Malus Domestica (54 page)

“Hide here,” she gasped to Wayne, pointing him into the gazebo.

“Robin!” shouted a man’s voice from the shadows.

She almost yelled in fright before she recognized the voice’s owner. Leaping the gazebo’s banister, she ducked through a scrim of ivy and found Kenway. “The hell are you doing here?” she growled. “Shut up before it hear—”

He grabbed her shoulders and brushed her sweaty mohawk out of her face, cupping her jaw in his big warm hands. “Heinrich went into their house looking for the fourth witch, but I heard you hollering out here, so I came to—”

“I don’t
need
saving!” Robin growled. “You shouldn’t be out here!”

The trellis next to them erupted in a chaos of leaves and wires and squealing hog-beast, throwing them both out from under the pergola. Robin hit the ground on her shoulders and skidded backwards through the grass, her feet pedalling the sky. She rocked forward to her hands and knees, and the heat-lightning flashed on an image buried in the foliage: a broad pink-brown face the size of a car.

Tiny black eyes glittered in leathery flab and darkness fell over them again.

“You want me?”
Robin bellowed. Blood ran down her neck from a cut on her temple.
“Come get me!”

“No!” shouted Kenway.

The admonishment came from somewhere to her left, on the other side of the gazebo. The razorback’s enormous head swiveled in that direction, splintering one of the few posts still standing.

Inside Robin’s jacket was a baby-food jar full of rubbing alcohol. She pulled it out and clutched it like a grenade. It wouldn’t be much, but hopefully it would keep Theresa off of Kenway and Wayne long enough for her to figure out what to do.

“I’m over here!” She ran back into the vines and into the velvet night.

Thump-thump-thump,

Thump-thump-thump,

The beast plunged through the trellis behind her and Robin hightailed it down the vineyard row, back toward the north, toward Annie’s sacred grove. Theresa was so close she could smell the boar’s breath, feel the blasting breath pushing at her hair.

As she ran, Robin reached behind her back, underneath her jacket, and pulled out the road flare jammed into her jeans. (Dinner had been rather uncomfortable with what felt and looked like a stick of dynamite wedged into the crack of her ass, but she was nothing if not prepared.) She turned to throw the jar, but Theresa was already on her.

A fleshy nose as big as a watermelon slammed into her belly and scooped her up. The world plummeted and then Robin was upside-down some fifteen feet in the air, gazing at a dark maze. Grass flew up and the horizon wheeled over her head, and the breath was driven out of her lungs as she hit the ground on her back.

Jar and flare both were knocked out of her hands and she lay there, stunned, gasping for air. A callous moon laughed down at her through the curtains of the sky.
This is it,
she thought in broken fragments,
I’ve met my match.

“I got you, baby,” said Kenway, coming out of nowhere.

“Way,” she grunted.
Go away! Not your fight, stupid! This is my battle, goddammit! This is what I was born and bred for, don’t you see? This is what I’m here for, don’t take this away from me!

Theresa had pulled a U-turn somewhere out in the sticks and came back, bearing down on them, shouldering through the vineworks. Kenway snatched up the jar, wound up like a Major League pitcher (his fake leg kicked up, say it ain’t so kipper), and fastballed it at the hog-witch’s face.

Glass shattered across Theresa’s snout, splashing her with alcohol. Robin smacked the end of the flare on the ground and it ignited with a flash,
SKSSSSSH!
, and a shower of red sparks.

She didn’t have anything clever to say, so she just threw it. The flare bounced off Theresa’s monstrous face and the alcohol went up in an arc of dim blue light, sweeping up the bridge of her nose and into her hairline. She shook her great face and tried to back away from the flames like a cat with a bag on its head.

Lifting her tusked snout to the sky, Theresa gave a trumpeting scream and galloped toward them.

Pop! Pop! Pop!
Kenway had brought his pistol, he was firing at the flaming thing as it charged like a shrieking meat meteorite,
it’s not
working,
Robin thought,
nothing is working oh God,
and she crabbed away, still on her ass, but she couldn’t get away in time. The meaty snout came down on top of her and drove her into the dirt, and now she was flattened against a seething-working mouth full of teeth, foul carrion breath washing over her.

