by S. A. Hunt
Fear gripped her. Shivers ran through her like a stampede of wild horses, and her face and hands became cold. The sound of her mother’s last words, echoing in the back of her mind as Annie Martine lay broken on the floor—Cutty. Witch. The sight of her father writhing on his back next to her, blood gushing out of his mouth and nose. Witches aren’t real witches aren’t real witches aren’t real—but they were, weren’t they? They were real. And here was one, right in front of her, large as life and dark as death, glaring at the both of them as her mentor crept closer and closer.
“Nothing is a good idea, except in hindsight.” Heinrich stepped into another circle, scuffing the diagram again. “Every decision we make is a Schrödinger’s Box. D’you know what that is, Robin Hood?”
“Sure. Yeah. The cat in the box.”
“The cat in the closed box, both alive and dead until you open it and find out which it is. Every decision we make is a Schrödinger’s Box—both good and bad. We never know which until after we make it.”
The woman’s breathing came quick and fast, blowing streamers of her hair out in front of her face, huff huff huff huff like birthing breaths in a Lamaze class. She laughed under her breath, casting all pretense aside. “You’re a pretty little one,” she croaked, her cheek meeting her shoulder in a bashful sort of way. “A little older than I like, but that just means I’ll have to cook you a little longer. You’re still ripe.”
“Cook me?”
“Yeah, Robin Hood,” said Heinrich. “They eat virgins, remember? They’re pedophages? Didn’t your mother ever read you the story of Hansel and Gretel?”
“You mean that’s real?”
“Yeah, it’s real. We been reading the same books up there in that tower, ain’t we?” The man took another step into a smaller circle, dragging his foot through the salt symbols. “Remember that one I made you read about witches in medieval Russia?”
She winced. “I’m sorry. It was long-winded as shit and really badly translated. I only made it about halfway through.”
Dust shook out of the witch’s clothes, hanging in the sunbeams coming through the hayloft, as she thrashed violently in her bindings. Rope bound her wrists and elbows behind the pole; rope kept her neck pinned. “It’s been so long since I’ve eaten,” said Tilda, grinning with those gnarly brown teeth.
“Anyway, who the hell said I was a virgin?” asked the teenager.
Halfway through scuffing another of the circles, Heinrich shot her an incredulous look. “You were involuntarily committed in your sophomore year, and you’ve been in there ever since. Your mother was about as religious as you can get in the South without mailing your paycheck to Billy Graham. You trying to tell me you got laid in the nuthouse?”
“Well, you did just call it the ‘nut’ house.”
If he’d been wearing glasses, he would have peered over them at her.
“No, I didn’t get laid.” Robin scowled. “I was too busy going through the Ludovico technique, sleeping through HGTV reruns, and eating spaghetti with a plastic spoon to care about sexual intercourse. Besides, antidepressants make it hard to orgasm, apparently.”
“TMI, kiddo.”
At this point, the man was only a few feet away from the witch. Her mouth opened, and kept opening, and her tongue uncoiled, fattening, lolling from between her teeth like a purple python. Lengthening, sharpening, Tilda’s teeth bristled in her cavernous mouth. “Come a little closer, Heinie,” she said, grinning.
“Heinie?”
Despite herself, Robin couldn’t help but laugh.
The man stepped inside the last circle, a ring of runes some six feet across. Reaching out with her serpentine tongue, Tilda could almost reach him—close enough, in fact, for Heinrich to lean backward to avoid getting licked in the face. As he did, he moved around the witch, sidling around the inside of the innermost rune ring.
“What are you doing?” asked Robin.
“Oh, nothing.” Heinrich’s hands rose in that don’t mind me way.
The witch watched him, her tongue curling around her own upper arm. “What are you doing?” she asked, as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing either.
Then Tilda looked down at her feet. Robin looked down as well, and realized the Icelandic containment circle had been disturbed in a straight line from her own toes to directly in front of the witch. The witch’s eyes came back up to Robin’s face, grin widening. In one swift motion, Heinrich slid the combat knife out of its sheath and cut the ropes.
Looking back and forth between the two of them, Tilda seemed to be indecisive about who to go after first, but she turned toward Robin and lunged forward, reaching—
—the teenager flinched in terror, falling—
—but Tilda was immediately halted by the silver dagger in her chest, doubling over around it. “Gurk—!”
