Blood Sisters

by Paula Guran

  After several conversational false starts, while the ink traced the arched outlines of petals across Mahasti’s skin and the at-first-insistently ringing phone went both unanswered and more frequently quiet, he said, “So if she was a kidnapped Persian princess, what were you?”

  Billy skipped a bootheel off the floor and turned, folding his arms. “Maybe I was Billy the Kid.”

  Mahasti snorted. “Billy the Kid wasn’t an Indian.”

  “Yeah? You think anybody would have written it down if he was? What if I was an iron-fingered demon? I wouldn’t need you to get me invited in.”

  With a cautious, sidelong glance at Mahasti, the man said, “What’s an iron-fingered demon?”

  “If I were an iron-fingered demon, I could eat livers, cause consumption, get on with my life. Unlife. But no, you get to be a lamashtu. And I had to catch the white man’s bloodsucker disease.”

  Mahasti spoke without lifting her head, or her gaze from the man’s meticulous work. The lotus taking shape on her skin was a thing of beauty. Depth and texture. No blood pricked from her skin to mar the colors, which were dense and rich. “You could be an iron-fingered demon. If you were a Cherokee. Which you aren’t.”

  “Details,” he said. “Details. First I’m too Indian, then I’m not the right kind of Indian? Fuck you very much.”

  “Billy,” Mahasti said, “Shut up and let the man work or we won’t be ready to go when the sun sets.”

  She was a desert demon, the sun no concern. It was on Billy’s behalf that they stalled.

  The dog’s barking has escalated to something regular and frantic. A twig cracked in the yard.

  Mahasti looked at the man, at the cold baby curled sleeping in the corner of her arm. She lifted her chin and stared directly, unsettlingly, at the woman. “Mommy?”

  The mother must have been crying silently, curled in her corner of the couch, because she stammered over a sob. “Yes?”

  “You’ve been such a good girl, I’m going to give you Alan back. You and Billy can take him in the back. I know you’re not going to try anything silly.”

  The woman’s hands came up, clutched at air, and settled again to clench on the sofa beside her bare legs. “No.”

  Mahasti looked at the man. “And you won’t do anything dumb either, will you?”

  He shook his head. Under the lights, his scrawny shoulders had broken out in a gloss of sweat. “That’s good, Cathy,” he said. The eye contact between him and the woman was full of unspoken communication. “You take Alan and put him to bed.”

  “Here,” Mahasti said, offering him up, his heartbeat barely thrumming against her fingertips. She tingled, warm and full of life. “He’s already sleeping.”

  Billy sat crosslegged on the unmade bed, his bootheels denting the mattress. The woman pulled all the toys and pillows from the crib and lay the baby on his back atop taut bedding. She moved tightly, elbows pinned to her ribcage, spine stiff. He slouched, relaxed. Until the front door slammed open.

  “Fucking vampire hunters.” He was in the hall before the words finished leaving his mouth, the woman behind him bewildered by the fury of his passage. A spill of sunlight cut the floor ahead, but the corner of the wall kept it from flooding down the corridor.

  Billy paused in the shadow of the hall.

  Three men burst into the front room—one weedy, one meaty, and one perfectly average in every way except the scars. Mahasti moved from the chair, the disregarded needle blurring a line of white across her wrist, destroying the elegance of the artist’s design. The artist threw himself into a corner behind the counter. By the time he got there and got his back against the wall, the fight was over.

  The perfectly average man was fast enough to meet her there, in the sunlight, and twist her un-inked right arm up behind her in a bind. The silver knife in his left hand pricked her throat. An image of a Persian demon, inscribed on the blade, flashed sunlight into Mahasti’s eyes.

  “Well, fuck,” she said.

  The meaty one grabbed her free hand and slapped a silver cuff around it.

  “Silence, lamashtu,” the vampire hunter growled, shaking her by her twisted arm. “Call the other out, so I can burn him too. You’ll terrorize no more innocents.”

  She rolled her eyes. “He’s not coming out when there’s daylight in the room.”

  “Really?” he laughed. “Your protector thinks so little of you?”

  “I’m my own protector, asshole,” she said, and kicked back to break the bone of his thigh like a fried chicken-wing.

  She threw the meaty one down the hall to Billy, and ripped the throat out of the weedy one while the perfectly average one was still screaming his way to the floor.

