Spectral Evidence

Home > Other > Spectral Evidence > Page 20
Spectral Evidence Page 20

by Gemma Files


  Those apartments were all vacant now, though not exactly empty, their redly hand-printed vistas giving only the impression of drawn blinds, or maybe a fall of particularly virulent-coloured cherry blossoms. While down in the pit sat Professor Maks Maartensbeck, leant back in the now deep-dyed fountain’s bowl with his equally-scarlet eyes half-shut and his long legs delicately crossed at the ankles, frankly luxuriating, dyed head to toe in unlucky moteliers’ blood.

  He’d swapped his Twister Relief dumpster outfit for what looked like the remains of a security guard’s uniform along the way. Still slightly too big for him, but a far better overall impression.

  And: “Well, ladies,” he called up to them as they stood rooted in the doorway, ridiculously polite voice anti-naturally resonant, some distant silver key dragged over ice. “Two witches, both demon-blooded, both by the same sire—and one full human, by the same dam; hmmm, let me see. The fabled Dionne and Samaire Cornish, I presume, here to chastise me for my many sins...but who, pray tell, are you?”

  Chatwin shrugged, then sidled in crosswise and sauntering, though Dee could tell even her hackles were up, under that don’t-care prison swag show. Calling down: “Allfair Chatwin’s my name, sir, thanks for askin’. But you can feel free t’call me A-Cat, you find yourself so inclined.”

  “Ah, yes. Descended from the fabled demoiselles de Chatouye, I’d wager, whose village was burnt by none other than these two’s equal-distant genetic author, Witchfinder Cornîche. Voulteuses of great power, all, as I’m sure you must be yourself, to find me so quickly...especially once one takes into account your—other connexions.”

  “Too kind, Professor. Just a humble holler-worker out of Black Bush, that’s all.”

  “Oh, hardly.”

  They’re fast, too, Moriam’d said, that long-ago night, so don’t forget it—and holy shit was that ever true, what with all that fresh type whatever jacking up Maartensbeck’s system. Because all it took was a blur of movement, a single tiny eyelid-flick, and there he was, right up in all three of their faces at once and smiling horribly, a highly-educated human shark with blood-breath sporting a manicure that—now you saw it close on—read halfway between Fu Manchu and full-on ten-fingered raptor.

  “You see, modesty truly does ill-become creatures such as we, my dear,” he told Chatwin, who stood there frozen for once, while Sami and Dee both shifted a half-step back into automatic attack-stance.

  “Why quibble terminology? Be proud, whatever you choose to call yourself.”

  Chatwin breathed out, visibly smoothing her face back into its usual smarm-charm lines. “No argument from me on that one,” she replied, lightly. “In fact, you’ll find monster pride’s pretty much my middle name, under most circumstances...unlike some I could mention.”

  He smiled, gore-mask crinkling. “Well, then. Since you’ve mentioned her—” Switching over, to Sami: “What a very decorative object you’ve made of yourself, Miss Cornish, to be sure. Can those be binding sigils? In Crossing the River, no less?” She nodded. “One would think they’d make it rather more difficult to summon your power, even when faced with imminent threat. And yet one can only assume you thought that a desirable outcome, when you carved yourself all over with them.”

  Dry: “Uh huh.”

  “Why?”

  “Less people get hurt this way.”

  Dee saw one stained yet elegant eyebrow tic up in disbelief. “Ah yes,” the professor replied, with fine contempt. “Morality.”

  “Kinda heard you had a thing for that, back in the day,” Dee couldn’t quite keep herself from snapping, though she knew it’d turn him her way—but hell, she was ass-tired of things like this supercilious old fuck always talking around her, just ‘cause her Daddy wasn’t the one with horns. So when Maartensbeck’s blood-charged gaze met hers, she just smiled: not as sharp as him, but sharp enough. Only to be more surprised than she’d expected to be when, a moment later, he did the same.

  “Little soldier,” he called her, with what rang like a gross parody of affection (though for all she knew, he actually might’ve meant it). “How you remind me of Ruhel, at your age...” Then threw back over his shoulder without turning, diction still crisp, yet tone gone melting: “...or you, of course, Anapurna—is that the correct pronunciation? What a joy! I still remember what your father’s heartbeat sounded like, in Ruhel’s womb. You also have his smell.”

