Malus Domestica (64 page)

Kenway led the escape with his fists, forging through the seething crowd toward some point. Robin fought the men and women off with the little martial arts Heinrich had been able to teach her. Augmented by the demon arm, she was a force of nature, throwing leaping haymakers and hammering knees and elbows into chests and faces.

A blood-tingling Godzilla roar echoed off the buildings around them. The throng of familiars parted and a bear, an honest-to-God
grizzly bear,
eight feet of primordial tooth and claw,
came loping out of nowhere.

Familiars scattered in every direction, braying and hollering. Even Robin stopped short, but when she caught a glimpse of Sara Amundson with her temples in her hands and her fingers sunk into her red hair, the spitting image of an actor in an Excedrin commercial feigning a migraine, she knew that the grizzly belonged to the magician.

“I thought you could make monsters,” Robin told her, the bear following them, driving a wedge through the crowd.

“So sue me, it was the best I could do on short notice.”

Joel stared at the bear, stumbling over the curb and onto the sidewalk. The trip seemed to bring him back into the moment and surrender flashed across his face as if he were thinking,
hell, that ain’t the craziest thing I’ve seen, and it’s only gonna get worse.

“We’ll hide in the comic shop,” Joel told them, his arms up. He pointed to something colorful in his other hand. “I got the key!”

The grizzly bear shambled along behind them, roaring and challenging the familiars as they got close. Spider-Man and Batman appeared ahead of them, Fisher’s window mural flickering into view through the mob. Joel ran for the front door and jammed the key home, his hands shaking.

Skittering out of the chaos, Eduardo leapt into Sara’s arms. “Oh thank
God,”
she muttered, clutching the dog.

The front door of Fisher’s comic shop stood in a shallow alcove on a short ramp. There were two locks—one was a latch in the center of the door, and the one above it, a larger deadbolt, commanded a pair of sliding bars that secured the top and bottom of the door. “What have y’all crazy-ass white people done got me into now?” demanded Joel, the lock disengaging with a double-barreled
clank.
“I got people actin like cats, car accidents, people shootin at me, and now we got freakin
bears
in the middle of town?”

“The bear isn’t real,” Gendreau told him as they all ran past into the darkened shop.

Joel tossed a hand and rolled his eyes. “Of
course
it ain’t.”

As soon as they were inside, he pushed the door shut on its hydraulic hinge and locked it again. Robin counted them…Kenway, Gendreau, Sara, Joel, and herself.

Her heart lunged painfully.
“Where’s Wayne?”
she shrieked, surprising herself.
“Where’s—”

“I’m back here!” a voice called from the feeble darkness.

Such intense relief settled over her that she could have collapsed. Robin lurched past her friends and into the depths of the comic shop, where Wayne stepped out of the shadows. He’d found a Batman cowl somewhere and was shrugging into it.

She snatched it off his head, eliciting an indignant yelp of pain, and squeezed him against her chest.

“I thought we left you out there, kiddo.”

“Nope.” He rubbed his ear. “I’m right here.”

Standing by the window, they watched the imaginary bear distract and fend off the crowd.

As the familiars tested the giant creature, dancing in to bat at its non-corporeal body and leap back, Sara released her grip on the hallucination and it faded with all the ceremony of turning off a television. The sudden disappearance left the cat-people stupefied and they boggled at the space where it’d been with vacuous screwhead eyes.

“Get away from the window before they see us,” warned Gendreau.

Heeding his advice, they retreated deeper into the shop, gathering in the clear space at the back where Fisher had once held Movie Nights. Someone tripped over a chair with a clatter. Kenway’s face was a smear in the darkness, the windowlight sparkling in his eyes. “Where’d that kid in the Blues Brothers suit go?”

“Lucas?” Gendreau sat in a chair, wheezing. “He’ll be all right, I think.”

“Why didn’t
you
magic those people?” Kenway asked. “You look like you could handle yourself more than the other two.” He caught his breath, his face drawn into the grimace of a side stitch. “You look like the third member of Siegfried and Roy went off and started a menswear line.”

“What witty commentary, coming from the lead vocalist of a Nickelback cover band.”

Kenway snorted. “Them’s fightin words, Snagglepuss!”

