Malus Domestica (65 page)

Blood ran down the man’s temples in heavy blotches and made glossy sealskin of his black suit. His shirt was ripped open.

“It’s Lucas,” said Wayne, opening the gate.

The magician staggered in, arming blood and sweat from his forehead with a trembling hand. “Goddamn, damn,
damn,
I thought that was the end of me.” He leaned against the wall. “Everybody make it okay?”

“Yeah.”

Lucas thumped his chest with pride. “Then my glorious sacrifice was not in vain.”

They brought him into the comic shop, where Sara gave him a hug and Gendreau shook his hand. “Good work back there, soldier,” said the self-proclaimed curandero. “How did you get away from the mob?”

Lucas collapsed into the booth, wiping his face with Miguel’s Pizzeria napkins.

“Well, I lasted about ten seconds and then they had me on my back, kickin the shit outta me.” He fished a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and shakily stuck it in his mouth, patted himself down for a lighter, didn’t find one. “But then I heard a roar—I guess Sara did something?—and then everybody ran away. I don’t know where the burnt-lookin guy with the rifle went; he ran off while I was gettin worked over.”

He scanned the dark shop. “Did the dog make it?”

A little black shadow came out from under the booth table. Lucas picked Eduardo up and hugged him.

“My leedle Dog Star mascot,” he said in a bad moose-und-squirrel accent, making air kisses. The terrier slavered all over his face, knocking the cigarette out of his mouth. He crooned at the dog, tousling and rubbing him all over as if he were fluffing a pillow. Eduardo did the shimmy-shimmy-shake, an expression of dumb pleasure on his face. “You knocked em all down with water from your magic mind-powers, yes you did, yeah! Yes you did! What a
good boy.”

Sara shook her head. “Sometimes I think Ed forgets he’s supposed to be human. And maybe you do too.”

“Now you’re making it weird.”

“I’m
making it—?”

“We’ve got things to do,” said Robin, getting up and heading for the back door. “We don’t have time to sit around petting dogs and chit-chatting.”

Kenway stopped her by the movie screen, his shadow sharp on the giant white-silver sheet. His hand lightly cupped her elbow. “Slow down,” he told her. “Take a minute. You just got out of the hospital and lived through a roll-over
and
a mob. I thought you wanted dude over here to take a look at your, uhh … your arm?”

She hesitated, her face grim.

His look of concern became one of reproach.

Sighing, she came back and unfolded one of the Movie Night chairs, plopping down into it. Gendreau took off his jacket and pushed up his shirt-sleeves.

His shirt was tailored, but without the Willy Wonka blazer his sleeves belled at the elbows and narrowed at the cuffs. With his platinum-blond hair, Arctic eyes, and Nordic face, it made him look a bit like a cover model for a romance novel. “All right,” he said, as Robin wrenched up her shirt impatiently. “This may hurt a bit at first—I’m going to have to pull the rest of these staples out, because I can’t quite achieve the effect I need with them in the way. And then I’ll need to press the wound together manually.”

“Whatever you need to do, doc,” Robin said noncommittally. She took off the helmet and let her head tilt back. “I took another couple of pain pills a minute ago. I figured I might as well, since I threw up.” A hard, workmanlike sort of temper had come over her since Joel had seen her last.

This must be her Go Mode, he decided. This was what it looked like when the going got tough and Robin Martine shifted into Four Wheel Drive.

“You’re pushing yourself too hard,” said Kenway.

She pointed at him. “You have no idea what—”

Joel thought he could tell what she was about to say, and that would have been the wrong thing.
Was
the wrong thing, he knew, because he could tell by the hurt look on the veteran’s face that he had read between the lines too.

“Don’t even go there,” Kenway said, grimly.

“I’m sorry.” Robin winced as Gendreau picked the bent staples out of her.

Her eyes were rimmed in red. “I didn’t mean it that way. I’m just saying … I’ve pushed myself harder than this.” She stretched the neck of her shirt open and pointed at a scar on the left side of her chest, high, directly under her collarbone. “This came from a girl in Connecticut last spring. She stabbed me with a pair of kitchen shears. Missed my heart by two inches.”

