by Hunt, S. A.
She nodded knowingly, but said nothing, urging him on with her pointed silence.
Gendreau spread his hands as if it were obvious. “Her particular Gift is the talent of transfiguration, alteration—if I were a betting man, I’d say that when you absorbed the witch’s libbu-harrani, you also inherited her Gift. In this case, you’ve inherited the ability to reconfigure matter.”
Kenway scratched his beard. “If Theresa could do that, why was she so heavy? Couldn’t she have just shaved herself down and made herself svelte?”
“Maybe she simply preferred herself that way.” Gendreau shrugged, twirling his cane under his armpit like a swizzle stick, and spoke with a campy dismissiveness. “Who are we to speculate on an immortal death-hag’s body image issues?” He scooped up Robin’s arm-worm in his gentle palm as if it were a diamond bracelet. “Anyway, it looks like your unconscious mind is trying to grow something to replace the arm that Theresa took.”
Robin rubbed her face with the hand that wasn’t an octopus tentacle. “Jesus freakin Christ. Could my unconscious mind come up with something that doesn’t look like carp bait?”
“Oh, hello,” Gendreau interrupted. “What’s this?”
She glanced at his face, then at the object of his focus: her shoulder. “What?” Her eyes ached as she stretched her neck to look.
“There are two now,” said Kenway.
Wayne adjusted his glasses, gazing through the bottom, his nose wrinkling like an old man reading the newspaper. “There’s another one coming out next to the first one.”
“Oh God, give me my meds,” Robin pleaded, jamming her fingers into Kenway’s jeans pocket and fishing out the baggie of Percocet.
The sharp pain of the U-scar was getting worse and worse, dulling into a coarse, grinding torment, fibrous and woody like chewing popsicle sticks. A headache bloomed at the base of her skull. Going over to the bar, she grabbed the club soda tap, hauled the sprayer hose out, and put a Percocet in her mouth. She thought it over and gave herself another dose, then sprayed them down her throat with club soda.
“Errruuhuhuh,” she shuddered at the bitter taste.
A chilling thought passed over her: the sound she’d produced reminded her of the dragon-gargle that Andras made when he exhaled.
(crooked)
Robin pushed it out of her mind and let the soda hose reel back into its socket.
“Are you—” Kenway started to say, then thought better of it.
“No, I’m really not okay,” she observed with a gentle scoff. “I am miles from okay.”
“Perhaps you should take it easy for a couple of days and let, ahh, nature take its course,” said Gendreau. “Cutty’s group is weakened by the loss of its eastern corner, and it will take some time to find and recruit a fresh member. In the meantime, I can prepare myself.”
“No. It’s got to go down today.”
Robin came back into the light, tugging her T-shirt back down. The tendril snaked back and forth under her shirt-tail. “They’ve got Wayne’s father. I’ve got to get him out of there, for Wayne. And the longer we wait, the more pod-people they’ll be able to make, and the more prepared Cutty, Weaver and their Matron will be when we actually come. We’re wasting time.”
Gendreau stared at her, his face gradually darkening. “All right; all right. We’ll have to make do with what we’ve got. But we’re going to have to storm the hacienda like the flippin Blitzkrieg, yeah?” He breezed past her, carrying his cane by the literal shaft. “We can’t give em any time to react.”
They followed him back toward the front of the restaurant. The magician led them outside to the narrow patio that served as the front porch. Feathery flakes of snow sparrowed down from the washrag sky, melting on the cement.
Wayne stopped short. “Woah, it’s snowing!”
“That’s weird,” said Kenway. “Isn’t it a little early in the year for it?”
Robin held up a hand to catch snowflakes. “It’s a little early in the decade for it. It hardly ever snows here.”
Gendreau shrugged with a knowing smile.
Instead of taking the zigzag of stairs back down to the parking lot, he cut left and went down a sloping sidewalk that led along the restaurant’s north side. An access road curled around the back of the building for deliveries.
Gendreau crossed this and made his way to a balcony that had been erected at the edge of the lakeview bluff.
Coin-op binoculars punctuated the balcony’s parapet, and two people stood at the edge watching the wind kick skirls of sunlight across the water’s surface hundreds of feet below. Sitting at their feet was a Boston terrier, a piebald dog with bulging eyes and sharp, pert ears.
