Armor of Roses and The Silver Voice

by Marjorie M. Liu

  I was outside St. Luke’s. It was night. The same homeless man I remembered from before was still asleep on the sidewalk, in the same position. The girl with the Gatorade was walking away. It had not been that long. Not long at all.

  The boys ripped free of my body, driving me to my knees. I started running, though, before the transition was entirely complete—shedding demons from my skin in smoky waves that coalesced into hard, sharp flesh.

  I found the emergency room, and within minutes was directed to a quiet area in recovery. Grant was there, perched on the edge of his chair—his head tilted toward the door as though listening for something. Maybe me. I skidded to a stop when I saw him. He looked so normal. All of this, normal, familiar. But in that moment all I could smell was mildew, and all I could feel was the heat, and I remembered the sounds of Shanghai at night and the Nazis with their laughter as they smiled at my grandmother.

  “Maxine,” Grant said, staring at me. “Your aura.”

  “Later,” I said softly, staring past him at the old woman resting on the bed. Giving her a good long look that drew readily from fresh memories.

  She seemed so ordinary. Such a sick, wounded, ordinary woman. Wrinkled, shriveled, with oxygen lines running directly into her nose, and heart monitors disappearing up her short sleeve to her chest. It was a miracle she still lived.

  Or maybe not so much a miracle. I saw the truth. I saw it in a way that I never would have, had I not looked the Black Cat in the face. Despite the odds, despite her advanced age, this was not Winifred Cohen.

  The woman lying in the bed in front of me was the Black Cat of Shanghai.

  “This is not who we thought,” I whispered.

  “I know,” Grant replied solemnly, rising with a wince from his chair. “Look at her arms.”

  I had not even paid attention, but I looked. Scar tissue covered her arms; rough, as though an electric sander had been taken to her skin. Or a knife. Something sharp that had cut and peeled.

  “The doctors found those scars everywhere, as though she had been skinned alive,” Grant said, his voice tight with disgust. “They asked me about it, but of course I knew nothing. It got me thinking, though. And then, the longer I was with her, and the more I studied her aura—”

  “That dark patch you saw.”

  “Something . . . demonic. Buried so deeply, she might not even know it exists. There are many odd things about her aura. Fragments, just . . . floating. I’m not sure she knows who she is.”

  I did not care. The real Winifred Cohen was probably dead—and if so, this woman had killed her, or paid someone else do it. Set up the others, even as she took over the woman’s life.

  Should have finished the job. Should have finished. I felt my grandmother’s consternation. I shared it, thinking of Ernie. I had not done enough. Not enough, by far.

  I walked to the far side of the bed where the shadows were thick, and tapped my foot on the ground. Zee rolled free, giving me an uneasy look.

  “You knew,” I said. “You must have. You pretended she was safe. Why the hell would you go to so much trouble?”

  “Many reasons,” he rasped, but a nurse chose that moment to approach the room, and he rolled back under the bed—leaving me fuming. The woman who entered took one look at my face—and then my ragged, ill-fitting clothing from 1944—and said sharply, “Is everything all right here?”

  “Just fine,” Grant soothed, a melody in his voice. “If you could give us a moment?”

  The nurse shot him a piercing look that lasted for all of two seconds. She swayed, touching her head. Grant said something else to her, his voice little more than a buzz to my distracted mind. The woman nodded absently, dreamily, and backed out of the room. He shut the door behind her.

  I said, “Can you wake her up?”

  Grant limped close, studying my face, probably seeing all kinds of ugly emotions rising from my heart. But there was only compassion in his eyes. “You went somewhere. Back.”

  “Back,” I agreed. “Can you do it?”

  Grant hesitated, staring from me to the old woman. His eyes grew distant, thoughtful.

  “She’s aware of you,” he said, limping to the side of the bed. “Even unconscious, a part of her is reaching toward you.”

  A chill raced over me. I watched the old Black Cat’s slack face. Remembered her golden eyes, the vibrancy of her lush curves. That cruel zombie smile.

  Antonina, I told myself. Not the Black Cat.

