Bloodbath

by Stephanie Ahn

  “I reconstructed this scene by compiling the memories of multiple witnesses, from multiple perspectives,” Bautista says to me in a faraway, muffled voice. It’s like I’m trying to hear her with a set of padded headphones over my ears.

  There’s a sound. A sort of rushing, soft at first, then building. Everyone in the room hears it; one by one, heads lift in confusion. Luo looks up, frowns, and orders one of the lab techs to check on the green substance. Just as he does, the Lockhart brunette beside him freezes up—and spasms like she’s been punched in the chest.

  Shouting, running. The rushing noise builds into a roar, centered entirely on the brunette. Luo catches her as she falls, but she’s twisting and convulsing too much to safely lower to the floor—

  The first blood vessels to burst are in her eyes. They come into definition so quickly, spider-web-thin and so vibrant, just before the red explodes into splotches of crimson mud beneath her corneas. And then the pressure behind her eyes must be building, because they bulge from their sockets, spilling blood down her cheekbones in twin sheets of red—more red pouring out of her nose, her ears. Maroon-purple just under the surface of her skin, blossoming across her face, her exposed hands and wrists—is it my imagination, or is she bloating?

  She’s bloating. Her face is almost entirely purple now, swelling, and when she opens her mouth to scream, a torrent of blood from her throat drenches the front of her clothes, which are becoming noticeably tighter around her limbs and torso—one of her eyes pops. Then the other. The sound of internal organ membranes tearing open, muscle and fat pushing insistently on bones to make them creak, crunch, and even c-crACK outward, unnatural protrusions showing under her clothes and then being engulfed by the continuous bloating, bloating, bloating—

  Her head explodes.

  I duck on instinct as the gore comes splashing toward me, but I feel no wetness. I raise my head to find I’m back in the surreal room with Bautista, still sitting in an armchair, everything still airbrushed and clean and dreamy. I’m shaking as I lower my arm, my breath coming in dry pants.

  Bautista’s eyes are on mine. “That wasn’t the first death, but it was the only one we could get such comprehensive eyewitness footage on. The first one to die was actually Danovich.”

  Another raindrop descends—I swat it out of the way.

  “Please,” I croak, “can we do this without the IMAX? Traditional 2D is fine.”

  Bautista raises an eyebrow, but complies with the request. The next time she waves her hand, the raindrop falls straight down and onto the glass tea table, being swallowed up in the flat surface. The tabletop ripples into the image of a blood-splattered king bed, its single, shirtless occupant splayed out like a frog pinned to a board. His head is intact, albeit with eyeballs, nostrils, and mouth crusted with blood. It’s his stomach that’s popped open like a bloody cyst. There’s also a tragically human-shaped clean spot on the sheets next to the body.

  “Danovich’s wife reported the death just a minute after the incident in Luo’s laboratory,” Bautista says. “We didn’t grasp that it was an organized assault on Council members until then. We rushed to protect who we could, but we still would have lost Sifri if it weren’t for your sister.”

  My head snaps up. “Luce? She was there?”

  Bautista waves her hand, remixing the tabletop image. An emaciated blonde in a black robe kneels in front of a stone altar, eyes rolled back and palms raised toward the sky: Tamara Sifri. Attendants in white robes with similarly sunken cheeks buzz around her like flies, wiping sweat from her forehead, polishing the altar’s obsidian surface, and rearranging coals in nearby braziers with pokers. There are no windows in the cramped, marble temple; it’s most likely underground.

  Luce is sitting behind Sifri in a plastic lawn chair, arms folded and back slouched, watching the whole process with annoyed impatience. Her dark brown cheeks are dusted with lavender glitter, and her puffy black skirt shifts as she kicks her feet. When an attendant gives her the stink-eye, she sticks her tongue out at them. Man, I love my sister.

  The rushing noise starts. The attendants stop, one by one, eyes turned heavenward and mouths open in awe. They all seem to think this is somehow Sifri’s doing. But Sifri herself blinks back to the real world, frowns, stands up and turns around. When she speaks, her voice is a smoker’s rasp.

