Malus Domestica (72 page)

Without Weaver around to alter the lay of the land back here, the vineyard turned out to be a lot smaller than she’d thought. The first time she’d been through it felt like they’d walked for miles, passing out of the world and into the leagues of some alien wilderness of vines and fences. Now it only took them a few minutes to reach the end of the property, and even the landscaping seemed smaller than she remembered it: four scant patches of purple flowers and stunted trees barely twice as tall as the fence, all of it scattered with lavender that drooped and shook in the wind.

The nag shi, the dryad, the Malus Domestica, her mother Annie Martine stood in the center of the clearing at the end of the path.

All the apples were gone. The tree had been picked clean.

That, at least, Cutty had been able to undertake in the last two days. A mixture of solace and irritation passed through her. To Robin, the apples themselves represented the witches’ repulsive influence, their fell intent, and to see her mother rid of them was like seeing a loved one come out of rehab, free of heroin and ready to live again.

Robin went to the tree and looked up into its branches.

“I’m back, Mom. Marilyn is gone and I’m here.” The wind sighed in the tree’s leaves, a sound that Robin would swear until the day she died carried a certain relief.

“I’m here to … to fix what … what they did to you.”

She placed a hand on Annie’s rugged hip, and then the other one, and closed her eyes. She let her mind relax and flow in a rivulet downhill through the slopes of her arms, into the apple tree.

It was dark and quiet behind her eyelids.

She had the feeling that she was standing at the bottom of a dry well; she could even smell the dank fossilized memory of water.

Mom?

A lambent spirit lustered softly in the narrow space, cowering, insensate.

Robin felt it turn and regard her. Guarded exhaustion came from the other mind in lieu of words, like the nonsense murmur of someone waking from a deep sleep after a long day.
It’s me.
Robin smiled.
I’m here. I came back. I beat them and I’m here to get you out.

The warmest light she’d ever felt poured from the presence as Annie recognized her.

It was love, it was love and sorrow and regret, and a vacant space in Robin’s center filled up with such overwhelming affection that at first she could no longer speak, paralyzed with secondhand adoration.
It’s okay,
she thought,
it’s okay,
because she was sure she knew where the regret was coming from: her mother.
You didn’t know what would happen when you summoned the demon, but it’s okay, everything turned out okay for me.

It wasn’t only love that was filling her up, she gradually realized, it was Annie herself, her mother was moving toward her,
into
her, this consumed woman that had spent the last half-decade trapped in this spiritual sweat shop spinning straw into gold, spinning the town’s prosperity into life-giving apples.

Robin enveloped the spirit as it stepped into her and suffused her with elation. She took the last fragment of her mother into her arms and held her until the dry well that had been her cell inside the tree was empty and cold.

“Oh,” breathed Kenway at her side.

She opened her eyes and took her hands away from the now-cold bark, dimly aware that she’d been crying,
sobbing,
tears spilling down her face.

Her hands were soft and human again.

Both of them. She studied her left arm with astonishment and found it whole and functional.
New,
even—the scars that had littered her arms were gone without a trace. Robin’s knees buckled and she sat on her ankles like a penitent in the dewy grass, holding herself, lost in a happiness so stunning and so savage it was almost grief.

Slipping his arms under Robin, Kenway lifted her, staggered up onto his titanium foot, and carried her out of the vineyard.

F
RIDAY

45

W
AYNE
WAS
A
ZOMBIE
.

He spent the entirety of Halloween (and the two days before) piled up on the couch, mindlessly staring at a succession of horror movies on television and ignoring trick-or-treaters that rang at the doorbell every few minutes.

Where u at Dad

His cellphone was glued to his hand. In the hours and days since the assault on Lazenbury House had failed to turn up his father, he’d sent dozens and dozens of text messages to Leon’s phone, waiting and listening for a response.

Where are u dad?

But none came. He refused to go to school, staying in bed until almost lunchtime, and he didn’t sleep well at all, pacing quietly around the house after midnight, staring out the front window at the lights of downtown Blackfield like a soldier’s wife.

They’d put in a missing-persons report at the police station, but Robin knew that if Cutty didn’t want him to be found, he wouldn’t be.

