by D. R. Perry
When I open my eyes, I notice Sebastian Caprice staring at me. I stare back, intending a withering defiant glare. But I fail at that, of course, due to my soft emotional state and his youth. It's a good thing too. Sebastian's face could almost mirror my own. He's like the sympathetic eye of the storm, surrounded by the cold calculation of his mother and the brutal sundering nature of her Lethian henchman. The poor kid is just as much at risk as the displaced children in this courtroom. Having no home for your heart is just as destabilizing as having no home for your body.
"Miss Leora Kupala, approach the bench." The judge, an ebony-skinned man with pearly white curls circling the back of his head below the temples, beckons.
"It's your turn Leora, sweetie." Gina pats the girl's arm.
Leora stands. I watch her shoulders square then lift as she takes a deep and bracing breath. She sidesteps to get out from behind the table in front of her, then practically marches straight up to where the judge sits. She has to look up, not just because the bench is higher by design, but because she is still just a youth. When I'm working with her, Leora almost seems larger-than-life, but here she's dwarfed as though the court and its processes could swallow her whole if she isn't careful.
I can tell by the set of her shoulders and jaw that Baba Yaga is not with her in any capacity this evening. But that makes sense. I'm the one who promised the old witch she'd have no need of magical help in situations like this. It's up to me to be here for her through this and any other mortal protocols and processes until she's an adult with her own legal autonomy. I'm protecting and serving again, though in an entirely different capacity now.
I only hear bits and pieces of their conversation. Mostly, the judge asks questions and Leora answers them. She makes her declarations with a tenuous sort of confidence. But one exchange does stand out, mostly because I don't see it coming.
"And what do you think of the Caprice's house, Miss Kupala?"
"It's a beautiful place." Leora smiles. "Sebastian seems to have almost everything and anything he could possibly need." She glances over her shoulder, her gaze connecting with the Mafia Prince's.
"What do you mean by almost, Leora?" The judge raises one salt-and-pepper eyebrow. It's clear he's just as surprised as I am by her answer.
"I guess I mean that needs are important but what you want matters, sometimes. You know?" Leora glances down at her shoes, then back up at the judge, looking him full in the face. I know that stare of hers, have felt its weight and power firsthand.
"That's quite perceptive, young lady." The judge notes something down on a paper in front of him. "I suppose this whole conversation has circled the most important question. Since your space, companionship, and even your schooling would be equal either way, which house you want to live in?"
"If it's all the same to you, Your Honor," Leora glances over her other shoulder at me before continuing. "I'd choose Pickering house."
"And why is that?"
"Because of Valentino Crispo. He helped me when a lot of people wouldn't have. And also Frankie Pickering. I think they'll be fair without going too easy on me." Leora closes her eyes, shakes her head and sighs. When she opens them, tears stand at the corners. "They just want me to learn and work hard. Like my mom."
"I see. Thank you Miss Kupala." The judge waits for Leora to take her seat again, then beckons to Gina. "Miss Paolucci, approach the bench."
"Yes Your Honor."
The two of them put their heads so close together, I don't have any hope of hearing without burning blood. Because I'm in a room full of mostly humans, I don't want to do any such thing. I had a decent breakfast of blood warmed in the coffee maker, but Carmine's presence prohibits me from using it on what might be a frivolous endeavor. After all, we'll know in mere minutes what the judge's decision is whether I eavesdrop or not.
I glance at Carmine, wondering if my memory issues will resolve on their own with his demise or if I need to take other steps. Maya's mention of defeating her own Lethian gave me hope, though I don't have enough details to even make a plan let alone act against the creature who messed my mind up.
Waiting on the decision should be harder than it is. But the time passes far faster than I would have thought if you asked me two weeks ago. Maybe my immortal status is catching up with me. Or this could be at another symptom of my supernatural memory loss issues.
Movement catches my eye as Gina turns away from the bench. I watch her walk toward Leora, holding a hand out. Leora stands, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. I totally understand. If I were standing I'd fidget too. You could cut the tension in here with a knife but it would snap back and hit everyone in the face if you did.
