Spectral Evidence

“I can still figure something, given time,” Samaire muttered.

Time. Which we had, again, and didn’t have, in just about equal measures—but I knew enough not to push.

“Well, okay; you just go on ahead and do that, then. I need a couple of days to myself, anyhow.”

“Why?” Dionne asked, suspiciously.

I shot her a smile. “Oh, nothin’ too strenuous. Just gotta wrap up some…unfinished business.”

—

Obviously, it had already occurred to me that trying to tote Maybelle on top of everything else would be a tad—difficult, at best. So while the Princess dicked around trying to figure out some slightly less morally suspect way to render her otherwise brilliant escape plan’s kicker fully functional, I went ahead and got my pretty May to help lay the seeds of its other components—conceal Abramelin’s SINAH box (SINAH, IRATA, NANIR, AXIRO, HAROQ) somewhere in her regular haunt, the laundry, so it could buy us the sort of violent yet short-term distraction we needed to slip the rest of our business past the Cos, while they were a bit too conveniently caught up in something else to notice.

According to Abramelin, SINAH meant “hatred.” The SINAH box was thus most often used “to create a general war”—a riot, say—which, because the square wasn’t perfect, wouldn’t go on forever. It’d start slow, working on whatever threads of conflict were already there, ‘til the conflagration finally bloomed into full effect…and really, M-vale was (by definition) just chock full’a people who couldn’t keep it in their pants for long, literally or figuratively, on both sides of the uniformed divide.

“Like yourself,” Dionne supplied, when I suggested this tack. To which I simply smiled, freely admitting—

“My impulse control can be somewhat inconsistent, dependin’ on circumstances.”

“Yeah, I hear that happens a lot, with people who end up in jail.”

“It does. Welcome to the curve, ladies.”

Naturally, though, there was a second element to trusting Maybelle with the SINAH square—mainly, that it got her out of my hair long enough for me to go through her stuff, and get some of her hair. Then get naked and take a steamy trip through the shower room, where I rifled the discarded brush of the next long-haired woman I saw: In this case, a hot little Latina Queens baller named Felicia Suarez who saw me hovering near her stuff and scowled like she would’ve happily thrown down with me right there and then, if only the floor hadn’t’ve been so damn wet.

“Stay on your own side, mami,” she told me. “I ain’t lookin’ to switch teams.”

I shrugged, thinking: Hmmm. Too bad for you, then, darlin’—‘cause you may be in for somewhat of a surprise.

By chow-time, when Maybelle drifted back my way, I’d already had more’n enough opportunity to tie the two of ‘em together by those two locks of hair in a classic holler lust-knot. And sure, she was just as attentive as ever, ‘til she glanced up to see Felicia comin’. A stammered excuse later, Maybelle went off to get “another chocolate milk,” and didn’t come back ‘til count; the two of ‘em disappeared under the stairs for maybe half an hour, re-emerging with disordered hair and their shirts tucked back in wrong only to head in opposite directions, fast, and blushing; sort of cute, when you thought about it. Though probably a bit off-putting for them.

“That was…really crude,” said Samaire—who’d seen me snickering to myself, and obviously wondered what the joke was—after she’d finally figured out what just happened.

“Could’a just made ‘em kill each other, and solved both our problems,” I pointed out. But she kept on shaking her head, like a damn looming metronome.

“You don’t have to do things like that,” she said, finally. “To be like that. You just…don’t.”

“Probably not; I just am. You too, gal. And one of these days, you really gonna have to start to relax, lay back and enjoy it.” I paused. “‘Sides, you do kill your own. Don’t you?”

Dionne, quickly: “They’re not our own.”

“‘Course not, Lady Di. But then again…I wasn’t talkin’ to you.”

Another head-shake, but slower this time. I saw something nasty bloom in back of Samaire Cornish’s too-calm eyes, and felt my heart leap in recognition—a shark ill-hid under blue water, sniffing ‘round for blood.

“We kill monsters, not people.”

“Not even people who are monsters?” When she didn’t answer: “And what about the half-monsters, Princess—the low-down dirty ‘breeds, like you ‘n me? But I don’t suppose you wanna look too close at that one, now, do ya?” I laughed out loud. “Gal, you got issues.”

And now Samaire was watching me really close, like she was studying hard on how good my head would look, severed and stick-set. Took her a beat yet just to collect herself far enough to say—

“My dad killed my mom for getting raped by demons, Ms. Chatwin. So yes, my feelings about heritage are… complicated.”

“Uh huh? Well, my Momma killed my not-Daddy for bein’ human, pretty much. That, and he owed her money.”

Dionne stepped in between us, then, clowning hat on firm. “See?” she said, lightly. “It’s like I always told you, Sami—never lend to family.”

Good save; even Samaire had to smirk a bit at that, boiling off the tension. But it didn’t surprise me much, even so, when—later that same afternoon—I stepped into the mailroom supply closet pushing the cart before me with one hip, only to find Dionne’s shank suddenly pressing up against my carotid.