Lunchtime traffic shushed past as Robin and Kenway ushered Joel onto the front porch of a bungalow-style house, perched on a hill overlooking downtown Blackfield. Through the screen of trees below the house, Robin could see an ocean of rooftops.
Instead of dropping him off, they stopped by to pick up some clean clothes. Kenway didn’t seem to mind playing chauffeur all day; he didn’t have anything better to do, especially since it was a Saturday.
“Hey, you wouldn’t mind checkin’ the place out for me, would you, hero?” asked Joel, unlocking the door.
The veteran looked like a barbarian as he climbed the front steps behind the line cook, six feet of blond hair and muscle crammed into a Powerwolf T-shirt. He moved into the house and stood motionless in the foyer, listening, his fists clenched, his eyes wandering slowly over the old-fashioned decor and flowery wallpaper.
“So is—” began Robin, but Kenway held up a hand.
He checked behind the front door and pulled a baseball bat out of the umbrella stand, but paused in surprise when it sparkled in the sunlight. The business end was covered in fake diamonds. “You Bedazzled a baseball bat?”
Joel shrugged sheepishly.
Shaking his head, Kenway stalked into the living room with the twinkling Slugger, and on into the kitchen. Joel went to his dish drain and pulled out a bread knife. Put the bread knife back, pulled out a silvery hammer. A meat tenderizer.
“You two stay here,” said Kenway, and he left through a doorway.
Robin scowled. “I can take care of myself, Major Dad. I’m probably more dangerous at hand-to-hand than you are. You forget the ass-whooping I gave you so soon? Or the video I showed you?”
“Nobody could forget that,” he replied from the hallway.
“What video?” asked Joel. “I ain’t seen no video.”
“I showed him the video of my first kill—the Witch-King of Alabama.”
“Huh. How many witches you done killed, anyway?”
“About twenty.”
“You killed twen-ty witches. Twennnnnty! Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah.”
She smirked at his impression of the Count. “About twenty. Nineteen, maybe? I’ve kicked the shit out of a lot more people than that, though.”
“You stone-cold, sister.”
As her eyes sank onto the tabletop, Robin saw a plethora of carved graffiti—JOEL, that weird angular S you see everywhere, doodles of cartoon characters, boxes with squiggly lines drawn through them (the impossible puzzle, she realized with a start), and to Robin’s mild surprise, dozens and dozens of algiz runes, a legion of four-lobed Ys.
When she looked up from the madness, she found Joel watching her. He was looking at the algiz rune on her chest, the Y with the extra lobe in the middle.
“What is that?” asked Joel.
“Protective rune from the Elder Futhark alphabet. Together with certain incantations, the Vikings used it to shield themselves and their homes from witches. It’s kind of a supernatural bulletproof vest. Witches use symbols like this to channel and catalyze their Gift. It don’t imbue me with any powers.”
“Gift?”
“Their power. That’s what they call it. They don’t like callin’ it magic, and I don’t either.” She noticed herself code-switching back into their country-talk again. At’s what tey call it. Ayon’t like callin’ it magic, ’n Ion’t either. Normally the twang only came out when her blood was up and she was facing down a witch, but around Joel it was like speaking a second language.
“Why not?”
“Magic is,” she began, “something wizards and magicians do in fantasy movies and on stages in Vegas, you know? Magic is … David Copperfield and David Blaine. Card tricks, cutting women in half, pulling rabbits out of hats, kids’ birthday parties. I don’t like callin’ it magic. After seeing how evil and dark it is, I don’t like associating it with my mother Annie, even if it takes pedantry to separate and distance her from what the witches like the Lazenbury coven do. Yeah, Mom was a witch … and she did some bad things—to me, to others … but that don’t mean she got to be lumped into the same gang.”
“What is this magic, anyway?” asked Joel. “This ain’t no Harry Potter shit, from what I can tell. I ain’t heard nobody hollerin’ about Wingardium Leviosa or ridin’ around on a broom.”
“The acolytes of Ereshkigal—true witches—ain’t so whimsical, and it goes a lot deeper. They channel the essence of the spirit world itself, guiding it with language, and intensifyin’ it with sheer will.” She pointed at the rune on her chest. “Using language to guide it works both ways, fortunately. We can’t produce it like they can, but we can manipulate their energy. Think of their power as a laser, and words and symbols as mirrors and lenses. I can’t create it, but I can bend it.”
