Malus Domestica (69 page)

Evan giggled in spite of himself.

“I ain’t jokin, turd-vert.”

“It’s like we’re in a giant aquarium, you know?” said Amanda, standing up. Katie Fryhover clung to her leg with the desperation of a castaway on a life-preserver. “We don’t know what’s going on. Our parents don’t either.”

“It’s the witches,” Wayne told them. “They did this. And we’re here to fix it.”

Pete came swishing through the grass, dusting off his shorts, and climbed the front steps. When he saw Robin, he stopped short, his hand on the banister. The other hand held the strength-test hammer, resting on his shoulder.

“It’s okay,” she told him. “It’s me. It’s Robin, the crazy chick with the camera.”

“Miss Martine?”

“The one and only.”

“What the hell
happened
to you?” he asked in the bravely rude way that is the kingdom of children.

“I did the drugs. All of them.” Robin pointed at him with one wire-coil finger. “Be smart, kids, stay in school.”

Lucas Tiedeman burst out laughing.

“We came over here to Wayne’s cause it’s the farthest away from the witches’ house,” said Amanda. “It seemed safe. Well, the safest place, anyway. The witches never come over here. I think they’re afraid of it.” Her eyes wandered out to the trailer park. “My dad seems like he is, too. He won’t leave the house.”

“He’s been drinking since the sun went away,” said Evan. “He sits in the dark and drinks and stares out the window.”

“Maw-Maw sleeps.” Katie Fryhover peeked at Robin and hid her face again.

Kasey Johnson’s stick slowly sank until the end of it was resting on the porch. “None of em will go outside,” he said, his tone flat and demoralized. “Not even our neighbors, like Mr Weisser and Mrs Schumacher. They won’t even answer the door when we knock.”

“I think you should take your friends to the hole that goes to my apartment,” said Kenway, his hand resting on Wayne’s shoulder. “Make yourself at home. There’s some stuff in the fridge if you get hungry. I don’t know how long this is going to take.”

The boy peered through his one spectacle eye at him. “Okay.” Wayne waved the other children into the house. “Come on, guys.”

They followed him willingly enough, but Pete stopped at the front door and turned back to Kenway. “Hey, mister?” he said, hefting the carnival mallet.

“Hmm?”

Pete grinned. “Take this with you,” he said, offering the mallet to the tall Nordic vet. Kenway’s big mitt closed over the wooden handle and he lifted it over his head like a barbarian straight out of a Boris Vallejo painting.

“Mjolnir,” Wayne said in awe from the foyer.

Kenway flourished it. The big hammer-head made a swooshing noise through the air. “Thanks, kid.”

“Kick their asses, man,” said Pete.

“Oh, I almost forgot—” Taking off the GoPro harness, Wayne handed it off to Robin. “Here’s your camera, ma’am.” He smiled and pushed his broken glasses up on his nose. “Thank you for lettin me be your cameraman for a little while.”

“Thank
you.”

She adjusted the straps and put it on Kenway.

“And now your watch begins, Mr Cameraman.” The GoPro’s evil red on-air light burned in the dark, a solemn, watchful eye.

With a soft and concluding
click,
the front door eased shut behind them, leaving the magicians, the veteran, and the demon-girl alone on the front porch.

Sprawling in front of them was a twilight zone of shadows, only interrupted by the sight of the pale mobile homes marching darkly into the distance, a cemetery for giants. The night was windless and heavy, a smothering summer twilight three months too late. No crickets sang. The silence was absolute.

❂

The dirt road leading to the Lazenbury was a dark and lonely one, winding for what felt like a quarter of a mile through suboceanic darkness. With no wind and no nightlife, the trees around them were nothing but a silent wall of black paranoia, beat back only by the crunching of their heels on the gravelly dirt. Above them, the sky remained a chintzy model-town facsimile of the real thing, the stars almost low enough to reach up and touch.

Robin’s glowing heart illuminated the path around them, but did nothing to assuage the feeling coming from that lightless storybook forest of being watched.

“Is that Heinrich?” asked Sara.

A wooden crucifix stood by the road some nine feet tall, overlooking them like a warning from an old pulp western. Heinrich Hammer was pinned to it with long roofing-nail spikes through his wrists and wire around his elbows.

