I Come with Knives

by S. A. Hunt

  The light of her heart flashed brightly through her chest, casting disco-ball flares around the room. Weaver gasped. The skin of her face became sallow and shrank taut, every curve and socket suddenly reliefed in sharp detail.

  “Nooo!” cawed the witch, wresting herself out of Robin’s grip. The other shadow-Weavers converged on Robin as the real one shrank away, and she found herself battling a flock of shrieking harpies. They shoved her down on the floor and raked and wrenched at her with their claws. “I’ll kill you, you wretched, hellspawned little heifer!” screamed one of them, wedging her nails under Robin’s skin and tearing it away in a tangle of wires. Another one scrabbled at her ear, ripping it. “You and your mother took my Edgar away! I’ll swallow your soul!”

  “Not if I swallow yours first.” Robin punched her with a wire-coil fist, shattering the witch’s teeth.

  The head of Kenway’s mallet came down on a clone’s head, snapping her neck. Weaver’s double collapsed like a house of cards, mushrooming across the floor in a carpet of smoke. Lucas hauled one away and threw her down on the floor, stomping her face; she, too, went poof.

  The big veteran growled, hooking the handle of the mallet under a witch’s chin. The two of them were locked in a staggering dance, the big veteran strangling her with the hammer. Robin watched out of the corner of her eye as the witch in Kenway’s arms finally gave up, going limp—

  —and turned into Sara Amundson.

  He let go with a stifled scream, and Sara’s slack body crumpled at his feet. The hammer fell out of Kenway’s shocked hand. As she went down, her face twisted and distorted, losing its shape, becoming something rudimentary and scarred. Her eyebrows disappeared, the bridge of her nose flattened, and her nostrils became two Voldemort slits in a melted face.

  “Oh, God!” screamed Lucas, shoving a path through the witches.

  Gendreau stood paralyzed with horror and confusion at the edge of the room, watching this tragedy play out.

  “Watch out!” screamed Robin.

  But the other Sara behind him was already stepping forward, transforming back into Weaver. The witch hooked an arm around the curandero’s neck.

  At the last instant, he spotted the blade and squeezed his eyes closed. That was probably the worst part—he saw it coming. The knife in her hand flashed, and she zipped open his throat as easy as you please. A sheet of arterial blood poured into the collar of Gendreau’s effete white shirt, staining it a rich watercolor red.

  Weaver shoved him and he stumbled over a broken chair, faceplanting onto the dusty boards.

  The witch cackled, flaunting the knife.

  Black blood made an inky bib down her face and chest. “You thought you were gonna beat the greatest illusionist that ever lived, did you? You thought you could see through my tricks, eh? Well, Ole Miss Tricksy got the best of you, didn’t—”

  “Eerraaahh!” roared Lucas, hurling the remainder of his poker cards.

  A dazzle of cards whirred across the saloon, passing through an open gauntlet formed by the crowd of clones, and tore through the true Weaver like a volley of fléchettes fired from a rail gun. Cards struck and lodged in the wall behind her. A card protruded from the divot between the witch’s eye and nose.

  Taking advantage of the distraction, Joel launched himself forward and swatted the witch across the skull with the baseball bat. The battle must have weakened the Louisville Slugger, because it exploded with an echoing CRACK, sending shards of wood in every direction.

  Every shadow-clone in sight disappeared as one, extinguishing en masse, and the saloon itself flickered like a bad television signal. Weaver slumped onto her knees, thump-thump, and fell over.

  One second, there were overturned tables and poker chips and smashed pint glasses all over the floor. Reality seemed to crossfade, and suddenly they were standing in Marilyn Cutty’s living room; the flatscreen TV had been knocked over and smashed, the chairs were against the walls, and the sofa had been shoved into the entertainment center, but otherwise, they were back in the twenty-first century.

  “Somebody help, goddammit!”

  Lucas sat on the floor, with Gendreau dragged up into his lap. The curandero was holding his own neck, trying to magic it back together, blood squirting through his glowing fingers.

  “Must—” He choked, blood gurgling out of his mouth. “I can’t—” His face was a drawn gray and his eyes were huge and terrified. “—Whug.”

  He can’t concentrate, thought Robin. He’s lost his mind with terror.

