The Hellion

by S. A. Hunt

  Most of the front porch had survived the fire, except for a trail of black going up the front steps. The roof had collapsed, though, dropping a pile of embers on top of it.

  Burnt paint and filth made a foul horror of the air. The only sounds were the subtle crackle of hidden fires, the hollow breath of the wind, and his shoes in the dirt. Gendreau stumbled around the side of the house, trying to find entry through the debris. The house had fallen in, creating what looked like the remains of a gigantic campfire, a pile of gothic black spikes. “She’s a demon, she’s a demon,” he muttered endlessly to himself, eyes searching the black angles of the house. “She’s a demon, she’s a demon. Of course she survived. They live in fire, don’t they? They’re filled with fire. They’re all about fire. Fire is all they know, right?”

  The back wall of the kitchen was mostly intact—an eight-foot shark’s tooth of clapboard—but had fallen in, creating a sort of archway where he crawled through on his hands and knees onto a mangled treasure map of linoleum.

  To his right, a slope of blackened wood planks led up to empty space where the second floor had been. Gendreau peered through a gap by the fridge and saw where the living room ceiling had collapsed into the basement. “Robin?” he asked, or at least he tried. His voice caught in his throat. Standing in the destroyed kitchen, clutching the Osdathregar against his chest, he tried again. “Robin? Are you in here?” His chest seized in a hot, hard anguish as his eyes darted over the ruins. “Come on, Miss Martine, Robin, you’re okay. You’ve got to be. You’ve got to be.”

  Navathe slipped under the kitchen wall. “Hey,” he said gently.

  “What?”

  The pyromancer pointed at the bottom of the pile of wood where the ceiling had caved in on the cellar stairs. He didn’t say anything, and he didn’t have to.

  Pins and needles raced up and down Gendreau’s body and he turned away, pacing in what was left of the kitchen. A sob forced its way out of the pit of his stomach. A carbonized hand protruded from underneath the fallen ceiling, gnarled into a black, claw-like fist.

  Tucking the dagger behind his belt again, the curandero reluctantly joined Navathe as he started trying to lift it off of the hand’s owner, and together they hauled the burned wood up, dumping ashes all over the floor, and turned it aside with a crash. Smoke and soot roiled up as it broke. Underneath was a figure coiled into a fetal position, a charcoal ghost.

  Faint orange light traced veins across her embrous skin where tissue still smoldered inside. Her teeth were white pearls in a black mouth.

  Tears streamed out of Gendreau’s eyes. “No, no, no, no, no.”

  “I’m so sorry, mate,” mumbled Navathe.

  All they could do was stare in despair and disbelief. “I don’t know, I just don’t, how could this happen?” Gendreau raked his arm across his face to wipe away the tears and left a war-paint stripe of gray. “I don’t know how demons work, but damn. Damn, man. How could this be? I don’t get it.” His brain was a tangle of disconnected thoughts, all fighting for attention. “She grew her fucking arm back. This shouldn’t have been—”

  His hands started to hurt. Gendreau looked down.

  “Ow.” The silver Osdathregar in his fists. “Ow! Shit!” Getting hot, as if it had been heated over a fire. In seconds, the heat was unbearable. He fumbled the dagger on the floor.

  Thin blue smoke—like the oil smoke coming out of a model train’s smokestack—whispered up from the linoleum underneath it, as if it were eating a hole through.

  “What in the world?” asked Navathe.

  Crack.

  Navathe twitched and took a step backward. “Oh, my, God. Oh my sweet Jesus God, Andy.”

  The corpse moved.

  Track 25

  She heard them coming into the house, heard their shoes scuffing on the charred boards. “Robin? Robin? Are you in here? Come on, Miss Martine, Robin, you’re okay. You’ve got to be. You’ve got to be.”

  “I’m in here,” she wanted to say, but her mouth didn’t want to work right; her jaw had been tied shut like Marley’s ghost, and she couldn’t draw breath to speak. How unfair—they hadn’t even left a coin on her tongue for the ferryman.

