The Hellion: Malus Domestica #3

By S.A. Hunt

For fans of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Stranger Things: S. A. Hunt’s The Hellion, third installment of their horror-tinged action-adventure series about a punk YouTuber on a mission to hunt down the supernatural, one vid at a time

Robin Martine has destroyed witches all across the country, but since her confrontation with the demon Andras, Robin has had to deal with her toughest adversary yet: herself. While coming to grips with new abilities, she and her boyfriend Kenway make their way to the deserts of rural Texas, where new opportunities await.

Something lurks in this isolated town of Keystone Hills: a dangerous gang ruled by a husband who wields an iron fist over his wife and daughter. Robin vows to protect these Latina women from harm, but may be underestimating how powerful Santiago Valenzuela is... and how his shapeshifting powers may pose a threat to everyone Robin holds dear.

The Malus Domestica series
#1: Burn the Dark
#2: I Come with Knives
#3: The Hellion

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Sep 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781250306494

S.A. Hunt

S. A. HUNT (she/her) is the author of the Malus Domestica horror-action series from Tor Books, which begins with Burn the Dark. In 2014, she won Reddit's /r/Fantasy "Independent Novel of the Year" Stabby Award for her Outlaw King fantasy gunslinger series. She is an Afghanistan veteran (OEF 2010), a coffee enthusiast, a fervent bicyclist, and she currently lives in Petoskey, Michigan.

Book preview

SIDE A

Frail and Fragile Bars

Track 1

Now

The lonesome notes of the Eagles’ Hotel California wailed into the sweltering stillness. But no warm smell of colitas rising up through the air, just the pickle-brine stink of an unshowered woman who’d spent the last several hours in a hot-box.

Penny-colored grass punched through the desert around them, and the sun was a merciless diadem on the blue brow of a cloudless sky. A river of asphalt ran straight out to the horizon in both directions, coming from nowhere and going nowhere. She stood next to the Winnebago, swearing at the top of her lungs, sweat soaking into her clothes, her ringlet Mohawk plastered to the side of her head. If this had been her usual Kool-Aid dye job, Robin Martine’s wavy dimetrodon sail of hair would be staining her neck with a dark lilac purple. Her underwear felt like a snot-rag.

Around her chest was a nylon harness, with a camera mounted on her chest. As it always had, the GoPro recorded her trials and tribulations for her YouTube channel MalusDomestica, this time bearing witness to one of her rare outbursts of anger.

Their air conditioner gave out hours ago and the Winnebago was a sweat lodge. If the tire hadn’t popped like a shotgun shell and started flapping around inside the wheel well, she might have passed out at the wheel and driven them into the desert. She tugged at her T-shirt to air out her sweat. A thing jutted from the tire, something like a pull-start or maybe a meat hook, a plastic T-shaped handle with a pointy metal bit sticking out of the middle.

A hundred thousand miles of hot sand and lizard shit, and you just happen to find the only whatever-the-hell-this-is in Texas! Robin gave the Winnebago a ferocious punch, clank!

The aluminum body was hot enough to burn and left red scrapes on her knuckles. She winced, massaging her hand.

The Winnebago’s door opened and Kenway stepped out, carrying a little Coleman cooler. "What’d Willy do to you?" He dropped the cooler in the shadow of the RV. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and he’d developed quite a tan on their tour down the American west coast this spring. Six months of fighting supernatural hags and their minions had trimmed the weight he’d gained moping around in Blackfield. His belly had slimmed to a wall of blond-frosted sandstone, and his hips narrowed to a V of muscle. Under his dock shorts, his prosthetic leg glinted in the sun. After the events of the last Halloween—a battle against four of the hardest of hard-core witches and a newly resurrected Mesopotamian death-goddess—Kenway had tagged along and made himself the big brawny Short Round to her Indiana Jones.

Ironically, you ran over a tire tool. He wrenched it out of the tire. The remainder of the air hissed out in a tired, resentful sigh. Tire guys use it for patching or something. He shrugged. I wouldn’t know; I’m not a tire guy.

Robin caught herself staring at him. Just grab the jack, beefcake.

He tied his hair back out of his eyes and opened the hatch in the side of the Winnebago. Hauling out the jack, he shoved it underneath the right fender and was about to start pumping when Robin stopped him.

I got this, she said, grasping the jack handle. Go get me the spare and the lug wrench.

You got it.

He went around to the back of the RV, leaving her to deal with the jack. The first couple of pumps were easy, a quick squeaky-squeaky, but on the third pump, the rod stopped short in midair. Robin gripped the handle with both hands and threw herself onto it with everything she had. It screamed and gave a few inches, almost dumping her over onto her face. What I wouldn’t give to be able to

(hulk out whenever you want?)

do whatever it was I did back in that house, she thought. Whatever that monster was that Andras turned me into that night. Her memory showed her a portrait of herself in the silvered glass of a mirror, her skin a latticework of shadows, her heart shining inside. Nothing like the woman she was now: short, sinewy, tanned, with coalsmoke eyes and a thin, expressive mouth. That girl-shaped effigy, that wicker-wire sculpture with the bottle-rocket soul.

Cambion.

She stared at the dirty steel staff in her hands as if it were a bloody sword. Blue paint flaked off to reveal rust red, polished by decades of hands. Cambion. Crooked. She threw herself on top of the jack handle again with a tortured squeak and the Winnebago started to tilt.