Shotgun Sorceress

by Lucy A. Snyder

  “Sorry, folks, must have nodded off there awhile. Come on in! My name’s Rudy, and mi hacienda es su hacienda!”

  I shrugged at Cooper and the Warlock. They shrugged back. We cautiously stepped inside.

  “I ain’t had a supply run in a while, so I’m short on snacks, I’m real sorry ’bout that.” The man ran his hands over the front of his red Western-style shirt, apparently trying to smooth out some of the wrinkles. “But I got Cokes and beer in the back if y’all are thirsty. Got the good Mexican and Passover Cokes, too. No corn syrup in my store if I can help it! Don’t know if that junk really causes diabetus or not—the ’betus took my wife, Yolanda, God rest her—but real sugar tastes better if y’all ask me.”

  I was actually pretty thirsty, but didn’t know if we could trust this guy or not. “Thanks, I think we’re good for right now … but can you tell us where we are?”

  “You’re in Cuchillo, Texas.” The man’s tone was an odd mix of pride and dread. “Really, you’re about a hunnert yards past the city limits—it’s a dry town, or it used to be. I don’t ’spose anybody there much cares about the potential for moral turpitude from ol’ debbil whiskey anymore.”

  “What happened here?” Cooper took his hat off and set it on a nearby café table.

  The old feller scratched his scalp nervously. “I can’t rightly say. We sort of had our own Hurricane Katrina blow into town and set for a spell, and things ain’t been right since.”

  He looked at me. “You folks come through the hole in the sky, or did you take a wrong turn on the highway?”

  Rudy said “highway” the way cancer patients say the word “cure.”

  “We dropped down onto that big pile of hay out in the field,” I replied. “I don’t suppose you know what that’s about?”

  He looked profoundly uncomfortable. “I can’t say. Don’t really understand it myself, but … well, the sky’s how most folk end up here these days. I keep praying the highways will open back up so we can get some help, but I guess the good Lord’s up to his old mysterious ways again.”

  “How are the highways closed?” the Warlock asked. “Roadblocks, or the National Guard, or what?”

  Rudy shook his head. “There ain’t no roadblock, none you can see, anyway. Like, for instance, say you got on the highway out here and tried to drive toward Lometa. After a mile or two you’d find yourself thinking you want to stop the car and go back where you came from, and after another mile your heart would be poundin’ and your hands would be shakin’ and you’d be so scairt you wouldn’t be able to keep going. And if somehow you could keep your hands on the wheel and your foot on the pedal … you’d find yourself turned around on the road driving back this way and not know how it happened.”

  Rudy paused to scratch the gray stubble on his chin. “But you probably wouldn’t find any of that out, not unless you had a ’lectric car, because you can’t so much as light a match round here anymore. Never mind gettin’ a gasoline engine or a generator started.”

  I looked up at the fluorescent lights. “Do you get your power from the electric company?”

  “No, miss, I ain’t been on the city grid for years. And the electric company went under same time as everything else round here.”

  “Then how are you running the lights and coolers and stuff?” I asked.

  Rudy smiled, looking proud and profoundly sad all at the same time. “Come take a peek out back. I ain’t got no weirdo Texas chainsaw monkeyshines going on out here, I promise.”

  We followed him through a door beside the cash register at the food counter. He led us down a hall past an employee restroom, the storeroom, and what looked to be his own living quarters and exited at a loading dock at the back of the building.

  Before us was a solid acre of blue-gray solar panels shining in the afternoon sun.

  “Ain’t it a beauty?” Rudy asked. “It was my daughter Sofia’s idea, going green like this. One thing we never lack out here is sunshine! The panels are real expensive if you buy ’em whole, but Sofia knew where to get the parts, and she and I spent six months building this out here with some help from some buddies of mine. My little gal’s smart like my daddy was; he helped engineer the Hoover Dam back in the day. She’s a physics professor at Cuchillo State. Was, anyway.”

  His expression fell into misery. “Well, all this is how I got lights and cool air.”

