Author: C. E. Murphy
Category: Vampires
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Of course I know, but the circumstances under which I would confess to that are nearly unimaginable. “Who have? The vampires?”
Surprise turns Janx to an unmoveable object, just for a moment. It is not done, to speak the names of the Old Races in public. In daylight. In mortal presence. There are too many secrets to keep, too much danger, even for creatures as powerful as they are. But there are half a million people gathering here, and my voice, my insignificant words, are far too small to be picked out of the crowd. At the end of his moment of stillness, Janx understands that, and says “Yes.”
I can see him trying to shape more words. Trying to say, “Yes. The vampires.” But he can’t: the weight of proscription is too heavy by far, and even the light and laughing dragonlord cannot throw it off. He will not acknowledge their names under the sunlight, no more, perhaps, than I would tell the secret that birthed my mother, if even I knew it. So we are silent together in that instant where he cannot make the words, and then I say “I’ve read my mother’s grimoires, Janx. Once upon a time—”
“Oh no,” Janx says. “That’s a fairy tale, Baba Yaga’s daughter. Start again, and make us true.”
It is hard. Surprisingly hard. I start twice, and end with a smile on my lips before I say “Once,” very firmly. “Once, there were so many more of you than there are now. Perhaps they’ve died away, like so many others.”
“No.” There is conviction, if not certainty, in the single word, but Janx presses his jade eyes shut and makes a light gesture, throwing away the question’s importance. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he says when he trusts his voice. “That his all-consuming fondness for building financial empires might be the bedrock upon which his bloodlust is sated. Here I’ve thought that it was me, all this time. How disappointing.”
A part of him is serious, which is rare enough in this dragonlord. The only other of his species I have met is a cold and dour creature, but then, he has been my mother’s slave in the frozen north for more years than I can tell. It was another of my mother’s daughters, long dead, who provided the charm to capture him, and she never broke free of Baba Yaga’s yoke. Poor Rumi is my mother’s forever, unless there’s another way to break the spell.
“Do yourself no disservice,” I say to the part of him that is injured, and though I don’t know it until I speak, when I do, I know I speak the truth: “You are vital to him. Your impulsiveness allows him to be reserved. The money,” I add, and this is a guess, but a good one, “is only a prize because dragons hoard wealth.”
“Beauty,” Janx says absently. “We hoard beauty. It’s hardly our fault beautiful things are precious and therefore worth money. Who ,” he finishes in a breathless sweet tone, “is that? ”
I know without looking that it can only be one of my daughters. Human women can and do turn Janx’s head, as they do Daisani’s, but there is something in the way he speaks which tells me he sees a member of the Old Races. Mortals are perhaps not quite so fascinating, and I am rushing through these thoughts to keep myself from flinching or turning too quickly. To keep myself from showing alarm, because I have no wish to explain my eldest daughter to the man who happens to be her father.
Janx does not, I think, see my sigh of relief when it is Emma tripping lightly up the hill. She moves more beautifully than Jana does, moves as though she’s barely tethered to the earth, and the clothes of this era, silly as they are on Janx, are perfect for her. A spectrum of blues is dyed into her skirt and loose blouse, and her long hair is unbound save for a braided headband. I turn back to Janx, but he knows the answer now: sees it in the mirror of myself which Emma is. “Good lord,” he murmurs. “Who is her father?”
I say “Not you,” with a smile to take the edge away, and he gives me a complex look: surprise that I would say such a thing followed hard by a brush of regret and disappointment, though none of it loses his constant hint of amusement. “Emma,” I say, perhaps too loudly, “this is Janx.”
Her eyes widen and she glances over her shoulder. Looking for Jana, I know, but her sister is one of the thousands, no more distinguishable than any other. She looks back, blue gaze still rounded, and Janx is all but dancing with glee.
