The Hellion

by S. A. Hunt

  “So, what do you think this is?” asked Gendreau, gesturing in a general way.

  “Guess I’m full-on demon again.” The words came out of her mouth, but they sounded as if someone else were speaking them.

  Strange hunger lay in the pit of her stomach, boiling on an element of rage. Only word she could find for the feeling was hangry, that term for when you’re angry because you’re hungry, but whatever was lurking inside of her at the moment transcended mere “hangriness” and blew past the intersection of rage and starvation. She wanted to rip and tear with her teeth, like wolves setting on a caribou carcass; she wanted to rampage and devour.

  What the hell was the portmanteau for it, then? Starge? Ravation? Hurious?

  Whatever it was, it was familiar. Same feeling she’d experienced that day in Hammertown, that furious urge to jump on Heinrich and rip his face off, only ramped up into the stratosphere. She looked at her friends and suddenly they seemed quite delicate, so delicate, and she could imagine her jaws closing on their faces, like biting into a hollow chocolate Easter bunny.

  There I am, said the glow-eyed warhawk. Her demon side. The power was inside you all along. The real treasure was the faces we ate along the way.

  Robin looked away, mortified and terrified.

  “I mean, we knew you were part demon,” said Gendreau, oblivious, “but I’m hard-pressed to say this is anything like your previous sublimation at all. I distinctly remember that—you looked like somebody had taken apart a wicker chair and a handful of wire clothes hangers and made a human sculpture out of them. This?” Gendreau made an inclusive gesture at Robin. “This looks like a Power Ranger invented by Clive Barker. You have five glowing eyes and antlers, for Christ’s sake. That’s not normal.”

  “I think the demon side re-creates me out of whatever killed me. Or the place where I died. Or something? Whatever, I … M-maybe it’s my built-in second chance. Maybe I’m like a cat with nine lives.”

  “Maybe you didn’t die,” said Navathe. “Maybe the demon part of you keeps you alive regardless of what happens to your body.”

  “My demon heart?”

  They couldn’t think of any better aphorisms, so they all just sat there, wobbling with the road, trying to avoid eye contact. The fire magician picked up an empty soda can and pretended to be enthralled by the ingredient list. A broom lay in the bed of the pickup truck, the old-school kind with a wooden shaft and sorghum bristles. Robin brushed the palm of her hand across the wood and contemplated the weight of it, the strength—and the irony of finding something so iconic, so entwined with her lifelong enemy, in this place, in this condition. She could make use of this.

  “Just hope we can reverse it,” said Robin, interrupting their reverie. The Osdathregar had stopped casting that fierce light, but it still thrummed with potential, pulsating darkly. “Gonna make it hard to get a new driver’s license to replace the one that was in my wallet.”

  “Hope we can, too,” said Gendreau.

  They rode on for a while in wary silence.

  Eventually, it dawned on her that she needed to hear their voices, needed their company just then. Maybe she needed to be reminded of her own humanity. To be grounded. To help drown out her own inner monologue, to keep it from filling the quiet with anxiety. The silence had an alluring, scary edge, a soundless siren call drawing her toward some deep and sinister part of herself.

  The devil on her shoulder, trying to talk her into some heinous shit—that was what she needed to be distracted from. The warhawk.

  “They said I could be anything,” she told them, breaking the quiet, “so I became a rotisserie chicken.”

  Stifled laughter.

  “You said you got promoted,” said Navathe. “What does that mean? Do you think it has anything to do with why the Sanctification isn’t blasting you to smithereens right now?”

  Just the same as it had been when she’d reached out from her father Andras’s Hell-prison and touched the mortal world through the painting in Kenway’s studio, the air was intensely cold. The Sanctification made Earth inhospitable for her, like trying to step naked onto the skin-crystallizing surface of the distant planet Neptune.

  Or at least it had been last October. This time, it was more like a casual dip into a cold mountain river. Wasn’t sure what kept her from shivering uncontrollably, but she wasn’t dead and she hadn’t been ejected into Hell, so—points for that, perhaps.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “What do you graduate to from a demon?”

  “An angel?”

