Eleven years ago, Elizaveta Hua was the most powerful woman in the world. And now a chisel-jawed police inspector with rough knuckles and a pleasant smile has walked through the door of her estate, asking for a favor.
By Benjanun Sriduangkaew and Devi Lacroix
Eleven Years Ago
I’m awoken by the sound of a woodpecker.
If anyone says they like the sounds of woodpeckers, they’re a lying bastard. No one in their right mind likes woodpeckers. They wake honest mothers from their sleep, and for that the entire species should be put to the sword. I’ll do it someday, too: Elizaveta Hua, the thirteenth of her name, warlock of her age, bane of the family Picidae.
I lie awake in the gray of early dawn, deceiving myself that I can ignore the noise and fall back asleep. I’ve almost succeeded, too, when I hear laughter from the lawn below. It’s at that moment I realize I’ve not been woken up by a woodpecker but by construction—the clunk-clunk-clunk sound of a hammer on wood.
There is only one woman on this planet stupid enough to come into my house and swing a goddamn hammer like an alarm clock, and I’m incensed that my goodwill would be taken advantage of this way. I hurl off the covers and stalk down the stairs, seeing red. I’ve always known I’d be the death of her someday; I didn’t realize that it would be this morning, when I flense the skin from her bones.
My youngest daughter is sitting at the dining table, reviewing an arcane tome while a tiny bound familiar serves as a coffee warmer under her mug. “You look like death, Mother.”
There is, fortunately, still some coffee left; I feel my bloodlust begin to slacken. “Maybe you can summon yourself some tact, young lady,” I reply, pouring my own cup. “Or at least the discretion to not poke at your sleep-deprived elders.”
“I did warn them not to wake you up,” Viveca says, going back to her book. “But you could have used a sound-dampening spell if you really wanted to sleep in, so who’s actually at fault here?”
“I’m not not too old to start over with a third daughter.” I watch my eldest through the kitchen window, out on the lawn laughing with the intruder. “I have a name picked out and everything.”
“Mother dearest,” the future warlock of the coming age says, “if this is how you announce your planned marriage to Ms. Budak—”
I choke on my coffee, and my coughing saves me from having to hear any more of my daughter’s quips.
Viveca closes her book and then stands. “I can see I’ll be getting no more reading done here,” she says with faux curtness, then condescendingly pats me on the back—too light to dislodge anything, but just firm and slow enough to let me know she’s enjoying herself at my expense. “Don’t worry. Somehow, Olesya is still blind to your liaisons with Inspector Budak.” Now that I can control my breathing a little better, I try to glare at my daughter; I only succeed in rolling my eyes. “Oh, I can tell from your expression that this is a sore point, so never you mind, Mother—I shan’t breathe a word of it.”
Viveca is taller than me now, as is Olesya; both have their own homes, their own lives—have begun to grow into the women I always hoped they would be. These days, it’s rare for them to both be under my roof at the same time, but we have a reason to celebrate: Viveca has just passed her final university classes, and Olesya has, after years of planning and training, finally shaped her body into its new, permanent form. It is the autumn of my life; the leaves have begun to turn yellow and the air is crisp with the promise of coming cold, but my family is near and the fire warm. It’s difficult to stay cross in such moments, especially with daughters. Even the interloper is a welcome guest, after a fashion.
I step out onto the porch as quietly as possible—preternaturally quiet, in fact: I take my daughter’s advice and cast a spell of sound dampening. I don’t know what compels me to do this. They seem happy, and maybe I want to hear what they are sharing; Olesya and her companion have stopped constructing whatever it is they’re building and are now sitting in the morning cool, talking.
“—really good work,” the woman is saying. “Alchemy gets short shrift among your peers for being too… blue collar? But to me, applied knowledge is infinitely more useful than esoteric navel gazing, and your paper really gets into some nitty-gritty techniques.”