“You know me! You know who I am! Don’t be silly,” he says happily. “It’s perfectly safe. All these people can have no idea what I am. You needn’t look out for me.” By the time he’s said all that, he’s managed to capture Emma’s fine-boned fingers, and to bow deeply over them. She makes no more effort to extract herself than I would, and indeed, looks as delighted by his attention as any girl. She has lived longer than most humans, of course, but both my daughters still look like youthful teens, just as I have appeared to be perhaps twenty-two or -three for decades now. We are sisters to the eye, not mother and daughters, which suits us all. And if the girls are slow to mature, well, they have no cause for hurry. My own maturity came more quickly, but I was Baba Yaga’s daughter.
Emma says, “But how?” to Janx, arresting his in-drawn breath and the no-doubt forthcoming flow of flowery nonsense. “How?” she asks again. “How can they have no idea? Mother says you’re—” She disengages herself from his hold so she can spread her arms, then spin on her toes, encompassing an impossible size with her dance. When she comes to a stop, she does so dizzily and with a smile that could break the strongest man’s heart.
Janx is not the strongest man I have known, and is entirely besotted by the time Emma finishes asking, “Your true mass must be—well, massive! How do you not shake the earth and fill the room every time you walk?” It is an utterly practical question for a girl whose sister is a dragon, but Emma’s delivery is breathlessly awe-struck, starry-eyed, and she has caught Janx’s hands again to squeeze them and deepen the impact of her appeal. He has no idea he is being used, which, with this man, is an accomplishment all its own.
“I do,” he says with perhaps the most honesty I have ever seen in him. “But my outrageous charm and devastating good looks distract people from noticing.”
I can see the thought flicker across Emma’s open face: that advice will do Jana no good. Jana has the beauty, but not the explosive personality to help hide her mass behind. Perhaps she could cultivate it, but neither of us would want her to. Her shyness is sweet, and it would be a shame to lose it in the name of safety. There have always been women who can arrest the attention of all when they step into a room. Reserved or not, Jana will be one such, and no one could possibly suspect the true reason for it.
But the thought is fleeting on Emma’s face, and laughter follows, as it’s meant to. Janx loves to amuse, and few women do not wish to find him amusing. “Tell me,” Emma pleads. “Tell me about you. About all of you.” All of us, she doesn’t say, but she does not have to. There is a law among the Old Races, that they do not make children with mortals. Emma, by their law, would be proscribed, although my curious stance as a thing of human magic might confuse the issue. Might, but also might not, and so Janx understands that she is a secret, and that she will only know as much of her father’s peoples as I can tell her.
He casts me a glance, half a question, which is more than I might expect from him. He seeks twofold permission: one, to talk with her as she wishes, and two, to be certain I have no questions of my own.
I nod. All I know of the Old Races I learned from my mother’s grimoires, and while I have told my daughters everything I know, it is easy to understand that the knowledge I hold is not the same as experience. It is also easy to understand that what is enough for me may not satisfy daughters of the Old Races who are, after all, not witches themselves.
“Anything you want to know,” Janx promises. A rash promise: my girls know much of a witch’s power comes from knowledge, and so very often choose to share what they learn. But I will not press Emma on this topic, because even now I recall the squirming images on the pages of my mother’s grimoires with discomfort, and do not ever wish to capture one of the ancient races with my knowledge. It is better, in this thing, to know too little, than too
much.
Janx, given permission, has tucked Emma’s hand at his elbow, and together they disappear into the crowd again, using numbers for anonymity. She will guide him into speaking of Daisani—no difficult trick, that—and will learn much of what she wishes to know about her father. I smile and kneel, re-establishing my space within the thousands. No one else has room to spread their arms or turn about, but the crush would disturb me. It’s humanity’s aspect I desire, not the touch of their bodies. For this is the rest of it: knowledge in one hand, essence in the other. Armed with those things, a witch might call a coal-shovel across the room to ride upon, or give life to a hut with chicken legs so it might carry her around the land. She might shape a life, or, with enough gathered power, even shape a world.
