Those of My Kind

by Loring, Jennifer

  The stake screamed toward the base of Anasztaizia’s skull.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Viscid brown sludge, more mud than blood, darkened the wood that had ceased to glow, its mission completed. The rest was up to her.

  Anasztaizia rolled onto her stomach and heaved herself toward the doorway, her sharp black fingernails scoring the floor.

  Blessing grabbed a fistful of the creature’s hair and flipped her onto her back before her leg gave out completely. She sat atop Anasztaisia’s spongy stomach.

  “Look at me,” Blessing said and closed her hands around Anasztaizia’s throat. “Look at me while I kill you.”

  She squeezed. Tendons shifted beneath her fingers; veins compressed and burst, and spread their poisonous contents through Anasztaizia’s skin. Her mouth flew open, instinctively seeking air she did not need.

  “I take it all from you. I take them all from you, every life you have stolen.” Blessing sealed her lips over Anasztaizia’s and sucked in the foulness, the darkness, as Anasztaizia withered under her. She choked down the fluids Anasztaizia spewed into her mouth.

  “We have to set her on fire,” Tristan said.

  Blessing realized that was what she had said a few moments ago. She was right, of course. Fire was the only way to true purification.

  Blessing glared at the shriveled, grinning thing whose neck she still gripped. The darkness swelled within her, a storm front rolling across the boundless African plains. It would never leave her. She was the abyss, and the abyss demanded blood. “Lord make me an instrument of your peace,” she prayed. “Where there is hatred, let me sow love; Where there is injury, pardon; Where there is doubt, faith; Where there is despair, hope; Where there is darkness, light; And where there is sadness, joy… For it is in giving that we receive, It is in pardoning that we are pardoned, And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.”

  “Slave,” Anasztaizia gurgled. Her cackle sprayed blood into Blessing’s face.

  “Blessing!”

  With one hand around Anasztaizia’s throat, she plunged the ash stake into Anasztaizia’s gullet. Black fluid gurgled up from between her lips, coating Blessing’s hands in slime.

  “Set the fire, Tristan.”

  “Move!”

  “It is inside me now. It’s all right, Tristan. I am ready. Please. You cannot free me any other way.”

  Tristan’s mouth worked to form words, but only a series of dry clicks emerged.

  “It will be all right. I promise.”

  “I thought I could,” she whispered. “I thought I could kill you if I had to, but I can’t. I don’t want to be alone.”

  “You can. You must. Do you not understand, Tristan? I was your test. You passed, but I have failed. I failed you, myself, and every Hunter before us.”

  “I can’t. This is crazy! I can’t, Blessing. We’ll find another way. A spell. Something.”

  “There is no spell that can undo this. Tristan, please,” Blessing pleaded.

  Fat, glossy tears quivered at the edges of Tristan’s eyes. She sighed and surveyed the room for kindling. Tristan collected papers strewn on the floor, wood, and threadbare clothing left behind, then formed a circle around Blessing and Anasztaizia.

  “I understand why you did what you did,” Blessing said. “Why you risked everything for Mira. Because you love her. And this is what I must do for you. For love. That knowledge is my salvation.”

  Tears spilled down Tristan’s cheeks. “I can’t. You can do it yourself; I know you can. You have that power.”

  “Please. Grant me this last request. I have wronged you in so many ways. It must be you who does it, Tristan. Purify me.”

  Tristan knelt down and flicked open her lighter, touched the flame to a colorful wad of construction paper, and jumped back. Firelight glimmered in her eyes.

  “I am not afraid,” Blessing said. “I was born to do this.” She closed her eyes and counted, ever so slowly, backward from ten. She drew each breath more deeply. Sweat beaded her face, her neck, and her arms. The fire snapped as it caught Anasztaizia’s skin, and the stench of burning air stung her nose, but Blessing had gone inside herself, and these things were no longer a part of her world.

