“I won’t tell anyone. I won’t call the police.”
It’s bad enough he’s bleeding all over her floor, but interrupting one of her all-time favorite movies . . . now that’s just plain rude. Sydney rolls her eyes, then gestures with her hand, a graceful swoop. Her meal rises up and smacks the ceiling with a wet thwack. She then gingerly removes the coffee table’s glass top and props it up against the side of her sofa.
“Another word, and I’ll drop you.” She gorges on the surge in fear as it pushes back that empty space inside her, recharging her like a battery fighting to live past its shelf life.
“Why are you—”
Another gesture and his lips zip shut. Sydney fluffs her sofa cushions, then gets back to the movie.
I know what you are, come his thoughts.
“Yeah, yeah. I’m a witch,” she says mockingly. She really doesn’t want to kill him, not just yet. Who knows the next time she’ll be able to feed? Too many people start disappearing and the cops start asking questions and canvassing for leads. Sydney’s getting too old to move. She’s lived in this apartment for almost six years now, probably longer than she’s lived anywhere her entire life. Well, at least the last century or so of it. She keeps to herself so maybe her neighbors won’t notice that she hasn’t aged since she’d moved in. Blending into the woodwork has become second nature. It’s all she can do to survive day to day, let alone expending the energy to rebuild a following.
Not a witch. Something more powerful. Something ancient.
That gets Sydney’s attention. She pauses her movie and looks up at her meal, who’s getting bloodstains all over her ceiling now. Sydney makes a mental note to pick up some primer and white paint from the hardware store.
It’d been all too easy to lure him here. She’d dressed as a prostitute, and a cheap one at that. Sydney had reached right into his head and had seen each and every time he’d been unfaithful to his wife—at least twice a week, every week, up until about two years ago. Then he’d stopped, cold turkey.
But his aura was gray, a heavy fog she could hardly see through. That’s what had attracted her to him while she’d browsed the streets for a meal. With a single concentrated shot of vulnerability, anxiety, and helplessness she’d pushed old desires right into the primal area of his brain. His eyes latched onto her, watching. Weighing. She wasn’t his type, but she’d pushed so hard, it didn’t matter. He’d taken the bait, following behind her, the stench of sin rising off him so incredibly intoxicating.
“Does your wife know what you’re up to this evening?” Sydney tosses back at him. She fans a handful of colorful bills, the 1,650 rand he’d offered her for sex, right before she’d lifted her index finger to make that first cut that severed the tendons in his legs. Combined with her tips today, that’ll put a nice dent in her overdue rent.
I love my wife. I wouldn’t even be here if you hadn’t vexed me.
“Is that so, Mr. Gnoto? So you claim that you’ve never had a pretty girl turn your head? Never found yourself in the company of a hooker? Perhaps a Ms. Mandy Ugunwa? You probably just knew her as Jessie.”
His mind goes quiet for a long while.
It was an accident.
Sydney clucks her tongue in disgust. “You liked to treat them rough, didn’t you? Let me guess, to make up for feeling so emasculated by your wife? Mandy didn’t deserve what you did to her. She didn’t deserve to have her breath taken by your hands, no matter how trashy you thought she was. She was a person.”
It was an accident . . .
“Was it an accident what you did afterward? Dumped her body in a ditch, washed over by sewage and scavenged by vultures while her parents plastered missing posters all over the city. She was fourteen, you know. A runaway. You were her third john.”
Have mercy on my soul.
In that moment, Sydney feels something magnificent, a prick of light in that empty spot inside her. Basos, pure belief. It warms her from the inside out, radiating from her fingertips in faint blue-white ribbons. Muscles she hasn’t felt in decades spasm to life, sending her on the brink of ecstasy. Minutes pass before Sydney is able to speak again.
She unsilences Mr. Gnoto with a flick of her hand. “What did you say?”
“Have mercy on my soul. I didn’t mean to. She, she said I was hurting her, but I didn’t listen. I just kept—” Mr. Gnoto begins to weep, his tears plinking down on the coffee table’s base like acid rain.
“You said you know what I am. How?”
“I teach at NMMU, Zulu mythology. You’re an ancestor spirit, one that plagued the villages near Port Natal. I’ve seen that nail rack in photos in a private collection from the 1850s.”
Sydney’s jaw drops as her mind sweeps back to a time when she’d wielded real power. She’d posed as a seer back then, helping to turn wars, and gaining favor among Zulu kings . . . until all that power went to her head and she got sloppy about hiding her true form. She was betrayed by a woman she’d dared call sister, accusing Sydney of witchery that had brought them famine and disease and death. The famine and disease—that was none of her doing, just a bad year for rain and a general lack of hygiene. The death . . . well, a girl’s got to eat.
The village had torn her into so many pieces, it took nearly two decades for her to pull herself back together. But she’d gotten her rack back. Eventually. And her revenge on the woman who’d crossed her. Sydney’s never had any sort of tolerance for traitors. Or murderers. Or rapists. Or professors who toss teenaged girls away like last week’s rubbish.
But Mr. Gnoto is different from the rest of her prey. He actually believes in her, and with that prize comes the strength that pulses through her being. It won’t last long, she knows. With the torture she’s put him through, Mr. Gnoto is not much more for this earth. Still, he’s given her something she’s been craving for ages, so she grants him mercy, lets him drop onto the bed of nails, his death quick and painless. Well, quick anyway. She absolves him of his sins and hopes when the time comes she’ll be granted the same mercy.