Malus Domestica (42 page)

“I thought silver was for werewolves.”

“This silver is….” She turned it so that the stiletto caught the white sky, and ivory shimmered down the mirrored metal blade. “To use a comic book analogy, it’s spiritual adamantine. Witches can’t change it or defend against it. It’s magically inert. Energy-neutral. If you had enough of these, you could pin a whole coven of witches to the floor and there’s nothing they could do about it. Only lay there cussing at you.”

“Do
you?” He lifted the dagger out of her hands and examined it. “Do you have enough?”

“Heinrich says there are two others in the world, but this is the only one of these I’ve ever seen.”

“Can’t you make more?”

“According to him, they were made using the nails that the Romans pinned Jesus Christ to the cross on Golgotha with. The nail is the core of the blade. Whether that’s total bullshit or not, I have no idea. For all I know, they’re made with Elvis Presley’s melted-down fillings. But I’ll tell you right now, this one works. It’s helped me kill a lot of witches.”

“What do you do, stab em in the heart?”

“Witches don’t have hearts to stab.” Robin explained the ritual of Ereshkigal’s sacrifice. “You pin her down with it and set her on fire while she’s immobilized. Fire is the only thing that can stop a witch. You can’t kill them, you can only destroy them.”

“I thought it was water you had to kill em with.”

“Nope.”

Wayne screwed up his face. “Why can’t you tie her to a stake like the old witch-hunters used to do?”

“Because those weren’t witches,” said Robin. “They were just your normal every-day humans. A rope isn’t going to hold a real witch, and that’s assuming you can even keep her still long enough to tie her up.” She put the dagger away. “Anyway, if I can get to the fourth witch and pin her down with this, I can burn her. With her out of the picture, the other three will be a lot easier to handle. Hopefully, if I play my cards right, I can take them out one at a time.”

“Why don’t you go do it right now?” he asked, showing her the ring.

“I need the diversion to make it work. I can’t match them all three at once. You and your dad are gonna go to dinner and keep them busy. Meanwhile, me and Heinrich will go into the Darkhouse and look for a door that’ll take us into the second floor of the Lazenbury.”

23

W
HEN
J
OEL
AWOKE
,
THERE
was a silhouette standing in the doorway. Officer Bowker, aiming a pistol at his face.

“Jesus God!” he shrieked, scrambling backward and off the end of the futon, tumbling to the floor. A rusty sawband of hot pain raked across his thigh. “Don’t shoot me! Don’t—”

“Hey-hey-
hey.
Hey.”

Bowker turned a switch—
click click
—and a lamp filled the room with a soft glow. It wasn’t Bowker at all, it was his brother Fisher, and he was holding out a cup of coffee, not a Glock. “It’s all right, man! You’re all right! It’s me.”

Joel’s mouth tasted like he’d been helping himself to a litter box. Hangover pain ran laps around the inside of his head, the scratches on his chest were still sore, and his entire body was stiff and achey, but none of it could hope to compete with the gunshot wound in his leg.

He was wearing nothing but a pair of Fisher’s boxers and gauze had been wrapped around his thigh in a thick band, affixed with a pair of tiny aluminum clips. The gauze was clean, but he didn’t know if that was because it was fresh or because he wasn’t bleeding that heavily. The stinging agony went bone-deep, as if he’d been shot with a nailgun and the nail was still in embedded in the muscle. He got a mental flash of the Serpent shooting nails through the garage door and squinched his eyes until it went away.

His hands were shaking too bad to hold a cup of coffee. “Just put it over here,” he said, his nervous fingers pattering on the end-table. “I’ll get to it.”

The walls of the cramped room were lined with bookshelves, and the shelves were full of hundreds of VHS tapes: all the best and most obscure horror and fantasy movies of the last forty or fifty years. Nestled into a space between the shelves was an old Magnavox television/VCR. A bundle of clothes lay on the end table (a shirt and a pair of jeans, both folded as meticulously as a display in an Abercrombie and Fitch) and the Bedazzled baseball bat leaned against the end of the futon.

Fish left the coffee next to the clothes and sat next to his brother. “How’s your leg feel?” he asked, handing Joel a couple of pills.

“Hurts.”

Extra strength Tylenol. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do until he could get back to the stash at Mama’s house. He dry-swallowed the Tylenol one at a time.

