Malus Domestica (68 page)

“NO!”
she cried again, and hammered Andras with her black fist.

The demon’s sternum cracked and he let go of her, stumbling away, clutching his chest like he’d had a heart attack.

“I am
not
you!”

Robin found her feet and fell against the wall, the plaster crumbling under her corded shoulders. Both her hands rose up and she stared at them. They were spun from smoky iron thread and dry vine, and hair the color of merlot grew down her wrists in woolly shags like the sleeves of a wizard gown.

Her heart gleamed from inside, a imprisoned pulsar, an orrery of light, flashing tiger-stripes of white throughout the Darkhouse.

“You can claim me all you want,” Robin snarled up at the owl-headed wicker man. The words were oily and metallic, syllables chiseled out of the workings of the earth. She pounded a fist against her chest,
CLACK,
“but you’ll never get that last five percent. I am
not
you!
My heart is my own!”

Fear, real fear, and bewilderment guttered in the demon’s dull lamp eyes. She ran at him and plunged both fists through the mesh of his chest, ripping him open.

Piles of spiders spilled out in a whispering rush, recluses and orb-weavers, tarantulas and fat scuttling hobos. Wayne shrieked somewhere, but Robin did not falter or relent. Clutching the demon’s bear-trap lips, she gripped the rim of his lower jaw, her fingers settling between his teeth, and tore his face in half as if he were made of papier mâché.

Inside his head was the biggest spider of all. Eight finger-bones as long as umbrella-tines unfolded from the ruins of his wicker skull, revealing a pale hard growth in the middle.

Eight onyx eyes glistened at her from a clump of stony yellow bone. Miserable disgust skirled through her at the idea that this abomination could be her father. Robin gripped the creature and hauled it out of its shattered shell, wrestling it over to the nearest window.

It tried to bite her face, lunging between her arms with clicking-grinding mandibles.

(
 
S H E
 
C O M E S .
 
I
 
M U S T
 
H A V E
 
H E R .
 
L E T
 
M E
 
G O ,
 
L I T T L E
 
O N E
 
)

A shiver of revulsion shot home like a deadbolt. He had recognized her for what she was. Andras knew that she was his daughter. She had nothing to say to that “little one” at the end, no wise-ass retort. A term of endearment from this monster? Intolerable.

She jammed one of her spun-iron elbows against the window and the glass shattered, shards sucking violently away into the deepest darkness Robin had ever seen.

On the other side of the frame was nothing. Not just a space with nothing in it, there wasn’t even a space—a lightless vacuum. And yet…a silvery malevolence breathed and watched back there, an invisible entity that she could only feel as a pulsing idiot wrath.

Faintly, distantly, she heard the tuneless trilling of flutes.

Thrusting the bone-spider through the broken window, Robin shoved it out into the void. Andras disappeared, its flailing legs swallowed up and away.

She searched for the fingery creature in the dark, and when she was satisfied that it was gone, she inhaled—
grrrrahuhuhuh
—and roared into the nothing,
“Fuuuuck!
Yooouuu!”

It felt impotent, a wretched scream into an unfeeling abyss, but it had a certain gratification.

No echo came back.

43

R
OBIN
FOUND
W
AYNE
IN
the upstairs bathroom, lying in the clawfoot bathtub. Red rust stains dragoned down the porcelain from under the faucet, licking at a drain clotted with dried paint. Dirty tiles marched across the walls in broken, snaggletoothed rows.

The medicine cabinet door was still shattered. Wayne had pulled it open, trying to find the way back, but behind it was nothing but glass shelves arrayed with ancient orange prescription bottles. She could see all this because her heart continued to shine through the tines of her chest, illuminating the house around her.

“No!” shouted the boy, curled into the fetal position. “Please don’t kill me!” He turned and threw something at her. “Just take it! Please don’t hurt me!”

Crooked,
she thought sadly.

She picked up whatever he’d thrown and found Haruko’s ring. “I’m not going to hurt you,” she said. Her voice seethed, deep and hot like a Ferrari engine.

Wayne didn’t turn, and only shivered harder.

“We’ve got work to do.” She knelt by the side of the tub. “Look at me, Wayne.”