For her part, she drove Wayne around in her plumbing van all Wednesday night and all Thursday, looking for Leon in all the obvious places—the high school twice, the liquor store three times, the police-taped comic shop once, and 1168 no less than six times—but he was nowhere to be found.

Answer me dam it

Wayne was staying with Joel Ellis at his mother’s uptown bungalow house, since it had a spare bedroom.

Robin spent Wednesday and Thursday night there, keeping vigil over the hollow-eyed Wayne and editing her videos for the MalusDomestica channel while Joel went back to work at Miguel’s.

Since Kenway Griffin didn’t have anything better to do, he hung around with her. On top of that, Ashe Armstrong came by in the evenings to talk with Joel about what they were going to do with Fisher’s comic shop, and ostensibly to console his best friend’s brother, so except for Wayne, the house was alive with activity. Joel definitely appreciated the company, since the weekend’s excitement was winding down and he’d finally had time to fully process his brother’s death.

His decision to go back to work so soon wasn’t made lightly. Miguel refused him at first, practically forcing him to go home and rest, and grieve, but Joel had insisted, saying he needed something to take his mind off of things, said he needed to stay busy.

Nothing made this more obvious than the way he’d been Wednesday afternoon; Armstrong had found him a drunken, sloppy mess splayed out in the kitchen floor with a beer, and he would have agreed to just about anything if it meant he wouldn’t have to sit in his childhood home alone, listening to the wind lowing in the eaves, waiting for Cutty (or, he admitted, a resurrected Euchiss) to come finish him off.

Someone knocked at the front door. Robin tore her eyes away from the TV
(Night of the Living
Dead,
of course) and answered it.

Instead of kids—she figured she’d probably handed out candy to at least thirty Spider-Men, Iron Men, and Batmen at this point—she found herself beholding the three magicians and their little dog, too. A feverish indigo sunset leapt across the sky behind them, making shadow-teeth of the city.

“Trick or treat.” Sara was wearing her Murdercorn wig again. She must have rescued it from their demolished Suburban.

Robin was dressed as a witch, of course, green-faced and hook-nosed. In a fit of pique, she’d also painted her cleavage green to fill out the deep V of her black Lycra gown. “Nice,” said Lucas Tiedeman. He was dressed in an Eastwood poncho and gambler hat, a cowboy revolver gleaming at his hip. “Super hot.”

“Thanks,” she said, dry but amused. “Come on in.”

She stepped aside, eyeballing Gendreau’s velvet top hat. With his navy waistcoat, he really
did
look like Willy Wonka.

Eduardo trotted between their feet and went into the living room. As soon as he saw Wayne sitting on the couch with his red eyes locked on the TV screen, the little dog clambered up onto the couch with him and pawed at his sleeve.

Noticing the dog, Wayne pulled Eduardo into his lap and wrapped his arms around him. Eddie licked his face consolingly.

Lucas smirked. “Eduardo Pendergast, the Boy Whisperer.”

They filed into the kitchen and sat at Mama Ellis’s table. The only light in the room came from the hood over the stove, casting a dim yellowish light at their feet. Somehow it gave the scene a desolate yet warm feel. Robin busied herself putting up the dishes in Joel’s dish drain, and said over her shoulder, “I have a pot of coffee on, if anybody wants any.”

“I’ll take some,” said Gendreau. His voice was the dusty, whispery croak of Death.

Robin eyed him. “How’s your throat?”

“Getting better.” The magician’s pizzle cane looked odd without the pearl on top. “I owe you my life.”

She smiled, searching the cabinet for a cup. She settled on a mug with a picture of a smiling macaw in front of a tropical vista. P
ANAMA
C
ITY
B
EACH
, it said across the bottom in slashy letters.

Sara opened the lid on the gravyboat in the middle of the table and peered inside. “Where’s your boyfriend?” Whatever was in there must have been distasteful, because she grimaced and put it back down.

“I don’t know,” said Robin, pouring coffee. “He’s been gone all day. He said he was trying to sell off his signage shop.”

Sara grinned crookedly. “I take it he’s made up his mind to go off with you, then.”

“Yeah. He wants to be my ‘cameraman’.”

“If the van’s a-rockin, don’t come a-knockin,” said Lucas, raising a fist for Sara to bump.

