Spectral Evidence

The smaller woman was visibly tensed now, biceps gone hard beneath the sleeves of her many-pocketed East Coast gangsta parka; she had thighs like she pumped prison iron, so cut Leah could see definition even through her jeans. Such a tough little cookie, with her narrowed brown glare and her dirty blonde Boot Camp haircut, and Leah felt herself beginning to kind of long to see what exactly she was reaching behind her for, the roots of all Leah’s brand new dental accoutrements set aching at once. With the bad voice whispering yet again, up and down the dry rivers of her veins: Yeah, go on ahead and whip it out; get it over with, ‘cause I’m tired of talking. Sun’s up, my head hurts, and better yet, I’m—I’m just, just so, so—damn—

(hungry)

But: This is not me, she told herself. Not while I can still refuse to let it be.

Then added, out loud, like she was arguing the point: “That stuff’s not real, though, is it—not outside of...True Blood, and whatever? It just doesn’t happen.”

The taller woman cocked her head slightly, neither confirming nor denying—though one tattooed shoulder did hitch just a tick, automatically, a movement perhaps only kept from blossoming into a full shrug by some arcane version of politeness.

“Not usually,” she agreed. “But sometimes. This time.”

“But...”

Now it was the smaller woman’s turn to shake her head, punctuating it with a snort. “Just skip the counselling, Sami,” she told her sister. “You were right the first go-’round—she gets it, just doesn’t like it, ‘cause who would? Now get your whammy on, and let’s do what’s gotta be done.”

“Dionne—”

“Samaire.” To Leah: “You got a bad case of the deads, kid, and it stops here, before you start treating the next diner’s staff like your private buffet. Nothing personal.”

“Dee, Jesus.”

“What about him? oh, that’s right: not here. As usual.” The thing behind her back was a machete, carving fluid through the air, already nicking Leah’s throat; Leah felt the creature inside her leap, vision red-flushing, and knew her teeth must be out, lips torn at their corners. But Dionne didn’t flinch, barely turning to yell, over her shoulder: “Do it, goddamnit, ‘less you wanna be doing me next!”

(Yes yes and fast do it fast)

Something caught Leah then, square in the back of the skull, like a hook; it lifted her up and soothed her slack at the same time, a novocaine epidural. She was sewn tight, paralyzed, unable to fire a single nerve—the voice, the hunger, all drained away, replaced by a smooth, warm feeling of peace. Behind Dionne, she saw Samaire’s long fingers flicker, drawing symbols on the air. Her many tattoos were glowing now, right through her clothes, each too-black line somehow rimmed in vitriolic green and sulphur yellow-touched at the same time, like light reflected off a shaken snake-scale.

I didn’t ask for this. Yet even as she willed her lips to shape the words, failing miserably to bring them to completion, she already knew Samaire could hear them anyhow. And thought she heard, in reply—echoing, as it were, from another part of her too-full head entirely—

No. No one ever does.

Seeing the cores of the tall girl’s eyes twist sidelong, little black swastikas at the center of two pearl-gray pools. And letting her own drift shut, letting go of everything at once; barely feeling the pain as Dionne’s blade slashed through her spine, severing her new-made vampire head with one quick, expert blow.

—

Take the night shift and lose your life, maybe your freaking soul; wake up with a killer hangover and a cannibal thirst, catapulted into a world where the best you could hope for was somebody like Dionne and Samaire Cornish to put you down before you did the same to anybody else. That was their cross to bear in a nutshell, Dee knew: the family curse, spelled out coast to coast in monster-blood and mayhem, still-live warrants for prison break and felony murder notwithstanding. But at least they could trust the Maartensbeck’s to use all that career vampire-killer money of theirs to cover their tracks for them this time, supposedly, so long as they returned the favor...

