by Wayne Santos
She shrugged.
“Excepting maybe Tate down there, who seems like an okay guy, you’ve got absolute shit taste in men. I mean, really, what the fuck?”
She rolled her eyes and threw her hands up. “I know. IknowIknowIknow… Oh, God, I have made some bad, bad choices.”
“So, why did you?”
She let out a breath slowly. “Because I thought being wanted was love.” She looked out over the jungle, now dotted here and there with school campuses, highways, gas stations and Western Union outlets. “Back in the day, all those people down there, they wanted something from me. The wanted Maria Makiling, goddess of the mountain, to give them good crops, bestow fortune upon their homes, ensure the safety of their children. They didn’t want me, just what I could do for them.” She looked down, saw a flower budding in the soil. She reached down and touched, felt its thirst for life, and gave it some. It grew a few centimeters, blossoming. “Then Aurelio and Mateo came along, and they wanted me. Not the providence of the goddess, or the divine presence in the mountain, they just wanted me. And they even fought over me. Fought for me. Fell all over themselves to get me to even look their way. It was… It was nice. But that wasn’t love, that was wanting something. Maybe, if I give them some credit, it was wanting to have something divine want them, but that’s really just an ego boost. It’s not love.”
“And Tate wasn’t like that.”
She smiled. “No, he was all kinds of fucked-up compared to them. They were successful, rich, aggressive, take-shit-from-no-one kind of guys. They were ridiculously hot. I mean, Tate looked good too, and he loved me, but he didn’t want me. Or at least didn’t want me the same way they did. Didn’t want me as something owned, something possessed. His name was Luntian back then, and the only thing he cared about was whether I was having a good or a bad day, and if there was anything he could do to make it better. And he wasn’t just like that with me, he was like that with his family. His village. Always helping. Always giving. Always poor, because if he ever had anything good in his life, he wanted to share it with others, and he always did. 400 years later, he’s still the same.”
“So they killed him.”
“Yeah.” She stood back up. “And I cursed them and that should have been the end of it. I thought Aurelio got emphysema and died. I thought I saw Rebels kill Mateo. I went onto the next life and tried to find Tate again. But then… something brought them back after that first death, and there they were, back in my life. And the next. They kept finding me. Over and over again. Never letting me go. Never letting us just be together.”
“The word ‘no’ is a difficult concept for some men.”
“Well, women are used to dealing the cards fate dealt them. Maybe men should get used to that too, and stop being so difficult. They should be civil and rational about it, instead of getting so emotional, and screaming how much they like... beer or something. Why are guys that yell a lot always put in charge?”
“Are we still talking about these two guys in particular or the world in general?”
“I’m talking about a problem. And now we’re going to solve it.”
“But not with our fists.”
“Maybe with our fists,” Maria said. She closed her eyes. “But maybe a different target.” Physically, she knew she wasn’t moving at all. She was just Maria Malihan, standing on the top of a mountain with her eyes closed. But she was extending her awareness, her presence across this land, the trees and rivers becoming new nerve endings, the soil becoming an all-encompassing ear, even the animal life communicating to her what they sensed. Maria Makiling was reconnecting with the land, with the greater version of herself.
It hammered at her, overwhelmed her, almost painful for the part of her that was Maria Malihan, the one still in charge, but she resisted the temptation to lose that mortal self, to fully embrace who she had been before. She wasn’t sure in her current state she actually liked who she had been before. And more importantly, Maria Makiling had failed. Repeatedly. Maybe Maria Malihan—smaller, slower, less prone to divine fury—wouldn’t.
But it made doing this goddess stuff a whole lot harder to process.
She was looking for traces now. Maybe Maria Makiling was more of a goddess-first-ask-questions-later’ type, but Maria Malihan had watched a ton of reality-TV following forensics and crime scene investigation, and by God, if bad humans could leave evidence of their horrible acts, then why couldn’t bad demi-gods?
She already knew where to look for the crime scenes, since she’d been personally at the scene in every instance. There, where they had drowned Tate in the Sulu Sea. And there, where they had thrown him into Mt. Pinatubo, and let him burn in volcanic fire and lava. And there, one of the nameless dots of sand near Sacol island, just off Zamboanga, where Tate had been sold—and subsequently died of overwork as a slave—to pirates.
In each of these places, echoes of Tate’s screams, despair, pain, and ultimately death. And in each of these places, faint traces of something else. Satisfaction, triumph, even relief, and joy were present too, and these came from Aurelio and Mateo. And their smug sense of victory was built on a foundation of black spirit energy that was not their own. They had built their engine of pain and suffering on the designs of their own perversity, but the components came from elsewhere, and Maria was surprised to see the essence of it, the roots of its power, came from here, in the Philippines.
This was not work of a Spanish Bruja, as she had suspected. She didn’t think that either Aurelio or Mateo had the interest or predisposition to wield these forces, let alone know how. But apparently, they had no issues with consorting with the very forces they had sought to suppress. This was magic of the land. The darker kind, one that was usually animal, predatory, instinctual, but now shaped by intellect and handed over to the two Spaniards like swords to wage war with.
