The Hellion

by S. A. Hunt

  “Afternoon?” She blinked. “How long did I sleep?”

  “Almost four days.”

  “Wow.”

  She examined herself. No change in her appearance in the intervening time; the only parts of her that were fully human were her legs, right arm, right shoulder, and head; her left arm and torso were still sheathed in the chitinous black exoskeleton.

  “Damn.” Her stomach growled.

  “What?”

  “Had hoped all this would be gone,” she said, tapping the thumb and fingers of her left hand together like castanets, producing a solid knocking sound. Her left hand was a wicked-looking gauntlet, with segmented fingers. A ridge of crags crossed her knuckles.

  “We’ll fix it,” said Kenway. “We’ll fix it, baby. We’ll find another Transfiguration relic and you can pick up where you left off.”

  “I guess.”

  “Now that you’re up, I don’t guess you need this after all,” said Isabella, holding up the IV needle and saline packet. “Sounds like you’re hungry. Lunch should still be warm, if you want some.”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Good thing you woke up,” said Kenway. “She couldn’t find a vein on you, so I was going to have to administer the saline … the other way.”

  “Up my nose with a rubber hose?”

  “Anal. Uhh, anally.”

  “You were going to squirt saltwater up my ass?”

  “Last-ditch hydration technique. They teach it to every combat medic from here to Timbuktu. If it’s stupid and it works,” he said, turning his wheelchair around, “it’s not stupid.”

  “Talk about a way to end a long, hard day. Kick back with a nice ocean colonic.” Robin raised up into a cloud of dizziness and sat there with her forehead in her hands, listening to the telenovela, only understanding every third word. The carbon spikes jutting out of her forehead were still there, between her fingers.

  “Got a hangover?” asked Kenway.

  “A little bit.”

  Even though the only light was the sun filtering through a set of venetian blinds, the room seemed too bright. Elisa and Isabella’s living room was cozy, with wood paneling and lots of cutesy figurines and religious paraphernalia. “Ah, shit,” she said, staring at a dazzlingly busy portrait of the Virgin Mary. “What do these folks think about having a demon with horns sleeping on their couch?”

  “Elisa hasn’t been here much. She’s been helping Navathe, Gendreau, and Rook get our stuff out of the Winnebago. I’m going to have it towed to Jake’s garage and sell it to him for parts and scrap. Now, Isabella, she … she’s cordial enough, I guess, but she doesn’t seem to want to get near you. She wanted me to stick you.”

  “So sorry your RV got fucked up.”

  “Our RV.” Kenway squeezed her left hand. She could barely feel it through the carbon armor.

  “Yeah, but you bought it for me.”

  He shrugged. “Shit happens.”

  “It does.” She rubbed her face, wringing her mouth. “It happens to me a lot. And now that we’re a thing, it’s going to happen to you a lot, too.” Robin’s eyes met his. “You almost died back there. In the clubhouse. Because of me.”

  “But I didn’t.”

  “You almost did. I thought you did.”

  “But I didn’t.”

  She sighed in exasperation, staring into his eyes.

  “Shit happens,” he reiterated.

  Standing up, she unfolded her stiff limbs and stretched, her back crackling in satisfaction. “Have you eaten yet?” she asked, pulling Kenway backward and turning him into the kitchen.

  “No, not yet today.”

  Pulling a chair out from under the kitchen table, Robin eased his wheelchair up under the edge and sat across the corner from him. Her armored back clattered against the wooden chair, and Isabella flinched subtly at the noise but didn’t say anything as she put plates of lukewarm spaghetti and garlic bread in front of them.

  “Thank you,” Robin told her. “For everything.” She picked at her food. “For letting me crash here for almost a week. For not … for not being upset at me over what happened with Santiago.”

  “You don’t have to be worried about me,” said Isabella, pointing to the yellow ring around her eye where her erstwhile brother-in-law had punched her in the face. “He was an asshole. Don’t know if he deserved to die, but he was due for an ass-beating, at least. Things played out how they played out, though.” The hard expression on her face softened. “What happened out there?”

