Stamps, Vamps & Tramps (A Three Little Words Anthology)

by Rachel Caine

  She stepped back just in time to let poor Leah’s skull fall one way and her body the other, neatly avoiding the tainted geyser of blood spraying out every which-way, cellular-level desperate to find something else to infect before its time ran out. But Sami was already twitching the diner’s blinds up again, letting in enough sunlight to crisp that evil shit to ash so fine it wouldn’t register on any CSI test. Of course, they could’ve just taken the former waitress down that way in the first place, but it was messy, to say the least, and beheading was a clean, relatively painless death. So saving the daylight exposure option for body disposal suited both Dee and Sami fine.

  No time for much more than starting to think Good work, little sis… before Dee found herself stopping short again, machete automatically whipping back up, as an all-too-recognizable voice drawled, from the diner’s conveniently propped-open doorway—

  “Hmmm, messy. Not s’much as the old boy I just did somethin’ similar to, ‘course, but that’s probably ’cause practice makes perfect. Y’all truly do know your stuff when it comes to supernatural creature disposal, you two.”

  Oh, you have gotta be fucking kidding me.

  Both of them turned together, then, to see well-known holler witch turned cellblock pimp Allfair “A-Cat” Chatwin standing there with both hands buried wrist-deep in her hoodie’s front pocket, large as life—which really didn’t work out to be too damn large at all comparatively, though grantedly bigger than Dee—and twice as skanky. Her bush of malt-brown hair was jammed down under a backwards-turned trucker cap so gross she might’ve rolled an actual trucker for it, and Dee was amazed (yet not, somehow, surprised) to note the crazy bitch was still wearing her prison jumpsuit, albeit with the shucked top hung down like shirt-tails, so it probably read to the uninitiated as nothing more than a particularly heinous set of bright orange parachute pants.

  Had a big book tucked under up one arm, too. Bible-heavy, though Dee didn’t have to see Sami’s nose twitch to know it probably had a very different sort of stink to it.

  Sami would claim they owed ‘Chatwin something for helping in the escape from Mennenvale Women’s Correctional, Dee believed, if pressed. For herself, Dee was pretty sure all they owed her was a quick put-down, an unmarked grave and the promise not to piss on it after, but she’d long since had to reconcile with the fact that whenever Sami’s highly flexible conscience was involved, things didn’t always go her way.

  “We should talk, that’s what I’m thinkin’,” Chatwin suggested, black eyes glinting with ill charm and a touch of sly humor both, like she could read Dee’s mind right from where she stood. And hell, maybe she could—Dee’d seen Sami do something similar enough times to not bother counting anymore, using the half-demon blood she and Chatwin shared, supposedly from the same source. That was if you could trust Chatwin on that one, which Dee very much didn’t, having watched her calmly lie about the sky being blue in her time (metaphorically speaking) for the express purpose of messing with both their minds, not to mention seeing how far she could slip inside Sami’s pants while doing it.

  Moriam Cornish’s sin made flesh, Dee’s dead Daddy would’ve called it, they hadn’t already shot his veins full of poison for killing her over lying down with the Fallen. She’d only done it to help him fight a crusade she apparently felt worth sacrifice, but that sure hadn’t saved her, once he found out. It was the key event of both their childhoods, Sami’s birth out of their Mama’s useless death—the thing that’d sent Jeptha Cornish to jail and both his kids into different degrees of foster care, kept them separated ’til they were both adults and well past the age of consent when they’d made their own pact together, a vow to take up the reins and keep fighting their parents’ Anabaptist crusade, with that solemn troth plighted on Moriam’s grave and sealed since in a hundred different variety of strange things’ blood.

  Dee’d already started up where Jeptha left off, wielding rote-learned knowledge and home-made weapons she would turn to her sister’s service, playing knight to her reluctant sorceress—just as Sami had committed on her own to Moriam’s path, though without the shamefaced layer of secrets and lies that had eventually dragged her down. Had already taken the first few steps along it back when Dee turned up at her university dorm room’s door, in fact, so long since. When she’d opened it gingerly, scratching at the first few raw, hand-scribed lines of Crossing the River—the Witches’ Language, Jeptha’d called it, a foul tongue good for nothing but spell-work and bindings on things too awful to force the thousand names of G-slash-d to touch—she’d just inscribed along her left wrist, and squinted down at Dee from under floppy blonde bangs, asking, Can I help you?

