by Gemma Files
That’s how I got myself my pocket-money business, running mail and brokering favors; how I snagged May right out from under M-vale’s former baddest Daddy-miss of all time, Verena Speller, who—after an extended turn in that extremely locked-down part of Ad Seg known as the Finishing School—eventually decided that having only three super-stacked blonde groupies with Nazi nicknames in her Aryan harem was probably impressive enough.
No magic involved in either case, nor (in fact) did it need to be…just like with fishing in Head CO Guard Erroll Curzon, King Prick in a whole jailhouse full of corrupt hacks, and so in love with his own piggy self that I sure didn’t have to raise any Hell but the usual in order to convince him he was the one raping me every so often, not the other way ‘round.
“I ain’t afraid of you, Chatwin, you goddamn witch,” he’d say, not even knowing how right he’d got it. And I’d just nod along, smiling. Thinking: ‘Course not, boss. Not like I scare MOST folks, after all.
Hell, sometimes? Sometimes, I even scare myself.
So he’d lumber on and off, huffing hard. And every time he did, I’d inject just a hint more of my poison in him, to keep him firmly on the hook; never did have to worry about falling pregnant, which was a mercy. Going by past record alone, I don’t really think I can conceive—not with a human man, anyhow. Not with the legacy of what my Momma conjured up coursing through my bloodstream.
Holler magic—blood, tears, sweat and spit. Bodily fluids of all descriptions. The good part is, it’s very direct. Bad part…well, one bad part…is, it sure won’t get you out of jail, not once you’re already in. Not when any given escape scenario means you gotta beguile each and every one of the hundred-some people between you and the front door individually, one by one by one. Daily penal system grind aside, ain’t no one has that sort of time to waste.
And: “Here we go,” Maybelle said, jumping off of me, while the PA simultaneously crackled and Guard Curzon’s voice rang out: “Count, ladies! All asses to the rail!” A general stomp and shuffle, a screech of contact locks; the gates slid open, admitting our newest members. And here was where I finally saw the Cornish sisters for myself, as they stepped onto Mennenvale Block A, with my very own eyes: caul-touched, always slightly narrowed against the light.
And just like that, not even a minute gone, I knew Samaire Cornish—the younger, taller, even blonder of the two—was my sister. Not just a sister, a fellow practitioner of the Art—like Gioia Azzopardi, Dom the Cop’s stregha widow, or that gal they call Needle, over in Psych—but a true something-sibling, with Hell’s own mark spread all over her too-calm face like an invisible stain. I think I know my own bad blood well enough to recognize the taint of it in others, even when it’s hid inside their veins.
I also noticed that while both of ‘em were cute in their own particular ways, all their (many, inventive, enticing) tattoos were strictly magical in intent. Tough little Dionne had the Gran Tetragrammaton on the back of her neck, Solomon’s Seal overtop her heart and the holy name of Saint Michael Archangel girding both arms, just like the warrior she was; Samaire’s whole rangy body, on the other hand, seemed inked up with spell-script specifically designed to not only keep things out but keep things in, as well.
Those images looped above and beneath her skin, buzzing against each other like rot.
Not that anyone but me could have told, by either witch-sight or plain-sight. But then again, that is precisely why they call such things “occult.” From the Latin, occultus, “to conceal.” Because their true meaning, their real story is…
…a secret.
—
What I knew about the Cornishes before I met ‘em boiled down to what everyone else did, albeit with one very important difference. In a nutshell, the sisters’ act had kept ‘em criss-crossing backroads America for upwards of seven years now, laying a trail of odd mayhem that’d grown into sketchy legend. They robbed gun-shops and places of worship, desecrated graves and left arcane graffiti behind; kicked ass, too—an unholy lot of it. And told the FBI that the people they’d killed along the way weren’t people at all but demons in human form, preying on the innocent. That they’d had to kill ‘em, along with anybody those demons’d touched, to keep Armageddon far off and little children safe at night. Which was why, in the main, they were in here now.
