Shotgun Sorceress

by Lucy A. Snyder

  Worried anew that I was losing my ability to use white magic, I began to pace around the yard, holding my flame hand well away from my body.

  “You should try to get some rest,” Pal said.

  “I will, in a little while.” I was absolutely bone-tired, and wanted nothing more than to lie down and sleep for the next sixteen hours, but I was afraid of what might happen once I drifted off. If I drifted off.

  My flame hand seemed to catch on something. I looked down, puzzled. I was out in the middle of the yard; there wasn’t so much as a tall dandelion nearby. I waved my hand through the empty air. And there it was again, the sensation of an invisible seam.

  “Hey, there’s something weird over here,” I said to Pal. “Can you see or feel anything?”

  He came over to investigate. “No, I don’t sense anything … What is it?”

  “I’m not sure.” I blinked through several views with my enchanted stone eye. One showed a faint blue rectangular outline in the air, just barely perceptible.

  Acting on a hunch, I dug my flame fingers into the seam and pulled. A small door swung open midair, revealing the inside of a wooden shipping crate. It was a little bigger than a school gym locker, maybe three feet tall and two feet wide, and perhaps as many deep. Stacked inside were several plastic-wrapped bricks of white powder and compressed plant matter. The air inside was musty with a familiar sweetly weedy odor.

  ALSO BY LUCY A. SNYDER

  Spellbent

  Books published by The Random House Publishing Group are available at quantity discounts on bulk purchases for premium, educational, fund-raising, and special sales use. For details, please call 1-800-733-3000.

  Shotgun Sorceress is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2010 Ballantine Books Mass Market Original

  Copyright © 2010 by Lucy Snyder

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-52180-4

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  v3.1

  For Sara Larson,

  who, it should be noted,

  bears absolutely no resemblance

  to the Sara you’ll find in this book.

  Well, okay, there’s one resemblance:

  her kitten Fred is indeed a little devil.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Part One - Suburban Outlaws

  Chapter One - A Kick in the Head

  Chapter Two - Cursed

  Chapter Three - Youthful Indiscretions

  Chapter Four - Raising the Tent

  Chapter Five - Hellement

  Chapter Six - Siobhan’s Boys

  Chapter Seven - Riviera

  Chapter Eight - Mirror, Mirror

  Chapter Nine - Cooper

  Chapter Ten - Faery

  Chapter Eleven - A Hole in the Sky

  Part Two - The Devil in Miss Shimmer

  Chapter Twelve - A Bale of Trouble

  Chapter Thirteen - Texas Hold ’Em

  Chapter Fourteen - Mirror Matter

  Chapter Fifteen - A Little Gift from the Welcome Wagon

  Chapter Sixteen - Highway

  Chapter Seventeen - Meat Puppetry

  Chapter Eighteen - Crazed State Unhinged

  Chapter Nineteen - Exorcism

  Chapter Twenty - Magus Shimmer

  Chapter Twenty-One - Doppelganger

  Chapter Twenty-Two - Fever

  Chapter Twenty-Three - Monsters

  Chapter Twenty-Four - Sprung Traps

  Chapter Twenty-Five - Charlie’s Story

  Chapter Twenty-Six - Grave Matters

  Chapter Twenty-Seven - Izanamiko No Oni

  Chapter Twenty-Eight - Shadowland

  Chapter Twenty-Nine - Showdown

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank the people who helped bring this book into the world: my agent, Robert L. Fleck; my editor, Shauna Summers; and her assistant, Jessica Sebor. I’d also like to thank my publicist, April Flores, and my deepest gratitude goes to my first readers: Dan, Trista, and my ever-patient husband, Gary.

  And finally, I must express my appreciation to the following molecule for helping me make my deadlines:

  Image of caffeine structure courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

  part

  one

  Suburban Outlaws

  chapter

  one

  A Kick in the Head

  The festering mob of meat puppets in their tattered Sunday best shambled aside as I rode Pal down Main Street toward the stark white columns and broad marble steps of the Saguaro Hotel. There had to be a thousand bodies in the stinking brown sea parting before us. My skull was pounding, the July heat and hard West Texas sun nearly unbearable. I tipped my straw cowboy hat forward in a futile attempt to get some of the weak breeze on the back of my head.

  And in a blink, Miko was suddenly there on the steps, Cooper and the Warlock strung up naked and sunburned on rough-hewn mesquite crosses to either side of her. As a small mercy, their limbs had been tied, not nailed, to the twisted branches. Their heads hung forward, insensible, as their chests shuddered to pull in shallow breaths.

  The devil kitten in my saddlebag was purring loudly. It could sense the impending carnage.

  You ready for this? I asked Pal.

  “Ready for a slow, bloody, excruciating death followed by eternal damnation? Of course. What fun.”

  Ignoring his sarcasm, I drew my pistol-grip Mossberg shotgun and racked a cartridge into the chamber.

  “Give ’em back, Miko!” My voice was tight, shaky, a mouse’s outraged squeak at a lion.

