Soon.
Dusk fell. Melissa put away her groceries. The kids sat at the dining room table to do homework and munch on snacks. They seemed happy when it was just the four of them, if a bit muted, but then Luke made his debut, pulling down the street in his sports car with an angry roar of the engine. He didn’t bother with the garage, instead stomping his way into the house with a bellowed greeting. The angry shouting started a half-hour later. Night One, there were no strikes, though Luke did throw a dish at the wall when something at dinner wasn’t to his liking. He left shortly thereafter and didn’t reappear until midnight. Night Two, he grabbed Melissa’s hair, yelling at her that she was stupid; when his eldest son tried to intervene, he backhanded him hard enough the kid sprawled out over the back of the couch. Again Luke left for a three-hour block.
The third night, Tanis started following Luke to the bar. She waited in the parked Caddy to see if he’d come, and sure enough, he peeled down the street in his 2016 Lexus Overcompensator at ten. It was easy to slide in behind him and follow him to the Watering Hole. Easy, the next night, to go to Ron & Emma’s. Easy the night after that to hit Justine’s. She considered snatching him outside of Justine’s, especially after the brutal beating he delivered to Melissa before he left for Ron & Emma’s and his version of loving sodomy when he returned home, but she gave it one more night to see if there was anything redeemable at all about the son of a bitch. She tailed him to work during the day, searching for a glimmer of goodness, but instead of being swayed by the smiles he levied at coworkers and strangers, she found him all the more repugnant.
When even a snake woman’s skin crawls looking at you, something is definitely amiss. Luke Des Moines had written a karmic check his ass was in no way ready to cash.
CHAPTER TWO
HE’S COMING BACK.
Scotch, Luke’s fine cologne, latex, and spunk. It wasn’t the nicest combination, especially since Tanis couldn’t decide if his shoot smelled more like asparagus or bleach. Her own lacked the odor, but his...? Tangy. It was tangy.
I hate the word ‘tangy.’
She spit out her dead cigarette, her eyes fixed on the restroom doors inside of the bar. Luke re-emerged ten minutes after his disappearance, the rumpled redhead in tow. She tucked her shirt back into her too-tight jeans, grinning at her lover maybe because she thought the number he gave her was real or maybe because the sink sex had the good grace to be over. Luke murmured to her and made for the bar, grabbing his jacket off the barstool before tossing two twenties onto the counter to cover his tab. The redhead shouted at his back. He didn’t turn around.
Tanis oozed from her streetlamp perch to slither up the sidewalk, one boneless, fluid stride bleeding into the next. Floyd’s parking lot was up a block from the bar, and unlit; she could see the silver chrome paint of the Lexus gleaming in the moonlight. She eyed the back left tire, flat thanks to a blade between the rises of the heavy tread, and smiled. She’d expected the alarm to go off when she’d split it hours ago, but no. She’d had to wait around for Luke’s skinny ass to do its skinny-ass thing before she could nab him.
Inconvenient, but not insurmountable.
She climbed into the Caddy and pulled out her phone, lifting it to her ear to make it seem like she was talking. Luke may think nothing of the woman in the parking lot six parking spots away, but on the off chance he glanced twice, better to have a plausible cover than not. She turned on the engine and let it idle, her headlights parting the darkness and beckoning an army of moths and mosquitoes. They hovered before her car’s massive grill in a roiling cloud of wings, twiggy legs, and furious hissing.
Luke shouldered into his jacket as he approached his car. Ten feet from the back bumper, he spied the damage and stopped. He crouched low, a toady man doing his best toady impression, his handsome looks lost to a bevy of irritation lines.
“Fuck’s sake. Come on.” He stood, his fingers working the sides of his mouth. He looked between the car’s trunk and his cell phone, likely deciding between changing the tire himself or calling roadside assistance at midnight. Tanis would help make the decision for him, because she was a good little Samaritan.
She climbed from the Caddy, one hand resting on her open door, the other waving in front of her mouth to keep the flies away.
“Hey, you need help? I got a jack to change out a spare.”
“I... shit. Yeah, alright. Sure.”
