Nancy A Collins - [Sonja Blue 09] - Tender Tigers Read online

  Once their ‘husband’ is no longer of any economic use or their children can no longer pass for human, the ogresses move on, leaving behind their victim-mates. Those ex-husbands that don’t immediately commit suicide tend to overdose or drink themselves within a year or so, striving to recreate the high they once knew.

  Knowing that Fiona would be busy for the time being, I eased myself over the fire escape railing and crawled head-first around the corner, clinging to the brick face like a lizard on a garden wall. The next window I looked inside revealed a cramped bedroom. The floor was littered with empty beer bottles, upended buckets of take-out barbecue ribs and fried chicken, with gnawed bones scattered about the floor like jackstraws. A double mattress and box-springs covered in dingy, gray sheets dominated the room. A baby’s crib was pushed against the wall. The crib was painted white and had a large picture of a yellow duck carrying a red umbrella emblazoned on the headboard. A plastic pail behind the door was overflowing with disposable diapers.

  Tiffany was standing beside the crib, talking to its unseen occupant. “Can you give Cissy a smile, Cully? That’s a good boy!” Tiffany asked as she gave the Winnie-the-Pooh mobile hanging over the crib a spin. “You want to play peek-a-boo?” She picked up a stained baby blanket off the floor and held it up in front of her face. “Where’s Cully? Where’d he go?” she gasped in mock surprise. Whatever was in the crib gurgled in delight at the game. “Peek-a-boo! There he is!” she exclaimed, dropping the blanket away from her face. It was the first time I saw something resembling a little girl in her eyes.

  Suddenly the bedroom door crashed open with such force it broke its hinges. Fiona filled the threshold. She was still nude, and her carefully pouf had come unraveled, revealing her gorilla-shaped skull. Still, as ogresses go, she was quite the looker.

  “You know you’re not supposed to play with the baby!” Fiona shrieked as she advanced on Tiffany. “You’re a bad girl! You know what happens to bad girls, don’t you?”

  Tiffany mutely shook her head. She was too frightened to even cry.

  “They’re eaten by monsters,” the ogress said, licking her lips with a pointed tongue.

  As the ogress grabbed Tiffany, the child finally found the breath to scream. It was a high, thin cry, like that of a kitten being tossed down a well. Fiona snarled and backhanded the girl, sending her flying across the room, where she struck the wall and then slid, unconscious, between it and the bed.

  That was my cue. I entered the apartment in a shower of glass. The ogress spun around to greet me, her lips drawn back in a jagged grimace. “You should know to keep your distance, bloodsucker! The morsel’s mine.”

  There was no point in trying to tell Fiona that I was not interested in Tiffany as prey. She wouldn’t believe me even if I did. So I bared my fangs and growled like a panther. But before I could move on Fiona, I found myself slammed into the wall hard enough to shake the plaster loose.

  “I’ve got her, Ma! I’ve got her!” Garth crowed.

  Fiona’s piggy eyes bulged in consternation. “Get away from her, Garth!”

  “You should really listen to your mother,” I said, as I grabbed the young ogre’s head by the lower jaw and turned it upside down. There was a loud cracking sound, like that of a bundle of dry kindling being snapped in half, and Garth fell to the floor. I was lucky I was dealing with a preadolescent; had he been a year or two older, I would not have been able to break his neck so easily.

  Fiona stared at the body of her son sprawled at her for a long moment, and then raised her gaze to mine. Her lips pulled back, exposing rows of needle-sharp teeth and charged, her talons hooked into claws. Her fingernails were hard as horn and sharp as knives, slicing through my leather jacket like it was tissue paper. Something warm and sticky spread across by belly. She had drawn first blood, and if I didn’t want to find myself tripping over my own guts, I would do well to keep some distance between us.

  I tried to reach into her mind but Fiona had been around long enough to know what a psychic probe felt like. She furrowed her brow and snapped her teeth in rage, saliva flying from her lips. It would take too much time to breech her defenses and wrest control of her motor center. I decided it was better to get things over with as quickly as possible, before one of the neighbors decided to call the cops.