  “The thing in his motorcycle twisted him into something that wasn’t human anymore,” said Robin. “Dunno that he would have ever been human again after that. He already had a screw loose, I think, but La Reina took all his screws out and then put his batteries in backwards.”

  “Elisa,” Isabella said, “she might be a different story. He was her brother by blood. I don’t know how she feels.”

  Robin’s heart sank.

  “Haven’t seen much of Carly. She went back to school the next day, though I didn’t think it was a good idea. Doesn’t come home after. Doesn’t go to the mall with the other kids. I think she doesn’t like the mall; she associates it with her father, maybe. Marina running away to the mall with her, y’know, when Santiago—” Isabella cut herself off, going to the fridge. “What do you like to drink? I have Sprite, tea, Dr. Pepper…”

  “I’ll take a Dr. Pepper,” said Robin, twirling spaghetti around her fork.

  As soon as the food hit her tongue, that was all she wrote. Wolfed it down like it was her last day on death row, fork in one hand, garlic bread in the other. Isabella sat across from them and ate a bowl of ice cream.

  Looked like fudge ripple. From time to time, Robin caught her looking at the horns.

  “How is she?”

  “Marina?” Isabella sighed. “Quiet. Serene, you might say, oddly enough.”

  “She knows what’s on the other side now.”

  “So you say. She hasn’t said much. Said it was nice. Says she’s not afraid of death anymore.” Isabella stopped eating, staring down into the bowl. “It’s a bit scary, to be honest.”

  “She doesn’t mean she wants to die,” said Robin.

  “I know.”

  A car pulled into the driveway, crunching across gravel. A few minutes later, Gendreau, Navathe, Rook, and Elisa came in through the carport door.

  “Miss Martine!” cried the curandero, hugging Robin. “You’re awake!”

  “I’m awake.” She squeezed him with her human arm.

  “Got just about everything out of the Winnebago,” said Navathe, holding up Walmart bags full of what looked like camera gear and toiletries. “State trooper came along as we were cleaning it out and gave us a hand. We gave him the canned food that wasn’t ruined so he could take it down to the homeless shelter in Lockwood. Jake’s going to tow the Winnebago to his garage and scrap it.”

  “What’d he say about the mess Tuco left on the front of the RV? The blood and guts.”

  “Told him we hit a deer.”

  “What’d he say about that?”

  “‘Musta been a hell of a deer!’”

  “Luckily, he didn’t ask where the deer went,” said Kenway.

  “No, we had already gotten the swords and gun stuff out and put it away the day before,” said Gendreau. “Some of that might not have been one hundred percent legal, I think.”

  The carport door opened again and Carly stepped in, her bookbag slung over her shoulder. As soon as she saw them all gathered around the kitchen table, she paused. Her eyes danced across their faces.

  “What?” she asked coldly.

  Elisa glanced at the clock on the wall. “It’s a quarter to two, honey. School doesn’t let out ’til three. What are you doing home so early?”

  “I got sick.”

  “Sick?” Alarm lit up Elisa’s face. “Are you okay?”

  “Not that any of you would give a fuck,” said Carly, giving them all one last smoldering glare.

&nb
sp; “Carlita!” blurted Isabella.

  The teenager marched out of the room. A few seconds later, the guest bedroom door slammed shut.

  Everybody stood stock-still, searching each other’s faces for quiet answers, or perhaps permission to speak again. “She’s upset about her parents,” said Robin, her stomach settling heavy.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do.” Elisa fidgeted with the wax fruit in the centerpiece of Isabella’s table. “I don’t know shit about teenagers, much less one that just lost one of her parents, and the other parent is on the verge of joining a convent.”

  “Especially when the one that killed her father is sitting in the kitchen, eating spaghetti,” said Robin. The food in her mouth, as much as she wanted it, had lost all taste. She got up. “Where is she?”

  “Marina?” asked Isabella.

  Robin nodded.

  “Out back.”

