The Hellion

by S. A. Hunt

  Gravel grumbled under her Converses as they walked through a neighborhood of bungalows, tract houses, and mobile homes, divvied up by sidewalks and chain-link fences into a lockstep grid. Most of the grass looked like loose hay. Dead as hell. Fortunately, unlike Georgia, the humidity was low and every breeze scraped a little sweat off.

  A figure fell into step with them. “Hi, love,” Annie Martine’s spirit murmured in her sketchy-AM-radio voice.

  “Hi, Mom,” said Robin. Annie still popped in from time to time ever since her daughter rescued her out of the witches’ soul-sucking apple tree. Evidently, her daughter was the only one that could see her, because no one else ever seemed to react.

  “Is she here?” Kenway’s eyes searched the empty space around his girlfriend.

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell her I said hi.”

  Speaking to ghosts no one else can see tends to freak people out, but he seemed to handle it admirably well. She wasn’t sure if he was just humoring her or if he actually believed her mother was there, but she was grateful for his cavalier attitude.

  The ghost grinned. Annie liked Kenway.

  “She says hi back.”

  Occasionally, she wondered where Annie went when she wasn’t visible. Was she hanging out in some afterlife waiting room? Chilling in some discreet room in the mansion of Robin’s head? She pulled up her T-shirt to wipe her face, flashing her belly. “Gendreau said they wanted to meet at a lunch café.”

  “You nervous?” Her self-appointed “cameraman” wore a Margaritaville T-shirt with the sleeves cut off to show off his new tan and the tattoos on his shoulders: Army Air Assault on one side and a rampant gryphon on the other, clutching a spear and a clawful of olive branches. Shitty and blue, they looked like icons on a fifteenth-century map.

  “Hell yeah, I’m nervous.”

  “He said they were gonna be cool.”

  “I dunno.” She smiled tightly, trying to make a face to telegraph “anxiety.” It was probably more like “constipation.” “If they were cool, wouldn’t they want to meet me at their home base in Michigan instead of the middle of nowhere?”

  “We were already out here—maybe they just wanted to meet us halfway.”

  “Maybe.” Almost three thousand people in town, according to the city limits sign. That sounded like a lot, until you considered the alternative—Blackfield alone was probably twice that, and nearby Houston had two million people. “They probably think I’m going to flip out and go on a rampage or something.” Robin flourished a hand around them. “Not much out here. They’re probably like, ‘If we talk to her in public, she’ll be more at ease, but we don’t want to endanger a Houston amount of people.’” She frowned. “Been months since I went into Beast Mode. We’ve been in dozens of fights. It ain’t happened again.”

  He didn’t say anything for a little while. She flashbacked on the memory of tearing open her father, the cacodemon Andras, the tickling-brushing of all those insidious spiders spilling out of his hollow body and coursing up her arm like a lacy black sleeve. “Maybe I need a demon to touch me again—to infect me—to make it happen.”

  Am I full of spiders?

  Jesus Christ, what kind of a question is that?

  “I think you’re reading too much into it,” Kenway finally muttered.

  A bird circled high overhead on some invisible thermal. Robin said, “Gendreau didn’t tell ’em right away that I was working for them now.”

  “What’d he tell them?”

  “That I drove away into the sunset after the fight with Cutty. I think he was trying to protect me. Feeding me leads under the table like I was his secret James Bond and he was my M.”

  “Maybe G wasn’t counting on you making more videos, and for the Dogs of Odysseus to see them and realize you still had the Osdathregar.”

  “Well, I did kind of tell him that I was going to close my channel down.” Which would have been a lark. She made way too much money on that thing to give it up. Besides … in the three years that she’d been running her YouTube channel, she’d grown to like the attention. The fans.

  Attention whore, said the psych-ward nurse in her head.

  No, Robin thought. They’re the family I never had. That’s why I love them.

  Kenway shook his head. He didn’t say anything, but the accusation was there: You lied and got G in trouble.

  “He must have done it because of what I did in the Lazenbury,” said Robin. “Saving his life. Guess he felt like he owed me. But they don’t sound pissed off about being left out of the loop, from what G told me.” She stopped at an intersection and peered up and down the road. “They sound like they just want to meet me and get a feel for me. Ugh, I don’t see this café anywhere.”

