“Bitter,” Soria replied, translating the girl’s name from Mandarin. “Appropriate, I assume.”
“In so many ways,” replied the man.

Soria did not want to know. “How can I be certain Roland sent you?”

Robert reached into his pocket and pulled out a battered silver bracelet: thick, scarred, and tarnished with age. A chunk of turquoise, like an eye, had been embedded in the cuff. Soria’s breath caught when she saw it.

He held out the bracelet. “He thought you would stay long enough for him to return this. Or at least, that’s what he told me.”

It was not proof, exactly, but Soria had no doubt that the piece of antique jewelry had come from her former boss. She took it from Robert, half expecting him to pull back at the last moment. The bracelet was cool in her left palm, and the old habit of slipping it over her right wrist was so strong that for a moment she felt the echo of silver sliding over her ghost skin.

“Roland can have my time,” Soria said hoarsely. “But he better make it good.”

“That’s up to you,” Robert replied, tearing her plane ticket in half. “But you know it will be interesting.”

Indeed, thought Soria, ignoring the phantom ache of her missing arm. With Roland and the other agents of Dirk & Steele, life was always a bit too interesting.

Written by MARJORIE LIU
Penciled by KALMAN ANDRASOFSZKY
Covers by ALINA URUSOV

There’s no place like home—just ask young mutant KIDEN NIXON. She’s survived the hard streets of Manhattan, and she’s built a home—and a family—for herself, with her friends TATIANA, BOBBY SOUL and his LI’L BRO. But with fewer than 200 mutants left on the planet, Kiden’s become a target—and when somebody strikes at one of her friends, Kiden’s going to find out just how much farther she can fall! By NEW YORK TIMES best-selling writer MARJORIE LIU (the DIRK & STEELE SERIES) with stunning art by KALMAN ANDRASOFSZKY! Collecting NYX: NO WAY HOME #1-6.

184 PGS./Parental Advisory …$24.99
ISBN: 978-0-7851-3995-9
Trim size: standard

NYX: NO WAY HOME PREMIERE HC (DM ONLY)
184 PGS./Parental Advisory …$24.99
ISBN: 978-0-7851-3996-6

Excerpt

Zombies had a bad habit of shooting me in the head. Most of them knew better, but there was always that one who wanted to get lucky.

It was a wet Monday morning. Almost dawn. Broken streetlights and glass in the road; and the hulking shadows of abandoned warehouses towering above me. Dead city, dead hour. Seattle was a dark place, even with the sun. Some days felt like living in the aftermath of a nuclear winter; as though a mushroom cloud had blown over and never left.

Quiet, too. Nothing to hear except harsh breathing, a soft whine; my cowboy boots scuffing concrete and the sharpening of claws; and the rumble of the freight trains at the rail yard across from the docks, mingling with the growls vibrating softly in my ears: baby symphonies of thunder. Good music. Made me feel safe.

I rubbed wet hair out of my eyes. “Zee. Hold him tighter.”

Him. Archie Limbaud. Scrawny man, sinewy as a garter snake, saddled with a crown of short brown hair plastered to his soaked skin and flecked with enormous flakes of dandruff. He was a fortysomething man who smelled like the private bathroom of a teenage boy: unwashed and vaguely fecal.

He was also a zombie. Not the brain-eating, shambling kind, either. Not a corpse. Just a man, possessed by a demon—who was using his body like a puppet. Practically the same as being dead, if you asked me.

I did not want to touch him. He sprawled on the edge of an empty parking lot, crammed against the bottom of a chain-link fence, the contents of his wallet scattered on the ground in front of me. More condoms than cash, along with one credit card, and an expired driver’s license. Minutes ago, there had been a gun—a .40-caliber pistol, pointed at my head—but that was gone now. Eaten.

I hated guns. I hated zombies. Put those together with what I knew about the possessed man at my feet, and I didn’t know whether to cry, scream, or kick the fuck out of his testes.

I eased off my gloves, shoved them in my back pocket, and extended my palm. A sharp little hand passed me a switchblade. Pretty thing, with a mother-of-pearl handle and silver accents. Razor edge, still wet with blood. Engraved with the initials A.L. I waved it in front of Archie’s ruddy face, and his dark aura fluttered wildly around the crown of his head.

“Some night,” I said quietly. “I found the body.”

