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  “You’re a frog,” said Andy. “I think that kissing random wildlife is sort of inappropriate, Mike or no Mike.”

  “More or less inappropriate than the time you kissed that sunny-haired boy with the fairy tale eyes?” The frog hopped closer. Its smile was gone. Somehow that didn’t help. “He was trying not to become a Cinderella, and you could have given him bus fare and the address for a safe house, but instead you kissed him behind the bar where he’d been bucking bottles for a dollar an hour, didn’t you? You drove him almost a hundred miles and you told your precious Mike that you’d been stuck late at work. You weren’t unfaithful with your body—not any more than a kiss, and those haven’t been an executable offense in centuries—but you wanted to be, didn’t you? You dreamt of it. You’re dreaming of it still, when the night is dark and your heart betrays you.”

  Andy’s mouth was dry, and his breath came in short heaves, like his lungs no longer quite knew how to do their job. That had to be what was making him light-headed: he was a big man, he needed his air if he was going to keep going. “You … you can’t know about that,” he stammered. “No one knows about that.” Not even Henry. He’d told her that the kid (Jason his name was Jason) didn’t trust the buses, that he was too afraid of being caught there by his wicked stepfather. And she’d believed it, because Andy was trustworthy, and because she’d never had an impure thought in her lily-colored life.

  “I know because you know, and you didn’t really think that you were talking to a frog, now, did you? Frogs don’t talk.” The frog winked one enormous golden eye. “I’ll just go fetch that wallet for you now, and then we can have a serious conversation about what you’re really willing to pay to get it back, all right? You just wait right where you are.”

  With a single mighty hop the frog was back in the water, disappearing into the black. Andy tried to convince himself to stand, and found to his dismay—if not to his particular surprise—that his legs would not obey him. He was going to wait, it seemed, until the frog-that-wasn’t came back with his wallet and the bargaining began in earnest.

  Andy Robinson sat alone in the mud and thought that he had never been so frightened in his life.

  #

  For one terrifying moment, it seemed like my grand gesture was going to be just that: a grand gesture that changed nothing and didn’t bring Jeff any closer to home. Then the slack lips pressed against mine shifted, slightly at first, but with increasing intensity, until Jeff was kissing me back with an urgency that I could never have imagined. He shifted positions, and I thought he was going to pull away until his hand hesitantly touched my hair and I realized that he was actually trying to draw me closer. I scooted forward on my knees, encouraging the motion. Anything that would keep him with us.

  Behind me, Sloane started laughing. “Holy shit, Snowdrop, you’ve got the Professor’s motor up and running.”

  I freed a hand, held it up behind me, and flipped her off. That only made her laugh harder.

  I turned my attention back to Jeff, but it was too late; the damage had been done. As soon as I had become distracted, he had stopped responding quite so enthusiastically, and now he was pulling away from me. I leaned back, not forcing the issue.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  He blinked at me, mouth working silently as he tried to process the question. His eyes were open now and very wide behind the wire rims of his glasses. I’d never noticed before just how brown they were, flecked with little spots of hazel and almost-gold.

  Finally, he figured out what he wanted to say: “Henry, you kissed me.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry. You were story-struck, and we needed to get you out of it any way that we could.” I tucked a lock of hair behind my ear, grimacing. “I’ll understand completely if you want to file a harassment claim or something, but in my defense, we were trying to prevent you getting reported to Dispatch as a victim of the narrative, and—”

  Jeff’s kiss cut me off before I could get another word out. I squeaked in surprise before allowing myself to sink into it, enjoying the moment while it lasted. It was probably just left over narrative pressure encouraging him to behave like a good prince. And since he hadn’t kissed me while I was sleeping in a glass coffin, it wasn’t like he could do me any damage, story-wise.