  A little dog barked at them from behind a fence. Beyond the dog was a mobile home, and a scrubby, pot-bellied old Hunter S. Thompson look-alike in a T-shirt and jeans sat on a warped deck porch with a glass of iced tea. Homespun knickknacks hung from his eaves: twisty blue blown-glass tadpoles, bamboo wind chimes, dreamcatchers.

  The dog stopped barking all of a sudden, as if he’d fulfilled his quota for the day. Annie’s ghost stopped to poke a silvery finger through the fence, and the dog sniffed it. Robin blinked, startled.

  The old fella waved at them. His eyes twinkled even through his rosy bug-eyed bifocals. “Welcome to the Hole,” he said, tossing a hand like a symphony conductor giving his final bow.

  “Excuse me, sir,” said Robin, leaning on the old man’s fence. The dog—some kind of scotty-dog schnauzer or something—sniffed her through the chain link. “Do you know where we can find Uncle Joe’s Diner?”

  “Uncle Mac’s?”

  “Yeah, Mac’s, that’s what I meant. I must have been thinking of Joe’s Crab Shack or something.”

  “What I wouldn’t give for a good crab joint.” The toothpick rattled around in the man’s teeth. He pointed one gnarled finger over their shoulders. “Mac’s just yonder ways, about three blocks down and one up. If y’all havin’ dinner there, get the chili. They do somethin’ wonderful with black beans. Best I ever had.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What brought yuns out this way? We don’t get many visitors out here. At least, ones that ain’t here to get lost out on the Ma’iitsoh. Y’all hikers?”

  “You could say that.” Overgrown grass brushed against the titanium gleaming under the cuff of Kenway’s shorts as he leaned against the fence. “She runs a video channel on the internet, driving around the country. Kinda like a travelogue.”

  The old man grunted. “Like them shows on TV? Travel Channel? The chunky kid with the frosted hair and the bowling shirts?”

  “Sorta like that.” Robin squinted. The sun lurked directly behind the trailer, throwing hot sunshine in her face. “We’re just passing through and wanted to stop and grab dinner with some friends. Said to meet ’em at Uncle Mac’s.”

  “Tell ’em Gil sent you.” He hesitated. “On second thought, don’t do that.”

  Laughter. “Thanks.”

  Gil’s grin faded. “Just behave yourself while you’re in the Hole, aight? Try to stay on this end of town.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at his trailer, even glancing in that direction, as if they could all see straight through it to some distant point. “Don’t wander past the Conoco up on Fifth. There’s…” Took off his glasses to knuckle one eye. “Well, let’s just say there’s folks. Folks you don’t want to run into.”

  “Message received.”

  Gil put his rose-colored glasses back on. “Enjoy your dinner. You two want to give an old man some company and put away a few beers before you take off again, I’ll be up all night.”

  * * *

  Uncle Mac’s was done up in retro soda-jerk—pastel colors, lots of jagged, futuristic Atomic Age angles. Big metal sign out front that looked like a Nike swoosh. Sketched out with neon in the middle of the swoosh was a ten-foot-tall football player, and three footballs traced an arc from one outstretched leg. Underneath t
his was TOUCHDOWN GRILL, and if the sign still worked, the neon figure would’ve been kicking an animated football—but by the time Robin and Kenway saw it, the sign was out of commission, and that extended leg just looked like a tremendous jagged penis, ejaculating footballs in a machine-gun stream.

  Stepping onto the curb in front of Uncle Mac’s Diner, she was overcome by sudden apprehension—Is this a trap? Is it going to be the third degree? Are they going to lull me into a false sense of security and throw a bag over my head? Surely, Gendreau wasn’t going to do that to her. If he was there and going along with the whole thing, he had to be cool with it, right?

  The healer-magician had been keeping her a secret since September, dear weird quiet Anders Gendreau, with his vulpine good looks and taste for svelte yet outdated clothes. He’d been the one to approach her after losing her arm to the witch Theresa LaQuices, and, other than her childhood friend Joel, he’d helped her acclimate to her new existence as a cambion.

