Severina Blue

She smiles even more pleasantly. “How’re you feeling?”

You clench and unclench your hands and shudder. Your hands feel like useless clubs on the ends of your arms, barely usable, and a pale green color.

“I didn’t mean to,” you mumble and wish you hadn’t said anything. “I didn’t know.”

Your grandmother’s smile grows into its final rictus form, like the final evolution of a Pokémon. “You’ll need to go to the mountain.” You groan and smoosh your face into the pillow. She shushes you. “It won’t be so bad.”

“Can’t you just give me some more of yours?” you say this into your pillow, perhaps hoping it would be the more merciful of the two. You glance over at your grandmother through your eyelashes and she gives a slow shake of her head. You sniff. “Do you know if the others are okay?”

“What others?” “The, uh, there was a witch.” “Damned creatures.” Your grandmother looks ready to spit on your floor but her expression relaxes into something more reasonable. “That was a yaga though. Haven’t seen one of them in two decades, at least.” “Servent of one.”

“Kind of a looker.”

“Grandma!”

She laughs. “You said it, not me.”

“Grandma!” You are suddenly grateful to not be getting anymore of her symbiote. It might infect you.

“No one else was around when she dropped you off.” Her face empties out then and her cool, soft hand rests on your forehead. “You’re cold, Kathleen.”

Your mouth pinches together. “We’ll—I’ll have to wait. Or maybe I could just,” you bite down, “buy some?”

Your grandmother really did spit on the ground, a hundred years of etiquette be damned. “And get yourself—” “But—”

“killed. Changed! By some blackmarket—” “They have regulations—” “Bilgewater, science-lab.”

“But I’m in no shape to go!”

“Katie,” she says, sharp and strange. “She wouldn't want me to.” You nod then and a new wave of exhaustion washes over you. You wish you remembered being carried. You flex your hands and they tingle and burn and have a strange empty-feeling, like you are alone.

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Your date is sipping their wine. The bar is a long dark-wooded space, casket in nature. And had bars always been so cold? You shiver in your layers of blouse and vest and flex your hands. Your least favorite solution to the summer heat were places that blasted the premise until people could see their breath. It said a lot that the bartender was wearing a long sleeve shirt. 

You flex your hands again in your gloves. It had been two weeks and you'd regained a lot of mobility, plus some—Oh no. Your date is talking.

“ . . . when I was there the next day, everything was different,” Carter said and you hadn’t heard a word. You were thinking about the frost bite working its way into your nervous system.

“How so?” “Oh, you know,” they wave a hand through the air, “all the furniture moved an inch to the left.” You crack a smile, you could’ve liked them, you think to yourself, but your stomach gave a sudden lurch. You are cold.

“Excuse me,” you hear yourself say and move to the edge of your seat. Your date has large hazel eyes and a rather peckish look about them—like they would be bedridden with tuberculosis in another era. They sit up straight and I think I might’ve liked them, if given the chance. They are wearing long swinging earrings that just barely miss hitting their shoulders with each turn and a long shawl that reminds me of a moth, a nice moth.

“Are you okay?” The moth—you mean, Carter, asks you, hazel eyes pinching. You realize, belatedly, that the room is spinning. 

Your feet are numb from the ankle down in your dumb strappy sandals and you need to get out of here. I stand, blood rushes to my head, a swirl of color and sound, and you’re on the ground. At least you didn’t lose any more time, but this is much worse. A bouquet of faces peer down from above and if you had enough blood, you would have flushed a deep green color.

“I think I need something to eat,” you say the first thing that comes to mind, lamely, from the floor.

“Brains?” a man asks in a voice shrill enough to believe he is at least being earnest. You frown deeply from, again, the floor, and your date as the decency to shoo them off. Really, you might’ve really liked them.

You methodically eat three cherries in a row before repeating how fine you are, really great actually, and manage to slip out the door before you start hallucinating or chewing on your own hand. The air outside is blessedly hot from the first step out and you walk the rest of the way home with your sandals in one hand.

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“You’ve got to go to the mountain.”

You are resting your head against the cool doorframe, still holding your shoes. Your grandmother was waiting for you. “I don’t want to go to the mountain,” you mutter into the woodgrain.

“No one wants to go to the mountain.” She frowns, and I have a feeling you are in for a kids these days speech. I cover my face with both hands. Had the lights of your house always been so bright?

“I haven’t even been back since . . .” I bite my inner cheek. I don’t want to think about it. Mom wouldn’t want me to think about it.

Grandma puts a hand over my own. “It won’t get better until you make it better.”

You clunk your head against the doorframe, rattling your thoughts into order. “Fine,” you say, much more like a petulant teenager than you want to. “But I’m not walking.”

Your grandma frowns harder. “Everyone walks!”

“It’s not the 1800s.”

“Well there are no damn trains, and,” Grandma narrows her eyes like I was about to run over her dog. “If you bring a car, they will—”

“Tear me limb from limb.” You are already plotting what to bring: dress shoes, blazer, a hammer.

