Malus Domestica (59 page)

“Aaaaa
aaaa
ah.” Gendreau held out a hand. Wayne shook it. “Pleased to make your acquaintance. I bet it would enchant you to know that we are magicians.”

“Magicians. Of course there are magicians.” Sitting on a stool, Kenway poured himself another finger of bourbon and threw it back. “Witches, demons, giant pig-monsters, and rings that open doors to Hell—why didn’t I think there would be magicians?”

“I have an issue, Anders,” said Robin.

By now the Percocet was wearing off again and the pain had returned in earnest…but there were three distinct sources of agony now: the papercut screaming of the stitched-and-stapled scar itself, a deep, knotty kinking that she supposed must have been the muscles or ligaments that were once attached to her tricep, and then there was an ache in her rib reminiscent of the side-stitches you get when you’re running.

She grabbed the left hem of her shirt and hiked it over her shoulder. This revealed her left breast, but at this point she didn’t care. It also uncovered the writhing foot-long earthworm-thing hanging out of the nadir of the U-shaped surgery scar.

Gendreau flinched.
“What
the dickens!”

“You
don’t know what it is?”

“Dear
shit!
No, I do not,” said the magician, leaning over the bar to get a closer look, a disgusted grimace spreading across his pale vulpine face.

The bloodworm, as Robin had come to think of it, had grown longer on the way over here (or perhaps more of it had emerged, and perhaps there was a whole
coil
of the thing inside the cage of her chest, and that horrible thought made Robin want to pitch herself through the closest window) but it seemed to have calmed, and now dangled from the stitches, the end twitching every so often in the come-hither motion of a cat’s tail.

Coming around the end of the bar, Gendreau came out and walked past, his bull-dick cane thumping insistently on the carpet. “C’mere into the light and let me take a look at it.”

She followed him over to the massive south window and her entourage joined them. The wan sunlight picked out a blue vein wandering across the cream-white dome of her left breast, and her skin prickled at the visual of that repulsive subtle tendril sliding through the warrens of her arteries. This thought made the areola of the nipple on that side pucker up, but something about the magician’s effete mannerisms told her that she might as well be a goose.

“I feel as though I should know,” said Gendreau, hitching up his cane in that jaunty way again. “It seems supernatural in nature.”

“You think?”

His glacial eyes flashed up at her in faint indignation and narrowed on the tendril again. This close to his face, she noticed how intense they were: gasflames in porcelain. The magician reached for it, hesitated, then drew up his courage and took the worm in his bare hand. It curled warmly, twining around his knuckles. His fingernails were clipped to a microscopic uniformity and reflected the windowlight as if carved from soapstone.

“It hurt me when the doctor pulled on it,” she told him. “I think it’s connected to something.” She swallowed terror and added, “Something inside.”

A peculiar heat radiated from Gendreau’s hands, as if her hip was too close to a stovetop, and she angled her head to see that it was the pearly head of his cane. He held the simmering orb close to the tendril, and let his eyes slip closed.

“What are you doing?”

“Testing it,” he murmured.

Did he say
tasting
it? She couldn’t be sure. The heat emanating from his cane flared brightly for a brief moment, and then faded away, leaving a cool emptiness. He rubbed the tendril between his thumb and forefinger, rolling it softly, squeezing it, and then he released it and stood straight.

The cane-tip rested on the floor by his foot. “It’s not a separate creature,” he said with an authoritative finality. Robin studied his haughty, borderline-impassive face.

“What do you mean? You mean it’s become
part
of me now?”

“No, I mean it never was. It
is
you.” Gendreau’s thumb worried at the smooth surface of the cane’s iridescent white head. “There’s only one life, one individual source of vitality occupying the space you’re standing in—other than your intestinal flora and mitochondria, of course—and that is
you.
There’s nothing else. That…
spaghetti noodle
…is your flesh and blood.”

“What does that mean?” Kenway stooped with his hands on his knees, his eyes wide and brow severe. “Is—is she growing a squid-leg to replace her missing arm? Can demons even
do
that? Grow back limbs?”

Gendreau’s face twisted as if he had a lemon-wedge in his mouth. “If she were going to grow something, I must say, what a horrendous thing to substitute a perfectly good arm with.”

Robin scowled. “You’re not helping.”

His face softened. “Ahh. Well…who knows, really? We do know that you absorbed Theresa LaQuices’ heart-road at the point of her death, yes?”

