Malus Domestica (28 page)

Weaver wagged a finger at Wayne. “A very dear little boy, you ought to thank him, and Peter, for their heroics. They’re quite exceptional for children these days.”

Turning to Kenway, Leon rubbed his head. “Hey, look, man…I’m sorry about the—”

The vet had produced a paint-smeared handkerchief from somewhere, and was holding it to his nose. “Unnerstandable,” he said, checking the fabric. His nose had stopped leaking. “Enh, I been through worse, trust me.”

Kneeling to get eye-to-eye with his son, Leon said, “Now…tell me what happened. You said you would explain everything. I want to know the truth.”

Wayne’s eyebrows scrunched. “When have I lied to you—”

Leon smirked dryly.

“—in the last week?” Before his dad could answer, Wayne took out the ring and showed it to him. “It was this.”

Leon took it in his thumb and forefinger, at the end of the chain still around the boy’s neck. “Your mother’s wedding band?” His features softened, his eyes wistful. “I didn’t know you were wearing this.”

“I been wearin it for…well, ever since.” Wayne held it up to his eye. “I woke up in my hospital room, got up and peed, and when I came back to my bed I looked through Mom’s ring and saw a door in the wall where there wasn’t one before.”

He went on to describe the strange past-version of the Underwood house, and the bizarre owl-headed Sasquatch, and rescuing Joel from the Serpent.

“A killer?” Leon stiffened. “You saw a
dead guy?”

Joel spoke up. “I was chained up in a garage somewhere next to a dude with a cut throat. This red-headed guy had knocked me out and I guess he was drainin people for their blood. Said something about ‘blood for the garden’. He was about to stick me like a pig too, until Bruce Wayne here showed up outta nowhere like Batman hisself and saved my sexy ass.”

“And you saw this weird dark version of our house too?”

“Yes sir, I did.” Joel peeled back the lapel of the jacket he’d borrowed from Kenway, exposing his bandaged chest. “And that monster damn near opened me up.”

The old woman coughed…once, twice, then started hacking into a lacy cloth and struggling to breathe.

“You okay?” asked Kenway.

“Oh, yes, yes. It’s getting that time of year when it gets dry outside,” choked Weaver, waving him off. “And I’ve got a bit of congestion. Nothing, really. I’m going to get a glass of water, if that’s all right with you-all.”

Robin got up and excused herself as well, following the old woman out into the hallway. Weaver glided around the corner and into the restroom, still crouping and wheezing into her napkin.

The restroom turned out to be empty. Five stalls occupied the back of the room, and a bank of three sinks were set in a marble countertop under a huge mirror.

Carefully prodding each door open, Robin checked the stalls until she was satisfied no one was in them. “Dammit.”

She went to the sink and cupped herself a handful of water, washed the sleep out of her eyes, and when she straightened back up, she toweled her face dry.

When she opened her eyes again, Weaver’s reflection stood behind her own.

Robin gasped and spun to face her.

“I know who you are,” said the crone, backing her against the sink.

“You do?”

“Oh, yes, of course. You’re huge on the internet, you know.” Weaver grinned, flashing peanut-colored teeth and blue-green gums. Her breath smelled like skunky weed. “You’re the witch-hunter on that Malus Domestica channel, aren’t you? Oh, I’ve been subscribed to you for ages. I even have a few of your T-shirts.” She threw her hands up in mock exasperation, her gaudy rings glittering in the fluorescent lights. “My friends, they don’t think much of you, but I think you’re a very brave young lady to do what you do.”

“You believe in witches, then.”

“Believe
in them?” Weaver laughed. “My dear, I
am
one.”

Robin had already suspected as much. “You’re one of the coven that lives in Lazenbury House.”

“Ah, it looks like you’ve done your homework.” The witch wrung her knobbly hands. “Are you here to, ahh,
slay
us too, then?”

Swallowing, Robin put a little steel in her spine and stepped into Weaver’s personal space. “You murdered my mother and turned her into a dryad. …If you’ve been watching my videos, you know I’ve been doing this for a couple of years now—”

She ripped the collar of her shirt open, popping a button. Tattooed on her sternum, just below the pit of her throat, was an algiz rune, a symbol like a Y with an extra limb in the middle:

ᛉ

“—So I’ve learned a few things…from Heinrich—”

Weaver was unimpressed. “Honey, Heinrich is a fool,” she said sweetly, encouragingly. “The only reason he isn’t dead yet is because he quit hunting us years ago. He’s made a puppet of you, a henchman, a bloodhound to hide behind and exact his mad, mean crusade against us without having to risk his own life. …You know, you should be proud of yourself. You’ve done more than
he
ever did.”