“You read our paper?” Olesya beams like it’s her thirteenth birthday all over again.
“Of course I did. In my line of work, staying up on the literature is how you stay alive. Your co-author, this Chang’er gal—she’s as smart as a whip. I… ah.” A knowing smile. “You like her, don’t you?”
“It’s… it’s very professional!” Olesya replies, the blush on her cheeks saying it’s anything but. “She’s very intelligent. And kind. And I… I…”
“You’ve had something on your mind this whole time, kiddo. Spit it out.”
My daughter looks away. “What if she doesn’t like me the same way? After, you know, this.” Olesya motions to herself.
“Olesya, from the moment I first met you, I knew you were meant for great things. Not because of the clothes you wear or the color of your hair, but what’s in here”—a tap on the skull—“and here”—a gentle touch against the sternum. “I’ve seen grown men possess less courage and love than you have in your pinkie, however long that pinkie might be or whatever length of the nail attached to it. If this Chang’er cares about you, cares about the real you, then she’ll love you the same as ever.”
“There’s a bit of an age difference between us, and she doesn’t come from wealth. I worry—”
“How much difference are we talking about? She’s not in high school, is she?”
“Gods, no. She’s Viveca’s age, or a bit younger. Maybe five years’ difference? She’s just started work on her senior thesis for university.”
Fahriye Budak, who is at least fifteen years my junior, laughs like a hyena; her face turns red, and tears stream down her face. It’s contagious; Olesya starts to chuckle, and then genuinely laugh. And then I realize I’m laughing, too, despite being the reason she finds this particular statement by my daughter so funny. The spell holds, though, and no one hears me join in with the merriment.
“You’re gonna be alright, kid. At your age, five years is basically nothing in the cosmic scheme of things. Rule of thumb: divide by two and then add seven years. You’re safe. Just be aware of the power imbalance, alright? Actually listen to her. Give her the space and the power to be secure in the relationship, whatever that might look like. Just…” Fahriye stops, uncharacteristically struggling for the next word. “Just don’t be like me, alright? Be courageous. Don’t let fear hold you back; let her know how you feel.”
Olesya gives Fahriye a keen look. “Is there someone in your life you’re afraid might not like you, Inspector? Do I need to give you a pep talk?”
I dispel the incantation around me and make a point of slowly, loudly closing the sliding door behind me; Fahriye and Olesya both startle from the unexpected noise.
“Inspector Budak,” I say, as icily and imperiously as I can while standing in a bathrobe and bunny slippers, “to what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Mother!” Olesya, hearing the sharp tone in my voice, looks between her role model and myself, trying to appease one of us and protect the other. “I asked Inspector Budak—”
She stands too fast off the porch step and begins to stumble. To a mother’s eye, Olesya is still unused to her body—lifting things too fast or slow, turning a corner too tight and smashing flesh that wasn’t there a few weeks before. I’ll never admit to noticing; my eldest would be angry and ashamed that the body she’s sought for so long is not an instantaneous, perfect fit. That, like all bodies and all of life, it takes time to grow accustomed to change, however welcome.
Fahriye, too, understands; she’s up in an instant, one hand gently at Olesya’s elbow. And then she makes a show of leaning down to look at the step Olesya tripped over, preserving my daughter’s dignity by finding fault elsewhere. “Wood looks loose. Can’t have you go tripping to your death, not after the effort I put into saving you. And don’t go sacrificing yourself on my account either, kid.” She turns back to me. “I stopped by to assemble that porch swing you’ve kept meaning to make. As the oldest Hua awake, Olesya here was obligated to keep an eye on me.”
“Thank you,” Olesya says, blushing and chagrined. She gives me a quick “Mother” and departs, leaving the two of us standing in the morning light on the porch of the Hua manor.
