The Hellion

by S. A. Hunt

  The light passed over a surprisingly large basement and a collection of junk: A dirty work table with nothing on it. Boxes of rags. Empty paint cans. Cold furnace. Stained mattress. Two red jerry cans that stank of gasoline. A clawfoot bathtub full of green muck that smelled like burnt plastic.

  “Stinks down here,” she said.

  “You don’t say.” Gendreau stifled a cough.

  “Should mask our scent the same way the stagnant swimming pool did earlier.”

  Gendreau shined his flashlight in Kenway’s face. “Mister, I need you to explain that David Blaine crack. Have you ever seen me swallow a goldfish? Do I look like some kind of sleepy-eyed two-bit street busker to you?”

  “Yikes. Did I hit a nerve?”

  * * *

  Underneath the stairs was a closet, unfinished, with naked studs, and not the good kind. Cobwebs draped in cotton bunting between the rafters, promising spiders and, thankfully, breaking that promise. They hid in this shadowy alcove and pulled the door shut, then sat, blind, to rest. And wait. And listen. Listen for the furtive movements of an investigating wolf-man, or the angry carnage of a temper tantrum elsewhere in the house.

  But they heard nothing. Nothing but the howl of the wind and the subtle, restless movements of the elderly house.

  “Miss Martine,” murmured Gendreau.

  “Yeah?”

  “You should change your Malus Domestica show into a conversation-based podcast format. Without so much, you know … screaming and running, and whatnot. Just a nice chat. A nice goddamn chat. With a studio cat with a funny name. Pop filters and nice chairs and a cappuccino machine.”

  “You know me. I ain’t the talking type. I’m a doer.”

  The magician sighed. “Then we need a plan.”

  “We do,” said Kenway, a breath against her cheek. “Any ideas, Mr. Wizard?”

  “Lure them into the house and burn it down,” said Robin.

  “Too dangerous,” said Gendreau.

  “More dangerous than being killed by a bunch of werewolves?”

  “Too easy for things to go wrong,” said Kenway. “For one of us to fall into our own trap and get stuck in the house. Go down with it. Besides, we probably wouldn’t be able to get them all in here at once.”

  They sat in their own individual solitude for a little while. She couldn’t tell how long. The darkness robbed her of her sense of time. Felt like ten minutes, might have been a half hour.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you something, Doc,” said Robin.

  “Another question, huh?”

  “Good-hearted Muggles like you can use magic when you’re not a witch? I thought the power was channeled from Ereshkigal herself. In that vision I saw, you said you could hear her.”

  “The power is user-agnostic,” said the curandero, shifting his weight in the shadows. “You know how a fetus is just a wad of genetic matter until a certain point in gestation where its brain activity ramps up into something closer to a human. Teratomas are like that pre-fetal wad of tissue—too dumb to know any better. Ereshkigal doesn’t know where her essence is going any more than you know where your tax dollars are going. Of course, once that teratoma reaches a certain stage and develops sentience, then all bets are off. But she knows it’s going somewhere. She sends whispers. Patronage magic, from Ereshkigal in particular, comes with a price. If you use it too much, or too hard, she can drive you insane. The exchange of power opens a line of communication. Whenever a heart-road is opened, it’s like calling a wrong number. The person on the other end can talk to you, but they don’t know who you are.”

  “Like Santiago?”

  “Exactly. Right now, he’s acting as an unregulated warlock. We’ve been charged, as you well know, with taking custody of unregulated relics like his motorcycle.”

  “And there’s no supernatural caller ID?”

  “Not that I am aware of.”

  “Fetuses? Death-goddesses? This is not a conversation I want to have in a dark basement,” said Kenway. “Especially not under an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere.”

  Question answered, Robin fell silent again.

  “Home alone!” she said a few minutes later, startling the two men.

  “What?”

  “Home alone. The movie, Home Alone. Where Macaulay Culkin kicked the shit out of those two robbers,” she explained. “All that Cracker Barrel stuff up there on the walls—think we could set up some traps with it? Get ’em as they come in through the doors?”

