HIS FACE, ALL RED

 

 

 

 

“You’re up very late, my dear,” the old man said, when Leah came over to hand him a menu and pour some complimentary water. It was 3:37 a.m. by the clock above the range, and the place was pretty much deserted—just her, him, and Amir and Gue back in the kitchen.

She shrugged, indicating the sign in the front window. “Twenty-four hours. Means somebody’s always gotta be up all night, and that’s me.”

He turned to study it a moment, quizzically, like he hadn’t even realized it was there, even though he must’ve passed right by it to get to the front door. Then replied, without much surprise, or interest, “Oh, well, yes.”

The old man had one of those crazy accents, prissy and kind of hot at the same time, every vowel struck like a bell—sounded like Gandalf, basically, or maybe Jean-Luc Picard. Leah couldn’t begin to reckon his actual age. Also, the nearer she got to him, the more she saw how his skin was kind of...flawless, creepily so. Eyes like blue glass, narrowed by smile-lines; perfect teeth, too, and wasn’t that weird, for an English dude? When he smiled, he looked like everybody’s favorite librarian. But he was wearing a decrepit, faded Lamb of God T-shirt that’d seen better decades and a pair of bright pink sweatpants, both much too big for his hawk-slim frame, with a cracked and battered set of Crocs Leah swore to God she could see his (slightly over-long) toenails through.

“What’s with the clothes, sir?” she asked, trying to make it sound funny, charming even—but she had to guess it probably didn’t sound like either of those things, because his good cheer faded on contact; he frowned slightly and looked down, studying the outfit like (again) someone had stuck it on him without his noticing.

“What is with them?” he repeated, genuinely baffled. Then: “oh, these aren’t mine; I found them in a trash-bin, I think. The one at the end of that alley beside your fine restaurant, with ‘Twister Relief ’ written on its side.”

“I don’t think that stuff is meant for...somebody like you,” Leah began, immediately feeling even sillier; now it was the old man’s turn to shrug, however, giving her an excuse to change the subject. “What was wrong with what you were already wearing?”

“Oh, it simply wouldn’t have done at all, my dear, not for a public venue. For one thing, my suit was almost completely covered in blood. And for another, I had been wearing it a good twenty years already, at least.”

Leah only realized she was staring at those amazing teeth of his—so white, so straight, so sharp—when he snaked his tongue out, unexpectedly, and licked them, like an animal. Completely out of left field, and gross, too; perverted, somehow, or at least profane. For anybody that age to be getting such an apparent charge out of being hungry, breathing in deliberately, holding it like a mouthful of weed-smoke...tasting the air itself, sensually, as though it were a steak he longed to take a bite out of...

“‘Covered in blood,’” she heard herself mimic as he stood up, seemed to almost eddy forward, near enough to touch. “‘C—covered in—’”

“Yes, dear. Just like that.”

“Whose...blood was it?”

“Oh, I don’t believe I ever got their names; professionals, you see. No element of friendliness about that transaction, I can tell you. Not like you and I.”

“...Can’t move.”

“No, of course not. That’s what the hypnotism is for, you see.”

Perfect teeth, so straight and white and shiny. She felt a tear streak down one cheek, thinking: He’s such an old man, and I’m not. I could—I should—

But she didn’t, of course, for far too long. And then there was a sudden, terrible pain, a tearing just above her collarbone, quickly followed by nothing at all.

 

—

 

When Leah came to again, everything hurt: her eyes, her guts, her skin. It was bright outside, enough to make her wince and flinch at the same time, cowering back, shoving herself as far underneath the table the old man’d been sitting at as geometry would allow for. Thank God, though, the two women standing in front of her seemed to have already figured out they should probably close the blinds before she woke, or lose their only witness to spontaneous inhuman combustion...

(What? )

...and oh, such an additional pain, so sharp and coring, to even think—let alone voice—that name. The one she was now forbidden access to, forever.

I don’t know where this is coming from, any of it, Leah realized, suddenly sick. Or how I know it...what I think I know, even...

Eyes flicking first left, then right, as though bracing herself for further attack; hands fisting so hard she could hear her nails grate on the floor beneath, scratching the linoleum, like claws. But the vertigo that immediately welled up made her want to put her head between her knees and moan, like a poisoned dog, so she did, while the women—sisters, they were definitely sisters, she could smell it on them—simply stood there and watched, the taller one projecting an aura of quiet authority and genuine sympathy even as the smaller simply rocked back on her bootheels, her sniper’s gaze never wavering from Leah’s face and one hand sneaking behind her back, feeling for some kind of weapon.

Better put me down quick, bitch, you want to keep me there, the unfamiliar mind-voice (that doesn’t sound like me) whispered in her head, gleeful-sly, all its worst instincts pricking up in anticipation of slaughter. Better not let me get a good jump in, ‘less you want to be wiping little sis’s blood off the wall...

Leah shook her head again, just once but sharply, to dismiss it. And made herself look back up, trying her level best to not only look harmless, but be so.

“That old man...is he still here?”

The taller one shook her head, blonde braids swinging. “Long gone, I’d say. Given the temp on your friends.”

“Gue—Amir?”

“That’s what their badges said, yes. And you’re Leah, right?”

Leah nodded, sniffed, eyes blurred and stinging. But when she put up a hand to wipe away the tears, she drew it away smeared with red.

“Oh Jesus,” she said, staring at the result, no matter how the word hurt to use. “Oh God, oh Christ. What happened to us all?”

The taller woman sighed, and took a moment, like she wanted to choose her next words carefully. In the meantime, Leah found her eyes drawn to the tattoos she could suddenly see crawling up along the woman’s arms, weaving underneath the sleeves of her shirt to climb the sides of her long neck like vines. They were snaky, deep-carven things, some of them roughly keloided as though self-inflicted, a strange contrast with the woman—girl, really, Leah now understood—herself, who seemed gentle, almost sad. I want to help, her gray eyes seemed to say, though they both knew that was impossible.

(Yes, yes we do)

(How, though? Why?)

“His name is Maks Maartensbeck,” the tall girl began, reluctantly. “Professor Maartensbeck. Highly respected in our field; did a lot of good, once. Saved a lot of lives. But he hasn’t really been that man for a very long time now.”

“Then...what is he?”

“Oh, Leah, come on: you’ve seen the movies. He came in here at night, put you to sleep with a look, drank from your neck, then ripped your friends apart. So if you just let yourself think about it for a minute, I kind of think you already know.”

(Running her tongue along the inside of her lips, across her teeth, and feeling skin part, seamless. Knowing without even having to check how they would shine just as brightly as the old man’s now; white-sharp like the new moon. Her empty stomach contracting, and the rush and pulse of blood—not her own—rising in her ears, more beautiful than any remembered song.)

The smaller woman was visibly tensed now, biceps gone hard beneath the sleeves of her many-pocketed East Coast gangsta parka; she had thighs like she pumped prison iron, so cut Leah could see definition even through her jeans. Such a tough little cookie, with her narrowed brown glare and her dirty blonde Boot Camp haircut, and Leah felt herself beginning to kind of long to see what exactly she was reaching behind her for, the roots of all Leah’s brand new dental accoutrements set aching at once. With the bad voice whispering yet again, up and down the dry rivers of her veins: Yeah, go on ahead and whip it out; get it over with, ‘cause I’m tired of talking. Sun’s up, my head hurts, and better yet, I’m—I’m just, just so, so—damn—

(hungry)

But: This is not me, she told herself. Not while I can still refuse to let it be.

Then added, out loud, like she was arguing the point: “That stuff’s not real, though, is it—not outside of...True Blood, and whatever? It just doesn’t happen.”

The taller woman cocked her head slightly, neither confirming nor denying—though one tattooed shoulder did hitch just a tick, automatically, a movement perhaps only kept from blossoming into a full shrug by some arcane version of politeness.

“Not usually,” she agreed. “But sometimes. This time.”

“But...”

