Malus Domestica (40 page)

Robin cut in while he cupped the cigar with a hand and lit it, shook the match out, and dropped it into the dregs of his coffee. “She put an illusion on me and left me in a hospital restroom, hallucinating that bugs were crawling out of my skin.”

Leon leaned away from her. His brow knitted together in an almost angry disgust, but the tilt of his frown telegraphed sympathy.

Heinrich took a deep draw, the cherry flaring, and blew it at the ceiling. The rich smell of coconuts floated in a dragon of blue smoke, turning the kitchen into a dingy cabana. “The
algiz
didn’t protect you?”

“No. Just from being familiared—she’s too powerful.” Robin started to take a sip and put the mug back down. “She told me that I’m a puppet. Your henchman, your human shield.”
Your personal Jesus,
interjected some weird neuron in her brain. “That you groomed me to be a witchhunter so you could quit the game and keep yourself safe.”

She leaned over her coffee. “You didn’t teach me how to fight so I could avenge my mother, did you? You did it so you could hide in your fortress in Texas, and let
me
do all your dirty work.”

“As George Washington was wont to say, I cannot tell a lie. It was, indeed, me that chopped down the cherry tree.” Heinrich ashed the cigar into his coffee mug. It was white and had a picture of Snoopy on it, fast asleep on the roof of his doghouse. “I’m turnin sixty-six this year. I can’t fight the good fight forever. Somebody’s gotta take over, and you were ready to be sculpted, a block of marble ready for Michelangelo’s chisel.” He shrugged a shoulder. “Or whoever it is that carves statues of naked-ass men. I ain’t no damn art historian.”

Robin’s face darkened as she overcame the urge to throw her coffee in his face. “I’m not your bitch.” She took a deep shaky breath and let it out in a sigh.

“You were never meant to be.”

Heinrich ashed his cigar again and leaned back, clasping his elbows. “They’re turnin you against me, Robin. Fragmenting the opposition. If you’re gonna make the decision to come back here and fight, you’re gonna have to keep your head together. Don’t let Weaver tie you up in knots. That’s what she’s good at. They’ve all three of them got specialties, and hers is getting inside that thing you call a head.”

“Maybe.”

Heinrich stared at the table, woolgathering.

“I saw a little girl with a lot of hurt and hate in her heart.” His voice was torn between defensiveness, compassion, and anger. “I seen good people turn to shit tryin to burn it all out with drugs. When I found out that Annie had a daughter and she was in the mental hospital, I knew I had to get to you before the streets did. Or worse, you tried to fight Cutty with no preparation.” He took another draw and talked the smoke out. “Bein homeless ain’t no joke. The hell you think you’d be if I hadn’t taken you in?”

Reaching across the table as quick as a cobra, he grabbed Robin’s wrist and held it up to the dim morning light. The pink rope of scar tissue running down the inside of her wrist shimmered with a faint opalescence. “You were already cuttin yourself when I got to you. You just got out of Blackfield Psychiatric and you were already lookin for the fire exit of life.”

She wrenched her arm out of his hand, his fingertips slipping shut on empty air.

“You’d be dead in a gutter,” said Heinrich, pointing at her with the two fingers pincering the cigar,
“that’s
where your skinny white-girl ass would be. Listen to your heart and use your head, Robin Hood.” The term of affection he’d been using since the day he’d first driven her to Texas and put her up in his guest room. It was not lost on her. “Ain’t nobody against you but them. Don’t let em talk you in circles. That’s their first trick. You know that.”

Robin stared into her coffee. “I saw her.”

“Her who?”

“My mother. In a dream, when I had my seizure.”

She recounted the contact with Owlhead and the demon’s vision from start to finish. Leon choked on his coffee, dribbling it on the table. He got up to fetch a paper towel to mop it up off his shirt. “There’s a gateway to Hell in my goddamn basement?”

“I don’t know what it is, specifically, but—”

“No, that’s exactly what it is,” said Heinrich. “In a way. Sounds like what happened was, Annie thought she had sacrificed Edgar Weaver to draw a demon into our world to kill Cutty, but what she did was sign a blood contract that allowed Hell to annex the house.”

“In plain English, please,” said Kenway.

Heinrich swept a hand down his face, pulling at his cheeks. His lower eyelids were rimmed in red; he obviously hadn’t slept since he got off the plane. As he talked, he stroked his mustache. “Basically, like Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States, this house is now a territory of Hell. It has been for about two decades. I imagine it’s why ain’t nobody lived in it since Annie died.”

