by Gemma Files
“Do not keep in mind, O Lord, our offenses or those of our parents, nor take vengeance on our sins,” Sami replied, not skipping a beat, while Maks Maartensbeck—him, increasingly, rather than the terrible force that had driven his frail form hither and yon these forty-plus years, gulping down anything stupid enough to come near—shuddered at her feet. “Lift this sufferer like Lazarus, out of the grave. Bring him forth, whole once more. ”
“Restore him,” Chatwin agreed. “Change his gall for blood, corruption for health. Set him free.”
“This we pray: liberate him from the mouth of the Abyss, ex inferis, in nomine patris, et filis—”
“—Et Spiritus Sanctii,” they all chimed in on this last part, seemingly without premeditation: Ruhel, Dee, Ana. Dee glanced down herself as she said it, eyes drawn back to the sheer spectacle of the professor’s—Jesus, who knew, at this point: salvation, ruination. One out of the other, out the back and right back in, straight on through ‘til morning...
Saw his lips move, whitening, firming. Saw his wounds begin to bleed, first clear, then red. And heard him gasp as the pain came rushing in, at last—a torrent of it, others’ as well as his own, deferred almost half a hundred years. The pain, so long forgotten, of being merely human.
“Ruhel...” he managed, just barely, but she heard it; fell to her knees in the mess at the sound, all uncaring of her lovely suit, and hugged him so hard he screamed. Exclaiming, as she did: “It worked, oh God, you’re cured. I knew it would. Oh, grandfather...”
Anapurna, boot still on his back and her gun leveled between his shoulderblades, seemed unconvinced, but Ruhel laughed and wept like a child; Dee wanted to look somewhere else, but was sort of starved for options. The professor, meanwhile, took it just as long as he could before gingerly shifting back, Taser’s cable dragging painfully between them. And—
“No, Ruhel,” he managed, lips twisting wry over a mouthful of newly-blunted teeth. “It...simply won’t do, you know.”
“Grandfather?”
“Oh my girl, you know it won’t. Look around you. Someone has to pay for...all this.”
She shook her head, shamed, dumb. Put a hand up to stop him speaking only to have him print a kiss onto her palm, so light and sweet it made her groan out loud, then fold to sag against him, sobbing against his frail, torn chest. He patted her awkwardly with the arm that wasn’t left hanging, Dee’s blade still stuck through it, and addressed the others over her shoulder, head turning in a short half-circle to them in turn—Sami and Chatwin, Dee, Anapurna. “Ladies,” he began, visibly exhausted, “there is...so much I must leave unsaid, and for that...I apologize, most of all for how quickly I must discard this gift you’ve bled to grant me. The last thing I wish is to seem ungrateful. But...blood sows guilt, as we Maartensbecks well know. And I...”
Gaze left steady on Anapurna alone now, her stepping back, regarding him for the first time as anything but a threat. Those fine blue eyes, both sets of them, shining with unshed tears.
“I understand,” she said.
“I have...been damned, all this time, utterly. But what they did saved me...” Nodding down, as Ruhel continued to cry: “She saved me, as she always said she would. I was the one who...tainted it. Do you understand that?”
“I think so, sir.”
But she didn’t move, and neither did he—gaze holding steady while hers slipped sidelong, supplicant, almost. Pleading. For what?
Dee wondered, but only momentarily.
“You want to die, again,” she said, out loud. “For real, this time. But you can’t pull the trigger—damn yourself all over, if you do. That right?” The professor didn’t answer, but didn’t object. Dee nodded at Anapurna. “So you want her to kill you, instead.”
“‘Want’ would be a...strong word.”
“For her too, given she fights monsters and you’re not one anymore. Plus, you’re family.”
(I know a little about that.)
Anapurna stiffened, gun jerking back up, as though challenged. “Never said I wouldn’t,” she snapped, to which Dee shrugged, making a placatory movement: Peace, lady. Managed to get this far without shooting each other—let’s go for the gold, huh?
“Just think maybe it’d go better if it wasn’t either of you,” she said, mainly to Maks. “‘Cause when you’re bent on doing good, doing bad—no matter why—don’t ever seem to help.”
