Malus Domestica (55 page)

“I’m awake.”

“How do you feel?”

“You know how they say hot dogs are made out of ground-up lips, foreheads, and assholes?”

“Yeah?”

“I feel like a hot dog.”

Kenway smiled in sympathy.

Robin sat back, her head flouncing into the pillow. The angry burn in her abs faded. “Take me out to the pasture and shoot me. I’m no good to you anymore. I’m glue.” Her stomach gave a gnarly growl. “I’m also starving.”

“I’ll get you something.” He stood up and dug in his pocket for change. “I’ll have to get you something from the vending machine. It’s too late for dinner. Is that okay?”

A lap tray on a floor-stand stood next to the bed, on the other side from Kenway, and there was a cafeteria tray on it, covered with a lid. She didn’t have to open it to know that the food inside would be cold.

“Yeah. That’s fine. What time is it?” She thought. “What
day
is it?”

“Monday night, about nine.”

“I slept all Sunday night and all Monday?” She frowned and glanced at the ceiling. “Where’s Wayne? Did he make it out okay?”

“He’s fine. We put down that hog-monster and he called 911 for me while I carried you out to the road. The ambulance was taking forever so I drove you here myself.”

“What about his dad?”

“I haven’t seen him. Wayne came to the hospital with me last night. He hasn’t been to school—he’s afraid to go home. He couldn’t sleep in these chairs, so he’s in the waiting room down the hall.”

“Leon will be fine. He’s been familiared and there’s no reason to kill him, so they’ll let him stick around. We can un-familiar him with an
algiz.”

“That’s good. I’ve been worried about that. So has Wayne.”

“What about Heinrich? Have you seen him?”

Kenway shook his head. “Not since he went into their hacienda.”

She sighed. Whatever mess he’d gotten himself into, she decided he deserved it. “He messed everything up. This is
his
fault. If he hadn’t gone in there like that, Marilyn would have let us walk out of there and I’d still—” Robin looked down at where her left arm had been, at a thick bandaging and gauze, and saw that there wasn’t even a stump; everything was gone right up to the shoulder.

Peeling back the adhesive gauze and padding, she could just see it out of the corner of her eye: a swollen hump, bristling with hairy black stitches, stained with orange Betadine. A hot bomb of loss and dismay dropped into her chest and tears sprang to her eyes.

She pressed the padding back down, less out of a desire to protect it than to hide it.

“What happened?”

“The bone was too damaged,” he told her. “Lots of splinters. They had to take everything up to the joint.”

It couldn’t be helped. She cried, big wet pitiful boo-hoo sobs, salt-water streaming down her face. Kenway came over and bent to kiss her forehead, which only broke her heart and made it worse, and squeezed her remaining hand.

“What am I going to do?” she asked. “What kind of a witch-hunter am I going to be with one hand?”

Kenway bit back a sad smile. “I do okay with one leg.”

Shame burned her face.

“I don’t know how I’m going to keep doing this with one hand. This is all I know. It’s all I’ve ever done. I can’t even open jars now.”

“We’ll figure something out.” His smile became earnest and she reached up to feel his face, combing her slender fingers through his gingery beard. “I can be your camera-man,” he said, his mustache brushing the pad of her thumb. “We’ll figure out the rest as we go.”

Giving her hand one last squeeze, he stepped away and left the room. Robin stared at the dark television. It was still raining. She listened to the rain clatter softly against the window-pane.

Her cellphone lay on the bedside table. She picked it up and logged into Facebook, and then YouTube, and finally her Gmail account. All three were full of posts, emails, and comments from strangers emotionally hooked into her video series:

“Where are you?”

“What’s going on?”

“Are you okay?”

“You haven’t posted any new videos. What’s happening?”

“Did you kill the witches?”

It was true that she marketed and produced the video series as if it were a fictional affair: scripted, staged, cinematic. Where the public-facing front of her ‘business’ was concerned, it was common knowledge that the videos were fake. Seriously, witches that turn into monsters and people possessed by cats don’t exist, right? (Right about now, she wished they didn’t.)

