Malus Domestica (50 page)

“I dunno,” said Fish.

Thunder broke outside, and a bullet whip-cracked against the lip of the cave, flicking chips of rock at him. Fish ducked and ran for the cover of the mine.

The main shaft drove straight into the heart of the mountain, side-tunnels branching off at constant intervals into side rooms. The air was thick and close, wet, musty. Moisture speckled Joel’s face. It didn’t take long to lose nearly all light, stranding them in a void of darkness traced only by the distant star of the cave opening behind them. He could cover it with one hand.

Euchiss stepped into the void’s only sun, a tiny silhouette. He slipped a flashlight out of his patrol belt and turned it on, shadows capering at his feet. “I know you’re in here,” he called, his voice a flat, raspy echo. “There ain’t no other end to this mine. You’re trapped; might as well save us all a headache and give up now.”

Go to Hell.
Joel stepped out of the faint light into a side room and into abject and total darkness. Fish followed, clutching his shoulder.

“You go to the other side,” Fish whispered.

“Why?”

“You get a rock or something. Hide in the dark. I’m gonna come out with my hands up and distract him. You come up behind him, hit him with the rock.”

“That sounds like crap. That’s a crap plan. He’s going to shoot you.”

“Do you have a better one?”

He didn’t. Joel crossed the river of light again and into the dark, shuffling around, his hands fluttering across the floor. No rocks, but there was a metal bucket with a rope attached to the handle, a heavy coal bucket with a thick bottom. The rope was spongy and wet, but intact. He carried the bucket to the edge of the shadow and held it aloft like a flail. As he waited for the cop to get close, something occurred to him.
What if Euchiss happened to point the flashlight this way before he could spot Fish? What if he shot Fish on sight?

His lungs itched. He needed to cough; every breath he took seemed more and more congested until he was shuddering.
What’s wrong with the air in here? It’s like suckin in sawdust.

The flashlight came closer, the floor swimming with blue-white light, throwing stones and ripples into sharp relief. Euchiss’s Oxfords scuffed across the hard-packed dirt.
Come on, come on.
Joel extended his arm back, bracing for action, getting ready to swing the bucket at the cop’s face. Euchiss came around the corner into view, his Maglite a cone of hard white. He’d slung the rifle over his shoulder by a strap and drawn his own service Glock.

No! The flashlight was wobbling in Joel’s direction! The circle of light swept back and forth, and brushed his toes.

“Hey,” said Euchiss almost casually, and flashed him in the eyes. Joel flexed, started to step forward, but Fisher coughed. The beam of light swung in the other direction and revealed Fish standing in front of a long wooden table, his hands up, squinting.
“There
you—” Euchiss began to say, the pistol in his hand following the flashlight.

Joel lunged blind, swinging from the side with a right cross. The bucket cut an arc through the air and missed completely.

Euchiss flinched and snorted laughter, but Joel followed through, swinging the bucket around his head, and hit him on the second go-round. The bucket whipped the redheaded killer square in the face, burying him in a cloud of black soot.

The Glock flashed,
BANG!,
and the flashlight’s beam danced across the ceiling. The bucket hit the floor and left Joel holding a rotten rope.

“Run!” shouted Fish.

He considered grabbing the light, but the pistol made him think twice. He ran after his brother’s fading footsteps and they fled headlong into the silk shadows of the cave.

31

D
INNER
WAS
AMAZING
. K
ENWAY
’
S
trick with dry-aging the steaks had worked perfectly, and to her chagrin, Robin found the witches’ side dishes more than adequate: potato salad with tender little chunks of boiled egg, dusted with paprika; garlic-buttered corn on the cob; bundles of asparagus spears, each wrapped in a piece of bacon and fried; French bread smeared with bruschetta; and to cut the savory, sweet-potato casserole topped with toasted marshmallows and crushed pecans.

They ate at the table in the garden, the lowering dusk kept at bay by citronella tiki-torches that smelled like grapefruit. It occurred to Robin that Kenway probably couldn’t see them inside the garden because of the wall.

That felt like bad news, even though she was probably more capable of defending herself against the coven than he was.
I wonder if he’s even observing. When I decided to go to dinner I didn’t fill him in on an alternate plan.
She couldn’t communicate with the earpieces like she’d planned. Hers was still in her pocket.
No doubt Heinrich is out there, though. Probably in a tree with a directional microphone, knowing him.
Her eyes scanned the dark forest, raking the pines for a glowing cigar-tip.

