by S. A. Hunt
“Who the hell are you?”
“I am a faun from the banks of Glasswater Creek,” said the horned man, in a soft, airy English accent. “My name is Aegeus, and this is my friend Marina, and we are here fishing. If you don’t mind, I’d be greatly appreciative if—”
“Where are we?”
“Narnia, of course,” said Aegeus.
“Narnia? As in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe? That Narnia?”
“How many Narnias have you heard of, miss?”
“Just the one?”
“Then by your own admission, wouldn’t this be the only Narnia?” He squinted up at her horns, then down at her feet. “What happened to your legs, miss? Aren’t you a faun like me?” He looked up, his face falling. “Were you cursed by a witch?”
Robin stared at the faun.
“I don’t have time for this,” she said, placing a hand on Marina’s shoulder. “Hon, we need to go. You have a daughter to get back to.”
“Daughter?” asked Marina.
“Yeah, a little girl named Carly. D’you remember?”
“Carly?”
“Yeah.”
“I told you, witch-hunter—she would not remember,” said the cow-god behind them. The Mother of Rivers stood at the head of the dock, ebony-black human feet planted in the technicolor-green grass. Against the verdant color, her robes were the darkest sable. “She has been stripped of all her pain. Her after—her contentment—is what you see before you.”
“A book?”
“When Marina Valenzuela and her mother Gloria crossed the border into California under cover of night in December 1986 and were given sanctuary, she discovered a copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe on the bookshelf in Alexandra Martinez’s house.”
Reeling her line out of the water, Marina flicked the hook over her head and sent it deep into the lake.
“For the next six years, she would treasure that book,” continued the Mother. “It was her only solace in a turbulent childhood, moving from home to home, avoiding the authorities, and it was how she learned to read and write English. Narnia is brightest in her mind of all the places her heart has ever called home.”
For a moment, she thought she saw a shadow in the water, a whale-shadow perhaps, but it might have been a trick of the sun. Robin sighed, looking back and forth between the shadow and Marina. “That’s sweet and all, but we need to—”
The galaxy inside the cow-god’s horns was barely visible in the sunshine, a spiderweb frosted with dew. As she spoke, the stars burned brightly for a second, a spiral of blue gas-flame. “The after will fight to keep her. Hell will fight to claim you. And you cannot fight Hell. Not even I can.”
“If you’re not a faun,” said Aegeus, “then you must be a devil.” He set down his fishing pole and stood to confront Robin. His face took on a scratchy, soulful definition and she realized that the riot of color around her had begun to darken and desaturate. Details were sharpening, filling in. The sun cowered in the sky and pulled a protective veil of clouds across its face. A sinister grit came over the lake, and the whale-shadow she thought she’d seen a moment before once again coalesced beneath their feet. Just beyond the dock, the water sank, bending downward into a bowl of dark glass.
“Carlita,” Robin told Marina, “your daughter. Your gorgeous, smart, brave little girl. She pepper-sprayed your asshole husband trying to save your life.”
Finally, the woman peered over her shoulder. “Carlita?”
“Yeah.”
“I have a daughter?”
At the end of Marina’s fishing line, the lake sank into a glassy cavern, becoming a pit of darkness as if some great mouth had opened just below the surface. Wind blew down the beach—a soft breeze at first, but it soon grew into a gale, threatening to push them into the widening gyre. Robin shifted her weight, her hair whipping.
“Yes,” shouted a familiar voice. “And she’s waiting for you.”
Power welled from Annie Martine’s eyes, distorting the air in a glassy funnel, as she used her Gift, her memory-powers, to put the missing pieces back into Marina’s mind like some kind of jigsaw puzzle. She stood on the bank next to the Mother of Rivers, weight forward, leaning into her power, almost trembling with the effort.
“You’re lying,” the gritty, gray, high-definition faun shouted back. “You just want to take my friend; that’s what you want to do. I know your kind! You’ll say anything you want to get your way! You lie, and you cheat, and you—”
Interrupting his diatribe, Robin punched the goat-man square in the face.
