“Perhaps yes. Perhaps no. It’s one of those delicate situations you mentioned. For both of us.”

  I hadn’t said a word concerning my vision of Oddling to Evis really. But I hid my thoughts, forced a smile. Knowing the resting place of a thing like Hisvin was a secret whole Houses would fight to the death for.

  The dead woman laughed, the sound of it wet and choking.

  “I like you, goodman,” it said. “No one else dares speak so plain to me. I find it refreshing.”

  She put her dead hand on my knee and squeezed.

  “This time.”

  I managed a nod.

  “So we’re done. There won’t be any more new-moon vampire picnics. My clients got their sister back. I got my fee.”

  “We are done. Peace and tranquility are restored. Good has triumphed, and evil has been, I am told, dismembered and then burned.”

  The carriage clattered on.

  “I trust Miss Tomas is recovered from her adventures?” asked the corpse.

  “Stop the cab,” I said. “Stop it right now.”

  “Of course,” said the corpse. The dead cab man cracked his whip at horses that weren’t there. At once, the carriage began to slow.

  “I owe you. I owe you twice, from the War. But if you ever mention Darla’s name again I’ll make a little trip up to Oddling. I’ll come and I’ll break down your door, and I’ll gut you dead. You hear me? Dead. No coming back.”

  The dead woman laughed. Her lips trailed black ropes of thick fluid and her withered black tongue writhed and worked.

  “Oh well spoken,” she said. “I expected no less.”

  I opened the door, and I was out.

  The carriage glided away, flies and stench and screams in its wake.

  I marched the opposite way, all the way to Darla’s door. She was there and safe, baking a pie, a spot of flour on the end of her nose. She took me in without a single questioning word.

  We are “walking out”, as Mama calls it. Mama is always pestering me to buy Darla fireflowers on Sweetheart Days or take her shopping at lunch. Any day now I expect Mama will start pointing out houses in the neighborhood that would be just perfect for a nice young couple starting out.

  I sighed, put my feet on my desk, laced my fingers behind my head. One thing at a time Mama. I won’t be walking any aisles until I can stop walking Rannit at night with my head halfway to the clouds and murder and flames in my heart.

  Things the huldra had showed me come back to me sometimes. I’ll look at the light streaming through the clouds, and I’ll briefly see a way to hurl lightning. A candle will flicker, just so, and I’ll see tiny, scurrying manikins, darting away from the wavering light, but each at my beck and call if I could just remember those long, strange words.

  Three-leg Cat leaped suddenly into my lap, and I spilled hot tea. Three-leg scampered away hissing, and I rose cussing. Then Mama’s shadow fell over my door.

  “Boy,” she said, turning my latch. “You in there?”

  I mopped tea, took a deep breath, thought about Mama’s question. Am I? Was I? Will I be?

  Another shadow joined Mama’s. This one was tall and slender.

  “Are you alone in there, Markhat?” asked Darla, and I could hear the impish grin she wore in her tone, though I could see only shadows through my cheap and bubbled glass.

  “Time will tell,” I said. I drained the cup of its last sip of dark bitter tea. “Come on in, ladies,” I added, sitting up straight and hiding Mama’s cup in a drawer. The fancy chocolate cake Martha had dropped off earlier sat untouched on my desk. “I’ve baked us all a cake.”

  Mama flung my door open, grinning, and all but dragged Darla inside.

  Darla eyed Martha’s cake as though it might conceal Trolls or haunts.

  “You did not,” she announced, “bake that cake.”

  “I beg to differ, Miss Tomas,” I replied. “I have baked thousands of cakes in my day. In fact, I’m scraping the finder’s eye off my door and painting a baker’s rolling pin on it tomorrow.”

  Darla laughed. Then she glided around my desk and dropped into my lap.

  “Cakes and shirts,” she said. “Do I have reason to be jealous, Markhat?”

  “Not at all,” I replied. I lifted an eyebrow, as if pondering. “Unless, of course, it’s an unusually good cake.”

  We kissed.

  We kissed again.

  “Well I reckon I’ll be heading on,” gruffed Mama. She dropped a brown-wrapped parcel on my desk—more bitter tea leaves, no doubt—and waddled out my door.

