by Hunt, S. A.
The threat devolved into a coughing fit, and she gasped for air. Her lungs felt like they were full of down feathers, itching and wispy.
“You don’t know your mother as well as you think you do.” Weaver opened the restroom door and wrenched her sleeve out of the girl’s hand, her expression one of genuine concern. “And you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into. Stay away from the Lazenbury house, and we’ll leave you be. Get out of Blackfield and I’ll…I’ll convince Marilyn not to come after you, yes, that’s what I’ll do.”
With that, the witch had the last word and slipped out the door. Robin wanted to retort, but she couldn’t stop coughing and catch her breath long enough to speak. The cavity of her chest was alive with fluttering-itching-whispering.
A lump in her throat. She made long, drawn-out huuuckkkk sounds as if she were trying to muster up a loogie, and some wet little wad popped up into her mouth, lying on her tongue like a swallowed cigarette butt.
Robin staggered over to the sink, coughing as she went, and spat it into the basin.
A dead moth.
“Ugh,” she said, and coughed again.
This time the tickling sensation intensified, rushing up her windpipe, and when she coughed again a cloud of fat fluttery moths burst from the depths of her lungs.
Their tiny legs fought for purchase on the roof of her mouth, filling her throat. The ones that managed to escape fell into the sink and battered the mirror, dragging their saliva-wet bodies across the glass, leaving smears of bitter wing-powder.
Bits of insect were caught in her teeth. Her stomach rumbled and gnarled, and her mouth flooded with salty spit. She was going to puke.
Wheezing, sucking wind, fighting to breathe, Robin pushed open a toilet stall and braced her hands on the seat. Tears clung to the rims of her eyelids. The convulsion came without preamble, as it always does, and she unleashed a torrent of sour vomit.
“Guh,” she gasped, staring down into a brown slurry of coffee and eggs. She flushed the toilet.
Pulling down her jeans and sitting on the john, she spooled out a handful of toilet paper and scrubbed her tongue with it in disgust. The sensation of having moths in her mouth was unbearable—after chasing the supernatural for several years there wasn’t much on this planet that Robin was still afraid of, but insects never failed to make her skin crawl.
Urine trickled into the water as she relaxed, covering her face with her hands.
Shivers danced down her back, turning into a pins-and-needles prickly feeling, goosebumps running across her shoulder-blades and down her arms. The hair stood up on her wrists and the backs of her hands. She hugged herself against the chill, wringing her hands.
Itchy, so itchy, suddenly she was scratching her hands, and then her arms, the goosebumps had become this helpless, crazy-making itchiness…it wouldn’t go away but it felt so good, it was so satisfying, Jesus, she was digging miniature orgasms out of her skin like a paleontologist unearthing fossils. Her fingernails left burning streaks down her forearms.
Opening her eyes, she looked down and saw that her arms were covered in pimples. Dozens—no, hundreds—of whiteheads. Not only were they on her arms, but they’d spread to her thighs, too.
“What the hell?” If she didn’t know any better, she’d have thought she had chicken pox, or perhaps impetigo.
She’d caught impetigo once, back in the mental hospital. She dropped her soap on the shower floor and picked it up again, shaving her legs with it. Washing it off apparently hadn’t rid it of bacteria, though, because the next day her legs were covered in whiteheads like this. A month of rubbing them down with antibacterial cream had cleared it up, but she’d been a religious user of bottled shower gel and body wash ever since.
The crawling sensation came back. This is wrong, she thought, slowly turning her arms this way and that, inspecting the surprise acne. Something is wrong. Something is really wrong here. She dug at one of the largest whiteheads, picking at it until it came loose in a tiny plug of wax.
Two little red-green eyes stared up at her.
She watched in horror as a housefly wriggled up out of the pore and struggled to its feet. The fly rubbed its forelegs all over its head as its wet, glassy wings unraveled, drying and hardening.
Robin slapped it away. “No. No no no no.” Her boots clomped a jig of panic on the tile floor.
