I Come with Knives

by S. A. Hunt

  “Speaking of psychotic, we talked to a member of the coven. The young third one, Weaver.”

  “What about?” He stuck the slender cigar between his lips and dug a matchbook out of his shirt pocket, the Royal Hawaiian wagging as he spoke. Robin knew what it would be before she even saw the label: Vanilla Coconut. He cupped the cigar with a hand and lit it, shook the match out, and dropped it into the dregs of his coffee. “You two catch up on life ’n shit? Quiche recipes, grandkids, who’s fuckin’ who on The Young and the Restless?”

  “She put an illusion on me and left me in a hospital laundry, hallucinating bugs crawling out of my skin. How did you get in without her seeing you?”

  Disgust passed across Leon’s face, tinged with sympathy.

  “I parked in the trailer park and hung out there for a while to watch the house.” Heinrich took a deep draw, the cherry flaring, and blew it at the ceiling. The rich smell of coconuts floated in a dragon of blue smoke, turning the kitchen into a dingy cabana. “Waited for her to go in the house, went around the side.”

  Robin started to take a sip and put the mug back down. “Weaver told me I’m a puppet. Your henchman, your human shield.” Your personal Jesus, interjected some weird neuron in her brain. “Said you groomed me to be a witch-hunter so you could quit the game and pull a D. B. Cooper.” She leaned over her coffee. “You didn’t teach me how to fight so I could avenge my mother, did you? You did it so you could hide in your fortress in Texas, and let me do all your dirty work.”

  “I’m turning sixty-six this year.” Heinrich ashed the cigar into his coffee mug. It was white and had a picture of Snoopy on it, fast asleep on the roof of his doghouse. “I can’t fight the good fight forever. Somebody’s gotta take over, and you were ready to be sculpted, a block of marble ready for Michelangelo’s chisel.”

  Robin battled the urge to throw her coffee in his face. “I’m not your bitch.” She took a deep, shaky breath and let it out in a sigh.

  “She told your tall dusty ass,” interjected Joel, clutching a cup of coffee.

  “You were never meant to be.” Heinrich ashed his cigar again and leaned back. “They’re turning you against me, Robin. Fragmenting the opposition. If you’re gonna make the decision to come back here and fight, you’re gonna have to keep your head together. Don’t let Weaver tie you up in knots. That’s what she’s good at. They’ve all three of them got specialties, and hers is getting inside that dyed-up volleyball you call a head. Remember how I told you back in the day how they’ll use tricks and lies to keep you from getting close? Well, this is it.”

  “Maybe.” She sipped coffee, trying to read the expression on Kenway’s face. The anger over the Abilify was new. It wasn’t scary, but it left her feeling cold and hollow inside.

  Heinrich stared at the table, woolgathering.

  “I saw a little girl with a lot of hurt and hate in her heart.” The old man’s voice was torn between defensiveness, compassion, and anger. “I seen good people turn to shit trying to burn it all out with drugs. When I found out Annie had a daughter and she was in the mental hospital, I knew I had to get to you before the streets did. Or, worse, you tried to fight Cutty with no preparation.” He took another draw and talked the smoke out. “Bein’ homeless ain’t no joke. The hell you think you’d be if I hadn’t taken you in?”

  Reaching across the table as quick as a cobra, he grabbed Robin’s wrist and turned it, held it up to the dim morning light. The pink rope of scar tissue running down the inside of her wrist shimmered with a faint opalescence.

  Fresh concern came over Joel’s face at the sight of the scars. She wrenched her arm out of the old man’s hand, his fingertips slipping shut on empty air.

  “You’d be dead in a gutter,” said Heinrich, pointing at her with the two fingers pincering the cigar, “that’s where your skinny white-girl ass would be. So, listen to your heart and use your head, Robin Hood. Ain’t nobody against you but them. Don’t let ’em talk you in circles. That’s their first trick. You know that. You know better. I didn’t take you in and teach you what I know for you to fall for their bullshit.”

  The sun continued to fill the kitchen with morning light. “I saw my mother,” Robin said eventually. “In a dream, when I had my seizure.”

