But there had been complications: an infection in the tissue of his throat, growing with silent, malicious hunger until the day the bandages came off and one of the nurses noticed the swelling in his lymph nodes. They’d done everything they could to save his voice. It had been far too late. His vocal cords were utterly destroyed; he would never speak again, and would need to monitor his diet for the rest of his life, since his already-narrow esophagus wasn’t equipped to handle acid reflux or vomiting, let alone swallowing food that wasn’t mashed or chopped into tiny pieces.
Such a little thing. It had seemed like a reasonable price to pay when he was learning ASL and teaching it to his sister, who had laughed and laughed at the straightforward bluntness of his new language’s phrasing. It had seemed like something he could live with when he’d first gone to the club and met Kyle—beautiful, capricious Kyle—who was dance floor royalty if such a thing had ever existed. It had seemed like it was going to be okay.
And then Kyle had told him that he couldn’t be with someone who couldn’t speak. “If you can’t talk, how are we supposed to be a thing?” he’d asked, somehow making the question sound completely reasonable, even though it was the most unreasonable thing in the world. “You’re a cripple. Maybe that’s a shitty way to put it, I don’t know, but it’s not going to work. You understand.”
Michael understood. He understood that he’d given up everything about the man he’d been to become a man that someone like Kyle could love, and it hadn’t been enough. Nothing was ever going to be enough.
Emily had been keeping a knife under her pillow since the accident. “I have to be able to defend myself,” is what she’d always said. She hadn’t heard Michael creep into her room and take it. He was very good at being quiet.
Michael dropped his left hand from the hollow of his throat and raised his right hand, looking thoughtfully at his sister’s knife. He didn’t have to say anything.
The knife already knew.
#
Snow fell all around us in an icy curtain, guided by gentle winds to create a small island of perfect calm in the middle of the clearing. The woman from Nova Scotia—whose name was Tanya, when she wasn’t embracing her fairy tale fate—sat on a tree stump, looking at me gravely. I struggled not to squirm. The rock I was using as a chair was uncomfortable; my ass was freezing; and since I always landed in the whiteout wood in whatever I’d been wearing when I went to sleep, I was wearing nothing but socks and a flannel nightgown. Not the best winter gear the world has ever seen, but I couldn’t fall asleep if I went to bed in a thermal jacket and snow pants.
This had been happening every night for the two weeks since my story had fully activated. I was starting to get used to it, even if I missed being able to dream like a normal person.
“What are the means of putting us under?” Tanya asked, for the third time.
“Poisoned apple, poisoned comb, poisoned ring, too-tight girdle,” I said, with the prompt, irritated precision of an honor student forced into the remedial class. “The girdle has fallen out of favor in the past few decades, but had a resurgence in the goth community in the early nineties, and still shows up from time to time in certain fannish settings, like the steampunk community. Or fetish groups, of course.”
“What form does the comb take?” asked Tanya, her tone relaying no pleasure at my accurate answer.
I frowned. “It’s a comb. It’s the least common of the variants anymore. I don’t know—it could be a hairclip, I guess? Maybe bobby pins. That would make sense.” The poison on the comb was usually a variant of the type used on the apple. It was weaker nine times out of ten, since the Snow White needed to recover long enough to foolishly eat the forbidden fruit. Maybe that was why the combs got dropped from the narrative: people realized that they were being redundant, or maybe they collectively decided that their fairy tale icons shouldn’t be stupid enough to let themselves get poisoned twice.
Tanya frowned at me. “You’re not taking this seriously.”
“You’re appearing in my dreams to teach me how to be a better Snow White,” I pointed out. “I’m not sure how seriously I can take this without losing my grip on reality completely.”
“There are dangers in the world. Dangers that prey specifically on our kind.”
“I’ve been an ATI Management Bureau agent for my entire adult life,” I said. “I think I know about the dangers.”