“What the hell, dude?” said Robin, sitting on her ass in the dirt. She reached behind her back and pulled out the flare gun he’d given her earlier, pointing it at Tilda.
“The Osdathregar.” Heinrich stepped away from the witch, standing by the innermost rune ring. “In the Vatican Archives, documents call it the Godsdagger. Secret verses of ancient Hindu texts refer to it as the Ratna Maru.” Tilda reached up and grasped the hilt of the Osdathregar, trying to wrench it loose. The man paced around the perimeter of the ring, his hands clasped behind his back. “Nobody knows who made it; nobody knows where it came from. All we know is that it’s powerful enough to stop a witch cold in her tracks.”
Hollywood had conditioned Robin to expect the eldritch and the ornate: a wavy flambergé with a pewter-skull hilt, cord-wrapped handle, and a spike for a pommel, a Gil Hibben monstrosity from a mall kiosk. But the real Osdathregar was a simple main gauche with a gently tapering blade a little wider than a stiletto. The guard was a diamond shape, the handle was wrapped in leather, and the pommel was only an unadorned onion bulb. The diamond of the guard contained a small hollow, and engraved inside the hollow was a sinuous scribble.
“See that symbol there?” Heinrich pointed at the hilt. “That means purifier in Enochian, the language of the angels. Regardless of where it came from, this is a holy weapon. Which means even if it can’t outright kill a witch, she can’t remove it from where it’s embedded. Deep magic, baby. You stake her into the floor, or a wall, wherever, she’ll be there until the end of time, or until you come along and pull it out.”
With the flare gun’s muzzle, the teenager gestured to the diagram that filled the barn floor. “What about this, then? And the ropes?”
Heinrich shrugged. “In my line of work, I’ve learned to appreciate redundancy.”
“What can kill a witch, then?”
A wry smirk. “Come on, Robin Hood. That’s Mickey Mouse kindergarten shit. You know what kills a witch.”
“… Fire?”
“Ding ding ding!” cried Heinrich. “We have a winner! Now, listen—I’ve brought the anger out in you, Robin. Made a fighter out of you. You finally cut me. Now I need to get rid of the fear. A knife ain’t nothin’ but a worthless piece of steel unless you’re willing to use it!”
With that, he pulled out the dagger.
Now nothing stood between them.
“Guns can’t stop me, child,” said the witch, marching resolutely through the gaps in the ward and out of the barn. In broad daylight, she was even more disgusting, a crusty ghost wrapped in shit and rotten fabric. Blood running down her chin looked like hot black tar, dribbling all over the ground. Her fingernails were yellowed spades. Her hair was the woolly, filthy mane of a lion, and her eyes were fiery red and yellow, with pinprick pupils.
A shout from the man in the barn: “Fire, you idiot!”
The flare gun in her hand. Robin pointed it at the witch and pulled the trigger, but the safety was on.
Tilda didn’t even flinch. “Nice shootin’, Tex,” she cackled, and charged, tongue snaking, harpy talons extended.
“Fuck!”
Panic made a live wire out of
every nerve in Robin’s body. Stones dug into her knees. She aimed the flare gun with both hands and fired. The flare hit center mass.
Waves of incredible heat washed over the little barnyard as the creature erupted into flames ten feet tall, a tornado of smoke and light. Tilda shrieked madly, staggering toward the teenager, flaming hands outstretched.
“Grain alcohol,” said Heinrich, coming outside to join them.
Blackened fingers combed through dim orange whorls of light, cupping and clawing, searching. The rest of her was obscured by the column of fire. The teenager shuffled sideways along the fence, trying to keep the flaming witch from grabbing her. “I see you burning, Robin Martine,” gurgled the thing in the flames. Collapsing on her knees, and then kneeling prostrate in the shade of the giant bur oak, Tilda laughed through a mouthful of fire. “One day, your enemies will trap you, and you will burn just like me.” She fell over and lay motionless, a black wraith shrouded in light. “You will burn,” she said in a strained hiss. “You will die.”
The last syllable seemed to stretch on forever, becoming the soft rustle of the bur oak’s leaves, until it faded into silence, broken only by the warp and woof of the flames biting at the wind.
