Malus Domestica (57 page)

The sleek magician got up from the chair and went to the door. Before he pulled it open, he turned and tucked one hand behind his back. “When you’re ready to go after Cutty, come get me. I’m staying at the Lake Craddock cabins down by the interstate.” He smiled and hitched the cane into the air, catching it in the middle. “The little café at the top of the mountain has the
best
view.”

36

A
FTER
G
ENDREAU
LEFT
, R
OBIN
put on a pair of sweatpants and went to the cafeteria for something to drink, wishing the hospital served whiskey. Sitting at a table in the back were Joel Ellis and a tall guy in scrubs, with bandages around his head. Joel was fully dressed in a sweater and jeans, though his skin was livid with tiny cuts and scrapes. The do-rag on his head matched his undershirt.

“Hey, man. What are you doing here?” she asked, sitting down at their table.

Joel and the tall man looked at each other as if conversing by eye contact. “What are
you
doing here—” he started to say, and then he sat up in shock. “What the hell happened to your arm?”

Robin glanced at the padding. “Oh this?”

“Yeah,
this,
hooker. Y’dadgum
arm
is gone.” He got up and sat closer, on her left side.

She rubbed the cotton again.
If only my arm was still there so I could scratch the damn thing.
“Sounds like we’ve both got a story to tell.” She took a deep drink of her soda to wet her whistle. “I guess I’ll start, since you seem to be so up in arms about my…arm.” She told him about going back into the Darkhouse and receiving the demon’s vision, right on up to the doomed dinner party and the Hogwitch biting her arm off.

“Sweet baby Jesus,” said Joel. “You’re that thing’s
daughter?”

(crooked)

She nodded sadly. “Looks like it.”

(crooked cambion)

The tall man pulled out a labeled sandwich baggie with yellow pills in it and swallowed one with his drink.

“Sorry.” He belched. “I’m not high enough for this shit.”

“This is Ashe,” said Joel, “Ashe Armstrong. He’s a veterinarian, he used to hang out with my brother.” This introduction segued into
his
story about getting jumped at his house by Bowker, getting shot in the leg, the truck crash, the cat fire, Fisher’s execution, and the Queen ambush at the sulfite drainage pond in the quarry.

“I thought the cop guy gave me a concussion, but he actually cracked my skull, so I had to stay a couple nights for observation,” said Ashe.

Robin’s remaining hand clasped Joel’s. “I’m so sorry about your brother.” His eyes sank to their hands and he stared at their knuckles. When he’d given the moment a little room to settle, and he could talk without choking up, Joel told her about yesterday.

“The cops came to talk to us after we told the nurses how we got hurt…I guess the hospital called the law. I rode out to the Mushroom Mines with a couple officers to show em the cat truck and Bowker’s body, and told them what happened up at the quarry. They’re investigatin everything, I guess. We’re not being charged with anything—nothin
yet,
anyway—but neither one of us can leave town until it’s finished. They said something about dredging the pond, but with all that acid…I don’t know if it’s possible.

“Anyway, it turns out that Bowker and Euchiss were the only two cops on the take. None of the others knew anything about it.” Joel took his hand back and studied it grimly. “They don’t believe me when I told em who was behind it, though.”

“Heh.” Robin’s mouth turned up in a dry smile. “Yeah, they do that.”

Joel darkened. “They may come and talk to you.”

“That’s fine.” She opened her styrofoam cup and crunched some ice. “So they said they’d been dumping stray cats in that drainage pond for years?”

“Euchiss said there was two or three thousand down there.”

Robin studied the people around them—nurses, doctors, patients. She wondered how many of them were carrying around a secret cat.
God that sounds crazy as hell,
she thought, not for the first time. “They’ve been familiarizing the city. At two or three thousand, they’ve probably got their claws into a third of Blackfield’s population.”

A man in a white labcoat standing in line for hamburgers stared at her. Even from here, she could see his honey-colored eyes and the vertical slits of his pupils.

Maybe not so crazy after all.

“Familiarizing?” asked Joel. “What is that?”

“The witches can sacrifice cats to the goddess of the afterlife. As soon as the cat dies, its essence jumps into either the human that the witch was thinking of, or the closest alternative.”

Ashe blinked. “Is that what happened to me?”

