The hour stretched on as the four of them sat behind the front desk of the foreclosed motel. Kenway propped Carly against the counter, where she stared desolately at the carpet. “No way we can take them on by ourselves,” muttered the veteran, only a lighter smear of gray in the darkness. “Not with just two blades and a handful of shotgun shells.” His tone made it clear that this was something he wasn’t used to saying: “What are we gonna do? He ain’t gonna give up on finding us, not after what happened to Marina.”
“We’re fucked,” said Gendreau.
“Hate to agree with you,” said the vet, “but yeah, as much as it pains me to say, we are well and truly fucked.”
Seeking some kind of solace or strategy, Robin searched the shadows for her mother’s ethereal ghost, but Annie was nowhere to be found. “I don’t know. I just don’t. Guess we wait. Wait for them to come back down from the house, then we’ll go out the back and head up there ourselves and … chill in the attic or something ’til morning.”
The two men said nothing. She supposed they agreed with her plan. Best they had, anyway.
Moonlight fell through a small window in the door as she looked outside. Everything was rendered in shades of gray. Straight ahead, the sidewalk stretched across the front of the L-shaped suite complex. To her left gaped an empty parking lot. She leaned so she could see the fallen gate to her right.
A dark shape came loping up the pool-area corridor. It clutched the gate and gently lifted it out of the way, leaning it against the clapboard wall of the L, and the werewolf dropped back on all fours, walking up the corridor in the slow, hip-rolling saunter of a caged panther, moving up the sidewalk toward the parking lot. As she watched it move, Robin wondered where the extra mass came from when people were transfigured—Theresa’s hog-monster form was easily ten times larger than her original shape. These wolf-men were twice the size of an average human, with hulking shoulders, barrel chests, towering shoulders.
“Bitch gotta be here somewhere,” said a voice outside.
A shadow cut through the moonlight in the corridor window. “Can’t believe they wasn’t in the house. Thought for sure they’d be up there in the house, shakin’ and pissin’ they panties.”
“Must have been Tuco that caused the crash. That weird motherfucker was down there with Marina’s body.”
“So it’s Tuco’s fault?”
“I ain’t sayin—”
“Well, he’s dead, so—” said a third.
“Don’t give a damn whose fault it is. Santiago sure don’t. He just wants that girl’s ass, and any of her friends we can find out here. Wouldn’t pay to piss him off today. He wrecked Pops, according to Javi. Said he ate Guillermo’s face right off his skull. Killed him.”
Kenway swore under his breath. “Gil got ganked.”
“Yeah. Shit’s crazy,” said one of the wolves.
“Man, I kinda hate that, y’know?” someone replied. “I liked Pops.”
“Getting too big for his britches. He the one that let this bitch run off with Marina. He had it coming.”
“Still.…”
“What is going on?” asked one of the bikers.
“Whatchu mean, man?”
“Like, this werewolf shit. Feel like I’m losin’ my fucking mind. This shit real? I feel like I’m not real. This is some seriously weird shit. Right? We on the same page here?”
Trying to internalize the relic’s influence, Robin realized. Trying to work out their cognitive dissonance, beginning to “converge,” the Dogs’ term for the merging of their magic-influenced minds and non-influenced minds, the spark of understanding that—
“This shit ain’t real?” asked one of the men.
—the strange phenomena they were experiencing wasn’t just coincidence, or a fever-dream, or a hallucination. It was real life, these transformations and half-lucid fugue states were actually happening, and they had a source.
“Feel like I’m taking crazy pills. Found a dead cat on my porch two months ago; thought the neighbor’s dog did it or something. Dreams I’ve been having … dreaming about running naked in the desert, huntin’ down rabbits and shit out in the badlands. Waking up with dirty feet. Blood in my bathtub. So, it’s real? All of it?”
One of the shadows shrugged.
“You too?”
“What you think’s doing it? D’you think we’re—”
“Real werewolves?”
“Yeah. Like, d’you think silver hurts us?”
“Don’t know. Think that’s just Hollywood bullshit.”
They’re like … false werewolves, thought Robin. Ginned-up bullshit from that Transfiguration relic in Santiago’s motorcycle. That movie stuff—silver bullets, full moon, none of that applies here. You can kill them with steel. She caught Kenway’s expression and had the feeling he silently agreed.
“I’d ask Santi, but—that—man, I just—he’s fuckin’ scary, dude. I don’t want to piss him off, you know? I mean, does he even know what it is? What’s causing it?”
“If he does, he hasn’t mentioned it.”