Archie said nothing. Part of that might have been the aluminum baseball bat pressed down on his throat. Stolen from the Seattle Mariners, if I had to guess. I could see the stadium walls of Safeco Field from where I crouched, and Zee and the others were going through a baseball phase. Babe Ruth was in, Bill Russell was out. Which pained me. At least my boys were still obsessed with Bon Jovi. I couldn’t have handled that much change.

Zee, Raw, and Aaz were down on the ground, pinning Archie to the pavement. Little demons, little hounds. Rain sizzled, trickling down bony backs the color of soot smeared with silver, skin shimmering with a muscular fluidity that resembled water more than flesh. Razor-sharp spines of hair flexed against chiseled skulls while silver veins pulsed with slow beats that, if I had pressed my ear close, would have sounded like the steady thrums of bass guitars.

Red eyes glinted. I used the switchblade to tap Aaz on the back of the head, and his hair cut through the steel like it was butter. Raw caught the bits of blade before they hit the pavement and stuffed them in his mouth, chewing loudly.

“Ease up on the windpipe,” I said to Aaz. “I don’t want the host harmed.”

Aaz blew a kiss at the zombie and removed the baseball bat from his soft, bruised throat. Archie started coughing, fighting to move his legs. No luck. Raw was sitting on his ankles, and Zee had his wrists pinned to the pavement. Not quite crushing bone, but close. My boys were strong.

“Please,” Archie whispered hoarsely. “I want to convert.”

“Liar,” rasped Zee, before I had a chance to tell the zombie to go fuck himself. The little demon leaned close to lick the air above Archie’s brow. “Cutter lies, Maxine. He still hungers.”
“He murders,” I said, gripping the remains of the switchblade in my fist as a young face flashed through my mind, bloody and sliced, long brown limbs naked, splayed. Torn doll. Torn in places I did not want to remember. “She was just a kid.”

“She was a prostitute,” Archie said. “She was already prey.”

Dek and Mal, coiled heavy on my shoulders, peered from beneath my hair and hissed at the zombie. Unlike the others, they were built like snakes, with two vestigial limbs good only for clutching my ears. Heads shaped like hyenas. Sharp smiles. Fire in their breath. Archie stared at them, and trembled.

I reached through his thunderous aura to place my hand on his clammy brow. He shied away, but the boys held tight, and in that last moment before I touched him, his eyes rolled back, staring at the delicate armor surrounding the entire ring finger of my right hand: a slender sheath of quicksilver, replete with a delicate joint at the knuckle, which allowed my finger to bend. Fit like a skin. Sometimes I forgot it was there.

“Prey,” I murmured. “And what does that make you?”

“One of a million,” he whispered, shaking; staring at me with hate in his eyes. “You can’t kill us all. When the prison walls fail—”

“You’ll be rat meat to the rest of the demons,” I interrupted, still thinking of the girl I had found in an alley only blocks from here, summoned to her still-warm body by Zee and the others, who had roused me from bed to hunt her killer. “Your kind will be slaughtered, just like the humans. You’re nothing to the others. Even your Queen has said so.”

“Hunter—” Archie began, but I didn’t let him finish. I knew everything he was going to say. I had heard it thousands of times since my mother’s murder, and thousands of times before that, as well.
I was going to die. I was never going to reach old age. The world was going to end.

All of which was true. But, whatever. His voice hurt my head. His sour scent, hot and prickly, made me want to vomit. I was tired, and cold all the way through to my soul, and there was a girl who had lost her life tonight for no good reason. She had suffered a bad death—and only because the parasite possessing this man had wanted to feed on her pain. I did not even know her name. No ID, no nothing. Lost forever.

Not the only one, either. The world was a big place. Too many predators: human, zombie, or otherwise. And just one of me. Nomad, born and bred, who had settled in this city longer than any other. Abandoning all others, so I could have some semblance of a normal life.

Right. Normal.

I ground my palm even harder against Archie’s brow, and exhaled a soft hiss of words; sibilant and ancient, a focused tongue that made my skin tingle, and my hand burn. Archie’s breath rattled, and he strained upward as his aura swelled, trying to escape me.

No such luck. The demon was young. Easy to exorcise. I drew it out, watching the passage of its wraithlike body churn through the human’s open mouth like poisoned smoke. Archie went limp. Raw and Aaz released his legs, while Dek and Mal slithered off my shoulders, winding down my arms to be near my hands. Their tiny claws pricked my skin like kneading cats, and their soft, high-pitched hum of Bon Jovi’s “Social Disease” filled the air.

