by S. A. Hunt
Sara sat down to rest as well. “Anders is a sensitive. He’s our … supernatural GPS. He’s how we found you Sunday night, and he’s how we knew which hospital they took you to. He’s not a battle-mage.”
“I am also a superlative alchemist, and I am quite useful at curative properties—removing poisons and illnesses, knitting small wounds, that sort of thing.” The slender magician sat back and tugged at his jacket, straightening it. “I was made an official curandero in Chile six years ago and some call me Don Gendreau, the Healer of Caddo Parish.”
“Some as in, like, twelve people,” rasped Sara.
She had found a roll of paper towels with the party supplies on a table in the corner and was mopping at the now-tacky blood on her forehead. Gendreau got up and went to her, his hands gravitating to her face. “Here, love, let me take a look.” He tsk-tsked, combing through her hair. His delicate hands probed a gash at her hairline, his fingers sweeping and flourishing. His fingertips traced delicate sigils on her skull. “You poor dear; banged your head pretty badly, didn’t you?”
“Oh, stop petting me and fix it, please.”
“Okay, enough banter. We need to figure out what we’re going to do now,” said Robin. “I don’t think we’ll survive another round with the Thundercats out there.”
At least a hundred people shambled back and forth in the street, picking fights with each other and sniffing the air. Many of them had taken off their clothes, and three of them rutted madly in the middle of the street. “Man, I’ve never seen this many familiars in one place before. Most I’ve ever seen was at that casino in Nevada.” One of the familiars peered through the gap created by Spider-Man’s thighs and his retinas flashed white-green in the black silhouette of his head. They hunkered instinctively, watching over the edge of a shelf. “Darkness can’t save you.”
“Where is your sign shop, Kenway?” asked Wayne. “Maybe we can make a break for it.”
The big veteran thought about it, rubbing his nose with his forearm. His hands came to rest naturally on his hips. “Umm.” He pointed one way and then the other, turned around, then jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “About a half-block that way. On the other side of the street.”
“Isn’t the canal behind us?”
Kenway nodded. “No, it’s behind my shop. But I think I might know where you’re goin’ with this. There’s a storm drain in the alley behind this shop. I know because I’ve been back there to throw out garbage. It probably runs past the drainage grate in my garage and empties in the canal out back. You figure we could use it to sneak over there?”
“Yeah.” Wayne got up and went through the door in the back, shouldering past the movie screen hanging from the ceiling.
Joel followed him. “Hold up. Make sure there ain’t no fire alarm.”
The adrenaline in Robin’s system faded, her shoulder singing hallelujah. She sat down in a booth and pulled her shirt back down, ferreting her new left arm out of the sleeve. Blood still leaked freely from the surgery scar, and now all of the stitches had been broken, the staples pried loose and jutting out haphazardly, so they caught on the fabric.
“When you finish with Sara,” she asked, “will you do something about my shoulder? It’s killing me.”
“Almost done.”
In the gray light seeping through from the front of the shop, she could study the arm’s fibrous surface, a thick plait of hard but yielding cables, like a tight gauntlet of tire-rubber, pliant yet hard. Taking her demon hand in her human hand, the silky copper hairs brushing her palm, Robin was overcome by a chilly awe.
Does he know? Does Andras know who I am? What I am? The next question was Will he recognize me? but she realized she didn’t care.
Or perhaps she did; she wanted the demon that took advantage of her mother’s fear to see her face and know her as she killed him. Compelling, irrepressible anger billowed up inside of her and Robin wanted to smash things; she wanted to destroy and pulverize. That thing is going to die for what it did to my mother and what it’s done to me. For the life it’s forced me into.
“Wow,” said Kenway, leaning on the booth table. “So, your arm grew back. Pretty damn sweet, yeah?”
Robin nodded, forcing a smile.
When he spoke again, she could tell his smile had drained away and left him cool, his voice low. “I know it’s weird. And it’s hard to deal with. I don’t know what to tell you.” His own hand curled around hers and it registered she could feel it with the Andras-arm, she could feel things with it, and compared to the hard demon-skin, his fingers were as soft and warm and fragile as a very old man’s. Instinctively, Robin shrank away. She didn’t want her strange demon hand to touch him.