She popped the trunk to retrieve the metal jack. Her nostrils flared, searching for approaching outsiders, but it was just her and Luke and a vacant parking lot. She kept the trunk open as she neared him, smiling all the while. He searched for a wrench in the Lexus’s back so he could loosen the lug nuts. She sidled up beside him, offering the jack. He murmured his thanks.
She struck.
Too fast for him to recoil. Retractable fangs from the roof of her mouth, coursing down, taking him on the side of his neck just below his ear. Curved bone needles stabbed and sliced, splitting his flesh like an overripe peach. Hot copper splashed the insides of her mouth and the white collar of his business shirt before he crumpled to the ground with a yelp, hand smacking at the wound. The venom worked fast. It wasn’t like a cobra’s venom—it wasn’t strong enough to seize his lungs so he’d suffocate—but it did attack his nervous system, his body bucking in the dirt as the poison coursed through his bloodstream, pinging his body’s hot spots like a pinball striking the bumpers.
Numbing him. Slowing him.
His heart beat half as fast.
His breaths were shallow gasps.
His pulse thrummed leisurely.
His body went pliant.
Stillness.
Tanis crouched beside him to survey her work. He couldn’t roll away even if he wanted to; he was dizzy and nauseated and his eyes swam around in their sockets. The bite on his neck swelled to an egg-sized lump, turning blue near the puncture wounds. If he was allowed to live to the see the morning, he’d recover maybe eighty percent movement. Tanis had seen it before, though not with her own venom. Her sister and friend Bernie—Berenike, actually, but everyone called her Bernie—let one of her tags go once when she discovered he was a father of twelve.
“Guy’s got more problems than Ma,” she’d said, showing Tanis the roll of school photos in the guy’s wallet. “Letting him live is the bigger punishment.”
They’d released the man along the side of the road outside of his hometown. He walked slower, reacted more sluggishly, and appeared photosensitive, but he still had his life, which was more than most who were bitten by a lamia ever got.
Tanis never let anyone go.
Luke Des Moines was fucked. He groaned as she closed the trunk of his car, his wrench tucked into the back pocket of her jeans. He gurgled as she looped her hands around his ankles and dragged him to the Caddy. He squeaked as she patted him down, pulling out his wallet and handgun and pocketing his cufflinks and wedding ring. Somehow, through sheer will or dumb fuck luck, he managed to get his eyes to focus on her, mouth opening, a torrent of spittle cascading down his cheek to sully his jacket collar. Tanis grabbed the wrench and flipped it around in her palm.
“Sorry,” she said, not sorry.
She brought it down twice on each knee, ignoring the wet cracking sounds and Luke’s muted screams.
“YOU MAY BE asking what you’re doing in the trunk of a 1986 Cadillac.” Tanis sucked on her cigarette, peering into the depths of the car. She’d parked on a spindly side road, off a dirt road, off another dirt road that was a mile away from an actual paved road that was ten miles away from the nearest street light. Des Moines looked pale, and he’d drooled a whole hell of a lot more during the thirty-minute drive into the Glades. There was a lake of spit beside his head, mucking up his hair, his jacket, her interior. The last wasn’t such a big deal—she’d had worse back there. One guy she’d pinched had eaten an entire pizza before she bit him and spewed it all over the place on the bumpy back roads. Luke’s saliva farm was no big doings next to a cubic ass
load of demi-processed tomato and cheese.
“Well, Luke. Can I call you Luke? I’m going to.” She reached into the trunk to grab him around the waist and heave him over her shoulder, fireman-style. Every part of him flopped around uselessly, his legs at odd angles thanks to his broken knees, his head a heavy bowling ball atop his spindly neck. His arms were lead weights dangling from his shoulders and struck the backs of her thighs with each step.
Tanis walked a familiar path, her boots snapping twigs and crunching leaves as she crossed the thick, rotting undergrowth.
