“We need to go,” said Robin, heading toward Elisa’s truck. “We need to save my boy, now, and we need to save Marina’s little girl. I made a promise.”
“Hold up,” said Gendreau. “You were a bacon sculpture not ten minutes ago. Don’t you think you should take a breather before you head out to fight tigers and possessed motorcycles and God knows what else?”
Wind combed through her bizarre antlers. “Do I look like I need a breather?”
“No, I d-don’t suppose you do,” Gendreau stammered as those five green lamplight eyes focused on him.
Once they were on the road, Robin found herself at a loss for something to do that didn’t involve staring at her own hands like a stoner. Couple of hours at least before they arrived at the Los Cambiantes’ clubhouse. According to Elisa, it was on the outskirts of Keyhole Hills near the east gate of the abandoned air base, heading out of town toward Almudena. They’d driven right past it leaving town in the Winnebago, and none of them had a clue.
“So, what do you think this is?” asked Gendreau, gesturing in a general way.
“Guess I’m full-on demon again.” The words came out of her mouth, but they sounded as if someone else were speaking them.
Strange hunger lay in the pit of her stomach, boiling on an element of rage. Only word she could find for the feeling was hangry, that term for when you’re angry because you’re hungry, but whatever was lurking inside of her at the moment transcended mere “hangriness” and blew past the intersection of rage and starvation. She wanted to rip and tear with her teeth, like wolves setting on a caribou carcass; she wanted to rampage and devour.
What the hell was the portmanteau for it, then? Starge? Ravation? Hurious?
Whatever it was, it was familiar. Same feeling she’d experienced that day in Hammertown, that furious urge to jump on Heinrich and rip his face off, only ramped up into the stratosphere. She looked at her friends and suddenly they seemed quite delicate, so delicate, and she could imagine her jaws closing on their faces, like biting into a hollow chocolate Easter bunny.
There I am, said the glow-eyed warhawk. Her demon side. The power was inside you all along. The real treasure was the faces we ate along the way.
Robin looked away, mortified and terrified.
“I mean, we knew you were part demon,” said Gendreau, oblivious, “but I’m hard-pressed to say this is anything like your previous sublimation at all. I distinctly remember that—you looked like somebody had taken apart a wicker chair and a handful of wire clothes hangers and made a human sculpture out of them. This?” Gendreau made an inclusive gesture at Robin. “This looks like a Power Ranger invented by Clive Barker. You have five glowing eyes and antlers, for Christ’s sake. That’s not normal.”
“I think the demon side re-creates me out of whatever killed me. Or the place where I died. Or something? Whatever, I … M-maybe it’s my built-in second chance. Maybe I’m like a cat with nine lives.”
“Maybe you didn’t die,” said Navathe. “Maybe the demon part of you keeps you alive regardless of what happens to your body.”
“My demon heart?”
They couldn’t think of any better aphorisms, so they all just sat there, wobbling with the road, trying to avoid eye contact. The fire magician picked up an empty soda can and pretended to be enthralled by the ingredient list. A broom lay in the bed of the pickup truck, the old-school kind with a wooden shaft and sorghum bristles. Robin brushed the palm of her hand across the wood and contemplated the weight of it, the strength—and the irony of finding something so iconic, so entwined with her lifelong enemy, in this place, in this condition. She could make use of this.
“Just hope we can reverse it,” said Robin, interrupting their reverie. The Osdathregar had stopped casting that fierce light, but it still thrummed with potential, pulsating darkly. “Gonna make it hard to get a new driver’s license to replace the one that was in my wallet.”
“Hope we can, too,” said Gendreau.
They rode on for a while in wary silence.
Eventually, it dawned on her that she needed to hear their voices, needed their company just then. Maybe she needed to be reminded of her own humanity. To be grounded. To help drown out her own inner monologue, to keep it from filling the quiet with anxiety. The silence had an alluring, scary edge, a soundless siren call drawing her toward some deep and sinister part of herself.
The devil on her shoulder, trying to talk her into some heinous shit—that was what she needed to be distracted from. The warhawk.
“They said I could be anything,” she told them, breaking the quiet, “so I became a rotisserie chicken.”
Stifled laughter.
“You said you got promoted,” said Navathe. “What does that mean? Do you think it has anything to do with why the Sanctification isn’t blasting you to smithereens right now?”
