Tristan let out all the air in her lungs. Beebee Zsofika, you have no idea what you’ve gotten me into.
“Sometimes I go to the library and look at things on the internet. I read news from Nigeria. Not many people care about what happens there, but I still do. One day the charity operating the hotel sent people to check up on the children, but they could not explain what they found there. All the girls, alive and healthy, and some even had new babies. But the boys… They were all dead. Some killed themselves, some each other.” Blessing shrugged. She may as well have been talking about a cockroach infestation for all the compassion her face registered.
“This isn’t how we work, Blessing. We don’t kill whoever we want, whenever we want. That makes us no different from what we hunt. We kill when we need to feed, and we kill the people who deserve it.”
“But who decides? We are no different from what we hunt.” Blessing closed her eyes for a moment, breathing deeply of the coppery scent that clung to the air. “We are monsters, the same as they. Why else do we hide what we are? Because we are ashamed, that’s why. Because we know the difference between them and us is only a matter of opinion.”
Tristan edged away from the body, from Blessing. Her stomach continued to churn, threatening to discharge what little it contained.
“You hated them, Tristan, before you met this girl. You said they all deserved to die for the things they’ve done to this world and to each other. To us.” Blessing jabbed a finger at her own chest. “And what would she do if you told her your secret? You already have the answer. So why the sudden sentimentality for them?”
“Well,” Tristan said, trying to disguise the alarm in her voice, “if you hate them so much, why don’t you just chant this spell and get it all over with?”
The corner of Blessing’s mouth twitched, and the hair on Tristan’s arms and the back of her neck prickled. “The gods know humans too well. The chant is like a special wish, and so each person can use it only once, when he or she needs it most. I wanted to protect the girls, who could not defend themselves after I left. That is our job.”
“Why didn’t you kill your mother for what she did to you?”
“Because she is my mother. Besides, she merely gave birth to me. She is not the one who made me what I am. Magic has consequences, Tristan, and to kill one’s own mother is unforgiveable.”
“But those boys—”
“Were innocent? Once, maybe. No, they did not deserve to be cast out as witches. But they became predators no less than the man we hunt.” An ugly smirk smeared her dusky lips, and she leveled a stare at Tristan like a lion sizing up an antelope. “Drink, Tristan, before he gets too cold. I know you need it. I can tell.”
Tristan waved her off. Make herself vulnerable so Blessing could knife her in the back? No way. She put nothing past her, and any doubt Blessing had been involved, somehow, with the hotel housekeeper’s death crumbled away. “I can wait a little while longer. Let’s just go. We’re not any closer to finding this guy.”
Blessing pouted a little but wiped her hand on her jeans. It was crucial, Tristan thought, to show not one ounce of fear. Easier said than done when the little bitch had just admitted to mass murder.
They headed back toward the El, which by then had stopped service for the night. Now the sentinel stood watch over its domain in silence. The body Tristan thought dead or just dozing had since wandered off. That didn’t necessarily mean it was alive.
A flash of white in the corner of her eye. She turned quickly enough to glimpse what it was but still blinked several times in disbelief.
“Blessing…did you just see that?”
“A white wolf.” She watched the spot in the weeds where the snowy blur had disappeared. “I dream of them sometimes.”
“We all do. Hunters used to call on them to find vampire graves.”
“Because they are drawn to their own kind. To demons.” Blessing unsheathed her knife again.
Tristan couldn’t stand the sight of that weapon any longer. She was almost sorry she’d convinced Blessing to use it, because it had been her favorite up until then. Now she wanted to use something else. A crossbow, maybe.
“I will follow it.”
“I don’t think splitting up is a good idea.” Tristan hoped she sounded sincere despite her urgent desire for Blessing to go as far away as possible. On the other hand, a small-time serial killer with a hooker fixation was a summer day at Six Flags compared to Blessing unleashed upon the city.
“It will be fine. Besides, splitting up is what you wanted.”
“Blessing—”
“Do not wait for me.”