“We’re in Adder’s Den. It used to have another name, but no one remembers it anymore. We fled here from Argentina, after most of us were wiped out.” Tanis ducked under a thick vine connecting two tall trees that stretched toward the night sky. Her pupils were dilated, the moonlight reflecting yellow off her eyes. Like most snakes, she saw better at night than during the day, an extra lens showing her a spectrum of blue and black shades humans couldn’t see. She also had heat vision; the crickets on the blades of grass were ectoplasm-colored green blobs peppering the landscape. “Back in the ’forties and ’fifties, it was a small town, maybe only a few hundred folks, but when it got too hard to keep the Glades out, they abandoned it. Moved to places more people-friendly and less gator-friendly. Can’t say I blame them. Gators grow big around here. Ten feet, easy.”
Tanis sucked another torrent of smoke into her lungs. “We didn’t care much for the above-ground structures, as you’ll see. But the pipe system below? Invaluable. We had to hide, Luke. Because we’re not like normal people. We’re not people at all.”
She stopped at the edge of town. The dilapidated buildings cut a jagged line against the horizon; caved-in roofs of what had been homes and small stores formed a menacing monolith atop the soggy ground. It had been a circle once, but the swamp had claimed the northern part for itself with shrubs, vines, tall grasses, and shallow water. At the center, an old flagpole stretched for the cloudless sky, the tattered remains of a pair of pants or a shirt or some inane thing that had been tied up there as a joke by one of Tanis’s sisters rustling with the breeze. The ground was littered with rusted-out tires and abandoned scraps of metal. A truck worn down to its frame languished between two of the broken buildings, moss creeping over the emaciated carcass of the undercarriage.
It smelled sour, like urine, but there was the sweetness of decay, too, thanks to the pulpy, water-beaten foundations infested with nesting insects.
Tanis adjusted her grip on Luke’s waist and pressed onward.
“We’re lamias. That might not mean anything to you. It doesn’t to most people. They sure as shit remember Medusa with the snakes on her head—and fuck Gorgons forever, the homicidal bitches—but not the woman Hera turned into a snake monster. See, Lamia was one of Zeus’s favorite women. Dark hair, golden skin, chocolate eyes. Typical Greek beauty, really. And Hera was the jealous type.” Tanis walked toward the last building on the right, with the doors sagging on the hinges. “Finding out Zeus had a family with Lamia, a couple of kids and a love shack, Hera cursed Lamia. Lamia’s upper half remained human-ish, but her bottom half? All snake. Hera also cursed her with a huge appetite and the inability to blink. You might not think those two things are related, but they are, because Lamia in her insatiable hunger devoured her own children. She couldn’t help it, and because she couldn’t blink, she witnessed the whole damned thing. Have you ever seen snakes feed? It’s not bloody. It’s more ‘squeeze ’em ’til they stop kickin’ and gulp ’em whole.’ Which she did, and then she mourned because she knew eating her kids was wrong but she couldn’t help herself.
“Zeus felt sorry for her, for all the good that did.” Tanis pulled open the door, the rusted metal screeching its displeasure at being moved. She spit the remnants of her smoke in a bucket placed under a leak in the moldering roof. “He allowed her to take out her eyes when she wanted to. She became like the Fates that way—a prophet when they were outside of her head. She could see all.”
Tanis’s eyes adjusted as she ventured further into what had, at one time, been a house, but had been repurposed to a sentry shed. It should have collapsed long ago, but the wood was reinforced from the inside with fresh boards to keep it standing, because it was one of the few entrances into the underground tunnels and required preservation. The water pipe system had never been fully fleshed out, the town abandoned long before it came to that, but they’d gotten a good start on it when there’d still been enthusiasm for construction, and what they hadn’t finished, they’d furnished supplies for. The townsmen hadn’t bothered moving the hulking pipes when they cleared out. When the lamias moved in, they dug the trenches and laid the steel pipes themselves, creating a proper subterranean network.
The boards beneath Tanis’s boots squealed as she carried Luke through the house and to the back stairs leading down into the basement. Two figures were seated at a small table with a lantern at the middle, playing cards clasped in their hands. The woman on the left was Sibylla, who everyone called Fi for some reason, and she was such a behemoth no one dared question her about anything. Dark hair worn spiky short, dark tan face, golden eyes cutting through the blackness. She was six feet of straight muscle, thick enough to nearly fill a doorway, and she tended to show off her bulging biceps with simple white tank tops tucked into simpler blue jeans. Like Tanis, she wore cowboy boots. Unlike Tanis, she had brown snake scales over the backs of her arms, and where they’d ended at her elbows, she’d gotten tattoos to continue the pattern up to her shoulders.