Down feathers of ice danced around them like a scene out of a snow globe. “Friends, Romans, countrymen,” said Gendreau as they approached.
“Do you think Deliverance is based on true events?” the woman asked him, turning away from the lake. Elvira’s spooky face stared out from the front of her T-shirt, and her arms were livid with tattoo sleeves of Día De Los Muertos skeletons and curlicues.
“God, I hope not,” said Gendreau. “Friends, these are my colleagues Sara Amundson, Lucas Tiedeman, and Eduardo Pendergast.”
“I’m using these binoculars to look for sexually ravenous troglodytes, but all I can find are birds.” Sara’s lipstick was blood-red, her fingernails were as black as murder, and her hair was silver-white, shot through with streaks of pink. Jutting from the prow of her skull was a spiraling bone point about seven inches long.
Robin liked her immediately.
The man standing next to her was dressed like an FBI spook, in a black suit and tie. Even though the sky was a pool of dirty cotton, his eyes were inscrutable behind a pair of shades. What Robin could see of his face was young and handsome, with a princely profile. Too young, maybe—she could see him getting carded a lot. “It’s too bad Gaiman couldn’t come,” he said, leaning on the parapet. “This lake is positively dismal in the fall with all these dead trees and cloud cover. He would love it.”
“Gaiman?” asked Kenway. “As in, Neil Gaiman? The guy that wrote Anansi Boys and Neverwhere? That guy’s a magician?”
“Oh, yeah, sure.”
Gendreau smiled widely. “Mr. Gaiman is one of the Order’s foremost magicians. We were going to bring him along as well—he voiced a desire to sample authentic Georgia ‘bulled peanuts’, and see The World’s Largest Chair, but unfortunately he’s got a book tour.”
“Bulled peanuts,” said the spook, in a deeply-affected twang.
“Buuuuullllled peanuuuuuuts,” said Sara, drawing it out, and the in-joke dissolved into polite laughter. She rapped knuckles on the spook’s shoulder. “This is Lucas, by the way, if you were wondering. Eduardo Pendergast is the ankle-biter.”
While they were talking, Wayne was petting the bug-eyed terrier. He squinted under his generous head massage, his tongue lolling happily.
“Eduardo. Odd name for a dog,” noted Kenway.
“That’s because he hasn’t always been like this,” explained Sara. “He was transfigured by a witch in Germany a few years ago and he liked being a dog so much he refused to let us change him back.”
Eduardo’s mouth slapped shut and he seemed to come to attention, listening to the discussion about him, but then he relaxed and went back to panting. There was a disconcerting intelligence in his face, Robin thought, so like a real dog, but with the weary self-awareness of a man. She pushed the urge to rub his head out of her mind, discouraged by the idea of petting a stranger.
“So, what…he’s a magician too?”
Sara grinned. “That he is.”
“This is the assault team I’ve assembled to help us storm Cutty’s stronghold,” said Gendreau, turning serious. “Each one has in his or her possession a libbu-harrani, a heart-road artifact imbued with a Gift, confiscated from a defeated witch. Mr. Tiedeman here has the unusual talent of ‘channeling’. I’m sure you’re familiar with this, Robin,” he offered. “Am
elia Burke could do it.”
Robin had fought and killed Amelia Burke in a condemned mall in Iowa and then spent two weeks in the hospital with a concussion suffered from, of all things, a teddy bear. “Yeah.” She asided to Kenway and Wayne, “Channeling is the ability to shift and focus energy.”
“Like Gambit from the X-Men?” asked the boy, his eyes lighting up.
Robin smiled. “Yeah, sort of. I’ve done a little research on it, and from what I can understand, the energy is derived from the adenosine-triphosphate of the body’s mitochondria.” Also known as ATP, the respiratory cell-energy produced by ancient foreign organelles living inside the cells of the majority of living beings.
Molecular biology, started in high school and continued in Heinrich’s training. Robin had spent dark, lonely nights during that monastic first year, locked up in his Texas compound, learning about her new enemies and studying the techniques that would help her exact the vengeance she thought she needed.