  The veteran shook his head. “Too many points of entry. Not only do you have two, maybe three door entrances, you’ve also got maybe eight to ten windows, and that’s not counting the second floor and the windows in the attic—”

  “Witch windows.”

  “What?” blurted Kenway. “Seriously? Why do they call ’em witch windows?”

  “They’re not witch windows,” said Gendreau. “Witch windows are sashed windows half-rotated to one side. They were designed crooked to confuse witches back in the colonial days, to keep them from getting into the house.”

  “Dormer windows?” asked Robin.

  “Dormers are those little protrusions coming out of the roof slope like doghouses. You know, they have their own little roofs.”

  “Then what the hell are they?”

  The curandero’s shrug scuffed in the dark silence. “Attic windows? Vents?”

  “They’re windows; they have glass in ’em.”

  “Who the fuck cares?” asked Kenway.

  “How do you know so much about home architecture?” asked Robin.

  “Because I come from a family that’s always lived in houses with gables and dormers and things like that?” The magician made a face. “What’re you asking me for? You grew up in a Victorian gingerbread. Those things are, like, sixty-five percent gable.”

  “Can we get back to the plan here?” asked Kenway.

  Robin leaned over him. “Whaddaya call those spinny metal thingies on the roof that look like Jiffy Pops? I saw one of those belch fire like a dragon one night after I lit a witch up in Colorado. Fuckin’ top just blew off, the fire was jetting out blue and red—”

  A big warm hand clapped over her mouth.

  “Plan,” said Kenway. “Can we get back to it? They could come back here any minute.”

  She nodded and he let go.

  “Home Alone?” asked Gendreau. “Can we do it?”

  “Like I said: too many entry points, not enough gear. I only saw a couple of bear traps on the wall, and there’s nothing else up there in good enough shape to fashion into a trap—if any of us even knew how to make traps out of it all. Besides, can you see any of that stuff up there stopping a monster militia?”

  “So … what?” asked Robin. “All we can do is hide? And wait?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. That’s why I’m trying to brainstorm here.”

  “Wait to die?” asked Gendreau.

  “Fuck that noise,” said Robin. She cracked the shotgun open, checked to make sure it was still loaded, and bullwhipped it shut again. Click.

  * * *

  After a long, unproductive discussion, they slept.

  Well, all but one of them dozed off, in that fitful strange way that people do when in the helpless throes of slow panic—that way that a child can drift off to sleep buried under a blanket, confident in the existence of a slithering closet-monster lying in wait underneath their bed, and then wake up in the morning, having forgotten all about whatever had menaced them in the night.

  That one who did not sleep now, Robin Martine, sat by the door, filled with crawling ants of anxiety, pressed into her boyfriend’s feverish hard bulk, with her knees up and her hands clasped against her belly.

  She breathed through her mouth to stay quiet. Listened for intruders. She wanted to sleep. Her eyes were grainy. But—

  But—

  Listen.

  Smells competed in the cramped space. The musk of Kenway’s sweat; the moldy quiet of the long-disused closet;
the exotic tang of Gendreau’s cologne; the always lurking rotten-egg-campfire stink of Robin’s sulphurous demon half, forever waiting for a reason to rampage and kill. Her own personal dark side.

  What would it take to trigger another transformation? Would they have to bite off her arm, the way Theresa the hog-witch had? Was there some other method of bringing that side of her out (and there her mind interjected with turning me inside out as if she were some kind of hand puppet lined with the velvet of heresy, which gave her gruesome mental images and the perennially horrible word degloving)? Would she need to touch another demon, like last time? God forbid—literally—would she have to touch her father again?

  She wondered if she could control it this time.

  When she’d transformed into that otherworldly thing before, that sinister, ligneous creature, it had been a slow, gradual change. She’d had time to adjust, as much as you can adjust to having a skinless snake for an arm and wood for skin.

  Her skin had, indeed, been greenish wood like her demon father’s, hoary with red hair like flames. The same green shade as her childhood home. Her demon-self had been constructed—or constructed itself—from the clapboard and floor planks of Wayne’s dimensionally iffy nightmare house, Andras’s decrepit prison, that ancient Victorian that only existed in Robin’s childhood memories, 1168. Her second chance had been built from trauma. She was made of pain.

