We Will All Go Down Together (43 page)

I’ve seen it done many times since my own birth, far more so than any other of the former Watchers, Penemue Grigorim is not one to deny itself. Every time, I’ve wanted to do something more than watch, and every time, I’ve failed to. That’s my real sin, above and beyond a mere accident of birth. That’s what I have to pay for, even if Penemue never will.

Which is, as you may already have guessed, where Sister Blandina comes in.

Back down on Five Below, the safehouse dormitory level, sisters were going through their motions in shifts: sleeping, praying, practising weaponry. Mother Eulalia stood waiting by the interrogation suite, next to a shuttered wall-sized observation window. From this angle, though upright as ever, she looked exhausted. So odd to think she could only be ten or twelve years older than Blandina or Cecilia, with her eyebrows already turning grey and that puckered seam from empty eye-socket to cheekbone permanently purple-tinged, as though necrotic.

“Sisters,” she said, raising her hand in blessing, then rapped lightly on the glass. The shutters turned, revealing a woman, the same shade and size as Blandina’s favourite auntie, tied down with double-weight straps, the heavy metal chair she sat in bolted to the steel-slicked floor.

Blandina leaned in, narrowing her eyes. “Looks like a . . . loogaroo, soucouyant?”

“The latter. We found it at Sick Kids’, on the oncology ward—that rash of ‘heart failures.’”

“Place is a buffet waiting to happen, Mother, I’ve always said it. We need a permanent lay sister nurse-practitioner in there yesterday, someone with the front desk on speed-text.”

“Perhaps after this mission, dear.”

The soucouyant listened intently, its very stillness a slap in the face of how any “normal” person would act—kidnapped by crazy church ladies, then left to wait in a room underground with no company but cameras. Shifting to peer closer, Blandina saw a film—brief but reflective, a cop-car red-blue flash—pass across its eyes.

“So,” Cecilia asked Mother Eulalia, “what’s the procedure, exactly?”

“Oh, nothing too elaborate. Just follow Blandina’s lead, and you’ll do admirably.”

“. . . ma’am.”

Brave words,
Blandina thought. As Mother Eulalia touched the girl’s shoulder, she could only hope Cecilia understood what an honour that was, though she suspected she probably didn’t.

“I call bad cop,” she said, and keyed the door.

In the
Bestiarium
, the soucouyant got a two-page spread with illustrations: two Sorores in full old-school habit holding one by either arm, poised as though to pull it limb from limb.
Found mainly in the Caribbean and West Indies, this creature leaves its skin each night to fly around as a ball of fire, preying on the weak and helpless. . . . Disturbingly, the soucouyant may be unaware of its own evil, dismissing its nightly wanderings as mere bad dreams. In all such cases, proof and cure are one and the same: effective, yet inevitably mortal.

As the door opened, the soucouyant looked up, desperately trying to get either of them to look it in the eye, and failing. “I swear, I won’t say nothin’!” it cried out, heaving itself around with enough weight to make the chair’s fastenings screech, before realizing that was probably a little beyond your average hospital janitorial staff member’s ability, and going slack again. “Jus’ let me go, nah . . . I a poor old lady cyan have nothin’ you want, fe sure! I never harm no one!”

Blandina shrugged, snapping on a pair of latex gloves. “Those kids in Ward Eight might have something to say about that,” she suggested.

“Check me wallet, me citizenship card! Rose-of-Sharon Hopkinson from Tobago-Saint Andrew, that’s me—I ain’t kill
no
body, let alone them poor child, for all they dyin’, any rate! And you ain’t no law neither, not no-how—”

“I’m fairly sure no one said we
were
,” Cecilia retorted, sounding offended. But Blandina waved her silent.

“Rose-of-Sharon,” she repeated, leaning in. “Pretty. That from the Bible?”

“’Course it is! Whah sort of nun ya play at bein’, girl, ya ain’t heard the name?”

Blandina smiled again. “Who said I’m a nun?”

The soucouyant’s lush curves drooped, as though deflating slightly; its complexion went almost dun, dewed with fright-sweat. “Think I don’t know where I am, nah? Everybody know whah ya do, ya crazy bitches—huntin’ an’ killin’ like it still Burnin’ Times! Listen, sister, I’m a good Christian, hear me? Just like you! So just let me go home an’ I won’t say nothin’ on you, on this place; on His sweet face, I swear it—”

“Don’t you dare take His name,” Blandina told it, evenly. “Not to me. And not to anyone else, either.”