Now it was the smaller woman’s turn to shake her head, punctuating it with a snort. “Just skip the counselling, Sami,” she told her sister. “You were right the first go-’round—she gets it, just doesn’t like it, ‘cause who would? Now get your whammy on, and let’s do what’s gotta be done.”

“Dionne—”

“Samaire.” To Leah: “You got a bad case of the deads, kid, and it stops here, before you start treating the next diner’s staff like your private buffet. Nothing personal.”

“Dee, Jesus.”

“What about him? oh, that’s right: not here. As usual.” The thing behind her back was a machete, carving fluid through the air, already nicking Leah’s throat; Leah felt the creature inside her leap, vision red-flushing, and knew her teeth must be out, lips torn at their corners. But Dionne didn’t flinch, barely turning to yell, over her shoulder: “Do it, goddamnit, ‘less you wanna be doing me next!”

(Yes yes and fast do it fast)

Something caught Leah then, square in the back of the skull, like a hook; it lifted her up and soothed her slack at the same time, a novocaine epidural. She was sewn tight, paralyzed, unable to fire a single nerve—the voice, the hunger, all drained away, replaced by a smooth, warm feeling of peace. Behind Dionne, she saw Samaire’s long fingers flicker, drawing symbols on the air. Her many tattoos were glowing now, right through her clothes, each too-black line somehow rimmed in vitriolic green and sulphur yellow-touched at the same time, like light reflected off a shaken snake-scale.

I didn’t ask for this. Yet even as she willed her lips to shape the words, failing miserably to bring them to completion, she already knew Samaire could hear them anyhow. And thought she heard, in reply—echoing, as it were, from another part of her too-full head entirely—

No. No one ever does.

Seeing the cores of the tall girl’s eyes twist sidelong, little black swastikas at the center of two pearl-gray pools. And letting her own drift shut, letting go of everything at once; barely feeling the pain as Dionne’s blade slashed through her spine, severing her new-made vampire head with one quick, expert blow.

 

—

 

Take the night shift and lose your life, maybe your freaking soul; wake up with a killer hangover and a cannibal thirst, catapulted into a world where the best you could hope for was somebody like Dionne and Samaire Cornish to put you down before you did the same to anybody else. That was their cross to bear in a nutshell, Dee knew: the family curse, spelled out coast to coast in monster-blood and mayhem, still-live warrants for prison break and felony murder notwithstanding. But at least they could trust the Maartensbeck’s to use all that career vampire-killer money of theirs to cover their tracks for them this time, supposedly, so long as they returned the favor...

She stepped back just in time to let poor Leah’s skull fall one way and her body the other, neatly avoiding the tainted geyser of blood spraying out every which-way, cellular-level desperate to find something else to infect before its time ran out. But Sami was already twitching the diner’s blinds up again, letting in enough sunlight to crisp that evil shit to ash so fine it wouldn’t register on any CSI test. of course, they could’ve just taken the former waitress down that way in the first place, but it was messy, to say the least, and be-heading was a clean, relatively painless death. So saving the daylight exposure option for body disposal suited both Dee and Sami fine.

No time for much more than starting to think: Good work, little sis, however, before Dee found herself stopping short once more, machete automatically whipping back up, as an all-too-recognizable voice drawled, from the diner’s conveniently propped-open doorway—

“Hmmm, messy. Not s’much as the old boy I just did somethin’ similar to, ‘course, but that’s probably ‘cause practice makes perfect.

Y’all truly do know your stuff when it comes to supernatural creature disposal, you two.”

Oh, you have gotta be fucking kidding me.

Both of them turned together, then, to see well-known holler witch turned cellblock pimp Allfair “A-Cat” Chatwin standing there with both hands buried wrist-deep in her hoodie’s front pocket, large as life—which really didn’t work out to be too damn large at all comparatively, though grantedly bigger than Dee—and twice as skanky. Her bush of malt-brown hair was jammed down under a backwards-turned trucker cap so gross she might’ve rolled an actual trucker for it, and Dee was amazed (yet not, somehow, surprised) to note the crazy bitch was still wearing her prison jumpsuit, albeit with the shucked top hung down like shirt-tails, so it probably read to the uninitiated as nothing more than a particularly heinous set of bright orange parachute pants.

Had a big book tucked under up one arm, too. Bible-heavy, though Dee didn’t have to see Sami’s nose twitch to know it probably had a very different sort of stink to it.

Sami would claim they owed Chatwin something for helping in the escape from Mennenvale Women’s Correctional, Dee believed, if pressed. For herself, Dee was pretty sure all they owed her was a quick put-down, an unmarked grave and the promise not to piss on it after, but she’d long since had to reconcile with the fact that whenever Sami’s highly flexible conscience was involved, things didn’t always go her way.

“We should talk, that’s what I’m thinkin’,” Chatwin suggested, black eyes glinting with ill charm and a touch of sly humor both, like she could read Dee’s mind right from where she stood. And hell, maybe she could—Dee’d seen Sami do something similar enough times to not bother counting anymore, using the half-demon blood she and Chatwin shared, supposedly from the same source. That was if you could trust Chatwin on that one, which Dee very much didn’t, having watched her calmly lie about the sky being blue in her time (metaphorically speaking) for the express purpose of messing with both their minds, not to mention seeing how far she could slip inside Sami’s pants while doing it.

Moriam Cornish’s sin made flesh, Dee’s dead Daddy would’ve called it, they hadn’t already shot his veins full of poison for killing her over lying down with the Fallen. of course, she’d only done it to help him fight a crusade she apparently felt worth sacrifice, but that sure hadn’t saved her, once he found out. It was the key event of both their childhoods, Sami’s birth out of their Mama’s useless death—the thing that’d sent Jeptha Cornish to jail and both his kids into different degrees of foster care, kept them separated ‘til they were both adults and well past the age of consent when they’d made their own pact together: a vow to take up the reins and keep fighting their parents’ Anabaptist crusade, with that solemn troth plighted on Moriam’s grave and sealed since in a hundred different variety of strange things’ blood.

Dee’d already started up where Jeptha left off, wielding rote-learned knowledge and home-made weapons she would turn to her sister’s service, playing knight to her reluctant sorceress—just as Sami had committed on her own to Moriam’s path, though without the shamefaced layer of secrets and lies that had eventually dragged her down. Had already taken the first few steps along it back when Dee turned up at her university dorm room’s door, in fact, so long since. When she’d opened it gingerly, scratching at the first few raw, hand-scribed lines of Crossing the River—the Witches’ Language, Jeptha’d called it, a foul tongue good for nothing but spell-work and bindings on things too awful to force the thousand names of G-slash-d to touch—she’d just inscribed along her left wrist, and squinted down at Dee from under floppy blonde bangs, asking: Can I help you?

Samaire Morgan? I’m Dionne. Cornish.

Morgan’s not my real name.

I know. Can I come in?

Standing there in her fatigues with a stolen sawed-off full of salt-cartridges in her backpack, and looking shyly ‘round at the detritus of a life she’d never once thought was possible to achieve on her own—track-meet photos, scholarship documents, the tricked-out laptop with all its bells and whistles. The friends, grinning from half a dozen frames—one in particular, familiar from various news stories and police reports.

Heard about Jesca Lind, she’d offered.

Did you. Wouldn’t’ve thought that’d’ve made the papers, over in Iraq.

Well, I got it from your Mom, actually, when I was tracking you down—Mrs. Morgan. She said you guys went to prom together, picked out the same university, all that. As Sami nodded, slowly: Yeah, that’s a damn shame, losing somebody you love so young A beat. She really possessed, when she died?

She was something, all right—and she didn’t just die. Why do you ask?

You know who I am, Sami?

I’m—starting to get an idea; Mom showed me coverage of the trial, when she thought I could handle it. You’re Jeptha Cornish’s daughter.

Your sister.

That’s what it said on the birth certificate. So, Dionne...you here to kill me, or what?

They looked each other over a moment, taking stock; Sami was bigger but lankier, and Dee was fairly certain she hadn’t had a quarter of as much training, not physically. Then again, if she took after Moriam the way Jeptha’d thought she would, she wouldn’t need it.

