Malus Domestica

by Hunt, S. A.

  She missed Kenway, wanted him here, should have brought him in. Needed his warm Viking closeness.

  It made her realize that he made her feel safe and normal, two things she hadn’t experienced in a very long time. Him and his broad back and Thor hair and quietly dark demeanor, constantly coiled and coolly hungry, like a one-legged James Bond. He made her feel like someone stood beside her against the world for a change.

  Maybe that’s why I like him so much, she understood, watching the old women eat. Not that she was weak without him, but it was nice to be able to rely on someone other than yourself for a change.

  “So you really are witches?” asked Wayne.

  “We are, mon garçon,” said Theresa.

  “You don’t look like witches.”

  Cutty smiled graciously. Robin knew enough about her to see under the mask and knew that it was an act. “Pray tell, young man—what is a witch supposed to look like?”

  Wayne’s eyes danced from his father to Robin, and then he murmured to Cutty, shrinking a little bit, “I don’t know.” A piece of bread touched his lips, clutched in his hands like a squirrel. He spoke into it bashfully. “Green? With all black clothes and a big floppy hat?”

  “And a wart on my nose and a broom and a cauldron full of bubbling brew?”

  He pushed his glasses up on his nose.

  “Well, you can thank artistic license for that depiction. Pure fiction.” She cut into her steak, talking as she did so. “…It’s sort of like Santa Claus. You know what the real Santa Claus looks like, yes?”

  “Santa Claus?” Wayne sat up, putting down the bread and pantomiming a beard. They had obviously strayed into something a ten-year-old could be enthusiastic about. “Yeah! He’s all dressed up in red, with white bits around his wrists and the edge of his hat, and he’s got rosy cheeks and a big red nose, and a big white beard. He carries a giant sack full of toys and rides in a sleigh pulled by reindeer.”

  Cutty forked the bite of steak into her mouth and waved this away as if to dispel it. “A fiction, concocted by a newspaper cartoonist and perpetuated by the Coca-Cola company to sell soda. The real man looked much different, and didn’t live on the North Pole.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. The name ‘Santa Claus’ comes from Sinterklaas, which is the Dutch name for Saint Nicholas, also known as the bishop Nikolaos of the ancient Greek city of Myra. People left their shoes out on the stoop at night, and Nikolaos would leave coins in them.”

  Leon paused, corn cob halfway to his mouth. “Santa Claus was a Greek priest?”

  “Yes. He was a very generous man, and he was also one of the most powerful magicians and alchemists that ever lived. He was tall, with a long beard, and not thick about the middle or rosy-cheeked as pictures would make you think. Nicholas died in the year 343 and his remains were buried in Italy.” Cutty swirled her tea, the ice clinking musically against the glass. She eyed Robin. “The point of my history lesson is, most things are not as others would have you believe. There is always a long story behind an old face.”

  “So witches aren’t the only ones that can do magic?”

  Weaver stifled a burp, speaking dismissively. “Heavens, no. Well, it depends on what you call ‘magic’. …We don’t really like to call it ‘magic’, by the way. That’s reserved for busking, card tricks, that kind of thing. Pulling rabbits out of hats.”

  “Witches are the most prominent users of paranormal energy these days,” said Cutty. “Always have been, really. Men can do it as well, like Nikolaos of Myra, but it requires artificial means. They can’t do it naturally like we can. They require conduits, such as crystal balls, alchemy, staves. As a Christian, Nicholas used a shepherd’s-crook…which is where candy canes came from, if you can believe that.

  “Whole secret societies have risen and fallen over the centuries, seeking to channel the Gift. Thaumaturgy, which is the name we use for it, is threaded into our very being. Men—wizards, warlocks, magi, magicians, whatever they choose to call themselves, can only borrow this force. We are filled with it. Thanks be to the goddess of the afterlife, Ereshkigal, we are magic.”

  Robin smiled. “You make it sound so noble.”

  “Is it not?”

