I Come with Knives

by S. A. Hunt

  “I have a particularly aggressive spam filter. Also, I get like a thousand new emails every day through the business address on my YouTube channel, and half of them are crazy-ass bullshit from people that really should be taking their medication. So, if I got one email in a hundred thousand emails talking nonsense about dog magicians, and those other ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine emails are all talking about third eyes, Sasquatch, reptilian politicians, and blonde Nordic angels from deep space, please excuse me if I didn’t take it quite as seriously as I should have.”

  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. The pearl was formed around it, in the mouth of a giant clam.”

  “That’s gross as hell. Why would you choose to carry that around?”

  “I didn’t. It was simply the artifact I resonated the most with, out of the dozens of charmed items in the Dogs’ lockup. Believe me, if I didn’t have to carry a huge dehydrated phallus around like some kind of magical Ed Gein, I wouldn’t. I’d much rather have a pocket watch, or a lighter like Rook, or a pair of scissors like Elena. But this grotesque thing was the only object in Francis Gendreau’s collection with curative properties.”

  “Who are Rook and Elena? Are they magicians too?”

  “Yes, they are friends of mine. We are all students and collaborators in the Dogs of—”

  “—Odysseus, yes.”

  “Indeed.”

  Wonder if I could close Gendreau’s heart-road if I touch the cane. She probably could. But in this state, the man would make short work of her if she tried. She considered asking him for a demonstration of his magical abilities, but in a place like a city hospital, unleashing arcane power had the possibility of drawing unwanted attention.

  Better safe than sorry. She folded the paper and gave it back. “I assume you’re here for the Osdathregar.”

  “Down to brass tacks, I see. Yes, at some point in our professional relationship—and by our I mean me and you, and by at some point I mean to say within the next couple of days—I’m here to retrieve the dagger.”

  “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 cramming it into her gob, talking with her mouth full. “He’s not hiding, as far as I know. 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. She didn’t trust this weird magician guy as far as she could throw him—and today, that was about half as far as she could have thrown him yesterday—but if he could line her up for another shot at both the coven and Heinrich, then she would play along and see what he had to offer. If his deal turns out to be rotten, she thought, studying his face, au revoir, toodle-oo, auf wiedersehen. Hit the road, Jack.

  “That’s too bad.” Gendreau stood the cane on the floor. “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, never mind the fact she’s got two coven-mates and a Matron. With the Osdathregar, the danger would only be moderately lessened. Assaulting her property without the dagger 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 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 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 hog’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 human 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, making a mess all over the sheet. “I think closing the heart-road turned her human again for a few minutes.”

  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? He’s an incubus, isn’t he?”

  “No. She gave herself willingly.” Robin’s lips were numb with epiphany, and so was her hand. “And I’m the offspring of that encounter. I was the price for the demon’s protection. I was the deal she made. A child for protection.”

  “The demon got her with child somehow. 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.”

  Anger flared in Robin’s chest. “He engineered my entire existence?” she demanded. “Why? Why would he do that?” Absentmindedly, she 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 Dogs.” Gendreau leaned forward. “We assumed he was trying to replicate what got him drummed out to begin with: trying to summon a demon and use 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. Besides, no one’s gotten a demon through the Sanctification since it went up. Not only is it against our law, it’s functionally impossible.”

  “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 didn’t know for sure. My mother was his guinea pig. The demon could have 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 he was anxious. Afraid of her?

  He had a right to be.

  And if he double-crossed her, or turned out to be a flake and his flowery e
xposition fell apart, she would give him a good reason to be afraid.

  “You are … a cambion,” he said, finally, with a grim, revelatory wonder.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a very old word for a being 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 for the term changeling, first published in the 1818 Dictionnaire Infernal, and stems from the Celtic root kamb, meaning crooked.”

  Crooked? Robin frowned. 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 gory videos.

  Time passed while she stared at her duvet and Gendreau sat there, quietly, doing nothing but staring at her. She supposed the magician 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 gotten his idiot students to work through some moderately difficult equation—made her want to clock him in the chin. But something told her the Dogs of Odysseus’s imperative against demons might extend to her, and that needed to be addressed.

