Malus Domestica (71 page)

If that’s Sara,
thought Robin,
then who is—

Gendreau stood paralyzed with horror and confusion at the edge of the room, watching this tragedy play out.

“Watch out!” screamed Robin.

But the Sara behind him was already stepping forward. She hooked an arm around the curandero’s neck.

At the last instant, he spotted the blade, and squeezed his eyes closed. That was probably the worst part—he saw it coming. The knife in her hand flashed, and she zipped open his throat as easy as you please.

A sheet of arterial blood poured into the collar of Gendreau’s effete white shirt, dyeing it a rich watercolor red.

Weaver shoved him and he stumbled over a broken chair, faceplanting onto the dusty boards.

The witch cackled, flaunting the knife.

Black blood from her broken nose made an inky bib down her face and chest. “You thought you were gonna beat the greatest illusionist that ever lived, did you? You thought you could see through my tricks, eh? Well, Ole Miss Tricksy got the best of
you,
didn’t she?”

“Eeeerraaaaaahh!”
roared Lucas, hurling the remainder of his poker cards. It looked like almost a whole deck.

A dazzle of cards arrowed across the saloon, passing through an open gauntlet formed by the crowd of clones, and the spinning squares tore through the true Weaver like a volley of flechettes fired from a rail gun.

Each card struck and lodged in the wall behind her in a rapid
tunk-tunk-tunk-tunk-tunk!
and a spray of black.

Some of them were intercepted by her ribs and face. A card protruded from the divot between the witch’s eye and nose.

Every shadow-clone in sight disappeared as one, extinguishing en masse, and the saloon itself flickered like a bad television signal. One second there were overturned tables and poker chips and smashed pint glasses all over the floor, then reality seemed to hiccup and suddenly they were standing in Marilyn Cutty’s living room.

The flatscreen TV had been knocked over and smashed, the chairs were against the walls, and the sofa had been shoved into the entertainment center, but otherwise they were back in the twenty-first century.

Weaver slumped onto her knees,
thump-thump,
and fell over.

“Somebody help, goddammit!”
bellowed Lucas. He sat on the floor, with Gendreau dragged up into his lap.

The curandero was holding his neck, trying to magic it back together, blood squirting through his fingers. His face was a drawn gray and his eyes were huge and terrified.

“Must—” he choked, blood gurgling out of his mouth.

“Don’t speak.” Robin took his cane away from him and clutched the cueball pearl in her strange hands, gazing into its smooth, iridescent white surface as if it were a crystal ball. She pushed her mind against the pearl and felt the heart-road inside, but it was muffled, weak, a whisper through a pillow, the thoughts of a chick in an egg.

She could take it, take it all, but it would require time. Twenty, thirty minutes, at least.

Time she didn’t have. She whacked the pearl against the floor.

Lucas gritted his teeth. “What are you doing?”

CRACK!
She banged it against the glossy hardwood again. “I’m trying to get at the
libbu-harrani
inside,” she told him. “I can absorb it and use it to fix him—”
CRACK!
“—but I can’t get it out fast enough with this hard matter around it.”

Finally, the pearl exploded into three heavy chunks with a puff of white dust. Robin picked up the largest piece.

In the middle was a tooth.

A human tooth: a pristine white molar.

Surreal alarm briefly scrambled her thoughts, a bewildered panic with wild, terrified wings, beating against the inside of her skull.
A human tooth—?

“Come on!” shouted Lucas.

“Yeah, okay.” Squeezing the ancient tooth in her fist, Robin tapped the ethereal energy inside, reeling it out like fishing line.

Visions from the 18
^th
century clouded her mind, hitchhiking on the power pouring from the tooth. Images of a petticoated woman tied to a maypole; men in buckled shoes. She ignored them and put her other hand on Gendreau’s throat

(Lucretia Melcher: we of the town of Philadelphia,)

and proceeded to channel the ectoplasm from his borrowed heart-road up her left arm and down her right and into Gendreau. The pulsar in her chest became

(hereby sentence you to be burned at the stake)

a stuttering supernova strobe. The bleeding stopped as Gendreau’s cells mingled, reattaching to each other, intertwining, reforming the pipettes of

(for the crime of being a witch.)

his severed carotid and jugular. His larynx, nicked by the blade, smoothed over and was whole. Bandy red muscles that had been split reached for each other and braided. The ragged smile stretching across his skin pursed together and resealed from ear to ear like the lips of a Ziploc bag.

