Malus Domestica (56 page)

“Heinrich Hammer, whose real name—or I should say, his previous legal name—is Henry Atterberry, was once a member of our organization, the Order of the Dog Star. We’re a society of practicing magicians, and proudly count a great number of famous, influential, and affluent individuals among our members.”

“She said as much,” said Robin. “So, your basic secret world-governing cult, right? You’re the Illuminati, aren’t you?”

“Not so much. We’re more like…the Avengers.”

She snorted grimly.

“Too precious?” smirked Gendreau. “The U.N. of magic, then.”

“A tribunal.”

“Nothing so barbaric.” He produced a folded piece of paper from his jacket pocket and handed it to her. She unfolded it and found a black-and-white sketch of the Osdathregar, in high resolution. “I’m here because you and he have something that belongs to us.”

She’d been carrying the dagger for the better part of two years, but until she’d seen this flat, super-contrast rendition of it, she’d never noticed how very Nordic and austere the dagger was.

Hollywood had conditioned her to expect the eldritch and the ornate: a wavy flambergé silhouette with a pewter skull hilt, cord-wrapped handle, and a spike for a pommel, a Gil Hibben monstrosity from a catalog. But the real Osdathregar was a simple main-gauche with a gently tapering blade a little wider than a stiletto. The hilt was a sideways diamond, the handle was wrapped in leather, and the pommel was only a brass onion-bulb. The diamond of the hilt contained a small hollow, and engraved inside the hollow was a scribble that, according to Heinrich, meant “purifier” in the Avestan language.

Sitting here in this hospital bed, staring at this drawing, Robin felt as if she had drifted out of the shallow end of the pool and now a deep darkness had materialized underneath her.

“We’ve been trying to find his place in Texas for several years now, and searching for you for about a year, ever since you started posting videos of your exploits to YouTube.” Gendreau’s grin displayed the toothy canines of a meat-eating man. “You’re a hard woman to track down, living on the road like that. We knew where you’d been, thanks to your videos, on about a week delay, but we never knew where you were heading.”

The toothy grin faded. “But that’s no matter now, is it? Here you sit in front of me, and here I sit, and this is the end of the line.”

“How did you finally,
finally
find me?”

“Your videos indicated that you were in Blackfield. From there it was a simple matter of going to your childhood home in Slade township. But when I got there last night, you were being carried away.” Gendreau sat back and leveled the black cane across his knees. “All that blood…I decided it wasn’t in either of our best interests to interrupt your trip to the hospital.”

“Why didn’t you try to contact me through my YouTube channel? Or my Facebook? Or my Twitter?”

Gendreau glanced at the TV, sighed, and said to her, “We’ve emailed you several times, to no avail. I figured Heinrich had poisoned you against us.”

The shaft of his cane was made out of a twisting dark shape that seemed organic, but not very wooden at all. The head was a pearl the approximate size of a billiard ball.

He smiled. “Admiring my cane?”

“It’s…different.”

“It’s made out of the penis of an Indian bull.” He raised it until it pointed straight up in the air, and Robin couldn’t help but draw the obvious parallel. “Which makes it an apt magical conduit. The pearl contains a heartstone, a
libbu-harrani
drawn from the breast of a witch in Philadelphia, 1796. The pearl was formed around it, in the mouth of a giant clam.”

Robin wondered if she could close Gendreau’s heart-road if she touched the cane. She probably could. But in this state, the man would make short work of her if she tried.

She folded the paper and gave it back. “I assume you’re here for the Osdathregar.”

“Among other things.”

“I don’t have it.”

“That much is obvious. I assume Heinrich has it, wherever he’s hiding.”

A pack of cheese crackers lay on the bedside table; she picked it up and tore it open with her teeth, taking out one of the crackers and gingerly breaking it in half.

“He’s not hiding, as far as I know.” She bit the half-cracker into a quarter, which satisfied a deep neurotic need for order she didn’t know she’d been craving until she did it. Then she ate the third quarter. “He’s still with the witches. He could be dead, for all I know, and good riddance. Lying bastard.” It felt good to have new hate for someone inside of her, a freshly-stoked fire in her chest. The cold, desultory determination she’d felt for Marilyn had dwindled over the last five years to a dull ache.