  “Not when you bleed people dry of their lives with the nag shi. Drain them of their happiness, their spirit—”

  Cutty held up a hand. Her fingers were slender and pale, young-looking. Robin realized that underneath the warm, diffuse glow of the citronella candles, the old woman’s face was softer, less creased than it ought to be. She’s been partaking of the nag shi’s fruit, she thought. She geared up for a tussle.

  Mom’s heart-tree fruit. The witch said earnestly, “You promised you weren’t going to bring us any drama, littlebird.”

  Littlebird.

  That term of endearment brought back old, old memories. Robin’s mind flickered with images of herself as a tiny child, sitting in the Lazenbury’s kitchen, eating Chips Ahoy cookies and drinking apple juice, reading the comics out of the Sunday paper or watching ReBoot, Pirates of Dark Water, or Darkwing Duck on the wood-cabinet Magnavox.

  Grandmother Marilyn had a dog back then, a miniature Pinscher named Penny, for the coins of copper fur over his eyes. She loved that dog almost as much as Mr. Nosy.

  Littlebird. She cast a glance at Wayne. “I did.”

  “You’re an honest soul,” said Cutty. “I remember when you used to call me Grandmother. Hell, two days out of every week you’d be up here knocking on my kitchen door, crying about your mummy and daddy fighting about this or that. Do you remember that?”

  “I do.” And she did, vaguely. There was a mental image of the Lazenbury’s back patio, and a sense-memory of knocking on the door. Cutty had a station wagon back then, gray, and she kept a tarp strapped over it to fend off the pollen. When she was little, Robin always wanted to open the car door and climb in under that tarp, the windows covered, and hide away from the world where no one could see her.

  “Why didn’t you get another dog when Penny died?”

  Cutty stumbled. “Oh…well, I don’t know. I suppose it just hurt too much to lose him. And besides, there was no little girl to come around and play with a dog anymore. Once you found makeup and boys and such, my little tomboy stopped visiting.”

  She cut a spear of asparagus into several bites. “I came to visit you in the hospital after…after your mother, you know.”

  Robin blinked. “You did?”

  “Oh, yes. They wouldn’t let me see you, though. The shrinks told me you weren’t stable enough for visitors, especially none so close to you and your mother.” Cutty punctured the asparagus with her fork and slipped it into her mouth. “They said it could possibly sabotage your progress.”

  “Maybe,” said Robin. She pushed food around on her plate for half a minute. “I knew it was you back then.” Her words were grim but gentle. “Your name was the last word on my mother’s lips.”

  Leon and Wayne had stopped what they were doing and were sitting there with their forks and knives on their plates frozen mid-cut, watching expectantly.

  Cutty chewed, staring at Robin without expression. “I wanted to bring you home with me, littlebird,” she said, sighing. “I would have raised you as my own. There would have been no…whatever this is.” Cutty made an inclusive gesture at Robin with her fork, as if pointing out her bad taste in shirts. “Blood feud, vengeance, vigilantism, I don’t know.”

  “How?” Something burned deep in Robin’s chest—not quite rage, but it was headed that way. “Lies? Keeping my mother from me?”

  “Your mother is dead, love. There would have been nothing to hide.”

  “Because of you.”

  Karen Weaver cleared her throat, butting in. “Your mother murdered my husband. I couldn’t stand there and—and—take that lying down,” the witch said indignantly. “Edgar may have been a shit, but I loved him, you know.”

  “So you turned my mother into a tree?”

  “Eye for an eye.
”

  Cutty interjected, “Besides, we had to replace the nag shi Annie burned down.” She shrugged and took a sip of her iced tea. “She brought it on herself, Robin. Annie thought she could punish her own coven and renounce her vows. Out of—out of disgust, I guess, she called it sins, transgressions against nature and decency, as if we had any choice. She thought of herself as a sort of whistleblower, thought she was better than us, better than her vows.

  “In retrospect, she discovered she wasn’t prepared to make the moral sacrifices required to live this life. It was darker, uglier than Annie expected. But that’s not the way it works. Once you promise your heart to the Goddess, it’s Hers for life, for good or for ill. It’s like the Mafia, like Hotel California, once you’re in, you don’t get to leave. And you do what you can to stay alive.”

  “Killing innocent people?” Robin screwed up her face.

