Midian Unmade (36 page)

It was only right; the goddamned thing wasn't even human. It was a monster, and they all knew what needed to happen to monsters.

She awoke exposed to the sun, which wreaked damage on her sensitive flesh she knew would take over a month to heal fully. Six months later she expelled a glob of tissue that had a single, brilliant blue eye, like her own. Her issue died before it could draw its first breath.

A world away, in China, a boy was born with similarly special eyes. As he matured it was discovered that he could see clearly in the dark—as in reading clearly in a complete absence of light. There came much speculation about the tapetum lucidum, “eyeshine,” retroreflectors and ocular albinism, as assorted experts attempted to debunk what was clearly a mutation. Human beings, in their entrenched prejudices, still automatically adjudged mutation as a bad thing no matter what the benefits or portent. Human beings tended to ignore or dismiss the signposts of their own evolutionary process, as if they had always been the same and always would be. It was the fundament of us versus them, all the way back to cave dwellers. Human beings were so obsessive about their enforced sameness that they even managed to circumvent natural selection for what they callowly called a greater good.

But now, post trauma, she discovered a new irritant, a hard, black, oblong nodule, beneath her skin on each inner arm. She worried briefly that she might be calcifying, turning to stone for some indescribable sin. As far as transgression went, she lacked a moral compass. What was right? What was wrong?

None of these ruminations mattered on the street, in the shadows she crawled back to. She knew the darkness loved and would not judge her.

The next time a human being touched her, she would be ready with the blade. It was not special either—merely a worn Buck lockback knife with a dicey hinge, scratched and scored by its passage out of the world of practical everyday use and into her possession. She had scavenged it from a landfill, and its disinterment held the allure of treasure. This was a practical tool. She used it many times daily but when she was attacked, the knife was out of reach, tucked safely in winds of clothing so it could not be lost. Hinge or no hinge, she had honed the edge to surgical sharpness and practiced how to deploy the blade one-handedly. Without knowing why she had also given it a name: Alevan.

*   *   *

If she entered a fast-food restaurant at the right time of night, when the Moon was smiling upon her, and once the minimum-wage earners had dismissed her as a threat (tempered by their reflex need to get her
out
, as soon as calmly possible), they would never really see her with their eyes, which was a boon since she enjoyed cheeseburgers. She was careful to keep on the move and not repeat venues too many times; the trick, as always, was invisibility in plain sight.

She was blindsided in the parking lot between the Dumpster and the more luridly stinky cache bin for cooking oil, which was recycled for rendering into “yellow grease” for livestock feed and biofuel use. The stranger simply appeared; not there one second and there the next, without tripping any of her usual skin alarms or her proximity sense. She lashed forward with the knife, Alevan, and hooked an extended pale palm, bringing bright red blood on the cut.

“Wait! Don't! Stop!” hissed the intruder.

There followed that uncomfortable combat beat of exploded time, in which they regarded each other. It was the stranger's burden to provide fast illumination, to avoid further injury, or a death struggle at worst.

“I am Jexelle,” the figure said, fisting its wounded hand so the blood flow was stanched. “I'm a Collector, like you. You are Aurora.”

No words in her entire history could have hit her with more impact. Someone like her, dressed like her. Someone who claimed an actual spoken name. Someone who claimed to know her name, which she had never known herself. She reeled back, abruptly thieved of breath, her vision spotting.

Aurora
reeled back.

There is a dance to steel and thorn; edge must answer edge, and Jexelle's own blade was already extended in a holding display that Aurora could not recognize, but knew down deeper on the level of instinct. She had never seen the draw. The blade was onyx, ornate, sunk in silver abraded so as not to reflect as much ambient light.

But it was Jexelle's wounded hand that urged Aurora's attention. Now it was held open, in offering, closer to Aurora than the mineral blade. The meaning was clear. Responding by sheer gut feeling, Aurora impaled her own free palm on Jexelle's blade, flowed her own blood, and clasped Jexelle's encrimsoned hand in communion.