When the last trail of the parasite’s writhing body was free of the human man, I held it in my hand with that soft, shrieking darkness spilling through my fingers, and felt a cold bite in my skin, like a glove of frozen nettles. Zee stepped over Archie’s still body, and the others extended their razor-tipped claws.

I gave them the demon. I did not watch them eat it.

I knelt by Archie and checked his pulse. Strong, steady. His eyelids fluttered, but he stayed unconscious, and I backed away quick, rubbing my sweaty palms on my jeans. I had no way of knowing what this man had been like before being possessed, though I guessed he hadn’t been the happy type. Stable, mentally robust people did not get possessed by demons. Too much work. No cracks to exploit.
But this man, Archie Limbaud, would wake up a murderer—and never know it. Demons left no memories in human minds. Just chaos, ruined lives. Friends and family who would never look at you the same way.

“Maxine,” Zee rasped, rubbing his mouth with the back of his sharp hand. “Sun coming.”

I knew. I could feel the sun, somewhere beyond the black skies and rain, slowly creeping upon the cloud-hidden horizon. I had minutes at most
.
“Pay phone,” I said to Zee, and he snapped his claws at Raw and Aaz, who were prowling the edges of the dark lot, slipping in and out of shadows. Both of them loped close, graceful as wolves, and whispered in Zee’s ears. Zee cocked his head, listening; and after a moment, pointed.

I said nothing. Just walked away from Archie. I did not rush. I did not look back. I held the handle of the switchblade and slid it into my hair. Listened to metal crunch as Mal chewed and swallowed. I could have left it. Evidence.

But I wanted the man to have a second chance. I wanted him to wake up, confused and amnesiac, but without the burden of murder. No one deserved that—even though there was a small part of me that felt like his hands were dirty. Dirty as mine. I could not stop rubbing my palms against my wet jeans. Felt as though Archie Limbaud’s stink was all over me.

Early morning continued to be quiet, the drizzling mist softening the streets and rough broken edges, and I drank in the cold air, savoring the chill of wet hair curled against my flushed cheeks. The boys moved through the shadows, invisible except for brief glimpses of their red eyes. I kept wiping my hands and thinking about the dead girl. And my mother. She had warned me before she died. She had warned me it would be like this. Always, victims. Victims, everywhere. And me, never fast enough. Always playing catch-up.

I found a pay phone two blocks away. Battered relic, covered in graffiti. I dialed 911 and left a brief message with the operator—teenager dead, murdered, several blocks south of Safeco Field—and hung up. Wiped off my prints, then remembered I could have worn my gloves. I was still rattled, not thinking straight. I wanted to go back to the dead girl and wait with her body—as if that would make a difference. Ease, somehow, the pain and loneliness of her murder.

Instead, I kept walking, taking a westerly route away from the rail yards, toward Chinatown. I saw no one but caught glimpses of headlights crossing distant intersections. The rumble of the trains seemed louder. The air tasted sharper, and suddenly electric, as though a city full of alarms had just gone off, and I was feeling the pulse of thousands of eyes opening at once. In my ear, Dek and Mal began humming more Bon Jovi. “Have a Nice Day.”

“You, too,” I said hoarsely, reaching into my hair to scratch their necks. “See you tonight.”

I stopped in the shadows, well off the street, and the rest of the boys slipped free of the darkness to gather close, hugging my legs, running their cheeks against my knees. The boys liked to be tucked in. I slid my knuckles against their warm jaws and savored the rumble of purrs. Their skin steamed in the rain.

Zee peered up at me and tugged on my hand until I knelt before him. Very carefully, he cradled my face between his claws, searching my eyes with a sad compassion that made my throat burn.
“Maxine,” he rasped gently. “Sweet Maxine. Be your heart at ease.”

We had seconds, nothing more. I kissed my fingers and pressed them against his bony brow. I thought of my mother again and caught myself in heartache. She had said good night to the boys like this, for all the years they were hers. I could not stop thinking of her tonight.

“Dream,” I whispered. “Sleep tigh—”

I never finished. I got shot in the head.

Just like that. Right temple. Not much sound. The impact shuddered through my entire body, every sensation magnified with excruciating clarity as the bullet drilled into my skull—the inexorable pressure of a small round object, crushing my life. I could feel it. I could feel it. My brain was going to explode like a watermelon. I had no time to be afraid.

But in that moment—that split second between life and death, the sun touched the horizon somewhere beyond the clouds—– and the boys disappeared into my skin.

