Skin in the Game Read online

  I hunt my own. My monstrous kin. And when I take them down, the last thing I see in their eyes is the sting of my treachery.

  But I ask, what deserves my loyalty?

  Not the hunger. Never the hunger.

  * * *

  Another Kind of Ghost

  I don’t know what Yoli reads on my face—self-loathing, stubbornness, what—but her jaw sets. “Tell me whatever it is you’re not saying,” she demands.

  She’s not using magic, but for the first time since we’ve known each other, the need to let her under the surface of my story hits as hard and fulminating as any other desire I’ve ever experienced. Even the one called up by blood and soft organ meats.

  It takes me a while. I don’t want to lose her friendship, and even her understanding that we don’t pick our magic—or our parents—won’t be enough to prepare her.

  “The victim,” I say. “The thing that took her out … I know it. I know its taste. It tastes like me.”

  “You?”

  “It has my same DNA.”

  I climb into the passenger side of her car without her asking me to get in, and when she slides in the driver’s side she focuses on fitting the key into the ignition. Her hand shakes a little.

  “I guess it’s time we talk to your mother,” she says.

  * * *

  Las Girlfriends

  My mother lives on a block of South Philly I’ve come to call Witch Central, because the neighbors whose houses flank hers have her same proclivities. They’re all old; single or singled; women who keep too many animals for their small living spaces: Sonia keeps birds, Nilda turtles, and my mother cats. They dress alike—as if big flower prints had never gone out of style—and talk alike, with accents that have slipped from Chiapas, Tabasco, and Guatemala to generic Spanish. They’ve even started a business together, though they can’t decide how serious they are about the actual selling side, so it’s more sideline than subsistence.

  When Yoli and I pull up, my mother’s place is dark but light dances out of Sonia’s windows. She opens almost immediately after we knock. A wave of warmth pulses through the door because she, like my mother, keeps her thermostat at a near-tropical setting.

  “Eh, Mena, entra,” Sonia says, stepping aside to let me in. Then she bellows, “Oye, Rosa Marta, llegó tu hija.”

  Not only my mother, but Nilda and about a dozen little finches perching free of their cages, look over at the summons.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt your party,” I say, “I just need to talk to my mother.”

  “Ay, chula, it’s no party and no interruption,” Sonia answers as she moves away and lets my mother take her place.

  “So, he’s found you,” my mother says as soon as she takes a look at my face.

  “How? And why?” I ask, following her from the entryway to the big room that is Sonia’s living room, dining room, and kitchen all rolled into one. I hear Yoli close the front door and come up behind me.

  “He’s your father, mija,” Nilda says. “That says it all, no?” She’s the oldest and largest of las girlfriends, and at the moment she has her massive arms sunk elbow-deep in the bowl of masa she’s mixing on Sonia’s kitchen table.

  “You think monsters don’t pay attention to rumor?” my mother says to me. “Or that they don’t know you’re protecting humans at their expense? The surprise is they’ve taken this long to try to rid themselves of a turncoat.”

  “You knew.” My words come hard, pushing against the years of disguise and subterfuge.

  “I’m your mother. Of course I knew.” She wipes her hands on the apron that half covers her wide skirt and comes behind me to guide me into one of the kitchen chairs. “Sit,” she says, pushing on my shoulders. She nods to Yoli to grab the remaining seat.

  Yoli clears her throat. “Are you saying the body Blanca found was left there as a message for her?”

  My mother scrunches her face at the unfamiliar nickname. She rummages through the jars of ground herbs gathered on the table and hands one to Sonia before she nods.

  “There are probably other kills like it that haven’t been found yet,” my mother says to Yoli. “Vivos, zombies, ghosts—anyone under Mena’s protection.”

  “In order to force a confrontation with her?” Yoli’s voice turns skeptical. “Doesn’t that—”

  “No, mija,” Nilda interrupts, “not confrontation. Mena’s father wants to reclaim her. ¿Entiendes?” She spreads the masa on a banana leaf she hands to Sonia, who sprinkles the ground herbs onto it, folds the leaf, and gives it to my mother to tie and place in the tamalera. Their hands work independent of their minds, because they’re all watching Yoli and me with their too bright, too dark eyes.

