by Matt Wallace
She grips the handle and inches it open, just a crack, testing. Nothing and no one attempts to leap out at her. Just to be safe, Jett digs into her bag and removes her Piece of the Dead, the small fleshy Bluetooth-like device that allows her to control her undead employees. Fitting it over one ear, Jett again grips the handle and yanks the door aside, walking into the room.
Two steps in she drops the pickle tub, splashing the leg of her running pants with yak’s blood. Her purse strap slips from a suddenly slack arm, as well.
Luciana is standing in the middle of what’s now a kill room, covered from head to toe in an elegant, translucent raincoat with pockets lined by thick white piping. The raincoat is splattered with viscous green and almost black red. In one gloved hand she cradles the haft of a large hatchet while the other grips the handle of a machete. The blades of both tools are dripping with the same sickly juice and covered with matching gore.
Luciana turns and peers out from beneath the raincoat’s clear hood at Jett, smiling calmly.
“Miss Hollinshead!”
Headless, decomposed bodies are strewn about the Astroturfed playroom Jett built to occupy the undead in their off hours, all of them still wearing their Sin du Jour work coveralls. Every single one of Jett’s workers has been decapitated and permanently removed from the realm of the living.
Gary, a former sound engineer who died in a fire during a rock concert, is still clutching one of the room’s large rubber balls in his gray hands.
“What have you done?” Jett demands.
“Oh, I’ve just completed a little spring cleaning. We decided your . . . employees . . . were simply too large a safety and security concern. And with your department being scaled back, they were also an unnecessary drain on resources.”
“You had no right!” Jett shouts at her, furiously.
“No,” Luciana corrects her, “they had no rights, Miss Hollinshead. Your staff relinquished them along with their grip on this mortal coil.”
“That’s not the point!” Another, equally horrifying thought strikes Jett. “What about Byron? Did he . . . was it . . . does he know about this?”
Luciana’s smile doesn’t change, but her eyes do, taking on something undeniably cold and almost gleeful.
“Of course,” she says. “He is the boss, after all.”
Jett begins walking toward her. “You bitch—”
She stops when Luciana raises her machete, holding it between them, its stained tip pointed at Jett’s heart.
“Careful, little girl,” Luciana says, and for the first time Jett can recall the woman has stopped smiling. “You’re holding on to gainful employment by a very thin thread. I wouldn’t go adding your personal safety to that already strained line.”
Jett stares at the machete blade, then up at the face of the woman holding it. Jett isn’t afraid, but as in all things, her mind concerns itself with realistically assessing the current situation.
She takes a step back.
Luciana slowly lowers the machete, and that smile returns to her face.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me,” she says, “I’ve got a cleaning crew coming in to sanitize the space. I think it’ll make a fabulous converted stock room.”
Jett swallows what feels like a dollop of hot lead.
“If you think I haven’t survived worse than you,” Jett says stonily, “then you’ve never planned a wedding for a reality television star.”
With that, Jett kicks over the pickle tub dropped at her feet, spilling the inside of a dozen yaks’ skulls all over the floor.
RELATIONSHIP MILESTONES
“Fuck!” Lena curses in frustration as she struggles to fit her key in the lock.
It occurs to her that rushing to unlock the door invariably leads to the process taking twice as long as it would’ve if she’d just operated at normal speed. Lena mentally tells that thought to go fuck itself too. She then curses herself for cursing her own thoughts, and by the time she’s done with all of that she realizes she’s still impotently and hurriedly stabbing the brass around the keyhole.
“Fuck!” she yells again, and finally manages to slide the key home.
Once inside, Lena unbuttons and pulls off her chef’s smock, tossing it over the sofa. There are several of her tops on hooks she hung from the hallway lintel to dry after doing her laundry. Lena impatiently yanks one down and pulls it over the tank top she wears beneath her smock.
“Darren! Are you here?”
From his bedroom at the end of the hallway she hears something that could be a muffled acknowledgment of her question.
Lena finds him neatly folding clothes on his bed and organizing them inside an open suitcase with an equally anally retentive attention to detail.
“Where the hell are you going?” she asks.
“Luciana gave me and James a few extra days off this weekend. We’re going to take a trip upstate. There’s this farmers’ market in Rochester he’s always wanted to go to.”
Lena feels the subtle stabs of a headache coming on. “I . . . there are so many things you just said that I don’t understand.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why did she give you two, specifically, time off? Especially when we have Consoné’s second speech coming up?”
Darren shrugs, continuing to pack.
“I dunno. I’ve been picking up a lot of slack while you were away. Now that you’re back maybe she wanted to reward me.”
“And James?”
“He works hard too.”
“We all work hard.”
“I mean, you do when you’re here,” Darren says without malice, but with definite reproach.
“All right, I’ll take that hit. But I don’t get how you can just, like, blow town with everything going on at Sin du Jour.”
“Okay, again, you lecturing me on running out of town without telling anybody is kind of fucked up—”
“I’ve copped to it! Repeatedly! Can we move on?”
“All right. What’s going on at Sin du Jour? Besides the usual stuff?”
