Shotgun Sorceress

by Lucy A. Snyder

  I pulled out my mouthpiece and got up slowly, my stiff joints and strained muscles bitching at me with every inch. My stomach was cramping, acidic. The floor felt like it was tilted at a weird angle. The furniture seemed to be undulating, and suddenly I realized I was seeing small, indistinct creatures scuttling in the periphery of my vision.

  “I’m seeing the fey,” I slurred.

  “Oh dear.” Pal put a clawed paw to my forehead. “You’re burning up.”

  I sat back down on the chair. “I thought the hepatitis wouldn’t set in for weeks.”

  “This doesn’t look like hepatitis to me. Admittedly I am not especially familiar with the disease, but you don’t seem to be jaundiced. A different blood-borne infection that the Warlock’s fetish couldn’t detect is the likely culprit.”

  “Where are the guys?”

  “The Warlock and Cooper came back about an hour after you went into your hellement—Cooper was apparently given a clean bill of health by the doctor—but an airman came to get them soon after. Evidently they were needed to help repel an attack by the meat puppets. Unfortunately I have no idea when they are likely to return.”

  “Well, damn.” I licked my lips; my tongue felt like it was covered in paste. I could see the fey more clearly now: the weird little creatures were all over the place. A vermilion-feathered starfish was napping on my knee. “Could you grab me a bottle of water?”

  “Certainly.” Pal turned away to get into my backpack.

  One of the kittens mewed, attracting my attention. In my fevered vision, it no longer looked much like a kitten: it was a rangy creature of utter blackness with huge mirrorlike eyes and a gaping mouth of long, curving teeth. Its head reminded me more of a deep-sea angler-fish than anything truly feline.

  I watched, horrified, as it pounced on a fey that looked like a fleshy daisy with tentacle legs. The “kitten” devoured the fey in two savage bites.

  “Hey, Pal?” My voice shook.

  “Yes?” He handed me the water bottle.

  “I just found out what Sara’s kitties eat—they’re fey predators.”

  “Oh dear. Well, given their reaction to the exorcism magic, we can be certain that they’re some type of devil.”

  I looked around the room. “Also we’re apparently surrounded by paradimensional cat poop.”

  “I must say I’m pleased that I do not share your enhanced vision.” He put his paw against my forehead again as I took a long drink from the bottle. “I think you should go see the doctor.”

  “No argument here.”

  Pal helped me up out of the restraint chair, and I leaned on him as we made our way down the hall to the elevators. It was probably five in the morning, and the dorm lobby was utterly quiet. A new girl was napping in the chair behind the counter. Once we got outside, the heat made me queasier and dizzy and I tripped on the curb in the early morning darkness. Pal caught me, sang himself a bit bigger, and carried me the rest of the way to the clinic.

  The broad entry hall of the Student Health Center was completely lined with military cots on which meat puppets lay blindfolded and earplugged, their arms and legs tied down. IV drips carrying nutrition and drugs were taped into every arm, and catheter bags hung beneath the cots. At the end of the hall, I saw Sara sitting in a folding chair beside one puppet, holding his hand, her eyes wet with tears.

  A petite young woman in green scrubs goggled at Pal and came hurrying over. Her name tag read Arleen Barnes, RN. “Can I help you?”

  Pal, put me down.

  “I’m sick, got some kind of fever,” I told the nurse as Pal gently set me on the floor. I nodded toward Sara. “What’s that about?”

  She followed my gaze, and her face fell. “Oh. Yes. That’s Sara’s husband, Bob. He was taken from us about six months ago, and she hasn’t been right since.”

  “So you’re just keeping all these bodies alive in the hopes you can get their souls back somehow?”

  Nurse Barnes nodded. “Yes. That’s our job, and we’re doing it the very best we can.” She pulled a digital ear thermometer out of her breast pocket.

  “Why the blindfolds and earplugs?” I asked. “Are they sensitive to light and sound?”

  “No. We found out the hard way that Miko can use them to spy on us.” The nurse looked uncomfortable at the thought. “Lean down a little so I can get your temperature.”

