by Gemma Files
“Them Cornishes got each other, darlin’; they ain’t plannin’ to be in here long enough to need anybody else, even if they either of ‘em swung that way. Not like I need you, anyhow.”
“You need me, A-Cat?”
“Let me demonstrate.”
After, while she dozed—all awash with dreamy dreams of how the two of us were both gonna squeeze, hand in hand, through whatever magickal escape hatch Samaire and I ended up cobbling together dancing in her empty blonde head—I studied the darkened ceiling and thought yet once more about that no-contact buzz I’d gotten just from standing next to (not-so-) little miss Princess; how she couldn’t helped but’ve felt it too, rippling up and down those carefully tattooed limbs of hers, the shiver before the quake. And how it’d probably only get stronger yet, the longer we stayed in proximity—ratcheting up unstoppably as we drew ever closer, like the static charge hum just before a flashbulb’s flare, or the filament whine as a lightbulb bloomed to full incandescence…
Dee might not be able to feel it, bein’ what she was, but she’d sure made certain I knew she didn’t like what she almost thought she saw going on: protective, like some five-foot nothing Mama Bear with her claws out, ready to fight to the bitter end. Which I guessed I could understand, though only in principle. ‘Cause me, I never did know what it was to have a sister, not even half of one…but then again, the pull I felt towards Samaire wasn’t entirely familial, as Dionne could no doubt tell; things always were a whole lot slipperier down in Hell than they were here up top, ‘specially in the bonds-of-kinship department.
I did need to know what-all they were planning to do next, though—about me, as much as anything else—and the surest way to find out was to send something to listen at their keyhole. Which I could certainly do, for all I hadn’t in quite some time—and like any other muscle, a witch’s craft does tend to get a mite…tight, if she doesn’t let it out for exercise on the regular.
So I shut my eyes, said a few choice words under my breath, bit my own lip ‘til it bled and took a deep old swallow. And a few moments later, I coughed out a little red glob of sickness onto the cell floor…dirt from my insides, stuck together with Hell-juice and ill-will. A fetch, just like my Momma taught me to make way back, long before I ever saw any Dark Man on top of any hill.
A beat more, and it opened two tiny black jewels to look my way, stretched out its spun-glass wings (still tinged pink with spray) and rubbed its delicate stinger-legs together in greeting. Its voice rose up drily, echoing off the concrete walls—a thin, companionable, whispering vibration.
Let me do thy will, Lady? the fetch asked, eager, inside my skull.
Gladly, I replied.
—
Over in their own cell, meanwhile, Samaire sat cross-legged on one bed with her eyes all rolled back like she was meditating, while Dionne paced the floor, one hand on her shank. Announcing, as she did—
“Look, this is just a bad idea, Sami, twenty years or not—that bitch is everything we ever fought, all wrapped up in a hag-ridin’, Devil-worshippin’ bow. Even layin’ aside what we already hear about how she conducts herself on the strictly human tip, she’s the sort of witch who probably takes names and steals babies—and we’re gonna let her back out, where she can get at the next given normal comes along, just to serve our interests? That ain’t buddies.”
I never stole a baby in all my life, I thought to myself, huffily, as the fetch hovered inside a vent above them, watching their debate through dim, colourblind eyes. Then added: ‘Course, I never really had to, just ‘cause I needed the parts. There’s abortion parlors all over the great state of Alabama, after all…and they dump out their trash like clock-work, twice a day.
(Ah, the conveniences of modern living.)
Samaire, unmoving: “Not helpful, Dee.”
“Right. ‘Kay.” A beat. “Seriously, though, Chatwin’s Hell-bait; we’ve killed enough like her to fertilize a car-park. A witch is a witch is a—”
“—witch, yeah, I got it.” A pause. “So what’s that make me?”
Dionne stopped, mid-stride. “Not her. You get that, right?”
“Except…I am.”
“But you use this shit, Sami. You don’t let it use you. That’s the difference.”
