Shotgun Sorceress

by Lucy A. Snyder

  Blue sometimes referred to the Warlock as Septimus. As far as Lake had been concerned, the boys were merely components for the blood ritual intended to give his adored first son, Benedict, tremendous magical power. If the boys’ mother, Siobhan, had enough mind left to give the Warlock and his numbered brothers proper names, I hadn’t heard them spoken in Cooper’s hell.

  Names matter in the magical world. Knowing the true, secret name of a devil or other supernatural creature can help you gain control over it. It’s one thing for a Talent to be thoughtlessly named; it’s another to have never been named by your parents at all. Being a nameless Talent means you don’t have full access to your own potential, your own powers. You’ve been cut from the grounding forces of your own family bloodline. A nameless wizard can still be a powerful wizard, but almost never a well-rounded one.

  I stared down at my gloved arm, thinking of my dead mother. Whether we like to admit it or not, our parents give us everything we have to start out with, good and bad. Sometimes their mistakes hang around your neck like loops of heavy, unbreakable chain.

  Blue and I reached the nursery. I couldn’t hear any babies crying, but Mother Karen had probably put a sound-dampening enchantment on the room so her other kids wouldn’t be disturbed. She’d surely have some kind of baby monitor working at the same time. I opened the door.

  The room was in utter chaos. Mother Karen was floating in the air, surrounded by a swirling storm of stuffed animals and colorful teething toys. She was holding onto the edge of the changing table for dear life, her free hand clutching a folded dirty diaper. Her graying brown hair was blown out in a wild corona around her face. Below her, the naked baby boy on the changing pad giggled and kicked in delight.

  “Karen—” I began, ducking to dodge a flying teddy bear.

  “All under control! Shut the door!” she cheerfully yelled back.

  “But—”

  “TakeBluebacktobedandshutthedoor!”

  I quickly did as she told me, feeling rejected and useless. And, frankly, a bit scared. Most Talented kids don’t start developing their magical skills until they’ve reached an age of rational thought. And that’s exactly as it should be. A happy baby with full-blown magical powers is far more dangerous than an angry baby with a bag full of live grenades.

  And we apparently had a house full of ’em. Christ in a chum bucket.

  “Okay, I’m supposed to take you back to bed,” I said to Blue as I led him down the hall to his room.

  “But I’m not tired,” he replied.

  “When adults tell you to go to bed, that mostly means they want you to stay in your room and play quietly.”

  “Oh.”

  I pulled open the door to his room. It was one of the smallest bedrooms, maybe eight by eight, with a child-size low bed in the corner, a green beanbag seat, a toy chest, and a play table and little red chair. The dissected remains of an old Batman clock radio lay in neat piles on the beige carpet. Blue had even carefully pried the transistors off the circuit board and had put them in color-coordinated piles.

  “Why did you do that?” I asked, pointing at the radio dissection.

  “I wanted to know how it works,” he replied.

  “Until you’ve read the manual, that’s not going to help you understand it,” I said. “It’s just going to leave you with a broken radio.”

  “Oh. Why?”

  “Because you can’t put it back together again the way it was, and so it won’t work anymore.”

  Blue stared down at the radio parts, a slightly rebellious look of determination creeping across his face. “I bet I remember exactly how it goes together.”

  I picked up one of the transistors. “Remember how this was stuck on with metal blobs?”

  “Yes.”

  “The blobs were stuff called solder. Regular glue won’t work. And since solder is poisonous and soldering irons are dangerous, I’m not going to give you any to play with.”

  Any other kid genius would have gotten mad at this point; I was partly testing Blue to see if he had indeed shuffled all his capacity for “bad” emotions off into the demon he’d created. But Blue didn’t even seem the least bit frustrated. Of course, his mind was older than mine, almost as old as Cooper’s.

  “Why won’t glue work?” he asked.

  “It doesn’t conduct electricity.”

  Blue reached down to the carpet and picked up a twisted paper clip, which he’d apparently used as a tool in his radio dissection. “Does this conduct electricity?”

  “Yes. So do you. So don’t go sticking that in an electrical socket, or you’ll hurt yourself.”