  Cambion. Half-girl, half-demon. Half Netflix devotee, half abyssal monstrosity. An image of the bloodworm popped into her mind: that wriggling red appendage creeping out of her amputation scar that had turned out to be her arm growing back.

  She shuddered at a sense-memory of the bloodworm curling against her hip.

  “You okay?” asked Kenway, his blue shadow draping over her.

  She squinted up at him. “Yeah.”

  “You’re untouchable, hon,” he reminded her. “You can eat those motherfuckers if this thing goes pear-shaped. You’re a half-demon, witch-eatin’, goddess-killin’ badass. Go in there and own ’em. If they ask for an arm and a leg, give it to ’em, and then grow ’em back.”

  The man was actually proud of her eccentricities.

  She grinned crookedly. “It’s not that easy, and you know that.”

  Track 2

  Carly Valenzuela was at the mall again, and it was because the power bill came.

  Her mother raced down the Valenzuelas’ driveway as the post office’s Ford Taurus with its British passenger-side steering column backed out into the road and pulled away with its payload of mail, amber beacon flashing from the roof. As soon as she saw the number inside the envelope, Marina got her purse, locked the front door of their doublewide, and went straight to Keyhole Hills High School.

  Their ancient Blazer sat in the parking lot. Carly had come out of the school, chatting with her friends, and heat blossomed in her face when she recognized it, and Marina inside, staring at her in barely veiled fear. Carly got into the Blazer and tossed her bookbag in the backseat—didn’t ask questions, didn’t ask why her mother was picking her up.

  This wasn’t her first surprise pickup.

  Taking a blue top off the clothing rack, Carly held it against her chest to appraise it, looking at herself in a nearby mirror. A band of silver shredded its way from one shoulder to the waist. Fifteen-year-old Carly was pretty and petite, like her mother, with dusky skin and rich black-brown hair. She was noodle-skinny, cervine, almost all leg, with a gazelle neck; sometimes, her friend Patrick would grab the plastic skeleton in Biology class and puppeteer it at her, teasing her in a Pepe Le Pew accent. Oh ho, heh heh, oui oui, eez a sexy skeleton just like me, eh hey?

  She caught her own eyes in the mirror, bright jade stones shining with need.

  Disgusted, Carly returned it to the rack.

  Her mother sat stiffly on a bench by the dressing rooms, her purse clenched under one arm. Marina Valenzuela had always been a bit of a firebrand, a coltish woman with a mane of springy tresses and a narrow, classically beautiful face. But these days, an insidious gray crept across her temples and her face was lined, her eyes those of a wounded hawk, haunted but alert. The fire had gone out, replaced by a frantic quiet that hummed underneath like a live wire. She had gone from buxom to willowy, almost gaunt, and when she walked her elbows sawed subtly at her sides, hands always worrying at each other.

  Haggard, thought Carly, an intrusive thought. Felt horrible, felt hateful, but if the shoe fit.…

  “It would look lovely on you,” said Marina.

  The blue shirt. Carly experienced a stab of shame. “Yeah. It would.” She raked aside a cluster of clothes and spotted an even nicer shirt, a baby doll peasant blouse even her grandmother would have liked, with poofy shoulders and flowers embroidered along the hem. She almost took it out, but an icicle—of fear, of regret, of resentment—slid into the pit of her belly, a cold sword into a warm scabbard, and she left it on the rack. She stood there staring at the clothes, thinking.

  Suddenly, she rounded on her mother and suggested, “Why don’t we go to the food court? That sandwich place has smoothies now. I’ve been wanting to try their blueberry-pineapple.”

  Marina looked at the floor and then at her watch. “We give it a little while longer.”

  “How long?”

  “About an hour. He went into work at two and he didn’t get his lunch break until at least five.”

  Fury bubbled up in Carly’s chest. She folded her arms. “We can’t hang out in La Rue all day, Mom. There are only so many clothes to look at. We’ve been in here for, like, forty-five minutes. Besides, this is just cruel. I hate looking at clothes I can’t buy.”

  Marina thought it over and stood, hitching her purse up on her shoulder. “Okay,” she said in defeat.