She pointed to the tiny pink commas peppered up her arms and the blade of her jawline. The pea-sized pit by her ear. “Scratches. From Neva Chandler, and others. God, those bitches always scratch.” She hiked up her left jeans leg and pointed at her shin, even though it was too dark to really see. “Got whacked with a shovel in Florida, ended up with a minor fracture.

“I’ve broken three toes and two fingers.” She waggled the fingers of her right hand. “I’d show you one of those broken fingers, but Theresa took it. Along with the rest of my arm.”

The more scars she explained, the angrier and more harried she seemed to get. Ferociously unbuckling her belt, she ripped her fly open and thrust out her pelvis, shucking her jeans with one hand, flashing utilitarian white panties. Her voice took on a choked, raw quality. “I got burnt all over my legs tryin to light up this witch in St. Louis—”

Both of her thighs rippled with pink, gnarly patches of long-healed burns.

“I been doin this for a long time now.” The tears on her cheeks silvered in the light coming back from the shopfront windows. “I can
handle myself,
goddammit.”

“I need you to quit moving,” Gendreau said blandly.

Robin looked at him, irritation clouding her face. Her eyes briefly danced between the curandero’s, and then she pulled her jeans back over her hips.

The noise of the crowd outside gradually began to diminish to an occasional shout. Joel thought he heard police sirens, but it was so far away it could have been more cat-yowling from the familiars.

Robin buried her face in her hand and sat quietly.

Kenway’s arms were folded. He stood at the edge of the generous Movie Night space, leaning against a rackful of action figures, his ankles crossed so that his prosthetic leg lay on top.

“I love you,” he said, after a not-inconsiderable amount of time.

“No, you don’t,” said Robin.

He thought about it a minute and said, “Yep. Maybe I do.”

She shook her head. Her voice was still rusty. “Look at me. Look at this thing I have for an arm now. You just
think
you do. Why would anybody love me?” The demon-hand flexed with a stony rasp. “Look at it. It’s a… it’s a piece of
him.
He ruined my mother and now I have to carry a goddamn piece of him. I belong in Hell with the rest of the devils.”

The edges of her front incisors met in a disgusted grimace as she balled a dragonish fist. She growled through her teeth, “What even
is
this?”

Gendreau had no answer. Neither did anyone else. Sara pretended to be absorbed in picking her fingernails, while Lucas babied the man-dog in low muttering tones. Kenway stared at the floor as if chastised, his brow dark.

Joel got up and knelt by her. “It’s
you,
is what it is.”

Robin looked down at him and he felt a thin ripple of fear. There was a terrible, angry thing in her spooked-horse eyes, a sweaty sort of madness come to the surface, and suddenly it was as if he were a vassal supplicating to a medieval lord drunk on both power and liquor.

The baseball bat even completed the analogy, because as he took a knee in front of her the business end of it rested on the floor and leaned against his knee like a knight’s sword. The fake diamonds glued to the wood even mirrored the faint light much the same way.

He thought to hold her hand, but had the idea to take the strange dark hand; he held it and was struck by how alien it was, like a sculpture of a human hand made of driftwood and sooted in a fire—a human hand but larger, the fingers hooking in blunt claws. Fleecy red hair grew all down the back of it in a singular finlike shag and ended in a final punctuating tuft over her knuckles. Up close, he could see veins of dark green tracing between her jagged knuckles.

It was the most foreign, outlandish thing he’d ever seen.

“I
love you too, girl,” Joel said, gazing up at her half-mad face. “We’re almost brother and sister, you and me. We grew up together, remember?”

She said nothing, but the corner of her mouth twitched and her eyes lost a bit of that fearsomeness.

“You think of me as a sister?” she asked.

“Y— Yeah, I do.” He was still wearing his silk do-rag. He took it off and bunched it in a ball in his fist against his chest.

“I never had a brother before.”

Joel smiled. He had put on eyeshadow and eyeliner that morning before he’d gone back to the hospital to check on Armstrong, and even though it was dark and he was slick with sweat, he knew he still looked good. “I ain’t
got
to be your brother. I can be your sister.” The smile widened into a grin. “Either or, you know, it’s okay. Whichever one you want, baby.”

“It’s okay,” she echoed, a bit dreamily.

“You’re the same Robin I grew up with, all right?” He put his other hand on top of the dark hand, and it was as if he clasped the horny, splintered base of a broken branch jutting out of a tree. He wondered if it hurt, the hand, as dry and hard as it felt. “You’re that same little girl me and my brother ate breakfast with in that big ol house. You remember what I said at Miguel’s?”

