Deliquesce

by Wendy T Lyoness

  The building groans, assailed by a strong gust. The sun bears down on the corridors. She can’t enter the fifth floor at this time of day. She’ll melt.

  The door to the roof creaks in the stairwell, rattling when someone tries the handle. Pointing for the cat to stay, where it’s safe, she moves to get a better glimpse at the top of the staircase. She can’t see the door to the roof, but under the light of another light bulb covered in cobweb, Liam stands on the landing.

  Unmoving, silent, he stares at her with a bloody brick in his hands. The murder weapon.

  “Got you.” Cleo extends her right hand at her side, transforming the nails on her fingers into claws to shred him into slices. Drenched in blood, humans can be quite tasty. “I should have put you down when you laid a hand on my daughter.” She expects him to retort or move to defend himself, yet he does neither while she nears. “You don’t have to speak, but you will beg me to put you down. Or your death will take much, much longer.”

  On the landing, it becomes obvious the smell of urine she thought came from the fifth floor comes from Liam. He’s pissed himself in his bathrobe. Why? Out of remorse? Guilt? He doesn’t even look at her, and it only infuriates her further. He bashed Elisa’s skull in with a brick, threw Amelie down the stairs, and he won’t look her in the eye. Coward.

  Lowering her hand to gut him on her claws, the disobedient calico meows between her legs and hisses at the door to the roof. Liam stares in the same direction. Did someone frame him? She almost laughs at the thought, yet as she turns to look for herself, Liam opens his mouth to reveal how they’ve cut out his tongue. Blood drips on subtle stains of his bathrobe.

  “This is unfortunate, Cleo, love, but it seems you’ve caught me red-handed.”

  Recognizing the voice, her stomach hardens when she sees the man in question. Dressed in a suit with silver buttons on the cuffs, Mark has shaved his head since they last met. He appears younger too, despite how he must be older than the day she died. The last day they saw each other.

  “You killed my Elisa…” She slides in front of Liam, unveiling her fangs, and points her claws at him. “Why? Spit it out you—”

  “My duty, that’s all.” Mark sticks his hands into the pockets of his dress pants, shrugging. “I promised to do everything in my power for her, after they claimed you, but it seems she liked you more even in death. In the end, I guess I should count myself lucky my new friends didn’t demand a higher price to prove my loyalty.”

  For the second time in a single night, she finds herself at a loss for words. She ought to be consumed by burning hot rage, worse than when she stumbled upon Elisa’s corpse, yet the edges of her vision merely blacken. Tunnel vision. If she doesn’t put Mark in the ground once and for all, she’ll never forgive herself. He didn’t settle for ruining her life. He had to destroy what came afterward too.

  “Cat got your tongue?” He chuckles. “Get it? Cat…” Meeting her gaze head-on, he loses his confidence. “Never mind, you always were dumb.”

  “I will kill you.”

  “I suspected you might try, at the very least, if I didn’t present you with a suitable target.” He nods at Liam behind her. “How about you kill him, blame him for your daughter’s death, and forget you ever saw me? My clan won’t appreciate it if you assault me after I carried out their wish.”

  “Our daughter.” She shakes while stepping up the staircase. No one should have made a piece of shit like him a vampire. He may personify the very definition of a leech, but even their kind has standards, or so she thought. “You killed our daughter to prove your loyalty.”

  “What can I say?” Mark grins. “If you weren’t such a bleeding heart, you would have done it yourself. Knowing you, it wouldn’t have been half as sloppy either.”

  When he bursts into laughter, her muscles strain against her skin. Pleasant, welcome rage consumes her. He shouldn’t get to laugh.

  She flies up the last steps, knocks him into the locked door to the roof, and shrieks in his ears. By challenging her in her own territory, murdering Elisa, he’s committed suicide. No clan in Madgate can harness more raw strength than hers. Since time immemorial, the others have looked down upon them for their brutality and labeled them vermin.

  “Cleo, Cleo, calm down.” He doesn’t flinch when she slams him into the door twice in quick succession. Instead he puts his hands on her arms, smiling, like she’s no more than a crazy woman overreacting. “If you open that door, we’ll both die.”

  “I’m counting on it.” She rolls her arms out of his grip, sinks her claws through his flesh and muscles, and severs his right forearm like he’d held a twig up to an industrial fan. “Amateur. If your friends sent you here, they did so because they wanted to rid themselves of you.”

  He stares at her, grimacing, trying to muster what powers they’ve taught him. Useless cretin. Anyone in possession of a brain would have targeted Elisa outside of her building, so they could have blamed it on the city or its countless criminals. A robbery gone wrong.

  “Let’s not be hasty, Cleo.” He doesn’t feel pain from being slammed into the locked door, over and over, even though his body crumbles. It almost infuriates her as bad as his whiny voice. “You owe me more than anyone. The people in this building… They would have learned the truth about you, sooner rather than later, if you’d kept Elisa alive much longer. She liked to run her mouth when she wasn’t busy sucking cock.”

  Stepping back, she throws Mark’s severed forearm over the staircase’s railing. She should have killed him after he forced himself on her all those years ago. In life, the fear of the city and its inhabitants always bore down on her. In death, she accepted she never feared the city. Only what Madgate allowed its inhabitants to do to each other in the light of day.

  “I’m sorry, okay.” Mark glances down the stairs. He can’t reattach his arm, nor regrow it, but he’s hoping he can. They always do. “I didn’t think you’d take it this personal. Our kind don’t get emotional.”

