The Hellion

by S. A. Hunt

  “No,” whispered the girl in the mirror, her face stark white.

  The raccoon-eyed valkyrie punched herself in the chest, a single gorilla-beat, with her new arm. Dull pain welled across her pectoral muscle. She did it again. “You’re not gonna run, are you?”

  “No, ma’am,” the girl in the mirror said a little more confidently.

  She punched herself again, leaving a bruise.

  “Good.” Robin stood up and scowled at her reflection. “Then let’s do this,” she said, scraped tears off her face, and turned off the water.

  * * *

  As she left, Gendreau sighed. He’d been leaning against the door in his own suite, listening intently. Tossing his T-shirt into his open luggage, he stood in front of his own mirror, the one on top of the desk, and studied the occult tattoos covering his torso.

  Whispering a litany of words in Icelandic, he caressed the surface of the bathroom door, and light glimmered briefly across the new paint. Then he did the same to the front door. His protective sigils installed, the magician glanced toward the suite next door and climbed into bed.

  In the fabric darkness of Robin’s computer bag, the Osdathregar grew warm.

  Track 8

  They roamed the midnight streets, looking for refuge, slipping in and out of the blue-white glow of buzzing streetlamps. Subtle thunder grumbled on the horizon as the sky grew darker and darker.

  The first place Carly and Marina fled to was Elisa Valenzuela’s house. Marina’s sister-in-law.

  Since she was the overnight stocking manager at the Lockwood Walmart, Elisa had been asleep—but her girlfriend Isabella Talamantes was there and awake, and she’d let them in easily enough, unaware of the pepper-spray incident other than a stray remark about how they smelled like cayenne. Even after she’d noticed the finger bruises materializing on Marina’s neck, Isabella hadn’t overreacted. She’d been concerned, but she was growing accustomed to seeing the bruises Santi left on his wife. Isabella was an RN at the Keyhole Hills assisted-living center, so she was prone to administering medical help and advice herself, but she didn’t say anything.

  Not my circus, not my monkeys.

  But as soon as they explained the events that led to them fleeing the house—Santi choking Marina, Carly spraying him with bear Mace—Isabella did a one-eighty on them and ran them out of the house. “I don’t want him in here pitching a fit,” she’d said, ushering them back outside as gently as she could. “I love you as much as a person in my position can, Marina. But you know how Santi is these days.”

  “Elisa would not stand for-for”—Carly thought her mother was going to say cowardice—“this; she would stand up to her brother and—”

  “Well, he’s not my brother,” said Isabella.

  “He’s as good as—”

  By then, the three of them were on the front porch. Isabella backed into the house and spoke to them through the screen door. “I’m afraid of him. We all are. He’s mean. He’s getting to be like he used to be back in the day. And it’s that damn motorcycle. Ever since he bought that stupid Enfield, it’s like the damn thing’s taken over his life. He grinds you two into the dirt over the bills and spends all his disposable income taking care of that bike.”

  “Where are we supposed to go?” Carly had asked.

  “I don’t care, as long as it’s not here.”

  “Some sister you are,” Marina spat.

  Isabella stared at them for a long time through the screen. “I don’t want Santiago in my house in a hysterical state.” She sighed and seemed to deflate. “Why don’t you go talk to Gil? Gil has a shotgun. Santi will listen to Gil, and if he don’t listen to Gil, then by God he will listen to two pipes of Ave fuckin’ Maria.”

  So, they went to Guillermo Delgado’s house.

  Gil’s windows were dark, his doors were locked, and his motorcycle was gone. Probably down at Heroes drinking away his demons. They kept moving, hustling down the sidewalk as the day grew shorter, listening for the demonic belch of La Reina’s engine, and ended up sitting on the sidewalk behind the Conoco until her mother began to complain about how her ass hurt.

  Gil still wasn’t home when they checked again, so they started walking to Lockwood, taking the secondary street parallel to the main drag so Santi wouldn’t catch them out on the surface road.

  “Where are we going?” asked Carly.

