Those of My Kind

by Loring, Jennifer

  “Or she’ll die because of you. What did you do, Blessing? Who is the dead woman in the hotel, and why does she have the same name as Mira?”

  “Who are you to accuse me of anything?” Blessing struck her across the face so hard that a warm gush of blood spurted from her lip and onto Blessing’s palm. She shuddered with the yearning to taste it. It had been a very long time.

  Tristan’s hand flew up to her mouth, her eyes wide with astonishment. But only for a moment before they turned into two cold, dead planets millions of miles from any light source. With her fingertips, she grazed the hilt of the fighting knife tucked into her jeans and wiped away the blood with her other hand, smearing it across her cheek like war paint.

  “You touch me again, Blessing, and I will kill you. Fuck your test. Fail it for all I care. Die for all I care. One more hunt tonight, and I’m done.”

  “Tristan—”

  “Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it.” Tristan stomped into the bedroom. She returned with her travel bag slung over her shoulder. “I have a place to stay. Do what you want with this one.”

  She slammed the door hard enough to rattle the entire wall. The next-door neighbors shouted muffled demands to shut the fuck up.

  Blessing stared at the door, willing Tristan to open it and apologize for everything that had happened since meeting Mira. But she did not return. Blessing throttled the ugly urge to chase after her and throw herself at her mercy. She did not need Tristan. She needed no one and never had. The proof had already come to her in the shape of a little girl.

  After half an hour or so, enough time to ensure she and Tristan wouldn’t cross paths, the intolerable atmosphere of the apartment drove her out onto the street. On some level, she appreciated the irony in scolding Tristan for the very thing of which she was guilty herself. She had done evil, had done it several times, and she recognized the banality in its intent. Then again, her root doctors and conjure women would argue it was all part of God’s plan, and she merely an instrument of His will. Why else had He given her such power? Magic aligned with neither good nor evil. In its ethical neutrality, it was simply another means to an end.

  Blessing had strayed no more than a few blocks in either direction since their arrival in Philadelphia. The warm morning had dissolved into a sweltering afternoon. Spring barely existed anymore, and it was not unusual for temperatures to climb into the eighties by mid-April. Now accustomed to seasons more complex than “wet” and “dry,” she longed for fall, for red and orange leaves and the aroma of wood stoves. Soon. Soon all would begin to wither and fade, in preparation for the season of dying.

  Blessing walked west, toward the sun.

  ~

  Blessing stretched out her legs and dug her heels into the gravel path. Boston terriers and dachshunds led their humans to the dog park a few meters away, while the occasional jogger with an iPhone trotted past. Orange threads of sunlight pierced through the leaves and the spaces between buildings, reflected off the windows of condominiums and luxury apartments, setting the glass afire.

  “Father left me lying on the ground while they dug my grave. He left my eyes open, and they recaptured my soul.”

  The voice alone drove spikes of dread into Blessing’s heart, though she had no explanation for her reaction. She had invoked this thing. It ought to fear her. But this was not, as she had first believed, some nameless minor imp, and Blessing again considered the possibility that something else altogether had answered her call.

  Anasztaizia sat on the opposite end of the wooden bench, her repellent glare fixed upon the passersby as if they were filets mignon on legs. Saliva collected in the corners of her mouth. Her body arrested between a girl’s and a woman’s, she swung her legs as a bored child might. Few offered her even a casual glance. In a big city, there were too many strange people to pay any particular one much mind.

  “Soon you will know me as I truly am. The eyes are always the most difficult to hide, but it helps that people see only what they want to see. Of course, we all wear these masks, don’t we? Even them. Even you. Hiding who we really are from the world. No one is ever what they seem, and we tell lies to uphold the deception until we can no longer distinguish reality from fiction ourselves.”

  Each word peeled a layer of Blessing’s skin away, leaving the raw nerve endings. A terrible thought occurred to her. “You are not what I summoned, are you?”