“Who is Ereshkigal?”
“The Mesopotamian goddess of death, witchcraft, crossroads, doors, and necromancy. The Greeks called her Hecate. She’s worshipped by modern Wiccans and neopagans. Ereshkigal is the source of all their power.” An ancient white Macbook lay on the table between them. She slid it over and opened it. “You wanna see the video I’m talking about? The Witch-King of Alabama?”
“Does the Pope shit in the woods?”
Robin winced in mock disgust. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
While she waited for the laptop to boot up, Joel opened the fridge and took out a beer, opening it saber-style with a single swipe of the meat tenderizer. He handed the bottle to Robin and opened another one for himself. She turned it up and downed half of it as she waited for YouTube to load. “Where you learn a trick like that?” she asked, and punctuated the question with a bone-rattling belch.
Joel made a face, then sashayed over and stood next to her, so he could see the computer screen. “I ain’t always been a pizza-boy.”
“Anyway,” Robin said, navigating to her video channel, “I was going to say earlier, this is your mother’s house?” She clicked on the Alabama video, turned the resolution up, and waited for it to buffer a bit. The Wi-Fi was slow, so it was going to take a minute. She silently thanked whatever God was up there she didn’t have to upload videos on this line.
“Yep,” said Joel.
With its speckly-green Formica countertops and avocado appliances, the kitchen was a picture-perfect representation of what it must have looked like when Joel and Fish were boys. “My brother Fish don’t like livin’ here, though. That’s why he moved into the back of his comic shop. He says this house remind him too much of Mama.”
“What happened to your mother? You make it sound like it was so bad it made you end up on medication.”
“She was on the anti-psychotics, I was on the anti-depressants.”
“What happened?”
“Your moms happened.”
“What?” Annie? What on earth could she possibly have done to break Joel’s family down the middle? Robin barely remembered them, much less her mother interacting with them enough to cause that kind of damage. “What are you talking about?”
“It was the witches.”
“What would they possibly want with your mother?”
“I don’t mean they put a spell on her or nothing,” Joel continued, “but it was … you know, her knowing they killed your mama Annie, her paranoia about ’em got worse. Night terrors sometimes, maybe three or four times a month. Got worse and worse. She started sleeping in the living room because she didn’t like being in her bedroom—she said there was a ‘man made out of cobwebs’ in her closet—but then she painted the living room windows because she thought somebody was watching her sleep.
“Accused Fish of stealing her money, accused me of stealing from her too. Spoons. She accused me of stealing her fuckin’ spoons. Can you believe that? Anyway, she went batshit at the end. Completely lost her mind. Started lumping Annie in with the witches, said she was afraid of all of ’em. She thought they were gonna cut her tongue like they cut Annie’s.”
“What?” Robin’s brow furrowed. “Ain’t nobody cut Mom’s tongue, she was born that way. Birth defect.” Annie Martine wasn’t the loveliest of women, but her petite Audrey Hepburn frame and heart-shaped face gave her an ethereal, elven quality people couldn’t seem to resist.
In that brutally honest fashion of curious children, Robin had asked her several times over the years why her tongue was the way it was.
Annie gave her a different tale each time. I stuck it out at a crab and he pinched it, she’d say, or I was running with scissors and tripped and, well, snip snip! and sometimes, I tried to kiss a turtle and he bit me, and the last time she claimed she’d stuck it in a light socket. Once Robin had even hauled out her toy doctor bag and asked to examine Annie’s tongue with a magnifying glass. A jagged red scar about an inch long bifurcated the very tip, twisting it.
Most strangers who heard Annie speak assumed she was deaf and spoke loudly to her, carefully enunciating their words. But she was never offended. She dryly looked up at whoever was speaking to her and said, “I’m not deaf,” and then stuck out her tongue. Robin hated the way they would recoil in horror at her twisted scar, but Mama always laughed gaily and carried on as if it were nothing but a bawdy joke.
Joel leaned back against the kitchen counter, folding his arms. “Anyway, my moms wouldn’t even go outside,” he continued. “She developed—what they call it, when you’re afraid of the outdoors?”