  Feeling like a spy sneaking through Nazi territory, Carly led her mother out of the clothing store and they hesitated in the corridor, standing between a sunglasses kiosk and a hurricane-simulator booth. Then she spotted the toy store down one of the wings and headed that way.

  As is de rigueur in the twenty-first century, the toy store was all but abandoned. Carly and Marina wandered into the back and browsed the action figures and board games. “Why didn’t you ever teach me chess, Mom?” asked Carly, holding up a box. Regal figures marched across a checkered surface. She never had video games, but the Valenzuelas always had board games and card games. Checkers, Clue, Chutes & Ladders, Sorry!, Scrabble, and of course Monopoly. Poker, Go Fish, craps dice, dominos, Jenga. Her father liked teaching her poker.

  Her father used to like a lot of things.

  “I don’t know how to play either,” said Marina. “Maybe you could look it up at the library and we can learn how to play it together.” Her eyes trickled listlessly across the board games, and then she checked her watch again and said, “This was a good idea, I guess. Santi, he would not expect to find us in a toy store.”

  “We always come here. Sooner or later, he’s going to find us. Why can’t we go somewhere else for a change?”

  “You know we can’t go to my sister. Elisa’s girlfriend is one of Santi’s bunch. He’d go straight there as soon as he got home. Probably there right now, wanting to know where we are.” Marina pulled out a game box, stared at it without reading it. “Besides, if we run into him here, there’s not much he can do.” She made a sweeping gesture. “Too many people, eh?”

  They were alone there in the toy store. If Santiago Valenzuela caught them back here, it would be perfectly private.

  But he didn’t. Carly and her mother hung around in the toy store, gradually relaxing, the knot inside the girl’s chest loosening, until the two of them were chatting coquettishly like a couple of girls, snapping at each other with hand puppets. In front of a display of collectors’ Barbies in glittery dresses and gauzy white gowns, Marina gave her a mini-lesson in Latin Hollywood history.

  Eventually, Carly migrated to the bookstore in the east wing, her mother in tow, and this time wasn’t like the last—this time, it felt like Carly was in charge. Less of a hideout than just a trip to the mall with the woman who raised her. They browsed the bookshelves with studious eyes. Do you ever read Nora Roberts? Have you read Tommyknockers? Do you remember when you would read this to me when I was little? Do you think you could cook some of the stuff in this cookbook? Time turned back a few years and Carly forgot she was a teenager, and Marina lost a little of that wrung-out look. She even smiled.

&nb
sp; A couple of hours later, Marina finally drummed up the courage to follow her into the food court, and they got smoothies—Carly blueberry, her mother piña colada—and Chinese food for an early supper. The meal was halfway over when Carly looked up, knuckled a bit of cabbage into the corner of her mouth, and said, “Why don’t we stop by that cop store on the way home?”

  “Cop store?” Marina asked. She ate everything with a fork, including the egg rolls, drizzled generously in duck sauce; her hands stayed impeccable, ornate rings inherited from Carly’s grandmother on every finger.

  “Yeah. The law enforcement shop on the highway. Like, PX Sports and Tactical, or something. Went in there once with Renee. They have stun guns and pepper spray—”

  Marina erupted into a gush of near-incomprehensible Spanish. “Are you out of your mind? If I pepper-spray Santi, he will kill us both and then burn the house down with us in it.”

  Carly grit her teeth. “He’s going to kill us anyway, one day. You might as—”

  “Do not say that. Do not go there. Santi is not actually going to kill me. Do not be ridiculous.” Where a tooth used to sit in her mother’s mouth, one of her canines, was now a dark gap. The rest of them were tall, the pale purple gums receded, with the white-brown sheen of a seashell. “I was using a figure of speech. Santi wouldn’t kill a fly. He’s all bark and no bite.”

  “He bites, Mom. He bites and you know it.”

  Marina abandoned her meal and took out a cigarette.

  “You can’t smoke that in here, Mom.”

  Marina paused, pincering the cigarette to her lips, the lighter already in her hand. “What are they going to do—throw me out of the mall?”

  * * *

  “We should be getting back.” Code for Your father should be back to work by now. Marina stubbed out her Marlboro Light in a half-cup of sweet-and-sour sauce. Carly dropped her dinner trash into a waste bin and the two of them headed for the food court exit.