Malus Domestica (38 page)

“Here,” Leon told them, opening the door to the cupola.

The only thing on the other side was the stairway hooking up into the shaft’s spiral. Wayne held Haruko’s ring up to his eye. This must not have had an effect, because he closed the door and opened it again. Closed it, opened it. “I don’t know, there’s nothing.”

Leon’s ring was still pointing at the door. He went upstairs, Robin, Pete, and Wayne following.

With four people standing in it, the cupola was unusually crowded. Examining the room with his ring, Wayne turned every which way, looking up at the ceiling, looking out all the windows, even squeezing between Robin and Pete to check under the bed.

Now the javelin of light pointed down the stairs. “Come on,” said Robin, herding Wayne down them. At the bottom, she closed the door leading out to the landing (wincing apologetically to Kenway and the girls as she did so) and braced the boy with a hand on his shoulder. “Now yours. Open the door.”

Wayne eyed the door through the monocle of Haruko’s ring and turned the doorknob. It scraped and creaked as if it were a thousand years old. He pushed the door open, revealing an archway full of deepest darkness.

A breath of frigid air wafted out, curling around their knees, chilling their hands. Groaning from the depths of the shadow-house was the immense galleon-creak of shifting timbers, as if the earth below that strange foundation was constantly moving.

Robin sat down and Leon settled behind her, putting his ring back on. “I’m not going in there,” said Wayne, staying on his feet, as if he would bolt at any moment.

She adjusted the GoPro on her chest rig. This was going to require a Spielberg-worthy framing.

“Hopefully you won’t have to.” She drummed her fingernails on the doorframe, lightly at first, then a little more insistently. “Here it is, buddy,” she said, her voice soft, as if perhaps she were speaking to herself more than anything on the other side. “Here we are. Come show your face. I know you’re in there.” The dark doorway yawned apathetically for a long several seconds, as if it had nothing to prove to her. She leaned forward, trying to get a better look at the faint light down the hallway.

Bursting out of the shadows, a shaggy arm reached through the door, claws flexed a hair’s-breadth from her face.

“Oh!” Robin threw herself backward against Leon’s shins, and Wayne screamed, running up the stairs into the cupola. Pete let out a shrill shout.

Before she could properly react, the coppery hair all over the arm burst into flames,
WHOOSH,
as readily as if it were drenched in gasoline. The arm withdrew and the fire diminished in the watery darkness, a single flame licking one last time.

A pair of bright green eyes blinked sluggishly, each one the size of a softball.

Grrrrurururuhuhuh,
rumbled Owlhead.

His wet, ragged respiration reminded Robin of a tiger, or perhaps a dragon in a movie, but muffled, heavy, languid.

( g i v e
 
m e )

“No,” she said, and realized that she was still cowering against Leon’s feet, halfway up the stairs. She sat down, but didn’t lean forward. “I got some questions.”

No voice reverberated in the corner of her mind.

“You there?”

Grrrrurururuhuhuh.

She checked over her shoulder. Wayne was still upstairs—he wanted no part of this, and she didn’t blame him. Leon’s face would have been as white as virgin snow if he could go pale, but his open mouth and wide eyes were more than enough evidence of his terror.

He didn’t leave, though, she had to give him that. Neither did Pete, though he had moved halfway up the stairs, watching around the corner.

“What
are
you?” Robin asked the empty doorway.

Grrrrurururuhuhuh.

( t h e
 
r i n g
 
t h e
 
r i n g
 
f r e e
 
m e )

Robin had never addressed anything like this before. She tried to remain assertive.

“No. You answer my questions.”

Well…there
was
that one witch in New Orleans, the one the priest had claimed was possessed by a demon. Taking the same tack with this thing seemed like the right course of action.

I wonder if Owlhead
is
a demon,
she thought, looking down at the protective runes tattooed in the palms of her hands.
Is this what demons actually look like?
After dealing with the paranormal as long as she had, the visual of pitchforks and goat-horns certainly seemed whimsical. She’d never actually
seen
a demon, but it stood to reason that they looked nothing like colonial woodcuts or monastic illustrations.

In retrospect, so many layman artists knowing what a real demon looked like seemed unlikely…artistic hubris, even.