  Samaire Morgan? I’m Dionne. Cornish.

  Morgan’s not my real name.

  I know. Can I come in?

  Standing there in her fatigues with a stolen sawed-off full of salt-cartridges in her backpack, and looking shyly ‘round at the detritus of a life she’d never once thought was possible to achieve, on her own—track-meet photos, scholarship documents, the tricked-out laptop with all its bells and whistles. The friends, grinning from half a dozen frames—one in particular, familiar from various news stories and police reports.

  Heard about Jesca Lind, she’d offered.

  Did you. Wouldn’t’ve thought that’d’ve made the papers, over in Iraq.

  Well, I got it from your Mom, actually, when I was tracking you down—Mrs. Morgan. She said you guys went to prom together, picked out the same university, all that. As Sami nodded, slowly: Yeah, that’s a damn shame, losing somebody you love so young. A beat. She really possessed, when she died?

  She was something, all right—and she didn’t just die. Why do you ask?

  You know who I am, Sami?

  I’m—starting to get an idea; Mom showed me coverage of the trial, when she thought I could handle it. You’re Jeptha Cornish’s daughter.

  Your sister.

  That’s what it said on the birth certificate. So, Dionne… you here to kill me, or what?

  They looked each other over a moment, taking stock; Sami was bigger but lankier, and Dee was fairly certain she hadn’t had a quarter of as much training, not physically. Then again, if she took after Moriam the way Jeptha’d thought she would, she wouldn’t need it.

  I’m your sister, Sami, she repeated. How you think you got out of that trailer, in the first place? I picked you up and I ran ’til I couldn’t run anymore. Never looked back, no matter how hard he yelled at me to. So hell no and fuck you, ’cause I ain’t him.

  That familiar/unfamiliar gaze—Mom’s eyes, Dad’s unholy calm. That set mouth, lips gone just a shade off-white, asking, But you know, right? What I am.

  Sure. You’re blood.

  Only half. Half-human, too—by family standards.

  To which Dee’d simply shrugged, throwing four hundred solid years’ worth of witch-hunting genes to the winds, at least where it concerned one witch in particular—and not giving all too much of damn, as she did it. Because: How many relatives did she have left, anyways, in this frightful world? How many did she need?

  Good enough for me, she’d said.

  And Sami had nodded, eventually, once she saw she meant it. Then slipped her sweater off to show the rest of what she’d been doing to herself, all up and down and every which-way, penning the forces she had no choice but to know herself capable of wielding carefully back inside her own skin. Tracing marker with razor, then rubbing the wounds with a gunk made from equal parts ink, salt and Polysporin, ’til the result began to heal itself out of sheer contrariness. Lines of power digging themselves down deep from epidermis to dermis, burrowing inwards like worms of living light, sinking ’til they could sink no more.

  Help me, then, she’d told Dee, a hundred times calmer than she’d had any good reason to be, given the circumstances. You see my problem, right? ’Cause long as my arms are, I just can’t seem to reach my back.

  And she’d handed Dee a blade, and Dee had taken it. Said, I got you.

>   And…

  …that was it, slang become fact. It was done.

  In the here and now, Dee hiked her eyebrows at Chatwin, trying her best to project every ounce of contempt she had across five feet of space, without moving more than those thirty tiny muscles. “Team up again, uh huh,” she replied. “’cause that worked out so well, last time.”

  “Still outta jail, ain’t you?” Continuing, when neither of them answered, “Naw, just listen—not exactly like I want to, ladies, given the acrimonious way we parted, ‘cept for the fact that it sure does appear we’re workin’ the same case for the same people, from suspiciously different ends. An’ if yours told you the same pile of bull mine told me, might be we should throw in together regardless of past conflicts, just to keep ourselves all upright for the duration.”

  “Pass,” Dee started to snap back—then sighed instead, as Sami waved her silent.

  “I want to hear,” the big idiot said, stubborn as ever.