  “Who is disturbing—”

  She’s thrown back into the altar by an invisible force, back arching unnaturally over the stone, twisting and thrashing like a pinned spider. Attendants freeze in place, screaming. Luce stares, wide-eyed—then stands so forcefully that her chair is knocked to the floor. She rushes to Sifri, hands already giving off blue sparks, and tears open the black robe. Sifri’s pale skin just barely restrains pulsing, swollen veins, internal ruptures splotching purple under the surface, organs bulging in their need to burst through.

  Luce’s midnight eyes dart back and forth, scanning, categorizing, calculating. Something flashes in her eyes—understanding. She calls to the attendants, “Sharp, I need something sharp!”

  She’s only met by panicked screams. She whirls around, still holding the sides of Sifri’s torn robe, and shouts even more loudly, “Knife, scalpel, anything, stat! I need to cut her open!”

  Someone actually runs out the door.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake—”

  Sifri’s back straightens and she springs upward, her screaming, purple-stained face flying toward Luce’s own—Luce shoves her back down over the altar with both hands. As the priestess continues to convulse, Luce rolls up her sleeves and carefully, carefully pushes her fingertips into the skin over Sifri’s sternum. They emerge holding a glowing violet thread that stretches out of Sifri like the thinnest nylon. Luce yanks the thread back with a flourish—and Sifri’s skin unseams from collarbone to navel, jettisoning buckets of red, red blood into Luce’s face.

  The tabletop scene shimmers away.

  “…Holy shit,” I say.

  “You didn’t know how involved your sister was in this, did you?”

  “No, I—I didn’t know that had happened at all, she didn’t tell me.” I see Luce in my mind’s eye, just after I’d woken from the nap in her bed. She’d been scrubbed raw and in her most comfortable pajamas, the dark circles under her eyes a lunar eclipse. That had been her first chance to rest since… this… and I had immediately called to tell her I was shot and dying. Oh, Luce, I’m so sorry. “What exactly did she do? How did cutting Sifri open like that work?”

  “The victims were being overfilled with blood, to the point of bursting. Your sister drained Sifri the way one would drain a fluid-filled cavity. The more difficult part was repairing the damage afterward. Sifri will likely be relieved of her duties on the Council to promote her ongoing recovery.”

  I stay silent for a moment. I’m coming to understand some things, and it’s not a pleasant feeling. “…So…there was one more death, wasn’t there?”

  Bautista says nothing, just meets my gaze with grave eyes as she plucks another raindrop from the ceiling. This one she lets slide across her wrinkled hand and down her fingertips, guiding it to gently drip off and sink into the tabletop.

  You wouldn’t think a six-year-old boy could be so small. You’d think, well, he’s not a baby anymore, he goes to school and eats without a bib and plays the violin or something. But gods, Miklos Nádasdy is so small. Even the brains leaking from his nose and mouth and ears seem like stuffing bursting out of a teddy bear. I see sidewalk puddles the size of that gut splatter every day. Hand-shaped smears surround his head like a halo, and claw marks adorn the floor like fallen feathers; a mother’s grief, tinted with a murderous streak.

  I lean back in my chair, unwilling and unable to keep looking. “There’s more you need to tell me, isn’t there? We’re not going to find Joy unless we put together this whole godsdamned puzzle.”

  Bautista nods, solemnly. “The attack threw this regional Council into chaos, so much so that the international Council took notice. We a
re both the victims and the most likely suspects; we were, after all, handpicked for these seats because of our power. We have one more day until the Arbiter comes to put us all on trial.”

  I tilt my head. The Arbiter, the most neutral judge and tie-breaker known to the magical world. Did she earn the title by being so powerfully impartial in her personal life, or did the title transform her very humanity when the last Arbiter passed it on? There’s a hundred scholarly books debating the topic, yet no clear conclusion. “You don’t think the Arbiter can figure out what’s going on?”

  “I think she brings both the promise and threat of justice. You know the Arbiter, she’s ruthless. She has to be. Even the most innocent of us have sins that would shine like beacons in her eye—it would be like the slaughter of a village to kill a werewolf. So the Council is united in its desire to keep her at bay.” She quirks her head at me. “You know, it was bad form of you earlier, taking her name in vain.”