In the green-yellow light of Robin’s pulsar heart, the blood running in blotchy ribbons down his chin and chest was a glassy obsidian. He’d been worked over good; his legs were obviously broken by the crazy bandy way they angled, and his chest was a litany of gills, a dozen fleshy pink stab wounds. The witches stripped him of everything except for his slacks, but his black duster caped from the back of the cross like Christ’s tomb shroud, the sleeves tossed over his shoulders as though he were being embraced by the Grim Reaper himself.

She thought he was dead, but as they approached, Robin was surprised to see his eyes crack open.

He coughed weakly. “Hi, folks.”

“Good evening, Heinie,” said Robin.

Heinrich spat blood into the weeds. “You know I hate when you call me that.” He stared at her with one glassy, jaundiced eye. The other was swollen shut. “See you found your daddy. I bet you got some questions, hu—” His gentle prodding was cut off by a wet, productive cough.

“Is this why you trained me to kill?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“You weren’t helping a bereaved girl find closure. You were sharpening a sword.
Your
sword.” Robin got up close, close enough to smell the sweet, coppery smell of blood, and…something else, something both ammoniac and sugary. “Your golden ticket back into the Order.” Ah, he’d pissed himself. That’s what it was. They’d either really scared him or really hurt him, and at this point she hoped it was the latter.

“You tried to break one of our cardinal rules, Mr Atterberry,” said Gendreau, taking off his jacket and stepping closer to place a hand on Heinrich’s shirt. “Bringing a demon through the sanctification. Did you think we’d let you back in if you actually managed to
break
it?”

Robin felt ectoplasmic energy skirl up and out of the curandero’s slender arm. She could see it, as well, a throbbing aura the dusky sapphire blue of the sky over a Dustbowl farm.

“I thought I could tame the demon,” said Heinrich. “Filter it,
extrude it,
through the girl.”

Robin made a face. “I’m not the best part of waking up, you dick.”

“You thought you could
smuggle
it,” Gendreau noted in droll disbelief.

Heinrich sighed. “I messed up. I did; I freely admit it. I made an ambitious mistake. But hey, look at it this way—you didn’t turn out so bad, did you? Right?” A fat tear cut through the blood on his face. “My God, look at you, Robin
—cough—
you’re—”

“A monster.”

“—Beautiful! You’re
beyond
extraordinary.” He chuckled, and the chuckles turned into full-fledged (if exhausted) laughter.

“What’s so funny?”

The crucified man shook his head slowly, dejectedly, and his grin drooped into a desolate grimace. She thought he’d started laughing again, but the convulsions turned out to be silent sobs. Drool slipped down his chin in a spider-silk strand.

“You have no idea what Cutty is up to in there,” he told them, his breath hitching. “I found their Matron upstairs.”

“You did?” Gendreau twitched. “Who is it?”

“She
claims
to be Morgan le Fay.”

“The sorceress fairy-queen from Arthurian legend?”

Sara folded her arms. “You are so full of shit. That’s impossible. Morgan le Fay wasn’t even real. Those were stories.”

“Hey, don’t shoot the messenger,” said Heinrich.

“Even if that
is
le Fay up there, she’d have to be
hundreds
of years old.”

“Almost two thousand years old,” said Gendreau. “According to Arthurian legend, Arthur Pendragon defended Britain against Saxon invaders in 510, 520 AD. He
was
real, if embellished. If Morgan was real, she was contemporary to that time.”

He stared at the dirt under their feet in thought, drawing curative runes with the tip of his cane. “She first appeared in an 1170 book by Chrétien de Troyes. I can’t remember the name, though. For some reason I want to say it’s
Enid Blythe,
but that’s not right. Oh no, wait, it wasn’t de Troyes, it was
The Life of Merlin
by Geoffrey of Monmouth.”

“You can remember all that,” asked Sara, “but you can’t remember your order between the radio and the window at freakin’ Chik-Fil-A? Some savant
you
turned out to be.”

Robin’s eyes rolled up to the temple-like silhouette of the Lazenbury. The lights were still on in there, hollow orange eyes in the black, but it might have been candles. Probably was. “If their Matron is really Morgan, she’s….”

“Old as hell?” asked Lucas.

“To put it bluntly,” interjected Gendreau. “And more powerful than any witch alive.”

The unspoken insinuation was obvious to Robin.
We may have bitten off more than we can chew.
She hoped she was the secret weapon Heinrich had intended her to be.

“I didn’t see much of her.” The old witch-hunter flexed one arm as if getting comfortable and jerked in sudden sharp pain, crying out, his legs twitching and curling like back-broken snakes. His cries were desperate, pitiful, and nothing at all like the commanding, brooding presence he’d been.