She was gone as quickly as the wolf. Tristan headed back toward the street unable to shake the feeling she had just made the biggest mistake of her life.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Blessing walked south, each cell in her body magnetized, drawn by an invisible filament. Her body controlled the path her brain could not. The wolf had found its demonic brethren, and through their shared blood, it called out to her to stop battling her nature. The war was already lost when she was just a child. She was not good. She had never been good, though she had genuinely tried for a time to defeat the demon on her own when the beatings and mutilations, rapes and hot oil had all failed. By the time Tristan found her, she was far past salvation. Her power was the one thing no one could take from her.
Twin spires of oxidized copper loomed high above the abandoned factories and storefronts, puncturing the night sky. Before her stood a dilapidated, terrifying Gothic Revival cathedral of red stone. She would find God there.
Pigeons nestled together in one of the towers’ broken windows, their fat, pale shapes as clear to Blessing as the three red doors at street level. The neighborhood businesses and the soup kitchen across the street had closed hours ago, and only two cars had passed in the last several minutes. Blessing hooked her fingers into the fence on the left side of the cathedral and climbed over it. She sought a smashed basement window, or even the back door, which probably was not as secure as the front…
She dropped onto her hands and knees into the weeds and wriggled through the last cellar window. The air was cool, and ripe with the dank, dirty odor of rotting wood. Objects untouched in a decade or more decayed in the corners. The form on the other side of the room remained indistinct but for two red pinpricks of light.
Unfazed by mud puddles or impenetrable layers of cobwebs, Anasztaizia knelt upon the floor. Four filthy plastic dolls, the old-fashioned kind whose blue eyes slipped shut when laid down, sat before her. A splinter of wood penetrated the forehead of one doll’s head, emerging through the back. Another revealed a similar splinter through its chest. A third had no head at all. The final doll appeared unharmed except for dark smears between its legs.
Anasztaizia sang to the dolls, her reedy voice barely affected by puberty:
When the blazing sun is gone,
When he nothing shines upon,
Then you show your little light,
Twinkle, twinkle, all the night.
Blessing’s shoes crunched over fragmented glass. Anasztaizia raised her head but did not meet her eyes.
“Blessing Adeyayo. I smelled your fear from miles away.”
Blessing stiffened. She must learn how to disguise her emotions from the creature if she were to harness its power. “You killed the wrong girl.”
“You should have been more specific.”
“You did it on purpose.”
Anasztaizia laughed, humorless. “You’re a Hunter who has abandoned her duty. Do you have any idea how long I’ve waited for someone like you?”
“Then come forward. Let us speak as equals.”
“We will never be equals. But you’ve come this far, haven’t you?”
A ripple of chilled air washed over Blessing. She saw the dress first, which filled the emptiness despite the girl’s thin frame. The twin voids of the girl’s eyes, now blood-filled pits, now the nighttime sea, stared down at her.
Her tranquil smile, as before, bared no teeth. She was a wisp, a child perpetually on the cusp of adolescence. A premonition of the beautiful woman she never became.
I will never be a whole woman, either, Blessing thought. How alike we are already.
“You are my test, then. The one I have been waiting for.”
“I am many things. I have been the illness that takes its victims in the night. I have been the voice that whispers in the ears of young men to kill. And I have been following you for a long time.”
Pale light from the windows illumined the fine white hairs on Anasztaizia’s arms, her neck, even her face. Blessing had battled countless others like her, and yet they were nothing like her at all. Something was…wrong, her child’s body a deception. Rage crackled around her like an electrified fence. Whatever lived inside that shell barely restrained its fury.
“That weapon cannot harm me. Soon, when I am able to fly, very little will.”
Blessing dropped her hand from the hilt of her knife. Fly? “Tell me what you are.”
“I am a harbinger for the cleansing, a light-maiden for the purifying fire. But inside and out, I bear the scars of the one who betrayed me. As you do.”
