Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 43

"What's your son's name?" Mahasti said, threat implicit in her tone. The babe had not shifted.

The mother settled back on her heels, but the stretched tension in the tendons of her hands did not ease. "Alan." She gulped air. "Please don't hurt him. We have a little money. We don't have any drugs-"

Mahasti stood away from the door. "We're going out front," she said to the man. "And then you're going to open the front door."

It took thirty seconds and a glare from the woman before the man decided to comply. Once he had, though, he moved quickly around the bed and past Mahasti. He was lean as a vampire himself, faded tattoos winding down the ropy stretched-rubber architecture of his torso to vanish into striped cotton pajamas.

He paused in the doorway and glanced back once at the nightstand. Mahasti coughed.

He stepped into the hall. The woman made a noise low in the back of her throat, as involuntary as an abandoned dog.

"You, too." Mahasti snuggled the baby closer to her breast. "Go with him. Do what I say and you won't get hurt."

She made them precede her down the short hall to the front of the house, which had been converted into the two rooms of the tattoo parlor. A counter constructed of two-by-fours and paneling divided the living room. Cheaply framed flash covered every wall.

Bullet-headed as a polar bear, sparing Mahasti frequent testing glances, the man went to the door. He turned the lock and pulled it open, revealing Billy with his hat pulled low, on the other side of the security door. A muscle jumped in his jaw as the man opened that lock, too, and stepped back, as if he could make himself flip the lever but not-quite-turn the handle.

"Invite him in," Mahasti said.

She came from another land, where the rules were different. But unfair as it was, Billy was cursed to play the game of the invader.

"Miss-," the woman said, pleading. "Please. I'll give you anything we have."

"Invite," Mahasti said, "him in."

"Come in," the man said, in a low voice, but perfectly audible to a vampire's ears.

Billy's hat tilted up. In the shadow of the brim, his irises glittered violet with eyeshine.

He opened the security door-it creaked rustily-stepped over the threshold, and tossed Mahasti's Crocs at her feet. "Your shoes."

"Thanks."

He shut the security door behind him. The woman jerked in sympathy to the metallic sc.r.a.pe of the lock. An hour still lacked to dawn, but that didn't concern the rooster that crowed outside, greeting the first translucency of the indigo sky. Dawn would come soon, but for now all that light was good for was silhouetting the shark-tooth range of mountains that gave Needles its name.

The man drew back beside the woman, against the counter. "What do you want?"

The baby, cool and soft, had fallen asleep on Mahasti's warm breast. She gently disconnected him and tugged her shirt down. "I want you to change me. Change me forever. I want a tattoo."

She told him to freehand whatever he liked. He studied her face while she gave him her left arm. Billy held the kid for insurance, grumbling about the delay. The mother went around hanging blankets over the windows and turning on all the lights.

"What are you?" he asked.

"A 'wetback f.u.c.king junkie,'" she mimicked, cruelly accurate. "Do you think if you talk to me you'll build a connection, and it will keep you safe?"

He looked down at his tools, at the transfer paper on the book propped on his lap. "You don't have much accent for a wetback."

He glanced up at Billy and the baby, lips thin.

Mahasti held out her right hand. "Give me Alan, please. He needs to suckle."

"Ma'am." The woman pinned the last corner of a blanket and stepped back from the window. "Please. I'm his mother-"

Billy glared her still and silent, though even the force of his stare could not hush the sobs of her breath. He slid the baby into the crook of Mahasti's arm, supporting its head until the transfer was complete.

"When I learned what would become your language"-Mahasti spoke to the man as if none of the drama had occurred-"it was across a crusader's saddle. I was too young, and the child the b.a.s.t.a.r.d got on me killed me coming out." She smiled, liver-dark lips drawn fine. "And when I was dead I rose up and I returned the favor, to both of them."

He drew back from her needle teeth when she smiled. His hands shook badly enough that he lifted his pencil from the paper and pulled in a steadying breath. Without meeting her eyes, he went back to what he had been drawing once more.

