Pride and Poltergeists

by H. P. Mallory

  I pushed myself off the wall with the full intention of killing someone in the kitchen, but a strange sight at the right end of the hallway stopped me. Mother, closing a door behind her, cut off a garbled moaning and the humming of some machine.

  “Mother?” I said, approaching her. “They’re looking for you. In the den.” They weren’t, but it would have been impolite for her to be gone very much longer. They were, after all, her guests, not mine.

  She smiled when she saw me. “Dulcie, my beautiful princess,” she said, opening her arms. “I meant to ask. How was your little excursion?”

  The ANC. “Successful,” I replied, approaching her. She pocketed something, a key, and set her back against the door. The mechanical thrum was louder now, and overlaid by the clicking of gears. “Unless they’re completely incompetent, they’ll know us by dawn.”

  “And they are all …?” she asked, tilting her head at me.

  “Dead,” I said, perhaps a little too quickly. No, I thought, there was one, the girl, who got away. But as soon as that thought entered my mind, something repressed it, obscuring it until I couldn’t remember it anymore.

  Mother nodded. “Good.” Her smile widened, but it seemed a bit stiff. “I hear you and Sebastian have become … better acquainted?”

  “We have,” I said, but she already knew that. Why ask me now? “Though …”

  “He lacks proper technique,” said Mother, clucking her tongue. “I’m aware of that. Don’t worry, he learns quickly.”

  I didn’t doubt that, but something about the way she said it made me pause. Her posture was a bit stilted, and her eyes had a distracted look in them. The dim light of lamps suspended from the walls struck her face hard, drawing harsh shadows on her cheeks and jaw, carving lines of old anger into her skin. Whatever lay beyond the door was old and important, some ancient grudge that reeked of secrecy.

  “Mother,” I said slowly, “what …” I looked toward the door, then at her, and thought better of my question.

  But Mother knew what it was anyway. Her face shifted into an expression I couldn’t read, something between vacancy and irritation. It might have conveyed anything. Then she relaxed and smiled at me. “Would you like to see?”

  Mother wasn’t one to share her secrets, but I nodded. She withdrew the key from her pocket and unlocked the door.

  “I warn you,” she said, “this is an unpleasant thing.”

  I refrained from saying I wouldn’t have expected anything less.

  The scene within was … almost archaic. The walls and floor were dark, a shining black that wasn’t black, glittering with early morning sunlight, that spilled through the slits of a tall window. They seemed to concentrate on the far wall, where a man was slumped against the floor, shackled in onyx and silver, the consecrated metals that even Mother would have been crazy to touch. They burned and chafed his skin, turning it red and black and purple wherever it touched him. His skin was red and blistered wherever the sun kissed it, and steaming, and it really reeked of smoke. Like the flesh of an unfortunate animal cooking on a spit. His breath came in long, rattling drags. Glassy eyes, white as milk, stared at a spot of refracted light on the floor—the eyes of a vampire just beyond the brink.

  “This …” I started slowly.

  Mother nodded. “The vampire who killed your father.”

  How strange. He didn’t seem particularly powerful. Certainly not potent enough to do in my father, not without significant help. His skin was pale, even for a vampire, papery white and dry as sand. He looked for all the world like a single touch would have broken him into a hundred thousand pieces. A papier mâché figure, brittle as sandstone. He moaned, vibrating with every breath, his body half convinced of its own mortality. He looked like he might have been handsome once, dark, chiseled, and irritatingly suave.

  “Does he have a name?” I asked. I’m not sure why I wanted to know what it was.

  Mother frowned and laid her hand on my shoulder. “He did,” she said. “Once, long ago. But it doesn’t belong to him anymore.”

  “Who does it belong to?”

  Mother took a deep breath. Her nails dug into my shoulder, drawing blood. I didn’t mind.

  “Me,” she said. Her eyes burned—she’d been after his name for a very long time.

  I didn’t know what possessed me to say what I asked next. “Did you love him?”

