Those of My Kind

by Loring, Jennifer

  “What about Blessing?” she said after she had spent a few moments processing her new reality. “You don’t think she’ll turn on you?”

  “Blessing is a rogue Hunter, and those rare Hunters that choose her path never last very long. We will dispose of her if we must.” Anasztaizia extended her hand to Mira. “Tristan is certainly on her way, and we must be ready for her.”

  “I’ve always been ready,” Mira said. She slipped her hand out of Anasztaizia’s and returned to the window. “I’ll watch for her. Do me one favor, would you?”

  Hadn’t she already done her the greatest of favors? But Mira gave her no chance to respond.

  “Keep Blessing away from me, or I’ll kill her myself. I don’t trust her, and you shouldn’t, either.”

  “I trust no one, Mira. I learned that lesson a very long time ago.” Anasztaizia paused at the doorway. “Do not think about crossing me. You are mine now, and I am much older than you are. Much more powerful. I can take away what I’ve given you in an instant.”

  “I have no regrets.”

  “I should hope not. It is far too late to entertain them.”

  Mira said nothing, but she sagged against the sill as if someone had strapped a boulder to her back.

  You mustn’t be so demanding with her. It took you weeks to adjust.

  And there are three sorrows your heart has never mended. Tristan is nothing like them. Mira will forget her in time.

  She had certainly better.

  ~

  Plains punctuated by dark swaths of trees flashed by. To travel for the first time in three years without Blessing was a bit like the phantom itch amputees often reported. The tactile sensation of something there that was no longer. Python coils of dread squeezed her until she nearly lost her breath. So much more than just Blessing awaited her. More, even, than Mira. That village. Zsofika’s legacy. And her own.

  Luxuriant trees and undulant hills surrounded the medieval city of Veszprém, with its red tile-roof buildings so common to Eastern Europe. A picture from a book of fairy tales and, somewhere in the forest, a monster expected her arrival. From there, she could take a bus out to Márkó. The remainder of the trip, deep into the Transdanubian countryside where neither rail nor bus line could profitably operate, consisted of walking and hitchhiking. Preferably the latter since she had no time left to waste. She walked fast enough, faster than a normal person could, but that amounted only to about two or three times their pace. The mere thought of meeting Blessing somewhere along the road caused her fists to tighten. She should have done the deed back in Philly, should have slit her throat and avenged the woman Blessing had murdered. If choosing to go rogue was a death sentence, maybe she was the one meant to mete it out. If not, she’d happily volunteer for the job.

  A mile or so outside of Márkó, she flagged down an old flatbed truck with cages of ducks in the back. The vehicle stank of duck shit, and the engine noise rivaled that of the jet in which she’d crossed the ocean, but she had travelled in worse conditions. Her real sympathies lay with the ducks, most likely raised for foie gras. The gray-haired man at the wheel spoke no English, not exactly a surprise for a rural farmer, and Tristan hoped her Hungarian wasn’t as rusty as it sounded in her head.

  “Can you take me to Bodi?” she asked. “Or as close as I can get?”

  “Bodi? Strange place for a tourist.” His expression darkened considerably, and the truck slowed as he scowled. “Zigány? I will not have your kind in my truck. I—”

  “I’m Italian. I’m doing research. Please. I’ll pay you for your trouble.”

  The black look faded. “No zigány would offer me money. Would rob me blind, though, right?” He offered a hearty belly laugh, and Tristan tried to play along despite the boiling of her blood. She was all too aware of the ethnic violence against the Romani all over Hungary. The fact it had taken her father’s life made this man luckier than he could imagine that she didn’t kill him where he sat. She would not even bother to drink his filthy blood before she left him on the side of the road for the wolves.

  Calm down. Save the rage for when you really need it. You knew you were going to see and hear this kind of shit here, and you can’t kill the whole damned country. That would do wonders for Romani rep.

