Malus Domestica (41 page)

The uncertainty in Leon’s voice made that a bald-faced lie Weaver would have to be an idiot to miss.

“You seem reluctant, love. What’s the matter?”

“I hate to impose.”

“It’s the stories, innit? The tall tales about us being a bunch of witches. Bubble-bubble-toil-and-trouble and all that. I expect the folks over there in the trailer park ha’been tellin you tales out of school.” Weaver chuckled dismissively, airily. “Take a gander at my face, hon. What color is my skin? Green? …No? And where’s the wart on my nose? My pilgrim hat and buckled shoes? My bristly dustbroom and black pussy-cat?”

Another stretch of quiet, and then Leon said with a soft laugh, “Okay, yeah. I get the point. Sometimes I’m bad about letting what people say get to me. Not quite gullible, but—”

“Too trusting?”

“I guess? I guess you could say that.”

“Trust is a good thing, Mr. Parkin. A good thing. I think this world could use a bit more of it. Without it, where would we be? Kids don’t hardly get to play outside these days, do they? They just sit in the house with their internet and videogames because the world out there scares the hell out of them. We don’t trust them around strangers anymore. We don’t trust
Halloween candy
anymore, for Pete’s sake, and as an alleged witch I can tell you without a doubt that that’s a cryin shame.”

Robin could only think of her mother pinning Weaver’s husband to the floor two decades ago. Edgar, the real-life boogeyman, making children disappear out of his homegrown Six Flags. She had no doubt that Weaver was complicit in the racket.
Hypocrite bitch,
she thought, squeezing little Katie’s shoulders.

The girl squirmed. She pressed her hand over Katie’s mouth before she could complain.
Sorry, sorry—don’t squeal! We’ll all be shitting bumblebees if she finds us in here!

“Anyway,” said Weaver, “I need to get back to the ranch. I’ve got a dress I’ve been working on for a month or so now and I’m starting to get down to the wire on my deadline. These young ladies these days, they don’t have any patience for craftsmanship.”

“A dress?”

“Oh, yes, yes. I design and make wedding dresses and sell em on the internet. A real cottage industry, all by myself. Can you believe it? I talk down at the internet like it’s some kind of lark, but really, it’s been a Godsend for an old lady like me. Why, I can visit the Great Wall of China from the comfort of my kitchen!”

The two of them headed to the front door, Leon with his slow cowboy stride, Weaver bustling along in a constant swish of fabric and a bootheel drum solo.

“How does steak sound?” Leon asked, opening the front door.

“Like this:
MOO.”

The kids in the living room giggled. Katie snorted against Robin’s fingers, reminding her she was covering the girl’s mouth.

She took her hand away and softly petted the top of Katie’s head. It was supposed to be an apologetic gesture, simple casual affection, but out of nowhere she registered the feel of the child’s silky brown hair spilling through her fingers. She was savoring it.
Urk. There goes that biological clock. Ring-a-ding-ding, rock star.

“Steaks sound just fine, Mr. Parkin,” said Weaver.

“Please, call me Leon.”

“Ah, the lion! I like that quite a lot. You strike me as a man with a lion’s courageous heart, Leon. That boy’s quite lucky to have such a father.”

“Thank you.”

“Seven o’clock? Six? I don’t want to keep the lion-cub up too late. It is a school night, after all.”

“Six is fine. I’ll be there.”

“It’s settled.” Weaver’s voice became a little clearer, a little louder. She must have leaned into the doorway to shout. “Have a good sabbath, everybody! Dig that cake! There’s more where that came from!”

An awkward silence followed this as the children hesitated, unsure of how to respond.

“Thank you, Miss Weaver,” called Amanda.

Pete and Wayne echoed her. “Thank you, Miss Weaver.”

Meanwhile, Robin could feel the witch’s laser gaze through the wall, as if she had Superman’s eyes.
She knows we’re here. She knows, dammit.
Even though they’d parked in Chevalier Village so the plumbing van wouldn’t be sitting in Leon’s driveway for Cutty to see. She hoped Heinrich had the presence of mind to have done the same.

“You’re very welcome,” grinned Weaver. “Au revoir!”

The front door closed. The whole house seemed to hold its breath for a full minute as everybody stayed locked in position, listening. Almost as if they were waiting for something.

Katie stirred. “I have to
peeeeeee.”

