by Hunt, S. A.
Crawling back into bed, she fixated on the TV screen so she didn’t have to see the expression of pity and sympathy almost gushing from Kenway’s face. Every time she noticed his hurt puppy-dog look she wanted to throw Cheez-Its at him, throw the TV remote at him, anything to make him stop.
I asked for this, she thought.
I didn’t ask for this, she thought.
She was still somewhat upset by his decision to jump into the fight in her defense last night. You could have gotten killed. She stared at his big dumb face. If anyone’s to be killed doing this, it’s me. Not you. I’m the one that chose—no, accepted this life. Not you. Kenway noticed her watching him and his face softened into a tired-eyed smile. Robin locked onto the TV screen again.
Don’t feel sorry for me, she thought.
Please feel sorry for me, she thought.
The longer the movies droned on, the heavier her eyes got. She finally fell asleep again about the time dawn-light turned the windowshades blue.
TUESDAY
35
SHE WOKE UP AGAIN around lunchtime. Kenway showed up with a sampler platter of sushi and two blueberry parfaits from the hospital cafeteria, and revealed that he’d retrieved her camera and Macbook when he’d taken Wayne to school that morning.
“Did you tell him his dad would be okay?” she asked.
“Yeah. I don’t know how we’re going to get him back, though, without you and Heinrich. I don’t know shit about witches.”
“As soon as I’m back on my feet, I’m going up there myself to end this.” She flexed her right hand. “Theresa told me something right before you put a bullet in her head. She said that Andras is my father.”
“Is that how you made the transformation go away?”
“Yeah. Demons eat their magic, their…essence. I don’t know how or why.”
He talked with a mouthful of sushi, which he’d never really eaten before and had now developed a serious hankering for. For hospital sushi, it was pretty damn good. “When you and Heinrich were talking about demons, he said that they’re deformed souls, adrift in the afterlife.”
“Right. Ambulatory crystallized egos, deprived of physical form except in—”
Kenway’s eyes were glazed.
She left off. “—Uhh, as you were saying.”
He continued. “Maybe demons are like unborn babies, in that they need the sustenance of that energy from the afterlife to maintain their existence. When they devour a witch’s magic, since it’s one of those—what’d you call it, a ‘heart-road’?—they’re usin that heart-road as an umbilical cord back to that space-womb that they came from.”
Robin blinked. “The libbu-harrani. The demons suckle on that source like plugging a lamp into a wall-outlet. …That makes perfect sense.”
A proud grin spread across Kenway’s face. “See? You need me. I’d be a perfect witch-hunting sidekick. I totally think outside the box.” Robin’s heart thumped once, hard, a sweet drumbeat. “So you think you’re gonna go back up there and do it again? Suck the magic out of them like you did Theresa?”
“If I can.”
He stared at her, his eyes searching her face. “So what does this mean? You’re half-demon?” She shrugged. It was a novel concept for her too. “I thought you said witches couldn’t have children.”
The nub of her left shoulder itched like ants were crawling around in it. She was about due for her pain meds again. She rubbed the padding gently as she spoke, careful not to pull the stitches. “I didn’t think so.”
“I wish Heinrich was here,” he said, staring at the window. “We could ask him. Maybe he knows.”
Robin scowled at the TV, clenching her remaining fist. “If Heinrich was here, I’d punch him in the goddamn nose for lying to me. And for ruining my life.”
❂
After lunch, she transferred all the footage from the camera to her laptop, and spent the afternoon editing and uploading it, while watching more horror movies with Kenway. They made it through Sleepaway Camp (which lost a lot of its nostalgic effect with all the censoring) and Day of the Dead before Kenway got up and put on his jacket.
“I’m gonna go pick up Wayne from school and bring him up here,” he said, jingling his keys.
She smiled. “Thank you for taking care of him. —Thank you for everything, really. You don’t have to, but you are…and that’s really good of you. You know? You don’t even know these people. Hell, I barely do. I only know them because they’re living in my old house.”