I’m your sister, Sami, she repeated. How you think you got out of that trailer in the first place? I picked you up and I ran ‘til I couldn’t run anymore. Never looked back, no matter how hard he yelled at me to. So hell no and fuck you, ‘cause I ain’t him.

That familiar/unfamiliar gaze—Mom’s eyes, Dad’s unholy calm. That set mouth, lips gone just a shade off-white, asking: But you know, right? What I am.

Sure. You’re blood.

Only half. Half-human, too—by family standards.

To which Dee’d simply shrugged, throwing four hundred solid years’ worth of witch-hunting genes to the winds, at least where it concerned one witch in particular—and not giving all too much of a damn as she did it. Because: How many relatives did she have left, anyways, in this frightful world? How many did she need?

Good enough for me, she’d said.

And Sami had nodded, eventually, once she saw she meant it. Then slipped her sweater off to show the rest of what she’d been doing to herself, all up and down and every which-way, penning the forces she had no choice but to know herself capable of wielding carefully back inside her own skin. Tracing marker with razor, then rubbing the wounds with a gunk made from equal parts ink, salt and Polysporin, ‘til the result began to heal itself out of sheer contrariness. Lines of power digging themselves down deep from epidermis to dermis, burrowing inwards like worms of living light, sinking ‘til they could sink no more.

Help me, then, she’d told Dee, a hundred times calmer than she’d had any good reason to be, given the circumstances. You see my problem, right? ‘Cause long as my arms are, I just can’t seem to reach my back.

And she’d handed Dee a blade, and Dee had taken it. Said: I got you. And...

...that was it, slang become fact. It was done.

In the here and now, Dee hiked her eyebrows at Chatwin, trying her best to project every ounce of contempt she had across five feet of space, without moving more than those thirty tiny muscles. “Team up again, uh huh,” she replied. “‘Cause that worked out so well, last time.”

“Still outta jail, ain’t you?” Continuing, when neither of them answered: “Naw, just listen—not exactly like I want to, ladies, given the acrimonious way we parted, ‘cept for the fact that it sure does appear we’re workin’ the same case for the same people, from suspiciously different ends. An’ if yours told you the same pile of bull mine told me, might be we should throw in together regardless of past conflicts, just to keep ourselves all upright for the duration.”

“Pass,” Dee started to snap back—then sighed instead, as Sami waved her silent.

“I want to hear,” the big idiot said, stubborn as ever.

“The shit for, Sami? She dumped your ass in the woods, left me stuck inside a wall.”

“Didn’t expect that to happen, just t’say,” Chatwin pointed out. “Neither a one.”

“Not like you tried all too hard to stop it, when it did.”

A shrug. “Well, in for a penny.”

Sami rolled her eyes. “Look,” she told Dee, “you were already sure the Maartensbecks couldn’t be trusted in the clinch, considering who we’re chasing. And it strikes me A-Cat probably knows a dirty deal when she hears one—better than us, given we’re not exactly social.”

Dee had to smile at that, since it was nothing but true; hell, even Chatwin knew it. As they both watched, she sketched a little bow, shrugged again, tossed her head like a hillbilly beauty queen. And drawled back, without any more or less malice inherent in the words than usual—

“Well, ain’t you sweet, still. Princess.”

 

—

 

When most people talked about the Maartensbecks, they concentrated on their twinned academic prowess and charity-work, not

to mention their storied geneaology—elliptical mentions of them stretched all the way back to the ninth century, when Holland separated from Frisia to become a county in the Holy Roman Empire, and a man named Auutet from Maarten’s Beck ended up qualifying as a student of the Corpus Iuris Civilis at the newly-founded University of Bologna. For those in “the life,” however, the name carried a very different sort of weight.

“They’re Dutch, and all they hunt is vampires,” Moriam Cornish had told her eldest daughter one night, during a Hammer Horror movie marathon. “Sure, they don’t use a ‘Van’ when they sign anymore, but you do the math.”

Though not rich in a conventional sense, their consistent ability—and willingness, even when it cost them bad enough to denude whole generations—to tackle the Rolls-Royce of monsters head-on had produced a wide-flung funding network of grateful, financially liquid patrons. And with the foundation of the Maartensbeck Archive in 1968, they’d begun to amass a vault full of magical artifacts other people wouldn’t touch with a literal ten-foot pole: grimoires, cursed objects, holy weapons, all of which the family’s surviving members either caretook or banked accordingly, loaning them out at a fair rate of interest to anyone who could afford their late fees, and was in search of a way to kill the unkillable.

Occasionally, someone would be dumb enough to think they could go full supervillain with whatever it was they’d borrowed, then find out better once the Maartensbecks came to retrieve it; Dee had seen photos, and the results weren’t pretty. These crafty stealth badasses might have multiple degrees and class out the wazoo, but they sure weren’t fussy about coming down hard on whoever they considered evil, a category whose boundaries sometimes appeared to shift at whoever was currently heading the Maartensbecks’ boardroom table’s will.

For the Cornishes, who’d received their initial email while recuperating after the M-vale break in a motel Sami swore up and down didn’t even have WiFi, contact had been made in the well-preserved person of matriarch Ruhel Maartensbeck, legendary Professor Maks’s only granddaughter. She was a silver fox of a woman with Helen Mirren style and Vanessa Redgrave pipes, turning up to their highly public first meeting—at yet another all-night roadside greasy spoon, somewhere on the Jersey Turnpike—dressed all head to toe in retired teacher drag so good Dee would’ve pegged her for a civilian, at least from across the room. Then she drew close enough to sit down, revealing sensibly low-heeled lace-up shoes with enough tread for a high-speed chase, a no-grip Vidal Sassoon crop, and the discreet lines of a high-calibre pistol packing modified rounds under one arm. The overall effect was of a stretched-out Dame Judi Dench, voice almost accentless and tartly crisp, as she slid her long legs under the plastic table and opened by saying—

“Congratulations on your recent return to circulation, my dears. Believe me, I’m not usually one to interrupt a celebration, but...well, the truth is, my family finds we have a problem that requires an outsider’s touch, albeit one educated in very—specific ways. I know you’ll understand what I mean, given your background.” A pause. “Beside which, we’ve heard such good things of you both, it seemed a pity to look anywhere else.”

Dee had to bite down on the urge to laugh, hard. But a quick glance Sami’s way told another tale; she had a look on her face that read as partly stunned, part wistful. This was civilized talk, Mrs. Morgan-grade, of the sort that hadn’t come her way in years—not since that last phone call, when Dee’d tried not to let herself overhear as Sami told her former “mother” how she not only wasn’t gonna make it for Christmas, but wouldn’t be able to tell her where to get in touch with her anymore. ‘Cause yes, what those cops had told her was true, to a point: they had just killed a bunch of people in a Beantown bar, deliberately and with premeditation, just like the charges said. But only their bodies, because the things inside those bodies weren’t the people they were claiming to be at all, what with the whole tempting transients down to the basement, then killing and cooking them routine they’d gotten into recently...let alone the additional part about feeding the remains to their customers as a Tuesday Night Special afterwards.

Thing was, when stuff’d already gone that far, that was pretty much the point where prayer and a 911 call stopped being any sort of use at all, and white magic against black took over; magic plus a bullet, or a load of cold iron buckshot mixed with salt. ‘Cause just as Jeptha’d always said, Exorcist movie franchise aside, sometimes the Power of Christ alone wasn’t up to compelling shit.

And: Oh God, Samaire, she could remember Mrs. Morgan crying, tinnily, on the other end. I told you it was a bad idea to take up with her. Told you that nice as she seemed, she was probably just as psychologically disturbed as that man, her father...oh baby, and you were doing so well, too, even after Jesca! My smart, smart girl. Where’s it all going to >end now?

Good enough question, back then; even better question seven years on, parade of victories balanced against the occasional defeat or not. Though it wasn’t like Dee really had the first or faintest idea of an answer, either way.