  She sat back and watched the forest draw closer. Her driver regaled her with tales of his rousing adventures in the foie gras industry, and while she pretended not to hear him, he pretended not to notice. Finally, at the mouth of a narrow dirt road tracking down to a farmhouse, he stopped the truck. “Bodi is two miles up the road,” he said, making sure to point away from his own road. Tristan pulled a wad of money out of her pocket and handed him 4,500 forint.

  “Thanks.” She pushed open the door and hopped out onto the cracked pavement. The man leaned his head out the open window.

  “If you come back this way… My wife and I don’t get many visitors now that our children have moved to Veszprém. I bet she would love to make a big meal again. If…” He cast his gaze toward the forest, and whatever lurked within, but left his thought unfinished. It was better that way. No sense in looking forward to a statistical improbability.

  “Thanks,” Tristan said again and followed the road into Bodi.

  ~

  She hadn’t expected the stares. Whether they viewed her as one of their own or an intruder, she could not guess. The women in their headscarves and brightly colored, patterned dresses whispered to each other over knotty wooden fences as Tristan passed through the village center, little more than a collection of squat, one-story concrete squares with pitched roofs. The men glared at her in silence. The scent of roasted pig wafted over from a backyard.

  “Zsofika,” someone whispered.

  “I drabarni!”

  She gazed up at the hilltop and the collapsing keep where once an entire castle stood. Bodi was supposed to become something, once, hence why they built the castle there. Something about sheep, wool; fragments gathered from Zsofika’s memories of local history. But the forest, and something left behind when the mad king—the last king of this district—was murdered, frightened everyone away. All but the Romani, who had so few places to go where they might live in peace. Yet even here, on the sides of a few houses, graffiti proclaimed in blue or red spray paint: “Zigány animals!”

  One woman, as old as Mami would have been, hobbled down her front walk and out to the gravel road. She clasped Tristan’s hands between her own, which were dry and warm. “You look just like her,” she said. “Like Zsofika. I was a friend of Treszka’s. I was very sorry to see her go.” Her gaze settled on the keep, and her red-rimmed eyes glistened. “Zsofika never came back from that damned place. So many have tried to stop whatever lives there. Have you come to end our curse? Save us from a Rém?”

  “Yes. It’s what I have to do.”

  “Then it is true. You are like her. A vadász.”

  The Hunter. She didn’t have a choice anymore, nor did it matter; either way, Mira was already lost to her. But she could still help these people, who had so little and suffered so much. “I am. And I will stop the curse.”

  “May the gods watch over you,” the woman said and kissed Tristan’s hands before retreating to her house. Tristan looked north, toward the impression of an ancient road grown over with grasses and weeds meandering up the hillside and into the ruins.

  One foot in front of the other.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The castle stank of must and animal droppings, and the ragged cobwebs of long-dead spiders adorned every available surface. Tiny paws skittered somewhere beyond her vision, in the ceiling and the walls, invisible yet surrounding her. She shuddered. Not a fan of rodents. Or bugs, for that matter, though she ought to be used to both given the surroundings in which she usually found herself. She’d learned rather quickly that demons, when not using humans as hosts, preferred to live in inconspicuous filth rather than in extravagant Victorian mansions. They were practical if nothing else.

  Beneath the stale
air lay a harsher, more rancid scent; a fusion of vomit, urine, shit, and blood. Mira’s. Tristan wrapped her fists around the knives’ grips. An ugly laugh like bones breaking reverberated through the castle’s empty spaces. Tristan raced up a flight of spiral stairs like a conquering knight, though not entirely sure what she planned to do once she got upstairs. As much as she wanted to execute a flying ninja-kick at Anasztaizia’s face, she had to stay calm. Focused. She could save no one if Anasztaizia broke her.

  Tristan gagged on the bile in her throat. Nothing, no risen dead, no swamp zombie in Louisiana, ever smelled like this. She flattened herself against the wall and peered around the doorway. Anasztaizia, Tristan presumed, sat on the floor just within the corner of Tristan’s vision. A repugnant mockery of a human being, draped in white hair and stinking of the grave. Anasztaizia wrapped her arms around the knees drawn up to her chest. Her laughter faded away.

