by S. A. Hunt
“So, are we cutting him down, or what?” asked Kenway.
The moment caught in their throats as the band of impromptu witch-hunters stood around the cross, watching Robin’s unearthly face. Finally, she told them, “No. If he’s tied down, he can’t find some fresh new way to betray me before he meets his maker.” She pointed to her own face. “He’s responsible for this. I don’t want to see what else he’s got up his sleeve.”
“We’re just going to let him die up there?” asked Sara.
“You play shitty games, you win shitty prizes. He brought this on himself. He almost got me and Wayne and Kenway killed, going into the Lazenbury behind my back. He pissed off Cutty while we were in the orchard and got Wayne’s father familiarized. Not to mention Lucky Luke back in Texas. He’s a conniving old man that only thinks of himself and tricks children into fighting his battles for him. This time, he wasn’t fast enough or clever enough to dodge the consequences of his actions.”
“I went into that house myself to keep you safe,” growled Heinrich. “I was trying to keep you out of the fight, even if that meant an ass-beating for me.”
“So, a last-minute change of heart?” She stepped close, jabbing a modern-art finger in his face. The wellspring of light in her chest throbbed with fury, glittering in the blood on his chest. “Do you have any idea how full of shit you are? Do you know when to quit? Do you ever? You turned me into a monster. You don’t give a rat’s ass about me past the fact I represent a weapon to you. You act like you’re proud of me, but you’re not proud of who I’ve become as a person. You’re not proud of how I’ve thrived in spite of what you’ve put me through. You’re only proud of me in the same way a dictator is proud of his best general.” She rapped on her arm and brandished her claws. “You care about this. You’re proud of this.” She knocked on her chest where her heart shone through. “Not about this. This means nothing to you, always has.”
He had no reply.
“So, no,” Robin said, walking away, turning her back on him. “We’re not cutting him down.”
Heinrich grinned, squinting in the smoke, the Hawaiian caught in his teeth. “You a cold-ass cambion, Robin Martine. Colder than a well-digger’s ass. After I saved you. After I gave you purpose. I gave you a home. I gave you the tools you needed to avenge your mother. I carved you from one of my own ribs. I am a good man, and you know it. I was good to you.”
She stopped walking, pausing mid-stride, and stood there, willing herself not to march back to the crucifix and beat the man the rest of the way into death. Her fists were tight, but her hands still shook. She turned to the others to speak. “A bad man that did one good thing in a whole sea of bad shit doesn’t make him a hundred percent good. Bank robbers don’t get to go free because they spent the stolen money on their kid’s Christmas before they were arrested.”
“You don’t believe a man can change?”
“All men believe they are good men, but good men are only good because they consistently do good things for good reasons. You don’t get to draw a line in the sand and say, ‘Everything I do past this line is good.’ That’s not for you to decide. You are a thief of historical artifacts, a con man, a cultist, a kidnapper, and a murderer. I didn’t thrive because of you. I thrived in spite of you. You set up this game from the get-go and forced me to play it. You don’t get to crow about how you helped me win it.”
He took another draw on the cigar, and blew it from the corner of his mouth with a pained wince.
“Rock on, then, baby, rock on, then.”
30
The dirt road seemed interminable, a ribbon of dust and gravel snaking into the false night. As they came closer to the Lazenbury, they got quiet, abandoning conversation, assumedly trying to preserve some element of surprise. Robin had put on Gendreau’s jacket, buttoning it closed to mitigate the shine of her heart inside her chest. She looked back at the others. Gendreau’s face was the picture of dark focus, but Lucas, Joel, and Sara were scared as hell. She knew why Joel was scared, but why the two magicians?
“How many have you killed?” she asked them.
Lucas spoke to the ground. “Three.”
“What about you, Sara?”
Sara didn’t speak at first. Eventually she said, “My Gift isn’t meant for combat.”
“So … none.”
Irritation simmered in the back of Robin’s mind, but what Gendreau said next fizzled it. “She’s not here for fighting,” mumbled the curandero. “She’s the most talented conjurer and illusionist in the order outside of my father. Sara is here to dispel Weaver’s illusions for us.”
“Ah.”
