by S. A. Hunt
“Frank and Heinrich’s father, Moses Atterberry, were in seminary together,” said Rook. “Moses became pastor over Walker Memorial Church there in Blackfield, and Frank went on to Italy to continue his education in demonology and…”
“Exorcism,” finished Navathe.
Ice rushed down Robin’s scalp as she made a connection. “Do you think it’s possible that he could exorcise the demon part out of me?”
Navathe winced. “Afraid not, love. That is an integral part of you. It’s in your spiritual DNA, so to speak. It’s not in you; it is you. Might as well try to exorcise the color of your skin. Or your hair.” He raised an eyebrow at her purple-and-black mohawk. “What is the original color of your hair, anyway?”
“Dark chestnut,” said Robin. “Okay. It’s my turn to ask a question.”
The Origo smiled. “We’re an open book.”
“Yes,” said Navathe, smirking, “and just like a book, I am full of good sex and big words.”
Rook quipped, “You’re also going to have a bad ending.”
“I’m assuming you guys are magicians like Doc G here,” Robin said, tucking one foot under her leg and hunching over the table, speaking low. “He can heal people … What can you guys do? What are your relics?”
The Dogs of Odysseus seemed hesitant. Navathe sat back and folded his arms. It was probably meant to seem authoritative, but to Robin it looked more like a protective gesture, as if the temperature in the room had gone down ten degrees. “You’re … you’re not going to suck the powers out of them, are you?”
Robin echoed his earlier smirk. Come on, you already know me better than that.
Reaching into her purse, Rook brought out a Zippo and flicked it open. “Mine is the Gift of Manipulation, psychokinesis. This lighter shell contains a lock of hair from a teratoma extracted from a Czech witch in 1909.”
“Like Marilyn Cutty?” asked Robin, her arm-hairs prickling.
“Aye.”
“And then there’s mine,” said Navathe, opening the messenger bag sitting on the floor by his chair. He took out a snow globe and placed it on the table. Inside, a cartoon alligator stood on a popsicle-stick surfboard in a drift of Styrofoam snowflakes. Around the rim of the globe’s base it read: I SPENT CHRISTMAS 1988 ON DAYTONA BEACH!
“Let me guess,” Robin said, “you can make it snow?”
Navathe shook his head. “Nope.”
“Control an army of surfing alligators?”
“… Nada.”
“Capture people in a glass ball?”
“What—? No, I can’t capture people in a glass ball.” The look of bemusement on Navathe’s face evaporated. “It controls fire, mate. Pyromancy,” he said, flourishing the last word in a duh, what else would it be way. “The Gift of Wrath.”
“Fire?” Robin pointed at Rook. “She’s the one with the Zippo lighter, but you’re the firestarter?”
“Twisted firestarter.” Navathe asided, “I’d keep going, but I was never really into the Prodigy—more of a Chemical Brothers man, myself.”
“No one ever said magic had to make sense.” Rook put her lighter away. “The artifacts serve as conduits for the teratomas’ power. We can’t channel the raw magic the same way you or the witches can. Magic is all about metaphors, you know. Connotations. A lot of it is channeled by inscriptions and moving parts. Frank claims there are relics that can perform necromancy. An egg timer, namely.”
“Necromancy?” asked Kenway. “Bringing the dead back to life?”
“Aye. Well, not so much back to life, you know.… Well, you wind the egg timer backward and it’d bring someone back. For a little while, at least. While the timer was running. Not the same as resurrection, according to the records; they were more like golems, dumb dead brutes with nothing but violence in their heads. That’s what the records claim, anyway.”
“Speaking of relics,” said Gendreau, “do you still have that watch I gave you?”
The watch with the hidden power that lent Robin telekinesis and provided the secret weapon she needed to defeat Marilyn Cutty. “I do.” Robin jerked a thumb in the general direction of the garage where they’d parked Willy. “In my stuff back in the RV, but the heart-road inside is closed. If you want to use it again, you’ll have to put another teratoma in it. Had to devour the power inside to be able to use it.”
“Devour the power,” said Navathe, clenching his fist at her. “That would make a magnificent tagline.”