  I shrug. “Sue me, I was desperate.” Please don’t sue me, I have no savings. “It got those assholes’ attention, and I don’t regret it.”

  Bautista’s chin wrinkles in disapproval. “You do know she’s the one who saved you?”

  I blink. “Eh?”

  “After you survived the demon blood, half the global council wanted you dead, and half wanted to build a lab solely for the purpose of taking you apart. The Arbiter laid down the sentence of excommunication. She saved you from death, imprisonment, and fingers prying in your bloodstream, even if it cost you your community.”

  I swallow a sudden lump in my throat. Look away. “She didn’t have to do that. I don’t even know her.”

  “No. You don’t.”

  Well, now I feel thoroughly scolded. I stumble as I try to reroute the conversation. “So… what does the Arbiter have to do with anything? What was it you said—that the Council’s trying to keep her away?”

  “Tonight, each member is scrabbling for pieces of the evidence and clinging to what they already have. Some are hoping to catch the real killer, some are looking to shift the blame, and some are just hoarding bargaining chips with which to beg for mercy.”

  I find myself squeezing the arm of my chair. “I don’t understand, what do you mean they’re scrabbling for ‘evidence?’ The evidence is a bunch of corpses, an empty clinic, and a clueless mortician. Nádasdy said everything will be destroyed or erased—” It hits me like a flying potted plant. “Oh, gods. She lied. You all lied. That whole trial was a sham.”

  Bautista regards me with weary eyes. “The Merestis have the clinic. They are the scholars and archaeologists, after all. They’re scrubbing the whole place, divining samples and digging into the very foundations of the building. They’ve probably even found traces of your escaped vampire by now, and are sending their bounty hunters after her. The Lockharts have the mortician. Their representative didn’t lie about him being an unknowing civilian, but you and I both know that secrets can be dredged up from the very depths of a person’s subconscious with enough expertise… or brute force.”

  My mouth is dry. “The mortician. He’s not going to make it, is he?”

  Bautista shakes her head. “He’s as good as dead. He wasn’t a major participant by any means, but he played a tangential role in the attack that took a Lockhart’s life—even if he’s still breathing by the time they’re done with him, he’s dead.”

  I look down into my own lap. Before I can process my emotions, Bautista speaks again.

  “The last, most desirable piece of the pie—the bodies. Nádasdy has those.”

  “What, all of them?”

  “Every single one… at least, in their physical forms.”

  It takes me a half-second to get the nuance. When I do, I have to fight the urge to throw my chair at Bautista again.

  “Memories. I have memories of the bodies, because I was the only one able to get a good look at them before Nádasdy swooped in. You want to crack my head open and pull them out.”

  Bautista stirs her tea. “I think you’re assuming my methods are cruder than they are, but otherwise you are correct. But you must realize, this benefits both our investigations. If you try to recall the details on your own, they will likely be incomplete. I can reconstruct everything you saw in that mortuary within this space, affording us a much, much better chance of discovering a usable clue.”

  I’m quiet for a moment. I lick my lips, even though they’re not dry. The universe is really testing me today.

  “…Okay. Do it.”

  Bautista tilts her head. “Why don’t you?”

  I feel my forehead wrinkle in confusion. “What do you mean?”

  “Obviously, you’re not looking forward to my rooting around in your head. So take the initiative. You are as much a part of this dream as I am.”

  I look up at the cloudy ceiling above me. I think about the mortuary, try to cycle through the memories of all the bodies I saw there. I concentrate, reaching up—the clouds swirl around my fingers, water spun into cotton, impossibly soft and refreshingly cold. When I pull back, droplets slide across my skin in gravity-defying directions. I stand up from my chair, stepping into a clear space, and shake the droplets off my hand; they land on invisible surfaces, splashing them with runny watercolors that seep outward in defined shapes. I see a metal table begin to form, and a shelf, a hand hanging out of a white shroud, a face with closed eyes—the mortuary room rises in front of me like a jungle from stark white desert, and I can hardly believe it.

