Bloodbath

by Stephanie Ahn

  I snap my eyes open and dart out an arm, getting a handful of his throat before he can react. Then I pop my other fist between his eyes—he lets out a belated squeak as he collapses out of sight. He coughs and groans on the floor while I untangle myself from the rest of the body bag and hop off the table. I finally get a good look at him as I’m trussing him up with my pink scarf; he looks frail but not old, thirty-five at the most, wearing blue rubber gloves and an apron over typical office attire. A mortician, huh? Kind of an old-fashioned way to dispose of bodies, but I guess it’s a classic. A little neater than floorboard goop.

  The rest of the room is… packed. Shiny metal tables and shelves line the eggshell white walls, and nearly every surface has been occupied by a body bag or similarly shaped lump wrapped up in a sheet. The bags the mortician just opened are nearby, one on a table and one on a shelf; the unmoving faces belong to a disheveled man on the cusp of elderly and a woman who’s either missing her nose or has had it so thoroughly pulverized that it may as well be missing. Lisa’s work, according to the mortician. I stare at the crusty, shredded mess just a second too long before I force myself to look away. Then I go around the freezing room, uncovering bodies one by one.

  There’s Phyllis, the barefoot receptionist. Now that she’s lying on her back, I can see her face, especially her open eyes and her… distinct lack of eyelashes. It doesn’t quite strike me as odd until I remember Lisa and her perfect lash job. I shudder and move on.

  Here’s a lanky, blond teenage boy in what looks like a paper-thin, white hospital gown. Despite the neat gash in his throat and the crimson spray pattern up across his chin, his pallid skin and gown are almost pristine. It probably helps that there’s not a drop of blood left in his body. This kid was suspended upside down and drained, like livestock.

  Lifting another plastic sheet reveals a teenage girl with the same wounds, blond hair, clothing, and cleft chin of the previous boy—oh. Ms. Talley had a cleft chin too. As I look back and forth between Natalie and Nathan Talley, the sibling resemblance becomes unmissable. It’s surreal, seeing them laid out next to each other like an artistic shot in a Stanley Kubrick movie. One of my knuckles brushes against the fabric of Natalie’s hospital gown; nausea overwhelms me, and I have to step away.

  A few tables over, there’s a twenty-something-year-old girl with mascara smeared all over her face and her entire crop top drenched with blood, almost decapitated from the depth of the cut in her neck. But what really catches my eye are her earrings, each featuring a pentacle arm-in-arm with a waxing and waning crescent moon. She’s the witchy college student whose campus I was chased off earlier.

  The man I find next is older by at least a decade, wearing khakis and a T-shirt and actually decapitated with strings of skin and muscle sticking out to the sides, presumably having been snapped after they weren’t cut through cleanly enough in the first slice. If fate is leading me to the victims whose homes Joy’s prophecy showed me, then this has to be the convenience store clerk with a clown fetish. Also, I really shouldn’t be fixating so much on the clown fetish thing, given that this guy doesn’t have a head now and probably deserves to be remembered by something other than—whoop, there’s a Harley Quinn tattoo on his calf. Okay, he’s the clown fetish guy.

  I continue unzipping body bags and lifting sheets. There’s seven more exsanguinated people in hospital gowns with surgically precise wounds and blood spattered up across their faces. Five total in regular clothes who look like they were harvested in a much hastier fashion, like the college girl and clown guy. Lisa’s playthings, whom I identify by mutilated facial features and sloppy feeding marks. And then some outliers killed without any bloodshed at all; one with a cave-in at the back of his skull, and two with garrote marks around their throats.

  No David. No Aden.

  No Joy.

  I circle the room again just to make sure I’m not missing anything. I tell myself I should be glad not to find familiar faces here, but my agitation only grows with every step. I don’t even realize I’m on my fourth circuit around the room until the mortician I’ve left tied up in the corner says, “Hey, lady? If you’re looking for someone specific, you can just, you know, ask. I’m screwed anyway, and at this point you’re just wasting both our time.”