“Is he the one doin’ it?”
Someone laughed. “Man, Santi’s a hard-ass and he’s got chops, but he couldn’t pour out a piss-pot if the instructions were on the bottom. I doubt he’s into that eye-of-newt black-magic shit.”
“Don’t let him hear you say that.”
Another voice rang out from the pool area. “Hey, Donato. What is this in the pool? Was this always here? Looks like something got trapped in here and died.” A pregnant pause. Robin could still smell the musty pond-scum stink of the stagnant water; it lingered in her nostrils like a stain. “What the shit? It’s José. The bitch killed José.”
“Got some kind of Lady Rambo on our hands, boys,” said one of them. “First grenades, now she out here cuttin’ us up. Who is this chick?”
“Santi gonna be pissed. And you know piss runs downhill, man.”
“That’s why he don’t need to find out.”
“Find her,” rumbled the beast.
“Hey, what are you guys up to?” asked another biker, joining them. Sounded like he wasn’t alone, by the plop-plop of bare feet. “Ain’t nobody in the house. Santi says we’re gonna go across the road and fan out, look for ’em out in the desert. ‘Hands Across America’ or some shit.”
“I think we should keep looking here at the motel.”
“You’ll do what I tell you to do,” said Santiago. He sounded tired, his voice raspy, low, a breathless murmur. “And you’ll do it. Unless you want what Gil got.”
“Yeah, okay, man.”
“Good. Goddamn, it stinks out here. Pool smells like rancid frog shit. Hidey, you go down and check the RV again—they might have doubled back on us.”
“You don’t think Max woulda seen ’em?”
“Just do what I told you,” said Santi. “You fuckers are like herding cats, you know that?” Snick, snick, snick, the ignition of a lighter. Santi firing up a cigarette. “Anybody know where José went?”
“Said something about going to take a piss.”
A moment of silence, and then Santi blew out smoke and said, “Why didn’t he just piss on the floor? He’s a dog. That’s what dogs do.”
More silence.
“Don’t shrug at me, asshole. Go get him.” Santi walked away into the parking lot. “You guys come with me. We’re gonna go look out there across the road. They might have headed south and gone to ground up there in those hills. Lot of places to hide.”
The other men followed him, leaving the parking lot desolately still.
“I think we should sneak up the hill and go hide in the house while they’re out of the picture,” muttered Gendreau, a few minutes later.
Her boyfriend scratched his beard, a dry sawing noise in the shadowy quiet.
Robin studied Carly’s emotionless gaze. The girl seemed to be transfixed by something on the other side of the planet. Robin waved her hand in front of Carly’s face. No reaction. She lightly patted her face, and this time Carly looked away, shifting her whole body to the side and tightening into a fetal position. Okay, so she’s not totally out of it. She’s just dissociating.
“All right,” said Robin. “Let’s move.”
She got up and pulled the chair out from under the door handle, revealing the apartment.
Relief. No wolf-man waiting in the cramped living room to ambush her. She checked the breech on the shotgun and led them outside, preserving the silence with an index finger to her lips. The four of them slipped out the back and around the pool area.
Steps made out of cross-ties zigzagged up the hill toward the house, and tufts of chaparral bristled from the sand. Robin found herself exposed on a hillside with no tree cover, showered in frosty blue moonlight. She glanced over her shoulder and saw a constellation across the desert: Santi’s ants crawling their way toward the south horizon. Flashlights and lighters twinkled in the dark.
Dread of being spotted up here on this bald slope made her pick up the pace, running with the shotgun at low-ready. The tomahawk’s handle beat against her knee.
Ten or twenty years earlier, the house on the hill might have been nice, if a bit boring. Utilitarian. Puritan, even. Probably aiming at “Victorian,” but there was no unnecessary ornamentation, no gingerbread scrollwork. Just no-nonsense clapboard.
Darkness gaped at the top of the steps; the doors had been torn down and thrown into the front yard. Robin raised the shotgun and pushed into the house, rolling her steps, swiveling back and forth cop-style. Stacks of old magazines, newspapers, and novels were hoarded against the baseboards in jagged stacks. Lawn chairs in various states of abuse shared space with about a dozen aquariums—which, thankfully, had been empty, because the werewolves had smashed them and strewn the floor with shards of cloudy glass. A tweed sofa was soaked in sour piss, a coffee table smashed in half. Walls were sprayed with a litany of obscene graffiti and had gaping holes smashed into them, through which Robin could see adjacent rooms.