And reached down to grab a fisted knot of “Rose-of-Sharon Hopkinson’s” plentiful braids in either hand, wrenching so hard in opposite directions that the soucouyant’s hairline stretched like dough—ripped outright, rolled back like a snapped blind, gouting jets of black stinking blood. Dipping further as she did, to whisper in one queasily unmoored ear: “Especially when we both know any claim to humanity you have is . . . skin deep at best.”

The soucouyant shrieked like a klaxon, voice soaring cartoonishly. “
Oh me Jesus!
I swear by Christ crucify, I
don’t know whah ya mean!
”

“Then this should come as quite a surprise.”

Blandina hauled again, twice as hard, ’til the thing’s whole offending face split wide open. Flame spurted up, emergency traffic flare-bright; the shriek turned roar, louder and more bestial than any human being could manage. Vaguely, Blandina realized that Cecilia was backed against the wall, crossing herself frantically. “Hold position!” she yelled without turning—and damn if the girl didn’t, surprisingly enough; her hands dropped belt-wards, feeling for the rowan-thorn extensible baton they’d both drawn one of this morning, at the armoury.

“Rose-of-Sharon” looked around, true eyes exposed in their naked sockets like little whirling blurs of fire. In the same coarse, warped voice, it groaned: “You terrible woman, whah for yah have to pick on me?”

“You eat children.”

“Goat eat grass, tiger eat goat—God make ’em both. How I can help whah He make me?”

“That’s
my
job,” Blandina told it, without an ounce of sympathy.

The soucouyant made a sound somewhere between a growl and a snivel, false hide bubbling like burnt bacon. When it spoke again, its voice was a hissing, curdled whisper.

“Whah yah want tah know?”

“Where the Watcher angel is. The Nephilim-maker. Penemue—”

“Don’t
say
, yah fool! Ain’t yah got one lick of sense?” Its tears smoked, acid, down skinless cheeks, as Blandina stood there watching. “Woman,” the thing managed, eventually, “yah killin’ me, an’ all fe nothing.”

“Don’t waste my time, creature. I’m not always this pleasant.”

But it still wouldn’t say out loud, so Cecilia passed it her phone, keyboard app already loaded. A brief spate of hunt-and-peck typing later, the soucouyant subsided, apparently too exhausted by its own daring to do anything but sit there and burn while Cecilia ran the results through MapQuest.

“It’s legitimate.”

Blandina nodded. “All right.”

If women could be invested as priests, she would have been in a position to offer extreme unction, even to a creature such as this—would have been
required
to, in fact. Thankfully, however, that decision was still out of her hands.

The
Bestiarium
again, its text cast up on her skull’s interior screen, like someone else’s memories:
remove its skin so it can never return to its hiding-place, and the soucouyant will burn to ash, consumed by its own fire.

Blandina reached out, grabbed hold, hauled hard. “Rose-of-Sharon” hung slack in her grip, too beaten to even mount objection. With a final mighty pull, the creature’s remaining sausage casing tore open to its waist, lipless mouth stretched impossibly wide, vomiting an eruption of blue-white flame as the rest went up like napalm.

Mother Eulalia took Cecilia’s coordinates and went off to pray with the current Anchoress, while Blandina turned towards the mess hall, only to have Cecilia genuinely blindside her: come in nose to nose, jaw jutted pugnacious, and demand without preamble—“What would we have done if she actually
hadn’t
known what we wanted?”

Blandina raised one brow. “Same thing, pretty much,” she replied. “After which we’d’ve grabbed up some other variety of kid-eating creature from wherever proved handiest and done it again. But let me guess—you get how we have to kill them, you just have a problem with torturing them, first. Or with me liking it.” Then, as Cecilia stared: “Tell me what it was that happened, sister. To you.”

“When?”

“Don’t play stupid with me. What I mean is, why
this
? Plenty of other orders to choose from if you want not to have to pick out your own clothes the rest of your life, and if you just want to kill, there’s the Army. So. . . .”

“They thought—they said—” Cecilia paused, feeling around the words. “Police verdict was, it might’ve been some sort of . . . animal.”

“But you knew better. Right?”

“I didn’t see how any
animal
could’ve done that—not to that many people, not all at once. Not and got away clean, without leaving any sort of trace behind. So I did some research, and I formed some theses, and then—I armed up, went out, and tried to do something about it.”