  Exhaustion spreads through my mind like thick sludge. This is it. I’m not physically or emotionally capable of going any further. My solo act just ran out of funding and the loan sharks are licking their lips, but I have no other choice. Not if I really care about seeing this through.

  The mortician’s trying to get my attention again; I ignore him, choosing instead to measure my breath until the trembling in my fingers becomes a mild, erratic twitch. Then I stand up straight and pull out my phone.

  Luce picks up on the fourth ring. “Harry? What’s going on?”

  “Luce. I need you to call the Council.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Judgment Day

  Awkward car rides get much more awkward when the people arresting you refuse to put a hood over your head. And they’re even shittier when you’re squished between two of those people in the backseat. And they’re the absolute shittiest when the radio’s playing a flute cover of The Girl from Ipanema, and the driver has no apparent intention of changing the station.

  The car jostles; my head thumps into the ceiling, and the crown of brambles around my head sticks me with two dozen genetically-modified thorns. I grunt and reach up on instinct, but the manacles chaining my wrists to my waist stop me short.

  “Motherbitch,” I spit.

  “Do we even need to put that on her?” the Enforcer to my right says without turning his head. He’s wearing a leather jacket with the collar popped up and sunglasses as opaque as the car’s blacked-out windows. Somehow, they obscure his eyes even from my angle.

  “Better safe than sorry,” comes the reply from my left. This one’s in a gray hood pulled so far forward her entire face is shadowed.

  “I’m right here, you know,” I complain.

  The first Enforcer to speak tilts his head to glance at my scar, then scoffs quietly and leans back in his seat. I’m about to say something again when the car goes over a particularly large bump and my head lights up with concussive fireworks.

  As the sparks fade and the throbbing pain sets in, I catch the driver’s eye in the rearview mirror—or at least, I see a glint in the shadows between the brim of a Bobcat baseball cap and a clean white surgical mask. Is that a look of burning hate or just mockery?

  The flute cover of The Girl from Ipanema finally ends… and then transitions to a xylophone cover. Yup, the driver definitely hates me.

  Two minutes into that torture, the car screeches to a halt. I turn to the hooded Enforcer to ask if we’ve arrived—just in time to see the ballooning blackness of a burlap sack engulfing my head. The fabric catches on the thorn crown in a dozen different places, filling my ears with a ripping noise, smearing the trickles of blood across my nose and forehead.

  A door opens. One hand clamps around the back of my neck and another twists taut the chains between my wrists, and they push-drag me out of the car. My feet land on flat concrete, then stumble across a patch of spongy earth, then slip on blades of rain-slick grass. Steel hands wrap around my biceps, and then it’s all I can do to stay upright while the Enforcers tow me forward with inhuman speed.

  The transit from car to trial takes way longer than expected. It’s like a hike where the top of the mountain is always visible but somehow never getting closer. I start sweating under the burlap sack, and I can eventually taste a salty droplet at the corner of my lip, mixed with blood and loose fibers. My ankles feel like they’ve been twisted twenty times over on every obstacle possible, and they’re somehow numb and aching at the same time. Cold moisture sticks to my clothes, my clothes stick to me, and all I want to do is strip naked and lie down in a warm, dry bed.

  The longer the trek goes on, the more certain I am that none of this has anything to do with securit
y. It’s humiliation, plain and simple. I never truly understood why Luce fought so hard to keep me out of the Council’s court the last time I fucked up, but I think I get it now. She was sparing me from this bullshit at a time when I really wouldn’t have been able to handle it, and I never showed her nearly enough gratitude for that.

  The sound of heavy double doors being pushed open—and then my feet are sliding across a smooth artificial floor, possibly marble? Even through the sack I can feel a change in air pressure, hear the echo of the Enforcers’ and my footsteps bouncing off of tall walls. A kick to the back of my leg brings me down to my knees, and then the sack is torn off. My eyes adjust to the light, and then—

  “A church? You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me!”

  I get a “shut up” sort of whack to the head. Someone snickers; I turn to see who, but all I glimpse is a skull-and-crossbones logo before hands clamp on my shoulders to force me back into position.