“Lucretia will never let me hear the end of it! Who raised that girl, they’ll say, and we had to steal her keys. We don’t like stealing keys,” she grumbles. “Your girl brings a car, a damn car, to our most sacred places.”

“I won’t!” You climb the stairs before you can do any more whining. “I don’t even own a car!” You don’t slam the door, which is an achievement. Living with your grandma was so bad for your maturity index. You plan to open your suitcase and begin crumpling and throwing your things inside, but take a rest on your bed first. A rest wouldn't hurt. You fall into a dead sleep instead.

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The neighborhood is ornate. Two-story buildings that exuded the sense they chose not to get any higher, and you could tell had big-bellied don’t-touch me space inside. You pass rows of grey-on-grey concrete townhouses that technically could be called townhouses in the way that purebred Shih Tzu could be called dogs. 

You creep along the street despite the wide, empty sidewalks. You check your phone every few steps to make sure Maps isn’t suddenly sending you to CuntFuckDieBitch street. The phone dings in front of one of another grey-on-grey townhouses and you shrink two inches into yourself.

Perhaps you understood how Stephanie is running a secretive organization because, of course, she would be rich. Shivering in your double-scarves, you want to go home, but that felt further away every day. Over the last two weeks, your body has always felt two steps behind you.

You were the one that asked for her address, you remind yourself and climb the steps. You knock twice and hold your coat close to your chest. Quiet answers you and a neighbor pokes her head out. A woman shriveled with age but whose gaze expanded to an all-consuming blackhole, pinpricks on her wizened face. You can practically hear her thoughts: a woman in a winter coat in September? Is she homeless?

I turn my back away. The old woman’s thoughts grow louder, as she doddles on the other entryway. You knock a third time and the door opens mid-strike. The woman that answers is wet. You pause, taking this in, and the wet woman narrows her eyes.

“Who are you?” she asks, her voice is graveled and accented.

“Who are you?” you say in return, because what else is there? Maps had forsaken you and who knew which technology was next. 

The woman is also exceptionally, distractingly beautiful. She wore a long blue drapery, all length and fluttering, that was either a freakishly nice bathrobe or a shabby evening gown. It's belted in the middle and appears furred like an animal. She had elven features, small on a small face, and hair is black and thick and lank down her shoulders. The dream-black hair is plastered to her skull and falls in wet chunks hung over her chest.

“I am Natalya,” she said smartly—if you can say your own name in a smart way.

You swallow. Turning around right then and walking past the all-seeing neighbor was not an option just yet. “Does Stephanie live here?”

“Oh.” Natalya looks over one shoulder and then the other.

“Is that her?” a voice calls from behind and you recognize Stephanie sauntering through what had to be a giant kitchen at the end of the hall. Her dark eyes fix onto yours. “Has your grandma patched you up?”

You look between the beautiful woman and Stephanie. “That’s actually what I’m here about . . .”

-------------

“I don’t know.” Stephanie rubs the back of her neck. “You said this was a holy place? We try not to build doors in people’s temples if we don’t have to. They’re not exactly . . .” she struggles for the word. “Kosher.”

Natalya who lounged in her long robe in the corner shot her partner a hard look.

“But you said they collapsed almost immediately afterward. So, no one would know.” You clench down on your jaw. Stephanie, like the rest of this damn neighborhood you bet, kept her AC on.

“Why don’t you walk? Ghouls can walk forever, yeah?” Natalya chimes in.

“Sure,” you say because you’re not supposed to say anymore than that. “But it still takes time and I’ve got, you know, plans.” That part was blessedly true. You have a job interview for a start-up company next week. You’d be more excited about this if your hand wasn’t a shriveled black thing and your symbiote wasn’t sapping every inch of strength and warmth for itself.

Internally, you apologize to the symbiote. It was doing its best with what it had. 

“Look,” you say, rubbing your good hand down your face, “you said I could get anything from the last job, so this is it. This is anything.”

Stephanie shrugs. “I was hoping you’d just ask for more money. You seemed like a money kind of girl.”

You swear on your very life that if you ever do manage to get a job, you would hold onto it with both shriveled ugly hands. People think you’re a money kind of girl.

“All I’m asking for is a door to the base—not even all the way.” You keep it as obscure as possible, otherwise your grandma would be the one throttling you next. “Unless, you think that witch I helped has a better way . . .” You flex your hand and you can see Stephanie narrowing her eyes.

“Witch?” Natalya says out loud and you turn slightly in her direction. She was lounging in a shallow pool of water and you strained to remember the name of well . . . water ladies? You’d already checked a few times if you missed a tail.

Stephanie waves a hand through the air. “About that,” she draws a shallow breath, “would you mind not mentioning Reb—the witch you met to anyone? They don’t really want gig workers running into one another.”

You raise one very pointed eyebrow. “Another favor, I see—”

“Fine, fine, you don’t have to be so dainty about it. I’ll build you a door. I just don’t want to be targeted by a hoard of, um,” she flushes, “a group angry that their holy places have been tampered with.”

“Fair enough,” you say. “Can you build one by the end of the week?”

“I’ll do you one better.” Stephanie grinned. “Let’s say end of the day.”

You shake on it.

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