  I wanted to ask what happened to Sofia, but sensed that it wasn’t something he wanted to talk about. He silently led us back into the café section of the building.

  “You wouldn’t happen to have a working phone or CB radio, would you?” Cooper asked Rudy.

  The old man shook his head. “No, sir. I got a radio, but if you’re looking to talk to somebody who ain’t here in Cuchillo, it won’t work. The landline don’t work, and I haven’t been able to get a signal on my cell phone since this mess got started.”

  “When did it happen?” I asked.

  “ ’Bout a year ago, give or take a month or two. The days’ve been kinda running together in my head.”

  Rudy glanced out the window toward the highway. Nervously, it seemed to me. “It’s a far piece into town, but somebody usually comes by to give new folk a lift. Have a sit if y’all want to wait; drinks are on the house if you want ’em.”

  Cooper frowned slightly. “I thought you said cars don’t work here.”

  Rudy’s expression was unreadable. “The people in town still have some horses and mules and such. Haven’t had to resort to eating ’em quite yet.”

  “We might take you up on those drinks in a little while,” Cooper said, beckoning the Warlock and me to follow him outside to the shaded gas pumps where Pal was resting.

  “I don’t like this,” Cooper said, his voice hushed even though we were surely out of Rudy’s earshot.

  “What’s to like?” I replied. “There’s been some kind of local apocalypse and the phones don’t work and we can’t escape.”

  “He says.” The Warlock crossed his arms.

  “Do you want to coldcock the old guy and ransack the place looking for his cell phone?” I asked. “Because I sure don’t.”

  “The healing crystal works,” Cooper said. “So, obviously some magic can still function here. I think we should try to open a mirror to call for help.”

  “How?” I asked. “You guys have never been good at that kind of magic in the first place. I could try it, I guess, but I don’t have a pointer.”

  Cooper suddenly looked a bit embarrassed. “I do.”

  He got his wallet out of his back pocket and pulled out the folded card containing a lock of my father’s hair.

  I stared at the pointer. “Where did you get that?”

  Cooper cleared his throat. “I found it on the floor of Mother Karen’s office, near the fireplace.”

  I gave my boyfriend a hard look. “And why were you in her office?”

  “You were really upset, and I didn’t know why, and I thought I should try to find out.”

  “Did you mirror my father while I was asleep?”

  He paused. “Yes, I did.”

  Cooper’s admission made me unreasonably furious. “Goddamn it all to hell—”

  “Jessie, he is kind of a jerk, but I think he actually means well—”

  “I am not calling that jackass and asking him for help!”

  “He seemed very concerned about you, and told me he wanted you to contact him again. And he might be our only option here.” Cooper held the card out toward me. “I think we’re in over our heads. And I think Magus Shimmer has the power to get us clear of all this.”

  “No way,” I fumed.

  Pal heaved himself to his feet on the oil-splotched concrete, looming above me. “Surely my ears deceive me. Surely you are not refusing to do what you can to help us all get out of this dust-blown, sweltering, fly-infested gulag because your pride has been injured?”

  I bit my lip. Pal was right. And apparently also really pissed off at me. My hand still trembling,
I took the card from Cooper.

  “Fine. I’ll give it a try. But I’m going to try contacting Mother Karen first, just so you know. What are we going to do if the mirror magic won’t work because of the suppression spell?”

  “We’ll figure something out,” Cooper said.

  “Do you have the power of creation in that hell fragment of yours?” Pal asked.

  Yes, I do.

  “Try the spell in there. Mirror magic should be workable from within a hell dimension,” Pal said.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go back inside; I’ll ask to use the ladies’ room and try opening the mirror in there. If that doesn’t work, I’ll go into my hellement.”

  “Hellement?” Cooper frowned. “What hellement?”