  And yet, I could not separate the two. It was impossible.

  Grant bent over, and placed his mouth close to the unconscious woman’s ear. He sang to her, softly, but his voice rolled through me like the ghost of a summer storm, rich and heavy with thunder. I moved closer.

  Her eyelids flickered. Her mouth moved, tongue darting over cracked lips. Grant motioned for me to grab a bottle of water from the nightstand, and I was ready when the old woman drew in a long, rasping breath. I rested the mouth of the bottle against her lips, and she instinctively tried to drink. I was careful only to let her sip. She finally opened her eyes, and met my gaze.

  She recognized me immediately, but I could see now that it went deeper than that. I should have noticed before—realized something was wrong. The first time I had met this woman, believing she was Winifred Cohen, she had known things about me. I assumed, erroneously, that she had witnessed my grandmother in action. Only half right. Winifred had seen little or nothing. But the zombie, on the other hand, and her host . . .

  “I know who you are,” I said softly to the old woman, when I was certain I had her full, conscious, attention. “Antonina. Black Cat.”

  The faintest hint of a smile touched her mouth, sending a chill through me. I wanted to back away, but held steady, forcing myself to hold her gaze; golden-flecked, with shimmers that rose from the very human brown of her eyes. I would never forget those eyes.

  “Hunter,” she whispered. “She was so taken with you.”

  “The demon who possessed you,” I said.

  She wet her lips. “My protector. I searched for her. For years. I felt her close sometimes, as though she was watching me, but she never . . . came home. Not after that day. You kept her from me. Both of you did.”

  I ignored that. “You’ve been up to your old tricks. Hurting people.”

  “Making right,” replied the old Black Cat. “I forgot you all, for a time. I forgot so much, but the Kuomingdang would not believe that. They did many things to me, trying to make me talk. All I could tell them were stories about Siberia. But one day they pushed me too far. I killed those men. I didn’t know how. Just that they were dead. I got out, and forgot them, too.”

  The Black Cat closed her eyes, sighing. “I had such terrible dreams, Hunter. I wanted a new life. I wanted to be someone else.”

  “You cut those tattoos off your body.”

  “Part of the bad dream.” Her voice softened so much I could hardly hear her. “But I kept them. You don’t . . . throw away pieces of yourself. Like trash.”

  Grant placed his hand on my shoulder. I straightened, fighting for my voice. “It was all a lie. You set Ernie up. You killed Samuel and Lizbet. Finally, you killed them. And you had yourself shot.”

  “Making right,” she whispered again. “I dreamed of you, Hunter. All these years, dreaming of you. Feeling you, in my veins. And then one day I crossed paths with Winifred Cohen. I found her. I think I had been searching, all along. Quiet woman. But I could hear her.” The Black Cat brushed fingers across her brow, but barely, as if the effort hurt and weakened her. Her hand fell limp into the covers, and her eyes drifted shut. “I . . . absorbed her. I made her tell me what she knew of the others. And your grandmother. I wanted to punish that woman. She loved those children.

  “But it all became a dream again,” she added, a moment later—sounding confused,
and sad, and tired.

  Grant drew me away. “Before, when we first met her, she truly believed she was Winifred Cohen. She believed everything she told us, right down to cutting the skin off a live woman. Which she did, apparently. Just to herself. Her immersion in that personality was flawless, even to me.”

  “And now?”

  “It’s like watching a quilt that has been cut into pieces. She’s floating in and out. Part of her is reaching for the Winifred personality. Other parts are just . . . resting in what she was. She’s crazy, Maxine. Well and truly scrambled. I think it’s possible she ordered the hit on herself, believing she deserved it. That she was Winifred and needed to die.”

  I looked at the Black Cat. It had been only hours for me. Hours, since I had seen her as a young woman. And now she was shriveled, a shell, shot and maybe dying in a hospital bed. I had no idea what to do with a psychotic old woman who was part demon, who murdered, who believed herself to be both victim and predator. She had taken a fucking knife and cut the skin off her body. God only knew what else she had done in the past sixty years.

