I Come with Knives

by S. A. Hunt

  Love, it was love and sorrow and regret, and a vacant space in Robin’s center filled up with such overwhelming affection that at first, she could no longer speak, paralyzed with secondhand adoration, as if she could see herself from the outside. It’s okay, she thought, it’s okay, because she knew the regret came from her mother. You didn’t know what would happen when you summoned the demon, but it’s okay, everything turned out okay for me.

  Not only was love filling her up, she realized, it was Annie herself, her mother was moving toward her, into her, this consumed woman who had spent years trapped in this spiritual sweatshop spinning straw into gold, spinning the town’s prosperity into life-giving apples. Robin enveloped the spirit as it stepped into her and suffused her with elation. She took the last fragment of her mother into her arms and held her until the dry well that had been her cell inside the tree was empty and cold.

  “Oh,” breathed Kenway at her side.

  She opened her eyes and took her hands away from the apple tree’s now-cold bark, dimly aware that she’d been crying, sobbing, tears spilling down her face.

  Her hands were soft and human again.

  Both of them. She studied her left arm with astonishment and found it whole and functional. New, even—the scars that littered her arms were gone without a trace. Taking her mother from the nag shi had imparted some measure of humanity to her once again, as if accepting Annie’s very human spirit had imbued her with that which she had lost.

  Knees buckling, Robin sat on her ankles like a penitent in the dewy grass, holding herself, lost in a happiness so stunning and so savage, it was almost grief.

  Slipping his arms under her, Kenway lifted her, staggered up onto his titanium foot, and carried her out of the vineyard. Joel stayed behind, watching the apple tree grow dark and gray, and he had an idea. He reached into his pocket and came up with his lighter, a cheapo gas station Bic, and his last two cigarettes. He cupped the cigarette with his hand and lit it, taking a deep draw to get the cherry going. Placing the lighter at the base of the tree like an offering, Joel stomped on it until the plastic cracked and the fuel inside leaked out. He kneeled, touched the cigarette to the puddle of lighter fluid, and it went up in a blorp! of blue flame.

  “Checkmate,” he said, and stepped back.

  As the tesseract twitched and faded around him, and the reality of the neighborhood returned to normal, Joel smoked and watched the tree burn. He found a little concrete bench by the garden and sat on it, smoking and resting, until the fire climbed the trunk, and the branches held out bouquets of flame, and tickets of gray ash drifted into the sky.

  31

  They wanted to hold Fisher’s funeral at his comic shop—seemed like the most natural place, since his body couldn’t be recovered from the acid pond, eliminating the need for a viewing at Lane Funeral Home—but when they realized how many people were coming, it became obvious there wouldn’t be anywhere near enough room in the tiny shop to hold a crowd of that size, even if they took out the booth tables in the back, the comics racks, the action-figure racks, and the point-of-sale counter. To say nothing of the fact the shop was an active crime scene because of the dead serial killer.

  So, about a hundred people clustered here in Rocktown, high above Miguel’s Pizza, in the mountains east of Slade Township. Mourners stood in deep corridor crevices and on top of rocks, and stone shelves, and boulders, wet leaves making a soft carpet under their feet. Framed portraits of Fish himself had been arrayed on the rocks leading up to the promontory, along with some of the pop-culture artifacts from his shop—a Lord of the Rings helmet, Thor’s Mjolnir hammer, Jason Voorhees’ hockey mask.

  Glittering with sweat, Joel stood between Robin and Fisher’s girlfriend Marissa on the cliff edge.

  Turned out, Fisher Ellis had been quite the avid rock climber, and Rocktown had been one of his favorite places. Joel had chosen to climb up the rock face from the pizzeria, believing that ascending the hard way was the best and most honest ritual to honor the memory of their dearly departed friend and brother. Some of the attendees had also climbed up. The older and more infirm (as well as the terminally lazy, like Robin) had driven up on the exit road on the back side of the mountain.

  The pizza-man had required lots of help and tutelage, and it had taken him all morning, but he made it, and you could see the pride and accomplishment written all over his face.