I believe a new world must be made, and have spent most of a century guiding two elements of that new world toward maturity. Tonight I begin the task of softening humanity with its own substance, softening it enough to let the changes I wish to see take place. My mother is ancient, eternal, but I am only the daughter of a man she once ate, so I do not know how long I might live. It is possible my work will take me all the rest of the long years of my life. I am content with that, because it is my choice, and because if I succeed, my daughters will live a life beyond their imaginings.
Jana enters the circle I’ve made, her presence announced by a sigh. “I’ve lost Emma again.”
“She’s found a curiosity, is all. She’ll be back when she’s done with him.” It is not precisely a lie, though I think Jana wouldn’t chase after them if she knew whom Emma walked with. She knows the story of how she came to me, and has never yet suggested she is prepared to meet her father. But she is satisfied with my explanation, and sits down, knees drawn up, within my circle. There are perhaps too many people here, though she was as eager as Emma to come and explore the masses. Still, dragons are large, and such a close press may be more uncomfortable for her than for her sister or myself. I am content to let her sit with me as long as she wishes, but almost before she is comfortable, an alertness strikes her spine and she radiates wariness. Astonished and concerned, I reach for her hand, but her attention is on the crowd below us.
After a moment, a small man steps out of the throng. Unlike Janx, he has not succumbed to the fashion of the era, though in this time and place a fastidious black suit makes him stand out. I climb to my feet with a more reserved smile than I feel, because Jana, her hand in mine, is trembling with rage.
I do not know what dragons learn while in the shell, but it was clear from before her birth that Jana recognized and loathed Eliseo Daisani, who took her away from the city she was meant to be born in. He did not steal her from her mother—that was another of his kind—but he failed to return her, and she harbors resentment a-plenty for that. I, too, of course, failed to return her, but I have earned forgiveness for that, or at least have been recognized as the one who took her from the hated vampires, and therefore am accepted. I tried to mitigate her fury against Daisani, but it is clear that I did not, and perhaps could not, fully succeed.
He joins us in our little clearing, small and lithe and very dangerous, though perhaps not to Jana and myself. His one concession to fashion is that his black hair is worn long, and drawn back in a tidy ponytail. I think him quite dapper, and dare a smile that begets a crushing squeeze from Jana’s hand.
I wince. So does Daisani, which is unexpected. Jana draws breath to speak and I interject quickly before she can loose her tongue: “Eliseo, this is my daughter Jana. Jana—”
“I know who he is.”
Fear is not a comfortable or usual cloak to settle on my shoulders, and it has never been laid upon me by one of my daughters. Now, though, its cold touch sinks through me, and whether I am afraid for Jana or of her, I cannot say. Magic flexes off her, her desire to take dragon form hardly under control. I hold her hand harder, but such restraint is like a flower trying to cup an iron chain. Nothing I am, nothing I can do, can stop her, not if she is determined to make this a fight.
Eliseo Daisani, my other daughter’s father, smiles, and it is not a nice expression at all. His teeth are flat, like human teeth, but they look wrong somehow as his lips peel back from them. He says “Do not,” and then again, “Do not, little girl. There is balance among the Old Races. The djinn can be contained by salt water, so the selkies were once their mortal enemies, and a dragon’s size can be matched by a gargoyle’s strength. But we vampires are not even born of this world, and no one, much less an infant dragon, might stand against me and win. Do not be a fool, child. It would do your mother a hurt to lose you, and I would prefer not to see that happen.”
Poor Jana is flexing so hard I imagine I can see her scales bristling, for all that she shows only human skin. “Someday,” she hisses. “Someday I’ll be your match and this will come to an end, vampire.”
Daisani smiles again, and this time he is actually amused. “No,” he says, gently. “No, you won’t.”
Jana spits and hisses with impotent outrage, and to me, Eliseo says “Another time, perhaps,” before walking away and leaving me with a gleam of regret under the darkening sky.
Smoke pours off my daughter, the sole dragonly indicator that breaks through her human form to reveal her. She strains to go after him, though his departure calms her enough that I can hold her in place. “The Old Races do not make war on one another, Jana.”
Her green gaze flinches to me, and for the first time in her life I hear an undercurrent of accusation: “But I’m not of the Old Races, Mother.”
