The Hellion

by S. A. Hunt

  Darkness swallowed Marina.

  “I’m so sorry,” Robin muttered endlessly into Carly’s hair, “I’m so sorry, baby, I’m so sorry.”

  The teenager fell silent, cold. Catatonic.

  Damn. Robin pried herself away and led the girl into the RV cabin, where Kenway crawled through the busted skylight and reached back in to help Carly out. Gendreau followed her, sliding out and tumbling into the dirt.

  Guilt and horror rippled through Robin’s chest. She’d gotten involved, gotten involved against her better judgment, and now what? Carly’s mother was dead. Robin had failed to keep her safe.

  This thought wedged itself between her ribs like a dagger.

  “Jesus God,” Kenway said outside. His voice was desolate. “Goddammit.”

  Flicking a light switch, Robin took a moment to look for the Osdathregar and some kind of gun, combing through drifts of food that was now so much garbage.

  Shotgun was nowhere to be found, but the Osdathregar lay in a tumble of boxes, jammed through a box of Cheerios and slimy with grape jam. Luckily, she’d put her MacBook away, back in the overhead compartment with some throw pillows and blankets. It would probably be all right until she could come back and properly salvage their stuff, barring some unforeseen theft or the gas tank exploding.

  “Hey,” Gendreau grunted. “Could you find my ring? I lost it in the crash.”

  “I can try.”

  Several taut minutes passed as she dug through drifts of what was now garbage, trying to find the curandero’s relic ring, keenly aware of the passage of time. Wouldn’t be long until the Wolfgang caught up with them, and she wanted to be on the move long before then.

  Ah, there it is. Mystical energy wafted off of it like fog seeping out of a freezer. Hidden under the valance, behind the kitchen sink. Straddling the window, she ripped the curtain away and grabbed the ring.

  As soon as she touched it, a vision crowded into her head.

  Two figures stood in a strange room much like a safe-deposit-box room at the bank, but tighter, claustrophobic. Illuminated by sickly fluorescent beams on a low ceiling. Soft white static filled the air with silent snow, as if she couldn’t get a good fix on the scene.

  One of the drawers lay open between them, and the person on the left had taken out something that glittered red in the misty light. “Last one I want to try on you today.” The magician woman, the Origo, Rook. “One of the newer relics. Not in historical terms—the organic matter is quite old—but it is a recent acquisition. May not be as powerful as the cane you had, at least right now, but with time you may find other nuances, other pathways that will help you unlock its true potential.”

  “It’s fine,” said Gendreau, the other figure, coalescing from the fog of time. “Took time to attune to the cane; I expect no less from this.”

  “Don’t let her ruin this one,” said the Origo.

  “I won’t,” said Gendreau, slipping the ring onto his finger. “You can rest assured of that.” The magician absentmindedly caressed the scar across his throat. “Okay, I guess we should give it a try.”

  “Remember what I taught you,” said the Origo. “Close your eyes. It’s like dowsing for water. Let it into your mind. Let her into your mind.”

  Gendreau’s eyes eased shut. “I hate this part.”

  “I know,” said the Origo, “it’s like hooking into the neighborhood junction box and stealing power from the power company.”

  “With the potential electrocution hazard.”

  “Not if you’re careful.”

  “Thanks for doing this for me, Haruko. I hate being a fuckup, and you’re good at not making me feel like one.”

  “You’re not a fuckup.” A wry smile. “Now concentrate.”

  With a start, Robin opened her eyes and a chill coursed down her arms. Haruko? Where have I heard that name before? Wasn’t that—

  A red light glittered in the rubble. She dug it out and discovered one of the GoPros. After a moment of indecision and guilt, she strapped it to her chest. She would just raw-dog a bunch of footage and sort through it later. Assuming, of course, there would be a later. She felt bad about filming everything—especially after what happened to Marina—but this action was too good to let go to waste.

  The show must go on.

  “Do you have the shotgun?” she asked Kenway, peering through the skylight hole.

  “Yeah.”

  She sighed. The AR-15 was useless now, the magazine spent, the few grenades that were left scattered across the Winnebago. She took the black tactical tomahawk and a katana that had miraculously managed to stay attached to the wall (which was now the ceiling). Didn’t have time to look for anything else.