  She sighed. “So, now what?”

  “The ball is now in your court, cambion. Go after Cutty yourself, and retrieve the dagger.”

  “I meant ‘now what’ with you. You said your people have a thing against summoning demons. I thought secret occultist societies were into that kind of thing. For that matter, why do you hunt witches, anyway? Aren’t you guys and witches like this?” she asked, twining her index and middle fingers together.

  Gendreau shook his head. “The Dogs of Odysseus have come a long way since Aleister Crowley’s death. His Thelemic Society splintered into a dozen disparate factions, some following the path of White, some following the paths of Black and Red magic. The Dogs are one of White and light. We were once a dark collective called the Aster Argos after Crowley’s Castle of the Silver Star, until my grandfather Francis Gendreau ascended to a leadership position in 1964 and moved the headquarters to Michigan. The Aster Argos became a White organization called the Dogs of Odysseus and dedicated itself to the dissolution and eradication of Black magic like Ereshkigal’s witches, as well as the collection, cataloguing, and destruction or storage of Black magic artifacts.”

  Something told her his occult Avengers gang wasn’t as virtuous as he made it out to be, but she didn’t interrupt. She was enjoying the history lesson, regardless of how little she trusted him. If it was a fiction, it was an engaging one. But why would he lie about the group’s provenance? Who would bother constructing such an elaborate history? No, the betrayal would come down the line. When it would hurt the most, like Heinrich. They would string her along just long enough to get what they wanted, then throw her to the wolves.

  Still. She was stuck, in the hospital. For now. So, history lesson it must be. She would burn that bridge when she came to it.

  “Why dogs, though?”

  “In Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, the main character has a dog named Argos, a greyhound. Aster Argos means dog star. While Odysseus was gone on his twenty-year adventure, Argos stayed behind, protecting his master’s property from the men that schemed to take his wife and home.” Gendreau’s eyes came down to the pin on his lapel. He held it closer so she could see the details of the dog and bow. “We are the guard dogs that serve to protect the world of mankind from those who would call dark energies to claim or destroy it. That’s what the symbols around the perimeter mean, by the way—our motto is Loyalty is Strength.”

  Folding the cellophane over the rest of the cheese crackers, Robin put them back on the bedside table. “So, what does all this mean for me?” she asked, picking crumbs off the duvet and folding them up into the napkin from lunch.

  “What does all this mean for you as far as being part demon, you mean.”

  She nodded, not looking up.

  Gendreau sighed. “I expect I’ll need to consult with the others and see what they say.” He studied her at length. “As for what I think: if it were entirely up to me, as soon as the Osdathregar is back in our hands, I would leave you alone and let you go back to what you were doing. You seem to be getting on pretty well to me. Damn well, honestly. In hindsight, I suspect it’s because of your demon heritage. You’ve probably been sipping at their essences without knowing it these past few years, growing stronger with every kill, the demon side of you unconsciously nibbling at their heart-roads. It’s probably why you’re sitting up and cracking jokes two days after your arm was bitten off by a monster.” The corner of his mouth rose in a half-smile. “Didn’t that seem strange to you?”

  After the last few days, it was hard to pick out what was the strangest, and sitting up watching the Halloween series on AMC the day after amputation surgery seemed like the least strange of all.

  Robin stared at the MacBook sitting open in front of her, trying to process all this new information. She’d been keeping her mind busy with video editing all afternoon, but now there was no way to block it out of her head. The pieces of the last two years—hell, her entire life—were coming together and creating a great jagged-edged puzzle picture.

  So, this is who I am, she thought.

  A liberating revelation, to be sure, to finally find her identity buried at the bottom of the Goodwill pile of life. She had never been sick that she could recall. She was none the worse for wear from the smoking. Come to think of it, she’d weathered injuries that would have incapacitated lesser people—dislocations, beatings, cuts, bites. She was covered in scars that should have landed her in a grave years before.

