The Wounded Ones

by G. D. Penman

  “It is just a few cities and they’ve got more Magi than they know what to do with keeping the barrier up. They can spare me for a couple of days.”

  Sully stepped into the house, where Clementine’s and Marie’s voices filled the space, but conversation ground to a halt when Clementine led them into the kitchen, where the rich tang of something slow-cooked and smothered in barbecue sauce assaulted them. The dining table was old battered wood, polished smooth by generations, and it had been set with four places. Sully met Marie’s wide eyes across the table and she felt her stomach drop. They didn’t know. They couldn’t tell Marie was a vampire just by looking at her. Sully opened her mouth to say something, but Marie’s scowl snapped her mouth shut again before she could make a sound. Marie loudly declared, “That sure smells good, Momma, but, uh, I already ate on the train.”

  Technically it was true, she had cleaned Sully off after the assassination attempt and she hadn’t been shy about drawing out a little extra blood when she found a decent sized cut.

  Clementine shook her head. “Always watching her figure. Wouldn’t you like to see a little more meat on her bones, Iona?”

  Sully opened and shut her mouth a few more times while Jeremiah cackled at the look on her face.

  “Come on, Marie, you can have a little bit, your mother made your favorite for you.”

  Sully wouldn’t be the one to say something—it wasn’t her place—but when Marie sank down into the seat without a word, Sully stayed standing. Clementine was bustling around the oven, but Jeremiah seemed to realize that something was going unspoken. Marie took a deep breath. “Before we eat, there’s something we need to talk about.”

  Sully sank down into her seat and said nothing. Marie groaned at their expectant faces, then let her face drop into her hands.

  “Not everything’s been good since the last time I saw you,” she said to the tabletop. “I had a shitty marriage. I went off the rails afterward and . . . I made some bad decisions. I made some really bad decisions.”

  Clementine hadn’t made it to a seat; now she wrapped an arm around Marie’s shoulders and forced a smile. “Darlin’, we all make mistakes. The important thing is that you are all right. You are alive, and you are back here with your family, and that is all that matters.”

  Marie’s shoulders heaved as she sobbed, and Clementine began to rub at her arms again. “No. I’m not. I . . . I died, Momma.”

  Clementine froze in her comforting, confusion written across her face. Jeremiah seemed to stop breathing too. Marie blurted out, “I’m a vampire.”

  There was always anger simmering just below Sully’s surface, ready to rise up when it was needed, and she could feel it burning in her chest now, just waiting for either one of the Culpeppers to say the wrong thing.

  Clementine opened her mouth and—like a sigh—“Oh my sweet girl. You’ve been through so much” came pouring out. Jeremiah was up and out of his chair, rushing over to wrap his daughter in what might have been the clumsiest hug Sully had ever witnessed. The freezing spell that had been coiling between her fingers beneath the table whispered away. There was a murmured conversation in that tangle of arms, and some sobbing that Sully didn’t need to hear. She was here for Marie, not these strangers who shared her name. If hugs and tears were what Marie needed, then Sully would sit in silence, smelling barbecue ribs burning all day if she had to. After a few minutes, the Culpeppers seemed to pull themselves together and remembered she was in the room. Clementine hustled back over to the oven. Jeremiah tried to straighten out his suit. Marie looked up at Sully when she finally escaped her mother’s furious hug, blood-tinted tears staining her cheeks. She was smiling.

  Sully had a limited selection of stories that she could tell a girlfriend’s parents. Marie had vetted that list and nixed the more scandalous ones. The list was trimmed even further when Sully decided she didn’t necessarily want them to know that she was the witch who had thrown the whole continent into upheaval and war. She got them through the meal with a few laughs and no need for any more blubbering. “. . . so, there I am, eye to eye with this bartender who is swearing blind that their drinks are completely tamper proof. That the glasses have been enchanted and there is no way somebody could have slipped a love potion into one without it exploding. He’s sweating, and I figure he is about two minutes from a nervous breakdown and admitting that he forged the papers on the glasses. So, I order a drink and sit down at the bar. Now the boys from the labs are going mad at the other end of the nightclub. A love potion that can’t be detected by enchanted glass? It would cause chaos. The bartender pours me a gin and puts it down on the bar right next to this glass that I am meant to be examining. And it is a different glass. One of them is a half-inch taller than the other. The bas—uh, the perpetrator, had brought an unenchanted glass from home.”