  Bautista shuffles into place beside me. “Good job, mija. Johanna would have been proud.” She passes me her cup of tea. “Here, have some.” I take a drink, then instantly choke on a horrific mixture of carbonation and bitter leaf.

  “Oh gods—what the fuck is this?”

  “Coffee and Coca-Cola. I quite enjoy the combination.” She takes the mug back and calmly takes a sip.

  I stare at her. “You’re a monster.”

  She shrugs and hobbles toward the metal table nearest to us. “We’re going to have to organize these if we want to get any thinking done.”

  “They were killed in different ways by different people. Here.”

  I start rolling the wheeled tables around, organizing them into rows. When I pull a corpse from the middle of a shelf, it floats where I direct it, weightless as a balloon. I weave around the furniture and bodies until I’ve arranged everything the way I want. I lead Bautista to the first row of bodies: the ones in white hospital gowns, with slashed-open necks.

  “These nine were gathered through the fake clinic and prepped before being drained. ‘Purifying rituals’ is what the vampire said. And the merc mentioned ‘virgin blood,’ but I didn’t fail the screening process until they figured I must be on some drug they couldn’t identify. I think they mean ‘virgin’ in the most technical sense—untreated through artificial means, like drugs. Or, in my case, magic.”

  I stand in front of Lisa’s victims. “These ones didn’t make it through the screening, so they were taken out by the vampire. Oh, and Phyllis over there. She wasn’t a reject, just a really unlucky employee.” I see the missing eyelashes again, and shudder.

  We move onto the row that includes the college Wiccan and the clown fetish guy. “These five were harvested too, but it wasn’t clean and it wasn’t premeditated. Everyone’s still in their regular clothes, and the wounds are just too messy.”

  Bautista hmms. “Some kind of emergency, or the correction of a mistake.” Her eyes sparkle. “A mistake… which would explain the erroneous deaths in the Council attack. The Lockhart lab technician wasn’t the target, Luo was. And it was Nádasdy, not her son, who was meant to die.”

  “Holy shit, yeah. Here—” I point at the three killed by bludgeoning and garroting. “I think these were the rejects from the emergency batch. They didn’t die in the clinic—Lisa doesn’t kill that quickly or cleanly. I think it was the mercenary, Jax. He was in the room when they killed the emergency sacrifices, and he wiped out the ones that weren’t qualifie
d.”

  Bautista peers closely at one of the last bodies, that of a man in an undershirt and sweats, his lack of hair nicely displaying his concave skull. She leans forward to give him a quick sniff, then taps on his chest. “Chemotherapy.”

  “What?”

  “Missing hair and eyebrows, needle marks in his chest—that’s chemotherapy.”

  An image flits through my head—Jax in a plastic chair, with a syringe sticking out of the back of his neck. “Huh. I think I heard Jax say that disease didn’t count against virgin blood.”

  “But man-made treatments for those diseases do.”

  I shrug. “I guess so.” I glance at the other two killed by Jax, see the ligature marks around their necks and the relatively peaceful looks on their faces. Compared to theirs, the bald man’s wounds look barbaric. I start pacing between the four groups of corpses.

  “Okay, so, we know what happened with all of these bodies. There’s a timeline; the killer was using the clinic to collect sacrifices, right up ‘til there were enough for the attack on the Council. Something went wrong—not enough sacrifices, or the wrong kind, maybe? So Jax and his men hit the streets, nabbed anyone they could—I know someone else who got taken that night, a teenage boy. The attack on the Council got flubbed, the killer cleaned house, and… kept collecting sacrifices. Joy only disappeared two days ago, and the clinic was still in operation right up until yesterday. Why? To try again? Is it really so important to take Luo and Nádasdy out of the equation?”

  Bautista is quiet. She sips her coffee-Cola. “You set out four bear traps for four bear cubs. Your plan was to trap and kill all four cubs, then leave with the pelts. All four traps were set off, but only two cubs died, and the two remaining cubs went running back to the den. Now, mama bear is coming. She runs too fast for you to escape. You have one bear trap left. What do you do?”