We watch her go, and then I turn back to Fahriye. She’s not in her typical inspector uniform, with its black suits and straight ties; she’s wearing a pair of worn jeans and a paint-stained shirt that reads ALWAYS ROB INSURED BANKS. And sure enough, there’s a toolbelt slung low over her hips and a stereotypical red toolbox open at her feet. On the immaculate lawn beyond, planks of wood and tubes of metal are carefully laid out; she really is trying to build that damn porch swing for me.
Still, I fix her with my best withering glare. “Why are you here, Inspector? Last I checked, you were just beginning a vacation in Ibiza.”
Fahriye flashes one of her damnable smirks; my glare must not be as strong as it once was, or the inspector has grown inured. “Oh, thank God—if I tricked you, then I must have tricked Sealing and Containment, too. An undine who owed me a favor is wearing my face and using my credit cards to enjoy my vacation hours.”
Now I’m really annoyed. I don’t like surprises, and I don’t like my efforts to protect valuable assets subverted by the assets themselves; I’ll have to talk with the lesser demon that is supposed to be keeping an eye on the inspector. “What the fuck have you gotten yourself into this time, Budak?”
“There’s no easy way to say this.” Her voice stays pleasant, but there is a tension in her jaw, a sharp look in her eye. I wonder, briefly, which words Fahriye does have a hard time speaking—the fear she mentioned to Olesya, the one that stills her tongue from saying what she needs to say to the object of her affection.
And then she’s finishing: “I need your help killing someone.”
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
We’re standing in my personal study, the same place where I met Fahriye nineteen years ago. The one where I thanked her for saving my children and told her I owed her an obligation of profound import.
She understood instantly I could not take no for an answer—that for me, a warlock who deals in pacts and obligation, a mother who loves her children before all else, there was no greater debt than the one I labored under to her. So she smiled, scratched at her chin as her eyebrows wrinkled together in thought, and said, in the most confident voice anyone had ever used to address me, “Why don’t we discuss your debt over dinner? For some reason, I’ve really been craving Italian.”
And for almost two decades, she has never asked for anything else beyond small, trivial things. Advice on how to kill a particularly esoteric folk legend, perhaps; favors that are more an excuse to meet than real inconveniences. She believes, by all accounts, that she is owed nothing at all, that the courage and suicidal bravery she demonstrated while saving my children from mortal peril were normal, should be inherit to any good person.
And maybe if I were someone else—not a warlock or a mother, less sensitive to my debts, blind to obligation—maybe I could live with this. Maybe then I could accept the lopsided, life-altering generosity bestowed on me with nary another thought. But Olesya asked me about it, once, when she was still very young, after she had awoken from a night terror of vampires: why was Inspector Budak kind? Why was she selfless, why did she help someone at such a great risk to herself? The inspector’s behavior was so at odds with Olesya’s understanding of how the world operated, with how people treat each other. And I couldn’t admit that I was confused, too, so I told my daughter about Mencius, and how he argued that man must be innately good—for if a man saw a child about to topple into a well, would he not, on instinct, reach out to save the youth?
“That’s very silly,” Olesya said. “That’s no way to build an empire. Sometimes you have to kill people. Like, someone tried to shove Viveca and me into a well, metaphorically. People like that deserve to die.”
And now Fahriye Budak is before me, preparing to explain why someone deserves death.
“His name is Kenneth McDonald. He’s an American tech mogul, richer than God.” She’s brought her toolbox inside with her; carefully folded at the bottom of it are documents, anachronistic, from a time before electronics—newspaper clippings, Polaroid photos, notes produced on a typewriter.
I pick up one of the pictures, a candid of an ugly man in an ill-fitting suit, shouting into his cellphone on a busy sidewalk. “He must be powerful, for you to hunt him,” I say, running my thumb along the tiny puncture wound left by a push-pin. Details are beginning to coalesce into a fuller image: she’s made an old-fashioned killboard—nothing digital, probably in the privacy of her home, maybe a storage unit if she is smart. Nothing at work, which means this is off-the-books; the fake vacation is an alibi, suggesting that her dislike of McDonald is professionally known.