  Was that how the demon side of her worked? Did it build itself a body out of its own environment? Did it rebuild her out of the rubble of trauma?

  She sighed. Rubbed her eyes. Dug her fingernails into her face, trying to wake herself up, or at least the chewed-down nubs that were left of them. The ragged rims left fine marks.

  Listen.

  Wood for skin. That would be really handy right now, wouldn’t it, against those terrible claws and teeth out there in the night?

  “Robin.”

  Her head jerked as she kicked up out of the pond of sleep. She had dozed off. She scanned the darkness and heard her name again.

  “Doc?”

  “I’m here,” said Gendreau. “You were talking in your sleep.”

  She pulled the Osdathregar out and gripped it in both hands. The dagger’s point had chewed a hole in her jeans, and the cold cellar floor pressed its wet nose against her left ass-cheek. “What was I saying?” She shifted her weight, straightening, stretching the cramps out of her legs and hips, and laid the dagger across her thighs.

  “Something about skin. Super creepy.”

  “Sorry.”

  She waited.

  After a while, Gendreau murmured, “Haruko is Leon’s wife, yes. We knew of her talents for artifice from her Etsy store. We approached her in the hospital and made her a deal—we’d cure her cancer, and in exchange, she would come work for the Dogs of Odysseus as a curator and custodian. But she couldn’t take her family with her. As far as they were concerned, she perished of her illness.”

  “And I thought I was an asshole.”

  “Haruko made that choice of her own free will. All we did was open the door. She’s the one that walked through it.”

  “Shitty choice. Submit or die, hmm?”

  “Wasn’t my call.” His voice was barely audible in the cramped closet.

  “I have half a mind to tell the Parkins she’s still alive.”

  “Don’t you think that’s up to Haruko? You might want to wait and talk to her before you make such a rash call.”

  “That little boy deserves to have a mother.”

  Changing the subject, Gendreau asked, “Speaking of mothers, how did Marina and Carly end up in your Winnebago? That seems like an unlikely series of circumstances.”

  “I’ve always had a tendency to stumble into these situations, or, rather, they stumble into me,” she replied. “Happened even before I went full-on demon. Andras was always there in me, I guess, even if I didn’t know it, and from what I know of them, demons have a magnetic attraction to … lost things, hidden things, people in deep dog shit. I reckon it’s how I always seem to be in the right place at the right time.”

  “Trouble magnet.” The magician scoffed in amusement. “I suppose that’s how the devil always shows up in the old stories, poof, just when people need to make a deal? Old Scratch does always seem to be right where he needs to be.”

  “More like ‘right where he’s needed.’”

  She waited, but he said nothing else. Time languished, the seconds leaking under the door like a quietly welling puddle, and then the soft sound of snoring came from the magician’s corner of the closet.

  Robin ground her fists into her eyes.

  Listen, said the black-eyed warhawk in the bathroom mirror. Listen, girl, wake up and LISTEN. Do you need to burn yourself with hot water again?

  No noise except for breathing and the desert’s night sounds. A faint insectile buzz came insistent and metallic from somewhere behind the house, and from time to time, the wind tossed handfuls of sand against the casement window by the closet. She cocked her head to the side and listened to the wheezy whistle of Kenway breathing, his side swelling and ebbing against her.

  No water here in the desert.

  I’ll make do, said the warhawk. I’ll stick you in the leg with that dagger you got. Maybe I’ll pop off a shotgun round in the ceiling and scare the shit out of everybody. That’ll wake your ass up.

  No, she told the mad-eyed woman she’d seen in the motel bathroom mirror, what that’ll do is draw the wolves.

  Is that such a bad thing? Maybe they should just get their asses up here and we can get this bullshit over with. The warhawk grinned. Her eyes were green sea-lamps. Fuck them. Fuck you. You like fighting, don’t you? Then let’s fuckin’ fight ’em. Then you can come down off your combat high the way you used to like to do—rub one out, flick the ol’ bean, then stick your feet out the van window and smoke and drink a beer. What say? It’s been a while.