  To their credit, the magicians showed up as well. The healer Anders Gendreau and the illusionist Sara Amundson were dressed nicely, although for Gendreau, with his black corduroy jacket and snug-fitting black slacks, that meant his everyday garb. With her fiery red hair, Sara was radiant in a black sundress and sensible black flats (in Rocktown, heels were asking for a broken ankle). The channeler Lucas was all geared up and sweaty in street clothes; he and Joel had made the climb together.

  At some point, Robin found herself walking alongside Sara in a deep, shadowy crevice. Gendreau walked a few feet behind them, staring down at his smartphone, texting someone. “Back there in the coven’s house,” Robin began. “I hate to pry, but—”

  “My face?” asked Sara.

  Robin nodded. “When you were unconscious, you, uhh—”

  “Witches eat children,” said the illusionist. “I was almost one of those kids. I was in an oven when the Dogs of Odysseus stormed the property and saved us. But they didn’t get to me in time—I was already burning. They saved my life, but they couldn’t get rid of my scars. So, when they offered me an artifact and a discipline, I chose Illusion. The witches took my face, but I used their own magic to take it back.”

  * * *

  “My brother would have been real happy to see so many people comin’ up this rock,” Joel said, indicating the climbers assembled to one side. Twenty-six of them altogether, men and women and a few kids, gathered downwind so as not to sour the rest of the congregation with their sweatiness. Joel sat on a rock at the foot of the promontory, flanked by the framed photos.

  Sunlight filtered through the trees, dappling his bare shoulders. “I’m gonna let y’all know, it was a hard-ass climb, but I’m glad I did it. I felt closer to Fish in the last couple of hours than I have in years.” His voice broke. He reached up and ground one eye with the heel of his hand.

  For a moment or so, he was unable to continue, sitting there on that rock, his eyes wandering across their faces.

  “I wish he could have been here to see it,” he continued. “He never said anything to me about comin’ out here, so this was kind of a surprise. Marissa here is the one that let me know about his extracurricular activities, so if you one of the ones got stuck in the mud comin’ up the back road, y’all know who to bring it up with.”

  Gentle laughter came from the crowd, barely audible over the birdsong. He let a little bit of time pass, listening to the forest around them.

  “We had a kind of family feud goin’ on, and we didn’t talk much. Moms had a bit of trouble in her later years, and Fish moved out to go to college, so it was up to me to take care of her. And at the time, I thought he had abandoned us—abandoned her, abandoned me. I was the only one that lived in that house, only one had to deal with her ‘difficulties,’ and near the end, the only one clothed, bathed, and fed her. For a long time, I hated him for leavin’ the two of us there together.

  “But I’ve had a lot of time to think lately, and I’ve realized he didn’t abandon us. He still helped on the financial side of things—namely, bills—and I know now, this was the only way he knew to help. He could be an inspiration—” And here Joel glanced at Wayne, who sat on a rock at the front of the gathered throng, along with Pete and Amanda.

  Adapt and overcome. The boy smiled sadly, raising a power-fist.

  “—But when it came to hands-on kinda stuff, ol’ Fisher, he just wasn’t prepared for that. He didn’t know how to handle Mama’s particular brand of crazy. Now, he could talk a good game. He could have you believin’ you were the strongest, or the smartest, but he wasn’t the hustlin’
type. So, he helped the best way he knew how: by keepin’ our moms and me off the streets.” A pause. He looked down, picking a fingernail. “I wish I understood that when we still had time to make up.” He gestured at the sky. “But I know in my heart of hearts he’s up there in Heaven’s comic shop right now, and he knows. He knows I love him. I always have.”

  “He knew,” Robin interjected, from the other side of the promontory. “He knew before all this. He knew you loved him. And he loved you.”

  When he heard that, the pizza-man’s eyes welled up and he took a moment to collect himself, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Anyway,” he continued with a deep inhalation, as if he’d awakened from a deep sleep, “Moms is gone, now Fish is gone. It’s down to me now. High time to follow his lead and do a little growin’ up. Do a little less drinkin’. A little less tokin’. Maybe take care of myself.” He flexed. “Get me a gym membership. Get back in shape. It’s been a minute since I picked up a weight, y’all.”

  “We can get you a discount,” a man said from the crowd.