But now she had a new face to want to punch. It was a driving, satisfying need that gave her an edge. “That’s too bad.” Gendreau stood the cane on the floor. “That means Marilyn Cutty’s coven is now in possession of the Osdathregar. It may very well be beyond our grasp now.”

“You
can’t go get it?”

The magician’s sleek, vulpine smile reappeared, but this time it was tinged with regret. “Cutty is quite powerful, even by herself, nevermind the fact that she’s got two coven-mates and a Matron. With the Osdathregar the danger would only be moderately lessened. Assaulting her property would be like attacking the White House with a salad fork.”

“What if I told you I killed her middling coven-mate last night with my bare hands?”

“I’d call you a liar. Not only that, but a
damn
liar.”

She corrected herself. “Well, with
this
hand.” She held up her right fist. “As you can see, I seem to have misplaced my other one.”

The magician wheezed a chuckle. “So you have. At any rate, beside the fact that you can only kill a witch by pinning her down with the Osdathregar and burning her to ashes, the youngest member of her coven has almost a century on you.”

“Theresa LaQuices had transformed into a huge boar-monster and attacked me and the people I was with, and bit off my arm. Before I passed out, I grabbed the witch’s nose like this,” Robin said, and pinched the rim of her nostril, “and somehow I managed to draw the power out of her and close the
libbu-harrani
inside her. I didn’t let go until she was back to normal again, and then my friend Kenway blew her brains out.”

“Bullets don’t work on them—” began Gendreau.

“This time it did.” Robin bit the other cracker-half and chewed. “I think closing the heart-road turned her human again for a few min—”

She stared.

She had. She really
had
turned Theresa human again, there at the end, hadn’t she? She’d closed the witch’s heart-road and reverted her.
Holy shit.
“So that’s how he…”

Gendreau openly boggled at her. “The ritual Heinrich gave to your mother all those years ago,” he said, his words coming out in a breathless murmur, “your mother was…
taken
by Andras, wasn’t she?”

“Yes.” Robin’s lips were numb with epiphany, and so was her hand. “And I’m the offspring of that encounter.”

“The demon closed your mother’s
libbu-harrani
and made her human again, and that’s when he got her with child.
You’re
that child. And you’ve got that, that…
way,
that talent of devouring their power, don’t you?” The man shifted uneasily, his eyes wide and staring. “So
that’s
why Heinrich gave the ritual to your mother. He wasn’t trying to bring Andras into the material world, he knew he couldn’t do that. By God, he was trying to bring
you
into it.”

“He
engineered
my entire existence?” she demanded. “Why? Why would he do that?”

Anger flared in her chest. Absentmindedly, Robin reached up to rub at the padding over her stitches again, trying to quell the constant itching that had flowered there since last night. The pain underneath was monumental (especially here on the back-end of a dose of Percocet), but it was nothing compared to the phantom-limb itching.

“To buy his way back into the Order.” Gendreau leaned forward. “We assumed that he was trying to replicate what got him drummed out of the Order to begin with: summoning a demon and using it against the witches.” He cleared his throat politely, pointedly,
ahem.
“We have rules about trying to conjure demons, as you can imagine. Fully summoning a demon into the material plane for that specific purpose would be like wiping all of Europe off the face of the planet with nuclear bombs…just to get rid of Italy.”

“But he figured out how to use a demon to craft a secret weapon that would make it through the barrier.” Robin gave a shallow, petulant sigh. “Me. Annie was his Trojan horse, his drug mule, to get
me
into the material plane.”

“Exactly. He knew the—”

“No.” She glared at him. Robin knew what he was about to say, and she knew better. She knew
Heinrich
better. “He
hoped.
He didn’t know for sure. My mother was his guinea pig. The demon could have just killed her, and he would have found someone else to manipulate.”

Gendreau went quiet. He swallowed, smoothing his tie down his chest. As she watched him fidget (so unlike her first impression of him), she realized that he was anxious. Afraid of her?

“You are … a cambion,” he said, finally, with a grim, revelatory wonder.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a very old word for a being that’s half human and half demon.”