Robin’s hands pushed at snot-slimed lips. “Get off me!” she cried, punching the Theresa-thing’s cheeks.

More gunshots.
Click click click.

Wind gusted from nostrils big enough to jam her hands into, so she did. Reaching up Theresa’s nose with both hands, Robin grabbed fistfuls of greasy hair and yanked it out by the roots.

“AAAAAWK” howled the witch, recoiling in pain. It moved back enough to relieve Robin and she took a deep breath.

Kenway grasped the rims of the boar’s nostrils and pushed, throwing all of his weight like a man pushing a minecart up a hill, trying to keep it off of her, but Theresa was too strong. She shrugged, shaking her boar-head, and he slipped loose, falling over the hoop of a tusk and stumbling by the wayside.

Robin thrust out her hands as the beast dove at her again, opening its mouth, trying to bite her.

She managed to catch Theresa’s nose, but her left hand skidded on mucus and slid into the boar’s cold mouth. Theresa bit down and grinding-chopping incisors pierced Robin’s forearm, tweezing the two ulna and radius bones together.

Pain unlike anything she’d ever known whipped through her system, ten thousand amps of agony along her elbow and up her arm, and she screamed in wordless horror. Hot blood squirted between those jagged yellow teeth as they rasped through the vessels in her wrist. Theresa let go, but only to gulp forward for higher purchase, biting down on Robin’s upper arm, right below her shoulder.

She’s eating me.

Tastebuds bubbled under Robin’s fingers at the back of the witch’s throat.

She’s eating me. She’s eating me. She’s eating me.

Reaching toward the witch’s beady black marble of an eye with her free right hand, she tried to claw at it, but it was too far away, three feet at least. She punched and punched and punched at the nose pressed against her chest, but it was like boxing a mattress.

“Let go a’ her!” snarled Kenway, and then he was working Theresa’s fat warty cheek with both fists like Rocky Balboa,
whump-whump, whump-whump.
It simply snorted and stepped back, dragging Robin helplessly through the grass. The joint of her shoulder was a knot of torture, but it was nothing compared to her bicep. Muscle shredded and a vessel ripped open, pumping into Theresa’s mouth.

When the witch laughed, she misted Robin with her own blood.

The behemoth warthog tossed its flaming head, lifting her to her feet, and the humerus bone in her upper arm broke with a hollow, singular, drumstick
SNAP!
over the fulcrum of its teeth. There was no pain at this point; her system was amped to hell and back by adrenaline, just a dull sense of
cutting, dividing
.

Again the thing that had been Theresa raised its head, rooting her into the air by her arm, and the skin and muscle ripped apart in fleshy strands of red and yellow curds. Cartwheeling over two trellises, Robin landed upside-down in a third as if she were a fly in a web. The arbor collapsed and she sank to the ground in a net of wire and grapevines.

As soon as she settled, she reached out to pull herself back up, but she couldn’t get a grip on the wire. The instant she managed to struggle to a sitting position, her head swimming, it became abundantly clear why she couldn’t grab anything.

Her left arm was completely gone.

She stared in disbelief at the ragged stump of her shoulder. Blood trickled out of the pulped gore.

There were no words she could call to mind, looking at this lie of reality, so her mind was simply a whirlpool of abstract perceptions. The remains of her left arm were something out of a horror movie, like a rubber special-effects prosthetic, leaking red-dyed Karo syrup, but it was all too real.

The blood soaked her shirt. Her stomach heaved, on the brink of vomiting. Her face felt ice-cold. This was
real,
it was really happening.

Firelight flickered through the trellis in front of her, and the gigantic witch-hog stepped into view. Theresa’s mouth hung open, and Robin could see her arm lying inside on a yellow-purple tongue. A dagger of bone protruded from the sloppy stump. The hog tossed its head several times, swallowing the arm inch by inch like a crocodile will swallow a fish, until one last gobbet of skin slipped through a gap in its teeth. Then it rumbled with surety and self-satisfaction, thumping toward her on stout, rippling legs.

Snot crept from the warthog’s nostrils in cheesy black strands. A few alcohol flames still licked around her eye sockets and the crown of her sweaty black mane.