“Acrophobia?” Robin squinted. “No, that’s a fear of heights. Agoraphobia, that’s it.”
“Developed agoraphobia. She lived there at the house for about a year, me here taking care of her, and then I eventually had to put her in the home. I couldn’t do it no more.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I’m so glad she didn’t do all that when I was little little—can you imagine how much that would have jacked up a little boy? And she wouldn’t have been in any kind of condition to raise the two of us. There’s no telling where I’d be now.”
Enough of the YouTube video had loaded Robin decided it was time to hit the play button. “Roll that beautiful bean footage,” she said, and … click. However, instead of her first battle, it displayed a black screen and a message: An error occurred. Please try again later.
“What the hell?” She looked up at Joel. “Your Internet is hot garbage.”
He shrugged. “It’s an old house, lady. What do you want from me?”
“Where is your router?”
He shrugged even deeper. “Beats the hell out of me.”
Robin scowled at him.
“Okay, you got me fair and square. I’m stealing Wi-Fi from the guy living behind me. I ain’t got my own Internet. So sue me.”
She made a snarly face at him. “I should,” she mock-threatened, and reloaded the website to try buffering the video again. “Take two. Maybe I can get this to go through before the connection craps out.”
The two of them languished in the stillness, listening to the subtle creaking and popping of Kenway creeping around upstairs.
“He sure is taking a long time,” said Joel.
Robin opened her hands, raising them from the laptop keyboard as if offering her answer as a surprise. “I reckon he’s very thorough when it comes to security. You want him to search this place top to bottom, right? Ain’t no creeps hiding in the closet after we leave.”
Joel shuddered. “Yeah, good point.”
Something shattered upstairs with a crash.
“Sorry,” called Kenway.
Joel’s hand slipped over his face and he pinched the bridge of his nose. His eyes darted around the room as if he were looking for a new topic to gab about, and he gestured with his beer bottle at symbols carved all over the kitchen table. “This algiz Viking thing. Does it work?”
“Not as much as it used to back in the day, but yeah. Why you ask?”
“Because my moms drew it and painted it all over our house. This right here ain’t even half of it. Hundreds of ’em, in every room. Sharpie, paint, ketchup, Nesquik syrup, shit, blood. Muhfuckin’ ants for days. Place stunk. Took ages to clean it all up after she went into the home.”
“Yuck.”
“Does the protection, ahh, does it get more powerful the more you put the symbol on the thing?” he asked, punctuating with that rolling hand-gesture, and so on and so forth. “Like, on your chest, or on your walls? Or—” He made an expansive motion to indicate the symbols carved all over the kitchen table.
“You asking me if it stacks? I don’t know,” said Robin. “Can’t say for sure. Ain’t like there’s scientific tests been done on this stuff. But if it does get more powerful that way, then it sound like you got the safest house in Blackfield.”
“Heh. Wish I could have told her that.”
“You still can.”
“She died in the home a little while after she went in. Massive stroke.”
Reluctant to give him another impotent apology, Robin opted for, “Wish I could have been here to explain things to her, and you, or even just to be there for you. Sound like Fisher wasn’t there in the way you needed him.”
“He thought the whole thing with the witches was bullshit.” Joel scoffed. “Weirdest thing, man, the guy that collects action figures and old fantasy and horror movies, he the one don’t believe in this supernatural stuff. Ain’t that a hot mess? But yeah, he was out of there as fast as his little legs could carry him. Left as soon as he graduated high school, went to college on a football scholarship. Computer stuff. IT, that kind of thing. Now he works from home here in town. Telecommutes.”
“Fancy.”
“Yeah, it’s aight. You’d think he’d get a big-ass house out in the country around here, but no, he lives in a loft apartment over his comic book store. I guess he’s trying to save up all that money he can. He always was the ant type, and me the grasshopper, I guess.”
“What about you?” asked Robin. “Did you go to college?”
“What college? On what scholarship?” Joel gave a genuine laugh. “Nah, after Mr. Barnett, I bounced around town doin’ this and that. Takin’ care of my moms, mostly. Fish helped, at least financially. He picked up what her insurance couldn’t carry. Since I lived in the house with Mama, I didn’t have to pay no rent, so at least I had that goin’ for me.