  Dek and Mal were heavy in my hair. I looked for the others, and found them arrayed around the room, bathed in the fluorescent glow of the long bulb arranged in the wall panel above the Black Cat’s head. Raw and Aaz ate popcorn as they stared at the old woman. Zee perched at the bottom of the bed, his claws bunched up in the covers surrounding her feet. Watching her solemnly.

  Maybe she felt his attention. She opened her eyes, and stared right at him. Showed no fear. Just that faint smile, which shifted from sweet to cold, to cruel.

  “Your highness,” she rasped mockingly.

  “Cat,” whispered Zee. “Miserable Cat. Nothing left but threads.”

  Gold glinted again in her eyes, but stronger, brighter. Hot with fury. Grant stiffened, and in two strides I was back at the bed.

  “You should have killed me then,” she said, trying to sound threatening, though the effect was little more than an angry, bitter whine. “But you both were too weak.”

  I could have said something about mercy. I could have told her that she had been an innocent, and that the formerly possessed should be given a chance to start over. But I looked into those golden eyes, fading even now into dull human brown—glazing over with forgetfulness and confusion—and kept my mouth shut. Mercy, again. Mercy, me.

  I snapped my fingers at the boys, and they fled into the shadows. All of them, except Zee. I said to Grant, “Can she harm anyone else?”

  “She’s dying,” he said simply. “I can see it all around her. She’s fading. I doubt she’ll last the night.”

  I nodded stiffly, sick to my stomach. Sick to death. I was walking away, again, but I wasn’t going to kill in cold blood. Not like this.

  I met the old woman’s gaze. “Good-bye.”

  “No,” she murmured, brow crinkling with confusion. “Not yet. I didn’t finish. I didn’t finish with you. Wanted to punish . . . her grandchild. Punish her.”

  “You punished yourself,” I replied, and left the hospital room.

  GRANT and I went to my mother’s apartment on Central Park. Everything was dusty. The white sheets that covered the furniture had turned gray. The windows were filthy. The air was cold and smelled faintly of mildew. But the electricity and water worked—paid for each month by one of the law firms that had overseen my mother’s affairs since her murder.

  In the closet I found clothes wrapped in plastic. I found a locked chest full of guns. A box crammed with cash and precious jewels. And in the kitchen cupboards, Spam. Along with two forks.

  “I feel like royalty,” Grant said.

  I tried to smile. Around us, Raw and Aaz were tumbling along the hardwood floors, tossing Dek and Mal through the air like spears—making the serpentine demons squeal with delight. I looked for Zee. I walked through the apartment, thinking of the last time I had been here with my mother. Wondering if Jean had ever come back.

  I felt Zee watching me before I saw him. I stood at the window, gazing out at Central Park. Waiting to hear what he had to say. Knowing part of it already.

  “Old Cat dead,” he finally rasped. “Took care of it.”

  I had thought he would. I searched myself for regret, and found none. “Did she suffer?”

  Zee climbed onto the wide sill. “Not in sleep.”

  “And the one who shot her? Who killed Samuel and Lizbet? Ernie?”

  An odd glint entered his eyes when I mentioned Ernie’s name, but he shrugged and said, “Different men, different cities. Hired like thugs. Got the scent. Tomorrow, I cut them.”

  Cut them, kill them. I had time to think about that, and decide whether there should be another kind of justice. Human laws, human wheels. Evidence could be planted. Police tipped off.

  I shot him a hard look. “And the rest of it? You could have warned me in time to save lives.”

  He dug his claws into wood beneath him. I noticed other gouge marks, older and just as deep. “Old mother needed you. Needed you in order to . . . change. Be better. Stronger. Pivotal. No you around, she go on. Never look back. Black Cat get strong and stronger. Children die early. More children after that.”

  “She would have done something,” I protested, though a small part of me wondered if that was true. “She would have fought to help those kids.”