Just the same as it had been when she’d reached out from her father Andras’s Hell-prison and touched the mortal world through the painting in Kenway’s studio, the air was intensely cold. The Sanctification made Earth inhospitable for her, like trying to step naked onto the skin-crystallizing surface of the distant planet Neptune.
Or at least it had been last October. This time, it was more like a casual dip into a cold mountain river. Wasn’t sure what kept her from shivering uncontrollably, but she wasn’t dead and she hadn’t been ejected into Hell, so—points for that, perhaps.
“I don’t know,” she said. “What do you graduate to from a demon?”
“An angel?”
Gendreau reached out to touch her and his fingertips came away sooty. Carbon? She looked at him, her antlers thumping the ceiling. “Does this look like an angel to you?” she asked.
“Perhaps,” said the curandero. “They’re supposed to be frightening. The chubby-cheeked cherubs in classical art aren’t actually angels—they’re called something else, but I can’t remember what.”
“What if demons aren’t fallen angels?” Robin asked. “What if it’s the other way around? What if angels are ascended demons? What if they all start out that way? Like, demons are a one and angels are a ten? Maybe I leveled up to a five.” Made sense to her. “Aren’t angels supposed to have wings?”
“Multiple sets, from what I understand. Flaming, covered in eyes. At least, that’s how classic religious literature describes them. Cherubim and seraphim. Among others.”
“Wings would be cool,” Robin said, picking up the broom. “Could do without the covered-in-eyes part. But I’ll be straight-up honest, real talk here, I don’t think I’m an angel. I think I’m back in demon mode. I got a real bad itch to fuck shit up, and not in a good way. I’m having a hard time controlling it.”
Navathe blanched.
“So,” said Gendreau, “the Sanctification isn’t destroying you like it would have if you’d stepped foot outside of Weaver’s deconjuration pocket in your demon form. If you’re still a demon, that means you must have earned your right to be here in this form, Miss Martine.” They stared at her again as he spoke. She felt the urge to hide her face. “You died in that fire, right?” he asked.
Her answer was just above a breath. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I did. Never died before. Don’t really have a frame of reference, you know?”
“You sacrificed yourself trying to beat Santiago and save Rook,” said the curandero. “You traded your life for hers. For all of our lives. You earned this.” He punctuated each point with a jab of his finger at her, his curative ring glinting in the light. “Whatever you are now, demon, angel, para-fucking-legal, you earned your right to be here. You passed your supernatural bar exam. The Sanctification doesn’t apply to you anymore because of what you did. You’ve been absolved of ‘the sins of your father.’” Blinking in surprise, he added, “Putto!”
“What’d you just call me?”
“No, putto, that’s what those angel-babies are called. They’re not cherubs, they’re called ‘putto.’ Well, putti, in plural. Italian. Took some art classes when I graduated high school, back before I knew about my grandfather, Frank, and his secret society.”
“You didn’t always know about the Dogs of Odysseus?”
“No.” Gendreau looked like he’d been through hell—dirty, covered in bruises, fancy white shirt splattered in blood, face nicked and scratched. The scar across his throat was shiny pink in the light filtering through the window. “He came and got me out of college and talked me into joining the Dogs because he wanted someone in the family to be part of it and he didn’t think my father could handle it. He didn’t find out that I was assigned female at birth until almost a year after inducting me. Didn’t take that too kindly. But by then it was too late, and he had to make do with me. Wouldn’t have been fair to throw me out, and honestly I don’t know if he would have even possessed the capability to do so—I was already well entrenched by then and had developed powerful friends who would have stood up for me, like the Jötunn.”
Taking the broom in both hands, Robin snapped it over her armored knee, right above the bristles, leaving her with a four-foot section of wooden broom handle. She pressed the Osdathregar to the broken end and wound duct tape around it, lashing the dagger to the end of the broom handle until she had a makeshift spear.
“What’d you do that for?” asked Gendreau.
“Probably not going to get close enough to stab him with the dagger,” she said. “Gonna have to needle him. Wear him down from afar.”
“Why not shoot him? Got to be somewhere we can pick up some firepower in Almudena.”
Testing it, she was satisfied to see the spear point didn’t budge. “I cut him multiple times with the katana. Burned him. He just shrugged it off. I don’t feel like guns are going to do the trick. I need something supernatural.” The freshly crafted spear frothed with ghostly smoke like frozen nitrogen. The Osdathregar’s influence leeched slowly down the broom handle, turning it all black. “Think I have a better chance of bringing him down if I go after him like a Roman foot soldier with the Osdathregar. With a spear, I’ll have better reach.”