  Dee looked up, and found herself locking eyelines with what must be Chatwin’s recruiter: little, yes—small as Dee herself—and definitely a shade darker than the Maartensbeck norm, curly beech-brown hair drawn back in a tightly-practical French braid, though her Bollywood movie-star eyes were as blue as his once must’ve been, or her grandmother’s still were. Had a modified flare-gun held in a two-hand grip (white phosphorus? That would’ve been Dee’s call) trained between the professor’s shoulderblades, with the famous Kevlar gorget peeping from her silk blouse’s collar. Much like Ruhel, she had her game face down pat, given that was undoubtedly who she’d learned it from. But—

  It’s different, when it’s one of your own. Always.

  “Great...great-grandfather,” Anapurna Maartensbeck said, finally.

  “Oh, that does seem a touch over-formal. Do call me Maks.”

  “I’ve—always wanted to meet you.”

  “And I you.” Cornish sisters and Chatwin apparently equally forgotten in the face of this long-desired reunion, the professor turned his back on them and took a pace forward, chuckling when he saw Anapurna’s finger tighten on the trigger. “But where is my pretty girl, my dear-beloved granddaughter? Where is my Ruhel?”

  “Here, grandfather. On your nine o’clock.”

  “Excellent. You never disappoint.”

  So here they all were, weapons either out or on the verge of being so, with the walking corpse of Professor Maks playing monkey in the middle. To her right, Dee had Anapurna, gun-barrel still levelled; to her left was Ruhel, having materialized out from behind what used to be the motel’s front desk, toting what looked like either the world’s biggest Taser or a high-tech portable flamethrower scaled down far enough you could hide it under your coat, like a shotgun.

  Must be nice to get paid corporate rates, Dee thought.

  “I’m sorry to have lied to you, at least by omission,” Ruhel Maartensbeck told them, voice only slightly shaky, “but I needed that book, as well as my grandfather’s location, and I needed whoever brought it to me not to know why. So while I must admit that Miss Chatwin turning out to be able to recognize it took me somewhat by surprise—”

  Chatwin shook her head, trucker-hat bobbing. “Tch. Why does everybody assume just ‘cause I never got my GED, I must’a stopped readin’ for pleasure altogether?”

  Dee could sympathize, not that she was going to say so. “Well, it’s here now, one way or the other,” she told Ruhel, instead. “It, him, and...about twenty dead bodies I can see plus six more floors of ones I can’t, plus whoever else he might’a happened to kill, on the way over...”

  “Plus the team you sent in to get it,” Sami added, “up to and including the only guy he didn’t gut right then and there, the guy A-Cat got your book from. Plus Leah, the waitress, who didn’t even know what was happening to her, ‘til Dee cut her damn head off. Her, those two guys in the kitchen, a couple more people who came in before Maks here was finished, just looking to get a midnight snack...”

  The professor threw back his head and hooted, delightedly, while Ruhel’s mouth trembled. “Please,” she said. “I know what we’ve done must seem—excessive, to an outsider—”

  Dee rounded on her. “‘Scuse me? We’re hunters, lady, just like you—that’s how you fished us in, in the first place. So no, I don’t give a shit how nice he used to be, or whether or not you can maybe make him that way again: you let your granddad eat people, real people. The kind we’re supposed to save from things like him.”

  “Be polite,” Anapurna warned, her voice chill.

  “Or what? How old ar
e you, man? You don’t even know him!”

  “True enough. But I know her—when my mum and dad died, she’s who took me in. So—”

  “—She tells you he’s worth however much collateral damage it takes, then that’s what goes, huh?” Dee didn’t quite spit, but it took effort. “Yeah, well—know what my parents told me? How you people were heroes.”

  At this, the professor laughed so hard he had to bend over just a bit, bracing himself, before finally trailing off. “oh,” he said, “that was delightful. Do you know what a hero is, my dear? As much a killer as anything he kills, but with far better public relations.”

  “That what the guy who made you this way told you?”

  “Amongst other things.” The professor sighed. “Ah, and now you’ve made me sad. I did think, you know—he and I having been nemeses for so long—that if I only caused a long enough trail of damage once I finally got on the other side of those five-foot-thick walls, he might hear about it, and come join me.” A hapless shrug. “But...as you see.”