This dislodged several other whiteheads on her thighs, and she leaned back on the toilet as if she could possibly get away from the spectacle. More flies pushed and floundered up out of her skin. “No, no, no, no, no.” As the flies emerged they left holes, stretched and hollow like toothmarks.
Within seconds, her arms were covered in a honeycomb of gaping pores. Her thighs resembled the surface of a sponge, freckled with holes. Some of them were still packed with tiny black bodies.
Dead flies littered the floor around her boots, rolled into wet bits by her frantic slapping and rubbing. Hundreds of them buzzed and droned around her head, crawling up the sides of the lavatory stall. She pressed her palms to her face again and tried to will it all away.
That’s it—maybe it’s an illusion. Maybe I can think it away. Acne littered her cheeks with lumps. The pimples on her forehead squirmed restlessly under her fingers. I think I can, I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. The little engine that could, goddammit, let it be an illusion and not an actual conjuration. Let it just be a visual suggestion, don’t let these flies be real—
Robin opened her eyes to silence.
No flies. She checked out her arms, expecting the holes to linger, but they were gone.
Relief crashed into her system, such blessed relief that she actually peed again. Her skin was smooth once more, the fine hairs ruffling under her hands as she rubbed the heebie-jeebies away. Pulling up her jeans, she stumbled backward out of the toilet stall and spat several times into the sink, washing her mouth out, washing dead moths down the drain.
Some of them still flapped and fluttered around the ceiling, trying to find a way out.
As she noticed them, the moths winked out of existence.
“Oh, that bitch,” she said to her subscribers, checking for acne in the mirror. She shuddered, pulling the camera off of her jacket and pointing it at her own face. “I am so going to kick her ass first.”
When she was finally convinced the illusion was out of her system, she washed her hands, washed her mouth out again, and went back to the waiting room. Karen Weaver was gone, and so were Wayne and his father.
Kenway looked up from an issue of National Geographic. “Everything come out okay?”
❂
The ride back to the apartment was much warmer inside the cab of the truck. She stared out the window as she rode, her mind sorting through options, the GoPro aimed out the window collecting B-roll footage. Joel rode in the middle, the gearshift protruding suggestively between his knees.
The protective algiz rune on her chest had been mostly sufficient until now, defending her from all manner of energy, ricocheting it back into its source. It still worked on familiarization, but Weaver’s moths-and-flies illusion…well, it had been a bit of a shock.
But why shouldn’t she have been surprised? After all, according to Heinrich, the Cutty coven was the most powerful in America.
And now it was one of the last. Under his tutelage, she had roamed the continent, hunting down every witch she could find in the Lower Forty-Eight, and a couple in Canada. Nineteen of them, from Neva Chandler, the self-proclaimed Witchlord of Alabama, to Gail Symes of Arizona, who called herself the Oracle of the Sands. There were still hundreds of minor witches out there—newbies, idiots, little girls who had no idea their hearts had been sacrificed to Ereshkigal, and like Neva, vapor-locked mummies too run-down to migrate out of their own ghetto—but most of them were too embedded, too well-hidden, or so weak that they might as well have been your normal every-day palm reader.
The witches had no real hierarchy. They had no structured government. Most of
them had divvied up the country as the first Presidents were buying it piece by piece from the Mexicans and the Spanish, and ripping it from the hands of the Native Americans.
Ever since, they moved from town to town every couple of decades, eradicating the weak ones or dueling each other like Highlanders.
Robin had never witnessed a witch-duel, but it must have been a sight to see. She turned the camera inward at the truck’s cab and spoke to Joel. “I think you should stay a couple nights somewhere else. Maybe at Kenny’s place. Y’know, in case the killer knows where you live.”
Joel wore one of Kenway’s old gray exercise shirts, ARMY across the chest. “I’ll be aight, I got my mama’s old shotgun at the house. I don’t think he knows where I live anyway.” Pointing at the camera, he added, “How you gonna put me on YouTube, and I ain’t fixed up at all? I look like I been through a wood chipper.”
“You look fine.”
“At least give me a ride back there and let me take a shower and pack a little bag.” Joel tugged the chest of the huge T-shirt out. “This thing like a tent on me. And, no offense, hero, but your clothes are all beat to Hell.”
