The Daughters of John Demetrius

The Daughters of John Demetrius

By Joe Pitkin (excerpt)

On waking he felt again the perfect confidence that he would walk out of Dessicant Wells with the child of Lupe Hansen. The night’s sleep, the revitalizing Ambrosias, the brilliant white tunic all convinced him that success was a foregone conclusion.

Then, walking out of the Hotel Vieja Delicias, he saw a lilith snooping about as she came up the road, peering into windows, swiveling her half-snake head to and fro like a flashlight. Mendel had worried about the blood on the old tunic. It wouldn’t have hurt him to have worried about it a little ore. But he had thought it unlikely for one like Perses to carry radio tags in his blood like a child or a criminal. Mendel’s main worry had been that the bloodstains would frighten the naturals.

The lilith was a good way up the street, moving past a trio of vulgaris hauling in enormous handcart towards some market or warehouse. Mendel was the only other divine on the road; she would spot him for sur if he began to run. To his left a laundromat operated out of a family’s garage. He turned into it as though that had been his errand all along.

A broad-faced natural with a thick braid of hair in the ancient style looked up at him from the pile of laundry her neighbors had left for her. Mendel wondered for half a second whether the old bloodstained tunic was in the pile, sent over by the hotel to be washed instead of incinerated as Mendel had demanded. He raised the back of his hand to her like a strange greeting; his fingernail, tapered and sculpted, began to grow out of his index finger into thirty fatal centimeters of talon.

Daughters of John Demetrius. Photo by Elena

“It there a bloody tunic in your laundry?” he asked in Spanish.

“No, lord,” she answered, emotionless.

He sheathed the claw back into his hand. “Is there a back door?”

“It leads to our house, lord.”

He asked if he could get to the roof by that way. He could. For a short, waddling woman, she moved in a hurry, and silently, and he followed her into a dusty cinderblock courtyard with a legion of geraniums growing in old rusted cans. The lip of the roof hung three meters or o above the ground; Mendel leapt, caught the lip, and vaulted himself up. He looked back at her only a moment to say in his antique Spanish: “From the day the gods bless your house.” Then, with the some finger that a moment before had been a blade of fingernail, he exhorted her to be silent. He stayed not a moment to see her bowing deferentially, but like a loon lifting off from the water he glided across the roof and leapt into the street behind, and then he ran faster than any lilith dep into the mirages of the desert.

He took a roundabout way back to Dessecant Wells, running far to the west into the creosote and circling back southeast. It was nearly noo when he arrived, and a call went up when he came into sight of them. By the time he walked into the central courtyyard they were arrayed in front of him in all their scabby glory like a choir. In the center of the formation, looking more desolate even than the day before. Yet at the girl’s feet was a backpack, and she stood dressed and washed and combed like a lamb for sacrifice.

The headwoman was the first to speak: “Will you, lord, cure us of our sickness?”

He showed them the trick with the water and ashes that would soften the corn kernels, that trick which even the poorest village in Mexico would have known in the last age, that trick which in fact had been discovered not far from Dessicant Wells nearly four thousand years before. As far as the villagers were concerned, Chloe Hansen was a fair trade for such knowledge.

During the celebratory dinner the little girl looked at him balefully and silently. If she had cried on learning that she would go with him, or if she was to cry about it later, she wasn’t crying now. Of course, Mendel had taken the other children whether they had cried or not. But it was always easier for him if they didn’t cry.

The sun was low before they were ready to set out. The headwoman and others clamored for him to stay one more night, to leave in the morning – give the girl one more night with her mother. But the girl would be safe at night, Mendel assured them and no marauder on the road would be so foolish that he would try to steal a child from a god