One full-strength jab in the upper lip, and he toppled backward into the lake, where he swirled down the vortex as if it were a bathtub drain.
“Rude,” said the cow-god.
Boards peeled loose from the dock, nails jutting, bobbling in the wind like wooden piano-keys. The water crawled backward, unveiling a slimy, muddy shore, uprooting water plants as it went, and crayfish were unscrewed from the mud and pulled into the hellhole. Robin squinted into the wind, reaching for Marina’s hand. “I can explain later. Right now, we need to get out of here.”
The woman’s hands wrung themselves in indecision. A mental image flashed in Robin’s mind of this same woman suspended by those hands over a yawning void after the RV crash, and some frustrated steel inside of her said she would not fail Marina again, not this time, not ever, and she bent down and took one of those hands by force. “I told you I would help you and your daughter, and when I make a promise, I keep that shit to the end and beyond. Do you comprende?”
Marina’s face darkened—not in rage, but in determination. “Yes … you made me a promise. I remember that. I remember.”
“I died keeping it. Twice.”
A dock board broke free and whirled past them, missing Robin by inches.
Rounding on the hellhole, she flipped it the bird with both hands. “I have shit to do, Hell,” she bellowed into the darkness, “so pack it in and piss off!” and she pulled Marina up from the dock.
The abandoned fishing poles whipped into the now-vast gulf before them, a churning tornado below the lake. Deep inside the mad whirl, the craggy bottom was visible, with its mucky green water-plants and thick, sloppy mud. Beyond that, the fabric of Narnia seemed to come apart, and inside the shatter was nothing—a dead TV channel, a speechless mouth, a thrumming absence.
Then, suddenly, a world-shaking shriek came from the abyss.
A voice she’d heard before. Last year.
The half-birthed thing on the floor of Kenway’s apartment, plumbed by a thousand silver filaments like interdimensional leeches. Something stirred at the bottom of the pit. A pale figure crawled toward them, caped in a brilliant web of shimmering white light. A cluster of red-rimmed eyes stared up at them, feral and terrifying. Its face was contorted by rage into an alien grimace, a white mask stretched thin over strange bones.
Ereshkigal.
“You,” breathed Robin. “Let’s pop smoke, lady.”
Rumor has it there’s one for resurrection—
One that can manipulate time, a phantom Gendreau said in the back of her mind. One that can kill with a glance. But I’ve never seen them. They’re all kept in a big warded vault in our place in Michigan.
She grabbed Marina’s hand and raised her other toward Ereshkigal as if to stop her, but instead, a filament of wriggling paranormal plasma burst out of the witch-goddess, threading itself through Robin’s palm, down her arm, and into her heart.
“Uh-n-n-n-n-n-n-nh,” Robin stuttered, trying to focus on the power, trying to bend it to her will, force it to suit her needs. Her eyes were snapping flashbulbs, her throat a sizzling light socket. She was pulling a heart-road straight from the source, and it was like taking hold of a bare powerline. Her bones turned to lightning; her heart raged in her chest. Her brain lit up like every inch of neon in Las Vegas.
Resurrection.
She searched through the energies surging through her, tasting each of the goddess’s po
wers as if sampling a soup buffet hooked into a 220-volt junction box. Candle flames ignited themselves in the grass at her feet. The grass itself parched, curled, and died, turning nicotine-brown.
“Run if you like, demon,” Ereshkigal hissed, as she clambered over the end of the dock, reeling herself in on Robin’s energy-filament like a fish on a line. “I’ll follow you to the ends of Creation.”
Rumor has it, said Gendreau.
“You got this, baby,” said Annie somewhere behind her.
There’s one for resurrection.
Power—green and warm and alive. She let it in and was suffused with the warmth of sudden life. The Narnia around her burst with vibrant, vital color once again, even with the howling hellhole punching through the middle of it, and Robin knew she’d found the right heart-road.
Fighting like hell to exclude all the others, she breathed deeply of the power until it filled every crevice of her soul.
Before the death-goddess could reach them, light strobed between Marina’s and Robin’s interlaced fingers and they exploded like a nuclear bomb, shunting the dock straight down and jamming the support poles fifteen feet into the earth of False Narnia.