“That will take years, perhaps decades, of re-bonding, re-augmenting, re-training,” said Rook. “I wish you’d spoken to us before you ruined a relic, Robin.”
“I didn’t exactly have your number. Not to mention I was pinned to a wall and trying not to be killed by a witch at the time.”
The magician had no response to that.
After the waitress returned with their food, the next few minutes passed in a quiet interlude of scraping forks and slurping drinks. Robin couldn’t help but watch the magicians’ faces, wondering what they were thinking. “So, what happens now?” she asked, wiping her lips with a napkin. “Am I in the order, or, I don’t know, consulting for the order? Or did Doc G make a fatal oopsie by being my under-the-table Judi Dench?”
Gendreau crowed laughter at the ceiling.
“Bond got you pegged, M,” said Navathe.
“For real, though”—Robin centered the conversation again—“are we cool? Is this a new-employee orientation, or are you sizing me up for a cell?”
Rook licked her lips thoughtfully. “It’s taken a lot of coaxing to talk Frank Gendreau into letting you work with the Dogs as opposed to containing you, or eliminating you outright. For what it’s worth, the three of us have all been convinced of your humanity since we first laid eyes on your video series, as well as the rest of the subordinate Dogs.”
“We like to call ourselves the Underdogs,” asided Navathe.
“G here has been fighting for you ever since he came back to Michigan,” continued Rook. “Whatever transgressions Heinrich committed, you’re not at fault here. That award goes to the dead guy.”
The iron ball that’d been sitting in Robin’s bowels lost a little of its heft. “That’s good.”
“Not that we honestly stand a chance even if we did decide that you were too dangerous to ignore,” said Gendreau. He carved off a piece of ham (he was eating ham and eggs, which surprised her, as she’d had him pegged as a rabbit-food-eater), and then he added, “You’re a girl wrapped around an atom bomb. I’m only glad you’re on our side.”
“I don’t know.” Robin mopped up the last of her ranch with the end of a chicken finger. “I’m not that bad.”
Rook shook her head. “You are powerful. We feel”—and here the magician glanced at the others, and then back at Robin—“that with training, and the right preparations, that you can learn to harness, bring out, and more fully utilize that side of you, that latent demon inside of—”
“No,” Robin interjected, “I don’t want it to come out. I like it where it is: where I can’t see it.”
“But—”
“You don’t know what it’s like to look down at your hands and see hollow claws made out of wires, and … like the demon you just tore apart, you wonder if you’re full of spiders, too.”
“Full of spiders?” Navathe and Gendreau said in unison.
“Yes. When I pulled the demon apart, there was nothing inside of him but spiders. That’s how he changed me in my mother’s house—he infected me with those spiders.” A familiar tingling sensation crawled up Robin’s scalp as she remembered that black night in the Hell-annexed Victorian. When she looked up after clawing at her head, the magicians were staring at her as if she’d gone mad. The diner seemed ten degrees colder.
“Real spiders?” asked Navathe.
“I don’t think they were ‘real’ spiders,” said Robin. “When they touched me, it was like being molested by the ghosts of perverts and psychos. The spiders were wicked thoughts, black cravings with legs.
Abstract. Crawling, violating metaphors.”
Navathe winced. “That sounds horrible.”
“Not as horrible as seeing them chew away my humanity and turn me into the same kind of monster as Andras.” Robin’s appetite was at the door, threatening to leave. “I think I can live like I am now. But … I don’t think I ever want to be that thing that I was, ever again.”
“So … what?” asked Rook, “does it require coming into contact with a demon to cause a full transformation?”
“As far as I know.”
What does it take to change me? she wondered. Do I have to get hurt to do it? Will it happen every time I get seriously hurt? What if I’m in a car accident and I demon it up in the hospital?
Maybe if I let them help me, I can learn how to control it. Not to be able to Hulk out whenever—
(Were you about to say “whenever you want”?)
Maybe if I let them help me, I can learn how to keep it from happening again. She looked at her hands, the one that was just old enough to hold a beer and the other one that looked like a high schooler’s. She flexed the younger hand. She could still imagine the texture of her demon hand, like a combination of driftwood and vulcanized rubber. Twice as large as her human right hand, a green-black eagle foot big enough to squeeze a volleyball flat.