  “Men,” Chatwin commiserated, deadpan.

  “All that effort, and all for nothing,” the professor continued, as Sami and Dee shot each other a quick glance behind his back while Anapurna’s eyes slid over to her grandmother, who was starting to look queasy. “I’d discorporated him five times already, throughout my career, which I now suspect he took as a variety of flirtation. But then I was old, and one night I dreamt he appeared in my bedroom, telling me he’d slipped some of his blood into my food. You will change either way, Maks, but if you meet me directly, if you let me do as I please, I can keep you from harming Ruhel, at the very least. I agreed, naturally enough—”

  “—Because that was the sort of man you were,” Ruhel broke in here, desperately. “Because you were good.”

  “No, child: because I was a fool. Because I didn’t know, then, how little I’d care about hurting you at all, once the deed was done.” If he heard her little gasp, horror-filled and breath-caught, he gave no sign. “So I went out past the point where my home’s protective wards ceased to work, and I bared my neck to him. Even thoroughly infected, I had time to make my peace and write out instructions before falling into a trance; when I woke, Ruhel had already prisoned me inside the vault. of course, I understood why he wouldn’t try to free me himself—I’d designed it, after all. A dreadful place, and booby-trapped, to boot. But still I warmed myself over those intervening years with the idea that if and when, he’d surely be bound to come and meet with me, at last—just drop by for a little look-see, no social obligations assumed. No...pressure.”

  “So you could kill him,” Anapurna suggested.

  “Oh no. So I could thank him.”

  Ruhel gasped again, the sound deeper this time, more of a half-sob; Anapurna jerked a bit, as if face-slapped. Then said, with a optimism she didn’t seem to feel: “But we have the book, yes? The Clavicule. So we can put it all back, the way it should be. The way you should be.”

  “And how’s that, exactly?”

  “Human. That was...the whole point, of all of this.”

  With mild disbelief: “Oh, dear. My poor, sweet girl, really—why on earth would you think I would ever want that?”

  And there it lay, at last, between all seven of them: the gauntlet. Dropped like it was proverbially hot, a mic, or a fuckin’ bomb.

  “Well, there you go,” Dee heard herself observe, ostensibly to Anapurna, who she almost thought she saw give a tiny little nod in return—before Ruhel jumped in on top, crying out: “But you can’t possibly mean it, grandfather—you, who taught me to always keep fighting, no matter what! This isn’t your fault, for pity’s sake. You have a condition, but it’s curable, and with the book’s help, you’ll be exactly the person you were again, before all this...oh God, why are you still laughing?”

  Because he doesn’t give a shit, Dee wanted to blurt at her, to grab and shake her, bodily—anything to keep her from abasing herself in front of this goddamned ghoul, this sacrilege, just because it wore a rough approximation of the person she’d once loved best in all the world’s face.

  But—

  “Well, one never does know ‘til one’s in it, so to speak,” Professor Maks explained, grotesquely reasonable. “But the fact is, I may have told you a bit of a fib, my darling, without meaning to—because so far as I can tell, I am exactly the same person I was before, right now.

  I know what I’ve done. It’s just, as I’ve already said, that I simply can’t seem to bring myself to care.”

  And: Oh, we got trouble now, Dee’s brain told her, stupidly. As though it’d somehow convinced itself they hadn’t had any, before.

  Out of the corner of one eye, Dee saw Chatwin reach to slip her hand in Sami’s, brazen as ever—and Sami, with no other alternative, close her fingers on it, hard. Saw those sketchy sigil-letters start to light up all up and down her arms, hair haloed and lifting; saw the trucker hat pop straight off of Chatwin’s asshole head, as her own mane did much the same. And felt the power they were both suddenly funneling into her start to light her own medulla oblongata up like a bulb, switching her over to full berserker mode without her even asking. The machete’s blade glowed horizon-flash green as she struck out, burying it hilt-deep through the prof ’s long-dead bicep; he whipped ‘round snake-quick, all fangs, but Dee managed to dodge and slip anyhow, steering him straight into a twinned blast of arcane witch-juice from Sami and Chatwin’s upraised, fisted fingers that sent him reeling, almost flipping back into the fountain.