He didn’t bother to nod, but Anapurna did it for him, so...good enough, Dee guessed. Pressed tight to her granddad’s clavicle, Ruhel covered her eyes with both hands and wept on, bitterly. And Dee reached into her sleeve, for real this time—not knowing if Sami was watching, but sure as hell not wanting to check, either. Hoping Chatwin was, though, and attentively, as she cocked back and dug the barrel into his fragile, rehumanized temple.
Been dead a long time, she reminded herself. But: “I’m sorry,” she heard herself tell him, nevertheless. To which he merely smiled, answering, with amazing self-control—
“I’m not.”
(So thank you, dear girl. Thank you. )
Over his shoulder, she saw Anapurna not quite close her own eyes because somebody had to stay on point, and thought: Damn, if you didn’t get the exact same training I did. We could’ve been friends, maybe, if not for this.
But that’s just me, right? Always the bad cop.
“Okay, then,” Dionne Cornish said, to no one in particular, as she pulled the trigger.
—
In the motel battle’s immediate aftermath, nobody but the surviving Maartensbecks was greatly surprised to discover that Allfair Chatwin had used the Professor’s death as distraction and run off while the getting was good, taking the easy-to-sell-for-travelling-cash Clavicule des Pas-Morts with her. Since Ruhel—icy veneer firmly back in place—was already on the phone arranging cover-up plus retrieval for her grandfather’s corpse, however, now finally set to occupy the tomb bearing his name at last, Anapurna was the one who offered the Cornishes a ride to the Canadian border, along with those fabled clean new IDs.
“Chatwin’ll be our next project, if I have any say in it,” she promised Dee, too.
“Good luck with that,” Sami replied, crossing her arms, not quite allowing herself to shiver.
Later yet, as the miles were eaten up beneath them and Dee stared at the back of Anapurna’s head, rubbing fingers still a little bruised from the recoil, Sami leant over to assure her she’d done the right thing—“The only thing, Dee, under the circumstances. He knew it. You do too.”
“Do I?” Dee shook her head. “Don’t feel that way. More like...well. Kinda—”
“—Like it sets a bad example?”
A pause. “There is that,” Dee eventually agreed, so quiet she could barely tell herself what she thought about it.
CANADA: ONE HUNDRED FEET, the next sign said. Above, the moon hung high; Anapurna Maartensbeck tapped the wheel as she drove, beating out some tune Dee couldn’t identify. “So who’s this guy your—the prof kept on talkin’ about?” Dee asked her, falling back on business, for lack of better conversational topics.
“Juleyan Laird Roke,” Anapurna replied, not turning. “Wizard first, then graduated to vampire at the moment of his execution, during the Civil War—ours, not yours—through some spasm of ill will and sciomancy. Helped that he was a quarter fae on his mother’s side, with ten generations of hereditary magic-workers on the other...a rancid bastard, too, from all accounts. Doesn’t surprise me a bit that he left poor old Maks to rot, once he’d had his way.”
“Uh huh. So tell me, Miss M—is some holler witch you barely know really at the top of your list, with this guy still on the loose?”
“Perhaps not.”
“Good luck again, then. Twice over.”
“And let’s hope the chase ends better for me than it did for my great-grandfather? Why, Miss C, I’m touched.” An expert swerve took them into the express lane, where Anapurna slowed to an idle. “Enough so to wish you the same, in fact, on your journey. S
ince, after all...”
But here she broke off, maybe thinking better of finishing the thought, considering how Sami was sitting right there all extra-large as life, listening. or how she already knew Dee had a gun.
Because: Some hunt monsters, Dee thought, and some become monsters, in their turn. But some are just made that way, with no say at all in the matter—collateral damage, already born fucked, just waiting for the worst possible moment to fall down.
Family as destiny, its own little ecology, forever struggling forwards, forever thrown back. But...it didn’t have to be a foregone conclusion, was what Dee believed, at the end of the day. What she had to make herself believe, to keep on going.
What’s the difference? she wondered, knowing there wasn’t much of one—that there couldn’t be, for any of it to work. And reached out, in the darkness, to take her sister’s hand.
THE SPEED OF PAIN
Five o’clock a.m., and all’s definitely not well.