The bullet ricocheted, the impact spinning me like a rag doll. I fell on my hands and knees, and stayed there, stunned and frozen. I could still feel the punch of the shot—the sensation so visceral I would not have been surprised to reach up and find the bullet grinding a path into my skull.

I touched my head, just to be sure. Found hair and unbroken skin. No blood. My entire right arm trembled, and a dull throbbing ache spread from my sinuses to my temple, all the way through to the base of my skull. My heart pounded so hard I could barely breathe. All I could see was pavement and my hands.

My transformed hands. My skin had been pale and smooth only moments before, but tattoos now covered every inch: obsidian roping shadows, scales and silver muscle shining with subtle veins of organic metal. My fingernails shimmered like black pearls, hard enough to dig a hole through solid rock. Red eyes stared from the backs of my wrists. Raw and Aaz. I closed my eyes, trying to steady my breathing, and felt five corresponding tugs against my skin. Demons, inhabiting my flesh. Minds and hearts and dreams, bound to my life until I died.
My friends, my family. My dangerous boys.

Somewhere distant I heard police sirens wailing. My 911 call, coming this way. I had to get up. I tried, and fell. Gritted my teeth and dug my nails into the concrete. Tried again.
This time I managed to stand. I started walking, stumbling, but did not go down. My head pounded. I bent over once, still moving—afraid to stop—gagging uncontrollably. Felt like my stomach was going to peel right up through my throat, but instead of making my head hurt worse, the pain eased.

I touched my right temple with a trembling hand, savoring the smooth, unbroken skin. Momentarily in awe that I still lived.

I had been shot before. Frequently. All over. Never felt a thing. Bullets bounced off me during the day. A nuclear bomb could hit me in daylight, and I would survive—without a scratch. Might be a different story at night, when the boys peeled off my body, but I never underestimated their ability to keep me alive.

But no one—no one—had ever had the foresight—or the balls—to try killing me in that moment between night and day, caught in transition between mortal and immortal.
Near-perfect timing. Any earlier, and the boys would have killed the shooter before the bullet could be fired. Any later, and I would have been invulnerable. Which was exactly the case. Saved by a fraction of a second.

Too damn close. I scanned the shadows but saw nothing except for warehouses and dark windows, and the glitter of downtown Seattle to the north, all the lights of the city frozen like the unwavering pose of fireflies. Nothing unordinary. No shooter, waving a flag. But I felt watched. Someone, somewhere, out there in the darkness. Long range, or else the boys would have felt their presence well before the attack.

Zombie, I thought. Had to be. No one else who knew what I was would try to hurt me.

“You almost died,” I said out loud, needing to hear the words, to hear myself—as though I required some proof of life. Maxine Kiss. Almost taken out, just like my mother—with a bullet through the brain.
A zombie had killed her. But that was different.

It had been her time to die.

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CHRISTINE WARREN
“Devil’s Bargain”
Supernatural bounty hunter Lilli Corbin made a pact with the Prince of Hell: She agreed to recover a book of prophecies. When she learns it could trigger the apocalypse, Lilli is forced to make the ultimate choice: save her soul, or the man she loves?

MARJORIE M. LIU
“The Robber Bride”
Welcome to a post-apocalyptic world where where humans are fed on for their life forces. Now it’s up to Maggie, one of the last survivors, to hunt down and destroy an army of darkness…

CAITLIN KITTREDGE
“Down in the Ground Where the Dead Men Go”
Ava is a demon slayer who needs help from mage Jack Winter to reach the demon underworld—a place of dark seduction…and, maybe, one of no return.

JENNA MACLAINE
“Sin Slayer”
London 1889. Jack the Ripper is killing off the city’s vampire population, and now it’s up to Cin Craven to hunt him down—and save the infected Michael, the love of her undead life.

Excerpt

Maggie was too young to remember life before the Big Death, but she had a brain for books, access to books, a great deal of uninterrupted time on her hands with which to enjoy those books – and so had, over the years, pieced together a history of the world that she knew was, in part, fiction – but that, like most good lies – rang true.  Not that anyone else was privy to her secret history:  Maggie knew better than to draw attention to her eccentricities.  It was enough that she ran the junkyard for Olo Enclave, and lived alone, and was twenty years old without a husband or prospect. 