Blandina’d heard that part of the tale previously, from Mother Eulalia—a typical stumble-across-an-op-in-progress, want-in origin story, same as her own or almost anybody else’s. Still, it showed initiative.

“And let me guess again,” she replied. “One of those dead people was somebody you cared for, which was why you couldn’t keep your nose out—family, friend. Boyfriend. Girlfriend?”

“Teacher,” Cecilia said. “Best I ever had. What happened to
you
?”

Blandina slid Roke’s screen-grabs free, shaking the top one out with a snap. “I think
that
happened.

“See that guy, near the back?” Blandina asked. “’Sides from being male and white as a sack of sheets, he looks just like a girlfriend I used to have—my best friend ever, only
real
friend. She came to a party my agent threw; I comped her in, ’cause she wanted to meet famous people. And I lost track of her. Thought she was having a good time. In the end, they found her when they were cleaning up, naked under a bunch of coats. She wouldn’t talk; parents took her home, wouldn’t let her do a rape-kit, wouldn’t let me call the police. When I turned up to see her a week later, her father spit on me. That was ’cause she’d hung herself the same morning, on the back of their bathroom door with a belt, from a hook.”

“You think
that
guy killed her?”

“Not directly. Whatever
made
him, though, out of
her
. . . that thing’s ‘
father
,’ that’s what I want.”

“Penemue,” Cecilia said, so soft her lips barely moved. As though she couldn’t help wanting to weigh that ancient name a while, hold it in her mouth like something heavy, something honied.

“Whose name means ‘the Inside,’” Blandina agreed. “Curer of human stupidity. For
The name of the fourth is Penemue: he discovered to the children of men bitterness and sweetness;/And pointed out to them every secret of their wisdom./He taught men to understand writing, and the use of ink and paper. . . .
”

Cecilia nodded, quoting from memory: “
Therefore, numerous have been those who have gone astray from every period of the world, even to this day./For men were not born for this, thus with pen and with ink to confirm their faith;/Since they were not created, except that, like the angels, they might remain righteous and pure.
”

The words came easily—for Ordo members, Apocrypha like Enoch were more regularly perused than the actual Bible, if only for practicality. “
Nor would death, which destroys everything, have affected them;/But by this their knowledge they perish, and by this also its power consumes them.
”

“Writing as a form of black magic?”

“Why not? Runes, sigils, seals—that thing Roke showed us. Thoughts are just thoughts; words are air. Write something down, it becomes
concrete
.”

“But. . . .” Cecilia shook her head again, unable to move on, like disbelief was suddenly her default. “. . . Grigorim are
angels
, Blandina.”

“Cast-
down
angels in vile bodies, Origen says—bodies made of flesh, which always dies, you just hit it right. As weapons in His service, we do what we do, nomenclature regardless . . . find the source, knock it out, make sure it can’t breed more; classic pest control. Like any other nest.”

“You can’t
kill
angels, though.”

Blandina regarded her still-gloved hands, smeared wrist-high with hot ash from the soucouyant’s dissolution. Beneath the latex, her unpolished fingernails looked like blisters waiting to form.

“Ten years I’ve been at this, sister,” she said. “Longer than anybody else, except for Mother Eulalia, and this is what I know, for sure: I can
kill
anything I can get my hands on if I’m told the right way to do it.”

“But . . . oh, my Lord. I don’t know why I’m even asking this.”

“Go on.”

“. . . what if God won’t let you?”

He’s let me so far, with everything else.

“Then I want to hear Him tell me so,” Blandina said, at last. “To my face.”

And here, at last, I feel constrained to confess how I have stage-managed much of this situation. To take responsibility is not in my nature; I am made to hang back, play attendance—be acted upon, not to act. Yet in my quiet way, I am still capable of strategy.

As children of Penemue Grigorim, our mother-Maker, we all know that others are involved. For me, that was indeed Sister Blandina’s ill-fated friend Veronique Louvain, called Ronni. She avoids her name even while telling her story, which I can well understand; love is always painful for humans, especially once lost.

I have made it my business to learn Ronni Louvain by heart, tracking her through every available source. I have lain in her bed, breathing what scent remains, studying a single skin-flake like a lace pattern. I have spoken to her mother at the supermarket, changed her father’s tires. And I have followed Blandina from a distance, watching her kill her righteous way through this world. I have seen her pray in the aftermath, invoking His grace, spitting forth blessings like curses. I have seen her rage, daily, but never weep.