  “It’s sort of a long story,” I said. “I’ll explain later once I understand it myself.”

  chapter

  fourteen

  Mirror Matter

  The women’s restroom was practically spotless; evidently Rudy had time on his hands and nervous energy to spare. I locked the door behind me, then turned to the mirror above the sink. Could it work? I slipped my father’s pointer into a side pocket of my backpack. After rummaging through the main compartment for a few moments, I found a long strand of Mother Karen’s hair. I tucked the strand up under the corner of the mirror’s frame and touched the glass; it seemed impossible that I could enchant the materials. Every time I tried to focus on Mother Karen’s office, tried to focus on bringing out my Talent, it felt as if a strong hand was closing around my throat, my mind.

  Time to try a different tack. I went into the toilet stall, hung the pack on the door hook, and sat down on the toilet. Could I even get into my hellement in this place? I stared down at my blackened stump.

  Despite having no flames to concentrate on, slipping into my hellement was even easier than it had been in Mother Karen’s yard. I found myself standing in front of the red door in my childhood bedroom. Everything appeared to be exactly as I left it. I went to the mirror above my dresser and brushed the dust off the top of the frame. How would the magic work in here? Names mattered, after all, and I had Mother Karen’s name and her address.

  I touched the glass and concentrated on visualizing the inside of Mother Karen’s office as it would appear from the vantage of the mirror. “I wish to speak to Karen Mercedes Sebastián, daughter of Magus Carlos Sebastián and Mistress Beatrice Brumecroft, of 776 Antrim Lane, Worthington, Ohio, 43085.”

  I spoke an ancient word for “open.”

  The mirror darkened, then began to clear. For just a moment I got a blurry view of Mother Karen’s office. Yes! Success!

  And then the mirror went entirely black. A life-size medieval knight in full silvery Spanish plate armor rose in the frame.

  “Begone, hellspawn!” the knight shouted, swinging his steel longsword at me. The blade thrust out of the mirror straight at my head. I managed to duck in time, snatching up my own sword from its place against the dresser, and parried his swing with a teeth-rattling clang.

  The knight leaped through the mirror, knocking everything off my dresser, swinging at me wildly. He was quick, strong, and hard to parry.

  “Can’t I just leave her a message?” I hollered at him as he knocked me backward onto the bed.

  “Devils deserve no quarter!” He lifted his sword with both hands, preparing to skewer me to the mattress.

  I saw a gap in the armor under his raised arms, and I jabbed upward. My blade sank deep into his armpit.

  The knight snarled and disappeared in a puff of acrid blue mist.

  I lay there on Buzz Lightyear’s quilted face, clutching the sword, panting for air, my heart pounding in my ears.

  That’s one hell of a security spell, I thought. Mother Karen ain’t fooling around.

  Once I’d regained my composure, I sat up and checked myself for injuries. Even sixty seconds of a sword fight can slice you up good if it doesn’t kill you outright. Karen’s knight had nicked the knuckles of my right hand, and I had a nasty defensive gash running along my left forearm. I went down the hall to the bathroom and patched myself up with some gauze and a roll of bandages I found in the medicine cabinet, then went back into my bedroom to try again. My only remaining option was to contact my father.

  I touched the glass, imagining my father’s workshop as I had seen it before. “I want to speak to Magus Ian Shimmer.”

  I spoke another ancient opening word. Nothing happened. Not even so much as a flicker in the mirror.

  My heart sank. I needed more information, or I needed a pointer of some kind, and I didn’t have either one. Too bad I couldn’t have brought the card into the hellement with me. I didn’t even know if Ian Shimmer was his true name, and I certainly didn’t have his home address.

  Then I had a little duh-moment epiphany: Shimmer was my biological father. Half my DNA was also his DNA. So wasn’t my own flesh and blood a kind of pointer to him?

  I slipped my right index finger under the bandages covering the gash on my forearm and smeared a bit of sticky blood on the glass. Concentrated.

  “I need to speak with my father. DvaaramuddhaaTaya!”

  The mirror hazed, resolved. I was looking into my father’s workshop.

  “Um, hello?” I called. “Are you there?”

  I had almost said, “Are you there, Dad?” but the D-word stuck in my throat and refused to come out.

