by Battis, Jes
All this time, it had simply been using me.
I tried to concentrate on the ache in my arm. It was the only part of my body that I could feel, aside from my head, which was spinning.
The Iblis drew closer. It touched the edge of the black dagger to my right cheek, and I didn’t cry out, even as I felt my skin burning.
“You’re beautiful,” it whispered. “Like your mother.”
“Fuck—you . . .” I managed to slur.
It shook its head. “No, Tess. Fuck you.” Its smile was terrifying. “I was prepared to show you things. So much. With my power, you could walk between the worlds. You could walk right up to your father, in the twilight realm. And before he had a chance to say anything, you could bury this . . .” He pressed harder with the knife. I could see the smoke twining from it. “Right in his heart. Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted to do? Isn’t it what you were born to do?”
He lowered the knife, placing it against my throat. I tried to move my left arm. I could wiggle my fingers, but barely. No time left. Never enough time. Oh God.
Derrick. Mia. I love you. Oh, I love you so much, and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I couldn’t win this time. Even after my mother—
My mother.
You’re beautiful. Like your mother.
A spark flared somewhere inside my dying brain. Was I dying? I flexed the muscles of my left hand. The sharpness was cutting into me. I felt for it—
“Too late.” The Iblis started to draw the blade against my neck. I felt warm blood on my throat. I tried to scream, but couldn’t. The pain was real.
Then it stopped.
I tried to focus my eyes. As I stared at the Iblis, I saw that something was different. Vines of earth dark light were drawn across its arms and legs, pulsing with flickers of blood and ebony. It had dropped the dagger, and its unholy eyes were narrowed, more in frustration than pain. I looked over its shoulder.
Lucian stood behind it. Both of his hands were raised, and black vines trembled as they hissed and curled from his fingertips. His shirt was covered in blood.
“I got lucky,” he said.
I reached down with my left hand, searching for that flash of pain, that unexpected sharpness. The sleeve of my coat had torn halfway off when I fell against the wall, and the inside pocket was shredded.
My fingers closed around a handle. It was hot.
I stared in wonder as I lifted a blade into the air. The hilt was carved of pearl, and it shone like an alicorn, like the bones of a seraph, like the perfect white of the snowdrifts I’d played in as a little girl. The blade was tapered, and the cruciform hilt gleamed with bloodstone, amethyst, and beryl.
It was my mother’s athame.
Jesus. She must have slipped it into the deepest pocket when I wasn’t looking. Maybe she’d even sewn it in. I could just picture my mother, humming quietly in the middle of the night as she worked my jacket through her sewing machine.
I’d never seen her athame before, but I could feel her in it, every inch of her. I remembered her holding me, smoothing my hair gently. Don’t face it alone, she’d said.
But I wasn’t alone. She was with me.
Don’t you know you’re everything to me. Don’t you know?
“You’re right.” The Iblis turned to regard me, its eyes suddenly small, like winking, murderous stars. “I’m just like her.”
I drove the knife into its skull. It slid between those smooth, glowing plates, so perfectly, as if it had been forged for this purpose alone. To close the bloody, unnatural wound of this demon’s wretched consciousness.
I pushed it in deep. All the way down to the hilt.
It staggered backward. The knife burned white-hot, like a diamond shard, flaring so hot and so bright that I had to look away.
The Iblis screamed.
And screamed.
And screamed.
Light boiled and seethed over its body, stripping away the flesh, layer by layer. First the dermis melted away, then the yellow fat—bubbling like polenta in the pan—then the red and blue muscle underneath. The tendons liquefied, the bones dissolved, until all that remained was a burning outline, a nuclear shadow with a gaping mouth.
Then the scream turned inward, sucking in all the light with it. A powerful wind rushed through the chamber. I saw two eyes floating in a cloud of poisonous smoke. I heard my name rising from the heart of all that evil.
My mother’s athame clattered to the floor. It winked at my foot. A glass slipper. I looked at it and laughed. Had she sewn it into my jacket? How did she sneak it in there? It didn’t matter anymore.
The Iblis was gone.
Derrick, Wolfie, and Miles were all rushing toward me. But a small, blurry shape outran them all. It was Mia. She tore through the entranceway and ran to my side, collapsing to her knees. That girl always could move fast when she wanted to.