Ranch implements were nailed up like the decorations at a fancy down-home restaurant: horse tack, a scythe, horseshoes, a two-man tree saw, frontiersman snowshoes that looked like wooden tennis rackets. Also a few car parts and rear tags: Arizona. New Jersey. North Dakota. New Mexico.
Black screws picked out a missing item about the size of a Frisbee.
Followed by an increasingly tired-looking Gendreau, Kenway stepped up onto the front porch, cradling Carly in his beefy arms.
Robin paused to look out the window.
The biker that had been ordered to go find José had returned to the pool and was dragging his shaggy werewolf corpse out of the blue pit.
Behind her, Gendreau turned his head sideways to read the titles on the weather-beaten paperback novels with his penlight. Stephen King, Nora Roberts, an assortment of nineties sword-and-sorcery.
“They’re afraid of him,” said Robin.
“Afraid of what he’ll do if he sees them fuck up.” Gendreau picked up one of the Koontz novels and tried to open it, but the pages were stuck together. He dropped it like a hot potato and wiped his hand on the wallpaper. “Hate to wonder what he did to poor Gil back there.” The magician sighed and looked toward the second floor, as if beseeching the gods for guidance. “If we can get into it, I think we should hide in the attic.”
Framed photographs lined the stairwell walls, depicting an older couple, both of them wearing rose-colored bifocals. None of them looked newer than 1995. Progressively older photos of two boys and a girl.
The bedrooms upstairs were completely devoid of furniture except for a gang of ratty-looking mattresses, also foul with werewolf piss. Neatly stacked collection of shoeboxes, each one full of various things: baby-food jars full of what looked like lab specimens preserved in formaldehyde, Beanie Babies, USB thumb drives, broken china. Another bedroom held a massive stockpile of clothes hangers, while another was wallpapered with pages torn from porno magazines.
As soon as Gendreau stepped into the porn room, he recoiled like he’d walked into a spiderweb and pulled his shirt over his face. “Jesus Christ.”
Other than an eternity of nudity the only thing in the room was a moldy-looking cardboard box in the corner. As if beckoning them closer, a mannequin arm stuck up out of the box.
“Hell, no,” said Robin, leaving.
Didn’t seem to be an attic. No access ladder, at any rate. “Probably full of bullshit like the rest of the house, anyway,” said the curandero.
“Hey,” Robin said, mildly.
“Yes?”
“Got a question for you.”
“Fire away,” Gendreau said, arming sweat from his forehead.
“Don’t know if it’s my demon blood or what, but sometimes when I touch things—relics, or just sentimental possessions—I get a flash of insight about who handled it last. Sometimes just a sensation, a snapshot of their mental state. Sometimes it’s a whole moment in time.” Robin pointed at the ring glistening on Gendreau’s finger. “When I touched that ring back there in the Winnebago, I saw you and Rook, standing together in a place that looked like a card catalog in a library. Think it was the day she gave it to you.”
Wincing in exhaustion, the magician glanced at his finger and let his hand fall back to his side. “Weird. Kinda cool, I guess. Did you ever tell me you could do that? I don’t remember you telling me you could do that.”
“Didn’t seem important. It’s never really helped me. I mean, it’s how I found out the Euchiss boys poisoned Joel Ellis last year, but it wasn’t really vital information. Something different happened this time.”
“Oh, yeah? What was that?”
“You called her Haruko,” said Robin.
She didn’t say anything else, opting to let Gendreau fill the silence.
“Now is not a great time to talk about this,” he said curtly, calling her bluff, and started to walk away. Robin reached out to clutch his shoulder, and as if by instinct, he shrugged her hand away, his hand up in a guarded posture, creating distance between the magic-eating demon and his relic.
“That’s Leon’s wife, isn’t it?” She held his stare. “Wayne’s mother. They think she died of cancer. Why are you hiding her from them?”
“We’ll talk about this later, when we’re not running for our lives.” The magician turned and marched down the stairs. “But I will tell you that we have a very good reason.”
“Better be a great one.”
Along the top rim of the kitchen cabinetry were about a hundred empty liquor bottles, their luster lost. The counters were a wilderness of garbage and filthy appliances. Three refrigerators stood open, each one full of a nasty ichor dried to a scummy spackle. Beer bottles and plastic wrappers jutted out of the black paste. The sour miasma floating in the humid kitchen could gag a Sasquatch.
“Basement,” said Kenway, pointing at an open door. Gendreau shined his keychain light, holding his shirt over his face like a colonial fop with a lace handkerchief. A stairwell led down into black nothing.