"The court grants long-term custody to domestic partners Valentino Crispo and Francis Pickering."
The rustle of paper, clothing, and shuffling feet echo in the courtroom as Sarah and Levi get up and reach out to hug Leora. Frankie slaps me on the back, then pulls me in for a hug. I hug back, of course then stand and reach out to the girl who's been released from the embrace of her new foster siblings. I don’t make out Francesca Caprice’s murmured words. As our fingertips touch and I clasp Leora's hand, a cloud of slate gray smoke covers the lights overhead.
Carmine’s unleashed his Hell. And it’s every bit as terrifying as you might imagine.
The air fills immediately with gray fog. It’s everywhere, covering everything like a burial shroud. I can’t even see Frankie anymore due to its obfuscating effects. Sure, vampires can see in darkness but this isn’t the same. The Lethian’s smoke isn’t the absence of light, it’s a collection of small particles refracting it. And bent light isn’t so easy for vampire eyes to handle. It dampens scent, too, so I can’t even tell where anyone is with my nose.
I burn blood and rely on my ears instead. The good news is that works. But there's bad news. I haven’t studied for this situation. It’s like that time I sat for a final exam in college and the strung-out adjunct professor accidentally administered a test from the next level course. I’d heard of the material before, knew the basics of how it worked, but never experienced it.
The first thing I hear are the doors behind me opening, the ones from the hall. A set of footsteps patter in, familiar ones clad in high-heeled pumps. That's Stephanie. And another squeaks through on sneakers. Scott? And one more comes with an uneven tread and a murmured four-letter word. Esther.
After that, the doors slam shut. The lock engages with a sharp snick. Yeah, some of the cavalry made it inside. But that means they think this already fubar situation’s about to go even further south in a supernatural sense. And there are way too many mundanes at risk here for a handful of supernatural vigilantes to protect.
Yeah, that’s right. I only count Steph, Scott, and Esther. Sure, Zack and Sarah are magicians. But one of them doesn’t remember how to be one and the other’s currently crying on her little brother’s shoulder. I can hear her. So it’s up to me and my rag-tag band of misfit supernaturals to stop a dude who can wipe everyone’s memory and change the outcome of this hearing. Because of course it is.
Chapter Twenty
I'm not even sure where anyone besides Leora is anymore. The fog’s thickened enough to muffle sound so I’ve got no choice but to keep up by burning blood. I pat the front of my jacket with my free hand, then shake my head. My extra blood is sitting in the refrigerator back at The Belfry. Steph might have brought some but I can't get at it for now.
“Tino?” Leora’s voice comes out all shaky. Her hand trembles.
“Right here, kiddo.” I squeeze her hand.
“You’ve got to stop him.”
“Okay.” Of course she's talking about Carmine. Who else could she mean?
Despite Leora's confidence, I haven’t got a snowball’s chance in Hell of beating Carmine. The guy’s used my brain as a punching bag for probably a third of my life. I’ll never get the upper hand and I don’t know how. Maya’s not here and she’s one of the only people I know who’s defeated a Le
thian. I’m flying as figuratively blind as I am literally.
And yeah, you heard me right. I’m flying through the air now. Someone pushed me but I don’t know who. A friend might have pushed me out of the way. Maybe a foe's trying to kill me. But no, it’s neither. I got knocked over by accident. At least I manage to hold on to Leora. She tumbles on top of me so I roll over, shielding her from the trampling feet coming toward us.
The three girls and the lady from the group home panic. I don’t blame them because that’s what I’d have done four months ago. Supernatural shit freaks mundanes like nobody’s business and these poor girls and their guardian already have enough past trauma to cope with. The last thing they need is more. Of course they bolt for the judge's chambers.