  “Don’t speak.” She took his cane and clutched the cue-ball pearl, gazing into its smooth, iridescent white surface as if it were a crystal ball. She pushed her mind against the pearl and felt the heart-road inside. Muffled, weak, a whisper through a pillow, the thoughts of a chick in an egg. She could take it, take it all, but it would require time. Twenty, thirty minutes, at least.

  Time she didn’t have. She whacked the pearl against the floor.

  “What are you doing?” asked Lucas.

  CRACK! She banged it against the hardwood again. “I’m trying to get at the heart-road inside,” she told him. “I can use it to fix him”—CRACK!—“but I can’t get it out fast enough with this hard matter around it.”

  “That’s the conduit,” said Lucas. “The conductive material.”

  “For him, maybe. He’s attuned to this thing. I’m not.”

  “Wait.” Kenway stepped in, raising the carnival hammer. Robin snatched her hand away and he brought the massive chunk of wood down on the pearl, exploding it into three heavy chunks with a puff of white dust.

  Embedded in the largest piece was a tooth.

  Bewildered panic beat wild, terrified wings against the inside of her skull. She picked it up, and indeed, it was a human tooth: a pristine white molar.

  “Shit gets weirder and weirder with you, sister,” said Joel, leaning over her. “You know that?”

  “Come on!” shouted Lucas.

  “Yeah, okay.” Squeezing the tooth in her fist, Robin tapped the paranormal energy inside, reeling it out like fishing line.

  Visions from the eighteenth century clouded her mind, attached to the power pouring from the tooth. Images of a petticoated woman tied to a maypole; men in buckled shoes. She ignored them and put her other hand on Gendreau’s throat

  (Lucretia Melcher: we of the town of Philadelphia—)

  and directed the ectoplasm from the heart-road up her left arm and down her right and into Gendreau. The pulsar in her chest became

  (—hereby sentence you to be burned at the stake—)

  a stuttering supernova strobe, turning her arms into sizzling Tesla coils. The bleeding stopped as Gendreau’s cells mingled, reattaching to each other, intertwining his severed carotid and jugular.

  (—for the crime of being a witch.)

  Bandy red muscles that had been split reached for each other and braided. The ragged smile stretching across his skin pursed together and resealed from ear to ear like the lips of a Ziploc bag. She felt for a pulse in his neck and found a bare sliver of movement, a fleeting squirm under the skin. The relief overwhelmed her and she sat back with a near-delirious moan.

  “Oh, my God,” said Lucas, looking over her shoulder. “You did it!”

  “Did what?” asked Sara.

  Kenway hauled the woozy illusionist up to a sitting position. She coughed and gasped for air, holding her throat, pain written on her features. The melted, scarred look had disappeared, her face having returned to the way it’d looked all day—beautiful, with deep green eyeshadow and rich red lips.

  “What happened?” Sara croaked.

  “Uhh…” Kenway glanced at them. “The witch tricked me, and I choked you out on accident.”

  Sara coughed again, wincing, glancing daggers of ice at the poor man. Then her eyes fell on the blood-soaked curandero in Lucas’s lap. “Oh! Ohhhh! Doc!” She struggled to her knees and hovered over Gendreau. “Is he gonna be okay? Is he alive?”

  “He’s still alive,
but … I don’t know.” Robin fixated on the tooth in her palm. “I don’t know.”

  * * *

  Karen Weaver dragged herself across the living room floor through a steak-sauce puddle of her own rotten blood. Dozens of Bicycle playing cards bristled from the wall above. The queen of hearts was buried in Weaver’s face up to the number, leaving only a tab of paper showing, as if her brain had been bookmarked.

  She’d been shot full of holes by thirty-eight of them, six of them lodged in her ribs and spine. She was half-carrion, her supernaturally altered cells half a century old, rejuvenated by the life-force stored in Annie Martine’s apples … but a severed spinal cord is a severed spinal cord, and Karen no longer had the use of her legs.

  Robin stood over her.

  The witch rolled over and put up her shaking hands. The eye on the card side of her face was lax and dead, unmoving. “I’m b-beat, you wuh-wearisome harlot.” Her mouth pooled with black. “Leave me buh-be.”

