Title: Red Riding Hood - Vengeance of Grandma

Prologue:

By sunset, Red had threatened the oak three times.

It was not the oak’s fault, but it had the broad, patient face of something that might accept blame. Its roots shouldered through the clearing like the knuckles of a buried giant, and its bark bore four years of shallow cuts: one mark for every week the Wolf had come padding out of the trees to submit himself to questions.

Have you crossed the boundary?

No.

Have you harmed livestock?

No.

Have you tasted human blood?

Not since the Huntsman.

Have you wanted to?

At that, the Wolf would look away.

Red had never punished him for honesty.

Now the newest notch waited unfinished beneath the point of her knife.

“You are late,” she told the empty clearing.

A jay scolded her from somewhere beyond the bracken.

“Not you.”

She drove the knife point into the bark and cut downward. The groove came out crooked. She stared at it, dissatisfied, then rubbed away the pale curl of wood with her thumb.

The sun had been over the eastern trees when she arrived. Now it lay broken and red among the western branches, bleeding through them in narrow bands. Cold gathered in the hollows. The mushrooms beneath the oak had opened their white undersides to the dusk, and the old leaves gave off the wet, cellar smell of autumn.

Red flexed her fingers inside her gloves.

Her iron sword hung over her left shoulder. Silver over her right. The Huntsman had taught her to draw either with either hand, because the world seldom announced whether the thing rushing at you ought to be killed as a man or as a monster.

He had also taught her patience.

He had been retired for four years and was therefore no longer present to be struck with a pinecone.

Red kicked one anyway.

It vanished into the bracken with a dry whisper.

“Four years,” she said. “Every seventh day. Rain, sleet, fever, hunters, mating season—which you described in such detail that I considered violating my own code—and not once have you failed to appear.”

The forest returned her voice in pieces.

Not once.

Failed.

Appear.

She looked toward the northern opening of the clearing. That was where the Wolf always entered. Never behind her. Never through the undergrowth. He had established the habit during their first meeting, when she had been eighteen and newly burdened with the Huntsman’s swords, the Huntsman’s medallion and the Huntsman’s collection of dangerous creatures who had promised, with varying degrees of sincerity, not to eat anyone.

The Wolf had stopped at the edge of the trees that morning, enormous and grey, his forelegs stiff beneath him. Old silver scars crossed his muzzle and ribs where the Huntsman had once opened him like a butchered hare.

You are not him, he had said.

No.

He said you would be fair.

He said you would be punctual.

The Wolf had laughed then. It had sounded like stones rolling in a grave.

He had never been late afterward.

Until today.

Red hooked one boot over a root and leaned back against the oak. The red wolf medallion at her throat rested cold against her skin. It had been forged from a broken piece of the Huntsman’s own, though the craftsman had softened the snarling muzzle and narrowed the ears. Hers looked less like a beast about to bite and more like one listening for permission.

At present, it heard nothing.

“No tremor,” she said, lifting it between finger and thumb. “No curse. No glamour. No malicious spirit. No invisible hag squatting in the branches.”

She looked up.

The branches were empty.

“That was not an invitation.”

The medallion slipped from her fingers and settled against her sternum.

Somewhere far off, a crow began calling. Another answered. The exchange passed westward through the trees, following the dying light.

Red took a heel of black bread from the pouch at her belt. She had packed it before dawn with a wedge of cheese and a strip of smoked pork. The cheese had disappeared before midday. The pork had gone shortly afterward, when patience had still seemed virtuous rather than idiotic. The bread had acquired the density of roofing slate.

She bit it.

Her jaw cracked.

“Excellent.”

She chewed with care and considered her obligations.

The wyvern had chosen a chalk ridge ten miles south of the village for its nest. Three sheep had gone missing. One shepherd claimed to have seen wings against the moon, though the same shepherd had once mistaken his wife’s laundry for a procession of ghosts. Red had found the shed scales herself: green as old coins, edged like knives. If the creature laid eggs before she drove it off, there would be hatchlings by spring.

She pointed the bread toward the southern trees.

“You are delaying a wyvern.”

No Wolf answered.

She pointed east.

“And Count Dracula.”

The name seemed to make the clearing colder.

“Five hours,” Red told the oak. “Five hours until I must be at the old toll bridge on the other side of the forest, where His Nocturnal Excellency will complain that the miller’s sons have been hanging garlic on public property.”

The oak remained neutral on vampire law.

“They know he can smell it from half a mile away. That is why they do it.”

The last of the bread resisted her teeth. She put it away before it could claim victory.

“And the priest is gone.”

That grievance carried greater weight. Red pushed herself away from the trunk and began pacing around the clearing, following the same narrow circuit she had worn into the moss since noon.