She nodded knowingly, but said nothing, urging him on with her pointed silence.

Gendreau spread his hands as if it were obvious. “Her particular Gift is the talent of transfiguration, alteration—if I were a betting man, I’d say that when you absorbed the witch’s
libbu-harrani,
you also inherited her Gift. In this case, you’ve inherited the ability to reconfigure matter.”

Kenway scratched his beard. “If Theresa could do
that,
why was she so heavy? Couldn’t she have just shaved herself down and made herself svelte?”

“Maybe she simply preferred herself that way.” Gendreau shrugged, twirling his cane under his armpit like a swizzle stick, and spoke with a campy dismissiveness. “Who are we to speculate on an immortal death-hag’s body image issues?” He scooped up Robin’s arm-worm in his gentle palm as if it were a diamond bracelet. “Anyway, it looks like your unconscious mind is trying to grow something to replace the arm that Theresa took.”

Robin rubbed her face with the hand that wasn’t an octopus tentacle. “Jesus freakin Christ. Could my unconscious mind come up with something that doesn’t look like carp bait?”

“Oh, hello,” Gendreau interrupted. “What’s this?”

She glanced at his face, then at the object of his focus: her shoulder. “What?” Her eyes ached as she stretched her neck to look.

“There are
two
now,” said Kenway.

Wayne adjusted his glasses, gazing through the bottom, his nose wrinkling like an old man reading the newspaper. “There’s another one coming out next to the first one.”

“Oh God, give me my meds,” Robin pleaded, jamming her fingers into Kenway’s jeans pocket and fishing out the baggie of Percocet.

The sharp pain of the U-scar was getting worse and worse, dulling into a coarse, grinding torment, fibrous and woody like chewing popsicle sticks. A headache bloomed at the base of her skull. Going over to the bar, she grabbed the club soda tap, hauled the sprayer hose out, and put a Percocet in her mouth. She thought it over and gave herself another dose, then sprayed them down her throat with club soda.

“Errruuhuhuh,” she shuddered at the bitter taste.

A chilling thought passed over her: the sound she’d produced reminded her of the dragon-gargle that Andras made when he exhaled.

(crooked)

Robin pushed it out of her mind and let the soda hose reel back into its socket.

“Are you—” Kenway started to say, then thought better of it.

“No, I’m really not okay,” she observed with a gentle scoff. “I am
miles
from okay.”

“Perhaps you should take it easy for a couple of days and let, ahh, nature take its course,” said Gendreau. “Cutty’s group is weakened by the loss of its eastern corner, and it will take some time to find and recruit a fresh member. In the meantime, I can prepare myself.”

“No. It’s got to go down today.”

Robin came back into the light, tugging her T-shirt back down. The tendril snaked back and forth under her shirt-tail. “They’ve got Wayne’s father. I’ve got to get him out of there, for Wayne. And the longer we wait, the more pod-people they’ll be able to make, and the more prepared Cutty, Weaver and their Matron will be when we actually come. We’re wasting time.”

Gendreau stared at her, his face gradually darkening. “All right; all right. We’ll have to make do with what we’ve got. But we’re going to have to storm the hacienda like the flippin Blitzkrieg, yeah?” He breezed past her, carrying his cane by the literal shaft. “We can’t give em any time to react.”

They followed him back toward the front of the restaurant. The magician led them outside to the narrow patio that served as the front porch. Feathery flakes of snow sparrowed down from the washrag sky, melting on the cement.

Wayne stopped short. “Woah, it’s snowing!”

“That’s weird,” said Kenway. “Isn’t it a little early in the year for it?”

Robin held up a hand to catch snowflakes. “It’s a little early in the
decade
for it. It hardly
ever
snows here.”

Gendreau shrugged with a knowing smile.

Instead of taking the zigzag of stairs back down to the parking lot, he cut left and went down a sloping sidewalk that led along the restaurant’s north side. An access road curled around the back of the building for deliveries.

Gendreau crossed this and made his way to a balcony that had been erected at the edge of the lakeview bluff.

Coin-op binoculars punctuated the balcony’s parapet, and two people stood at the edge watching the wind kick skirls of sunlight across the water’s surface hundreds of feet below. Sitting at their feet was a Boston terrier, a piebald dog with bulging eyes and sharp, pert ears.

Down feathers of ice danced around them like a scene out of a snow globe. “Friends, Romans, countrymen,” said Gendreau as they approached.

