Amy Wood

Broker slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Meek Lantern. Craft: Record Tracing.

Amy Wood was born in 1998 at Birmingham, Alabama, and is living today in Birmingham, where she works as a pharmacy technician and, since 2019, as a vampire slayer of the House of Proctor and the White Ledger. The family book knows her as The Meek Lantern, a name for a small shaded light that is carried low and shown to no more people than it needs to be, and it classes her as a Broker, a hunter who works by dealing, by terms and by go-betweens, who would sooner settle a matter across a table than in a street. Her craft is Record Tracing, the following of a creature through the paper that it cannot help leaving behind, and her gear is a service pistol and a silver-edged knife. She was called in 2019, in a boarding house, when a lodger paid in coins older than the building. She is the younger child of the machinist Wesley Wood and of the secretary and slayer Wilma Thorne, The Wide Bell, who was her mentor and who died in 2019, and the sister of the slayer Darren Wood Proctor. She has not married and has no children. The coins were the thing, and she says so every time. It was the third Tuesday of January, a day of low grey cloud and a cold fine rain, and she was twenty and in her second winter at a family pharmacy on the Southside of Birmingham, an old corner shop with a bell on the door, a soda counter that had not served a soda since 1971 and a delivery bicycle that the owner would not allow to be replaced. She had been given the housebound round. It was the part of the work that she liked best, since nobody on it was in a hurry. At four o'clock she climbed the steps of a tall frame boarding house on a street behind the hospital district, a place of nine rooms with a veranda, a hall stand and a smell of boiled cabbage and furniture polish, where the widow who kept it, Mrs Dunning, who was eighty-one and had a heart, was waiting at the door for her tablets. The widow could not find her purse. A lodger, who was coming down the stairs with his hat, said that he would settle it, and laid the co-payment on the hall stand in silver. There were nine coins, and they were all dark, and every one was dated before 1880. She was a girl who looked at numbers for a living, and she saw it at once. The house, which had a plaque on the gate, had been built in 1911. The coins had been struck forty years before it, and they had not been handled for forty years since, as they had no wear on them at all. The lodger, who was pleasant, slight and rather formal, with a gentle, courteous, faintly puzzled way of looking at a person as if wondering whether he had met her, thanked her and said that he hoped Mrs Dunning would soon be better. He had no shadow on the wall of the hall. She noticed it as one notices a missing tooth. She said that it was no trouble. She handed over the bag, put the coins in an envelope, rode back to the pharmacy in the rain and said nothing to the owner about the matter. She had been meek, her mother said later, in exactly the way that a lantern is meek, which is that it does not argue and it does not go out. She told her mother that night in the hospital. Wilma Thorne had gone in on the Monday of that week, in the middle of the month, with a cough that she had refused to treat for two years and that had turned, in the cold, to pneumonia, and she was lying in a room on the fourth floor, thin, grey and propped on three pillows, with the docket of a matter beside her on the blanket. Amy, who had spent the week bringing the case notes in a backpack every evening and reading them aloud, was, in the family's phrase, trusted with the paper. When she had finished the account of the coins, her mother, who had listened with her eyes shut, said that she would like to see the envelope. She counted nine, turned over the third and said, in her dry, level voice, that she had been looking for that man for seven weeks. It was the matter that she had been running since the autumn. He had been through four boarding houses in the district since the autumn, always in the same kind of house, always behind a hospital, always paying in old silver, and she had been building a case to trap him, a month of notices, forms and appointments, and had been taken ill a fortnight short of the last of them. She called her daughter to the bed. She said that she was a Detective and that Amy was not. She said that she had known it since Amy was twelve, when a child who had been asked to share a bag of sweets between four had given each of them a different number and none of them any cause to complain. She said that a trap was a thing that you built out of the creature's habits, and that Amy was not a builder of traps but a settler of terms, and that it would be a waste of a very good gift to put her at a desk. It was the nearest that she came, in her life, to a compliment. Then she opened the docket. Over twelve evenings, in a hospital room that smelled of antiseptic and orange juice, with the nurses coming and going and the rain on the window, she taught her daughter what she knew, which was to ask the question twice, to write the answer down and to look in the paper for what the creature could not hide. Amy learned the other half from her own work, which was where she found the matter. It was in the pharmacy records. For a creature that wishes to stay in a town, she found, leaves a trail in the only places that no one thinks to look. It does not use the bank. It uses the prescription file. Each of the boarding houses, when she went through the dispensing records of the housebound round, held a customer who had been on the books for a great many years and who had never, in all that time, collected anything. Such a patient is a ghost in the records, a name kept alive by a standing order and an automatic renewal, so that the pharmacy's computer, which asks no questions, goes on assuming that he exists. She traced the name through the insurers, the claims, the refill dates and the old paper cards in the drawer under the till, and the dates matched, to the day, with the nights on which the previous house had burned, been sold or been emptied. The creature kept a dead man's name alive in a pharmacy, as other creatures kept an old cloak. It was a method that she called Record Tracing, and her mother, who had used the same words for a different craft, said from her pillow that it was an improvement. On the last Monday of January, her mother died in the evening, at fifty, with her daughter reading aloud from a notebook and her husband and son at the bedside, and the nurses said later that she had corrected the spelling on her own chart. Wesley, who is a quiet man, stood at the window of the room for an hour with his hands in his pockets and said nothing at all. Amy went to the funeral at Bessemer in a black dress, with her mother's silver-edged knife in her handbag, and on the Wednesday after the funeral, still in the black dress, she went to Mrs Dunning's house and sat down in the front parlour, with the widow listening from her chair, and asked the lodger, quite pleasantly, to come down and speak with her about a matter of terms. She said that she knew whose the coins were. She said that she knew the names. She said that she was twenty and a technician, and that she would be glad if he would sit. He sat. She laid on the table, in order, five pharmacy printouts and four old cards, and said that there were two ways to do it. She said that she had a pistol in her bag and a knife, and a house full of cousins who had been waiting for him in all four of the places where he had lived. She said that she did not wish to fight in a widow's parlour. She offered him a train, a night and a ticket, and a promise that his name would be taken from every file in the district, if he would leave Birmingham by the following Friday and not come back. He asked what would happen if he did not. She said, very kindly, that she would be at the station. It took two hours. He was on the platform on the Friday with a single bag, and he is not known to have returned. She works at a hospital outpatient pharmacy now, at the edge of the medical district, in a clean white room with a window onto a car park, where she checks, counts and labels, and keeps at the back of the screen a second set of records of her own. She has closed thirty-odd matters in seven years. In the pandemic years, when the rest of the world stood in a queue outside the door, she found three standing orders that no one had signed for in a century. She is twenty-eight, a small, round-faced, brown-haired woman in a lanyard, with a deferential manner that has misled every creature she has ever met, and she carries her mother's knife in her bag and a torch, which she calls her lantern, with a little paper shade on it. Her father, who is living, rings her on Saturdays. Her brother comes up from Savannah at Christmas, and the two of them sit in the kitchen with the case-book between them, saying nothing for a long time, which is how they remember their mother. Amy Wood is remembered in the Proctor family as The Meek Lantern, the pharmacy technician who noticed nine coins on a hall stand and settled the matter across a parlour table. In the Slayerverse she stands for the Brokers of the White Ledger, the quiet go-betweens who won by terms and records instead of by force, and who showed that a small light carried low, a well-kept file and a polite request can empty a town of a very old guest.