  Gendreau reached out to touch her and his fingertips came away sooty. Carbon? She looked at him, her antlers thumping the ceiling. “Does this look like an angel to you?” she asked.

  “Perhaps,” said the curandero. “They’re supposed to be frightening. The chubby-cheeked cherubs in classical art aren’t actually angels—they’re called something else, but I can’t remember what.”

  “What if demons aren’t fallen angels?” Robin asked. “What if it’s the other way around? What if angels are ascended demons? What if they all start out that way? Like, demons are a one and angels are a ten? Maybe I leveled up to a five.” Made sense to her. “Aren’t angels supposed to have wings?”

  “Multiple sets, from what I understand. Flaming, covered in eyes. At least, that’s how classic religious literature describes them. Cherubim and seraphim. Among others.”

  “Wings would be cool,” Robin said, picking up the broom. “Could do without the covered-in-eyes part. But I’ll be straight-up honest, real talk here, I don’t think I’m an angel. I think I’m back in demon mode. I got a real bad itch to fuck shit up, and not in a good way. I’m having a hard time controlling it.”

  Navathe blanched.

  “So,” said Gendreau, “the Sanctification isn’t destroying you like it would have if you’d stepped foot outside of Weaver’s deconjuration pocket in your demon form. If you’re still a demon, that means you must have earned your right to be here in this form, Miss Martine.” They stared at her again as he spoke. She felt the urge to hide her face. “You died in that fire, right?” he asked.

  Her answer was just above a breath. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I did. Never died before. Don’t really have a frame of reference, you know?”

  “You sacrificed yourself trying to beat Santiago and save Rook,” said the curandero. “You traded your life for hers. For all of our lives. You earned this.” He punctuated each point with a jab of his finger at her, his curative ring glinting in the light. “Whatever you are now, demon, angel, para-fucking-legal, you earned your right to be here. You passed your supernatural bar exam. The Sanctification doesn’t apply to you anymore because of what you did. You’ve been absolved of ‘the sins of your father.’” Blinking in surprise, he added, “Putto!”

  “What’d you just call me?”

  “No, putto, that’s what those angel-babies are called. They’re not cherubs, they’re called ‘putto.’ Well, putti, in plural. Italian. Took some art classes when I graduated high school, back before I knew about my grandfather, Frank, and his secret society.”

  “You didn’t always know about the Dogs of Odysseus?”

  “No.” Gendreau looked like he’d been through hell—dirty, covered in bruises, fancy white shirt splattered in blood, face nicked and scratched. The scar across his throat was shiny pink in the light filtering through the window. “He came and got me out of college and talked me into joining the Dogs because he wanted someone in the family to be part of it and he didn’t think my father could handle it. He didn’t find out that I was assigned female at birth until almost a year after inducting me. Didn’t take that too kindly. But by then it was too late, and he had to make do with me. Wouldn’t have been fair to throw me out, and honestly I don’t know if he would have even possessed the capability to do so—I was already well entrenched by then and had developed powerful friends who would have stood up for me, like the Jötunn.”

  Taking the broom in both han
ds, Robin snapped it over her armored knee, right above the bristles, leaving her with a four-foot section of wooden broom handle. She pressed the Osdathregar to the broken end and wound duct tape around it, lashing the dagger to the end of the broom handle until she had a makeshift spear.

  “What’d you do that for?” asked Gendreau.

  “Probably not going to get close enough to stab him with the dagger,” she said. “Gonna have to needle him. Wear him down from afar.”

  “Why not shoot him? Got to be somewhere we can pick up some firepower in Almudena.”

  Testing it, she was satisfied to see the spear point didn’t budge. “I cut him multiple times with the katana. Burned him. He just shrugged it off. I don’t feel like guns are going to do the trick. I need something supernatural.” The freshly crafted spear frothed with ghostly smoke like frozen nitrogen. The Osdathregar’s influence leeched slowly down the broom handle, turning it all black. “Think I have a better chance of bringing him down if I go after him like a Roman foot soldier with the Osdathregar. With a spear, I’ll have better reach.”