  I heard the sound of flip-flops slapping across the wooden floor, and my father appeared, still dressed in his orange pants and patchwork jacket. He sat down in the wooden chair across from his mirror, looking at me with an expression of deep relief and concern.

  “Jessie, I’m so glad you’ve been able to contact me again,” he said. “Are you in Cuchillo?”

  His question surprised me. How did he know where we’d gone? And then I was surprised that I’d been surprised. After all, how had he known that I was in the backyard to receive the teddy bear message? My father kept an eye out, clearly.

  “Yes, we’re at a liquor store just outside the city limits.”

  “I see you’re mirroring from a hell. Is everyone all right?”

  “We’re okay. Do you know what’s going on out here?”

  “I only know what Randall told me before he went there with Dallas Paranormal Defense. That was almost a year ago. He said that there was a report of a small town taken over by a powerful demon; he seemed to think it would be a routine operation for them, but his whole team went incommunicado that night. And then the Regnum put down a regional isolation barrier and I haven’t been able to get through—”

  “Wait, who’s Randall?”

  Shimmer blinked at me. “He’s your older brother.”

  The word “brother” sent a shock straight down to the soles of my feet, and in the next moment I thought that surely I’d misunderstood him.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Randall is your older brother,” Shimmer repeated.

  “I … I have a brother?” I replied stupidly, suddenly feeling thrilled. I’d wished for a big brother to play with when I was a little kid, yearned for someone to commiserate with when I was a teenager. Like most of my childhood longings, it wasn’t something I thought about much as an adult, although brotherly figures still popped up in my dreams every so often. The Warlock was too much of a hound to fill in as a surrogate, but he came pretty close sometimes.

  “Yes, you have a brother.” Shimmer smiled, apparently amused by my reaction, and his expression infuriated me.

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” I scowled at him.

  My father raised an eyebrow at me. “You didn’t exactly give me a chance when we talked before.”

  “But what about Vicky?” I demanded, feeling betrayed. Having a brother was a damn big deal, and I wanted to know why nobody in my whole family had seen fit to clue me in. “She knew, didn’t she? Why didn’t she tell me?”

  “She thought the boy was dead,” my father replied quietly. “That’s what the aut
horities told her when she went asking about him after your mother died. And so she didn’t tell you about him for fear it would just upset you more during a difficult time of your life.”

  “And you didn’t tell her anything different?”

  Shimmer shook his head. “We only had a few moments to talk outside the Regnum’s surveillance, and frankly I was too worried about your situation to think to mention him to her.”

  I paused, trying to get a grip on my roiling emotions. “Tell me about my brother.”

  “Randall is five years older than you,” Shimmer replied. “The authorities removed him from your mother’s care and put him in a foster home during our trial. She wasn’t allowed to have him back afterward; they claimed we’d exposed him to necromancy and they wanted him to have some sort of fresh start. They told him we’d both died considerably sooner than we actually did.”

  Shimmer shook his head, looking angry and disgusted.

  “How did you find him? Or did he find you?” I asked.

  “I wanted to see my son graduate from high school, so I attended in disguise. Randall saw right through my careful obfuscations.” Shimmer smiled, looking proud. “The lad has sharp eyes and a good memory. He tracked me back to my hotel, and we’ve stayed in touch in the years since. He’s strong, well-trained … all my divinations say he’s still alive, but whatever is happening there in Cuchillo is most serious and dangerous.”

  “I’ll find him,” I blurted out. “I’ll get him out of there. What does he look like?”

  “I think you’ll see a family resemblance right away. He’s a few inches taller than you, just a shade over six feet, has your and your mother’s hazel eyes, but my mother’s sandy blond hair. Girls find him quite handsome; boys, too, apparently, but I won’t begrudge him his dalliances if he doesn’t deprive me of grandchildren when the time comes.”

  I didn’t really know what to say to that; surely it was entirely Randall’s business if he wanted to have kids or not. So I changed the subject: “About us being stuck in Cuchillo … what you’re saying is nobody can get into or out of the city?”