“If my leg grew back, I wouldn’t care what it looked like,” he said. “You know? I’d be happy just to have it back.”
A sick thought occurred to her. Is he jealous this happened, that it grew back? Was there a part of him that felt … felt a kinship, or a satisfaction when he’d found out she’d lost her arm to Theresa? Robin brushed it aside. Of course not. What kind of a person would he be to think that way?
Her fears were vanquished handily when he leaned over and kissed her on the forehead.
“I like you anyway, the way you are,” he said, and kissed her on the forehead again. “Hell, I think it looks badass—you’re, like, a superhero now,” and then he kissed her on the mouth and pleasure rippled through her chest, her heart thumping.
Robin reached up with her human hand and clung to him, mashing their lips together, and kissed him back. His beard clouded against her face.
“Thank you,” she said, finally.
Her cheeks were wet. She scraped them dry with the demon-hand and winced at the hard crag of her thumb.
“For what?”
She didn’t know what to say, so she kissed him again.
27
The bedazzled baseball bat glittered like a disco ball, flinging arrows of light all over Fisher’s videotape room. He’d found it where his brother had left it Sunday morning, propped against the futon, along with the half-cup of cold coffee he’d never finished. Joel stared at the coffee, thinking about Fish and the strange black hellhound. That dog. That was the dog I’d seen at the acid lake, just after—after Fisher—
For the millionth time, the pistol in Owen Euchiss’s hand barked fire into Fisher’s face and Joel watched his brother’s body capsize languidly into water the color of bile. Joel had closed his eyes but he didn’t flinch, weak acid spattering his face and chest.
Movie posters were tacked to the walls here. They had a theme. Black heroines. Pam Grier in Foxy Brown. Rosario Dawson as “Claire” in Daredevil. Letitia Wright as “Shuri” in Black Panther. Grace Jones as “Zula” in Conan the Destroyer. And last but not least, Gloria Lynne Henry as “Rocky” in the horror epic Phantasm. Joel focused on them, trying to stave off another anxiety attack over the lingering image of his brother’s final moments. The two of them had loved these women, in different ways—Fisher was in love with them, while Joel idolized them, Zula and Rocky in particular. Something about Grace Jones’s feral, unflinching beauty and watching Gloria knock the Tall Man’s spheres out of the air with her nunchaku gave ten-year-old Joel a thrill. Those fade haircuts were the icing on the cake.
“Mister.”
He snapped out of it. Wayne was a collection of shapes in the darkness. “Do you have a key for this back door?” asked the boy.
The movie room—Fisher’s personal home theater, at least as theatrical as a futon in a closet and a thirty-year-old TV and VCR could be—had three doors: the one leading back to the shop, the one on the right leading to the stairway to Fisher’s loft apartment, and one on the left at the end of a short hallway. That one went out back to the alleyway.
“I don’t know.” He fished the shop key out of his pocket.
They stood there in the shadows, regarding each other.
“I’m sorry aboutcher brother, mister Joe-elle.” Wayne’s glasses reflected the li
ght from the shop in a bulging square of white. The eye revealed by the missing lens was warm and full of concern. “He was cool. A real nice guy.”
Joel sighed, glancing up at the posters. Rocky posed with her nunchucks with the rest of Phantasm’s characters, artfully arranged around her.
“He taught me something cool.”
Joel smiled wanly. “Oh, yeah? What did he teach you, little man?”
“Adapt and overcome.”
“Ah, he gave you the Hulk monologue,” said Joel. “I heard that one a few times. He was real into the big green guy, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah.”
Choosing action over more thought, Joel led Wayne down the little hallway to the fire exit. The more he did, the less he could think, and the less he thought, the less he could watch those brains spray on the Movie Night screen of his mind.