  She shut the door before she killed him. The noise was going to bring the neighbors around. Then she went to help Billy drag the third body up to the pile, and make sure the woman hadn’t run out the back in the confusion.

  She was still crouched by the crib. Mahasti left her there and met Billy in the hall. “See?” he said. “More fun if you don’t use ’em up all at once.”

  Mahasti said, “He had a knife with an image of Pazazu etched on it. That could have been the end of all our fun.”

  “He got prepared before he followed us here.” Billy grimaced. “They’re getting smarter.”

  “Not smart enough to use it before asking questions, though.”

  Mahasti jerked her thumb over her shoulder, towards the rear of the house. The white lotus and babe, blurred on her wrist, shone in the dark. She felt different. Maybe. She thought she felt different now.

  She said, “What about them? If there are any more hunters they will be able to answer questions.”

  “We could take them with us. Hostages. The Impala’s got a six-body trunk. It’s cozy, but it’s doable.”

  “Fuck it,” Mahasti said. “They’ll be a load. It’ll be a long fucking drive. Leave them.”

  “Fine,” Billy said. “But you got what you needed from the kid. I still have to get a snack first.”

  He met her on the concrete stoop two minutes later, licking a split lip. Smoke curled from his fingers as he pulled his hat down hard, shading his face from the last crepuscular light of the sun. “Cutting it close.”

  “The car has tinted windows,” she said. “Come on.”

  Traffic thinned as the night wore on, and the stark, starlit landscape grew more elaborately beautiful. Mahasti read a book by Steinbeck, the lotus flashing every time she turned a page. Billy drove and chewed his thumb.

  When the sky was gray, without turning, she said, “Pity about the kid.”

  “What do you care? He was just gonna die anyway.” He paused. “Just like we don’t.”

  She sighed into the palm of her hand, feeling her own skin chilling like age-browned bone. There was no pain where the needles had worked her skin—but there was pain in her empty arms, in her breasts taut with milk again already. “Mommy’s going to miss him.”

  Billy’s shrug traveled the length of his arms from his shoulders to where his wrists draped the wheel. “Not for as long as I’d miss you.”

  They drove a while in silence. Without looking, she reached out to touch him.

  A thin line of palest gold shivered along the edge of the world. Billy made a sound of discontent. Mahasti squinted at the incipient sunrise.

  “Pull over. It’s time for you to get in the trunk.”

  He obeyed wordlessly, and wordlessly got out, leaving the parking brake set and the door standing open. She popped the trunk lid. He lay back and settled himself on the carpet, arms folded behind his head. She closed the lid on him and settled back into the car.

  Her unmarred brown left arm trailed out the window in the sun. Tonight, somewhere new, they’d do it all over again.

  Once in a while, Billy was right. Nothing changed them. She could touch the world, but the world never touched her.

  The Impala purred as she pulled off the shoulder and onto the road. Empty, and for another hour it would
remain so.

  FROM THE TEETH OF STRANGE CHILDREN

  Lisa L. Hannett

  Lisa L. Hannett has had over fifty-five short stories appear in venues including Clarkesworld, Fantasy, Weird Tales, ChiZine, the Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror (2010, 2011, and 2012), and Imaginarium: Best Canadian Speculative Writing (2012 and 2013). She has won three Aurealis Awards, including Best Collection 2011 for her first book, Blue-grass Symphony, which was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award. She coauthored themed collections Midnight and Moonshine (2012) and The Female Factory (2014) with Angela Slatter. Her first novel, Lament for the Afterlife, is being published by CZP in 2015. You can find her online at lisahannett.com and on Twitter @LisaLHannett.

  Hannett’s Mister Pérouse is, like the archetypal vampire, an evil creature—but he and his not-at-all-merry band are also quite original …

  What do ghosts look like?

  The whisper cracks my voice, but I know he’s heard me. He takes a hesitant step forward and drops his rucksack inside the entrance. Dust lifts off the bag, settles onto the scuffed floorboards. Then he stands there, half in the daylight, half in the dark of our lampless, curtained sitting room. He clears his throat and fingers the house key like he’s amazed it still works. As though Ma was the one who’d left, not him, and changed the locks on her way. I couldn’t have been more than nine when his pack last disappeared, leaving nothing but a few scratches in the doorframe to show where he’d dragged it out behind him. Eight years later, he’s got a truck to carry most of his things, more white in his hair, and an expression so downcast I can’t yet tell whose father he is. Mine or Harley’s.

