Sucks to Suck – Chapter 15

Control of anything had always been an illusion. That was a lesson Marion had learned over and over again across her relatively long life and yet she kept forgetting it and having to be retaught. Whenever she thought she had things under control, her life was uprooted much like a tree in a hurricane and tossed about in the winds of chaos. And this mysterious assailant was no different, of course. It was the latest, but perhaps the deadliest hurricane, so far, to sweep through her life. And the only thing she could do, besides sitting and waiting for the inevitable return of the one hunting her, who was unlikely to underestimate her again, felt much like grasping at straws. But grasping at straws beat lying down and waiting, every time. That lesson she only had to learn once, and she never, ever forgot it.

She opened her eyes to watch the dark ceiling of the room she was occupying in Logan’s house, and as soon as she did, her mind was already racing. Vampires didn’t experience the drowsiness that mortals felt when waking up, and Marion couldn’t be sure she even remembered what that was like, though she was familiar with the concept. Instead, she felt something different. A certain lethargic slowing of her body and a dulling of her senses, but not of her mind, for the first half an hour, while the sun had set but its influence could still be felt. The same sort of thing she experienced before sunrise. Her cursed body coming from the suspension of life or leaning into it. She lay there, watching the ceiling, her vision sharp enough to pierce through the darkness of the room and see the contours of cheap furniture. Marion didn’t have many possessions and those she did were in clear plastic boxes piled around the room, mostly clothes too. She had gotten used to living with very little, knowing that at a moment’s notice, she might need to leave whatever life she had been leading behind. And that was definitely still a possible way to handle the situation with the tall pale woman hunting her. But, Marion reckoned, she had already agreed to give Isabella’s idea a chance, and as she woke up and heard the noises coming from the living room, she could identify Logan and Isabella’s voices talking. And she remembered why she was doing it. As she got up from the bed, she began the process of dressing herself in the dark. She had slept with a long loose T-shirt and she decided to just keep that on and put on some jeans and her usual black Converse to slip out of the room, starting to flatten her hair to head towards the living room when she felt a dull throb of pain radiating from her wrists and it gave her pause. The burnt scars of silver were still lingering there. Most of her wounds would be healed over a night of what she had grown used to calling ‘sleep’, though it was very much something else. But silver injuries had a way of persisting, for days. If she were to step out there in a short-sleeved T-shirt, she’d invite questions from Logan that she couldn’t answer. She grabbed a simple grey zip-up hoodie and, with a wince, pushed her injured wrists through the sleeves and adjusted them to make sure they covered the burnt marks well. Leaving it open and keeping her hands in her pockets, she walked to the living room.

“…just a little surprised, she’s not very social, and last night…” She can hear Logan’s voice saying as Marion's footsteps approached the threshold.

Marion was just mildly surprised to see that Isabella was wearing a whole different outfit from the previous night, considering she had slept over at Logan's after the club. She reckoned she must’ve gone home and come back before sundown, and considering how far away she said her house was, she must not be operating in a whole lot of sleep. The two of them were sitting on Logan’s couch side by side, but their legs half turned towards each other, and it was only Marion's arrival that caused their heads to turn to her.

“Hey,” Marion said sheepishly as she entered the room, her voice made deeper by her early night languor.

The two girls lifted their heads to look at Marion with an expression that she struggled to read. Was it sympathy or pity or concern that she felt on their faces? Whatever it was, it was thick in the air. And the three of them tried their best to ignore its presence, though the effort was pretty obvious.

“Good night… Or is it morning for you?” Isabella teased.

“Night is still night…” Marion said with a shrug.

There was an unspoken question in her eyes as she looked at Logan and Isabella, and it hung there for a tense handful of seconds before Isabella finally broke the silence by tossing herself up to her feet and gesturing towards the door.

“We should head out now… It’s a long way to my place,” the witch proposed and, turning to Logan, said, “sorry to take her away from you this soon.”

