My Big Fat Supernatural Honeymoon

We both stood there, panting and wounded. Gard sank to the floor to rest.

"You were right," I said. "I guess we didn't need to worry about the malks on the way out."

Gard gave me a weary smile. "That was my favorite ax."

"Go back for it," I suggested. "I'll wait for you here."

She snorted.

Mouse came shambling up out of the tu

"It's all right, Mrs. Braddock," I said. "You're safe. We're going to take you back to your husband."

She closed her eyes, shuddered, and started to cry. She sank down to put her arms around Mouse's furry ruff, and buried her face in his fur. She was shivering with the cold. I shucked out of my coat and draped it around her.

Gard eyed her, then her own broken arm, and let out a sigh. "I need a drink."

I spat some grit out of my mouth. "Ditto. Come on."

I offered her a hand up. She took it.

SEVERAL HOURS AND DOCTORS LATER, GARD AND I wound up back at the pub, where the beer festival was winding to a conclusion. We sat at a table with Mac. The Braddocks had stammered a gratuitous amount of thanks and rushed off together. Mac's keg had a blue ribbon taped to it. He'd drawn all of us a mug.

"Night of the Living Brews," I said. I had painkillers for my shoulder, but I was waiting until I was home and in bed to take one. As a result, I ached pretty much everywhere. "More like night of the living bruise."

Mac rose, drained his mug, and held it up in a salute to Gard and me. "Thanks."

"No problem," I said.

Gard smiled slightly and bowed her head to him. Mac departed.

Gard finished her own mug and examined the cast on her arm. "Close one."

"Little bit," I said. "Can I ask you something?"

She nodded.

"The grendelkin called you a Geat," I said.

"Yes, he did."

"I'm familiar with only one person referred to in that way," I said.

"There are a few more around," Gard said. "But everyone's heard of that one."

"You called the grendelkin a scion of Grendel," I said. "Am I to take it that you're a scion of the Geat?"

Gard smiled slightly. "My family and the grendelkin's have a long history."

"He called you a Chooser," I said.

She shrugged again, and kept her enigmatic smile.

"Gard isn't your real name," I said. "Is it?"

"Of course not," she replied.

I sipped some more of Mac's award-wi

Her expression was unreadable.

"I thought valkyries mostly did pickups and deliveries," I said. "Choosing the best warriors from among the slain. Taking them off to Valhalla. Oh, and serving drinks there. Odin's virgin daughters, pouring mead for the warriors, partying until Ragnarok."

Gard threw back her head and laughed. "Virgin daughters." She rose, shaking her head, and glanced at her broken arm again. Then she leaned down and kissed me on the mouth. Her lips were a sweet, hungry little fire of sensation, and I felt the kiss all the way to my toes. Some places more than others, ahem.

She drew away slowly, her pale blue eyes shining. Then she winked at me and said, "Don't believe everything you read, Dresden." She turned to go, and then paused to glance over her shoulder. "Though, to be honest: sometimes he does like us to call him Daddy. I'm Sigrun."

I watched Sigrun go. Then I finished the last of the beer.

Mouse rose expectantly, his tail wagging, and we set off for home.

Jim Butcher enjoys fencing, martial arts, singing, bad science-fiction movies, and live-action gaming. He lives in Missouri with his wife, son, and a vicious guard dog. You may learn more at www.jim-butcher.com.

ROMAN HOLIDAY OR SPQ-ARRRRRR

Rachel Caine

In My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding, Cecilia Lockhart met her perfect match in an undead pirate captain. But even in calm seas, the course of true love never does run smooth…

Boston, September

HONESTLY IF SHE'D KNOWN THAT HER WEDDING WAS going to become the media event of the entire eastern seaboard, Cecilia would have gotten a better haircut. And a faster getaway limo, preferably one driven by a NASCAR star.

"Almost there," the limo driver said reassuringly as Cecilia clung to the arm of her groom and looked anxiously out the smoked windows at the flanking phalanx of news vans, reporters hanging out of car windows screaming questions, and bright popping strobes. "I can see the barricades."

The barriers were pulled aside, and the limo sailed sleekly through, coming to a flawless stop in a parking lot surrounded by marked police cars, all flashing their lights. No sirens, thankfully. Cecilia breathed a sigh of relief. She was pretty sure that the last black SUV to peel off pursuit had held Larry King and Oprah.

Cecilia looked at her groom, and hoped she didn't look as terrified as she felt. "That was—extreme," she said. Liam Lockhart—Captain Liam Lockhart—smiled.

"Lass, you've sailed with dead men, broken curses, and married a pirate," he said. "You might want to redefine how you measure an extreme."

He had a point. She studied him in the relative quiet of the limousine, and he looked back, perfectly calm. In the six months or so since they'd sailed the eighteenth-century pirate ship Sweet Mourning—Liam's ship—back into Boston Harbor and created a media firestorm, Liam had adapted to the modern world well in some ways, and not at all in others. He'd cut his hair, for example; it was a neat salt-and-pepper style, not exactly modern and not exactly antique, either. His wedding suit, however, was definitely a throwback—a fantastic black brocade coat and trousers made along the lines of what he'd been wearing when they met, only much cleaner and without the slashes, bullet holes, and various stains.

He was not conventionally handsome, maybe, but sharply intelligent, with black eyes deep and secret as the sea and a lovely kissable mouth. All in all, Liam looked utterly fantastic, and it gave Cecilia a goosebump-raising shiver of delight to see the sparkle of the gold ring on his left hand.

We're married. Not exactly a match made in heaven, a formerly cursed pirate and a slightly plain, too-round corporate wage slave who'd spent most of her not-quite-thirty years cultivating a fluorescent light tan in an office cubicle.

But when he looked at her, she felt like a goddess.

Liam lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it, mouth warm and gentle on her fingers. "In your own time, my love," he said. "No hurry."

"I'm ready," she lied with a smile, and he opened the door. He emerged first, then handed her out with the kind of flourish and elegance that she'd seen before only at Renaissance faires. On the other side of the press barricades, the cameras were eating it up. She was too terrified even to glance at the roaring crowd, but the pulse of strobes was so constant, it was like an extra sun.

Liam squeezed her hand, held her gaze, and winked. He bent close, put his lips to her ear, and said, "It'll be over soon. And then we'll have our leisure."

Cecilia fussed a little with her full silk skirts—a copy of a period wedding pattern from the eighteenth century, including a fiercely tied corset that had somehow managed to give her a dainty figure—and took his proffered arm to sweep past the rows of police officers standing at the barricades, heading for the wedding reception.

The Sweet Mourning loomed at the end of the dock, a massive ship with her sails currently lashed down, though Cecilia could see men swarming up into the rigging like spiders.