  Kneeling, Robin took hold of the lapels of Weaver’s riotous rag-coat, lifting her. “You may be done,” she said, her voice without fire or ice, “but I’m not.” Her mind dived for that dark power again. This time, she found a thread of warmth and recognized it as stolen life-force, the give-a-shit from what Heinrich would have called Annie’s flora de vida. She drew them both out, the heart-road and the life-force, and internalized them. Weaver’s face emptied, a jaundiced canvas pulling tight across her skull. The witch’s nose caved in like a spoiled jack-o’-lantern and her eyes retreated, shriveling. Her lips thinned, shrinking back to reveal horsey yellow teeth, giving her the silently screaming face of a peat-bog corpse.

  “I’ll be waiting for you,” the witch wheezed in an arid whisper, “in Hell,” and she died for the second time.

  * * *

  Marilyn Cutty’s clairvoyance proved to be to her advantage, as neither she nor her Matron were anywhere to be found in the Lazenbury. Robin explored the house, moving purposefully from room to room like a SWAT cop. The second floor was occupied by the witches’ three spacious and palatial bedrooms, each one containing a four-poster bed and resplendent with each woman’s tastes—for Weaver, a room straight out of the Ponderosa. For Theresa, the austere room of a nun, piled high with moldy dishes, half-eaten food. For Cutty, a frilly Victorian nest of paisleys and silks.

  In the last bedroom, a hatch and ladder led up to the attic. She pulled the hatch down and climbed into darkness, her shining heart cutting the soft shade. The attic was enormous, running the length and width of the house. Dusty furniture and assorted bric-a-brac made a dark, cluttered labyrinth; this she trickled carefully through, constantly on the lookout for an ambush.

  Half-hidden behind an armoire was a simple door. She pushed it aside and behind it was a small room with a bed, a television, and a window overlooking the vineyard grove. A chair sat abandoned in the middle of the room, arrayed with cushions and a warm blanket.

  Heading back downstairs, Robin wondered if the Matron really was the Morgan le Fay from the Arthurian legends. A hot pang of shame drilled through her when she thought of the talk she would have to have with Wayne. Leon Parkin was nowhere in the house either. What would the boy say? What would he do? What would she have to do?

  Of course, she would have to hunt down Cutty and her Matron wherever they went. That was a given … this blood feud didn’t stop just because Robin eliminated her coven. The two of them had probably jumped ship to settle down somewhere else, God knew where. But that was their way, wasn’t it? The witches were most often nomadic. They roamed like rats from town to town, country to country, looking for a place to chew a hole and make a nest. But some of them put down roots, and that’s where Robin found them.

  Wayne would undoubtedly want to go with Robin to find Cutty.

  Could she allow that?

  Did she have a choice?

  He couldn’t stay here by himself. He needed to have a real life, a normal life, go to school and live in a house, not in the back of a van, running from maniacs and starting fires.

  On the way through the living room, she checked on Gendreau. The blood-soaked curandero was breathing shallowly, his eyes open just enough to see her. They closed and his face pinched in pain.

  The kitchen was abandoned and dark, no boar, no oblivious chefs. She fetched a glass of water from the tap and took it to Gendreau. It felt a bit strange to see real people get really hurt—and almost die—and realize how long it takes for fully human people to get over their injuries.

  Now I know why I’ve always been so strong, she mused to herself, looking at her strange wire-and-vine hands.

  “Come to the order’s compound in Michigan. Come meet Frank.” Gendreau winced, whispering. The slash across his throat was now a jagged pink lightning bolt. “We’ll figure out how to help you.”

  “Help me, or kill me?” She folded her arms. “Or do experiments on me?”

  “Can’t promise the alchemists won’t want a urine sample.” Wincing again, he swallowed. His voice was now full of ragged vocal fry, so much so he almost sounded like a robot. “But we’re not the Pentagon. Nobody will be dissecting you, promise.”

  Sara combed his hair out of his face, petting his head. “Shut up, man. Rest yourself.”

  “So, now what?” asked Lucas.

  “Cutty’s flown the coop with the Matron. Took Wayne’s dad with her, too.”

  “She left her dryad here?”