Samaire opened her eyes at that, and raised a doubtful brow; she looked down at her hand, studying that wrap-around ribbon of Transitus Fluvii circling the arm it attached to, like she could see things movin’ underneath it.
“Six of one,” she said, half to herself. Then: “You hear that?”
“What?”
“That…buzzing.”
Okay, time to go.
They both turned toward “me,” then, and I knew the fetch had almost reached its expiry date. So I peeled my consciousness back from it in long, sticky strings, letting its sight grow ever fuzzier, bleeding away pixel by pixel. ‘Til the bond between us finally grew so tenuous I barely even felt a thing when Guard Curzon swatted it from the air as it flew from vent to vent, and crushed it messily beneath one boot. I could hear Brenmer through the wall, muffled, as he blurted out—
“Damn. How those things get in here, anyways?”
Curzon, stomping on: “Fuck if I know. Maybe they can smell all the pussy.”
Which was crude, as ever. Yet not entirely inaccurate.
I turned over, wondering if Samaire would bother sending a fetch of her own to watch me sleep—or if she even knew how to make a fetch, considering who’d raised her. one way or the other, I wasn’t about to lose a good night’s shut-eye over it.
Things learned so far: Cornishes don’t want to work with me, but too bad, ‘cause they ain’t exactly got another choice to switch to, I thought. So let ‘em sweat on that a while; hell, I got time.
Nothin’ but.
—
That was Friday. And a day or so later, I come ‘round a corner in the library—mail-cart in hand—to find Dionne waiting on me between the stacks, arms crossed and scowling, with Samaire looming right behind.
“…We might need your help, after all,” was all Samaire had to say, after a moment.
And: “Oh, Princess,” I said, “tell it to me again, will ya? Slower.”
—
“What do you know about Abramelin the Mage?” Samaire asked, as she pumped a thirty-pound barbell in the southmost corner of the weight-pile, with Dionne spotting. I sat down nearby, took up a pair of ten-pounders and started doing curls, to cover my reply:
“Abramelin? He thought all worldly phenomena were produced by demons working under the direction of angels; we all come with a guardian angel and a demon attached, the one liftin’ us up, the other suckin’ us back down, like gravity. Thought initiates could make ‘emselves into angels, for as long as it took to control the demons…”
“…by using spell-squares. Five-line palindromes that read the same up and down, forward and back. The most famous of which being…”
“…the SATOR box? SATOR, AREPO, TENET, OPERA, ROTAS: Hold this in thy right hand, ask what thou wilt, and it shall be delivered.’ No tools necessary, ‘sides from pen, ink and willpower. But the thing also repels witches somethin’ fierce, so too damn bad we can’t either of us use that…”
“That’s right, we can’t.” She pumped up one more time, shelved it, and lay there a moment, sweating. Before adding—
“But Dionne can.”
We both shot Dionne a glance, like we’d been choreographed that way; Dionne—who’d been watching this little back ‘n forth of magickal esoterica like it was a Satanic tennis game—flushed deep, looking uneasy for maybe the very first time since I’d made her acquaintance.
“Hey, man,” she said, “I don’t…do magic. Ain’t my style. I just don’t got it in me.”
Samaire nodded. “You’re not trained, no—but seriously, Dee, once it’s made, this item’s pretty much idiot-proof.” A beat. “No offense.”
“None taken. If it repels witches, though, then how are you guys supposed to make
it?”
“Take turns. A-Cat does a character, I do a character, out of order. You hold the paper, so we don’t even have to pass it back and forth. Easy.”
Dubious: “Oh yeah, sounds it.”
For once, I had to agree. “Yeah, it’s a neat little concept—‘cept we’d have to shield ourselves, somehow, just to stay in the same damn room while Lady Di here worked her will on the thing. You got any bright ideas about that?”
“…Not yet. I thought, though, with both of us going full-bore—”
“Princess, I can’t shield myself from the sator box, let alone you too.”
And there it sat, for a minute; I could see her thinking on the problem—hard, straight white teeth just denting her lower lip—which was a sort of pleasure in itself, for all it went on just a shade too long for comfort.