  She rubbed the padding on her shoulder again. It felt like she had ants under her skin, which did not bode well under these circumstances. She hoped Karen Weaver wasn’t screwing with her in some long-distance bid to drive her out of town.

  “I’ll do my best to convince the Dogs to leave you alone,” said Gendreau. “It may help to introduce you to them, and allow them to see how—ahem—relatively harmless you are. You’re no rampaging monster, I can see that as plain as the nose on my face.”

  The sleek magician got up from the chair and went to the door. Before he pulled it open, he turned and tucked one hand behind his back.

  “When—”

  “You know, I don’t think I like the idea of my fate being up to a bunch of know-it-all cultists I’ve never met.” She scowled at him. “How do I know I can trust you? One of your ‘Dogs’ has already royally screwed me over. How do I know you’re not going to do it too?”

  “How do I know I can trust you?”

  “Because I got a trophy from YouTube for getting a million subscribers. They don’t hand those things out to every Tom, Dick, and Harry, you know. You have to earn YouTube’s trust.”

  The magician laughed. “Would it make you feel better to know they give us licenses, and we have to qualify with our artifacts and prove we can safely use them before we are allowed to carry them?”

  “It would make me feel better if I didn’t have to prove my integrity to a man that looks like the Prince of the Elven Realms and smells like a spice rack.”

  The magician did not laugh. “Maybe it would make you feel better that we know how many crimes you’ve committed in the course of your self-imposed duties, and yet we chose to send a lone emissary to speak to you directly instead of simply informing the FBI about your activities, showing them documentation of said activities, providing them with the relevant arrest warrants, and then telling them where you are.”

  “You haven’t done that because you need me.”

  “Indeed. You are the first cambion born in two thousand years, and my grandfather wants to study you for our research. And you haven’t stabbed me and subsequently jumped out the window because you need the Dogs to help defeat the Blackfield coven. So, evidently, we need each other. I propose a compromise.”

  “I don’t need shit.”

  “Other t
han help shifting gears in your stick-shift utility van, tying your shoes, and buttoning your fly.”

  “That’s a low blow.” Robin winced.

  “You are not the only one here capable of antagony, Malus Domestica.” Turning back to the door, Gendreau added, “As I was about to say, my sarcastic new friend, when you’re ready to go after Cutty, come get me. I have something that may help you. I’m staying at the Lake Craddock cabins down by the interstate.” He smiled and hitched the pizzle cane into the air, to Robin’s disgust. “The little café at the top of the mountain has the best view.”

  After he left, she sneered at the door. “I’ll shift your gears, asshole,” she said, and then took out her phone to look up the definition of the word antagony.

  22

  After Gendreau left, Robin put on a pair of sweatpants and went to the cafeteria for something to drink, wishing the hospital served whiskey. Sitting at a table in the back was Joel Ellis. The pizza chef was fully dressed in a sweater and jeans, though his skin was livid with tiny cuts and scrapes. The do-rag on his head matched his undershirt.

  “Hey, man,” she said, sitting down at his table.

  “What are you doing here—” he started to say, and then he sat up in shock. “What the hell happened to your arm?”

  Robin glanced at the padding. “Oh, this?”

  “Yeah, this, chick. Y’dadgum arm is gone.” He got up and sat closer, on her left side.

  She rubbed the cotton again. If only my arm was still there so I could scratch the damn thing. “Sounds like we’ve both got a story to tell.” She took a deep drink of her soda to wet her whistle. “I guess I’ll start, since you seem to be so up in arms about my … arm.” She told him about going back into the Darkhouse and receiving the demon’s vision, right on up to the doomed dinner party and the Hogwitch biting her arm off.

  “Sweet baby Jesus,” said Joel. “You’re that thing’s daughter?” He pulled out a labeled sandwich baggie with yellow pills in it and swallowed one with his drink. “Sorry.” He belched. “I’m not high enough for this shit.” This declaration segued into his story about getting jumped at his house by Bowker, getting shot in the leg, the truck crash, the cat fire, Fisher’s execution, and the Queen ambush at the sulfite drainage pond in the quarry.