by S. A. Hunt
Kenway emerged from the Winnebago. “Everything’s where it should be, as far as I can tell.” He halfheartedly waved a hand in front of his face, as if waving away a pesky fly. “You gonna file a police report?”
He smells it, thought Robin. The brimstone.
“No point, really,” she told him. “Even if they show up, and even if they give a damn, they won’t find any clues, and there’s nothing stolen. So, they won’t do anything.” She stormed out of the lot, the men in tow. “Let’s just go get something to eat and something cold to drink before I kill somebody with my bare hands.”
They found a Waffle House six hot blocks away and drowned some eggs and bacon with a load of coffee.
“Why do you two call your RV ‘Willy,’ anyway?” asked Gendreau. He looked trim and slim in an impeccable white blouse with the sleeves neatly fold-rolled.
“Braveheart,” she said.
“That Mel Gibson movie?”
“It’s a 1974 Winnebago Brave. We caught Braveheart on late-night cable up in Oregon and started calling it the Brave William Wallace. It stuck. Sort of evolved into Willy, I guess.”
Across the street they found a mom-and-pop coffee shop with Wi-Fi, where they all got iced frappuccinos to gird them against the day’s rising temperature and Robin spent the rest of the morning editing videos for YouTube. Thousands of comments on Malus Domestica videos to read as her footage struggled to force itself through the coffee shop’s modem, and she only made it through about three hundred of them before her eyes tried to cross.
Around lunchtime, they wandered into the shopping center next door and discovered a pawn shop. No witch-relics, thank God.
A small tube television sat on a shelf, unplugged. Sadness and loneliness emanated from the speaker-holes like the frost vapors curling out of a chest freezer. Robin touched it, and for a brief moment the screen blinked on an image of Fred Astaire dancing with Grace Kelly. She sensed a floral pattern, stark fluorescent light, the squeak of shoes on tile, the smell of industrial antiseptics.
Ever since the events of last October, she had developed a sort of sixth sense about old things. Psychic sense of smell, maybe. Probably a by-product of developing a sensitivity to teratoma relics. Or maybe it was bullshit. She hadn’t told anyone about it. Possibly just her overactive imagination. Probably.
Antiques are haunted by memories, echoes of usage; they give off an aura, like the sun’s heat resting in the frame of a car. Most people can feel this, to some degree. When you look at an old violin on a pawn shop shelf, you can see its carewornness, imagine the passion of the person that originally owned it: practicing music every night, driving her parents crazy. You see an old VCR and wonder who owned it, and picture a band of teenage friends spending a sultry summer night watching Friday the 13th on cassette tape. Robin, though, she could lay a hand on an antique or pawn shop trinket and tell you things about it that no one should know. Never specific names, only fleeting, faint sentiments—a wedding band might whisper I hope it’s a girl, or a knife might conjure up auditory hallucinations of the rip and squelch of its previous owner field-dressing a deer.
A blue-and-cream six-string guitar hung from pegs on the wall behind the sales counter.
“Mind if I hold this?”
The clerk smiled. “Sure.”
As she held it, an image flashed in her mind: feminine hands with black fingernails, sliding up and down the neck, tickling a Motley Crüe arpeggio.
A girl’s guitar. She bought it.
* * *
As soon as the mechanic smelled the whiff of sulphur still clinging to her clothes, he had trouble making eye contact with her. “Extra rim’s in the compartment with the spare.”
“Figure out what happened to my window?”
He shook his head. “’Fraid not. But I glued it back together for ya. Had a hot glue gun layin’ around. Should be dry by now. Just a little temporary thing until you can get to Houston, I guess. It’ll keep the bugs out.”
“Thanks.”
They hashed out the invoice. Everything was aboveboard. She paid with cash she’d pulled out at an ATM outside the pawn shop. “You did good, gipper,” she told him. “Other than the random vandalism, if I ever have car trouble out this way again, I’ll have to come back here.” She raised a fist and he hesitantly fistbumped it.
Back inside the RV, the air was a mouthful of hot cotton. Kenway climbed into the driver’s seat and cranked it up, turning up the AC and flooding the compartment with cool air. As he pulled out of the parking lot, Robin deposited her new guitar in the bedroom and went around, closing all the windows.