  Track 28

  Then

  A teenager and an old man staggered through dusty Las Vegas alleys littered with trash. Behind them burned the Oracle of the Sands Casino. Howls of cat-people—witches’ familiars, men and women driven insane by arcane energies—made a siren that roller-coastered up and down, washing over them in shrill alien waves.

  They’d walked into a trap. The two witch-hunters had launched an assault on Gail Symes in her casino on the outskirts of Vegas. Unfortunately, they didn’t know she kept a Schrödinger box on the premises—a cat-bomb, basically, a kill switch designed to sacrifice a shit-ton of cats and send their little cat-spirits into any nearby unmarked bystanders. In just a few seconds, the entire casino was flooded with raving maniacs. They’d assassinated the eponymous oracle Gail Symes herself and barely escaped with their lives, but they’d managed to set up several firebombs throughout the building before a member of Symes’s security team caught them.

  Flames roared out of the casino’s windows. The giant neon Illuminati sign out front was on fire. “Gotta get you to a hospital,” said Robin, blood streaming down the side of her face. Heinrich hobbled alongside her, one arm thrown over her shoulder for support. He clutched his chest where one of the security men had put a bullet in him.

  Apparently, in Heinrich’s world, when a 220-pound slab of beef with a Glock tells you to stop what you’re doing, you forget how to English.

  “No, kiddo, no hospital. Ain’t got no insurance anyways.”

  Fire-engine sirens overcame the howling of the familiars as they wandered through the demolished front doors, shrouded in fire, and collapsed in the street. Robin carried Heinrich down a side alley bordered by restaurant kitchen doors and fire escapes, emerging into a vacant lot where her Conlin Plumbing van waited.

  Vibrating with adrenaline, she helped him into his seat and closed the door on him, then threw herself into the driver’s seat and fumbled her keys out of her pocket to turn the engine over. Beside her, Heinrich looked like death warmed over, a heap of crumpled man sitting in her passenger seat. His respiration was a series of wet, ragged sighs.

  “Man,” he grunted, his hands full of blood, “sure wish that Andy kid was here.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind. Just get us out of here.”

  “You need to go to a hospital,” said Robin, pulling her seat belt on. “You’re fucking bleeding all over the place.”

  “I’ll be fine. Just get us home.”

  “Hammertown is hours away. It’s in another state, Heinie. You’re going to die if I don’t—”

  Even in his decimated state, her mentor could still burn a hole through a bank safe with his eyes. “Then we’ll get outta town and get another motel room! The goddamn cops are going to be all over this part of town, lookin’ for whoever blew that place to shit, and if we don’t get out of here, we’re gonna get the first degree.”

  “The third degree?”

  “Who cares what degree? Just drive! And don’t”—cough, cough—“don’t call me Heinie!”

  * * *

  A car alarm chirped next to the van, oy-oy, wrenching Robin out of sleep. She sat up with a start and rubbed her eyes.

  The van was frigid with the night cold of the desert. She’d driven all evening and into the night, ten hours, stopping in Las Cruces, New Mexico, when she couldn’t stay awake anymore. Heinrich told her it was okay to stop, she remembered. She pulled into a Walmart, a big gray Supercenter, parked in the shadows, and passed out almost immediately.

  Her eyes flicked over to the passenger seat. He was gone.

  Jesus Christ, blood everywhere.

  Robin peered through the windshield but saw only a squad of frat-boys coming around the corner of the building, pushing a cart full of junk food, beer, and Gatorade. The one leading wore a hoodie with their university logo.

  In the back. She twisted in the seat.

  Lying on the air mattress between the racks, under a pile of blankets, with his hat over his face. Heinrich was motionless.

  She shook him. “Hey, Heinie, you awake?”

  No answer.

  “You okay, man? Wake up.”

  Still no answer.

  “Oh, my God. You better not be dead, Heinrich Hammer. You better not be dead.” Bilious panic rose in her throat and suddenly she couldn’t catch her breath. Tears welled in her eyes. “Don’t leave me here all alone, you asshole. You’re all I got. Wake your Black ass up, please.” She shook him again and his hat fell off.

  To her relief, his eyes were shut. But his mouth was open.