Ruhel Maartensbeck had come equipped with two fat files that night. one was full of background stuff on them, which Dee found creepy, enough so to mainly skip over, but she’d seen Sami studying it off and on since, apparently fascinated by how the Maartensbecks had managed to trace the exact moment where the long-defunct European Cornîches had broken off into their only slightly less so Americanized brand, after a younger brother of witch-finder Guilliame Cornîche converted to Hugenot Protestanism, fleeing France for Québec in the wake of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. The other file, meanwhile, was about Miss M’s “little problem” itself, a crisis forty years in the making—one that’d started all the way back in 1971, with Professor Maks’s tragically quick and surprisingly unheralded passing, from Stage Four prostate cancer...

...except, well, that turned out to be a bit of a face-saving fib, on the Maartensbecks’ part: i.e., for “prostate cancer,” read “undeath.”

“‘Vampire-hunter turned vampire, no news at eleven,’” Dee’d commented, munching a fry. “Understandable, right? I mean, that’s really gotta rankle.”

“Somewhat, yes.”

Sami, nodding: “Be hard to cover up, though. Unless—oh, tell me you didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?” Dee’d demanded, watching Ruhel Maartensbeck nod, sadly. But then the penny dropped, with an almost audible clink—‘cause while she might not’ve been able to get much schooling beyond what her Spec-4 called for (high school equivalency, plus some Engineering Corps courses and a whole two years of Explosive Ordnance Disposal training), no one could accuse Dionne Cornish of being completely unable to follow things through using plain old logic.

“You stuck him in the vault,” she said, out loud. “‘Course you did. ‘Cause given that place is like a toxic dump, ‘cept for magic crap, there must be some real full-bore sons of bitches trying to slip in there—and a live-in vampire? Best security system money can’t buy. Don’t even have to feed him, just let him keep what he kills, long as he doesn’t actually turn any of ‘em...”

“Well done, Miss Cornish the Elder.” Ruhel sighed. “Yes, that was the plan—his idea, actually, a contingency protocol decided on long before it happened, which he made me swear to honor, if and when. Imprison him in there and wait for the vampire who killed him to come free him, as a trap. But it never showed up, and after a certain amount of time, I simply ceased periodically dropping by to check on...that thing.”

“Not like it was really your grandpa, anymore.”

“No, of course not. You understand: everything I know I learned from him, and it knows everything he did, so it knows not to even bother claiming to be him. Vampires aren’t people; not the people you hope they are, anyhow.”

Sami, took into care far too young to remember Jeptha and Moriam’s bedtime stories, raised one eyebrow. “So what is it, then?”

“A demon wearing my grandfather’s skin which says horrifying things to me in a beautiful voice, such as ‘oh, you’re pregnant—it’s a boy, how lovely. Babies taste so good, or so I’ve heard.’ Not to mention one entirely capable of biding its time, fashioning an escape plan and just waiting, as such things can, until I’m too old to do anything about it.”

Said without rancour, so far as Dee could tell. This swank old lady had killed a thousand similar monsters in her time, probably—more than she and Sami’d ever seen—but when it came to emotional weaknesses, everybody had their something; if she wanted to contract hers out, Dee could certainly relate. No different from any other job, long as the money was good.

“We’re still wanted,” Sami reminded her. “Sticking around in the States wasn’t part of the plan.”

“Oh, no doubt. But you’ll need new identities, won’t you, to cross the border into Canada? Unless you’re planning on using magic, that is—and that does leave a trail.”

“Not one the FBI can follow, far as I know.”

“Ah, yes. But what of Miss Chatwin, your former partner in escape?” Here Ruhel had tapped the second file, lightly. “Turns out, there’s a fair deal of historical linkage between her family and yours, above and beyond the sad fact of both your mothers having decided to initiate, ahem, intimate contact with the same member of the Goetic Coterie—”

Dee: “Careful.”

“I’m always careful, Miss Cornish; so should you be. Especially since I know you both know that Allfair Chatwin remains fixated on her half-sister, for...various reasons, all of them toxic. A dangerous woman.”

Dee shrugged, reluctant to state the obvious. But it was Sami who answered, anyways.

“Look,” she said, “I don’t think we have any problem with hunting your grandfather down, per se. But what is it you want us to do with him, exactly, once we find him?”

 

—

 

“So she gave you a phone too, huh?” Chatwin shook her head, grinning. “Can’t say they ain’t a canny lot, them Maartensbecks. Particularly like her usin’ me as a threat, too, to light a fire under your asses.”

Dee snorted. “‘Threat,’ Jesus. Annoyance, maybe...”

“Now, now, Lady Di. No need t’be insultin’.”

But: “Just shush it, both of you,” Sami broke in. Then asked, of Chatwin: “So who’d you talk to? Ruhel again?”

“Naw, they sent me a pretty little brown gal in undercover cop slacks and a Kevlar neck piece, tough as nails. Said her name was Anapurna Maartensbeck, so I’m thinkin’ she’s probably this generation’s granddaughter, but she didn’t say nothin’ ‘bout her great-great-great...whatever. Just how there’d been a break-in at the vault, some big black books took, an’ now they needed somebody t’get ‘em back, an interested third party knew enough of what magic smells like t’sniff ‘em out.”

“They sent you after books.” Dee shook her head. “The fuck.”

“Funny, that’s what I thought; them books weren’t the only things stunk, by a long shot. Most ‘specially so ‘cause when I did track ‘em down, they turned out t’be mainly no great shakes—I mean, sure, I guess if you never seen a grimoire in your life, you might get all het up. But really: Agrippa, Paracelsus? The Petit Albert? They’re the Time-Life series of black magic—ten a penny, find a copy any damn place. Hardly worth the lockin’ up, ‘sides from this...”

Bitch meant what she had under her arm, of course—that squat, thick tome, more folio than book at closer examination, ill-bound in sticky-pale leather. She flourished it forth at Sami with a little half-bow, running her thumb along the embossed title, which Sami read out loud: “Of The True Heirarchy of Hell, or Pseudomonarchia Daemo-nium, blah blah blah. Greatest Magickal Hits bullshit, like you said.”

“Uh huh. Now flip it open.”

Sami did, gingerly. And Dee watched Chatwin grin even wider, so much so it was like the top of her skull was in danger of falling off, as her—their, shit on it all—half-sister’s eyes widened, when she saw what was written inside.

“Clavicule des Pas-Morts,” she said, amazed. “This is...this was burnt. Wasn’t it?”

“Oh, more’n once, from what I heard. Then again, those might’ve just been rumours put ‘round by whoever had it at the time, to throw everybody else lookin’ for it off the scent. ‘Cause once you got a copy of this bad boy, you probably want to keep it just as long as possible, don’t ya think?”

Dee looked at Sami, the resident expert. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll bite. Why?”

“Because whoever has the Key of the Not-Dead can cure vampirism,” Sami replied, eyes still firmly riveted to the thing in question. To Chatwin: “How’d you find it?”

Chatwin shrugged. “Easy enough. Miss Anapurna give me a box of forensic samples, said they took ‘em at the crime scene—I whipped up a trackin’ spell, but didn’t get more’n one trail and that gone cold hours back, ‘cause it looked like the old boy who made it was already dead. odd thing was, though...”

“He was still moving?”

“Mmm. Just like old Professor Maks, I’d bet—or like that gal he left behind here would’ve been, you hadn’t performed an emergency head-ectomy.”

“So you figure out he’s a vampire, kill him, grab the book—and? Maartensbecks are the ones who lied to you, why aren’t you takin’ it up with them? How’d you even know where to find us?”

“Aw, now you’re drainin’ all the fun out of it.” Chatwin waited for Dee to rise to the bait, then sighed when she didn’t. “Well—as it ensues, Princess here was always gonna be my next stop already, but let’s lay that by, for the nonce. Given Mister Book-Snatcher didn’t look like he’d been undead too long, I decided t’use his blood and see how near the one’d turned him was, just in case it decided to come lookin’; that’s what brought me this-a-way, though I guess I’m runnin’ a bit late in terms of catchin’ up with the head monster-maker himself. Imagine my surprise, though, when I snuck up t’peek through the diner window and saw the two of you standin’ there, all large as life, ‘bout to cut yourself some fresh new vampire’s throat!”