But apparently like everything else Heinrich told her, his theory on channeling was bullshit too. “If only it were that simple,” said Gendreau. “That would make for a temporarily accelerated metabolism, wouldn’t it though, every time the individual used his or her Gift? But that isn’t the case.” The magician’s marble-pale hand clapped on Lucas’s shoulder. “We’ve done our own research, since we can capture and contain the witches’ libbu-harrani and we can observe their properties at our leisure. No, we believe that the Gift of channeling stores and redirects bosons.”
“Bosons?” Robin was at a loss.
“Bosons are what gives matter mass,” said Wayne. “People call it the God Particle because it’s part of the glue that holds the universe together.”
Gendreau pointed at him, you win the kewpie doll, a grin breaking across his face. “Yes! What a clever little boy you are. Yes, among other properties, bosons are what give matter its mass, which is why channeled objects exhibit disproportionately concussive force. We only managed to come up with this theory after years of experimentation with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.”
Wayne blinked. “That’s what the LHC is for? You guys are researching magic?”
“We’re given access to their results in exchange for funding. The LHC was constructed for legitimate scientific research, but during the construction our leadership was made to understand its potential in the world of supernatural sciences, and we’ve …diverted funds in their direction. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement.” Turning, Gendreau marched out several paces away from Lucas and the edge of the parapet, doing an about-face with a swirl of jacket. Sara moved away as well. “Now, if you’ll all take a few steps back, Mr. Tiedeman here can demonstrate the power of channeling.”
Lucas knelt down and picked through the dead leaves until he found something suitable, which turned out to be an acorn, new and green at the tip. He held it up to them as if it were a card trick
(if the audience will please examine the ace of spades and ensure that it has not been altered in any way)
and made an OK with his fingers, the acorn pincered between his thumb and forefinger. This Lucas held for five, ten, fifteen long seconds, his arm beginning to tremble like a weightlifter at the end of his reps. Robin thought he was trying to squeeze it to pieces, but then he spun on his heel and whipped his hand toward one of the coin-op binoculars mounted on the parapet, his tie flapping.
His hand opened up like a pantomimed pistol, his index finger pointed out—bang bang, my baby shot me down—and the acorn razored across the air into the teardrop-shaped machine, embedding itself, ptank!, in the steel housing. Both eyepieces exploded in unison with sharp crystalline snaps and the whole machine came loose from its pedestal, plummeting over the side. Broken screws tapped across the cement.
The binocular pod smashed open halfway down the bluff, cartwheeling along the rocks through a glitter of quarters.
Gendreau looked up from the gorge even as it continued to tumble down the mountain, scattering change. “I can’t say I approve of unsolicited vandalism, but … impressive as always, gunslinger.”
Kenway whistled.
“Lady Amundson, on the other hand,” the magician said, gesturing to her with his pearl-headed cane, “possesses the Gift of illusions and conjurations. She is the one responsible for this rather anomalous weather.”
“I normally make people hallucinate monsters, but I figured making you see a physical manifestation of your worst phobia might’ve made a bad first impression.” Sara emphasized each point with a sinuous gesture. Illusory snow danced around her hands, transforming into monarch butterflies, which then burst into flames and burned into flakes of ash. “Bedbug monsters, rainbow LSD monsters, monsters made out of tax paperwork (ugh), all kinds of monsters. That’s kinda my thing. Why sublimate when you can intimidate?”
Gendreau cracked a genteel grin. “Your only limit is your imagination, dear.” He gestured at the dog. “Eduardo here, on the other hand, is our resident manipulations expert.”
“Manipulations?” Robin stared. “The dog is psychokinetic?”
“As well as clairvoyant.” Gendreau dug in his jacket pocket and produced a dog treat, wafting the smell of fake bacon up Robin’s nose. He leaned his cane against the parapet and briefly turned away from them. Kneeling in front of the dog, Gendreau held out both fists. “Okay, Eddie, which hand is the dog treat in?”
Eduardo reached up and brushed his left hand with a paw. Gendreau opened it. It was empty.
The dog touched his other hand. It was empty as well.
“Not so clairvoyant after all,” said Wayne.