  “Not exactly, sweet little witch.” Anasztaizia’s mouth turned up at the corners. “But I came when you needed me. I believe they call that “serendipity.””

  Blessing bristled. The mere word “witch” conjured images of children with burns like hers, with shattered bones and mutilated genitals, with scars from beatings for which an entire village might turn out. “I am not a witch.”

  “It was not what you intended, certainly. Sometimes others choose our paths for us. What we do on our path is what matters. Your people think witches inherit their power, do they not? But your mother doesn’t even know her husband is not the one who fathered you. In that sense, you really are an evil spirit.”

  “You know nothing of me or my family.”

  “You just cast a spell to kill your companion if she will not submit to your love. You would kill another Hunter if you cannot have what you want. Shall we continue to debate the semantics of the word witch?”

  “What are you?”

  “Do you notice how no one sees me? Even when standing still, I can be invisible to others just by wanting it. I can be anywhere I choose, at any time. I am there and not there. Everywhere and nowhere. For the dead travel fast.”

  A tiny gasp escaped Blessing’s lips. The sun’s warmth bled away, and a cocoon of frigid air encased her. A frenzy of shivering wracked her entire body like a seizure. As if turned to ice, she could not escape no matter how urgently her body willed it.

  “When I move, it is faster than the human eye can perceive, unless I choose to be seen. Time no longer exists for me as it does for you. There was a day, a long time ago, when I stopped to watch the flowers blooming on a tree in the forest. I saw the blossoms burst forth as if mere minutes had passed, yet it turns out I had been in that same spot for a month.”

  Every hair on Blessing’s body stood on end. She folded her hands in her lap. “You really are a demon.”

  “I do not know if there is a name for what I am. The trader never told me, and I have not seen him since the day I died.” Anasztaizia turned her face to the sun and closed her eyes. Bathed in tones of peach and gold, her white skin appeared almost natural, and for a moment the girl she must have been so long ago sat in her place. “But I remember I had a dress once. My father gave it to me. It was just like the sun.” Her lips trembled but not with grief. What lay beneath them struggled to burst free and, unable to restrain it, her mouth contorted into a scowl. “I hate the sun.”

  Anasztaizia opened her eyes, the eyes into which Blessing must never fall, and flames ignited by the sunset or by some unholy inner conflagration danced within them. Something terrible had sparked her black eyes into life, something wounded and hateful, darker than night or death. Now a black hole of torment, now a fiery circle of Hell, endless in its suffering.

  Blessing tore her gaze away before she lost herself forever. Anasztaizia stretched her jaws wide, her horrible, sucking lamprey mouth full of pearlescent razor-blade teeth, as if she would devour the sun itself.

  Panic slithered into Blessing’s chest, constricting her heart, wrapping around her throat.

  “At night,” Anasztaizia said, her voice a dry leaf scratching across concrete, “I put my mouth on theirs, and I drink their souls. I can go a very long time between feedings when I’ve drunk an entire life.” Thin lips tasting of blood, a delight and a torment, brushed Blessing’s. “But I don’t like to wait.”

  She did not, would not, open her eyes. Without the power of sight, Anasztaizia’s illusion lost its grip on her. Blessing retched as the stench of decomposition, of gases and fluids gurgling in a
fetid stew within Anasztaizia’s intestines, filled her nostrils. She forced the vomit back down, inhaled deeply through her mouth, and compelled herself to stay calm.

  “I could slaughter everyone in this park. It is nothing to me.” The lips were against Blessing’s ear, hot dead air like a desert wind. “Do you want to know something? You and Tristan are the only ones who can stop me. But you don’t know how, or why.

  “I will give you a choice, Blessing, as I have given all the others. When you see me tonight, you will follow me.”

  “What if I don’t?”

  Even with her eyes closed, Blessing saw the voracious, world-eating grin.

  “You will die.”

  Blessing scrambled off the bench, lost her footing, and fell onto the gravel. Dozens of tiny stones bit into her palms. She ignored the pain and the pink indentations left behind as she brushed her hands off on her jeans. She got to her feet and ran, and it didn’t matter she lived countless blocks away, miles away, Blessing ran in the early spring heat, and nothing else mattered until she reached safety, whatever that was.

