Switchblade Goddess (12 page)

I looked at the old man, his shabby clothes, his slashed throat. He’d had such a rotten life and had done nothing to deserve his hardship. And after all that misery, I had given him a painful, shameful death. In that moment, I saw the world through my victim’s eyes, and the terrible unfairness of it all hit me. I fell to my knees, weeping.

“Girl! No crying!” Uncle Roy’s voice carried a sharp warning.

“I am damned,” I whispered to myself in
kyōtsūgo.
The nurse who’d thought to drown me had whispered that to herself under her breath over and over as she carried me down to the dock. In the eight years since I’d left the orphanage, I had thought of her and her words practically every day.

“No Japanese!” he thundered, jumping out of his steel folding chair in the corner and striding toward me. “You’re an American now, speak English! Get up!”

I knew I should stop crying and do what Uncle Roy told me, but the old man’s sadness had spread through me, a soft rot of emotion I couldn’t purge.

“Stop crying, Miko.” I heard his switchblade flick open behind me.

Instead of steeling my nerves, the fear I felt made me sob harder, the tears flowing freely down my cheeks.

Uncle Roy rammed his knife into my back between my ribs, directly into my left kidney. As I gasped at the astonishing pain, he twisted the blade out and jabbed it into my other kidney. I fell to the oil-stained concrete floor, unable to do much but whimper and tremble as hot blood poured from my wounds, plastering my thin cotton shirt to my shivering skin.

I’d never experienced this kind of agony before, not even in the memories of the people Roy had made me kill. I’d tasted death twice as a toddler, once when I’d been knocked overboard and drowned, and again when the wind had blown me off a third-story ledge and I’d snapped my neck in the fall. Those fatalities were nothing compared to this.

“A kidney wound is one of the most painful ways to die.” He dragged his chair over so that he sat where
I couldn’t help but see him. “A ruptured spleen, that’s very painful, too, and it takes longer, possibly a dozen hours or more.”

He wiped his steel off on a dipstick rag, folded the switchblade, and put it back into the pocket of his tweed jacket. “Creatures like you and I don’t have the luxury of emotions. We demons don’t cry, Miko. It’s just not done. You need to learn to master yourself, master that pain,
today
, because the next time I see a single tear in your eye and we’re not in the middle of a dust storm, I will stab you in the spleen. And if you cry again after that? I will disembowel you. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

I nodded weakly. My vision was starting to go dark. I hated dying, but I hated returning to life even worse, despised the grinding ache in my joints, the bone-deep chills, the burn in my heart as it strained to pump half-congealed blood. I couldn’t catch human diseases like influenza or polio, but coming back from death surely felt a hundred times worse.

Uncle Roy pointed at the old man’s corpse. “You’re going to kill a lot more sad sacks just like this one, broken oldsters who don’t have so much as a spoonful of sugary life left to help their bitter spirits go down. You need to develop a taste for them if you’re going to harvest enough American souls to make up for what your mother lost to your brother in the atomic fires. At my estimation, you still have over 236,000 to collect. Even my mind boggles at the enormity of that, but it’s what you were born to do. And it’s my job to make sure you’ll do it.”

He paused, leaning forward, watching intently as my heart struggled, shuddered, and stopped.

“If I have to go through Vlad Tepes’ entire repertoire to bleed your father’s disgusting weakness out of you, my sweet child,” he said, “then that’s exactly what I’ll do.”

   I got free of Miko’s memory, saw a crack in the ice I knew I could break through with my sword and shield, kicked as hard as I could to reach it, but the black water was taking me down again—

   “Miko, I told you, you mustn’t block your thoughts around me.” Roy turned away from the kitchen window and faced me. He looked and sounded perfectly calm but I knew that wouldn’t last. “It’s a clever trick you’ve learned, and it will serve you well around others of our kind, but you must never do it around me.”

“Why not?” I had to steady my heart; it wanted to jump with terror in my chest. Part of me still couldn’t believe I was challenging him like this. “You’ve never left
your
mind open for me to read.”

“That’s quite a different matter, and you know it.”