“We’d need a jolt, then,” she said, at last. “Some sudden extra burst of power, like jump-starting a…car battery, or whatever—”
“Sacrifice, sure. So kill somebody.”
Dionne, without even thinking twice, like she’d just remembered she was the big sister here: “We’re not gonna do that.”
I looked right on past her, straight to Samaire, the more innately practical of the two. “Let me, then; you know I’d do it. Do it in a damn minute, I thought it’d get us outta here…”
“Well, demonstrably, Alleycat!” she snapped back. “But we won’t.”
“Okay, then: Fuck someone, that’d work almost as well. Or are you too damn good to do that, either?”
Now it was her turn to blush. “Not with you,” she said, shortly. Adding, as I looked back at Dionne, cocking one eyebrow: “And not with her, either—I mean, Jesus! Just what the Hell is wrong with you, anyways?”
Quantifying that one’d’ve probably took us all night, so I just shrugged. “Does sort of limit our options then, don’t it?” I pointed out, instead.
“I can still figure something, given time,” Samaire muttered.
Time. Which we had, again, and didn’t have, in just about equal measures—but I knew enough not to push.
“Well, okay; you just go on ahead and do that, then. I need a couple of days to myself, anyhow.”
“Why?” Dionne asked, suspiciously.
I shot her a smile. “Oh, nothin’ too strenuous. Just gotta wrap up some…unfinished business.”
—
Obviously, it had already occurred to me that trying to tote Maybelle on top of everything else would be a tad—difficult, at best. So while the Princess dicked around trying to figure out some slightly less morally suspect way to render her otherwise brilliant escape plan’s kicker fully functional, I went ahead and got my pretty May to help lay the seeds of its other components—conceal Abramelin’s SINAH box (SINAH, IRATA, NANIR, AXIRO, HAROQ) somewhere in her regular haunt, the laundry, so it could buy us the sort of violent yet short-term distraction we needed to slip the rest of our business past the Cos, while they were a bit too conveniently caught up in something else to notice.
According to Abramelin, SINAH meant “hatred.” The SINAH box was thus most often used “to create a general war”—a riot, say—which, because the square wasn’t perfect, wouldn’t go on forever. It’d start slow, working on whatever threads of conflict were already there, ‘til the conflagration finally bloomed into full effect…and really, M-vale was (by definition) just chock full’a people who couldn’t keep it in their pants for long, literally or figuratively, on both sides of the uniformed divide.
“Like yourself,” Dionne supplied, when I suggested this tack. To which I simply smiled, freely admitting—
“My impulse control can be somewhat inconsistent, dependin’ on circumstances.”
“Yeah, I hear that happens a lot, with people who end up in jail.”
“It does. Welcome to the curve, ladies.”
Naturally, though, there was a second element to trusting Maybelle with the SINAH square—mainly, that it got her out of my hair long enough for me to go through her stuff, and get some of her hair. Then get naked and take a steamy trip through the shower room, where I rifled the discarded brush of the next long-haired woman I saw: In this case, a hot little Latina Queens baller named Felicia Suarez who saw me hovering near her stuff and scowled like she would’ve happily thrown down with me right there and then, if only the floor hadn’t’ve been so damn wet.
“Stay on your own side, mami,” she told me. “I ain’t lookin’ to switch teams.”
I shrugged, thinking: Hmmm. Too bad for you, then, darlin’—‘cause you may be in for somewhat of a surprise.
By chow-time, when Maybelle drifted back my way, I’d already had more’n enough opportunity to tie the two of ‘em together by those two locks of hair in a classic holler lust-knot. And sure, she was just as attentive as ever, ‘til she glanced up to see Felicia comin’. A stammered excuse later, Maybelle went off to get “another chocolate milk,” and didn’t come back ‘til count; the two of ‘em disappeared under the stairs for maybe half an hour, re-emerging with disordered hair and their shirts tucked back in wrong only to head in opposite directions, fast, and blushing; sort of cute, when you thought about it. Though probably a bit off-putting for them.
