Malus Domestica (51 page)

“You’re predators, but you’re not eagles. That’s too noble. You’re spiders, if anything. You’re unnatural. You’re rotten inside. You’ve been alive too long.”

“Who are you to tell me when I should die? Where is your cloak, Death? Where is your scythe and hourglass?” Cutty bit her lips and looked at the table, and back up at Robin. “These are laws you haven’t bothered to know anything about, littlebird. There is an old way, sacred traditions, that you ignore in your crusade to avenge your mother, who was not blameless. You haven’t given any consideration to that, you murder and murder and you think it’s okay because of what we are. And you videotape their anguish and put it on the internet, like it’s some kind of goddamned circus!”

“Forty-six,” said Weaver.

Robin and Cutty faced her. “What?”

“Forty-six. That’s how many people you’ve killed.” Her eyes wandered the table and her plate as if she were looking through them at her computer screen, and then rose to meet Robin’s. “The commune in Oregon, the Sand Oracle’s coven….”

Leon licked his lips. “I thought you said you’d only killed, like, twenty.”

“I have,” said Robin, feeling defensive. “Like nineteen. About that many.
Witches!”

The situation was slipping out of control, if it ever had been to begin with. Again, Weaver was trying to turn the Parkins against her. Cutty was trying to talk her over to the dark side, so to speak, with her
littlebird
and pouty wistful woe-is-Granny faces.

Weaver’s head shook slowly and she said,
“People.
Witches
and
familiars. Robin, dear, I’ve watched your videos. I told you I was subscribed to your YouTube channel. I’ve also been following you.”

“What? Following me?”

“My specialty is the thaumaturgy of illusions and conjurations, remember?” Weaver reached out a hand and snapped her fingers, once, dramatically,
click!,
and the citronella torches turned from white to a deep oceanic blue. All of a sudden the grove looked like some kind of rave out of 1993.

Click!
Back to white. “I’m the best there ever was, devil, you can’t win
this
golden fiddle. And once you decide what people can see, you can decide what people
can’t
see.” Weaver pointed to herself, her smile a mixture of pride and idiocy.
“Me,
in case you were wondering.”

“You think I’m a fool?” Cutty asked, her voice wry, her face disbelieving, one eye scrunched. Robin’s heart had begun to pound in her chest. Leon had turned his knife around in his fist like he was getting ready to stab somebody. “I already told you I knew you were in Blackfield Psychiatric. What kind of an idiot would I be if I didn’t keep tabs on you when Hammer came and took you back to Texas? If I’d known he was at the hospital the day you were released by the state, I would have killed him and took you myself. But you two were driving across the state line into Alabama by the time I got there.”

I honestly hadn’t even considered that,
Robin thought. Back then she had been nothing but a confused, angry, small-minded girl with a prescription for anti-psychotics and anti-depression medication, psycho-analyzed half to death and more than ready for the wide-open skies of Texas after spending so much time in the stark, sterilized hallways of the psych ward.

All this time she’d considered Cutty’s coven passive, oblivious, just sitting here in Blackfield unknowingly waiting to be killed…but it was now evident that she was still that angry, ignorant girl. She hadn’t been the cat, she’d been the mouse the whole time. Running the maze, looking for the cheese, completely in the dark.

But Cutty put it even more aptly. “You were so focused on building the gallows you didn’t realize it was your own neck in the noose,” she said with a soft finality, her eyes sinking from Robin’s face, across the tablecloth, and onto her own plate. She went back to eating quietly, gazing into her food.

“Dinner truce, y’all,” said Leon. “Don’t forget about that.”

Robin’s eyes were pinned to Cutty’s face. “Why didn’t you kill me? You had so many chances.”

The witch ate as if she hadn’t said anything.

Eventually Cutty said, “I thought of you as my grand-daughter, Robin Littlebird. That tiny girl that spent so much time in my big house, lying on the floor coloring with her stinky markers and playing with my dog…how could I stand to hurt you? I may be heartless, but not that way.”

Theresa made a droll face. “You got more willpower than me. I’da done killed her. She’s dangerous.”

“Yes, well,
hyenas
have more willpower than you do, dear Reese.”