( s o
 
h u n g r y
)

“Hungry?” Owlhead’s eyes were like green Christmas baubles with lights inside them. “What do you eat?”

An image squirted into Robin’s mind, indistinct, piecemeal, like a half-finished jigsaw puzzle. Her subconscious fluttered around the edges, trying to make sense of the shards, and she caught glimpses

liver-spotted hands, wielding a knife, coming around a boy’s throat, slash

of various things, faces,

a curtain of blood

places…no names, but

tiny graves in the woods

a distinct motif she thought she could sort through…

broomstick leaning in the corner, flickering firelight, bubble and gurgle of boiling water

Marilyn Cutty’s birdlike smirk swam in the gloom. Robin leaned forward, disregarding the fact that she was within arms’ reach of the creature again.
“Cutty?
You eat witches?”

No answer.

The stairway creaked slowly. Robin looked up and saw Wayne creeping down, his eyes curious. She threw out a hand. “No! Stay upstairs! Keep the ring up there, away from the door.”

Grrrrurururuhuhuh.

( t h e
 
r i n g
 
t h e
 
r i n g
 
s h e
 
i s
 
c o m i n g
)

“Why do you want the ring? Does it protect you? Does it allow you get out of that house?”

Grrrrurururuhuhuh.
Owlhead blinked slowly.

“If it eats witches,” Wayne said from the cupola, “ask it why it tried to bite my damn head off.”

A hand slipped over Robin’s shoulder. Leon in the corner of her eye. “Are you psychic or somethin? How is that thing talkin to you? I don’t hear nothin but the breathin.”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I don’t know! Until I came back to Blackfield, I hadn’t ever heard voices like this—”

But she had, hadn’t she? The schizophrenia.

Maybe Kenway was right…maybe it hadn’t been schizophrenia at all, all this time. Maybe she had inherited something from her mother. If not her witch-ness, but perhaps some obscure level of paranormal sensitivity. She frowned.
Am I a witch and I don’t know it?
What if her mother had sacrificed her when she was a child, without her knowledge, and she’s grown up without a heart all this time?
Nonsense. Bullshit. Heinrich would know, I’m sure. Besides, you’d know if you were dead inside, right?

Heinrich. She really needed to talk to him, but he wasn’t answering his phone. He had a bad habit of that.

“Why are you here?” she asked the eyes.

Grrrrurururuhuhuh,
breathed Owlhead. Sensory echoes welled out of the darkness, like heat distorting the air over a fire. When the ripples broke over her mind’s eye, she saw her mother’s face.

“Mom?” Robin stared. “Mom brought you here?”

Another ripple issued from the doorway, but this time when it touched her, she went blind.

❂

Light flares in the ink-black void, resolving into a face. Annie Martine materializes, illuminated by candles, as if fading in from black. Gradually, the scene makes itself clear: her mother is kneeling in a dirt-floored, stone-walled room, surrounded by thousands of stumpy white candles—on the floor, arrayed along the walls, standing in floor brackets.

Annie mutters to herself, her eyes closed. The incantations she’s saying are too low for Robin to make out. She is nude, nubile, her late-teens body sleek and glittering, her breasts high and firm. Sweat beads on a bunny-tail of brown pubic hair. Occult symbols have been painted in key positions on her body with some dark paste like melted chocolate. Not blood. Some kind of mixture. They look like kanji, but…wrong, somehow. Upside-down, maybe. Too many dots.

A round diagram six feet across has been drawn on the floor with chalk, a ring of incomprehensible symbols. A man lies in the center of the runic circle, stripped naked, his paunch sweaty, his balding scalp glistening in the candlelight. His arms and legs are outstretched like the Vitruvian Man, his wrists and ankles tied to steel tent-stakes, driven into the earth. He is waking up, blinking, looking around worriedly.

A folded dishtowel lies across his groin, obscuring his genitals, for which Robin is grateful. “Where am I?”

Annie finishes muttering and looks up at him from under her brows. She is indebatably angry, but it is a long-simmering rage, ripe, reptile-cold. “You’re in my cellar, Edgar.”

“Why am I naked? What is this?”

