A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters - Martin Harry Greenberg [14]
A moment, a moment, and all would be . . .
Prudence threw back her head and howled, howled with sorrow and misery, howled for a brother dead and a family forever gone.
April March did not hear the grief. She heard only the cry of a wolf, dangerously close. She ran as if the wolf was on her trail. Near the center of town a rinkytink piano stopped in mid-note. Then someone laughed and someone else made a coarse comment. The music resumed.
Prudence raised her wolf’s head and saw Clyde Begay staring at her in fascination.
“I do not think,” the skinwalker said, “you will be my ally as your brother was. I will leave this place. Soon, I think, you will lead others to our cave and I do not wish to be there.”
He moved his hands and sang a few words in Navajo. In a moment, a scrawny old wolf, tail clamped between his legs, stood where the man had been. He paused, assessing her once more.
Prudence growled and the old wolf ran.
Warily, Prudence changed back to human. With the moon’s strength in her, she lifted Jake’s body up and carried it at a trot to the badlands. She buried him under a fall of rocks where no one would ever find his corpse, nor wonder at the manner of his death.
Then she sought out his cave. Five shabby wolf puppies played in the deep grass of the canyon, but they stopped hunting grasshoppers and mice as soon as they caught Prudence’s scent. They came for her with a very unfriendly look in their yellow eyes.
Prudence dealt with them as she had her brother, wondering if her heart would ever stop weeping. She forced herself to watch as five little wolf cubs turned back into five scrawny children. In the front of the cave, she buried the bodies of those Jake had hoped would be his new family.
The next afternoon, scrubbed clean, her six-guns at her hips, her rifle in the saddle boot, Prudence rode into town. There she sought Reverend Printer and told him an edited version of events.
She ended by saying, “I’ll draw you a map, so you can find the cave and the children’s bodies. Their deaths will be sad news for the families, but sometimes sorrow is better than hope.”
“So you think the trouble is ended?” Reverend Printer asked.
Prudence snorted. “As long as humans are humans there will be trouble. All I’m saying is that one madman is dead.”
“Fallen down a cleft in the rocks.”
“That’s what I said.”
Reverend Printer nodded. Prudence could tell he didn’t believe her, but also that he wasn’t going to push it.
“And you came here why?”
“He was my brother. Mama always told me we shoot our own dogs. We don’t leave the job for someone else.”
Then Prudence Bledsloe, last of the Bledsloe werewolves, mounted her big buckskin stallion and rode out of town.
OUR LADY OF THE VAMPIRES
Nancy Holder
“You won’t go hungry here,” my mother told me, as she set my suitcase down and rang the bell of our Lady of the Angels Home for Girls. Night was falling. Her face was so thin she looked like a skeleton, and I tried not to show my fear. For her. Of her. If she ever died, I would die, too.
It was December 23, 1929, and everyone was afraid. The stock market crash, the bank runs . . . overnight, our world had blown up, and we were not very good survivors. We were fragile females, used to being catered to and doted on. My mother had lived like a queen—like the Queen of Los Angeles—and I’d been my father’s princess, and he took care of everything. My mother had never touched a paper bill or a coin in her entire married life. It was a bargain ladies made with society—we would barely exist in the world, and in return, men would love us.
But my father hadn’t loved us enough. On Halloween, he had leapt from the ledge of his office window in the Crocker Bank Building on Santa Monica Boulevard.
They are vampires, he had written in his suicide note. They have sucked the life’s blood from this country.
We