  “Alone at last,” said Darla. Her eyes twinkled. “And I know just what to—”

  Knock, knock, knock. Not Mama’s knock, either.

  Darla sighed and stood.

  “I’ll wait for a while at Mama’s—” she began.

  I pulled her back down. She giggled and kicked.

  “Come back tomorrow,” I yelled, at the door. “I’m busy right now.”

  “But—”

  “I said come back tomorrow,” I yelled, putting some bellow into it. “No buts. No more knocking. Come. Back. Tomorrow.”

  Silence.

  Darla touched the Angel Malan I wore around my neck, the one she’d left for me, all those nights ago. I caught her searching my eyes, just for an instant, looking to see what might still be in there with me. I didn’t ask what she saw. I doubted the answer would please either of us.

  Darla took my hand.

  “It’s losing its grip, a little every day,” she said. How do women do that?

  I just nodded. I wasn’t so sure. She didn’t see the things I dreamed of.

  “Mama says you’ve already been through the worst.”

  “Mama’s tea has been the most frightening part of the whole ordeal. I’m terrified she’s just feeding me her laundry water.”

  Darla tweaked my nose.

  “She spends hours brewing that…tea, Markhat, I was there when a package came all the way from that place she calls home—Pot Lock, something like that?”

  “Pot Lockney. I hear they eat vampires whole there, dressed and snarling.”

  Darla giggled. “Well, Mama is going to a lot of trouble and you, Mister Markhat, could be a little more appreciative.”

  “Oh, I’m very appreciative of all my womenfolk. Why, I bought a middling expensive bottle of wine just for you this very day.”

  Darla beamed. “I’m flattered. Does it have a cork, or do we twist something off the top?”

  I sat Darla on the edge of my desk. She swung her long legs back and forth at the knees and watched expectantly as I rose, went to my bunkroom, and came back with a blood-red bottle of ten-year-old wine in my hand.

  “Cork and a label,” I said. I offered Darla a pair of glasses—real glasses, not mugs, and clean.

  She smiled.

  I pulled corks and filled glasses. We resumed our preferred seating arrangement of my chair and my lap. I held my glass beneath my nose and made a show of sloshing it around in the glass and sniffing it.

  “You have before you a slightly warm Rethmarch Red,” I said. “Bottled at the height of the summer in ninety-one, from grapes grown on the slopes of the famed Rethmarch Vineyard itself. I believe Madame will find it at once hearty and ethereal. Or is it fruity and redolent of oak? I can never keep my fancy wines straight.”

  “You talk too much, Mister Markhat,” said Darla, making herself comfortable in my lap with an intriguing series of wiggles and twists. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were in love with the sound of your own voice.”

  “It’s a good voice. At once throaty and redolent of tenor.”

  She interrupted me with a kiss.

  And if anything—anyone—ever lays the huldra left inside me to rest, I think it shall be Darla.

  About the Author

  Frank Tuttle discovered writing at an early age. Later, when Frank figured out that writing did not in fact involve mixing seahorses with caustic lye compounds, he began to enjoy writing. And when Frank was first paid to write about things that never happened to people that never existed, he knew he’d found a vocation to take the place of professional carnival weight-guessing.

  Frank is a hairy, nine-foot tall hominid weighing nearly six hundred pounds who makes his home in the heavily-forested wilderness of the American Pacific Northwest. And he wishes all you people would stop trying to film him, and that business of making plaster casts of his footprints is really beginning to cheese him off.

  To learn more about Frank Tuttle, please visit www.franktuttle.com. Send an email to Frank at franktuttle@franktuttle.com. Send money to Frank any way you please, but quickly.

  Look for these titles by Frank Tuttle

  Now Available:

  Dead Man’s Rain

  The Mister Trophy

  Can a haunted man help the dead find peace?

  Dead Man’s Rain

  © 2008 Frank Tuttle

  Markhat is a Finder, charged with the post-war task of tracking down sons and fathers gone suddenly missing when an outbreak of peace left the army abandoned where they stood. But now it’s ten years on after the war, and about all he’s finding is trouble.