Lena is practically gawking at him. “The usual stuff like all the forces of Hell wanting to kill us and fucking torment our souls eternally, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Has that beard grown up through your jaw into your brain or something?”
“Leave me alone about the beard.”
“Darren, for fuck sake, I like the tweaks you’ve made in my absence, but not being a little bitch doesn’t mean being dense.”
“I wasn’t a little bitch.”
“You were kind of a little bitch.”
“I was kind of a little bitch, fine.”
“She’s taken over the damn company! Monrovio! How have you not noticed this? She locked me out of the fucking kitchen. Literally. She put a lock on the kitchen.”
“Stuff goes wrong in the kitchen. Boosha and the Goblin wedding. That . . . the thing I accidentally let out that time. It probably should have a lock on it.”
“And me being on the other side of that lock?”
“I don’t know, dude, it’s her and Bronko’s call—”
“Her call.”
“Either way. I don’t know why she did it.”
“Has it occurred to you at all that she seems to be systematically weeding out and isolating anything and anyone that doesn’t want to fuck her?”
“Wow. You’re not usually the catty girl type.”
“You . . . what, are you saying I’m jealous of that bitch?”
“I didn’t say.”
“Fuck you.”
Darren frowns. “What do you want me to do, Lena? Agree with you about everything all the time and not have an opinion? I’m through with that.”
“Oh, what the fuck ever, man. Don’t make me the boogeyman of this personal renaissance you’re having or whatever it is. And don’t act stupid because you want to go balls-deep in James in a bed-and-breakfast upstate. I’m watching the rest of the line work their stations like Jett’s zom
bies. You saw it too. Something weird is happening, and it started happening when Monrovio showed up.”
Darren shrugs again. “Have you thought about the idea that maybe it’s not her. Maybe it’s Dorsky. Like, maybe you being back and the way you left stuff with him is the reason he’s not his usual self and the reason you’re not on the line.”
“And what about the others?”
“They take their cues from Dorsky, you know that.”
“So, what? They’re sympathy moping? Do you fucking hear yourself? The line, Bronko, practically the whole Stocking & Receiving crew, every hetero dude in our company looks and acts like they haven’t slept in a week and somehow that’s all my fault? I didn’t fuck everybody, Darren, just two of them.”
Darren’s eyes widen. “Two? What?”
“What? One. Whatever. The point is, she’s doing something and I want to know what, and why.”
“Okay. Do what you do. I don’t want to know any of that stuff, though.”
“I’m going to visit Boosha in the hospital,” Lena says, resolute. “All I want to know is are you going to be here when I get back?”
“No. I want a break. I need a break. You had one, a long one, and I want one too. With James. And I think you’re overreacting to Luciana. She’s just doing her job. I’m sorry that’s pissing you off.”
“I liked you better as a little bitch,” Lena says, turning and striding out of the room.
“No, you didn’t!” he shouts after her.
“No, I didn’t!” she shouts back.
Darren nods to himself, satisfied. “See you on Monday!”
Out in the living room, he hears their front door slam shut.
VISITING HOURS
It’s a special ward of Mount Sinai Hospital of Queens, one that receives very few human visitors because humans are never admitted there as patients.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” the doctor explains to Lena as he guides her through a hallway lined with unmarked doors. “And mind you, my job consists almost entirely of seeing things no one else has ever seen before.”
He’s human, it seems, the doctor is, with a deep baritone voice and a neat ponytail.
“The injuries she sustained in her accident were relatively minor, but they won’t heal.”
“Why not?”
“Boosha is a hybrid, seemingly of . . . well, everything. She has DNA from most known species we have on file, and DNA from species we haven’t catalogued, and then there’s some stuff that doesn’t really qualify as DNA, but seems pretty important.”
“Okay, but why would that stop her from healing herself?”
“Because it isn’t all one thing, which makes almost no sense. Actually, I’m wrong. It makes no sense. Boosha seems to be a collection of different genetic material existing independently of each other. When her body attempts to perform a simple operation, like healing a wound, that contrary material collides trying to perform the task and it all cancels each other out so nothing gets done.”
Lena gives up trying to understand or even process that halfway through his explanation.
“So what are you going to do?” she asks.
“We’re trying to figure out a way to neutralize her own internal processes and heal her ourselves. In the meantime, she’s largely unresponsive. Hearing a familiar voice never hurts, though.”
The doctor opens one of the unmarked doors and ushers Lena inside. Boosha’s tucked into a small, plush bed in a simply appointed room. She’s not hooked up to any machinery, not even a pulse monitor. Lena can see bruises on her cheek and forehead. Her skin is also tinted a sickly green, but Boosha’s skin is always tinted a sickly green, so that’s not particularly telling.
The doctor leaves them alone and Lena seats herself on the edge of the bed beside the comatose woman. She studies the features of Boosha’s face, the eyes that are set just a little too far apart and shaped a little too octagonally to be entirely human.
“You know, you’re about the furthest thing from normal I’ve ever met in my life, but you were actually the only one who made that place feel normal to me. Coming to you, listening to you tell us about all these things, all these creatures and their history, sounding like my Hungarian grandma, it made it all feel okay. You gave me some kind of anchor for things. I never once thanked you for that, and I should’ve.”
