Spectral Evidence

She was mainly putting on a show for rubes like that new CO Brenmer, who threw us a full-gawk double-take as he went by, pulling at his crotch like he’d suddenly noticed someone slipped ants in his shorts.

“Oh, you’re so bad, baby girl,” I told her, and watched her pout, more in confirmation than denial. “But I guess you aim to be.”

“I do.”

“Thought so.” I pulled her closer, adding, in a murmur: “Hell, ain’t like I mind.”

And oh, didn’t she just perk up and glow at that? ‘Cause May always was easy to please…just as well, what with her being Grade-A born victim meat thrown straight into the lions’ den, rare and bloody as any potential bitch-turned-butch might hope for. Her ability to enjoy herself under pressure was probably pretty much all that helped keep her sane, given the circumstances.

Was a time when I could do sweet (if not innocent) fairly well myself, but prison ain’t exactly conducive to that. oh, I guess I could glamour up now and convince you my skinny stringbean bones were sleek and foxy, this hillbilly hatchet-face of mine “interesting” rather than off-putting, my many visible scars fascinating rather than freakish. But one of the few things I like about lock-down is how you can breeze by on half-speed, or even quarter-, you just know how to play it right; talk people in and out of things like a human would, fuck and fight to a stand-still without ever even having to use your own full strength.

That’s how I got myself my pocket-money business, running mail and brokering favors; how I snagged May right out from under M-vale’s former baddest Daddy-miss of all time, Verena Speller, who—after an extended turn in that extremely locked-down part of Ad Seg known as the Finishing School—eventually decided that having only three super-stacked blonde groupies with Nazi nicknames in her Aryan harem was probably impressive enough.

No magic involved in either case, nor (in fact) did it need to be…just like with fishing in Head CO Guard Erroll Curzon, King Prick in a whole jailhouse full of corrupt hacks, and so in love with his own piggy self that I sure didn’t have to raise any Hell but the usual in order to convince him he was the one raping me every so often, not the other way ‘round.

“I ain’t afraid of you, Chatwin, you goddamn witch,” he’d say, not even knowing how right he’d got it. And I’d just nod along, smiling. Thinking: ‘Course not, boss. Not like I scare MOST folks, after all.

Hell, sometimes? Sometimes, I even scare myself.

So he’d lumber on and off, huffing hard. And every time he did, I’d inject just a hint more of my poison in him, to keep him firmly on the hook; never did have to worry about falling pregnant, which was a mercy. Going by past record alone, I don’t really think I can conceive—not with a human man, anyhow. Not with the legacy of what my Momma conjured up coursing through my bloodstream.

Holler magic—blood, tears, sweat and spit. Bodily fluids of all descriptions. The good part is, it’s very direct. Bad part…well, one bad part…is, it sure won’t get you out of jail, not once you’re already in. Not when any given escape scenario means you gotta beguile each and every one of the hundred-some people between you and the front door individually, one by one by one. Daily penal system grind aside, ain’t no one has that sort of time to waste.

And: “Here we go,” Maybelle said, jumping off of me, while the PA simultaneously crackled and Guard Curzon’s voice rang out: “Count, ladies! All asses to the rail!” A general stomp and shuffle, a screech of contact locks; the gates slid open, admitting our newest members. And here was where I finally saw the Cornish sisters for myself, as they stepped onto Mennenvale Block A, with my very own eyes: caul-touched, always slightly narrowed against the light.

And just like that, not even a minute gone, I knew Samaire Cornish—the younger, taller, even blonder of the two—was my sister. Not just a sister, a fellow practitioner of the Art—like Gioia Azzopardi, Dom the Cop’s stregha widow, or that gal they call Needle, over in Psych—but a true something-sibling, with Hell’s own mark spread all over her too-calm face like an invisible stain. I think I know my own bad blood well enough to recognize the taint of it in others, even when it’s hid inside their veins.

I also noticed that while both of ‘em were cute in their own particular ways, all their (many, inventive, enticing) tattoos were strictly magical in intent. Tough little Dionne had the Gran Tetragrammaton on the back of her neck, Solomon’s Seal overtop her heart and the holy name of Saint Michael Archangel girding both arms, just like the warrior she was; Samaire’s whole rangy body, on the other hand, seemed inked up with spell-script specifically designed to not only keep things out but keep things in, as well.

Those images looped above and beneath her skin, buzzing against each other like rot.

Not that anyone but me could have told, by either witch-sight or plain-sight. But then again, that is precisely why they call such things “occult.” From the Latin, occultus, “to conceal.” Because their true meaning, their real story is…

…a secret.

—

What I knew about the Cornishes before I met ‘em boiled down to what everyone else did, albeit with one very important difference. In a nutshell, the sisters’ act had kept ‘em criss-crossing backroads America for upwards of seven years now, laying a trail of odd mayhem that’d grown into sketchy legend. They robbed gun-shops and places of worship, desecrated graves and left arcane graffiti behind; kicked ass, too—an unholy lot of it. And told the FBI that the people they’d killed along the way weren’t people at all but demons in human form, preying on the innocent. That they’d had to kill ‘em, along with anybody those demons’d touched, to keep Armageddon far off and little children safe at night. Which was why, in the main, they were in here now.

Digging back, what seemed to’ve kicked it all off was the State-assisted death of the man whose name they both wore, Jeptha Cornish. Their paper trail started where his finally went to ground: Raised off the grid by like-minded outlaw parents, a demon-slaying cult of two, up ‘til Jeptha was popped by the law for killing his common-law woman Moriam, somehow managing to reduce her body to a flesh slurry so fluid its provenance had to be back-traced through her daughters’ DNA. Local constabulary thought he might’a used a woodchipper, though they later had to admit they couldn’t find that, either—along with much of a motive, beyond the usual hit parade of well, he’s weird and well, so was she and since when’s a damn domestic get this complicated, for shit’s sweet sake?

Money, sex and/or parentage, the Jerry Springer trifecta. Maybe she’d been cheating, or maybe he’d just thought she was; maybe he’d figured out Samaire might not be his after all, not to mention the basic difficulty inherent in some self-taught backwoods exorcist’s wife popping out hellspawn on the down-low, no matter how that circumstance might’ve originally come about.

The girls went into foster care either way, separated for most of high school; Dionne did a tour in Iraq, then rabbitted after she got tapped for stop-loss turnaround, taking a load of Army weaponry with her when she did. Samaire, armed with a sprinter’s scholarship and a panel of genius-level IQ scores, managed to make it into law school by twenty, but dropped out just before finals of her second year. Her neighbours-in-residence said she got a visit from some woman looked almost exactly like her, except for being half a head shorter, about a week before she packed up and hit the highway. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Like most history, though, the really intriguing bits are always those ones which rarely get written down. Like the difference between the official version, say, and mine: Where most probably considered Samaire and Dionne Cornish either crazy or faking, I knew they were right. Didn’t necessarily mean I approved of their methods, let alone their raison d’être—they did kill monsters, after all. Awkward.

Yet that, more’n anything, was what made Samaire’s potential heritage issues so very…interesting, might be the word. Especially within context.

—

Back in the now, meanwhile, the new fish got ‘emselves all lined up, “yes sir”-ing quick-smart in turn, as Guard Curzon checked their names off his print-out. “Ahmad, Zaidee. Burch, Lisanne. Cornish, Dionne. Cornish, Sahmeyer…”

“Sah-meer-ah,” the Cornish in question corrected, quietly.

Curzon frowned. “What’d you say there, convict?”

“That it’s pronounced Sahmeerah. Boss.”