  I felt Mother go stiff at my side. She slowly turned her head toward me, her eyes ablaze, dragging her nails down my arm with a systematic kind of rage. I blinked at her in confusion.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Have I upset you?” Some part of me—a deep, distant, carnal bit of my brain—was thrilled by the idea. I quashed it down the moment I realized it, horrified, trying my best to replace it with the fear I should have been feeling. Mother could tear me in half if she really wanted to, and I couldn’t imagine that as being a pleasant experience.

  Tear her in half, I thought. Rip her in two and see how she likes it.

  I recoiled from the voice. It was dark, angry, and feminine, but there was no way it was mine. I would never, ever hurt Mother. Yes, as soon as I was alone, I would banish that dreadful sprite from my head and tear it into pieces.

  “It … is all right,” said Mother, releasing her hold on my shoulder. She wiped my blood away with the hem of her sleeve, and a few moments later, the wounds had closed themselves.

  A muffled, deep voice came shivering down the hall. “Meg!”

  “What was that?” I asked, startled.

  Mother sighed. “An ungrateful houseguest,” she said. “I’ll take care of it …” She blinked, and smiled. “Actually … Dulcie. Come with me.”

  She took me by the hand and led me down the hallway, toward a door laced with wards of fire. The cry of “Meg!” sounded again and again from within, only louder this time, and much more distraught. Beneath it was laughter. Antoine fell in with us from nowhere, matching Mother’s gait step-for-step.

  Mother stopped outside the warded door, positioning me to the left of the frame. “Stay right here,” she said, “and be quiet until I call. All right?”

  I nodded. I’m not a fucking child, I thought but shook the rude words right out of my head, afraid for mother’s reaction if I’d actually said them. Suddenly, I had to physically resist the urge to strike her.

  No, no, be nice, be good to Mother, be respectful, I thought, shaking my head. Enough of this.

  Fuck you.

  Mother waved her hand, the wards snaked back, and she entered the room.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sam

  Splendor took the Singularity hard. Buildings that could withstand eight-point earthquakes were in a thousand pieces and damn near everything was still on fire. Governor Vance declared a state of emergency, and now the streets were swarming with rescue personnel—and even from here, inside my sanctum of wards and guards and spellworks, my impossible web of protections, I could taste the burnt-iron and blood of bad magic. Magic strong enough to cling like static to the people responsible for it. The streets swarmed with creatures carrying black clouds, choking auras as thick as ash, dark enough to sting anyone with the right kind of eyes from more than a hundred yards away. I could feel them even when I wasn’t looking. The overpowering heat combined with a bone-chilling cold, ice, and thunder, and the ropey tendrils of demons bound to lesser souls.

  In layman’s terms, it meant the Darkness’s people—Dulcie’s people, I thought, although I was desperately trying not to—and they were everywhere. Had I been a judge of preternatural auras, I would have suspected they were looking for something. Probably me, but I was trying to be optimistic.

  We went back to my house. It was probably a stupid thing to do—okay, it was definitely a stupid thing to do—but I was desperate for someplace familiar. And when I suggested it, Casey didn’t argue, although he looked dubious.

  We approached the quaint, little, suburban dream with our hackles raised, Casey with his gun in hand, and me with a lar
ge stick I found in the yard. I held it up as best I could, trying to look huge and imposing, but the muscles around the stiches had cramped until they were hard as stone and would only move so far—which is to say, not at all. I got my elbow just about to my shoulder before I almost screamed.

  Not that it mattered, since there was nobody there. I ran a cursory spellcheck on the house and its thousand wards (and I do mean thousand)—I’ve made a habit of compounding my spells after Dulcie’s initial run in with Melchior. I discovered not one of them had been breached. After opening the door with a key I’d hidden inside a false rock, I slowly shuffled inside, Blue darting past me to check for demons and any small animals.

  Casey gave me a very strange look once the door was closed. “Oh, hell!”

  “What?’ I replied. Then I felt the blood running down my side and I looked down. My shirt and skirt were stained red. The spirit strings were barely holding, but the skin seemed to find another way around them to mend itself. “Oh.” Now that I was looking at it, really looking at it, I could feel the stinging and burning of my nerve endings as they began to reactivate, desperately trying to kick my bones back into place. My body cried out for avocado oil, owl feathers, and sage, but when my head began pounding, I started to see stars. Damn! How long have I been bleeding?

