Descendant

The Sacred Seal

I took Ricochet for a walk around the Scenic Loop at Cherokee Park. It was a warm, gusty afternoon, and kites of all shapes and sizes were flying from Hill One. They reminded me of that Japanese print of people being caught in a sudden gale, with papers flying in the air, and their whole lives suddenly being turned into chaos, as mine had been.

Jill was a strigoaica. I wondered if I had ever suspected it before, and deliberately ignored it. But it really didn’t matter. What did matter was that I was morally obliged to do something. She would have to kill more people to satisfy her endless thirst for blood, and even if they were derelicts or drunks or down-and-outs that nobody else would miss, they were human lives, and I couldn’t allow her to take them.

But I loved her. I had loved her from the moment I had first seen her, in St. Augustine’s Avenue, in Croydon, on that hot summer day in 1957. So how could I drive nails into her eyes, and cut off her head, and dismember her? I couldn’t even ask anybody else to do it.

I sat down on a bench and Ricochet came up and laid his head on my knees, as if he understood what I was going through. He was so much like Bullet, except for a tiny tan-colored smudge between his eyes.

“Goddamnit, Ric,” I told him. “If it hadn’t been for Duca — ”

It was then that I thought: Duca was caught by my mother, but she didn’t kill it. She had sealed it into a casket, and if that plane hadn’t crashed, Duca might still be preserved today. Not destroyed, not dismembered, but rendered harmless.

Maybe I could do the same to Jill. Seal her away, so that she wouldn’t kill anybody else. Then maybe I could find a way to bring her back to life, as a human being. But how was I going to do it? Only my mother had known how.

I stood up. The kites were whirling in the wind. “Come on, Ric,” I told him. “I think I need to go to San Diego.”