squinted down at Dee from under floppy blonde bangs, asking: Can I help you?
Samaire Morgan? I’m Dionne. Cornish.
Morgan’s not my real name.
I know. Can I come in?
Standing there in her fatigues with a stolen sawed-off full of salt-cartridges in her backpack, and looking shyly ‘round at the detritus of a life she’d never once thought was possible to achieve on her own—track-meet photos, scholarship documents, the tricked-out laptop with all its bells and whistles. The friends, grinning from half a dozen frames—one in particular, familiar from various news stories and police reports.
Heard about Jesca Lind, she’d offered.
Did you. Wouldn’t’ve thought that’d’ve made the papers, over in Iraq.
Well, I got it from your Mom, actually, when I was tracking you down—Mrs. Morgan. She said you guys went to prom together, picked out the same university, all that. As Sami nodded, slowly: Yeah, that’s a damn shame, losing somebody you love so young A beat. She really possessed, when she died?
She was something, all right—and she didn’t just die. Why do you ask?
You know who I am, Sami?
I’m—starting to get an idea; Mom showed me coverage of the trial, when she thought I could handle it. You’re Jeptha Cornish’s daughter.
Your sister.
That’s what it said on the birth certificate. So, Dionne...you here to kill me, or what?
They looked each other over a moment, taking stock; Sami was bigger but lankier, and Dee was fairly certain she hadn’t had a quarter of as much training, not physically. Then again, if she took after Moriam the way Jeptha’d thought she would, she wouldn’t need it.
I’m your sister, Sami, she repeated. How you think you got out of that trailer in the first place? I picked you up and I ran ‘til I couldn’t run anymore. Never looked back, no matter how hard he yelled at me to. So hell no and fuck you, ‘cause I ain’t him.
That familiar/unfamiliar gaze—Mom’s eyes, Dad’s unholy calm. That set mouth, lips gone just a shade off-white, asking: But you know, right? What I am.
Sure. You’re blood.
Only half. Half-human, too—by family standards.
To which Dee’d simply shrugged, throwing four hundred solid years’ worth of witch-hunting genes to the winds, at least where it concerned one witch in particular—and not giving all too much of a damn as she did it. Because: How many relatives did she have left, anyways, in this frightful world? How many did she need?
Good enough for me, she’d said.
And Sami had nodded, eventually, once she saw she meant it. Then slipped her sweater off to show the rest of what she’d been doing to herself, all up and down and every which-way, penning the forces she had no choice but to know herself capable of wielding carefully back inside her own skin. Tracing marker with razor, then rubbing the wounds with a gunk made from equal parts ink, salt and Polysporin, ‘til the result began to heal itself out of sheer contrariness. Lines of power digging themselves down deep from epidermis to dermis, burrowing inwards like worms of living light, sinking ‘til they could sink no more.
Help me, then, she’d told Dee, a hundred times calmer than she’d had any good reason to be, given the circumstances. You see my problem, right? ‘Cause long as my arms are, I just can’t seem to reach my back.
And she’d handed Dee a blade, and Dee had taken it. Said: I got you. And...
...that was it, slang become fact. It was done.
In the here and now, Dee hiked her eyebrows at Chatwin, trying her best to project every ounce of contempt she had across five feet of space, without moving more than those thirty tiny muscles. “Team up again, uh huh,” she replied. “‘Cause that worked out so well, last time.”
“Still outta jail, ain’t you?” Continuing, when neither of them answered: “Naw, just listen—not exactly like I want to, ladies, given the acrimonious way we parted, ‘cept for the fact that it sure does appear we’re workin’ the same case for the same people, from suspiciously different ends. An’ if yours told you the same pile of bull mine told me, might be we should throw in together regardless of past conflicts, just to keep ourselves all upright for the duration.”
“Pass,” Dee started to snap back—then sighed instead, as Sami waved her silent.
“I want to hear,” the big idiot said, stubborn as ever.
“The shit for, Sami? She dumped your ass in the woods, left me stuck inside a wall.”
“Didn’t expect that to happen, just t’say,” Chatwin pointed out. “Neither a one.”