The Hellion

by S. A. Hunt

  “What do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “The magicians. You gonna keep working with ’em?”

  She didn’t open her eyes, speaking to the ceiling. “Don’t guess I have a choice. I imagine I’m either with them or against them. And I don’t want to be against them when I don’t know their full capabilities.”

  “Can’t be that black-and-white. They didn’t know you and G were working together, and they never mobilized a hunter-killer death squad to take you out, did they? Nobody showed up to turn you into a toad.”

  “Maybe that’s what Sara and Lucas were. Maybe they came out here as a team to catch me, and G let me go because he saw how cool I am after we took out Cutty’s coven.”

  “Maybe! They seem like good people. Maybe they were like a lot of us soldiers—good people coerced into doing questionable things.”

  She got up and moved across the tub, straddling his thighs. “I don’t like talking about it,” she said, kissing him. A half-truth—really, she was just tired of the topic and wanted to get laid. “Can we do something else?”

  “Fine by me.”

  When she was perfectly still and silent, she could feel his heartbeat. He kissed her again. She reached under the water and guided him into herself, then sat astride him, surrounding him, appreciating the feeling of fullness he gave her. It wasn’t the dumb animal sex they had in the Winnebago after changing the tire, but a tidal, thoughtful exercise that barely rippled the water. She didn’t finish earlier—it was too damn sweaty and muggy in the RV—but she did now, a flash-burn of pleasure that coiled in the pit of her belly and rose along her spine. Muscles in her thighs shuddered, and her body hardened, trapping the air in her lungs. Then the coil shredded brightly and her breath escaped in a blast of euphoria.

  Then his stomach tensed and she knew he was there, too, climaxing; she let him stay and spend himself inside her. Always had, since they started sleeping together, and this was how she knew she was genetically incompatible with other people.

  She stared down at him, each breathing in the other’s face, and wondered if it would be any different if he were part demon, too.

  “What you thinkin’ about?” he asked.

  “Nothing.” It didn’t bear discussing. Robin kissed him.

  “I know that look. That ain’t ‘nothing.’ There’s gears turning in that skull of yours. Penny for your thoughts?”

  She sighed, reading his face. “The one magician chick. The Asian.”

  “Rook?”

  “Yeah. Does she seem familiar to you? Like…”

  “Like, you get a friend request on Facebook from somebody, and you creep on their pictures, and you recognize some of the people in them as old classmates, so you figure, I went to school with this person, and—”

  “Rook is a weird name, too, ain’t it?”

  “Yeah,” said Kenway. “Like a code name or something.”

  A knock at the bathroom door. She slipped off of him and retreated to the other end of the tub, sinking low and peering over the edge. “Come on in.”

  Gendreau’s muffled voice: “Are you decent?”

  “No, but is anyone decent, really?”

  A sigh. “Can I come in? This stuff is melting.”

  “Velcome,” Robin said in a bad Lugosi accent. “Come een, come een.”

  The magician eased the door open, peeking through his fingers. His other hand carried a carton with cups of frozen yogurt. “I’ll put it in the mini-fridge for later,” said Gendreau, putting it away. He crept back out through the bathroom.

  A moment of floating later, Kenway said, “How can you be afraid of a dude that buys you frozen yogurt? That guy’s on your side.”

  Track 6

  Then

  “Now put it back together,” said Heinrich Hammer, resetting the stopwatch.

  Strains of Red Hot Chili Peppers murmured from the distant tower, yelling about sabretooth horses and paisley dragons. Lying on the picnic table in front of the girl were the component pieces of an assault rifle. The adobe wall behind her looked as if it had been blown out by a grenade, revealing an eternity of desolate Texas scrubland where buzzards circled on distant thermals.

  “Still don’t understand why I need to know about guns like this,” the teenager said, glaring insolently. “Thought you said the only thing that can stop a witch is the dagger, and the only thing that can kill her is fire.”

  “You won’t always be fighting witches.”

  “Like what? Vampires? Werewolves?”