  This time, trouble comes in the form of a rich widow with a problem. Her dearly departed husband, Ebed Merlat, keeps ambling back from the grave for nocturnal visits. Markhat saw a lot of during the war, but he’s never seen anyone, rich or poor, rise from the grave and go tromping around the landscape. But for the right price, he’s willing to look into it.

  As a storm gathers and night falls, Markhat finds darker things than even murder lurk amid the shadows of House Merlat.

  Enjoy the following excerpt for Dead Man’s Rain:

  Curfew in Rannit falls with the sun. The night belongs to the half-dead, the Watch and anybody crazy enough to risk running afoul of the former or tripping over the recumbent, snoring forms of the latter.

  Curfew fell, and the big old bells on the Square clanged nine times. Before the last notes had faded Mama Hog herself was yelling “Boy, wake up,” and banging on my door.

  I swung my feet off my desk, put my sandwich down on a plate and hurried to the door.

  Mama Hog looked up and grinned. “The Widow Merlat found you,” she said, not asking but reporting.

  “She did indeed,” I said, opening the door. “What a chucklesome old dear. She’s coming by later for tea and a séance.”

  Mama cackled and trundled inside. “The Widow Merlat’s got the fear, boy,” she said. “Got it bad.” Mama plopped down into my client’s chair and started eyeing my sandwich.

  “You make that?”

  “It’s from Eddie’s,” I said. “Tear off a hunk.”

  She tore, bit, chewed.

  “You sent me a lunatic, Mama,” I said, shaking my finger. “Shame on you.”

  Bite, chew, swallow. Then Mama wiped her lips on her sleeve and grinned. “She ain’t crazy, boy,” Mama said. “She’s ec-cen-tric. Ain’t that the word for rich folks?”

  “She thinks her dead husband spends his evening knock-knock-knocking at her door,” I said. “Eccentric doesn’t cover that, Mama, and you know it.”

  Mama shrugged and chewed.

  “I have no love for the idle rich,” I said. “But I’ve got no desire to fleece sad old widow women, either.” I went behind my desk, pulled back my chair and sat. “Why not send her to a doctor or a priest, Mama?” I said. “Why me? Why a finder?”

  My sandwich—melted Lowridge cheese on smoked Pinford ham—was vanishing fast. I grabbed a hunk when Mama paused to speak.

  “The widow ain’t crazy, boy,” she said. “Could be she ain’t seeing things, either.”

  I shook my head and swallowed. “Your cards tell you that?”

  Mama Hog nodded. “Cards say she’s got a hard rain coming, boy,” she said. “Turned up the Dead Man, and the Storm, and the Last Dancer, all in the same hand. Dead Man’s Rain. That ain’t good.” Mama grabbed another morsel of sandwich, guffawed around it. “But I don’t need cards to see the sun. The Widow Merlat is headed for a bad time. She knows it. I know it. You’d best know it, too.”

  “Dead is dead, Mama,” I said. “That’s what I know.”

  Mama grinned. “There’s other things you need to know, boy. Things about the ones that come back.”

  “First thing being that they don’t,” I said.

  Mama pretended not to hear.

  “Rev’nants only walk at night,” she said. “It’s got to be pitch dark.”

  “Do tell.”

  “You can’t catch ’em coming out of the ground,” said Mama. “It’s no good trying. They’re like haunts, that way. Solid as rock one minute, thin as fog the next.”

  “Sounds handy,” I said. “Do their underbritches get all misty and ethereal too, or is that one of the things man was not meant to know?”

  “Don’t look in his eyes, boy. Don’t look in his eyes, or breathe air he’s breathed.”

  “I won’t even ask about borrowing his toothbrush,” I said.

  Mama slapped my desktop with both her hands.

  “You listen,” she hissed. “Believe or not, but you listen.”

  “I’ve got all night.”

  “His mouth will be open,” said Mama. “Wide open. He’s been saving a scream, all that time in the ground. Saving up a scream for the one that put him there.” Mama lifted a stubby finger and shook it in my face. “Don’t you listen when he screams. You put your hands over your ears and you yell loud as you can, but don’t you listen. Cause if you do, you’ll hear that scream for the rest of your days, and there ain’t nothing nobody nowhere can do for you then.”