She extended her senses, new ones she didn’t even have a name for that could taste the light, feel how blood thickened soil and taste the air of a long-dead scream or throaty laugh, that had echoed once and been remembered by the stones in a cave.
She took all the traces her new senses gave her, putting together a fuller picture. Local. Not human, but not Diwata like her. Feminine. Hungry. With a taste for entertainment that fell firmly in the sadistic end of the spectrum. Someone that laughed at suffering. Something that fed on people, and used their fear as a seasoning to bring out flavor in the blood and muscle.
An Aswang, one of the demonic predators that roamed the islands. But something more too.
Maria stopped her probing and turned to face Teek. “Do you know any Mangkukulam?”
“What, you mean like wannabe witches? Or actual badass witches that do really evil shit, so you should stay the fuck away from them? I know both.”
“Do you know any that are also Aswang?”
Teek actually took two steps back, visibly tensing. “This is not a casual question, is it?”
“No. It’s where I need to go next.”
He put his hands on his hips. “No, sir. I don’t like it.”
“Well, neither do I. But it’s something I learned. One of the predatory spirits stopped just hunting down and eating people, and actually learned how to work magic, then worked its own natural, demonic energy into that magic and then started freelancing. And Aurelio and Mateo are her best customers. So before we deal with them, we have to deal with her.”
“Is this about Hiraya?”
Maria’s eyes narrowed. “Who is that?”
“She’s the worst of the bunch,” Teek said. “She has threatened on more than one occasion to turn me into a jacket. I have learned to respect her boundaries.”
“And where are her boundaries?”
“You’re in them. It’s one of the reasons I decided to go all expatriate. She basically took over. There’s a whole pyramid of them now, but she was the first. She passed on the arts to a few of the others. The rest are just goth kids wearing too much makeup and lighting up candles, hoping someth
ing bad will happen to someone they know if they stick enough needles in dolls.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know where she is right now, would you?”
“Not around here, or I wouldn’t have said this was a good idea.”
Maria stretched out her senses again. Now that she knew what she was looking for, it was easy to see this witch’s—Hiraya’s—influence all over the Philippines. The other divine and supernatural forces were webs, spreading out over their particular territories. Maria was here on her mountain now, and she could feel the powers of the other Sisters of Mountain: there, Maria Sinkuan on Mt. Arayat; and there, Maria Cacao on Mt. Lantoy. And oh, fuck, that was not a family reunion she was going to be ready to deal with anytime soon.
But beyond the territories ruled over by the Diwata, claimed by predators like the Manananggal, or even the pockets carved out by the Duwende, there was a gossamer coating that covered everything like black film. That was new.
That was Hiraya, most likely. And the more she probed, the more she saw how Hiraya had laid out her network, like a demonic, regional Internet that granted her and her chosen access to certain esoteric privileges.
The tracery of that black power crossed from the Philippines all the way back across the Pacific, across America, up to the Great Lakes and back to Toronto. In two places. Two people.
And when Maria followed that trail back to the Philippines, to the exact point of origin, she found that it settled back up north, just east of Metro Manila, in Marikina. It was a node. A storehouse.
And it was feeding energy to Aurelio and Mateo.
“Are you up for a really bad idea?” Maria asked.
“Is it something that’s going to get noticed by Hiraya?”
“Probably.”
He shrugged, clopped his hoof into the ground a couple of times. “Well… at least you’re asking.” He stuck out his hand in a closed fist. “What the fuck. Let’s do this.”
“Imma fuck up some immortal Spaniards, yo.” She closed her own hand into a fist and bumped his.
And that was it. Maria took a few steps forward, felt the tug of the spiritual energy around her mountain. Her land. Her. Behind her, Teek was cracking his knuckles.
Time to commit.
Chapter Ten
IF THE SHOE FITS
MARIA HAD TO make this fast.
She’d tracked a huge, bubbling nexus of extremely dark, sorcerous energy festering like cancer somewhere in downtown Manila. She wasn’t sure whether she could take Hiraya in a stand-up fight, and was in no hurry to find out. Hiraya wasn’t part of the plan, only Aurelio and Mateo were.
There wasn’t going to be a lot of time to do this; Hiraya, if she chose to, could respond quickly. The only thing Maria would have going for her is that the witch wouldn’t be expecting this.
Maria held onto Teek as he ran through the path that Maria opened. They made a good team. When she knew what to look for, it was easy for her to open the paths through the bonds, the energy, the connective tissue of heart, thought, imagination, and soul. But he ran through it all like he was born for it. Maybe he had been.
When they came out on the other end, Teek shouted, and even Maria screamed as a column came out of nowhere that Teek could not avoid.
A column of shoes.
They bowled into it, causing screams to erupt from all around them. Teek went into a tumble, while Maria spun to a halt, before finding her footing and getting back up.
Shoes.
They were completely, utterly surrounded by shoes.
On shelves. In cases. On racks. Nothing but shoes. Maria tried to process it all, looked to Teek, who was staring similarly, unblinkingly. He shrugged.