  “Don’t be a smart-ass. Vampires and werewolves don’t exist and you know it.” More pepper than salt back then, his hair glittered in the sunlight that filtered through the holes in the canvas awning.

  She sneered. “Didn’t think witches existed either.”

  “You’re gonna be fighting people.”

  “People?”

  “Like I told you,” said the big Black man, pacing in front of the table. “Like what happened to your daddy. The witches and their cat-people familiars. Got to be willin’ to put them down before they can kill you.”

  “So, I shoot them?” she asked, incredulous.

  “If the witch had time to build an army of familiars, yes. You’ll be out there all by your lonesome, Robin Hood. One word from the old woman and the townies will come pourin’ out of the woodwork like a swarm of cockroaches, tryin’ to rip your kidneys out.” He paused, his eyes blazing. “Is that the way you wanna die? Crawlin’ across the floor, tryin’ to push”—he clutched imaginary intestines—“your guts back in with bloody hands?”

  Robin grimaced. She was pale and puffy from living the last two years in a psych ward, with the dark-circled, suspicious eyes of a little girl who’s spent that whole time plotting and mourning in the lucid hours between doses of antipsychotics and antidepressants.

  “Knives for the witches, guns for the bitches.”

  “Okay,” she said, bracing herself. “I get the picture.”

  He clicked the stopwatch. “Go on, then.”

  Her hands fluttered across the table from part to part—first, the bolt went into the bolt carrier, then the bolt carrier slid into the upper receiver along with the charging handle. Then, the handle and trigger assembly bolted onto the bottom of the upper receiver. She pushed the recoil spring into the buttstock and attached it to the upper receiver and handle.

  Flipping it up and standing it on the stock, she fit the handguard pieces back onto the barrel and laid the rifle down on the tablecloth.

  Click. “One minute, seven seconds. Six seconds faster than yesterday.”

  Reluctant pride burst in her chest. Heinrich sat across from her, digging in his pocket. She thought he was going to come up with another one of his coconut cigars and light it, but he took out something that looked like a tiny fencing sabre made for action figures. “You forgot something, though.”

  “The firing pin. God damn it.”

  “Attention to detail, honey,” he said, dropping the pin on the table. He did, then, take out a cigar and light it. “Those crazy cat-people ain’t gonna be the only thing comin’ atcha.” He squinted, blowing smoke over their heads that smelled like burning leaves, reminding her of autumn. “Them witches can turn into things. Monsters. Big monsters.”

  “Monsters?”

  “Transfiguration. You’ll see—makes them vampires and werewolves in them old Universal movies look like Fisher Price–level shit. And no, guns like this won’t kill ’em, but it’ll slow ’em down. And when you’re buttin’ heads with a seven-hundred-year-old priestess of the god of death, every second counts.” Reaching into the collar of his ratty henley shirt, Heinrich took out a necklace and opened the pendant to sneak a peek at the cameo inside.

  “What is that?” Robin muttered, fidgeting with the firing pin in a desultory fashion.

  He showed her a delicately carved picture of a woman’s face in profile, like the head on a nickel. “Belonged to my daddy, Moses. Picture of my mama. She gave him th
is when he went to Vietnam. He was a chaplain in the Army. Caught some shrapnel and they sent him home; he took up with the church there in Blackfield. Hell, I reckon he’s still there.”

  “She’s pretty.”

  He grunted and put the pendant away.

  Drawing deep on the cigar, he took it out of his mouth, picking up the stopwatch and blowing smoke over her head. “Arright, now I want you to take it back apart, and this time don’t forget the firing pin. If you wanna eat supper tonight, you better beat your disassembly time.”

  Time resumed with a click.

  Track 7

  Now

  Red numerals hovering over the nightstand flipped to 12:04 and Robin sat bolt upright in the bed, waking up from another dream of the desert, and training with Heinrich. Got to be willin’ to put them down before they can kill you, echoed his phantom voice from across the years, like sitcom laugh tracks from a long-dead studio audience.

  Gray light flickered across sinuous shapes. They’d fallen asleep with the TV on, turned down low, whispering nonsense.