The woman on the right was less Everest and more Bunker Hill: Bernie. She tilted her head to smile at Tanis. Lots of teeth, too many teeth, like a piranha, with pale skin, gray hair tugged back into an efficient ponytail that ended just past her shoulders, and eyes that were, in daylight, nearly black. At night, they were as golden as Tanis and Fi’s. She was older than Tanis, over sixty and maybe closer to seventy, though she’d never said for sure, with skin so weathered it looked like a topographical map.
Lamia living was hard living.
“Uh-oh. S’breedin’ time,” Bernie said, slapping her cards on the table. Fi grunted at having to wait to take a turn, but she found solace in the mason jar of moonshine she’d brewed herself. Tanis had made the unfortunate mistake of sampling her milk-bucket booze once and determined, after one sip, that drinking gasoline was not actually part of her repertoire.
Bernie walked around Tanis to inspect the grab, her track pants swishing with each step, her sneakers a Day-Glo pink that matched the print on her black gym T-shirt. She picked up Luke’s hand, eyed it, and snorted. “Pretty boy gets his nails done? Really? Ma’ll like him.” Bernie had a voice like liquid sugar, just enough rasp and music to it you knew if she broke into song, it’d be prettier than a lark.
Tanis had yet to hear her sing. Whenever she asked, Bernie shrugged her off with a strange little smile.
“Yeah, she will.”
Luke groaned. A gob of spit took the open-mouthed opportunity to plummet to the floor and spatter.
Bernie biffed him upside the head. “What’s his deal?”
“Beating the shit out of his wife and kids. Rape. Being a dickwad. You know, the usual.”
“Ooooh. Welp. I’d say you’re going to a better place, boyo, but Ma’s gonna use you up and send you to Hell.” Bernie clapped him on the back with an “Atta boy” before slinging herself back into her rickety chair. “She’s in a mood, Tan. Keep your head down, yeah?” She tossed her head, showing off the impressive blue-green scales glimmering along the back of her neck.
“When’s she not in a mood?”
Fi’s answer to that was to grunt, which Tanis took for solidarity. “Good to see you, too, Fi.” Tanis lifted the bulkhead door into the tunnels. It was a ten-foot drop to the bottom of the pipe; there was a rusty metal ladder on the left if she wanted it, but carrying Luke, it was easier to jump. She bent her knees and leaped, her boots clanging against metal and kicking up water on impact.
&
nbsp; Halogen lamps peppered the main pipeline, strung from the makeshift ceiling with wire and run by generators. It wasn’t a lot of light, but it was enough for her to see thirty feet before her, thirty feet behind, and various shorter pipelines jutting off to the sides where the lamia had set up tables, bunks, and in some cases, tents for sleeping. It was an underground village—and evil lair, she’d once told Naree—where the lamia could safely exist.
For a while, Tanis had grown up in the darkness, among the other daughters, toiling while their kind fought for survival. Lamia wasn’t born snake: her transformation was the result of a goddess’s curse. As such, making more like herself required effort—magic and human sacrifice, mostly. For reasons no one completely understood, the combination of Lamia and snake-blessed human produced no viable sperm in those daughters with penises, nor had it ever in thousands of years. Hence the kidnappings.
Hence Lamia’s disdain of Tanis and all like her.
Lamia played favorites with her three types of children. Her darlings were those she called her “True Daughters.” They were considered superior to all other offspring, as they were capable of reproduction. There were only eleven total, eight adults and three juveniles, each of the girls shaped like Lamia herself, with human tops and coils of snake below. While Lamia bred monthly, her brood gestating in three days, the True Daughters only mated once a year, in the spring, and it took them ninety days to lay their eggs. Each breeding was another opportunity for more ‘true’ lamias, but rarely, if ever, did it work out. True Daughters were present in all clutches, but they didn’t thrive. Magically manufactured fathers meant a weaker strain of lamia, and a lot could and did go wrong, babies never breaking from the eggs or dying in their youth due to frailty. Sometimes, though, one would be perfect and, as such, exalted.
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