She stepped back just in time to let poor Leah’s skull fall one way and her body the other, neatly avoiding the tainted geyser of blood spraying out every which-way, cellular-level desperate to find something else to infect before its time ran out. But Sami was already twitching the diner’s blinds up again, letting in enough sunlight to crisp that evil shit to ash so fine it wouldn’t register on any CSI test. of course, they could’ve just taken the former waitress down that way in the first place, but it was messy, to say the least, and be-heading was a clean, relatively painless death. So saving the daylight exposure option for body disposal suited both Dee and Sami fine.

No time for much more than starting to think: Good work, little sis, however, before Dee found herself stopping short once more, machete automatically whipping back up, as an all-too-recognizable voice drawled, from the diner’s conveniently propped-open doorway—

“Hmmm, messy. Not s’much as the old boy I just did somethin’ similar to, ‘course, but that’s probably ‘cause practice makes perfect.

Y’all truly do know your stuff when it comes to supernatural creature disposal, you two.”

Oh, you have gotta be fucking kidding me.

Both of them turned together, then, to see well-known holler witch turned cellblock pimp Allfair “A-Cat” Chatwin standing there with both hands buried wrist-deep in her hoodie’s front pocket, large as life—which really didn’t work out to be too damn large at all comparatively, though grantedly bigger than Dee—and twice as skanky. Her bush of malt-brown hair was jammed down under a backwards-turned trucker cap so gross she might’ve rolled an actual trucker for it, and Dee was amazed (yet not, somehow, surprised) to note the crazy bitch was still wearing her prison jumpsuit, albeit with the shucked top hung down like shirt-tails, so it probably read to the uninitiated as nothing more than a particularly heinous set of bright orange parachute pants.

Had a big book tucked under up one arm, too. Bible-heavy, though Dee didn’t have to see Sami’s nose twitch to know it probably had a very different sort of stink to it.

Sami would claim they owed Chatwin something for helping in the escape from Mennenvale Women’s Correctional, Dee believed, if pressed. For herself, Dee was pretty sure all they owed her was a quick put-down, an unmarked grave and the promise not to piss on it after, but she’d long since had to reconcile with the fact that whenever Sami’s highly flexible conscience was involved, things didn’t always go her way.

“We should talk, that’s what I’m thinkin’,” Chatwin suggested, black eyes glinting with ill charm and a touch of sly humor both, like she could read Dee’s mind right from where she stood. And hell, maybe she could—Dee’d seen Sami do something similar enough times to not bother counting anymore, using the half-demon blood she and Chatwin shared, supposedly from the same source. That was if you could trust Chatwin on that one, which Dee very much didn’t, having watched her calmly lie about the sky being blue in her time (metaphorically speaking) for the express purpose of messing with both their minds, not to mention seeing how far she could slip inside Sami’s pants while doing it.

Moriam Cornish’s sin made flesh, Dee’s dead Daddy would’ve called it, they hadn’t already shot his veins full of poison for killing her over lying down with the Fallen. of course, she’d only done it to help him fight a crusade she apparently felt worth sacrifice, but that sure hadn’t saved her, once he found out. It was the key event of both their childhoods, Sami’s birth out of their Mama’s useless death—the thing that’d sent Jeptha Cornish to jail and both his kids into different degrees of foster care, kept them separated ‘til they were both adults and well past the age of consent when they’d made their own pact together: a vow to take up the reins and keep fighting their parents’ Anabaptist crusade, with that solemn troth plighted on Moriam’s grave and sealed since in a hundred different variety of strange things’ blood.

Dee’d already started up where Jeptha left off, wielding rote-learned knowledge and home-made weapons she would turn to her sister’s service, playing knight to her reluctant sorceress—just as Sami had committed on her own to Moriam’s path, though without the shamefaced layer of secrets and lies that had eventually dragged her down. Had already taken the first few steps along it back when Dee turned up at her university dorm room’s door, in fact, so long since. When she’d opened it gingerly, scratching at the first few raw, hand-scribed lines of Crossing the River—the Witches’ Language, Jeptha’d called it, a foul tongue good for nothing but spell-work and bindings on things too awful to force the thousand names of G-slash-d to touch—she’d just inscribed along her left wrist, and