Ereshkigal, the dock, the shore, her mother, and the cow-god all scattered into dust, and Cosmotelluria itself evaporated in a vast white light.
And then …
And then everything hurt.
Track 39
Robin gasped and sat up, almost jabbing Kenway with a horn. Gendreau managed to sob and laugh at the same time, and Navathe quietly threw his fists into the air as if she’d scored a game-winning touchdown. Kenway gathered her up into a hug so tight, it made her neck hurt. “Oh, my God, oh, my God,” he jabbered, her face mashed into the sweaty pit of his shoulder.
She held him, reveling in the woodsmoke-and-musk smell of his body. The demon rage was completely gone, leaving only a bone-deep exhaustion, and the real world was a fog reeking of real-world smells. Petrichor, sweat, burnt paint, wet soot. She hadn’t realized how clean the afterlife felt until this moment.
“Sorry about that,” she said. “I died, but I got better.”
Kenway chuffed hoarse laughter.
Robin gasped. “Where’s Marina?”
“What?” he asked. “You know—”
“No! No! I saw her! In there! I saw her; she was in Middle-Earth or some shit, with a goat-man. I saved her. Ereshkigal found us and I used her power against her to bring us back to life. The cow told me not to do it, but I did it. I guess in Heaven it’s illegal to steal magic.”
“The cow told you?” asked Gendreau.
Body screaming, bones aching, she rolled to her hands and knees and stood, scanning the tarmac. “Where is she? Please tell me she made it back.”
To their credit, every single person there looked around.
“I don’t—” Elisa began. “She’s not here.”
Oh, no, thought Robin, her heart dropping in despair. After all that, she didn’t make it. “I didn’t do it right.” Balling her fists against her eyes, she fought dual urges to shriek and weep. She’d wasted her only golden ticket.
A chunk of stone lay nearby, dislodged from the tarmac.
Snatching it up, she pitched it across the wasteland and loosed a singular, throat-shredding scream of rage.
* * *
Loading Robin into the back of Elisa’s truck, they drove up the runway to look for whatever remained of Santiago’s transfigured form. “Stop here,” she said through the back window as they neared the street where the battle had taken place. She could already smell the bitter, sour stench that accompanied the grotesque tar gushing out of Santiago’s wounds, a foul reek somewhere between burnt hair and long-spoiled food.
“Why are we stopping?” asked Carly. “Where’s my dad?”
“Don’t know what we’re going to find, and you deserve to remember him the way he was,” said Robin, moving stiffly. Her injuries had been mended by the resurrection, but she was still a mass of aches and pains. Having a human form, even partially, wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. “The relic in his motorcycle really changed him, and it wasn’t a good change. Things got a little crazy at the end. There is no Santiago, not anything that you would recognize.”
The teenager met Elisa’s worried eyes.
“Might be a good idea, hon,” said Elisa, digging around behind the seat. She came up with a flashlight, a heavy police skull-cracker. “Stay here in the truck, and I’ll go check it out.”
Rain continued to fall as Robin, Elisa, and Navathe got out and trudged down a dark, narrow alleyway, blurring Robin’s eyes and turning the truck’s headlights into clusters of white circles. She examined her belly as she walked. The gashes where she’d been gored had sealed over; unfortunately, the demonic carapace over the wound didn’t re-form, leaving a hole in the armor over her chest about the breadth of her finger, surrounded by hairline cracks. So, that’s how it works, she thought. My heart. That’s my kryptonite. She made a mental note to buy a bulletproof vest. Adapt and overcome, indeed. Man, Fish, you didn’t know just how right you were.
When they emerged from the alley, Navathe clapped a hand over his mouth and made a hoarse gagging noise. The pyromancer just managed to stagger over the sidewalk before he vomited into the scraggly landscaping.
Foul-smelling black slime heaped in the middle of the street like blood pudding. Swimming in it were monstrous tangles of shaggy limbs and bones, scraps of matted fur, mounds of ropy gray innards. Dozens of misshapen skulls floated in the ooze, some of them sporting three eyes or split palates.