  “Ada,” he says, nothing more. No questioning lilt to the way he pronounces my name—he recognizes me even though I look nothing like the little girl he once protected. And hearing the rumble of his cof-fee-and-cigarette voice, I know him in return. In a familiar, unconscious gesture, Banjo runs his hand over his stubbly beard. Harley’s dad always was a fidgety one, never could sit still for more than a minute. A need to see the world beyond our farm, to do things the way city folk might, set his muscles twitching and kept his feet planted on the trail. I reckon he’s much like his twin in that sense; Ma once said neither he nor Jez, my father, ever had it in them to stay put for long. And as long as they didn’t mind other men keeping the chill from her bed, she didn’t begrudge them their freedom.

  Again, Banjo coughs. Too many excuses, too many overdue answers fight their way up his throat. A lifetime of words glue his mouth shut.

  I don’t get up from the couch, so I have to crane my neck to the right to see him. “That’s what Harley asked me,” I explain, motioning Banjo to come all the way in and close the door. The summer months have scrubbed the sunlight thin over the fields but it’s still too bright for Ma. She’s curled up on the cushions beside me, skin clammy with sweat though she’s stripped to her petticoat, mouth clamped on wads of cotton and gore. I pull the afghan up to cover her shoulders, wipe the blood from her cheek. “The first time we saw Mister Pérouse at one of Ma’s parties, Harl asked—almost hissing, so Ma wouldn’t catch us sneaking—he asked, ‘What do ghosts look like? Ain’t that one?’ Peering through the slats in the pantry door where we were hiding, Harl’s eyes stretched wide enough to swallow the night. His hand shook, clutching mine, but a smile tickled his lips as we stared. A mix of dread and awe—but that’s just like our Harl, isn’t it? Always mistaking fear for excitement. Then again, seeing that man, so pale he was more blue than white, so skinny he seemed to float while the rest of us clung heavy to our footsteps, for once I knew how Harl felt.”

  My gaze drifts to Ma’s face as I speak. Anxiety lines her forehead, even in sleep. Each breath she takes is shallow; her exhalations are thick wheezes of air.

  “I’ve thought about this a lot,” I say. “Spent years doing little but.”

  Banjo’s fingers worry at his chin, scritch-scritching over his bristles.

  “I can’t stop hearing his voice,” I continue. “Even now I’m back here. ’Cause, far as I can tell, that was it: the parties, those outfits, that ghost of a man. His dreams. His high notions of what made proper living. Everything that changed us; right there, dancing on the other side of the pantry door.

  “Of course, how could we know that then? Harl always was young for his age—you said so yourself, remember? And Ma thought I was too sweet for fourteen, too innocent to wear such a grown-up face.” I feel the color rising in my cheeks. Outside, Banjo’s truck cools, settles with a series of metallic pings. There’s no wind to shake the trees ringing our twenty-acre lot, no harvest for revving tractors to tend. Crickets hum pure white noise, thrumming beyond register in the heat. Silence plods into the room, sits like a boulder between me and Banjo.

  I can see he wants to ask more about Harl.

  Instead, he shifts from foot to foot, still hanging back. “Where are the girls?”

  “With their brother.” I swallow hard; there’s no time for tears. “It’s rude to linger in doorways, you know.”

  Harl’s dad squints and takes a good look at me, but doesn’t show any sign of moving.

  “I’m fine,” I say, sighing. Baring my teeth, I run my tongue across their blunt edges. “See? Harmless as Ma.”

  He releases a pent-up breath and finally lets the door swing shut. My eyes take a minute to adjust to the returned gloom. Outdoor scents waft from him as he sits in the worn recliner across from me: maple and pine and a rich hint of hot earth. He brushes invisible dirt from his jeans. Smooths out the lifelines they’ve collected over the years; exhausted white wrinkles like the ones on the backs of his hands.