They stood there and watched her burn until she was a coal sculpture, twisted into a fetal position in the dust.
“That wasn’t pleasant,” said Heinrich.
“Wasn’t a fucking birthday party, that’s for sure.”
He looked over at her, genuinely surprised. “It’s your birthday?”
“Yeah,” said the teenager, and she walked away, still gripping the flare gun in one trembling hand.
“Happy birthday,” he called after her.
“Stick it up your ass.”
SIDE A
Frail and Fragile Bars
Track 1
Now
The lonesome notes of the Eagles’ “Hotel California” wailed into the sweltering stillness. But no warm smell of colitas rising up through the air, just the pickle-brine stink of an unshowered woman who’d spent the last several hours in a hot-box.
Penny-colored grass punched through the desert around them, and the sun was a merciless diadem on the blue brow of a cloudless sky. A river of asphalt ran straight out to the horizon in both directions, coming from nowhere and going nowhere. She stood next to the Winnebago, swearing at the top of her lungs, sweat soaking into her clothes, her ringlet Mohawk plastered to the side of her head. If this had been her usual Kool-Aid dye job, Robin Martine’s wavy dimetrodon sail of hair would be staining her neck with a dark lilac purple. Her underwear felt like a snot-rag.
Around her chest was a nylon harness, with a camera mounted on her chest. As it always had, the GoPro recorded her trials and tribulations for her YouTube channel MalusDomestica, this time bearing witness to one of her rare outbursts of anger.
Their air conditioner gave out hours ago and the Winnebago was a sweat lodge. If the tire hadn’t popped like a shotgun shell and started flapping around inside the wheel well, she might have passed out at the wheel and driven them into the desert. She tugged at her T-shirt to air out her sweat. A thing jutted from the tire, something like a pull-start or maybe a meat hook, a plastic T-shaped handle with a pointy metal bit sticking out of the middle.
“A hundred thousand miles of hot sand and lizard shit, and you just happen to find the only whatever-the-hell-this-is in Texas!” Robin gave the Winnebago a ferocious punch, clank!
The aluminum body was hot enough to burn and left red scrapes on her knuckles. She winced, massaging her hand.
The Winnebago’s door opened and Kenway stepped out, carrying a little Coleman cooler. “What’d Willy do to you?” He dropped the cooler in the shadow of the RV. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and he’d developed quite a tan on their tour down the American west coast this spring. Six months of fighting supernatural hags and their minions had trimmed the weight he’d gained moping around in Blackfield. His belly had slimmed to a wall of blond-frosted sandstone, and his hips narrowed to a V of muscle. Under his dock shorts, his prosthetic leg glinted in the sun. After the events of the last Halloween—a battle against four of the hardest of hard-core witches and a newly resurrected Mesopotamian death-goddess—Kenway had tagged along and made himself the big brawny Short Round to her Indiana Jones.
“Ironically, you ran over a tire tool.” He wrenched it out of the tire. The remainder of the air hissed out in a tired, resentful sigh. “Tire guys use it for patching or something.” He shrugged. “I wouldn’t know; I’m not a tire guy.”
Robin caught herself staring at him. “Just grab the jack, beefcake.”
He tied his hair back out of his eyes and opened the hatch in the side of the Winnebago. Hauling out the jack, he shoved it underneath the right fender and was about to start pumping when Robin stopped him.
“I got this,” she said, grasping the jack handle. “Go get me the spare and the lug wrench.”
“You got it.”
He went around to the back of the RV, leaving her to deal with the jack. The first couple of pumps were easy, a quick squeaky-squeaky, but on the third pump, the rod stopped short in midair. Robin gripped the handle with both hands and threw herself onto it with everything she had. It screamed and gave a few inches, almost dumping her over onto her face. What I wouldn’t give to be able to
(hulk out whenever you want?)
do whatever it was I did back in that house, she thought. Whatever that monster was that Andras turned me into that night. Her memory showed her a portrait of herself in the silvered glass of a mirror, her skin a latticework of shadows, her heart shining inside. Nothing like the woman she was now: short, sinewy, tanned, with coalsmoke eyes and a thin, expressive mouth. That girl-shaped effigy, that wicker-wire sculpture with the bottle-rocket soul.
