Midian Unmade

by Joseph Nassise

  I know, a thousand questions boil.

  As I said, you are not what bad fiction would call the darling of destiny.

  But you were born to a place in our society, and serve a purpose within our scattered family. Very soon now you will begin to discover the breadth of your true abilities. After all, up until now you have existed as little more than a child.

  I have a little saying I made up: Instead of screaming and crying, I prefer creaming and scrying.

  WHAT CAME AFTER

  Aurora startled herself again by actually laughing at Jexelle’s joke. But then Jexelle was gone from her sight, vanished. She had been hoping for a steward, a mentor to guide her through her thousand questions, but had now learned the hard lesson that this was not the way of her people. She was not an apprentice. She was not even an adult. Her task was to earn her place, in whatever world came After.

  It would not be the same as the world she had come to know—its limits and dangers. She had become complacent about, if not comfortable with, the mystery she thought of as her fate, which turned out to be another story, one she had made up herself, one that was untrue.

  Her intersection with Jexelle had produced a calmer veneer, like a warm membrane enshrouding her perceptions. When the single claw broke the surface on first one forearm, then the other, Aurora regarded them dispassionately. At first they resembled dewclaws, but slightly hooked, with points meant for precise penetration. Possibly for defense, although they seemed too fragile for that purpose. She could extend them, make them retract; and they caused no pain.

  They were natural. They were supposed to be. Another tiny furrow of her mind activated eager synapses, and she deduced their purpose.

  She already had the stories of Dane, Brad, and Fulton. She knew their lives as a Collector. Where they could be found; how they lived. She had their DNA and memories. She knew Brad secretly wanted to make sweet love to Fulton. That Fulton had killed and skinned animals for pleasure. That Brad planned to murder his parents. Now, in her new skin, tracking them down was easy … because she had their stories.

  She learned her misshapen leg had a purpose. It was strength and power, balanced by the maneuverability of her more humanlike appendage. Not an impediment; a hammer. This knowledge altered her stride. She could pivot and swing her hammer to head height on the boys who had assaulted her; it would be like getting hit in the face with a cinder block.

  Aurora had inherited some other things, too. Things she carried inside her, like the stories of a Collector, which did not take up space or encumber her in any way. Things she could give back to the ones who attacked her, merely by scratching them with her special new claws, which would dispense at her will.

  Things with melodic names—hanta, Lassa, dengue—that seemed almost like kinship names for siblings she would never have.

  Things with less melodic names, like HIV, bubonic plague, H5N1.

  After the fall of Midian, the Nightbreed prided itself to not suffer many human misapprehensions—made-up gods, fairy tales, morality fables meant to blunt the harshness of an indifferent cosmos. The concept of race hatred was harder to shed. More difficult still was the covenant of retribution.

  A new flame had been lit, and Aurora was ready to party.

  BAIT AND SWITCH

  Lilith Saintcrow

  Usually I stayed away from Pammy’s work tent.

  There’s nothing good about me being near tarot cards, or crystal balls, or any of that junk. That’s why Pammy took the Madama Illyria spot, intoning portentous “fortunes” to idiots and draining each one a little, a very little. Not enough to notice, and if they did, well, lots of people had headaches and lethargy after a carnival.

  Me, I was a Continuing Attraction. The Animal Girl. The shifting was easy—sometimes scales, sometimes fur, always teeth. So easy, in fact, that it was my incognito form—what you’d call human—that took effort now.

  Which explains why I was wandering around during setup, in the gloaming, hat pulled low and shoulders slumped, sweating and suppressing the tickle of tonight’s form all over me like a wire brush just slightly scraping, when I heard that word raising little devils along the dusty alleys between the tents.

  Midiaaaaaan, it breathed.

  Pammy was running her mouth again. Was she drunk? Baphomet be praised, but each time she got incandescent she started babbling about … home.

  Or what used to be home.