Digging back, what seemed to’ve kicked it all off was the State-assisted death of the man whose name they both wore, Jeptha Cornish. Their paper trail started where his finally went to ground: Raised off the grid by like-minded outlaw parents, a demon-slaying cult of two, up ‘til Jeptha was popped by the law for killing his common-law woman Moriam, somehow managing to reduce her body to a flesh slurry so fluid its provenance had to be back-traced through her daughters’ DNA. Local constabulary thought he might’a used a woodchipper, though they later had to admit they couldn’t find that, either—along with much of a motive, beyond the usual hit parade of well, he’s weird and well, so was she and since when’s a damn domestic get this complicated, for shit’s sweet sake?
Money, sex and/or parentage, the Jerry Springer trifecta. Maybe she’d been cheating, or maybe he’d just thought she was; maybe he’d figured out Samaire might not be his after all, not to mention the basic difficulty inherent in some self-taught backwoods exorcist’s wife popping out hellspawn on the down-low, no matter how that circumstance might’ve originally come about.
The girls went into foster care either way, separated for most of high school; Dionne did a tour in Iraq, then rabbitted after she got tapped for stop-loss turnaround, taking a load of Army weaponry with her when she did. Samaire, armed with a sprinter’s scholarship and a panel of genius-level IQ scores, managed to make it into law school by twenty, but dropped out just before finals of her second year. Her neighbours-in-residence said she got a visit from some woman looked almost exactly like her, except for being half a head shorter, about a week before she packed up and hit the highway. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Like most history, though, the really intriguing bits are always those ones which rarely get written down. Like the difference between the official version, say, and mine: Where most probably considered Samaire and Dionne Cornish either crazy or faking, I knew they were right. Didn’t necessarily mean I approved of their methods, let alone their raison d’être—they did kill monsters, after all. Awkward.
Yet that, more’n anything, was what made Samaire’s potential heritage issues so very…interesting, might be the word. Especially within context.
—
Back in the now, meanwhile, the new fish got ‘emselves all lined up, “yes sir”-ing quick-smart in turn, as Guard Curzon checked their names off his print-out. “Ahmad, Zaidee. Burch, Lisanne. Cornish, Dionne. Cornish, Sahmeyer…”
“Sah-meer-ah,” the Cornish in question corrected, quietly.
Curzon frowned. “What’d you say there, convict?”
“That it’s pronounced Sahmeerah. Boss.”
“Oh, really. And what is it makes you think I give a good goddamn about cross-checking the correctness of all your little biographical details? I look like oprah friggin’ Winfrey to you, cupcake?”
Others might’ve met this sort of dickery with a similarly harsh word, or even a punch, and ended up in Ad Seg for a month as of Day One for it; Dionne sure as Hell looked like she wanted to kick him where it counted, from the way her fists balled up. Samaire, though, just shrugged, and made herself look somehow small—small as a gal who loomed over Curzon by a good two inches while slumping ever could, at any rate. Projecting, if not saying right out loud: Nope.
“Thought not,” Curzon shot back, and flounced off to finish count, Guard Brenmer hot on his heels. Which left us all alone together, free to get acquainted however we felt most inclined.
—
But I didn’t approach ‘em right then, no. I watched ‘em a while instead, from long-range—across the yard, passing in the halls, two tables over in mess. Sent Maybelle to do fly-bys; she told me how they�
��d been split up for work (Samaire got library, Dionne got workshop), but stuck together as cellmates (no surprises there). Kept my eyes peeled for whatever scuffles might arise, so’s I could confirm for myself both what quarters said scuffles might come from, and how the Cornishes might deal with ‘em, if and when they did.
Now some fools will speak from hubris and say that we women are too frail to fight, and some’ll speak from rosy innocence and say we’re too compassionate. Neither of these is true. What is true is that unlike men, women—most women—don’t fight for fun. A woman throws down with you, she wants you either dead, or beaten bad enough you’ll never look her in the eyes again. Two women throw down, it don’t stop until it stops for good, or gets stopped. Which is why women mostly don’t start a fight unless we’re either damn sure we’ll win or we got no other choice, and why we learn right quick to tell the fights we can win from the ones we can only hope to survive.