She missed Kenway, wanted him here, should have brought him in. Needed his warm Viking closeness.

It made her realize that he made her feel safe and normal, two things she hadn’t experienced in a very long time. Him and his broad back and Thor hair and quietly dark demeanor, constantly coiled and coolly hungry, like a one-legged James Bond. He made her feel like someone stood beside her against the world for a change.

Maybe that’s why I like him so much,
she understood, watching the old women eat. Not that she was weak without him, but it was nice to be able to rely on someone other than yourself for a change.

“So you really
are
witches?” asked Wayne.

“We are, mon garçon,” said Theresa.

“You don’t
look
like witches.”

Cutty smiled graciously. Robin knew enough about her to see under the mask and knew that it was an act. “Pray tell, young man—what is a witch
supposed
to look like?”

Wayne’s eyes danced from his father to Robin, and then he murmured to Cutty, shrinking a little bit, “I don’t know.” A piece of bread touched his lips, clutched in his hands like a squirrel. He spoke into it bashfully. “Green? With all black clothes and a big floppy hat?”

“And a wart on my nose and a broom and a cauldron full of bubbling brew?”

He pushed his glasses up on his nose.

“Well, you can thank artistic license for that depiction. Pure fiction.” She cut into her steak, talking as she did so. “…It’s sort of like Santa Claus. You know what the real Santa Claus looks like, yes?”

“Santa Claus?” Wayne sat up, putting down the bread and pantomiming a beard. They had obviously strayed into something a ten-year-old could be enthusiastic about. “Yeah! He’s all dressed up in red, with white bits around his wrists and the edge of his hat, and he’s got rosy cheeks and a big red nose, and a big white beard. He carries a giant sack full of toys and rides in a sleigh pulled by reindeer.”

Cutty forked the bite of steak into her mouth and waved this away as if to dispel it. “A fiction, concocted by a newspaper cartoonist and perpetuated by the Coca-Cola company to sell soda. The real man looked
much
different, and didn’t live on the North Pole.”

“Really?”

“Really. The name ‘Santa Claus’ comes from
Sinterklaas,
which is the Dutch name for Saint Nicholas, also known as the bishop Nikolaos of the ancient Greek city of Myra. People left their shoes out on the stoop at night, and Nikolaos would leave coins in them.”

Leon paused, corn cob halfway to his mouth. “Santa Claus was a Greek priest?”

“Yes. He was a very generous man, and he was also one of the most powerful magicians and alchemists that ever lived. He was tall, with a long beard, and not thick about the middle or rosy-cheeked as pictures would make you think. Nicholas died in the year 343 and his remains were buried in Italy.” Cutty swirled her tea, the ice clinking musically against the glass. She eyed Robin. “The point of my history lesson is, most things are not as others would have you believe. There is always a long story behind an old face.”

“So witches aren’t the only ones that can do magic?”

Weaver stifled a burp, speaking dismissively. “Heavens, no. Well, it depends on what you call ‘magic’. …We don’t really like to call it ‘magic’, by the way. That’s reserved for busking, card tricks, that kind of thing. Pulling rabbits out of hats.”

“Witches are the most prominent users of paranormal energy these days,” said Cutty. “Always have been, really. Men can do it as well, like Nikolaos of Myra, but it requires artificial means. They can’t do it naturally like we can. They require conduits, such as crystal balls, alchemy, staves. As a Christian, Nicholas used a shepherd’s-crook…which is where candy canes came from, if you can believe that.

“Whole secret societies have risen and fallen over the centuries, seeking to channel the Gift. Thaumaturgy, which is the name we use for it, is threaded into our very being. Men—wizards, warlocks, magi, magicians, whatever they choose to call themselves, can only borrow this force. We are
filled
with it. Thanks be to the goddess of the afterlife, Ereshkigal, we
are
magic.”

Robin smiled. “You make it sound so noble.”

“Is it not?”

“Not when you bleed people dry of their lives with the nag shi. Drain them of their happiness, their spirit—”

Cutty held up a hand. Her fingers were slender and pale, young-looking. Robin realized that underneath the warm, diffuse glow of the citronella candles, the old woman’s face was softer, less creased than it ought to be.
She’s been partaking of the nag shi’s fruit,
she thought.
She geared up for a tussle.