  When he pulled away, his cheeks were flushed. “I really appreciate you snapping me out of my story, even though it’s going to be hard not to document ‘kiss from a beautiful woman’ as a means of paying your elves,” he said. “But I assure you, I’m not going to be filing any sort of complaint against you for doing something I wanted done so very badly.”

  “Oh,” I said dazedly.

  “Yeah, yeah, the dumb bitch is the fairest in the land, we know,” said Sloane, sounding bored. It was an affectation; there was an edge of concern under her words that rendered them both softer and more biting than usual. “Now that we’ve got that out of the way, how about you tell us what happened?”

  “The story.” Jeff’s voice turned hollow. It was like he’d seen a ghost. I shifted positions so that I could sit beside him, letting him see both Sloane and me as he spoke. He caught my hand before I could get too far away, and I stopped moving. If he needed me for comfort right now, he could have me. “It was … it was here.”

  I frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I heard the sound of hammering in the van. Shoes being made, leather being cut … it wanted me, Henry.” He glanced at me, the streetlight glinting off his glasses. “This isn’t happening because of some impossible concordance of events. This is intentional. The narrative is hunting, and I think … I think that it’s hunting for us.”

  #

  Memetic incursion in progress: estimated tale type 327A (“Hansel and Gretel”)

  Status: ACTIVE

  Demi stepped out of the trees and into something out of a dream—or a nightmare. It was impossible to tell the difference, because there was just no way that it was real. No matter how strange her life had become in the past few months, things like this just didn’t exist outside of … outside …

  Outside of fairy tales.

  The house was the sort of place where you could raise a family or live by yourself, content with your music and your books and maybe a small dog or something, so that the nights wouldn’t seem so lonely. It was easily three floors in height, built so that it would have blended easily with the houses in the development outside the wood … if not for its building materials. Demi loved it on sight, and feared it, too, because of what it represented.

  Every inch of the house, from the base of the foundation to the tip of the roof, was made of sweets. Great slabs of frosted gingerbread formed the walls, decorated with curlicue swirls of frosting and with dozens of pieces of penny candy, candy corn, and jewel-toned hard candies. The windows looked a little too thin and irregular to be glass, but they could be hardened corn syrup and cream of tartar. Sugar glass was easy to make, if you knew how, and she’d learned from her grandmother years ago.

  Smoke wafted from the red velvet brick chimney, and that was the most impossible thing of all. No one could possibly live in a house like this, made of sweets and sitting in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t safe. It wasn’t sanitary. It wasn’t up to building code. It had to be some kind of a trap.

  The front door swung open in silent invitation. Demi took a step forward.

  “Gregory? Hannah? Are you kids inside the creepy candy house? Because I want you to come out of there right now.” Her voice wavered a little at the end, but she felt that it was a good command, overall. It sounded commanding, at least, and that was all she’d really been hoping for.

  This time, the giggling came from inside the house. Demi took another step forward.

  “Stop messing around!” she shouted. “I have to get you back to your parents!”

  The giggles stopped. The candy house didn’t change, and yet somehow everything changed, as it went from whimsical and silly to looming threateningly over her, a haunted
mansion waiting for its next victim. Demi shuddered as she took another step. The kids were inside. She had to get the kids. She couldn’t go back without them. She couldn’t possibly—

  Her flute felt hot in her hands, like a burning brand plucked from the center of a fire. She would have thrown anything else aside if it had come so close to burning her, but not this, not now. Instead, Demi closed her eyes and raised the burning metal to her lips, fingers already starting to trace a song she didn’t need any sheet music to know. This song was part of her story, and since she was part of her story, that meant that the song was a part of her. All she had ever needed to do was let go of the things that were stopping her from seeing how important it was.

  All she ever had to do was play.

  #

  Sloane twitched. It was a strangely convulsive motion, like she had just been stung by a bee that no one else could see. Jeff and I both turned to look at her. He was sitting on the van’s bumper, drinking from a bottle of Gatorade as he tried to steady himself enough to join us in the field. After what had happened with his story, there was no way we were going to leave him alone again.

