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  “Ghost bears,” I snarled. “Oh, that’s just perfect.”

  I turned. Demi was staring with wide, frightened eyes at the place where the phantom bear had been. Her flute was in her shaking hands.

  “Play something!” I shouted.

  She shook her head and mouthed something that looked like “But Jeff didn’t—”

  “Just play!”

  Demi nodded, raised her flute, and began to play.

  More bears emerged from the shadows and the thin spaces between the walls and the furnishings. They came in every size and type imaginable—even koalas and pandas, which aren’t actually bears. They lumbered and they raced and they were coming right for us.

  Jeff and I took up positions to either side of Demi, shooting at the phantom bears as they came toward us. Only one bullet seemed to be required to dissipate the smaller ones; the big ones, the grizzlies and the Kodiaks, took two or three. I paused twice to reload. Jeff fired more slowly, and he covered for me whenever I was unable to shoot. The whole time, we continued down the hall, making our way step after step toward the interview room.

  We were almost there when the door slammed open and Sloane crashed out into the hall, a fireplace poker in her hand. The incongruous nature of her weapon aside, it was effective; she slashed it through the three nearest bears, opening a path for the three of us. “Come on!” she snarled, lips moving in an exaggerated fashion as she tried to make herself understood despite our earmuffs.

  She didn’t have to tell us twice. We rushed past her into the interview room, Demi piping all the while. Sloane slammed the door behind us. Andy and Jennifer were there: Andy with his gun drawn and his eyes on the door; Jennifer facedown on the table and apparently unconscious.

  “Report,” I said, pulling my earmuffs down and letting them dangle around my neck. “What the hell happened?”

  “She said she needed a nap, and as soon as she closed her eyes, bears,” said Sloane. She shot a glare at Jennifer. “We’ve been trying to wake her up. Bitch sleeps like the dead. And stop that!” She transferred her glare to Demi. “We don’t need more bears, okay? We have plenty of fucking bears. There is no room at the inn.”

  Demi lowered her pipe, looking guilty.

  “Okay,” I said. “So she’s finishing her story at this point. She’s gotten so far along that she’s going to complete. Jeff?”

  “Most variations, the bears wake Goldilocks up and she runs away, never to trouble them again,” he said. I started to relax. He continued: “In others, the bears rip her to pieces as a warning to anyone else who might try breaking into their home.”

  “Fuck,” I muttered. “Andy? Sloane? Did the bears actually hurt anyone when they showed up?”

  “At least three people dead, possibly more by now,” said Andy. “We locked ourselves in here, since this is the epicenter.”

  “And we didn’t shoot her because ghost bears don’t necessarily fuck off when you kill their Goldilocks,” added Sloane. “We could just wind up haunted.”

  “Ghosts are real?” demanded Demi.

  There was a moment of silence, save for the distant sirens, as we all turned and looked at Demi. Finally, Jeff said, “Magic is real. Ghosts come with the package. It’s just that the narrative is usually more subtle than this. It doesn’t want to be seen, because it doesn’t want to be stopped. Ghost bears aren’t something you can overlook under normal circumstances.”

  “What do we do?” asked Andy. “We could throw her out of the building, but that won’t stop the bears. It’ll just move them into an unprepared populace.”

  There are rarely easy answers when there are fairy tales involved. Still … “The bears came into her yard, but they never entered her home,” I said. “They’re sticking to the story, at least to a certain degree. How is it supposed to end?”

  “They wake her up, they scare the pants off of her, and she promises never to break into a stranger’s house again,” said Jeff. “Or, as I mentioned before, she gets eaten.”

  “Okay,” I said. “This is what we’re going to do …”

  #

  Demi, Sloane, and I had nearly been tagged as Jennifer’s bears, before we shunted the narrative and caused a ghost bear invasion. So now it was the three of us who stood in front of her, separated only by the table. “Now, Sloane,” I said.

  “Who’s that sleeping in my bed?” Sloane boomed, and emptied the pitcher of water in her hand over Jennifer’s head. Jennifer sat up with a gasp, eyes wide, wet hair slicked back and sticking to her neck and cheeks.