The atmosphere in the dark room chilled as everybody paused for a long, pregnant moment. Then Kenway chuckled, shaking his head dismissively, breaking the tension.

“I didn’t participate in the combat,” said Gendreau, “because I am not, ahh, versed in combative magic.”

Sara put the dog on the floor and sat down to rest as well. “Anders is a sensitive. He’s our … supernatural GPS. He’s how we found you Sunday night, and he’s how we knew which hospital they took you to.”

He sat back and tugged at his jacket, straightening it. “I am also a superlative alchemist, and I am quite useful at curative properties—removing poisons and illnesses, knitting small wounds, that sort of thing. I was made an official
curandero
in Chile six years ago and some call me Don Gendreau, the Healer of Caddo Parish.”

“Some, as in like, twelve people,” rasped Sara. She had found a roll of paper towels with the party supplies on a table in the corner and was mopping at the now-tacky blood on her forehead.

Gendreau got up and went to her, his hands gravitating to her face. “Here, love, let me take a look at that for you.” He
tsk-tsk
ed, combing through her hair. “You poor dear; banged your head pretty badly, didn’t you, Murdercorn?”

“Oh, stop petting me and fix it, please.”

“Sensitive.” Kenway watched Gendreau dress Sara’s head wound. “Hey, does that mean you can see ghosts?”

The magician glimpsed something in the veteran’s eyes and went back to work. His delicate hands probed a gash at her hairline, his fingers sweeping and flourishing in graceful, encompassing gestures.

“No,” Gendreau said quietly, “I’m afraid it doesn’t.”

“Okay, enough banter. We need to figure out what we’re going to do now,” said Robin. “We barely made it just now, and I don’t think we’ll survive another round with the Thundercats out there.”

There were at least a hundred people shambling back and forth in the street now, picking fights with each other and sniffing the air. Many of them had taken off their clothes, their breasts swinging, and three of them rutted madly in the middle of the street. “Man, I’ve never seen this many familiars in one place before. Most I’ve ever seen was at Gail Symes’s casino in Nevada, and the only way I got away from them was by cutting the power and sneaking out.”

One of the familiars peered through the gap created by Spider-Man’s thighs and his retinas flashed white-green in the black silhouette of his head. Robin stooped instinctively, watching over the edge of a shelf. “And even then, darkness doesn’t always save you.”

“Where is your sign shop, Ken?” asked Wayne. “Maybe we can make a break for it.”

Kenway thought about it, rubbing his nose with his forearm. His hands came to rest naturally on his hips, and with not a small amount of humor and attraction, Robin thought it made him look like a superhero.

“Umm.” He pointed one way and then the other, turned around, then jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “About a half block that way. On the other side of the street.”

“Isn’t the canal behind us?”

Kenway nodded. “…No, it’s behind my shop. But I think I might know where you’re goin with this. There’s a storm drain in the alley behind
this
shop. It probably runs past the drainage grate in my garage and empties in the canal out back. You figure we could use it to sneak over there?”

“Yeah.” Wayne got up and went through the door in the back, shouldering past the movie screen hanging from the ceiling.

Joel followed him. “Hold up. Make sure there ain’t no fire alarm.”

The adrenaline in Robin’s system began to fade, her shoulder singing Halleluah. She sat down in a booth and pulled her shirt back down, ferreting her new left arm out of the sleeve; blood still leaked freely from the surgery scar and now all of the stitches had been broken, the staples pried loose and jutting out haphazardly, so that they caught on the fabric.

“When you finish with Sara,” she asked, “will you do something about my stitches and stuff? It’s killing me.”

Gendreau nodded. “Almost done.”

In the grey light seeping through from the front of the shop, she could study the arm’s fibrous surface, a thick plait of hard but yielding cables. It was as if she’d never lost her arm at all and now it was sheathed in a tight gauntlet of vulcanized tire-rubber. Her hand was as tough, the fingers pliant yet hard. Taking her demon hand in her human hand, the silky copper hairs brushing her palm, Robin felt an awed chill and wondered if this was what Andras felt like.

Does he know? Does he know who I am? What I am?
The next question was
Will he recognize me?
but she realized that she didn’t care.