Lazenbury House hulked at them from the darkness like a ghost ship. Faintly to the north, past the end of the driveway, were the rollups of the garage. Except … the longer she looked at it, the less it resembled a garage and the more it appeared to be a stable. The doors shimmered and wavered, and she could see Cutty’s green Chevy Nova resting on a layer of scattered straw and rushes. And then it was a horse, a chestnut quarter horse, tail swishing against the night.
Fists clenched at her sides, Sara leaned forward as if pressing her forehead against some invisible surface, immense concentration on her face.
The Lazenbury itself came alive with raucous noise and movement. Playful fey laughter of young women, tinkling piano music, shuffling boots, the heady thunk of glass mugs on hardwood tables. Windows that had been clear and modern, double-paned to retain heat, became warped and cloudy leaded glass.
Through them Robin could see shapes moving back and forth, as if there were some kind of party going on inside. An electric wall-sconce next to the exterior-opening kitchen door jiggered like a film reel and suddenly it was a gas lantern, dull and hissing with a sick green-orange light. The door itself transformed, melting with LSD fluidity from an aluminum screen door into a heavy wooden one with a head-sized password hatch cut in the middle. Iron pencil bars were bolted over the hole.
Lucas asided to Gendreau, “Why didn’t you tell me you were taking me to a whorehouse?”
“Because it hasn’t been a whorehouse for almost a century.” The curandero tapped Sara. “This is, I’m assuming, an illusion. Can you dispel it?”
“I’m trying. It’s really stapled down.” The illusionist raked her fingers through her flame-red hair, tousling it, and her hands went back to her temples. “I’ll keep working on it.”
“You do that,” said Robin, opening the kitchen door, releasing a burst of fragrant steam and a wave of incredible heat. “I’m going in.”
“Not by yourself, you ain’t.” Lucas followed her.
Gendreau grumped. “Oh, hell. Wait for me.”
Lit only by gas lamps on the walls to either side, the hot kitchen was a bustle of movement. Three Black women and a Black man in greasy white smocks shuffled in a coordinated dance between two bubbling stock pots, a brick oven full of Halloween-orange light, and the gruesome cadaver of a wild boar
(stab it with their steely knives)
suspended on a spit over glowing coals. Both left haunches, the flank, and half the face were gone, leaving clinical cross sections open to the heat of the air. An empty skull, a crabbish cluster of teeth, pallid stripes of rib-bone. Robin looked away, queasy.
A preoccupied, dreamlike ignorance hung over the scene like Scrooge being shown his own memories by the Spirit of Christmas Past, and the cookies took no notice of their new visitors—or if they did, paid them no mind. “Aww, hell naw,” said Joel. “They got the brother and the sisters back here roasting the pig and washing the dishes and shit. This is some real-talk bullshit. There better not be a colored man behind the bar.”
“Well, it is a turn-of-the-century cathouse,” said Robin. “Come on, let’s keep going. I don’t want to be here any longer than absolutely necessary.” She pushed through a swinging door and went into the saloon.
Filthy workmen in chambray shirts and dungarees played cards, told jokes, and drank at five round tables in what should have
been Marilyn Cutty’s living room. Cigarette smoke hovered around an iron chandelier arrayed with hurricane lamps. Women in bustiers and striped hose leaned against an upstairs railing. Below, a bar ran across the room on their left, staffed by a ginger in arm-garters and a villainous mustache. At the far end was a player piano, where someone in a ratty hide coat and hat sat on a stool, tickling ivories.
The barman poured liquid honey into a glass and pushed it toward a grungy hobo in a Stetson and a leather duster.
Kenway stared. “Did we wander into the holodeck from Star Trek, or what?”
“This is quite possibly the most realistic illusion I’ve ever seen.” Gendreau’s face was grim. “Hell, I’m not one hundred percent sure it’s not a conjuration … or even, God help me, a temporal anomaly.”
“It’s not a time-warp,” said Sara, snapping her fingers in front of a man’s face. He sifted through his poker cards, oblivious to her attempts to distract him.
“Time-warp?” Joel held himself. “It better the hell not be.”
“Do they know we’re here?” Robin asked. “Do Weaver and Cutty know we’re here?”