“On the road again,” Gendreau sang in his best Willie Nelson impression. He parked his narrow butt in the breakfast nook. “So, where we headed, Miss Martine?”
“I was hoping you could answer that, Mr. Auditor.”
Ever since Robin had started doing witch-killing gigs for him, Gendreau had her looking for teratomatic relics on the side. Only one that year, an antique bell jar clock with a toe bone inside.
Before the Dogs of Odysseus used teratomas to create new relics, the only people who made them were magicians contemporary to Aleister Crowley—Black and Red magic practitioners, namely. When Gendreau’s grandfather Francis took over in the sixties, those old-school magicians destroyed or stole many of the relics before White magicians could get their hands on them.
When a magician with an old relic died alone, it would usually be passed down to their descendants and next of kin, who were none the wiser about the relic’s abilities. Gendreau was alerted to the clock through a newspaper article about a “haunted heirloom.” The family that inherited the clock claimed it was haunted by the ghost of the wife’s grandfather, because the day they brought it into their house and put it on the mantel, strange occurrences began to happen: papers would blow off the living room coffee table, doors would slam shut. One evening during an argument, the family dog was thrown out of a window by an invisible force and a hellacious wind had blown around the room for several minutes.
Robin knew what was up the instant she laid hands on the clock: a witch teratoma, imbued with the Gift of Mind. The family accidentally channeled the psychokinetic power in the relic through their emotions. A man-made poltergeist.
According to Gendreau, relics were usually to blame for strange paranormal phenomena such as, for example:
poltergeists
Spontaneous Human Combustion
time-slips
objects falling from the sky such as fish, buttons, coins, or stones
out-of-body experiences
accidental dimensional jumps.
Those unaccustomed to relics often aren’t aware of what’s happening. If they even notice the insidious effects of a relic, they blame it on ghosts, or bad dreams, or carbon monoxide. Ignorance is bliss, as they say, and the ignorant will do the most intricate mental gymnastics to explain away the strangest phenomena. Anything to maintain that bliss, that thin membrane between their everyday world and the unknowable.
Sometimes, a mental break will force them to acknowledge what’s happening to them, and their experiences will converge. They’ll have a car accident. Go into a coma. Wake up in the hospital with clairvoyance. They’ll get beat up, or mugged, or raped, or bullied at school, lose a loved one, and suddenly develop telekinesis or pyrokinesis—not even realizing in all these cases the paranormal energy was there all along, suppressed by their need to maintain that all-important bliss, waiting in the wings, feeding them little tidbits of evidence: blips of insight, mysterious fires, poltergeist activity, rats or snakes that follow you wherever you go.
Complacency, and the hunger for normalcy and safety, can camouflage a lot of strange shit.
Self-aware relic owners—those were the dangerous ones. They had internalized their experiences, processed the phenomena; they understood what they had, and they would fight you tooth and nail to keep it. Luckily, she hadn’t encountered any of those yet.
Gendreau took out h
is phone. “I’ll see if I have any emails.”
“I’ll be in there,” said Robin, pointing at the bathroom. She toddled in place as the floor tilted with the sway of the RV. “Need a minute to myself.” She stepped inside and opened the tiny window, letting in a gust of road breeze.
Rummaging through a tub under the sink, she found a bottle of nail polish. Midnight Black. She put a foot against the opposite wall to steady herself and leaned back. Dabbed a bit of the black paint on her left index nail and held it up. That’ll work. She got this way sometimes, wanting to do things like paint her nails like the girl that had once owned the guitar. Just like she siphoned off the teratomas’ power, she “got a little bit of the memories on her” from hand-me-downs, like soot from handling charcoal.
Wonder if I could somehow find the girl and give her the guitar back. Wouldn’t that be fine?
Smelled a little like charcoal in there, actually.
Sweat, too. Gym sweat. Feet and ass. Robin flicked the switch for the bathroom air cycler. A fan rattled to life. “Look out, fucker!” shouted Kenway from the front of the Brave, stomping the brakes.