“How is it different?” My voice was hard. “I don’t think it is.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw the switchblade flash open in Roy’s hand, but that bastard wasn’t going to get the better of me again. Not
ever
again. I grabbed his wrist and twisted his hand up and over, pushing the knife into his shoulder joint, and he actually looked surprised, as if it hadn’t occurred to him that I was no longer a skinny little girl, a rag doll he could toss around whenever he felt like it.

“Miko, come now,” he said as I backed him up
against the kitchen counter. I could tell he was trying to sound stern but he was grinding his teeth from the pain. Dark red blood, nearly black, was spreading in an irregular circle across the shoulder of his gray dress shirt. “Be nice to your Uncle Roy.”

I almost laughed out loud at that.
Nice?
When had nice ever even cast its frilly pink shadow on our relationship? He’d taught me how to rob, murder, blackmail, cook dope, forge documents, dance a burlesque, fuck like a street whore … and how to die stoically when my efforts didn’t please him.

Still keeping my thoughts to myself, still steadying my heart to hide the elated terror I was feeling, I stared into his ice-white eyes. Genuine fear lurked behind his careful mask. And that’s when I had an epiphany: my reflexes were faster than his now, and I was stronger, too. If he couldn’t read my thoughts, couldn’t anticipate what I was going to do, he was completely at my mercy.

It was his own shame, then, that he’d taken such pains to beat the mercy right out of me. I yanked the blade out of his shoulder, out of his clutching fingers, and drove it guard-deep into the side of his neck. He gave a surprised gasp that was quickly choked off by the blood filling his mouth.

I could have slowed his death and tortured him for hours; I’d earned that kind of revenge a thousand times over, and Mother knows he taught me how to exact it. But I didn’t want to. I was done with him, done with his abuse and his lectures and his hypocrisy, and that’s all there was to it. Best to make a clean cut and move on.

He was still standing there bubbling through his
own blood, still wearing that stupid look of disbelief, so I grabbed a handful of his scarecrow hair and threw him down on the linoleum. It took me only three minutes to cut through his tough sinews and vertebrae to sever his head from his body. There wasn’t much blood in him, at least not compared to full humans. Slit a man’s aorta and he’ll spurt all over the walls; Roy’s artery flowed like a forgotten garden hose, slicking the kitchen floor in his sticky merlot. For good measure, I cut his cold heart from his chest and stuffed it into his mouth. He didn’t have a proper soul, and I was glad, because I didn’t want to have to harvest it. The stunted ones that were no good to Mother just slipped away, like sardines through a tuna net.

My vision blurred toward the end, and when I wiped my eyes in the unbloodied crook of my elbow I realized I’d started to cry, fat briny drops darkening the front of my silk chemise. I made myself turn off my waterworks as I washed up at the sink. I’d gotten good at that. He of all people didn’t deserve my tears.

I rinsed off his switchblade and dried it with a dish towel, admiring it. Roy had never let me hold his weapon of choice. But he was right: it was an unusually fine blade, much sharper than the trench knife I’d been using for years, and it wasn’t nearly as bulky. Extended, the knife had an excellent balance, good for throwing and thrusting both, and folded, it fit well in my fist. I’d miss the brass knuckles built into the trench grip, but I could change my attack style a little and use the folded switchblade like a yawara on pressure points or to crush temples.

It had the weight of a trophy. And when I saw the
weapon in my hand, I would know that I could do anything that I put my mind to. If I could kill my guardian, there wasn’t any mortal on the whole green Earth that I couldn’t destroy.

I tucked the switchblade into the pocket of my blue jeans and sat on the counter. Roy had never told me exactly what kind of devil or demigoddess his mother was; I didn’t know if what I’d done to him would put him down for good. So I sat there for a whole hour, staring down at his body, watching for signs of regeneration that never came.

When I was sure he was dead, I began to pack my most important belongings into my canvas rucksack. First in was a wooden cigar box containing five hundred dollars and my identities. I had three sets of birth certificates and driver’s licenses, which variously said I was Suzy Chen, nineteen, from San Francisco; Mary Redfeather, seventeen, from Shawnee, Oklahoma; and Rosa Dominguez, eighteen, from El Paso, Texas. Roy had made sure I learned to speak enough Chinese, Spanish, and Cherokee to pass locally if I had to. My Spanish was best, so Rosa’s license went into the pocket of my jeans. Then I packed my favorite clothes into the rucksack and laid my enameled steel mess kit on top.