  * * *

  Toasted grass and hardpan dirt crunched under Robin’s feet as she slipped out the back and eased the screen door shut. Isabella’s back lawn wasn’t big, but with nothing in it and the merciless Texas sun beating down, it seemed a mile wide. Desiccated sticks jutted out of a brick-lined garden off to one side.

  In the shade of a desert willow, Marina Valenzuela sat in a rickety lawn chair. Half a glass of lemonade sweated in one hand. She squinted in the sun, bereft of sunglasses.

  “Hey,” said Robin, approaching.

  “Buen día,” said Marina.

  “Hot day.”

  No response. Carly’s mother stared at the back of the house, or maybe nothing at all. Robin sat next to her, plopping down on the spiky brown grass. Occasionally, Marina would clear her throat, or sigh, or close her eyes for a moment, but for the most part, she just focused on the middle distance.

  To Robin, it looked like shell shock. “You doing okay?”

  “Sure,” Marina said, a bit listlessly.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  This time, Robin had no response.

  “You did what you thought you needed to do,” said Marina. “You were right. You made a promise, to me and my daughter. Bringing me back here was the only way to honor that promise.”

  “She—”

  “Yes.” Marina sipped at the lemonade. Ice tinkled against glass. “She needs me. I know. That is why I’m here.”

  Definitely something missing, thought Robin, giving her a sidelong look. She couldn’t help but experience a guilty sort of regret as she watched the woman space out. Had it really been necessary to drag her out of the Matrix-pod of her own personal paradise and force her back into this hot, stupid, unfair world?

  Yes. It had been. Marina had been lost before her time. She still had money on her meter, so to speak. Now, if she’d died of old age … that would have been different, right?

  Right?

  “Is this what it’s like?” asked Marina. “For, como se dice, near-death experience? To see heaven, and to experience it, and come back to the real world?”

  A lone cricket chirped somewhere in the bushes.

  “I feel like—” Marina peered into her lemonade as if the words she needed were in there. “I feel like I won the lottery and then I had to give it all back, every penny.”

  Robin winced.

  “And now I am a ghost.”

  Welcome to the club.

  “I am La Llorona, come to life. I am a heartbroken spirit forced to wander the earth, crying for something she cannot have.”

  Some fire in Robin’s chest ignited—adrenaline, not hellfire—and she got stiffly to her feet, standing over the other woman. “No. You’re not going to do this. I didn’t drag you back here, in the face of Hell and defiance of two gods, so you could mope around and wait to die again.”

  Marina looked up, vaguely startled.

  “You are in the prime of your life, Marina. Live it the best you can,” Robin continued. “I got that albatross Santiago off your neck; now make sure I didn’t waste my time, and go out there and make something of the time you have left. And take care of your little girl while you’re at it. She still needs you—she’ll always need you. Now you know what’s waiting for you when you get to that finish line, but for right now, you need to get your fucking feet on the ground and stop pining for the fucking fjords. Live fearlessly if that’s your jam, but live. Or do I need to kick your ass, too?”

  Sitting straighter in her ancient lawn chair, Marina poured the remnants of her lemonade on the ground and held the glass in both hands. Seemed as if she were hugging herself. With suddenly haunted eyes, she said, “That thing at the bottom of the whirlpool.”

  “The supernatural asswipe in charge of all the witches I’ve been hunting down,” said Robin. “She wants to drag me into Hell. And my demon daddy is probably down there waiting for me.”

  Marina went back to staring into space.

  For a moment, Robin was afraid she’d retreated into herself again, but then she produced a pair of big Jackie Onassis sunglasses and slipped them onto her face. “If that terrible creature down there is what waits for bad people—I am going to live my life so that I never have to go to Hell and see her again.” Marina took a deep breath through her nose, held it, let it out, and stood from the chair. “I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.”

  “Lovely,” said Robin. “Is that a quote?”

  “Willa Cather, in her book Death Comes for the Archbishop.”

  “Had no idea you were so literary.”