The tires barked with a seal-like tremolo, and the whole Winnebago lurched forward, pressing Robin against the wall behind the toilet. A heavy figure behind the shower curtain leaned toward her, threatening to fall in her lap, and Robin gasped, her eyes widening, adrenaline rocketing into her system. Oh god it’s a dead body there’s a killer on the loose and he left a dead body in my shower! And then a hand thrust out to brace against the wall over her head. A feminine squeal of surprise came from the cramped shower. The Winnebago swooped hard starboard, a shudder rolling through the floor as Kenway slewed into a parking lot.
Her heart fighting to get out of her chest, Robin snatched the curtain aside and found two women standing in the shower, squeezed together.
Awkward silence. Robin stared at them, holding the curtain aside with paint-wet fingernails. The taller one was a scrawny, dewy Disney-channel teenager. The other was an older lady, mid-forties maybe. Both rolling with sheets of sweat, and Mom’s makeup was coming off in maudlin streaks.
The teenager grinned apologetically.
“Who the fuck are you?” Robin stood up in indignation and shoved the older woman back into the shower. The girl bumped her head on the shower’s plastic wall and a bar of soap clattered to the floor. “The hell you doing in my bathroom?”
“Hiding?” asked the teenager.
“What’s going on in there?” asked the magician.
“You the ones that cut my window open?” Robin demanded. She felt a warm shape at her back and saw Gendreau in the mirror, standing behind her.
“Yeah.” The teenager gazed at Robin with the squinty, suspicious eyes of someone that’s trying to remember your face. “I’m—I’m sorry. I cut it open with a nail file so we could hide in here. Th-The doors were locked.”
“No shit, Shirley! I wonder why they were locked. Did I wander into fucking Canada, where nobody locks their cars up and the milkman gives you a kiss hello in the morning?”
The teenager fought a smile in spite of herself.
“Do you think this is funny?” Robin was talking as much with her hands as her mouth, almost yelling. “Breaking into people’s cars? Hell, homes? You realize I live in here, yeah?”
“We were hiding from my husband,” said the older woman, in a thick accent. Mom sat up straighter, prouder, looking Robin in the eye. Her neck was ringed with a collar of faint purple bruises, soft tiger-stripes that lined the edge of her jawbone.
Knocked off-balance by the woman’s face, Robin relented. She had seen that mama-bear look before.
“Your husband?” asked Gendreau, concerned.
“Santiago.” Mama Bear cupped one hand at her throat as if she were choking; a few more words almost made their way out of her, but not quite—as if she wanted to explain but the words were too big to push out.
“Y’all scared the living shit out of me.” Robin’s eyes ricocheted back and forth between their faces. She finally stepped back out of the room with a sigh, defeated. “Come on out and get some air; you’re both sweating like priests at a playground. What are your names, at least?”
“I’m Carly.” The stowaways sat elbow-to-elbow in the kitchen nook. The teenager’s eyes flitted starrily between Robin’s amethyst mohawk and Gendreau’s Willy Wonka–David Bowie look. The girl’s clothes were relatively upscale, a green baby doll blouse and jeans, but they were old, threadbare, almost too small. Someone bought her nice school clothes last year and she was outgrowing them.
“I know you from somewhere,” she said. “You look so familiar.”
“I get that a lot.” Robin plopped down across the table.
“This is my moth—”
Mama Bear interrupted. “Marina. Marina Valenzuela.”
Robin blinked. She picked up her messenger bag and dug through it, taking out the GoPro camera and turning it on, and she pressed the camera into a little wall mount so that it aimed down the length of the table.
“That’s where I know you from!” Carly stiffened. “That YouTube channel about hunting witches!”
“Witches?” asked Marina.
“Something’s been nagging me about this RV all morning, like I’ve been here before, and now I know what it is. This is Robin Martina—”
“Martine,” Robin corrected.
“—and she makes a TV show about hunting witches across the US.”
“It’s not a TV show; it’s on YouTube.”
By that time, Kenway had wallowed out of the driver’s seat, climbing into the living compartment. Carly twisted in her seat, miming with her hands, aiming a camera with one hand, the other stabbing with a dagger. “It’s called Malice Something-or-other. I don’t subscribe to it, but I’ve seen it before.”
