Malus Domestica (74 page)

“I thought you might appreciate sleeping on a bed,” he was saying, “even if it’s an RV bed, a lot more than a sleeping bag in the back of a panel van.”

Her throat closed up when she saw the sink full of ice and the bottle of champagne.

“That’s for drinkin, not for smashin,” Kenway said, climbing into the motorhome. The whole thing lurched to one side as he filled the narrow space with his bulk. “But if you
really
wanna christen it, I got a bottle of Boone’s Farm some girl left in my fridge last Christmas after my Army unit party.”

Wayne climbed in and sat in the dinner nook. “Cool,” he said, listlessly staring around. His eyes were dim, bleak flashlights with old batteries. His hands rested on the table as if he couldn’t remember what they were for.

Kenway stood in the galley gauging him. He opened the cupboard over the stove and took out a stack of clear party cups. “You know what, kid?” he said grimly, but encouragingly. “You need to take the edge off. How about you share this wine with us?”

“It’s champagne.”

“How about you share this champagne with us?”

Wayne stared into the back of the RV. “Yeah? Okay.”

He checked his phone for the ten-thousandth time. A few moments ticked by as Kenway stood there with the bottle in his hand.

“Shit,” he said, “I forgot to get a corkscrew. I’ll be right back.” He buried the bottle back in the ice and went outside, the motorhome shaking like a wet dog. There was a faint, metallic
clank
as he opened the toolbox on the back of his truck and then heavy raking noises as he rummaged through tools and other assorted detritus.

Wayne looked up from his phone. “I can’t believe you guys are gonna sit in here and drink champagne while my dad’s still out there somewhere. With that
witch.”

Robin had forgotten she was dressed as one. The Lycra witch-dress hugged her slinky, boyish figure so tightly it began to make her self-conscious.

The windows flashed softly as heat lightning danced across the sky again. Sitting down in the breakfast nook across from him, she took his hands with her pasty green ones and looked into his face with deadly seriousness. “We’re going to find them. I promise. I’ve found every witch I’ve looked for up til now…and this one won’t get away either.”

He watched her, the blinds-filtered light glinting on his glasses, the cellphone coloring his jaw a ghastly blue. The sky guttered the windows with lavender lightning.

“You hear me?” she reiterated. “We
will
find your dad.”

He nodded, perhaps a bit dismissively, and went back to flipping through the apps on his phone.

“No. Listen.” She leaned in and looked up at his face again.

He smouldered at her in irritation, but at least he was paying attention.

“I will turn every stone, I will burn down every house, I will fight every demon between here and Hell if that’s what it takes.” She sat back, letting her hands slide away from his. “I’ve killed to get where I am, and I ain’t afraid to do it again. … So don’t count me out, little man.”

In the reflection on Wayne’s glasses, she saw an eerie green gleam in her own silhouette’s eyes.

To his credit, he didn’t flinch.

Kenway stepped into the Winnebago again, tilting it crazily. He held up a pair of channel-lock pliers. “Never leave home without em.”

Robin shook her head. “You are such a redneck.”

He picked up the champagne and clamped the parrothead of the pliers on the cork, twisting it like a stubborn bolt, and it came out with a heady
thoonk!,
gurgling white foam into the sink. He filled three cups with it and carried them to the table. Robin scooted over and let him sit down.

Wayne sipped at the champagne and wrinkled his nose. “Tastes kinda like ginger ale.”

He finished it off. “I think I like beer better, honestly.”

“Well, uhh!” Kenway tossed his back and slammed the cup on the table with a feeble clap of plastic. “I had no idea you was a grown-ass man, Mr Connoisseur!” The vet pushed himself to his feet and started to pour himself another, then decided to drink it straight from the bottle.

He gave a shudder. “Aight, maybe you got a point. I got some Terrapin and some Yuengling in my apartment.” He pulled the plug on the sink to let the ice-water drain.

Robin took the bottle from him and pulled a swig. “I concur.”

Kenway paused in the door to study her face.

“What do you think?” His face seemed to be asking,
Did I do good?

She smiled widely. “I think you spent a hell of a lot of money and gambled your place away on a girl you barely know, but … I do love it.” The wooden cabinets and walls glowed a soft cheese-orange in the darkness. “I really do.” She slid her arms around his neck and squeezed him tight. The bottle in her hand rolled across his back.