  At almost the same instant, Anapurna pulled the trigger, firing into his side. White light bloomed, taking half her great-great-grandfather’s ribcage with it; he gave a shriek, spinning sidelong, then shrieked yet again when Ruhel discharged her own weapon, half-harpooning him with species of grappling-hook that chunked in deep and sizzled as she juiced him hard: once, twice, three times, ‘til his hair stood straight on end, smoking, and his eyes rolled up white in their sockets. But did he fall?

  (No.)

  Sharp teeth set and grinding, Maks Maartensbeck clambered grimly to his feet once more, shook himself like a wet dog, throwing off sparks. And began, by slow, tug-of-war degrees, to pull the cable between them ever tighter, reeling her steadily in.

  Though Ruhel fought him all the way, it was a foregone conclusion; Anapurna scrabbled in her vest for another cartridge, tore her palms reloading, but his claws were already closing on her grandmother’s throat—so she threw a glance Dee’s way instead, too angry to beg, and Dee found herself punching Sami’s arm, gesturing at the book Chatwin still clung to. “Read it!” she yelled.

  Sami’s brows shot up, startled by the very notion...just as Chatwin, predictably unpredictable, flipped the folio open one-handed, and started to do exactly that.

  “O judge of nations!” she yelled out. “Ye who threw down Bethsaida, Chorazin, Sodom! Ye who raised Lazarus up, whose voice spoke out of the head of the tempest! Ye who made the bush of the Hebrews burn!”

  “Lift up this carrion flesh, and make it clean!” Sami chimed in, scanning the page over Chatwin’s shoulder. “Ye who made wine of Your own blood and bread of Your own meat, heal even this mortal wound! Ye who harrowed Hell, put fear into this black and fearless heart! ”

  At the first few words, a shudder straightened the professor’s spine, whip-cracking him erect. His mouth squared in pain, “You—” he began. “You, I—stop it. Damn you! Stuh, stuh—stop—”

  Not likely, motherfucker. one more time, Dee glanced at Anapurna, who nodded, and whistled at Ruhel: a three-note phrase, very definite, clearly some signal. Still vainly fighting against the pull, Ruhel reached inside her jacket for a glass ampoule of some red liquid, which she broke open with her thumb and deftly tossed, splattering its contents across her grandfather’s deformed face. The bulk of it landed straight between those snapping jaws, sizzling as it went down; Maks Maartensbeck coughed smoke, then retched outright, bringing up a rush of hot, black, stinking mess. His hands slipped off the Taser�
��s cable, letting Ruhel leap away even as Anapurna jumped forward, landing a vicious kick to the small of his back that sent him crashing further down, face against the floor.

  “Adjuramus te, draco maledicte!” Sami told him, every word a blow, under whose impact Dee watched him writhe. “Exorciso te! Humiliare, sub potente manu Dei!” To which Chatwin added, without any apparent shred of irony: “For my God is frightening in His holy places, since all places are those He has made, and thus it is His name before which all terrible things must tremble.”

  The professor looked up, punished face-skin starting to darken and tremble, almost to melt and run—and was it just the light in here, or did his squinted eyes suddenly look less red, more blue?

  “Whah wash thah?” he demanded of Ruhel, then spat yet more black, before continuing: “Ih fehlt...blashphemous.”

  “Communion wine, blessed by the pope. The literal Blood of Christ.”

  “Buh ohny a priesht—”

  A sad smile. “You told me yourself, grandfather: we have an indulgence, because of what we do. Who we are.”

  Yeah. ‘Cause Sami and her, they were just itinerants like Mom and Dad, riding ‘round from town to town in a series of stolen cars, dodging Feds and killing things out the back. But the Maartensbecks were Templars, for real, Vatican giftbags included...and for all Dee’d found herself thinking must be nice, earlier on, maybe it wasn’t so much. Not the way Ruhel made it sound.

  “Sympathetic magic,” Sami murmured, to which Chatwin snorted.

  “Or some-such,” she replied. “Ain’t religion grand?”

  They looked up to find Anapurna glaring at them both, eyes wild enough to make Dee automatically reach for her drop-piece, the little .22 she kept holstered up one sleeve. Hissing, as she juiced the Professor twice more, in quick succession: “Did she tell you to stop?”

 

‹ Prev