  Jeremiah slapped his thigh, Clementine smiled at her indulgently, and Marie was watching her with that look of quiet adoration that would make Sully cry if she thought about it for too long. The food had been good, and after eating her own portion and a fair bit of the pork that had been meant for Marie, Sully was feeling sleepy.

  She stepped out onto the porch for a smoke as Marie helped with the dishes and Jeremiah slunk out to bum a cigar off her once he was sure Clementine was distracted. They looked out at the yellowing trees in amicable silence for a moment before he said, “So you’re a witch? That is handy.”

  “Let me guess, you’ve got a heating rune acting up?” Sully chuckled.

  He at least had the good grace to look embarrassed. “I really ain’t sure what it is. But when something weird happens, more often than not it’s magic. Care to take a stroll with me?”

  He led her through the orchards trailing a blue cloud of cigar smoke behind them. Sully’s time looking for clues was meant to be over, but everywhere that she turned she could spot traces of Marie. A heart carved into the bark. The tattered remains of a rope swing. The rusted frame of a bicycle half swallowed into the roots of a pear tree. She could almost hear a child’s laughter echoing among the trees as the last of the day’s sunshine filtered through. On the far side was a solid wall of wheat, taller than Sully, although that wasn’t hard. It parted for Jeremiah, so Sully dove right in behind him, tripping and cursing all the way.

  They emerged into a clearing after a few minutes and Jeremiah turned to her. “Well, what do you think?”

  The clearing was a perfect circle in the crops. For something to do while the wheels in her head spun into action, Sully walked into the center and turned around slowly, then she paced around the outside of the circle, counting her steps. While she walked, her arcane senses danced over the circle, searching for the tell-tale signs that a spell had been cast. She stopped in front of Jeremiah and shrugged. “Circles are used for summoning or to contain magic. Maybe this is like a blast radius? The crops aren’t snapped, just bent over. If it was magic, it was weak enough to have faded already. I don’t get the point of this. Could it be kids messing around?”

  Jeremiah nodded along with her non-explanation. “Could be. Could be. We ain’t the first to have one of these pop up. There’s been a few other farms around here with circles appearing in their fields.”

  Sully felt like more was required so she said, “I’ll ask around once I am back in the city, see if anyone has heard about this.”

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  Back in the house, Sully could hear Marie and her mother singing a duet over the dishes. Some old war song about trying on a redcoat’s jacket. Jeremiah caught her smiling and grinned in return. Marie’s suitcase was still by the door, with Sully’s duffel bag laying on top of it. Jeremiah hoisted it onto his shoulder. “Listen, I know that you and Marie are, uh, involved but this is a Christian house.”

  Sully fists clenched but he rambled on. “And while I realize that your relations may not be completely orthodox, that doesn’t mean that we can have our da
ughter and her, uh . . . partner sleeping in the same room. Out of wedlock. You are grown women, and you can do whatever you like in your own lives, but under my roof—”

  Sully put a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll sleep wherever you put me, it isn’t going to be a problem.”

  He huffed out a sigh of relief. “Well we ain’t tossing you out in a barn. The guest house ain’t been lived in much but it has a bed and a roof without any holes.”

  For all of Jeremiah’s jokes, the guest house was as well appointed as anywhere that Sully had ever lived and smelled a lot better than most of her homes, despite the damp seeping into the foundations. She had a little kitchen of her own to make coffee and a bedroom that was almost the size of her old apartment in New Amsterdam. She swung her bag onto the bed and finally found her courage. “What you said before, about living in sin.”

  He spluttered, “I didn’t mean no offense.”