“This is a ritual. I’ve chosen you as my sacrifice.” Annie stands up, presenting the full glory of her lithe, petite body. Her dark hair is feathered and parted in the middle, in that iconic Eighties way, and it makes everything feel like a scene excerpted from a horror movie from the Me Decade. The only thing missing is a synth score from John Carpenter.

“Sacrifice?” He angles his head up, peering over his belly. “What the hell are you going on about?”

“Shut your mouth.” Annie walks slowly around the runic circle, pacing like a predator. He watches her, his eyes trickling up and down her sweat-slick body, and the lust hiding behind the terror in his eyes is disgusting.

“Listen, I’m willing—”

“I know about the children,” says Annie.

Edgar immediately stops talking. The girl-woman makes a complete revolution around the circle before he speaks again. “The children.”

“The amusement park you built in the woods with your wife’s money.”

“Weaver’s Wonderland.”

“Whatever you want to call it.”

“Those kids are trash,” Edgar says at first, then seems to realize he’s spoken harshly, frowning, biting back his words. “They come from broken homes, poor homes, dead homes. No one’s going to miss them. Nobody’s even going to look for em, we got the county in our pocket.”

“Someone will miss them.” Annie picks up a kitchen knife from the floor and points at him with it. Liquid fire dances on the blade. “I found out what you and Cutty are up to. The tree. You know the trees are unnatural. Disallowed—”

Edgar laughs nervously. “The dryads? Everyone has them.”

“No. Only the ones willing to kill for them. That’s—”

“They’re the only way you can live on, you idiot bitch. You want to die like one of us?”

She scowls. “That’s fell magic. You know that—”

“Falling apart at eighty years old?”

“And I know that. Cutty knows that.”

“Cutty doesn’t care.” His chuckling grows in confidence. “Marilyn is just over three hundred years old. She was around when they signed the Declaration of Inde-fuckin-pendence! Can you grasp that? Can you even wrap your pretty little head around it? Cutty’s been crafting nag-shi since long before you were born. She does what she wants. That’s the consequence of self-government, isn’t it? It’s no different from anarchy. ‘The honor system’. Ha! There’s no honor among thieves, and even less among witches.”

“What would you know about witches…man?” She says ‘man’ as if it is a derogatory term, like ‘imbecile’ or ‘outsider’. It doesn’t affect him, because he’s heard it a hundred times.

“I know Cutty and my wife are going to kill you if you hurt me.”

“Not if I kill you.” Annie gestures to the runic circle, drawing a broad oval in the air with the tip of the knife. “Do you know what this is, Edgar? My new friend knows a lot about us. And about—”

“It’s bullshit. You don’t know anything.” He spits at her, but most of it only speckles his own legs. “You and your so-called friend, Annie, you don’t know shit. And I don’t know what you’re planning, but when you’re done, the coven is going to kill you. No—they’re going to flatten you. Squash you like a bug. Fledgling. You’re a baby witch.

“The nag-shi came from the Dream-Witch, she’s the first one to have made them—she was the Prometheus that showed them how it was done. And they’ll kill you to protect it.”

“Not if I kill them.” Annie smiles.

“And how, pray tell, do you intend on doing that? Cutty’s too powerful. They all are. Even my wife’s got forty years on you.”

“I found a way.”

“The only thing capable of killing a witch as old as Cutty is a demon. And nobody’s brought a demon into the material world in centuries.”

She stands over him, smiling knowingly. A drop of sweat trickles down her belly, zagging through the fine hairs like a bolt of lightning.

Edgar’s angry expression sours and his eyes dart around the room, widening in revelation. “Wait—that’s what this is?” He flexes his arms, straining against the ropes, kicking. “You think you’re going to summon a demon?” Now he’s flailing, pulling at the ropes as hard as he can. The anger melts away, replaced by crazed, fearful giggling. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

Annie steps over Edgar’s thrashing legs and takes a knee between his thighs, crouching over his pelvis. She hovers over him in a three-point stance, her black hair spilling around her face, burying her eyes in shadow.

“What good is immortality with a price like this?” she asks him, tracing curlicues in his chest hair with the tip of the knife. “A blood price? Innocent blood? Come on, Eddie. Even if I condoned the crafting of nag shi, they’ve been watered with the blood of criminals before. Murderers, thieves, rapists. Not children. Not that it’s any—”