Robin felt for a pulse. There wasn’t one. She tried his wrist; none there either.

No, wait—there it was. A bare sliver of movement, a fleeting squirm under the skin. The relief overwhelmed her and she sat back with a near-delirious moan.

“Oh my God,” said Lucas, looking over her shoulder. “You’re alive!”

Kenway hauled Sara up to a sitting position. The illusionist coughed and gasped for air, holding her throat, pain written on her face. “What happened?” she croaked.

“Uhh…” Kenway glanced at them. “The witch tricked me, and I choked you out on accident.”

Sara coughed again, wincing, glancing daggers of ice at the poor man. Then her eyes fell on the blood-soaked curandero in Lucas’s lap. “Oh!
Ohhhh! Doc!”
She struggled to her knees and hovered over Gendreau. “Is he gonna be okay? Is he
alive?”

“He’s still alive, but…I don’t know.” Robin fixated on the tooth in her palm. “I don’t know.”

❂

Karen Weaver dragged herself across the living room floor through a slimy, gritty, steak-sauce puddle of her own rotten blood. Dozens of Bicycle playing cards bristled from the wall above.

The Queen of Hearts was buried in her face up to the number, leaving only a tab of paper showing, as if her brain had been bookmarked.

She’d been shot full of holes by thirty-eight of them, six of them lodged in her ribs and spine. She was half carrion, her supernaturally-altered cells half a century old, extended by the life-force stored in Annie Martine’s apples…but a severed spinal cord is a severed spinal cord, and Karen no longer had the use of her legs.

Robin stood over her.

The witch rolled over and put up her shaking hands. The eye on the card side of her face was lax and dead, refusing to move. “I’m d-done for, you wuh-wearisome harlot.” Her mouth pooled with black. “Leave me buh-be.”

Robin knelt and took hold of the lapels of Weaver’s riotous rag-coat, lifting her.
“You
may be done,” she said, her voice without fire or ice, “but
I’m
not.” Her mind dived for the source of that dark power again.

This time she found a thread of warmth, and recognized it as stolen life-force, the give-a-shit from what Heinrich would have called Annie’s
flora de vida.

She drew them both out and internalized them.

Weaver’s face emptied, a jaundiced canvas pulling tight across her skull. Her nose caved in like melting wax and her eyes retreated, shriveling. Her lips thinned and shrank, sliding back to reveal horsey yellow teeth, giving her the silently screaming face of a peat-buried corpse.

“I’ll be waiting,” the witch wheezed in an arid whisper, and died for the second time.

❂

Marilyn Cutty’s clairvoyance proved to be to her advantage, as neither she or her Matron were anywhere to be found in the Lazenbury. Robin explored the house, moving purposefully from room to room like a SWAT cop. The second floor was occupied by the witches’ three spacious and palatial bedrooms, each one containing a four-poster bed and resplendent with each woman’s tastes.

Karen Weaver’s looked like the inside of a homestead lodge, with framed paintings on the walls depicting wildlife and mountain ranges, and there were bolts and scraps of cloth and half-finished projects all over the room.

The bedroom belonging to Theresa LaQuices held the austerity of a nun’s cell but it was messy, the bedquilt and wood floor strewn with clothes and dirty dishes.

Cutty’s was probably the cleanest and most ostentatious of the three, well appointed with baroque cherry furniture and silk fleur-de-lis wallpaper the oceanic green of seawater at the shore. The curtains were spiderwebs of white, lacy gossamer.

A descending-ladder hatch led up to the attic.

Robin pulled the hatch down and climbed into darkness, her shining heart cutting the soft shade like a torch.

The attic was enormous, running the length and width of the house. Dusty furniture and assorted bric-a-brac made a dark, cluttered forest of antiques, but there was a labyrinthine path cut through the middle; this she trickled carefully through, constantly on the lookout for an ambush, but when she found the Matron’s Anne Frank hideyhole in the very back she knew they were gone.

The door was half-hidden behind an armoire. She pushed it aside and behind it was a small room with a simple bed, a television, and a window overlooking the vineyard grove.