“Sittin’ up in your little attic bedroom, playin’ with dolls and shit,” said Joel, in a wistful tone. “You prolly played with me more than Fish did. Man, we didn’t have no worries back in them days, did we?”
Robin shook her head, smiling a bittersweet smile.
The video was ready. She hit play, and the sound of her voice floated out of the speakers as her two-years-younger face appeared on the screen. “Been trackin’ this one for weeks.” The two of them stood there in the quiet kitchen, drinking beer and watching her fight Neva Chandler.
“You will die,” the man said again, reaching through her van window, reaching through a window in time, reaching into her chest and clutching whatever nerve governs fear in the human body. “The Red Lord will find you.”
Welcome home.
Robin shivered. Finished her beer, considered going for another one. When the video ended, Joel shook his head and walked away, tossing the beer bottle in the recycling bin.
“What?”
He shook his head again. “I don’t know how you do it.”
“It was hard at first. I had a hard time, in the beginning. Between Heinrich’s brutal training and the blood-curdling paranormal things I saw facin’ the witches, I almost wanted to go back to the mental hospital. I didn’t go completely out of my mind when I was in the loony bin, but the shit I saw, and the shit I had to do, after I got out, it just about broke me.”
Peering into the cabinets as if he were looking for something, Joel busied himself puttering around the kitchen. “I’m so hungry I could eat a farmer’s ass through a park bench.”
“What?”
“I’m so hungry I could eat a knuckle sandwich and go back for the fingers.”
Robin burst out laughing. “Where in the hell did you hear that?”
“Shit my moms used to say. I think she got it from her granddad back in the day.” Finally he found a jar of peanut butter and a half-pack of saltines. “What kinda shit you seen?” Joel asked, sitting back down.
“I met a witch that could go out-of-body and jump into other people’s bodies.”
Joel recoiled. “What? Like Quantum Leap?”
“Yeah. She had to touch them first. It was crazy as hell watchin’ her move through a subway—I met this witch in New York City, by the way—and it was like watching a train full of people do the Wave. Except instead of standing up and raising their hands, these people sitting elbow-to-elbow would turn and look at me one after the other with this creepy, pissed-off look.”
“How did you fight her, sis?” The pizza chef slathered peanut butter on crackers. “How you even fight something like that?”
“I couldn’t attack her directly. She was jumping around inside of innocent people; she abducted kids and puppeteered the innocent hosts, made ’em take the kids to dead-drop points, like out in the industrial parks or in the subway tunnels, and leave them for her coven to retrieve. If I managed to catch her and try to fight her, she would find some way to jump out and leave me standing there ready to beat the shit out of somebody that never even seen me before.” Robin stole one of his crackers and crammed it into her mouth. “What I had to do was, I had to figure out where her original body was at, and kill that.”
“How did you figure that out?”
“I let her kidnap a kid, then I followed her proxy host into the subway system and ambushed the coven when they got there. From there I just had to work my way into the center of the coven’s lair to kill the Matron. Along with three other witches and about two dozen henchmen. My guy Heinrich helped me with that one. He did not appreciate having to walk through sewer water.”
Joel stared at her for a long moment, his eyes studying her face, a half-slathered cracker on the table in front of him.
Finally he said, “I’m glad you’re back in town. It’s like having my sister back. You do feel like the only person I know that truly gets me. And knowing you’re the resident professor on this shit makes me feel a lot better about all of it.”
“I’m glad.” She smiled and stole the cracker. “The more time I spend with you, the more you feel like the brother I never had. I’m glad I came back, even if it was just to reconnect with you.”
Joel shook like he’d gotten a chill and went back to peanut-buttering crackers. “If we keep on with this Hallmark Channel shit, my teeth are gonna rot right out of my head.”
Kenway returned, the Bedazzled ball bat resting on his shoulder.
“The coast is clear,” he said, laying the bat across the table. “Thought I saw somebody. Turned out to be a really big mirror that for some dumbass reason was inside of a goddamn closet.”
“Seven years bad luck, Sergeant Slaughter.” Joel got up and pushed his chair under the table. “And now I’mma go change out these clothes into something a little more me. And … look for a broom to clean up broken glass.”
Kenway winced and mouthed Sorry as he passed.