Dark pulsed at the edges of Robin’s eyes, and she couldn’t seem to catch her breath. Her body was as numb as a waxwork statue. She raised her right hand to fend off the encroaching monster, though of course she had no delusions that she could prevent another catastrophe.

This is it. I have officially messed up, Mom.

The behemoth overwhelmed her with bloody lips. Wind tugged at Robin’s hair, whistling into those cavernous nostrils.

She reached out and grasped the rim of Theresa’s snout as its mouth came open, revealing that bilious tongue and those disgusting teeth. Her own blood still stained the pebbled tastebuds, still dripped from the boar’s upper lip.

The wind that tousled her mohawk hair wasn’t coming from Theresa’s nostrils—it came from nowhere and everywhere at once. Restless air churned around the two of them. Her right hand had fallen asleep somehow, still clutching the edge of the flabby pig-snout. Pins and needles swirled along her skin and deep inside, prickling up her arm in a helix of bright pain.

No—wait—this wasn’t what it felt like, it was
something else,
something strange. Swamp-light radiated from her fingers, tracing green radiation along her wrist, following the veins along the back of her hand toward her elbow. The bones were visible inside as murky shadows.

Something was coming out of Theresa and coursing up Robin’s right arm, some kind of essence.

Care Bear Stare,
she thought drunkenly.

The boar’s flanks quivered and the beast trembled, trying to pull away, but Robin’s fingers held it fast. She was a live wire, grounding the witch, but instead of electricity flowing out of her, it was flowing
into
her, draining the Stygian source where the witch’s heart used to be. She could feel something withering inside of Theresa, healing over, closing up.

The libbu-harrani, Theresa’s heart-road to Ereshkigal.

The beast shook like a dog with a rope in its mouth, trying to break free, but Robin’s right arm was an iron chain.

I’m sucking it out of her. I’m closing the door.
She’s diminishing.

The hulking Grendel-hog was not so hulking anymore, now only as big as a horse. Heavy sheets of collagen drooped from Theresa’s sides and thighs like raw dough, and her brown areola dragged in the grass. She pulled and jerked, her cloven hooves shoveling humps of churned dirt, but to no avail.

I’ve lost too much blood.

Her fingers were locked, a perfectly relentless clamp. The pergolas behind the boar were on fire, orange flames licking at a night sky, but she could feel unconsciousness lurking behind her temples.

Whatever this is, I don’t know how much longer I can keep it up.

An old woman knelt on her hands and knees between the witch-hunter’s feet, as naked as the day is long, heaving and porcine and dark. She slavered like a winded horse. The tip of Robin’s thumb was still up Theresa’s nose, as she still had the witch’s nostril pinched in her fingers.

“My God,” breathed the witch, her voice muffled. It was probably an epithet she hadn’t uttered in a very, very long time. “You’re his daughter.”

Robin bared her teeth with effort, on the brink of passing out, going deaf from blood loss.

“What—”

“You’re the demon’s daughter,”
said Theresa, and then Kenway was by her side. He pressed the muzzle of the pistol to the witch’s skull and pulled the trigger, barking silent fire.

Robin slept.

we got to hurry

                                         
fifty cc, stat

come on come on

               
i need that hemostat

we’re losing her

34

S
HE
OPENED
HER
EYES
and found a hospital room. The windows were dark, but a soft fluorescent light above her head picked out the foot of the bed, a chair to her left, a flatscreen TV hanging from the ceiling.

Even though Robin felt like a mashed insect, the bed and duvet were astonishingly comfortable—other than the post-seizure snooze on Leon Parkin’s bed, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept on something that wasn’t a couch or the floor of her van, and she’d forgotten how nice it was. The mattress felt like something she could sink into, warm and deep. Her legs were more or less pain-free except for a dull ache in her right knee, but she was sensitive, and the rough linen felt pleasurably like burlap.

Rain tappled restlessly on the window.

It told her the world outside was still going, it had moved on without her for the evening. From time to time, the wind would rake a gust of water against the glass, like a pearl necklace with a cut string.

A blond head was buried in a pair of folded arms, nestled into the duvet. She reached over and stroked his hair, and her abdomen howled in tormented chorus with the stump of her left arm.

Kenway sat up and took her hand. “You’re awake.”