Authors: Elle Hill
“Right there?” the man asked pleasantly.
“Perfect,” the woman said warmly, with gratitude.
“Noooooooooo!” Katana shrieked at the black silhouettes. Her head thrashed about on her neck.
The blade plunged.
His mother had always joked that she’d turned his sister and him into two irreverent smartasses. “My mama was right when she said I was doomed to raise children just like me,” she’d mock mourn. This was before he’d lost his family, before everything had changed.
Reed milled about the dark-paneled room, scanning titles in bookcases and instantly forgetting them. He ended up standing before a potted bamboo palm and planning how to tell the Grecos to stop over-watering it.
Someone strode into the room behind him and paused. He waited.
“I’ve decided,” Cor breezed, “to come in here and give you the opportunity to apologize.”
Reed turned from the palm. Cor stood across the room from him, just inside the doorway, a narrow couch and a coffee table between them. She posed before him, hands on hips, eyebrows raised, foot tapping like some kind of cinematic diva.
“Thank you for the opportunity,” he said dryly. He stuffed his hands in his pockets up to the knuckles.
She inclined her blue head. “What was that in there? I know you’re a newbie and all, but that was some heavy-duty self-righteousness.”
“You woo me with your saccharin sweetness,” he said.
Cor sighed and started to run a hand through her hair before remembering she had gelled, sprayed, or glued it into a jagged blue sculpture atop her well-shaped head. “All right with the sarcasm.” She sighed. “Let’s try an honest answer for once. What were you doing in there?”
After a moment, Reed looked past her into the empty hallway. “Don’t you ever question the morality of feeding off people?”
Cor slunk over the couch and plunked down on it. She slapped her hands on her knees and chirped, “Nope.”
He walked a step toward her. “You never worry that you’re taking something that doesn’t belong to you? Stealing something finite, something that might actually change or shorten someone’s life?”
“Nope,” she repeated, smiling at him.
“Liar.”
After a moment, Cor’s mouth straightened. “FYI, you suck at this apologizing thing,” she said. After a moment, she challenged, “Does it bother you to know your meals have stolen a life from a factory farm?”
Reed took another step toward the couch. “It’s kind of different, animals versus people.”
Cor chuckled and leaned against the back of the couch. “Well, thank goodness issues of morality are so clear to you,” she said. “None of that gray area or anything messy, right?”
Reed reached the couch and sat down at the end. After a moment, during which time Cor’s smile softened into something a bit more genuine, he asked her, “How many Clan members have you killed?”
Her face chilled into a thinner, harder, version of itself. In that moment, he saw her kinship to Alexis Greco.
“Cozy, cozy!” sang a voice from the doorway. They both turned and found Carnelian standing there, grinning impishly at them. “And you accuse
me
of flirting!” she tsked.
Carnie bustled into the room, ample hips swinging, curls bouncing. With a homey
whump
she plopped into the velvety chair adjacent to the couch.
“I was bored to tears,” Carnie confided in a loud whisper, “and figured I’d come out here where the conversation is bound to be more
interesting
.” She grinned, and her eyes twinkled like fierce blue stars.
“Seeing you is one of the only bright spots of these horrible meetings,” Cor admitted, smiling at the woman.
“Such a charmer, this one,” Carnie said with great warmth. “I helped raise this little hellcat, you know,” she told Reed, her teeth and eyes still sparkling. “When her mother passed, God rest her soul, Alexio sent her to stay with me for a bit. I was beyond myself with happiness.”
“Oh, stop it,” Cor said, smiling at the plump woman. “I was a mess. Dad had no idea what to do with a grieving daughter. I know I caused you a sleepless night or seventy.”
“Oh, maybe a couple, but we were happy to have you there. And besides, with Ericka at the helm, we managed to whip you into shape.” Carnie laughed.
Cor turned to Reed and spoke out of the corner of her mouth. “Ericka Tailor was hell on wheels. I was terrified of her. More than once I went crying to Carnie for comfort after Ericka caught me breaking one of her eight million rules.”
“Hellcat,” Carnie repeated, and winked at Reed. She smoothed her hands over her upper thighs, stirring the baggy denim into clumps. “And in answer to your question, Reed, six.”
His eyebrows tilted in confusion.