The witch traced the symbol with a painted claw. “Now, this is very pretty, dear, quite a lovely tattoo, but it won’t save you. You may be protected against being made a familiar, but it won’t protect you from the rest of our bag of tricks.”

Weaver laid a cold palm on her cleavage, and Robin sidled away, sliding her butt along the edge of the sink.

Following her, the witch migrated her hand from her left breast and then to her belly. Her fingertips were cold as December, even through the cloth. “Oh, dove, I think I feel something kicking. Don’t you?”

Robin pushed her away. “Get off me.”

“Wait a minute,” said Weaver, snatching her hand away. “Did you say
dryad? Mother?”

Her rheumy eyes widened and she swept in, taking off her bifocals and staring into Robin’s face. “Are you…? Could you be? Annie Martine’s daughter? Oh how you’ve grown, my dear. How lovely you are now! Who could have guessed that such a beautiful girl could have come from such a homely woman?”

“Don’t talk about my mother,”
growled Robin, and she let out a mild cough.

There was a bit of a tickle in her chest…maybe she was coming down with a cold too. “She may have been a witch, but she was a good person, and better than any of you. You had no—
cough
—no right—”

“Who knows rights better than you, eh Malus? Malus Domestica, YouTube star, traveling the roads, living the American dream, killing innocent witches by the fourscore. You wouldn’t know your right from your left.” Weaver emphasized
right
and
left
with palsied fists, then marched off in that sweeping, handsy Gargamel way of hers, reaching for the door handle.

Before she could leave, Robin had a fistful of her coat. “Tell Marilyn I’ll be—
cough, cough
—making a house call.” She pulled the witch close and said through gritted teeth, “You three can prepare all you want, but—
cooouugh, cough
—I’ve gotten a lot of practice doing what I’m gonna do to the three of you.”

The threat devolved into a coughing fit, and she gasped for air. Her lungs felt like they were full of down feathers, itching and wispy.

“You don’t know your mother as well as you think you do.” Weaver opened the restroom door and wrenched her sleeve out of the girl’s hand, her expression one of genuine concern. “And you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into. Stay away from the Lazenbury house, and we’ll leave you be. Get out of Blackfield and I’ll…I’ll convince Marilyn not to come after you, yes, that’s what I’ll do.”

With that, the witch had the last word and slipped out the door. Robin wanted to retort, but she couldn’t stop coughing and catch her breath long enough to speak. The cavity of her chest was alive with fluttering-itching-whispering.

A lump in her throat. She made long, drawn-out
huuuckkkk
sounds as if she were trying to muster up a loogie, and some wet little wad popped up into her mouth, lying on her tongue like a swallowed cigarette butt.

Robin staggered over to the sink, coughing as she went, and spat it into the basin.

A dead moth.

“Ugh,” she said, and coughed again.

This time the tickling sensation intensified, rushing up her windpipe, and when she coughed again a cloud of fat fluttery moths burst from the depths of her lungs.

Their tiny legs fought for purchase on the roof of her mouth, filling her throat. The ones that managed to escape fell into the sink and battered the mirror, dragging their saliva-wet bodies across the glass, leaving smears of bitter wing-powder.

Bits of insect were caught in her teeth. Her stomach rumbled and gnarled, and her mouth flooded with salty spit. She was going to puke.

Wheezing, sucking wind, fighting to breathe, Robin pushed open a toilet stall and braced her hands on the seat. Tears clung to the rims of her eyelids. The convulsion came without preamble, as it always does, and she unleashed a torrent of sour vomit.

“Guh,” she gasped, staring down into a brown slurry of coffee and eggs. She flushed the toilet.

Pulling down her jeans and sitting on the john, she spooled out a handful of toilet paper and scrubbed her tongue with it in disgust. The sensation of having moths in her mouth was unbearable—after chasing the supernatural for several years there wasn’t much on this planet that Robin was still afraid of, but insects never failed to make her skin crawl.