  I cut into the alley between RVs and trailers for the punkers, thin metal coated with a layer of dust that would hide any sparkle. Summer in the asshole below the Bible Belt, with a nice long drought to make you choke on all the yellow dust, billing ourselves as a family-friendly show. Even Pammy had to pray loudly to Jesus before gazing into her crystal ball. The smart ones, maybe, could hear the sarcasm in her earnestness, but if they were that smart, they kept their mouths shut.

  Especially if they noticed how thin Pammy was, and how hungry-looking, and how her teeth were just a little too sharp. She didn’t have to take a mouthful, neither of us had to, but there wasn’t much around to keep us from doing it.

  Except each other.

  Midiaaaaaaaan. Again, skipping through the lanes, snapping the tent ropes taut, rocking the trailers just enough to make them creak. I shivered, scales rippling up my skin but retreating when I took a deep breath.

  They itched, especially around my ribs. Which stuck out more than they should. Meatskin stretched too tightly over bone, and sometimes the shadows underneath looked like claws rippling under silk, just on the edge of puncturing. Sometimes I made a supermarket run and came back with a bag of raw meat, and that held us for a while.

  I hadn’t done that for a couple of weeks.

  The sign wasn’t out front, so she wasn’t with a client. I pushed the flap open, blinking against a sudden gust of grit-laden wind, and ducked in.

  Sudden, balmy dimness. Even twilight hurts our eyes sometimes. She had incense burning, a sharp exotic bite that immediately made me want to sneeze. My nose wrinkled, whiskers trying to prickle out on my cheeks, and I saw her at the table with a sharp-faced man.

  He wore a linen suit and a fedora, as if he were on an old black and white rerun. Nose like a knife blade, and cheekbones under stretched-tight parchment skin. He reeked of nervousness, and a thread of that other scent, like music in the dark.

  Nightbreed.

  He sat in the old wooden client chair, the angle of its back just a fraction too acute, forcing whoever was in it to lean forward a little. Which he did, elbows on the table, a cigarillo fuming in one limp, wax-white hand. It smelled sweetish, and nasty. He looked vaguely familiar, but only vaguely.

  Pammy, her dark hair a rat’s nest and her eyes—just a little too big, just a little too dark—heavily outlined with kohl. I don’t know who made the rule that all fortune-tellers have to dress in Romany drag, but on the circuit it’s necessary. So it was the peasant shirt and the long flowing skirts, the beads and bangles and glimmers of mellow gold, and the peacock-eye shawl she kept wrapped as high as she could.

  Things went easier when she acted like she wanted to cover up the scars. And the stumps on her back.

  “Cal.” Pammy grinned, and the glamour slipped for a moment. With it on, she was just a frail, older lady with white, sharp teeth.

  Without it, her essential difference shone out, and the teeth, while just as sharp, were nicotine-yellow.

  “What are you doing?” I tied the tent flaps, my fingers glimmering as luminescent scales crawled over them.

  “Come meet him.” She drummed her claws on the tabletop, and the crystal ball wobbled uneasily under the hank of spangled velvet she used to keep its eye closed. “Our savior.”

  “We had one, remember?” I stalked over the threadbare rugs piled on the tent’s faintly mildewed floor. “Didn’t work out too well.”

  “Calpurnia.” The man’s head turned, a fluid, predatory movement. “I’ve heard of you.”

  “Can’t say the same.” I halted just s
hort of the table and slumped there, hands stuffed deep in my pockets. “What do you want?”

  “We’re gathering again.” He didn’t look quite at me or Pammy, just at some vague point to my left. “A new city. A new flame.”

  “Keep your voice down.” A shudder passed through me, and Pammy hissed out a rasping, rumbling obscenity. Two nervous steps away, sidling, before I could force the claws to retract. My hands tingled. “Are you from … him?”

  “Cabal? No.” He said it so casually, I sidestepped a little more, ending up almost behind Pammy. “He is no true prophet.”

  “I saw—” Pammy began, and I shushed her. She subsided, but only grudgingly. If she started telling that story again—the fire, the fleeing, the gunfire, the dying—she’d be off the whole night.

  “Who are you?” I kept my hands in my pockets, aching and trembling with the claw-tingle.