  “Wh-what—”

  “We’ll ask the questions here,” Sloane snarled. “Who told you to make that prank call to 911? Don’t you understand that this is no laughing matter?”

  “Couldn’t it at least have been funnier?” asked Demi stiffly, like she was having trouble remembering her lines.

  “Bears,” I scoffed. “As if.”

  Jennifer looked at each of us in turn, starting to shake. “I didn’t … I mean, I was …”

  “We’ve searched your neighborhood, Miss Lockwood,” Demi said. “There are no bears there. Did you call us because you had a bad dream? There are laws against this sort of thing.”

  “We should lock her up,” said Sloane. “Make an example.”

  “We should let her go,” I said. “Show mercy.”

  “What’s going to stop her from doing the exact same thing the next time she has a nightmare?” Demi demanded. “No, punishment is the only answer.”

  Somehow, Demi’s tone made the words sound just right. “I won’t do it again, I swear!” Jennifer leaned across the table, grabbing for my hands. “Please, believe me. I didn’t mean to do anything wrong. Please!”

  The three of us looked at her solemnly, but inside, I think that we were all smiling.

  #

  Andy drove Jennifer home. The bears were gone; they had disappeared as soon as Jennifer apologized. Maintenance was already working on the back door, and EMTs were swarming in the halls, helping those who had been wounded by the ghost bears and collecting the bodies of the fallen. I, and the rest of my team, wound up sitting in the interview room, waiting to be debriefed.

  “You realize that poor woman will have psychological issues and a fear of authority after this,” said Jeff.

  “Narrative never plays nicely with any of us,” I said.

  “Still …”

  “We did what we had to do. What we’ll always do. We stopped the story before it could get to ever after.” I shook my head. “Better a few ruined lives than an entire ruined world.”

  Silence fell between us. For once, none of us had anything left to say.

  Episode 4

  Blended Family

  Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 315 (“The Treacherous Sister”)

  Status: UNRESOLVED/AVERTED

  Everything was too loud and everything hurt.

  Sloane Winters peeled her eyelids open through a combination of Herculean effort and pure spite. Something had to be making that horrible clanging, roaring noise that was ripping through her head and setting her teeth on edge. She was going to find it, and she was going to kill it. Once it was good and dead, she might even bury it in the backyard, just so that she could have the privilege of dancing on its grave. Then, and only then, would she be able to go blissfully back to sleep, no longer harassed by uninvited shrieks from beyond.

  The noise stopped as soon as her eyes were open.

  “What the …” Sloane caught herself before the curse could pass her lips. Instead, she sat up and ran her fingers through her tangled, bleach-fried hair. She hit a knot and winced as new pain was added to the existing pain left behind by the infernal clanging. When she had been sitting long enough to be sure that her head wasn’t going to fall off and roll around the room, she straightened, looking around with narrowed eyes.

  Everything seemed to be normal. The birdcage in the corner was still covered, which eliminated one possible source of the din. Lovecraft was not a quiet
bird, but like all parrots, he truly believed that it was nighttime when he couldn’t see the light—or at least he pretended to believe that, and Sloane, who was anxious to coexist with something she didn’t want to kill, allowed him to think that he was fooling her.

  The walls were covered in a thick layer of posters, flyers, and bumper stickers. It looked more like a sixteen-year-old’s bedroom than the domicile of a grown woman, but what did that matter? Not even Sloane herself was quite sure how old she was. Too many years had been lost in the struggle to evade her story. Those years were never coming back, and if she felt safer in her nest of teenage rebellion and outdated angst, then no one was going to convince her that she should do anything differently.

  She was cautiously stretching one leg toward the floor, preparing to slide out of the bed, when the shrieking roar began again. Sloane clapped her hands over her ears and screamed, the sound swallowed by the greater scream of whatever was invading her privacy. She thought she heard Lovecraft squawking under the noise, but couldn’t be sure; she couldn’t move under the weight of that painful din.