  Casey’s face twisted. “God, I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be, I’m not dead,” I said. “I just need …” I blinked. What did I need? “Oil.”

  “Oil?” he asked incredulously.

  “Potion,” I said. “To set the bone and … close the …” The world spun, and I barely caught myself on the wall, jarring my displaced rib. I gasped as a shock of pain ran the length of my body, making my bones vibrate. I was definitely in no shape to be working on myself.

  “Where’s your bathroom?” Casey asked.

  I stiffened. “What?”

  “Bathroom,” Casey repeated like I was dumb. “You know, bathtub, running water, toilet, et cetera.”

  I stared at him blankly and he gestured vaguely to my wound, maybe not looking quite nauseous, but something very close to it.

  “We need to clean this, disinfect it, and rebandage it,” he said. “And you need some sleep."

  “Oh. Um, that way,” I said, and I pointed toward the hall.

  He helped me out of my shirt. By that, I mean he cut my shirt away with his pocketknife, dragging the blade through my blood-soaked blouse and throwing the strips in the sink. His fingers grazed my skin, sending cold shocks of electricity, absent of magic. He smiled at me when I caught his eye, trying to look as reassuring as he could manage. His thumb caught the skin under my arm, prodding a freshly-formed bruise, and I winced.

  “Sorry, sorry,” he said, slowly pulling away the last bit of my sleeve. I was just wearing my bra now, a simple white thing that was stained all the wrong shades of red. For three-tenths of a second, I was wildly uncomfortable, furious that I lacked the pitiful strength it required to cross my arms. But when I looked at him, he was staring at my face and smiling. Not grinning, not laughing, just the smile of a doctor trying to put his patient at ease.

  “It’s okay,” he said without looking down once. He just stared at me with those alabaster eyes, all cool and collected and cute as hell.

  My nerves melted into a puddle and I smiled back.

  “Do you mind if I take a look at it?” he asked.

  “Oh. Um, yeah,” I said. “Go ahead.”

  Casey knelt in front of me, pulling down the side of my pants just enough to expose the point of my hip bone, where the long red line ended. I was caked in blood all the way down to my knees, with still more seeping languidly from the half-open cut. Dulcie’s magic, the silver-green shadow of whatever she’d become, clung to the open skin, preventing it from scabbing over. He gently pressed his thumb into the base of the incision. I winced again and my rib strained against his primitive magic.

  “How’s it feel?” Casey asked, sounding wary of the answer.

  I took stock. The blood was flowing again, but slower. His cosmic threads were frayed, hastily strung out from nothing and hammered into reality with Stone Age charm and raw fury. A child’s work, the tested waters of a witch or a warlock on the ass end of third grade—but still more than he should have been capable of if he were only human.

  “Not bad,” I said. Not good either, but I probably wouldn’t bleed out.

  He scoffed. “That’s sweet, but come on. I know I suck at this.”

  I grimaced. “Uh … not great. The threads are tearing and the bone’s starting to feel heavy.” Then I asked him the question I’d been meaning to for a while now. “How did you learn how to do this?” I cleared my throat. “How is it you’re human but you seem to possess magic too?”

  “That’s a long story,” he answered with a quick smile. “And one I’ll tell you over coffee someday when the world isn’t blowing up around us.” He stood slowly, keeping his hand on my hip. “You mind if I go through your medicine cabinet?”

  “Go ahead,” I said, and he opened the mirror. I wondered why he avoided getting into all the hows and whys of his primitive magic, but he didn’t want to so I had to temporarily shelve my fact-finding mission for the moment.

  “You have bandages around here somewhere?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Top left. The white ones are non-adhesive.”

  He took the bandages down and weighed them in his hand as he examined my bare stomach. My skin prickled under his gaze. “God, that … that looks like it hurts.”

  “It’s fine,” I lied. “Really.”