  She recounted the contact with Owlhead and the demon’s stolen vision from start to finish, from the ritual Annie performed on Weaver’s husband to the demon crawling out of the hole. Leon choked on his coffee and got up to fetch a paper towel to mop it up off his shirt. “There’s a hellhole in my goddamn basement?”

  “I don’t know what it is, specifically, but—” Robin started to say.

  “No, that’s exactly what it is,” said Heinrich. “Sounds like what happened was Annie thought she had sacrificed Edgar Weaver to draw a demon into our world to kill Cutty, but what she did was sign a blood contract that allowed Hell to annex the house.”

  “In plain English, please,” said Kenway.

  Heinrich swept a hand down his face, pulling at his cheeks. His lower eyelids were rimmed in red; he obviously hadn’t slept. “Basically, like Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States, this house is now a territory of Hell. It has been for about two decades. I imagine it’s why ain’t nobody lived in it since Annie died.” He pointed toward the living room. “The dark version of it that little boy in there found with his mama’s ring? That’s the Hell-side of this house.”

  Everyone stared at Robin, making her want to shrivel up. “I thought you said there wasn’t a Hell,” said Kenway.

  The old witch-hunter grimaced, tossing a hand. Ashes dusted the tabletop. “Of course there’s a Hell.” Heinrich swept them off onto the floor. “Is she filling y’all’s heads with her Dalai Lama God-is-love-and-Hell-is-regret bullshit?”

  They smirked at him. Robin gave him the finger.

  “There for a while last year, she got real deep into Nichiren Buddhism,” said Heinrich. “She even had me chanting Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō over and over again, doin’ yoga and shit and eatin’ rabbit food. Me—! The last time I did the Downward Dog, I got crabs and a night in jail.”

  “Y’all nasty,” said Joel.

  “The demon,” said Heinrich, getting up from the table. “The hallucinations. Owlhead was drawing you here.” He paced slowly up and down the foyer hallway, one hand in his pocket, the other holding the cigar to his mouth. “He wants you here for some reason.”

  “But why now?” asked Robin. “I’ve always seen him, but it’s only been every now and then. The first nineteen years of my life, I saw him four times. Once when I was as young as that little girl in there, once in middle school, and twice in the mental hospital. The last two years, I’ve seen him at least fifteen times. It’s like he’s leading me here. What’s special about now?”

  “You turned eighteen. Came of age. Maybe he thinks you’ve passed some kind of threshold that would make it possible for you to let him manifest in our world? You are the daughter of the woman that summoned him, after all. Maybe there’s a link somewhere.”

  “If he’s looking for a virgin, he’s barking up the wrong girl.”

  Heinrich laughed.

  “And if he wants me to let him loose, I ain’t doing that. I wouldn’t even know how.” She eyed the cigar smoke in the air. “You’re the research wonk—do you know if there’s another part to that ritual beyond cleaving off a shadow-clone of the house to imprison him in?”

  The old man shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know, I’d have to look at the materials she used.”

  “What are demons, anyway?” asked Joel. “That thing with the owl-head didn’t look like any demon I’ve ever seen. I would’ve expected, y’know, the usual—cloven hooves, pitchfork, horns, the whole nine yards. Not a dilapidated animatronic owl from a haunted pizzeria.”

  “Demons, at their simplest,” explained Heinrich, “are viruses.”

  “I ain’t pickin’ up what you’re throwin’ down.”

  “All right, a virus is basically a piece of DN
A wrapped in protein. You could say it’s dead, but it would have to have lived to be dead, and it’s never been alive. But it wants to be alive. And the only way a virus can assume some semblance of life is by infecting a living being. I like to think of it as a Terminator—a facsimile of life that’s never been alive itself, wrapped in meat.” He sighed and took the cigar out of his mouth, staring at it as he rolled it in his fingers. “The way it’s been explained to me is, there are two kinds of souls. The souls that come out of Creation’s oven well formed and functioning find their way into a living body at some point. The souls that come out deformed don’t get a body. They sorta float around out there in the dark, in the void of Purgatory. Demons are those two-faced, water-headed, heart-on-the-outside, too-fucked-up-to-live souls. And the only way they can reach the same level of life we enjoy is to possess a living body, the same way a virus possesses a living cell.”