“Henrietta…”
“Henry,” I corrected firmly. “My name is Henry.”
“Henry, then, if you insist. You’ve been fighting those dangers from the outside. You’re inside the story now. Some things can no longer touch you. Others…” Tanya shook her head, looking mournful. “Others will be a hundred times more dangerous.”
I saw my opening and I took it. “Is that what happened to you?” I asked, trying not to show my eagerness.
Everyone who existed in the whiteout wood was a Snow White. Most of them—like Tanya—were dead, their bodies having been lost forever in the waking world. Some were just sleeping, living out their comas on life support and in forgotten hospices all around the world. Most of the girls I’d been introduced to so far were among the dead. They dealt better with strangers, since they no longer hoped for rescue.
I’d been looking up the other Snows since my first trip to the wood, trying to ferret out the details of their lives and deaths based on the few facts that I’d been able to glean. What I was finding so far was deeply unnerving. At least two-thirds of the women in the wood didn’t seem to be in the records. Either Birdie’s meddling had gone deeper than any of us had guessed, or we’d been missing incursions for years, letting the narrative slip things under the radar. Of Tanya, whoever she’d been in life, I had thus far found no trace. That didn’t mean that I was going to stop looking.
Tanya sighed, and for a moment I thought she might actually answer me this time. The moment passed. “No,” she said finally. “I was done in by a piece of fruit, because I was a traditionalist. Can you please try to focus? We don’t have long.”
The snow was falling harder now, starting to actually drift into our little island of calm. I stiffened. “Why not? Is it Adrianna?”
“She doesn’t like us teaching you,” Tanya said. “She’ll stop us if she can. That’s why you have to focus.”
“Why? What’s the worst she could do?”
“Focus, Henry,” said Tanya, and the snow was coming down hard now, blocking out her coal black hair and blood red lips, until everything was white, and the snow was falling, and I was falling—
—and I opened my eyes on the pleasant dimness of my bedroom, and the distant, too-familiar sound of bluebirds beating themselves to death against my window. My phone was ringing. I sat up, reaching for the sound on autopilot. One: grab phone. Two: press button. Three: bring phone to ear. “Hello?”
“Henry, it’s Jeff.”
I blinked, looking around my room for some clue as to the time. With the blackout curtains drawn, it could have been any time between dawn and noon. “What’s going on? Did I sleep through a call?”
“No, no, you didn’t miss anything. It’s a little after five in the morning.”
That explained why I’d still been asleep: my alarm didn’t go off until six. I fell backward into the pillows, closing my eyes as I asked wearily, “Is there a reason you’re calling me this early? Better yet, is it a good reason?”
“We have a case.”
“That’s annoying and regrettable, and unless I hear it from Dispatch, I’m not seeing where this is our team’s problem. Did you sleep at the office again?”
Jeff sounded faintly defensive as he said, “I had things to do. You should be getting the call from Dispatch in about five minutes.”
“Why five minutes?”
“Piotr is calling Sloane first.”
That was enough to make me open my eyes again. Waking Sloane was something best done from a distance, and always done at your own risk. The rest of us tended to wake up grum
py. She had the potential to wake up homicidal. “So it’s ours?”
“It’s ours.”
“Got it. I’ll see you in the office.” I hung up and sat up again, pushing the covers back. This was the first call my team had received in the two weeks since my story had gone active. This was our chance to prove that we could still do our jobs, even though I was technically compromised. Which meant that above all, we couldn’t fuck this one up.
Swamp mallow had sprouted in the corners of my room, treating the carpet like a preternaturally good growth medium. I wrinkled my nose when I saw it. Then I picked up my phone, snapping a few quick pictures. Jeff would want to know what I’d found growing out of my floor this time. He could cross-reference it against whatever story we were about to get involved with, and that would give us one more way of predicting what was coming.