When he came back downstairs, he was tying a silk do-rag around his head, dragging a cloud of tart perfume. Skinny jeans, black boots, and a spaghetti-strap top. “You should polish your boots,” said Kenway. “I used to wear some like that. I can show you how to spit-polish them so shiny you can see yourself in ’em.”
Joel looked down. “I’ll skip the spit, but I do appreciates ye.”
“So are we gonna go pick up his car by ourselves, or do we want to get a cop to follow us down there?” asked Robin.
“I fear for my car,” said Joel. “Ain’t no tellin’ what he’s done with it. But I fear for myself a little bit more. I think if I’m gonna go knockin’ on a serial killer’s door, I want a trigger-happy cop there with me.”
The officer on duty at the police station took them into the break room and made a cup of coffee while Joel gave him a statement. Kenway and Robin sat at a hand-me-down trestle table from the local school that folded up in the middle and had attached stools.
“So you say he had you tied upside down by your feet,” the cop echoed for clarification.
Lieutenant Bowker was a tall, corn-fed man. The back of his neck cradled his shaved skull in a fat roll. Stirring his coffee, he came over to the table and sat down with a clipboard. “And he had another man tied up there? You say this killer was … collecting blood for a ‘garden’?”
“Yeah.” Joel sat with his fingers templed under his nose. The studs in his ears twinkled in the fluorescents.
“Now, are you sure—” Bowker lifted a sheet of paper to peek underneath, let it fall. “—this wasn’t just some kind of sexual fetish game gone wrong? Maybe things got a little out of hand and maybe you misconstrued the, ahh, the situation, so to speak. I mean, people get roofied all the time, and stuff like this happens. Not to diminish that kind of thing, you know, but, ahh … murder is kind of in a whole ’nother ballpark.”
Joel had already detailed the series of events that led to waking up in the garage—talking to B1GR3D online about dinner and sex, meeting him at his apartment, getting halfway through a steak and passing out.
He closed his eyes as if in restraint, and a few seconds later, opened them. “Yes. I’m more than sure it wasn’t a sex game. There was a man who was dead as shit, and all of his blood was in a plastic bucket. Not a little bit of blood. All of the blood from his body was in the bucket.”
“Now, he, ahh…” Bowker wrote some more. “You said you escaped. How did you ‘escape’? Seems like it would be hard to get out of a hogtie like that. Especially in fuzzy cuffs.”
“I didn’t say the cuffs were fuzzy.”
“Ah, right.” Bowker crossed out some text.
“I squeezed one of my hands out the cuffs—they weren’t put on tight enough—and I got myself down while he was gone.” The cuffs themselves had, in reality, been removed with Kenway’s bolt cutters and were now rusting quietly at the bottom of the Dumpster behind his studio. “I ran through the woods until I got to the road, where Mr. Kenway here found me walkin’ down the highway.”
“What about the other man?” asked Bowker. “The other one that was tied up. You just left him there?”
“He was dead. Nothing I could do.”
“How d’you know?”
“Because his throat was cut.” Joel drew a finger across his neck, and his voice became urgent, exasperated. “Blood was runnin’ up to the top of the man’s head and drippin’ on the motherfuckin’ floor.”
Bowker leaned back warily. “Well now there ain’t no need to get excited, Mr. Ellis.”
“There ain’t—” Joel stopped himself before he could become fully livid, and spoke in measured tones, bracketing each point with his hands. “I almost got killed, and you want to mess around. Ain’t you supposed to protect and serve?” He sat up straight and boggled at some spot on the wall with a dazed look. “Oh, hell. I must’ve forgot where I was at. I’m Black in a got-damn police station.” His eyes focused lasers of sarcasm on Bowker’s pink face. “What was I thinking? Maybe I should’ve kept the cuffs on.”
Adrenaline dripped into Robin’s system at the way this meeting was going.
The officer pursed his lips, flustered, his face darkening. He glanced over at Kenway and the snarling, hooded wolf-man stretched taut across his broad chest. “We ain’t got to go there, Mr. Ellis,” grunted Bowker. “I’m honestly tryin’ to help you in good faith. Now I don’t much care one way or the other what your proclivities are, and I’m real sorry you must have got the wrong idea here.” He twiddled the ink pen between his stubby fingers and went back to writing, his tone hardening, losing that good-ol-boy apathy. “Can you tell me what this man looked like?”