“After you,” he said, adjusting his grip on Carly.
“You first.”
“You have the flashlight.”
“Ugh.” Gendreau plodded down them, his silhouette pushing the dim white glow down the stairs. Wooden risers complained under his expensive Italian leather shoes.
“I’ll stay up here and keep an eye out,” Robin told them.
Kenway’s voice came from somewhere down in the dark. “I’ll leave Carly down here with David Blaine and come up there with you.”
“David Blaine?” asked Gendreau.
“Need you down there protecting her, babe.”
Kenway’s reply was muffled. “Uhhh?”
“Your ego will live,” said Robin.
“You know me better than that, lady. I’m not leavin’ you alone with Teen Wolf out there.”
“Goddammit.” Robin pushed past him. The stairs complained, creaking and crackling as her hand slid down the dusty, smooth wood of the baluster. Gendreau stood in the middle of the basement, shining his keychain light to and fro. “If I come down here with you, will you be satisfied?”
The light passed over a surprisingly large basement and a collection of junk: A dirty work table with nothing on it. Boxes of rags. Empty paint cans. Cold furnace. Stained mattress. Two red jerry cans that stank of gasoline. A clawfoot bathtub full of green muck that smelled like burnt plastic.
“Stinks down here,” she said.
“You don’t say.” Gendreau stifled a cough.
“Should mask our scent the same way the stagnant swimming pool did earlier.”
Gendreau shined his flashlight in Kenway’s face. “Mister, I need you to explain that David Blaine crack. Have you ever seen me swallow a goldfish? Do I look like some kind of sleepy-eyed two-bit street busker to you?”
“Yikes. Did I hit a nerve?”
Underneath the stairs was a closet, unfinished, with naked studs, and not the good kind. Cobwebs draped in cotton bunting between the rafters, promising spiders and, thankfully, breaking that promise. They hid in this shadowy alcove and pulled the door shut, then sat, blind, to rest. And wait. And listen. Listen for the furtive movements of an investigating wolf-man, or the angry carnage of a temper tantrum elsewhere in the house.
But they heard nothing. Nothing but the howl of the wind and the subtle, restless movements of the elderly house.
“Miss Martine,” murmured Gendreau.
“Yeah?”
“You should change your Malus Domestica show into a conversation-based podcast format. Without so much, you know … screaming and running, and whatnot. Just a nice chat. A nice goddamn chat. With a studio cat with a funny name. Pop filters and nice chairs and a cappuccino machine.”
“You know me. I ain’t the talking type. I’m a doer.”
The magician sighed. “Then we need a plan.”
“We do,” said Kenway, a breath against her cheek. “Any ideas, Mr. Wizard?”
“Lure them into the house and burn it down,” said Robin.
“Too dangerous,” said Gendreau.
“More dangerous than being killed by a bunch of werewolves?”
“Too easy for things to go wrong,” said Kenway. “For one of us to fall into our own trap and get stuck in the house. Go down with it. Besides, we probably wouldn’t be able to get them all in here at once.”
They sat in their own individual solitude for a little while. She couldn’t tell how long. The darkness robbed her of her sense of time. Felt like ten minutes, might have been a half hour.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you something, Doc,” said Robin.
“Another question, huh?”
“Good-hearted Muggles like you can use magic when you’re not a witch? I thought the power was channeled from Ereshkigal herself. In that vision I saw, you said you could hear her.”
“The power is user-agnostic,” said the curandero, shifting his weight in the shadows. “You know how a fetus is just a wad of genetic matter until a certain point in gestation where its brain activity ramps up into something closer to a human. Teratomas are like that pre-fetal wad of tissue—too dumb to know any better. Ereshkigal doesn’t know where her essence is going any more than you know where your tax dollars are going. Of course, once that teratoma reaches a certain stage and develops sentience, then all bets are off. But she knows it’s going somewhere. She sends whispers. Patronage magic, from Ereshkigal in particular, comes with a price. If you use it too much, or too hard, she can drive you insane. The exchange of power opens a line of communication. Whenever a heart-road is opened, it’s like calling a wrong number. The person on the other end can talk to you, but they don’t know who you are.”
“Like Santiago?”
“Exactly. Right now, he’s acting as an unregulated warlock. We’ve been charged, as you well know, with taking custody of unregulated relics like his motorcycle.”
“And there’s no supernatural caller ID?”
“Not that I am aware of.”
“Fetuses? Death-goddesses? This is not a conversation I want to have in a dark basement,” said Kenway. “Especially not under an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere.”
Question answered, Robin fell silent again.
