#1 Calliope

Calliope sat on the curb in the parking lot next to the liquor store, beer in one hand, cigarette in the other.  She had that look on her face, an intense glare aimed at the whole wide world that made people think twice about hassling her, even with her delicate five-foot-nothing frame dressed in a washed out tank top and cutoff jeans, or what she would call her dirt poor hooker look.  Anyway, people in this particular neighborhood didn’t hassle her.  And since it held the city’s highest murder rate, the cops that did spend their time around there didn’t give a single fuck about open containers, unless it looked like you were about to shove a broken one into someone’s eye.

She always scowled.  That was just her natural face, she’d tell the few people who had the guts to tease her about it.  Then she’d smile.  And no matter how well they knew her, no matter how hard they believed she had their back, every single one of them would get a little second of panic in their eyes.  It was just who she was.  She’d gotten over it a long time ago, especially when she realized that the fear-factor and all those other little quirks she had were an excellent way to get people to see things her way.

She had no idea where her crazy skills came from.  She had no wise grandma telling her about her mystical people from way back.  Didn’t even know exactly where her people came from.  She called herself an American mutt from both Americas, North and South, although one of her cousins swore there’s some Philippino blood in them somewhere.  She had no clue.  All she knew was that no one could explain why it was that she could do the things she did.  Like get people to back down with a single word.  Like kill them, if they pissed her off enough.  Not that that had happened.  Much.  And anyway, that was a long time ago.

She kept herself in check, not for herself so much as for the people who had come to count on her.  People who had no power at all, who could easily wind up dead or wishing they were, stuck like she was in what she swore must have been the asshole of creation.  But it was getting harder and harder to keep it all in check.  She was starting to think it might be high time she tried living alone for a while.  Or at least until she was sure Spike’s bring-him-to-his-knees, put-tears-in-his-eyes migraines weren’t some kind of side effect of her desire to shake some sense into the kid.

She never was sure, when people got sick around her, wether it was just a regular human biology… whatever, or whether it was just what came of getting too close to her particular variety of crazy.  She really, really hoped she didn’t make people sick.  She liked people.  She might have even said she was a people person, if it wasn’t for the fact that she was a walking talking mindfuck.

Tags: speculative fiction, urban magic

Category: Scifi