Then her eyes settled on a sign for a gift shop, welcoming visitors to the Marikina Shoe Museum, home of ‘some’ of the collection of Imelda Marcos, wife of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Maria remembered the talk from her childhood about the mad dictator’s wife collecting enough pairs of shoes to outfit an entire women’s army. The Marcoses had left the endless collection in their home after they’d fled the revolt.
But there was something else that was off here. Despite the bright morning light and the many windows, claustrophobia closed in on her from all sides. And although she was pretty sure she was the only one, she could hear weeping and screaming all around her.
From the shoes.
There was supernatural energy here. The entire building was flooded with it. But it should not have been able to stay like this, gathered up, building on itself, like some kind of solar panel for dark sorcery. Something was pulling in energy and anchoring it.
A little prodding revealed that it was souls.
Hiraya had used the souls of people as tendrils, like coral or jellyfish, to strain the air of magic.
“She turned the shoe collection into a repository of black magic,” Maria said.
“That almost makes sense,” Teek replied. “I think Hiraya helped those two along, back in the day.”
Names came unbidden into her mind as she brushed against the shoes:
A teenage rebel named Enrico Mendoza, who had been betrayed and handed over to the Japanese during WWII.
Julio Nalundasan, dead in his own home from a single bullet, an early political opponent.
Countless protesters, journalists, even police officers who valued the rule of law over tyranny, and had been dealt with.
Hundreds. Thousands. Bound into luxury footwear as magical accessories, as the ultimate insult.
“Well, she’s helping two others with this. At least she has been, until today.”
People screamed.
Maria looked around. There were visitors here. Of course. Some of them were even white. All of them looked at her and Teek.
“Tikbalaaaaang!” someone shouted.
“They can see you?”
“I dropped my guard, and we are surrounded by a lot of bad goddamn juju.”
He was right about that. Maria didn’t even need to use her newfound divine senses, she could feel the energy in the shoes trying to consume her, like Venus flytraps closing in on new prey.
No time for anything subtle. “Keep the civilians out of the way! These shoes are evil!”
“What are you going to do?”
“Fire in the hole!” Maria shouted, stretching out one hand.
“Oh,” Teek said, and charged towards the nearest tourists, raising his hands up and waving them, shouting, “I’m some kind of horrible beast, folks! Get the fuck out! Shit’s going down! Rawr!”
It was a little more convoluted here because she wasn’t directly on home ground. But she was home, in her land if not directly of it, and the land remembered who she was when she called.
She could not create fire, but she could damn well start one.
There were water and life here, under the floor tile, and drainage pipes. She sent word, lending strength to the green and the blue that lay underneath the thin layer of civilization, and a tree that should have taken decades to mature burst from the ground, crashing through the wall and into the electrical wiring. She thanked the tree and pulled it back as water burst forth, hitting sparking wires.
“‘We don’t need no water, let the motherfucker burn,’” Teek said behind her.
She raised one hand up for a high five, and got it from Teek without even needing to look. Then the flames burst into life with a deep, satisfying WHOOMF, and burned merrily along the walls.
She couldn’t create the flame, but now that it was here, it would listen too.
She moved her hand in a long, sweeping arc that encompassed the menagerie of high heels, pumps, boots and brogues that represented a generation of people—crushed under metaphorical heels to pay for literal heels.
The fire grew and extended itself, a ribbon of heat and light, a burning rainbow that settled wherever Maria told it to go. It landed on the shoes.
And ate them.
It didn’t burn the way Maria expected. There was a lot of leather here, so she
didn’t think the fire would get going until it was really hot. But when the shoes burst into black flames, screaming and wailing instead of crackling, she knew this wasn’t going to take long. The flames danced over the shoes, not so much burning them as purifying them.
Then with her new senses, Maria felt it. Like the tremble along a thin strand of spider silk, as the spider raced to investigate a disturbance.
Hiraya was coming.
Maria took in the sight of the black flames racing around the shoe collection. Everything was burned, or in the process of burning. The power here was but a fraction of what it had originally been, and in a few minutes, even that would be gone entirely.
She had a feeling that somewhere in Canada, two immortal Spaniards would be feeling that, and going through some serious WTFing right about now.
“Are we done here?” Teek asked.
She nodded.
“Can we flee?”
She nodded again, vigorously.
“That’s good, ’cause I am scared.”
“We’re heading back.”
“That’s fine by me, there are a lot of people I don’t need to see here right now.” He offered his back, and Maria made a quick run and jump onto it. They disappeared from the Marikina museum and back along the paths and plains between things and people. Teek was galloping now, and not to save time or for the sheer joy of it; Maria could see the edges of white in his eyes, and felt the tension of his muscles. He wasn’t kidding, he was afraid.
A few moments later, she found out why.
The scream started out as something muted and distant, like a train howling over the horizon. Then it grew louder, and closer, and sharper, and then it was behind them, closing in.
Lights shot past them now, like fireflies. The lights of other minds and thoughts, as Teek traveled dreams and hearts, crossing oceans and continents on a plain of human consciousness. And something was tearing up the ground not far behind them, only now Maria could make out the words.