“Home alone!” she said a few minutes later, startling the two men.
“What?”
“Home alone. The movie, Home Alone. Where Macaulay Culkin kicked the shit out of those two robbers,” she explained. “All that Cracker Barrel stuff up there on the walls—think we could set up some traps with it? Get ’em as they come in through the doors?”
The veteran shook his head. “Too many points of entry. Not only do you have two, maybe three door entrances, you’ve also got maybe eight to ten windows, and that’s not counting the second floor and the windows in the attic—”
“Witch windows.”
“What?” blurted Kenway. “Seriously? Why do they call ’em witch windows?”
“They’re not witch windows,” said Gendreau. “Witch windows are sashed windows half-rotated to one side. They were designed crooked to confuse witches back in the colonial days, to keep them from getting into the house.”
“Dormer windows?” asked Robin.
“Dormers are those little protrusions coming out of the roof slope like doghouses. You know, they have their own little roofs.”
“Then what the hell are they?”
The curandero’s shrug scuffed in the dark silence. “Attic windows? Vents?”
“They’re windows; they have glass in ’em.”
“Who the fuck cares?” asked Kenway.
“How do you know so much about home architecture?” asked Robin.
“Because I come from a family that’s always lived in houses with gables and dormers and things like that?” The magician made a face. “What’re you asking me for? You grew up in a Victorian gingerbread. Those things are, like, sixty-five percent gable.”
“Can we get back to the plan here?” asked Kenway.
Robin leaned over him. “Whaddaya call those spinny metal thingies on the roof that look like Jiffy Pops? I saw one of those belch fire like a dragon one night after I lit a witch up in Colorado. Fuckin’ top just blew off, the fire was jetting out blue and red—”
A big warm hand clapped over her mouth.
“Plan,” said Kenway. “Can we get back to it? They could come back here any minute.”
She nodded and he let go.
“Home Alone?” asked Gendreau. “Can we do it?”
“Like I said: too many entry points, not enough gear. I only saw a couple of bear traps on the wall, and there’s nothing else up there in good enough shape to fashion into a trap—if any of us even knew how to make traps out of it all. Besides, can you see any of that stuff up there stopping a monster militia?”
“So … what?” asked Robin. “All we can do is hide? And wait?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. That’s why I’m trying to brainstorm here.”
“Wait to die?” asked Gendreau.
“Fuck that noise,” said Robin. She cracked the shotgun open, checked to make sure it was still loaded, and bullwhipped it shut again. Click.
After a long, unproductive discussion, they slept.
Well, all but one of them dozed off, in that fitful strange way that people do when in the helpless throes of slow panic—that way that a child can drift off to sleep buried under a blanket, confident in the existence of a slithering closet-monster lying in wait underneath their bed, and then wake up in the morning, having forgotten all about whatever had menaced them in the night.
That one who did not sleep now, Robin Martine, sat by the door, filled with crawling ants of anxiety, pressed into her boyfriend’s feverish hard bulk, with her knees up and her hands clasped against her belly.
She breathed through her mouth to stay quiet. Listened for intruders. She wanted to sleep. Her eyes were grainy. But—
But—
Listen.
Smells competed in the cramped space. The musk of Kenway’s sweat; the moldy quiet of the long-disused closet; the exotic tang of Gendreau’s cologne; the always lurking rotten-egg-campfire stink of Robin’s sulphurous demon half, forever waiting for a reason to rampage and kill. Her own personal dark side.
What would it take to trigger another transformation? Would they have to bite off her arm, the way Theresa the hog-witch had? Was there some other method of bringing that side of her out (and there her mind interjected with turning me inside out as if she were some kind of hand puppet lined with the velvet of heresy, which gave her gruesome mental images and the perennially horrible word degloving)? Would she need to touch another demon, like last time? God forbid—literally—would she have to touch her father again?
She wondered if she could control it this time.
When she’d transformed into that otherworldly thing before, that sinister, ligneous creature, it had been a slow, gradual change. She’d had time to adjust, as much as you can adjust to having a skinless snake for an arm and wood for skin.
Her skin had, indeed, been greenish wood like her demon father’s, hoary with red hair like flames. The same green shade as her childhood home. Her demon-self had been constructed—or constructed itself—from the clapboard and floor planks of Wayne’s dimensionally iffy nightmare house, Andras’s decrepit prison, that ancient Victorian that only existed in Robin’s childhood memories, 1168. Her second chance had been built from trauma. She was made of pain.