He pointed toward the living room. “The dark version of it that little boy in there found with his mama’s ring? That’s the Hell-side of this house.”

Both Kenway and Leon stared at Robin. “I thought you said there wasn’t a Hell,” said the vet, folding his arms.

The old witch-hunter grimaced, tossing a hand. Ashes dusted the tabletop. “Of
course
there’s a Hell.” He swept them off onto the floor. “Is she filling y’all’s heads with her Dalai Lama God-is-love-and-Hell-is-regret bullshit?”

They smirked at him. Robin gave him the finger.

“There for a while last year she got real deep into Nichiren Buddhism,” said Heinrich. “She even had me chanting
Nam Myoho Renge Kyo
over and over again, doin yoga and shit and eatin rabbit-food.
Me—!
The last time
I
did the Downward Dog, I got crabs and a ticket for public indecency.”

Their laughter was interrupted by a knock at the front door. Heinrich’s grim smile disappeared and he eased out of his chair, his head hunched down.

“You expectin visitors?” he asked, glancing at the window over the sink.

Leon got up, shaking his head. “No.” He started toward the hallway leading to the foyer, but Katie Fryhover stepped into the doorway.

The little girl knuckled one eye sleepily. “Witch-lady is outside.”

Heinrich pointed at Robin, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. The universal sign for
You. Come with me.

“Why is she wearing a bunch of rags?” asked Katie, watching them cross the hallway and slip into the downstairs bathroom, a cramped half-bath with a toilet and a sink. The walls were tiled in a dizzying motif of hornet-yellow sunflowers.

“Go see what she wants, Mr. Parkin,” Heinrich said through the half-open door, flicking his cigar into the toilet. “Don’t let her know we’re here.”

Kenway sidled inside, squeezing between them. Robin stood in the corner behind the sink, pushing a wastebasket out of the way. “If she sees me, she’s gonna know you’re here,” he said to her, closing the toilet’s lid and sitting on it. Heinrich tried to close the door, but there was a soft knock.

He opened it a crack. “I need to use the bathroom,” Katie whispered through the gap.

The grizzled old witch-hunter palmed the top of her head and tugged her inside, closing the door for good. Robin clutched the little girl against her knees. “Shh,” she murmured, looking down at Katie’s inverted face with her finger across her lips. “Gotta be quiet, okay, honey? We can’t let the witch-lady know we’re in here, or she’ll turn us into bugs.”

“I don’t wanda be a bug,” Katie murmured back, shaking her head slowly.

“Then be as quiet as you possibly can.”

In perfect unison, Heinrich turned off the light and Leon opened the front door.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning from the Welcome Wagon!” hooted Karen Weaver. “I was out and about, and I wanted to stop by and see how your boy was doing.”

“Actually, I’m glad you came by. I was going to come up and see you today.”

“Is that so, is that so.”

“Come on in, ma’am…feels a little clammy out there. I’d hate for you to catch your death of cold.”

“Too true, too true.” Weaver’s boots thumped on the entryway rug and knocked on the hardwood floor.

The front door closed with a soft
click
and the two of them went into the living room, which made them a little harder to hear. In the bathroom, Robin was dead silent and motionless, straining to listen. The smell of ointments and cigar smoke wafted out of Heinrich’s coat, making a murk of the air. Robin tried not to cough.

“Well, hello there, children! Ah, oh, a sleep-over! How wonderful!”

“What’s this?” asked Leon.

“Oh, it’s an icebox cake. I thought the boy would appreciate a sweet treat while he convalesces.” The rustle of paper. “Look through the glass dish—see how the cake is marbled underneath? You bake the cake and pour Jello mix into it, and let it soak in the fridge. The Jello sets inside the cake.”

Some strange sensation of hunger echoed in Robin’s bones, reverberating from deep in the center of the house as if the creaky Victorian itself were tired of nails and mice and wanted something fresh. A half-presence lurked out there with them, the same eerie weight you sense when you know someone’s home with you but you haven’t seen them yet.

Owlhead,
she thought.
You can smell the witch, can’t you?
When she closed her eyes, she could almost hear his ragged, leonine breathing.

“Wow, that’s really nice of you. That sounds great.”