Even the dumbest of M-vale’s denizens, it seemed, could see with a single look neither Cornish was a winnable fight. Around them the subtle vicious swirls of violence roiled on, while they floated through it like pumice in a Yellowstone caldera, untouched, untouchable. Model prisoners, ‘cause they could afford to be. And because…they needed to be.
No, it was the guards they had to fool, not us; it was the men with the keys they wanted to be overlooked by, the watchdogs they had to bore to sleepiness. That extra edge of alertness Maybelle reported, that I saw for my own self, whenever a bluebird came within hearing of their constant low mutters to each other: the tension, the flickering eyes, the expert balance of submissiveness, dullness and sullenness, thrown over that spark of sharp defiance like an oil-rag wrapping carbon steel. That it took me so long to realize what it all meant is some embarrassing, in full honesty.
Once I did realize, though…well. I never have been one for wast-ing time, once the course of action is clear.
—
“You two’re thinkin’ on escape, ain’t you?” I said, sliding in between both Cornishes without any fair warning, as they leant up against their usual staked-out corner of the prison yard. Dionne reacted pretty much just like I’d expected she might to this display of unmitigated gall: shifted back into fight-stance and fisted one hand, while the other went on the sly for that shank she kept shoved down the back of her pants. But Samaire just drew herself up to full height and shot me the downwards cut-eye, before asking, calmly—
“And…you would be?”
“Oh, just another poor victim of stunted parental creativity.” I stuck out my own hand, so fast she almost couldn’t help but take it, if only for a second. “Allfair Chatwin—Alleycat, they call me; looks like ‘all-fair,’ sounds like Ah-la-fahr. Kinda like bein’ named Cinderella, back where I come from.”
Dionne glowered at me, and snapped: “Don’t say word one to this bitch, Sami. I’ve been askin’ around; she’s nobody we need to know.”
“Oh, I’d say that probably depends, pretty gal.”
“On what?”
“On whether or not it’s true your li’l sister’s Daddy wears the same set of horns mine does.” She flushed a bit at that, but didn’t argue; though it might still be a sore spot, the concept obviously wasn’t really up for debate. So I simply smiled, and continued. “‘Cause if he does…”
“If,” Samaire put in, raising a brow.
“…Well. Then I think we might be fit to do some business together.”
Dionne and Samaire traded looks; Dee’s seemed to read like she thought she could probably stab me quick and walk on ‘fore the guards noticed, but Samaire’s half-shrug, half-headshake seemed less for than against. So Dionne let out a breath, and stepped back just far enough to let me get between her and her sister—metaphorically, at least. Especially considering exactly how little wiggle room she’d left me to work with…
(For now.)
“I mean, you do need to get outta here too, am I right? Go back to savin’ the world, and all.” Now it was my turn to get looked at. “So…how’s that goin’ for you, anyways?”
Dionne: “Like it’s any of your damn—”
But: “Not as well as I’d hoped for, considering,” Samaire replied, cooler than cool, at almost the same moment. “But I take it you have suggestions.”
‘Cause she could see it on me too, ‘course; no way she couldn’t. We all know each other by sight, if nothing else.
I nodded. “Now, don’t get me wrong,” I began, “I hear you’re an educated woman, so I know whatever sort of craft you practice probably got to have mine beat all to Hell and back, just on the reference material. But I been in here long enough to learn this much: Craft in itself ain’t gonna get you through gate one, let alone out those front doors without anyone puttin’ a bullet through ya…or better still, through her.”
Dionne snorted loudly at the very idea, naturally—but Samaire’s eyes flicked over nonetheless, automatic as a skipped heartbeat, like she was already checking for damage. And: Well-a-day, I thought to myself, wonderingly, as I so often had before. Ain’t family something special?
Best earthly way to get an otherwise smart person to do somethin’ stupid under pressure that I ever have tripped across, inside jail or out of it, hands damn down.
“I’m listening,” was all she said in return, though. Which was more’n good enough.