  More shotgun shells were in a box in one of the kitchen drawers. “We got to go,” she said to her boyfriend, wriggling through the hole in the roof. As soon as she got outside, she smelled gasoline. “They’re gonna be right behind us.”

  “Don’t have to tell me twice.”

  Gendreau pointed across the arroyo. “There’s a house.” On the other side of the dry river bed, a dark square loomed against the night, tall and angular. No lights. “Or something. Did you find my ring?”

  “Yeah,” Robin said, holding it out.

  The magician reached out, but she didn’t put it in his hand. Instead, she forced him to awkwardly pull it out of her fingers.

  At first, he gave her a strange, almost angry look—or maybe offended, a little confused. He twisted it back onto his index finger, still staring at her with that vaguely alarmed expression, and walked away.

  Kenway lifted the catatonic Carly up and carried her like a baby.

  No night sounds meant the soundtrack to their flight was only the scuffing of their shoes on the dusty asphalt. Overhead, a galaxy of stars blasted a million pinholes in a beautiful black sky. They hobbled around the back of the Winnebago and up onto the nearby bridge, where, to their surprise, a motel lurked squat and dark at the bottom of the hill from the house.

  Their first stop was in the office. Kenway stomp-kicked the front door open, almost falling on his ass, and they went inside.

  Pitch-black darkness. Robin ran into a chair and barked her shins on a coffee table, swearing. “Here you go.” A light winked on behind her, casting a stark but faint glow across the room. Gendreau had a little keychain flashlight.

  “This place out of business or what?” Kenway deposited Carly on a tweed sofa, stirring up a cloud of dust.

  Behind the front desk, Robin searched for keys. A corkboard on the wall was covered in yellowed, dog-eared pieces of paper. A row of nails was hammered into the bottom of the frame, but no keys on them. “I guess so.” She pulled out drawers, searched through cabinets. Finally, in one of the bottom drawers, she found a shoebox full of receipts. Sliding around loose in the box were a handful of keys with plastic fobs on them. Robin took the key for suite 22 and put the box back in the drawer, kicking it shut. “Come on,” she said, taking her sword and tomahawk and leading them back outside.

  “Looks like the abandoned Psycho set or something,” said Gendreau. On the sidewalk, Robin paused to listen for motorcycle engines. Nothing yet.

  She led them down a short corridor between the office building and the suites. The motel was constructed in an L shape, with a big pool in the middle. A chain-link fence kept visitors out of the pool area, and a chain wrapped around the latch. Long strips of plastic had been threaded through the mesh for privacy. She expected it to be locked, but the chain pulled apart. They slipped through and she closed the gate.

  Suite 22 lay on the other side. As they skirted the pool, Robin leaned over to look inside and found only dry cement and a large puddle of stinking green water. One whole side of the pool was thrown into shadow by the moon in the east.

  Gendreau lingered poolside, shining his tiny flashlight into the pit. “You know, we could hide in there. They’d never think to look in the pool, you know. Besides, that crap at the bottom stinks so much, I don’t think they cou
ld smell us. Smells like Los Angeles crawled in there and died.”

  As if on cue, the snore of a fleet of motorcycles came burring into earshot.

  “Time to test your hypothesis.” Kenway picked his way down the plaster stairs in the shallow end, his prosthetic leg threatening to collapse out from under him, and they followed him. He weeble-wobbled like an old robot. “Lord help,” the veteran said, setting Carly down in the shade as softly as possible and dropping onto his ass in exhaustion. “I felt safer in a war zone.”

  She handed him the box of shells she’d salvaged from the RV. He opened them and filled his pockets with them. “Did you really dig that damn GoPro out of the Brave?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Whatever the hell for?”

  “If I’m going to go through this shit, I might as well get some useful footage out of it.”

  He sighed, shaking his head.

  “What?”

  He said nothing.

  The sound of the motorcycle engines didn’t seem to be getting any closer. They stopped on the other side of the bridge.

  “They’re checking out the RV,” Gendreau muttered.

  Several minutes of silence passed.

  She thought she heard someone yelling, Fuck, it’s Tuco, and further words that were too soft to make out.