“Like Christmas,” Sami agreed. “or Hallowe’en.”

“Six of one, darlin’. And now...here we are.”

A pause. Sami looked away, tapping two fingers against her lips and cogitating so furiously Dee could almost smell the gray cells burning. Chatwin took advantage of her distraction to run a frankly admiring look up and down Sami’s frame that made Dee long to knock her into the middle of next week, thinking: Eyes front, bitch. I got a cold iron knuckle-duster in one pocket and a shaker full of salt in the other, both with your name written all over ‘em.

But: “Okay,” Sami said out loud, interrupting Dee’s reverie. “Professor Maks is a vampire, been one since 1971, and Ruhel still seems pretty cut up about it—so if they have the Clavicule, why don’t they use it? ‘Cause...”

“‘Cause—they didn’t know they had it,” Dee answered, slowly. “Not until it was already banked. only thing that makes sense.”

“Yeah. They take the cover at face value, then find out they were wrong. But by that time, it’s already inside the vault, with not-Professor Maks guarding it.”

A-Cat frowned. “Just a second of enlightenment here, ladies, for all those who ain’t in the biz...wouldn’t havin’ a vampire squattin’ over your stuff put a kybosh on the Maartensbecks’ whole magic item-loanin’ sideline?”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure they could negotiate with him to get him to send things out, considering how dependent on them he’d be,” Sami replied. “Give him extra blood, maybe even donate their own...but they certainly wouldn’t tell him about the Clavicule, because he’d know what they wanted it for.”

“Granted,” Dee agreed. “So—say they did want to get it back out—”

“Arrange a break-in. It’s pretty much the only way.”

Dee frowned. “They must’ve known he’d get out, though.”

A raucous snort, from over Chatwin’s way. “Known? Lady Di, I’ll stake my box they was bettin’ on it.”

They both turned to look at Chatwin, who nodded, almost to herself. Then added, for clarification: “Yeah, just before I told that old boy to put the book down and step back, I recall he was goin’ on about how he didn’t understand why ‘the money people’ hadn’t shown up yet. In fact, I think he kinda thought I was one of those people.”

Dee: “Why’d you want him to step back?”

“Oh, that was so’s none of him’d get on the book when I opened the door t’let the sun in, basically. ‘Cause one way or another, I knew I was gonna need it, later on.”

That smile again. Sami looked anywhere but, while Dee met it straight on, glaring extra-hard: You’re gonna get yours, Chatwin, and sooner than you think. That’s if I got anything to say about it.

Would she, though? This was starting to be the baseline problem, whenever Sami and Chatwin got in close proximity. There was no denying the witch could be useful, in her way, but Christ.

She’s evil, Sami, Dee tried to signal her sister. And you, no matter what happened, ‘fore you had me help you cut those binding tattoos into your skin—you’re not. Don’t matter how much blood you share; you and me must share the same amount, right? And human trumps demon, or should...

But it wasn’t like Sami could hear her, anyways. At least—

(—she didn’t think so.)

Chatwin was leaning forward now, hand raised tentatively, like she actually thought she was going to try and lay it on Sami’s shoulder in mock-sympathy, or some such shit. If she did, Dee thought, it was more than likely she—Dee—would respond to that unbearable provocation by leaning forward herself, and sticking her vamp-killin’ blade so far through the part of Chatwin’s wrist that didn’t connect with Sami’s flesh she might succeed in severing both bones at one chunk.

Luckily for everyone concerned, however, it didn’t prove necessary, after all.

“We need to get to Professor Maks first,” Sami said. “Then hold him, ‘til his relatives show up. After which we can discuss all the people they’ve let him kill so far just to get a chance at turning him back, not to mention whether or not we were supposed to be three of them.”

Dee sighed. “There go the spankin’ new IDs.”

Chatwin laughed at that, heartily. “Oh, Lady Di,” she said, “that’s precious. You should’a heard what they promised me, to get me t’deal myself in.”

No, I shouldn’t, Dee thought.

 

—

 

Dee left the magic shit to Sami and Chatwin, just like last time, when they’d ended up using a spell called the SATOR box and a scrap of dead girl’s soul stuffed in an aspirin bottle to bust themselves out of M-vale. Just sat there and listened to them hash out how to use blood from two of old Prof Maartensbeck’s spawn and that goddamn book a whole bunch of people who’d never heard of him had all paid so much for to locate where he was right now, then drag them towards it, like iron filings to some tainted magnet. She was trying to remember everything Jeptha and Moriam had ever told her about vampires, which wasn’t much, aside from don’t get within grabbing range and only thing really works for sure is the head comin’ off, so...

(And here she had a clearish image of Jeptha shrugging, somewhat baffled by his own contradiction. Shooting Moriam a smile as he did and seeing it returned, softly, yet with interest.)

Thinking: They did love each other, once. Just like Sami and me.

That’s the fucking pity of it.

Then remembering a little further on, the last time she’d seen him, after the date’d finally been set and all his appeals wrung out. Sitting there across from a man she barely recognized anymore, listening to him rant about how if she ever found out where her little sister was he was counting on her to finish the damn job, this time, sentiment aside. You hear me, Dionne? To which she’d just shook her head and answered no, on no account, no fucking way—you hear me, Dad? Just goddamn no.

They’d sat there a minute, glaring at each other with the same fierce eyes. Because she’s my sister, and I love her, no matter what. You do remember how that goes, right? Family is family, that’s what you always said...up ‘til the night you decided it wasn’t, anymore.

Think I didn’t love your Mama, Dee? he’d answered, finally. I did. Still do. But—

—sometimes, that didn’t mean as much as it should, in context. Sometimes it couldn’t. Not when civilians were involved. And she knew that, too.

Britishisms aside, the Maartensbecks had to “understand” it just as well, if anybody did.

(Civilians like Jesca Lind? that voice at the back of Dee’s mind asked her, though its tone also Jeptha’s, as it often was. Not that that likeness was ever enough to keep her from ignoring it.)

I made my choice, Dee thought, giving her machete a last quick, sharpening scrape. And tuned back into the conversation still going on to her right, even while stowing the whetstone away in one of her jacket pockets.

“Now, you got to keep a tight hold, this time, Princess,” Chatwin was warning Sami. “Don’t wanna go spinnin’ off all unexpected-like, not given the forces we’re playin’ with, here...”

“You just make sure we all arrive together—me, you and Dee,” Sami replied. “Because if I come out of fugue and find her gone again, first thing I’m gonna do is put a thrice-blessed iron cross-nail right through your Third Eye.”

“Witch’s lobotomy? Perish the thought.”

Dee stood up, tucking the machete out of sight. “All that mean we’re good to go, or what?” she demanded, eyes firmly on Sami, who sighed. Replying, as she did—

“Good as we’ll ever be, I guess.”

Things contracted, then: there was some old-fashioned Appalachian hair-knotting and a bit of haemoglobin fingerpaint action, followed by a three-way handfasting and widdershins footwork on three, two, one. Seconds later, with a pitch-black spacetime rip through a wormhole where only Sami’s lit-up tats showed the way, they stumbled like one clumsy, six-legged animal into the parking lot in front of one of those weird new airport motels with the courtyard inside the building, six stories of glass-fronted apartments looking only inward, where a sunken fountain-pool combo and some scattered built-in couches lurked.

Those apartments were all vacant now, though not exactly empty, their redly hand-printed vistas giving only the impression of drawn blinds, or maybe a fall of particularly virulent-coloured cherry blossoms. While down in the pit sat Professor Maks Maartensbeck, leant back in the now deep-dyed fountain’s bowl with his equally-scarlet eyes half-shut and his long legs delicately crossed at the ankles, frankly luxuriating, dyed head to toe in unlucky moteliers’ blood.

