November 1, 2015

Sully hung around the train platform looking as awkward as she felt. Marie’s parents had come to meet them and there was a great deal of crying and exclamations of love going on that she wouldn’t have wanted any part of, even if she had been invited. Marie’s mother resembled her daughter, but her hair was darker and straighter. She was older too, of course—something Marie would never be. Her father had Marie’s blonde hair and curls. Marie had had his soft blue eyes when she was alive. The color had changed now to a red so deep it was almost brown.

Sully lurked while the train pulled away with a shriek and she slipped unobtrusively into the backseat of the car when they headed out, casting quick and quiet charms to keep the worst of the sunlight on the other side of the windows where it wouldn’t do any harm. Marie’s father’s name was Jeremiah—Sully had managed to gather that much from the non-stop flurry of conversation. Her mother’s was a little more difficult, but from one of the few words that Jeremiah managed to get in edgewise, Sully suspected her name was Clementine. Marie had a lifetime of local gossip to catch up on, and her mother seemed just as desperate for any news from New Amsterdam. Looking out the window at the endless uniform fields, Sully could understand why. They had been driving for a half hour when there was a brief moment of silence and Sully realized that a question had been directed at her. “Sorry?”

Marie giggled beside her. “Momma was asking about your job. They don’t know who you are. At all.”

“Really?” Sully’s face split into a grin that she wiped away almost as quickly. She met Clementine’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. “I’m a soldier nowadays.”

Jeremiah chuckled tactlessly. “Uh . . . well at least you’ll always have plenty of work.”

Sully laughed despite herself, a harsh little bark that sounded more like her own mother than she would have liked. Clementine filled the expectant silence with another story about somebody that Sully had never heard of and she was happy to sink back into her seat. It was nice to be somewhere where nobody knew your name. Where you could speak, or not speak, freely.

They arrived at the plantation an hour later. The Culpeppers were one of the older families in the Province, so when the land was being parceled out they’d had first pick and had chosen relatively fertile soil close to town over more acreage farther afield. The buildings must have been riddled with spells to keep them so pristine and white in such a muddy place after a century or more. The main house, a guest house, and long, repurposed stables formed three sides of a square around a manicured garden with a fountain at its center. On the other side, beyond their private road, was an orchard and beyond its bowed and withered trees was the rest of the Culpepper land. Sully had caught a glimpse of it on the way in, wheat waving golden as far as the eye could see.

It would have been nice to let Marie come home to this place the way that she remembered it, blazing in the sunshine, but it would have been a very brief homecoming. Sully got out of the car as it rolled to a stop, calling up as much of a raincloud as she could muster on the spur of the moment. It looked a little out of place hanging in the otherwise empty sky, but it did the job. Marie was hustled into the house without so much as a blush, her mother’s arms wrapped around her shoulders, rubbing at her bare arms as if she could be warmed up. Jeremiah held back to walk Sully in. He rolled his eyes at the Culpepper women and would probably have made some comment about women in general if Sully hadn’t been one. “Surprised that they let you away from your post. I heard that the Brits are bombarding the whole East Coast.”

“It is just a few cities and they’ve got more Magi than they know what to do with keeping the barrier up. They can spare me for a couple of days.”

Sully stepped into the house, where Clementine’s and Marie’s voices filled the space, but conversation ground to a halt when Clementine led them into the kitchen, where the rich tang of something slow-cooked and smothered in barbecue sauce assaulted them. The dining table was old battered wood, polished smooth by generations, and it had been set with four places. Sully met Marie’s wide eyes across the table and she felt her stomach drop. They didn’t know. They couldn’t tell Marie was a vampire just by looking at her. Sully opened her mouth to say something, but Marie’s scowl snapped her mouth shut again before she could make a sound. Marie loudly declared, “That sure smells good, Momma, but, uh, I already ate on the train.”

Technically it was true, she had cleaned Sully off after the assassination attempt and she hadn’t been shy about drawing out a little extra blood when she found a decent sized cut.

Clementine shook her head. “Always watching her figure. Wouldn’t you like to see a little more meat on her bones, Iona?”

Sully opened and shut her mouth a few more times while Jeremiah cackled at the look on her face.

“Come on, Marie, you can have a little bit, your mother made your favorite for you.”