“I bet. Luckily it was just a graze. Cut a hole in the outside of your leg about the size of a quarter, but that’s all. Coulda been worse. At least he didn’t hit an artery or clip the bone.”

Underneath the gauze was about ten or twenty stitches. Joel didn’t know the exact amount and he really didn’t care, to be honest—the night before was a haze of alcohol and pain, only broken up by memories of running from the police lieutenant and hiding in a bush in the park like a wino, finishing off a blood-slick bottle of cognac. Fisher had picked him up on the back of his motorcycle, one of those sleek Japanese deals in cranberry red and black, and spirited him away.

He vaguely remembered refusing to be taken to the hospital. “Who stitched me up?”

“Ashe.”

A huge shadow stepped into the doorway. “I hear voices. Sounds like the patient is awake.”

Ashe Armstrong was a local veterinarian and the comic shop’s equivalent of Norm from the TV show
Cheers—
a regular and Fish’s most loyal customer. If he wasn’t at work, he was here, sitting on a stool at the end of the counter and talking comics with Fish. They’d called him around nine the previous evening with a breathless plea to make a house call, and to his credit he’d showed up with bells on.

He was also a little over six feet tall and nearly sturdy enough to arm-wrestle a grizzly bear. Plenty of muscle to hold down a struggling drunk.

“How you feeling?”

“Like I been shot in the leg and like I
need
to be shot in the head,” Joel said testily. The god-rays of morning sunlight shifting through the doorway around Ashe’s frame were sending shards of glass into his brain. After his initial snap was met with silence, he added, “…Sorry. I’m jus a little beat-up. Thank you for patchin me up.”

“No biggie. Anything for my friends.”

“‘Beat up’ is putting it lightly,” said Fish.

Stepping into the room, Ashe sat on a milk crate with a creak of plastic. “You said a
cop
shot you? I take it that’s why you didn’t want to to go to the hospital.”

“Yeah. He said somebody he called ‘the Serpent’ was supposed to have finished me off. The cop said they’re all workin together…said Marilyn Cutty owns this town.” Joel tilted his head back and slumped down, pressing a palm against his eyes. A kaleidoscope of geometric shapes flashed behind his eyelids. “I’m guessin this ‘Serpent’ guy is the dude I met on the internet Friday night.”

“A booty call?” Fish sighed. “Brother, you got to quit cattin around like this. You gonna end up with something they don’t make vaccines for.”

“I got rubbers.”

“That’s always what you say, ain’t it? A raincoat ain’t gonna keep you dry forever. Besides, you came within a hair of getting yourself killed by some looney-tune cracker with a knife.”

“Livin on bacon and cauliflower ain’t gonna make
you
immortal, either. You can’t jog your Jamaican ass away from Death, and he don’t care how much you can dead-lift.” Joel picked up his coffee and cradled it under his chin. “Complex carbohydrates ain’t what drove Mama crazy and pushed her into the grave, you know. They ain’t gon kill you either.”

Fish turned and walked out, shaking his head. A radio in the shop came on, obnoxiously loud, tuned to some local station in the middle of their drive-to-work morning chit-chat. It snarled through a dozen stations before landing on classic rock. Guns N’ Roses wasn’t Fish’s forte, but this was how his brother dealt with turbulent conversations between the two of them: blocking it out with music. Any kind, it didn’t matter, as long as it was loud.

This is probably why we ain’t never fixed nothing,
thought Joel.
He storms off into his bedroom and plays The Roots at three hundred decibels, and I go find something to smoke.
Ashe quietly watched him drink his coffee, his hulking body hunched over with his elbows on his knees and his hands slowly wringing each other. The veterinarian’s dark hair and heavy features made him look like a young Penn Gillette.

“You gonna give me the After-School Special too?”

Ashe briefly opened his hands in a sort of awkward, blameless shrug. “I’m just glad to see you doing okay.”

“You off today?”

“Yep. I get weekends off.”

Joel nodded in that
cool, daddy-o
way and sipped his coffee. Black, only sweet enough to take the bitter edge off. Hot enough to fog up his eyeballs. Oily. Vaguely salty. He sighed. “He put butter in my damn coffee.”

“Gross.”

“Yeah.”

The vet shrugged his hands again. “I hear it’s good for you. I don’t have the stomach to subject myself to it, though.”