  Silence fell. Only after Curfew do we get any silence, in my neighborhood. I let it linger for a moment.

  I leaned forward, put my eyes down even with Mama’s, motioned her closer, spoke.

  “Boo.”

  Mama glared. “Don’t get in his way, boy,” she said. “He didn’t come back for you. But that won’t mean nothing if you get in the way.”

  “Dead is dead, Mama,” I said.

  Mama sighed. “Dead is dead,” she agreed. “Sometimes, though, good and dead ain’t dead enough.”

  A troll’s missing head could cause Markhat to lose his own.

  The Mister Trophy

  © 2008 Frank Tuttle

  All the finder Markhat wanted was a beer at Eddie’s. Instead he gets a case that will bring him face to fang with crazed, blood-craving halfdead, a trio of vengeful Troll warriors, and Mama Hog’s backstreet magic. Plus, the possible resurgence of the Troll War.

  All right in his own none-too-quiet neighborhood.

  Through the town of Rannit’s narrow alleys and mean streets, Markhat tries to stay one step ahead of disaster. And ignore Mama Hog’s dire warnings that this time, the head that rolls could be his own.

  Warning: This book contains well-dressed vampires, extremely polite Trolls, and occasional bursts of humor. Avoid reading it when landing aircraft, welding in the nude or taunting grumpy jackals while wearing pork chop earmuffs.

  Enjoy the following excerpt for The Mister Trophy:

  Eddie the barkeep stared at the Troll and then at the “Dead Troll Tavern” emblem carved into the bar-top and then back at the Troll. The Troll grinned. Forty-eight finger-long incisors popped out, sharper and shinier than anything Eddie might have hidden behind the bar and dripping with poisonous Troll saliva to boot.

  Eddie deftly dropped his drying rag on the Dead Troll carving, wiped his grubby hands on his equally grubby apron and donned a shaky tough-guy scowl. “Yeah?” he said to the Troll. “You want something?”

  The Troll boomed something back. A second later, Kingdom words rang out in a flat male human voice. “I come for the finder Markhat.”

  I choked on my beer. The Troll’s neckless head swiveled, owl-fashion, to face me. It gargled more words in Troll, and its translator spell spoke again. “You are the finder named Markhat.”

  “Nope,” I said quickly. “Not me. Not Markhat. Never met the gent.”

  The Troll glided over, flashing me that mouthful of nightmares smile. “I was told you would deny your name,” it said. “Shameful. I am—” The Troll spoke its name, and the translator gave up, leaving me with the sound of dishwater gurgling down a sink-drain.

  “Honored to meet you, Walking Stone,” I said, as the Troll reached my table. “May your shadow fall tall and your soul grow to meet it.” I rose, my knowledge of Troll etiquette nearly exhausted. “I am not he that you seek, though, and anyway I hear he married a centaur and retired to the Fiti Coast. Why don’t you finish my ale and—”

  The Troll’s grin split wider. It made a very human gesture for silence, finger at lips, and then it pulled back its greatcloak just far enough to reveal three fist-sized chunks of shiny solid gold on a fat wrought silver chain. Trolls don’t value gold themselves, but they do use it to barter with the other races. Word is that Trolls don’t haggle; they just stack money in big piles until someone says “yes”.

  I sat down. Hard. The Troll shoved a rickety chair aside and squatted on the floor across from me.

  “I walked fifty sunsets to see you, finder,” it said. “I wade wide swamps, swim deep rivers, sleep on brother stones.”

  “I live three blocks from here,” I replied. “So, I suppose, I walked fifteen minutes and drank two beers and sat on cousin chair.”

  The Troll’s translator choked my words slowly out. The bar cleared, except Eddie, whose right eye—the blue one—hovered unsteadily behind a wide crack in the storeroom door.

  The Troll barked and gurgled. My hackles rose, though I recognized booming Trollish laughter. “You jest with me, finder Markhat,” it said. “You are brave. I admire bravery.” It leaned closer, yellow slitted owl-eyes narrowing. “I pay well for bravery.”

  I shook my head. “Someone usually does, Walking Stone,” I said. “Just how much bravery are you wanting to buy?”

 

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