“The priest is gone,” she repeated, louder, “which means I must return before midnight and consecrate the churchyard because apparently holiness evaporates when he travels. Then I must check the crypt hinges. Then I must salt the eastern threshold. Then I must explain to the sexton, for the third time, that grave dirt is not improved by adding manure.”

Her circuit brought her back to the unfinished notch.

She stabbed the knife into the oak beside it.

“And tomorrow I am expected to behave like a regular woman.”

A squirrel scrambled halfway down the trunk, saw her expression and retreated.

“My mother has promised me to the butcher’s son for an evening.”

The squirrel remained hidden.

“Not in marriage. Yet. Merely supper.”

Red folded her arms.

“He has clean fingernails, she says. As though cleanliness beneath the nails were evidence of a soul.”

The butcher’s son was named Willem. He had shoulders like a cupboard and the cautious smile of a man approaching a chained dog. Twice that week he had passed Red in the village square. Twice he had looked at the swords on her back before looking at her face.

Her mother had interpreted this as shyness.

Red had interpreted it as sound survival instinct.

“I am to wear blue,” she informed the absent Wolf. “Mother says red makes men think of blood.”

The clearing darkened by another shade.

Red glanced down at her coat.

It had once been bright. Years of rain, travel and washing had deepened it to the colour of dried rowan berries. The hood lay flat between her swords. Its hem was patched where claws had caught it near the old mill.

“Blue,” she said.

Her voice sounded small beneath the oak.

She stopped pacing.

The silence had changed.

It was not quieter. The forest was full of minute sounds: water slipping beneath roots, beetles working inside rotten wood, the dry friction of branches high above. Yet those sounds had drawn inward, as if the living things making them had pressed themselves close to their holes.

Red slowly removed the knife from the oak.

The medallion remained still.

She turned toward the northern opening.

The path beyond it was narrow and old. Brambles crowded both sides, their thorns black against the remaining light. The Wolf’s usual route lay through there, between a split beech and a stone shaped like a kneeling woman.

Nothing moved.

Red listened.

No pawsteps.

No breathing.

No low complaint about the weather, the villagers or the humiliating indignity of supervised freedom.

She crouched beside the place where he usually sat.

The moss had not been crushed.

That unsettled her more than blood might have.

Blood was an event. This was an absence.

She placed two fingers against the ground. The earth was damp and cooling. Beneath the smell of leaf mould came rabbit, fox, distant deer and the bitter trace of iron from her own weapons.

Then something sour touched the back of her tongue.

Red inhaled again.

Old sweat.

Wet fur.

And beneath both, faint but unmistakable, the greasy sweetness of spoiled meat.

She rose.

Her hand went to the hilt of the silver sword.

“No,” she said.

The word came out more sharply than she intended.

The Wolf had rules. He kept them. Even when hunger made him tremble through an entire hearing, he kept them. Once, two winters ago, he had presented himself with a hunter’s arrow buried in his shoulder rather than miss his appointed hour. Red had pulled it free while he bit through an oak branch to keep from biting her.

He did not miss hearings.

He did not leave carrion near the clearing.

He did not force her to search for him.

Red stepped through the northern opening.

The forest closed around her at once.

The path was narrower than she remembered it being that morning. Alder switches caught at her sleeves. Dead ferns brushed her boots with papery hands. What remained of the daylight came down in thin, colourless strips, insufficient to warm anything it touched.

She walked ten paces before finding the first track.

A forepaw, larger than her spread hand, pressed deep into the mud.

Then another.

The Wolf had been running.

Red crouched and examined the edges. Still sharp. Made after the morning dew had begun to dry, perhaps near noon. His weight had fallen unevenly. The left forepaw cut deeper, while the right dragged at the toe.

Injured, then.

Or exhausted.

She followed the tracks off the path.

Three strides into the bracken, she found bark scored from shoulder height to the earth. Four parallel grooves had opened the white wood beneath. Dark hairs clung to the splinters.

Red plucked one free.

Grey at the tip.

Black at the root.

The Wolf’s winter coat had not yet darkened.

She brought the hair beneath her nose.

Smoke. Sweat. Rot.

And something else.

Something herbal and cloying, like flowers left too long in a sickroom.

The medallion stirred.

Not the clean vibration of nearby magic. This was a single weak knock against her chest.

Red froze.

The path ran on beside her, bending deeper into the forest. She knew where it led. She had once walked it with a basket hooked over one arm, stepping carefully so the jars would not strike together. Bread. Salt. Lamp oil. Medicines the priest pretended not to know how to make.

A little cottage waited at the far end.

She had not seen it in four years.

She had not thought of its door, its smoking chimney or the old woman inside except when memory caught her unguarded and forced upon her some useless detail: flour on a pair of knuckles, lavender drying from a beam, a cracked cup painted with red birds.

The priest had forbidden the visits.

Red had obeyed.

Now, it seemed, pursuing the wolf would take her down that path one more time...

Chapter 1: The Trail