“That’s fine, I have to head to work in like an hour anyway…” Logan said with a shake of the head. “You guys go do what you need to do.”

Marion lifted an eyebrow in confusion but she didn’t argue with Logan on the matter. Instead, the unspoken question was aimed at Isabella in the form of a querying gaze. In response, Marion got nothing but a mischievous smile as she gestured towards the door. Marion stood behind as Isabella walked past her and looked at Logan for a moment longer, wondering how she could formulate the question she wanted to ask without giving away anything that Isabella had not yet. With Isabella out of the door though, Marion just gave up and began to turn away when she heard Logan’s footsteps approaching her. It gave her pause but she didn’t turn, and then warm arms were wrapped around her from behind and she was pulled into a hug. Her cheeks flushed, a gift and a curse of being so well fed, and she turned around towards Logan as the embrace was broken with visible surprise.

“What was that about?”

“N-nothing… Just… Sorry if things went weird last night.”

Marion paused for a second before giving a dip of her head and a reassuring smile towards her roommate. No words were needed, at least she hoped, for Logan to know things were fine between them. The encounter with Skye, while she couldn’t bring it up, had brought much into perspective. And then the door opened and Isabella’s hand darted out to grab Marion by the arm, luckily missing the sore spot from the silver burns and yanked her into the corridor.

“Come on, I wasn’t kidding when I said we need to go. We are burning night light…”

“Night light?” Marion asked as she followed Isabella downstairs.

“Isn’t that how your people talk?”

“Oh, wow.”

“No, no… Don’t start that with me, you know what I mean.”

Marion repressed a chuckle at the girl getting the closest thing to flustered that she had ever seen, but she continued to follow Isabella to the ground floor. And then to a beige old 2010 model sedan parked not too far from the building's entrance. The witch fished something out of her purse to unlock the car from a distance and then got in the driver’s seat. Marion frowned in confusion for just a second before hopping onto the passenger side and Isabella was quick to speed out of the parking spot and into the street, checking three or four times on all rear-view mirrors for anything behind them. Marion looked directly over the seat, through the back window, but saw nothing there. And then she turned back, sitting facing forward and attaching her seatbelt.

“Seatbelt, huh? Can’t you survive everything except, like, a stake to the heart?” Isabella asked as they drove out of Logan’s neighbourhood.

“What? No, not at all… At least, I don’t think so.”

“Don’t think so? You don’t know?”

“They don’t exactly give you a pamphlet when they turn you, you know? A lot of this is figure on the go and I have never tried to figure out how much I could endure before being destroyed.”

“That… That makes sense, yeah… Sorry, I am just really new at this.”

“At this? Driving?”

“No, talking to a vampire,” Isabella said as the car came to a halt at a stoplight.

“I never spent much time talking to witches either…” Marion said in a tone of admission.

Isabella nodded and made a little grunt of acknowledgement and then there was only silence between them while they waited for the light to turn green. And then for a few moments after. It wasn’t until they were further away from the apartment and, Marion reckoned, in relative safety, that her thoughts went back to the hug with Logan by the door and the strange moment she seemed to have interrupted between Isabella and her roommate when she woke up.

“So… What did you tell her?” Marion asked.

“What?”

“Logan. What did you tell her?”

“Oh… I didn’t tell her that her roommate is a bloodsucker, so, don’t worry, chica.”

“No, I know you didn’t tell her that. At least I didn’t think you would but… You told her something. She looked very… Well, I don’t know. There was something there when I woke up.”

“Well… Logan thinks you were raised in a cult or something.”

“Raised in a cult?! I was not!”

“…or something, jeez…” Isabella rolled her eyes briefly while she drove, attention fixed on the road for now. “But since she thinks that you have some… Dark past you are trying to escape… And you kinda do, don’t you?” Isabella proposed, “so, well… I told her that my mom has helped girls like you before and that you agreed to talk to her.”