  Silent images flashed across the screen of Tristan’s mind. A body violated by the one man she should have been able to trust. A rage even vengeance could not cure. And the others, her loved ones, dead by his hand. A priest, one of the dead, who murmured words of comfort. The words perverted by her fury until she could not remember them any differently. And the thing in the guise of a man that fed upon a dying soul’s torment.

  So much blood. So much hatred, justifiable hatred for what he did to her. She was right to hate. He deserved it. A damaged world allowing such a thing deserved it.

  Tristan’s mouth went dry. No one, not even her, deserved to live with those horrors.

  No compassion. It’s messing with your head. Remember what you are. Merciless.

  Without it, I am a monster.

  “I can hear you breathing,” Anasztaizia said.

  An unpleasant chill shuddered through Tristan as she walked into the room, weapons raised for attack, but Anasztaizia did not rise. What the hell was she, anyway? Blessing stood beside her like a bodyguard, arms folded over her chest.

  Tristan scanned the area for Mira. Her skin itched as Anasztaizia’s lifeless eyes watched her from behind, their rat-like glower boring straight through her. But the creature merely sang to herself, the words stained with an almost gleeful pitch. She made no effort to attack or even to stand up. Something was seriously wrong here.

  Then, in the far corner of the room, a figure with her back to Tristan began to stir. Everything, she realized too late, was unfolding according to Anasztaizia’s, and maybe Blessing’s, plan. She’d been foolish enough to walk right into it for one reason and one alone.

  Mira slowly turned around. Her hair was stringy and matted, her face puffy from crying, her clothes soiled and stinking. Tristan could have lived with that. That was all fixable. But those soulless eyes were not.

  “Mira?” Tristan said stupidly. Nothing else came out for far too many minutes. “What did she do to you?”

  “She saved me,” Mira whispered. A phantom smile flickered over her lips before vanishing, and her teeth, as briefly as Tristan saw them, were sharp as broken glass. Anasztaizia cackled behind her.

  Hell was real, Tristan thought, but it wasn’t some burning pit in the afterlife. Hell was reliving all your regrets and failures over and over in one never-ending instant. Hell was not appreciating what you had, and only dwelling on what you didn’t. Hell was not being able to forgive yourself.

  And Hell was right here, right now. Standing in front of her. A white, dead thing with purple spots of color where the blood had pooled. With eyes now crimson, now ebony, burning into her chest where her heart, up until a moment ago, had been.

  “I could’ve helped you! Me! My blood! But you let her do it?”

  “You barely even know how your blood works. You don’t know what it’s like, Tristan. You have no idea how it feels to know you’re dying.”

  “What do you think I’m doing right now?” Tristan drew in a shuddering breath. Had to stay alert. Detached. But she wasn’t a fucking robot, and her girlfriend was…

  Dead. There was no cure, no reversal for that permanent affliction.

  “I wish I had never met you. If I had never met you, I wouldn’t have had to make this choice. She wouldn’t have come for me. It was all because of you.”

  Her eyes filled up and blurred. It’s not Mira, she thought, but how much of that was true? Tristan had no rational argument in her favor. If she and Blessing had never come to Philadelphia, chasing a serial killer who murdered women the city had already discarded, Mira would be safe. Whole. Saving just one life made the world a better place, but those women were not worth Mira’s.

  There it was. Once she started classifying people according to personal worth, she had failed in her objective duty. And she didn’t care one damned bit anymore. Her moral standing had been lying down for weeks.

  Anasztaizia finally rose from the floor. Her razor-blade smile gleamed in the early morning light from the sliver of a window in the opposite wall.

  “God… What are you?”

  “I am a Rém. I am the Terror.”

  “You had no reason to drag her into this!” Tristan drew her arm back, telegraphing her intention, but the feral rage unwinding in her gut threatened to swallow her whole if she didn’t release it somehow.

  “This is why,” Anasztaizia said, her smile wilting, “Hunters are meant to walk the world alone. Do you see how weak your emotions have made you? How stupid?”