  She ran for her life.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Blue paint peeled away from the El’s giant rusting frame, a monster shedding the last vestiges of its disguise. Everything was false on the stroll; hope most of all.

  To the west lay the Badlands, North Philly’s heroin heaven. The stroll’s women turned tricks for it, endured rape for it, died for it. There the El wasn’t just a set of train tracks; it was the barrier preventing them from escape to the outside world. It called them back with its clattering siren song, with the detritus of their wasted lives scattered about its steel girders. A reminder they belonged there, and all they might recall of their former lives held no more substance than a dream. That they, like it, were nothing but rust and decay on the inside. No more than chunks of fractured concrete from the underside of the deck, so hard on the outside but so prone to breaking.

  Vomit-colored streetlight illuminated a body, unfazed by the rattling and shuddering of the train that chugged overhead, resting against the El. Dead or just nodding off, Tristan wasn’t sure. Not her problem either way. Long ago, Tristan had wanted to help all of them no matter the city. Every town had its version of the El women. But in her line of work, compassion fatigue set in all too quickly, and idealism died with barely a whimper. She and Blessing didn’t speak as they picked through an overgrown lot, along a path leading to a filthy mattress where the prostitutes plied their trade or found themselves forced to do so. She didn’t know why she even bothered with one last hunt at Blessing’s side except out of some misplaced sense of duty. Blessing was as primed for her test as she’d ever be, and Tristan, though she understood the implications of her choice, didn’t give a damn anymore.

  “Careful,” Tristan said at last, abolishing the hush that, despite distant sirens and the chatter of hookers walking the street behind them, sounded like the end of the world. She pointed to piles of human shit, dirty syringes, and used condoms. Didn’t want to pry any of that off the bottoms of her shoes.

  Blessing nodded but said nothing. She danced around an exceptionally large pile of shit and frowned. Had it been like that in Blessing’s village? They had no running water and no electricity, except for—according to Blessing—the witch-hunting pastor who owned a generator.

  You accuse her of witchcraft, and now you think she shits on the ground like a homeless crackhead. No wonder she hates you.

  All right, so she had no real proof of Blessing’s involvement in the housekeeper’s death. But she sure as hell had her weird behavior to go on. And intuition.

  Not one woman over thirty-five out there, and not one that didn’t look fifty-five. It wasn’t just the drugs. Fear carved itself into the lines of faces that shouldn’t have them yet, into worry creases around their mouths and eyes. Those eyes darted about in timid, cocaine-induced paranoia but also in terror of the man who might sneak up behind them, hit them in the head, and drag them into an alley or abandoned lot. Or the johns who raped freely because the cops wouldn’t do anything about it except force the women to choose between a blowjob and an arrest of their own. The women who trusted no one had begun to trust this girl and her friend. But those eyes still scanned the darkness for a faceless creature prowling the night, a serial killer, despite an arrest of some kid her own age a few months ago. He inadvertently prompted many of the women—newer girls, mostly, still young enough to fight the El’s magnetic influence—to seek help. Yet his crimes did not persuade the lost souls, the ones who accepted their deaths by either syringe or strangulation.

  A prostitute propped herself against an abandoned car and sank a needle into her arm. Few places on her body weren’t festering with open sores and track marks, but even the sight of her bitter, poisoned blood stirred Tristan’s hunger. She and Blessing had to put their differences aside. They had to find a john or someone equally deserving of their fury. She craved blood. They both did.

  A smile dotted with several black gaps brightened the woman’s ravaged face. Happiness required so little; you merely had to feed it all the dreams you ever cherished, but dreams were mostly bullshit anyway. When she opened her dilated eyes, the thin rind of pupil still visible was azure, like the ocean. And like the ocean, Tristan could not see herself in them.