“He had red hair.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah, he was real skinny, had a skinny throat and skinny arms, but he was—he was sinewy, you know? The strong kind of skinny. Big hands.” Joel traced the edge of his jawbone. “Had a real sharp jaw. Nose like a beak, big nostrils. Itty-bitty beady eyes, dark eyes.”
Bowker wrote for a long time, pausing every so often.
“Anything you can tell me about where this man was holding you?” He fidgeted, rubbing his nose, scratching his cheek. “Do you remember any details about where you were detained?”
“Yeah. Yeah … lot of signs and pictures and stuff leaning against the walls. Like, advertising signage. Stuff about Firewater sarsaparilla, a big picture of the Loch Ness—no, I mean, the Creature from the Black Lagoon. I think there was something with a clown. I saw something about Wonderland. Welcome to Wonderland?”
“Weaver’s Wonderland?”
“That’s it.”
Bowker sighed in a way that seemed like dejection to Robin. Or perhaps disappointment. “Sounds like the old fairgrounds out in the woods off the highway.” The pen tapped the clipboard. Reaching up to the radio on his shoulder, he keyed the mike. “Hey, Mike. This is Eric. Can I get a ten-twenty?” They all sat staring at each other expectantly for an awkward moment.
“I just got done with lunch and now me and Opie are uptown goin’ south down Hickman,” said a static-chewed voice. “Ten-eight.”
“Want you to do me a favor.” Bowker examined the clipboard. “We ain’t got a key to the gate out there at the fairgrounds, do we?”
“The city probably does, somewhere, God knows where,” said the radio. “But that don’t stop me from getting out of my cruiser and walking around it. What’s goin’ on?”
“I’m taking a statement from a fella says he escaped from involuntary confinement in that location. He was put there by someone he describes as a serial killer.” Bowker coughed into his fist and keyed his mike again. “I want you to head up there and see if you can find anything shady.”
“Ten-four.”
Bowker sat there, breathing through his teeth and staring at the clipboard. Robin could almost hear his gears grinding. “Okay,” he said, rising up out of his seat and adjusting his patrol belt. “Gonna go get this keyed into the system. I’ll be right back.”
As soon as he left, Joel leaned over to Robin and Kenway. “These redneck-ass small-town cowboys,” he growled under his breath.
Robin hugged herself. The break room was cold, it seemed, colder than the actual October day outside. Must be the slab floor, she thought. “He gon’ send those two cops out there by themselves? To look for a serial killer?”
“He probably ain’t even believe there is a killer. He probably still just thinks it was a—” Joel made air-quotes with his fingers. “—sex game.”
The conversation dwindled into silence, and Robin finished off the last of her coffee, putting the empty cup into a trash can that was already full of garbage. Digging some quarters out of her pocket, she went to the snack machine and browsed the junk food inside.
“How long it take?” asked Joel.
“You know these country boys,” said Kenway, poking at the table with his index fingers. “Hunt and peck typists.”
Bowker stepped into the break room and Kenway looked up from his impersonation of the man’s keyboarding skills, casually leaning back and folding his arms, nothing to see here. The officer paused awkwardly, then sat down and shuffled a stack of papers against the table.
“Okay.” He folded his arms and leaned on his elbows, speaking confidentially. “I’ve got the report filed. You’re on the books.” He twiddled the pen between his forefingers again. “How come it took you so long to come down here and talk to somebody?”
“I don’t know.” Joel sat back and anxiously picked at his fingernails. “Guess I was so freaked out and glad to be away from it, going to the cops didn’t really occur to me.” Of course, he glossed over the necessity of getting Wayne back to his father at the hospital, the explanation of which would have thrown a real wrench into the situation.
“Fair enough.”
“Besides.” Joel pointed at his face. “I’m black and gay. Goin’ to the cops ain’t gon’ be my first instinct.”
Bowker gave it some thought and tapped the pen on the table. “Mr. Ellis, we here don’t discriminate, okay?” He pointed at his own face, to the military haircut. “Now, I may look like Cletus T. Slowboat, third in line at the Asshole Parade, but I want to assure you, you’re as important to me and everybody else here as the next guy.” He glanced at Robin. “Or gal.”
Joel nodded quietly. “Okay.” He bit down on a tight smile. “All right. Aight, we’re cool.”