  She smiled at me, and all at once her beauty and power hit me like a velvet sledgehammer. If I’d been standing I would have fallen to my knees. I hoped I wasn’t getting wet; Pal would know and it would be a sprinkle of embarrassment on top of the disaster sundae I’d brought to our table.

  “You know what I want,” she whispered, her voice floating easily over the distance between us. “Give yourself to me, and your men shall go free.”

  A tiny part of me—the part that was exhausted, weary of fighting, weary of running—wondered if giving my body and soul to her would really be such a bad thing.

  Oh, fuck that noise, the rest of me replied. Fuck that long and hard.

  But wait.

  I’m getting ahead of myself … as usual.

  I should have known my life would keep going merrily to shit. The previous Friday had been busier than a dam full of beavers on crystal meth. I’d run police roadblocks, battled dragons, and literally gone to hell and back as I rescued my boyfriend, Cooper, and his little brothers from a fate considerably worse than death. Every muscle in my body ached, and I was looking forward to getting some rest, if perhaps not much actual sleep. I’d seen some things that evening that would probably give me insomnia for, oh, the next decade or so. And there was the little detail that I’d put our city’s head wizard into a coma and killed a major guardian spirit. They both richly deserved it, but I’d broken about infinity-plus-one laws and surely the authorities were going to hunt me down with extreme prejudice. So I had prison and perhaps execution to look forward to as well. Yay, go me.

  But, so far, it appeared I was safe for the night. I was
definitely looking forward to the late dinner my witch friend Mother Karen was making for me and the other Talents who’d helped in the rescue. Whatever she had cooking in her kitchen smelled wonderful. And I knew my familiar, Pal, was plenty hungry.

  I carried a platter of savory, steaming ham and a wooden bucket of water down Karen’s back steps out into the moonlit yard. It probably looked the same as most other backyards in the neighborhood: rattan furniture and a shiny steel gas barbecue on the brick patio, a wooden picnic table on the lawn, a scattering of oak and buckeye trees bordering the tall dog-eared plank fence ringed by softly glowing solar-charged lights. However, I suspected this was the only place in the entire state of Ohio sheltering a shaggy, six-foot-tall spider monster.

  Who, based on the circles his clawed legs had torn in the turf, had spent the past half hour stalking his own posterior.

  “Hey, Pal, I got your dinner,” I called.

  He stopped going around in circles and blinked his four eyes at me, licking his whiskered muzzle uncertainly.

  At least, I thought Palimpsest looked uncertain; as a ferret his emotions had been pretty easy to read. But now that his familiar form had become magically blended with his true arachnoid body … well, I didn’t exactly know what “happy” or “sad” or “puzzled” was supposed to look like on such an alien face.

  “Having troubles over there?” I asked, setting the platter and bucket down on the picnic table.

  “I … have an itch,” he replied gravely, his voice strange and muffled in my mind. Our telepathic connection was slowly improving, but that, too, was taking some getting used to.

  “I could reach every part of my Quamo body and my ferret body,” Pal continued, “but oddly these new rear legs aren’t very flexible. I can reach my underside, but not my back.”

  “Maybe you just need to do some yoga.”

  Through the valved spiracles on his abdomen, he blew noisy chords that sounded like a child randomly banging on the keys of an organ. Laughter? Oh-please snorts? I’d only known Pal for a week, and already I had to get to know him all over again.

  “That doesn’t help me at the moment,” he said.

  “Horses back into trees and fence posts to scratch themselves,” I replied. “You’re tall enough to stand on tippytoes and scratch yourself on the low limbs of that oak over there.”

  “How dreadfully undignified.”

  “Or you could just roll around on the grass.”

  “And that’s more dignified how?”

  “Oh, hush. It’s not like anybody can see you back here,” I pointed out. “Otherwise you’d have flipped out the neighbors already and the cops would probably be here.”

  Long ago, Mother Karen had put her house and its yards under a camouflage charm to keep her foster children’s magical practice sessions out of sight of the neighbors. So at least there would be no panicked suburbanites dialing 911 to report a monster prowling through Worthington.

  I glanced up at the sky, half expecting to see a Virtus silently descending, ready to smite me like a curse from Heaven. One of the huge guardian spirits had already tried to do a little smiting earlier that evening. Mr. Jordan, the aforementioned now-comatose head of the local Governing Circle, had convinced the Virtus that I was committing some kind of grand necromancy instead of simply trying to rescue Cooper. I’d defended myself, not expecting to win the battle, but win I did.

  It was still hard to believe: I had killed a Virtus. Nobody was supposed to be able to do that. Not with magic or luck or nuclear weapons or anything. It was as if I’d thrown myself naked in front of a speeding freight train in a desperate, stupid attempt to halt hundreds of hurtling tons of iron … and had somehow stopped it cold.

  Miracles had abounded that evening. But I doubted the Virtus Regnum would see me as anything but a threat. They’d be coming for me, and from what I’d seen so far, they were as merciful as black holes.

  I squinted up at the dark spaces between the stars, wondering what lurked there.

  “Speaking of things that shouldn’t be seen by mundanes, how is that working for you?” Pal asked.

  “Huh?” I looked at him, confused.