At Mahasti's other breast, the child suckled. The touch still warmed her.

"Somebody will notice when we don't open," the woman said. "Someone will know there's something wrong."

"Maybe," Mahasti said. "In a week or two. You people never want to get involved in a G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing. So shut up and let him f.u.c.king draw."

He drew, and he showed her. A lotus, petals like a crown, petals embracing the form of a newborn child. "White," he said. "Stained with pink at the heart."

"White ink." She held up her brown arm for inspection. "You can do that?"

He nodded.

If a child changed her once, maybe a child could change her again. She said, "You've got through the daylight to make me happy. When the sun goes down we're moving on."

He didn't ask "and?" Neither did the mother.

As if they had anyway, Billy said, "And there's two ways we can leave you when we go."

"I'll get clean needles," said the man.

Billy paced while the man worked on Mahasti's arm and the baby dozed off against her breast once more. Dimly, Mahasti heard the flutter of a heart. The woman finally sat down on the couch in the waiting area and pulled her knees up to her chest. The man kept wanting to talk. The dog barked forlornly in the yard.

After several conversational false starts, while the ink traced the arched outlines of petals across Mahasti's skin and the at first insistently ringing phone went both unanswered and more frequently quiet, he said, "So if she was a kidnapped Persian princess, what were you?"

Billy skipped a boot heel off the floor and turned, folding his arms. "Maybe I was Billy the Kid."

Mahasti snorted. "Billy the Kid wasn't an Indian."

"Yeah? You think anybody would have written it down if he was? What if I was an iron-fingered demon? I wouldn't need you to get me invited in."

With a cautious, sidelong glance at Mahasti, the man said, "What's an iron-fingered demon?"

"If I were an iron-fingered demon," Billy said, "I could eat livers, cause consumption, get on with my life. Unlife. But no, you get to be a lamashtu. And I had to catch the white man's bloodsucker disease."

Mahasti spoke without lifting her head, or her gaze from the man's meticulous work. The lotus taking shape on her skin was a thing of beauty. Depth and texture. No blood p.r.i.c.ked from her skin to mar the colors, which were dense and rich. "You could be an iron-fingered demon. If you were a Cherokee. Which you aren't."

"Details," he said. "Details. First I'm too Indian, then I'm not the right kind of Indian? f.u.c.k you very much."

"Billy," Mahasti said, "shut up and let the man work or we won't be ready to go when the sun sets."

She was a desert demon, the sun no concern. It was on Billy's behalf that they stalled.

The dog's barking had escalated to something regular and frantic. A twig cracked in the yard.

Mahasti looked at the man, at the cold baby curled sleeping in the corner of her arm. She lifted her chin and stared directly, unsettlingly, at the woman. "Mommy?"

The mother must have been crying silently, curled in her corner of the couch, because she stammered over a sob. "Yes?"

"You've been such a good girl, I'm going to give you Alan back. You and Billy can take him to the bedroom. I know you're not going to try anything silly."

The woman's hands came up, clutched at air, and settled again to clench on the sofa beside her bare legs. "No."

Mahasti looked at the man. "And you won't do anything dumb either, will you?"

He shook his head. Under the lights, his scrawny shoulders had broken out in a gloss of sweat. "That's good, Cathy," he said. The eye contact between him and the woman was full of unspoken communication. "You take Alan and put him to bed."

"Here," Mahasti said, offering him up, his heartbeat barely thrumming against her fingertips. She tingled, warm and full of life. "He's already sleeping."

Billy sat cross-legged on the unmade bed, his boot heels denting the mattress. The woman pulled all the toys and pillows from the crib and lay the baby on his back atop taut bedding. She moved tightly, elbows pinned to her rib cage, spine stiff. He slouched, relaxed.

Until the front door slammed open.