  As the unseen sirens clamored on, Sloane Winters collapsed back onto her bed, clamping her hands down until her nails scratched her scalp hard enough to draw blood, and waited for the noise to stop.

  #

  ATI Management Bureau Headquarters

  “Where’s Sloane?”

  I stopped in the process of putting my bag down on my desk chair, frowning at Andy. “What do you mean, ‘where’s Sloane?’ Is this a trick question? And have we cancelled ‘good morning’ for the foreseeable future? I was never overly fond of it to begin with, but it’s a ritual thing, and I do appreciate a good ritual.”

  Andy crossed his arms and glared at me. Being more than a foot taller than I was, with shoulders like a linebacker and the sort of craggy, determined face that was designed for either male modeling or law enforcement, he did so excellently. Andy was such a champion glarer that Jeff had been known to spend entire afternoons trying to goad him into a good glare. Most of the time, it worked. Andy was a friendly man who believed in doing his job, and doing it well. But that didn’t grant him infinite patience—and thank Grimm for that. If he’d been smart, athletic, good-looking, and a saint, I would probably have been forced to shove him into the path of an oncoming story just on general principle.

  “I mean, where is Agent Sloane Winters, who was supposed to be here an hour ago?” he said. “Her computer hasn’t been turned on. She isn’t in the office.”

  My frown deepened. I finished putting my bag down, removed my sunglasses, and asked, “Did she have today off? Maybe this is one of her weird Sloane-specific holidays, like Australia Day, or National Cotton Candy Day.”

  Sloane’s part in the narrative had been averted sometime before I’d joined the Bureau, and she had been living a normal, if angry and maladjusted, life ever since then. Part of her conception of “normal” included a flat refusal to live by any social convention that even smacked of story. Sloane worked on Christmas and stayed home on April Fools’ Day, which she celebrated—last I checked—by carving faces into cantaloupes and inviting the local kids to smash them with hammers.

  The door opened. Andy and I both turned, only to pause and frown again when we saw that the figure slipping into the bullpen was Demi Santos, and not Sloane. Demi blinked at us as she approached her desk. “Why are you both staring at me?” she asked, her trepidation visible in her face. “Did I forget about a meeting?” She blanched, her complexion taking on a distinct waxy undertone. “Is there an incursion?”

  “Dispatch hasn’t alerted us to anything, and no, there wasn’t a meeting,” I said, shaking my head. “We just hoped that you’d be Sloane, that’s all.”

  “You hoped I’d be … Sloane.” Demi raised an eyebrow. “Under what circumstances, ever, in this universe, would you hope that anyone was Sloane?”

  “Our lovely young Miss Winters is probably relieved to wake up every morning and find that she remains Sloane, rather than becoming the nameless antagonist in some larger narrative,” said Jeff, stepping out from behind a filing cabinet. I managed not to jump. It was a near thing. Not even years of dealing with our resident archivist’s tendency to appear out of nowhere had rendered me completely immune to the surprise of it.

  Demi laughed. “I guess that’s true,” she admitted. “I’m pretty happy to wake up in the morning and still be me.”

  “There you are. A good morning to you, Agent Santos, and to you, Agent Robinson, and to you, Agent Marchen.” Jeff accompanied each greeting with a nod to the appropriate person. When he got to me, I smiled. He smiled back. Jeff was one of the few people I knew who wasn’t disturbed by the contrast of too-red lips with too-white skin. A true Snow White looks more like a horror movie than a fairy tale come true, but Jeff always treated me like I was myself, nothing more or less than that. It was nice. In my own way, I was just as happy to wake up as Henry every morning as Sloane and Demi were to wake up as themselves, our respective stories aside.

  “Morning, Jeff,” I said. “We were just wondering if Sloane had the day off. We were a little surprised not to find her here waiting when we all got to the office.”

  “She left at her usual hour last night, and she hasn’t been in yet today,” said Jeff, a crease appearing between his eyebrows as he pursed his lips in concentration. “The duty roster posted in the break room has her on active for the entire week. I’m sure I would have noticed if she had a day off in the middle.”