“All right, all
right.”
Heinrich cracked the door open. Wayne’s father was standing by the front door, peeking through the side-light windows. “Is she gone?”

Leon spoke over his shoulder. “Yeah. She’s gone.”

“Gone
gone? She’s off the property?”

“Yeah, she’s crossing the highway right now.” Leon gave them a pointed look as they came out of hiding. “Man, for a bunch of big-shot witch-hunters, you guys sure are hot to stay outta sight.”

Robin was the last out of the bathroom, closing it behind her to give Katie some privacy. “You remember that green-eyed thing in the darkhouse?” She said ‘dark house’ as one word,
darkhouse,
as one would say ‘big-house’ or ‘outhouse’. Seemed to be evolving into her name for it. “Well, that thing is the only thing that can kill those witches. That’s how powerful they are. They’d tear through us like wet toilet paper.”

“Then what made you think you’d be able to take em on by yourself?” asked Leon, going into the kitchen. The water ran as he washed out the coffee carafe, staring out the window over the sink.

She put her fists on her hips and stared darkly at the foyer rug as if she could find wisdom in the intricate red-and-blue curlicues.

“The demon,” said Heinrich. “The hallucinations. Owlhead was drawing you here.” He shook out another Royal Hawaiian and stuck it in his mouth, but didn’t light it. Instead, he paced slowly up and down the foyer hallway, one hand in his pocket, the other holding the cigar to his mouth. “He wants you here for some reason.”

“But why
now?”
asked Robin. “I’ve always seen him, but it’s only been every now and then. The first nineteen years of my life, I saw him four times. Once when I was as young as that little girl in there, once in middle school, and twice in the mental hospital. The last two years, I’ve seen him at least fifteen times. What’s special about now?”

“It
is
close to your mother’s birthday.”

“Would that be numerologically important, though? Would that have any kind of occult relevance?”

He shook his head. “No…none that I can imagine. If it were
your
birthday, maybe.” Heinrich gestured with the cigar. She could tell he didn’t think much of it anyway. Numerology is bullshit, astrology for math nerds. They were grasping at straws. “Maybe he thinks you’ve passed some kind of threshold that would make it possible for you to let him manifest in our world? You are Annie’s daughter, after all. Maybe there’s a link somewhere.”

“You know as well as I do that demons have never manifested in the material plane.” Heinrich had been a demonologist in a previous life and had a library of reference works, including a stash of material stolen out of the Vatican’s archives in 1976. As part of her training, Robin had studied them all, and she knew that he’d forgotten more than she’d even learned. “They can’t. That’s why they possess people.”

“What
are
demons, anyway?” asked Leon. “That didn’t look like any demon
I’ve
ever seen. I would have expected, y’know, the usual—cloven hooves, pitchfork, horns, the whole nine yards.”

Heinrich sat on the stairs. “Demons are viruses.”

“I ain’t pickin up what you’re throwin down.”

“Goddammit, I knew you was gonna make me explain it. All right, look. A virus is basically a piece of DNA wrapped in protein. You could say it’s dead, but it would have to have lived to be dead, and it’s never been alive. And the only way a virus can assume some semblance of life is by infecting a living being.”

“…Stillborn.”

“Yeah, kinda. I like to think of it as a Terminator—a facsimile of life that’s never been alive itself, wrapped in meat.”

He sighed and took the cigar out of his mouth, staring at it as he rolled it in his fingers.

“The way it’s been explained to me is, there are two kinds of souls. The souls that come out of Creation’s oven well-formed and functioning find their way into a living body at some point. The souls that come out deformed don’t get a body. They just sorta float around out there in the dark, in the primordial ghost-soup of Limbo. Demons are those two-faced, waterheaded, heart-on-the-outside, too-fucked-up-to-live souls. And the only way they can reach the same level of life that
we
enjoy is to possess a living body, the same way a virus possesses a living cell.”

“You say ‘Creation’s oven’,” said Leon, wiping his hands dry with a towel as he came back to the foyer. “So you’re tellin me there’s an actual God up there, cranking out souls in His spiritual bakery?”

Heinrich guffawed, leaning back to laugh at the ceiling. “That’s the million-dollar question, ain’t it?” He put the coconut cigar back in his pocket. “Welcome to the clergy. Nice to meet you, hope you guessed my name.”