The piano stopped abruptly, mid-melody.
Eyes burned at them from every direction as the miners and cowboys looked up from their liquor and card games and fixed on Robin and the Dogs of Odysseus. The pianist wheeled about on her stool and clutched her bony knees, standing up. “Yes, we’re quite aware you’re here.” Karen Weaver’s dark-rimmed eyes blazed underneath the floppy brim of her hat, a loose hat cord under her chin. She looked like an elderly Annie Oakley in her tweed vest and leather coat. One hand softly closed the piano’s key cover and rested there. Weaver’s other hand went to the hat cord and worried at it. “How did you get into my poke?”
“Your poke?”
“My tesseract,” Weaver said sharply, impatiently, as if talking to an idiot. “My tesseract, my tesseract! You know what that is, yes?”
“Tesseract! A simple-enough astrophysics concept,” said Joel Ellis, from behind the group of magicians. “The folding of space to make a distance shorter. Folding point A to point C to eliminate point B, bringing two spatially distinct locations into closer dimensional proximity to drastically reduce travel time. Also known as a hypercube.”
Everyone in the saloon turned to look at him.
“What? Y’all think I don’t know about some of this extra-ass shit? I read fantasy too. Muhfuckin Wrinkle in Time. You ain’t Fisher Ellis’s brother all your life without pickin’ up some science. Aight?”
Nobody said anything.
“Y’all wrong for that.” He shook his head. “Hey, y’all do y’all thing. Look.” He pointed. “It’s a witch.”
Weaver stepped away from the piano, her age-spotted hands clutched over her heart—or at least where her heart should have been—and she retreated to touch it again as if the keys could lend her some degree of protection, or comfort. “Well, of course, of course. The colored boy has the right of it. But ay; what happens to point B, then? Ah, you’re standing in it, you are, you are. This is the land between: my … poke.” The witch continued to stare at Robin. “Who are you?… What are you?”
“Annie’s daughter.” Robin took off the plush navy jacket and handed it back to Gendreau, revealing the lighthouse pulse of her heart. “It turns out the ritual my mother used Edgar for—”
“Killed!” screeched Weaver. “My husband, killed!”
“—killed Edgar for wasn’t entirely wasted. She did manage to summon a demon. But it was an incubus. She made a deal with the demon to bear his child in exchange for his protection.”
“A half-breed, then.” Weaver’s face soured. “Got the blood of a demon in you. Should have expected as much. Always was a mystery to us how your mother could have given birth to you after her sacrifice to the Goddess … We always assumed she’d been with child since before. Children carried through the ritual usually come out stillborn.…”
“The demon made her human again, long enough for her to hold up her end of the bargain.”
“And got her with child, didn’t he?” The witch remained by the piano. “Oh, but you’re such a deadly beautiful snake, aren’t you? A regular prize. A changeling, I think. You know, I’ve never seen a demon before. Marilyn says they’re dangerous; they eat magic, you know, they feed on the energies out there—” She swept a pensive hand at the ceiling, as if the afterlife rested just outside.
All the desperados’ eyes tracked Robin as she took a step across the saloon. “But when we’re here among the living,” she said, “we prefer to suckle on the heart-roads of witches.”
Weaver recoiled, shaking.
She shouted, “Don’t you take another step, you snide hobgoblin, you worthless cur-dog! You stay away from me, you hear? I told you not to come here. But you didn’t listen. You never listened.” The witch bit back a grimace, flashing her buckish front teeth. “Always knocking on the door, let me in, Gramma, let me in, little whelp screwing up my seamstress work.” She pinched at the air to emphasize. “I thought maybe if I left a few of my needles in the carpet, you’d stay out of my sewing room, maybe a few pricks in your pink little feet and you’d stay the hell out, but nope! I’d get up to go piss, and when I came back, you’d be right back in there again, pulling out my pins and knocking my dummy over! And Marilyn didn’t care, oh, no, she’d laugh and laugh, and tell me, She’s just a little girl, Karen, you had a little girl once, you know they’re a handful, and yes, I had a little girl once, but did she have to rub it in?”
Robin took another step.
The witch pointed at her. “Go back where you came from, goddamn you!” she said in a rapid, poisonous hiss, “I’m not going to tell you again!”