“Oof!” My breath huffs out as a booted foot crushes my left shoulder. A second sneakered foot scrapes all the knuckles on my right hand. What feels like a loafer conks the back of my head, setting it spinning in a whirling vertigo. The last set of feet stomp my ribcage on the left, crunching bones. At least I don’t have to worry about breathing with a punctured lung. I focus on not healing the broken bone or anything else. Because I need to reserve my blood for other stuff.
I burn some and speed up, which makes me faster than even the older vampires I know. They tell me it’s another special talent of mine, like the vomiting visions only cooler and less painful.
I’m on my feet before I finish those thoughts. Yeah, I learned to kip up in a stage combat workshop. This puts me between Leora and the danger, which is more considerable than I originally thought.
The conjunction of oil and powder in my nose tells me someone in here is packing heat. Which is usually no big deal because regular bullets don’t hurt me. But I also smell wood along with the usual scent of a loaded weapon. Expensive-smelling wool, Chanel Number Five, and leather back it and I know now who’s holding the gun loaded with wood shrapnel rounds.
I thank God. Francesca Caprice can’t see any better than I do right now and has no other supernatural senses to help compensate. And I know exactly where she is and I can tell she’s moving her firearm in an arc like she can’t get a bead on me.
So I dash straight at her.
Nothing significant is in my way. I leap the chairs like they’re nothing. My hand wraps around her wrists like a pair of undead manacles. She chuckles, pushes up. I realize what I forgot this evening. My Kevlar vest. The gun goes off.
I fall backward, rigid as a pine board. Staking sucks.
“Carmine.” Francesca’s voice rings through the fog, more piercing than the bullet in my chest. “Here.”
My mouth doesn’t budge when I try to snark off. But I should have known. Stephanie warned me. Staking equals full and total paralysis.
I’m going to die. Or effectively cease to exist if Carmine eats the rest of my memories. And I’m not even going to go out with a biting meme-worthy insult.
The touch at my temples is both foreign and familiar. I’d shudder or struggle, probably both. But the stake stops me. At first.
My shoulder’s shaking, hitching up and down in time to a tune someone’s humming from what feels like a million miles away. And my forearm’s twitching, too. I'm practically screaming at my arm with my inside voice, telling it to slap at the smoky tendril I can’t see but know is here to drink my entire identity away.
But my brain doesn’t save me. It can’t, not against this enemy. This unexpected music does.
“Tarantara, tarantara!” The humming’s expanded, grown into a number from Pirates of Penzance.
I blink.
“All right, we go,” Zack’s warm baritone fills my ears. “Yes forward on the foe—”
My forearm lifts off the floor.
“Yes, forward on the foe—”
I sit up, my jaw moving, voice joining his. I'm not doing any of this.
“We go, we go!”
And I’m off the ground now, fangs out in the fog. I see the tendril now, a thicker rope of smoke in the miasma leading straight to the Lethian attacking me.
“Yes forward on the foe—”
I’m not moving or singing on my own. I’m like a marionette and Zack’s voice is my string.
“Yes, forward on the foe—”
“We go, we go!”
And I stumble into Carmine, bat his hands away with movements not my own. He gapes, eyes and mouth wide, like a fish. Zack repeats the refrain and I slap, kick, punch in time to Arthur Sullivan’s bygone tune.
Italian moms always threaten their kids with the wooden spoon though my mom never actually used it on me. Right now, with the way Zack's brandishing me at Carmine, I feel like that spoon. But no. I’m too floppy. More like a loaf of crusty bread.
I want to laugh but can’t unless Zack makes me. He doesn’t. Instead, we repeat half the refrain. I wonder what my old rival’s tactic is. He’s not the combat type so I seriously doubt his choices right now. I take my ears off the catchy song and finally hear what’s happening in the rest of the room.
The rest of the bystanders are escaping into the chambers behind the bench, including the judge, Gina, Levi, and Leora. Sarah protests, insists on staying to help. Esther argues and I hear them scuffle by the door.
I think about what I’d shout if only the damn stake wasn’t next-door to my ticker. A moment later, Zack belts out a “we go” with me and my heart throbs twice. The paralysis eases enough for me to move my face and neck. And I can talk. Finally.