“Ain’t nothin in this world that good bacon can’t make better.” Robin’s eyes focused on his.

“That’s right. That same little girl that me and him played with in your big ol back yard. We used to take turns swingin on that swing back there, you and your mosquito. What was his name?”

“Mr. Nosy.” A faint smile. “I still have him. He’s in my van.”

“He must be old as hell now.”

“Falling apart. I’ve had him fixed so many times I can’t even remember.” The smile spread a bit more. “I love that stupid mosquito so much.” A fresh tear re-wet the track on her face. “I remember playing dress-up with you and Fish in my room in the cupola. Oh my God, you used to love puttin on my mom’s old dresses and pearls. I remember that.”

Joel stroked the strange hand.

“You’re still here. You’re that same little girl with that same stuffed mosquito. Only you growed up now, and there’s a
little
different but not much. I’ve changed too—there’s been a few dirty things in my system and my lungs are prolly as black as my outsides by now—but under it all I’m still that little boy in your mama’s old dresses and high-heel shoes too big for my feet.”

All the hardness had drained from Robin’s face, though her tone was still a bit lost, as though she were speaking from the far side of another world. But with each word she seemed to get a better handle on herself.

“Yeah. We’re still the same. Okay.”

He let go of her demon-hand and she balled her fist again. The sound of it flexing was simultaneously like the creak of oiled leather and the thin, fibrous crackle of wicker.

“This ain’t
him,”
Joel told her, taking her woody fingers in his. “It ain’t. This is
you,
lil girl. It’s just a little more badass than the rest of you.”

She nodded and wiped her cheeks with the heel and then the back of her human right hand.

“You can’t go through this life and not pick up a little shit here and there. We are all the sum of our lives, hon… and we all gotta carry a piece of crazy to the end.”

Joel got up off the floor, using the Batdazzler as a cane. The bullet-graze across his thigh had been re-closed at the hospital and now it only hurt when he bent his knee. Of course, the pain meds they’d given him were helping with that. “Yeah, you got a
big
piece. But Imma help you carry it, aight?”

She nodded again, and a hardness came back to her, but it wasn’t the Crazy-Eyed-Lord-on-His-Throne, Off-With-Your-Head look again; it was a positive and steely resolve. The
lost
-ness was gone. Joel sensed that he had dragged his childhood friend back from the edge of some dark, destructive, self-loathing promontory.

“I love you, yeah?” His tone said this was not optional. “And this boy over here—” Joel pointed at Kenway with the end of the bat, “—he love you too. Dig on
that.”

Robin wiped her face again. “I can dig it. Yeah.”

“I
know
he does,” Joel said, eyeing Kenway. “It’s written all over him. This boy wanna marry yo mohawk ass.”

Kenway put his hands up in a guarded way, his beard parting in an embarrassed grin. “All right now.”

Joel paced in the other direction, twirling the bat. “Just sayin.”

The sound of someone knocking on the front door echoed back to them. Kenway turned and peered through a gap between the shelves. “Who the hell…?”

“I thought I heard a police siren earlier,” said Sara. “Maybe the cops are trying to disperse the familiars. —Hell, maybe the familiars have even come back to their senses.”

“No. I don’t think—”

Joel looked as well. A man stood on the other side of the glass, his hands cupped around his eyes so he could see through into the shadows.

Roy Euchiss.

“Hey, anybody in there?” called the Serpent, wispy strands of colorless hair haloing from his acid-burned head. “I know you’re in there. I saw somebody movin. You open yet? You got this month’s
Iron Man?
I’m a fan, you know.” He raised the rifle, shouldering it. “Don’t get up. I have a key.”

The first shot thundered in the comic shop like a judge’s gavel. A hole appeared in the Plexiglas door.

“Shit, we got to get out of here.” Joel pushed away from the rack and held the bat in front of his face, a Jedi with his lightsaber. “Y’all go on out the back. This the bastard that killed my brother. Imma have words with
his
ass.”

BOOM!
Euchiss fired another bullet through the glass.

Everybody paused except for Robin.
Fish would be chewin her tail if he could see this,
he thought.

But then Kenway fist-bumped him. “Beast mode, man.”