Dead Reckoning

Pelt.
    Suddenly I was holding the shoulder of a woman who’d gone completely limp. I let go, and she fell to the ground. Her head sagged oddly. Jannalynn had broken her neck. I didn’t know if Sandra was dead or alive.
    “Fuck,” Jannalynn said pleasantly. “Fuck, fuck, fuckety fuck.”
    “Amen,” Sam said.
    I burst into tears. Jannalynn looked disgusted. “I know, I know,” I said despairingly, “but I saw a lot of people get killed last night, and this is just one person too many! I’m sorry, y’all.” I think Sam would have hugged me if Jannalynn hadn’t been right there. I know he thought about it. That was the important thing.
    “She isn’t completely gone,” Jannalynn said after a moment’s concentration on the inert Sandra, and before Sam or I could say or do one thing, she knelt by Sandra, clenched her fists, and brought them down on Sandra’s skull.
    And that was that.
    Sam looked across the corpse at me. I didn’t know what to say or do. I’m sure my face reflected that helplessness.
    “Well,” said Jannalynn brightly, dusting her hands together with the air of one who’s finally completed an unpleasant job, “what shall we do with the body?”
    Maybe I should install a crematorium in my backyard. “Should we call the sheriff?” I asked, since I felt obliged to at least suggest it.
    Sam looked troubled. “More bad news for the bar,” he said. “I’m sorry to think about that, but I have to.”
    “She took you all hostage,” I said.
    “We say.”
    I got Sam’s point.
    Jannalynn said, “I don’t think anyone saw us leaving the bar with her. She was sitting low in the backseat.”
    “Her car’s still at my place,” Sam said.
    “I know somewhere she’ll never be found,” I heard myself saying, to my own complete surprise.
    “Where would that be?” Jannalynn asked. She looked up at me, and I could tell that we were never going to be best friends or paint each other’s nails. Aww.
    “We’ll throw her in the portal,” I said.
    “What?” Sam was still staring down at the body, looking sick.
    “We’ll throw her in the fairy portal.”
    Jannalynn gaped at me. “There are fairies here?”
    “Not at the moment. It’s hard to explain, but I’ve got a portal in my woods.”
    “You’re quite the . . .” She couldn’t seem to think how to end the sentence. “Quite the surprise,” she said finally.
    “That’s what everyone says.”
    Since Jannalynn was still bleeding, I stooped over to get Sandra’s feet. Sam got her shoulders. He seemed to have gotten over the worst of the shock. He was breathing through his mouth, since his broken nose was clogged. “Where we headed?” he said.
    “Okay, it’s about a quarter mile that way.” I jerked my head in the right direction, since my hands were occupied.
    So off we went, slowly and awkwardly. The blood had quit dripping, and she was light, and it went as well as carrying a body through the woods can go. I said, “I think instead of calling this the Stackhouse place, I’ll just call it the Body Farm.”
    “Like that place in Tennessee?” Jannalynn said, to my surprise.
    “Right.”
    “Patricia Cornwell wrote a book called that, didn’t she?” Sam said, and I almost smiled. This was a very civilized discussion to be having under the circumstances. Maybe I was still a little numb from the night before, or maybe I was continuing my process of hardening up to survive the world around me, but I found I simply didn’t care much about Sandra. The Pelts had had a personal vendetta against me for no very good reason for a very long time, and now it was over.
    I finally understood something about the mayhem of the night before. It wasn’t the individual deaths I found so appalling but the level of violence, the sheer horror of seeing so much dealt out and received. . . . Just as I found Jannalynn’s execution of Sandra the most disturbing thing about today’s encounter. Unless I was mistaken, Sam did, too.
    We reached the small open space in the trees. I was glad to see the little distortion in the air that betrayed the portal into Faery. I pointed silently, as if the fae could hear me (and for all I knew, they could). After a second or two, Jannalynn and Sam spotted what I was trying to show them. They eyed it curiously, and Jannalynn went so far as to stick her finger in it. Her finger vanished from sight, and with a yelp, she pulled her hand back. She was definitely relieved to see that the finger was still