Or perhaps she did; she wanted Andras to see her face and know her as she killed him. A compelling, irrepressible anger billowed up inside of her and Robin wanted to smash things, she wanted to destroy and pulverize.
No, It. That thing is an It and It is going to die. That thing is going to die for what it did to my mother, and what it’s done to me. For the life it’s forced me to live.

“Wow,” said Kenway, leaning on the booth table. “So your arm grew back. That’s pretty damn sweet, yeah?”

Robin nodded, forcing a smile.

When he spoke again, she could tell his smile had drained away and left him cool, his voice low. “I know it’s weird. And it’s hard to deal with. I don’t know what to tell you.”

His own hand curled around hers and it registered that she could feel it with the Andras-arm, she could
feel
things with it, and compared to the leathery skin his fingers were as soft and warm and fragile as a very old man’s.

Instinctively, Robin shrank away. She didn’t want her strange demon hand to touch him.

“If my leg grew back I wouldn’t care
what
it looked like,” he said. “You know? I’d be happy just to have it back.”

A sick thought occurred to her.
Is he jealous that this happened, that it grew back?
Was there a part of him that felt…that felt a kinship, or a satisfaction when he’d found out she’d lost her arm to Theresa? Robin brushed it aside.
Of course not. What kind of a person would he be to think that way?

Her fears were vanquished handily when he leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. “I like you anyway, the way you are,” he said, and kissed her on the forehead again, “hell, I think it looks badass—you’re, like, a superhero now,” and then he kissed her on the mouth and a flashbang tumbled pleasantly down her chest, her heart thumping.

Robin reached up with her human hand and clung to him, mashing their lips together, and kissed him back. His beard clouded against her face like candy-floss made of silk.

“Thank you,” she said, finally.

Her cheeks were wet. She scraped them dry with the demon-hand and winced at the hard crag of her thumb.

“For what?”

She didn’t know what to say to that, so she kissed him again.

41

T
HE
B
EDAZZLED
BASEBALL
BAT
glittered in Joel’s hands like a disco ball, flinging arrows of light all over Fisher’s videotape room. He’d found it where his brother had left it Sunday morning, propped against the futon. Along with the half-cup of cold coffee he’d never finished.

Joel stared at the coffee, thinking about Fish.

“Mister.”

He snapped out of it. The boy, Wayne, was a collection of shapes in the darkness. “Do you have a key for this back door?”

The movie room—Fisher’s personal home theater, at least as theatrical as a futon in a closet and a thirty-year-old TV and VCR could be—had three doors: the one leading back to the shop, the one on the right that opened on the stairway to Fisher’s loft apartment, and one on the left at the end of a short hallway. That one went out back.

“I don’t know.” He fished the shop key out of his pocket. “I hope so. The rest of the keys are with Fish.”

They stood there in the shadows, regarding each other. For the millionth time, the pistol in Owen Euchiss’s hand barked fire into Fisher’s face and Joel watched his brother’s body capsize languidly into water the color of time. Joel had closed his eyes but he didn’t flinch, weak acid spattering his face and chest in a mist.

“I’m sorry aboutcher brother, mister Joe-elle.” Wayne’s glasses reflected the light from the shop in two bulging squares of white. “He was cool. A real nice guy.”

“Me too.”

Joel sighed and followed Wayne down the little hallway to the fire exit, choosing action over thought.

The more he did, the less he could think, and the less he thought the less he could watch those brains spray on the Movie Night screen of his mind.

Feeling around the surface of the door, he found a handle with a keyhole in it and a deadbolt. The deadbolt didn’t behave like the front door, it was a simple house door. He unlocked both of them and pushed the door, a heavy wooden solid-core.

Silver daylight rushed down the inside as it came open and stuck, scraping on the concrete. Joel shoved it the rest of the way with a dull scuff. Outside, a narrow alleyway ran to their vanishing points in both directions. Boxes were piled in one corner by a steel utility door that led into the water heater closet, and two wheel bins leaned against the far wall.

A chain-link fence framed the area on both sides. Joel was peering into the storm drain when a dark figure came out of nowhere, crashing into the fence and scaring the hell out of him. He flinched, raising the Batdazzler.