  “I don’t hurt,” Blue replied, turning the paper clip over in his hands. I realized for the first time that his little nails were chipped, and he had cuts and blisters on his fingers, presumably from prying the radio apart. “What if I melted this and used it to attach the transistor back on the green board thing?”

  “How do you plan to melt it?”

  He looked up at me. “With my mind.”

  Uh-oh. “It would take a lot of heat to melt that.”

  He shrugged. “That’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not. You’d melt the circuit board and the transistor. You also might set the house on fire. Mother Karen wouldn’t be happy with you trying that.”

  “I can be careful.” He shrugged again. “And she doesn’t have to know.”

  “This is her house; she has to know. You couldn’t hide this from her.”

  “I think I could. I’m good at hiding things.”

  And he was; he’d built a whole secret passageway in the house in hell, apparently without the Goad ever realizing. Mother Karen, for all her skill at keeping a watchful eye on her foster children, surely couldn’t supervise her home as ruthlessly as a devil monitored its hell.

  Hoo boy. I racked my brain, trying to figure out how best to redirect Blue onto something harmless. Or at least onto something less potentially harmful than bare-handed soldering.

  “But it would be rude to secretly do things she doesn’t like in her house,” I said. “Rude and disrespectful and … and just plain mean. You don’t want to be mean, do you?”

  “I guess not,” he replied, sounding uncertain.

  Appealing to a sense of honor he couldn’t have possibly developed yet wasn’t going to work. I went to the closet, hoping its contents would provide inspiration, and opened the door. And there, crammed in the corner atop old boxes of Christmas and Hanukkah decorations, was an old blue-and-white, Dalmatian-spotted iMac computer, its hockey puck mouse wedged under the top handle.

  “I have a better idea,” I said, grabbing the iMac and hauling it out of the jumble. “This is a computer. Computers are cool. You can use them to learn lots of new things without having to destroy anything else.”

  I set the iMac down on the play table, then went back into the closet to disentangle the USB keyboard and power cord from some tinsel garlands.

  “What kind of things?” Blue asked.

  “All kinds of things.” I got the keyboard free, then turned it over and tapped the back to knock out bits of stray tinsel and old crumbs. “And you can play games on them.”

  Blue watched intently as I attached the keyboard and mouse and blew dust off the iMac’s vent holes. I plugged in the power cord, then paused, my finger over the power button.

  “Okay, before I boot this up, you have to promise me something.”

  “What?” Blue asked.

  “Promise that you won’t try to take this apart. If you’re super-curious, I’ll show you how it’s put together later. And you have to promise not to take apart anything else, either.” I paused. “Especially not the cats. Or yourself.”

  Blue looked down at the parts on the floor. “Will you help me put this back together?”

  “Yes. But later.”

  “Okay. I promise I won’t take anything else apart.”

  “Good boy,” I said, feeling relieved. I pressed the Mac’s power button, and alt
hough the hard drive made some ominous grinding noises at first, we were soon looking at the old OS 9 desktop, littered with shortcuts to various educational games. I showed him how to use the mouse and keyboard, and then launched Reader Rabbit.

  “I’ve got to go, but I or somebody else will check on you in a little while,” I said as I put the radio parts in an old shoebox I found in the closet.

  “Okay.” He was already engrossed in the game.

  Once I’d gotten the radio pieces out from underfoot, I left Blue at the computer and quietly shut the door behind me.

  I ran into Mother Karen in the hallway; she was looking completely frazzled.

  “Did you get Blue to bed?”

  “Sort of … he wasn’t tired, so I broke out an old iMac I found in the closet and showed him some games.”

  “Good enough!” She rubbed her eyes with the backs of her hands.

  “Did you get any sleep last night?” I asked.

  “Oh, one or two hours, I expect.”

  “Want me to make some coffee?”

  “Already brewing! You’re welcome to have some, of course.” She pulled a wristwatch out of the pocket of her denim jumper; I figured she’d taken it off before her episode of Iron Mom: Battle Diaper. “We’re supposed to mirror Riviera Jordan in about three hours; I’d like to bathe before I do anything else. Would you mind hanging around the kitchen in case any of the children go downstairs needing help with something?”