  The morning’s wind, even slipping meekly through the cracks in the wood, was as icy as an Antarctic gust. If she thought she could, she would have shivered. The fire. Had she fallen asleep? Had she died? Was this how death went? Your soul doesn’t actually go anywhere, you just sit in your corpse, unable to communicate, watching the world pass you by until there’s nothing but dust, nothing for what’s left of you to cling to?

  Where do you go after that?

  Soft sunlight fell across Robin as the two men lifted the wood off of her and pushed it aside with a crash.

  “No, no, no, no, no.”

  “I’m so sorry, mate.”

  Their voices were muffled and hollow, distant, as if heard through an air vent in a drafty old mansion. She listened to them talk, listened to them stand there and stare. She wanted to console the magician, to give him a hug around the neck and tell him that—

  (that they would be better off without her? The world would? No. That’s defeat talking. That’s the Blackfield psych ward talking)

  —that everything would be okay.

  Am I still dead if I can give myself a pep talk?

  “You’re not dead, my love,” said a warm third voice.

  Mama?

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  Mama, I didn’t make it. Look at me. Santiago kicked my ass fair and square.

  Visions of Annie passed across the surface of Robin’s mind: the two of them sitting in the kitchen of 1168, Robin just five years old, tears rolling down her face. Annie knelt in front of her, pulling a Band-Aid across an ugly scrape on her knee. “You’ll live, it’s not that bad,” she said, and made her daughter a glass of chocolate milk and a peanut butter and honey sandwich, and lo and behold, she did indeed live.

  This is a bit worse than falling off the front porch, Mama.

  “Did you forget what you are?” asked Annie’s ghost. Her lisp had disappeared again. “Who you are?” A hand pressed itself against Robin’s shoulder, and it was like being caressed through an astronaut suit. She was encased in unfeeling death, a roasted husk.

  (demon demon demon crooked cambion)

  How could I forget?

  “Then get up. Get up, you little hellion.” Annie challenged her and berated her like a drill sergeant. “Get up. Walk it off. Ain’t no daughter of mine gonna get beat that easy.”

  What is that noise? It sounds like

  (bacon cooking, ain’t nothin good bacon can’t make better)

  flies buzzing.

  “Ow!” shouted Gendreau, and he dropped something on the floor, something heavy, something metallic.

  A cold, hard light materialized in front of her, like a distant star. She peered through stiff eyelids and saw the Osdathregar lying at the magician’s feet, almost within reach. The dagger burned with an intense white fire, slag sizzling out of the sun’s reflection like a welder’s torch.

  “I think it likes you,” said Annie.

  Can I keep it?

  Annie, 1999, laughing as five-year-old Robin holds up a beat- up-looking cat for her mother’s approval. “Yes, if you promise to—”

  —Feed it.

  Yes, it’s hungry, isn’t it?

  Who do you really belong to, Mr. Knife?

  Track 26

  Crack. Crackle. Crumbs of charcoal dribbled from its arm as the cinder-corpse slowly, glacially slowly, reached for the dagger. Black fingers uncurled and hooked uselessly against the warped linoleum.

  “Oh, fuck me,” said Navathe.

  He stumbled outside to retch in the weeds.

  Crackle. One of Robin’s legs rose up and she planted a foot on the cellar door frame, pushing herself weakly across the floor. More charcoal fell off with a soft clatter. Almost imperceptible, barely audible under the wind, a dry rattle slipped out through her pearly grimace.
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  Anguish and terror mixed into a ball of acid in Gendreau’s throat. His legs buckled and he fell on his ass, pushing himself in the other direction until his back met the wall. The Osdathregar was now a strange firebrand, glowing an angry propane-blue against the dark linoleum, piercing his ears with a tinnitus whine.

  A black film spread outward from the dagger, radiating like mold across the floor. “What the hell is happening?” Gendreau said in a shell-shocked whisper.

  One carbon claw reached for the Osdathregar.

  “Do you want this?” he asked the girl, or what remained of her.

  Coal-encrusted fingers flexed for the dagger’s handle.

  The magician stuck a foot out to push it closer to the Robin-shape. Turned out to be more of a kick, knocking it past her outstretched hand and next to her face. The seared hand retreated, folding around the dagger’s blade. Her mouth opened with a gruesome crack and she screamed feebly, a baby-bird squeak, exhaling a gnat-cloud of red embers. Her roasted skin turned as black as pig iron, and her hand and arm seemed to plump and regain their original shape, filling out.