Finally, his head swiveled slowly, and Robin handed him his eyeglasses. He took them and slid them over his awed, terrified eyes.

“Oh my God,” Wayne said, one lens still broken out. Blood trickled from a cut in his hair. “You really
are
a demon.”

She smiled. Her lips ground against each other. “Only ninety-five percent.” She tapped her chest, where the shining evidence of that last five percent rested. A loud but muted kickdrum thumped in time with her nuclear heart, sending subtle ripples across the bathroom.
Lub-dub. Lub-dub. Lub-dub.

“I can’t get the crawlspace open.” Wayne pointed at the broken mirror. He spoke in the petulant, tired tone of a boy that can’t get to sleep.

Robin stood at the sink, her dark fingers curling around the basin’s edge.

“I can fix this, I think.”

She picked up a shard of glass and slipped it into the door of the medicine cabinet.

Then she took another and slid it into place next to the first. It should have taken her a long time, but the mirror was dirty and had broken in large pewter daggers held together by filth, shattering outward from a point in the center.

Placing the final shard, Robin pressed her fingertip to the starburst of silver cracks and concentrated.

While Gendreau had been healing her surgery scar in the back of Fisher Ellis’s comic shop, she had been subtly tapping the
libbu-harrani
buried in the pearl at the end of his cane, drawing off some of his curandero power for herself. At the time she’d figured she would need it to keep herself together in the battle to come, but now she found she could use it to put the mirror back together.

Sliding the pad of her demonic finger across the refractive edges, Robin traced each crack out to the frame of the mirror. Each time she did so, it faded, the glass smooth and unmarked underneath, as if she were erasing them.

“There we go,” she said, thumbing the final crack away. She stepped back to admire her handiwork.

Wayne was speechless. Taking his mother’s ring out of his shirt-collar, he lifted it so that he could look through it and focus its magic, and opened the cabinet door. The stark glow of the fluorescent lights in Kenway’s kitchen tumbled through as if they’d been waiting all along.

To Robin, the light fell brisk and sharp, like the chill of a winter door left open. She diminished into the shadows, stepping away until nothing was visible but her eyes and the pulsar-heart still throbbing in her chest.

“Go,” she told Wayne.

“No.”

“Go.” Robin took his shoulder. “Go to Kenway’s apartment and wait there for me.”

“I want to go with you,” said Wayne, backing against the tub. “I want to save my dad. I want to help you.”

She sighed, making that disturbing underwater-engine noise again. Her voice was an impossibly deep rumble. “You can help me one last way before you go back. You can help me find the door that leads to the Lazenbury.”

“Okay.”

“Robin?” called someone from the other side of the mirror-hole. Sara Amundson. “Wayne? Are you…you okay in there?”

Kenway said, his voice shaking, “Is that you?”

“Tell them not to be afraid of me.”

Wayne climbed into the sink and leaned through the portrait-mirror-hole. He glanced back at her. “You can’t go out there anymore, can you?”

“I don’t know.” She really didn’t. “It’s … cold out there. Cold like… fire.” It was counterintuitive, but she knew deep inside that if she went through that hole, if she tested the sanctification, she would burn in that katabatic superfreeze, as if the thermometer had gone all the way past zero and come back around to the top.

He turned back to the kitchen. “She can’t come to the window,” Wayne told them. “But she—”

“Is she okay?” asked Joel.

Kenway sat on top of the fridge next to the painting. Now he leaned over to look through the hole. “Babe? You there? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Robin told him, even though she wasn’t, not really. In her present condition, she felt no pain; she felt godlike, perhaps, indestructible, aware only of the press of the floor against the soles of her feet and the constant draft of supernatural cold seeping through the hole.

He stared at her. The sensation of invincibility melted away under his warm eyes, leaving her feeling naked and vulnerable.

“I’m coming in,” he said, climbing into the hole.

Wayne scrambled out of the way and Kenway clambered over the sink, lowering himself to the bathroom floor.

He stood in front of her, abject wonder and terror in his eyes. “Is that really you?” he asked, reaching for her. At first she wanted to move away, or maybe push his hand back, but she let him touch her, rake his fingertips softly down the coiling slope of her chest and feel the rough wasp-nest swell of her left breast. The starshine of her heart filtered through his fingers.