  I was cheered that she finally wanted me to do something. “I don’t mind at all.”

  I went downstairs and had just finished doctoring my coffee with a couple of teaspoons of sugar and a slug of cream when the Warlock came through the front door carrying a brown paper Kroger’s bag.

  “Hey, I thought you and Cooper were going to the store together.” I nodded toward the bag as I took a sip from my mug. It was still a little too hot to drink, so I set it back down on the counter.

  “I couldn’t sleep, and I wanted to see if Opal was okay. I figured I’d stop to grab some beer on the way back while I had the chance. I’ll go out again with Coop later.”

  “So is Opal okay?”

  “She had kind of an interesting time with the Circle Jerks after we left, but now everything seems relatively calm. The critters are fine. We had to fix the front doors and one of the upstairs windows, but it could have been worse. The Jerks seem to have called off the dogs for now.”

  The Warlock set the bag down on the counter beside me and reached inside it. “I also picked up a little something Coop said you needed.”

  He tossed me a fresh six-pack of women’s cotton bikini underwear. The size was right, and the colors weren’t hideous. I was ridiculously thrilled.

  “Yay! I don’t have to go commando today! Thank you!” I impulsively hopped up on my toes and gave him a quick kiss on his bearded cheek.

  Suddenly, I was lying on a concrete basement floor, my eyes covered with a cloth blindfold; “The Twelve Days of Christmas” tinkled from a music box nearby. A man intoned a command I was too young to comprehend, and the blade of a knife came down on my tender throat, a silvery pain as it sawed through my windpipe and arteries—

  “Whoa, Jessie, are you okay?” the Warlock asked.

  I’d fallen to my knees on the kitchen floor. My throat still ached from the relived murder, the psychic imprint of the Warlock’s death during the blood ritual. It took me a moment to get any words out. “You died.”

  The Warlock looked supremely puzzled. “What?”

  I coughed, trying to clear the phantom pain. It was gradually fading. “Your father made Cooper … made him sacrifice you. To steal your magic. When you were a baby. Death’s all over you. You don’t remember?”

  He shook his head, his puzzlement changing to a look of worry. “No, I’ve never been able to remember what happened then.”

  I picked my underwear pack off the floor and slowly got to my feet. “Be glad of that.”

  “I am,” he said faintly.

  Mother Karen came down the stairs in a well-worn purple bathrobe, her wet hair wrapped up in a green towel. “Who’s next for the big kids’ bathroom?”

  “Me,” I said. “I definitely need a shower.”

  chapter

  seven

  Riviera

  Taking a shower when one of your hands is made of fire is a bit more challenging than you might expect. Almost immediately, I got water in the opera glove, and the bathroom filled with thick, sulfurous steam despite the vent fan’s buzzing labor. Within a few seconds, it was pretty hard to breathe in there. I quickly soaped and rinsed all the important parts one-handed and got out to get dried and dressed.

  The Warlock was waiting by the bathroom door when I emerged, toweling off my hair. He held his nose and waved his other hand dramatically when the rotten-egg steam reached him. “Sweet Zeus, woman, what have you been eating?”

  “Oh, bite me.”

  “I’d love to, but I’m sure my dear brother would object.”

  I made a rude noise and whipped my damp bath towel at the back of his legs; he narrowly dodged the snap and danced into the bathroom, quickly latching the door behind him.

  Downstairs, Mother Karen was busily directing her teens in the kitchen; it looked like French toast and sliced fruit were on the menu that morning. The smell of the toast made my stomach growl; I hoped it wouldn’t taste of caged horror.

  I went out into the backyard to take Pal’s order (a bucket of peeled cantaloupes and a few dozen hard-boiled eggs) and woke Cooper, who was still snoozing away in the tent. I brought him inside and he helped me set the table.