To her shock and surprise, the first news she realized was that Jexelle's blade was named Viloriun.

J
EXELLE'S
T
ALE

I am not going to tell you a human fable.

You are not the chosen one, the hidden redeemer, or the secret savior. Our culture has never worked that way; messiah conceits based on completely unfounded optimism.

To begin at the beginning: Your name is Aurora, born of Avo and Matilda.

I have traveled two thousand miles and six years to find you, for you are a Collector, like me.

We have a history, of course—heroes, villains, betrayal and redemption.

But very little of it is supernatural. In fact, most of the Nightbreed's unique capabilities are defensive, no more unusual than fangs on a serpent, or talons on raptor. As in the human world, there are exceptions, and those exceptions form the stories that have always threatened us with genocide. As for humans themselves, they are silly and trivial, deluded and crazy, filled with hate and hallucination. If their idea of a god actually existed, he, she, it, or they would actively hate them. If they did not outnumber us, we could almost pity them.

For some of them have learned that we are the nightside dwellers, the ones who come
next
—after them.

We have legends, too, and prophecies, but we have learned to ignore speculation until it yields fact. We know the difference between fiction and reality. We are painfully reminded of it every waking hour. We squandered time with oaths and oracles; we squandered dignity waiting for the tribes of the moon to be judged by never-seen deities. We sanctioned the delusions of a self-appointed leader and paid the price for believing in Baphomet. Neither leadership nor belief saved us. Midian was lost as foretold, but the truer thing is that no home is forever.

Godless now, we are stronger.

Your aura, too, was quite strong. It repelled most who came near. In that way, it hampered us from finding you. You had no way of knowing what you were broadcasting; to you it was always a matter of shield and defend, which is practical and logical. Even those who move about the city streets as you do, in the big urban areas where detection is diminished, could not approach you, nor could they have known what to do with you.

It takes another Collector, like myself.

You have come into contact with others and tasted their stories, drawn them into yourself. All those stories will forever be at your beck. That is what Collectors do—we are the repository of the history of our kind. There is no dark library, there are no musty tomes of arcana or forbidden spellbooks of sorcery, there is no record of artifact except what the Upworlders confect about us in their fear and ignorance. There are only the Collectors.

This is what you have not been told, because Midian was ripped away from us. To the generation that followed the fall, Midian became as fanciful as Atlantis. Another danger—and this is one we never share with outsiders—is the hazardous length of time it takes many of us to mature, fully twice the number of years of the humans whom we outclass, but do not outnumber. You, Aurora, are still an adolescent. Your forearms have not yet even sprouted. You feel the difference in your flesh, but there was no way to know that you are entering puberty only now.

I know, a thousand questions boil.

As I said, you are not what bad fiction would call the darling of destiny.

But you were born to a place in our society, and serve a purpose within our scattered family. Very soon now you will begin to discover the breadth of your true abilities. After all, up until now you have existed as little more than a child.

I have a little saying I made up: Instead of screaming and crying, I prefer creaming and scrying.

W
HAT
C
AME
A
FTER

Aurora startled herself again by actually laughing at Jexelle's joke. But then Jexelle was gone from her sight, vanished. She had been hoping for a steward, a mentor to guide her through her thousand questions, but had now learned the hard lesson that this was not the way of her people. She was not an apprentice. She was not even an adult. Her task was to earn her place, in whatever world came After.

It would not be the same as the world she had come to know—its limits and dangers. She had become complacent about, if not comfortable with, the mystery she thought of as her fate, which turned out to be another story, one she had made up herself, one that was untrue.

Her intersection with Jexelle had produced a calmer veneer, like a warm membrane enshrouding her perceptions. When the single claw broke the surface on first one forearm, then the other, Aurora regarded them dispassionately. At first they resembled dewclaws, but slightly hooked, with points meant for precise penetration. Possibly for defense, although they seemed too fragile for that purpose. She could extend them, make them retract; and they caused no pain.