  “You think rabbits are evil creatures? Flies? Mice? Where is your righteousness when the owl plucks the mouse from the fields? When the bear catches the fish in the river?” Cutty pointed at her with her fork again. “Subsistence. That’s what it is. That’s all it’s ever been. You don’t understand.”

  “You’re predators, but you’re not eagles. That’s too noble. You’re spiders, if anything. You’re unnatural. You’re rotten inside. You’ve been alive too long.”

  “Who are you to tell me when I should die? Where is your cloak, Death? Where is your scythe and hourglass?” Cutty bit her lips and looked at the table, and back up at Robin. “These are laws you haven’t bothered to know anything about, littlebird. There is an old way, sacred traditions, that you ignore in your crusade to avenge your mother, who was not blameless. You haven’t given any consideration to that, you murder and murder and you think it’s okay because of what we are. And you videotape their anguish and put it on the internet, like it’s some kind of goddamned circus!”

  “Forty-six,” said Weaver.

  Robin and Cutty faced her. “What?”

  “Forty-six. That’s how many people you’ve killed.” Her eyes wandered the table and her plate as if she were looking through them at her computer screen, and then rose to meet Robin’s. “The commune in Oregon, the Sand Oracle’s coven….”

  Leon licked his lips. “I thought you said you’d only killed, like, twenty.”

  “I have,” said Robin, feeling defensive. “Like nineteen. About that many. Witches!”

  The situation was slipping out of control, if it ever had been to begin with. Again, Weaver was trying to turn the Parkins against her. Cutty was trying to talk her over to the dark side, so to speak, with her littlebird and pouty wistful woe-is-Granny faces.

  Weaver’s head shook slowly and she said, “People. Witches and familiars. Robin, dear, I’ve watched your videos. I told you I was subscribed to your YouTube channel. I’ve also been following you.”

  “What? Following me?”

  “My specialty is the thaumaturgy of illusions and conjurations, remember?” Weaver reached out a hand and snapped her fingers, once, dramatically, click!, and the citronella torches turned from white to a deep oceanic blue. All of a sudden the grove looked like some kind of rave out of 1993.

  Click! Back to white. “I’m the best there ever was, devil, you can’t win this golden fiddle. And once you decide what people can see, you can decide what people can’t see.” Weaver pointed to herself, her smile a mixture of pride and idiocy. “Me, in case you were wondering.”

  “You think I’m a fool?” Cutty asked, her voice wry, her face disbelieving, one eye scrunched. Robin’s heart had begun to pound in her chest. Leon had turned his knife around in his fist like he was getting ready to stab somebody. “I already told you I knew you were in Blackfield Psychiatric. What kind of an idiot would I be if I didn’t keep tabs on you when Hammer came and took you back to Texas? If I’d known he was at the hospital the day you were released by the state, I would have killed him and took you myself. But you two were driving across the state line into Alabama by the time I got there.”

  I honestly hadn’t even considered that, Robin thought. Back then she had been nothing but a confused, angry, small-minded girl with a prescription for anti-psychotics and anti-depression medication, psycho-analyzed half to death and more than ready for the wide-open skies of Texas after spending so much time in the stark, sterilized hallways of the psych ward.

  All this time she’d considered Cutty’s coven passive, oblivious, just sitting here in Blackfield unknowingly waiting to be killed…but it was now evident that she was still that angry, ignorant girl. She hadn’t been the cat, she’d been the mouse the whole time. Running the maze, looking for the cheese, completely in the dark.

  But Cutty put it even more aptly. “You were so focused on building the gallows you didn’t realize it was your own neck in the noose,” she said with a soft finality, her eyes sinking from Robin’s face, across the tablecloth, and onto her own plate. She went back to eating quietly, gazing into her food.

  “Dinner truce, y’all,” said Leon. “Don’t forget about that.”

  Robin’s eyes were pinned to Cutty’s face. “Why didn’t you kill me? You had so many chances.”

  The witch ate as if she hadn’t said anything.