“You…”

“Which is not a lie. She has helped girls like you, in a way, and you agreed to talk to her.”

“Oh fuck, the hoodie with the blood…”

“I took it to my mother when I woke up today. She still wants you there for it, though.”

“It?”

“The spell…”

“Why?”

“Look, it’s complicated but… The short of it? Because she worries about you. It’s what they do.”

“They?”

“You’ll see,” Isabella promised.

“Where are you taking me exactly?”

“Wyrd Street, just at the edge of Pike.”

“Wyrd Street?”

“I told you, you’ll see…”

Marion had lived in Seattle for decades but she couldn’t claim to know every street in the city. Especially because a number of them had changed names over time. But she knew the Pike and Pine area relatively well, and she didn’t remember ever seeing a plaque with that name on it. Yet Isabella seemed to know confidently where she was going. And surprisingly enough, after crossing Madison Street, heading towards Pike, Isabella took a left turn and there it was, the green plaque announcing the intersection between Wyrd Street and 10th Avenue.

At the surface, it looked like most streets near Pike, with old redbrick buildings and old wooden lamp posts. It was mostly a mixed zone with a line of hip-looking bars and stores at ground level while the upper floors were occupied by lofts and apartments. There were lots of trees, arching over the road and in many places their branches seemed to touch each other forming a green arch over the asphalt. And as they drove, Isabella moved to park the car near the sidewalk, that was the first time Marion noticed something odd about the place. There were too many parking spots for someone so close to Pike Street at night. It was surprising the high demand from the popular nighttime destination had not spilt into Wyrd Street, but still, Isabella parked right in front of the black wooden frame of a metaphysical supply shop called ‘The Witching Well’. Incense holders, decorative swords, crystals, wind chimes and many books adorned the shelves, along with a few items for sale like wide-brim hats with conical tips. Isabella pulled the parking break in the car and turning the engine off, she said:

“This my mom’s place…”

“The shop?”

“Well, that too, but above it.”

“Bit on the nose, isn’t it?”

“Says the vampire who only wears black.”

“That’s…” Marion started but it was obvious that the young witch was toying with her, and there was no point in engaging.

They stepped out of the car and at that time of the night the Witching Well was no longer open. Most of the store was dark except for the lights over the main displays. Marion looked at them, thinking that the witches hiding in plain sight might have done the same with some mystical artefacts. But everything she saw there looked like any quack store of esoteric and mystical supplies, a bit cheap and even a bit campy. Many handmade incense holders had gnomes atop mushrooms and caricatures of witches with big noses marked by moles stirring cauldrons of green bubbling goo. The items for sale were densely packed and organized very chaotically and it all looked very kitsch in a cosy and familiar way. Isabella pulled a key from her purse, unlocked the door to the store and then moved inside to input a code into an alarm beside the door. Once the alarm was disarmed, she signalled Marion to come in.

“We could enter through the side but it’s faster to cut through the store.”

Without questioning the witch on the best path to her house, they walked through the shelves of strange supplies, like glass flasks of herbs and dust with corks in them, which would appear like they might belong in a proper apothecary if it wasn’t for the very commercial and modern Witching Well label on them; crystals and orbs, hourglasses, vaguely ethnic incense holders. Marion's eyes let her navigate the dimly lit shop easily enough but she was surprised with the fact that Isabella didn’t seem to need her phone light to walk through the tight and densely packed shelves without dropping and breaking many of the display items. She opened the counter, where new-age music CDs and LPs were on sale side by side with books on the matter of spirits, spells and mystical enlightenment, and the back door to a depot room.

The room was a narrow corridor packed full of crates on shelves on all sides, but across it, on the opposite side of the door they came in, there was another door, leading into a stairwell that ended in a door. A dreamcatcher made with raven feathers hung on the door, and above it, there was a small sigil etched on the wood. Yet nothing magical happened as Isabella pushed the door open and called.

