by S. A. Hunt
Soon, Carly will be able to protect herself, but until then, I need your word. I need your protection. She needs your protection.
Don’t let them find me.
Kill them.
Yes, my love. Yes, Mother Mary. Yes, my heart and my fire. We will kill them. We will tear the hunter open and strew her guts across a hundred miles of sand. Robin Martine will pass into your domain screaming.
Track 35
Buildings loomed over her, the walls of a canyon, and the darkening sky sapped the day of light, leaving Robin in an abyssal environment, as if the ruins of Fort Bostock were at the bottom of the ocean.
Black windows gaped blindly like eye sockets in gargantuan skulls, some of them filmed by glass cataracts. She walked slowly, gripping the spear.
Took everything in her mind and heart to control the demon’s anger-hunger, to make herself focus on the task at hand instead of hiking back to town. Every step tugged at a rope tied to her insides, pulling her toward civilization. The glow in the sky where Keyhole Hills and Lockwood sent their evening light into the dusk—she could see it, and she wanted to go there and tear it down. She’d told the Dogs of Odysseus there was no danger of her losing control, because at the time, there wasn’t … but if her grasp on her humanity was weakened even more by her next transformation—assuming there would be another, somehow—then there would be no guarantees. Every time it happened, she was becoming more and more naturalized … more feral.
Can’t let that happen. Broken window-eyes leered down at her. This has to be the last time. No more Nancy Drew shit, no more Dexter-for-hire shit, no more helping strangers get rid of their stalkers and abusive husbands and pervert uncles. No more sacrifices. No more martyrdom for the downtrodden. Keep letting this go on, and one day, you’re either going to come back as an uncontrollable monster, or you won’t come back at all. She felt as if she were abandoning everyone, but she had to think of herself for a change.
Had to get as far away from her friends as possible. As far away from everybody as possible. She couldn’t save Kenway anymore—he was past saving now, thanks to this mutant son of a bitch—but she could save the Dogs of Odysseus and the Parkins and Joel and everybody in Blackfield from the demon inside of her.
Baby steps. You can’t save everybody from each other, but you can save them from yourself. Do what you can with what you got.
She sighed. Dude, fuck the supernatural. It sucks.
“Give me the relic, Santi,” she called, but her voice, exasperated and hollow, barely seemed to carry ten feet in front of her. “Let me end this. Your daughter is still alive.”
“No.” Santiago’s voice sounded like a crowd of mouths. She could have sworn people spoke to her from every one of the windows around her. “I have to kill you, or they’re going to kill her.”
“Who?” Robin turned in a circle, looking for eyeshine. “Who’s going to kill who?”
“You. And your friends. You’re going to kill my daughter like you killed my wife.”
“What? I agreed to this to save her.”
“My wife.” Santi’s voice was a crowd of conspiratorial whispers. “She’s dead. Did you promise to save her?”
Robin’s heart rumbled anxiously in her chest. She wondered if it was a charge of pure light, a sizzling star, like it had been when she was the demon in the Darkhouse last year, or if it was a real heart this time. “No!” she told him, fists clenched. “Marina died because we were attacked by your friend Tuco, and he caused the RV to run off the road. Marina went through the—”
“Lies. You lie to me. You threw her into the gutter to get to me. You let my wife die just to hurt me.”
“I’m telling the truth.”
“You say anything to save your own skin,” growled Santiago in a thousand raspy tongues. “Leave my daughter alone, and I will let you live. She stays with me.”
“Why did you eat Marina?”
“Because I couldn’t allow her to leave me again.”
Then, to Robin’s surprise and disgust and despair, Marina Valenzuela’s voice came from the ruins around her, a forlorn city of voices. “Now I’m part of him,” said the dead woman, “forever … and ever.”
“You’re sick, Santi.”
Santiago’s rusty laugh reverberated throughout the maze of buildings. “Took you this long to figure that out?”
“Give me the gas tank, and we’ll leave.”
Silence.