I slipped on the black steer-hide Perfecto jacket I’d taken from a Highwayman biker outside Chicago then went into the living room to gather Roy’s expensive liquors from the wet bar, thinking hard. Just because Roy was gone now didn’t mean I wouldn’t feel an ever-increasing urge to murder. If I went much more than a month without taking a soul, I’d start to
hallucinate, only a little at first, but soon enough I’d be fully reliving the personal horrors of my victims.

Roy once locked me in a basement for two whole months, just to see what would happen. Like everything else he did to me, he claimed it was for my own good: I needed to know my own limits. Needed to know them not just intellectually, not just as some theory of the flesh, but as a hard, physical certainty. After he finally let me out, it took me most of the rest of the year to recover my sanity. At least he’d been relatively gentle with me afterward; maybe he realized that Mother wouldn’t be pleased with him if he broke her best weapon.

But I knew full well that the more souls I took, the worse it would be when I stopped taking them. Mother was nothing if not a ruthless motivator.

There was a circus camped just outside the town; if I joined their crew, I’d be able to make quiet kills in every town we visited. And maybe I wouldn’t get stuck shoveling elephant dung or hammering tent stakes; maybe they could use a contortionist, or a sword swallower, or a strong woman. I could make my flesh do almost anything any human could do. And more than most, surely; I wasn’t burdened with a Christian’s moral terror of body violations.

I took an armload of whiskey, gin, and vodka bottles back into the kitchen and soaked Roy down with his favorites. If there was anything worthwhile to be had in the house or my uncle’s shriveled excuse of a spirit, my brother the fire god was welcome to it. I lit a match, dropped it onto Roy’s body, and left his remains to burn along with the rented bungalow.

I never looked back.

I
broke free of Miko’s memory at last. My lungs were burning for air. The cracked ice was inches from my face. I still gripped my sword and shield—thank God the cold water made my shivering muscles clench, my fingers slow to release—so I punched up with my left arm, the edge of the shield breaking a wide moon crescent out of the ice. I thrust my sword arm up, breaking the hole wider, and hauled myself to the surface.

The ice started crazing and crackling beneath me as I scrambled toward the rocky dam, but I reached the glazed stones and managed to throw myself onto them before the frozen shelf shattered. I lay there, clinging to the rocks, gasping for breath, the frigid air like a thousand needles in my lungs. My water-stringy hair was freezing into icicle dreadlocks, and I could see frost crystals spreading across the sleeve of my jacket. To top it all off, my eyelids froze over my damn ocularis again.

It’s not really cold in here
, I told myself.
It’s not really
anything
in here. This is all the Goad’s illusion. See through it
.

My pep talk wasn’t working, not even a little bit, and I could feel the knees of my leather pants freezing
to the stones beneath me. I started crawling forward toward the bank, still gripping my shield and weapon. My gloves were turning hard as iron, but at least they were keeping the rocks from skinning my knuckles. The land surrounding the pond was a huge, beautifully landscaped garden that had suffered a fierce ice storm; tulips and roses were bent nearly double, their ice-sheathed heads touching the ground. The limbs of flowering bushes and small cherry trees were also burdened, dragging low, twigs and branches threatening to break at any moment.

I collapsed again as I reached solid ground. The paving stones below me felt as though they were sucking every last joule of heat from my core. I wasn’t sure what it would be like to freeze to death, whether it would hurt as tiny razors of ice seeded in my flesh and sliced open my cells, or if it would simply be a numb drifting away, but I was pretty sure I was within just a few minutes of finding that out.

In Cooper’s hell, when I’d switched to a different ocularis view, my entire perception of the dimension had changed, not just my vision. Roughly the same things were happening, but the people were different, the scenery had changed, even the air was different. Could it work here, too? I prayed that it would.

My whole body was shivering and my flesh was so numb I could barely feel any of what I was doing. I cracked the ice sealing leather to leather and slipped my leaden arm out of the straps so I could set my shield down on the stones. With effort, I got to my knees and sat in the padded concave interior. I dared not let go of my sword, and I dared not let my shield get far from me. For all I knew, the Goad was
lurking just out of sight, waiting to snatch away my protection.