by S. A. Hunt
Robin stared at him, mouth open. “I leave you alone for ten fuckin’ minutes.”
“They were dirty,” he said, glancing at the window. “The cops, I mean. And they were trying to kill me and Joel, so I guess it’s self-defense? I don’t think anybody knows about it yet. I’m honestly not sure what to do. We drove away in the killer’s truck. Which I regret, because it’s a piece of shit. I really traded down.”
“I was right. We’re all kinds of fucked-up.”
“We’re fighters,” he said, shaking his head. “Like I told you the other day. We’re in the shit. This is us. We’re ghosts. We went to Narnia. This stuff doesn’t happen to normal people. We’re extraordinary.”
“Extraterrestrial, maybe.” She sighed. “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had to keep my mouth shut about a dead dirty cop.”
“They killed Joel’s brother Fish.”
“Fuck!” she spat. Her heart sank. Robin sat back, her head flouncing into the pillow, and stared at the wall. Fuck fuck fuck. Too much bad news to take at once, especially after the night in the vineyard. The angry burn in her abs faded. “Take me out to the pasture and shoot me. I’m no good to you anymore. I’m glue.” Her stomach gave a gnarly growl. “I’m also starving.”
“I’ll get you something.” He laboriously stood up, leaning on his chair, and dug in his pocket for change. A lap tray on a floor-stand stood next to the bed, and there was a cafeteria tray on it, covered with a lid. She didn’t have to open it to know the food inside would be cold. “I’ll have to get you something from the vending machine. It’s too late for dinner. Is that okay?”
“That’s fine. What time is it?” She thought. “What day is it?”
“Monday night, about nine.”
“I slept all Sunday night and all Monday?” She frowned and glanced at the ceiling. “Where’s Wayne? Did he make it out okay?”
“He’s fine. Rode in the back of the truck while I drove you here myself. I didn’t trust the ambulance to get here in time, and to be honest, I didn’t think about it much because after I saw what condition you were in, I was in autopilot. You were bleeding like—well, like a stuck pig.”
“What about his dad?”
“I haven’t seen him. Wayne came to the hospital with me last night. He hasn’t been to school—he’s afraid to go home. He couldn’t sleep in these chairs, so he’s in the waiting room down the hall.”
“Leon will be fine. There’s no reason to kill him, so the witches will let him stick around. We can un-familiar him with an algiz.”
“Good. I’ve been worried about that. So has Wayne.”
“What about Heinrich? Have you seen him?”
Kenway shook his head. “Not since he went into their hacienda. I think he walked into an ass-whooping. I helped him get inside, but then…” He trailed off. “I saw something that scared me.”
“What did you see?”
“A ghost. I think. A very personal ghost.”
“An illusion, probably. Weaver didn’t go into the vineyard with me, so she must have stayed behind. Probably ambushed you with a hallucination and drove you out of the house to get you out of the picture.” She sighed. Whatever mess Heinrich had gotten himself into, he deserved it. “This is his fault. If he hadn’t gone in there like that, Marilyn would have let us walk out of there and I’d still—” Robin looked down at where her left arm had been. Thick bandaging and gauze. Not even a stump. Everything was gone right up to the shoulder. Peeling back the adhesive gauze and padding, she could see it out of the corner of her eye: a swollen hump, bristling with hairy black stitches, stained with orange Betadine. A hot bomb of loss and dismay dropped into her chest, and tears sprang to her eyes. She pressed the padding back down, less out of a desire to protect it than to hide it.
“What happened?”
“The bone was too damaged,” he told her. “Lot of splinters. They had to take everything up to the joint.”
It couldn’t be helped; she cried, big wet pitiful boo-hoo sobs, saltwater streaming down her face. Kenway came over and bent to kiss her forehead, which only broke her heart even worse. “What am I going to do?” she asked. “What kind of a witch-hunter am I going to be with one hand?”
Kenway bit back a sad smile. “I do okay with one leg.”
Shame burned her face.
“I don’t know how I’m going to keep doing this with one hand,” she said. “This is all I know. It’s all I’ve ever done. I can’t even open jars now.”
“We’ll figure something out.” His smile became earnest and she reached up to feel his face, combing her slender fingers through his gingery beard. “I can be your cameraman,” he said, his mustache brushing the pad of her thumb. “We’ll figure out the rest as we go.” Giving her hand one last squeeze, he left the room. Robin stared at the dark television.
Rain clattered softly against the windowpane.
Her cellphone lay on the bedside table. She picked it up and logged into Facebook, Twitter, and then YouTube, and finally her Gmail account. All of them were full of posts, emails, and comments from strangers emotionally invested in her video series:
Where are you?
What’s going on?
Are you okay?
You haven’t posted any new videos. What’s happening?
Did you kill the witches?
It was true she marketed and produced the video series as if it were a fictional affair: scripted, staged, cinematic. Where the public-facing front of her “business” was concerned, it was common knowledge the videos were fake. Seriously, witches that turn into monsters and people possessed by cats don’t exist, right?
Right about now, I wish they didn’t.
But the people that watched her videos treated them as if they were real. They commented on each upload with words of encouragement and asked after her well-being, remarked on how attractive she was (even though she didn’t believe that, not for a second), begged her for a chance to fight alongside her. Ex-military, male and female both, asked to join her personal crusade, sometimes dozens a week. A national spectrum of neckbeards and Don Juans alike professed their love for her. Cops offered their protection on the downlow and insinuated they’d turn a blind eye to the legal vagaries of her adventures, while female true-crime fans—adherents of TV shows like Cold Case Files and podcasts like My Favorite Murder—posted selfies of red apples with combat knives stuck into them—because of her exploits hunting down wife-beaters and child-molesters, she had become their patron saint of vigilante feminism, a real-life Punisher.