  Eventually Cutty said, “I thought of you as my grand-daughter, Robin Littlebird. That tiny girl that spent so much time in my big house, lying on the floor coloring with her stinky markers and playing with my dog…how could I stand to hurt you? I may be heartless, but not that way.”

  Theresa made a droll face. “You got more willpower than me. I’da done killed her. She’s dangerous.”

  “Yes, well, hyenas have more willpower than you do, dear Reese.”

  The elephantine witch huffed and dug into her food with renewed enthusiasm, as if in spite. She ate her steak with her fingers, ripping it into pieces and pushing them into her gob like jerky.

  “At any rate, I didn’t consider the daughter responsible for the mother,” continued Cutty. “I still don’t. Annie did what she did and you had nothing to do with it. I saw no reason to go after you.” Her lips pursed, the corners drawn into a frown, and her next words were made hoarse by emotion. “I loved you, Littlebird.”

  Pouring it on thick now, thought Robin. “That’s why you let me go? You let me train to kill your kind, and you let me rampage across the countryside doing it, because you loved me?”

  Cutty bit her lip, and then nodded.

  Silence fell as the garden party ate and sat processing the conversation. After a while, Wayne told Theresa, “This orange stuff with the nuts is really good, ma’am.”

  “Thank you, mon garçon.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “That’s sweet-potato casserole.” She smirked, wiping her saucy hands on her napkin. Theresa’s face was smeared with Heinz 57. “I’ll give you a piece of advice: never trust a skinny cook.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You got such good manners. I like you. Y’all all right for colored folk.”

  Leon choked, pounded on his chest, took a drink of tea.

  ❂

  “What is that spectral beast living in Annie’s house?” Cutty asked out of the blue, when they had all finished eating and were dabbing their lips and sipping the last dregs of their tea. The crickets were in full swing, and the black forest breathed music all around them.

  She asked it of all three of them, the witch-hunter and the Parkins, her eyes dancing between Robin and Leon. “What did Annie do? Is that thing—”

  “A demon,” answered Robin.

  “A demon.” The witch spoke with a disbelieving curiosity. “What kind of demon? Where did she get her hands on such a ritual?”

  “A cacodemon named Andras. A Discordian and an incubus.”

  “I expect Heinrich Hammer provided her the necessary texts. A meddler, that one. Probably using her to get to us, since he’s a man, and men have no power over the likes of us. I’ll bet he got the ritual’s material from the little…grou
p that he used to be a part of.”

  “Group?” Robin’s head bobbed back in bewilderment.

  “He never told you? He was expelled from a secret society of magicians called the Order of the Dog Star. They’re conceptual descendants of the Thelemic Society founded by that charlatan Aleister Crowley.”

  Leaning over her empty plate, Karen Weaver growled, “So that’s why that bitch killed my husband? To summon a ‘demon’?” Her fists were clenched against the white tablecloth, and had none of the palsied shaking that a woman her age would normally display. All the witches, really, moved like teenagers, which never failed to unsettle Robin. “No one’s ever brought a Discordian into the real world. This reality was sanctified against them when the Christ’s blood was spilled—that was the whole point of his sacrifice.”

  She sought validation in Cutty’s stoic face. “Wasn’t it? Or am I thinking of an episode of Petticoat Junction again?”

  “You are right, for a change,” said Cutty. “In the Old Testament days, demons walked this world with impunity. The only way to seal them outside of the material plane was with a carefully ritualized self-sacrifice.”

  I have to admit, that makes sense, Robin considered. You didn’t see much mention (if any at all) of fully-materialized demons on Earth in the Bible after Jesus was crucified. “I want to know more about this Dog Star order, Marilyn.”

  Something soft wrapped itself around Robin’s leg. She looked underneath the tablecloth and found a spotty gray cat rubbing himself against her ankle.

  “Ask your friend about the Dog Star when you see him again.” Cutty smiled. “I’m sure he’d be glad to tell you all about it. Besides, I’m afraid I don’t know a lot about them myself, other than the fact that they hunt witches. They’re quite elusive.” Robin shooed the cat away and it popped up on the other side, climbing up onto the table next to Cutty, where it hunkered down and busied itself chewing on the witch’s table scraps.