I Come with Knives

by S. A. Hunt

  A few moments ticked by as Kenway stood there with the bottle in his hand. “Shit,” he said, “Forgot to get a corkscrew. Be right back.” He stepped outside, the motorhome shaking like a wet dog from his weight.

  The boy looked up from his phone. “I can’t believe you guys are gonna sit in here and drink champagne while my dad’s still out there somewhere. With that witch.”

  Totally forgot I was dressed as one. Lycra hugged her slinky, boyish figure so tightly, it made her self-conscious. Sitting down in the breakfast nook across from him, she took his hands with her pasty green ones and looked into his face with deadly seriousness. “We’re going to find him. I promise. I’ve found every witch I’ve looked for up ’til now. This one won’t get away either.”

  He watched her, the blinds-filtered light glinting on his glasses, the cellphone coloring his jaw a ghastly blue. The windows guttered with lavender lightning.

  “You hear me?” she reiterated. “We will find your dad.”

  He nodded, perhaps a bit dismissively, and went back to flipping through the apps on his phone.

  “No. Listen.” She leaned in and looked up at his face again. He smoldered at her in irritation, but at least he was paying attention. “I will turn every stone, I will burn down every house, I will fight every demon between here and Hell if that’s what it takes.” She sat back, letting her hands slide away from his. “I’ve killed to get where I am, and I ain’t afraid to do it again.… So, don’t count me out, little man.”

  In the reflection on Wayne’s glasses, she saw an eerie green gleam in her own silhouette’s eyes.

  To his credit, he didn’t flinch.

  Kenway stepped into the Winnebago again. He held up a pair of channel-lock pliers. “Never leave home without ’em.”

  “You are such a redneck.” Robin shook her head.

  He picked up the champagne and clamped the pliers on the cork, twisting it like a stubborn bolt, and it came out with a heady thoonk!, gurgling white foam into the sink. He filled three cups with it and carried them to the table. Robin scooted over and let him sit down.

  Wayne sipped at the champagne and wrinkled his nose. “Tastes kinda like paint.” He finished it off. “I think I like beer better, honestly.”

  “Well, uhh!” Kenway tossed his back and slammed the cup on the table with a feeble clap of plastic. “I had no idea you was a grown-ass man, Mr. Connoisseur!” The vet pushed himself to his feet and started to pour himself another, then decided to drink it straight from the bottle. He gave a shudder. “Aight, maybe you got a point. I got some good local beer in my apartment. And some weird shit, too. You like cocoa?” He pulled the plug on the sink to let the ice water drain.

  Robin took the champagne bottle and stood up. Kenway paused in the door to study her face.

  “What do you think?” His face seemed to be asking, Did I do good?

  She smiled widely. “I think you spent a hell of a lot of money and gambled your place away on a girl you barely know, but … I do love it.” The wooden cabinets and walls glowed a soft cheese-orange in the darkness. “I really do.” She slid her arms around his neck and squeezed him tight. The bottle in her hand rolled across his back.

  “Thank you,” he said, his face muffled by her jacket. “For understanding. For standing there and lettin’ me cry it out.”

  She leaned back and looked him in the face. The laugh lines under his eyes were wet. She scraped them with her thumb. “Of course.”

  They stepped down out of the Winnebago. Robin stood there, her eyes playing over his broad back, and she wondered what he was thinking. How did I let this man so easily slide into my crazy life where so many others before him have bounced right off? Am I his ticket out of town? The random crying jag over his friend and the fact he actually had the money, and the means, to leave Blackfield whenever he wanted, must have meant this was a conscious, deliberate decision on his part. Am I, though? Am I the means to an end? Am I an excuse to leave? Robin wrapped her arms around herself, feeling the cold a little bit more than usual. He did seem to have real feelings, but … if she let him in, was he going to stay?

  “Are you sure you want to be my cameraman?” she finally blurted out. Cameraman, here, having evolved beyond its original platonic connotation. Connotations, she thought, isn’t that where the magic is?

  Hope sparkled in his red-rimmed eyes as Kenway turned. “I don’t think I’ve ever wanted anything more.”

  She realized it was the first time she’d seen anything like it since she’d met him. The even-keel Zen complacency she’d come to associate with him hadn’t been contentment at all, it had been a … lostness. A sort of bleak one-foot-in-front-of-the-other dormancy. His perceived failure to save Chris Hendry had been a self-imposed prison cell.