  It’s not a very fancy church, or a very new one, but a church for sure. There are no pews to speak of, but there’s piles of wooden planks in the corners that speak of their destruction. The ribs of the arched, wooden ceiling have giant splotches gouged out by time and decay. The only intact structures are the stained-glass windows filtering in late afternoon sunlight—there must be clouds out, because the glass is lit up with color but the light doesn’t reach all the way down to the dusty, uneven floor where I’m kneeling. There’s no altar at the front of the church. Instead, the New York Council—‘scuse me, the Northeastern American Regional Council—looms on the platform before me in an imposing semicircle formation.

  At the far left is Amadeus Luo, a man whose jawline should be on the covers of architecture textbooks. He’s in a camel blazer and ivory turtleneck, the hems of which form crisp lines against warm brown skin. If you follow the cleanly-pressed creases down to his ankles, you can glimpse the subtlest glint of titanium beneath his dress pants. The corner of his mouth is turned down in distaste, but only as he watches his fellow councilors; when he turns to me, he’s non-judgmental, albeit unapologetic.

  He’s an alchemist, one that Johanna used to call her “intellectual twin.” They stayed in correspondence across the world, sending what I thought at first were love letters, then realized to be more like passive-aggressive fan mail. Maybe they did love each other—I don’t know enough about Jo’s romantic attractions to contradict that.

  To the right of Luo is a bald, burly bodyguard type in a suit and sunglasses, only identifiable as the Lockhart family’s representative by a conspicuous necktie striped black and gold. He stands with his face blank, shoulders squared, hands clasped in front, legs apart and solidly grounded. Beside him, in identical formation, is a sleek woman in aviators, a steel blue pantsuit, and silver brooch. Silver and blue: Meresti family colors. The two of them are like a salt and pepper shaker set—adorably matched, and useful only as empty vessels for the real substance. The Merestis and Lockharts, like many magical corporate families, consider their elders and CEOs too important to be risked at petty things like Council meetings. So, they send pretty pawns and feed them lines through near-invisible earpieces, all the while scheming to orphan each others’ children.

  Next in line is Katlin Nádasdy, turning up the whitest, sharpest, littlest chin and nose as she glares down at me through a lacy black veil. I squint back at her; I don’t like being looked down on by people wearing floor-length fur coats worth more than my current existence. She’s a blood witch like me, but way more of a buzzkill. Sure, her type and mine both have wild orgy raves, but hers require a five-digit cover fee, and the dirty talk is all about making designer babies. But I shouldn’t take her sneering so personally. There’s only one human being in the whole damn world that Nádasdy doesn’t despise, and he’s still in kindergarten. So, yeah, I’m not special.

  —Oh wait, yes I am! Nádasdy was one of the councilors screeching for my execution a year ago, during that trial I wasn’t even present at. Can’t believe I forgot that.

  And then there’s Bautista. No first name, just Bautista. She’s already shorter than everybody else on the platform, but she slouches forward as she regards me, making her forest green blouse and pink knitted vest wrinkle. Plenty of these people are past middle age, but Bautista’s the only one who shows it. Her frizzy bob is gray almost all the way through, and she’s got creases around her mouth and eyes like small canyons. Her skirt ends at her bony calves, and the slippers she’s wearing look so comfortable I’m envious just looking at them.

  Second to last, there’s… no one. Wait, what? I scan the line again: classy Luo, beefy Lockhart rep, slick Meresti rep, stuck-up bitch Nádasdy, Bautista, and…

  “Where’s Danovich and Sifri?” I say, loudly enough for the age-eaten walls to throw my voice back at me in fading echoes. I get another whack in the head for that.

  Nádasdy bristles, and it’s like her whole coat follows suit. “Silence. You’re treading on thin ice, Lee.”

  “I didn’t even do anything this time! I’m the one who called you! A mage is killing people for blood—”

  “There is no evidence of this.” The baritone rumble catches me off guard. Its source, the Lockhart representative, maintains his concrete poker face as he speaks. “Every corpse in the mortuary you reported was dispatched by manual means, which does not indicate a magic user as the perpetrator.”