“Do you think
Deliverance
is based on true events?” the woman asked him, turning away from the lake. Elvira’s spooky face stared out from the front of her T-shirt, and her arms were livid with tattoo sleeves of Día De Los Muertos skeletons and curlicues.

“God, I hope not,” said Gendreau. “Friends, these are my colleagues Sara Amundson, Lucas Tiedeman, and Eduardo Pendergast.”

“I’m using these binoculars to look for sexually ravenous troglodytes, but all I can find are birds.” Sara’s lipstick was blood-red, her fingernails were as black as murder, and her hair was silver-white, shot through with streaks of pink. Jutting from the prow of her skull was a spiraling bone point about seven inches long.

Robin liked her immediately.

The man standing next to her was dressed like an FBI spook, in a black suit and tie. Even though the sky was a pool of dirty cotton, his eyes were inscrutable behind a pair of shades. What Robin could see of his face was young and handsome, with a princely profile.
Too
young, maybe—she could see him getting carded a lot. “It’s too bad Gaiman couldn’t come,” he said, leaning on the parapet. “This lake is positively dismal in the fall with all these dead trees and cloud cover. He would love it.”

“Gaiman?” asked Kenway. “As in,
Neil
Gaiman? The guy that wrote
Anansi Boys
and
Neverwhere?
That guy’s a magician?”

“Oh,
yeah, sure.”

Gendreau smiled widely. “Mr. Gaiman is one of the Order’s foremost magicians. We were going to bring him along as well—he voiced a desire to sample authentic Georgia ‘bulled peanuts’, and see The World’s Largest Chair, but unfortunately he’s got a book tour.”

“Bulled peanuts,” said the spook, in a deeply-affected twang.

“Buuuuullllled peanuuuuuuts,” said Sara, drawing it out, and the in-joke dissolved into polite laughter. She rapped knuckles on the spook’s shoulder. “This is Lucas, by the way, if you were wondering. Eduardo Pendergast is the ankle-biter.”

While they were talking, Wayne was petting the bug-eyed terrier. He squinted under his generous head massage, his tongue lolling happily.

“Eduardo. Odd name for a dog,” noted Kenway.

“That’s because he hasn’t always been like this,” explained Sara. “He was transfigured by a witch in Germany a few years ago and he liked being a dog so much he refused to let us change him back.”

Eduardo’s mouth slapped shut and he seemed to come to attention, listening to the discussion about him, but then he relaxed and went back to panting. There was a disconcerting intelligence in his face, Robin thought, so like a real dog, but with the weary self-awareness of a man. She pushed the urge to rub his head out of her mind, discouraged by the idea of petting a stranger.

“So, what…he’s a magician too?”

Sara grinned. “That he is.”

“This is the assault team I’ve assembled to help us storm Cutty’s stronghold,” said Gendreau, turning serious. “Each one has in his or her possession a
libbu-harrani,
a heart-road artifact imbued with a Gift, confiscated from a defeated witch. Mr. Tiedeman here has the unusual talent of ‘channeling’. I’m sure you’re familiar with this, Robin,” he offered. “Amelia Burke could do it.”

Robin had fought and killed Amelia Burke in a condemned mall in Iowa and then spent two weeks in the hospital with a concussion suffered from, of all things, a teddy bear. “Yeah.” She asided to Kenway and Wayne, “Channeling is the ability to shift and focus energy.”

“Like Gambit from the X-Men?” asked the boy, his eyes lighting up.

Robin smiled. “Yeah, sort of. I’ve done a little research on it, and from what I can understand, the energy is derived from the adenosine-triphosphate of the body’s mitochondria.” Also known as ATP, the respiratory cell-energy produced by ancient foreign organelles living inside the cells of the majority of living beings.

Molecular biology, started in high school and continued in Heinrich’s training. Robin had spent dark, lonely nights during that monastic first year, locked up in his Texas compound, learning about her new enemies and studying the techniques that would help her exact the vengeance she thought she needed.

But apparently like everything else Heinrich told her, his theory on channeling was bullshit too. “If only it were that simple,” said Gendreau. “That would make for a temporarily accelerated metabolism, wouldn’t it though, every time the individual used his or her Gift? But that isn’t the case.” The magician’s marble-pale hand clapped on Lucas’s shoulder. “We’ve done our own research, since we can capture and contain the witches’
libbu-harrani
and we can observe their properties at our leisure. No, we believe that the Gift of channeling stores and redirects bosons.”