They were natural. They were supposed to be. Another tiny furrow of her mind activated eager synapses, and she deduced their purpose.

She already had the stories of Dane, Brad, and Fulton. She knew their lives as a Collector. Where they could be found; how they lived. She had their DNA and memories. She knew Brad secretly wanted to make sweet love to Fulton. That Fulton had killed and skinned animals for pleasure. That Brad planned to murder his parents. Now, in her new skin, tracking them down was easy … because she had their stories.

She learned her misshapen leg had a purpose. It was strength and power, balanced by the maneuverability of her more humanlike appendage. Not an impediment; a hammer. This knowledge altered her stride. She could pivot and swing her hammer to head height on the boys who had assaulted her; it would be like getting hit in the face with a cinder block.

Aurora had inherited some other things, too. Things she carried inside her, like the stories of a Collector, which did not take up space or encumber her in any way. Things she could give back to the ones who attacked her, merely by scratching them with her special new claws, which would dispense at her will.

Things with melodic names—hanta, Lassa, dengue—that seemed almost like kinship names for siblings she would never have.

Things with less melodic names, like HIV, bubonic plague, H5N1.

After the fall of Midian, the Nightbreed prided itself to not suffer many human misapprehensions—made-up gods, fairy tales, morality fables meant to blunt the harshness of an indifferent cosmos. The concept of race hatred was harder to shed. More difficult still was the covenant of retribution.

A new flame had been lit, and Aurora was ready to party.

 

BAIT AND SWITCH

Lilith Saintcrow

Usually I stayed away from Pammy's work tent.

There's nothing good about me being near tarot cards, or crystal balls, or any of that junk. That's why Pammy took the Madama Illyria spot, intoning portentous “fortunes” to idiots and draining each one a little, a very little. Not enough to notice, and if they did, well, lots of people had headaches and lethargy after a carnival.

Me, I was a Continuing Attraction. The Animal Girl. The shifting was easy—sometimes scales, sometimes fur, always teeth. So easy, in fact, that it was my incognito form—what you'd call
human
—that took effort now.

Which explains why I was wandering around during setup, in the gloaming, hat pulled low and shoulders slumped, sweating and suppressing the tickle of tonight's form all over me like a wire brush just slightly scraping, when I heard that word raising little devils along the dusty alleys between the tents.

Midiaaaaaan
, it breathed.

Pammy was running her mouth again. Was she drunk? Baphomet be praised, but each time she got incandescent she started babbling about … home.

Or what used to be home.

I cut into the alley between RVs and trailers for the punkers, thin metal coated with a layer of dust that would hide any sparkle. Summer in the asshole below the Bible Belt, with a nice long drought to make you choke on all the yellow dust, billing ourselves as a family-friendly show. Even Pammy had to pray loudly to Jesus before gazing into her crystal ball. The smart ones, maybe, could hear the sarcasm in her earnestness, but if they were that smart, they kept their mouths shut.

Especially if they noticed how thin Pammy was, and how hungry-looking, and how her teeth were just a
little
too sharp. She didn't have to take a mouthful, neither of us
had
to, but there wasn't much around to keep us from doing it.

Except each other.

Midiaaaaaaaan
. Again, skipping through the lanes, snapping the tent ropes taut, rocking the trailers just enough to make them creak. I shivered, scales rippling up my skin but retreating when I took a deep breath.

They itched, especially around my ribs. Which stuck out more than they should. Meatskin stretched too tightly over bone, and sometimes the shadows underneath looked like claws rippling under silk, just on the edge of puncturing. Sometimes I made a supermarket run and came back with a bag of raw meat, and that held us for a while.

I hadn't done that for a couple of weeks.

The sign wasn't out front, so she wasn't with a client. I pushed the flap open, blinking against a sudden gust of grit-laden wind, and ducked in.