But the people that watched her videos treated them as if they were real, they commented on each upload with words of encouragement and asked after her well-being, remarked on how attractive she was (even though she didn’t believe that, not for a second), begged her for a chance to fight alongside her. Ex-military, male and female both, asked to join her personal crusade, sometimes dozens a week. Cops offered their protection on the downlow and insinuated that they’d turn a blind eye to the legal vagaries of her adventures. A national spectrum of neckbeards professed their love for her.

Searching the nooks and crannies of her mind, she couldn’t think of anything to tell them. Seemed like all those four million or so people that’d followed her shenanigans thus far deserved a well-thought-out, optimistic, detailed answer, and right now she didn’t know if she had one in her.

Besides, it was damn hard to type with one hand.

She tested the voice-to-text function on her phone, but the pain meds had slurred her speech and the results were less than satisfactory. “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.”
The brain in Spain follows
mainly on the plane.
“The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.”
The rain in Spain hauls manly only praying.

“Come on, you asshole. I know how to speak English.”

Come on your asshole, uno how do speakeasy?

Kenway came back a little while later with cheese crackers, candy bars, chips, M&Ms. It looked like he’d bought half the machine. She cried again at the sight of it all.

“Okay, okay,” he said, piling red bags into her lap, “you can have the Cheez-Its.”

Her sobs broke up into pained giggles.

Since it was October, there were several cable channels showing marathons of horror movies. They sat up for several hours, eating vending-machine snacks, drinking vending-machine coffee, and watching masked maniacs slay their way through half a thousand promiscuous teenagers.

At some point Robin slithered out of the bed and took a shower, but she had to do it with the lights off, going through her ablutions by the night-light over the sink. Every time she caught a glimpse of that stitch-haired vacancy on her left side, it was everything she could do not to burst into tears again. The effort it took to avoid this, and the constant pain and itching, felt as if it were slowly driving her mad.

Crawling back into bed, she fixated on the TV screen so she didn’t have to see the expression of pity and sympathy almost gushing from Kenway’s face. Every time she noticed his hurt puppy-dog look she wanted to throw Cheez-Its at him, throw the TV remote at him, anything to make him stop.

I asked for this,
she thought.

I didn’t ask for this,
she thought.

She was still somewhat upset by his decision to jump into the fight in her defense last night.
You could have gotten killed.
She stared at his
big dumb face.
If anyone’s to be killed doing this, it’s me. Not you. I’m the one that chose—no,
accepted
this life. Not you.
Kenway noticed her watching him and his face softened into a tired-eyed smile. Robin locked onto the TV screen again.

Don’t feel sorry for me,
she thought.

Please feel sorry for me,
she thought.

The longer the movies droned on, the heavier her eyes got. She finally fell asleep again about the time dawn-light turned the windowshades blue.

T
UESDAY

35

S
HE
WOKE
UP
AGAIN
around lunchtime. Kenway showed up with a sampler platter of sushi and two blueberry parfaits from the hospital cafeteria, and revealed that he’d retrieved her camera and Macbook when he’d taken Wayne to school that morning.

“Did you tell him his dad would be okay?” she asked.

“Yeah. I don’t know how we’re going to get him back, though, without you and Heinrich. I don’t know shit about witches.”

“As soon as I’m back on my feet, I’m going up there myself to end this.” She flexed her right hand. “Theresa told me something right before you put a bullet in her head. She said that Andras is my father.”

“Is that how you made the transformation go away?”

“Yeah. Demons eat their magic, their…essence. I don’t know how or why.”

He talked with a mouthful of sushi, which he’d never really eaten before and had now developed a serious hankering for. For hospital sushi, it was pretty damn good. “When you and Heinrich were talking about demons, he said that they’re deformed souls, adrift in the afterlife.”

“Right. Ambulatory crystallized egos, deprived of physical form except in—”

Kenway’s eyes were glazed.

She left off. “—Uhh, as you were saying.”

He continued. “Maybe demons are like unborn babies, in that they need the sustenance of that energy from the afterlife to maintain their existence. When they devour a witch’s magic, since it’s one of those—what’d you call it, a ‘heart-road’?—they’re usin that heart-road as an umbilical cord back to that space-womb that they came from.”