A chair sat abandoned in the middle of the room, arrayed with cushions and a warm blanket.

Robin went back downstairs, wondering if the Matron really
was
the Morgan le Fay from the Arthurian legends. No matter. If she
was
that old, she was dangerous regardless of what she called herself.

Leon Parkin was nowhere in the house either. A hot pang of shame drilled through her when she thought of the talk she would have to have with Wayne. What would he say? What would he
do?
What would
she
have to do?

Of course, she would have to hunt down Cutty and her Matron wherever they went. That was a given…this blood feud didn’t stop just because Robin eliminated her coven. The two of them had probably jumped ship to settle down somewhere else, God knew where. But that was their way, wasn’t it? The witches were most often nomadic. They roamed like rats from town to town, country to country, looking for a place to chew a hole and make a nest.

Wayne would undoubtedly want to go with Robin when she went after Cutty.

Could she allow that?

Did she have a choice?

He couldn’t stay here by himself. He needed to have a real life, a
normal
life, go to school and live in a house, not in the back of a van, running from maniacs and starting fires.

On the way through the living room, she checked on Gendreau. The blood-soaked curandero was breathing shallowly, his eyes slit open just enough to see her. They closed and his face darkened in pain.

The kitchen was abandoned and dark, no boar, no oblivious chefs. She fetched a glass of water from the tap.

On the way out, she heard a scuffling noise at the driveway door, and when she opened it Eduardo the dog came trotting out of the night. They must have accidentally shut the door on him.

“We really could have used your help back there, Eddie,” she told him.

Eduardo whined.

She brought the water back and gave it to Gendreau, who was sitting on Cutty’s sofa recuperating from having his throat cut. It felt a bit strange to see real people get really hurt—and almost
die
—and realize how long it takes for fully human people to get over their injuries. “Now I know why I’ve always been so strong,” she mused to herself, looking at her strange wire-and-vine hands. “So resilient.”

Gendreau winced, whispering, “We’ll figure out how to fix you. Come to the Order.” The slash across his throat was now a jagged pink lightning bolt.

“Fix me, or kill me?” She folded her arms. “Or do experiments on me?”

He smiled. “Can’t promise the alchemists won’t want a urine sample.” Wincing again, he swallowed. The knot of his adam’s-apple curtseyed under his new scar. “We’re not the Pentagon. Nobody will be dissecting you, promise.”

Sara combed his hair out of his face, petting his head. “Shut up, old man. Rest yourself. Are we going to have to get Thor here to knock you out with his hammer?”

He gave a weak grin, flashing one pointy canine.

“So now what?” asked Lucas. “I’m guessing that since you’re here talking to us, Cutty wasn’t upstairs.”

“No, she’s flown the coop. Took Wayne’s dad with her, too.”

“She left her dryad here?”

There was no way Cutty could have dug up Annie by herself in two days, much less transport a tree half the size of the Christmas pine in Rockefeller Square. “I guess she considers herself and her Matron more important than the nag shi tree.” Robin sighed. “She can always make another one, after all.”

“That’s true. Man, that kid’s gonna be bummed his dad wasn’t here.”

A few minutes passed as Robin considered her options and let them comfort Gendreau.

“Kenway,” she said, finally.

“Hmm?”

“Will you come with me into the vineyard?” she asked, pointing toward the rear of the house. “I don’t want to go by myself. I want you with me.” Her hand rested on Lucas’s shoulder. “You guys stay here and take care of Doc.”

Kenway got up out of the chair he’d been sitting in, with the hammer across his knees. Now he stood and wordlessly slung it over his shoulder.

❂

Night rested in the vineyard clotted and cold, an ocean floor that rustled with dead grapevines instead of kelp. Robin’s heart was a depth charge of light, sifting through the trellises in soft tines of gold.

Kenway walked silently alongside her, flint in his expression.

His furrowed brow and downcast face almost made him seem as if he were a pouty little boy, and suddenly she wanted to be far from this grave place, somewhere warm and far away from the world where she could be alone with him.

He noticed her watching and smiled, though his eyes were still hard. She wondered what he was thinking. She stared up at the stars as they walked. The “poke”, as the witch had called it, had straightened itself out on her death, and now the galaxy no longer seemed to be twenty feet above them.