The pale magician rose into the air, kicking and flailing. “Hey, all right now, Eddie.” Then he was upside-down, pinwheeling his arms like a newbie astronaut on his first day in the Space Station. The tail of Gendreau’s bespoke jacket flapped over the back of his head and several Beggin’ Strips fell out onto the asphalt. “Put me down, or you’ll be sleeping in the car!”
Eduardo ducked underneath Gendreau and snagged one.
“Nice,” laughed Kenway, turning him right-side-up and standing him back on his feet. Gendreau jerked his lapels, straightening his jacket.
Lucas Tiedeman grinned over his shoulder. “Welcome to the A-Team.”
38
THE MAGICIANS WERE STAYING in one of the larger lodges down the hill, a rustic frontier shack full of fragrant cedar furniture, dizzying quilts, and deer heads mounted on the walls. Robin and Wayne watched Kenway help them load the last of their belongings into their vehicle. “We’ve still got the cabin for the week,” Gendreau told her as they crammed luggage into the back of a Chevy Suburban. “But if we don’t survive Cutty’s wrath, it wouldn’t do at all to leave our things here where the normals can find them.”
Robin elbowed Wayne. “I’m so glad they don’t call us Muggles. That would just be too much.” The boy grinned, the white windows flashing on his glasses. “We’re gonna go get your dad, okay?”
He traded the grin for a sad but confident smile. “I know.”
Sara Amundson joined the two of them as Lucas and Kenway hauled the last couple of bags. Robin eyed the horn sticking out of the part in her hair. “What’s with the, uhh…” Robin made an A-OK with her hand, pretending to loop an imaginary unicorn horn on her own head.
“It’s a wig,” said Sara, tugging the horn. Her entire head of hair lifted up to reveal fiery red underneath. She readjusted the pink-white wig, twisting it back down onto her skull. “Last Halloween I went as what I like to call a ‘Murdercorn’ and everybody liked it so much I thought I would do it again this year.”
“Don’t let her lie to you.” Lucas shut the back of the Suburban. “She’s been wearing it ever since.”
Sara lowered her head and jabbed him in the arm with the horn.
He backed away, making the sign of the cross with his fingers. “The Murdercorn is murderous.”
The seven of them piled into the SUV. Gendreau was driving, Lucas sat up front in the passen
ger seat, and Sara sat in the back with Kenway and Eduardo. A farty funk hung inside the car, the smell of the Taco Bell the magicians had eaten for lunch.
The minute she was nestled in next to them, Robin felt fraudulent by association. She reflected on the past couple of years and the battles and hardships she’d had to endure alone at the hands of America’s witches, and she couldn’t help but feel like the one hardass in a car full of untested rookies. Suddenly the Suburban had the silly yet claustrophobic feel of a clown car. They’re not taking this seriously enough, including Gendreau, she thought, looking around at them. Sara gave her a pinched, disaffected smile that didn’t touch her eyes. It’s a field trip for them. A woman in a unicorn wig, a cock-eyed dog, and a Quentin Tarantino character.
I’ve got half a mind to tell them to stay in the cabin and let me handle Cutty. This is my fight anyway.
A sensation of impending doom came over her, as if she’d bought a ticket on the Titanic. Robin faced front and buckled her seatbelt. Isn’t the dog supposed to be the clairvoyant one? What good is a clairvoyant that can’t talk?
Eduardo barked. A pocket watch dangled from his collar, the cover gone, the protective glass cracked.
Pain throbbed in her shoulder, taking her mind off the dog. She caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror and marveled at how sallow her face looked. Her eyes were dark pits in her face, glassy in the watery Tim Burton daylight.
I look like I’m dying of exposure. Donner, party of six!
Gendreau drove them down the mountain, winding back and forth through the switchback and the hairpin curves running across the south slope. The woozy snaking of the top-heavy vehicle turned her medication-and-booze-marinated guts into a churning lava lamp.
When he got to the bottom and passed the office lodge, Gendreau paused at the frontage.
The Subway’s sign glowed yellow in the failing afternoon light. “Last chance. Smoke em if you got em,” he said, looking back and forth down the access road. “Anybody for a last meal?”