  Her former scared-rabbit pace had slowed to a desultory walk. Marina forged forward, her steps stilted and weary like a robot that’s forgotten its purpose but is still full of drive. “I don’t know,” replied her mother. “Maybe the county police.” Which would be a better idea than the Keyhole PD, an institution everyone knew was under the thumb of Los Cambiantes. A couple of the gang’s members were officers themselves, clean-shaven gestapo on black-and-white motorcycles. “Maybe we’ll just keep walking right out of Texas. Put down roots somewhere else.”

  Unrealistic, Carly knew, but it was a comforting thought.

  A familiar blatting rumble resonated in the distance. Marina stopped short in the orange warmth of a sodium lamp, abject terror on her face.

  La Reina.

  They were caught on a weird stretch of road with nowhere to hide, a straight two-lane funnel flanked on both sides by a wall and a fence. Their north was a tall, nameless aluminum warehouse that ran the length of the block, and their south was a chain-link fence containing a crowd of cars in various states of disrepair.

  Carly opted for the fence and cars. A dumpster stood at the edge of the orange light. She scrambled up on top of it and then climbed atop the fence and picked her way over the barbed wire, earning a painful scratch. She tumbled over and landed in a crouch, falling over on her arm.

  The sound of the Enfield’s engine ripped against the valley of houses, a hollow snore. Sounded like he was maybe three blocks north, cruising low, looking for them. Marina grenade-lobbed her purse over into the car yard and clambered on top of the dumpster like a baby climbing onto a couch, stiff and awkward. One of the plastic hatches made a thumping-cracking noise, threatening to cave under her weight.

  “Come on, Mama!” Carly pleaded.

  Marina fussed back at her in Spanish, picking her way over the barbed wire like a spider crawling across the strings of a guitar.

  “Come on! He’s coming!”

  “I’m trying!”

  Just as Carly saw La Reina’s one Sauronic headlight appear at the stop sign two blocks down, Marina jumped over the fence. Her jean jacket snagged on the barbed wire and she only made it nine-tenths of the way down, suspended from the tail of her jacket like a baby, her shoulders hiked up to her ears.

  “Shit!” hissed Marina, lapsing into more Spanish cursing, her toes scratching at the gravel. “Help me, Carlita!”

  A distant star, the headlight-eye paused at the intersection. La Reina cruised across the asphalt at a jogging pace, just fast enough to stay upright. Carly grabbed the waistband of her mother’s jeans and pulled at her hard, but she just sprang up and down on the twangling wire.

  “You’ll have to take off your jacket,” she said. Marina wriggled and bucked like a fish on a line.

  The headlight approached the four-way at the end of the block. Marina slid out of her jacket and fell onto her knees inside the fence, leaving her jacket hanging from the wires. Dry weeds rustled against their legs as Carly hurried her into the labyrinth of cars, and the flat bluster of Santiago’s motorcycle drummed in their chests as he motored past, either not seeing or not recognizing the jacket hanging from the fence. The splash of his headlight washed past them.

  Minutes passed as Carly and her mother crouched behind a white Hyundai on flat tires. Some insidious voice in Carly’s head kept telling her: He can see your feet under the car, he can see the top of your head, he can hear you breathing, he’s gonna find you he’s gonna GET YOU HE’S COMING HE’S COMING.

  La Reina’s engine faded into the distance, heading east.

  “Maldita sea,” Marina said, cursing in Spa
nish, snagging her jean jacket. “My only good jacket. Stupid, stupid.”

  “You’ll be fine, Mom.” Carly hooked her fingers into the fence and looked down the street, almost in disbelief that her father was really gone, untrusting of the sound of his engine shrinking into the night. She half-expected him to double back on a dead engine and no lights, gliding silently down the road like a ghost.

  Marina’s fussing wound down and she joined her daughter at the fence. “I’m sorry, honey.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know.” She threw her hands up, face twisted in frustration and despair. She was out of breath and sweaty, disheveled by her flight over the fence. “For all of this. For—”

  “Not your fault, Mama. You—”

  “I married him.”

  “If you hadn’t married him, you wouldn’t have me.” Carly gave her mother a tight hug. As she backed out of the embrace, she glimpsed a finger bruise on her mother’s neck. “You aren’t the one that bought that motorcycle, either. None of this is your fault. Okay?”