  When she reached one, she replayed the day of the mutilation, her rape at Papa Joe’s hands, and her mother’s murderous rage. Each memory was a drop of mercury dripping out of her and sizzling away into nothingness. She saw herself traversing the world’s great deserts. She watched herself waste away from malarial fever. She imagined wave upon wave of blazing energy engulfing her from her feet to her head. Her skin popped and blistered, and she inhaled a peculiar fusion of scents; charcoal, sulfur, grilled pork and fried beef. The hot air scorched her nostrils and her throat and seared a path into her chest. Black smoke drove out and replaced all the oxygen in her body. Her lungs blistered and filled with fluid and began to drown her. She was aware of all of these things and yet observed them as if they happened to someone else. In truth, she had never felt more alive. Death was a gift, yes. A gift from which she had fled her whole life but in confronting it, making peace with whom she was at last.

  Through the crackle of orange flames, she beheld a giant of a girl with wild sprigs of dark hair jutting from her scalp. Just as Blessing’s did, or used to, before it burned away. The girl clutched a stake made of ash wood. Blessing’s was just a pile of cinders.

  Are you ready?

  I have been waiting my whole life. I did not know it until now.

  The girl smiled and held out her hand. Blessing rose from the pyre and crossed the room, looking back only once at the two smoldering bodies collapsed into one another. She lifted a hand to the side of her head and found unblemished skin and tightly coiled hair, for the fire had scoured away her scars and seared them to ash. Blessing gazed through the smoke at Tristan, who gaped back at her.

  Goodbye, Tristan.

  Tristan swiped clumsily at her eyes. Blessing turned back to Shapa and accepted her hand. She would miss the human world, imperfect and sorrowful though it was, but not the pain of being one of them. How brave they were for suffering all they did. How they deserved better than what they had made for themselves.

  A blinding white light consumed the room and everything in it, until the light was all that had ever existed. Blessing followed Shapa’s voice into it.

  ~

  She meant to turn around, to block the blow with her breastbone, to grab Blessing’s wrist and twist her arm until it tore free from its socket. But she did not—could not—move, not even as the stake whistled through the air and penetrated the indentation between her skull and her neck.

  Latin. What few words she understood indicated a binding spell. How clever.

  Anasztaizia drank in the golden sunlight, basked in the rays whose warmth she had not felt in a thousand years, and spread her arms like an angel’s wings, for she could do nothing else. Embraced by its radiance, she prayed for its forgiveness that she had held a grudge against it for so long, as if the sun itself had been her father’s co-conspirator. It did not realize he had stolen its magic for himself.

  The stake punctured her skin in a red cloudburst of agony, driven home at an upward angle into her brain stem. A universe of stars exploded before her eyes. She had underestimated Blessing, but that did not make the Hunter worthy of killing a light-maiden.

  When Blessing wrenched the stake out, brown blood flowed over Anasztaizia’s shoulders like filthy hair. She remembered gazing at her father’s face while he lay impaled and dying on the wall that had protected him for years. Still she could not forgive him. But the time had come, finally, to forget.

  “I was not…a wicked girl,” she croaked. She flopped over onto her stomach, the survival instinct refusing to die as she tried to crawl away, to find a safe place to heal her wounds and regain her strength. Then the pain vanished as swiftly as it had arrived. Her limbs, even her face, went numb. Dead. As though she had never existed. Deprived of the sensation of having lim
bs, Anasztaizia found herself in Blessing’s grip. She sputtered one last word before the stake silenced her.

  A fluttering near the windows caught her eye. Butterflies. The purple and yellow butterflies found nowhere else but in one mysterious Hungarian forest. They did not flee from her this time. This time, they hovered right above her, their wings shimmering softly in the sunshine. Anasztaizia wondered if Blessing too saw the butterflies, but she was no longer there.

  A prayer swirled about in her mind, for it was the prayer of the dying: In the name of He-She Who-Sends-Me I pray: May the Divine Presence of the True Light be manifest, May the false glory and shadows pass away and be gone! O children of the earth, come if you are called and you are willing, Remember yourselves as children of the stars and seek your star, Turning neither to the right nor to the left, but abiding in the Middle Way, Rise up and ascend to join us on the Day of Be-With-Us, Grasp not at the false lights of the heavens of chaos, But cleave to the True Light of the Divine Order, The diamond-like White Brilliance of the Most High – This is salvation; this is the Way! Come and let us go now into the Light Continuum! Amen and amen.