That’s the thought to which Nimue Ewalt wakes, more or less, as she pulls herself headlong from the shreds of her latest Valerian-influenced nightmare. She reaches for her nightstand sketch-pad before the connect-the-dots “narrative” behind that cold hand in her sternum can dissolve into complete uselessness, shivers plucking up and down her arms as she scrabbles for a pen in the half-open drawer, while Veruca Luz snores asthmatically on the futon couch across the room…
…and shit, what was it, now? A hazy wash of images overlaid like bad Flash on an overburdened browser, shucking files Trash-bound right and left and spiralling headlong downwards towards the final Big Freeze…
Out on a deserted beach at night, maybe Cherry, maybe not; the Island’s polluted shore spread out behind her in a blur of garbage, rocks cold against her naked back, black lake-water lapping at her toes. No stars above. And this sensation of being watched by something hidden, maybe from above, maybe below. of laying herself open—physically, psychically—to wait for an unseen enemy, already settling down upon her like a cloud: entering by the mouth, leaving by the sex. Splitting her from stem to stern entire, in a sudden spray of heat and blood and waste.
Then being buried in the beach’s wet sand, spade-full by hideously slow spade-full—broken, paralyzed, yet somehow still alive, a turtle’s egg stewed fast in its own leathery shell. A chrysalis, waiting to hatch.
But with that, Nim abruptly finds herself shaking all over, so hard she can’t hold the pen straight enough for legible notes anymore. So she lets it go instead, pulls the covers close around her, while Veruca sleeps on. Keeps her unspectacled eyes front, focus lost against the far wall’s blurry stucco veneer, and waits for morning.
—
There’s an early frost in Toronto this August; no big deal, a few black tomatoes here and there, but try telling that to somebody who’s used to running on California time-slash-weather. So Veruca wraps herself up like Arnold Vosloo every time they set foot outdoors, complaining endlessly about how the cold could affect her septal piercing, how if it goes below a certain temperature it could set off one of her migraines. How since of course she left her medicine at home, or maybe lost it in transit someplace, that leaves her prospectively sol when the hypothermic muscle tension comes a-callin’…
So: “Just take the fucking thing out, then,” Nim snaps back at her, finally—not exactly wanting to be too much of a bitch on wheels, but not willing to seem too sympathetic, either; this is Veruca we’re talking about, after all. And with Veruca, there’s always one more thing.
She feels bad about it almost immediately afterward, though, especially when Veruca looks down and sniffs, bolt swinging. Saying, quietly:
“Dude, you don’t have to be like that. I mean…I’ll be fine, totally, I’m sure. For tonight, I mean. I’m just, y’know…”
(Just what? But for the love of God, please please please don’t say)“…just…sayin’.”
And here endeth the lesson, Nim finds herself thinking, for neither the first time nor (probably) the last: File under Truism ‘cause it’s true, and never again let yourself think that because you like somebody online, you’ll like ‘em in person. Or, say—
(at ALL)
Because virtual friendships should stay just that: virtual. Or risk spawning prospective justified manslaughter charges, on BOTH sides of the equation.
Nim takes another sidelong glance at Veruca, bundled well beyond the tenth power, with the very roots of her bleached-blonde skater grrrl-cum-faux chola cornrows visible where her hoodie meets her hairline; eyes with a semi-epicanthic droop peek out from under boxy black-rimmed glasses, half-squinted against any light brighter than that of a screen set on PowerSave. Doesn’t help that Veruca seems to revel in the same chin-to-chest geekslump Nim’s spent hours trying to yoga away, either, or that her voice constantly ricochets back and forth between whine (when upset) and mono-tone (when anything else), like she’s never even taken the time to consider how she might sound to other humans.
It all makes being near her familiar and dreadful in teeth-grittingly equal measure, cringe-worthy the same way flipping through your Mom’s hidden stash of high-school snapshots is—Veruca’s everything Nim used to be, back before Nim wised up, grew up. Back before she knew, or cared about knowing, any better.