“Tess?” She was crying. “Tess, can you move? Can you feel my hand?”
I smiled weakly at her. “M-Command? Is that you?” It was hard to speak.
She laughed through her tears. “Yes. It’s me. I’m squeezing your hand. Can you feel it? Can you feel my fingers?”
“Yes,” I said softly.
“You can?” She put her arms around me. I realized that we’d reversed positions since the last catastrophe. Before, I’d held her, telling her that everything was going to be all right. Now, she was holding me.
“I love you,” I whispered into her hair. “Over.”
She laughed. “I love you, too. Over.”
I stared at my mother’s athame. It had come to rest next to mine. The blades were almost touching.
I closed my eyes.
Epilogue
I woke up in a CORE clinic, my arms covered in tubes and wires, my body aching, aching, aching.
I woke up, and I saw the most amazing thing.
Derrick and Miles were sitting on a small couch. Derrick was half-asleep, his head drifting onto Miles’s shoulder. Miles was writing in a book. I thought it was a book of crosswords at first, but it was just sudoku. Patrick was leaning against the doorway of the room. He didn’t seem to be looking at anything in particular.
Lucian and Mia were sitting next to each other in two broken-down chairs, and it looked as if Mia was teaching him how to play a handheld video game. “No,” she was saying, “you can’t attack the Swamp Lord until you level up your cleric.”
“But I’ve got the Staff of Neutrality.”
“You’ve got a piece of the staff. It’s useless without the Gem of Primordial Knowledge. You might as well attack him with a badminton racquet.”
“I don’t see why I can’t just use one of my three wishes.”
Mia rolled her eyes. “Have you learned nothing in the past hour?”
“Evidently not.”
Everyone was here.
But that wasn’t the most amazing thing.
The most amazing thing, really, was Wolfie standing at one end of the window, staring at the city beyond, and Devorah Kynan standing at the other end. It seemed impossible for them to occupy the same room. But here they were. Wolfie had his ISASKATOON hat turned backward. Devorah was wearing a sleek charcoal jacket with a flared collar. She played with one of her buttons absently.
“She really defeated it single-handedly?” Devorah asked.
Wolfie nodded. I realized with a start that they were talking about me. “Stabbed it right in the fucking head. Craziest thing I’ve ever seen. She was amazing.”
Devorah shook her head. “I can hardly believe it.” She stared out the window. “I was in Rome. Looking for allies. Calling in favors. Doing research on the families. I seemed to have the whole world under a microscope. I was doing everything in my power to track down this creature, and it was here the whole time, living in some condemned rat hole. Invisible.”
“Officer Sedgwick found the house.”
She glanced at Derrick and Miles. Pain flashed across her eyes for a moment. Then she spoke, not looking at Wol
fie.
“Jacob loved you. Did you know that?”
“I did.” Wolfie spoke in the barest whisper.
“He talked about you. I think you must be a good person.”
Wolfie stared at her. Obviously, he didn’t know what to say.
“I knew how dangerous his life was,” she continued. “I knew that. But he always seemed on the verge of quitting. Soon, Mom. I promise. That’s what he said. And I pretended to believe him.”
“It’s hard to get out,” Wolfie said.
“I know that he was taken care of. Duessa’s a lot of things, but she’s not negligent. I know she watched out for him. And I was jealous, in a way. She got to see him all the time. I had to settle for visiting hours.”
Wolfie looked at the ground.
“There are things I can’t stop thinking about.” Devorah laughed softly. “Ridiculous things. Like a picture book that I used to read to Jacob when he was little. He forced me to read it nearly every night. Laila Tov Yareah.”
“Goodnight Moon,” Wolfie said.
She looked at him, startled. “You speak Hebrew?”
“I went to Hebrew school when I was a kid.”
“Jacob, too.” She shook her head.
They were silent for a minute more. Then Devorah pressed her fingers against the window. She lowered her head.
“Bachedar hashinah yesh kairot irkim,” she murmured. “A’ch’lo t’zom y’lo.”
“In the great green room,” Wolfie translated, staring in the opposite direction as Devorah, “there was a telephone.”
“V’lo adom porecha, t’zol ha’kir tami’onih . . .”
“And a red balloon, and a picture of . . .”
“Shel pirih t’zom yareah.”
“A cow jumping over the moon.”