  “Do you—” Marina brushed away a tear with the palm of her hand. “Do you really think it is the bike?”

  “Sometimes, Dad looks at La Reina like it’s talking and he’s the only one that hears it. You ever notice him doing that? Like a dog when you make noises at it. He even … he even kinda turns his head sideways.”

  Marina let go of the fence and paced around Carly, gesticulating. “Now you’re talking nonsense. Next thing I know you’re going to be seeing chupacabra and such. Bigfoot.” She wagged a finger. “Stop calling it ‘La Reina’ like it’s a woman, Carlita. It’s not a woman; it’s a motorcycle.” Her admonishment ended on an uncertain, doubtful note. “Anyway! What do we do now that we’re in here?”

  The girl examined the cars parked around them at haphazard angles.

  “We hide.”

  They pulled door handles, trying to get into a dozen, two dozen, three dozen cars, but they were all locked. She considered breaking one of their windows with a brick she found under one of their tires, but the noise might attract unwanted attention, and some part of her wanted at least one layer of protection from Santiago besides the fence, if he came back.

  Toward the front end of the lot, a Winnebago silhouetted against the late night skyglow of Keyhole Hills. Carly tried the door, but it was locked—all three of them, driver, passenger, living compartment.

  “The window is open,” Marina said, pointing at the side of the RV.

  One of the windows was partially open, about six inches. “Pick me up and I’ll climb through it and open the door from the inside,” said Carly. “We can spend the night in there and figure out what to do in the morning.”

  Her mother gaped at her for a second with a shocked look, but also somehow admiring. “All right then, mi pequeña ladrona.”

  Searching through her mother’s purse, Carly found a pair of fingernail clippers. Attached to the swivel was a nail file with a cuticle hook on the end. Marina linked her hands together and her daughter stepped into them. She stood, carrying the girl’s foot against her belly, wobbling. Carly pierced the window-screen with the cuticle hook and sawed it open from the top, tearing a slit down one side. Then she cut from right to left across the bottom, making an L-shaped hole.

  Tossing the nail clippers aside, Carly clutched the edge of the window and let it take her weight, bracing her feet against the wall. “Okay,” she said, trying to do an awkward chin-up. Marina pushed Carly’s butt with both hands. Carly lifted herself inside, belly on the windowsill.

  Inside, it was stiflingly hot. Carly lay on top of a kitchen sink like a mermaid looking for water, on her belly with her legs scorpioned behind her. She dragged herself in and lowered her feet to the floor.

  Streetlights outside threw a fevered light through red curtains, turning the interior into a boudoir. Objects hung on braces nailed to the walls, and at first Carly thought they were huge, ornate crosses—this ingrained by a childhood spent in a Catholic household—until her eyes adjusted to the darkness.

  Blades. Swords, daggers, a few axes. Tomahawks.

  “What the hell?” she murmured, taking one down, an exotic three-pronged weapon that looked a bit like a pitchfork with a sword handle.

  “Carlita?” a voice chirped from outside.

  Carly let her mother into the RV, then closed and locked it again. “What is this?” asked Marina, gawking at the weapons hanging on the walls. “Conan the Barbarian’s Winnebago?”

  “Who is that?”

  Marina winced. “Oh, you make me feel so old.”

  Sweat beaded on her forehead and rolled down Carly’s back. “I feel like I’ve been here before,” she said, plopping down in the nook. Even the table’s Formica surface was warm. Her mother went into the front, where the lights of the commercial district were a dazzling play of blue and silver, and squatted behind the console.

  “Damn, no keys.”

  “Wasn’t planning on stealing it, Mama. Just spending the night here. Then we can figure things out in the morning.”

  Carly went into the back and opened the window over the bed. A cool night breeze immediately slid in, drying her sweat. She lay down on the bed—made with a precision neatness—and closed her exhausted eyes. The duvet smelled like a man: brisk, dark, sharp. She briefly wondered what the man’s name was and what he was like, and then she was asleep.

  “Carlita.”