“Now, you said you met him at his apartment. I’m assuming your vehicle is still over there on the property, if this ‘Big Red’ hasn’t moved it to another location.” Bowker fetched a huge sigh. “What I’m gonna do is, I’m going to follow you-all over there to his apartment and we’re gonna kill two birds with one stone—get your car and see if this fella is at home.”
The closer they got to Riverview Terrace Apartments, the antsier Joel became until he cracked the window and bummed a cigarette off of Kenway. Robin sat in the middle, the twenty-sided-die gearshift between her knees. She reached over and took his hand. “It’s gonna be okay, bro,” she said, smiling. They were shoulder to shoulder. “You’re gonna be safe and you’re gonna get your car back.”
As soon as they came around the corner of the building and started seeing the 400 block, Joel threw his head back and swore in anguish.
Black Velvet was gone.
“I’m not surprised,” said Kenway. “It’s probably at the bottom of Lake Craddock.”
Robin shot him a look, and he winced.
“You better hush your mouth,” Joel told him. “I’d sooner you take the Lord’s name in vain than insinuate somebody’s hurt my baby.” He slipped into a loud and vehement string of curses, his fists clenched. “I just had that sound system put in there. This is some grade-A bullshit.” The truck curved to a stop in front of the 400 block and Bowker’s cruiser slid into a space next to them.
They all got out, except for Joel, who stayed in the Chevy. As soon as Robin shut the door, he locked her out.
The bitter, clean smell of cut grass lingered in the air.
Bowker knocked on Red’s door. “Police.” No answer. He knocked again, this time more insistently. After there was again no answer, he went to the front office to fetch the property manager and get a key. Robin pressed the rims of her hands to the apartment’s window and peered through them, trying to see past the blinds, but they were turned so the cracks between the vinyl slats afforded no visibility at all.
Even though she knew full well the front door was locked, she took hold of the knob and tried to turn it.
(gotta go gotta get out pack it up go go go)
She snatched her hand back.
That was strange.
Disembodied smells filled her nostrils: expended gunpowder, sizzling steak. The green scent of cut grass became stronger. She stepped away, cautiously, as if she’d encountered a beehive, and was overcome by the sudden and intense need to flee, mixed with a cold cloak of guilt. Not remorseful guilt, but only the clear recognition of culpability; she felt chastised. No: chased. Abstract words flickered in her head, Polaroids of excited fear.
(stupid let your guard down shoulda done em both)
“What was that about?” asked Kenway. “You jerked like you touched a live wire.”
“I don’t know.” She looked at the palm of her hand. Residual paranormal power? Am I picking up on it? If so, it was the first time anything like that had ever happened. She wasn’t even sure if it was a thing that could happen—the witches were the only ones with any paranormal ability, weren’t they? The sigils and runes decorating her body deflected paranormal energy like a sort of metaphysical armor, but other than the hallucinations of the owl-headed Sasquatch, Robin had never been privy to any kind of paranormal sensitivity. The sigils were an umbrella, but she had never felt the rain itself before. It was a bit like discovering a new sense.
Maybe her sigils being overpowered by Weaver at the hospital had left her sensitive, like sunlight on a burn. Maybe … maybe it was the proximity to Cutty. The creases in Robin’s palm shined in the sun as she flexed her hand. Was Cutty so powerful her power overflowed into the streets?
Could simply being the daughter of a witch mean Robin could siphon off surplus power like some kind of psychic vampire? She had certainly wondered over the years whether she had inherited some modest fraction of whatever paranormal talent lay within her mother Annie. As far as Robin knew, witchcraft began with a singular ritual, and had nothing biologically to do with the witch herself—it was all on the paranormal side of the equation, spiritual, exterior to genetics, initiated by the symbolic sacrifice of the heart to Ereshkigal.
Witchcraft did not live in your DNA.
This might even be why she’d been seeing the Red Lord more and more since getting closer to Blackfield. Maybe it’s—maybe the Red Lord is like their patron. No, that’s not right. Witches derive their power from Ereshkigal. Maybe it’s their amplifier. Is that even a thing? No doubt Heinrich would have mentioned it in our studies back in Hammertown.
He doesn’t know everything, she told herself.