  She got up on her knees and lowered her ear to his lips to listen for his breathing. Maybe? She couldn’t tell with the frat assholes laughing and screwing around next to the van making so much noise.

  Pressing her fingertips to his neck, she searched for a pulse, but he was so leathery, she couldn’t be sure.

  “Damn, baby,” said one of the frat boys, his alcohol-slurred voice muffled by the window. Jock type with a military haircut. “That is a magnificent ass. Please don’t be a dude when you turn around.” Robin looked over her shoulder and realized her jeans-clad rear end was up against the steering wheel.

  Two guys were staring at it through the windshield. “Oh, hell yeah. This chick looks like she knows how to party. Check out that Mohawk.”

  “Hey, you wanna ride with us?” asked Army-Jock.

  “We’re on our way to Mexico, and we got plenty of weed.”

  She glanced at the motionless Heinrich and back at the frat boys. “Fuck off, please. I’m in the middle of something.”

  Both boys recoiled in surprise.

  “Fuck off, she says,” said the one on the right, a heavy-browed kid that could have been a stunt double for a caveman. “Man, you believe the mouth on this chick?”

  “I got something she can use it for.”

  The third guy came around the front of their car, the one in the uni hoodie. “What are you two retards jabbering about over here?” he asked, but then he spotted Robin still bent over in the van. “Oh, my God, this punk chick is hot as fuck.”

  Someone pulled the van’s driver door open, and turning around, Robin found herself face-to-face with Army-Jock. “What’s wrong?” he asked, his breath reeking of vodka. “You swing the other way?”

  “Get out of my van,” Robin said, pushing him out.

  Not far enough, though, and she couldn’t get the door shut before he was on her again. “Bitch, I’m trying to talk to you. Just settle your ass down and gimme a few minutes to get to know you. I’m not such a bad guy.”

  “I don’t have time for this. You’re all drunk and you’re not thinking straight. You need to just get in your car and leave.” She shoved him and tried to close the door on him again, but he slapped the door out of her hand and thrust himself into the van, almost headbutting her. He was so drunk, he was sweaty and his eyes seemed to have trouble pointing in the s
ame direction, drifting around like a chameleon on quaaludes. “God, I hope you’re not driving.”

  “Why don’t you step out here and get some fresh air?” he asked, grabbing the lapels of her jacket and hauling her out of the front seat. “Stinks in there.” Army-Jock pressed against her.

  “Stinks out here, too,” said Robin.

  The man kissed her.

  His mouth was like making out with an ashtray full of Everclear and he needed a shave—his face could take the paint off of a car. I can get you to do anything, Heinrich echoed from her subconscious. All I gotta do is piss you off. All of the fear and shock in her popped like a bad bulb (later, she would swear she actually heard it pop) and turned into rage.

  Biting into the soft meat of his upper lip, Robin latched on as fiercely as a snapping turtle.

  The man screamed into her mouth. She didn’t let go when he reeled back, and the two of them did an awkward West Side Story dance there in the parking lot. “YOU CRAZY VITCH!” he shouted, grabbing her head, and he pressed his thumbs into her eyes, squeezing stars out of her brain. Robin released her grip and slipped out of his hands, trying to see through a haze of black spots.

  His friends came around the car and surrounded her.

  “Who do you think you are, Mike Tyson?” asked Hoodie, pushing up his sleeves. “Who bites a dude in the mouth? He just wanted a little sugar.”

  “Tyson didn’t bite Holyfield in the mouth; he bit him on the ear.”

  “To hell with sugar, man,” said Army-Jock, talking through his fingers. He was cupping his bloody mouth. “Kinda just want to kick the shit out of her now.”

  Robin’s heart pounded in her neck. Her hands shook as she methodically took out her earrings and put them in her Army jacket’s pockets. Then she shrugged her jacket off and tossed it under the back bumper of the plumbing van, out of the way.

  “Oh!” said Caveman Stunt Double. “She does want to play!”

  “Think she likes it. Check that shit out.” Hoodie pointed at her chest. The desert chill made her nipples stand up under her Florence + the Machine T-shirt.