Cambion.
She stared at the dirty steel staff in her hands as if it were a bloody sword. Blue paint flaked off to reveal rust red, polished by decades of hands. Cambion. Crooked. She threw herself on top of the jack handle again with a tortured squeak and the Winnebago started to tilt. Devil-girl.
Laughter. She rounded on the comedian.
“You all right?” Kenway stood there stifling a grin, the massive spare drooping from one hip.
“Yes, thanks.”
Sweat beaded in his beard, his forehead glittering. He set the tire down on the roadside with a basketball pung-pung and shoved at the side of the RV, rocking it. “I’ll push, you pump. This should make it easier.” He shoved again, and she pushed down on the handle. Him shoving and her pumping, she was able to raise the flat tire off the dirt.
While Kenway made sandwiches with the stuff in the Coleman cooler, Robin changed the tire with much sweating and cursing and kicking. She crouched down and cupped her arms underneath it, lifting the spare like a sumo wrestler, and heaved it onto the axle with a grunt. After screwing on the lug nuts, she let the Winnebago down on all fours with a thud and armed sweat from her forehead, leaving a gray smear.
After washing her hands, she sat with Kenway, eating turkey-and-salami sandwiches, sharing a big bag of Doritos, and drinking Blue Moon in the shade of the RV, listening to music. Aerosmith. Janie’s got a gun.
He finished his lunch first and carried the flat tire around back, heaving it into the spare compartment. Robin pushed the last bite of her sandwich into her mouth and carried the cooler into the RV.
Bladed weapons glinted from their mounts on the interior walls—swords, knives, tomahawks. All the windows were open and a breeze struggled through, trying to dilute the stuffy air. She unbuckled the GoPro harness and tossed it onto the bed. Her T-shirt clung to her like shrink wrap on ground beef. She pulled it off and tossed it in the hamper.
Since she wasn’t wearing a bra, when Kenway turned around his eyebrows bobbed straight up. “Well, okay.”
The wind stiffened her nipples. She shot him a guarded look that dissolved into a smirk, and she held up a fist. “Rock, paper, scissors. Winner gets the shower firs
t.” They shook fists at each other, and on the fourth beat, she held up the two-finger peace sign of scissors, but he pointed at her with an accusing finger.
Puzzled, she asked, “What is that? This ain’t rock-paper-pistol.”
He made an A-OK sign with his other hand and stuck the pointer finger through the loop of his forefinger and thumb. Then he sawed it in and out of the hole.
“Ohh.” A slow smile spread across Robin’s face. “We both win, then.”
She turned off the GoPro, hid it in a dresser drawer, and unbuckled his belt.
* * *
WELCOME TO KEYHOLE HILLS,
WHERE ROUTINE ENDS AND ADVENTURE BEGINS!
POPULATION 2,849
ORIGIN OF THE MA’IITSOH HIKING TRAIL
Thank God, no witch graffiti.
Most graffiti is an unintelligible mess, but if you know what you’re looking for, you can find special runes hidden in the design that tell you there’s a witch living nearby. They use runes to passively communicate with each other, same way hobos did back in the Andy Griffith train-jumper days.
The highway led up a hill and through a gap between two sandstone bluffs. Time and weather had punched a space as big as a house through the stone, creating a keyhole-shaped wedge of indigo air.
On the other side of the pass was a low sprawl of houses, businesses, and fast-food signs. There wasn’t a two-story building in sight that Robin could see, and the squatness of Keyhole Hills made the sky look heavy and oppressive. The town seemed to melt down an enormous sagebrush slope that reminded her of a Skee-Ball game, as if the highway lowballed tourists into one of the motels and shops littering the grade. The City Visitors’ Center, 10 points! Roger’s Gas-N’-Go, 25 points! The Best Western, 50 points!
They hobbled into a shade tree at the edge of town, a white cinderblock garage surrounded by desolate old cars and stacks of tires.
To Robin’s surprise, the transaction was painless—the tubby, grease-handed man with the Teddy Roosevelt face actually had the right kind of tire for a 1974 Winnebago Brave, and he was more than willing to mount it on their rim for the right price. Robin bought an extra just in case, and she and Kenway wandered into town on foot.