Thought she heard the rasping of scales from the windows to her right, but it could have been nothing but the sighing of the damp breeze. Rain was on the way. Gonna have to end this before then, or my visibility is going to go to shit.
“Don’t make me come find you,” Robin called out.
Still no answer. She headed for the nearest door and kicked it open, smashing the deadbolt in a cloud of dust.
“When I was a little boy,” said Santiago’s voice from somewhere in another room, “the person I used to be was convinced a monster lived under his bed.”
Inside was a dark foyer with a splintery hardwood floor.
“He lived in a trailer, his grandmother and he.”
The armor running down Robin’s legs had hardened into weird biomechanical shoes that protected her from the splinters—hard black exoskeleton, like the chitinous carapace of a beetle, a segmented Gigerian cross between cowboy boots and bare feet. She didn’t know what this new development was, but it had saved her ass back there in Santiago’s driveway. Hard as SWAT armor, leathery but tough, sturdier than anything Heinrich Hammer had ever given her to wear. Condensation or something collected on it, giving it a shiny look like a wet car.
Armored in a panoply of ashes and shadow.
“His father, he…” Santiago paused. “Well, to cut a long story short, his father decided it would be best if the boy lived with his abuelita.”
Robin moved through the office building, armored feet crunching on long-neglected floors, pushing open doors with the butt of the spear, buzzing with anticipation of an ambush.
“They lived in a trailer, in a trailer park, and the boy I once was slept in a bunk bed, in a bedroom just wide enough to contain it. His brother slept on the top bunk.”
“Where are you?” Robin called out, looking out a window at a two-story drop.
“In the middle of the night,” said Santiago, ignoring her, “the boy was terrified to get out of bed. His brother used to lie in his bunk and tell the boy the most horrible stories about boogeymen and chupacabra and demons.”
Summoning her courage, Robin vaulted the windowsill and threw herself onto the dirt below, rolling to her feet. She picked up the spear and went to the building across the street.
“Ay! Then he would lie awake for hours, even if he had to piss, thinking about those monsters,” continued Santiago. “He could just see them, in his mind, lying right under his mattress, inches from his back. Sometimes, the boy thought it was Freddy Krueger, the man with the hat and the claw, because of those movies his dad liked to watch when he was high.”
This door was chained and padlocked shut but no match for the spear. She pushed the Osdathregar’s blade into a steel link and shoved the spear into the gap, neatly breaking it in two. The chain slithered out of the door handles.
“Candygram,” she called, pulling the door open.
No answer. Robin walked into another dark lobby. “Then one night, he realized something,” Santiago said from deeper in the building, his voice a hollow echo. “Since his brother’s bed was over his own, the boy was under a bed himself—”
A goat bleated from behind the double door in front of her, and she thought she heard hoofbeats.
This was followed by a gravelly, leonine snarl.
Robin made a face. “The hell?”
“… SO THAT MADE HIM A MONSTER TOO!”
Flinging itself wide open, the door disgorged a flood of hot bodies into the room, a stampede of screaming shapes that slammed into her and pushed her back through the front door, knocking
it off of its hinges. Robin hit the ground rolling, the spear cartwheeling alongside her.
When she found her feet, she saw one of the strangest things she’d ever witnessed in her life.
It’s said that when sewer rats hibernate, they gather together in a cluster for warmth, and because they’re so filthy, their tails can become intertwined and permanently stuck together, creating a collective organism called a “rat king,” an ambulatory knot of rats all tied together at the tail. That’s a pretty good analogy for what Robin Martine saw that day in the ruins of Fort Bostock as Santiago Valenzuela came pouring out of that Tex-Mex pueblo, except instead of rats, it was a multitude of creatures all molded like Play-Doh into one singular shape.
The Santiago-beast’s face had an immense Chinese-lion grin, a mouth bristling with saurian teeth, and his shaggy head was covered in multicolored eyes of a thousand shapes and sizes. Fur ran down his fat, sleek sides in striations of orange, red, and gold, shredded by stripes of waxy white scales.