  Breakfast with eighteen kids was pretty loud, but went far better than dinner had; the French toast gave me a brief twinge from a couple of weevils that had fallen into the wheat grinder, but the ambrosia salad was quiet and sweet. Afterward, we helped clean up and then played boxing and snowboarding on the Wii in the rec room until it was time to talk to Riviera Jordan.

  Mother Karen led me, Cooper, and the Warlock upstairs to her study. The room was one of many spatial surprises in the house; its door was tucked in between the master bathroom and the teen girls’ room, and based on how everything else was laid out, you’d expect it to be a windowless cave at most nine feet wide and possibly ten or eleven feet deep. But when I stepped inside, I found myself in a vaulted haven bigger than many living rooms. Tall windows with gauzy curtains alternated with floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelves loaded with spellbooks, cookbooks, and various jars and enchanter’s implements. The windows on the western side looked out over a rocky north Pacific beach; the eastern windows had a view of white sands and gently lapping Caribbean surf. Near the door, there was a nautical blue-striped couch and chair set around a coffee table made from glass and driftwood. Set in an alcove in the middle of the room was Mother Karen’s desk, and across from it a wet bar with a coffeemaker and tea caddy. At the back of the room was a big marble fireplace with a softly burning enchanted fire that matched the sea-green wallpaper, and above it was an eight-foot-wide antique silver mirror in a gilded wooden frame.

  “I’ve never seen anyone open a mirror,” I said. It was one of a list of enchantments Cooper hadn’t showed me. “Is it hard to do?”

  “It’s harder than opening iChat”—Karen nodded toward the Mac tower on her desk—“but I suppose having us all crowd around the webcam would lack a certain gravitas.”

  Mother Karen led us to the fireplace and pulled a business card out of one of her pockets; a lock of bright silver hair was stapled to the back. “Riviera’s courier dropped off this pointer to her office. What happens next is I put this under the edge of the mirror’s frame and recite the opening trigger.”

  “But what if you didn’t have a pointer, or a mirror that was already enchanted? Could you still do it?” I asked.

  “You ubiquemancers would have a better chance than I would, I suppose, but I’m not sure how you’d go about it,” she replied.

  “In theory it’s doable,” said the Wa
rlock. “Any mirror will work, but you’d have to be at least somewhat familiar with the person you’re trying to contact. You know, be able to keep a good solid mental picture of him and the room his mirror’s in while you do your chant. And you’d have to hope that he’d either be there to respond to the mirror spell, or that his mirror has a message enchantment.”

  “Eh,” replied Cooper. “That’s a chancy lot of work, and if you don’t have a pointer, you never really know who you’re actually talking to. Lots of sorcerers and demons like to play mirror games. And if you know your contact well enough to have a pointer … shoot, you probably have their phone number, right? So just call them on your cell. No sense in blowing magical energy when there’s cheap technology that does the job just fine.”

  “Well, wizards of the old school see resorting to technology as disrespectful and lazy,” Mother Karen replied. “We should mind our p’s and q’s and do this the way Riviera wants us to.”

  She tucked the card up under the edge of the gilded mirror frame and looked back at us. “Last chance to brush hair and straighten clothes and check your teeth for strawberry seeds. Jessica, this means you.”

  “Oh. Yeah.” A couple of the buttons on my borrowed blouse were undone; I’d gotten a little overenthusiastic playing Wii Boxing. I fixed them, and ran my fingers through my hair. “Good?”

  “Good enough,” Karen replied. She put her hands against the glass, closed her eyes, and spoke the trigger: “Speculus, speculus.”

  The mirror shimmered, brightened, and our reflections dissolved into a view of a slim, well-dressed woman in a plum business suit seated in a tall-backed antique chair. Queen Victoria could have scarcely looked more commanding. Her hair was a thick, fashionable bob of bright silver, but her face was smooth and unwrinkled. Powerful Talents have a wide array of antiaging magic at their disposal; if you don’t fall into poverty or die through accident or violence, you can keep going for centuries if you’re determined enough. Some people get tired of the endless and increasingly difficult rejuvenation rituals after a time and let nature take its course; one look in her sharp, intense eyes, silvery as her hair, and I doubted Riviera would ever willingly surrender her grip on life.