  “I just might take you up on that,” Joel said, pointing. He floundered, glancing at Robin. “Well, this the first time I ever had to do something like this, so I’m running out of words. Help me out here, sister.”

  Dozens of eyes zeroed in on Robin, and she instantly locked up and went blank. She could talk to a camera smoothly enough, but when it came to getting up in front of people in Real Life™, she was out of her league. “Umm,” she said awkwardly, eyes down, smoothing out her dress. Yes, folks, Robin Martine was wearing a dress, a little black T-shirt dress, dark cranberry leggings, and black flats. Feeling like a little choir girl, she spoke down to her hands, trying not to unsettle herself by looking back up at the crowd. “Have to admit I didn’t know Fisher well, at least as an adult. But back in the day, my mom used to babysit Fish and Joel. From what I remember of him, he was a good kid. Always quiet. Smart.”

  “Smart,” said Joel. “Goddamn, he was smart.”

  “Yeah. He had this little computer thing? Looked like an adding machine, had these word games on it: scrambles, missing letters, etcetera. He’d play that thing for hours on end.”

  “He liked to read Reader’s Digest magazines.” Joel laughed and sniffed back a wet sob. “You believe that? An itty-bitty boy sittin’ there, readin’ a old folks’ magazine. Shit, he read everything he could get his hands on—the newspaper, your daddy’s Tom Clancy books, Field & Stream, Highlights, Cracked, Mad Magazine, your mama’s big red medical encyclopedia, he’d even leaf through a TV Guide.”

  “Started loving the pop culture stuff early. Had a Ghostbusters proton pack, I remember. He would run around our house, busting ghosts.”

  “Oh, my god,” said Joel. “Can you imagine if he knew about the dem—” He cut himself off, eyes darting over the crowd. Demon. Top-secret need-to-know info, indeed. “Yeah, man, I remember one day he come runnin’ into your little tower bedroom and tried to ghost-bust the two of us while we was playin’. We ended up getting in a fight and you got your lip busted.”

  “Yeah.” She laughed.

  Felt good to feel her memories slowly come back to her through the haze of time. By now, the medication was completely out of her system. It had served its purpose, the Abilify and the Zoloft, helping to eliminate the psychosis and depression of the last several years. But she was stronger now, tougher, her mind ground down to a hard, stony polish. The grueling brainwashing she had endured at Medina Psychiatric to wipe her mother’s hex out of her mind was over.

  It was time to move on and remember, to reclaim her stolen past and face the future.

  Silence fell over them again. A vivid red cardinal in the trees timed it with an intermittent chirp, like the battery reminder of a smoke alarm. “There are so many of you. I think he loved everybody that came to Movie Night at his comic shop,” said Joel. “Wish he could see all y’all up here.”

  “I expect he can, dear Mr. Ellis,” said Gendreau, with a knowing smile. The curandero peered up at him from his seat on a slab of stone, bereft of his bull cane. “I expect he can.”

  32

  Wayne was a zombie. He spent the entirety of Halloween on Joel’s couch, mindlessly watching horror movies on television and ignoring trick-or-treaters who rang at the doorbell every few minutes. His cellphone was glued to his hand. In the hours and days since the assault on Lazenbury House had failed to turn up his father, he’d sent dozens and dozens of text messages to Leon’s phone, waiting and listening for a response.

  WHERE U AT DAD

  None came. He refused to go to school, staying in bed until almost lunchtime, and he didn’t sleep well at all, pacing quietly around the house until well after midnight, staring out the front window at the lights of downtown Blackfield like a soldier’s wife.

  They’d put in a missing-persons report at the police station, but Robin knew if Cutty didn’t want him to be found, he wouldn’t be.

  For her part, she drove Wayne around all Wednesday and Thursday night, looking for Leon in all the obvious places—the high school twice, the liquor store three times, the police-taped comic shop once, and 1168 no less than six times—but he was nowhere to be found.

  Since it had a spare bedroom, Wayne stayed with Joel Ellis at his mother’s uptown bungalow house. Robin kept vigil over the hollow-eyed boy and edited her videos for the MalusDomestica channel while Joel went back to work at Miguel’s. Gotta keep moving, she thought, staring at the laptop. She marveled at her demon self staring out of the screen with her traffic-light eyes. Like a shark, you gotta keep moving, you gotta keep putting those videos out there, even if you got your arm chewed off, your mom was inside of a tree, and your orangutan demon father turned you into the third-place entry at the Blackfield High Art Show.