Was that how the demon side of her worked? Did it build itself a body out of its own environment? Did it rebuild her out of the rubble of trauma?
She sighed. Rubbed her eyes. Dug her fingernails into her face, trying to wake herself up, or at least the chewed-down nubs that were left of them. The ragged rims left fine marks.
Listen.
Wood for skin. That would be really handy right now, wouldn’t it, against those terrible claws and teeth out there in the night?
“Robin.”
Her head jerked as she kicked up out of the pond of sleep. She had dozed off. She scanned the darkness and heard her name again.
“Doc?”
“I’m here,” said Gendreau. “You were talking in your sleep.”
She pulled the Osdathregar out and gripped it in both hands. The dagger’s point had chewed a hole in her jeans, and the cold cellar floor pressed its wet nose against her left ass-cheek. “What was I saying?” She shifted her weight, straightening, stretching the cramps out of her legs and hips, and laid the dagger across her thighs.
“Something about skin. Super creepy.”
“Sorry.”
She waited.
After a while, Gendreau murmured, “Haruko is Leon’s wife, yes. We knew of her talents for artifice from her Etsy store. We approached her in the hospital and made her a deal—we’d cure her cancer, and in exchange, she would come work for the Dogs of Odysseus as a curator and custodian. But she couldn’t take her family with her. As far as they were concerned, she perished of her illness.”
“And I thought I was an asshole.”
“Haruko made that choice of her own free will. All we did was open the door. She’s the one that walked through it.”
“Shitty choice. Submit or die, hmm?”
“Wasn’t my call.” His voice was barely audible in the cramped closet.
“I have half a mind to tell the Parkins she’s still alive.”
“Don’t you think that’s up to Haruko? You might want to wait and talk to her before you make such a rash call.”
“That little boy deserves to have a mother.”
Changing the subject, Gendreau asked, “Speaking of mothers, how did Marina and Carly end up in your Winnebago? That seems like an unlikely series of circumstances.”
“I’ve always had a tendency to stumble into these situations, or, rather, they stumble into me,” she replied. “Happened even before I went full-on demon. Andras was always there in me, I guess, even if I didn’t know it, and from what I know of them, demons have a magnetic attraction to … lost things, hidden things, people in deep dog shit. I reckon it’s how I always seem to be in the right place at the right time.”
“Trouble magnet.” The magician scoffed in amusement. “I suppose that’s how the devil always shows up in the old stories, poof, just when people need to make a deal? Old Scratch does always seem to be right where he needs to be.”
“More like ‘right where he’s needed.’”
She waited, but he said nothing else. Time languished, the seconds leaking under the door like a quietly welling puddle, and then the soft sound of snoring came from the magician’s corner of the closet.
Robin ground her fists into her eyes.
Listen, said the black-eyed warhawk in the bathroom mirror. Listen, girl, wake up and LISTEN. Do you need to burn yourself with hot water again?
No noise except for breathing and the desert’s night sounds. A faint insectile buzz came insistent and metallic from somewhere behind the house, and from time to time, the wind tossed handfuls of sand against the casement window by the closet. She cocked her head to the side and listened to the wheezy whistle of Kenway breathing, his side swelling and ebbing against her.
No water here in the desert.
I’ll make do, said the warhawk. I’ll stick you in the leg with that dagger you got. Maybe I’ll pop off a shotgun round in the ceiling and scare the shit out of everybody. That’ll wake your ass up.
No, she told the mad-eyed woman she’d seen in the motel bathroom mirror, what that’ll do is draw the wolves.
Is that such a bad thing? Maybe they should just get their asses up here and we can get this bullshit over with. The warhawk grinned. Her eyes were green sea-lamps. Fuck them. Fuck you. You like fighting, don’t you? Then let’s fuckin’ fight ’em. Then you can come down off your combat high the way you used to like to do—rub one out, flick the ol’ bean, then stick your feet out the van window and smoke and drink a beer. What say? It’s been a while.
They faced each other in the darkness, the daughter of a God-fearing woman and the daughter of a demon. Two luminous green points floated in the shade like two alien cigarette-cherries, unblinking, unwavering. Which was which? She couldn’t tell anymore.
Not that person anymore, said Robin. I’m not you.
You sure about that? You think this man cured you? That you saved each other? The demon-daughter laughed. You really are as stupid as you look.
Eventually, the closet filled with an oppressive chill as the adrenaline seeped out of her system, draping her in a wet creeping sheet, and not even Kenway’s big warm body could warm her up. She woke just long enough to realize she’d fallen asleep again, and closed her eyes.