Florida
year six
The RV rolled into Tallahassee just as autumn was creeping over the swamps, dark green and soft with decay. In Virginia, where they had come from, the air was already growing thin with cold. Stepping out of the RV was like stepping back into summer again, or a nostalgic memory of it.
John was already waiting for them in the parking lot.
“How does he always know?” Hanna asked, swinging past Conrad on his way to the exit.
Conrad sighed and shifted the bundle in his arms. “It’s probably for the best,” he said, “if we get this out of the way first thing.”
John was waiting with one of his pitifully hopeful faces at the edge of the grass, rocking on his heels. Conrad stuck his head out the door and waved him over. “Hold this,” he said, pushing the bundle into the kid’s hands, “but be careful. I’ve got to unload some suitcases.”
Conrad skittered back up the steps into the familiar cramped sanctuary of the RV, just as John’s cracking voice shrieked, “It’s a baby?”
Five minutes later, Conrad stood inside a ring of suitcases—only several of which were his—doing his best to quiet the screaming infant. Who the hell decided that he was going to have to be the one to do it, he didn’t know, but he was feeling extremely put-upon and not a little bit bitter. It had been a long trip, and he’d never been at home with children.
“Her name is Lamont,” Conrad explained, bouncing her against his non-existent hip.
“Lamontoinette,” Hanna called, halfway crawled into the undercarriage after some elusive luggage.
Conrad pursed his lips and said, “I will have nothing to do with that fucking ridiculous fake name.”
There was a metallic creak as Worth came down the steps, closing his medical bag with a click. Conrad immediately shoved the baby into his free arm, and like a clockwork toy she fell perfectly silent.
“She’s from Christiansburg,” Conrad said, and then clarified, “Virginia. She’s an orphan, as far as we can tell. They thought,” he said uneasily, “maybe her parents were going through lean times… I heard that’s what they used to do in the old days, leave them out where another family would find them. Maybe they were hoping somebody down the road could do better by her.”
And then the town thought somebody even further down the road might actually want her, Conrad added silently, dipping a little deeper into that well of bitterness. The truth was, the people in Virginia had been passing the poor thing from house to house for weeks, like an unwanted fruitcake. They’d practically thrown her into the arms of Hanna’s crew, looking desperate and terrified even as they hightailed it out of there. It was as if they’d never seen a baby before. Granted, Conrad felt desperate and terrified around babies too, but he didn’t already have two of them in the next room over.
“Fuckin’ cowards didn’t wanna keep ‘er,” Worth grumbled, “what’s a goddamn baby gonna do to ‘em? She ain’t even barely toddlin’ yet.”
“Why’d they give her to you two?” John sniffed. “Isn’t Cross the head of your unholy little circus?”
Conrad and Worth exchanged a glance; Conrad crossed his arms. “Yeah, Hanna,” he said, “how come?”
“You’re, like, basically married,” Hanna said. “That makes you the most qualified.”
“We are not,” Conrad said, “married. Like I would ever hitch myself legally to this–” he eyed the week-old blood stains on Worth’s collar for a moment, “disgusting wreck of an inhuman being.”
“I ain’t the marrying type,” Worth agreed, wiggling a pinky into his ear.
“You’re having sex,” Hanna replied, unimpressed, “you’re monogamous, and you turned Worth into your immortal death companion for the rest of eternity.”
“It wasn’t,” Conrad sputtered, “it wasn’t at all like that–”
“There’s something wrong with this baby,” John interrupted, so solemnly that Conrad had to do a double take. John had moved over to Worth’s shoulder, and was poking its cheek with one grubby finger. He sounded like he was reading off a terminal diagnosis.
“Yeah?” Worth said, lifting an eyebrow, “and how you reckon that, mister pediatrician?”
John squinted at the now wriggling infant. “I dunno,” he said, “I can just feel it. She’s wrong. Abominable. Untouched by the benevolence of the Lord.”
“Oi,” Worth said, shouldering himself between the baby and the young man, “what a thing ter say. That’s yer baby sister yer talkin about there.”
John’s eyes went big and round.
“Oh no,” Conrad said, “no no no, Worth don’t encourage him.”
Worth just shrugged.
“Besides,” Conrad said, “we’re not keeping her. It’s bad enough you people insist on naming her, but look, the second we find a suitable family that’s the end of it. We’re not cut out to raise a child, not with our lifestyle.”
“I’unno,” Worth said, “we keep Hanna just fine.”
From underneath the luggage compartment, Hanna said, “Oh, hardy har, I never get tired of that joke.”
“She’s very good,” John remarked, eyeing the infant at arm’s length. “Was she fashioned from the unconsecrated clay of the grave?”
“What?” Conrad said. “No.”
“Sacrificial animals? Dirt from the crossroads?”
Hanna popped out from underneath the vehicle, visibly fascinated. “Where does he hear these things,” he asked, tilting his head. “I’ve visited the local churches and they don’t say anything like that on Sunday service.”
Conrad gave the whole motley congregation a despairing look. “Look,” he said, “John. We can get into this later, if we absolutely must. Right now we need to find a room where we can keep a twelve month old.”