Blessing ran her fingertips over the right side of her head, over its profound ugliness.
“They accused you of being a witch. You denied it even to me. But it is who you are. What you are.”
She shuffled her feet as if Anasztaizia had scolded her. Or judged her. What did anyone know of her life? “I used the old magic. And chaos magick to amplify my powers. To help me protect them.”
“And to what end? So someone will love you at last? I assure you…” The girl drifted past her, a ghost with her white dress and dark hair. “Love is the worst thing that will ever happen to you.” Coldness trailed her like a spectral cloak. Blessing hadn’t noticed the odd smell before, a composite of freshly turned soil, old forest, and…
Blood.
“Who betrayed you?” Blessing asked as the girl turned from her toward the windows. “Why do you hate them so much?”
“I loved my father to the very end. Even as he raped me. Even as he tore me apart with his sword. I loved him, even as I pushed him out my window. That is love’s cruelty, and you would do well to abandon it before you suffer as I did. When others died because of me, it caused me great sorrow until I learned to embrace my gift. Death is that gift.” Anasztaizia nudged the dolls aside with her foot. “I give the gift of death to all who have no hope of finding their way to the Light.”
“What are you?”
“‘He who drinks from my mouth will become as I am and I shall be he.’” Her lips parted to reveal the two rows of serrated teeth. “I can give you power you cannot imagine. There is always a choice, Blessing, even for a Hunter.”
You must resist.
Blessing gazed into the bloody pools of the girl’s eyes, into the blackness beyond, the cosmic abyss in which lurked horrors more appalling than the ones inflicted upon her own body, if such a thing were possible. In the pit of Blessing’s stomach, coils of darkness and desolation entwined until they formed one everlasting knot of hatred, inviting the girl and her insidious wrath into her own heart. She had every reason to despise them all, and she let it feast upon her.
I owe them nothing.
“You must stop thinking so much. It is why your recent spells have all failed. You know this.”
Blessing cocked her head. She had not considered that perspective, despite warning Tristan against it when she helped prepare her for her test. Magic centered on action, not idea, but emotion had consumed her as she carried out her workings against Tristan. Betrayal. Disgust.
“You are enslaved by the idea that what you are doing is wrong, despite your attempts at justification. That wanting what makes you happy is wrong. You are not weak. Why do you allow yourself to be a victim of their morality?”
“God—”
“Has given you an incredible gift—the power to be like Him! Will you not use it? Will you refuse to become godlike yourself?” Anasztaizia grasped Blessing’s hands in her own, as cold and damp as salamanders. “‘Evil,’ Blessing, is a word created by the weak because they envy the strong.”
Perhaps it truly was all part of His plan, but she was not yet enlightened enough to comprehend it. Perhaps Tristan, the village, Papa Joe and her mother and the boys at the hotel, truly did envy her. It made a certain sense; why else should they abuse her so terribly? They saw God in her, and they envied. They sinned as the weak always did.
“The most powerful words in this world are “I am.” When you have embraced what you are, your strength will imbue every act and word that follows. But you must claim that power for yourself. Create the world you want, just as I have chosen to do. Create as you speak.” Anasztaizia released her and stepped back.
“But what do I say?”
“Find it within yourself. Knowledge is our salvation. It is not God who seeks to keep you from knowledge, for the Bride of Christ Herself is Wisdom. It is men who deny you. And remember…” Anasztaizia crouched and gathered the dolls into her arms. “I can wait a very long time.”
“I am…I am Blessing Adeyayo. I am a Hunter.” She glanced over at Anasztaizia, her expression as unreadable as ever. “I am Blessing Adeyayo. I am an ogbanje. And I am a witch.”
“That’s more like it,” Anasztaizia whispered. “They let you sacrifice yourself for them. Will you allow that?”
“I am strong. I am a killer. I am Death.” The words revitalized her, for the strongest magic had always dwelled in the simple repetition of syllables. Words were power, and power belonged to her. She stomped her feet and jumped up and down. “I am Blessing, and I am a god!”