Thousands of legs marched underneath him, hoofs and claws clattering across the sandy macadam. Santiago surrounded her in a coil of his body as if he were circling the wagons, then lunged inward at her.
She rolled aside as his jaws thundered shut inches behind her, and jabbed him in the ribs—or at least what she thought were his ribs—with the spear. The abomination roared, flinching. The hair around the wound rippled like a blast wave, flickering from soft brown horsehair to the stripes of a zebra, and then to the rich russet of a fox.
Before she could jump back, the wall of muscle and hair swung forward and slammed her to the ground. An eagle foot as big as a chair came out of the living tumult and pinned her legs. “Aaugh!”
It’s inside him.
Coming into contact with Santiago had given her some sort of visceral insight—she could feel Ereshkigal’s power thrumming from deep inside him.
The relic is inside his body.
Darkness overcame her as Santiago’s mouth closed on her upper body.
Pebbly-scratchy tongue caressed her back and two teeth slid between plates of armor, plunging pain into her abdomen like a giant barbecue fork. Tentacles slid under her crotch, trying to lift the rest of her into his jaws. She shrieked down his throat and grabbed two other teeth in either hand, wrenching them loose. Santiago choked off a scream, spitting her out.
Blood flowed from the bite wounds in her waist, running in a sheet down her legs. Now she had teeth as big as mattock-heads in her hands, but the Osdathregar spear was still stuck in Santiago’s side, waggling up and down. She jumped, trying to knock it loose, but Santiago corkscrewed as he crawled, pulling it out of reach.
Agonizing heat built in her stomach where he’d bitten her. Was he venomous now? “Nice try,” Robin said, brandishing his own teeth at him like a knife fighter. She leapt at his flank and jammed the right tooth into his flesh, creating a handhold.
That great maw came at her again and she juked back, letting the teeth snap together in front of her face.
She planted her foot on his cheek and used it to kick herself farther up, where she stabbed him with the left fang. Santiago roared and lunged again, this time biting down on her legs. Another tooth went through her hip with a crunch and he dragged her away, lifting her into the air.
No doubt he meant to hoist her up and swallow her like a shark. Robin curled under with a scream of pain, doing an upside-down sit-up, stabbing both teeth into the soft underside of his throat.
The beast howled, choking, and flung her away.
Whipping across the street, Robin slammed against a wall and fell on her head. Her other antler snapped off with a noise like a gunshot and clattered across the pavement, a broken branch of shrike thorns.
The Santiago-chimera writhed and flailed around in the street, trying to get the fangs out of his throat, the ground vibrating under him, a tremendous zoological foam, as if God had put the entire animal kingdom on to boil. Lions, squids, and bears roiled out of his flesh and dissipated back into it. Blood sprayed out of his wounds, misting the air, painting streaks and puddles all over the asphalt in crazy graffiti whorls.
“Gonna cut that thing out of you, Santi.” Robin limped around him, holding her bleeding side, to where she could see the spear lying in the road.
As soon as she got her hands on it, the thing snapped at her again. Luckily, this time none of his teeth got through her armor, but he threw back his head and flung her the other way.
Glass shattered across her shoulders as she hurtled through a window into some second-floor room.
Exhausted, she got up, grabbed up the spear and took off running, that whole three seconds reeling out in slow motion, her feet thump … thump … thumping across the dry parquet and back through the window. She tucked her knees to clear the windowsill. Cool sunlight fell across her.
He was waiting, jaws open, striking at her in midair …
… But she had the spear up and ready like Zeus’ lightning bolt. Driving it into his mouth, Robin rode him down into the dirt and pinned his tongue to the ground with the Osdathregar.
Her antler lay in the street. She picked it up and hobbled toward Santiago, clutching her belly.
He thrashed around, flopping and body-slamming himself trying to get out from under the dagger’s spearpoint, a piece of paper under a paperweight, helpless and immobile, a gargantuan blob the size of his own mobile home, with dozens of legs—padded lion feet, hooved horse legs, lizard claws. Just as many wings had sprouted from his back: leathery bat wings, iridescent bird pinions, veiny insectile paddles. They cut the air incessantly as she got close, whooping and flapping.