  “The hunger is always inside me,” I say, but tentatively, because it’s the first time I’ve lent breath to these thoughts. “Like a huge hole that wants to be filled with blood. Blood, or the taste of human fear.

  “I hold it back with tricks of restraint. With hope of redemption. But just barely,” I say. “My father must know that. He knows who I really am, because he made me.”

  Yoli stays quiet for a long time, then gives me one of her looks—the one with which she compels good—even though she knows it won’t work on me. Even now that she knows why.

  “But your father isn’t the only one who made you,” she says finally.

  “¡Eso!” I hear the old women say. That!

  And with it, they acknowledge Yoli worthy to add something to the collective magic they’re cooking up: they hand her an apron. For a few minutes—finches flying free in circles around us and the women I love making their tamales—I let myself believe that nurture can win over nature.

  Either way, I’ve got skin in the game.

  * * *

  Hunger

  Las girlfriends make hundreds of tamales with special protections steamed into them. Tamágicos is what they’ve called them since they first started making them a few years ago. The little steamed packets—wrapped variously in plantain leaf or corn husk—bring love and luck and winning judgments after just a few bites. They’d be a hit even without the magic—Sonia, Nilda, and my mother have never once in their lives made a bad, or even mediocre, tamal.

  They drive their battered vehicle around the older barrio streets not so very different from their own South Philly ones, handing out free samples as they ask people to nominate them for Best Food Truck on Philly Magazine’s annual list. Sonia’s daughter Pat comes up with the ruse.

  Unfortunately, not only does it point out the city’s cultural gulf (no barrio store carries the Anglo magazine, so las girlfriends have to write out the internet address on scraps of paper) but also, it doesn’t have enough reach. Even with Yoli handing out more tamágicos to the ghosts, and me sharing them with the domino players and bodegueros, too many are left unfed.

  The next week, Nasey and I crash three more fraudulent drug rehabs and stumble onto four more bodies. Johnny the Fox brings me word that the Biblicals are down to two—Ezequiel has met an end that left him looking like a lobster after its innards have been scooped out by a famished diner.

  And at the tents, two of the ghost children have gone missing. Yoli and I find one shell of a body spraddled across a ditch at the far end of the rail bed, and another small one folded into a box that once held a microwave.

  With every body found, the spasms twist my gut, urgent and increasingly undeniable. I’m running out of time.

  * * *

  On the Rails

  I’m crunching across the familiar landscape of needles. A hundred feet behind me, the zombies’ girder table is empty.

  In just seventy-two hours everything has changed.

  The tents are gone and so are most of the ghosts. After the gruesome deaths of the two homeless children leaked to the public, the District Attorney swept in with most of the 26th precinct at his back and social services covering his flanks, to tear down the makeshift homes, haul the adults in for criminal checks, and portion out the childre
n to the city’s youth shelters.

  And to arrest the zombies, from whose ranks the child killer is assumed to have come.

  It is an election year, and after the well-coifed and well-heeled TV reporters slip and slide down the steep incline of Zombie City/La Boca del Diablo, the cameras capture the DA’s heroic stance and tough words as slow-moving zombies are put in restraints behind him, and ghosts are rousted from their homes.

  By the time it is done, one of the news people has been taken away in an ambulance with a spent needle caught through the thin red sole of her stylish shoe. The DA and cops, who’ve never experienced Zombie City, leave … counting the minutes until they can bleach the traces of it from their hands and minds.

  Nasey stays longer than anyone else.

  He pokes at a stained mattress pushed up against a hollowed-out sofa and mound of other rubble the city sanitation guys are supposed to clean out in the next couple of days. It’ll never be cleaned, I’m sure of this, as I’m sure that the fast-scattering zombies will be back, and new ghosts will find their way here. Zombie City is self-renewing, and probably eternal.

  “You can’t do this anymore, Villagrán,” Nasey says when he finally looks up at me.

