Crystal Kelly

Spouse of Mark Kowalski Faulkner, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

Crystal Kelly counts by fives, with a spatula, on a tray, and has done so for thirty years without being wrong by a single tablet. She was born in 1975 at Phoenix, Arizona, and is living today in Phoenix, where she works as a pharmacy technician in the desert suburbs of the American West. She is a woman of the Faulkner bloodline by marriage, the Lancastrian line that keeps the Red Ledger, and the Ledger lists her as unaffiliated. She is not a hunter and not a vampire slayer, and she has no alias, archetype or craft. In 1997 she married the oil-field roughneck Mark Kowalski Faulkner, the son of the slayer Eugene Faulkner, The Pale Scythe, and of the librarian Beatrice Kowalski, and they have two daughters, Laura Kelly Faulkner, born in 2000, and Beatrice Faulkner, born in 2002, neither of whom was called. The family remembers her as the person who reads a label with a trained eye and who knows which counter in six states will fill a prescription and ask nothing. She was born in a mild, dry February, in a hospital on the west side of Phoenix, the elder of two daughters of a utility lineman and a school-bus dispatcher, in a bungalow in the grid of streets between the canals and the freeway, with an orange tree in the yard that was watered, as every tree was, by an irrigation gate that opened on a schedule. Phoenix in the middle of the seventies was a city that had not yet decided to be large. It was a place of swimming pools and carports and dry heat, with the red mountains standing around it like furniture, and she remembers it, as she tells it, as a place where one went indoors at noon and came out at dusk. Her father, who was a quiet Irish-American man with a sunburnt neck and a taste for crossword puzzles, was transferred in the winter of 1985 to the power company's mountain division in Colorado, and the family moved to Denver when she was ten. She cried all the way across New Mexico. She was, by the time they arrived, already a Denver girl in everything except the weather, and she held on to Phoenix as to a lost coin. She was a small, sturdy, brown-haired child with a straight back and a brisk way of speaking, who liked things in rows. At eleven she sorted her mother's spice shelf by height and then by use. At thirteen she was found, on a Saturday afternoon, counting the jelly beans in a jar at a church fair, and the lady in charge, who had said that she would give the jar to whoever guessed the number, was obliged to give it to her. She had no ambition to be a doctor, and said so, with some contempt for the profession of looking important. She wanted to be the person who made sure that the medicine got to the right patient in the right dose. She took a Saturday job at eighteen at a drugstore on South Broadway, where the pharmacist, an old, courteous Czech named Mr Vlasak, who had a bow tie and a voice like a cello, taught her the vocabulary of the trade, and she took the national certificate in the first year that she was eligible. It was at his counter, in the spring of 1996, that she met Mark Kowalski Faulkner, who came in one afternoon with his thumb wrapped in a red rag, having been caught between two lengths of pipe on a rig in Weld County and having driven himself to town with the other hand. She was twenty-one. She looked at the thumb, said that it needed a doctor and not a pharmacy, shut the till and drove him to the hospital herself, in her own car, in her white uniform, at a steady thirty-five miles an hour, which he said was the slowest he had ever been driven in an emergency and the safest. He said afterwards that he had been in love by the second traffic light. She said that she had been exasperated by it. He came back the next day with a bunch of carnations from a supermarket, the stems still in a plastic sleeve, and asked her to the cinema, and she said that she had a shift. He said that he would wait. He did. It was the first of a great many occasions on which she found that he was perfectly happy to wait. They were married in the spring of 1997, in a Catholic church on the south side of Denver, with Mark's sister Lorraine, who was to be called that summer, at the aisle in a look of complete composure, his mother Beatrice weeping in the second pew and his father Eugene, a man of few words, saying throughout the service that it was a very good wedding. She was told what the family was within the year. Mark had put it off for months, in the way that a large man puts off an unpleasant errand, and it was Beatrice who finally came to the rented flat, sat her down at her own kitchen table with a mug of tea, and said in a librarian's level voice that there was something that the family had not told her and that she should be allowed to be angry. Crystal heard it out. She asked whether anyone had ever been hurt, and was told the truth. She said that she had always thought that the Faulkners had too many locks. Then she asked who dealt with the injuries, and Beatrice said that, so far, a good many of them had dealt with them for themselves. It was the one gap that she could close. She did not want a weapon, a calling or a secret to carry. She wanted a clean counter, a locked drawer and a telephone number. Over the next twenty-nine years she made herself, in the Ledger's cousinhood, the pharmacist whom nobody had to explain things to. She learned what a hunter cut by something that was not a dog would need, in what order, and how soon, and she kept a small stock of it in a kitchen drawer in Denver under a label that read Camping. She taught Lorraine to ring her before anyone else, and to say the number of hours since the injury and nothing more. She built, over time, a short list in a plain notebook of pharmacists in six states who could be trusted, who would fill a prescription for a family cousin with a bad story and a tight face and write nothing on the file but the name of the drug. She calls it, privately, the counter list. She has patched, by Mark's count, nine members of the family, and has never been permitted to hear how it happened. Laura Kelly Faulkner was born in the winter of 2000 and Beatrice Faulkner in the spring of 2002, in the house on the south side of Denver that she and Mark bought in 1999 with a loan and a long back garden. Both girls were brought up in a kitchen with an exact rule for every medicine and a perfectly relaxed attitude to everything else, and both are now grown, with careers of their own. Neither was called, and Crystal, who watched her sister-in-law become a hunter and never wished it on her daughters, is quietly glad, and would be glad to say so to anyone who asked. In the week of the attacks of September 2001 she was behind the counter, with a baby of nine months on a blanket in the back office, filling prescriptions for people who had suddenly remembered that they had been meaning to renew them, and said afterwards that the pharmacy had been the quietest place in Denver and the most crowded. She lost her mother-in-law in the winter of 2011. Beatrice, who had been ill for three years, had asked that her daughter-in-law be the one to manage the medication, and Crystal, who did, did it as she did everything, in a notebook with the times, and sat in the room in the last week with a plastic cup of crushed ice. She has not forgotten it. Her own father died the following year, and her mother, who had gone back to Phoenix after his retirement, needed looking after, and Crystal, who had been looking at the map for some time, took a post at a pharmacy in a suburb of the Valley in 2013, rented a small house with a carport and an orange tree, and moved back to the city of her birth. Mark, who works fourteen days on and seven off, keeps the Denver house for his father and his gear and spends the weeks off in Phoenix, in the sun, on a lawn chair, which he says is the only place in the world where he has ever been truly bored and entirely content. Their daughters come and go. In the pandemic years she worked at the front of a pharmacy in a plastic visor, in a queue of masked faces that stretched out into the car park in a hundred and ten degrees, giving out the tests and the vaccines and the long paper bags, and counting, as she always has, by fives. She is fifty-one, a small, sturdy, brisk woman with brown hair going grey, a straight back and a pair of glasses on a cord, who still sorts the spice shelf by height and who has never, to the best of anyone's knowledge, asked a question that she did not need the answer to. Crystal Kelly is remembered in the Faulkner family as the Phoenix pharmacy technician who kept the counter list and the Camping drawer, the sturdy daughter-in-law of The Pale Scythe who never lost a tablet. In the Slayerverse she stands for the kin of the Red Ledger who were never called, the nurses, chemists and keepers of the first-aid drawer, who patched the hunters at a kitchen table and proved that a clean dose, a discreet counter and an exact count are as much a part of the hunt as a silver edge.