  My God, thought the curandero, my God, I can’t even imagine …

  Sliding one burned arm under her, Robin pushed herself to a sitting position. Her face was a gaunt parody of human features, frozen in a toothy yawn, eyes shriveled. Gendreau watched in a state of stunned horror. She looks like a stop-motion skeleton in a Ray Harryhausen movie.

  She opened her eyes, like jade lit from within, green traffic lights in the pits of her eye sockets.

  Demon eyes.

  The darkness seeping out of the Osdathregar ran down her wrist, encroaching on one of those veins of deep, smoldering red. A cloud of steam spewed out of the crack as the dagger’s coldness battled the heat of the fire under her skin. Gendreau crawled through the gap under the wall, stumbling down the back steps and out into the sand, where he turned to regard the house and the steam billowing up out of it.

  The coal figure lurched through the back door and down the stairs in hesitant, stiff, mummy-like steps. Her arms, still drawn tight against her body in rigored knots, had turned smooth shadow-black, matte-black, as if she’d been spray-painted. Robin paused on the steps, unsteady, and Gendreau came forward to help her, but she jerked away, almost falling.

  “No,” she whispered, glancing at him with incandescent eyes.

  Three of them. Three eyes.

  A third eye had opened in the middle of her forehead.

  No, Jesus, there were five of them! Two other eyes opened in her temples. All of them focused on Gendreau’s face and a sublime chill vibrated through him. Hair on the back of his neck stood on end.

  “The hell is going on?” Navathe, astonished, crouching in the weeds.

  Gendreau shrugged helplessly back at him.

  “Don’t know,” Robin wheezed through her lipless teeth. “I think it’s happening again.” Pieces of charcoal fell away as the burned husk peeled off to exhibit beet-red muscle, only to be replaced by a strange shell, as though the dagger was recreating her flesh out of black leather. The Osdathregar’s influence spread across her chest and up her neck, trickling down the xylophone of her chest.

  “Demonization?” Navathe stared in amazed fear. “Is this what it looks like?”

  “Does it hurt?” asked Gendreau.

  “It did. Oh God, it did.” Her voice was an elevator full of people all whispering at the same time, and when she spoke, her mouth didn’t move, a grim reaper’s grin, white teeth set in flawless obsidian, fossils stuck in a tar pit. “Not anymore.” Liquid shadow continued up her neck and down her belly in fractal Mandelbrot splotches, spreading, ossifying, covering. Slipped over her chin and poured itself up her jaw, becoming a soot-and-bone mask.

  Two black horns thrust into the air from the crown of her skull, becoming a thorny rack of antlers, as the charcoal shell slid over her forehead. Intricate lines etched themselves down the edge of her jaw, tracing chevrons down her throat and a thousand scrolling curlicues along the contours of her chest, as if some invisible artist were putting the final touches on a suit of medieval armor. Robin looked like Persephone brought to life. As the demon came down the back steps of the house, her five eyes twinkled green emeralds in the watery dawn sun. “Mama says I got promoted,” she said, her voice strange and multitiered, two people talking in unison: Robin, and a deeper, darker thrum, like a violin and a bass in harmony.

  “Oh, my God,” said the Latina woman with the rifle. She’d put away the cell phone and now stood behind the magicians, her mouth wide open.

  “Promoted into what, love?” Navathe asked, staring with terrified eyes, his mouth hanging open. “And why isn’t the Sanctification killing her or expelling her?” he asked Gendreau. “She’s not in Hell, not in some pocket dimension or otherworld. She’s right here on Earth, in front of us. She should be evaporating, or being sucked down into a hole in the ground or something.”

  Candle flames licked up from the corners of her mouth as Robin studied her black-gauntleted hands. “He was right. He was right—the Godsdagger, it did take care of me.”

  “What the fuck are you?” asked the woman, pointing the rifle at her.

  “I’m a demon. Please don’t shoot me.”

  “Yeah, that’s not very reassuring. I’m going to shoot you now.”

  “No!” cried Gendreau, stepping between them, his hands up. “It’s okay! I know she looks like she eats babies, but she’s a good guy! I swear to God.”