Feeling around the surface of the door, he found another commercial deadbolt. He unlocked it and pushed the door open. Silver daylight rushed down the inside. Beyond, a narrow alleyway ran to vanishing points in both directions. Boxes were piled in one corner by a steel utility door leading into the water heater closet, and two recycling bins leaned against the far wall. A chain-link fence framed the area on both sides. Joel was peering into the storm drain when a dark figure came out of nowhere, crashing into the fence and scaring the hell out of him. He flinched, raising the Batdazzler.
Blood ran down the man’s temples in heavy blotches and made glossy sealskin of his black suit. His shirt was ripped open.
“It’s Lucas,” said Wayne, opening the gate to let him in.
The magician staggered into the enclosure, arming blood and sweat from his forehead with a trembling hand. His once-impeccable suit hung from him in black-and-white tatters. “Goddamn, I thought that was the end of me.” He leaned against the wall. “Everybody make it okay?”
“Yeah.”
Lucas thumped his chest with pride. “Then my glorious sacrifice was not in vain.”
They brought him into the comic shop, where Sara gave him a hug and Gendreau shook his hand. “Good work back there, soldier,” said the self-proclaimed curandero. “How did you get away from the mob?”
“Well, I lasted about ten seconds and then they had me on my back, kickin’ and scratchin’ the shit outta me.” Lucas collapsed into the booth, where he fished a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and shakily stuck it in his mouth, patted himself down for a lighter, didn’t find one. “But then I heard a roar—I guess Sara did something?—and then everybody ran away. I don’t know where the burnt-looking guy with the rifle went, he ran off while I was gettin’ worked over.”
“Excellent. We’re all in one piece. Now, we’ve got things to do,” said Robin, getting up and heading for the back door. “We don’t have time to sit around chitchatting.”
“Slow down.” Kenway stopped her by the movie screen, his shadow sharp on the giant white-silver sheet. His hand lightly cupped her elbow. “Take a minute. You just got out of the hospital and lived through a car accident and a mob. I thought you wanted Gandalf over here to take a look at your shoulder.”
She hesitated, her face grim.
His look of concern became one of reproach.
Sighing, she came back and unfolded one of the Movie Night chairs, plopping down into it. Gendreau took off his jacket and pushed up his shirt-sleeves. His shirt was tailored, but without the Willy Wonka blazer, his sleeves belled at the elbows and narrowed at the cuffs. With his platinum-blond hair, Arctic eyes, and Nordic face, it made him look a bit like a cover model for a romance novel, or a character in an Anne Rice vampire movie. “All right,” he said, as he pulled up Robin’s shirt. “This may hurt a bit at first—I’m going to have to pull the rest of these staples out, because I can’t quite achieve the effect I need with them in the way. And then I’ll need to press the wound together manually.”
“Whatever you need to do, doc,” Robin said noncommittally. She took off the helmet and let her head tilt back. “I took another couple of pain pills a minute ago. I figured I might as well, since I threw up.”
A hard, workmanlike sort of temper had come over her since Joel had seen her last. This must be her Go Mode, he decided. This was what it looked like when the going got tough and Robin Martine shifted into Four-Wheel Drive. That, or the pain is making her surly.
“You’re pushing yourself too hard,” said Kenway.
She pointed at him. “You have no idea what I’ve been through—”
“I know what running yourself into the ground looks like,” Kenway said, grimly. “I didn’t get my Purple Heart flipping burgers at McDonald’s. Let the medic help. You can’t keep fighting if there’s nothing left of you.”
“I’m sorry.” Robin winced as Gendreau picked the bent staples out of her. Her eyes were rimmed in red. “I didn’t mean it that way. I’m saying … I’ve pushed myself harder than this.”
She stretched the neck of her shirt open and pointed at a scar on the left side of her chest, high, directly under her collarbone. “This came from a girl in Connecticut last spring. She stabbed me with a pair of kitchen shears. Missed my heart by two inches.” She pointed to the tiny pink commas peppered up her arms and the blade of her jawline. The pea-sized pit by her ear. “Scratches. From Neva Chandler and others. God, those bitches always scratch. Bite marks from a dog Heinrich used to train me.” She hiked up her left jeans leg and pointed at her shin, even though it was too dark to really see. “Got whacked with a shovel in Florida, ended up with a minor fracture. I’ve broken three toes and two fingers.” She waggled the fingers of her right hand. “I’d show you one of those broken fingers, but Theresa took it. Along with the rest of my arm.”