Her fingers had scraped against each other hollowly, like bird bone. She could remember feeling it resonate in her teeth.
Are you sure you want to give that up?
I want to control it. I want to put a leash on it.
Track 4
Astride the Royal Enfield, Santiago Valenzuela felt like a god—one of those Greek gods, perhaps the god of war, a mountain-legged giant full of piss and lightning. He didn’t remember their names, or perhaps he never knew, but that didn’t stop him from sitting ramrod-straight on the motorcycle’s leather spring-seat, his hands clenching the grips as if they were axe handles. Wind beat and howled against his bare face. He didn’t wear a helmet, so his hair was a rippling charcoal mane. He caught a glimpse of himself in the windows of a Wendy’s on the way out of Lockwood and thought he looked like a lion tearing ass across the bushlands.
La Reina wasn’t your average biker ride. She wasn’t a sleek road machine painted in sparkly red, with chrome and flames. She looked more like something Indiana Jones would escape from Nazi stormtroopers on: a primitive but powerful Tinkertoy with one cyclopean floodlight and toothy bicycle spokes. The exhaust and the engine were gunmetal gray, but everything else was powder-coated olive green: classic Army power.
Got her three years before in a police auction. He’d been there looking for another car to go with Marina’s Blazer, something Carly could learn to drive when she was old enough, but something about the powder-green motorcycle spoke to him, reached right out of that impound lot and grabbed him by the balls and refused to let go. He sat there on those folding chairs on that brisk Saturday morning in November and the auctioneer’s voice just sailed right over his head. The only voice he could hear clearly was a pregnant, beckoning sound in the middle of his head like the slow tearing of long strips of paper.
At first, he thought it was his imagination. Santiago looked over his shoulder and his eyes danced across the faces around him, but everyone was sitting as still as mannequins, a few of them with their hands up.
Don’t they hear it? he squinted. Don’t they hear that? What the hell is that?
“Two thou, two thou, do I hear two fitty?” droned the auctioneer, a small bald man in a plaid shirt. He stood behind a lectern borrowed from the Lockwood PD conference room.
The gray sky was the lid of a lead-lined coffin. Santiago stared at the powder-green motorcycle. Something was trapped inside the machine, eager to escape. Scrrrrrrrratch. The sound scrawled down the slopes of his skull until he couldn’t take it anymore—he could almost see the sound rolling down the corner of his eye, a fuzzy gliding bruise like a finger pushing against his eyeball.
“Two thou, I hear two thou, do I hear two fitty?”
Santi jabbed a peace sign at him.
“Two thou fitty … do I hear two-sanny-five?”
Scrrrrrrrrrrrratch. His fingers remained skyward as the price climbed. Let me out, the sound seemed to plead, a talon being raked down the inside of a cardboard box, a shard of bone sliding down the inside of a helmet. Take me back to the road. Take me. I belong on the road.
“No more takers? No more takers. Last chance, last chance. Four thousand.” The auctioneer smacked the edge of the lectern with a ball-peen hammer. Flowers were painted on the handle. Santiago would always remember those flowers, tiny blue ones with white centers. “Sold, to the man in the black vest.”
Two weeks later, he sold his original bike, a 1974 Harley shovelhead he’d inherited from his father, Emiliano.
He hadn’t heard that strange phantom scratching since.
The boys at the clubhouse asked him why he’d given up the heirloom bike, teased him for weeks about it, asked him if the bike was a welcome gift for joining the Army. All he could tell them was that it was love at first sight. And it was, in a way. Over time he more and more often referred to the bike as his “Queen”—La Reina, which drew comparisons to Lorena Bobbitt and comments about getting his dick burned while he was fucking the exhaust pipe, which he quickly put a stop to.
When he first bought her, there was a sidecar attached. For a while, he left it on. Several times (who are we kidding, many times) he filled the sidecar with ice and used it as a rolling beer chest. Sometimes, back in “the old days” in the weeks and months after he bought her, he gave Carly a ride in it. Nothing quite like seeing that lovable little stick figure sitting in the sidecar like a prairie dog peeking up out of a hole, the wind whipping her silky hair across the sides of her helmet.