“Sarah, leave!”
“But—”
“Now!”
The door slams behind her. A shimmer of green flashes in the fog. By its light, I see Esther spraying it with a re-purposed Windex bottle.
And the fog’s been dissipating since Zack started using me to attack Carmine. But he’s not the only one who’s been fighting the all this time. Scott’s grabbed Francesca, has her by the arms so she can’t reach for any more of the guns holstered under her suit jacket. She's dropped the one she used on me.
Stephanie’s moving her arms in a syncopated, almost ritualistic pattern. And then, she adds her voice to the impromptu performance, kicking backward to an earlier verse in the piece and directing it at Carmine.
“Go to glory and the grave!”
I’m dismayed to learn that though Stephanie can carry a tune, her voice is nothing special. That doesn’t stop her from adding the song to whatever she's doing. My sire’s been negating the Lethian’s memory-stealing energies. I can see it now though her energy isn’t like what my magician friends do. Instead, it reminds me of the lighting back in the memory vault.
Maris said Mnemosyne owed Stephanie a favor, paid it off with my ticket into the vault. And here she is, earning herself another one. She opens her arms, sweeping them to indicate each of her allies in this room. Everyone picks up a line.
“For your foes are fierce and ruthless,” Scott snarls.
“False, unmerciful, and truthless,” Frankie waves the open Zippo like he’s at a rock concert.
“Young and tender, fucking toothless,” Esther spits a colorful improvisation.
“All in vain their mercy crave.” That’s a voice I haven’t heard lifted in song before. But I recognize it anyway.
Sebastian Caprice.
Before Zack can utter another line in the song, we hear a thud behind Carmine, like an ax hitting a log. The Lethian throws his head back, Adam’s apple bulging until I think it’ll burst. And it does, with the copper-tinged blade of a punch dagger protruding from it. It’s absolutely as gross as you might imagine. Worse, actually.
Black water erupts from the wound which reminds me of the time I put a soda can in the freezer and forgot about it. This mysterious Lethian liquid smokes like something toxic. And maybe it is. I know right away it’s nothing like blood. Everyone gets out of the way, avoiding the spray. Except for Sebastian.
He steps around Carmine, standing directly in front of the dying monster. And he holds his hands out like he’s a kid running through a sprinkler on some nicely
trimmed lawn in the suburbs, gory dagger still in hand.
As the water or whatever it is gushes out of his neck, Carmine shrivels. At least, his skin does. What happens to him is something like watching time-lapse photography of a jerky dryer. Except strips of meat for jerky don’t have a skeleton, aren’t still trying to stand upright. The Lethian’s flesh can’t hold his bones together and he topples. His limbs scatter across the floor like tree branches after a windstorm.
Sebastian’s on the floor, hands in the water, as though he’s trying to touch every drop he can. At first, I don’t notice that he’s oblivious to the smoke rising from it. I only grok what I’m actually seeing when I notice who else can see what I see. Stephanie. But not Esther or Zack.
I lock gazes with my sire. She’s got a lot of explaining that she’ll never end up doing. I'm sick of that. I narrow my eyes, about to cut loose on her now that the most imminent danger has passed. But she shakes her head and points at the twists of lost memory curling through the air.
More than half of it is coming straight to me. My eyes widen and my jaw drops. Some enters my mouth, fills my nostrils. Flashes of past days and nights fill my mind. But trying to isolate them is like trying to grab dandelion seeds after they’ve blown off the stem. Almost as soon as they hit, they’re gone.
No. Not gone. Assimilated. And there's more coming.
I smile. Finally, no more mind sieve. I try to remember the night before Kayleigh broke up with me when I would have woken up in Doctor Maris’s ICU. But the memory’s still gone. My face falls harder than cement overshoes in Narragansett Bay. I drop to my knees, more because Zack’s attention isn’t on animating a partially paralyzed vampire than anything else. But the shards of dashed hopes don’t help.