  Infomercial. Robin flipped through the channels until she found some kind of cartoon and slid out of bed, slipping into a T-shirt. She got a cup of frozen yogurt (turned out to be peanut butter fudge) out of the mini-fridge and sat on the floor at the foot of the bed, staring up at the TV and not really paying attention, eating yogurt with a plastic spoon and occasionally wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist.

  When she finished it, she gently placed the empty cup in the wastebasket so as not to wake up Kenway and lay back down, staring up at the ceiling as the TV pushed strange shades across the smooth plaster. She got up again and thought about going outside—maybe go for a smoke or something. Cigarette right about then sounded pretty good, but they’d both quit smoking ages ago. No turning back now.

  Maybe some water. Some water would make her feel better. Yeah. It always did after she’d eaten too much sugar.

  The bathroom light was on but the door was almost closed, just a bare crack of yellow hanging in the darkness. This wasn’t odd, since she’d left the light on as a night-light so she could still see if she got up in the middle of the night, as she’d been doing lately. She opened the door and discovered someone standing in the shared bathroom.

  Leaning over the sink was a pale, willowy woman in a towel, inspecting her face in a foggy mirror with her fingers, maybe pinching a zit. Feminine hips but broad shoulders and big, delicate hands. On the flat of her shoulder like a cattle brand was an algiz tattoo, a Y with an extra arm in the middle.

  Blazing sea-glass eyes. The woman’s reflection looked at her in surprise.

  “Oh!” blurted Robin, and she whipped the door shut.

  Her heart banged. “I’m sorry,” she said, suddenly very aware of the smell of the fresh paint on the bathroom door. “I didn’t know anybody was in there.”

  The stranger had been exceedingly familiar. That brief glimpse of her burned in Robin’s mind for a moment, a stark, too-bright image, and she realized that the woman’s throat had been a ragged pink smile. And only once the door was closed did she retroactively notice the ruby ring on the left index finger.

  Wait, what …

  “It’s okay, Miss Martine,” a soft voice said from inside. “I just got out of the shower. Should have locked the door, but I thought you were asleep.” The door eased open of its own accord to reveal Anders Gendreau in an old T-shirt and jogging shorts. All Robin could do was stand there, silently hunched over her folded arms as if she were standing in the snow at someone’s front door. Gendreau stared at the carpet. “I always wait until late at night to take a shower, so nobody will, ehh…”

  They stared at each other for several seconds, the magician silhouetted by the bathroom light. He let his hands wander awkwardly down to his sides, as if he wasn’t quite sure what to do with them.

  Mastectomy scars peeked out of the cut-off sleeves of his t-shirt, pink lines across the bottom of his chest. Robin didn’t know what to say or do. The thought occurred to her to hug him, or compliment him, or, in a wild fit of pique, tell him that she loved him (and she did, she supposed, there in that instant, even if only platonically—how can you not love such a gentle, stuffy, important scarecrow?), but all of them seemed inappropriate, so she did the first thing that popped into her head and apologized again.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” Gendreau stepped back into the bathroom and went back to inspecting his face.

  “Thank you for the frozen yogurt.”

  Gendreau gave her a wan smile. “You’re welcome.”

  She pointed at the sink. “Do you mind if I get some water?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  Robin stepped into the bathroom and slurped it straight from the faucet.

  When she straightened, Gendreau’s face went soft. “Have you been crying?” In the mirror, Robin could see that her eyes were rimmed with red, the whites turned pink.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “No, it’s not nothing.” One of Gendreau’s long, nimble hands found its way to her shoulder, and he glared past Robin at the sleeping figure on the bed.

  “It’s absolutely not him,” said Robin. “Kenny’s a teddy bear.”

  “Oh. Was it the dreams he told us about?”

  “Yeah.”

  Gendreau twitched, as if he were about to remove his hand, but left it there. They remained this way for several seconds, until he glanced down at himself as if checking to see if his body was still there.

  “Will he wake up if we talk too loud?”

  “Kenway?” The shape on the bed was motionless, the big veteran’s soft respiration a whistly ebb and flow. “No,” said Robin. “That man could sleep through a rolling gun battle in a hurricane full of snare drums.”

