by Rachel Caine
“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 eye-lines 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 in held in a two-hand grip (white phosphorus? That would’ve been Dee’s call) trained between the Professor’s shoulder blades, 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 ether 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 an 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.”
“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, like 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.”
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 a 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, Ana, Dee. Who 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 shoulder blades, 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, the 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, she 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?