“Yeah, absolutely. There’s a Starbucks on 12th and Walnut. Meet me there in an hour?”
“I’ll be there. See ya.” Tristan hung up the phone. She wiped her sweaty palms on her jeans. Not much she could do to spruce up, and nothing was going to change the fact that her nose was just a touch too big for her face or her eyes spaced slightly too far apart. Tristan ran her fingers through her curls. She shuffled through her messenger bag for her travel-size deodorant stick. Not enough time to go back to the house and change clothes. Tristan rubbed several layers of deodorant over her unshaven armpits. Too many frivolous thoughts. She should call back and cancel. Now was not the time—never was the time, but especially not with Blessing’s test on the horizon. She was being selfish.
For once, she didn’t care. Not about Blessing, not about the rest of the human race. Coffee wasn’t going to kill anyone.
The day had turned cooler, the sky overcast. Once downtown, she walked from 15th Street Station a few blocks south then a few more blocks east. People with laptops sat at the tables facing the coffee shop’s large picture windows. Tristan claimed a vacant outdoor table and waited.
Mira walked up the street about ten minutes later. She wore sweatpants tucked into a pair of Uggs, a fitted University T-shirt, and her hair gathered into a messy bun. She waved as she approached. “I’m gonna grab a drink. Be right back.”
Tristan watched her through the glass. She wasn’t much taller than she was, but she had long legs. Chunks of golden highlights shone through her otherwise chocolate-brown hair. When Mira turned toward the door, Tristan quickly directed her attention to the people walking by.
Mira set her coffee on the table and sat across from Tristan. Her gray eyes, lined with black eyeliner, were like a stormy summer sky. “So, we haven’t been formally introduced. I’m Mira.” She held out her hand, her nails short and painted pale pink. Tristan shook it, hoping Mira didn’t notice her own chipped and bitten nails.
“Tristan. Nice to meet you. Can I ask you…why you gave me your number?”
“This may sound completely crazy, but something told me to look over at the bar at that moment, and there you were. What do they call that? Serendipity?” Mira spoke with the distinct and mildly abrasive accent common to the region, full of misplaced vowels and the occasional absent consonant. “Anyway, you seemed like you could use a friend. People are basically nice here, but…it can be a hard place. I don’t make a habit of picking up random people, in case you’re wondering. I’m not a psycho or anything. So what’s your story?”
“Well, I’m from Toronto originally. I was planning on just passing through after a while, but who knows.” She didn’t want Mira to think she was in any hurry to leave, just in case.
“Toronto, huh? I thought you sounded Canadian. What did you do up there?”
Tristan shrugged. “What everyone else does, I guess. Mostly I danced.”
“No shit?” Mira dug through her purse until she produced a pack of Marlboro Reds and a pink plastic lighter. “You don’t mind, do you?”
Tristan shook her head. She craved one of her own, but it would draw attention to her trembling hands. God, she should be past this schoolgirl bullshit. She had resisted temptation her entire life. She saved people on a nightly basis. Was she really going to let some random hot girl turn her into a complete fool? What was happening?
Hell, she was already enjoying it. She never did like rules all that much.
“Wow, I knew there was something about you. I’m a ballet major at the U of A.” She cocked her head toward Broad Street. “Three months to go. My parents are from the Ukraine, so it was either ballet or gymnastics for me, even though they’ve been here forever. I already have an apprenticeship with the Pennsylvania Ballet. I might stick around for a little while, suffer through a season of the fuckin’ Nutcracker and Swan Lake, and see what happens. Maybe I’ll audition for BalletX if I get bored. Worse comes to worse, I can always teach.” She sneered and flicked ashes into a tray. “What kind of dance were you into?”
“I started out at the Victoria Ballet Academy, and I was supposed to go to the National Ballet School, but I just…didn’t quite get along with the other girls.”
The other girls, with their straight blonde hair pulled into severe buns, with their milky skin and blue eyes. She was nothing like them. She would never possess the long, lean body of a ballerina, and no one in the ballet world intended to let her forget it.