Kenway tossed a shoulder. “What else am I going to do? Besides, I like doin things for people like this. I like having a purpose. Sitting around my apartment feeling sorry for myself and for Chris Hendry, painting depressin-ass pictures…what kind of life is that?”
Feeling sorry for myself. Robin nodded. “Yeah, okay. Well, be careful out there. It’s been raining.”
He saluted, letting himself out.
She sat in the bed, editing footage until her bladder felt as if it was about to burst. She’d been to the bathroom once that morning already, as soon as she got up, and twice last night—a laborious, pain-wracked trek on cold tile—but the coffee she’d had with lunch was going right through her.
Leaving the Macbook on the duvet, she swung her legs down onto the floor, slipped her feet into a pair of gift-shop slippers, and shuffled into the bathroom.
The itching in her shoulder was getting worse. She massaged the bandage, which wrapped around her boobs like a banding and held a thick wad of absorbent material against the surgery area. “Damn, I’m glad I can afford insurance,” she told the cold desolate bathroom, releasing a stream of urine into the toilet.
She peeked between her thighs at the honey-colored water. Getting dehydrated. Maybe I should pop down to the cafeteria and get something to drink.
When she came out, a man sat in Kenway’s chair, a handsome, clean-shaven fellow in a neat suit of rich navy-blue. Everything else about him was pale: his wolfish alabaster face, his sea-water eyes, his bone-blond hair. His angular stick-figure frame—along with the creepy black cane in his hand—made him look like a European fashion model.
“Hello,” she said, surprised. “Can I help you?”
“You don’t know me, but I know you.” He spoke eloquently enough, with a hint of an accent she couldn’t quite place. Robin regarded him warily. “My name is Anders Gendreau. We’ve been watching you, Ms. Martine. You’re one of the most prolific witch-hunters that’s ever operated in the United States.”
“There are others?”
“Only my people. And Heinrich. I don’t suppose Heinrich ever told you about the group he used to be a part of.”
“No,” she replied. “But Marilyn Cutty said something about it last night, right before she ordered her coven-mate to tear my arm off. Which, you know, wouldn’t have fucking happened if you’d been there to help me. Where the hell have you guys been all this time?”
The corner of Gendreau’s right eye twitched. “If you’ll sit and listen, I’ll explain everything.”
“How about you explain my foot in your skinny ass?”
He cleared his throat, looking bemused. Robin sat on the bed in a huff.
“Heinrich Hammer, whose real name—or I should say, his previous legal name—is Henry Atterberry, was once a member of our organization, the Order of the Dog Star. We’re a society of practicing magicians, and proudly count a great number of famous, influential, and affluent individuals among our members.”
“She said as much,” said Robin. “So, your basic secret world-governing cult, right? You’re the Illuminati, aren’t you?”
“Not so much. We’re more like…the Avengers.”
She snorted grimly.
“Too precious?” smirked Gendreau. “The U.N. of magic, then.”
“A tribunal.”
“Nothing so barbaric.” He produced a folded piece of paper from his jacket pocket and handed it to her. She unfolded it and found a black-and-white sketch of the Osdathregar, in
high resolution. “I’m here because you and he have something that belongs to us.”
She’d been carrying the dagger for the better part of two years, but until she’d seen this flat, super-contrast rendition of it, she’d never noticed how very Nordic and austere the dagger was.
Hollywood had conditioned her to expect the eldritch and the ornate: a wavy flambergé silhouette with a pewter skull hilt, cord-wrapped handle, and a spike for a pommel, a Gil Hibben monstrosity from a catalog. But the real Osdathregar was a simple main-gauche with a gently tapering blade a little wider than a stiletto. The hilt was a sideways diamond, the handle was wrapped in leather, and the pommel was only a brass onion-bulb. The diamond of the hilt contained a small hollow, and engraved inside the hollow was a scribble that, according to Heinrich, meant “purifier” in the Avestan language.