  I flexed my right arm, freeing the switchblade from its hiding place inside the sleeve of my jacket. It dropped butt-first into my cupped palm, filling my hand like that of an old friend. I ran my thumb across the dragon wrapped about the handle, pressing the ruby chip that served as its eye. The silver blade sprang forth, quick as a serpent’s tongue. The ogresses’ piggy little eyes narrowed in confusion as she spied the weapon in my hand. Vampires don’t need such things in combat.

  I feinted with the knife, making as if I was going to stab her in the belly. Fiona moved to block the blow, just as I knew she would. I then, at the very last moment, drove the blade into her left eye. I felt a sharp pain, and then saw one of my ears fly across the room in a spray of brackish blood. But instead of letting go of the switchblade, I merely gave it a little extra twist.

  The ogress shrieked like a gutted sow as she pushed me away. She staggered drunkenly towards the crib, the switchblade still jutting from her eye, blood pouring from her nose and ears. Her legs buckled before she could take three steps. She grabbed the crib to try and keep from falling, smearing gore across the headboard. She gargled something in the language of her kind—doubtless a curse on my head— and collapsed face-first onto the floor, driving the switchblade all the way through her brain, so that it punched its way through the back of her skull like an ice pick going through a ripe cantaloupe.

  I nudged her in the ribs with my boot, to make sure she was truly dead, and then flipped her over in order to retrieve my blade, wiping it clean on my jacket sleeve. As I stood up, I touched the side of my head where my ear used to be. My fingers came away sticky with the thick, blackish-red ichors that passes for my blood. It would take a day or two’s rest to reconstruct the damage, nothing more. I’d have to wear my hair down, instead of spiked, if I wanted to go unnoticed, but it that was far easier than the time I had travel across town on the subway while holding my intestines inside with a dinner plate.

  Now that Fiona and Garth were taken care of, the last thing on my “to do” list for the night was the ogree. I leaned over the crib, knife at ready, but all I saw was a tangle of bedclothes and a teddy bear with its ears chewed off.

  “Don’t you hurt my brother.”

  Tiffany was standing in the farthest corner of the room, clutching a squirming bundle to her thin chest. I have to admit I was surprised she was still alive. A bruise was already spreading its dark bloom across her cheek and her lower lip was swollen to twice its normal size, but otherwise she seemed unharmed.

  Realizing what I must look like, I tried my best not to frighten her, but I had to get Fiona’s whelp away from her. “Tiffany...you know what he is. Its better I deal with him, believe me.”

  Tiffany tightened her grip on the whelp and drew away, even though she knew there was no hope of escaping. “I won’t let you hurt Cully.”

  “Tiffany, he’s not your brother. Fiona tricked your father into thinking Cully was his so he would help feed and care for him. Once he was old enough to walk, Fiona was going to feed you to him. Cully is an ogre—a monster—just like her and Garth.”

  Tiffany shook her head, tears building in her eyes. “But he’s just a baby! See—?” She flipped back the blanket, exposing the ogree’s face. It was actually cute, the same way baby rhinos and gorillas are “cute.” Fiona’s whelp looked human enough to fool the casual observer, although the width of its jaw and the shape of its skull and brow hinted at its true nature, as well as the fact it already had teeth.

  “You love your Cissy, don’t you, Cully?” Tiffany cooed. The ogree smiled broadly and reached out with a pudgy hand capped with tiny, pointed fingernails and squeezed her nose, giggling with babyish glee. “See? H
e loves me!” Tiffany held her half-brother out toward me, only to have him bare his milk fangs and hiss like a startled kitten, clawing the air in my direction.

  “Yes. I see.” I replied, stepping forward.

  “No!” Tiffany wailed, snatching her precious bundle away. She turned so that her back was to me, sheltering Cully as best she could. “Who says he has to be like Fiona and Garth?”