“Look,” said Robin, waving her hands, “I hate to get mixed up in this kind of shit these days. I been playing Nancy Drew the last couple of years, sticking my nose into screwed-up families when I happen to run into them like this, but I don’t know if I can keep doing it. I’ve done things I’m not proud of. There’s a child molester in a cemetery down in Clearwater that’s there because of me.”
Both Kenway and Gendreau met her eyes. Only Kenway’s held any real surprise. “Wait, you killed a guy? Like, not a witch or a monster? Just a normal, everyday dude?”
“It was him or me!” Robin almost shouted. “He came home from work early before I could get out of his house, and he caught me hiding in a closet. Luckily, it was the closet where he kept his golf gear. We had a fencing session with nine irons and he broke two of my ribs. And a picture that was hanging on the wall. And a vase of flowers that was sitting on the kitchen table. I broke the TV and smashed the front out of a china cabinet. He almost broke my arm.” She folded her arms defensively and stared out the window at some distant point. “Hit the guy in the head a little harder than I meant to. And … probably too many times. I guess I shoulda stopped after the third one.”
“Jesus.”
“His wife helped me get rid of it. Him.” Robin heaved a deep, soul-searching sigh. “She went to the police before I ever showed up, but they didn’t have enough evidence to do anything, and when her husband found out what she did, he beat the shit out of her.”
Suddenly, everything came out in a rapid, nervous over-explanation. Lot of bad blood on her hands. The rapists, child molesters, wifebeaters she’d intimidated and … just say it, say it out loud, okay, the assholes she’d killed. “They were pieces of shit, begging for an ass-kicking.” Felt like an asshole, hated admitting the things she’d done in the past, hated having done it, hated defending it. “But when Kenway came along, I stopped letting people pressure me into this vigilante stuff.” Before that, really—several months before going home to Blackfield to confront Marilyn Cutty’s coven. She stared at the unimpressed Gendreau. “You knew, didn’t you?”
The magician shrugged vaguely. “We do our homework, Miss Martine. You’ve
left a trail of newspaper stories as long as my arm. We’ve been watching your progress since Neva Chandler. That’s when we knew Heinrich had taken you under his wing. We’ve been putting two and two together for quite a while.”
“Jesus,” Kenway said again, softly, staring at nothing in particular. He sounded lost, absorbed. The big man trundled away back to the front of the RV and dropped into the driver’s seat, and the Foghat pouring out of the stereo climbed a couple notches.
What’s his problem, anyway? thought Robin. He was a soldier. Like he’s got room to talk. She glowered at the back of his head, then at Carly Valenzuela. Kenway. Carly. Kenway. Carly.
“He doesn’t know?” asked Gendreau.
“He does now. Thanks, bud!”
The magician winced.
Throwing herself into the passenger seat next to her boyfriend, Robin leaned in and murmured, “What’s your beef, Han Solo?”
He looked at her from the corner of his eye. “I don’t know.” Those baby blues wandered slowly all over the dash, the wheel, the radio. “Guess it just made me see you differently. Only ever seen you kill witches. I didn’t know you—”
“He was a child molester.”
“Do you know that for sure?”
“Yeah.” Robin nodded sternly. “I had evidence.”
“Still, that doesn’t give you the right to play judge, jury, and executioner. Look, if Afghanistan taught me anything, it’s that not everybody deserves to die.”
“No, but sometimes they ask for it, don’t they?”
Kenway stared at her face.
“They stomp right up to you and demand it,” she said. “Them or you.”
“I guess. But there’s a difference between some insurgent jumping your shit with an AK-47, and Joe Bob from Accounting who’s just being an asshole. That’s war. This is just Tuesday.”
“If anything, the child molester deserved it more than some goat farmer that’s just shooting at you so the Taliban doesn’t kill his family.”
He sighed. “You ain’t gonna kill this guy, too, are you? This woman’s husband. He’s full human, ain’t he?” His hands curled over the steering wheel and he kneaded it tightly. “I hate a wife-beater as much as the next guy, and I’ll bust him in the goddamn mouth for hittin’ a woman, but I ain’t Dexter fuckin’ Morgan. I’ll do the Buffy thing and fight monsters all day long, but if that’s your jam, count me out.”