I don’t know what swamp mallows normally smell like, but these smelled like apples, making my mouth water and my stomach clench at the same time. I was starting to think that most Snow Whites were thin not because the narrative liked skinny girls, but because they couldn’t force themselves to eat once the smell of apples had started permeating everything.
I was standing in front of my closet, selecting the appropriate black suit to wear to work, when my phone rang. I clicked it on. “Henry,” I said, sounding considerably more awake than I had only ten minutes before.
“Agent Marchen, this is Agent Remus with Dispatch, we have reported incursion in your region, what’s your status?”
“Available, preparing for the field,” I said, grabbing a jacket from its hanger. “I just spoke with my Archivist, and he’s also preparing to be dispatched. Do we know what kind of incursion we’re dealing with here?”
“Confirmed one-three-eight dash-one.”
I made a disgusted sound. “A Little Mermaid.”
“Directions will be sent to your phone,” said Piotr. “You now know everything that we do. Try not to get yourself killed this time.”
“Don’t worry, Piotr,” I said, balancing the phone between my cheek and shoulder as I closed the closet with my free hand. “Once a month is my limit.”
Now it was his turn to make a disgusted sound before he hung up. I chuckled to myself, and then turned to the business of getting ready to go.
#
The address Piotr provided took me to one of the smaller suburbs that clustered around our fair city like shelf fungus ringing a tree stump. Our van was already parked in front of a low-slung colonial home when I pulled up. The front door was open, and Andy was standing on the lawn, consoling a yellow-haired girl in a manual wheelchair. I turned off the car and opened the door, sliding my keys into my pocket as I stood.
“You took your time getting here,” said Sloane’s voice from directly behind me.
I jumped, yelping in surprise as I whirled to face her.
She watched me struggle to catch my breath with apparent disinterest. Finally, when I was sure that I wasn’t about to have a heart attack, she said in a flat deadpan, “Boo.”
“I will report you to Human Resources so fast you’ll still be standing here when they show up with your formal reprimand,” I said. It was pure reflex, and we both knew it—she had startled me, and now I was threatening her. We’d been doing this dance for a long damn time. “What did you do to your hair?”
“Are you really going to stand outside an active incursion and grill me about my hair? I guess you really are a fairy tale princess now.” Sloane reached up to pat one of her bleach-white ponytails in an exaggerated preening gesture. Streaks of bloody red and poison apple green wormed through the bleached strands, somehow looking less like Christmas and more like a crisis getting ready to happen. “I figured it was time for a change. Between you and Demi, all the ‘black haired girl’ slots are taken.”
I arched an eyebrow. “So sorry.”
“You should be. My field team leader before you was a Snow Queen. She’s why I started dyeing my hair black in the first place. Blondes may have more fun, but I hate getting shown up by people whose hair is naturally blue.”
I lowered my eyebrow, my dubiousness fading into a frown. “Why are you stalling?”
Now it was Sloane’s turn to jump, a guilty look flashing across her face. “I’m not stalling.”
“You met me outside an active incursion because you wanted to talk about your hair. Don’t try telling me I brought it up—you only put it in ponytails when you want us to ask if you’ve had a haircut recently. Why are you stalling?”
Sloane hesitated. That put my back up further. Sloane never hesitated. Finally she said, “The girl in the wheelchair isn’t our target.”
I blinked. Until Sloane said it, I hadn’t even realized I was making that assumption. It was a natural one, though. Fully half of the Little Mermaids we encountered were people who had been injured in an accident of some kind, and who wanted to walk again almost as much as they wanted to find true love. “She’s not?”
“He came home to drown,” said Sloane bleakly. She met my eyes for only a moment before looking back toward the little suburban house with its sheltering ring of unmarked black cars. There were more vehicles here than would have been needed for simple team transport. That alone should have tipped me off about our target being dead: cleanup was already on the scene. “He took the knife into the water with him. I guess he figured the chlorine would wash the blood away.”
That caught my attention. “Blood?”