Joel stared at his coffee, grinding his incisors together. “The cop came to my house. He knows where I live. I can’t go back there to lock up. They’re gonna leave my doors wide-ass-open and I ain’t gonna have nothin left…if I can ever even go back.”

“I’m sure it’ll be okay. I don’t imagine the cops would leave your front door unlocked.”

“I didn’t imagine they’d show up out of the blue and try to shoot me, either.” Setting his coffee aside, Joel wallowed his butt out to the edge of the futon and braced himself on the armrest, trying to stand up. He hissed as the imaginary nail in his leg drove a little deeper.

“Take it easy,” said Ashe.

“Take it easy and give it hard, that’s how I roll.”

He unfolded the clothes, feeling an unsolicited pang of regret at ruining Fish’s folding job, and put them on, starting with the shirt. The jeans were a little harder. Every inch of denim drove the rusty nail in his thigh a centimeter deeper. “Damn. He said this hole in my leg was the size of a quarter. Right, the French Quarter, maybe.”

“Okay, so he was downplaying it.” Ashe made that weeble-wobble seesaw motion with his hand. “I’d say it was more the size of a…silver dollar?”

Joel blew through pursed lips and opened the door at the end of the couch, limping through. On the other side was a narrow stairway leading up to Fisher’s apartment over the comic shop. He put his good foot on the first riser and steeled himself for the climb. Taking a deep breath, he picked up his right foot and put it on the second riser. His thigh flexed, pulling at his stitches, grinding the denim against the bandage.

Sharp hot pain swelled in the muscle as if there were a lit cigarette trapped under the gauze. Twelve steps to go. “God help me.”

Halfway up, he had developed a system; he leaned to his left, bracing himself against the banister screwed to the wall, and lifted himself with his left leg, holding his right out stiff to the side. Instead of stepping up with it, he humped it up on the left like Bugs Bunny’s flute-playing Revolutionary War soldier. By the time he had reached the top, his left thigh was on fire and sweat was running down his temples.

He stood at the top of the stairs to survey Fish’s apartment. He hadn’t been up here since his brother had bought the place, he realized with shame. He really ought to visit more often, and not under duress like this.

The walls were alive with artwork. Superhero posters were hung at tasteful intervals—
Avengers, Hulk,
and
Spider-Man
movie promotionals, artsy minimalist pieces, and comic-book panels so big the individual colors pointillized into sprays of red-and-yellow dots and bold fronds of sharp white lettering.
BOOM! BANG! POW!
There was a television, a large flatscreen standing on a low-slung entertainment center with a small collection of videogame consoles.

No sofa. Nowhere to sit, really, except for a beanbag chair right in front of the TV. The only other piece of furniture in the room was a treadmill on the opposite side of the room, but it faced the wall, running up under a computer desk with a Macbook on it. It was a standing desk; the woodgrain surface came up to Joel’s chest, standing on a sturdy telescoping frame.

A small pile of unopened mail lay next to the laptop. Joel briefly thought about checking his email, and then decided it was going to be a while before he wanted to look at a computer screen again.

The kitchen was a Spartan nook on the other side of a Formica breakfast bar, everything done up in 1960s greens and whites. A window over the sink overlooked Broad Avenue, the daylight shooting razorblades into his eyes. He went to the fridge, drank several pulls straight out of a carton of orange juice to wash the taste of sleep out of his mouth, then went into the bathroom to piss.

Something darted into the bathroom while he was standing in front of the toilet. Fisher’s cat Selina meowed, curling around his ankle.

“What up, cat.”

He flushed, washed his hands, took another few swigs from the orange juice in the fridge, and flopped down in the beanbag chair to rest. A long, groaning sigh rolled out of his mouth and he wiggled himself deeper into the styrofoam peanuts.

A remote control lay on the floor next to the beanbag. He aimed it at the TV and pressed the Power button, but the TV didn’t come on. Instead, the treadmill behind him growled to life and slowly climbed to jogging speed. Nonplussed, he got up and found the TV remote on the stand-up desk. A control panel that looked like something from a Houston space terminal was mounted to the back of the desktop. He stopped the treadmill, but to his annoyance, the power button wouldn’t turn it off.

Selina jumped up onto the entertainment center as he turned the TV on. The eight o’ clock morning news filled the screen with the pitty high-def face of an anchorman and the cat sat in front of it, stretching luxuriously and throwing out one leg so she could sit and run her tongue down her haunch.