“Mamá, ya llegué…”

Isabella called into the apartment and entered. Marion moved, standing at the threshold and Isabella paused and turned back. She signalled for Marion to come inside but as the vampire wouldn’t move, she paused and said:

“Oh, right… Please, come in.”

Marion took a sigh of relief and crossed the threshold, as Isabella seemed to find the restriction a little amusing. The interior of the apartment took advantage of the old red bricks that formed the building and didn’t attempt to cover it with plaster or wallpaper, instead, it was all left on display, even the places where time, wear and tear had caused some bricks to crack and fall off. Large windows were looking over Wyrd Street, and the ceiling was higher than most modern buildings. The furniture seemed to be all antiques, though it didn’t belong to the same style or period. Everything was though, made of old hardwood. A grandfather clock sat in a corner, surprisingly working, and Marion had to force herself to think when was the last time she saw that, and everywhere she looked there were cauldrons and candleholders, pentagrams, mandalas, tiny animal skulls, pots with ingredients and dirt and basically the less cheap and soulless version of everything one might find in the Witching Well. A pentagram built with twigs, and with what Marion hoped was not human skin, hung from the wall inside an empty old-timey picture frame.

“In the kitchen, cariño.”

The voice came from their left as they entered, and past the reclamation wood peninsula, a woman in her early fifties was stirring a pot over the stove. The smell of home-cooked food was delicious, even if Marion knew she would be unable to keep it down should she eat it.

“Hey, mom.” Isabella waved, tossing house and car keys on the kitchen counter and sitting on a bar stool there. “This is Marion, the girl I told you about.”

“Oh, si… The vampire…”

Marion would never get used to being so casually referred to as that, even though it was very much factually correct. It was one thing when it was said with some shock in surprise, but the casual tone of the older witch really took her off guard. Perhaps Isabella was right and Marion really wanted to have that card in her sleeve, because standing there in front of who she presumed was Isabella’s mother with her secret in the open made her feel naked.

“It’s nice to meet you, uh…”

“Oh, right…” Isabella swatted her forehead. “Marion, this is my mom, Rosalinda Blanco,” Isabella introduced, “and mom this is Marion… Wait, what’s your surname again?”

“I don’t really…” Marion began and then thought for a moment before deciding how to finish the sentence. “I don’t think it matters. I don’t feel that I’m that girl anymore.”

Isabella seemed ready to offer a follow-up question before Rosalinda chuckled softly and gave an empathic nod with her head towards Marion as if she understood very well what she was talking about. Wiping her hands on the apron and lowering the heat on the stove, she approached the two girls, her daughter and the vampire she had invited into their home, but looked at both with the same tenderness, as if seeing them both as children despite the fact Marion was very much older than her, assuming witches aged the same as mortals, which seemed to be the case with Isabella as far as she knew.

“No surname works for me,” Rosalinda said as she closed the gap, walking around the counter.

She placed both hands on Isabella’s cheeks and pulled her head forth, leaning down to place a kiss on the younger witch's forehead and then looked into her face with what seemed like intense attention, thumbs brushing softly against her cheeks just below the eye in mute praise of her daughter, and the sight of it made Marion rather uncomfortable. But not as uncomfortable as when Rosalinda turned to her and cupped her chin with one hand, lifting her head to make Marion look at her directly.

“Let me see you, girl,” she spoke with a warm and tender tone, almost as if Marion was her daughter too.

She was used to people younger than her talking to her as if she was the age she appeared, rather than her actual years. That was part of the deal with being a vampire after all, but Rosalinda ought to be able to guess Marion was far older than she looked, and yet she treated her like that. Just like any other of Isabella's friends. And the worst part was, Marion felt a certain urge to lean into it. It was just easier to go with it, she decided.