“What the hell?” said Elisa, her voice shaking. “Looks like a tannery’s been using this place as a dump.”
“In the end, he couldn’t figure out what animal to Transfigure into,” said Robin. “So, he became all of them.”
“This is what’s left of my brother?”
“I’m sorry.”
At first, she couldn’t figure out the watermelon-sized object lying at the edge of the scene.
La Reina’s gas tank.
Since removing the teratoma—and thus Ereshkigal’s power—from inside it, the tank had become a corroded shell, as if some giant cicada had shed its husk and left it there. No doubt the rest of the motorcycle had followed suit as well; by the time they made it back to town, the Enfield would just be a pile of rusty parts and bald tires.
“Never shot anybody before today,” Elisa said forlornly, looking up at them. She panned the flashlight back and forth over the grisly remains. The undercast gave her a ghastly, stricken appearance. “Ain’t like the movies, is it?”
“No,” said Robin. “It isn’t.”
As soon as the words left her mouth, a hand reached out of the slime and clutched Navathe’s ankle.
He gave a shrill scream and jumped straight up in the air, doing an uncoordinated bicycle kick, and ran in the opposite direction, shoving his way through a barracks door, swearing the entire time.
Peering down at the muck, Robin and Elisa were shocked to find a human body, covered in blood and slime.
The figure drew ragged breath.
“Marina?” gasped Elisa, flinging the rifle into the weeds. She knelt to grab the woman’s hands, Robin took Marina by the arm, and together they pulled her away from the swamp-smelling carnage, depositing her on her back. She was completely naked, her modesty preserved only by a thick sludge of gore.
As the worsening rain washed her face, Carly’s mother gazed up at the sky. “Where—where am I?”
“Texas,” said Robin.
Marina blinked, as Elisa helped her to her feet and took off her own jacket, wrapping it around the newly reincarnated woman.
“I think I’d rather have gone to Hell,” she said, matter-of-factly.
* * *
As soon as Elisa pulled into the driveway, her girlfriend Isabella came charging out of the kitchen door, shouting obscenities in Spanish. “Where the hell have you been?” Her black eye had turned a jaundiced yellow-green. “Christ,
I’ve been worried sick!” As Robin climbed out of the back of Elisa’s truck, Isabella went quiet, her eyes widening.
“Buenos días!” said the horned, blood-slimed witch-hunter.
“Uhh, buenos días.”
Isabella pulled her house robe tighter.
“Mi nombre es Robin, y estoy en una biblioteca.” One corner of Robin’s mouth quirked up in a half-smile. “Sorry, my Spanish is a little rusty.”
Isabella’s eyebrows shot straight up. “Uh … huh,” she said, and turned to Elisa as she and Navathe got out of the truck. Robin and Rook helped a one-legged Kenway out of the back. “What is going on? Who are these people?”
“They’re…” Elisa searched their faces. “New friends, I guess.”
Isabella stared at Robin’s jet-black left hand and the horns jutting from her forehead. “What is she wearing?”
“Long story,” said the witch-hunter. “If you got some coffee on and a bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol, I can tell it to you.”
Track 40
Despite the coffee, Robin dozed off in the middle of her story about the battle with Santiago and the ensuing visit to the bizarre in-between land called Cosmotelluria, and slept for three and a half days.
Track 41
She woke up voraciously hungry and thirsty on the afternoon of the fourth day. Kenway sat in a wheelchair by her side the entire time, administering what liquids he could manage, which mostly consisted of squeezing a water-soaked rag into her mouth. Being a registered nurse, Isabella dug up a packet of saline solution and was gearing up to hydrate her with an IV when Robin opened her eyes.
She was hungry, but she was relieved by how normal it was. How human. The kind of hunger that begs for burritos, chicken chow mein, hamburgers, pizza, not entire civilizations. That demonic need to destroy and devour was gone.
“Afternoon, Rip Van Winkle,” said Kenway, smiling.
Behind him, the TV was on and women were yelling at each other in hushed volumes. Robin lay on the sofa, and they had pushed the coffee table against the entertainment center to make room for Kenway’s wheelchair.