“I guess it was,” said Joel. “Now I know what it’s called.” He showed Robin the
algiz
branded into his hip. “My mama burned these into me and my brother when we were little. That must have been what kept me and Fish from being taken over.”

“Attack of the Body Snatchers,” said Ashe. “That’s
awesome.
I’ve always wanted to be in a pod-people movie.”

He held up a hand for a high-five, but Joel only scowled at him.

“You gonna leave me hanging?”

“Hero, you need to ease up on them pills.” Joel leaned an elbow on the table, supporting his head with a hand. He looked exhausted. “So what happened with Fish’s cat? That crazy animal put her head in the garbage disposal and killed herself.”

“That must have been Cutty.” Robin stole one of his French fries. “She took over the cat and tried to familiarize one of you with it kamikaze-style. I’ve seen it before. It didn’t work, though, because you had the
algiz
on you. I can’t really speculate where it went after that, unless it jumped into Ashe here and didn’t manifest until later, at the truck crash.”

“There you are,” said Kenway, sitting down at the table. Wayne Parkin was with him, wearing a bookbag.

The boy was downcast, staring down at the table and eating a granola bar in tiny, disconsolate bites. Robin reached over and squeezed his shoulder. “Don’t worry, kiddo,” she told him, staring into his eyes. “We are absolutely going to save your dad.” Speaking to the whole table, she announced, “Tonight. I’m going to go up there and end this. Tonight.”

Kenway frowned. “Are you sure you’re up to that?”

Their eyes were all locked on her.
Ah, damn—they’re all relying on me. They know I’ve got the hammer for this particular nail. This is
my
show now.

A
feeling of angry misery passed briefly over her
(thanks, Heinrich, you asshole),
followed by a sensation of anxious responsibility. It was surprising to realize that she actually sort of liked it, liked this feeling of purpose, and of being held to a task. It shouldn’t have been; she had grown accustomed to being relied on by the subscribers to her YouTube channel.

But this was different. These people, they were
real,
physical, close enough to touch, and they had real stakes in the game she was going up to bat in.
Robin took a deep breath and sighed through her nose, feeling burdened.

“My Aunt Marcy calls me that,” said Wayne, bringing out a sad-eyed smile.

“Calls you what? Kiddo?”

“Yeah.”

Joel tapped the table as if he were putting down a poker hand. “I’m goin with you.”

Cool resolve had materialized in his eyes, a steely effect Robin wouldn’t have thought him capable of. Pride swelled in her chest. “They killed my brother. I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let em get away with it without puttin in
my
two cents’ worth.”

“Of course, you know I’m goin too.” Kenway folded his arms, his elbows on the table. “Bein your cameraman sidekick, and all.”

The ball was really rolling now. Robin regarded them all with respect and anxiety and only hoped she could keep them all alive to the end. “I’m used to working alone,” she said, giving them the Batman spiel. “I can’t protect you all.”

“We can protect ourselves.” Joel’s head bobbed from side to side in coy indignation, and his hoop earrings danced. “I think we’ve proven
that
to be true.
I
ain’t afraid to smack a bitch with the phone. Ring-
ring!”

❂

“You said you quit taking your schizophrenia medication over the weekend,” Kenway said when they got back to the hospital room. “How long have you been taking that stuff? What did you say it was?”

“Abilify.” Robin climbed into the bed and sat on the duvet. The TV was still on, and it was still turned to a horror movie, this one being
Psycho.
Anthony Perkins’ black-and-white face filled the screen as they talked.

“What does it do?”

Wayne came in behind them and sat in the chair next to the bed, rummaging through his bookbag, which looked quite full.
Kids these days have a lot of homework,
Robin thought, watching him. He still seemed despondent, always watching the floor with a frown, and she couldn’t help but feel for him.
He’s still broken up over his dad. Man, I have got to pull through for this kid.

“Umm…” She rubbed her face in thought. “It’s a dopamine agonist.”

Kenway shrugged in confusion. “Mickey Mouse-style, please.”

“Okay: dopamine is the pleasure chemical. Your body releases it when you do pleasurable things, like cocaine, sex, when you get chills from listening to orchestral music. An agonist makes you more receptive. It’s used to treat low-dopamine conditions.”

“You really know a lot about this stuff,” said Kenway.

Robin shrugged. “A couple of years living with taking them every day, you eventually learn a few things about them.”