Maybe it’s their pet. Maybe they knew I would come back to Mom’s house one day, so they stuck a monster in there as a trap. Weaver had said the Red Lord didn’t belong to them, but it wouldn’t be the first time a witch had lied to her face. They’re all full of shit. Shit and shadows.
If the coven didn’t conjure it and didn’t make her hallucinate it, and Annie didn’t,
(“We don’t talk about magic in this house,” dream-Annie had told her over their dream-breakfast a thousand times in half the motels in the Midwest)
then who did?
Maybe—That little voice in the back of her mind, a little Jiminy Cricket, a tiny Doubting Thomas.
Maybe what?
Kenway was still staring at her, alarm slowly overtaking his face. She realized she was mouthing her internal monologue to herself, and the heat of embarrassment coiled up her neck into her face, glowing in the curve of her jaw. Maybe your mother did conjure that thing.
And it scared her so bad she swore off witchcraft forever.
She checked her cell phone. Call me back, Heinrich, damn you. I need to pick your brain.
… Heinrich.
Did Heinrich put it there?
No, she told the cricket. He’s about as magical as ten hours of fuckin’ C-SPAN.
“You okay there, Pedro?” asked Kenway. “Doing some long division?”
She snorted. “I’m fine.”
Eliminate the impossible, said the Sherlock Holmes standing next to her mental Jiminy Cricket, and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Okay. So—
Hallucinations don’t scratch gouges in bathroom doors.
So it’s not a hallucination.
Whether Mom could or couldn’t—and I have no reason to think she could—she wouldn’t conjure something that would terrorize her own daughter for as long as this thing has, and completely ignore the witches and their Groundskeeper Willie.
So it’s not Mom’s.
Heinrich couldn’t conjure something this powerful. He can barely get his dick out of his pants, much less pull a rabbit out of a hat. Hell, I’m more magic than he is.
So it’s not Heinrich’s.
Then it’s real. And it has to be from the coven.
“Elementary, dear Watson!” she said to herself.
“I think you need to lay off the caffeine,” said Kenway. “I’m grounding you from Starbucks for a week.”
She glared at him. “Do you want to see me cut somebody?”
“Okay, a day then. I think your eye is twitching.”
“What?”
Interrupting her impromptu impression of Travis Bickle, Lieutenant Bowker came back with the property manager, a limping stump of a man with big staring eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard. His golden bouffant was parted in the center like a monkey’s ass. The name embroidered on his shirt was ROGER.
The manager unlocked the door and stepped aside for Bowker, who strode in with his hand on the butt of his pistol.
“Well, damn,” said the officer.
The living room was completely devoid of furniture—of anything, really, that said a human had been living here until last night. The walls were bare, and the spotlessly clean carpet wasn’t even marred by the footprints of a sofa’s legs.
No appliances stood on the counters. No food in the cabinets, no food in the fridge except for a single Arby’s sauce packet in the crisper.
Bowker came out of the bedroom. “Can you tell me who the apartment is leased to?”
“Yeah, sure.” Roger stared at the clipboard in his hand. “Says here it’s a fella by the name of Richard Sutterman.” He looked up and shrugged. “I don’t get back here much other than to check on old Mr. Brand in 432. Always havin’ to snake his toilet out, sewage backin’ up into his bathtub and whatnot. I don’t recall what this Sutterman looks like.”
Startling Robin, Joel leaned against the front door’s frame. He must have mustered enough courage to get out of the truck.
Bowker asked him, “That name mean anything to you?”
“Never heard it before in my life.”
Bowker rubbed his face in exasperation and tossed a hand. “I can head back to the station and look through the database, or maybe go talk to the county clerk and see if he can find any info more concrete on this Sutterman fella, but…” His offer tapered off, the unspoken admission hanging in the air. It ain’t much to go on.
Psychic whispers still lingered in the air, tracing cobweb fingers along the rims of Robin’s ears.
She got a faint mental flash of a vial, and a hand using a hypodermic needle to draw out a tiny bit of the contents. Then she flashed on an image of that same needle being injected into a grilled steak. She also got a flash of a word—Yee-Tho-Rah—but had no idea what it meant.
“Come on, the trail’s cold for now,” she said, sidling past Joel. The GoPro on her chest gulped footage. “I got some editing to do while I think, and then I want to go have a look at my old house.”