Searching the nooks and crannies of her mind, she couldn’t think of anything to tell them. Seemed like all those millions of people following her shenanigans thus far deserved a well-thought-out, optimistic, detailed answer, and right now she didn’t know if she had one in her.
Besides, it was damn hard to type with one hand.
She tested the speech-to-text function on her phone, but the pain meds had slurred her speech and the results were less than satisfactory.
“The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.”
The brain in Spain follows mainly on the plane, it typed.
“The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.”
The rain in Spain hauls manly only praying.
“Come on, you asshole. I know how to speak English.”
Come on your asshole, uno how do speakeasy?
Kenway came back a little while later with cheese crackers, candy bars, chips, M&Ms. It looked like he’d bought half the machine. She teared up again at the sight of it all.
“Okay, okay,” he said, piling red bags into her lap, “you can have the Cheez-Its.”
Her sobs broke up into pained chuckles.
Since it was October, several cable channels showed marathons of horror movies. They sat up all night, eating vending-machine snacks, drinking vending-machine coffee, and watching masked maniacs slay their way through half a thousand promiscuous teenagers.
At some point, Robin sli
thered out of the bed feeling gross and wiped herself down with a wet paper towel, but she had to do it with the lights off, going through her ablutions by the night-light over the sink. Every time she caught a glimpse of that stitch-haired vacancy on her left side, it was everything she could do not to burst into tears again. The effort it took to avoid this, and the constant pain and itching, felt as if it were slowly driving her mad.
Crawling back into bed, she fixated on the TV screen so she didn’t have to see the expression of pity and sympathy on 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. 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 going to be killed doing this, it’s me. Not you. You’re not a ghost or an alien. I’m the one that took on this life. Not you. You’re not the fucked-up one, I am.
He noticed her watching him and his face softened into a tired-eyed smile. Robin looked away, locked on to the TV screen again.
The longer the movies droned on, the heavier her eyes got. She finally fell asleep again about the time dawn-light turned the window shades blue.
21
She woke up again around lunchtime. Kenway showed up with a plate of sushi and two blueberry parfaits from the hospital cafeteria, and revealed he’d retrieved her camera and MacBook, along with her utility van.
“You’ve been a busy beaver,” Robin asked.
“Yeah. I don’t know how we’re going to get Leon back, though, without you and Heinrich. I don’t know shit about witches, or how much use I’m gonna be with this gash on my head. It’s a concussion but I’ve been released from observation. They said to take it easy for a few weeks, but I have the feeling you’re not done.”
“As soon as I’m back on my feet, I’m going up there myself to end this.” She flexed her hand. “Theresa told me something right before you put a bullet in her head: Andras—the demon—he’s my father.”
“Do you believe her?”
“I don’t have any reason not to. Makes sense, given the time frame. My vision of her summoning Andras must have taken place before I was born, not after.” That means if Heinrich knew when the summoning ritual took place, she thought, he lied about what the demon means to me. He knew the price my mother had to pay.
It was me.
I was the price.
“Is that how you made the transformation go away? Was that you?”
“Yeah. Demons eat their magic. I don’t know how or why.”
Kenway talked with a mouthful of California roll. For hospital sushi, it was pretty damn good. “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 and bring him up here,” he said, jingling keys. “He’s at school.”
She surrendered a dim smile. “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.”
“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 depressing 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 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 binder 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.
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 limpid seawater 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. He had affixed an enamel pin to the lapel of his jacket, and there was something about it so familiar, it actually made Robin’s skin flash cold, but she couldn’t quite place it.
Then she understood. It was the same pin she’d seen on Heinrich’s nightstand—the green-and-gold dog head in profile, surrounded by laurels and a banner inscribed with unreadable symbols. Around the dog’s neck was a longbow.
Her heart beat a little faster.
“Hello,” she said, surprised. “Can I help you?”
“You don’t know me, but I know you.” He smiled tightly. “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, currently, and maybe a few others. And Heinrich. I don’t suppose he ever told you about the group he used to be a part of.” He spoke eloquently, with a hint of an accent she couldn’t quite place, and a saccharine, gentlemanly manner that made him seem like a character from a Tim Burton movie.
“He said he escaped from a cult,” she replied. “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 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 is Hank Atterberry, was once a member of our organization, the Dogs of Odysseus. We’re a society of practicing magicians, and proudly count a number of famous, influential individuals among our members.”
“Hank Atterberry?” said Robin, stiffening. “No wonder he changed his name. Sounds like he should be some retired guy living in a shitty little house in Tennessee, yelling at the raccoons that keep getting into his garbage.”
Gendreau chuckled.
“So,” Robin continued, “The ‘Dogs of Odysseus,’ huh? Quaint. Your basic secret world-governing cult, right? You’re the Illuminati, aren’t you?”
“Not so much. We’re more like …
the Avengers. The superhero Avengers, not the old British Avengers Steed and Peel.”
“There’s a British Avengers?”
“Before your time, I suppose. Before mine as well.”
She snorted grimly.
“Too precious?” smirked Gendreau. “The UN 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 found a black-and-white sketch of the Osdathregar, in high resolution. On second thought, it was—what do they call them? Lithographs? Woodcuts? One of those, something you’d see in a history book. “I’m here because you and he have something that belongs to us. Well, a lot of things, mostly books, a small fortune in historical documents, but this is the main thing I’d like to address.”
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 into a deep darkness.
“We’ve been trying to find his hideout 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 find me?”
“Your videos indicated 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 evacuated.” Gendreau sat back and leveled the black cane across his knees. “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 this year, to no avail. I figured Heinrich had poisoned you against us.”