Rosalinda had the same dark brown hair as Isabella, which started straight as it cascaded down growing wavier and curlier the further down it went before it ended on her shoulders. She was beautiful in a classical way, as one might expect to see in a painting, with a well-defined bone structure and smooth skin. A few subtle marks of age around her eyes, but just like the few silver lines cutting through her dark brown hair, they didn’t diminish anything from her beauty. Her complexion was just a bit darker than Isabella’s, and she had a perfectly round beauty mark just above her lip to the right.

“You poor thing, what did they do to you… Turn someone this young,” she spoke as her thumb reached to caress Marion’s chin as the vampire was held and studied with focus.

“I’m actually…”

“I know,” Rosalinda interrupted her, as she leaned closer to gaze intensely into Marion’s eyes.

For the moment that it lingered, but was probably not more than a couple of seconds, Marion could swear the woman was approaching her to place her lips on hers. She wasn’t sure why she expected the older witch to kiss her, but she did, and she found herself blushing and her lips parting. But instead, that thumb on her chin pressed against Marion’s lower lip and pulled it down to expose the bottom row of her teeth.

“Show them to me,” she whispered as if that was a secret between the two.

The idea of exposing her fangs caused Marion to blush deeply as if the woman was asking her to lift her dress. And in a way, it was a part of her few ever got to see. And none ever got to linger their eyes. And that idea brought a shameful background of arousal to the moment, that Marion hoped she could keep to herself as she closed her eyes and allowed her fangs to protrude forth. With a wet click, she displayed those sharp teeth. Two shorter ones on her last lower incisors, and two longer ones sprouting from her upper canines. She opened her mouth just one more inch, and the thumb on her lip pulled it further down as Rosalinda produced a soft ‘hm’ as she peered into her.

Marion felt a warm tingle travelling down her spine and especially on the very tip of her breasts, acutely aware that she wasn’t wearing a bra with her shirt and how the loose fabric was in direct contact with them as they stiffened slightly. Thankfully, that was partially obscured by the open grey hoodie, else she would feel doubly embarrassed. Rosalinda’s thumb finally released her lip but only so it could run across the bottom row of her teeth, and that caused a shudder Marion couldn’t disguise. Isabella furrowed her brow at the sight of it but her mother seemed just as unfazed by it as she had been by anything else.

“Mhm, as I thought…” she finally concluded and she released Marion’s chin, rising back up straight from her lean.

Marion was left with a pulsing feeling on her fangs as if they were complaining to have been pulled out under the promise of tearing flesh and feasting, and now nothing was happening. And there were other parts of her pulsing with a different but maybe tangentially related feeling. Closing her legs tighter and putting her hands on her knees, she looked at Rosalinda with mild confusion.

“Lots you can tell about a vampire by looking at their fangs,” the older witch said.

“What did you see in mine?”

“That you are not a killer,” Rosalinda said with a shrug, “no judgement otherwise but… If you were, I might be less inclined to help you.”

“I suppose that’s fair… So, that means you will help me, Miss Blanco?”

“Oh, none of that here. No Miss Blanco. Just call me Rosa,” she said, shaking her head vigorously and moving back towards her cooking pot. “But yes, I will help you. Because you’re a lost child.”

“Mom.” Isabella sighed and rolled her eyes. “She’s, like, a hundred.”

“I’m eighty-…”

“There are lost children of all ages,” Rosalinda said, turning the heat off, putting a lid on her pan and taking off her apron.

She wore a long black dress underneath, with a bit of lace around the hem of the sleeves, and much like Isabella, an abundance of rings, necklaces and bracelets of crystals and other symbols adorned her neck, wrists and fingers. She pulled from under the kitchen counter a Ziploc bag with what Marion recognized was her cat hoodie stained with Skye’s blood and placed it on the counter.

“But to help you,” Rosa said, “I need to know exactly what you are trying to do.” She concluded by placing a hand on her waist and another on top of the bag.

