by Gemma Files
(hungry)
But: This is not me, she told herself. Not while I can still refuse to let it be.
Then added, out loud, like she was arguing the point: “That stuff’s not real, though, is it—not outside of...True Blood, and whatever? It just doesn’t happen.”
The taller woman cocked her head slightly, neither confirming nor denying—though one tattooed shoulder did hitch just a tick, automatically, a movement perhaps only kept from blossoming into a full shrug by some arcane version of politeness.
“Not usually,” she agreed. “But sometimes. This time.”
“But...”
Now it was the smaller woman’s turn to shake her head, punctuating it with a snort. “Just skip the counselling, Sami,” she told her sister. “You were right the first go-’round—she gets it, just doesn’t like it, ‘cause who would? Now get your whammy on, and let’s do what’s gotta be done.”
“Dionne—”
“Samaire.” To Leah: “You got a bad case of the deads, kid, and it stops here, before you start treating the next diner’s staff like your private buffet. Nothing personal.”
“Dee, Jesus.”
“What about him? oh, that’s right: not here. As usual.” The thing behind her back was a machete, carving fluid through the air, already nicking Leah’s throat; Leah felt the creature inside her leap, vision red-flushing, and knew her teeth must be out, lips torn at their corners. But Dionne didn’t flinch, barely turning to yell, over her shoulder: “Do it, goddamnit, ‘less you wanna be doing me next!”
(Yes yes and fast do it fast)
Something caught Leah then, square in the back of the skull, like a hook; it lifted her up and soothed her slack at the same time, a novocaine epidural. She was sewn tight, paralyzed, unable to fire a single nerve—the voice, the hunger, all drained away, replaced by a smooth, warm feeling of peace. Behind Dionne, she saw Samaire’s long fingers flicker, drawing symbols on the air. Her many tattoos were glowing now, right through her clothes, each too-black line somehow rimmed in vitriolic green and sulphur yellow-touched at the same time, like light reflected off a shaken snake-scale.
I didn’t ask for this. Yet even as she willed her lips to shape the words, failing miserably to bring them to completion, she already knew Samaire could hear them anyhow. And thought she heard, in reply—echoing, as it were, from another part of her too-full head entirely—
No. No one ever does.
Seeing the cores of the tall girl’s eyes twist sidelong, little black swastikas at the center of two pearl-gray pools. And letting her own drift shut, letting go of everything at once; barely feeling the pain as Dionne’s blade slashed through her spine, severing her new-made vampire head with one quick, expert blow.
—
Take the night shift and lose your life, maybe your freaking soul; wake up with a killer hangover and a cannibal thirst, catapulted into a world where the best you could hope for was somebody like Dionne and Samaire Cornish to put you down before you did the same to anybody else. That was their cross to bear in a nutshell, Dee knew: the family curse, spelled out coast to coast in monster-blood and mayhem, still-live warrants for prison break and felony murder notwithstanding. But at least they could trust the Maartensbeck’s to use all that career vampire-killer money of theirs to cover their tracks for them this time, supposedly, so long as they returned the favor...
She stepped back just in time to let poor Leah’s skull fall one way and her body the other, neatly avoiding the tainted geyser of blood spraying out every which-way, cellular-level desperate to find something else to infect before its time ran out. But Sami was already twitching the diner’s blinds up again, letting in enough sunlight to crisp that evil shit to ash so fine it wouldn’t register on any CSI test. of course, they could’ve just taken the former waitress down that way in the first place, but it was messy, to say the least, and be-heading was a clean, relatively painless death. So saving the daylight exposure option for body disposal suited both Dee and Sami fine.
No time for much more than starting to think: Good work, little sis, however, before Dee found herself stopping short once more, machete automatically whipping back up, as an all-too-recognizable voice drawled, from the diner’s conveniently propped-open doorway—
“Hmmm, messy. Not s’much as the old boy I just did somethin’ similar to, ‘course, but that’s probably ‘cause practice makes perfect.