  “Sloane?” I said. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “The narrative is spiking, and I don’t know why.” She gave us a serious look. “This is bad.”

  “We already knew that,” I said.

  “I can testify on the matter,” said Jeff.

  “I don’t mean this is ‘see who can get the snarkiest quip in’ bad; I mean this is bad,” Sloane said. “Jeff, were you recording when the noises started?”

  “No, but I talked to Henry on the walkie-talkie while they were going on,” he said, reaching up to adjust his glasses. “Why?”

  “Henry, did you hear anything out of the ordinary?” Sloane turned to me, a strange, fierce hopefulness in her eyes. “Banging, clanging, anything that would say ‘Jeff has opened an illicit elf shoe shop behind his desk’?”

  “No,” I said. “What’s this all about?”

  “Before my current issues with the narrative started, I heard this noise for hours. It was just this huge blaring siren that wouldn’t slack off and wouldn’t stop ringing in my ears. It was enough to make me want to rip the throat out of the world in order to make it stop.” Sloane looked grim. “I don’t think my parrot could hear it. I don’t think anyone could hear it, except for me. The narrative started this shit by going after me.”

  “Why didn’t you—” said Jeff.

  “You never said—” I said, at the same time.

  “Because I didn’t want you people to think I was losing my fucking mind, okay?” Sloane snapped. “I start dreaming about poison apples and you start calling for the therapists and reaching for the restraints. I tell you it started with me hearing an alarm that nobody else could hear, and you start looking into rubber rooms. Thanks, but no thanks. As long as I can keep myself from poisoning Blanche over there,” she gestured violently toward me, “I can do a lot more to figure out what’s going on from out here than I ever could in an Agency institution.”

  “I wouldn’t have let them do that to you,” I said.

  “You wouldn’t have had a choice,” Sloane said, shrugging off my loyalty like it was nothing. She focused back on Jeff. “Okay. We have about thirty seconds before Henry does the math and realizes we’re down two people, who are probably about to be eaten alive by predatory fairy tales. So tell me before she freaks: what can we do? How can we stop this, how did we start this?”

  “I …” Jeff stopped for a moment, paling until his skin tone was close to mine. “Oh, God. You and I were both attacked by our stories. Henry’s been talking to birds. The narratives are leaking. There’s only one thing that could do this.” He put his Gatorade aside, sliding quickly to his feet. “We have to find the others.”

  “You’re not the one I expected to go all big damn hero on me,” said Sloane, grabbing his arm. “We’re not going anywhere until you tell me what your ‘one thing’ is.”

  I wanted to intervene, to tell her to let go of him before somebody got hurt. Instead, I stood frozen, thinking about what they were both saying, and thinking about the crow in Dr. Reynard’s kitchen. Talking to it had seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

  Maybe Deputy Director Brewer was right. Maybe I was being compromised.

  “There are tale types that include storytellers,” said Jeff. “The whole Scheherazade class of narratives depend on someone who can tell them—and that’s just one grouping. We could be dealing with someone, a person, who can control the narrative. And if that’s true …”

  “If that’s true, then we’re all screwed,” I said. “More screwed, I mean. Okay. Let’s go.”

  #

  Memetic incursion in progress: estimated tale type 440 (“The Frog Prince”)

  Status: ACTIVE

  The frog stayed in the water for at least five minutes. Even a talking amphibian couldn’t stop the current from doing its work, and Andy’s wallet hadn’t been that heavy; it must have traveled some distance down the creek bed before the frog went back in to look for it.

  When the frog finally came back out of the water, the wallet clutched smugly in its jaws, Andy was ready for it. He might not have been able to make his legs work, but he was fully capable of moving his arms, and the high weeds around the creek had proved to contain a great many treasures. There were tools there—even makeshift weapons, for a man who knew how to use them.