Kenway smirked. “None taken.”
Joel pointed at the symbol tattooed on her chest. “What’s with the plunging neckline all of a sudden? And what’s this? You all up in that magic too?”
“It’s called algiz.”
“Owl jizz?” asked Kenway.
“Nooo,” said Robin, “‘All-geez’. It’s a protective rune from the Elder Futhark alphabet, one of a number of sigils witches use to channel and catalyze their Gift.”
“Gift?”
“…Their power. That’s what they call it. They don’t like calling it magic, and I don’t either.”
“Why not?”
Kenway stopped for a red-light. At four in the morning, the roads were nearly dead except for a few people going to work. Without the radio on, the atmosphere inside the truck was quiet and contemplative.
“Magic is…something wizards and magicians do in fantasy movies and on stages in Vegas, you know? Magic is David Copperfield and David Blaine. Card tricks, cutting women in half, pulling rabbits out of hats, kids’ birthday parties.” Robin retreated into jargon and esoterica, not telling him the reason she didn’t like calling it magic was because her mother Annie called it magic. And after seeing how evil and dark it was, she didn’t like associating it with her mother, even if it took pedantry to separate the darkness from her memory of Annie.
Everything she could do to distance that addle-tongued lady from the sinister craft of the witches, she did. Yes, Annie was a witch…but that didn’t mean she had to be lumped into the same gang. Annie was Glinda; she was Sabrina; she was Hermione. She was good and she did Magic, because Magic was what good witches did.
On the other side of the intersection was a Starbucks. Kenway crossed the road and pulled into the parking lot.
Robin continued. “What the acolytes of Ereshkigal—true witches—do is far less whimsical, and goes a lot deeper. They channel the essence of the spirit world itself, guiding it with language, and intensifying it with sheer will.” She pointed at the rune on her chest. “Using language to guide it works both ways, fortunately. We can’t draw it like they can, but we can manipulate their energy. Think of their power as a laser, and words and symbols as mirrors and lenses.”
Joel nodded in understanding as Kenway pulled up to the drive-thru menu.
Robin offered him her debit card, but his face conveyed reluctance. “Go ahead,” she said, urging him on with the card in her hand. “You know I’m good for it. I’m staying in your apartment, after all. I owe you anyway.”
While Kenway ordered them coffee, Robin took out her cellphone and dialed a number. It rang several times, but no one picked up. A recorded voice told her that the owner of the number hadn’t set up his voicemail yet, so she couldn’t even leave him a message.
“Dammit,” she told the mechanical voice. “Heinrich, when will you ever get with the times?”
This hadn’t been the first time that Robin had made plans to go after a formidable witch alone. She peeled back the lapel of her shirt, looking not only at the algiz on her chest but the stab-wound scar at the top of her right breast.
The Oracle of the Sands had been a hell of a fight—Symes had been hiding out in one of the smaller, dinkier, rundown casinos on the outskirts of Vegas. Robin had gone in masquerading as one of the customers, but as soon as the Oracle realized she was there (thanks to a particularly eagle-eyed pit boss and an armada of surveillance cameras), every customer in sight lost their minds. Suddenly the casino was full of crazed cat-people out for her blood, and Robin barely made it out with her life.
She found out after the fact that Symes had gassed a cage full of house-cats in a specialized panic room in her penthouse suite. A familiar-bomb, basically.
Joel borrowed Robin’s cellphone and tapped a number into it. “Hello? Blackfield Police Department?” he said, pressing it to his ear. “I need to be talkin to y’all about something, and you gonna want to hear this. I think I just got rescued from a serial killer.”
He paused. “Yeah, I’ll wait.”
Kenway handed out the coffee and pulled back into traffic. “Hello there, Mr. Officer,” Joel said, folding his arms. “I almost got killed by some maniac, and I thought y’all would like to know about it.
“Yeah, he drugged me and when I woke up I was chained to the ceiling next to a dead guy. Yeah. No, he said he was going to bleed me dry, because he needed ‘blood for the garden’. No, I have no idea what that means. No, the only enemies I got live in glass bottles. Yeah, glass bottles. As in alcohol. …It was a joke.”