Y’all truly do know your stuff when it comes to supernatural creature disposal, you two.”
Oh, you have gotta be fucking kidding me.
Both of them turned together, then, to see well-known holler witch turned cellblock pimp Allfair “A-Cat” Chatwin standing there with both hands buried wrist-deep in her hoodie’s front pocket, large as life—which really didn’t work out to be too damn large at all comparatively, though grantedly bigger than Dee—and twice as skanky. Her bush of malt-brown hair was jammed down under a backwards-turned trucker cap so gross she might’ve rolled an actual trucker for it, and Dee was amazed (yet not, somehow, surprised) to note the crazy bitch was still wearing her prison jumpsuit, albeit with the shucked top hung down like shirt-tails, so it probably read to the uninitiated as nothing more than a particularly heinous set of bright orange parachute pants.
Had a big book tucked under up one arm, too. Bible-heavy, though Dee didn’t have to see Sami’s nose twitch to know it probably had a very different sort of stink to it.
Sami would claim they owed Chatwin something for helping in the escape from Mennenvale Women’s Correctional, Dee believed, if pressed. For herself, Dee was pretty sure all they owed her was a quick put-down, an unmarked grave and the promise not to piss on it after, but she’d long since had to reconcile with the fact that whenever Sami’s highly flexible conscience was involved, things didn’t always go her way.
“We should talk, that’s what I’m thinkin’,” Chatwin suggested, black eyes glinting with ill charm and a touch of sly humor both, like she could read Dee’s mind right from where she stood. And hell, maybe she could—Dee’d seen Sami do something similar enough times to not bother counting anymore, using the half-demon blood she and Chatwin shared, supposedly from the same source. That was if you could trust Chatwin on that one, which Dee very much didn’t, having watched her calmly lie about the sky being blue in her time (metaphorically speaking) for the express purpose of messing with both their minds, not to mention seeing how far she could slip inside Sami’s pants while doing it.
Moriam Cornish’s sin made flesh, Dee’s dead Daddy would’ve called it, they hadn’t already shot his veins full of poison for killing her over lying down with the Fallen. of course, she’d only done it to help him fight a crusade she apparently felt worth sacrifice, but that sure hadn’t saved her, once he found out. It was the key event of both their childhoods, Sami’s birth out of their Mama’s useless death—the thing that’d sent Jeptha Cornish to jail and both his kids into different degrees of foster care, kept them separated ‘til they were both adults and well past the age of consent when they’d made their own pact together: a vow to take up the reins and keep fighting their parents’ Anabaptist crusade, with that solemn troth plighted on Moriam’s grave and sealed since in a hundred different variety of strange things’ blood.
Dee’d already started up where Jeptha left off, wielding rote-learned knowledge and home-made weapons she would turn to her sister’s service, playing knight to her reluctant sorceress—just as Sami had committed on her own to Moriam’s path, though without the shamefaced layer of secrets and lies that had eventually dragged her down. Had already taken the first few steps along it back when Dee turned up at her university dorm room’s door, in fact, so long since. When she’d opened it gingerly, scratching at the first few raw, hand-scribed lines of Crossing the River—the Witches’ Language, Jeptha’d called it, a foul tongue good for nothing but spell-work and bindings on things too awful to force the thousand names of G-slash-d to touch—she’d just inscribed along her left wrist, and
squinted down at Dee from under floppy blonde bangs, asking: Can I help you?
Samaire Morgan? I’m Dionne. Cornish.
Morgan’s not my real name.
I know. Can I come in?
Standing there in her fatigues with a stolen sawed-off full of salt-cartridges in her backpack, and looking shyly ‘round at the detritus of a life she’d never once thought was possible to achieve on her own—track-meet photos, scholarship documents, the tricked-out laptop with all its bells and whistles. The friends, grinning from half a dozen frames—one in particular, familiar from various news stories and police reports.
Heard about Jesca Lind, she’d offered.
Did you. Wouldn’t’ve thought that’d’ve made the papers, over in Iraq.