  Another furtive whisper. Someone shook her. “Carlita.”

  She turned over and looked blearily at her mother. Marina sat cross-legged on the cramped bed next to her. She was a silhouette, a black head and shoulders against yellow stripes where a streetlight cast itself through the blinds.

  “Yeah?”

  Marina didn’t speak for what felt like a full minute. Carly could feel her mother’s eyes searching her face. When she finally spoke: “You saw what I saw?”

  Now Carly’s turn to look for words. “Dad?”

  As if her mother had to pry her words out of the mud of her thoughts, Marina spoke softly, almost whispering. “Yeah. Did I see…”

  A chill skittered down Carly’s spine. “I didn’t want to say anything, in case I was seeing—” She wanted to say in case I was seeing things, but only crazy people “see things,” don’t they? She mumbled something about a trick of the light and Santi having Mace-foam on his arms. His arm-hair had turned white and gotten longer, like the fur on the Abominable Snowman or something.

  “That scream there, just before we left,” said Marina. “That did not sound

  (human?)

  like my husband.”

  And maybe it wasn’t just her imagination that led her to believe that Santi’s eyes had turned yellow, dark golden irises. Carly’s hands found each other and she lay in the darkness of the Winnebago, picking her fingernails and staring in baffled fear at her mother.

  Rain began to rattle on the roof.

  Track 9

  “Wake up!” sang Kenway, shoving the mattress and bouncing her up and down. “Wake up!”

  “Who gave you meth?” Robin’s eyes were grainy and achy. Sunlight seeping in around the curtains shot hot bolts of lead into them. Felt like she’d been asleep for about fifteen minutes.

  He shook the bed some more and raked open the curtains, flooding the suite with morning sun. “Nobody. Just got a good night’s sleep in a real bed after an evening in a hot tub. Better than any meth. Now get your cute butt out of bed and let’s go get Willy and find some breakfast.”

  She slid her head under her pillow and growled again.

  “Coffeeeee,” he said in a low, haunted whisper.

  Reluctantly, she slithered out of the sheets and into a pair of jeans.

  * * *

  The rims had just arrived when the three of them got to the garage about nine. “It’ll probably be lunchtime you can come pick ’er up,” said Jake, and that was fine, but when Robin stepped into the RV to deposit yesterday’s clothes in the hamper, she saw that s
omeone had cut the screen open in the window over the sink.

  “What is this shit?” she demanded, storming out the door.

  “What shit?”

  “That shit!” She pointed at the window, where a flap of gray mesh flagged in the breeze. “Who cut my window up?”

  The mechanic checked his clipboard as if he was going to find the answer there. 7pm, another oil change. 8pm, turtle wax. 9pm, slash a window open. “Ah, I have no idea, ma’am. Wasn’t like that when you brought it in?”

  “Hell no!” Robin turned to Kenway. “Baby, will you go in there and look to see if anything’s been stolen?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  She threw her hands out in an astonished shrug like What the hell? and looked up at the sky as if perhaps she’d see meaning written in the clouds. That’s when she noticed a security camera mounted to a power pole in the corner of the lot.

  “That camera!” she said, pointing.

  Jake squinted up at it.

  “Ain’t hooked up to nothing,” he said. “Been there for what, ten years now? Used to work, until somebody throwed a rock up there and busted the lens out of it.” He drummed his pen on the clipboard. “Damn kids, you know? Ain’t had nobody come down and fix it, never really had the money to bother. Nobody ever breaks in anyway. Just a bunch of junk cars on flat tires. About the only thing you’d wanna steal are my tools, and I lock them up in a tool cabinet in a locked closet. If you—”

  Glancing over Jake’s shoulder, Robin caught her reflection in the mirror over the garage sink, and at first, she thought she saw a pair of ivory horns curving up out of her own skull,

  (we wanted to see how human you are)

  but she shifted her weight and realized she was standing in front of an antique aluminum Coors bar poster. A bas-relief of a silver bull loomed over a snowy mountain range, horns wide and pointy. “Whatever!” she snapped, angry that she’d startled herself over something so stupid. “I’ll find a place in Houston or somewhere that does screens.”