“Enough of this—” Robin lunged at her, clutching Weaver’s jacket.
It came away in her hands as if the witch had slipped right out of it. When she looked up, she saw the witch had evaporated, leaving Robin holding empty clothes … if she’d ever really been there at all. She turned to say something, and saw all the cowboys now had Weaver’s face.
Two, three dozen Karen Weaver clones played cards at the tables. The man drinking at the bar was Weaver. The ginger behind the bar was Weaver, mustache and all. Even the cathouse ladies upstairs were Weaver, her eight mushy old hippie tits wobbling in their bust-cups like tapioca pudding.
“Time to take you all out to the woodshed and give yuns a whoopin,” said one of the gambling Weavers, tossing back a glass of whiskey.
The Weaver bartender rolled up her sleeves, flourishing handfuls of gleaming black claws. “Yessssss,” she snarled, her face lengthening, her mouth drooping open. Wolfish teeth dripped saliva on the bar.
Weaver-doubles all over the saloon rose from their chairs, stripping off their hats, faces and fingers stretching, becoming swarthy and hideous. Their eyes deepened, darkened, red marbles glittering in black pits. Kenway let the carnival hammer drop into his other hand and rolled his neck with a sick crackle.
“Nope,” said Joel, shaking his head. He lifted the bat, pointing it at the nearest witch. “We ain’t about to do this.”
“Ah, well, you see—” Gendreau started to say.
The saloon exploded into movement as every witch in sight descended on the magicians like a murder of screeching ravens.
“—Piss and potatoes!”
Snatching up a deck of poker cards, Lucas started whipping them overhand into the crowd. One of the witches fell away, a Jack of Diamonds sticking out of her chest, and collapsed on the floor, melting into smoke.
Thwock! thwock! thwack! Kenway’s hammer echoed off the high plaster ceiling, swinging in great overhead arcs. The vet staggered from one encounter to another, smacking their foreheads in a frenzied game of Whac-A-Mole. Witch-skulls whiplashed, bouncing off Kenway’s bloody mallet head. “Little Bunny Foo-Foo!” he sang with maniacal glee, “a-runnin’ through the forest! Pickin’ up the field mice and boppin’ ’em on the head!”
Witches all around them jittered
and hiccupped like video glitches as the illusionist Sara made obscure symbols in the air with her fingers, trying to dispel the imagery. Gendreau defended her with his pizzle cane, twirling and striking with some clever sort of martial art. The fist-sized pearl at the end made for an outstanding bludgeon.
Robin waded into the melee, attempting to grab a Weaver and suck the juice out of her, but it was like herding cats—the clones would flinch or duck, fending her off with chairs and bar stools, juking out of the way. The two she managed to lay hands on vanished into pungent smoke.
“One of them’s got to be the real witch!” she told the magicians, “grab one and hold her and let me—”
Something hard slammed into her shoulder, almost knocking her down. Kenway winced, lifting the carnival hammer. “Woop, sorry!”
“Watch where you’re swingin’ that thing!”
“Yes, ma’am!” He turned and smashed it through a chair and into a clone’s head, evaporating her. Then he missed a swing at another one and upended a table with it, scattering beer, broken glass, and nineteenth-century dollar coins. A witch leapt on his back and sank her yellow fangs into his shoulder. “Aaaaah!” he shouted, twisting and writhing, trying to get her off him, colliding with tables and people alike.
Gripping her by the hair of the head, Robin wrenched her from Kenway’s back and marched her over to the bar, where she slammed the old woman face-first into the polished counter, breaking her nose with a thick bang. Simultaneously, the nose of every Weaver clone in the room exploded with black goo as her real face propagated throughout her illusionary army.
This one didn’t disappear.
“Got you now, chick,” said Robin, and grasped her by the throat. Oily blood streamed out of Weaver’s nose, dripping from her hellacious gargoyle teeth. Concentrating, Robin pushed her consciousness into the witch as a sort of ethereal mental pseudopod, and found the heart-road deep inside. Then she withdrew, pulling the energy with it like a fishhook. It came thin and watery into the center of her being, and a dank, salty taste welled in her mouth.