  The frog probably didn’t even see the rusty old crowbar coming before Andy smashed it down on the fragile plane of the amphibian’s skull. The frog was driven down into the mud, its entire head taking on a distinctly flattened aspect. The wallet shot out of its mouth, coming to rest nearly a foot away.

  “This isn’t … over … you fool …” wheezed the frog. Its legs started to spasm. “You’ll pay. You’ll …” The spasms stopped.

  Andy gave the frog’s body an experimental prod with the end of his crowbar. “You dead, or I need to hit you again? You know what, fuck it. I’m just going to hit you again.”

  He actually hit the frog’s body three more times, until it started to feel less like vengeance and more like sadism. Then he climbed to his feet, his legs suddenly working once more, picked up his wallet, and started looking for a way back up to solid ground.

  He barely even noticed that he was still holding the crowbar.

  #

  Andy had been assigned to follow a bunch of semi-spectral goats over a creek until he either managed to dispel them or found the troll that was inevitably going to show up and start trying to eat them. The idea was to prevent a troll bridge narrative from establishing itself in the area. There were kids around here.

  Jeff, Sloane, and I approached the bridge cautiously. Jeff and I both had our service weapons drawn. Sloane was empty-handed, which made her the most dangerous of us all.

  Something was rustling in the scrub grass that grew around the creek. I stopped, motioning for the others to do the same. “Who’s that trip-trap-tripping over my bridge?” I called.

  “Fuck you,” Andy’s voice replied. One large brown hand appeared through the grass, followed a moment later by his head and shoulders as he pulled himself up to our level. “Where the fuck have you people been all night? I’ve been dying out here.”

  “Nice crowbar,” said Sloane.

  Andy shot the rusty crowbar in his hand a look, like he’d never seen it before. Then he flung it away into the weeds and climbed to his feet. “You didn’t give me all the intel, Henry. I’m pissed.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. He was wet and muddy, and there was what looked like blood on the cuff of one sleeve. “Are you all right?”

  “I took out the troll, no problem,” he said. “But the frog …” A bleak look crossed his face. “I think the frog nearly had me.”

  “You fell into a Frog Prince?” asked Jeff, sounding horrified. “I didn’t think you qualified for a four-forty scenario. You�
��re not a prince. I mean, you’ve never shown any princely tendencies …”

  “Whoever’s driving this thing is trying to take us out,” I said. “If they’re twisting the narrative to force it to do what they want, it doesn’t matter if Andy would normally qualify for a four-forty.” I turned to the muddy agent. “You okay, Andy?”

  “I’m fine,” he snarled. “I beat the goddamn thing to death and left it by the water. You think that’s far enough from happy ever after to save my ass?”

  “I say again, nice crowbar,” said Sloane approvingly.

  “I think you’re good, but don’t really have time to worry about that right now. There’s something more pressing going on, so if you’re capable of moving, we need to move,” I said.

  Andy’s eyes skirted over the three of us, drawing an immediate and unwanted conclusion. “Demi?” he asked.

  “She dropped off the walkie-talkie the same time you did, and we haven’t been able to rouse her,” I said.

  “Then what the fuck are we standing around here for?” he said. “Let’s move.”

  We moved.

  #

  Demi’s assignment had taken her into the little square of woodland still standing at the heart of the newest neighborhood in the area. It was too small to get lost in, yet somehow two of the local children had managed to do exactly that: Gregory and Hannah, twins, age eight. They were ripe for a three-twenty-seven-A, and when the story came calling, they went after it. Demi should have had no trouble pulling the wayward kids out of the woods and returning them to their homes.

  So why the hell wasn’t she answering her walkie-talkie?

  Sloane was the first one into the trees, with Andy’s muddy, rusty crowbar clutched in one hand like a sword. She’d somehow managed to find the thing in the grass, and had refused to leave it behind—probably because she was charmed by the idea of beating someone to death Tarantino-style. As long as she was taking point, I wasn’t going to argue with her about it.