  “You say ‘Creation’s oven,’” said Leon, wiping his hands dry with a towel as he came back to the foyer. “So, you’re tellin’ me there’s an actual God up there, cranking out souls in His spiritual bakery?”

  Heinrich guffawed, leaning back to laugh at the ceiling.

  “That’s the million-dollar question, ain’t it?” He stubbed the cigar out on the sole of his boot. “Welcome to the clergy.”

  3

  The Parkins didn’t have any of the ingredients for breakfast, but Leon needed to make a trip to the grocery store anyway to get the steaks, leaving the kids with Kenway and Robin.

  “I’m gonna go with you, if you don’t mind,” said Joel as the Parkin patriarch headed for the door. “You can drop me off at my house. After bein’ face-to-face with Granny Clampett out there, I think I’ve had my fill of witch shit for today. I don’t have to go in to Miguel’s tonight, so I’m gonna take a long nap, sleep all afternoon, then take a long, hot shower and get drunk as a skunk and watch Netflix.”

  “I don’t blame you one bit.”

  Robin gave him a hug. “Much love, brother.”

  He returned it. “Love you too, sister. Good luck with your thing. Don’t let ’em get you. I expect to see your tiny ass in one piece tomorrow.”

  To the boys’ surprise, the veteran Kenway was quite a gamer, and they geeked out with him over Wayne’s PlayStation. Heinrich spent most of the morning sitting on the back stoop smoking his cigars and staring at the forest out back. Wayne kinda liked that dude—he was standoffish and creepy, but in a cool, self-aware way, as if it were a façade he’d developed over the years.

  “You will tell us how it went, won’t you?” asked Amanda, as the kids got ready to head home to Chevalier Village. They were standing on the front porch of the Victorian. The day had grown cool, and the overcast sky was the blank, featureless white of an unwritten story. “You know, dinner with the witches? And don’t leave anything out, no matter how gross.”

  “Why don’t you go with us?” Wayne offered.

  Both Pete and Amanda visibly blanched at the thought.

  “What, are you scared?”

  “Hell, yeah,” said Pete.

  “They’re super creepy.” Amanda folded her arms and glanced at Pete as if seeking reassurance. “I don’t think you understand, Wayne. We’ve been living down the hill from those women our entire lives. Our parents—I don’t know if they’re afraid of them, but … nobody in Chevalier Village goes outside much after dark unless it’s an emergency, you know? The women don’t talk to us; we don’t talk to them.” Her eyes found their way up to the hacienda. “This morning was the first time I’ve ever heard Karen Weaver speak.”

  “They’re kinda like you guys’ Dracula, huh?” asked Wayne.

  Pete’s head tilted. “What do you mean?”

  “The mysterious Count Dracula, living up on the hill overlooking the town. Nobody goes up there, and the village warns away anybody that comes snooping. Chevalier is kind of a mini-Transylvania, ain’t it? They got you spooked like a vampire.”

  Amanda nodded but didn’t say anything.

  “Astute observation,” said Robin, startling Wayne. She was sitting in the swing at the end of the porch.

  “We’d better get out of here, I guess,” said Amanda, bouncing down the front steps. As she stepped into the grass, she turned back to him. “Be careful. If they really are witches, they’re dangerous. Take care of your dad, okay?”

  “I’ll try. I don’t think they’re gonna do anything. We’re just eating steak, right? We’re going to dinner there. They can’t violate guest right.”

  “Real life isn’t Game of Thrones.”

  Wayne swallowed anxiously and sat down on the steps to watch his new friends trudge back to the trailer park.

  The woman who called herself Malus Domestica came down to his end of the porch. She wasn’t wearing her chest harness, but she carried the little camera in her hand. Her messenger bag was slung around her shoulder. Robin put the camera on top of the newel post at the end of the porch railing, facing them, and the red light on it told him it was recording.

  “So, you got a YouTube channel?” he asked her.

