“I’m not.”
(So thank you, dear girl. Thank you. )
Over his shoulder, she saw Anapurna not quite close her own eyes because somebody had to stay on point, and thought: Damn, if you didn’t get the exact same training I did. We could’ve been friends, maybe, if not for this.
But that’s just me, right? Always the bad cop.
“Okay, then,” Dionne Cornish said, to no one in particular, as she pulled the trigger.
—
In the motel battle’s immediate aftermath, nobody but the surviving Maartensbecks was greatly surprised to discover that Allfair Chatwin had used the Professor’s death as distraction and run off while the getting was good, taking the easy-to-sell-for-travelling-cash Clavicule des Pas-Morts with her. Since Ruhel—icy veneer firmly back in place—was already on the phone arranging cover-up plus retrieval for her grandfather’s corpse, however, now finally set to occupy the tomb bearing his name at last, Anapurna was the one who offered the Cornishes a ride to the Canadian border, along with those fabled clean new IDs.
“Chatwin’ll be our next project, if I have any say in it,” she promised Dee, too.
“Good luck with that,” Sami replied, crossing her arms, not quite allowing herself to shiver.
Later yet, as the miles were eaten up beneath them and Dee stared at the back of Anapurna’s head, rubbing fingers still a little bruised from the recoil, Sami leant over to assure her she’d done the right thing—“The only thing, Dee, under the circumstances. He knew it. You do too.”
“Do I?” Dee shook her head. “Don’t feel that way. More like...well. Kinda—”
“—Like it sets a bad example?”
A pause. “There is that,” Dee eventually agreed, so quiet she could barely tell herself what she thought about it.
CANADA: ONE HUNDRED FEET, the next sign said. Above, the moon hung high; Anapurna Maartensbeck tapped the wheel as she drove, beating out some tune Dee couldn’t identify. “So who’s this guy your—the prof kept on talkin’ about?” Dee asked her, falling back on business, for lack of better conversational topics.
“Juleyan Laird Roke,” Anapurna replied, not turning. “Wizard first, then graduated to vampire at the moment of his execution, during the Civil War—ours, not yours—through some spasm of ill will and sciomancy. Helped that he was a quarter fae on his mother’s side, with ten generations of hereditary magic-workers on the other...a rancid bastard, too, from all accounts. Doesn’t surprise me a bit that he left poor old Maks to rot, once he’d had his way.”
“Uh huh. So tell me, Miss M—is some holler witch you barely know really at the top of your list, with this guy still on the loose?”
“Perhaps not.”
“Good luck again, then. Twice over.”
“And let’s hope the chase ends better for me than it did for my great-grandfather? Why, Miss C, I’m touched.” An expert swerve took them into the express lane, where Anapurna slowed to an idle. “Enough so to wish you the same, in fact, on your journey. S
ince, after all...”
But here she broke off, maybe thinking better of finishing the thought, considering how Sami was sitting right there all extra-large as life, listening. or how she already knew Dee had a gun.
Because: Some hunt monsters, Dee thought, and some become monsters, in their turn. But some are just made that way, with no say at all in the matter—collateral damage, already born fucked, just waiting for the worst possible moment to fall down.
Family as destiny, its own little ecology, forever struggling forwards, forever thrown back. But...it didn’t have to be a foregone conclusion, was what Dee believed, at the end of the day. What she had to make herself believe, to keep on going.
What’s the difference? she wondered, knowing there wasn’t much of one—that there couldn’t be, for any of it to work. And reached out, in the darkness, to take her sister’s hand.
THE SPEED OF PAIN
Five o’clock a.m., and all’s definitely not well.
That’s the thought to which Nimue Ewalt wakes, more or less, as she pulls herself headlong from the shreds of her latest Valerian-influenced nightmare. She reaches for her nightstand sketch-pad before the connect-the-dots “narrative” behind that cold hand in her sternum can dissolve into complete uselessness, shivers plucking up and down her arms as she scrabbles for a pen in the half-open drawer, while Veruca Luz snores asthmatically on the futon couch across the room…
…and shit, what was it, now? A hazy wash of images overlaid like bad Flash on an overburdened browser, shucking files Trash-bound right and left and spiralling headlong downwards towards the final Big Freeze…
Out on a deserted beach at night, maybe Cherry, maybe not; the Island’s polluted shore spread out behind her in a blur of garbage, rocks cold against her naked back, black lake-water lapping at her toes. No stars above. And this sensation of being watched by something hidden, maybe from above, maybe below. of laying herself open—physically, psychically—to wait for an unseen enemy, already settling down upon her like a cloud: entering by the mouth, leaving by the sex. Splitting her from stem to stern entire, in a sudden spray of heat and blood and waste.
Then being buried in the beach’s wet sand, spade-full by hideously slow spade-full—broken, paralyzed, yet somehow still alive, a turtle’s egg stewed fast in its own leathery shell. A chrysalis, waiting to hatch.