  “The shit for, Sami? She dumped your ass in the woods, left me stuck inside a wall.”

  “Didn’t expect that to happen, just t’say,” Chatwin pointed out. “Neither a one.”

  “Not like you tried all too hard to stop it, when it did.”

  A shrug. “Well, in for a penny.”

  Sami rolled her eyes. “Look,” she told Dee, “you were already sure the Maartensbecks couldn’t be trusted in the clinch, considering who we’re chasing. And it strikes me A-Cat probably knows a dirty deal when she hears one—better than us, given we’re not exactly social.”

  Dee had to smile at that, since it was nothing but true; hell, even Chatwin knew it. As they both watched, she sketched a little bow, shrugged again, tossed her head like a hillbilly beauty queen. And drawled back, without any more or less malice inherent in the words than usual—

  “Well, ain’t you sweet, still. Princess.”

  When most people talked about the Maartensbecks, they concentrated on their twinned academic prowess and charity-work, not to mention their storied genealogy—elliptical mentions of them stretched all the way back to the Ninth century, when Holland separated from Frisia to become a county in the Holy Roman Empire, and a man named Auutet from Maarten’s Beck ended up qualifying as a student of the Corpus Iuris Civilis at the newly-founded University of Bologna. For those in “the life”, however, the name carried a very different sort of weight.

  “They’re Dutch, and all they hunt is vampires,” Moriam Cornish had told her eldest daughter one night, during a Hammer Horror movie marathon. “Sure, they don’t use a ‘Van’ when they sign anymore, but you do the math.”

  Though not rich in a conventional sense, their consistent ability—and willingness, even when it cost them bad enough to denude whole generations—to tackle the Rolls-Royce of monsters head-on had produced a wide-flung funding network of grateful, financially liquid patrons. And with the foundation of the Maartensbeck Archive in 1968, they’d begun to amass a vault full of magical artifacts other people wouldn’t touch with a literal ten-foot pole: grimoires, cursed objects, holy weapons, all of which the family’s surviving members either caretook or banked accordingly, loaning them out at a fair rate of interest to anyone in search of a way to kill the unkillable who could afford to pay their late fees.

  Occasionally, someone would be dumb enough to think they could go full supervillain with whatever it was they’d borrowed, then find out better once the Maartensbecks came to retrieve it; Dee had seen photos, and the results weren’t pretty. These crafty stealth badasses might have multiple degrees and class out the wazoo, but they sure weren’t fussy about coming down hard on whoever they considered evil, a category whose boundaries sometimes appeared to shift at whoever was currently heading the Maartensbecks’ boardroom table’s will.

  For the Cornishes, who’d received their initial email while recuperating after the M-vale break in a motel Sami swore up and down didn’t even have WiFi, contact had been made in the well-preserved person of matriarch Ruhel Maartensbeck, legendary Professor Maks’s only granddaughter. She was a silver fox of a woman with Helen Mirren style and Vanessa Redgrave pipes, turning up to their highly public first meeting—at yet another all-night roadside greasy spoon, somewhere on the Jersey Turnpike—dressed all head to toe in retired teacher drag so good Dee would’ve pegged her for a civilian, at least from across the room. Then she drew close enough to sit down, revealing sensibly low-heeled lace-up shoes with enough tread for a high-speed chase, a no-grip Vidal Sassoon crop, and the discreet lines of a high-calibre pistol packing modified rounds under one arm. The overall effect was of a stretched-out Dame Judi Dench, voice almost-accentless and tartly crisp, as she slid her long legs under the plastic table and opened by saying—

  “Congratulations on your recent return to circulation, my dears. Believe me, I’m not usually one to interrupt a celebration, but… well, the truth is, my family finds we have a problem that requires an outsider’s touch, albeit one educated in very—specific ways. I know you’ll understand what I mean, given your background.” A pause. “Beside which, we’ve heard such good things of you both, it seemed a pity to look anywhere else.”