“Anorexic bitches.” Mira smiled and blew an elegant wisp of smoke out of the corner of her mouth. “Seriously, I hate about ninety percent of the fuckin’ girls here anymore. What did you do after ballet school?”
“I started dancing flamenco, and I’ve done it ever since. That was eleven years ago.”
“Flamenco? Nice. Can’t say I’ve ever met a flamenco dancer. So hey, if you’re sticking around for a while, maybe we could get together and, you know, see what you’ve got. Dancing, I mean.” Mira winked and took another drag off her cigarette.
Tristan’s heart began a dance of its own. A terrible, horrible, wonderful sensation unfolded within her like a butterfly opening its wings for the first time. She couldn’t let distraction happen. Clean up the worst of the criminal element and get out of Dodge. That was the deal, just like always.
But all the bitterness and anger she’d carried for so many years inexplicably melted away in the presence of this woman. Her helplessness alarmed her, and yet resistance was futile.
“I’d love to.”
“Awesome. I have an apartment around the corner I share with a couple other girls. Tiny bedrooms, but we have a huge kitchen to practice in. Where are you staying?”
“Well…” She couldn’t tell her she was squatting. What would she think? She’d run the other way.
As she should. As Tristan should have encouraged her to do. Because this meeting, this embryonic friendship, this…wherever it might lead, was absolutely, unequivocally, the worst idea ever.
“I’m up in Kensington right now.”
Mira wrinkled her nose. “Do yourself a favor and get out of there as soon as you can. I know it’s cheap, but you’re gonna get shot or raped or something.” She dropped her cigarette on the sidewalk and ground her heel over it. “Listen, I have to get to class, but call me when you want to hang out.” Mira slurped the last of her iced tea through a straw. The remaining ice clacked against the plastic cup as she tossed it into a trash compactor. She hiked her purse up over her shoulder and flashed a blithe smile full of small, straight teeth. She must have been born with effortless perfection. Even the accent wasn’t so bad after all.
“Definitely. See you soon.” Tristan waved and watched her walk away. An unfamiliar sensation tugged at the corners of her mouth until her lips had curved into an expression she’d thought lost to them.
She had remembered how to smile.
Chapter Fifteen
Imagine waking to a silence so profound one fears the sudden onset of deafness. And there is darkness, too, starless and moonless. Claustrophobia besets you when you discover the inability to move your arms and legs in any direction.
And the dirt. The dirt is always falling from above, crumbling into one’s mouth, eyes and nostrils, caking in one’s hair. Worms make pinpricks in the darkness so tendrils of silvery light, fine as silk thread, pierce the makeshift grave. The light comforts, for a moment, until the sensation of insects nibbling upon one’s dead flesh.
Then the traveler in the dark,
Thanks you for your tiny spark,
He could not see which way to go,
If you did not twinkle so.
Images trickle back into one’s mind, slowly at first then in a detonation of color and sound. The images do this each day until one stops sleeping altogether, but it doesn’t matter. Sleep is something like a muscle memory, though the dead do not truly rest at all.
But they do dream. The dreams feed the hunger, and the hunger devours the host until she learns life itself is what quells t
he famine within her. The hunger is a furnace for which there is never enough fuel.
And always there is blood, spreading like a great crimson butterfly upon one’s dress, reminding of the ghastly red dragon that haunts the edges of her mind, the one who bears her father’s face. Conquered in body but never in spirit.
She haunted the forest for many weeks. She was a witch, a werewolf, a demon, any number of fairy tale monsters. The villagers saw the skeleton of the impaled and vanquished ispán upon the hill, crossed themselves whenever they passed by, and proclaimed the land cursed, even haunted. They called her many things: szépasszony, lidérc, a Rém. She visited them at night and inhaled their breath as they slept, until they breathed no more.
With the passage of time, Anasztaizia’s body had fortified itself against attack. Bones ossified and muscles hardened themselves into a kind of armor, leaving after nine centuries a nearly impenetrable breastplate protecting her heart. No longer a lady but a warrior, fighting for the sanctity of the world. She had found the Hunters, and she would kill them as she had so many others. In the castle she had built an altar of their severed heads and torn limbs and worshipped her own power, for it was also the light-maiden’s. They would not stand between her and the cleansing.