He pulled her against him and he gave her an earnest hug. “Thank you,” he said, his face muffled by her jacket. “For understanding. For standin there and lettin me cry it out.”

She pulled back and looked him in the face. The laugh-lines under his eyes were wet.

She scraped them with her thumb. “Of course.”

They stepped down out of the Winnebago and Kenway locked it. Robin stood there, her eyes playing over his broad back, and she wondered what he was thinking, wondered how she’d let this man so easily slide into her crazy life where so many others before him had bounced right off. She thought about asking him if she was just his ticket out of town, but decided that the random crying jag over his friend and the fact that he actually had the money, and the means, to leave Blackfield whenever he wanted, must have meant that this was a conscious, deliberate decision on his part.

Was she, though? Was she just the means to an end? Was she an excuse to leave? Robin wrapped her arms around herself, feeling the cold a little bit more than usual. He did seem to have real feelings, but…if she let him in, was he going to stay?

“Are you
sure
you want to be my cameraman?” she finally blurted out. ‘Cameraman’, here, having evolved beyond its original platonic connotation.

Connotations,
she thought,
isn’t that where the magic is?

Kenway turned, hope lighting up his red-rimmed eyes. “I don’t think I’ve ever wanted anything more.”

She realized it was the first time she’d seen anything like it since she’d met him. The even-keel Zen complacency she’d come to associate with him hadn’t been contentment at all, it had been a…
lost-ness.
A sort of bleak one-foot-in-front-of-the-other dormancy. His perceived failure to save Chris Hendry had been a self-imposed prison cell.

“Even after what you’ve seen?” she asked.

Taking out a pack of cigarettes, he tapped one out and tucked it into his mouth. He produced a lighter. “Yeah. Hell, all that probably did the
opposite
of running me away.” He cupped his hands around his face and lit the cigarette, putting the lighter away. They started up the sidewalk to his shop.

“Ever since I met you,” he said, the cigarette’s cherry flaring, “it’s like… it’s like….”

He pincered the cigarette away from his face, jetting a stream of blue-white smoke. “Well, lemme put it like this: do you have any idea how much body armor weighs in the Army?”

“I can’t say I do.”

“It’s a Kevlar vest with ceramic impact plates capable of stopping assault rifle rounds. The Kevlar fabric by itself is like wearing a leather jacket, but with the plates in, it’s forty pounds or more, especially with extra side plates, codpiece, helmet. It’s heavy as balls, but if you wear it all day you kinda get used to it. But at the end of the day? When you take it off? Suddenly all that weight is magically gone. You feel like you’re walking on the moon. Your step is
all
spring.”

His beard parted with a broad smile. “Ever since I met you, it’s like I took off my armor. I can breathe again. The gravity’s so low I could jump right out of the atmosphere.” An anxious hand crept up to rub his face. “And, you know, well, I don’t … really want to give that up. You know?”

The corner of Robin’s mouth quirked up. “I know.”

He unlocked the front door of his art shop, the cigarette cherry glowing in the dark shapes smeared across the glass, and pulled it open. The front area presented them with long smears of pale gray: the rollers and spools of his vinyl machines.

Robin and Wayne followed him through the shop and into the garage. Wayne’s face was traced in blue by his cellphone screen. She could see that he was texting his father again. “I’ll have to teach you how to play cornhole,” Kenway told him, as they started up the stairs to the loft apartment. “You’ll like it. Fun stuff.”

“Mmm,” Wayne grunted noncommittally.

An electronic
bink!
came from the top of the stairs.

Wayne froze, staring at Robin’s face. His glasses were white squares, refracting the screen of his cellphone.

His thumb danced across his phone. They heard the
bink!
come from upstairs again.
“DAD?!”
Wayne screamed, scrambling up the stairs toward Kenway’s apartment.

Robin lunged for his ankles and missed.
“No!”
she screamed after him.
“Don’t go up there!”

The boy reached the top of the staircase and disappeared over the crest. Robin and Kenway thundered up after him, his titanium foot clanking and thunking like a robot, the champagne sloshing in her hand. Rising into the lightless apartment, she scanned the dark shapes around them, trying to pick out something familiar, something human.

