Those of My Kind

by Loring, Jennifer

  “Blessing…what did you do?”

  She kept her back to Tristan and said nothing.

  “Did you feed on her? Did you…kill her?”

  “I put her out of her misery. She was diseased, though she did not know it yet. You were right, Tristan. All those times you said we should just let them die, you were right. We’re standing in the way of evolution.”

  “Evolution? You think letting things like your friend take over the world is evolution?”

  “But we’re on the winning side. We have power. So much power but we use it to protect the weak instead of making ourselves stronger. If they understood it, we would be gods to them. But we have made ourselves their slaves.”

  “Being able to control what’s inside us gives us our power. It’s what keeps us from becoming like that…freak.”

  “And it is what subjugates us. We must fight it, day in and day out. I have been fighting one thing or another since the day I was born.”

  “Do you think you’re the only one? Yeah, it sucks, but think of what everyone else in the world deals with. War, disease, death… And you see it every day. So spare me the self-pity, Blessing. You don’t have it any worse than anyone else.”

  “I am so lost,” Blessing said, her voice barely a whisper, “even you cannot help me now.”

  “You’re not an evil spirit or a monster.” Tristan all but gagged on the sentences. They tasted as lies usually did, cynical and sour. Finding Mira, however, depended on regaining Blessing’s trust. Time to be smart, not emotional, and unravel the damage passion had perpetrated. Find the loose thread still connecting Blessing to her. “I wish I could change what your mother—what your village—did to you. You’re all I’ve got in this. So please help me. Tell me where Mira is, before it’s too late.” Tristan knelt on the other side of the body. The throat torn out, a patina of arterial blood darkened the woman’s lower face and neck. She had never seen it coming.

  How had Blessing lured her to this fate? What trick had the little girl with the horrific burn scars used to soften this woman’s heart? A prostitute, if Tristan were to judge from the high platform wedges and a dress little more than lingerie, already flirting with danger by virtue of her profession. Certainly, Blessing found the protection of women who did nothing to better their circumstances exasperating at best, worthy of nothing but her contempt. They were caught in a vicious cycle of drugs and abuse; Tristan understood on a basic level, but she admitted mounting frustration with the women who would not seek any alternative even with a serial killer targeting them. Not if it meant giving up heroin. She recognized how sanctimonious her line of thinking was, coming from someone invulnerable to such addiction in the first place.

  Perhaps Blessing’s face alone had been enough to allow a degree of trust. Perhaps the woman had seen something of herself in those troubled eyes. Blessing, tiny and harmless, appeared much younger than eighteen. It was often her greatest asset. But she was also cheetah-quick and lethal with a fighting knife. A true apex predator.

  A monster. Funny, how that word kept popping into Tristan’s head.

  You need her back. Now is not the time to give up on her, whether Shapa was right or not.

  The tears on Blessing’s cheeks glistened pink-orange in the streetlight’s sodium fizz. “There was a boy. A little younger than me. At the cathedral, she… We… I did it, Tristan. I gave myself to her. I wanted to feel powerful just once in my life. We fed on him, and she let me taste his life essence in her mouth, and… Oh, God.”

  Tristan scooted around the corpse and squatted beside Blessing. The girl collapsed against her, the violent quake of her sobs rattling Tristan’s composure enough that she started to doubt her own words. Maybe control was just a fantasy, and all it required to shatter the illusion was one sweet promise.

  “I have always understood what I must do. I have always fought it. I thought, just this once, I could change destiny. I could be bad enough to avert the inevitable. It was me. Mira is gone because I told Anasztaizia to do it. Because she took you from me. She took away the only thing I had left.”

  Tristan wished she found that surprising. She hoped for something less trite, something worth beating Blessing to within an inch of her life. Blessing wanted to think otherwise, but she was as subject to the vagaries of human emotion as anybody. “We’re in this together. And we’ll get through it together. But you’ve got to help me.”