It is easy for her to pull free of me then, and I watch her stomp away with an ache in my heart. I have not, I think, done badly by my daughters, but Jana is right. Unlike Emma, she is pureblooded, but nothing in her upbringing has taught her the ways and mores of her birth parents. I dislike feeling I have done her a disservice, but then, at the heart of me, I know I have been selfish. I took her for myself, after all, and kept her, and I do not think she knows that she and her sister have, all unawares, shaped the path I have chosen to walk along.
Perhaps I should tell them.
Perhaps I should, but not tonight. Tonight there is work to do in shaping the world to my path, and despite the men entering and exiting our lives, I must prepare. The girls are not like me: they are not witches, and do not harvest power from human interaction. There is no ritual for them, no need for a five-pointed star in a circle surrounding them, no need to sit in silence and strip away the thoughts of the world until they are receptive to its gifts. Nor, in truth, am I like my mother, who might cozy herself within the pentagram, but who seizes life forces rather than ask and take what she is offered. I tread more lightly than that, and have found the rewards beyond measure.
Tonight, in this place, among these throngs of people, it is entirely unremarkable to discard my clothing. It is more remarkable that no one notices, but I am not here to share the passion of bodies, and do not wish to explain that over and over again. Easier by far to twist a thread of power and make gazes slide off me, make myself unremarkable. A few, the especially astute, might still see me, but like me, they are waiting for the music, and there is little else in their worlds right now.
For my part, I want to feel the first beat of music against all my skin. It is the connection I am searching for, the moment where man and earth and sky are bound together, as rarely happens with tremendous gatherings. There is power in that when only one or two experience it; when hundreds of thousands do, then there is magic indeed.
A crone erupts from the earth and cuts me down just as the music explodes over us.
***
It has been too long since I was Baba Yaga’s daughter. I am astonished , and humiliated, that I did not see this coming. That I was unprepared for it. There would be a witch in America’s north-east; of course there would be. Were there not trials, after all? Were there not dozens done to death by those trials? Hysteria is rarely born of nothing, and a witch like my mother—which most of them are—would gain great po
wer from such chaos and cruelty. All of this flies through my mind as abruptly as my blood flies through the air, the scarlet arc captured in a witch’s palm.
Fear clenches my heart as she smears that blood on both hands, painting her fingers and nails with it. Now she is part of me, immersed in my blood, and my magic will think she is me. I have not been so vulnerable, not ever, for Baba Yaga wished me to live, not to die. I call on the oldest trick I know, the one my mother taught me first: that of whisking a coal-shovel to my hands that I might fly away on it. But that was a magic for another time: coal-shovels are not often found anymore, and there are none at this place beneath a starry sky at three o’clock in the morning.
The Salem witch pounces on me and sinks her claws into my skin, through my ribs, searching out the tastiest and most vital parts of me. I scream and dig at the earth, but no one sees me, hears me, comes to fight for me, because there is a spell laid to turn their gazes away. The Salem witch is canny: she has let me do all the work, and siphons every drop of power from me, from the music, from the masses. I buck beneath her, trying to throw her off, but magic is simple stuff, and only knows its own. My mind is wise to her trickery, but to the magic, blood is all.
I do not want to die.
Perhaps summoned by the thought, a tiny woman appears. I have seen her once before, as if in a dream, as the winter ice that birthed me thawed. I have no more than a glimpse of her this time, too, but I know her: as much as Baba Yaga, I think this woman gave me life. Wizened, wise, delicate, she rises behind the Salem witch and rips her head off and throws it away. It bounces across the shoulders of teeming humanity. Her limbs follow, flung terrible distances, and her eviscerated torso is left smeared across the grass.
My saviour is gone.
This will not kill the witch. I am numb, cold, staring at black blood on the flattened grass. This will not kill her, because it is not the revelation of the secret which gave her life, but she will, I think, have a very hard time recovering. Her arms will be easiest: they can crawl, inch by slow inch, back to her body, and fit themselves into ragged sockets.