The funny thing being…in e-correspondence or chat-rooms, on ICQ or her blog, Veruca’s one seriously impressive cyber-chick: She can actually spell, for one thing, which helps sort the wheat from the chaff straight off; got a strong grasp on punctuation and sentence structure, can debate without degenerating into FlameWar territory, always backs up even her oddest points with quotes or links, or both. A delight to “hang” with, no matter the URL occupied, and somebody Nim’s always considered one of the closest non-RL friends on her friendslist.
But in person, Christ Almighty, in person—
—in person, Veruca is shy, awkward, adenoidal to the point of incoherence, scarily opinionated, possibly hypochondriac. Inside Nim’s apartment, she’s barely communicative; outside, she exhibits all the fine interpersonal skills of Kaspar Hauser.
She’s also so obsessed with each and every facet of (say it with me now, in unison) The Late Timothy Darbersmere’s life and work as to literally talk of very little else, no matter the context or circumstances…a fact, Nim is forced to admit, that she A) certainly can’t say she hadn’t already known, given the two of them first hooked up when Google directed her to Veruca’s Darbersmere fanlisting (A Man of Wealth and Taste, for those who like their Stones references so old as to be practically crunchy) and B) once considered far more a plus than a minus, way back when. I.e., in those halcyon days before she’d actually met her, or been forced to squire her around in public, where they might occasionally collide with those few people whose good opinion Nim truly cares about keeping.
Still. After tonight, after the Speed of Pain opens its doors and Veruca walks through them—eyes darting ‘round like she’s on crack, continually peeled for any brief glimpse of The Late Tim’s mysterious heir/nephew Tom, the Speed’s new co-owner—Nim’s probably (hopefully) never going to have to see, talk to or think about her again. She’ll have served her purpose, gross as that sounds. And if, a second past the Speed’s midnight, she tells Veruca to lose her number—along with her addy, her ICQ handle, and any other bloody thing Veruca can remember about her—well, to be frank, Veruca will have only herself to blame.
But that prospective relief, either cutting contact with Veruca for good or finding an environment where she’s once more bearable, is still hours off. If pain really has a speed, then right now Nim would have to call it pure glacier: heavy, cold, creeping. Going out only seemed like a good idea in comparison to remaining trapped in Nim’s tiny no-bedroom; she’s since been forced to settle for the Second Cup three blocks away instead of the Starbucks two doors down, because Veruca (surprise, surprise) considers the funky green mermaid logo Ground Zero for the Evil Empire of Globalization, and refuses on principle to contribute Dime one to it.
/> So here Nim is, making do with the second-class blends Second Cup specializes in, while Veruca’s green tea cools untouched on the table in front of her—unable to compete for even a second, in terms of interest, with Veruca’s latest Darbersmere monologue.
“You see the same threads running through every story,” Veruca rambles. “Like, if you look at the first couple of stories Tom came out with, it’s pretty obvious he’s picked up where Tim left off: Human relationships are based on deception, people adapt to crisis by cannibalizing their own minds for parts, run rampant ‘til sooner or later, God cuts ‘em down. His word choices, his phraseology, all lifted straight from Tim’s.” She leans forward. “Know what happens if you take the profanity out of Tom’s story ‘Starfucker,’ though? I did that—transcribed the whole thing, dropped all the swears and translated all the automatic street cred shit back into, like, ‘proper English.’ And guess how it comes out?”
“Two thousand words shorter?” Nim’s dry response fails to adequately cover the profoundly nonplussed, almost frightened, bemusement she feels.
“Sounding exactly like Tim.”
“And you know ‘exactly’ how he sounds because…?”
“He spoke to me.” For a minute Nim thinks Veruca’s being metaphorical, but no. “On his last tour, for The Bodiless and Embodied. I might’ve been the last person to see him alive.”
Oh, riiight.
Because now Nim remembers this story…she’s only heard it half a million times before, after all. How Veruca sold her first motherboard to get down to St. Louis in 1999, so she could get her ‘79 first-printing copy of Jaguar Cactus Fruit (a Novel in Slices) signed in person, and tell the Late what “a babe” he was as he did it. To which stalkerish infringement of personal space he apparently smiled, and said—Veruca’s treasured imitation sliding quickly into Withnail & I territory here, every vowel a languorous string of same, sing-song-ing happily like she doesn’t even get how pedophile-creepy its actual content is—