  The curandero brushed his teeth. He finished, shaking the water out of his toothbrush, then rinsed his mouth out and awkwardly smiled at her. “This is where we part ways. Good night, Miss Martine. I hope you feel better, and I hope you have better dreams. You know where I am if you need to talk.”

  “Probably not falling asleep again tonight.”

  “That’s a shame, but fair, I suppose,” said Gendreau. “You gonna be all right tomorrow?”

  “Me and coffee are old pals.” Robin held her hands out and shook them as if she had the jitters. “I’m probably eighty percent bean at this point. Besides, I am not unaccustomed to operating on a bare minimum of sleep. This is not unusual for me.”

  The magician shrugged. “Want me to slap you if I see you nodding off?”

  “Sure.”

  Gendreau laughed. “Sleep good.”

  “You too.”

  Gendreau paused in the doorway.

  “My deadname, my birth name, is Irene,” he said, closing his eyes. “Only my grandfather Francis, Asha, and Ha—” He corrected himself. “—perhaps only one other knows … and now you know. I had it legally changed to Anders as soon as I turned eighteen. I started testosterone about five years ago.” His eyes opened again, and he glanced at himself in the mirror. “I mean, I don’t really keep my transition a secret, but I don’t go around advertising it, either.”

  “I won’t say anything.” Ha? Robin thought. Ha-who?

  The magician stepped into his suite and closed the door.

  All right, then, Gandalf, keep your secrets.

  As soon as he left, Robin leaned on the counter, alone in the bathroom, and allowed herself to take off her emotional mask, let down her shields. She leaned on the counter, her face inches from the faucet. Ran cold water and gulped some of it straight from the tap.

  She faced herself in the bathroom mirror as the water ran hot and steam climbed out of the sink. Wiping a swath of fog from the mirror, she revealed her face—sweaty hair, pale skin, Pepto-pink eyes. For a brief second, the stream of condensation running down the left side made it look as if her left arm had been amputated again, and she reflexively gasped.

  “Goddammit,” she said in a straine
d whisper. She ran a hand down the mirror, wiping the mirage away.

  Her reflection, peering through the foggy gap, said nothing for a change.

  Something gripped her system—terror? Relief? She wasn’t quite sure. As she straightened, she was racked by real tremors—a tectonic quaking that started in her knees, tensing her abs, compressing her lungs, driving the breath out of her. She pressed fists into her eyes until she saw stars. Gritted her teeth until they ached. You got this, said something inside her. Stand up. Shake it off. Rub some dirt on it.

  Her heart hammered in her tightening chest, demanding to be let out. She was suddenly too big for her own skin. Felt like the slightest cut and she would explode into a thousand little screaming starlings.

  Adrenaline drip-fed into her system. Robin gripped the counter, breathing deeply and smoothly through her nose.

  When the water got as piping hot as it was going to get, she plunged both hands into it. Immediate and enlightening, the scalding sink-water felt as if it were eating straight through both hands, slowly and excruciatingly, like acid. The pain infuriated her, emboldened her, dampened the fear, chased away the memories of hags in the dark with embers for eyes that chased her through filthy houses, raving and slobbering and threatening to tear her in half and eat her. Mental images of her own face, made of wire and twine, flaming green in the bowels of the Darkhouse. Sensations of the hog-monster breaking bone, ripping muscle, swallowing her arm whole. Blood running. People running.

  She stood there, running hot water over her hands until they were raw and sore, then she backed away, dazed, and sat on the edge of the bathtub, flexing her biceps and squeezing her thighs until the agony in her hands began to subside.

  I can get you to do anything in the world, climb any mountain, swim any sea, said a phantom Heinrich in her head; all I gotta do is piss you off.

  Pain. Pain pissed her off.

  “Kill them all,” she growled under her breath, staring into her own dark runny-mascara eyes in the bathroom mirror. “Kill ’em all. Burn ’em to the ground. All them witches. You’re gonna fucking do it, ain’t you? You’re not gonna run, you coward. Are you?”