  “Over there,” the woman said. Air whistled through the spaces teeth once filled. She cocked her head to the right.

  Tristan and Blessing crouched and let the tall grasses and weeds swallow them. Across the lot, a john stood in the doorway of an abandoned house. Most houses in the neighborhood were derelict, whether occupied legitimately or by squatters. Bed sheets stood in for curtains and flapped in the black, glassless void like ghosts desperate for recognition. Orange mold invaded the stoop and the walls holding the door in place. The entire house sagged in despondency.

  The john tossed a cigarette butt into the lot, reached into his jeans pocket for a crumpled pack, and lit up another. He too studied the darkness but not the way the women did. Women had been unkind to him, probably, with his premature balding and his bad skin. Tristan almost read his loathing of them inscribed in the lines of his face. Bitches deserved everything they got, said those grooves and blotches. Sometimes he wished he were the one strangling them.

  Tristan squeezed the fighting knife. She couldn’t pull it on him, not yet. He hadn’t done anything. Well, he undoubtedly had, but nothing she’d witnessed herself.

  She and Blessing weren’t exactly dressed for the part, but their exotic features went a long way. Time to reel him in. The quake of her hands could be easily mistaken for heroin withdrawal.

  Only when they made a show of emerging from the weeds, dusting themselves off and raising their voices to a manic “I-need-some-shit-NOW” level did he lower the cigarette and turn toward them with the ugliest smirk ever to pollute a human face. His thick lips resembled rubber tubing, his teeth small and sharp like a child’s but brown. Tristan immediately felt sympathy for any woman so frightened of dope sickness she’d let this thing even look at her let alone stick any part of him in her.

  “You ladies looking for something?”

  “Depends on what you got.”

  “I got dope, but it’s gonna cost you.” He swiveled toward Blessing and sized her up with an inhuman leer. “I take this black bitch first. Then you. Then maybe both of you. Sound like a deal?”

  “You will not touch me with your filth,” Blessing muttered. She had already pulled out her knife.

  “Put that away!” Tristan whispered loudly. “He’s not the goddamned killer!”

  “Look, I don’t have all night. Plenty of other bitches who will do whatever I want. You in or you out?”

  He never knew what hit him. By the time he slumped into the fluffy orange mold, he’d been dead for several seconds already, his throat slit so wide and deep his larynx protruded from the wound like a section of PVC pipe. Blessing stood with her mouth open and her eyes closed, baptized by the mist of
blood from his severed carotids.

  “What the fuck!”

  “This is a man we would have killed and drunk from anyway. It was his time to die.” Blessing licked the blood from her fingers with a calmness even Tristan’s well-honed misanthropy could not abide.

  “Chill the fuck out for a minute, Terminator. Maybe he had information about the killer.”

  “More likely he did not. The women know more. We should ask them.” Blessing rolled the john onto his back to minimize further blood loss. She didn’t want to waste any she could take for herself. “Do not mourn him, Tristan. No one else will.”

  Something had always been not quite right with Blessing, but that nebulous suspicion started, finally, to crystallize. It didn’t matter whether she was conscious of her target’s crimes or if they merely got in her way as this guy had, creeper or not. She enjoyed every second of it. It was hard not to when you held dominion over life and death. Absolute power and all that, given to someone with nothing to lose. Hell, Tristan sympathized. She fought off the nastier urges to run with the dominance her biology endowed to her. She’d be a fool not to consider the world redesigned exactly as she wanted it. There was a conspicuous line, however, between thought and action.

  “Blessing…when we left the hotel in Eket, you were whispering something. What was it?”

  She dipped her hand into the wound and sucked at the congealing gore, a child licking cherry pie filling from her fingers. For the first time, Tristan’s stomach roiled at the sight of blood. “How strange you remember. It was just a chant.”

  Liar. “Why would you chant?”

  “It is very old. Many believe the gods themselves wrote it, and that is why it still holds such power. I sang it only to the boys.” Her eyes grew distant, as though she relived the moment. “It was a spell to make them die.”