I walked her through what I knew about M-vale’s various pitfalls, as gleaned from tales of other past break-out schemes (sadly truncated in their execution, most often), then sat there while Samaire walked me in return through what she’d decided on when she first heard the verdict read out on her and Dionne, and why it wasn’t quite coming together the way she’d thought it would.
“I usually practice hierarchical magic,” she said. “But that’s pretty tool-heavy for in here—not least since they took all my supplies away, before we even went to trial…”
“Uh huh. Good luck gettin’ hold of ‘a hazel-wood wand new-peeled’ on the black market, not to mention the steel caps, lodestone and virgin cock’s blood you’d need to consecrate it.” Adding, as she stared: “What? You think just ‘cause I ain’t been to university, I don’t know my basics?”
She kept on staring a second, then shook it off. “okay,” she said, finally, pointing to a sinuous double line of text snaking up around her right-side humerus. “If you’re really up on your rituale magiciae componentum, then—what’s that?”
I just grinned: Man, far too easy.
“Why, that there’d be protection against demons if you read it one way and a binding on your own demon blood if you read it the other, written in the language known as Crossing the River—Transitus Fluvii, as the dead Roman tongue would have it. Y’all don’t know everything just ‘cause you read a book or two got written before Gutenberg made up his first Bible, Princess.”
Dionne, impatiently: “Look, so you know some shit, and she obviously knows some of the exact same shit…was there gonna be a plan in here somewhere, or what?”
“Like you say, wizardly workings tend to take the sort of accoutrements our current position renders pretty much inaccessible,” I told Samaire, ignoring the unsolicited commentary from the peanut gallery. “So why not go the opposite route?”
“Such as?”
“Holler magic. Y’all might have heard of it.”
“Sure. That’s the tradition where every spell involves wearing your materiel in your crotch for a day or so.”
I nodded, unoffended: “Ain’t fancy, I’ll grant you, but it’s simple, cheap—”
“If you don’t count the boiled-down human body parts you usually build it from,” Dionne muttered.
“—and it does work…‘specially so when you got two qualified people doin’ it, ‘stead of just the one. And that’s my main point, Princess: You ain’t ever gonna get where you want to by exactly when you want to, not without help from another worker. But if you was to lay your high-class hexation next to my gutter witchery and let ‘em cross-pollinate—feel on ea
ch other awhile, or such—might be they’d both end up movin’ a tad faster, to our mutual improvement.”
“Like a sort of a…really skanky…feedback loop.”
“Well, I never did go too far through school…but metaphorically, sure. Why not?”
The Cornishes exchanged another glance. “Look, Sami, you already know what I think,” Dionne said, at last. “Witches are witches.
Plus, word on the yard is, banking A-Cat here’ll do anything more’n lie right to your face, then kick you down and fuck you ain’t gonna get you anything but kicked down and fucked even harder. But we both already know you’re gonna do what you want, just like always.”
Samaire nodded. To me: “So, assuming everything she’s said is true—how could I ever trust you to hold up your end of the bargain? What do you want to get out of here for, anyhow?”
Never you mind, kin-killer, I almost snapped back. But said instead, out loud—
“You kiddin’ me? I want to be out of here to be out of here, Princess, same’s anyone else. ‘Cause it’s cramped, your options for fun are substantially limited, and I been here more’n long enough already. ‘Sides which, you sure don’t have to trust a person to work with ‘em. That’s half the fun, ain’t it?”
She looked at me then, long and level, eyes hard.
“Tell you what,” she said, at last. “If it turns out I do find I need you for—anything—I’ll go ahead and have Dionne let you know.”
I nodded, thinking: That’s all I ask.
—
That night, in the slice of space between count and lights-out, Maybelle’d already laid there pouting for quite a bit before I finally wised up enough to look over and notice. She’d seen me getting what looked like up close and personal with Dee and Samaire, and that made her nervous; guess she was a bit too well-used, at this stage of the game, to think goin’ back on the market was a good idea, particularly if she wanted to trade up (rather than down) from where she was right now. So she wanted some token show of reassurance she really wasn’t in immediate danger of bein’ thrown over for a newer model, which I—truth be told—was more’n happy to provide.