He sipped coffee. “You want me to come up there and take a statement? Aight. I’ll be up there in a little bit. I got to go get my car and some clean clothes.”
“So what you gonna do now, Malus?” asked Kenway.
“After we take Joel to his apartment, I want to try to edit and upload today’s video,” said Robin, glaring daggers out the window. “And then head out to my old house and formally introduce myself to Mr. Parkin. If there’s really a monster in there, I’m sure my mother had something to do with it. And I’m sure there was a good reason.”
“Point of order,” said Joel, holding up a finger.
“Hmm?”
“I need to get my car. Black Velvet is not at my house.”
“Where is it?” asked Kenway.
“I drove Velvet to my date with the mysterious Mr. Big Red last night.” Joel massaged his face with both hands, talking through his fingers. “I left it parked in front of the serial killer’s apartment.”
15
THE STETHOSCOPE WAS COLD on Wayne’s back. A latex-gloved hand cupped the curve of his ribs as he breathed in, out, in, out. “Do me a favor and breathe real deep,” said the doctor, in his soft Australian accent. Morning sunlight streamed in through the window, throwing bars of gold over Leon. He stood at the end of the bed, his arms folded imperiously, his eyes red and squinty.
Wayne filled his lungs with the hospital’s minty-sweet air and expelled it slowly.
“Hrrm. This is weird.”
“What’s weird?” asked Leon.
“Well…” Dr. Kossmann took a Dum-Dum sucker out of his labcoat pocket. He was an athletic, fresh-faced young man that looked like he could be the Blackfield High football captain. As he spoke, he emphasized his words with the sucker. “…We gave your son a dose of antivenin last night when he got here, but I’ve got to say, this is the fastest I’ve ever seen anybody recover from a snake-bite.”
He gave the sucker to Wayne, then lifted the boy’s left leg with gentle hands and placed it on the bed. “The swelling’s gone down precipitously.”
The bandage had been removed so the bite could be examined. “There’s very little discoloration, there’s no necrosis or infection at all in or around the punctures. I don’t know what this lady Mrs… Mrs. Weaver put on you before they brought you here,
but whatever it was, it must have been some kind of miracle salve.”
Wayne unwrapped the cream soda Dum-Dum and stuck it in his mouth, staring at his leg and marveling at his own luck.
“Obviously I’ve never been one for homeopathic hoo-doo,” said Dr. Kossmann, picking up a clipboard and clicking an inkpen. “But judging by the effect this had on your son, Mr. Parkin, maybe it’s time to start believing.”
“Maybe she’s one of those crazy religious snake-handlers you hear about in this neck of the woods.”
The doctor grunted.
They hadn’t told the hospital about Wayne’s strange absence in the middle of the night. As far as the ward’s nurses were concerned, Leon had fallen asleep and his son had inadvisedly wandered out to the parking lot for some fresh air. This explained why the soles of Wayne’s feet were dirty, and Kossman didn’t seem to even be aware that anything had happened, so they didn’t trouble him with it. Which was good, because he really didn’t want to have to tell the story again.
“So he’s gonna be fine?” asked Leon.
Dr. Kossmann nodded. “Oh yeah,” he said to the clipboard, writing. “He’s more than okay—all things considered, he’s fantastic. A week or two of taking it easy, maybe stay off that foot as much as possible, and he’ll be good as new. And that’s a liberal estimate. Honestly, I think he ought to stay here another night for observation, but in truth he’s not really gonna get any better day-to-day care here than he would at home.” He winked. “And there’s no Xbox here either.”
“Point taken.”
“Is there any pain?” asked Dr. Kossmann, gently feeling the flesh around the bite. “On a scale from one to ten, ten being the worst pain you ever felt?”
“One?” said Wayne. “I mean, I guess it just feels like a bruise.”
That seemed to satisfy the doctor. “Like I said, he can stay here another night if you’re on pins and needles about his condition, but if you want to take him home…I’m not going to put my foot down. To the best of my knowledge, he’s through the worst of it.