  “What?”

  He motions around him. “Protecting the zombies and ghosts. It’s not meant to be like this. You, alone.” His voice is uncharacteristically kind, and I feel hope surge up in me, fierce and unexpected.

  “Are you saying you’ll join me?”

  He gives me a tight-lipped smile as he shakes his head.

  Hope, such a human attribute. When Nasey’s teeth rotate on their sockets and project from between his closed lips to punch through my skin and pump their venom, I should curse my mother for the weakness I inherited from her.

  But I doubt I’ll long have the heart to curse.

  * * *

  Fraternal Order

  I’m not bound, but the paralyzing venom wears off slowly. Some monsters like to play with their food, I guess.

  Nasey has taken me to a private club on the corner of Front and Lehigh that never gets busted because it’s at the juncture of three precincts and everyone knows it caters to cops. It is a plain space, enlivened only by bar mirrors and the colors that flash from the screens of illegal poker machines.

  It’s not only Nasey in the room. Three of my colleagues from the 24th, and eight cops from the 25th and 26th lounge at tables and stools, all watching me. When I can speak again I ask them what they’re waiting for.

  “Not what, who,” says an officer from the 25th. She looks familiar, but not enough to call up a name. “The head of our little fraternity. Should be here shortly.”

  “We’re giving you the benefit of a doubt, being that you’re one of us,” Nasey adds, in a tone I assume is meant to reassure me, but infuriates me instead.

  “I’ve never been one of you,” I say. “Not as a cop, not as a monster.”

  “That’s my fault,” says a new voice. A tall, sandy-haired figure moves from the shadowed door behind the bar to stand in front of me. The eagle insignia identifies him as an inspector, his features identify him as my father.

  “If I had realized your mother had some cunning craft, I never would have gotten you on her,” he says, after he’s studied me.

  “Your bad,” I say. My hand strays to where my taser usually hangs but, of course, Nasey has taken that from me. “Speaking of my mother … she’ll figure this out and come looking.”

  He waves the comment away. “Nedders are resistant to puny human magicks, as you well know.”

  “St. Patrick managed to drive you out of Ireland while he was still human.”

  He doesn’t laugh, but his smile stretches so wide he no longer passes for human.

  “And turned us from isolated, solitary predators to a fraternity in exile,” my father says. “So here we are now—a fraternity within a fraternity within yet another fraternity—the threefold blessing.

  “Nedders keep tabs on every class graduating out of the police academy,” he continues. “But it wasn’t until you slipped that herbal mickey into the coffee at the 24th that anyone started paying attention to you.”

  He sighs. “How many monsters have you killed? Seven? Ten? If they were humans instead, you’d be on par with our most promising rookies. You’ve got good aim, kid, you just picked the wrong targets.”

  “She hasn’t killed one of us, just solitary monsters of lesser type,” Nasey pipes up. “And we aren’t sworn to loyalty to them. I say we give her a chance. She’s got the instincts and the hunger, and if we teach her proper Nedder protocols—”

  “You can’t teach loyalty,” one of the cops from the 26th interjects.

  “She’s my partner, I’ll vouch for her.”

  I’m stunned by this, and so are the others. There is a rustling from among their ranks, and one voice rings clear, “Crack her, drain her, share her tender bits.” And then, a sound of metal pinging on metal.

  I think some of the cops are tapping their badges on their holstered pistols and I don’t know what it means. I don’t even know if it’s a cop thing, or a monster thing, or something specifically Nedder. I don’t know, because I’ve always been on the loneliest of trajectories.

  And it’s this thought, more than anything that has preceded it, that lands a punch. What might it be like to be surrounded by those who share my desire? Who understand the how and why of who I am? Who swear to have my back no matter what I’ve done?

  I want to belong somewhere. I crave community even more than I crave blood.

  The metallic sound gets louder, relentlessly rhythmic and hypnotic. I feel myself vibrating to it as it fills the room. It takes all my will to force my words out into that ringing space.

  “I’m sorry, Nasey, but no,” I say.

