Robin gasped and sat up, almost jabbing Kenway with a horn. Gendreau managed to sob and laugh at the same time, and Navathe quietly threw his fists into the air as if she’d scored a game-winning touchdown. Kenway gathered her up into a hug so tight, it made her neck hurt. “Oh, my God, oh, my God,” he jabbered, her face mashed into the sweaty pit of his shoulder.
She held him, reveling in the woodsmoke-and-musk smell of his body. The demon rage was completely gone, leaving only a bone-deep exhaustion, and the real world was a fog reeking of real-world smells. Petrichor, sweat, burnt paint, wet soot. She hadn’t realized how clean the afterlife felt until this moment.
“Sorry about that,” she said. “I died, but I got better.”
Kenway chuffed hoarse laughter.
Robin gasped. “Where’s Marina?”
“What?” he asked. “You know—”
“No! No! I saw her! In there! I saw her; she was in Middle-Earth or some shit, with a goat-man. I saved her. Ereshkigal found us and I used her power against her to bring us back to life. The cow told me not to do it, but I did it. I guess in Heaven it’s illegal to steal magic.”
“The cow told you?” asked Gendreau.
Body screaming, bones aching, she rolled to her hands and knees and stood, scanning the tarmac. “Where is she? Please tell me she made it back.”
To their credit, every single person there looked around.
“I don’t—” Elisa began. “She’s not here.”
Oh, no, thought Robin, her heart dropping in despair. After all that, she didn’t make it. “I didn’t do it right.” Balling her fists against her eyes, she fought dual urges to shriek and weep. She’d wasted her only golden ticket.
A chunk of stone lay nearby, dislodged from the tarmac.
Snatching it up, she pitched it across the wasteland and loosed a singular, throat-shredding scream of rage.
Loading Robin into the back of Elisa’s truck, they drove up the runway to look for whatever remained of Santiago’s transfigured form. “Stop here,” she said through the back window as they neared the street where the battle had taken place. She could already smell the bitter, sour stench that accompanied the grotesque tar gushing out of Santiago’s wounds, a foul reek somewhere between burnt hair and long-spoiled food.
“Why are we stopping?” asked Carly. “Where’s my dad?”
“Don’t know what we’re going to find, and you deserve to remember him the way he was,” said Robin, moving stiffly. Her injuries had been mended by the resurrection, but she was still a mass of aches and pains. Having a human form, even partially, wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. “The relic in his motorcycle really changed him, and it wasn’t a good change. Things got a little crazy at the end. There is no Santiago, not anything that you would recognize.”
The teenager met Elisa’s worried eyes.
“Might be a good idea, hon,” said Elisa, digging around behind the seat. She came up with a flashlight, a heavy police skull-cracker. “Stay here in the truck, and I’ll go check it out.”
Rain continued to fall as Robin, Elisa, and Navathe got out and trudged down a dark, narrow alleyway, blurring Robin’s eyes and turning the truck’s headlights into clusters of white circles. She examined her belly as she walked. The gashes where she’d been gored had sealed over; unfortunately, the demonic carapace over the wound didn’t re-form, leaving a hole in the armor over her chest about the breadth of her finger, surrounded by hairline cracks. So, that’s how it works, she thought. My heart. That’s my kryptonite. She made a mental note to buy a bulletproof vest. Adapt and overcome, indeed. Man, Fish, you didn’t know just how right you were.
When they emerged from the alley, Navathe clapped a hand over his mouth and made a hoarse gagging noise. The pyromancer just managed to stagger over the sidewalk before he vomited into the scraggly landscaping.
Foul-smelling black slime heaped in the middle of the street like blood pudding. Swimming in it were monstrous tangles of shaggy limbs and bones, scraps of matted fur, mounds of ropy gray innards. Dozens of misshapen skulls floated in the ooze, some of them sporting three eyes or split palates.
“What the hell?” said Elisa, her voice shaking. “Looks like a tannery’s been using this place as a dump.”
“In the end, he couldn’t figure out what animal to Transfigure into,” said Robin. “So, he became all of them.”
“This is what’s left of my brother?”
“I’m sorry.”
At first, she couldn’t figure out the watermelon-sized object lying at the edge of the scene.
La Reina’s gas tank.
Since removing the teratoma—and thus Ereshkigal’s power—from inside it, the tank had become a corroded shell, as if some giant cicada had shed its husk and left it there. No doubt the rest of the motorcycle had followed suit as well; by the time they made it back to town, the Enfield would just be a pile of rusty parts and bald tires.
“Never shot anybody before today,” Elisa said forlornly, looking up at them. She panned the flashlight back and forth over the grisly remains. The undercast gave her a ghastly, stricken appearance. “Ain’t like the movies, is it?”
“No,” said Robin. “It isn’t.”
As soon as the words left her mouth, a hand reached out of the slime and clutched Navathe’s ankle.
He gave a shrill scream and jumped straight up in the air, doing an uncoordinated bicycle kick, and ran in the opposite direction, shoving his way through a barracks door, swearing the entire time.
Peering down at the muck, Robin and Elisa were shocked to find a human body, covered in blood and slime.
The figure drew ragged breath.
“Marina?” gasped Elisa, flinging the rifle into the weeds. She knelt to grab the woman’s hands, Robin took Marina by the arm, and together they pulled her away from the swamp-smelling carnage, depositing her on her back. She was completely naked, her modesty preserved only by a thick sludge of gore.
As the worsening rain washed her face, Carly’s mother gazed up at the sky. “Where—where am I?”
“Texas,” said Robin.
Marina blinked, as Elisa helped her to her feet and took off her own jacket, wrapping it around the newly reincarnated woman.
“I think I’d rather have gone to Hell,” she said, matter-of-factly.
As soon as Elisa pulled into the driveway, her girlfriend Isabella came charging out of the kitchen door, shouting obscenities in Spanish. “Where the hell have you been?” Her black eye had turned a jaundiced yellow-green. “Christ, I’ve been worried sick!” As Robin climbed out of the back of Elisa’s truck, Isabella went quiet, her eyes widening.
“Buenos días!” said the horned, blood-slimed witch-hunter.
“Uhh, buenos días.”
Isabella pulled her house robe tighter.
“Mi nombre es Robin, y estoy en una biblioteca.” One corner of Robin’s mouth quirked up in a half-smile. “Sorry, my Spanish is a little rusty.”
Isabella’s eyebrows shot straight up. “Uh … huh,” she said, and turned to Elisa as she and Navathe got out of the truck. Robin and Rook helped a one-legged Kenway out of the back. “What is going on? Who are these people?”
“They’re…” Elisa searched their faces. “New friends, I guess.”
Isabella stared at Robin’s jet-black left hand and the horns jutting from her forehead. “What is she wearing?”
“Long story,” said the witch-hunter. “If you got some coffee on and a bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol, I can tell it to you.”