She heard them coming into the house, heard their shoes scuffing on the charred boards. “Robin? Robin? Are you in here? Come on, Miss Martine, Robin, you’re okay. You’ve got to be. You’ve got to be.”
“I’m in here,” she wanted to say, but her mouth didn’t want to work right; her jaw had been tied shut like Marley’s ghost, and she couldn’t draw breath to speak. How unfair—they hadn’t even left a coin on her tongue for the ferryman.
The morning’s wind, even slipping meekly through the cracks in the wood, was as icy as an Antarctic gust. If she thought she could, she would have shivered. The fire. Had she fallen asleep? Had she died? Was this how death went? Your soul doesn’t actually go anywhere, you just sit in your corpse, unable to communicate, watching the world pass you by until there’s nothing but dust, nothing for what’s left of you to cling to?
Where do you go after that?
Soft sunlight fell across Robin as the two men lifted the wood off of her and pushed it aside with a crash.
“No, no, no, no, no.”
“I’m so sorry, mate.”
Their voices were muffled and hollow, distant, as if heard through an air vent in a drafty old mansion. She listened to them talk, listened to them stand there and stare. She wanted to console the magician, to give him a hug around the neck and tell him that—
(that they would be better off without her? The world would? No. That’s defeat talking. That’s the Blackfield psych ward talking)
—that everything would be okay.
Am I still dead if I can give myself a pep talk?
“You’re not dead, my love,” said a warm third voice.
Mama?
“Yes, I’m here.”
Mama, I didn’t make it. Look at me. Santiago kicked my ass fair and square.
Visions of Annie passed across the surface of Robin’s mind: the two of them sitting in the kitchen of 1168, Robin just five years old, tears rolling down her face. Annie knelt in front of her, pulling a Band-Aid across an ugly scrape on her knee. “You’ll live, it’s not that bad,” she said, and made her daughter a glass of chocolate milk and a peanut butter and honey sandwich, and lo and behold, she did indeed live.
This is a bit worse than falling off the front porch, Mama.
“Did you forget what you are?” asked Annie’s ghost. Her lisp had disappeared again. “Who you are?” A hand pressed itself against Robin’s shoulder, and it was like being caressed through an astronaut suit. She was encased in unfeeling death, a roasted husk.
(demon demon demon crooked cambion)
How could I forget?
“Then get up. Get up, you little hellion.” Annie challenged her and berated her like a drill sergeant. “Get up. Walk it off. Ain’t no daughter of mine gonna get beat that easy.”
What is that noise? It sounds like
(bacon cooking, ain’t nothin good bacon can’t make better)
flies buzzing.
“Ow!” shouted Gendreau, and he dropped something on the floor, something heavy, something metallic.
A cold, hard light materialized in front of her, like a distant star. She peered through stiff eyelids and saw the Osdathregar lying at the magician’s feet, almost within reach. The dagger burned with an intense white fire, slag sizzling out of the sun’s reflection like a welder’s torch.
“I think it likes you,” said Annie.
Can I keep it?
Annie, 1999, laughing as five-year-old Robin holds up a beat- up-looking cat for her mother’s approval. “Yes, if you promise to—”
—Feed it.
Yes, it’s hungry, isn’t it?
Who do you really belong to, Mr. Knife?