  “I believe you,” I said. As a five-oh-three, Jeff was a born archivist whose attention to detail bordered on the obsessive—if he said that something was so, then it was so, no argument needed. I wasn’t certain, but I was reasonably sure he lived in the office, sleeping in one of the supply closets that were supposedly not in use. He left sometimes, but he always came back, and he was always in when we needed him.

  It didn’t bother me. Whatever it takes to get through the day and survive your story, that’s what you’ve got to do.

  “Should we call her at home?” asked Demi. “Could something have happened to her?”

  “Things don’t happen to Sloane,” said Andy. “Sloane happens to things.”

  “Please don’t start making Chuck Norris jokes,” I said, turning to face Andy. “Still, we should check. I’ll go up to Dispatch, see if Birdie can raise her. Sloane won’t be happy about it, but she’s less likely to get violent if the call comes from someone whose job is knowing where we all are.”

  Andy looked relieved. “Would you, Henry? I don’t like to admit it, but I’m worried about her.”

  “I don’t like to admit it either, but thanks to you guys, now I’m worried too. I’m on my way.” I paused long enough to unclip my badge from my purse strap and clip it to my lapel—Agent Henrietta Marchen, ATI Management Bureau—and offered the rest of my team members a little wave as I turned and started back toward the stairs.

  Even when I’m not out in the field, it sometimes seems like a field commander’s work is never done.

  #

  Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 315 (“The Treacherous Sister”)

  Status: UNRESOLVED/UNDETERMINED

  The noise had stopped long enough for Sloane to empty the top drawer of her dresser out onto the floor, pawing through the tangle of torn fishnets, worn-out bras, and mismatched socks until she found the pair of earmuffs she’d been issued when they had that Snow Queen incident to clean up in Ann Arbor. She clamped them down over her ears, letting out a sigh of relief when even the small ambient noises of the room stopped. They might not hold against a full-on aural assault, but they would at least let her keep her wits long enough to get dressed and get out.

  “Someone’s going to die,” she announced to the room, as she staggered back to her feet. Her knees were still shaking, and her head spun with every motion. Hands out to help her hold her balance, she made her way to Lovecraft’s cage and pulled off the sheet that covered it.

  Lovecraft, l
ooking as affronted as it was possible for a Black Palm Cockatoo to look—which was remarkably affronted, thanks to the years they’d spent together—opened his beak, emitting what was doubtless a deafening screech.

  “Sorry, dude, but you don’t want to be in here right now,” said Sloane, opening the cage door and sticking out her arm. “Come on. I’m moving you to the aviary cage.”

  Lovecraft screeched again before resentfully stepping onto her arm. Sloane smiled.

  “For once, you fail in your ‘make me go deaf’ campaign,” she said. “I’m wearing earmuffs. Neener-neener.”

  Lovecraft responded by sidling up her arm to her shoulder, where he began nibbling on her hair in a grooming motion that was as soothing as it was familiar. Sloane moved away from the cage, grabbing the clothes she’d laid out the night before—thank God for Internet housekeeping advice sites, or she’d be pawing through her closet while she waited for the sirens to resume.

  “Momma’s going to commit a murder today,” she said conversationally, tucking her bundled clothing up under her arm as she started for the door. “That’s right. I’m going to find whoever woke me up, and I’m going to rip out their heart and show it to them before they have a chance to finish dropping dead. Won’t that be nice, sweetie? Won’t that be nice and bloody?”

  Unheard, Lovecraft screeched.

  #

  ATI Management Bureau Headquarters

  Most of the building that housed the ATI Management Bureau was old wood and older design, like a stage set transported from the 1970s—which was, not coincidentally, when the building had been originally constructed. The Dispatch Unit was a science fiction dream, all chrome, glass, and unnecessarily streamlined plastic fittings. I always felt like I was leaving a hard-boiled crime drama and stepping into something with starships and empires when I had to visit the dispatchers in their home territory. Still, “we may have misplaced our Wicked Stepsister, do you think you could give her a ring for us” wasn’t the sort of question I felt comfortable asking over the phone.