She had been on her own for years.  Her junkyard lay on the outskirts of Olo, which bordered what had been, and still was, the Ohio river.  It was settlement number six in the government grid – six out of several thousand, scattered across the former United States – located smack dab in the new territory of Inohkyten, an abbreviation for all the states thrown together after the Big Death:  Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee.  Other territories had their own odd collective names, but when folks in Olo talked about the rest of the country, they just called those places as they had become:  the South, North, East, or West, with the Rockies, Dakotas, and Alaska thrown in, all on their own. 

It was spring when the motorcycle man came looking for Maggie.  Blue sky morning with the dew glittering like diamond drops on the tips of the green grass, and the cardinals and magpies lilting full-throated on the naked branches of the oaks and maples—which threatened any day now to burst bud-first with leaves.  Maggie, in the old barn workshop, had a clear view of the meadow.  Junkyard business stayed on the other side of the building, but when Maggie worked the foundry and tinkered with her machines, she liked a bit of the world in front of her: the old world, the world she figured had almost reclaimed itself less than two decades past; a world that undoubtedly would swallow humanity, again.

That very morning Maggie was experimenting with old clay flowerpots, which she had found years ago while scavenging for scrap in the burned out garage of a home not ten miles south.  Up until now she had used the pots – in vain – to grow miniature roses and small pepper plants.  But as no seed she touched ever seemed to reach the sprout stage, there was no loss in finding other ways to take advantage of the unique shape and material of a flowerpot – such as turning it into a furnace for smelting brass. 

So far, success.  Just some brick to stand the pot upon, a hole drilled into the base and fitted with a long copper pipe – at the end of which Maggie had tied the balloon of an old turkey baster to make the draught – and voilà (a word she had appropriated from the tattered pages of her dictionary, and that seemed to fit her mood, most days).  Charcoal was burning, the heat was intense, and the scrap of brass pipe she had tossed inside was quite obviously melting.

I am, she thought cheerfully, a clever girl.

Outside, the gate bell jingled.  Maggie thought about not answering – brass was much more interesting than flesh and blood—but out here, folks would come inside anyway and start poking around until they found her.  She never liked that much.  Her grandfather hadn’t, either.  Territory was a precious thing.  Especially now.  Word of mouth carried far.  You had to keep reminding people of what was yours, until the knowing went so deep it twined and twisted into the fabric of a place.  Until it became part of your identity.  Something no person could ever steal. 

The bell rang again.  Maggie maneuvered an old steel lid on top of the flowerpot foundry – caging the raging heat – and walked quickly through the barn.  She shed gloves, goggles, and her heavy leather apron along the way, running fingers through her short-cropped hair, and picked up one of the old sledgehammers hanging neatly against the wall.  She slung the tool over her shoulder, and ambled out of the barn into the yard. 

A man stood just inside the gate, fingering the string of steel bells hanging from the barbed wire wound around the old wooden rails.  Maggie stopped in her tracks when she saw him, and not simply because he was a stranger.  He was big and lean, dressed in black dusty leather that matched the color of his long hair and eyes.  He wore no shirt beneath his open jacket, and his skin was impossibly pale.  Colder than ice, she thought.  Cold as winter sun, or the river at dawn.  His presence cut, and for one moment Maggie knew him, in the same way she had known her grandfather was dead before ever seeing his body:  with certainty, and dread, and vast terrible loneliness.

The man looked at her sideways, tilting his head just so, away from the bells: an odd, graceful movement that affected only his head, so that the rest of him remained perfectly still.  He had a piercing gaze, sharper than anyone Maggie had ever met; sharp as a hook in her gut, drawing her toward him.  She wanted to take a step, worse than anything—almost as bad as breathing – but she was good at holding her breath, and did so now, forcing herself to stay rooted in one spot as sweat trickled between her shoulder blades and down her breasts.  Her eyes burned from holding his gaze.  She felt naked.  But after a moment, the strange compulsion to walk toward the stranger eased, and she allowed herself to breathe again. 

The man frowned.  “You are the fixer.”

“You have something broken?”  Maggie asked, surprised at how calm her voice sounded.  Her hand felt broken – aching fierce from squeezing the handle of the sledgehammer. 

His frown deepened.  “On the road, yes.”

Maggie hesitated.  “Show me.”

He had to think about it, which only made her more uncomfortable.  She imagined her sledgehammer swinging toward his perfect face: heels dug in and ready, ready, ready for anything.  Maggie had not yet found cause to kill a man, but she had scared several since her grandfather’s death.  She had a feeling this one would not take a fright all that easily. 