  Nasey’s teeth rotate and poke out from his closed lips, as do those of some of the other Nedders; those with fangs, like my father and me, let them slide out from their maxillae and snap into place. All of us are showing and ready to strike, but we don’t move.

  Melody serpentines across the percussive backbone, then sidewinds to full-on music.

  I don’t know who cuts through the metal doors of the private club—there are a number of folks in the barrio who know how to work an acetylene torch—but the first person I see come through is Johnny the Fox, shimmying in time to his own singing. Behind him are his domino-playing companions—hitting cowbells with clappers, running steel brushes up and down güiras—and old Tatán Ortíz, thumbing the metal tabs of a marimbol almost bigger than he is.

  Behind them, dozens of others: las girlfriends with Yoli, too many vivos to count, and a few zombies and ghosts who were missed in the raid. Almost everyone is carrying metal: bars, jagged lengths of window grille, even a few cortacañas and machetes, which they ring, metal on metal, blade on blade, keeping to the rhythm Johnny and his band set.

  They dance around us, a swarm of warm human bodies surrounding the cold-blooded ones vibrating open-mouthed and torpid from the music.

  Las girlfriends and Yoli encircle me in arms. It’s not a hug, and not an attempt to further immobilize me. They shield me from what’s coming. Anyone who’s lived in the tropics can tell you: you’ve got to cut off the head of a snake to kill it.

  When the screaming starts, they block my sight with their bodies. So many trusting arms around me. So much tender human flesh.

  My nostrils flare wide to the aroma of blood and iron that atomizes in the air. Las girlfriends, Yoli, they’ve got quick reflexes but I’m quicker. I strike without intending to. It’s glancing, a mere nick, but enough to draw blood and when the dribble trickles down my throat, the need inside me rises so huge it threatens to swallow me whole.

  Magic, love, my own will—who knows which keeps me from striking again. All I know is that as one part of me strains to sink my fangs into the flesh of what remains, stubbornly, within my reach, the other parts band together to hold me back.

  When the music stops, las girlfr
iends and Yoli step away from me and I stumble first to Nasey’s body and severed head, then to my father’s. I close their eyes, as I’ve always done with the dead on my beat, but I don’t stick my thumbs in my mouth. I fear the familiarity of this death like I’ve feared no other, and I don’t want its taste in my mouth.

  After a long time, I walk back to where las girlfriends and Yoli wait. I see my mother’s left hand curled protectively around her injured right hand. She’s pressing on it hard, so no more blood will well up from the abrasion, or perhaps to stop any poison from working its way up her arm.

  “I’m not like them,” I say. I mean, I have no venom in my bite, but my mother understands it differently.

  “I know,” she says. Her uninjured hand goes to my hair, smoothing it back as if she were shooing away thoughts. “You take after me.”

  * * *

  Minor Chord

  “I have you to thank, don’t I?” I say to Yoli as we walk away from the carnage, and through the crew of vivos under orders to clean up and repair the joint.

  Behind us, I can hear las girlfriends bantering as they follow. Johnny the Fox, too, and damned if I don’t think they’re are all taking turns flirting with him: making him laugh, exacting promises that he’ll come to South Philly to get a good taste of their tamales. I really hope that’s not a euphemism.

  When I return my attention to Yoli, I continue. “You used your magic to compel nearly everyone in the barrio to join in this.”

  “Johnny, las girlfriends, me—we all used magic, but the community came forth on its own,” she says. “You may not be from the barrio, but you are of the barrio.”

  “Just wait. When the communal adrenaline of this wears off, they won’t be able to see past the fact I’m Nedder. They’ll never again think of me as being like them. I might as well be covered in snakeskin.”

  She laughs, but there is a sharp undertone to it. “And you think it would be the first time they act that way toward one of their own?”

  Snakes have notoriously bad eyesight, so it would be a comfort to think it is inheritance that has made me blind to this aspect of my friend’s life. But comfort isn’t truth. I’ve protected Yoli on these streets, yes, but only from the most obvious aggressions.