He’d swapped his Twister Relief dumpster outfit for what looked like the remains of a security guard’s uniform along the way. Still slightly too big for him, but a far better overall impression.

And: “Well, ladies,” he called up to them as they stood rooted in the doorway, ridiculously polite voice anti-naturally resonant, some distant silver key dragged over ice. “Two witches, both demon-blooded, both by the same sire—and one full human, by the same dam; hmmm, let me see. The fabled Dionne and Samaire Cornish, I presume, here to chastise me for my many sins...but who, pray tell, are you?”

Chatwin shrugged, then sidled in crosswise and sauntering, though Dee could tell even her hackles were up, under that don’t-care prison swag show. Calling down: “Allfair Chatwin’s my name, sir, thanks for askin’. But you can feel free t’call me A-Cat, you find yourself so inclined.”

“Ah, yes. Descended from the fabled demoiselles de Chatouye, I’d wager, whose village was burnt by none other than these two’s equal-distant genetic author, Witchfinder Cornîche. Voulteuses of great power, all, as I’m sure you must be yourself, to find me so quickly...especially once one takes into account your—other connexions.”

“Too kind, Professor. Just a humble holler-worker out of Black Bush, that’s all.”

“Oh, hardly.”

They’re fast, too, Moriam’d said, that long-ago night, so don’t forget it—and holy shit was that ever true, what with all that fresh type whatever jacking up Maartensbeck’s system. Because all it took was a blur of movement, a single tiny eyelid-flick, and there he was, right up in all three of their faces at once and smiling horribly, a highly-educated human shark with blood-breath sporting a manicure that—now you saw it close on—read halfway between Fu Manchu and full-on ten-fingered raptor.

“You see, modesty truly does ill-become creatures such as we, my dear,” he told Chatwin, who stood there frozen for once, while Sami and Dee both shifted a half-step back into automatic attack-stance.

“Why quibble terminology? Be proud, whatever you choose to call yourself.”

Chatwin breathed out, visibly smoothing her face back into its usual smarm-charm lines. “No argument from me on that one,” she replied, lightly. “In fact, you’ll find monster pride’s pretty much my middle name, under most circumstances...unlike some I could mention.”

He smiled, gore-mask crinkling. “Well, then. Since you’ve mentioned her—” Switching over, to Sami: “What a very decorative object you’ve made of yourself, Miss Cornish, to be sure. Can those be binding sigils? In Crossing the River, no less?” She nodded. “One would think they’d make it rather more difficult to summon your power, even when faced with imminent threat. And yet one can only assume you thought that a desirable outcome, when you carved yourself all over with them.”

Dry: “Uh huh.”

“Why?”

“Less people get hurt this way.”

Dee saw one stained yet elegant eyebrow tic up in disbelief. “Ah yes,” the professor replied, with fine contempt. “Morality.”

“Kinda heard you had a thing for that, back in the day,” Dee couldn’t quite keep herself from snapping, though she knew it’d turn him her way—but hell, she was ass-tired of things like this supercilious old fuck always talking around her, just ‘cause her Daddy wasn’t the one with horns. So when Maartensbeck’s blood-charged gaze met hers, she just smiled: not as sharp as him, but sharp enough. Only to be more surprised than she’d expected to be when, a moment later, he did the same.

“Little soldier,” he called her, with what rang like a gross parody of affection (though for all she knew, he actually might’ve meant it). “How you remind me of Ruhel, at your age...” Then threw back over his shoulder without turning, diction still crisp, yet tone gone melting: “...or you, of course, Anapurna—is that the correct pronunciation? What a joy! I still remember what your father’s heartbeat sounded like, in Ruhel’s womb. You also have his smell.”

Dee looked up, and found herself locking eyelines with what must be Chatwin’s recruiter: little, yes—small as Dee herself—and definitely a shade darker than the Maartensbeck norm, curly beech-brown hair drawn back in a tightly-practical French braid, though her Bollywood movie-star eyes were as blue as his once must’ve been, or her grandmother’s still were. Had a modified flare-gun held in a two-hand grip (white phosphorus? That would’ve been Dee’s call) trained between the professor’s shoulderblades, with the famous Kevlar gorget peeping from her silk blouse’s collar. Much like Ruhel, she had her game face down pat, given that was undoubtedly who she’d learned it from. But—

It’s different, when it’s one of your own. Always.

“Great...great-grandfather,” Anapurna Maartensbeck said, finally.

“Oh, that does seem a touch over-formal. Do call me Maks.”

“I’ve—always wanted to meet you.”

“And I you.” Cornish sisters and Chatwin apparently equally forgotten in the face of this long-desired reunion, the professor turned his back on them and took a pace forward, chuckling when he saw Anapurna’s finger tighten on the trigger. “But where is my pretty girl, my dear-beloved granddaughter? Where is my Ruhel?”

“Here, grandfather. On your nine o’clock.”

“Excellent. You never disappoint.”

So here they all were, weapons either out or on the verge of being so, with the walking corpse of Professor Maks playing monkey in the middle. To her right, Dee had Anapurna, gun-barrel still levelled; to her left was Ruhel, having materialized out from behind what used to be the motel’s front desk, toting what looked like either the world’s biggest Taser or a high-tech portable flamethrower scaled down far enough you could hide it under your coat, like a shotgun.

Must be nice to get paid corporate rates, Dee thought.

“I’m sorry to have lied to you, at least by omission,” Ruhel Maartensbeck told them, voice only slightly shaky, “but I needed that book, as well as my grandfather’s location, and I needed whoever brought it to me not to know why. So while I must admit that Miss Chatwin turning out to be able to recognize it took me somewhat by surprise—”

Chatwin shook her head, trucker-hat bobbing. “Tch. Why does everybody assume just ‘cause I never got my GED, I must’a stopped readin’ for pleasure altogether?”

Dee could sympathize, not that she was going to say so. “Well, it’s here now, one way or the other,” she told Ruhel, instead. “It, him, and...about twenty dead bodies I can see plus six more floors of ones I can’t, plus whoever else he might’a happened to kill, on the way over...”

“Plus the team you sent in to get it,” Sami added, “up to and including the only guy he didn’t gut right then and there, the guy A-Cat got your book from. Plus Leah, the waitress, who didn’t even know what was happening to her, ‘til Dee cut her damn head off. Her, those two guys in the kitchen, a couple more people who came in before Maks here was finished, just looking to get a midnight snack...”

The professor threw back his head and hooted, delightedly, while Ruhel’s mouth trembled. “Please,” she said. “I know what we’ve done must seem—excessive, to an outsider—”

Dee rounded on her. “‘Scuse me? We’re hunters, lady, just like you—that’s how you fished us in, in the first place. So no, I don’t give a shit how nice he used to be, or whether or not you can maybe make him that way again: you let your granddad eat people, real people. The kind we’re supposed to save from things like him.”

“Be polite,” Anapurna warned, her voice chill.

“Or what? How old are you, man? You don’t even know him!”

“True enough. But I know her—when my mum and dad died, she’s who took me in. So—”

“—She tells you he’s worth however much collateral damage it takes, then that’s what goes, huh?” Dee didn’t quite spit, but it took effort. “Yeah, well—know what my parents told me? How you people were heroes.”

At this, the professor laughed so hard he had to bend over just a bit, bracing himself, before finally trailing off. “oh,” he said, “that was delightful. Do you know what a hero is, my dear? As much a killer as anything he kills, but with far better public relations.”

“That what the guy who made you this way told you?”

“Amongst other things.” The professor sighed. “Ah, and now you’ve made me sad. I did think, you know—he and I having been nemeses for so long—that if I only caused a long enough trail of damage once I finally got on the other side of those five-foot-thick walls, he might hear about it, and come join me.” A hapless shrug. “But...as you see.”

“Men,” Chatwin commiserated, deadpan.