Fresh blood dribbled from the nails through his wrists. Every fifth or sixth word was interrupted by a panting breath. “They’re tryin to bring someone—some
thing
back. Tryin to resurrect something. They been tryin for a long time. It’s why Annie’s apples are so fat. They been nibblin’ on em, savin em up for the resurrection.”

Heinrich hung his head. “They’ve always been here, Robin. I was too big for my britches. We
all
was. Cutty and her Matron have been here since the inception of this town.” He grunted and cried out in pain again. “I’m sorry I dragged you into this, babygirl.”

“If you’ll open your eyes again, you’ll see that I’m neither baby nor girl. Or even human.”

He did so, and looked at her for a long time with drowsy eyes.

“Get out of here,” he said. “While you still can.” Heinrich coughed, spattering Robin’s wirecoil chest with blood. “However you got here, use it to get back, and stay away. This some Plan 9 top-level Pentagram Pentagon black magic. They gonna jump up and down on you til you die, then wake you up and beat you some more.”

“We’re here, and I can’t leave until this is done.” She pointed north, toward the black mission-house. “My mother is in that nag shi. I’m not going to abandon her again. I can’t have her back, but I can set her free.”

Even in his state, Heinrich still managed to give her that under-the-eyebrows
you better do what I say girl
look. She knew it well; she’d seen it enough over the last few years.

When he couldn’t elicit a change in her, he turned to Gendreau. “What’s the verdict, Doc?”

“Hypothetically, I could pull you back from the brink.” The curandero left off, shaking a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiping his bloody hand on it. “But you’re so far gone that you’re going to die before I can make much of a difference. I would need a lot more time. To be honest I’m surprised you’ve lasted this long.”

“The human body is a miracle thing, Doc,” said Heinrich with a scoff. “It can take a good whoopin before it gives up. And I ain’t never gave up.” He coughed and choked, grimaced, spat to the side. “Before you go, will you take me out a Hawaiian and light it for me? They’re in my coat pocket behind me.”

Robin dug in one pocket, then another, found the box and the Zippo. Tapping out a cigar, she paused to drag it under her nose, savoring the rich coconut smell.

“S’good shit, baby,” said Heinrich.

She stuck the cigar in his mouth, and if she’d told you she didn’t do it to shut him up, she would have been by all rights a liar.

He walked it in with his lips. She flicked open the lighter, ignited it, and lit the cigar with it. He took a deep draw and a cloud of smoke billowed out of his face. He winced, his hands flexing against the nails and fence-wire.

“I can’t fuckin reach it.”

She dropped the lighter in his shirt pocket and patted it neatly in place. “You’ll figure it out.”

He grinned, squinting in the smoke, the Hawaiian caught in his teeth. “You a cold-ass cambion, Robin Martine. Colder n’ a welldigger’s ass.”

“It’s the season of the witch.”

He took another draw and let it go, coughing with a pained wince. “Give em hell, babe.”

44

T
HE
DIRT
ROAD
SEEMED
interminable, a ribbon of dust and gravel snaking into the false night. She didn’t remember it being this long, or the upslope being this dramatic.

As they got closer to the Lazenbury, they got quiet, rolling their steps and abandoning conversation, assumedly trying to preserve some element of surprise. Robin had put on Gendreau’s jacket, buttoning it closed to mitigate the shine of her heart inside her chest.

She looked back at the others. Gendreau’s face was the picture of dark focus, but Lucas and Sara were scared as hell.

“How many have you killed?” she asked them.

Lucas spoke to the ground. “Three.”

“What about you, Sara?”

Sara didn’t speak at first. Eventually she said, “My Gift isn’t meant for combat.”

“So…none.”

Irritation simmered in the back of Robin’s mind, but what Gendreau said next fizzled it. “She’s not here for fighting,” mumbled the curandero. “She’s the most talented conjurer and illusionist in the Order outside of my father. Sara is here to dispel Weaver’s illusions for us.”

“Ah.”

The ground leveled out and the west face of Lazenbury House hulked at them from the darkness like a ghost ship. Faintly to the north, past the end of the driveway, they could see the rollups of the garage. Except… the longer she looked at it, the less it resembled a garage and the more it appeared to be a stable. The doors shimmered and wavered, and she could see the cars inside—an RV and a Plymouth Fury—resting on a layer of scattered straw and rushes.