I remembered the book by Margaret Wise Brown. I could see the green room now, and the cow jumping over the moon, and the three little bears sitting on chairs.
Devorah stared out the window. “Goodnight, Jacob.”
Wolfie hesitated. Then he wrapped his arm around her. They stood perfectly still like that, the spark and the sorceress, not speaking. There was nothing left to say.
“Hey!” Derrick looked up. “She’s awake!”
Lucian and Mia walked over to my bed, flanking me.
“How was your nap?” Lucian asked.
“Oh, lovely. How long was I out for?”
“Almost two days.”
“Jesus.” I groaned. “I hurt.”
“You got banged up pretty good. There was some swelling around the base of your spine, and they had to keep you out for a while.”
“I can feel my legs again.” I winced. “Almost wish I couldn’t.”
“You’ll heal.”
“Yeah.” I smiled. “We all will.” Then my eyes burned a bit. “Hey—you died, remember?” My voice was barely a whisper.
“I know. I was there.”
“Don’t do that again, okay?”
He kissed my forehead. “Okay.”
“They said you might be able to go home tomorrow,” Mia said. “But only if you’re really good, and you don’t try anything funny or yell at anyone.”
“I’ll be good.”
“We have, like, no food in the house,” she admitted, “and Derrick’s been eating Top Ramen and drinking hospital coffee, and he wouldn’t listen to me when I told him how bad that was. But he’ll listen to you.”
“He’ll listen when I bury my foot in his ass, you mean.”
Derrick winked at me. “Yes, ma’am.”
I heard a cell phone vibrating. Miles glanced down at his Sidekick, then groaned and rolled his eyes. “Sorry. I have to take this. I’ve still got some arrangements left to make.” He smiled warmly at me. “Good to have you back, Tess.”
“Thanks, Sedge.”
He chuckled at the sound of his nickname. Then he ducked outside.
“Arrangements?” I asked.
“Miles is moving to Vancouver.” Mia grinned at me. “Derrick hasn’t been this happy since Battlestar was renewed for a final season.”
“Selena scored him a position here,” Derrick said.
“And I’ll bet you’ve been smiling like an idiot since you heard.”
He nodded. “Yep.”
I looked up at Lucian. “What about you? What are your plans?”
He winked. “I’m staying right here.”
“Good answer.”
Patrick was looking at me from across the room. His eyes had lost that frightening gold color, but there was still something inhuman about them.
“Hey, Patrick.”
He blinked. “What? Sorry, Tess—I was drifting.” He grinned sheepishly. “I’m glad you’re awake.”
“What were you thinking about?”
He shrugged. “Figuring out what I might do next. I’m old enough to be legally emancipated. But I’ll have to find a job, I guess.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to just live with us?”
Mia stared at me, open-mouthed. “How hard did you get hit?”
Patrick smiled shyly. “Are you being serious?”
“Absolutely. You can keep an eye on Mia.”
She rolled her eyes. “Thanks.”
In the back of my mind, I knew that I was asking him for a lot more. His senses must have picked up on Mia’s VR+ blood by now. He knew that she carried the virus. And what happened if the medications stopped working? What happened if she drifted toward some dark place, where we couldn’t follow? Only another vampire could pull her back. Only Patrick would be able to recognize the signs for sure.
And we’d be watching him, too. He had no family. No friends. No sire to show him how to be the next vampire magnate. He just had us.
Lucky I wasn’t the kind of girl who believed in odds.
“Besides,” I said, “you’re tall enough to clean the gutters. Everybody wins.”
He flushed slightly. It was nice to see color in his face.
“Is it . . .” He blinked. “I mean, yes, yes, I’d love to. It sounds perfect. But, I mean . . . is it really that simple?”
I looked around the room. I scanned the expectant faces.
God is a bullet, I thought, straight to the heart. Just when you think you’re finished, there’s a second start.
“It can be,” I said.
Afterward
There are various queer-friendly advocacy groups in Vancouver, including the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre, the LGBT Centre, Vancouver Status of Women, PACE, Out on Campus, and Pride UBC. Anyone in the United States can also call the Trevor Project at 866-488-7386.
Part of the proceeds from the sale of this book go to the LGBT Centre in the West End. They are located on Davie and Bute, and can be contacted at 604-684-6869.