  With a sharp, scalp-searing pain, Mira jerked Tristan’s head back, a tangle of her hair caught in Mira’s fist. The more she coiled her body to escape Mira’s grip, the more ensnared she became. “Let go, Mira! You don’t know what you’re doing!”

  “Doesn’t she? How much do you suppose is my influence, and how much is her free will? If you loved her, why didn’t you tell her the truth? You did not give her the choice of loving you as you are; she fell in love with a mirage.”

  “Don’t project your shit onto me. Do you think the people you lost would be happy with what you’ve become?”

  “You did not know them.” Anasztaizia’s low voice bristled with unexpressed fury. Mira pulled Tristan’s hair even harder, driving her chin upward and exposing her neck. With each pulse of Tristan’s veins, Anasztaizia’s mouth opened a little at a time until the two rows of tiny white arrowheads hovered mere centimeters from her flesh. Tristan willed her heartbeat to slow down. It refused to cooperate.

  Bloodstained fluid oozed from Anasztaizia’s nostrils, but worse was the miasma of rot expelled from the putrefied interior of her mouth. Tristan twisted her head away from the stench, her guts roiling. The swollen, blistered face bore down on her as Anasztaizia’s serpentine tongue flapped against the air. She caressed her stomach with her translucent, brown-veined hands. Black raptor talons curved out from her fingers.

  “You’re still young enough,” she whispered, “to taste like the children do. Even if she has had you first.”

  Mira removed her fingers from the tangled curls and locked Tristan’s arms behind her back. The knife clattered to the floor. As invisible pins and needles pricked her arms into numbness, Tristan did the only thing she could think of, though she regretted it even before it happened.

  She rocked her head forward and then slammed it back into Mira’s nose as hard as possible. A warm spurt of blood pattered onto Tristan’s scalp. Mira let go of Tristan’s arms and clutched the shattered cartilage and bone, a futile attempt to staunch the spigot of her nose. Tristan drove her running shoe straight up into Anasztaizia’s crotch. The flesh collapsed, spewing a putrid greenish-brown stain onto her dress, and she staggered back a few steps. She did not, however, drop to the floor as Tristan had anticipated. Her features barely registered anything other than momentary disbelief at being caught off guard.

  “I’m sorry, Mira,” Tristan said, and curled her fingers into a fist. She’d regret that, too. But for now, she disregarded the inevitable damage to her hand and threw a haymaker right into Mira’s jaw.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Mira lay spr
awled on her back. The rise and fall of her chest reassured Tristan she hadn’t accidentally killed her, but she ought to stay down for a while. Tristan had dislocated a knuckle at best, broken a couple of fingers at worst. With each throb, her hand grew another size. She turned to Anasztaizia. The creature stared at back her. Lank white hair fell over her face, and her arms hung at her sides.

  “They are both mine. If you want to free her, you will have to kill her.”

  “You’re using her, you coward. Are you too worthless to fight your own battles?”

  Anasztaizia growled deep in her throat. “You have no idea how many of your kind I’ve killed. I have torn off their heads and limbs and built altars of their bones. You are no different, and I have no need to prove myself to you. Blessing!”

  “What do you ask of me?”

  “Remember how she has hurt you. Remember how you have suffered for her. Make her feel the same pain.”

  Blessing gripped the stake with such force that rivulets of blood dribbled from the palm of her hand where her fingernails left red half-moons. The hunger flared within Tristan’s belly. If she incapacitated Blessing, just long enough for a few drops…

  “I bled for you. I embraced the pain my own body inflicts upon me for you. And you rejected me. You rejected your duty. We could rule this world as gods, but you will not let go of your human weaknesses.”

  “I don’t want to rule it. I don’t want any part of it anymore, if you’d really like the truth. But I’m not about to hand it over to you two. So take your best shot, Blessing.”

  “You’re so hungry,” Blessing whispered. She screwed her mouth into a horrifying grin and held out her arms. “Cut me, like we used to cut our prey. Feed on me. I am yours.”