Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(36)

Turning, she spotted Laurel, hovering between the sturgeon’s tail and the wall. Flopping down on the sturgeon’s back, she reached for Laurel while the kelpie swam furiously for open water. Seizing hold ? 112 ?

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of the water horse, Jenny lifted her, dripping, while Laurel struggled in the hag’s massive hand, shifting from horse to girl to slippery fish.

“What’s this?” Jenny snarled. “Did you sting me?”

Russell ran lightly up the hag’s spine, using the braids in her hair to climb to the top of her head.

He stood there, sword in hand, and his eyes met Laurel’s. She nodded, once, then sank her razor teeth into Jenny’s fleshy palm.

Enraged, the storm hag flung Laurel away. The kelpie landed, broken, on the rocks of the shoreline and lay there without moving.

Russell rappelled down the front of the hag’s face. Bracing his feet on either side of her nose, a hair’s breadth above her gaping mouth, he plunged his sword into one of her sulfur pool eyes.

The storm hag exploded, covering Russell head to toe with yellow goo and launching him far out into the lake. He hit the water hard and sank, a helpless bag of broken bones in the churning waves.

Drowning’s not a bad way to go, he said to himself as he spiraled down.

Then multiple hands were supporting him, lifting him back toward the surface. He saw it coming toward him, so brilliant it hurt his eyes, and then his face broke through, into the sunlight.

Incredibly, the storm was over, the waters lapping calmly against the breakwall, the sky that brilliant blue that sometimes happens on rare days in autumn.

“Laurel,” Russell gasped. “Where’s Laurel?”

“Don’t worry,” the nixies said. “You go together.”

“Good,” Russell said. And closed his eyes.

An honor guard of six nixies laid the two warriors side by side in a small boat filled with water lilies and sea glass and some of the sea hag’s ropes of pearls, since she wouldn’t be using them any more.

Followed by a retinue of nixies and grindylows and shellycoats and water dragons and brook horses, they towed the boat far out into the lake, to a place where the sunlit waves glittered all the way to the horizons. The mourners commenced to diving, bringing up pebbles ? 113 ?

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and stones from the bottom of the lake and piling them into the boat until it sank beneath the surface.

The nixies scattered flowers over the warriors’ watery grave and chanted,

I will always place the mission first.

I will never accept defeat.

I will never quit.

I will never leave a fallen comrade.

Every one of them knew that a new Lake Erie legend had been born.

“This is it?” Margaret MacNeely ducked under the metal infrastructure of the bridge. “This is just as you found it?”

Sergeant Watson nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Except, you know, for the personal effects we’ve already given you. The medals and like that. We were afraid somebody would take them, if we left them there.”

There wasn’t much. A sleeping bag, left unzipped, gaping open.

The charred remains of a fire. A U.S. Army backpack.

Margaret knelt and poked through the backpack. A few flannel shirts, socks, underwear, an extra pair of jeans. The e-reader she’d given him last Christmas, carefully protected in a plastic bag. She flicked it on, scanning through the bookshelves. They held the books she’d pre-loaded it with, nothing more. Before his four deployments, he’d been an avid reader. These days, he had trouble concentrating long enough to read a book.

On the ground next to his sleeping bag lay some shreds of dried vegetation. It looked like seaweed.

Margaret slid the straps of the backpack over her shoulders and returned to the riverbank. “But you didn’t find a body?”

“Sometimes it takes months for a body to surface, especially this time of year,” Watson said. “Sometimes they never do.”

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Margaret walked along the rocky beach. “Why would he come here?” she muttered, kicking driftwood out of the way, shivering in the November wind.

“Does he have friends in Cleveland?” Watson asked. “Has he ever been here before?”

Margaret shook her head. “Not that I know of. But, I guess it’s possible. I haven’t seen much of him since his discharge from the service.” Looking down the shoreline to the west, she saw a small flotilla of boats bobbing just inside the breakwall. And more people on the wall itself.