  “Yup. It’s got all my detective work and encounters on it. All my fights this far. Well, almost all of them. I’ve been ambushed a couple of times.” She sat down next to him, leaning over with her elbows on her knees. “You and your dad should watch a couple of them. So you can—I don’t know, maybe it’ll help you trust me.”

  “I think after showing him the monster in the doorway, he believes,” said Wayne.

  The woman’s eyes sparkled even in the dim light of the overcast day. She was intensely pretty, he thought, fine-featured and pale, but her eyes were old. Or maybe tired. There was a sharp, almost unsettling intelligence in them, like a crocodile.

  He sighed. “I know I believe.”

  “I have a plan,” she told him.

  “A plan for what?”

  “I want to use your ring to get into their house without having to walk through the front door. Take ’em by surprise.”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “There’s a fourth witch, somewhere on the property,” she said, looking up at the Lazenbury. “I’m pretty sure she lives upstairs, in the attic. She’s much older than the other three. That fourth witch is the one augmenting the power of the rest of the coven. Witches can band together and draw on each other’s power—that’s the whole point of a coven.”

  Delving into her messenger bag, Robin took out a beautiful dagger. “Made of silver. The entire thing, from point to pommel. This is what we’re going to use to kill them.”

  “I thought silver was for werewolves.”

  “This silver.…” She turned it so the stiletto caught the white sky, and ivory shimmered down the mirrored metal blade. “To use a comic book analogy, it’s spiritual adamantine. Witches can’t change it or defend against it. It’s magically inert. Energy-neutral. If you had enough of these, you could pin a whole coven of witches to the floor and there’s nothing they could do about it. Only lay there cussing at you.”

  “Do you?” He lifted the dagger out of her hands and examined it. “Do you have enough?”

  “Heinrich says there are two others in the world, but this is the only one of these I’ve ever seen.”

  “Can’t you make more?”

  “According to him, they were made with the nails the Romans used to pin Jesus Christ to the cross on Golgotha. The nail is the core of the blade. Whether that’s total bullshit or not, I have no idea. Heinrich says a lot of things. Half the time he could be full of shit—for all I know, they’re made with Elvis Presley’s melted-down fillings. But I’ll tell you right now, this one works. It’s helped me kill a lot of witches.”

  “What do you do, stab ’em in the heart?”

  “Witches don’t have hearts to stab.” Robin explained the ritual of Ereshkigal’s sacrifice, how they offer their hearts to the goddess of death in exchange for a direct line to her power. “You pin her down with it and set her on fire while she’s immob
ilized. Guns can slow them down, but fire is the only thing that can stop a witch. You can’t kill them, you can only destroy them. And if I can get to the fourth witch and pin her down with this, I can burn her. With her out of the picture, the other three will be a lot easier to handle. Hopefully, if I play my cards right, I can take them out one at a time.”

  * * *

  Leon brought back lunch from his trip into town, so the two witch-hunters talked shop with everybody at the kitchen table eating Taco Bell. The GoPro sat on the table, dark and deactivated, staring straight up at the ceiling as everybody talked over it. Leon sat by himself in the living room, getting ready for the coming week, going over lesson plans and grading a pop test he’d given Friday. He hadn’t gotten around to it, with Wayne’s emergency hospital visit. “Witches and monsters can’t make your job disappear,” he said, and dived into his homework.

  Something else was eating at Dad, that much Wayne could tell, at least. Leon didn’t seem amenable to talking about it, though. Wayne left him to his own devices and sat in the kitchen, nibbling on a burrito, eavesdropping on the witch-hunters’ conversation.

  The table was piled with a dozen old books bound in choppy chunks of thick, yellowed pages. Titles in obscure Latin and insignia that looked like geometry diagrams were etched on their covers in faded gold. The ones in English had pretentious or boring titles like Chronology of Cabbalistic Philosophy, Essential Demonic Taxonomy, Invisible Science, Western Applied Invocation. If he didn’t know any better, he’d think they were college textbooks. They certainly sounded like the ones Dad had stacks of, boxed away in his bedroom.

  Robin told Heinrich about her plan to use Wayne’s ring to get upstairs to the fourth witch without Cutty seeing her.

  “Dangerous,” he said. “That demon’s waiting for us to wander back in there.”