“You can stay with me,” John blurted out, and then amended, “the baby and you, I mean, she can stay with me.”
“You?” Conrad echoed. In all fairness, the last couple times they had visited, he and Worth had ended up staying over with John—it was hard to say no, after agreeing to pretend to be his parents for an entire holiday. It was just another one of those weird things that Conrad had no choice but to accept now comprised his entire life. “What happened to abominable graveyard dirt?”
John clasped his hands behind his back. “Jeramiah 29:11, for I know the plans I have for you—”
“Nuh uh,” Worth cut in, shoving his medical bag into John’s chest with a thump, “no verses. Connie, grab yer shit. Let’s go, the little brat needs her nap time.”
There was still a crib under a sheet in the corner of the room that had been a nursery—and John’s DIY blacked out windows too—so it was pretty easy to put the baby down and then go about shifting in the rest of their stuff. Worth always gave him hell for overpacking, but look, if Conrad didn’t overpack then Worth would have fuck all of his own stuff. Besides. Conrad packed trading supplies too.
It was sort of becoming… normal, to go down to the market with John when they stayed over. God knew he could barely shop for himself—if the Bread of the Lord was enough sustenance to run a body on, John would probably never eat.
In the kitchen, Conrad was reaching for the milk jug in the cupboard when John reappeared and startled him so badly he nearly dropped the thing. Conrad swore violently.
“I think your daughter is the antichrist,” John announced, like he didn’t even notice the chaos he caused.
Conrad swore again, for good measure, and then said, “She’s not my daughter, John. We’re just watching her.”
John gave him a really patronizing look. Unbelievable. You agree to make an ungrateful little twerp a couple of sandwiches and suddenly he thinks he knows you.
“Does Ricky Asad still bring the cows in around dawn?” Conrad asked, aggressively changing the subject.
“Yeah.”
“Alright.” Conrad set the empty milk jug down on the counter. “Pull the tin of band-aids out of the blue suitcase and put on some shoes. I’m taking you up to the market while Worth is off doing… whatever the hell it is Worth does. Frightening nuns or something.”
While John toed on his shoes, Conrad popped in to check on the baby, sound asleep in her second hand crib. Part of him wasn’t sure it was okay to leave something that small alone in a house—but the market was just a block up from here, and Worth would be around, and it was only for a couple minutes. Still, it made him nervous. There were so many things that could go wrong with an animal that small, and to Conrad’s vampire nose she smelled infinitely vulnerable.
Glancing over his shoulder to make sure that nobody was around to see him, Conrad slipped through the door and made his way over to the crib. She seemed fine. Conrad paused, reached into the crib, and fished out a plaster crucifix, the kind that old women hang over doorways.
As he shut the door behind him, he said, “John. What the hell is this.”
John flushed underneath his freckles. “Warding us from her evil,” he muttered, hunching down over the suitcase. “Not that you’d need it, though. I suppose you’re both of a kind.”
“That girl is not the antichrist!” Conrad snapped, abruptly losing his temper with John, this city, everyone in it, and the whole concept of small needy humans. “She’s just loud and hungry all the time! That’s normal for babies!”
“She’s not normal! I can feel it, I can feel it in her!”
“Oh,” Conrad snarled, “like you could feel that Worth was some kind of prophet messiah? Like you could feel that I needed to be doused in pig blood? Like you—” he jabbed a finger into John’s chest, “could feel—” he jabbed again, “that your stupid, racist, disbanded church was destined to rescue the world?”
John’s improbably blue eyes swam with water.
All the irritation inside Conrad abruptly turned over, leaving a bone crushing embarrassment instead. “I’m—” he said, “I’m sorry, that was uncalled for. I should be used to your delusions by now…”
“They’re not delusions,” John said, his eyes puffy and wet. He snatched his worn bible from the counter and clutched it to his chest. “I’ll prove it. I’m not—I’m not stupid.”
“John,” Conrad started to say, but John was already off, running for the nursery. For a moment Conrad just stood there, stunned and trying to catch up with the conversation, and then the penny dropped. He threw himself over the couch and flashstepped to the door of the nursery, taking a chunk out of the door frame as he grabbed hold of it to deaden his speed.
The baby had started crying. John had her up in his arms, the book open on the night stand, and Conrad’s brain was already raging with images of his stupid fucking son stabbing their baby, or throwing her against a wall or something, and how the hell would he explain that to Worth?
Conrad grabbed hold of John’s arm, and of the screaming baby’s little hand, and tried to wrestle her free. “Put her down,” Conrad shouted, digging claws into John, who just shot him a murderous look and read louder, blowing through the words of something that sounded vaguely like the communion rite Conrad had attended a couple times as a child.
Lamont screamed, shaking her tiny fists—Conrad swore hard enough to punch a hole through a less stubborn person—John was still crying even as he yelled over the infant in his arms—something paper ripped—and then the space between the three of them erupted in a concussive force that threw Conrad across the carpet.