  Since Kenway Griffin didn’t have anything better to do, he hung around with her. He and Joel had long conversations about what they were going to do with his brother Fisher’s comic shop.

  So, except for Wayne, the house was alive with activity. Joel appreciated the company, since he’d finally had time to fully process his brother’s death. His decision to go back to work so soon wasn’t made lightly. Miguel refused him at first, practically forcing him to go home and rest, and grieve, but Joel had insisted, saying he needed something to take his mind off of things, said he needed to stay busy. Nothing made this more obvious than the way he’d been Wednesday afternoon; Kenway had found him a drunken, sloppy mess splayed out in the kitchen floor, and he would have agreed to just about anything if it meant he wouldn’t have to sit in his childhood home alone, listening to the wind lowing in the eaves, waiting for some arcane monster to come finish him off.

  Someone knocked at the front door. Robin tore her eyes away from the TV and answered it.

  Instead of kids—she figured she’d probably handed out candy to at least thirty Spider-Men, Iron Men, and Batmen at this point—she found the three magicians. A feverish indigo sunset squatted low across the sky behind them, making shadow-teeth of the city.

  “Trick or treat.” Sara Amundson wore her Murdercorn wig again. Must have rescued it from their demolished Suburban.

  Robin was dressed as a witch, of course, green-faced in a Morticia Addams wig. In a fit of pique, she’d also painted her cleavage green to fill out the deep V of her black Lycra gown. “Nice,” said Lucas Tiedeman, dressed in an Eastwood poncho and gambler hat, a cowboy revolver gleaming at his hip. “Super hot.”

  “Thanks,” she said dryly. “Come on in.” She stepped aside, eyeballing Gendreau’s velvet top hat. With his navy waistcoat, he really did look like Willy Wonka.

  They sat at Mama Ellis’s table, all marked up with dozens of algiz runes. The only light in the room came from the hood over the stove, casting a dim yellowish light over them. Somehow, it gave the scene a desolate yet warm feel, like a lone streetlamp in a dark alley. Robin busied herself putting up the dishes in Joel’s dish drain, and said over her shoulder, “I have a pot of coffee on, if anybody wants any.”


  “I’ll take some,” said Gendreau. His voice was the dusty, whispery croak of Death.

  Robin eyed him. “How’s your throat?”

  “Getting better.” The magician’s pizzle cane looked odd without the pearl on top. “I owe you my life.”

  She smiled, searching the cabinet for a cup. She settled on a mug with a picture of a smiling macaw in front of a tropical vista. PANAMA CITY BEACH, it said across the bottom in slashy letters.

  Sara opened the lid on the gravy boat in the middle of the table and peered inside. “Where’s your boyfriend?” Whatever was in there must have been distasteful, because she grimaced and put it back down.

  “I don’t know,” said Robin, pouring coffee. “He’s been gone all day. He said he was trying to sell off his signage shop.”

  Sara grinned crookedly. “I take it he’s made up his mind to go off with you, then.”

  “Yeah. He wants to be my ‘cameraman.’”

  “If the van’s a-rockin’, don’t come a-knockin’,” said Lucas, raising a fist for Sara to bump.

  “Pervert.” She scowled and opened the gravy boat, showing him the contents.

  Lucas sat back. “Ew.”

  Handing off the coffee to Gendreau, Robin took off her floppy witch-hat and hung it on one of the posts of the fourth chair, then folded her arms and leaned against the stove.

  “Thank you,” he croaked.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Oh, that reminds me.” Gendreau reached into his jacket and took out a pocket watch, handing it to her.

  “Is this a heart-road artifact?” Robin held the watch up to the hood-light and studied its cracked face-glass. It was genuine. Power lay dormant inside, pulsing drowsily in time with the ticking clockwork. Helping Annie into the afterlife had won Robin her humanity back somehow, but she was still half-demon … and after the catalyzing effects of finally facing Andras, she supposed there were parts of her that were permanently stretched out of shape. She would never be fully normal again.