Urine trickled into the water as she relaxed, covering her face with her hands.

Shivers danced down her back, turning into a pins-and-needles prickly feeling, goosebumps running across her shoulder-blades and down her arms. The hair stood up on her wrists and the backs of her hands. She hugged herself against the chill, wringing her hands.

Itchy,
so itchy,
suddenly she was scratching her hands, and then her arms, the goosebumps had become this helpless, crazy-making itchiness…it wouldn’t go away but it felt so good, it was so satisfying, Jesus, she was digging miniature orgasms out of her skin like a paleontologist unearthing fossils. Her fingernails left burning streaks down her forearms.

Opening her eyes, she looked down and saw that her arms were covered in pimples. Dozens—no,
hundreds
—of whiteheads. Not only were they on her arms, but they’d spread to her thighs, too.

“What the hell?” If she didn’t know any better, she’d have thought she had chicken pox, or perhaps impetigo.

She’d caught impetigo once, back in the mental hospital. She dropped her soap on the shower floor and picked it up again, shaving her legs with it. Washing it off apparently hadn’t rid it of bacteria, though, because the next day her legs were covered in whiteheads like this. A month of rubbing them down with antibacterial cream had cleared it up, but she’d been a religious user of bottled shower gel and body wash ever since.

The crawling sensation came back.
This is wrong,
she thought, slowly turning her arms this way and that, inspecting the surprise acne.
Something is wrong. Something is really wrong here.
She dug at one of the largest whiteheads, picking at it until it came loose in a tiny plug of wax.

Two little red-green eyes stared up at her.

She watched in horror as a housefly wriggled up out of the pore and struggled to its feet. The fly rubbed its forelegs all over its head as its wet, glassy wings unraveled, drying and hardening.

Robin slapped it away. “No. No no no
no.”
Her boots clomped a jig of panic on the tile floor.

This dislodged several other whiteheads on her thighs, and she leaned back on the toilet as if she could possibly get away from the spectacle. More flies pushed and floundered up out of her skin. “No, no, no,
no, no.”
As the flies emerged they left holes, stretched and hollow like toothmarks.

Within seconds, her arms were covered in a honeycomb of gaping pores. Her thighs resembled the surface of a sponge, freckled with holes. Some of them were still packed with tiny black bodies.

Dead flies littered the floor around her boots, rolled into wet bits by her frantic slapping and rubbing. Hundreds of them buzzed and droned around her head, crawling up the sides of the lavatory stall. She pressed her palms to her face again and tried to will it all away.

That’s it—maybe it’s an illusion. Maybe I can think it away.
Acne littered her cheeks with lumps. The pimples on her forehead squirmed
restlessly under her fingers.
I think I can, I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. The little engine that could, goddammit, let it be an illusion and not an actual conjuration. Let it just be a visual suggestion, don’t let these flies be real—

Robin opened her eyes to silence.

No flies. She checked out her arms, expecting the holes to linger, but they were gone.

Relief crashed into her system, such blessed relief that she actually peed again. Her skin was smooth once more, the fine hairs ruffling under her hands as she rubbed the heebie-jeebies away. Pulling up her jeans, she stumbled backward out of the toilet stall and spat several times into the sink, washing her mouth out, washing dead moths down the drain.

Some of them still flapped and fluttered around the ceiling, trying to find a way out.

As she noticed them, the moths winked out of existence.

“Oh, that
bitch,”
she said to her subscribers, checking for acne in the mirror.
She shuddered, pulling the camera off of her jacket and pointing it at her own face. “I am so going to kick
her
ass first.”

When she was finally convinced the illusion was out of her system, she washed her hands, washed her mouth out again, and went back to the waiting room. Karen Weaver was gone, and so were Wayne and his father.

Kenway looked up from an issue of
National Geographic.
“Everything come out okay?”

❂

The ride back to the apartment was much warmer inside the cab of the truck. She stared out the window as she rode, her mind sorting through options, the GoPro aimed out the window collecting B-roll footage. Joel rode in the middle, the gearshift protruding suggestively between his knees.

The protective
algiz
rune on her chest had been mostly sufficient until now, defending her from all manner of energy, ricocheting it back into its source. It still worked on familiarization, but Weaver’s moths-and-flies illusion…well, it had been a bit of a shock.