  “Wha—of course they were killed manually! Harvesting sacrifices with magic corrupts virgin blood, that’s Blood Magic 101! You can’t seriously be dismissing this on a technicality, members of our own community are missing—”

  “Not ‘our,’ community, Lee,” Luo interrupts, his voice low but firm. “Your excommunication remains intact.” There’s something in his eyes close to pity. Close to, but not quite.

  Inwardly, I wonder what was in those letters he wrote to Johanna. Outwardly, I roll my eyes. “Fine, your community. Your community of psychics, kitchen witches, and Wiccans is under attack, and you all just don’t give a crap? I mean, I can believe that coming from Barbie Cruella over there, but you too, Luo? Seriously?”

  Luo’s eyes flash. They flicker over to Nádasdy for a half-second, then pointedly back to me. If he’s trying to scold me silently for the insult, it’s not working.

  Nádasdy is too busy glaring meat cleavers at me to notice Luo. Her upper lip curls into the beginning of a snarl, but the sleek-suited Meresti rep interrupts her in a voice smooth as butter.

  “None of the bodies found have so far been identified as those of magical practitioners.”

  “There’s a dead girl literally wearing a Triple Goddess symbol!”

  Nádasdy snorts out loud before the other councilors can get a word in. “Children these days will wear anything interesting they find on the Internet,” she says. “Half the Wiccans in this country are just excitable little girls vying for their god-fearing parents’ attention. Didn’t your prude of a mistress ever teach you the difference?”

  My jaw clenches. “You don’t talk about her like that.”

  Luo coughs into his hand. “Katlin, it’s ‘mentor,’ not ‘mistress.’ We agreed to stop using those terms at the PR meeting last month.”

  “I speak how I want, cripple,” Nádasdy hisses back.

  Silence. Luo regards Nádasdy with a deathly calm in his eyes. “You would think,” he murmurs, “that a woman in your situation would be easier to sympathize with. But you’re not even worth my pity, are you?”

  Sick burn, but I’m not at all interested in watching a Council infight right now. A thought strikes me just as Nádasdy rears forward to retaliate. “Wait! The vampire, there’s an unregistered vampire at the clinic I reported! Her name is Lisa—”

  “The clinic you speak of was empty when our people investigated it,” the Meresti representative says, her brooch so shiny I can see my bruised raccoon eyes reflected in it. Luo and Nádasdy stare each other down in the background. “You’re grasping at straws, Lee.”

  “I’m not grasping at an
ything, your ‘people’ are the ones who couldn’t sneak up on one godsdamned vampire! What about that asshole at the crematory, why don’t you question him?”

  “We did,” the Lockhart rep replies. “He is a civilian who was being paid to ask no questions. His memories are being rearranged as we speak.”

  “He helped cover at least twenty murders and you’re just letting him go?”

  The Lockhart rep raises a square eyebrow above his square sunglasses. “Civilian crimes are not ours to punish. We never have, and never will dispense justice outside of the community.”

  “My gods, I’d forgotten how insufferable you people are.” I squint at him. “Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere? Did we get in a bar fight or something?”

  The corner of his mouth twitches upward. “Something like that.” A metallic earpiece flashes yellow at his ear; the smirk vanishes as he quickly resumes his uncaring facade.

  Luo looks pained as he turns to me, like a doctor trying to break bad news. “Without evidence of malevolent magical activity or an active threat to the protected community, there must be a majority ruling to act. As such, the majority of the Council has decided that this incident is not a priority. This… is simply how the system works.”

  “What majority?” I practically scream. “You don’t even have the whole Council here! Where the Hell are Danovich and Sifri?”

  All five councilors stiffen on the platform, even the unflappable family representatives. In the silence, the Meresti rep tilts her head ever so slightly to the side; a minuscule blue light flickers at her ear. She turns back to me, her polished, professional voice turned slow and halting.

  “Councilors Danovich and Sifri are—indisposed.”

  I’ve hit a weak spot; I keep pushing.

  “None of this is happening the way it’s supposed to! No one’s keeping anybody accountable! What do I have to, call the Arbiter?”