He was dead, but his deeds had not perished with him. She began to loathe them all, those weak and boorish beings that had overrun the Earth. They were not worthy of the Light, and yet it was she whom his actions had consigned to darkness. Until the day of revelation, her own personal apocalypse, when God had revealed her purpose. For nothing on this Earth had ever meant to be.
“One day,” Zsofika Domokos had said before Anasztaizia plunged her hand into the girl’s chest cavity, “we will purify this place of your taint. We have sworn to it.”
The Hunter collapsed in a pool of her own blood, her sternum cracked open and hollowed out before she had time to raise her ridiculous weapon. Anasztaizia clenched the thick red muscle in her fist. She crushed it between her hands; blood exploded from the heart, leaving only a pulpy stew behind. Zsofika’s corpse joined the ancient skeletons on the wall.
Anasztaizia turned her face up toward the basement windows of the abandoned red-stone cathedral. A saint had been christened there. It made her think of an old priest. In her dreams, he had no head. He could not come back as she had.
Outside, rain beat against the old stones. Hundreds of butterfly wings thrashed against tree trunks. Anasztaizia crouched over one of the puddles of reddish mud collecting in the basement and observed her reflection. The illusion, the mask resembling a once-lovely young lady that allowed her to live without detection amongst humans, should she choose to, fragmented beneath her scrutiny. The dead thing, with its elongated teeth, its skin sallow and stretched tight like a painter’s canvas across a frame of bones, gazed back at her.
She did not enjoy the thought of paintings.
Like her father’s ill-gotten enchantments upon the dresses, she was something beautiful made ugly. Her own face stolen from her, as so much else had been, and she could not bear the sight of her reflection for very long. But she was on the cusp of another metamorphosis, her body merely the vessel for her perfected soul. Beauty did not matter when one changed shape or was impervious to injury. Beauty did not matter when one mastered the ability to fly. And she would learn how, soon, like the butterflies that fled from her in a long-ago forest.
This time she would catch them. And she would crush them.
~
Where am I?
Anasztaizia’s thoughts fumbled about as she lay in the rich, earthen darkness encasing her. She pressed her palms upward and smashed through the dirt—I’ve been buried!—and hoisted herself from the shallow ditch. If the court believed her dead, Father would inter her in the church, next to the lady. A robbery, then. Criminals had beset her and left her there to die. She must warn Father thieves were about. They had taken her dress and even her shoes, leaving her in a shift stiffened with a brownish substance that smelled of iron left out in the rain.
Anasztaizia shook the dirt and bits of twigs and leaves from her hair and shift, loosening flakes of blood with it. Grime caked her fingernails. She pressed a hand over her heart to calm herself, though she was relieved to sense no injuries. She dared not yet examine her body for any violations.
A moment of silent terror passed as she stood perfectly still, waiting for the comforting rhythm of her own heart to beat gently beneath her breast.
It did not come.
She thumped her fist against her chest, even as it slowly dawned on her that its familiar rise and fall, the sacred act of breathing to which she’d never before given a second thought, had ceased to exist along with the beating of her motionless heart.
But she was alive! Is it another nightmare? How they plagued her so these past few weeks.
A scrap of hide lay nearby. She picked it up and turned it over in her hands. A fool’s cap, made of leather, with ass’ ears stitched on. Anasztaizia clutched it to her chest, and the same metallic tang rose from it as from her shift. Three other mounds, strewn with branches and leaves to conceal them from view, distorted the forest floor. They might escape others’ eyes but not hers. At the sight of them, something cold and ugly bubbled up from her core, into her throat, choking her with an inexplicable hatred and rage made more infuriating because she could not remember its cause.
It was night. The cratered orb hung high above the clearing, yet the forest around her lit up as if bathed in daylight. The detail of each leaf, down to the lattice of veins, revealed itself with impossible clarity.