Well, I got it from your Mom, actually, when I was tracking you down—Mrs. Morgan. She said you guys went to prom together, picked out the same university, all that. As Sami nodded, slowly: Yeah, that’s a damn shame, losing somebody you love so young A beat. She really possessed, when she died?
She was something, all right—and she didn’t just die. Why do you ask?
You know who I am, Sami?
I’m—starting to get an idea; Mom showed me coverage of the trial, when she thought I could handle it. You’re Jeptha Cornish’s daughter.
Your sister.
That’s what it said on the birth certificate. So, Dionne...you here to kill me, or what?
They looked each other over a moment, taking stock; Sami was bigger but lankier, and Dee was fairly certain she hadn’t had a quarter of as much training, not physically. Then again, if she took after Moriam the way Jeptha’d thought she would, she wouldn’t need it.
I’m your sister, Sami, she repeated. How you think you got out of that trailer in the first place? I picked you up and I ran ‘til I couldn’t run anymore. Never looked back, no matter how hard he yelled at me to. So hell no and fuck you, ‘cause I ain’t him.
That familiar/unfamiliar gaze—Mom’s eyes, Dad’s unholy calm. That set mouth, lips gone just a shade off-white, asking: But you know, right? What I am.
Sure. You’re blood.
Only half. Half-human, too—by family standards.
To which Dee’d simply shrugged, throwing four hundred solid years’ worth of witch-hunting genes to the winds, at least where it concerned one witch in particular—and not giving all too much of a damn as she did it. Because: How many relatives did she have left, anyways, in this frightful world? How many did she need?
Good enough for me, she’d said.
And Sami had nodded, eventually, once she saw she meant it. Then slipped her sweater off to show the rest of what she’d been doing to herself, all up and down and every which-way, penning the forces she had no choice but to know herself capable of wielding carefully back inside her own skin. Tracing marker with razor, then rubbing the wounds with a gunk made from equal parts ink, salt and Polysporin, ‘til the result began to heal itself out of sheer contrariness. Lines of power digging themselves down deep from epidermis to dermis, burrowing inwards like worms of living light, sinking ‘til they could sink no more.
Help me, then, she’d told Dee, a hundred times calmer than she’d had any good reason to be, given the circumstances. You see my problem, right? ‘Cause long as my arms are, I just can’t seem to reach my back.
And she’d handed Dee a blade, and Dee had taken it. Said: I got you. And...
...that was it, slang become fact. It was done.
In the here and now, Dee hiked her eyebrows at Chatwin, trying her best to project every ounce of contempt she had across five feet of space, without moving more than those thirty tiny muscles. “Team up again, uh huh,” she replied. “‘Cause that worked out so well, last time.”
“Still outta jail, ain’t you?” Continuing, when neither of them answered: “Naw, just listen—not exactly like I want to, ladies, given the acrimonious way we parted, ‘cept for the fact that it sure does appear we’re workin’ the same case for the same people, from suspiciously different ends. An’ if yours told you the same pile of bull mine told me, might be we should throw in together regardless of past conflicts, just to keep ourselves all upright for the duration.”
“Pass,” Dee started to snap back—then sighed instead, as Sami waved her silent.
“I want to hear,” the big idiot said, stubborn as ever.
“The shit for, Sami? She dumped your ass in the woods, left me stuck inside a wall.”
“Didn’t expect that to happen, just t’say,” Chatwin pointed out. “Neither a one.”
“Not like you tried all too hard to stop it, when it did.”
A shrug. “Well, in for a penny.”
Sami rolled her eyes. “Look,” she told Dee, “you were already sure the Maartensbecks couldn’t be trusted in the clinch, considering who we’re chasing. And it strikes me A-Cat probably knows a dirty deal when she hears one—better than us, given we’re not exactly social.”
Dee had to smile at that, since it was nothing but true; hell, even Chatwin knew it. As they both watched, she sketched a little bow, shrugged again, tossed her head like a hillbilly beauty queen. And drawled back, without any more or less malice inherent in the words than usual—
“Well, ain’t you sweet, still. Princess.”