His hand found its way up to her cheek and stayed there. She closed her luminescent eyes and pressed against the cooling cup of his palm.

“You’re still beautiful to me,” Kenway said. “If not even more than before.”

A rusty laugh bubbled up out of her. “You think a demon is prettier than me?”

“Uhh…” His hand twitched.

“…I’m kidding.”

“Your skin kinda reminds me of a shredded mini-wheat.”

“You’re really pressing your luck, sir.”

The others were coming through now, all except for Joel. Sara came through first, and then Lucas, who helped Gendreau down from the step of the sink. “Simply remarkable,” the curandero said again, eyes wandering the decrepit bathroom.

A dog barked on the other side.

“Sounds like Eduardo wants to go too,” chuckled Lucas. Joel handed the terrier through the hole. Safely on the Darkhouse side, Eduardo shook himself and panted up at them, his tail waving back and forth.

Robin got as close to the hole as she could tolerate, looking out at the pizza man. He sat on the fridge with his elbow in the dimensional hole, as pretty as you please. It could have been the windowsill of his Black Velvet.

“Are you staying here, then?”

He gawped openly at her. “Yep. I’ll keep the light on for ya, and the way open. I think I been through enough today, and you look like you can handle yourself. I’ll leave you to it.” The moment lingered between them for a second, and then he added, “You gonna be like that forever, Girl Wonder? It’s a nice look, but … it’ll be hard gettin a table at IHOP lookin like modern art.”

“It doesn’t feel sustainable. I don’t know.” Robin looked at her hands. “I’ll figure something out.”

“We’ll get you a hat and a nice pair of sunglasses.”

Robin laughed again. “Yeah.”

The others were already filing out of the room. “We’ll be back soon,” she told him, backing out, and he saluted.

“I’ll be here.”

❂

After trying every door in the house—including the back door, which led into the go-kart garage in Weaver’s Wonderland, where they found Joel’s car and the body of Michael DePalatis—the one they needed turned out to be the front door, and Robin couldn’t overlook the irony. Apparently the front entrance of both 1168 and its Hell-annexed alter ego were linked in some deep way.

She stood way back while Wayne opened it, but no rush of wintery cold came in, even though she could plainly see the front porch of her childhood home outside. It was night-time out there, but she wasn’t sure if that was because it was getting close to six, or because it was
always
night in this strange new aberration of a timezone.

“I don’t feel the sanctification out there,” Robin told them.

“Perhaps it doesn’t apply to a piece of reality when someone has tied it off like a puppy-dog’s tail,” said Gendreau.

Eduardo whined.

“—Err, sorry.”

Robin stepped toward the door and, with a brief pause, put her hand outside. There was a bad moment where she felt the creep of ice—as if there were a holy residue—but then it passed.

“It’s safe.” She stepped out onto the porch and they followed her.

Someone sitting in the swing down at the end loosed a shriek worthy of a Sioux warrior and vaulted the railing into the bushes.

“Pete?” called Wayne, squinting into the darkness. “Amanda?”

“Batman? Is that you?”

“Yeah, it’s me.” Wayne walked down to the swing where Amanda, her brothers, and little Katie Fryhover cowered in the dark. Evan and Kasey Johnson stood in front of their sister, wielding heavy-looking sticks and shields devised from garbage can lids.

Leaning on the banister, Robin gazed out into a dark sky strewn with unfamiliar constellations that hung low in the night like electric bulbs screwed into the clouds. The trailer park’s mobile homes were pale, dark-eyed hulks run aground on a black shore. There were no lights. The de-conjuration must have interrupted the electricity in the power lines.

“Looks like when Weaver tied off the neighborhood,” said Kenway, “she took Chevalier Village and 1168 with it.”

Evan Johnson coughed, wiping his face with his sleeve. “It’s been dark out for like two days straight. The power went out and all of a sudden the sun went away at like three in the afternoon yesterday.”

“Ever since,” said his brother, “we can’t get out. The night makes a wall.”

“The night makes a wall,” echoed little Katie.

“Me and Evan tried to get out.” Kasey pointed west with his stick, down the road. “But it’s like…it’s like the air gets
hard.”