One kiss alone I’d ever had from my Princess, got under duress, during the escape she and I—and Dionne Cornish, who’d once threatened to cut my tits off if I didn’t stay away—had supernaturally connived, by matchmaking our two traditions together, to win all three of us out through M-vale’s iron walls. Yet here she was still, run through me like some pleasant disease; finding her would be hard, I had no doubt, yet more than worth the effort. And I had my ways and means.
I well remember the day the Warden called me in to tell me my Momma was dead at last. How they’d found her laid up in that hovel of a house, all swole up and black and covered in flies, with ‘coons gnawing away at the bare meat of her feet. Someone had cut the tall crown of hair that used to fall straight to her thighs when unbound and carried it away, to use in witch-balls, or other such tokens. Someone else had cut away her nose and mouth-skin like Tobit did for Ashmodai, to show his devil-rid love the lips she’d hung on last night, and break the spell she lay under for good. And in between her eyes some third had cut a cross to bleed her of all her power. I could only hope it hadn’t helped him much—that she’d given at least as good as she’d got in those last moments, leapt up high with her claws out like any nighthawk, before they finally pulled her down.
Since then, through the vine, I’d heard how neighbours had broken our homestead down for parts and crushed each brick of it with a rock, burnt what was left, then plowed the ash over
with salt. But my Momma they’d paid a sin-eater to carry away on his back, hoping she’d ride him ‘til she found herself a proper place to rest, and leave them all the hell alone. Him they’d found face-down at the edge of a swamp the next spring, a mask of half-froze mud cutting off his air, and the assumption had been that what was left of Gley Chatwin’s body now lay somewhere underneath that same mucky water. Which at least made it as good a place as any other to start looking.
I wanted words with her, you see—one word, in particular: the name she’d used to call my Daddy up, so’s he could get me on her. For being that he was the same creature’d once got Samaire Cornish on her own mother Moriam, I felt for sure I’d be able to use that connection to trace like a reel whose either end was a hook sunk deep into both our flesh, and pull us together once more. And after that?
After that, Dionne or no Dionne, I reckoned that blood would tell. True family, spawned in the same Pit, ‘stead of raised up apart in separate Social Services petri dishes. Blood would out, come up hard like a flash flood, and Lady Di would find her tough little self swept away in its wake, witch-killing knives and all.
The swamp was up the hill, just over a ridge and through some trees, where the moss dipped low and cracks brought up a welcome whiff of sulphur. If I could just get there, I felt, things would fall right into place.
Except that, when I did...what-all I’d been after was just plain gone. Whole place and my Momma’s body, together.
—
I’d been caught in Alabama, that last time, but one step from the Trail’s end...recalled that much clearly, though not a lot else. Back then, crank and liquor’d been my poison, with the occasional side of junk to bring me down; truckers were my source of transportation, recreation, prey. Kept myself high enough to forget I could do magic, or want to, beyond the usual: glamouring, bewitchment, knowing at a glance where best to put my fingers—whether a man (or a woman) was worth my efforts, and for how long. A couple times I sent the Law ‘round me on the highway, or made fools think my thumb and forefinger could shoot bullets, but eventually, that just wasn’t enough; kicks got hard to find, and the price of keepin’ myself entertained went up, accordingly.
Back at M-vale, the prison shrink asked me once if I was sorry for what I’d done, all the trouble and harm I’d caused, the people I’d hurt, while expressing myself the best way I knew how. I knew what he wanted to hear, ‘course, but I figured hard truth was probably the best policy for both of us, in the long run.
“That’d be not at all, doctor,” was my reply. “Not one little bit. Ain’t thought of them since, even for an instant, and don’t expect to do so.”
‘Cause yeah, I’ve been beat down and fucked a good few times, just like I’ve done the same elsewhere, to others; sowed my unfair share of pain, some of which I do regret, so far’s I’m able. Still, I ain’t been too hard done by, in the main, and most’ve what I got, I frankly asked for. I know what I am—something wicked from a long line of such and proud of it, like Jezebel, or Lilith. Like that great whore of Babylon who consorts with the Beast at End Times, whose house shall be overthrown and never more inhabited, except by owls and satyrs and dragons.
Only person folks ‘round me ever fool’s themselves, assuming I don’t.
I can’t remember now, exactly, what it was that first set me off. Maybe just Momma’s own bad example, for watching her conduct herself was always as much pain as joy to me. Like most witches, she lived a half-life at best, lazy and dirt-poor and subject to fate and the State’s whims as any other during the daytime, only to gain and revel in terrible power at night. But even then, her craft waxed and waned all month long, moon-wise. She never did learn to read or cipher, nor owned more’n two dresses at a time, nor shed her essential liking for hard booze and handsome, stupid men whose passions ran cruel as her own. Wasn’t much of a housekeeper, neither. Hell, I didn’t know what it was to sleep up off the floor ‘til I run off and begged refuge in my friend Orpah Cleves’s not-Daddy’s trailer, and look how that turned out.
“There’s something right bad in you, you Devil’s whore-piece!” her Momma yelled at me as she drove me off, throwing rocks—little thirteen-year-old gal with eyes blacked and split scalp oozing blood, and her a full-grown woman makin’ horns, like she thought I’d curse her where I stood. “Worse’n Gley by far, and that’s sayin’ something!”
I spat, and grinned to see her cringe from it. “What’s in me, Gley Chatwin ain’t seen but the once since it laid down atop her!” I threw back. “My Daddy’s a prince of the power of the air, bitch; I got more jolt in the littlest part of me than most in this holler’ll see ‘fore they’re bones in the ground. And it was that no-‘count man of yours first laid his hands on me, not the other way ‘round—shouldn’t’ve tried to take the trip, he couldn’t pay the fare.”
“Don’t you never come back ‘round here, you know what’s good for you!”
“Don’t look to. But if you know what’s best, you better damn well hope I don’t!”
And I never did, ‘til now.
—
Standing on the flats where that swamp used to be, my prison shoes crammed down inside poor Tad the driver’s boots like insoles and their tight-laced tops rubbing a blister on either ankle, I narrowed my eyes and swore outright: “Well, I’ll be God-damned for sure if I ain’t already, which I damn well know I am.”
“That’s what I’d heard, all right, if you’re who I think,” a voice replied. “So...are you?”
I turned, and there was a girl standing under a lightning-struck locust tree with her puffy jacket’s hood up and hands dug deep in both pockets. From what-all I could glimpse of her she struck me as blonde, or maybe just mouse with possibilities; her eyes were the same sort of blue as her thousand-times-washed men’s jeans, worn high and belted tight. Except that they were hard instead of soft, as imperturbable as cross-cut stone.
I nodded. “And who’d you be?” I asked.
“Doll Tearsheet.”
“A good old name. Would that be of the Step-Stair Tearsheets?”
“The same, though we ain’t been out that way since six-six or six-eight, to hear my Grandmomma tell it. I was looking to find my brother in there—Harlan Tearsheet.”
“When’d he pass?”
“Now, that I don’t know. But I dreamed of water three nights runnin’, dark and mucky and still, with poison oak roots all through it. So I figured this might be where he was laid, probably staked down with ash.” She looked down. “He was a cunning man, or tried to be.”