Robin went into the kitchen to fetch her cup. Sitting on the counter was her camera, the R
ECORD
light burning red, in full view of anyone putting an icebox cake in the Frigidaire.

22

“Y
OU
WILL
TELL
US
how it went, won’t you?” asked Amanda, as the kids headed home after breakfast. “You know, dinner with the witches?”

The Parkins didn’t have any of the ingredients for breakfast, but Leon needed to make a trip to the grocery store anyway to get the steaks, leaving them with Kenway and Robin. To the boys’ surprise, the veteran was quite a gamer, and the boys geeked out with him over Wayne’s PlayStation. The tall black guy, Heinrich, spent most of the morning sitting on the back stoop smoking his cigars and staring at the forest out back. Wayne kinda liked that dude—he was standoffish and creepy, but in a cool, self-aware way, as if it were a facade he’d developed over the years.

“Why don’t you go with us?” Wayne offered, and both Pete and Amanda blanched at the thought. “What, are you scared?”

“Hell yeah,” said Pete. The carnival hammer rested on his shoulder.
 

“They’re super-creepy.” Amanda folded her arms. The three of them were standing on the front porch of the Victorian. The day had grown cool, and the overcast sky was the blank, featureless white of an unwritten story. “I don’t think you understand, Wayne.”

“Understand what?”

“We’ve been living down the hill from those women our entire lives,” said Amanda. “Our parents…I don’t know if they’re
afraid
of them, but…nobody in Chevalier Village goes outside much after dark unless it’s an emergency, you know? The women don’t talk to
us;
we don’t talk to
them.”
Her eyes found their way up to the hacienda. “This morning was the first time I’ve ever heard Karen Weaver speak. Or really, the first time I’ve ever been close enough to
hear
her speak.”

“They’re kinda like you guys’ Dracula, huh?” asked Wayne.

Pete’s head tilted. “What do you mean?”

“The mysterious Count Dracula, livin up on the hill overlookin the town. Nobody goes up there, and the village warns away anybody that comes snooping. Chevalier is kind of a mini-Transylvania, ain’t it? They got you spooked like a vampire.”

Amanda nodded, but didn’t say anything.

“Astute observation,” said Robin, startling Wayne. She was sitting in the swing at the end of the porch.

“We’d better get out of here, I guess,” said Amanda, bouncing down the front steps. As she stepped into the grass, she turned back to him. “Be careful. If they really
are
witches, they’re dangerous. Take care of your dad, okay?”

“I’ll try. I don’t think they’re gonna do anything. We’re just eatin steak, right? We’re going to dinner there. They can’t violate guest right.”

“Real life isn’t
Game of Thrones,
Wayne.”

Wayne swallowed anxiously and sat down on the steps to watch them trudge back to the trailer park.

Robin came down to his end of the porch. She wasn’t wearing her chest harness, but she was toting the little camera she carried everywhere. Her messenger bag was slung around her shoulder. She put the camera on top of the newel post at the end of the porch railing, facing them, and the red light on it told him it was recording.

“So you got a YouTube channel?” he asked her.

“Yup. It’s got all my detective work and encounters on it. All my fights this far. Well, almost all of them. I’ve been ambushed a couple of times.” She sat down next to him, leaning over with her elbows on her knees. “You and your dad should watch a couple of them. So you can—I don’t know, maybe it’ll help you trust me.”

“I think after showing him the monster in the doorway, he believes,” said Wayne. The woman’s eyes sparkled even in the dim light of the overcast day. She was intensely pretty, he thought, fine-featured and pale, but her eyes were old. Or maybe tired. There was a sharp, almost unsettling intelligence in them, like a hawk. “I know
I
believe.”

“I have a plan,” she told him.

“A plan for what?”

“I want to use your ring to get into their house without having to walk through the front door. Take em by surprise.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“There’s a fourth witch, somewhere on the property,” she said, looking up at the Lazenbury. “I’m pretty sure she lives upstairs. She’s much older than the other three. Heinrich believes that fourth witch is the one augmenting the power of the rest of the coven. Witches can band together and draw on each others’ power—that’s the whole point of a coven.”

“What good is
that
going to do?” he asked, studying his mother Haruko’s ring.

She delved into her messenger bag and took out a beautiful, ornate dagger. A few emeralds were laid into the hilt. “Except for the core, it’s made of silver. The entire thing, from point to pommel.”