Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(80)

“What, no salt or pepper for the cultured monster who reads?”

Justus asked, when Monster finished with the organs and moved on to crunching the bones.

Monster snorted, his steaming breath raising a cloud of feather fluff from his bloodstained snout. “This turkey thoughtfully ate some herbs, so it was already stuffed.”

Justus stifled a laugh and looked out into the woods. He wasn’t supposed to be enjoying himself. He should have shot Monster through the eye, while the Greve was eating. Now it was too late.

“What are you?” Justus asked suddenly.

Monster met Justus’s eyes. “I am this.”

“But how did you become this? Were you a baby monster, once?”

Justus persisted.

Justus’s arrows were lying within Monster’s reach. The Greve plucked one from the quiver and turned it over in his enormous fingers as he spoke.

“I will tell you a story,” Monster said. “Long ago, there was a rich man, a magnificent hunter, who tried to impress a woman with his prowess. He told her he would bring her a thousand beasts, and so he set about killing everything he could get his hands on—never two of the same kind. Squirrel, hare, grouse, deer, wolf, even fish and snake.

On the last day of his hunt, he killed an owl.

“The owl was a witch’s familiar. The witch found her pet in the rich man’s personal tannery, tacked up to dry on the wall. Devastated and bent on revenge, the witch set about stealing a piece from each of the thousand beasts, and sewed them into a cursed cloak.”

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? Cory Skerry ?

There was a snap, and Monster looked down at the arrow, which had broken into four pieces in his mighty grip.

“She presented this cloak to the rich man and told him that only the greatest hunter should wear it. When the arrogant Greve put on his gift, it transformed him into a bulk of muscle with a thunderous voice and immense strength, indistinguishable from the human he once was. The witch thought herself clever, because now the hunter had become a great prize. Surely another hunter would make short work of him to gain such a rare and strange pelt—but she underestimated the fears of men. No one wanted to risk their life, even when it became clear it would save the lives of others.”

Monster belched and got to his feet. “Forgive me, I didn’t think it would be so brittle,” he said, handing Justus the splinters of broken arrow. “Perhaps the head can be saved.”

Justus wondered what he thought he was doing. He expected to shoot down Monster with these feathered sewing pins? To stab him with his butter knife of a cutlass? Maybe the witch should have made a tinier, weaker monster with her curse.

When Monster took to the trail, Justus followed at a short distance.

Snow began to fall. It caked the hem of his dress, attracting more snow with annoying regularity, and Justus paused periodically to shake it loose so it wouldn’t trip him.

He studied Monster’s broad form, shaped so much like a man’s in the shoulders and back, undeniably animal in the tail and bent hind legs. The unhealed wounds showed angry and red in his otherwise impenetrable pelt. If Justus could get close enough to stab into the wounds Monster already had, perhaps he could ruin Monster’s guts.

But if he’d already been punctured there, and he was walking around with no apparent pain, Justus did not imagine it was much of a gap in the Greve’s armor.

Perhaps he could be poisoned, but then again, perhaps Monster would smell the impurity. Justus didn’t want to risk it. Perhaps while Monster was asleep . . . but Justus knew better. Any hunter avoided taking a predator in its lair. It was best to catch it during a routine, ? 249 ?

? Castle of Masks ?

when it was focused on drinking water or eating its kill—not when it had nothing better to do than wake up and savage you.

Justus was wondering if Monster would stop at a stream to drink, as his muzzle was unfit to suck at the nozzle of a water flask, when the clump of snow weighed too low and dragged the hem of his dress under his boot. Justus stumbled to the side, stepped on the hem again, and fell down the steep ravine.

He skidded over an expanse of decaying leaves and pine needles.

Snow-laden branches whipped Justus’s face and tangled in his hair, but every time his fingers closed on a clump of roots and leaves, his momentum ripped them free. Even after a stump knocked the wind out of him, Justus was most worried about being sliced by the hidden cutlass. He couldn’t untie it any more than he could slow his descent.