—
When most people talked about the Maartensbecks, they concentrated on their twinned academic prowess and charity-work, not
to mention their storied geneaology—elliptical mentions of them stretched all the way back to the ninth century, when Holland separated from Frisia to become a county in the Holy Roman Empire, and a man named Auutet from Maarten’s Beck ended up qualifying as a student of the Corpus Iuris Civilis at the newly-founded University of Bologna. For those in “the life,” however, the name carried a very different sort of weight.
“They’re Dutch, and all they hunt is vampires,” Moriam Cornish had told her eldest daughter one night, during a Hammer Horror movie marathon. “Sure, they don’t use a ‘Van’ when they sign anymore, but you do the math.”
Though not rich in a conventional sense, their consistent ability—and willingness, even when it cost them bad enough to denude whole generations—to tackle the Rolls-Royce of monsters head-on had produced a wide-flung funding network of grateful, financially liquid patrons. And with the foundation of the Maartensbeck Archive in 1968, they’d begun to amass a vault full of magical artifacts other people wouldn’t touch with a literal ten-foot pole: grimoires, cursed objects, holy weapons, all of which the family’s surviving members either caretook or banked accordingly, loaning them out at a fair rate of interest to anyone who could afford their late fees, and was in search of a way to kill the unkillable.
Occasionally, someone would be dumb enough to think they could go full supervillain with whatever it was they’d borrowed, then find out better once the Maartensbecks came to retrieve it; Dee had seen photos, and the results weren’t pretty. These crafty stealth badasses might have multiple degrees and class out the wazoo, but they sure weren’t fussy about coming down hard on whoever they considered evil, a category whose boundaries sometimes appeared to shift at whoever was currently heading the Maartensbecks’ boardroom table’s will.
For the Cornishes, who’d received their initial email while recuperating after the M-vale break in a motel Sami swore up and down didn’t even have WiFi, contact had been made in the well-preserved person of matriarch Ruhel Maartensbeck, legendary Professor Maks’s only granddaughter. She was a silver fox of a woman with Helen Mirren style and Vanessa Redgrave pipes, turning up to their highly public first meeting—at yet another all-night roadside greasy spoon, somewhere on the Jersey Turnpike—dressed all head to toe in retired teacher drag so good Dee would’ve pegged her for a civilian, at least from across the room. Then she drew close enough to sit down, revealing sensibly low-heeled lace-up shoes with enough tread for a high-speed chase, a no-grip Vidal Sassoon crop, and the discreet lines of a high-calibre pistol packing modified rounds unde
r one arm. The overall effect was of a stretched-out Dame Judi Dench, voice almost accentless and tartly crisp, as she slid her long legs under the plastic table and opened by saying—
“Congratulations on your recent return to circulation, my dears. Believe me, I’m not usually one to interrupt a celebration, but...well, the truth is, my family finds we have a problem that requires an outsider’s touch, albeit one educated in very—specific ways. I know you’ll understand what I mean, given your background.” A pause. “Beside which, we’ve heard such good things of you both, it seemed a pity to look anywhere else.”
Dee had to bite down on the urge to laugh, hard. But a quick glance Sami’s way told another tale; she had a look on her face that read as partly stunned, part wistful. This was civilized talk, Mrs. Morgan-grade, of the sort that hadn’t come her way in years—not since that last phone call, when Dee’d tried not to let herself overhear as Sami told her former “mother” how she not only wasn’t gonna make it for Christmas, but wouldn’t be able to tell her where to get in touch with her anymore. ‘Cause yes, what those cops had told her was true, to a point: they had just killed a bunch of people in a Beantown bar, deliberately and with premeditation, just like the charges said. But only their bodies, because the things inside those bodies weren’t the people they were claiming to be at all, what with the whole tempting transients down to the basement, then killing and cooking them routine they’d gotten into recently...let alone the additional part about feeding the remains to their customers as a Tuesday Night Special afterwards.