“Given your line of work,” I go on, “I can only assume you’re planning an unsanctioned killing of a powerful mage—and someone who is well connected, given that you are here and not at work. I have to ask, though: who the hell is McDonald?”
The inspector gives me a confused look; to her, it must be self-evident who our target is. But I don’t keep up with American personalities, mages or not; that whole continent is always churning out forgettable nouveau riche who demand respect for re-inventing concepts like “mass transit” and “healthy drinking water” and “basic cantrips,” but somehow shittier and more expensive. An entire society of innovators eating themselves alive, pawning off stolen land and stolen ideas as their God-given inheritance. Crabs in a bucket, each and every one of them—and I’d rather waste my time naming actual crabs I’m about to eat, than bore myself with names of anyone residing on the North American continent.
And then Fahriye laughs—short, too short, but delight all in the same, that my ignorance means offense to and obliviousness of a man she must despise. “Kenneth McDonald is an up-and-coming ‘technologist’ and ‘innovator’ in the computer industry.” Fahriye punctuates each air quote with a palpable disdain. “Very famous, very media darling. He has contracts with Sealing and Containment and connections with High Command, which means he’s untouchable by us rank-and-file. His itinerary is virtually impossible to access; he leans into the ‘unavailable mogul’ type more than most. But…”
Another document is unfolded: a flier for a headline speaking event in the United States. “It seems McDonald has decided that he also wants to ‘disrupt’ health food. He’s giving a glorified sales pitch at a tech conference this week. This is the first time I’ve nailed him down to a place and time; he’s frustrated my own tracking efforts for years. I’ve scoped out the presentation hall, prepositioned the gear I need. I’m up on the venue’s security communications, have countermeasures for the casters that will be mingling with the mundane personnel. Ideally, it won’t come to that, but…”
Fahriye trails off. “He preys on children,” she finally says, with such force and sincerity that I’m momentarily speechless, again reminded that there are some people in this world who care, who refuse to accept that they should be complicit in the grinding evil that happens around us. “Between the ages of four and ten—old enough to be aware, to know confusion as their lives are taken.”
She pulls from the tool box another sheaf of records, handling them with great care: a stack of photos, tied together with rough string. Victims. She gently taps the top photo, not looking at it, not looking at me. “Predominantly orphans, but occasionally the well-loved child, suddenly disappearing from some white-picket house somewhere; he seems to relish in the unexpected suffering, the recognition of powerlessness before the final blow.” The earlier anger has leached from her voice, replaced with a stoic facade. But I’ve heard her enough to know there is a deep well of passion and fury just below the surface.
I can’t very well tell this woman that the murder of innocents is commonplace in my profession, in my social milieu, in all of life and society; that she should just accept that fact the same way that the rest of us have. That the blood price of not having your own children murdered is killing their children first.
But she knows all of this already; she lives in defiance of this fact. And I find that I do not want to tell her otherwise, to have her think less of me. Even I fall silent when confronted with Fahriye’s sense of justice, unalloyed and incorruptible. So I focus on the specifics: “A serial killer? A vampire?”
“No, nothing so… dramatic. I mean, a serial killer, yes—definitionally. But I think he’s just a blood mage. He seems to sacrifice his victims to maintain his own youth; very Elizabeth Bathory.” She has regained her composure, energy returning to her voice. “But I don’t know for certain. There’s too many variables and no support from Sealing and Containment. You’re the only person I could turn to, Liz. Will you help me?”
I scoff at the absurdity of this woman and roll my eyes for the second time this morning. Alone in all the world, she is allowed to call me by a diminutive. She wanders onto my estate without my permission, talks freely with my children, and still she cannot, will not, assume my aid or friendship.
“Fine, I’ll help. But only because it amuses me to see you plot out your first political assassination. Also, I pick where we eat.”
TO BE CONTINUED…