  “Even after what you’ve seen?” she asked.

  Taking out a pack of cigarettes, he tapped one out and tucked it into his mouth. He produced a lighter. “Yeah. Hell, all that probably did the opposite of running me away.” He cupped his hands around his face and lit the cigarette, putting the lighter away. They started up the sidewalk to his shop. “Ever since I met you,” he said, “it’s like … it’s like…” He pincered the cigarette and blew a stream of blue-white smoke. “Well, lemme put it like this: do you have any idea how much body armor weighs in the Army?”

  “I can’t say I do.”

  She did know, actually—after wearing an IOTV every day for months, she knew quite well—but she really wanted to hear what he was about to say and didn’t want to ruin the moment.

  “It’s a Kevlar vest with ceramic plates capable of stopping assault rifle rounds. The Kevlar by itself is like wearing a leather jacket, but with the plates in, it’s forty pounds—more, with extra side plates, codpiece, helmet. Heavy as balls, but if you wear it all day, you get used to it. But at the end of the day? When you take it off? You feel like you’re walking on the moon. Your step is all spring.” His beard parted with a broad smile. “Ever since I met you, it’s like I took off my armor. I can breathe again.” An anxious hand crept up to rub his face. “And, you know, I don’t … I don’t really want to give that up. You know?”

  The corner of Robin’s mouth quirked up in recognition.

  “I know.”

  He unlocked the front door of his art shop, the cigarette cherry glowing in the dark shapes smeared across the glass, and pulled it open. The front area presented them with long smears of pale gray: the rollers and spools of his vinyl machines. Robin and Wayne followed him through the shop and into the garage. “I’ll have to teach you how to play cornhole,” Kenway told him as they started up the stairs to the loft apartment.

  Wayne’s face was traced in blue by his cellphone screen. She could see he was texting his father again. He grunted noncommittally.

  An electronic bink! came from the top of the stairs.

  Wayne froze. His glasses were white squares, refracting the screen of his cellphone. His thumb danced across the screen and they heard the bink! from above again. “DAD?!” Frantic, he scrambled up the stairs, almost on all fours.

  “WAIT!” Robin lunged for his ankles and missed. “No!” she shouted. “Don’t go up there!”

  34

  The boy reached the top of the staircase and disappeared over the crest. Robin and Kenway thundered up after him, his titanium foot clanking like a robot, the champagne sloshing in her hand. Rising into the lightless apartment, she scanned the shapes around them, trying to pick out something familiar, something human.

  Wayne stood in the open kitchen. The white-eyed shadow snatched up a square of light and waved it over his head. “It’s Dad’s phone!” He came over, holding up Leon’s phone and his own. “Why is Dad’s phone here? Is Dad here? Why would Dad be here? He’s never even been here, has he?”

  “Come on,” Robin told him, her arms and neck prickling. “We need to get out of here, now.”

  She took his wrist. “Come on, we got—”

  “AAAH!” screamed Kenway, lurching
forward onto one knee. The cigarette fell out of his mouth.

  Leon Parkin stood over him.

  Both of Leon’s hands were wrapped around the Osdathregar, and he had jammed it deep into Kenway’s back. Heat lightning blued the clouds outside, briefly turning the windows overlooking the canal into a bank of television screens. A strange silhouette, squat and angular, was outlined by the squares of dim light. The apartment plunged into darkness again.

  We’re screwed, we waltzed right into this, as Kenway crawled away, the silver dagger jutting from his back. She moved toward the maniacally grinning Leon, clenching her fists and preparing for a hand-to-hand. Cutty waited for the magicians to leave so she’d have the upper hand again. She still had the champagne; she’d break it over his head. I gotta take Parkin out of commission first, she decided, but Wayne slammed into her chest.

  “No!” the boy shrieked. “Don’t kill him!”

  As soon as he shoved her, Wayne ran at Leon. The familiarized man threw his arms wide, his eyes and teeth flashing in the abyss of his face, and Wayne plowed into his father’s belly. Both of them plunged backward down the stairs in a sickening drum solo of knees and elbows. Leon snarled. Wayne screamed. The scuffling-smacking sounds of a fight carried up to her, and she started to take off downstairs, but the sight of Kenway with a knife in his back made her hesitate.