“Six,” she repeated. “I know you were asking Corinna, but I’ve killed six of them.”
Reed stared at her, mouth closed, eyes clear.
“They were all Hunters, all women, all mean as scorpions.” She grinned saucily at him.
“Carnie is a real firecracker,” Cor said.
“I know it may be hard to believe, but I was quite active in the field up until my early sixties. Not many get to be my age, you know, but I like to think I’m just a little bit faster and a whole lot meaner.” Her chiming laugh clanged through Reed’s ears.
Carnie leaned back into the chair and stared over their heads. Her eyes sat like merry blueberries in her round, smooth, happy face. “The last one I took out happened right around eight, maybe nine, years ago. Broschi and Clan, we make for a small community, and most of us know each other. I’d known Lin for more than twenty years, and I hated her. Finally, just a few years before I retired, I was lucky and crafty enough to smear the bitch.”
“Carnie!” Cor scolded.
The older woman ducked her head and grinned, acknowledging her naughtiness. “You’re right, Cor. No need to bring a potty mouth into the room. We’re civilized folk.”
Reed stared at her, wishing for one of his smartass comments to pop into mind.
From her relaxed position against the chair cushion, Carnie dimpled at him. In a dramatic whisper, she confided, “Cor is still a virgin. No kills just yet. But she’s a good fighter and one of our brightest. We have great hopes for this one.”
Like some kind of fevered hospital patient, Katana’s attention faded from one moment to the next. Boundaries, tangibles, the alphas and omegas: edges remained indistinct, substance undefined. She had memories of ferrying across some version of the River Styx, of jumping up and finding the ground suddenly miles beneath her, of stumbling through a maze of corridors in search of someone screaming, of the tears from her eyes sliding downward and shattering the world. Every time she became aware of her surroundings, she’d try to establish control, to assert dominance over her world. Walls would shimmer, scenery would change, but then something would distract her and she would forget.
Throughout all of it, she watched for Reed. Was it time? Was this the one? Would she find him behind this wall, inside that groaning sarcophagus?
Sometimes for seconds, even minutes, at a time, she would realize she was dreaming and try to grab hold of the thoughts that drifted through her brain like confetti. Katana. She was Katana. Katana A-A-Actor? Acton? No. Acton was a city. Was she from Acton?
A roar would swell from behind her, the wind would shove her to her knees, the ground would ripple like Jello. She would scream. Or run. Or shake her fists and rage.
And forget.
After dinner that night back at “Casa Daleth,” Quina asked Reed, with razor-edged politeness, if he would please follow her into the family room. Once seated, she withdrew from the bottom curio cabinet an extra-large, leather-bound photo album. She and Maricruz sat silently on the sofa opposite his chair, leafing slowly, ponderously, through the black pages. A small coffee table separated them.
A little over halfway into the album, they turned it toward him and centered it on the coffee table. Pictures of a gamine, white-skinned and blonde, crowded the left page. She wore pastel dresses in each picture and posed in that self-conscious way people adopt in front of a camera. In the only truly candid picture, she wore a voluminous white nightgown and pink bunny slippers and appeared to be tickling a darker-skinned adolescent. The pair sat on the very loveseat Cor had occupied just days ago.
“That’s Berto,” Mari told him, pointing to the young teenager. Reed looked again and could see it.
“That girl is my daughter, Lily,” Quina said. “She died four years ago, two years after this picture was taken.” Reed glanced at her and found her as dry-eyed and remote as usual.
The right page featured pictures of Maricruz ranging in age from a pre-pubescent girl to a photo of her that might have been snapped yesterday. Her radiant smile beamed from many of the pictures, while a few highlighted her solemn, wide-eyed beauty.
After a moment, Mari turned the page. Berto on the left, mugging for the camera in almost every picture. On the right, a collection of pictures featuring a narrow-eyed, young White man with a prominent chin and surprisingly full lips. His curly brown hair billowed around his head in every shot. He never smiled.
“Mark,” Quina said, pointing at the right page. She flipped the page one more time, and Reed saw two new people, one a hard-lipped Black man in his fifties and the other an ambiguously raced, very young woman with the light brown skin, dark eyes, and plush lips. She flashed attitude in the pictures, sticking out her tongue, making annoyed faces, and even flipping the bird. “Stefan and Sita.”