"f.u.c.king vampire hunters." He was in the hall before the words finished leaving his mouth, the woman behind him bewildered by the fury of his pa.s.sage. A spill of sunlight cut the floor ahead, but the corner of the wall kept it from flooding down the corridor.

Billy paused in the shadow of the hall.

Three men burst into the front room-one weedy, one meaty, and one perfectly average in every way except the scars. Mahasti moved from the chair, the disregarded needle blurring a line of white across her wrist, destroying the elegance of the artist's design. The artist threw himself into a corner behind the counter. By the time he got there and got his back against the wall, the fight was over.

The perfectly average man was fast enough to meet her there, in the sunlight, and twist her un-inked right arm up behind her in a bind. The silver knife in his left hand p.r.i.c.ked her throat. An image of a Persian demon, inscribed on the blade, flashed sunlight into Mahasti's eyes.

"Well, f.u.c.k," she said.

The meaty one grabbed her free hand and slapped a silver cuff around it.

"Silence, lamashtu," the vampire hunter growled, shaking her by her twisted arm. "Call the other out, so I can burn him, too. You'll terrorize no more innocents."

She rolled her eyes. "He's not coming out when there's daylight in the room."

"Really?" he laughed. "Your protector thinks so little of you?"

"I'm my own protector, a.s.shole," she said, and kicked back to break the bone of his thigh like a fried chicken wing.

She threw the meaty one down the hall to Billy, and ripped the throat out of the weedy one while the perfectly average one was still screaming his way to the floor.

She shut the door before she killed him. The noise was going to bring the neighbors around. Then she went to help Billy drag the third body up to the pile, and make sure the woman hadn't run out the back in the confusion.

She was still crouched by the crib. Mahasti left her there and met Billy in the hall. "See?" he said. "More fun if you don't use 'em up all at once."

Mahasti said, "He had a knife with an image of Pazazu etched on it. That could have been the end of all our fun."

"He got prepared before he followed us here." Billy grimaced. "They're getting smarter."

"Not smart enough to use it before asking questions, though."

Mahasti jerked her thumb over her shoulder, toward the rear of the house. The white lotus and babe, blurred on her wrist, shone in the dark. She felt different. Maybe. She thought she felt different now.

She said, "What about them? If there are any more hunters they will be able to answer questions."

"We could take them with us. Hostages. The Impala's got a six-body trunk. It's cozy, but it's doable."

"f.u.c.k it," Mahasti said. "They'll be a load. It'll be a long f.u.c.king drive. Leave them."

"Fine," Billy said. "But you got what you needed from the kid. I still have to get a snack first."

He met her on the concrete stoop two minutes later, licking a split lip. Smoke curled from his fingers as he pulled his hat down hard, shading his face from the last crepuscular light of the sun. "Cutting it close."

"The car has tinted windows," she said. "Come on."

Traffic thinned as the night wore on, and the stark, starlit landscape grew more elaborately beautiful. Mahasti read a book by Steinbeck, the lotus flashing every time she turned a page. Billy drove and chewed his thumb.

When the sky was gray, without turning, she said, "Pity about the kid."

"What do you care? He was just gonna die anyway." He paused. "Just like we don't."

She sighed into the palm of her hand, feeling her own skin chilling like age-browned bone. There was no pain where the needles had worked her skin-but there was pain in her empty arms, in her b.r.e.a.s.t.s taut again with milk already. "Mommy's going to miss him."

Billy's shrug traveled the length of his arms from his shoulders to where his wrists draped the wheel. "Not for as long as I'd miss you."

They drove a while in silence. Without looking, she reached out to touch him.

A thin line of palest gold shivered along the edge of the world. Billy made a sound of discontent. Mahasti squinted at the incipient sunrise.

"Pull over. It's time for you to get in the trunk."

He obeyed wordlessly, and wordlessly got out, leaving the parking brake set and the door standing open. She popped the trunk lid. He lay back and settled himself on the carpet, arms folded behind his head. She closed the lid on him and settled back into the car.