A smile at last cracked the mortar of Anasztaizia’s face. “Go upstairs. Let us celebrate your awakening with a very special reward.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Tristan unlocked the front door and crept up the stairs. She pushed the door closed behind her, too hard; it shut with a thud, and she winced.
Mira peered out from her bedroom. “Tristan? Is that you?”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“Where have you been? Don’t wake up Lauren!” Her voice, having already passed the threshold of whispering, was more likely to wake her than any noise Tristan made. Mira stalked down the hall in an oversized Phillies T-shirt, arms folded over her chest, and flipped on the light switch. “You didn’t call or anything!”
“That was on purpose. You don’t want to know what I’ve been through tonight.” Tristan, her feet throbbing, sank onto the couch. Stupid shoes were made for fashion, not walking. She kicked off the red Chuck Taylors and stretched out her legs.
“Yeah? Try me.”
“I was out with my now-former roommate.”
“Oh really?” Mira curled up on the chair and pulled her shirt over her bruised thighs. Her eyes flashed with—jealousy? Kind of cute, actually.
“She’s… I don’t know what she is. I thought I did, but I don’t think I ever knew her at all.”
“What happened?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. I’ll take care of it, whatever it is. I didn’t want you to worry.”
“Too late. Listen…I haven’t been totally honest with you. I’ve been thinking about this a lot anymore. Ugh.” Mira sighed and picked at invisible lint on the arm of the chair. “Okay. The reason I didn’t go to New York wasn’t because I thought I couldn’t make it as a dancer there.”
Oh good, more surprises. The night hadn’t been quite eventful enough.
“When I was applying to schools, I was diagnosed with leukemia.”
Not exactly a minor detail to gloss over. Tristan sat up and took a deep breath. While she’d expected better of Mira, she also had a lifetime of experience to back up the fact you couldn’t trust anyone to tell you the truth.
Not that she had any room to talk.
“Figured I should stay close to home. And yeah, smoking doesn’t help. Whatever.
Better than eating myself right out of a fuckin’ career—when I can keep anything down anymore. Anyway, I had chemo and it went into remission. But I’m bruising all the time, and sweating again, and I’m never hungry. And…I’ve been throwing up a lot. But you knew all of this already. So I think maybe it’s coming back.” Mira covered her face with her hands.
The dream of a normal life, with her—just another carrot on a stick. Tristan chastised herself for having ever believed in it. She was smarter than this; she had to be, or she was no different from any other woman out there.
Just like you wanted.
Maybe Blessing was right, in her own fucked-up way. Hunters didn’t get cancer. They always died in the line of duty, and that duty should be their first priority. No strings. No attachments. No love.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I should’ve, right from the start. You had a right to know what you were getting into. So now you do. I’m sorry I lied to you.”
“Please tell me you’ve seen a doctor, eh?”
“The same one who’s been treating me since the beginning, at Fox Chase. Great hospital if you’re ever in the market for one. I hope you’re not. God, I’m babbling.”
“You’re scared. You’ve earned the right to babble.”
Mira sniffed, and a half-choked chuckle escaped her lips. That would have to do for a laugh. “Anyway, we’re waiting for test results. You’re pissed, aren’t you? I would be, too. I’m sorry, and I mean it. I was afraid to tell you, because…well, who the fuck wants to deal with cancer? Tristan…” Mira wrapped her arms around her knees and tucked them under her chin. “I lost my hair last time. And let’s be honest, I’m not exactly Natalie Portman when I’m bald.”
“You think I care about your damn hair? I mean, it’s nice, but give me a little credit.”
She offered a lukewarm smile. “I guess this early in a relationship, I expect people to still fixate on the shallow stuff, you know? But you’re not like that. You’re not like anyone I’ve ever met.”
“You have no idea.”
Mira attempted a genuine laugh this time, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “You really don’t believe it, do you? That someone could like you.”
Those of My Kind Page 16