It had been a while since the last time Marion felt in a position where she wanted to earn the approval of a motherly figure, and it brought a mix of bittersweet memories. Mother was never too gentle with her, and even when she was tender, her caress felt like the blunt side of a razor, with a sharp edge never too far away. Rosa didn’t seem to be that type, but Marion couldn’t be sure about such a short experience. Yet she knew the woman could do for them, for her, something nobody else she knew could.

“This woman is hunting me… She knows where I live. Even if I move, she might hurt my roommate. She wants me for something I didn’t do, killed someone…” Marion explained, “I want to figure out who it was and who did it, and how I can get her off my back.”

Isabella nodded in the wake of Marion’s words, confirming all that she said, as she drummed with her fingers on the kitchen counter. And then Rosalinda took the hand off her waist and lifted the bag containing the bloodied hoodie up to take a look at it.

“Alright, Isabella…” She turned to her daughter, “What’s the plan here?”

The tone in her voice wasn’t one of curiosity. No, it was rhetorical. She knew the answer already, but she wanted her daughter to get there. Isabella shook her head:

“Mom, I came to you for help! Do we have to do this…?”

“Yes, yes we do. I’m your mother, cariño. I will help you, but I won’t do your work for you. This is for your friend, si? So, come on… You must know this if you knew to bring me blood.”

“We could… Use haruspicy on the blood to learn why she’s after Marion, to learn what she knows and then we deal with it.”

“Bueno… It’s good, but not perfect. Haruspicy isn’t going to provide you with enough useful information to catch a killer. Especially not from just a bit of blood.”

Isabella frowned in thought. After humming for a moment, she suddenly jumped up.

“We could… Ask a spirit?”

“We could… They aren’t always helpful though. The most useful would be the spirit of the murdered person, but we don’t know anything about them to summon them, right?”

“Right, right….”

“And besides, you brought me her blood, mi hija. Any other way we could use besides Haruspicy.”

“We could…” Isabella pondered.

Marion watched the black magical educational exchange with a frown of confusion. She had no idea what the plan was for the blood but she had assumed Isabella’s mother would just perform a spell and then give out an answer, or a clear path forward. Apparently, things really weren’t as simple.

Isabella paced around in thought, despite her initial annoyance to engage with her mother's ‘game’ of guessing what was the best answer, she now seemed fully emerged in it, walking back and forth while looking intently at the floor in front of her as if trying to visualize things. And then she sighed, raised her head and her eyes went straight to the pentagram inside a frame. Her face lit up with realization. Marion looked at Rosalinda and realized that she was smiling. Whatever answer Isabella had stumbled upon, was the correct one, it seemed.

“I know it…”

“Yes, cariño?” Rosalinda encouraged.

“The best way to know what she knows… Is to ask her directly.”

“I knew you’d get there,” Rosalinda said.

“What?” Marion blurted.

She would rather not have anything to do with Skye again if she could avoid it. Not before she had the answers. Talking to her seemed just as likely to end with that sharp knife stuck in her stomach. Or maybe a silver blade if the vampire was feeling particularly mean.

“Don’t worry, Marion… I know what mom wants to do,” Isabella said, sounding almost excited.

“I don’t want to do anything, Isabella. I will just help you do your thing,” Rosa said with a shrug.

“Right, right… Wait, does that mean I’ll be the one doing the whole…”

Rosalinda simply nodded as Isabella seemed way too excited to take charge of whatever they planned next to explain herself better. And Marion simply sighed and realized that she was at the mercy of whatever the two witches decided. As Isabella went into the next room and Marion heard the sound of clinking glass and drawers being pulled open, Rosalinda placed a hand on her shoulder and delivered a comforting squeeze to her.

“Don’t worry, you’re in good hands with Isabella,” she said with an encouraging smile.

Marion smiled back at her before her eyes went to a big magnet on their fridge, displaying a silhouette of a stereotypical witch flying around in a broom surrounded by bats, with a Spanish phrase written to the right of it: ‘No creo en brujas pero que las hay, las hay’.