“That was…really crude,” said Samaire—who’d seen me snickering to myself, and obviously wondered what the joke was—after she’d finally figured out what just happened.
“Could’a just made ‘em kill each other, and solved both our problems,” I pointed out. But she kept on shaking her head, like a damn looming metronome.
“You don’t have to do things like that,” she said, finally. “To be like that. You just…don’t.”
“Probably not; I just am. You too, gal. And one of these days, you really gonna have to start to relax, lay back and enjoy it.” I paused. “‘Sides, you do kill your own. Don’t you?”
Dionne, quickly: “They’re not our own.”
“‘Course not, Lady Di. But then again…I wasn’t talkin’ to you.”
Another head-shake, but slower this time. I saw something nasty bloom in back of Samaire Cornish’s too-calm eyes, and felt my heart leap in recognition—a shark ill-hid under blue water, sniffing ‘round for blood.
“We kill monsters, not people.”
“Not even people who are monsters?” When she didn’t answer: “And what about the half-monsters, Princess—the low-down dirty ‘breeds, like you ‘n me? But I don’t suppose you wanna look too close at that one, now, do ya?” I laughed out loud. “Gal, you got issues.”
And now Samaire was watching me really close, like she was studying hard on how good my head would look, severed and stick-set. Took her a beat yet just to collect herself far enough to say—
“My dad killed my mom for getting raped by demons, Ms. Chatwin. So yes, my feelings about heritage are… complicated.”
“Uh huh? Well, my Momma killed my not-Daddy for bein’ human, pretty much. That, and he owed her money.”
Dionne stepped in between us, then, clowning hat on firm. “See?” she said, lightly. “It’s like I always told you, Sami—never lend to family.”
Good save; even Samaire had to smirk a bit at that, boiling off the tension. But it didn’t surprise me much, even so, when—later that same afternoon—I stepped into the mailroom supply closet pushing the cart before me with one hip, only to find Dionne’s shank suddenly pressing up against my carotid.
“Listen up, bitch,” Dionne began, a bare voice in the dark, low and grim and even. “I know how you think I’m some kind of dead weight ‘cause my blood’s a hundred percent human, but here’s the deal—we get out, we give you a head start, and that’s all. You’re a monster, we’re monster-killers. End of story. Nod if you understand me.”
I did, quick-smart. “Won’t happen again,” I managed, voice thin with effort.
“Good.” The blade drew back—but she leaned forward nevertheless, whispering right in my ear: “oh yeah, and by the way…try to fuck with my little sister again, and I’ll cut you
r damn tits off.”
“Message received, loud and clear.”
“Better be,” she told me. And was gone, into that same darkness, long before I could get up the nerve to look ‘round.
—
On some level, I truly do think I believed I was doing Maybelle a favor—but I also know she didn’t see it as such, because for the next couple of days she followed me around, alternating frantic make-out sessions with Felicia with equally frantic apologies to me. on the surface, she seemed genuinely horrified both to have “cheated” on me in the first place and by her utter inability to not keep on doing so, any and every chance she got; at base, she was scared shitless I might kick her to the curb, so’s she’d be back out on the market again, with no one to protect her at all.
“Think you might be doin’ Felicia somewhat of a disservice there, darlin’,” I pointed out. “She seems a loyal sort, from everything I’ve heard; I’m sure she’ll stand by you.”
“Don’t make fun of me, A-Cat! I just…why did I do that? I just don’t understand…”
“Well, c’mon, gal: Seriously, it’s okay. You two seem very happy together.”
“But I’m not! A-Cat, please don’t cut me loose, please. Please.”
And there I was, still trying to be nice, but really; this was all getting somewhat ridiculous.
“Maybelle,” I said, “you just need to step off, right now. Stand on your own two. It’s pitiful.”
I just walked away and left her standing there, lips trembling, with nary a backwards glance. And the very next time I saw her was when Guard Curzon came by our cell, as per the Warden’s request, to take me to the morgue.