  He knelt in front of me again, squinting at the line, gently pulling his thumb through the sheets of blood. “We need to clean this.” He looked from me to the porcelain tub. “Do you think you can manage it yourself or …”

  I swallowed. Or do you want to be bathed by a total stranger?

  Yes! Although it was hilariously awkward and weird, I couldn’t exactly refuse him. I didn’t think I had it in me to clean the blood away myself, not with so much bad magic still pouring out of it like a waterfall, and he was right. If we just let the blood congeal, it could easily flare up, get infected, and maybe poison me, which wouldn’t help anybody.

  And I was already half-naked anyway.

  “I think …” I shook my head, uncertain of how to say it. “I can’t really move, so … You know.” I shrugged.

  He nodded, and his face didn’t change. “All right. Come here, then.” He looped my arm around his head and together we limp-waddled to the bathtub. I sat on the edge, my bones creaking like clanking metal as we moved.

  “Do you want to leave that on?” he asked, indicating my skirt. From anybody else that would have been an invitation, albeit a poorly constructed one, but the way he said it made it seem utterly normal.

  “Um … no,” I said. It would have been impossible to get off once it was wet, and I didn’t relish the idea of bathing in a dirty skirt. “Can you, um …” Don’t you dare blush, Sam, don’t you blush!

  I blushed.

  Casey had the manners and good grace not to mention it. “Of course.”

  It was already unbuttoned. I stood and let him gradually work it down over my thighs. His hands moved slowly, pulling one side down lightly, then the other, shimmying it over my skin, taking great care to leave my underwear exactly where it was. The fabric slid over my bruises and bleeding abrasions, which I hadn’t noticed before. Clenching my teeth, I wrapped my fingers tightly around the rim of the tub.

  “It’s okay,” Casey said softly, and I nodded, swallowing a whine.

  He got the skirt over my ravaged thighs and it fell to the floor, burnt and blackened, in filthy contrast on the white veneer. I sighed, throbbing.

  Casey lifted his hand to my thigh, placing it gently on the skin below a particularly nasty red. It wasn’t so much of a scrape but an entire layer of skin that was sheared off, a burning, crimson splotch the size of my hand. Casey frowned at it, his thumb moving back and forth.

  �
��Can you sit down?” he asked.

  I nodded and sat slowly. His hand stayed where it was.

  “It doesn’t look that bad,” he said. “The bleeding’s almost stopped.” He dipped his hand in the water, which was steaming now, and its thick haze settled over the room like fog. “I’m going to touch it, and you have to tell me if it stings, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, bracing myself.

  He gently touched his thumb at the center of the wound. I flinched out of reflex, but it didn’t sting too badly.

  “Does it sting?”

  “A little bit,” I said. “Um …” I put my hand to my head, suddenly dizzy. The room shrank and grew and I had to remind myself to breathe.

  “Easy,” said Casey. I didn’t realize I was starting to lose my balance until he caught me.

  “Oh,” I said stupidly. “Um. Thanks.”

  “Does that feel okay?”

  I nodded, closing my eyes, inhaling the steam, and letting the moist heat fill my lungs and cloud my head. The dizziness abated, replaced by a vague nausea.

  “You have a cup somewhere?” said Casey. “Or maybe a washrag?”

  “There,” I said, pointing to the cabinets. He pushed himself onto his feet to retrieve one, opening the cabinet and whistling.

  “Lotsa towels,” he said, grabbing one at random.

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  Casey sat on the ground, soaking the towel.

  “So, um …” I said, searching for a source of conversation, but there was only one that kept prodding my mind. “So you’re really not going to tell me how you know how to do this?” I gestured vaguely to the fraying magic.

  He grimaced like the question itself hurt him, squeezing the rag over my shoulder. “I … work in the Preternatural Division,” he answered simply.

  The air went cold. “So?”

  “So,” he said, “it’s protocol.”

  “Protocol … what? To know magic?” Something about that rang false.

  He hesitated. His hand hovered over the water and he bit the inside of his cheek, ostensibly thinking. “Do you know what a siphon is?”