Sully wouldn’t be the one to say something—it wasn’t her place—but when Marie sank down into the seat without a word, Sully stayed standing. Clementine was bustling around the oven, but Jeremiah seemed to realize that something was going unspoken. Marie took a deep breath. “Before we eat, there’s something we need to talk about.”

Sully sank down into her seat and said nothing. Marie groaned at their expectant faces, then let her face drop into her hands.

“Not everything’s been good since the last time I saw you,” she said to the tabletop. “I had a shitty marriage. I went off the rails afterward and . . . I made some bad decisions. I made some really bad decisions.”

Clementine hadn’t made it to a seat; now she wrapped an arm around Marie’s shoulders and forced a smile. “Darlin’, we all make mistakes. The important thing is that you are all right. You are alive, and you are back here with your family, and that is all that matters.”

Marie’s shoulders heaved as she sobbed, and Clementine began to rub at her arms again. “No. I’m not. I . . . I died, Momma.”

Clementine froze in her comforting, confusion written across her face. Jeremiah seemed to stop breathing too. Marie blurted out, “I’m a vampire.”

There was always anger simmering just below Sully’s surface, ready to rise up when it was needed, and she could feel it burning in her chest now, just waiting for either one of the Culpeppers to say the wrong thing.

Clementine opened her mouth and—like a sigh—“Oh my sweet girl. You’ve been through so much” came pouring out. Jeremiah was up and out of his chair, rushing over to wrap his daughter in what might have been the clumsiest hug Sully had ever witnessed. The freezing spell that had been coiling between her fingers beneath the table whispered away. There was a murmured conversation in that tangle of arms, and some sobbing that Sully didn’t need to hear. She was here for Marie, not these strangers who shared her name. If hugs and tears were what Marie needed, then Sully would sit in silence, smelling barbecue ribs burning all day if she had to. After a few minutes, the Culpeppers seemed to pull themselves together and remembered she was in the room. Clementine hustled back over to the oven. Jeremiah tried to straighten out his suit. Marie looked up at Sully when she finally escaped her mother’s furious hug, blood-tinted tears staining her cheeks. She was smiling.

Sully had a limited selection of stories that she could tell a girlfriend’s parents. Marie had vetted that list and nixed the more scandalous ones. The list was trimmed even further when Sully decided she didn’t necessarily want them to know that she was the witch who had thrown the whole continent into upheaval and war. She got them through the meal with a few laughs and no need for any more blubbering. “. . . so, there I am, eye to eye with this bartender who is swearing blind that their drinks are completely tamper proof. That the glasses have been enchanted and there is no way somebody could have slipped a love potion into one without it exploding. He’s sweating, and I figure he is about two minutes from a nervous breakdown and admitting that he forged the papers on the glasses. So, I order a drink and sit down at the bar. Now the boys from the labs are going mad at the other end of the nightclub. A love potion that can’t be detected by enchanted glass? It would cause chaos. The bartender pours me a gin and puts it down on the bar right next to this glass that I am meant to be examining. And it is a different glass. One of them is a half-inch taller than the other. The bas—uh, the perpetrator, had brought an unenchanted glass from home.”

Jeremiah slapped his thigh, Clementine smiled at her indulgently, and Marie was watching her with that look of quiet adoration that would make Sully cry if she thought about it for too long. The food had been good, and after eating her own portion and a fair bit of the pork that had been meant for Marie, Sully was feeling sleepy.

She stepped out onto the porch for a smoke as Marie helped with the dishes and Jeremiah slunk out to bum a cigar off her once he was sure Clementine was distracted. They looked out at the yellowing trees in amicable silence for a moment before he said, “So you’re a witch? That is handy.”

“Let me guess, you’ve got a heating rune acting up?” Sully chuckled.

He at least had the good grace to look embarrassed. “I really ain’t sure what it is. But when something weird happens, more often than not it’s magic. Care to take a stroll with me?”

He led her through the orchards trailing a blue cloud of cigar smoke behind them. Sully’s time looking for clues was meant to be over, but everywhere that she turned she could spot traces of Marie. A heart carved into the bark. The tattered remains of a rope swing. The rusted frame of a bicycle half swallowed into the roots of a pear tree. She could almost hear a child’s laughter echoing among the trees as the last of the day’s sunshine filtered through. On the far side was a solid wall of wheat, taller than Sully, although that wasn’t hard. It parted for Jeremiah, so Sully dove right in behind him, tripping and cursing all the way.