  She demonstrates how she disagrees by rushing into him, bringing her knee into his stomach with all the force she can muster, and wrecking the door.

  Mark rolls across the warm concrete of the roof, through a bird’s nest, and screams when the sun burns him.

  After the horror stories she’s heard about leeches caught out in the sun, she expects it to hurt worse than it does. Oh, it burns. No doubt about it. Her flesh drips off her bones, becoming ash before it lands on the roof, but it’s nowhere near as bad as they told her.

  Watching Mark squirm on his back next to a vent, as good as dead, is enough for her to enjoy the moment. The sun can burn her to ash. She wouldn’t have stayed in Madgate this long with her daughter if another option existed, but the city never relinquishes its hold on its prisoners. Once it’s sunk its tendrils into a person, it drags them down beneath its deceitful, pristine surface.

  Feet clatter up the staircase behind her, exiting out onto the roof while seagulls squawk over another roof. The salty air from the ocean slips inside her lungs, forcing her to reminisce about the simple act of breathing. The skyscrapers to the east and south almost appear inviting as they glisten in the sunlight. She hasn’t stood outside during the break of day in years.

  One of her legs gives out from under her in the wake of the sun’s power. Everything below the knee has disappeared.

  Yet someone places their hands on her shoulders, drags her backward out of the sun, and leaves Mark to scream where he fell. She’d have loved to laugh at him after everything he’s subjected her to, but her mouth doesn’t respond to her wishes.

  She would have preferred to die somewhere else. Closer to her daughter, further away from the pines of the deep forest to the north. Perhaps if they’d vanished within its groves, hidden from the rest of the leeches, Elisa wouldn’t have died at all.

  Liam leans her against the wall next to the broken door where the sun can’t reach her and dons a solemn expression. Why would he save her? He saw what she did to Mark, what she
planned to do to him, yet he’s still dragged her out of the light. What does he think it’ll accomplish?

  “Thank you…” Her voice sounds hoarser. She’s lost her right leg, her right arm, and the sun opened up wounds in her torso. She’s glad she doesn’t have a mirror to check her face because she imagines it will burn long after today. “I should have trusted you, earlier.”

  Liam retreats out of sight, down the stairs. He can’t answer her after Mark cut out his tongue. The calico hops up the last step of the staircase and climbs into her lap while purring. Either it doesn’t notice the holes in her body, or it doesn’t care as long as it has a place to rest. She should have treated it better, named it. Someone else must do it now.

  A large spider crawls out of the cracks in the ceiling. Even if the injuries she’s sustained ought to hurt, they amount to nothing compared to the loss of her daughter. Worse, Mark’s stench lingers in the stairwell. His body odor, his unwashed clothes. Smells she would have preferred to never sense again.

  “I thought… thought I did everything I could for her.” She pets the calico with a burnt hand whose skin peels off into ash after each stroke to reveal bone. “Everything she allowed me to do, after she became an adult. Still, it… amounted to nothing.”

  A sour taste on her tongue, phantom limbs growing heavy. She sags against the wall, glancing at the sunlight at her side. She’s loath to give the city another victory this morning. The calico readjusts its position in her lap, kneading the remains of her right leg with its paws.

  “The memories don’t fade.” She allows herself to smile, ignores the claws digging into her skin. “After death, they just don’t.”

  The calico stretches in her lap.

  “Will you miss me when I’m gone?” She scratches the cat under its chin. “I didn’t think you could miss anyone after you’d died, but…” She can’t finish the sentence. The cat doesn’t ask her to.

  She has more than enough regrets when her vision dims, and the stairwell fades, but it’s her lack of tears for Elisa that annoys her most. She shouldn’t have left her lying on the floor of her apartment. By now, someone has probably called an ambulance. Not that it’ll help. The medics will declare her dead on arrival before shuffling her off to the morgue.

  Cleo will never get to visit her grave. It’s such a horrible desire to have, but she would have wanted to visit it. If for no other reason than to assure they didn’t dump Elisa in the ocean or the sewers.

  “This is…” She laughs, ruefully, and focuses on the sensation of the cat’s fur under the remains of her skin. The only tangible sensation left after losing her vision and smell. “This is why they warned me not to contact Elisa. They knew how it would end.”

  It’s difficult to tell whether she did too much or too little. After her embrace, her clan kept her hidden for weeks. They didn’t give her permission to go anywhere on her own before they’d taught her every little unwritten rule they planned to teach her. The woman who’d cursed her with conditional immortality swore she’d only sunk her fangs into her neck as a last resort.

  By the time she could roam Madgate, freely, she needed to see Elisa so bad that she didn’t consider how such a meeting would play out. Or what her daughter had been told about her disappearance.

  She scared Elisa out of her wits when she visited late at night, in her home, yet talked her down from swatting her with a frying pan after half an hour. At which point Elisa assured her she was in fact relieved to have her back, even if she didn’t breathe. They could resume where they’d left off, pretend nothing had happened. Especially nothing involving a frying pan.

  She would have given anything for the same opportunity now. Fading out of hell on Earth, leaving Madgate to rot, Elisa could have waited for her in purgatory, and it would have been an improvement. She should have died in her daughter’s stead. She should have forced immortality on her. The calico meows. The three of them ought to have defied the city and escaped through the forest.

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  I have a short story, for you, if you enjoyed Deliquesce

  Joyhead is set in the same city. Although, not the same decade.