  He nodded toward the gray satin opera glove on my left arm. “The gauntlet. Is it keeping your flames contained?”

  “Yes, Karen and the Warlock did a good job enchanting this,” I replied, looking at the thin curls of smoke that were trailing from the cuff of the glove, as if I’d used it as a place to stash a still-smoldering cigarette. So far, that was the only sign that the lower half of my arm was a torch of hellfire, courtesy of my having to plunge my arm into the burning heart of the Goad, the pain-devouring devil that had imprisoned Cooper and his family.

  “It slips down a little sometimes—I might have to find some double-sided tape or superglue to hold it in place.”

  Sheathed in the glove, my arm functioned more or less normally, but still had a squishy unreliability. Fine finger movements were still difficult. And that wasn’t surprising, considering that my hand was boneless, fleshless, nothing but diabolic flame. I’d had to rely on a natural talent for spiritual extension to give it any kind of solidity; Pal had referred to the ability as “reflexive parakinesis.”

  And it was pretty close to true reflex. My crysoberyl ocularis—a replacement for my left eye, which I’d lost the week before in a battle with a demon—still hurt a bit, and I was constantly aware that I had a piece of polished rock stuck in my head. But a couple of times that evening, I had completely forgotten that my left arm was no longer entirely flesh. And fortunately I hadn’t dropped anything important as a consequence.

  “With luck we may be able to find someone to remove the underlying curse, and you’ll have your regular arm back,” Pal said.

  I frowned. Everyone was treating my flame hand—and its power—like a curse. If I were an evil person, somebody bent on destruction and domination, my hand would have seemed almost purely a gift from the gods. With that kind of power literally at my fingertips, so what if having a fiery hand presented a few practical problems? That would be like complaining that you had to move a few boxes out of your garage to make way for the new Porsche. Or in my case, the new tank with a seemingly unlimited supply of surface-to-air missiles.

  I was pretty sure I wasn’t an evil person. Though I’d certainly made some decisions I regretted—crushing a couple of Mr. Jordan’s men under the Warlock’s Land Rover was currently at the top of my growing list—I’d been trying to do the right thing at the time. Evil, certainly, was bad. But the power in my hand had saved us all from the Virtus, hadn’t it? I was getting pretty annoyed that everyone seemed to think I ought to be in a hurry to get rid of it.

  “I should go back inside before they all start dinner without me,” I said. “And anyway, your ham’s getting cold over here … Did you want anything else for dinner? Karen’s got pie.”

  “Let me start with the ham and see how it sits first,” he replied. “Wanting to eat something and being able to digest it are two different things.”

  I looked up at him; surely he’d get bored or lonely staying out in the yard all by himself. “I could see if one of the others knows a shrinking spell so you could come inside with me and have dinner at the table.”

  “Thank you, but I’m quite all right.”

  “You sure? I mean, someone in the house has to know a good spell.”

  He blew another chord and reared up on his back legs. In his ferret days the motion would have meant slight indignance, but in his new form it made him seem monstrously threatening. I had to stifle my prey-monkey instinct to run.

  “I know a good spell, actually,” Pal told me. “The only silver lining to my current situation is that I am finally the proper size. I’d rather not be … diminished again unless it’s necessary.”

  “Okay, suit yourself. Let me know if you change your mind.” I left Pal to his dinner and went back inside to the guest bedroom.

  Cooper lay thin and pale under the covers, dead to the wo
rld. Dark curly bangs obscured his eyes. He’d lost a scary amount of weight during his time trapped in the hell; he’d always been on the wiry side, but now I could see every rib, every bump on his sternum. I wanted to crawl into bed with him and hold him close.

  Instead, I gently shook his bony shoulder. “Wake up, time to eat.”

  He grunted and pushed away my hand. “Don’ wanna. Wanna sleep.”

  “C’mon. Potions only go so far—we gotta get some real food into you. We can sleep after.”

  “Where’s Smoky?” he mumbled. “I can’t feel him.”

  My stomach dropped. I hadn’t yet told him that his white terrier familiar died the night he was pulled into the hell. Smoky had been with him for years. And the loss of a familiar wasn’t just the loss of a steadfast companion—Cooper’s magical power had taken a hit, too. Even if my boyfriend was so heartless as to want to run right out and find a new familiar, he wouldn’t be able to do any better than a dumb toad or mute alley cat. It would be another set of eyes, but nothing more: no intelligent advice, no friendship, no boost to his Talent. The Regnum controlled all access to the modern, intelligent familiars. And we were now outlaws.

  I just didn’t know how to break the bad news. “He, um … he’s not with us.”

  Cooper seemed confused. “You left him at the apartment?”

  I took a deep breath. “He didn’t make it. The night you disappeared … he got killed. It was quick. I don’t think he suffered.”

  A bit of a lie, that; being torn apart by a demon was quick but certainly not easy. I felt horrible about Smoky dying, because it was my own damn fault for not knowing what to do.

  Cooper’s features twisted in pain and sorrow, and he covered his face in his hands, pressing the heels against his eyes, I guessed to try to keep himself from crying. “Dammit. Poor little guy.”