“All that effort, and all for nothing,” the professor continued, as Sami and Dee shot each other a quick glance behind his back while Anapurna’s eyes slid over to her grandmother, who was starting to look queasy. “I’d discorporated him five times already, throughout my career, which I now suspect he took as a variety of flirtation. But then I was old, and one night I dreamt he appeared in my bedroom, telling me he’d slipped some of his blood into my food. You will change either way, Maks, but if you meet me directly, if you let me do as I please, I can keep you from harming Ruhel, at the very least. I agreed, naturally enough—”

“—Because that was the sort of man you were,” Ruhel broke in here, desperately. “Because you were good.”

“No, child: because I was a fool. Because I didn’t know, then, how little I’d care about hurting you at all, once the deed was done.” If he heard her little gasp, horror-filled and breath-caught, he gave no sign. “So I went out past the point where my home’s protective wards ceased to work, and I bared my neck to him. Even thoroughly infected, I had time to make my peace and write out instructions before falling into a trance; when I woke, Ruhel had already prisoned me inside the vault. of course, I understood why he wouldn’t try to free me himself—I’d designed it, after all. A dreadful place, and booby-trapped, to boot. But still I warmed myself over those intervening years with the idea that if and when, he’d surely be bound to come and meet with me, at last—just drop by for a little look-see, no social obligations assumed. No...pressure.”

“So you could kill him,” Anapurna suggested.

“Oh no. So I could thank him.”

Ruhel gasped again, the sound deeper this time, more of a half-sob; Anapurna jerked a bit, as if face-slapped. Then said, with a optimism she didn’t seem to feel: “But we have the book, yes? The Clavicule. So we can put it all back, the way it should be. The way you should be.”

“And how’s that, exactly?”

“Human. That was...the whole point, of all of this.”

With mild disbelief: “Oh, dear. My poor, sweet girl, really—why on earth would you think I would ever want that?”

And there it lay, at last, between all seven of them: the gauntlet. Dropped like it was proverbially hot, a mic, or a fuckin’ bomb.

“Well, there you go,” Dee heard herself observe, ostensibly to Anapurna, who she almost thought she saw give a tiny little nod in return—before Ruhel jumped in on top, crying out: “But you can’t possibly mean it, grandfather—you, who taught me to always keep fighting, no matter what! This isn’t your fault, for pity’s sake. You have a condition, but it’s curable, and with the book’s help, you’ll be exactly the person you were again, before all this...oh God, why are you still laughing?”

Because he doesn’t give a shit, Dee wanted to blurt at her, to grab and shake her, bodily—anything to keep her from abasing herself in front of this goddamned ghoul, this sacrilege, just because it wore a rough approximation of the person she’d once loved best in all the world’s face.

But—

“Well, one never does know ‘til one’s in it, so to speak,” Professor Maks explained, grotesquely reasonable. “But the fact is, I may have told you a bit of a fib, my darling, without meaning to—because so far as I can tell, I am exactly the same person I was before, right now.

I know what I’ve done. It’s just, as I’ve already said, that I simply can’t seem to bring myself to care.”

And: Oh, we got trouble now, Dee’s brain told her, stupidly. As though it’d somehow convinced itself they hadn’t had any, before.

Out of the corner of one eye, Dee saw Chatwin reach to slip her hand in Sami’s, brazen as ever—and Sami, with no other alternative, close her fingers on it, hard. Saw those sketchy sigil-letters start to light up all up and down her arms, hair haloed and lifting; saw the trucker hat pop straight off of Chatwin’s asshole head, as her own mane did much the same. And felt the power they were both suddenly funneling into her start to light her own medulla oblongata up like a bulb, switching her over to full berserker mode without her even asking. The machete’s blade glowed horizon-flash green as she struck out, burying it hilt-deep through the prof ’s long-dead bicep; he whipped ‘round snake-quick, all fangs, but Dee managed to dodge and slip anyhow, steering him straight into a twinned blast of arcane witch-juice from Sami and Chatwin’s upraised, fisted fingers that sent him reeling, almost flipping back into the fountain.

At almost the same instant, Anapurna pulled the trigger, firing into his side. White light bloomed, taking half her great-great-grandfather’s ribcage with it; he gave a shriek, spinning sidelong, then shrieked yet again when Ruhel discharged her own weapon, half-harpooning him with species of grappling-hook that chunked in deep and sizzled as she juiced him hard: once, twice, three times, ‘til his hair stood straight on end, smoking, and his eyes rolled up white in their sockets. But did he fall?

(No.)

Sharp teeth set and grinding, Maks Maartensbeck clambered grimly to his feet once more, shook himself like a wet dog, throwing off sparks. And began, by slow, tug-of-war degrees, to pull the cable between them ever tighter, reeling her steadily in.

Though Ruhel fought him all the way, it was a foregone conclusion; Anapurna scrabbled in her vest for another cartridge, tore her palms reloading, but his claws were already closing on her grandmother’s throat—so she threw a glance Dee’s way instead, too angry to beg, and Dee found herself punching Sami’s arm, gesturing at the book Chatwin still clung to. “Read it!” she yelled.

Sami’s brows shot up, startled by the very notion...just as Chatwin, predictably unpredictable, flipped the folio open one-handed, and started to do exactly that.

“O judge of nations!” she yelled out. “Ye who threw down Bethsaida, Chorazin, Sodom! Ye who raised Lazarus up, whose voice spoke out of the head of the tempest! Ye who made the bush of the Hebrews burn!”

“Lift up this carrion flesh, and make it clean!” Sami chimed in, scanning the page over Chatwin’s shoulder. “Ye who made wine of Your own blood and bread of Your own meat, heal even this mortal wound! Ye who harrowed Hell, put fear into this black and fearless heart! ”

At the first few words, a shudder straightened the professor’s spine, whip-cracking him erect. His mouth squared in pain, “You—” he began. “You, I—stop it. Damn you! Stuh, stuh—stop—”

Not likely, motherfucker. one more time, Dee glanced at Anapurna, who nodded, and whistled at Ruhel: a three-note phrase, very definite, clearly some signal. Still vainly fighting against the pull, Ruhel reached inside her jacket for a glass ampoule of some red liquid, which she broke open with her thumb and deftly tossed, splattering its contents across her grandfather’s deformed face. The bulk of it landed straight between those snapping jaws, sizzling as it went down; Maks Maartensbeck coughed smoke, then retched outright, bringing up a rush of hot, black, stinking mess. His hands slipped off the Taser’s cable, letting Ruhel leap away even as Anapurna jumped forward, landing a vicious kick to the small of his back that sent him crashing further down, face against the floor.

“Adjuramus te, draco maledicte!” Sami told him, every word a blow, under whose impact Dee watched him writhe. “Exorciso te! Humiliare, sub potente manu Dei!” To which Chatwin added, without any apparent shred of irony: “For my God is frightening in His holy places, since all places are those He has made, and thus it is His name before which all terrible things must tremble.”

The professor looked up, punished face-skin starting to darken and tremble, almost to melt and run—and was it just the light in here, or did his squinted eyes suddenly look less red, more blue?

“Whah wash thah?” he demanded of Ruhel, then spat yet more black, before continuing: “Ih fehlt...blashphemous.”

“Communion wine, blessed by the pope. The literal Blood of Christ.”

“Buh ohny a priesht—”

A sad smile. “You told me yourself, grandfather: we have an indulgence, because of what we do. Who we are.”

Yeah. ‘Cause Sami and her, they were just itinerants like Mom and Dad, riding ‘round from town to town in a series of stolen cars, dodging Feds and killing things out the back. But the Maartensbecks were Templars, for real, Vatican giftbags included...and for all Dee’d found herself thinking must be nice, earlier on, maybe it wasn’t so much. Not the way Ruhel made it sound.

“Sympathetic magic,” Sami murmured, to which Chatwin snorted.

“Or some-such,” she replied. “Ain’t religion grand?”

They looked up to find Anapurna glaring at them both, eyes wild enough to make Dee automatically reach for her drop-piece, the little .22 she kept holstered up one sleeve. Hissing, as she juiced the Professor twice more, in quick succession: “Did she tell you to stop?”