  Blessing swiped at her cheeks, though they were already dry. Everything else about the act had been so believable, but she was incapable of faking more tears. “I do not know how you will stop her.”

  “What do you mean? She may be your test, but in the end she’s just another demon.”

  “She said that when she could fly, nothing would be able to harm her. She can fly. And she knows things, even when she is not there to see or hear them. She will know we are coming.”

  Let the fire do its work…

  “I’m pretty sure I can end this.” Tristan jumped to her feet and held out her hand. After a moment’s hesitation, Blessing accepted it. A stinging current passed between them, more potent than electricity, and Blessing’s eyes widened. Tristan yanked her hand away. She needed a spell for cloaking her thoughts, too.

  What had Blessing inadvertently seen?

  “Here.” Blessing held out her knife in both hands, a ceremonial presentation. “Take it. I will not need it anymore. I have made my choice, and it is not with you. I will not accept what fate has written for me. The future can be changed, and I will change mine.”

  Tristan plucked the knife from her. When she raised her head, Blessing was already far down the street, swallowed by the night. The wind picked up and stung Tristan’s cheeks like slaps from an unseen hand, its screeching words gone before Tristan deciphered them.

  It began to rain. A stream of water collected the dead woman’s blood and washed it in a dark swirl down a storm drain under the curb where it flowed into the Delaware River, into fifteen million people’s drinking water.

  We’re all monsters. Most of us just don’t know it.

  Chapter Thirty

  The plastic stare of four ancient dolls welcomed Tristan as she dropped through the basement window. When she assured herself the only sound she heard was the thump of her pulse in her ears, she permitted herself to breathe again. A pew, nearly severed in half by decay, slouched at the farthest end of the basement. Tristan knelt before the pew and pressed her hands against it. The tree. The fire. Radiant warmth bloomed into her hands, up into her arms.

  Ash…

  The Tree of Life.

  Tristan grasped a chunk of fractured wood from the bottom of the pew and pulled. The rot was severe enough that it ought to have come right off, but it clung even more tenaciously to the pew with each increase in her exertion. She pressed one foot against the bench for leverage and, using both hands, yanked the rough timber with all her strength. For her efforts, she gained several bloody scratches, even more splinters, and a solid landing on her ass.

  “I was meant to find this. I know I was!” She kicked the pew so hard that pain blossomed through her entire foot, and for a second or two she believed she’d broken a toe. She had broken her shoe; that much was evident. The rubber ruptured into a wide arc that, if she pressed her toes against it, revealed her dingy white sock.

  Tristan plopped down on the pew as tears exploded from her eyes. She buried her face in her hands and wailed like a child, a helpless, stupid child utterly unprepared for this kind of responsibility. It wasn’t just difficult; it was unfair.

  Tristan wiped her eyes then got down on her hands and knees before the splintered wood. Not just the Tree of Life. The tree of sacrifice.

  “What do you want from me?” she whispered. “Isn’t it enough? Haven’t I given enough already?” She rested her hands on the pew again. Energy vibrated from the stained wood into her flesh, energy for which she desperately beseeched the spirits. “Please speak to me. Help me see. I don’t know what I’m doing
. Please. I’ll do what you ask of me. I’ll let her go.”

  Tristan gripped the wood again and gave it a hesitant tug. A sharp crack shattered the basement’s deathlike stillness. She wriggled the chunk back and forth, painfully aware of the minutes ticking by as she tried to work it free from the pew. Her heart pounding, Tristan at last tore it off into a post the length of her forearm. Even in its unsharpened and formless state, the wood conformed to her like a missing appendage grafted back onto her hand. The vigor of a long ago tree ripened and swelled within her.

  Peering into the space beneath the stairs, Tristan nudged a sodden cardboard box. She rifled through the donated items that never found new homes and discovered a set of kitchen knives. Dull, rusted, but the carving knife sufficed. She laid the wood on the floor and held it down with one hand. With the other, using fluid strokes, she peeled away the excess wood at one end and scraped away the dark finish of the pew it had once been. A force emanating from both the ash and the collective memory of all the Hunters who had undertaken the same ritual guided her movements. The ash wood glowed with purpose, its heat assuring her she had found the final piece of the puzzle—her true weapon, her basis for existence.