  Silent lightning illuminated the loft’s windows, tracing the strange figure again. “It’s so nice to finally meet you,” the thing in the wheelchair said, with a voice like dry leaves blowing across a sidewalk.

  “Morgan,” said Robin.

  “Morgan,” said the Matron. “Sycorax. Circe. Cassandra of Apollo. Miss Cleo of the Psychic Hotline. I forget. You get to be my age, you forget a lot of things.”

  Indirect lighting in the kitchen clicked on, bathing the apartment in a soft, slanting glow. Marilyn Cutty stood on the other side of Kenway’s chopping block. “Happy Halloween, littlebird,” said the witch, coming around the kitchen island at a stately pace.

  Tearing her eyes away from Cutty, Robin peered at the wheelchair at the edge of the light and saw a thin, hunched hag swaddled in an old quilt.

  The Matron’s arms were twigs, hooked into drawn, papery fists. Her mouth was frozen in a gaping tragedy-mask frown. Eyes like manzanilla olives twitched in stretched, drooping eye sockets. One of the holes sank down her face toward the corner of her stiff lips, revealing a knob of cheekbone in a grotesque C. She was the looming specter that had followed Annie down the driveway all those years ago. She was Haruko Nakasone’s prophetic ghost-painting. She was the drowned woman in the black bathtub.

  Perched in the valley between the Matron’s left ear and the knob of her left shoulder was a burden of sweat-slick flesh that writhed like the egg of a giant snake. “Ah, yes,” rasped the ancient witch, almost obscured under the tumor. “Happy Halloween, my dear.”

  “Champagne,” said Cutty. “Feeling festive, I see.”

  Carefully, cautiously, Robin stood the champagne bottle on the floor to free her hands. Her eyes flicked down to the Osdathregar sticking out of Kenway, and out of the corner of her eye she saw Cutty regard it as well.

  Blood glistened between the veteran’s lips.

  Is he dead? Her heart tumbled in her chest. She lunged for the dagger, but she was too late. It leapt out of Kenway’s back and whirled across the room, landing in Cutty’s outstretched hand. Before she could react, Cutty gestured at her and an invisible force washed her across the apartment, where she hit the bedroom wall and hung there, suspended some eight feet in the air. Paintings tumbled from the wall in a card-flutter of canvas squares, clapping to the floor.

  The Matron wheezed laughter.

  “Ereshkigal.” Cutty smiled as she paced slowly, inexorably, out of the kitchen. She flourished the dagger. “We’ve been incubating her for quite some time now. It takes time to resurrect a death goddess, you know.” The witch casually leaned against the kitchen island and gestured at the Matron and her fleshy, heaving tumor. “Hundreds of years, we’ve been working to bring Ereshkigal into the material world. Coddling her, feeding her life from the dryads. Mum’s been eating for two for a very, very long time.” The witch scoffed sadly. “Halloween. It’s almost too on the nose, isn’t it? Hokey. But I kinda like it.”

  Robin tried to push away from the wall, but no dice: she was glued down. She could move her hands, though, and as Cutty kept talking, she slipped one into her jacket.

  “Regretfully, I’ve missed a few of your birthdays, littlebird,” said the witch, emphasizing every so often with the handle of the dagger. “What kind of a grandmother am I? So, after your magician friends left, I thought, why don’t I bring Mother to town and make a night of it? Throw you a surprise party. Isn’t that neato-keen? I wanted you to see her. I wanted you to see what you and Annie missed. Annabelle betrayed us and endangered our family. You refused my generosity and killed my sisters. The time for reunions, and conciliations, and truces is over. Your mentor is dead. Your family is dead. Your little boy-toy is dead. Now you’re going to lay eyes on the goddess Ereshkigal and feel the true weight of your failure as she is reborn, and then you are going to die, cold and alone.”

  “But I haven’t seen the last season of Breaking Bad yet,” Robin said petulantly. “Let me finish that, and then you can come back here and resurrect the Mesopotamian avatar of death in our kitchen, okay? In the meantime, that dagger belongs to me.”

  “You should—”

  Interrupting her, the top of the Matron’s massive hunchback split open like a Jiffy-Pop bag—splutch!