Wayne was in the open kitchen. The white-eyed shadow snatched up a square of light and waved it over his head. “It’s his phone! It’s Dad’s phone!”

“Come on,” Robin told him, her arms and neck prickling. “We need to get out of here,
now.”

He came over, holding up Leon’s phone and his own. “Why is Dad’s phone here? Is Dad here? Why would Dad be here? He’s never even
been
here, has he?”

She took his wrist. “Come on, we got—”

“AAAH!”
screamed Kenway, lurching forward onto one knee. The cigarette fell out of his mouth.

Robin spun, startled, to find Leon Parkin.

Both his hands were wrapped around the Osdathregar, and Leon had jammed it deep into Kenway’s back. Heat lightning blued the clouds outside, briefly turning the windows overlooking the canal into a bank of television screens.

A strange silhouette, squat and angular, stood against the squares of dim light. The apartment plunged into darkness again.

We’re screwed,
Robin knew,
we waltzed right into this,
as Kenway crawled away on his clanking leg, the silver dagger jutting from his back. She moved toward the maniacally grinning Leon, clenching her fists and preparing for a hand-to-hand.

She still had the champagne; she’d break it over his head.
I got to take him out of commission first,
she decided, but Wayne’s hands slammed into her chest.

“No!”
the boy shrieked,
“don’t kill him!”

As soon as he shoved her, Wayne ran at his father. Leon threw his arms wide, his eyes and teeth flashing in the abyss of his black face. Wayne plowed into his belly and both of them teetered over the edge of the stairs, falling into the stairwell. The sound of them tumbling down the risers was a sickening drum solo of knees and elbows.

Leon snarled downstairs. Wayne screamed. The scuffling-smacking sounds of a fight carried up to her, and then everything was still and quiet.

Silent lightning illuminated the loft’s windows, tracing the strange figure again. “It’s so nice to finally meet you,” the thing in the wheelchair said, with a voice that was like dry leaves blowing across a sidewalk.

“Morgan,” said Robin.

“Morgan,” said the Matron. “Sycorax. Circe. Cassandra of Apollo. Miss Cleo of the Psychic Hotline. One of those, I’m sure. I forget. You get to be my age, you forget a lot of things.”

The light over the stove clicked on, bathing the apartment in a soft, slanting light.

Marilyn Cutty stood on the other side of Kenway’s chopping block. “Happy Halloween, littlebird,” said the witch, coming around the kitchen island at a stately pace.

Tearing her eyes away from Cutty, Robin peered at the wheelchair at the edge of the hoodlight and saw a thin, hunched creature, a hideous marionette swaddled in an old quilt. Her arms were twigs, hooked into drawn, papery fists. Her simian Yoda face pushed puggishly into the front of her skull. Eyes like manzanilla olives twitched in gaping sockets.

Perched in the valley between the Matron’s hairy left ear and the knob of her left shoulder was a burden of sweat-slick flesh. It bulged and undulated like the egg of a giant snake.

“Ah, yes,” rasped the antiquated troll, almost obscured under the tumor. Her face was a mask of stiff yellow skin. “Happy Halloween, my dear.”

“Champagne,” said Cutty. “Feeling festive, I see.”

Robin bent carefully, cautiously, and stood the champagne bottle on the floor to free her hands. Her eyes flicked down to the Osdathregar sticking out of Kenway, and out of the corner of her eye she saw Cutty regard it as well.

Blood glistened between the veteran’s lips. Was he dead? Her heart tumbled in her chest.

Robin lunged for the dagger, but she was too late. It leapt out of Kenway’s back and whirled across the room, landing in Cutty’s outstretched hand. Before Robin could react, Cutty gestured at her and an invisible force washed her up off the floor and across the apartment, where she hit the bedroom wall and hung there, suspended some eight feet in the air.

The impact knocked down several paintings in a card-flutter of canvas squares. The frames banged and slapped as they fell.

Cutty smiled as she paced slowly, inexorably, out of the kitchen. “Ereshkigal.” She flourished the dagger. “We’ve been incubating her for quite some time now. It takes time to resurrect a death-goddess, you know.”

“That’s
why you settled in Blackfield and never left, never went nomad like the others,” said Robin. The wall pressed against her back hard enough that she thought she would sink through the brick.

“Bingo.” Cutty pointed the dagger like a magic wand.