Then she officially blossomed into a real teenager and grew out of her evening rides, a flower too big for its pot, and Santi went to fewer and fewer shindigs with the boys (that’s what he called ’em on the good days, “shindigs”; when he was feeling his oats, they were “fuckarees”), until finally one hot summer evening, like casting aside a crutch, he took off the sidecar.
Took hours, and he never could seem to find all the bolts affixing it to the Enfield’s frame—there seemed to always be one more to take off—and he’d had to give up and cut the damn thing off with a Sawzall, like an arm trapped under a rock. These days, the sidecar sat in a tangle of weeds by the woodshed behind their trailer, a green husk rusting in the shadow of a stand of hickory. Unlike the bike, which never seemed to deteriorate at all, the sidecar had steadily slipped into a twilight zone of corrosion, the floor rusted out in big buckshot holes.
He could still remember the terrible, rending squeal of the reciprocating blade chewing through the support rods. Even then, a dark corner of his mind wondered if it was the power saw screaming or the bike itself.
Until he cut off the sidecar, he hadn’t done any maintenance on the bike at all, outside of keeping the fluids topped off. They say a Harley ain’t a Harley unless it leaks, but the Enfield was as mint as the day he bought it—which is to say that it wasn’t exactly princess-pretty even then, very obviously “pre-owned,” but that it never really got any worse than that. Never visibly depreciated prior to the sidecar amputation, other than the random nick and dent. Santiago had smacked her with a rock one Saturday while mowing the lawn and knocked out her headlight. It stayed broken until he fetched a new bulb and ordered a fresh lens.
You better believe he cursed up a storm when he broke that light. He turned the air blue. That was the week Marina lost her tooth for dropping breakfast on the floor. Santi slept on the couch for a while. (Their marriage might not have fared so well if he knew she’d tearfully gathered the scrambled eggs off the floor while he was outside smoking and blowing off steam, and put it back in the pan and served it to him anyway.)
For several months after he cut off the sidecar, the Queen turned into a real bitch. The morning after Santi performed his laborious
amputation, he dragged himself out of bed exhausted and sore, and went outside to discover a huge patch of greasy darkness under her pendulous gray belly.
At first, he thought he might have accidentally cut a line or something, but there didn’t seem to be any damage to the engine. He’d even thought to disconnect the electrical lines that ran out to the sidecar’s taillight before he cut through the strut, yet, no, everything was intact. But she continued to drop every quart of oil he put in her, as if she’d come down with some kind of mechanical Montezuma’s Revenge. And for months, whenever he started her up, La Reina would only weakly cough to life and sputter like Archie’s old jalopy, as if to spite him for what he’d done.
Ultimately, she got better. She learned to live without the crutch, got stronger, learned to lean into the turns the way she couldn’t with the sidecar, a sinuous steel snake. She evolved past the dowdy World War II image and became something new and strong.
The white Army star stenciled onto the gas tank glowed as solidly as the day of the auction. Santiago’s gloved hand caressed the star, untouchably hot in the livid Texas sun, and he followed Marina’s Blazer through the city-limits pass and into Keyhole Hills. The tiny town declined the deeper they went, front lawns getting grayer and more strewn with toys and junk, until the Blazer trundled into the real beating heart of the Keyhole, where the only homes were dust-beaten mobile homes and the grass no longer grew except in breathless patches of brown stubble.
Marina parked the Blazer in its customary bald patch in front of the trailer, and Santiago grumbled past to the woodshed at the back corner of the lot, where the amputated sidecar languished in rattling bone-colored weeds. The “woodshed” was little more than a lean-to of splintery gray wood, three walls and an A-frame roof to keep the Queen out of a rain that hardly ever fell. He turned her around to face the trailer and walked her into the lean-to backward. The engine cut off with a final series of stuttering reports. Santi’s leg swung up and off in a roundhouse arc like John Wayne climbing down off a horse, and he gave La Reina’s flank an affectionate clap.