  “Never really went to church. Disculpame pero, God never did much for me. But books, they can save you in ways religion can’t. They can give you strength, teach you, give you a place to go when the world is too much. I wanted Carly to have that refuge too, so I always made sure she could go to the library and that our home always had books.”

  “I’ve read a lot of books,” Robin noted, as they walked across the dead lawn to the house. “Reference books. History books, occult stuff. Never really did it for fun. Not since I was a kid.”

  “Maybe this is the time to start.”

  She thought about it, holding the door open for Marina.

  “Their rock was an idea of God,” said the woman with a wan smile, quoting Willa Cather again. “The only thing their conquerors could not take from them.”

  Track 42

  “We’ll be back later today,” Kenway said, crutching out the door of their motel room six days later. It was the day of his VA appointment to get fitted for a new prosthetic leg. Gendreau had elected to go with him in Robin’s place, since she didn’t exactly want to sit in a clinic waiting room, decked out like a demonic Stormtrooper. “Try not to get in a fight with a gang of vampires while I’m gone.”

  A pale blue dawn settled over their heads, making the world cold and watery and weak. Robin’s “tactically acquired” Harley-Davidson stood in the parking lot next to the magicians’ car. Robin wore a light jacket, T-shirt, and jeans over her armor carapace. Part of her wished she’d gotten rid of the horns while she had a chance, but hindsight’s twenty-twenty, ain’t it?

  “Vampires aren’t real.”

  “Neither were werewolves.”

  “Don’t worry,” she told him with a kiss. “Just going to sit in the room. Watch movies and eat. When you get back, I’ll be in a food coma.” She helped him into the car and slipped his crutch into the back seat. Shutting the door, she gave him a kiss. “Love you.”

  “Love you too, babe.”

  She rested her hands on the windowsill and looked him in the eyes. “I love you very, very much, Kenway Griffin,” she said as sincerely as possible. “You know that?”

  His smirk turned to puzzlement. “I love you very, very much too.”

  “Be back as soon as we can,” said Gendreau. The magician started the car and the radio came on, droning some nameless country song. As the car backed away, she blew Kenway another kiss, and his eyebrows furrowed.

  Then the moment was gone. Gendreau drove up to the
highway, put on his blinker, and pulled into morning traffic. Robin sighed and went back inside, where she sat and finished her breakfast as Rook lay on the bed reading the news on her phone.

  The MacBook had sustained visible damage in the Winnebago crash; the bottom plate was warped and the screen was loose, but otherwise, it still worked. As she gathered all the equipment she thought she could fit into her saddlebags, she made a mental note to stop by an Apple store somewhere.

  As for the Osdathregar, Robin had cut the twine binding the spear head to the broomstick, making it a simple dagger once again, so that it would fit in the Harley’s bags. Belatedly, she kicked herself for not thinking to ask the cow-god if she knew anything about the weird dagger-spear-thing, the supernatural ice, and the fact that it turned her into a monster.

  Rook looked up from her phone. “What are you doing?”

  “Packing my stuff.” She thought about adding a smart-ass remark, but thought better of it.

  “Are you leaving?”

  “Yes.”

  “Without us? Without Kenny?”

  “Yes.”

  Rook stood up from the bed and dragged the bag Robin was packing out of her hands, clutching it against her thighs, looking uncharacteristically vulnerable. “What for?” she asked, staring into Robin’s face. One arm was pinned to her chest with a sling; the explosion under the Blue Wolf had torn her rotator cuff.

  “Thinking of taking Doc G’s advice. Ending the YouTube videos and starting up a podcast. With a cat and a Keurig. Wanna be my co-host?”

  “That’s not what I asked you.”

  Reclaiming her bag, Robin sighed and focused on rolling up clothes. “He almost died because of me. Because he’s with me. And then back there on that runway…” She looked up, her throat tightening. “The pain on that man’s face, Rook. His heart wasn’t just broken; it was shattered.” Her eyes burned, threatening tears. “I don’t ever want to see that again. It will kill me so hard, nothing will be able to bring me back.”