  Anasztaizia held out her arms to them. A patch of sunlight on her flesh warmed her, saturated her with its heat. It had been a very long time, and so she was unsurprised by her body’s thirst for it. The thing inside her hissed and writhed, and steamed out of her through her mouth and nose, her body too defeated to be of use to it anymore. The twisted black phantom slithered out of the room, away from the windows and into the darkness, its defeated screeches echoing in her ears.

  It was She, Anasztaizia thought suddenly. The purifying fire. It was She all along, clothed in the flames of Wisdom. Tears burning like sulfur simmered in Anasztaizia’s eyes. She had not recognized Her, who had been able to let go of the world when Anasztaizia could not.

  “My Father!” she cried out. “Have pity on me!”

  Her entreaty met with silence. She felt herself sinking into the blackness, and there was no one to rescue her this time, not even the ghosts of those for whom she had taken up the mantle of retribution. All had forsaken her.

  Only one prayer remained now, and it was that her father did not await her in the invading and eternal night.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Blessing’s hazy image evaporated as quickly as it had appeared. And now the crushing weight of isolation, of the very thing she both longed for as a condition of her being and rejected as unnatural to her human half. The word itself mocked her as it tumbled about in her brain like a child on a trampoline: Alone.

  No. I can do this. I was made for this.

  Anasztaizia’s body crumpled into itself, disintegrating into little more than ash. And then there was Blessing, who had asked Tristan to kill her. To burn her like the witch she was.

  Tristan knelt beside the charred corpse. Beneath it laid a fine gray powder, all that remained of Anasztaizia. The pattern of blood and residue almost resembled a butterfly. But Blessing still looked like a human being, despite the startling whiteness of teeth clenched in unimaginable torment. Despite the skin that, when Tristan dared to touch it, flaked away like burned paper. Her stomach churned again.

  Wait.

  With quivering fingers, she peeled away another flap of charred flesh. Beneath it, impossibly, she uncovered brown skin as unblemished and supple as a child’s. Tristan pawed at the rest of the crumbly, scorched residue until she had excavated Blessing from her tomb.

  The scar on her head had vanished, had never even existed if Tristan were to judge by the shoots of coiled hair springing from her scalp. The skin itself bore no evidence of trauma. Clear, smooth, perfect.

  But she was still gone.

  Tristan placed her on the floor again, atop the ash pile. When her perfected body made contact with the mound of soot, she melted away as if she had never lived at all, as if she had only ever been a figment of Tristan’s imagination. Erased from existence. Blessing had done it all because of her and surely wouldn’t have done it otherwise. Logic made a valiant attempt to mitigate Tristan’s sense of responsibility, but she carried enough guilt to start her own religion.

  “It was her idea, you know,” said a voice behind her. “The only way to get to you was through me. She knew your weakness. And guess what? She won.”

  Tristan spun around. Mira crouched where she had left her, her eyes like sparks struck from metal. To look at her like this and know what they had shared, to feel passion still scorching through her and to understand time had run out for them, was the kind of torture the Inquisition might have envied, bodies debilitated and lifelong scars both outside and in.

  “Why? Why do this? I could’ve found a way to help you, if you had let me.”

  “What, cast some spells on me? Drink your blood? There was nothing anyone could do. Anyone but Anasztaizia.” Mira’s knees creaked and popped as she stood up. She stretched out her arms as though she had not used them in years. “I made her promise not to hurt you, though, so I guess she was right—you can’t trust anyone.”

  “I can’t reverse this, Mira. There’s no magic potion or incantation. You made a really stupid decision.”

  A dark cloud passed over her pale and drawn face. Purple half-moons smudged the skin beneath her eyes. “What do you know about dying?” she screamed. “What the fuck do you know about being human?” Mira thrust bony fingers into her own chest. “You will never know what this feels like!”

  “I go out every night and face death for people like you! For all of you, and none of you appreciate a goddamned thing! None of you know what you have! You kill each other and yourselves like it’s nothing, but you don’t know what some of us would give to live your lives. You don’t deserve our protection, and the worst part is that we know it. But we do it anyway, because we keep hoping someday you’ll wake the fuck up and realize how lucky you are.”