  “He’s an ogre, Tiffany,” I sighed. “That’s just how ogres are.”

  “But what if I teach him to be a good monster?”

  Man, the kid was really busting my chops. “Tiffany, that’s impossible,” I replied with a shake of my head.

  “Why is it impossible?” she demanded, her voice trembling on the verge of tears. “Just because he is a monster doesn’t mean he has to be a monster! You’re a good monster, aren’t you?

  Fiona told me what you are. She thought you wanted to eat me. But I knew you were different. I don’t know why, but I just did.”

  I cocked my head and dropped my vision into the Pretender spectrum. There was a faint glimmer of intuition about the child’s head; not enough to qualify as a sixth sense, but enough to be of use in tight situations. I wondered if she had been born with it, or whether living in a house full of monsters had forced its development.

  I turned and left the bedroom, stepping over the cooling bodies Fiona and her son, and entered the kitchen. Tiffany’s father was still laying on the floor, curled in a fetal position. He lifted his head upon hearing my footsteps. “Fiona—?” he whispered hoarsely, in both dread and anticipation.

  I lifted him by the collar of his shirt like a kitten and dragged him into the bedroom. Upon seeing the body of his wife splayed in a slowly expanding pool of her own blood, he began to shake. He staggered as I let go of him, then regained his footing, as the reality of his captor’s demise flooded over him.

  “Thank God” he sobbed. “Thank God, thank God...”

  “Do you have family outside the city?” I asked.

  He nodded weakly. “Yes; back in Kentucky.”

  I reached into my jacket and removed the roll of hundred dollar bills I kept there for emergencies. “Take this,” I said as I pressed it into his hand. “Pack what you can in a suitcase and go. Don’t worry about the cops. There’s no way in hell the authorities are going to pursue this, believe me. Besides, homicide only applies to human beings. Just take Tiffany and the baby and walk away like this never happened.”

  “Are you sure about that?” he asked, shooting a fearful look at Cully. The ogree promptly bared his little fangs and growled at his mother’s husband.

  I glanced at the snarling whelp, then at Tiffany’s fearful, tear-stained face. “Family is family. Whatever else Cully might be, he’s still your son,” I lied.

  That was many years ago. I have not seen not seen or heard from Tiffany and her family since then, not do I expect to. Every now and again, though, I wonder whether I made a mistake in not destroying the ogree. But then I remember the love in Tiffany’s eyes for the monstrous infant she claimed as kin how the whelp smiled and cooed in Tiffany’s arms, and, and my doubts are once more set aside.

  There is a character from one of the old Oz books called The Hungry Tiger. Like his companion, The Cowardly Lion, he was a most uncommon talking beast. Although The Hungry Tiger longed to eat fat babies, and even drooled whenever he thought about it, his conscience would not allow him to do such a horrid thing, and often displayed more humanity than the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve who surrounded him. There is a lesson in that.

  There is no telling what role nature plays over nurture in human families, much less ogrish ones. If it turns out I made the wrong decision, then Tiffany and her father will no doubt pay for it with their lives, if they have not done so already. But if it turns out I made the right decision...well, the world could stand a few more tender tigers.

  THE END

  More books from Hopedale Press

  Knuckles and Tales

  Nancy A. Collins

  Knuckles and Tales is a collection of atmospheric, disturbing, spooky, and downright weird Southern Gothic short stories by award-winning author Nancy A Collins, best known for her edgy novels featuring the punk vampire/vampire slayer Sonja Blue. The original hardback edition of Knuckles and Tales was nominated by both the Horror Writers Association and the International Horror Guild for Best Collection of 2002. The stories on display in Knuckles and Tales range from suspense and psychological horror to dark fantasy and black comedy, with the occasional weird love story thrown in for good measure. Knuckles and Tales features two never before published novelettes in the Seven Devils Cycle: "Junior Teeter And The Bad Shine" and "the Pumpkin Child", as well as the previously unpublished short story "Big Easy".