She scowled and opened the gravyboat, showing him the contents. “Pervert.”

Lucas sat back. “Ew.”

Handing off the coffee to Gendreau, Robin took off her floppy witch-hat and hung it on one of the posts of the fourth chair, then folded her arms and leaned against the stove.

“Thank you,” he croaked.

“You’re welcome.”

“Oh, that reminds me.” Gendreau reached into his jacket and took out a pocket watch, handing it to her. It was the busted pocket watch that had been hanging on Eduardo’s collar like some kind of canine Flava Flav. “Eddie wanted you to have this.”

“Is this his heart-road artifact?” Robin held it up to the hood-light and studied its cracked face-glass. It was genuine, but lacked the patina of an antique buffed by a thousand hands. She put it at less than twenty years old.

She could feel the power lying dormant inside, pulsing drowsily in time with the ticking clockwork.

Helping Annie into the afterlife had won her her humanity back, but she was still half-demon…and after the catalyzing effects of finally facing Andras, she supposed there were parts of her that were permanently stretched out of shape. She would never be fully normal again.

“I guess Eddie’s hanging up his wizard hat,” said Sara.

Lucas shrugged. “He really likes being a dog. Like, he
really
enjoys it. A forty-two-year-old dog. I think it’s kind of creepy, to be honest, but to each their own, I guess.”

“We should all be so lucky to find that kind of contentment,” said Gendreau. “Perhaps
we
should give being a dog a try.”

Lucas shook his head. “If I could lick my own nuts, I’d have to resign too.”

Sara feigned a noisy dry-heave.

The back of Eduardo’s watch screwed open. Robin took it off and examined the gears inside, where she found a lock of dark hair.

This was where the power she felt originated, a wellspring that darkled weakly but constantly, sending off the eerie signal of a long-dead radio station.

Hair in the watch…a tooth in the pearl…what
was
all this?

When she looked up at Gendreau, the question must have been plain on her face, because his own held an expectant solemnity. He looked twenty years older than he had when they’d met in her hospital room Tuesday; his bone-blond hair now seemed more silver than platinum, and his eyes were rimmed in shadow.

He took the tooth that had been inside the head of his cane out of his jacket pocket and put it on the table, sipping his coffee and regarding it as if he could divine the meaning of life from it.

Presently he asked, “Robin, have you ever heard of a ‘teratoma’?”

“No.”

“It’s a type of tumor that contains a piece of foreign organic matter. Some teratomas have teeth in them…some contain hair, some skin cells, some bones, some even have entire body parts in them like hands and eyes.”

“Well that’s freaking
gross.”

“Indeed.” He picked up the tooth and held it at eye level. “Teratomas are rare, but not super-rare. One out of every forty thousand births. That doesn’t sound like many, but it comes out to about five a day.”

Robin couldn’t help but be surprised. It sounded like the kind of nightmarish thing you’d only see maybe five times a year, if that. She remembered seeing something when she was studying in Heinrich’s Texas stronghold…an article about children with oversized tumors that turned out to contain their unborn twin. Pale, gnarled, brain-dead hobgoblins wadded up in a pouch of skin, quietly and insidiously stealing their sibling’s blood supply. Parasitic twin? She couldn’t remember, and frankly she didn’t want to. The concept was terrifying to think about, even in her current state. It was like something out of a Japanese horror movie.

“Anyway,” Doc Gendreau continued, “the witches’
libbu-harrani
are teratoma, usually located around the heart.”

“A cancer that channels ectoplasmic energy.”

“Pretty much.”

“Wait,” said Robin, “you mean that when they do their ritual, the heart isn’t actually replaced? It’s still there?”

“You’ve never looked for yourself?”

She thought about it. “It’s kind of hard to do an autopsy on a pile of ashes.”

“Ah…yeah. I suppose it would be.” He nodded. “But yes, the heart is still there. It just beats really slowly. The witch is—” he made air-quotes with his fingers, “—‘undead’. This side of flatlining. A body on the brink of death, animated by the heart-road and kept from rotting by the dryad fruit.”

Robin pushed away from the stove and paced slowly. “So it
is
possible to completely revert a witch to human form.”