Conrad came up coughing, his confused lungs not quite knowing what to do about being thrown against the floor mid-tirade. He levered himself upright, fingers digging into nylon, and peered across the room towards the growing scent of blood and barbecue. The baby was unharmed on the floor, determinedly crawling away from the stunned specter of John. On his knees, pale as a ghost, John clutched the stump of the forearm currently giving off trails of greasy smoke. On the floor between his legs: his right hand, perfectly severed, the round white bone in the middle poking through as clearly as a hamhock.
John took several shallow, panicked breaths, and said, “Told you so.”
Then he toppled over onto his back.
“Oh yes,” Mr. Fell said, “she’s definitely the antichrist.”
Conrad dropped the roll of bandages, which landed on John’s thigh and bounced away. “You’ve got to be joking,” he said, weakly. “A demon, maybe, or a changeling or something, I understand that, but—you can’t mean to tell me there’s such a thing as an actual antichrist?”
John made a little wheezing noise that managed to sound both extremely pained and extremely smug. In the mason jar next to him, his hand was carefully settled with its fingers pointing down, to keep as much blood inside as possible. The arm itself had cauterized, but somehow the missing bit was just as leaky and soft as any other severed limb.
“Well,” Mr. Fell said, settling little Lamont on his hip, “I should say she’s one of any number of past and potential antichrists. It’s a matter of parentage, you see. She’s half human. The other half is infernal. I’m sure that you found something to be slightly off about her? A little uncanny? Stares too long, makes strange sounds, that sort of thing?”
Conrad ducked and went fishing around for the bandages. “I thought that’s just what babies did,” he muttered.
“I suppose if you don’t have much experience with human babies,” Fell said, generously, “it would be more difficult to spot. She’s very sweet though, you’re quite lucky. It looks like you’d have to make her quite upset before anything unnatural came of it.”
Conrad closed his fingers around the bandages and sighed into the dusty space below the crib. He was never going to live this down. And, on top of that, now he felt about three thousand times worse for yelling at John. The little idiot shouldn’t have tried to exorcise someone else’s baby, but still. He had been right. Unbelievably.
“At least it isn’t raining,” Conrad mumbled, and stood up again.
“I guess it all depends on your perspective,” Fell said, presumably not responding to the rain comment specifically. “On the one hand, the amount of self loathing rolling off of you right now is actually making me slightly nauseous. On the other hand, since it’s a demonic injury, I should be able to do something about it. You might consider this fortunate in a way.”
“You?” Conrad echoed.
“Hand me that hand,” Fell said, as he stripped off his suit jacket.
Dumbly, Conrad held out the mason jar. Fell delicately lifted the severed hand from the glass and lined it up against the stump from whence it came. The lining up took a long moment, as Fell clicked his tongue and shifted it incrementally, and then there was a flash of light and a fizzle of heat, as if a sparkler had been lit inside of John’s skin.
“Good as new,” he pronounced, clapping his hands together as John whimpered.
Conrad stretched John’s arm out and inspected it, the thick circle of burnt skin around the area of the joining and the… oh dear.
“It’s gone red,” Conrad said.
A wine stain was blooming, slowly, across the back of the wrist, like a puddle of watercolor. John let out a distressed keen.
“Red, yellow—” Fell shrugged, “—it still works just fine. Think of it as a permanent lesson in proper childcare. The next time you drop a baby, it probably won’t bounce.”
Fell picked up the girl again and gently set her down in Conrad’s arms. She buried her tiny head in his shoulder, tiny pudgy fingers attempting to bury themselves in his polo. God, she was a little thing wasn’t she? And he’d just snatched her around like a bag of flour. He was lucky she wasn’t screaming just at the sight of him now.
Fell tapped his chin. “I feel like I might know her mother. It’s the eyes.”
Conrad ignored him. He pressed his finger to her little hand, pushing to get her to let go of his shirt, and she grabbed hold of him instead. Oh no, he thought, I can feel it coming, this is the evolutionary instinct that wants me to protect the offspring of the tribe. Well I’m not about to fall for that. She’s not really ours.
“Da,” she said.
Conrad stared down in horror, literally feeling the swell of paternal pride sweeping through him like a flash flood carrying telephone poles and small dogs along with it. Fell patted him on the shoulder, knowingly.
“Hey,” John said, his voice sounding dry and cracked, “I want a do over. Let me hold her again.”
Conrad stared at him. “She just took your arm off.”
John rubbed at the grisly circle of scar tissue. “I mean, yeah,” he said, “but babies do stuff like that. I had a bunch of younger siblings when I was in the foster system. I used to get hit with tonka trucks a lot.”
“But she’s literally the antichrist. She’s literally the spawn of hell.”
John just kind of shrugged and held his arms out. “Nobody can help their parentage,” he said, in that sanctimonious voice he always used to deliver his patented pearls of wisdom. He gave Conrad another one of those patronizing little looks.
Before Conrad could say anything else, there was a creak at the other end of the house, the sound of birds and such things suddenly magnified tenfold, and then Hanna’s voice calling, “Hey, anyone home? I think I found a family for the Mont-ster!”
Fell pulled on his jacket again, smirking at whatever expression he saw on Conrad’s face—probably sheer dumb bewilderment, he wasn’t too proud to admit when he was in over his head—and added, “Let me know if you need a babysitter. I’m expensive, but I'm worth it.”