He cleared his throat and leaned forward, his head sinking and his eyes closing as if reaching back in time. Then he looked up at the ceiling, and at Robin. “Enfans des demons. ‘Cambion’ is a word, I hear, for the term ‘changeling’; it was first published in the 1818 Dictionnaire Infernal, and stems from the Celtic root
kamb,
meaning ‘crooked’.”

Robin frowned. Crooked? As if she didn’t have it bad enough this week. As if she weren’t crooked enough already, with her candy-van and her YouTube channel.

She didn’t think she would ever stop thinking of that word. ‘Crooked’. Time passed while she stared at her duvet and Gendreau simply sat there, quietly, doing nothing but staring at her. She supposed he was allowing her to absorb and internalize what he’d told her. The academic, self-satisfied expression on his face—like some haughty tenured professor that’s successfully gotten his idiot students to work through some moderately difficult equation—made her want to whop him in the chin.

She sighed. “So now what?”

“It appears that the ball is now in your court, cambion. Perhaps you can go after Cutty yourself, and retrieve the dagger.”

She already knew she would be going back to the Lazenbury to rescue Leon Parkin, free her mother from the apple tree, and satisfy her curiosity as to whether Heinrich Hammer was still alive (and if so, make him pay for what he did to her).

But something told her that the Order’s imperative against demons might extend to her.

“I meant with
you.”
She ate the last quarter of the cracker for no other reason than that she had grown tired of looking at it. “You said your people have a thing against summoning demons. I thought secret occultist societies were into that kind of thing.

“For that matter, why
do
you hunt witches, anyway? Aren’t you guys like this?” she asked, twining her index and middle fingers together.

Gendreau shook his head. “The Order of the Dog Star has come a long way since Aleister Crowley’s death. His Thelemic Society splintered into a dozen disparate factions, some following the path of White, some following the paths of Black and Red magic. The Dog Star is one of White and light.”

“Ah.” Something told her that his occult Justice League wasn’t as virtuous as he made it out to be, but she didn’t interrupt.

“It was once a dark collective called the Aster Argos after Crowley’s Castle of the Silver Star, until my grandfather Francis Gendreau ascended to a leadership position in 1964. The Aster Argos became a White organization called the Order of the Dog Star and dedicated itself to the dissolution and eradication of fell magic.”

Folding the cellophane over the rest of the cheese crackers, Robin put them back on the bedside table. “But what does that mean for me?” she asked, picking crumbs off the duvet and folding them up into the napkin from lunch.

“What does that mean for you as far as being part demon, you mean.”

She nodded, not looking up.

Gendreau sighed. “I expect I’ll need to consult with the others and see what they say.” He studied her at length. “As for what
I
think…if it were entirely up to me, as soon as the Osdathregar is back in our hands, I would leave you alone and let you go back to what you were doing. You seem to be getting on pretty well to me.
Damn
well, honestly.

“In hindsight, I suspect it’s because of your demon heritage. You’ve probably been sipping at their essences without knowing it these past two years, growing stronger with every kill, the demon side of you unconsciously nibbling at their heart-roads. It’s probably why you’re sitting up and cracking jokes two days after your arm was bitten off by a monster.” The corner of his mouth rose in a half-smile. “Didn’t that seem strange to you?”

After the last few days, it was hard to pick out what was the strangest, and sitting up watching cheesy horror movies on AMC the day after amputation surgery seemed like the least strange of all.

Robin stared at the Macbook sitting open in front of her, trying to process all this new information. She’d been keeping her mind busy with video-editing all afternoon, but now there was no way to block it out of her head. The pieces of the last two years—hell, her entire
life
—were coming together and creating a great jagged-edged puzzle picture.

So this is who I am,
she thought.

That was a liberating revelation to be sure, to finally find her identity buried at the bottom of the toybox of life. She rubbed the padding on her shoulder again. It felt like she had ants under her skin, which did not bode well under these circumstances. She hoped Karen Weaver wasn’t screwing with her in some long-distance bid to drive her out of town.

“I’ll do my best to convince the Order to leave you alone,” said Gendreau. “It may help to introduce you to them, and allow them to see how—
ahem
—relatively harmless you are. You’re no rampaging monster, I can see that as plain as the nose on my face.”