  Tristan tucked the stake into her jeans and ascended the basement stairs to the nave. A body lay at the altar just as Blessing had said, rigid, his blood a gooey pudding beneath him. Tristan inhaled deeply and knelt beside him. She passed her hand over his eyelids to close them, though with his head divided from his body, his soul would not return. When she lifted him into her arms, he was like a baby bird, tiny and thin. His skin was frozen.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, hoping it brought him peace. “I will put an end to this.”

  She carried him, then his head, out the back door into a small and overgrown courtyard with a dilapidated tool shed. Tristan set him down and recovered a shovel from the shed. She wished she could identify him, at least. Then she would contact his family anonymously, so he did not have to lie here all alone. They would claim him and provide him with a proper burial, and a headstone, giving him back his name if nothing else.

  Fury boiled inside her as she worked, and with it came the thirst. And with that, because her selfishness had helped hasten this child’s death, came more tears. Tristan swiped her sleeve across her eyes. She tamped the dirt over the boy’s body then, panting, leaned against the shovel. All that existed of him were the black and white flyers his parents had surely hung up on telephone poles all over town, his brief life outlined and concluded by a single word: MISSING.

  Most of the neighborhood’s telephone poles bore similar flyers. They were not of the dead boy but of other children, children of all races, of both genders, layered on top of each other in a thick stratum revealing the nature of the area’s dominant predator. And the police had no hope of catching the culprit, if they saw her at all. She appeared to them as nothing more than a teenaged girl.

  Her clothing, even her skin, stank of death. She would never get the smell out. She let out a primal cry of grief and rage and bit down into her forearm until she drew blood. It burst into her mouth and coated her tongue and at last she accepted—what choice did she have?—her role in this grand production. There was no bringing this child back or any of the others. There might be no hope for Blessing and just as little for Mira. But she must put an end to it all one way or the other.

  ~

  Each tick of her heartbeat was another second shaved off Mira’s life. Whatever Anasztaizia had done to her, if she had indeed done something—Tristan’s visions were unclear at best—was reversible. There was a balance in all things. Anasztaizia’s death alone ought to be the solution, but life was never that simple. Destroying the source did not cure the disease, no matter how many monster movies claimed the contrary.

  The rain soaked through her clothes, her hair, and she shivered as she walked away from the alley. Most of the abandoned structures were storefronts or row homes, too many of them, the stuff found in any North American city trashed by one recession after another. Even in nice residential neighborhoods, the odd boarded-up house, the forsaken retail space no one had the money to fill, or the deserted restaurant that might never feed another customer sat in forlorn decay, blighting otherwise pleasant streets. Maybe Blessing wasn’t so far off the mark. People had destroyed virtually an entire planet in less than a hundred years. The human race really had lost its way.

  But I’m not like her. I’m not a monster. There’s a better way to fix things—there has to be. Or else I really am useless.

  Now and then, a john approached her with the promise of a warm bed, food, and a full needle. She restrained herself from kicking each one square in the balls. If you only knew what I could do to you, she thought and turned them away. Part of her, though, longed to accompany one to his shitty motel room, pacify him with the promise of sex, and then…

  No time for such amusements. She already had so little.

  Tristan hailed a cab and headed for the airport.

  ~

  Dontseeme, she thought and drew the shadows around herself. Cameras at intervals along the fence scanned the area for trespassers, and signs screamed “Authorized Personnel Only” or “Private Property.” The rain-slicked runway reflected the gleam of the lights outlining its length and that of the terminal windows facing it. Planes maneuvered slowly into their gate positions, or backed away and turned onto the tarmac in preparation for takeoff. She’d spent just a few moments inside the airport to determine which plane was the correct one, and now it lay in her sights. A Delta, shortly on its way to Budapest.