But work was work, and when strangers showed up on her doorstep needing a fixing, it never seemed right to tell them to go away.  Nearest Enclave was over a day to the south, across the river – and the Eclaves in the north were a bit farther out than that.  This was the only junkyard in the region to service all those folks looking for spare and rare parts – and she could not in good conscience tell anyone desperate enough to make the journey to mosey the hell off her spread. 

So Maggie waited, clear-eyed and tense until the man finally backed away, around the gate.  She followed at a safe distance, walking down the short overgrown drive toward the cracked paved road.  Watching him carefully.  Finding it hard to determine his age.  He had flawless skin, as though he had never spent a day beneath the sun – and was effortlessly graceful, footsteps light as air.  He did not move like the men from Olo or other Enclaves, whose feet seemed part of the earth; and as solid.  Watching him made her afraid – but she spied a glint of silver through the young oaks, and then passed around the bend and saw the machine the man had brought to be fixed. 

It was a motorcycle.  Maggie had never seen one in real life; only in bits and pieces, wreckage, bent scrap; and in pictures from magazines.  Like comparing fossils to paintings.  But this was real.  Onyx, obsidian, made of night; metal polished and shining like some reckless mirage of the past.  For the second time in as many minutes, Maggie stopped breathing.  She would never breathe again, if it would keep the machine genuine, and whole. 

“Oh, my,” she said, unable to look away – knees locked, heart racing.  Aware, dimly, that she deserved what she got if the stranger decided to take advantage of her distraction with a good wallop over her head. 

He remained near the motorcycle, though, regarding her with a thoughtfulness that continued to unnerve.  Sunlight splashed against his hair and clothing, but only served to make him seem more like a shadow. 

“It is a small problem,” he said, his voice a slow rumble; a rubbing purr against the air.  “A torn tire, and nothing more.  But I am…far from my tools.”
Far from home, she imagined he would say instead. Far from everything known. 

“You need a replacement,” she replied, finally looking past the dazzle of chrome to find the ripped tread, so badly torn there was little doubt he had lost the most of the tire while moving at some considerable speed.  “I have something.”

“And is it right?” asked the man.  “Will you serve me well?”

An odd question – or perhaps just odd phrasing – but it irritated Maggie, and before she could stop herself, she replied tartly, “If you plan on paying.”
A cold smile touched his mouth, and though the road was bright and the sky blue, and the morning sun shining, the light seemed to dim around him for just a moment; and the spring chill worsened with a snarl of wind. 

He reached inside his jacket, and then held out his hand.  Small flecks of color sparkled against his gloved palm: rubies, emeralds, diamonds.  Gemstones.  Or plastic.  No way to know for certain, though Maggie couldn’t imagine anyone parting with the real thing.  Not for a tire. 

Maggie did not touch the jewels – afraid that doing so would constitute a bargain sealed.  She studied them from a distance, marveling at their glitter, but finally shook her head.

“I have no use for them,” she told the man. 

“Then, what?” he asked dangerously.  “What do you want?”

“My life,” she said, without thinking – and froze in embarrassment, and fear.  But the words sat on her tongue, and could not be shook loose, and part of her wanted to say them again, louder.  My life.  Do not take my life.

Because she thought he might.  Maggie thought he would be able to, if he wanted, no matter how fast she moved, or how hard she fought.  He had a way about him. 
A cold gleam filled his eyes.  “I heard of you.  Miles away, I heard of you.  The woman who fixes machines.  But you are more than that, I think.” 

“Am I?” asked Maggie carefully.  “Where did you come from, that you heard such things?”

But the man did not answer her.  He hid away the gems inside his leather coat, and inclined his head so that his long hair fell around his pale face, sharpening and hiding his features until he resembled a fox more than a man – nothing but a pointed chin and high cheekbones, and eyes that glinted golden.  Maggie found herself unable to look away from his eyes, and though he studied nothing but her face, she felt him as though he was all over her, touching her body in places she did not want to be touched. 

“Your life,” he said.  “I believe that will be an interesting trade.”

And then he moved – blindingly quick – and kissed her mouth.  Maggie could not fight him.  He was too strong.  His lips were cold as ice—so cold, dunking her face into a raging winter river might have felt warmer – and in one dizzying moment it seemed that all the air in her lungs was sucked away, drowning her.  She screamed, but heard her voice only in her head.  She tasted blood.