The sun, the moon, and the stars…
A dreadful bottomless hole unlocked itself in the pit of her stomach.
She remembered it was spring, and the forest was still chilly, especially at night. Yet her skin did not register the prickling sensation she expected, clad as she was in a thin shift, from the chilled air. The wind conversed in sighs, and the trees inhaled and exhaled, an act no longer required of her.
But she was alone, cradled only by the cold and gentle hands of the night.
She wanted to go home.
The forest rushed past as she walked, faster than riding on horseback at full gallop. No exhaustion weakened her legs, and in mere moments, she reached the tree line. Torches, tiny candles in the distance, marked the castle’s periphery.
They’d drawn up the bridge for the night, and there was no other way to avoid the moat, the castle’s first line of defense. Anasztaizia crinkled her nose. The distended corpses of rats and of hounds who had outlived their usefulness, along with kitchen waste and that of the castle’s residents, floated past. She dipped one toe into the water but did not detect a change in temperature any more than that of the air. Already filthy, Anasztaizia waded into the fetid, neck-deep liquid, steeling herself against the coarse hides of dead animals that brushed against her bare arms, against the bones stripped clean and submerged in their watery graves pricking her feet. She wished she could return the gift of her strange new eyesight and, more, that her sense of smell had died along with her other functions. The cloying stench of feces and rotted, waterlogged flesh churned her stomach.
Having traversed the maze of sharpened stakes planted into the bottom of the moat, Anasztaizia emerged on the other side and peered through the portcullis’ bars. The lever to open it was out of her reach. She let out a strangled half-sob and gripped two of the bars then stared at her hands as if for the first time. They were darker than they should have been—darker, certainly, than she recalled. The flesh revealed a tracery of bluish-brown veins beneath, so her hands resembled dead leaves more than the hands of a noblewoman.
Above her, the watchman stirred, muttered something to himself, and went back to sleep. She looked through the space and into the gatehouse. Rats scurried into crevasses, climbing over each other in desperation.
“Watchman! Let me in! The lady commands it!”
This time he snorted and, after a few moments, shuffled to the edge of the
wall. He peered down at her. His eyes bulged as he staggered back, waving the torch as if to frighten her off. As if she possessed no more sentience than a wild animal and did not recognize fire as anything but pain. “Begone, spirit! Begone!”
Spirit? Has he lost his mind?
“I demand you let me in! Where are my father’s guards? Let me in, or I shall see you put to death myself!”
At the far end of the gatehouse, the door to the bailey opened; both soldiers and guards poured from it, rushing forward with swords drawn and torches blazing. A heavy silence fell upon the castle grounds as they stopped just short of the portcullis and Anasztaizia’s eyes met her father’s.
His jaw muscles clenched. Gripped around his sword hilt, his knuckles turned white. Something about the blade, dulled with a color resembling the splotches on her shift…
“This is not the lady,” he said, his eyes glassy. “This is a demon sent to trick us.”
“But my lord—”
“Do not question me! This…thing, whatever it is, is not my daughter! My daughter is dead!”
It couldn’t be true. He had not buried her properly. He had left her in the forest. “But I am yours,” Anasztaizia whispered. “What girl ever forgets her father?”
His lips trembled. “Get back inside, all of you. Seal the doors and windows. I want all soldiers patrolling the walls until daylight.”
“Yes, my lord,” said the men, who turned away and walked back through the gatehouse.
Whatever glimmer of emotion had sparked however briefly in his eyes went out. His mouth was a thin, grim line bisecting his face. “I will not let you do this to me. I had every right. Every right!”
“Father, I do not understand you. I found myself in the forest, and I wished only to come home—”
“Leave me be!” He ran back to the bailey door. The bar fell into place with a loud thud, followed by an all-embracing stillness. Anasztaizia no longer felt her hands curled around the gate. She felt nothing at all.
She found no rest there, no solace that with the morning light she would awaken and shed the residue of horror left behind by her dreams. She was the horror, a thing that should not be.
Those of My Kind Page 11