  Robin recoiled. “What—”

  “Okay.” The magician clasped his hands as if he were begging. “Okay, all right, square one: what’s your name, ma’am?”

  “Elisa.”

  “Elisa…?”

  “Elisa Valenzuela.” She gestured with the rifle barrel. “Who are you? Why did you kidnap my brother’s wife and my niece?”

  “You’re Santiago’s sister? I, we—ahh—we didn’t. We didn’t kidnap anyone. We found them hiding in our Winnebago and we were going to take them to a battered women’s shelter back home. Marina told us everything.”

  Elisa stared at Robin, still unwilling to lower the rifle.

  “Who were you talking to on the phone just now?” asked Gendreau.

  “My brother.”

  “Santiago?”

  “No, the other one, Alfie—Alvaro. Our older brother. He called to tell me Santi rolled into their clubhouse with Carly, some Asian woman, and the one-legged blond guy.”

  “Rook and Kenway,” said the five-eyed shadow-demon.

  “What the hell are all these dead animals?” Elisa threw a hand at the carnage behind her. “Looks like a bunch of clowns burned down a rodeo out here.”

  “Werewolves. Your friends Los Cambiantes.”

  “Werewolves?” Elisa was incredulous.

  “Santiago’s motorcycle. It’s got a—” Gendreau cut himself off. “Hard to explain. Let’s just say it’s got black magic in it and he’s been using it to turn him and his friends into—”

  “Werewolves.”

  Reluctantly, Gendreau nodded. “Among other things.”

  “You’re telling me this thing is one of Santi’s asshole buddies?”

  “Yes. Sounds like you don’t believe me, but you’ve been anticipating this for a while, judging by the rifle in your hands.”

  “I just knew Santi and his gang were up to no good. Went to the bar outside Almudena, and my friend said they found Gil’s body in a house down the street. Alfie thinks Santiago’s finally gone off the deep end. When they followed you out here, Alfie stayed behind and called the police in Lockwood. There’s a warrant out for Santi now and every L-C member that came out here.”

  “If Alfie called the police, why are you running around with a rifle? That’s a good way to get shot, I think. If the Los Cambiantes didn’t get you, the cops probably would.”

  “My brother’s hurt a lot of people, Mr. Magician. Wish I could tell you I came here to hurt him back, but I think I’m just doing what I’ve alw
ays done when it comes to Santiago.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Deal with the aftermath. Help the people he’s hurt. Pick up after him.” Elisa sighed. “I’ve always picked up after him.”

  “Maybe it’s time to stop.”

  “That’s what I thought—that it needs to stop. He’s turned the Los Cambiantes into his own personal army.” She held up the rifle. “Maybe that’s why I brought this. I wanted an equalizer. People tend to stop what they’re doing and listen to what you have to say when they see a gun in your hands. Also, apparently, there are demons here now, so I’m glad I brought it.”

  “What is he going to do with my friends?” asked Robin.

  Elisa renewed her aim, and the demon put up her hands. “If shit has gone south like I think it has, and they’re all on the warpath, it can’t be good.” She locked eyes with the curandero, and hers narrowed in resigned determination. “My brother is not a nice man.”

  “Neither am I,” said Robin.

  Elisa tightened her grip on the rifle. “I believe it.”

  Track 27

  “We need to go,” said Robin, heading toward Elisa’s truck. “We need to save my boy, now, and we need to save Marina’s little girl. I made a promise.”

  “Hold up,” said Gendreau. “You were a bacon sculpture not ten minutes ago. Don’t you think you should take a breather before you head out to fight tigers and possessed motorcycles and God knows what else?”

  Wind combed through her bizarre antlers. “Do I look like I need a breather?”

  “No, I d-don’t suppose you do,” Gendreau stammered as those five green lamplight eyes focused on him.

  Once they were on the road, Robin found herself at a loss for something to do that didn’t involve staring at her own hands like a stoner. Couple of hours at least before they arrived at the Los Cambiantes’ clubhouse. According to Elisa, it was on the outskirts of Keyhole Hills near the east gate of the abandoned air base, heading out of town toward Almudena. They’d driven right past it leaving town in the Winnebago, and none of them had a clue.