Sitting here in this hospital bed, staring at this drawing, Robin felt as if she had drifted out of the shallow end of the pool and now a deep darkness had materialized underneath her.
“We’ve been trying to find his place in Texas for several years now, and searching for you for about a year, ever since you started posting videos of your exploits to YouTube.” Gendreau’s grin displayed the toothy canines of a meat-eating man. “You’re a hard woman to track down, living on the road like that. We knew where you’d been, thanks to your videos, on about a week delay, but we never knew where you were heading.”
The toothy grin faded. “But that’s no matter now, is it? Here you sit in front of me, and here I sit, and this is the end of the line.”
“How did you finally, finally find me?”
“Your videos indicated that you were in Blackfield. From there it was a simple matter of going to your childhood home in Slade township. But when I got there last night, you were being carried away.” Gendreau sat back and leveled the black cane across his knees. “All that blood…I decided it wasn’t in either of our best interests to interrupt your trip to the hospital.”
“Why didn’t you try to contact me through my YouTube channel? Or my Facebook? Or my Twitter?”
Gendreau glanced at the TV, sighed, and said to her, “We’ve emailed you several times, to no avail. I figured Heinrich had poisoned you against us.”
The shaft of his cane was made out of a twisting dark shape that seemed organic, but not very wooden at all. The head was a pearl the approximate size of a billiard ball.
He smiled. “Admiring my cane?”
“It’s…different.”
“It’s made out of the penis of an Indian bull.” He raised it until it pointed straight up in the air, and Robin couldn’t help but draw the obvious parallel. “Which makes it an apt magical conduit. The pearl contains a heartstone, a libbu-harrani drawn from the breast of a witch in Philadelphia, 1796. The pearl was formed around it, in the mouth of a giant clam.”
Robin wondered if she could close Gendreau’s heart-road if she touched the cane. She probably could. But in this state, the man would make short work of her if she tried.
She folded the paper and gave it back. “I assume you’re here for the Osdathregar.”
“Among other things.”
“I don’t have it.”
“That much is obvious. I assume Heinrich has it, wherever he’s hiding.”
A pack of cheese crackers lay on the bedside table; she picked it up and tore it open with her teeth, taking out one of the crackers and gingerly breaking it in half.
“He’s not hiding, as far as I know.” She bit the half-cracker into a quarter, which satisfied a deep neurotic need for order she didn’t know she’d been craving until she did it. Then she ate the third quarter. “He’s still with the witches. He could be dead, for all I know, and good riddance. Lying bastard.” It felt good to have new hate for someone inside of her, a freshly-stoked fire in her chest. The cold, desultory determination she’d felt for Marilyn had dwindled over the last five years to a dull ache.
But now she had a new face to want to punch. It was a driving, satisfying need that gave her an edge. “That’s too bad.” Gendreau stood the cane on the floor. “That means Marilyn Cutty’s coven is now in possession of the Osdathregar. It may very well be beyond our grasp now.”
“You can’t go get it?”
The magician’s sleek, vulpine smile reappeared, but this time it was tinged with regret. “Cutty is quite powerful, even by herself, nevermind the fact that she’s got two coven-mates and a Matron. With the Osdathregar the danger would only be moderately lessened. Assaulting her property would be like attacking the White House with a salad fork.”
“What if I told you I killed her middling coven-mate last night with my bare hands?”
“I’d call you a liar. Not only that, but a damn liar.”
She corrected herself. “Well, with this hand.” She held up her right fist. “As you can see, I seem to have misplaced my other one.”
The magician wheezed a chuckle. “So you have. At any rate, beside the fact that you can only kill a witch by pinning her down with the Osdathregar and burning her to ashes, the youngest member of her coven has almost a century on you.”
“Theresa LaQuices had transformed into a huge boar-monster and attacked me and the people I was with, and bit off my arm. Before I passed out, I grabbed the witch’s nose like this,” Robin said, and pinched the rim of her nostril, “and somehow I managed to draw the power out of her and close the libbu-harrani inside her. I didn’t let go until she was back to normal again, and then my friend Kenway blew her brains out.”