Sloane nodded. “His clothes were covered in it. And here’s the upsetting part: none of it’s his.”
“Oh,” I said faintly.
As if the rest of it weren’t upsetting enough already.
#
Little Mermaids are a relatively recent addition to the Index: technically, they’re not listed in the ATI, since the version used by mundane scholars only looks at true folk tales and motifs, not stories whose authors have been identified and listed in the public record. Maybe we shouldn’t list the voiceless girls and boys either, but our job is hard enough without splitting our best defense into multiple rulebooks. Everything goes into our official Index—the Thumbelinas and the Peter Pans, the Match Girls and the Captain Hooks. And the Little Mermaids. Always the damn Little Mermaids.
Like so many stories, the Little Mermaid narrative requires multiple players: the Mermaid, the Prince, the Sea Witch, and the sibling or siblings who can provide a murder weapon. I walked past Andy and the crying girl in the wheelchair, keeping my eyes fixed firmly on the front door to prevent her getting too good a look at me. She was already upset. Seeing someone who looked like a modern-day interpretation of Death walking into her house wasn’t going to help.
Jeff was in the living room directing a group of cleanup staffers when Sloane and I came through the door. He turned toward the sound of our footsteps, and offered a genial nod. “Agent Marchen, Agent Winters.”
Professionalism: right. He probably suspected at least one of the cleanup crew’s members to be reporting our activities back to Headquarters, and he wasn’t likely to be wrong about that. “What’s the situation?”
“Michael Christian, age twenty-four, deceased,” said Jeff. “He was found floating face down in the pool by his younger sister, Linda, who called the police. Dispatch had been monitoring a narrative spike from this area. We were able to intercept the call, and have taken possession of the scene.”
Including the little sister, who probably had no idea what was going on, and who had just lost her brother. Shit. “Any sign that someone else was involved with getting him into the water?”
Jeff shook his head. “He’s still in the pool—I assumed you’d want to see the body before we moved it—but there are no signs of foul play. Everything is consistent with a single person drowning.”
“Except for the blood.”
“Except for the blood,” Jeff grimly agreed.
“Okay, this is all portentous and spooky and all, but can we go see the dead guy now? Because you people are serio
usly boring me.” Sloane rocked back onto her heels, giving the living room a seemingly disinterested once-over before adding, “And they’re orphans. Parents have been dead five, six years. Probably explains why he was such a good target—if they had any fairy tale potential at all, losing their parents was like a flare to the narrative.”
“Somebody check the records on this family, find out what happened to the parents and when,” I snapped to the cleanup crew, neither arguing with Sloane nor asking her to explain her reasoning further. “Agent Davis, take me to the body.”
“Right this way,” said Jeff, and started toward the back of the house, plainly expecting us to follow him.
As we walked I scanned the rooms around us, first the front room, and then the hall that led into the dining room adjoining the backyard. Sloane was right. The décor was elegant, obviously chosen with exquisite care—and at least five years out of date. Something had caused the people who lived here to stop caring about whether or not their pictures reflected reality. And in all the full-length shots, Linda was standing on her own two feet, not confined to the chair I’d seen in front of the house.
The backyard was as large and well-designed as the rest of the house, and here at least they’d been keeping things up, maybe because hiring a landscaper was easier to deal with than the local homeowners association. A brown-haired man floated in the middle of the pool, the back of his shirt soaked through with blood. It was still leaking into the water, sending out little crimson tendrils that dissolved as the tireless action of the pool cleaner sucked the blood away.
I walked to the edge of the pool and stopped, crouching down. “How sure are we about drowning as the cause of death?”
“Fairly sure,” said Jeff. “We’ll need to do an autopsy and toxicology screen to make sure that he didn’t drug or poison himself before going into the water, but one of the cleanup staffers got in and swam beneath him to check for a cut throat.” He caught my look and put his hands up, adding, “We tested the water for biohazards before anyone went in.”