Mom’s heart-tree fruit.
The witch said earnestly, “You promised you weren’t going to bring us any drama, littlebird.”

Littlebird.

That term of endearment brought back old, old memories. Robin’s mind flickered with images of herself as a tiny child, sitting in the Lazenbury’s kitchen, eating Chips Ahoy cookies and drinking apple juice, reading the comics out of the Sunday paper or watching
ReBoot, Pirates of Dark Water,
or
Darkwing Duck
on the wood-cabinet Magnavox.

Grandmother Marilyn had a dog back then, a miniature Pinscher named Penny, for the coins of copper fur over his eyes. She loved that dog almost as much as Mr. Nosy.

Littlebird.
She cast a glance at Wayne. “I did.”

“You’re an honest soul,” said Cutty. “I remember when you used to call me Grandmother. Hell, two days out of every week you’d be up here knocking on my kitchen door, crying about your mummy and daddy fighting about this or that. Do you remember that?”

“I do.” And she did, vaguely. There was a mental image of the Lazenbury’s back patio, and a sense-memory of knocking on the door. Cutty had a station wagon back then, gray, and she kept a tarp strapped over it to fend off the pollen. When she was little, Robin always wanted to open the car door and climb in under that tarp, the windows covered, and hide away from the world where no one could see her.

“Why didn’t you get another dog when Penny died?”

Cutty stumbled. “Oh…well, I don’t know. I suppose it just hurt too much to lose him. And besides, there was no little girl to come around and play with a dog anymore. Once you found makeup and boys and such, my little tomboy stopped visiting.”

She cut a spear of asparagus into several bites. “I came to visit you in the hospital after…after your mother, you know.”

Robin blinked. “You did?”

“Oh, yes. They wouldn’t let me see you, though. The shrinks told me you weren’t stable enough for visitors, especially none so close to you and your mother.” Cutty punctured the asparagus with her fork and slipped it into her mouth. “They said it could possibly sabotage your progress.”

“Maybe,” said Robin. She pushed food around on her plate for half a minute. “I knew it was you back then.” Her words were grim but gentle. “Your name was the last word on my mother’s lips.”

Leon and Wayne had stopped what they were doing and were sitting there with their forks and knives on their plates frozen mid-cut, watching expectantly.

Cutty chewed, staring at Robin without expression. “I wanted to bring you home with me, littlebird,” she said, sighing. “I would have raised you as my own. There would have been no…whatever
this
is.” Cutty made an inclusive gesture at Robin with her fork, as if pointing out her bad taste in shirts. “Blood feud, vengeance, vigilantism, I don’t know.”

“How?” Something burned deep in Robin’s chest—not quite rage, but it was headed that way. “Lies? Keeping my mother from me?”

“Your mother is dead, love. There would have been nothing to hide.”

“Because of you.”

Karen Weaver cleared her throat, butting in. “Your mother murdered my husband. I couldn’t stand there and—and—take that lying down,” the witch said indignantly. “Edgar may have been a shit, but I loved him, you know.”

“So you turned my mother into a tree?”

“Eye for an eye.”

Cutty interjected, “Besides, we had to replace the nag shi Annie burned down.” She shrugged and took a sip of her iced tea. “She brought it on herself, Robin. Annie thought she could punish her own coven and renounce her vows. Out of—out of disgust, I guess, she called it
sins,
transgressions against nature and decency, as if we had any choice. She thought of herself as a sort of whistleblower, thought she was better than us, better than her vows.

“In retrospect, she discovered she wasn’t prepared to make the moral sacrifices required to live this life. It was darker, uglier than Annie expected. But that’s not the way it works. Once you promise your heart to the Goddess, it’s Hers for life, for good or for ill. It’s like the Mafia, like Hotel California, once you’re in, you don’t get to leave. And you do what you can to stay alive.”

“Killing innocent people?” Robin screwed up her face.

“You think rabbits are evil creatures? Flies? Mice? Where is your righteousness when the owl plucks the mouse from the fields? When the bear catches the fish in the river?” Cutty pointed at her with her fork again. “Subsistence. That’s what it is. That’s all it’s ever been. You don’t understand.”