“Do not keep in mind, O Lord, our offenses or those of our parents, nor take vengeance on our sins,” Sami replied, not skipping a beat, while Maks Maartensbeck—him, increasingly, rather than the terrible force that had driven his frail form hither and yon these forty-plus years, gulping down anything stupid enough to come near—shuddered at her feet. “Lift this sufferer like Lazarus, out of the grave. Bring him forth, whole once more. ”

“Restore him,” Chatwin agreed. “Change his gall for blood, corruption for health. Set him free.”

“This we pray: liberate him from the mouth of the Abyss, ex inferis, in nomine patris, et filis—”

“—Et Spiritus Sanctii,” they all chimed in on this last part, seemingly without premeditation: Ruhel, Dee, Ana. Dee glanced down herself as she said it, eyes drawn back to the sheer spectacle of the professor’s—Jesus, who knew, at this point: salvation, ruination. One out of the other, out the back and right back in, straight on through ‘til morning...

Saw his lips move, whitening, firming. Saw his wounds begin to bleed, first clear, then red. And heard him gasp as the pain came rushing in, at last—a torrent of it, others’ as well as his own, deferred almost half a hundred years. The pain, so long forgotten, of being merely human.

“Ruhel...” he managed, just barely, but she heard it; fell to her knees in the mess at the sound, all uncaring of her lovely suit, and hugged him so hard he screamed. Exclaiming, as she did: “It worked, oh God, you’re cured. I knew it would. Oh, grandfather...”

Anapurna, boot still on his back and her gun leveled between his shoulderblades, seemed unconvinced, but Ruhel laughed and wept like a child; Dee wanted to look somewhere else, but was sort of starved for options. The professor, meanwhile, took it just as long as he could before gingerly shifting back, Taser’s cable dragging painfully between them. And—

“No, Ruhel,” he managed, lips twisting wry over a mouthful of newly-blunted teeth. “It...simply won’t do, you know.”

“Grandfather?”

“Oh my girl, you know it won’t. Look around you. Someone has to pay for...all this.”

She shook her head, shamed, dumb. Put a hand up to stop him speaking only to have him print a kiss onto her palm, so light and sweet it made her groan out loud, then fold to sag against him, sobbing against his frail, torn chest. He patted her awkwardly with the arm that wasn’t left hanging, Dee’s blade still stuck through it, and addressed the others over her shoulder, head turning in a short half-circle to them in turn—Sami and Chatwin, Dee, Anapurna. “Ladies,” he began, visibly exhausted, “there is...so much I must leave unsaid, and for that...I apologize, most of all for how quickly I must discard this gift you’ve bled to grant me. The last thing I wish is to seem ungrateful. But...blood sows guilt, as we Maartensbecks well know. And I...”

Gaze left steady on Anapurna alone now, her stepping back, regarding him for the first time as anything but a threat. Those fine blue eyes, both sets of them, shining with unshed tears.

“I understand,” she said.

“I have...been damned, all this time, utterly. But what they did saved me...” Nodding down, as Ruhel continued to cry: “She saved me, as she always said she would. I was the one who...tainted it. Do you understand that?”

“I think so, sir.”

But she didn’t move, and neither did he—gaze holding steady while hers slipped sidelong, supplicant, almost. Pleading. For what?

Dee wondered, but only momentarily.

“You want to die, again,” she said, out loud. “For real, this time. But you can’t pull the trigger—damn yourself all over, if you do. That right?” The professor didn’t answer, but didn’t object. Dee nodded at Anapurna. “So you want her to kill you, instead.”

“‘Want’ would be a...strong word.”

“For her too, given she fights monsters and you’re not one anymore. Plus, you’re family.”

(I know a little about that.)

Anapurna stiffened, gun jerking back up, as though challenged. “Never said I wouldn’t,” she snapped, to which Dee shrugged, making a placatory movement: Peace, lady. Managed to get this far without shooting each other—let’s go for the gold, huh?

“Just think maybe it’d go better if it wasn’t either of you,” she said, mainly to Maks. “‘Cause when you’re bent on doing good, doing bad—no matter why—don’t ever seem to help.”

He didn’t bother to nod, but Anapurna did it for him, so...good enough, Dee guessed. Pressed tight to her granddad’s clavicle, Ruhel covered her eyes with both hands and wept on, bitterly. And Dee reached into her sleeve, for real this time—not knowing if Sami was watching, but sure as hell not wanting to check, either. Hoping Chatwin was, though, and attentively, as she cocked back and dug the barrel into his fragile, rehumanized temple.

Been dead a long time, she reminded herself. But: “I’m sorry,” she heard herself tell him, nevertheless. To which he merely smiled, answering, with amazing self-control—

“I’m not.”

(So thank you, dear girl. Thank you. )

Over his shoulder, she saw Anapurna not quite close her own eyes because somebody had to stay on point, and thought: Damn, if you didn’t get the exact same training I did. We could’ve been friends, maybe, if not for this.

But that’s just me, right? Always the bad cop.

“Okay, then,” Dionne Cornish said, to no one in particular, as she pulled the trigger.

 

—

 

In the motel battle’s immediate aftermath, nobody but the surviving Maartensbecks was greatly surprised to discover that Allfair Chatwin had used the Professor’s death as distraction and run off while the getting was good, taking the easy-to-sell-for-travelling-cash Clavicule des Pas-Morts with her. Since Ruhel—icy veneer firmly back in place—was already on the phone arranging cover-up plus retrieval for her grandfather’s corpse, however, now finally set to occupy the tomb bearing his name at last, Anapurna was the one who offered the Cornishes a ride to the Canadian border, along with those fabled clean new IDs.

“Chatwin’ll be our next project, if I have any say in it,” she promised Dee, too.

“Good luck with that,” Sami replied, crossing her arms, not quite allowing herself to shiver.

Later yet, as the miles were eaten up beneath them and Dee stared at the back of Anapurna’s head, rubbing fingers still a little bruised from the recoil, Sami leant over to assure her she’d done the right thing—“The only thing, Dee, under the circumstances. He knew it. You do too.”

“Do I?” Dee shook her head. “Don’t feel that way. More like...well. Kinda—”

“—Like it sets a bad example?”

A pause. “There is that,” Dee eventually agreed, so quiet she could barely tell herself what she thought about it.

CANADA: ONE HUNDRED FEET, the next sign said. Above, the moon hung high; Anapurna Maartensbeck tapped the wheel as she drove, beating out some tune Dee couldn’t identify. “So who’s this guy your—the prof kept on talkin’ about?” Dee asked her, falling back on business, for lack of better conversational topics.

“Juleyan Laird Roke,” Anapurna replied, not turning. “Wizard first, then graduated to vampire at the moment of his execution, during the Civil War—ours, not yours—through some spasm of ill will and sciomancy. Helped that he was a quarter fae on his mother’s side, with ten generations of hereditary magic-workers on the other...a rancid bastard, too, from all accounts. Doesn’t surprise me a bit that he left poor old Maks to rot, once he’d had his way.”

“Uh huh. So tell me, Miss M—is some holler witch you barely know really at the top of your list, with this guy still on the loose?”

“Perhaps not.”

“Good luck again, then. Twice over.”

“And let’s hope the chase ends better for me than it did for my great-grandfather? Why, Miss C, I’m touched.” An expert swerve took them into the express lane, where Anapurna slowed to an idle. “Enough so to wish you the same, in fact, on your journey. Since, after all...”

But here she broke off, maybe thinking better of finishing the thought, considering how Sami was sitting right there all extra-large as life, listening. or how she already knew Dee had a gun.

Because: Some hunt monsters, Dee thought, and some become monsters, in their turn. But some are just made that way, with no say at all in the matter—collateral damage, already born fucked, just waiting for the worst possible moment to fall down.

Family as destiny, its own little ecology, forever struggling forwards, forever thrown back. But...it didn’t have to be a foregone conclusion, was what Dee believed, at the end of the day. What she had to make herself believe, to keep on going.

What’s the difference? she wondered, knowing there wasn’t much of one—that there couldn’t be, for any of it to work. And reached out, in the darkness, to take her sister’s hand.