Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback

An honor guard of six nixies laid the two warriors side by side in a small boat filled with water lilies and sea glass and some of the sea hag’s ropes of pearls, since she wouldn’t be using them any more.

Followed by a retinue of nixies and grindylows and shellycoats and water dragons and brook horses, they towed the boat far out into the lake, to a place where the sunlit waves glittered all the way to the horizons. The mourners commenced to diving, bringing up pebbles ? 113 ?

? Warrior Dreams ?

and stones from the bottom of the lake and piling them into the boat until it sank beneath the surface.

The nixies scattered flowers over the warriors’ watery grave and chanted,

I will always place the mission first.

I will never accept defeat.

I will never quit.

I will never leave a fallen comrade.

Every one of them knew that a new Lake Erie legend had been born.

“This is it?” Margaret MacNeely ducked under the metal infrastructure of the bridge. “This is just as you found it?”

Sergeant Watson nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Except, you know, for the personal effects we’ve already given you. The medals and like that. We were afraid somebody would take them, if we left them there.”

There wasn’t much. A sleeping bag, left unzipped, gaping open.

The charred remains of a fire. A U.S. Army backpack.

Margaret knelt and poked through the backpack. A few flannel shirts, socks, underwear, an extra pair of jeans. The e-reader she’d given him last Christmas, carefully protected in a plastic bag. She flicked it on, scanning through the bookshelves. They held the books she’d pre-loaded it with, nothing more. Before his four deployments, he’d been an avid reader. These days, he had trouble concentrating long enough to read a book.

On the ground next to his sleeping bag lay some shreds of dried vegetation. It looked like seaweed.

Margaret slid the straps of the backpack over her shoulders and returned to the riverbank. “But you didn’t find a body?”

“Sometimes it takes months for a body to surface, especially this time of year,” Watson said. “Sometimes they never do.”

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Margaret walked along the rocky beach. “Why would he come here?” she muttered, kicking driftwood out of the way, shivering in the November wind.

“Does he have friends in Cleveland?” Watson asked. “Has he ever been here before?”

Margaret shook her head. “Not that I know of. But, I guess it’s possible. I haven’t seen much of him since his discharge from the service.” Looking down the shoreline to the west, she saw a small flotilla of boats bobbing just inside the breakwall. And more people on the wall itself.

“What’s going on over there?” she said.

Watson rolled her eyes. “This giant fish got caught in the passage there. The biggest lake sturgeon anyone has ever seen. So there’s a lot of talk about sea monsters and like that. Weekly World News has been and gone. If you ask me, it’s a big stinky mess. I’m just glad they didn’t give me the cleanup job.”

Just then, Margaret noticed something caught in the rocks by her feet. Reaching down, she pulled it free.

It was a necklace made of fresh water mussel shells. Bits of rotting flowers fell away as she lifted it.

“What did you find?”

“Looks like somebody dropped a necklace,” Margaret said. She sighed, and blotted away tears with the backs of her hand. “I appreciate your bringing me down here and al ,” she said. “It just helps to see where my father died.”

“I’m glad to do it, ma’am. See, I was in the military myself.” She paused. “They said he won the Silver Star.”

“Yes. He did,” Margaret said, her voice low and bitter. “And the Distinguished Service Cross.”

“That’s something.”

“Yes,” Margaret said. “That’s something. Being a soldier was everything to him.”

Pulling out the bag of effects they’d given her at the station house, she surfaced the velvet case that contained her father’s medals.

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