  She had more demons to face in Hungary than anywhere else. Were her mind not so clouded, she could have beaten Anasztaizia to the punch and arrived ahead of schedule, maybe dealt with some of her personal troubles before taking on the fight of her life. That something she’d never even met read her so easily twisted her stomach into knots. It wanted her distracted and weak. She didn’t doubt Blessing had revealed to it everything she knew, and it planned accordingly.

  Blessing. Just one more problem for which Tristan had no solution. She was probably prowling the airport as well, having plucked the same travel plan from Tristan’s psyche.

  Tristan scaled the fence with animal efficiency and dropped down onto a patch of grass beside the tarmac. So far so good. The things that usually afflicted the rare stowaway found in wheel wells did not affect her; no hypoxia or hypothermia, no oxygen level drops in her blood. No falling unconscious and then tumbling from the sky when the compartment door opened upon approach. She merely had to avoid the crush of the retracting undercarriage.

  She crept across the concrete, chanting Dontseeme in her head as the line crew made their inspections and baggage handlers trundled by with carts of suitcases. Tristan hoisted herself up into the rear wheel well, a cramped circular space tangled with wires and various mechanical bits. She wedged into the back of the well and hooked her arms over two thick cables so she wouldn’t fall out when the plane began to taxi. Tristan made herself as comfortable as possible given the situation, and once the wheels were up she could reposition herself for the bulk of the flight, but an aircraft wheel well was no place for any living thing to spend thirteen hours.

  The jet engines roared like twin tornadoes in her finely tuned ears. Deafness was another risk for stowaways, one for which she could not be certain of her immunity. But it wouldn’t matter either way, she thought, if she never heard Mira’s voice again.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Nightfall thieved away the last of the horizon’s dying orange glow, and the stars winked on just as the lights did in the village below. They still feared the dark, though they would not admit it, still banished it with electricity where once fire had served that purpose. Somewhere in their collective unconscious, they feared, despite their dominion over the earth, that another creature, one dwelling in the terrible darkness, ruled the top of the food chain. A genetic memory of the giant beasts once haunting the depths of caves in which they made th
eir homes, or which snatched away their children in the night. A mnemonic that, for all they had done to conquer nature, they were still frail and frightened creatures constructed of bones that broke with ease and flesh that tore like tissue.

  The girl’s first stirrings were a twitch in her legs, then her arms as, like in the village below, the current switched back on in her brain. Dried saliva from her open mouth, which worked in silence to recapture its ability to form words, crusted her cheeks. Her thundercloud eyes blackened until her pupils disappeared within them, though scarlet flames sometimes flared in their centers.

  She sat up and took stock of the room before she settled her gaze on Anasztaizia. Confusion, then recognition, skimmed over her features. “It’s gone,” she said. She held out her arms, examined her legs, and pressed her hands against her abdomen. “I can feel it.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “And I’ll live forever.”

  “Yes. This is even more likely once we kill the Hunter. Trust me when I say she will kill you if you do not.”

  A particularly bright light blazed in the nadirs of her eyes. It was difficult to read her, since Anasztaizia had no practice with others of her kind until now. And she avoided her own reflection as a matter of course, for there was nothing in it she wished to see. “There’s no other way, then.”

  Though she had anticipated it, the statement offended Anasztaizia. Mira would naturally have residual emotions; after all, she had been dead only hours. “She is immune to my gift, but she has no right to it anyway. She is weak. And she is our enemy. You will do well to remember that whenever you begin to feel compassion for her.”

  “But the feelings never go away. Not entirely. I’ve seen it in you.”

  Some sentiments still lingered like a chronic illness, a fatal attachment that kept her tethered to the world. She knew where she came from and where she must go, and yet here in this world of deception she remained. “They fade enough that you will be able to do what you must to survive. Some attachments can be difficult to sever. But she cannot love you, Mira, not like this. It is against everything she stands for.”