  “I’d offer you a drink.” I look down at Ma, then back at Banjo. “I don’t know if she’s got any. And after this morning … She couldn’t even tell me if she’d change for the phone box. I hunted for her purse and she kept crying the whole time; crying and pulling at my arms, telling me not to go. When I found it I had to lock her in the cellar—don’t look at me like that! It’s the only way I knew, to keep her from chasing me to the truck stop…

  “She’s only just dozed off. She might not even remember telling me to call you.” I hesitate before admitting, “You and Jez.”

  Banjo nods once. Doesn’t ask who I called first—he’s never been much of a talker. I think that’s why Ma got together with him in the first place, why she kept taking him back though she kept the door closed on his brother. After a while, my father’s opinions were just too vocal, too hard for her to handle. You call this living? Jez’d said, on more than one occasion. Scouring dirt for scraps what ain’t fit for eating, guzzling potato wine, pumping out babies what ain’t got no hope of leaving this heap? Even when she made an effort, took a job in town, it wasn’t enough for my dad. The costume shop embarrassed him—as did the parties Ma threw. Our closest neighbors happily traveled the five miles between their places and here, just to come dressed in Ma’s wares. The stitching on her pieces proved so fine, she started getting mail orders from all over the country—her boss even gave her a raise! All that only seemed to make things worse with Jez.

  Ain’t no old-fashion time we’s living in, Wendy, he’d say, looking at her fine silks and brocades like they were sewn from pig-hide and dung. This here’s the future, fer fuck’s sakes—even them radio jockeys says so. Why don’t y’all give them a listen, since you clearly ain’t gots the sense to hear me?

  Guilt trips didn’t work so well on Ma. Day after day, she frocked up in skirts with bustles, whalebone corsets and elaborate jackets. Jez hollered like a good thing when she stopped taking us to the church ladies’ bazaars to buy our clothes, and started making everything but the hard leather boots she selected from Roebuck catalogues. He split her lip when she cancelled the electricity, opting to use candles and a woodstove. An old icebox and the house’s root cellar kept our goats’ milk fresh and veggies from our garden cool. And when she sold the car for thirteen bales of cotton, Jez grabbed a bag from the linen cupboard. Shouldered it and
said he needed to check out a breach in our property’s fence.

  We loved Ma for all of it; more so after Jez left. Even Harley, who kicked up a stink fighting for costumes much plainer than us girls’—even he never said our way of living was odd. Chopping and carrying wood to heat the house, drawing water from a pump out back, shitting in a flea-bitten outhouse. Anyone who came ’round our place played their part in Ma’s old-style life, right up until it was time for them to go home.

  Ain’t it just a lark, Ada? They’d ask, buttoning themselves back into overalls and faded work shirts, putting on their regular life suits. Ain’t it grand playing the regal lady like yer Ma?

  And I’d smile, knowing how lucky we were to have her, how special. Knowing it wasn’t just play. Ain’t goin’ta deny it, I’d reply—that’s how I spoke then, all ain’ts and y’alls and none of yer never minds, uttered without the slightest shame—Bring them fiddles and guitars with y’all next time, and we’ll have ourselves a regular honky-tonk!

  Their music burned like fireweed down the hall to our bedroom at night; in the morning, fast jigs and slow reels echoed through our daydreams. While Ma worked her shifts in town, Harley and I stayed home and explored our land’s twenty acres, learned the ins and outs of its crazed wheat fields and dry river gullies. Sometimes we spent hours, days, searching the flat land for Panagonquin treasure. Empty-handed we ran as far from the highway as our short legs could take us; took shelter in copses of birch and sycamore; made bracelets from wisps of white bark. Around us Chinook winds whistled through parched branches, told us our fortunes in the language of dried autumn leaves.

  As the oldest, it was only right that I’d watch the kids, keep them from climbing too high or falling off edges. Feed them when they were hungry, bandage their skinned knees. I didn’t mind. Most of the time, it was no more trouble than caring for puppies.

  On burning summer days, when the sky stretched along with the hours and scalded air leached clouds from the endless blue, we’d stay inside. Harl hated being cooped up—his skin was baked brown as clay from all his time outdoors—but even he’d settle down if it meant Ma would tell us tales of our seafaring ancestors, folk whose ships had led them astray, stranding us in this landlocked county. He loved those ones most, Banjo’s son. Stories of heroes and betrayals. Of men thriving against all odds.