“This particular cake is lemon, and the Jello inside is lime. A lemon-lime cake! Quite clever, huh? And the icing is just Cool-Whip, dusted with lemon zest and graham-cracker crumbs. Oh, it’s very lovely, quite tangy and delicious, you really must try it.”

“After breakfast, maybe, I’d love some.”

“Yes, yes, after breakfast, of course, of course. Here, I’ll stash it in your Frigidaire.”

The brittle rapping of Weaver’s boots clattered down the hallway toward the kitchen and the bathroom. Robin realized she was scrunching up the little girl’s shirt and let go.

Weaver kept going and hung a right into the kitchen, opening the fridge. “Oh, boy, oh boy oh boy oh
boy.
I can tell you’re a bachelor, sir. Heavens. Nothing but takeaway leftovers and condiments! Cold pizza indeed! Looks like I’m going to have to treat you two more often.” The heavy Pyrex dish thumped onto the metal rack inside and she closed it up.

“That’s sort of what I wanted to talk to you about, actually,” said Leon, right on the other side of the bathroom door.

“Oh, we’ve got all the time in the world for small talk.” Weaver came back out into the hallway and paused. Her breezy bulk was almost palpable through the door, like a winter wind through an autumn window.
Here it comes,
thought Robin.

A faint ratcheting noise was followed by a gush of warm air from the vent next to her toes.

“It’s so drafty in this old house, isn’t it?” asked Weaver. Come on, let’s turn up the heat a bit. Don’t want the boy to catch a cold on top of everything else, hmm?”

The witch thumped back into the living room and clapped once, rasping her dry old hands together. Robin’s mind produced a mental image of a house-fly furiously rubbing its forelegs against each other. She shuddered.

“How are you feeling, dear boy? How is your leg?”

Wayne mumbled something not quite audible.

“Very good, very good. Sounds like the poultice did the trick, hmm? Drew the poison right out of you as easy as…well, dirt out of a carpet! It’s the salt, you know, that does the trick. You toss in a few secret ingredients and it’ll draw the venom right out of the bite.”

( b i t e
 
y o u ,
 
w a n t
 
t o
 
b i t e
 
y o u
)

The feeling of starvation surged in Robin’s chest, dropping into the pit of her belly, and for a terrifying second she thought her stomach was going to growl out loud.

“People have lots of mean things to say about our country remedies and old wives’ tricks,” Weaver was saying, “but when they work—and they always do—oh, those folks shut their traps, they shut em right up.”

Leon took the opportunity to jump in. “Mrs. Weaver—”

“Oh, do call me Karen.”

“Karen, then…I just—”

“Or, you can call me Grandma if you like. Granny, Gramama, Mee-Maw, I come a-runnin to bout any of those.”

“Mee-Maw? I wanted to thank you for what you did at the hospital. For…for footing Wayne’s hospital bill. I don’t—I don’t even know
how
to voice my gratitude enough. You have no idea how much you helped me out. I mean, twenty-thousand dollars? As a high school teacher, that’s like a year’s pay for me.”

The witch tittered. “It was no trouble, lovebird, no trouble at all. You save up a lot of money living with two other old biddies in a crumblin pile in the ass-end of nowhere. Chicken coops’re cheap, and we’re all hens down that way.”

“I see.”

“You know, speakin of teachin, it’s a shame those hokey old boys on Capitol Hill don’t put more into education. They keep on rolling the way they’re headed, and soon enough this grand old country of ours is gonna be nothing but a nation of imbeciles. Not to say it ain’t halfway there already.”

Leon scoffed politely. “Well, there’s not much I can do to repay you, at least for the time being, but I, uhh…I wanted to invite you over for dinner. My treat. It’s the least I can do for the lady that saved my son’s life and me a ton of heartache.”

“How lovely of you. I would be delighted. But your kitchen is awfully small…and not exactly geared to the quills, is it? Now,
our
kitchen, on the other hand,
well.
You could roast a buffalo in that sucker, hooves and all, and dress it up no worse than Wolfgang Puck himself! And it’s been quite a long time since we’ve had any company up there.”

Silence lingered for a few seconds, and then Weaver went on talking.

“I’ll make a deal with you, Mr. Parkin. You put together what you want for dinner—steaks, chicken, lamb, whatever you fancy. Bring it on up to the house. We’ll sizzle it up fine and dandy with some veggies and baked tubers and yeast rolls, hmm?”

“Yeah, okay. That sounds good to me.”