  He grinned, a death’s-head wrinkling itself up with sheer good humor. “I come from Seraphine.”

  Another cold, dark thrill all through bone and breath.

  Her. Of course she’s survived.

  I stalked to the curtain, pushed it aside, and dragged the other chair across the rugs, clumsy with the shift fighting me. He expected to see something other than normal, and fighting the current of that expectation was hard swimming.

  Pammy whisked the crystal ball into her lap with a sigh. I spun the chair, settled down spraddle-legged, and rested my chin on the high back. “Talk.”

  * * *

  That night, in the trailer, she exhaled a long satisfied sound, creaking and cracking as she stretched swollen joints and unfurled the wispy, scorched stubs protruding from her bare back. Thick, pearlescent salve gathered between my fingers, I worked it into leathery skin.

  “I don’t like it.” Very quietly.

  “You never liked anything to do with her.” Pammy cackled, but softly. “That pretty face of hers.”

  Irritation rasped a flush of scales down my arms, but my hands stayed soft. Extra fingers sprouted, a sweet piercing sensation, the shifting reflecting exactly what would feel best. Still, fingertip-claws prickled, and I knew she felt it.

  She sighed again, her hair writhing against itself with dry whispering sounds. The take had been good for her tonight. For me too—they paid at the door to see the Animal Girl, and it was easy to be what they expected. Some of their darker imaginings felt … familiar. While they were dazed by the pheromones my glands pumped out, Jimmy the hawker took up a collection for the poor Animal Girl.

  Some crowds were better than others.

  Still, there was the dissatisfaction. After dark, within Midian’s circuit, any of the gawkers would have been meat. Chase them outside, and you could eat your fill. Some, like Peloquin, stretched the law to its breaking point, feeding darker hungers.

  Some didn’t.

  Pammy scratched under her left breast, scraping with flat spatulate nails. “You’re quiet.”

  What she meant was that I hadn’t said anything about staying or going, one way or the other.

  “We shouldn’t have come down on this part of the circuit.” I touched one of the ruined stumps; it quivered. Once, she had been able to spread a blanket of black feathers over both of us. Now, I kept rubbing the salve in, and the fading luminescence of Baphomet’s blessing in its oiliness was the same as our starving by inches.

  She had screamed when the fire took her, and I remembered very little afterward. They expected monsters, those who broke our home, and so the shifting made me …

  No, not the shifting. I did it. Later, when I dragged her from the cemetery, stone angels garish-painted with orange and yellow, the screams of the armed men as some of us fought back echoed along with hers. Leave me, she had wailed. Leave me to diiiiiiiie!

  “The take is good.” She moved, restlessly, and I knew she understood what I meant.

  “We’re always five minutes away from another burning, down here.” And no Berserkers to set free to save us.

  “Even praying to Jay-sus before every show.” Her derisive snort steamed the windows. Under her skirt, her feathered haunches would be twitching, her horn-tough feet with their rings and claws working. Shoes for her were always expensive, and her claws sliced them if she got agitated. “Stupid.”

  We must remember, Lylesburg always said. We were gentle, once.

  So gentle that most of the tribe hadn’t even fought back when the militia came. Their guns, and the stink of their fear. It took him releasing the old ones, the mad ones, for some of us to survive, to flee.

  “We could find Cabal.” I worked along the burn scars, pressing in where she liked it. “We’re still of the Moon.”

  “Will he take us in?” High and breathless, childlike. She shivered, and I remembered her spread ink-black and paper-sharp against a full moon, rising over Midian on a flurry of straining wingbeats. She was so light; it was how I had brought us both out of the fire. The shifting on me denied injury, because I didn’t expect to burn.

  “You, he will.”

  “And you?”

  “I don’t know.” I had broken their fragile bodies, and snarled as the blood spattered. I had always been more of Peloquin’s persuasion than Lylesburg’s. But maybe that was only because of the orphanage and the chains.

  “Will Seraphine? A new Midian, he said.”

  “Maybe she has Baphomet. Or pieces of…” Perhaps Cabal was even dead, and Baphomet’s remains in Seraphine’s slender white hands.