His head was a massive confusion of skins and parts, constantly glitching through thousands of eyes and horns and teeth. Transformations rolled backward from his face as if he were swimming through the concept of evolution itself.
“Let’s open ’er up,” growled Robin, jamming the antler into his side. Santiago roared in pain and fright. “See what we got.” Pulling it free, she thrust the antler into him again, and again, carving a hole in the wall of his belly as if she were hoeing garden soil, driving the spikes into his skin, over and over, twisting them until her arm ached. Soon, she had a ragged pit punched in him the size of a watermelon. She threw down the antler and shoved a fist inside, entering the gaping laceration all the way to her shoulder.
Meat gave way under her knuckles, gliding and squirting sinuously over her elbow. She had the sensation of being in the nastiest porn video ever taped. “Come on, buddy, give it to me,” Robin told him, groping around for the gas tank. Could feel it down deep, the relic’s dark resonance like the angry rattling of a snake. Her hand bumped into something more solid than bone, a rod with a right angle to it: a piece of the motorcycle’s frame.
As fast as lightning, a hooved foot popped out and mule-kicked her in the side.
“Ungh!” One second, she was standing next to him; the next, she was sprawled on her back, splattered in Santiago’s blood and her own blood, all the oxygen driven out of her. Black spots and stars wormed through the white sky as she fought sleep.
“Get up, Robin!”
“Mama?”
“GET UP!” shrieked Annie Martine’s ghost from somewhere behind her. “Get up and get it! You’re almost there!”
“Almost there,” she wheezed.
Rolling over, Robin got to her feet and staggered back toward the multiformed gorgon, a maimed St. George facing down the dragon. She reared back and threw a haymaker into the bleeding gore, shoving her hand deep inside, and grabbed the gas tank strut again.
“Got you.” She pushed the other hand inside, pressing her cheek against Santiago’s rippling flank. Both hands had it.
The horse foot lashed out again, kicking her in the leg. If not for the armor, it would have shattered her femur. As it was, the blow buckled her knee and knelt her in the dust. Another kick bashed her under the arm, refreshing the agony of the rib the bikers had broken at the Blue Wolf.
Robi
n fought for breath. “Uhhhrr-hrr-hrrrgh!”
All right, chick, she thought, planting one foot on the wall of shivering skin. It’s go time. She found another foothold and pulled with everything she had on the blood-slicked steel.
Another kick, this time in the ass. Burning cramps rolled down her leg. Another kick glanced off her thigh.
Can’t take too many more of these.
Another kick nearly brained her, bouncing off the side of her head. Reality narrowed to a fine point. Sound streamed out of a hole in the blackness, thin and high, the distant thundering of Santiago beating the shit out of her a thousand miles away. Unconsciousness slowly put its hand over her face.
What woke her up was the squeeze of a huge eagle claw slipping around her waist. Air wheezed out of her. Santiago pulled, but she was stuck as fast as a tick. Even as slick as her hands were, she wasn’t letting go. He had her pulled straight out, legs kicking, arms extended, a flying Superman.
Slurp. Crunch. It was coming loose.
Fibrous muscle ripped out of the way, popping like rubber bands as the gas tank slid toward the surface. Santiago screamed in pain and indignation. Can’t tell if he’s doing it on purpose or not, but he’s helping me. Cold sunlight glinted on the white star. Almost there! Just a little fa—
The gas tank popped out and hit her in the face.
This was immediately followed by an overwhelming gush of hot fluid, cascading all over her, a geyser of steaming black gore. Gallons and gallons of black slime poured out of the monster that used to be Santiago Valenzuela, piling all over the road in thick, tarry puddles that smelled like black licorice and smoldering plastic and rotten ham and infection. The eagle claw threw her aside and turned into an octopus tentacle covered in warthog hair and porcupine needles, slapping around in a frenzy.