He paced back and forth between the bed and the TV. “Since we found out that you don’t actually
have
schizophrenia—that the voices and hallucinations have been Andras trying to draw you here, back to your childhood home—then I imagine the Abilify’s been, what, double-dipping your dopamine? If that’s even possible?”

“I guess it has. Maybe? I don’t know.” She laughed. “I guess that makes me double-dopey, dude.”

Kenway leaned his elbows on the footboard, putting his weight on one foot. He did that from time to time, presumably to give his prosthetic foot a rest. “So maybe it’s what’s been suppressing your demon side all this time. Maybe having a high load of dopamine in your system keeps a lid on that side of you.”

Another tingle of itchiness. Robin rubbed the dressing again, wincing at the deep ache. “When you lost your leg—” She hesitated. “Did it itch all the damn time like this does?”

“Yeah,” said Kenway, tugging at his jeans leg so that the prosthetic foot glistened in the sunbeam coming through the window. “It still does, sometimes. I can tell you a trick they taught me at the VA for dealing with that kind of thing if you want.”

“Please. It’s driving me nuts.”

“What I do is, I take a hand-mirror and put it next to my foot so the reflection of my good foot overlaps my fake foot, so it looks like I still have two real feet. And then I scratch the real foot.”

Robin angled her head so she could see her shoulder out of the corner of her eye. “Where would I put the mirror? Between my boobs?”

“Uhh. Good point.”

Someone knocked at the door and a doctor let himself in, checking his watch. “Good afternoon, folks,” he said amiably, taking note of Kenway and Wayne. Despite the authoritarian white labcoat and clipboard, the visitor’s shock of dark hair and youthful face made Robin think of Doogie Howser, but his Australian accent was the strong and surprisingly sonorous tone of a much older man. She was glad to see that his eyes were normal and not the gimlet screwheads of a familiar. “I’m Dr. Kossmann. I’m just going to take a look at you right quick. How ya doin?” His very human eyes rose from the clipboard and widened, magnified by his glasses. “Wow, you’re already up and moving around?”

“I come from hearty Irish stock,” said Robin, closing her Macbook.

“I see. Your paperwork says you were…in a car accident?”

“Yep.”

“Jesus.” The doctor hung the clipboard on the end of the bed. “How fast were you driving?”

“Not fast enough, apparently.”

He shot her a look of grim concern and glanced down at the scars running up her wrists. “It pains me to ask and I know you probably don’t want to hear it, but…you’re not having suicidal ideations, are you, ma’am?”

“Not these days.” Robin sucked her upper lip, noticing him noticing the scars. “So sue me. I took it really hard when they discontinued Crystal Pepsi.”

Dr. Kossmann shook his head and stuck his hands in his coat pockets, eyeing Kenway and Wayne. “You’re going to have to take your gown off for me to examine you. Are you all right with your friends being in here for that?”

Wallowing around in his chair, Wayne faced the wall.

“I can turn around like this.” He opened the textbook he’d been reading again, tossing his legs over the arm of the chair. “Is that okay?”

“That’s fine,” said Robin.

She met Kenway’s eyes and he stood there obliviously for a second. “Oh, right.” He turned to face the TV and watched an Arby’s commercial.

While Robin shrugged out of her hospital gown, Dr. Kossman’s brow went up in recognition as he glanced over his glasses at Wayne. “Ah! I thought you looked familiar. I didn’t expect to see you back so soon, Mr. Parkin. How’s the leg? I trust you’ve been staying away from the snakes this weekend.”

“It’s a lot better,” Wayne said over his shoulder, pushing his glasses up with his knuckles. “Thank you.”

The doctor’s eyes focused on Robin. “You aren’t into country cures too, are you?” She wadded up the gown and tossed it onto the bed, sitting up straight and dangling her feet off the edge of the mattress.

Kossmann went to work peeling off the adhesive gauze and removing the dressing. Orange Betadine and dried brown blood made a pit in the center of the absorbent padding. “I swear, it’s been one hell of a weekend,” he was saying in that clipped, sporty Aussie brogue, “I’m starting to wonder if my medical license is becoming obsolete. First some lady brings in a kid with a snakebite that she’s put a witch-doctor poultice on and he’s walking around that night and even sneaking out of the hospital. I mean, really? And now I’ve got a girl that lost her arm in a high-speed car accident and she’s up two days later joking about oh fuck me dead!
What the hell is that!”