  The nameless man had those hands.

  “I won’t go into any Midian without you.” Flat and toneless. Muscle flickered in her back, the stumps twitching.

  My throat filled with something scorch-hot. “Pammy—”

  “I won’t.” She shook her head, and her rasping hair flickered into life for a moment, fat snakes writhing. “You saved me.”

  Do you remember what flying was like? I couldn’t ask her that, so I simply worked more salve into the scars.

  “Cal?”

  “Mmmh.” I added up our savings, balanced the likely state of the truck engine against them, and decided. “We should leave here anyway. We’ve stayed too long. Even Jimmy’s getting nervous.” Maybe he even regrets hiring us.

  “He can’t complain about the take.” Pammy yawned, luxuriously. Now that I’d decided, she would settle into resting quiescence.

  “Still.” I capped the salve jar. There wasn’t much left. “At least the Breed smelled right.” Even though he insisted he had no name. Who does that?

  “It could all be fake.” She shivered, skin rippling as once again the burned stumps tried to flex further.

  I shut my eyes for a moment, wishing I could be the one asking for reassurance. “If it is, we’ll find something else.”

  * * *

  Our truck engine roused in gray predawn hush, creeping past the sleepers on either side. A carnival obeys its own schedule; on nontraveling days you have an hour or two before the sun rises to vanish.

  If you have to.

  I drove, because Pammy’s feet … well, the pedals were a bit small for her. Also, I’m less sensitive to that great glare the meatskins call day.

  She was silent next to me, propped against the towels and blankets I carefully arranged around her each time. Dust rose in silvery plumes until we turned onto blacktop, still warm from yesterday. No air-conditioning, but both our windows down just enough to provide a breeze. Wet heat, the type that slicks the skin and makes the tongue thick, not the dry oven-bake of the desert. Pammy descended into her dozing, twitching sleep—she was more comfortable hanging in a hammock, still a poor substitute for her old perch.

  I drove, and remembered.

  Tunnels below the cemetery, a honeycomb of delving in crumbling stone. Lylesburg said the will of Baphomet kept the tunnels from collapsing, but where was the spirit when the invaders came? And he—Cabal, once Boone, the most hated syllable among the tribes of the Moon.

  Or if it wasn’t, it should have been. Boone was dead. Cabal was
different, they said, for all that he was in the same body. Cabal had the bones of Baphomet and was looking for a new home for the survivors of the shipwreck his former self had brought upon us.

  First the tribes were orphaned when the meatskins turned against us, long in the ago. Each new generation of us was cast out from their daylight world, in one way or another. For Pammy, it was when the feathers came.

  For me, it was at birth. Then there was the orphanage and the chain, the dank basement so I wouldn’t be seen by the parents coming to choose their children. For a long time I wished I were one of the chosen, wished I could be taken to a daylight home.

  Until Seraphine told me about Midian.

  A child with long inky hair and glass-fragile bones, she was thought attractive by the meatskins but too likely to require medical care for adoption. When she eventually had to use the long metal canes to walk, so tiptap carefully, the taunts and teasing sprouted like mushrooms. Her face turned round and doughy, her hands turned into limp wax-white gloves, and her dark eyes began to burn.

  Midian, she whispered to me in the dark of the basement. There, I’ll be a princess. I’ll walk.

  I was useful, so she would guide us. I never knew how she’d learned of sanctuary’s existence, or of its location, but she did. We survived the trip and were taken in, and it was a shock to find that the shift made me more valuable to them than her fragility.

  Baphomet did not mend her bones, either.

  As soon as the sun rose, a white glare in the east, I slid dark sunglasses on. Pammy’s snoring deepened, and by the time we crossed the state line I was already contemplating how Seraphine was likely to greet us both.

  * * *

  Long ribbons of highway, gas stations where we paid cash, bought junk masquerading as meatskin food, and hunched our shoulders against stares. At least with the carnival we were part of a herd expected to be strange. There was some comfort in hiding among a mass, even of them.