  Dee had to bite down on the urge to laugh, hard. But a quick glance Sami’s way told another tale; she had a look on her face that read as partly stunned, part wistful. This was civilized talk, Mrs. Morgan-grade, of the sort that hadn’t come her way in years—not since that last phone call, when Dee’d tried not to let herself overhear as Sami told her former “mother” how she not only wasn’t gonna make it for Christmas, but wouldn’t be able to tell her where to get in touch with her anymore. ’cause yes, what those cops had told her was true, to a point: they had just killed a bunch of people in a Beantown bar, deliberately and with premeditation, just like the charges said. But only their bodies, because the things inside those bodies weren’t the people they were claiming to be at all, what with the whole tempting transients down to the basement, then killing and cooking them routine they’d gotten into recently… let alone the additional part about feeding the remains to their customers as a Tuesday Night Special, afterwards.

  Thing was, when stuff’d already gone that far, that was pretty much the point where prayer and a 911 call stopped being any sort of use at all, and white magic against black took over; magic plus a bullet, or a load of cold iron buckshot mixed with salt. ’cause just as Jeptha’d always said, Exorcist movie franchise aside, sometimes the Power of Christ alone wasn’t up to compelling shit.

  And: Oh God, Samaire, she could remember Mrs. Morgan crying, tinnily, on the other end. I told you it was a bad idea to take up with her. Told you that nice as she seemed, she was probably just as psychologically disturbed as that man, her father… oh baby, and you were doing so well, too, even after Jesca! My smart, smart girl. Where’s it all going to end now?

  Good enough question, back then; even better question seven years on, parade of victories balanced against the occasional defeat or not. Though it wasn’t like Dee really had the first or faintest idea of an answer, either way.

  Ruhel Maartensbeck had come equipped with two fat files, that night. One was full of background stuff on them, which Dee found creepy, enough so to mainly skip over, but she’d seen Sami studying it off and on since, apparently fascinated by how the Maartensbecks had managed to trace the exact moment where the long-defunct European Cornîches had broken off into their only slightly less so Americanized brand, after a younger brother of witch-finder Guillaime Cornîche converted to Huguenot Protestantism, fleeing France for Quebec in the wake of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. The other file, meanwhile, was about Miss M.’s “little problem” itself, a crisis forty years in the making—one that’d started all the way back in 1971, with Professor Maks’s tragically quick and surprisingly unheralded passing, from Stage Four prostate cancer…

  … except, well, that turned out to be a bit of a face-saving fib, on the Maartensbecks’ part: i.e., for “prostate cancer,” read “undeath.”

  �
��‘Vampire-hunter turned vampire, no news at eleven,’” Dee’d commented, munching a fry. “Understandable, right? I mean, that’s really gotta rankle.”

  “Somewhat, yes.”

  Nodding, Sami said, “Be hard to cover up, though. Unless—oh, tell me you didn’t.”

  “Didn’t what?” Dee’d demanded, watching Ruhel Maartensbeck nod, sadly. But then the penny dropped, with an almost audible clink—’cause while she might not’ve been able to get much schooling beyond what her Spec-4 called for (high school equivalency, plus some Engineering Corps courses and a whole two years of Explosive Ordnance Disposal training), no one could accuse Dionne Cornish of being completely unable to follow things through using plain old logic.

  “You stuck him in the vault,” she said, out loud. “‘Course you did. ’cause given that place is like a toxic dump, ‘cept for magic crap, there must be some real full-bore sons of bitches trying to slip in there—and a live-in vampire? Best security system money can’t buy. Don’t even have to feed him, just let him keep what he kills, long as he doesn’t actually turn any of ‘em… ”

  “Well done, Miss Cornish the Elder.” Ruhel sighed. “Yes, that was the plan—his idea, actually, a contingency protocol decided on long before it happened, which he made me swear to honor, if and when. Imprison him in there and wait for the vampire who killed him to come free him, as a trap. But it never showed up, and after a certain amount of time, I simply ceased periodically dropping by to check on… that thing.”

  “Not like it was really your grandpa, anymore.”

  “No, of course not. You understand: everything I know I learned from him, and it knows everything he did, so it knows not to even bother claiming to be him. Vampires aren’t people; not the people you hope they are, anyhow.”

  Sami, taken into care far too young to remember Jeptha and Moriam’s bedtime stories, raised one eyebrow. “So what is it, then?”