The elephantine witch huffed and dug into her food with renewed enthusiasm, as if in spite. She ate her steak with her fingers, ripping it into pieces and pushing them into her gob like jerky.

“At any rate, I didn’t consider the daughter responsible for the mother,” continued Cutty. “I still don’t. Annie did what she did and you had nothing to do with it. I saw no reason to go after you.” Her lips pursed, the corners drawn into a frown, and her next words were made hoarse by emotion. “I
loved
you, Littlebird.”

Pouring it on thick now,
thought Robin. “That’s why you let me go? You let me train to kill your kind, and you let me rampage across the countryside doing it, because you loved me?”

Cutty bit her lip, and then nodded.

Silence fell as the garden party ate and sat processing the conversation. After a while, Wayne told Theresa, “This orange stuff with the nuts is really good, ma’am.”

“Thank you, mon garçon.”

“You’re welcome.”

“That’s sweet-potato casserole.” She smirked, wiping her saucy hands on her napkin. Theresa’s face was smeared with Heinz 57. “I’ll give you a piece of advice: never trust a skinny cook.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You got such good manners. I like you. Y’all all right for colored folk.”

Leon choked, pounded on his chest, took a drink of tea.

❂

“What is that spectral beast living in Annie’s house?” Cutty asked out of the blue, when they had all finished eating and were dabbing their lips and sipping the last dregs of their tea. The crickets were in full swing, and the black forest breathed music all around them.

She asked it of all three of them, the witch-hunter and the Parkins, her eyes dancing between Robin and Leon. “What did Annie do? Is that thing—”

“A demon,” answered Robin.

“A demon.” The witch spoke with a disbelieving curiosity. “What kind of demon? Where did she get her hands on such a ritual?”

“A cacodemon named Andras. A Discordian and an incubus.”

“I expect Heinrich Hammer provided her the necessary texts. A meddler, that one. Probably using her to get to us, since he’s a
man,
and
men
have no power over the likes of us. I’ll bet he got the ritual’s material from the little…group that he used to be a part of.”

“Group?” Robin’s head bobbed back in bewilderment.

“He never told you? He was expelled from a secret society of magicians called the Order of the Dog Star. They’re conceptual descendants of the Thelemic Society founded by that charlatan Aleister Crowley.”

Leaning over her empty plate, Karen Weaver growled, “So
that’s
why that bitch killed my husband? To summon a ‘demon’?” Her fists were clenched against the white tablecloth, and had none of the palsied shaking that a woman her age would normally display. All the witches, really, moved like teenagers, which never failed to unsettle Robin. “No one’s ever brought a Discordian into the real world. This reality was sanctified against them when the Christ’s blood was spilled—that was the whole point of his sacrifice.”

She sought validation in Cutty’s stoic face. “Wasn’t it? Or am I thinking of an episode of
Petticoat Junction
again?”

“You are right, for a change,” said Cutty. “In the Old Testament days, demons walked this world with impunity. The only way to seal them outside of the material plane was with a carefully ritualized self-sacrifice.”

I have to admit, that makes sense,
Robin considered. You didn’t see much mention (if any at all) of fully-materialized demons on Earth in the Bible after Jesus was crucified. “I want to know more about this Dog Star order, Marilyn.”

Something soft wrapped itself around Robin’s leg. She looked underneath the tablecloth and found a spotty gray cat rubbing himself against her ankle.

“Ask your friend about the Dog Star when you see him again.” Cutty smiled. “I’m sure he’d be glad to tell you all about it. Besides, I’m afraid I don’t know a lot about them myself, other than the fact that they hunt witches. They’re quite elusive.” Robin shooed the cat away and it popped up on the other side, climbing up onto the table next to Cutty, where it hunkered down and busied itself chewing on the witch’s table scraps.

Cutty stroked the cat. “I’m sure they’re where Hammer stole the Osdathregar that you’ve been killing witches with. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve been looking for him.”

The ominous stormfront had faded while they were eating, revealing a deep violet sky hidden behind shreds of blue-jean clouds. The sun was setting somewhere to the west, throwing a warmth on the heavens like a great bonfire at the edge of the world.

Kenway was probably worried about her, Robin decided, and she didn’t want to be here any later at night than she could manage. Not that daylight made the witches any less dangerous, but she preferred it to the darkness. “Before I go,” she said, finishing her drink, “I want to see my mother. I think I deserve it.”