  “No way Cutty could have dug up Annie by herself in two days, much less transport a tree half the size of the Christmas pine in Rockefeller Center. Guess she considers herself and her Matron more important than the nag shi tree.” Robin sighed. “She can always make another one, after all.”

  “True. Man, that kid’s gonna be bummed his dad wasn’t here.”

  “No Osdathregar?” asked Sara.

  “No. They took it with them, unfortunately.”

  “Then our only weapon is out of our reach. It’s up to you now, I suppose.”

  A few minutes passed as Robin considered her options and let them comfort Gendreau.

  “Kenway,” she said, finally.

  “Hmm?”

  “Will you come with me into the vineyard?” She studied his face, looking up at the gauze still around his forehead, stained with old brown blood. “I don’t want to go by myself. I want you with me.” Her hand rested on Lucas’s shoulder. “You guys stay here and take care of Doc.”

  Kenway got up out of the chair he’d been sitting in, with the hammer across his knees. Now he stood and wordlessly slung it over his shoulder.

  “You too, brother,” she told Joel.

  To his credit, the pizza-man wordlessly stood and came with her. On the way through the kitchen, he grabbed a carving knife out of the block on the counter island to replace his broken bat.

  * * *

  Night rested in the vineyard clotted and cold, a tangle of shadows rustling with dying grapevines. Robin’s heart sifted through the trellises in soft tines of gold.

  Kenway and Joel walked silently alongside her, flint in their eyes.

  The veteran’s furrowed brow and downcast face almost made him seem as if he were a pouty little boy, and suddenly she wanted to be far from this grave place, somewhere warm and far away from the world where she could be alone with him. He noticed her watching and smiled, though his eyes were still hard.

  Without Weaver around to alter the lay of the land back there, the vineyard turned out to be a lot smaller. The first time she’d been through it felt like they’d walked for miles, passing out of the world and into the leagues of some alien wilderness of vines and fences. Now it only took them a moment to reach the end of the property, and even the landscaping seemed smaller than she remembered it: four scant patches of purple flowers and stunted trees barely twice as tall as the fence, all of it scattered with lavender flagging in the wind.

  Energy washed up on the shore of her mind, cold echoes of Weaver’s power. Robin could feel it ebbing slowly. She cast her eyes s
kyward at the stars, which had begun to flicker and fluctuate, like some kind of malfunctioning 3-D, zooming in and out in frenetic stutters and flashes. The Georgia pines around them undulated in mad waves like an oscilloscope, bolts of green electricity laddering upward between the trees.

  Only had a few minutes until the poke straightened itself out, and her demon body would be destroyed by the Sanctification.

  “Damn,” she said, as they entered the grove at the end of the path. “We need to hurry this up before the de-conjuration collapses. Won’t be good for me when we rejoin reality. The real world doesn’t like demons.”

  The nag shi, the dryad, the Malus Domestica, her mother Annie Martine stood in the center of the clearing. All the apples were gone. The tree had been picked clean. That, at least, Cutty had been able to undertake in the last two days.

  Solace and irritation passed through her. To Robin, the apples represented the witches’ repulsive influence, and to see her mother rid of them was like seeing a loved one come out of rehab, free of heroin and ready to live again. But she knew when she faced Cutty, the witch would have devoured as many of the life-giving fruit as possible, making what would have already been a hard fight into a true bloodbath.

  “I’m back, Mom,” she said quietly, as the forest quivered and the sky crawled. “Marilyn is gone.” Wind sighed in the tree’s leaves, a sound Robin would swear until the day she died carried a certain relief. She placed her hands on Annie’s rugged hips and closed her eyes. Her mind relaxed and flowed downhill through the slopes of her arms, into the apple tree.

  Behind her eyelids, darkness, silence.

  She had the feeling that she was standing at the bottom of a dry well; she could even smell the dank, fossilized memory of water.

  Mom?

  Lustering softly in the narrow space, a spirit turned to regard her with lambent eyes. Guarded exhaustion came from the other mind in lieu of words, like the nonsense murmur of someone waking from a deep sleep after a long day.

  It’s me. Robin smiled. I’m here. I came back. I beat them and I’m here to get you out. The warmest light she’d ever felt poured from the presence as Annie recognized her.