  Then, from a distance, a sound came ripping through the air that at first Robin mistook for a motorcycle engine starting up. Goose bumps rippled down her arms as the voice became a roar of pain and rage, a guttural, inhuman vocalization, the wail of a feral beast on the verge of madness. Could have been the same as St. George heard as he plunged his sword into the belly of the dragon; could have been Grendel as Beowulf tore off the beast’s arm.

  “Oh, my God, oh, my God,” muttered Gendreau next to her. He trembled violently, on the verge of bolting. “He found Marina.”

  Robin stayed him with a hand, but she couldn’t think of anything reassuring to tell him. She clutched the mute teenager to her chest, and Carly pressed her hands against her ears. A thin, breathy squeal slipped through her teeth, reminiscent of a whining dog. “I’m gonna get you out of here,” Robin told her, stroking her hair, “Gonna keep you safe. Take care of you.” Didn’t escape the witch-hunter’s notice that Carly was now in a similar position to herself: deprived of a mother, menaced by a monstrous father. Even reacting the same way Robin had as a teenager six years before. Out of her mind, mute. Closed off. Dissociated.

  What bothered Robin was this question: if she hadn’t told Marina to grab her hands, would it have ended the same way? Did they ever have a chance of saving her? For God’s sake, was it Robin’s fault the woman was now lying broken at the bottom of the ravine?

  She sighed. She’d flagellate herself later. Right now, she had a job to do, and that job was keeping them alive. “Need you to be quiet, baby,” she whispered into Carly’s ear. “They’re going to hear us.”

  To her surprise, the breathless whining stopped.

  Glass smashed somewhere nearby. Kenway slowly closed the shotgun breech with a subtle click.

  Tension wound into Robin’s body, hardening her fists, her heart trying to hammer its way out of her rib cage. The others were all but invisible; their breathing was a soft, shallow susurrus. The magician sounded like he might have been trying not to sob out loud, vibrating with fear.

  “WHERE ARE YOU?” snarled a cavernous voice from the pits of Hell.

  Wood and steel barked as a door was smashed in. The paracord wrapped around the handle of the tomahawk creaked gently in Robin’s hand. Her bladder screamed for release, the muscles in her legs taut and ready to move.

  “Come out, you murdering bitch! I know you’re here SOMEWHERE!”

  Itchy sweat crawled down the side of Robin’s face.

  Doors slammed open and windows shattered across the suite complex. The Los Cambiantes were going from room to room, looking for them. “You can’t hide! I CAN SMELL YOU!” Santiago’s voice was an earthquake with a mouth.

  “God, dear God,” Gendreau breathed.

  Steel screamed as the gate to the pool was torn out of its frame and thrown aside. Scuffling feet and scraping claws came out onto the patio over Robin’s head, rustling through the dead and naked hedges. More doors were bashed in. Windows imploded. “I will find you! You’re in one of these goddamned rooms, and it’s only a matter of time!”

  Terrific booms echoed off the inside of the pool as the werewolves slung furniture around, knocking holes in the suites’ walls. An old tube television came hurtling over the edge of the empty pool and slammed into the mucky puddle at the bottom, the screen shattering. Filthy water sprayed up the walls, speckling Robin’s face with slime. The magician’s shaking intensified into a St. Vitus’ Dance of terror. Just hold steady, man, she thought, stay strong, they’ll give up and move on eventually. They’ll start looking for us in the house up there, and when they can’t find us there, they’ll search up in the hills, and then—

  One of the werewolves came crawling around the edge of the pool, slow and sinuous in the dim moonlight.

  She had no love for what she saw. The creature had the peaked shoulders of a hyena and jagged, twisted limbs. Patches of greasy skin glistened through its coarse black hair. Naked as a jaybird, the wolf-man turned to peer into the swimming pool with a feral, misshapen parody of a human face: teeth as long as fingers, beady black eyes, gaping nostrils, all embedded in a head like a potato. Two hoary gray ears cupped the quiet night.

  No light reflected from its retinas, which told Robin it couldn’t see in the dark. Still, was the moon enough it could pick them out in the shadows of the pool’s bowl?

  It stared for what felt like a week.