“Bullets don’t work on them—” began Gendreau.
“This time it did.” Robin bit the other cracker-half and chewed. “I think closing the heart-road turned her human again for a few min—”
She stared.
She had. She really had turned Theresa human again, there at the end, hadn’t she? She’d closed the witch’s heart-road and reverted her. Holy shit. “So that’s how he…”
Gendreau openly boggled at her. “The ritual Heinrich gave to your mother all those years ago,” he said, his words coming out in a breathless murmur, “your mother was…taken by Andras, wasn’t she?”
“Yes.” Robin’s lips were numb with epiphany, and so was her hand. “And I’m the offspring of that encounter.”
“The demon closed your mother’s libbu-harrani and made her human again, and that’s when he got her with child. You’re that child. And you’ve got that, that…way, that talent of devouring their power, don’t you?” The man shifted uneasily, his eyes wide and staring. “So that’s why Heinrich gave the ritual to your mother. He wasn’t trying to bring Andras into the material world, he knew he couldn’t do that. By God, he was trying to bring you into it.”
“He engineered my entire existence?” she demanded. “Why? Why would he do that?”
Anger flared in her chest. Absentmindedly, Robin reached up to rub at the padding over her stitches again, trying to quell the constant itching that had flowered there since last night. The pain underneath was monumental (especially here on the back-end of a dose of Percocet), but it was nothing compared to the phantom-limb itching.
“To buy his way back into the Order.” Gendreau leaned forward. “We assumed that he was trying to replicate what got him drummed out of the Order to begin with: summoning a demon and using it against the witches.” He cleared his throat politely, pointedly, ahem. “We have rules about trying to conjure demons, as you can imagine. Fully summoning a demon into the material plane for that specific purpose would be like wiping all of Europe off the face of the planet with nuclear bombs…just to get rid of Italy.”
“But he figured out how to use a demon to craft a secret weapon that would make it through the barrier.” Robin gave a shallow, petulant sigh. “Me. Annie was his Trojan horse, his drug mule, to get me into the material plane.”
“Exactly. He knew the—”
“No.” She glared at him. Robin knew what he was about to say, and she knew better. She knew Heinrich better. “He hoped. He di
dn’t know for sure. My mother was his guinea pig. The demon could have just killed her, and he would have found someone else to manipulate.”
Gendreau went quiet. He swallowed, smoothing his tie down his chest. As she watched him fidget (so unlike her first impression of him), she realized that he was anxious. Afraid of her?
“You are … a cambion,” he said, finally, with a grim, revelatory wonder.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a very old word for a being that’s half human and half demon.”
He cleared his throat and leaned forward, his head sinking and his eyes closing as if reaching back in time. Then he looked up at the ceiling, and at Robin. “Enfans des demons. ‘Cambion’ is a word, I hear, for the term ‘changeling’; it was first published in the 1818 Dictionnaire Infernal, and stems from the Celtic root kamb, meaning ‘crooked’.”
Robin frowned. Crooked? As if she didn’t have it bad enough this week. As if she weren’t crooked enough already, with her candy-van and her YouTube channel.
She didn’t think she would ever stop thinking of that word. ‘Crooked’. Time passed while she stared at her duvet and Gendreau simply sat there, quietly, doing nothing but staring at her. She supposed he was allowing her to absorb and internalize what he’d told her. The academic, self-satisfied expression on his face—like some haughty tenured professor that’s successfully gotten his idiot students to work through some moderately difficult equation—made her want to whop him in the chin.
She sighed. “So now what?”
“It appears that the ball is now in your court, cambion. Perhaps you can go after Cutty yourself, and retrieve the dagger.”
She already knew she would be going back to the Lazenbury to rescue Leon Parkin, free her mother from the apple tree, and satisfy her curiosity as to whether Heinrich Hammer was still alive (and if so, make him pay for what he did to her).
But something told her that the Order’s imperative against demons might extend to her.