  “That is part of the reason that I came down here to meet you. Marie was nervous to see you again after all this time, but I wanted to speak to you properly before . . .” She cleared her throat and turned to face him. “Mr. Culpepper, I would like to ask your permission to marry your daughter.”

  He looked like he had been hit with a hammer. “Marry Marie?”

  “I love your daughter, sir. I’ve loved her since the first moment that I set eyes on her, and I will take good care of her for the rest of my life. With or without your permission.”

  He spluttered, “I don’t . . . I need to speak to Clementine.”

  Sully nodded. “Take your time. You don’t really know me yet and I’m not trying to make anyone uncomfortable. Just making my intentions clear.”

  “It is a lot to think on. Uh, sleep well, Iona, we’ll talk in the morning.”

  Sully grinned, “Nobody calls me Iona except Marie when she is mad. I’m Sully.”

  “Uh, pleasure to meet you, Sully.”

  “Likewise.”

  The evening stretched out long and empty ahead of Sully. For farmers like the Culpeppers, early awakenings were normal, but for Sully, the sunrise was a sign that it was past her bedtime. She had been working nights her entire adult life and—especially with Marie’s issues with sunlight—it just made more sense to sleep during the day. After some digging in the drawers she found some paper and a pen, and with those in hand, she settled at the counter to write out from memory the long and complex equation to cast Dante’s Inferno. It was an old hobby, tinkering with the spell to get it to work without killing its user, and it would fill a few hours until she was mentally exhausted enough to try to sleep. Sully was fairly confident that she had resolved the Inferno’s main problem— instantaneously draining all the magic from the caster—by forcing the spell to collapse even as it was being cast, creating a momentary burst of fire so hot it could incinerate nearly anything, without turning the caster inside out. Still, she wanted to re-check all of her equations before trying it, Despite what many of her “on the job assessments” might have said, she didn’t have a death wish.

  May 9, 1971

  Iona didn’t know what she’d done wrong. Normally when she did something wrong the nuns were happy to tell her, usually with a great deal of yelling and the odd smack with a ruler. When they’d caught her kissing Katherine Horgan out by the bike shed it had been hard to get a single word in. There had been a couple of red lines across the back of her thighs after that one. Most of the time Mother didn’t have much to say about her transgressions. It wasn’t that she didn’t care, it was just that her version of right and wrong sat a little bit distant from the nuns’ version. As long as Sully was still top of the class, Mother didn’t give a damn.

  Saying damn had earned her a whack too, which wasn’t fair because Mother said it all the time, and with some passion. Every time she burned her fingers on the pot or she read one of the letters her friends up north had sent her, you could hear her muttering, “Damn, damn, damn,” along with a few other words that she’d had the kindness to warn Iona off from using before the nuns had to intervene.

  Something had been up all week. There had been a tension in the air that the little girl wasn’t able to understand. Mother watched her intently as she ate her porridge in the morning. She ground the bones in Iona’s wrist with her grip when she was traveling them to the woods behind the schoolhouse. It was like she was waiting for something to happen. Something that kept on not happening. Iona had no clue what it was going to be until one day there was a man in the classroom when she arrived, standing right beside Sister Mary-Elizabeth with a beatific smile on his face and a fancy silk cravat. He spent the first morning sitting quietly in the corner reading a book, and the other children seemed to forget all about him. Iona did not. By lunchtime she had ascertained several facts about the strange man: He was not a priest and did not seem particularly in awe of the nuns like the village dads were. He had a funny accent that Iona suspected was English, but he hadn’t spoken enough to confirm that. He smelled a little bit like damp paper and oranges. Iona thought that he used the latter smell to cover up the former, but again, more data was needed. He was reading a book that Mother also kept in the house, but that Iona hadn’t been allowed to read yet. Which was to say, a book about magic. He was some sort of magician, and he was probably British. No wonder Mother had been acting strange.