Lena waits, unconsciously hoping for some reaction. When she receives none from Boosha, Lena realizes the futility of it all, speaking to her, Lena’s suspicions, even coming here at all.
“You were telling me and Darren about the elementals,” she presses on anyway. “Monrovio interrupted us. Boosha? You said you know what she is. What did you mean? Can you tell me? Somehow? Please? Everything’s kind of gone tits up back . . . back home, even for that place, and I need to know what’s happening.”
Lena waits, and then waits some more.
The futility she was feeling a moment before becomes oppressive and undeniable.
Lena nods to herself. “That’s okay,” she says, softly. “Don’t worry about it. You just rest, okay?”
She leans down and kisses Boosha’s forehead, tasting copper and ash. The texture of her skin is like that of a palm leaf.
Lena stands up from the edge of the bed. She’s turning to leave when Boosha shivers, visibly, under her gaze. Lena hesitates, watching her closely.
“Boosha?”
Her lips part, but there’s no sound.
Lena slides back onto the bed and leans over her carefully. “What is it?”
Boosha’s left hand twitches, then flops from the bed onto the bedside table. She taps one withered fingertip against the corner of the Gideon Bible lying there.
“The Bible?” Lena asks, confused.
The ancient woman shakes her head just so.
Lena’s mind races. “Book?”
Boosha nods.
“Not this book, though.”
Again, Boosha nods.
“One of your books? Back at Sin du Jour?”
Boosha’s most emphatic nod yet.
BACKGROUND CHECK
“She’s a goddamn succubus.”
Nikki and Cindy stare blankly at Lena across the diner booth table.
It’s obviously not the reaction Lena was expecting.
“Luciana Monrovio,” she clarifies. “She’s a succubus.”
“Right,” Cindy says, not disagreeing even a little.
“And?” Nikki asks.
Now it’s Lena’s turn to stare at them with her expression a void, at least until realization hits her.
“No! No, she’s actually a succubus. Like, a real one. She’s not human. She’s a succubus and she’s, like, magicked every Y chromosome in the company into being her mindless slave.”
Lena reaches under the table on her side of the small booth they’re sharing. She hefts a large tome with an intricately carved wooden cover protecting aging reams of papyrus. Dropping the volume down onto the table between them, she opens the book to a page she’s marked with a receipt from the market attached to Kellogg’s Diner, where she’s convened this rare off-site meeting between the three.
Both pages are filled with one overwhelming illustration. Folds of inked-in black are wrapped around a mostly unseen figure but for a pair of narrowed feminine eyes peering above the top of the darkness. Piled beneath the curtained figure are men drawn as wrecked caricatures with Xs for eyes. Latin words, Japanese and Hebrew characters seem to be jammed together in those otherwise all-black panels.
“I’m pretty sure none of this says ‘succubus,’” Cindy observes, examining the text.
“Yeah, turns out ‘succubus’ just means hooker in medieval Latin, which is . . . hypocritical and troubling in a wholly misogynistic way I can’t deal with right now because we have bigger immediate issues.”
“Granted,” Nikki says.
“That is for real fucked up, though,” Cindy adds.
“The entry in this book talks about Namaah, which is Jewish
, and Kanjirottu Yakshi, which is Japanese, and I had to Google Translate and Wikipedia all this shit so I’m not pretending to be a demonologist, but the gist is they all correspond to a real thing, and ‘succubus’ is the most popular representation of that thing. It’s a chick that holds men, or anything with a predilection toward women, in thrall by draining their free will.”
“I mean . . . I feel that,” Cindy says, “but how did you go from one of Boosha’s old-ass books to Monrovio being one?”
“Because Boosha left it for me. For us, I mean. That damn lectern of hers is the only thing still standing upright in her room, and this book was on it, turned to this page. She must’ve managed to put it there before she went out. I’m convinced Monrovio is the one who put her in that coma, too. Boosha knows what she is and Monrovio didn’t want her telling anyone. She took Boosha out and made it look like Boosha’s junkyard of an office finally collapsed on her.”
Cindy taps her fingertips against the tabletop in rapid succession, several times, gaze removed in thought.
“Good enough for me,” she proclaims a moment later. “Let’s cut the bitch’s head off and bury it behind a church.”
Nikki frowns at her. “We’re not killing anyone!”
“Any thing,” Cindy corrects her.
“Nikki’s right,” Lena says. “We don’t have enough information to take that kind of action. Yet.”
Nikki frowns at her now too.
“So, what do you want to do, whistleblower?” Cindy asks.
“I want to get back inside the main kitchen, first of all. Monrovio went to a lot of trouble specifically to lock the women out of that place, and I’m almost positive that’s why she’s moving your department off-site, to get you out of the building, just in case. I want to know why.”
“Breaking into a gate in our own building shouldn’t be too tough,” Cindy says.
“Should we get everyone else who Monrovio doesn’t have her hooks in yet?” Nikki asks.
“Pretty sure you two are it at this point. Little Dove is off with that awful old man who calls himself her grandfather. Darren and James are getting sweaty upstate somewhere. I can’t get a hold of Jett.”