  But instead of popcorn, what volcanoed out was a river of … at first, Robin wasn’t sure. Looked like crude oil, black and thick—then a nose-burning stench filled the apartment with fish and rotten eggs. Pus and blood and God knew what else sprayed straight up in the air and clattered to the floor around the wheelchair.

  Even Cutty was surprised. “Oh, goodness gracious,” she said, and tugged the collar of her sweater over her face.

  Robin’s fingers closed over the prize in the pocket of her jacket. She pulled out Gendreau’s watch and flipped it upside down, screwing it open with her thumbs. The backplate came loose with a subtle click, revealing a lock of hair.

  The shredded skin over the hunchback’s colossal tumor spread like lips, and the whole thing tilted forward, spilling its contents.

  A great gush of fibrous black matter poured out of the broken hump like a horse giving birth and hit the floor with a surprisingly bony thud. The empty sac flopped over the Matron’s lap, covering her face with a parachute of loose skin. Soupy slime oozed down her shins.

  Robin removed the teratoma and focused on it, seeking the energy lying latent inside. Light spiraled up her arm, her skin glowing green from within, as the heart-road entered her mind and infused it with a strange power. To her bewilderment and horror, she experienced a sensation as if her brain had sprouted fingers, dozens of them, pressing against the inside of her skull. Darts of pain rippled across her scalp as it seemed to stretch.

  “Yo, Maude,” she said, pointing.

  Preoccupied by the nauseating resurrection taking place in front of her, Cutty looked up. Robin put her index fingertip over the Osdathregar and stole it out of Cutty’s hands as if she were dragging a file on a computer screen. The dagger whipped upward and hovered over the witch’s head.

  “The hell is this?” asked Cutty, staring up at it. Robin whipped her hand down in a slashing motion. The Osdathregar arrowed down at the witch but halted in midair as if it’d struck an invisible obstacle.

  Concentration on her face, Cutty grinned back at her. “Where did you learn to do that, littlebird?”

  Turning in the air like the needle in a compass, the Osdathregar trembled as Robin pushed against it. “I get by with a little help from my friends.” The dagger had become the ball in a game of will, and the blade point slowly, excruciatingly, rotated toward her.

  “The Dogs of Odysseus?” Cutty cackled. “They’
re a bad influence on you.” The witch thrust her finger, overpowering Robin, and the Osdathregar whipped across the room. At the last instant, Robin put up her hands and the dagger pierced her right palm, bursting from the back. The hilt slammed into the heel of her hand and the tip of the stiletto stopped a few inches from her face.

  It really fucking hurt, the blade grinding between the bones of her hand, lacerating the muscle, her fingers forced apart in a Spock live long and prosper gesture. She screamed until her throat was raw and her breath ran out.

  “I hate to do it, my sweet little demon, but you’ve got to be taught a lesson.” Cutty selected a fillet knife from Kenway’s dish drain. Then she went to the creature writhing on the floor and used it to pierce the caul covering its face.

  Taking hold of the Osdathregar, Robin pulled it out of her hand, inviting a fresh round of agony. Blood ran down her arm. She flung the dagger back at Cutty, who looked up and put out a warning hand.

  It stopped in midair again.

  “You need new material,” said Cutty, twirling her finger. The Osdathregar tried to pivot again, but Robin pointed with both hands two-gun style. She howled with effort, tears standing in her eyes, muscles cording under her skin. Cutty’s face darkened. “Do you know what the definition of insanity is, dear?”

  Vivid red blood dribbled from the girl’s clenched fist. “I may not be insane,” Robin growled from the wall, her entire body shaking with exertion, “but I’m pretty goddamn crazy.”

  The witch stepped away from the thing on the floor, redoubling her efforts, her teeth bared, eyes wide.

  “Uungh,” said a low voice.

  At first, the two women thought it was the thing on the floor, but it turned out to be the other thing on the floor—the big blond lunk with the blood running down his back. Kenway stirred, slowly finding his feet, and he got up.

  “What are you doing?” asked Robin. “Stay down, I got this.”

  “We’re in the shit, baby.” He looked at them, assessing the situation. The man was hunched over in agony. Blood trickled down his chin and across his neck where the wound had leaked over his shoulder. Approaching the dagger hovering in midair, he gripped the Osdathregar with both hands.