Robin blinked. “The
libbu-harrani.
The demons suckle on that source like plugging a lamp into a wall-outlet. …That makes perfect sense.”

A proud grin spread across Kenway’s face. “See? You need me. I’d be a perfect witch-hunting sidekick. I totally think outside the box.” Robin’s heart thumped once, hard, a sweet drumbeat. “So you think you’re gonna go back up there and do it again? Suck the magic out of them like you did Theresa?”

“If I can.”

He stared at her, his eyes searching her face. “So what does this mean? You’re half-demon?” She shrugged. It was a novel concept for her too. “I thought you said witches couldn’t
have
children.”

The nub of her left shoulder itched like ants were crawling around in it. She was about due for her pain meds again. She rubbed the padding gently as she spoke, careful not to pull the stitches. “I didn’t think so.”

“I wish Heinrich was here,” he said, staring at the window. “We could ask him. Maybe he knows.”

Robin scowled at the TV, clenching her remaining fist. “If Heinrich was here, I’d punch him in the goddamn nose for lying to me. And for ruining my life.”

❂

After lunch, she transferred all the footage from the camera to her laptop, and spent the afternoon editing and uploading it, while watching more horror movies with Kenway. They made it through
Sleepaway Camp
(which lost a lot of its nostalgic effect with all the censoring) and
Day of the Dead
before Kenway got up and put on his jacket.

“I’m gonna go pick up Wayne from school and bring him up here,” he said, jingling his keys.

She smiled. “Thank you for taking care of him. —Thank you for
everything,
really. You don’t have to, but you are…and that’s really good of you. You know? You don’t even know these people. Hell,
I
barely do. I only know them because they’re living in my old house.”

Kenway tossed a shoulder. “What else am I going to do? Besides, I like doin things for people like this. I like having a purpose. Sitting around my apartment feeling sorry for myself and for Chris Hendry, painting depressin-ass pictures…what kind of life is that?”

Feeling sorry for myself.
Robin nodded. “Yeah, okay. Well, be careful out there. It’s been raining.”

He saluted, letting himself out.

She sat in the bed, editing footage until her bladder felt as if it was about to burst. She’d been to the bathroom once that morning already, as soon as she got up, and twice last night—a laborious, pain-wracked trek on cold tile—but the coffee she’d had with lunch was going right through her.

Leaving the Macbook on the duvet, she swung her legs down onto the floor, slipped her feet into a pair of gift-shop slippers, and shuffled into the bathroom.

The itching in her shoulder was getting worse. She massaged the bandage, which wrapped around her boobs like a banding and held a thick wad of absorbent material against the surgery area. “Damn, I’m glad I can afford insurance,” she told the cold desolate bathroom, releasing a stream of urine into the toilet.

She peeked between her thighs at the honey-colored water.
Getting dehydrated. Maybe I should pop down to the cafeteria and get something to drink.

When she came out, a man sat in Kenway’s chair, a handsome, clean-shaven fellow in a neat suit of rich navy-blue. Everything else about him was pale: his wolfish alabaster face, his sea-water eyes, his bone-blond hair. His angular stick-figure frame—along with the creepy black cane in his hand—made him look like a European fashion model.

“Hello,” she said, surprised. “Can I help you?”

“You don’t know me, but I know you.” He spoke eloquently enough, with a hint of an accent she couldn’t quite place. Robin regarded him warily. “My name is Anders Gendreau. We’ve been watching you, Ms. Martine. You’re one of the most prolific witch-hunters that’s ever operated in the United States.”

“There are others?”

“Only my people. And Heinrich. I don’t suppose Heinrich ever told you about the group he used to be a part of.”

“No,” she replied. “But Marilyn Cutty said something about it last night, right before she ordered her coven-mate to tear my arm off. Which, you know, wouldn’t have fucking happened if you’d been there to help me.
Where the hell
have you guys
been
all this time?”

The corner of Gendreau’s right eye twitched. “If you’ll sit and listen, I’ll explain everything.”

“How about you explain my foot in your skinny ass?”

He cleared his throat, looking bemused. Robin sat on the bed in a huff.