  The pool stank ferociously of stagnant water. She hoped the stench hid their scent. A nub of darkness moved in the corner of her eye and she realized Kenway was pointing the shotgun at it.

  “TO ME, FUCKERS!” snarled Santiago.

  The werewolf jerked its head up at the sound of their leader’s voice and scuttled out of sight. Another window shattered, one last desultory act of vandalism.

  “What are they doing now?” Gendreau breathed in her ear.

  “No idea.”

  Silence dragged on forever. Angry muttering echoed from the other side of the suite complex. Then they could hear the transfigured bikers charging up the hill. The Los Cambiantes were searching the abandoned house. “Find them,” came a shout from the moonlit sands behind the motel. “Kill that murdering cunt.”

  “They’re gone,” Gendreau whispered. “They fell for it.”

  She pressed a fingertip to his lips and he made an effort to still himself. Carly shuddered, and put her face in her hands.

  The magician wouldn’t stop talking. “We should make a break for it while they’re up there in the house,” he hissed. “We’ll run the other way, across the road, and go into the ravine. We’ll hide under the bridge and—”

  She interrupted him, squeezing his mouth with a hand. “Shut up,” she breathed into his ear.

  He nodded, chastised.

  Robin took his hand and put it on Carly’s shoulder, and put the girl aside so she could move freely. As carefully as possible, without grinding her shoe sole into the plaster floor, she raised up and looked over the rim of the pool.

  Motionless, a shape crouched in the moonlight, staring at the suites that faced the inner courtyard.

  Remnants of a red lumberjack-plaid shirt streamered from its shoulders in pennants. Werewolf’s back was to her. Was he waiting for them to come out of hiding? What the hell? Confused, she hunkered down again, heart racing. Her hand ached, the tomahawk’s corded handle biting into her palm.

  Turning, the werewolf approached the pool’s edge and stared up at the dark house on the sagebrush hill. Robin tensed, preparing to launch herself upward. The werewolf looked down into the pool, beady eyes glittering.

  It snorted once, watery snot peppering her face.

  A suspicious growl gathered deep in the mo
nster’s throat.

  Stepping up the curve of the pool’s bowl, Robin leapt up and grabbed a handful of hair at the pit of the werewolf’s throat. She used her weight to pull him into the pool, and the biker landed on his shoulders with a wet, heavy slap.

  Scrambling astride the creature’s belly, she began to tomahawk it, but the werewolf snapped at her face with a mouth big enough to crush her skull whole, bristling with jagged yellow teeth that reeked of tobacco. Again, snap, again, with that vicious Ferrari-engine growl. She’d managed to wedge the axe-haft in its mouth. She swore in a panic, holding him at arm’s length, bench-pressing his face.

  Someone unsheathed the katana on her back and plunged it deep into the monster’s guts, splutch, again, splutch, and again, splutch. Kenway, beside her. The growling died off into a wretched gurgle, and the thing underneath her kicked and bucked in mindless hysterics.

  Bright red blood ran down the slope of the pool into the dirty water.

  “Fuck you,” coughed the werewolf.

  Amazing. Still wasn’t dead. Well, she’d solve that problem for him. Tossing the tomahawk aside, she took the katana out of her boyfriend’s hands and pointed it under the beast’s chin, putting her weight on it. The sword blade slid through the werewolf’s throat and up into its skull.

  Faint crackling echoed up the steel as she pierced eggshell bone. “Grrk.” The werewolf relaxed.

  Still straddling the hairy corpse, Robin tried to will her heart to settle down. Claw-wounds down her arms stung, building into an orchestra-swell of pain as more dark blood trickled into the swamp. Subtle ripples across the water made the moon dance.

  “Thanks,” she told Kenway.

  “Yeah.”

  “Come on,” she told them, sheathing the sword. “We can’t move this big bastard, and they’ll see him as soon as they come back down. We’ll head out the other way while they’re distracted in the house.”

  “Why didn’t I think of that?” said Gendreau.

  “Lead the way, Cochise.” Kenway handed Robin the shotgun and lifted Carly.

  The crew started down the corridor that led back to the front parking lot, but the privacy-fence gate had been torn down and lay haphazardly across the path, only traversable by walking on the noisy chain link.