“I’m impressed,” said Cutty.

“At what?”

“At how civil you’re being.” Marilyn Cutty narrowed her eyes. “I’ve watched some of your videos. There is a determination to you…this past couple of years has made you
ferocious,
for lack of a better word. Damn near feral. Is it the memories holding you back, littlebird?”

Robin wasn’t sure. What she said was, “No.” That hate was still back there somewhere, but in the intervening time between Then and Now, it had grown cold and smooth and dark, like polished obsidian.

The reply to that was wry and reflective. “You’re such a bad liar. It’s a good thing you got into killing witches and not professional poker.” Cutty rose from her chair, unfolding herself. “Welp, come on. Who am I to begrudge a daughter a visit with her mother?” The cat leapt down and followed her as she walked toward the darkness at the edge of the torchlight, pulling up one of the torches as she went.

The last of the sun was enough to paint the vineyard in a muted haze of red and purple shadows. Robin followed the silhouette of the robed witch through the trellis rows and the citronella torch in her hand. Were it not for the sickly-sweet aroma of rotting grapes, the soft darkness would have made it hard to tell that the vineyard wasn’t some labyrinth of
Shining
hedges.

Footsteps in the grass behind her. Theresa and the Parkins had joined them. The bayou witch walked like a man, her pudgy fists driving back and forth with each stride.

Leon was closest, walking in Robin’s shadow. “You ain’t leavin us alone.”

This entire experience must have been a shock for the man and his son, even after the past couple of days. They’d showed up for a peaceful steak dinner and ended up in the middle of a slow-motion battle of will. Robin hated to see them embroiled in it, but it had been inevitable from the moment Parkin had signed the lease on the house, regardless of how careful she could have been to exclude them.

“I won’t,” she muttered to him. “Stick close, okay?”

His jaw was set in stone, his eyes a combination of fear and strength. She could see the man in him that had socked Kenway Griffin in the face.

32

T
HE
CONSTANT
FEAR
OF
stepping off into a vertical drop made Joel reluctant to run full speed. He was one-hundred-percent blind back here in the depths of the mine shaft, and had no idea what he was running toward. Fish, on the other hand, seemed to have no such reservations, and Joel could only track him by the sound of his sneakers clapping against the sooty stone ahead.

Behind them, Euchiss was swearing at the top of his lungs, cycling through a thesaurus of every curse and epithet he could come up with, and threatening every conceivable form of death and torture.
“I’m gonna rip your dick off and feed it to birds! You broke my goddamn nose!”

Deeper and deeper they went, the air thickening to a warm soup. Joel didn’t have any kind of cloth to cover his nose and mouth with, so he settled for breathing through his teeth and spitting every so often. After twenty minutes of running, he slowed to a jog. The cop’s shouting had dwindled away, leaving them in a bone-chilling silence.

His mouth tasted like he’d been eating cheese and his jeans were wet where his stitches had come loose. “Wait up, Mr. Goodbody!” he pleaded with the invisible Fish.

“I ain’t waitin up for shit. Come on.”

“You need to slow down before you run off in a hole. I ain’t carrying your carbless ass out of here with two broke legs.”

“He’s done shot me once, I ain’t about to sit still and give him another try. This ain’t Chuck E. Cheese, Joel, he ain’t here to win tickets.” He pronounced it
Johl
instead of
Jo-elle,
which he only did when he was pissed off. Joel figured it was his version of calling him by all three of his names. “Now how about you shut up before he hears us?”

“We ain’t exactly church mice.”

“Well, you ain’t helpin!”

The tunnel extended on and on, some three or four hundred yards, he guessed, or maybe a quarter mile. Who knew?

His sight returned some ten or twenty minutes later and the darkness became a faint, dreamlike hint of gray rock as light bounced in from some distant nook. A colorless square loomed ahead of them, only a shade lighter than the black around it. Rough surfaces led them into a tunnel that ran perpendicular to the first one, and as Fish stepped into reflected daylight, Joel understood that they’d reached a branching path.

The right-hand shaft led toward the source of the sunlight. He came out into the intersection and squinted at a point of fierce white. Wind whispered and the sound of the cicadas drifted down to his ears.