They emerged into a clearing after a few minutes and Jeremiah turned to her. “Well, what do you think?”

The clearing was a perfect circle in the crops. For something to do while the wheels in her head spun into action, Sully walked into the center and turned around slowly, then she paced around the outside of the circle, counting her steps. While she walked, her arcane senses danced over the circle, searching for the tell-tale signs that a spell had been cast. She stopped in front of Jeremiah and shrugged. “Circles are used for summoning or to contain magic. Maybe this is like a blast radius? The crops aren’t snapped, just bent over. If it was magic, it was weak enough to have faded already. I don’t get the point of this. Could it be kids messing around?”

Jeremiah nodded along with her non-explanation. “Could be. Could be. We ain’t the first to have one of these pop up. There’s been a few other farms around here with circles appearing in their fields.”

Sully felt like more was required so she said, “I’ll ask around once I am back in the city, see if anyone has heard about this.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

Back in the house, Sully could hear Marie and her mother singing a duet over the dishes. Some old war song about trying on a redcoat’s jacket. Jeremiah caught her smiling and grinned in return. Marie’s suitcase was still by the door, with Sully’s duffel bag laying on top of it. Jeremiah hoisted it onto his shoulder. “Listen, I know that you and Marie are, uh, involved but this is a Christian house.”

Sully fists clenched but he rambled on. “And while I realize that your relations may not be completely orthodox, that doesn’t mean that we can have our daughter and her, uh . . . partner sleeping in the same room. Out of wedlock. You are grown women, and you can do whatever you like in your own lives, but under my roof—”

Sully put a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll sleep wherever you put me, it isn’t going to be a problem.”

He huffed out a sigh of relief. “Well we ain’t tossing you out in a barn. The guest house ain’t been lived in much but it has a bed and a roof without any holes.”

For all of Jeremiah’s jokes, the guest house was as well appointed as anywhere that Sully had ever lived and smelled a lot better than most of her homes, despite the damp seeping into the foundations. She had a little kitchen of her own to make coffee and a bedroom that was almost the size of her old apartment in New Amsterdam. She swung her bag onto the bed and finally found her courage. “What you said before, about living in sin.”

He spluttered, “I didn’t mean no offense.”

“That is part of the reason that I came down here to meet you. Marie was nervous to see you again after all this time, but I wanted to speak to you properly before . . .” She cleared her throat and turned to face him. “Mr. Culpepper, I would like to ask your permission to marry your daughter.”

He looked like he had been hit with a hammer. “Marry Marie?”

“I love your daughter, sir. I’ve loved her since the first moment that I set eyes on her, and I will take good care of her for the rest of my life. With or without your permission.”

He spluttered, “I don’t . . . I need to speak to Clementine.”

Sully nodded. “Take your time. You don’t really know me yet and I’m not trying to make anyone uncomfortable. Just making my intentions clear.”

“It is a lot to think on. Uh, sleep well, Iona, we’ll talk in the morning.”

Sully grinned, “Nobody calls me Iona except Marie when she is mad. I’m Sully.”

“Uh, pleasure to meet you, Sully.”

“Likewise.”

The evening stretched out long and empty ahead of Sully. For farmers like the Culpeppers, early awakenings were normal, but for Sully, the sunrise was a sign that it was past her bedtime. She had been working nights her entire adult life and—especially with Marie’s issues with sunlight—it just made more sense to sleep during the day. After some digging in the drawers she found some paper and a pen, and with those in hand, she settled at the counter to write out from memory the long and complex equation to cast Dante’s Inferno. It was an old hobby, tinkering with the spell to get it to work without killing its user, and it would fill a few hours until she was mentally exhausted enough to try to sleep. Sully was fairly confident that she had resolved the Inferno’s main problem— instantaneously draining all the magic from the caster—by forcing the spell to collapse even as it was being cast, creating a momentary burst of fire so hot it could incinerate nearly anything, without turning the caster inside out. Still, she wanted to re-check all of her equations before trying it, Despite what many of her “on the job assessments” might have said, she didn’t have a death wish.