The more scars she explained, the angrier and more harried she seemed to get. Ferociously unbuckling her belt, she ripped her fly open, shucking her jeans to her knees with one hand, flashing panties. Her voice took on a choked, raw quality. “I got burnt all over my legs tryin’ to light up this witch in St. Louis—” Her thighs rippled with pink, gnarly patches of long-healed burns. “I been doin’ this for a long time now. I can handle myself, goddammit. So don’t patronize me, okay?”
“I need you to quit moving,” Gendreau said blandly.
Irritation clouded her face. Her eyes briefly danced between the curandero’s, and then she pulled her jeans back up.
“We’re all a little stressed right now,” he continued. “So, let’s utilize this all-too-brief moment of solitude and take a fucking break. Can you do that?”
* * *
The noise of the crowd outside gradually diminished to an occasional shout. Joel thought he heard police sirens, but it was so far away, it could have been more cat-yowling from the familiars.
Kenway stood at the edge of the generous Movie Night space, leaning against a rackful of action figures, his ankles crossed so his prosthetic leg lay on top.
“I love you,” he said, after a while.
“No, you don’t,” said Robin.
He thought about it a minute and said, “Yep. Maybe I do.”
She shook her head. Her voice was still rusty. “Look at me. Look at this thing I have for an arm now. You just think you do. Why would anybody love me?” The demon-hand flexed with a stony rasp. “Look at it. It’s a piece of him. My stupid mom made a deal with him and now I have to carry a goddamn piece of him. I belong in Hell with the rest of the devils.” Her front incisors met in a disgusted grimace as she balled a demonic fist. She growled through her teeth, “What even is this?”
Gendreau had no answer. Neither did anyone else. Sara pretended to be absorbed in picking her fingernails, while Lucas read a comic book. Kenway stared at the floor as if chastised, his brow dark.
“It’s you, is what it is.” Joel got up and knelt by her.
Robin looked down at him and he felt a thin ripple of fear. There was a terrible, angry thing in her eyes, a sweaty sort of madness come to the surface, and suddenly it was as if he were a knight supplicating to a medieval lord d
runk on both power and liquor. The baseball bat even completed the analogy, because as he took a knee in front of her, the business end of it rested on the floor and leaned against his knee like a sword. The fake diamonds glued to the wood even mirrored the faint light as a blade might.
He thought to hold her human hand, but had the idea to take the strange dark hand; he held it and was struck by how alien it was, like a sculpture of a human hand made of driftwood and sooted in a fire—a human hand but larger, the fingers hooking in blunt claws. Fleecy red hair grew all down the back of it in a singular finlike shag and ended in a final punctuating tuft over her knuckles. Up close, he could see veins of dark green tracing between her jagged knuckles.
It was the most foreign, outlandish thing he’d ever seen.
“I love you too, girl,” Joel said, gazing up at her half-mad face. “We’re almost brother and sister, you and me. We grew up together, remember?”
She said nothing, but the corner of her mouth twitched and her eyes lost a bit of that fearsomeness.
“You really think of me as a sister?”
“Y—Yeah, I do.” He still wore his silk do-rag. He took it off and bunched it in a ball in his fist against his chest.
“I never had a brother before.”
Joel smiled. He had put on eyeshadow and eyeliner that morning before he’d gone back to the hospital, and even though it was dark and he was slick with sweat, he knew he still looked good. “You do now.”
“It’s okay,” she said, a bit dreamily. “I’m sorry the meds made me forget you. It’s been a long time, Joel.”
“You the same Robin I grew up with, aight?” He put his other hand on top of the dark hand, and it was as if he clasped the horny, splintered base of a broken branch jutting out of a tree. He wondered if the hand hurt, as dry and hard as it felt. “You’re that same little girl me and my brother ate breakfast with in that big ol’ house. You remember what I said at Miguel’s?”
“Ain’t nothin’ in this world good bacon can’t make better.” Robin’s eyes focused on his.