“All Family Daleth,” Maricruz said to him in a serene, singsong tone.
Reed didn’t ask the obvious question about where they were. He was pretty certain he knew.
After pausing for a moment, Quina pointed again at various pictures, repeating the names. She stared into his eyes, her face cold and white.
“Lily, Stefan, and Sita all died in the same fight against Clan members.” Deadpan voice, steadfast gaze. “Four years ago they, along with Mari, went out as a group. While they were out, a large group of Hunters attacked. Only Mari escaped, and she remained hospitalized for some days afterward.”
Mari flipped the page and swirled her fingertip around the curly-haired man Quina had called Mark. “Mark and Sita were an item, but of course he loved all of us. When he found out what had happened, he blasted out of the house. They tell me no one could stop him or find him for a couple of days.”
“We found out he was dead when we received a visit from police,” Quina said. “They ruled it a suicide, but he died from a slit throat, a common Clan method.”
They were silent for a moment. “If you’ve ever wondered why we’re such a small Family compared to Families Tailor and Greco, now you know,” Mari said. She slid to her feet and walked sinuously, feet slightly crossing with each step, out of the room.
Reed finally looked away from the pictures.
“We’re just trying to survive.” Quina spoke quietly. From the sound quality, he imagined her head lowered as she stared at the pictures of the dead. “We never asked to be who we are. We never asked to fight in a war that we didn’t start.”
He looked back at her and found her turning the page to the one that featured an awkwardly smiling, but still warm and breathing, Lily Daleth.
Alberto pressed his forefinger to his lips and screwed his face into a ball of caution. “Shhhhh!”
“Why do people say that?” Reed mused. “The sibilance draws more attention than any words could.”
“Man, shut up,” Berto said in exasperation. “We’re about to cross into enemy territory, and these crazy bitches hear as well as cats.”
“We’re here to see Clan members?” Reed asked as they reached the top of the interior staircase. “Here” was a running track in northeast L.A. The two men had climbed to the top of the structure from some interior, dimly lit set of stairs doubtlessly used by maintenance crews.
His forefinger bisecting his lips into two plump hemispheres, Alberto gazed pointedly at Reed and jerked his head toward rusted, pneumatic door held open with a crumbling brick. Reed crept obediently forward to the doorway and the watery daylight washing the threshold.
The view beyond the door failed to inspire awe, or even caution. Clouded sunlight yawned down on the eastern curve of the 400-meter track looming below them. Reed slipped forward a few feet to see beyond the wall immediately to his right.
Once clear of the wall, he pressed his hand against its adobe-textured coolness and gazed down upon the sight of ten or eleven young women stretching their legs and torsos. Bodies in varying shades of beige and brown, clad in anything from tanks and leggings to sweats, flexed smoothly, sinuously. Even doing something as innocuous as bending and twisting to warm up their muscles, these young women radiated grace and danger. He was reminded of the same panther-like grace and sleepy energy of Maricruz.
A cool wind hissed over his face. Luckily for Berto and him, it blew toward them. No Hunter would smell the two Broschi playing peeping Toms.
A high-pitched, feminine voice snapped something, and a couple of the women laughed.
“They come here to learn jumps and sprints,” Berto whispered next to him.
Reed turned his head. “Why are we here?”
Berto shrugged. “Quina told me to bring you. Know thy enemy kind of thing, probably.”
Reed stared at the women, who were listening to an older woman as she strode before them, gesturing with sharp chops. She looked like any general in the field, instructing the troops.
“Why are their warriors all women?” he asked quietly.
Berto shrugged again. “It’s just how it is. Lots of animals—you know, in nature —are like that. The female is the fierce one. God knows the Clan are as close to animals as you can get and still walk upright.”
“What do their men do?”
Berto snorted, and his eyes moved beyond Reed’s to look at the women below, who were arranging themselves into a line. “Use their psychic mojo to figure out where to point the Hunters. Other than that, who knows?”
“But what about that guy I saw that first day—the one with the scars?”
Berto scrunched his upper lip into his nose. “That’s Gabriel. He’s one of the few Psychics they bother training. Sometimes when I watch them training I see him in the group, the only guy with a bunch of girls.”