  They faced each other in the darkness, the daughter of a God-fearing woman and the daughter of a demon. Two luminous green points floated in the shade like two alien cigarette-cherries, unblinking, unwavering. Which was which? She couldn’t tell anymore.

  Not that person anymore, said Robin. I’m not you.

  You sure about that? You think this man cured you? That you saved each other? The demon-daughter laughed. You really are as stupid as you look.

  Eventually, the closet filled with an oppressive chill as the adrenaline seeped out of her system, draping her in a wet creeping sheet, and not even Kenway’s big warm body could warm her up. She woke just long enough to realize she’d fallen asleep again, and closed her eyes.

  Track 19

  Then

  Wind chimes tinkled somewhere nearby, joining the chorus of birds flittering about in the scratchy, stunted desert trees. Black soot stains made the place look as if a thousand pounds of firecrackers had gone off. The teenager crept quietly through buildings and crumbling concrete walls made up to resemble an Afghanistan village.

  Decades ago, before the Army bought it and turned it into an abandoned MOUT range (Movement Over Urban Terrain), Hammertown had been a soundstage for a spaghetti-western movie called The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree, and the buildings around her still somewhat resembled their former glory, even under all the concertina wire and Arabic signage.

  When the Army built a better course in the middle of the firing ranges on Fort Hood in 1998, Killeen law enforcement started using that one and left this one to rot. Teenagers made it their clubhouse later, evidenced by all the graffiti, used condoms, and beer cans everywhere, but Heinrich had cleaned all the garbage out and moved into the largest building on the property, a four-story firefighter-training structure. The doors were all kicked in, but Heinrich replaced them with fresh new steel doors, each one with two deadbolts, and put welded rebar grilles over the windows.

  Clutched in Robin’s hands was a nine-millimeter Beretta. She moved cautiously with the pistol up in high ready, thumbs overlapping like Heinrich had taught
her.

  In a window, a wooden silhouette stood up with a creak. Crudely painted on it was a man with a furious, snarling face, his hands up as if he were going to choke you. Robin fired with an ear-splitting blast. An empty casing tinkled against the wall. The silhouette fell.

  To her left, another silhouette stood up behind a road barricade. She knocked that one down, bang.

  For some reason, he’d made her put on a bunch of armor and pads: a hockey mask on her face, hockey pads on her hands and feet, a catcher’s vest that looked like it’d seen its fair share of fastballs, and her jeans and shirt sleeves were wound about with several layers of duct tape. On top of the IOTV and ankle weights, this extra stuff was making her sweat more than usual. She continued to move through the tangled MOUT course, walking down a winding, narrow street, firing nine-millimeter bullets into man-shaped wooden boards. They appeared around corners and in windows, standing up from behind the chaparral and swinging down from the undersides of balconies. Heinrich ran pell-mell back and forth through the buildings, his boots clapping hollowly in the shadows, pulling ropes.

  Three more silhouettes, turn right, head down the corridor, one silhouette, and then.…

  Getting faster, her shot placement surer. Squeezing off her shots instead of pulling them now, and practicing proper trigger discipline by taking her finger out of the trigger well when she wasn’t firing. A woman with a crazed grimace slid up from behind a windowsill, eyes wide, hands clawed over her head. Bang! A hole appeared in her chest. The silhouette whirled out of sight.

  Hot breath glued the hockey mask to her face with cold sweat. Robin stepped through a doorway into a dark corridor.

  Halfway down, a silhouette stood up and she put a bullet in it. She turned left into another corridor where she raised the pistol in anticipation, but the target she expected never came up.

  Reloading the Beretta, she passed through a pair of plywood sheets that hinged inward to create a door. Normally, when she got to this part, it would close in front of her and create a picture of a giant creature meant for her to empty the magazine into, but this time, when the plywood swung shut behind her and met with a clap in the middle, painted on the back was a crowd of enraged people leaping in midair and running with their fingers hooked like cat-claws. She spun and fired. Pow, pow, pow-pow!