  After lunch he began taking children out of class, one by one, and returning them unharmed a half hour later. It was after some careful badgering of one of those children that Iona got to the bottom of things. The man was from the Imperial College in Cork and he had been sent out to test all the children their age for magical potential. If he had just been a visitor from the Empire then Iona was pretty sure she would have spent her days splashing about in the swamp in peace, maybe snaring a couple of rabbits for the stew or chasing after the cheeky otters in the sunshine. Mother was a bit strange about magic. She’d never made a secret about loathing the way that the British taught it, compared to the traditional Irish methods that had been passed down, but she still pushed Iona to read about the British way as much as she could. Iona wasn’t called out to be tested on the first day, but she gave the man from the college a big smile on her way out and he smiled back.

  She was still smiling when Mother fetched her from the woods. She didn’t talk about the man from the college. Not yet. Mother obviously knew about him, otherwise she wouldn’t be acting so strangely, so Iona wanted to see how long it would take for the old woman to break and ask her. Iona wasn’t called on the second day of testing either, but she did start to get excited about the prospect. She knew that she was magical. Her mother was a witch after all. It would be absurd if she wasn’t the best at magic in her whole class.

  On the third day her name was called, and she went down to the Mother Superior’s office, which had been commandeered. She didn’t talk about Mother to the man from the college—she’d been trained well enough to keep anything about that subject well away from the Empire—but the man seemed to recognize the confidence in her immediately and he responded in kind. She could understand the simple equations that he offered to her and she handed him back a few more complex ones that would improve the efficiency of the textbook spells, impressing him.

  There was a chalk circle drawn on the desk, and he asked her to put her finger on it and close it. Iona diligently placed one finger on the edge of the chalk and concentrated on that white circle with all of her might. It didn’t look like anything had happened, but that was often how it went with Mother’s spells, so she didn’t fret too much. He made some fire come out of his fingers, pretty blues and greens all fluttering around. Iona tried to do the same thing. Pushed as hard as she could until her hands were shaking, but nothing happened. He smiled at her anyway and they spent a good while trying different things—breathing exercises and thinking hard about different pictures—to try to make some fire come out. With some reluctance and a pat on the shoulder he sent Iona
back to her classroom where she sat and pouted for the rest of the day.

  When Mother fetched her there was no way that she didn’t see the anger on her daughter’s face, but she still said nothing. Iona put herself to bed and stared into the fire instead of eating whatever stew was for dinner, and if she felt hungry, she didn’t notice because it already felt like her insides were hollow.

  The rest of the week had gone on much as the weeks before. Iona went to school. She came home and studied whatever Mother told her to. She slept. If some of the spring was out of her step on the first few days, it was back by the end of the week. The resilience of a child cannot be overestimated. The strange tension had seeped out of the cottage and Mother had stopped giving her the long lingering looks, had stopped looking at her at all, really. By the weekend it was as if everything were back to normal. They made their trip into town to collect Mother’s bundle of letters and whatever bare essentials they couldn’t make for themselves, then hopped back home from inside a mausoleum in the churchyard where Iona was pretty sure she had seen a real skeleton poking out of a hole in the wall.

  They’d eaten well that night on a whole chicken roasted on a spit and a pair of potatoes wrapped up in sooty foil that stung Iona’s fingers when she tried to peel it back. Mother had given her a kiss on the head before telling her to sleep and that was when a tiny snake of doubt coiled up in Iona’s tummy. Mother didn’t do things like that. She must have done something wrong. There was no other explanation. She flopped back and forth under the furs by the fireside until the flames had died down to embers, by which time that little snake had swollen up to fill her whole torso. Iona got up, even though it must have been close to midnight, and made her way to the outhouse.

  Mother wasn’t sleeping in her spot when Iona passed it, but she barely even noticed, completely lost in her own worries. She wandered barefoot out into the grass and did her business without even thinking of wasting a candle. The whole swamp had been her playground since she was old enough to crawl and it didn’t hold any surprises for her now. Or so she’d thought until she saw the marsh-lights out by the standing stones flicker from their usual green to an enticing red.