  “You call this luck? Living in a body like this, that gets sick and injured so easily?”

  “I guess it’s all perspective. When you never get to be a part of that world, you’d do anything to live in it, even for just a few weeks.”

  Mira’s expression softened, and even the flames in her eyes died down. Yet they were even harder to look at then, because there was no life in them whatsoever. “What have I done?” she whispered. “What have I become?”

  If anything was left of Tristan’s heart, it burned out like the last star in a dead universe. “Mira, you know I can’t let you walk away. Not like this.”

  “You could. No one would ever have to know. I won’t be like her.”

  “Not exactly like her, no. But you’ll kill. You’ll have to. And I can’t…” Tears threatened to strangle Tristan’s words before she could speak them. “You’re so new. It won’t take long, I promise.”

  “You can’t kill me. Please!” Mira’s eyes glittered with ruby tears, not at all the eyes once like storms rolling over an Oklahoma plain.

  “I don’t have a choice. You know that.”

  “You knew we could never be together. You knew from the beginning.”

  “Yeah.” Tristan chuckled a little, somberly. “I was being…human.”

  “I wish I never met you,” Mira said, and Tristan contemplated, if only for an instant, driving one of the knives through her own chest. One trauma too great for her body to bear; that was all it took…

  “Me too,” Tristan whispered.

  Mira, still sluggish from her body’s recent transformation, had no chance to prepare herself. Tristan grasped her shoulder and speared her with the knife, yanking it up from her stomach into her sternum. Tears, red and coagulated, dribbled from Mira’s saucer eyes as she tried to hold in her viscera. More blood leaked from the corners of her mouth.

  “I love you,” Tristan choked, and slashed the fighting knife across Mira’s throat before releasing her. A crimson torrent spilled from between her lips. Her legs, unable to support her, collapsed beneath her weight. She stared up at Tristan in silence. The fires in her eyes dwindle
d to glowing embers, then to ashes smoldering in hopes of resuscitation, but there was nothing left to give them. And just like that, they stopped burning forever.

  She closed Mira’s eyes. The dead could get back in that way, Mami used to say, but did the rule apply to someone who had already died and come back once before?

  Without at first being conscious of the act, she dipped a fingertip into the blood around Mira’s mouth. Tristan stared at the globule as if it were a substance foreign to her. She sniffed it. Dead blood. But still blood. She crouched over Mira and lapped gently at it, a kitten savoring its first saucer of milk. Her lips, her throat, the last Tristan would ever taste of her. She stripped Mira’s shirt away from her stomach wound and cleaned that, too, until nothing remained but a few rusty smears and the teardrops that had splashed onto her skin.

  This is what you are. What you will always be.

  Tristan pressed her hands to her sides to keep them from shaking, but it didn’t alleviate the desire to end her own existence. What was the point of it, if she couldn’t save the woman she loved? What hope did anyone else in her charge have? Blessing, Mira…eternal ghosts of her failure.

  Tristan hobbled out of the room and followed the spiral stairs down to the great hall. She passed through what must have been a kitchen, though little remained but a fireplace and a metal spit, until she reached a doorway overlooking the cellar. There must have been wooden stairs here, long since rotted away. She had enough strength left to land on her feet, at least, but by the time she hit the floor, she could do little more than crawl into a corner like a dying possum. A parasitic twin lived inside her, a dead girl that fed on the illusion of happiness and left only scraps behind. It weighed her down like slabs of concrete tied to her ankles. Memories of Mira, bright as tissue paper and, when Tristan clutched at them, just as easily torn to bits. Her useless human half. The part she must contain in order to save them.

  She slumped against a cool stone wall, her body throbbing as bones knit themselves back together with inhuman efficiency. Yet it would be hours, maybe even days, before she fully recovered. Her reservoir of strength was already exhausting itself with the effort and the toll of so many injuries. She couldn’t possibly go back to Philly and explain to Lauren and Sarah everything that had happened. Tell them Mira was dead and worse, why she was dead. Because then she had to explain herself, and she could reveal to no one else what she was.