  “No,” Zee whispered, with utter certainty. “Would have been different. Colder, harder. No good mother. No heart. Seen it happen. Again, again.” He rested a claw upon my hand. “You got heart. Heart from your mother, because your grandmother got heart. Because you shook up her heart. Shook her hard. Made her regret. Regret is sweet if it burns you right.”

  “So you’re saying. . . . all this was to make me go back. To help my grandmother become a better person.” I stared at him. “But she didn’t even remember me. Later, the first time I met her. We were strangers.”

  Zee made a slashing motion across his brow. “Waited until lessons took, then cut you out. Better that way. No good remembering future. No good.”

  I wanted to argue with that, but stopped myself. If I had met my grandchild while hardly out of my teens, it would have messed me up. It would have been all I thought of. No good remembering the future. Because it stole from the present.

  I wrapped my arm around his hard shoulders, and rested my chin on top of his head. I could hear Grant’s cane clicking in the other room, coming closer.

  “But we failed,” I said softly, staring at the glittering city lights. “Those kids died.”

  Zee held up his clawed hand, splitting his long fingers like a Vulcan from Star Trek. “Live long and prosper.”

  I stifled a sharp cough of stunned, incredulous laughter. But mostly, I just wanted to weep. Grant peered into the room. “You okay?”

  “No,” I said. “There’s been a lot of death.”

  “Lot more you’re not telling me. If I checked your right hand, what would I see?”

  I did not want to look. “More of your future cyborg woman.”

  “And the rest?”

  “I couldn’t save the people I was supposed to.”

  Grant leaned against the doorway, studying me. “You’re talking about those kids whom Winifred knew, and who were . . . targeted. Samuel, Lizbet.”

  “Ernie,” I whispered, aching.

  Grant frowned. “You feel so much grief when you say his name. I can see it.”

  “He’s dead,” I blurted out, wondering why he should look so confused—and then remembered that Grant did not know. I had not told him yet, about going back in time. Seeing those . . . names . . . as children. Saving Ernie, at least for a moment. In this time, Ernie had been dead for days now, in my arms.

  Unless he was not dead.

  “Grant,” I said slowly. “How did we get here? How were we warned to find Winifred?�
��

  His frown deepened. “There was a letter, Maxine.”

  THE following week in Seattle, I picked Ernie Bernstein up from the airport. It was a rare day, sunny and warm, and I was the only person wearing jeans and a turtleneck. I did not feel the heat.

  I saw him coming out of customs: a portly man, shorter than me, his hair silver and tufted. But his eyes were the same. I remembered those eyes.

  He stopped when he saw me. Stood stock-still, staring. Drinking me in. I walked up to him, and smiled. Not bothering to hide the fine burn of tears in my eyes.

  “I listened,” he said hoarsely. “Even when Winifred called me out of the blue and said I needed to find you, and go in person. Even when she mailed me that scrap of skin and said the Black Cat was back. I waited, and did as you asked.”

  Time was a funny thing. I had assumed nothing could change, but it had. I could not explain the paradox that created. Only that moments counted. That it was possible—it was possible, against all odds—to make a difference.

  “You did good,” I said.

  “I trusted magic,” Ernie replied, with a tremulous smile. “But now I’m an old man, and you’re still the same. I can only hope . . . I can only hope that Jean is doing just as well.”

  I hesitated. He saw the answer in my eyes, and bowed his head.

  “Oh,” he whispered, a little boy all over again, pained and grieving. “I never thanked you. Either of you. I regretted that, always. So I watched for you both. All these years, everywhere I went. I watched for your faces.”

  “I was hoping you would find me,” I said.

  He leaned in, and kissed me shyly on the cheek. “It was only a matter of time.”

  The Silver Voice

  A Hunter Kiss Short Story

  It wasn’t that Grant couldn’t remember his mother’s face. It wasn’t like that at all. He just couldn’t recall her features with the same clarity that he could the amulet she had always worn around her neck—which, for almost fifteen years, he had kept locked away in a safety-deposit box. Only after meeting his future wife did it occur to him that the amulet might be more than a simple piece of jewelry though it was still months later before he gave himself permission to retrieve it.