  I did as she asked. The tip of the thermometer was cold and uncomfortable in my ear canal.

  “Goodness, you do have a fever,” she said. “It’s 103.5. Come with me, we need to get your temperature down.”

  Pal sang himself mastiff-size, and he supported me as I followed the nurse back to a cramped beige examining room that was absolutely filled with mushroomlike fey with tiny butterfly wings. At the nurse’s request, I sat down on the vinyl-upholstered exam table. There wasn’t a sheet of paper covering it; I supposed they’d run out some time ago.

  The nurse took hold of my hands, frowning at the angry red marks the straps had left on my wrists. “What’s this all about?”

  “I … had a seizure. My friends tied me down to keep me from hurting myself.” I got the feeling that the nurse was already plenty freaked out by Pal, and she didn’t need to know that I was possessed by a devil.

  “Do you have seizures often?” She held open my eyelids one by one and shined a penlight in my eyes. “And what’s this thing?” She frowned at my ocularis.

  “It’s a makeshift artificial eye,” I replied.

  “Did you start getting the seizures after you lost your eye?”

  “Yes.” It wasn’t a lie.

  She turned away to furiously write notes on a clipboard, looking up only to ask for my name and Social Security number, both of which I gave her.

  “What about your rash?” she asked, pen poised above the clipboard.

  “Rash?” I looked down at my arms, and sure enough, my skin was covered in itchy-looking red bumps. “Wow. I didn’t even see that. This is new.”

  “Have you been exposed to the blood of one of the Taken?” she asked.

  I guessed that the medical personnel had been discouraged from using terms like “zombie” to describe Miko’s puppets. “Yes, a couple of them bled all over me yesterday. And … I’ve been recently exposed to hepatitis, but I don’t know if I’ve actually got the disease yet or not.”

  The nurse hmmed and wrote more notes. “Well, a lot of people around here have that as well. Dr. Ottaway should be up by now … let me go see if she can take a look at you.” She set the clipboard down, went to a nearby cupboard, and pulled down a big bottle of ibuprofen 800s.

  “Do you have any bleeding problems? Are you allergic to Advil or aspirin or tetracycline antibiotics? And are you pregnant?” she asked.

  “Nope, nope, and nope.”

  “Good.” She filled a paper cup with water from the tiny sink, and handed me one of the ibuprofen horse pills and the cup. “Take this … it should help bring your fever down. We’ll give you more to take back to the dorm with you.”

  “Thanks.” I swallowed the medicine.

  The nurse left, and a few minutes later she returned with a tired but pleasant-looking woman in a long white doctor’s coat. Her thick graying brown hair was parted in the middle and pulled back from her face; the style reminded me of Frida Kahlo, but wasn’t as severe. I guessed the doctor was just a few years older than Cooper.

  She gave a start when she saw Pal crouched attentively on the floor beside me. “Holy smokes, what’s that thing?”

  “This is Pal,” I replied. “He’s cool.”

  “But what is he?”

  I racked my fever-addled brain for a believable response. “He’s a … spider weasel … bear … from … Japan. They’re the hot new pets there these days.”

  It had finally occurred to me that although he was a spider in general form and a ferret in coloration, there was something distinctly bearish about his teeth, broad skull, and the texture of his fur.

  “I’ll have
to take your word for that.” She straightened up, seemed to recover her professional demeanor, and stuck out her hand. “I’m Christine Ottaway, M.D. And you are”—she glanced at the clipboard—“Jessie Shimmer?”

  I took her hand and shook it. Her grip was strong, and she had a guitar player’s calluses on her fingertips. “Yes. Thanks for seeing me on such short notice.”

  “Honey, it’s all short notice around here.” She laughed. “I’m lucky if I get a solid five hours of shut-eye. But let’s not make this about me. So. You’ve got a pretty bad fever, and a rash, and you’ve had some blood contamination. Any new headaches and body pains? Upset stomach?”

  I nodded. “All that, yeah.”

  She stepped up beside the table and started feeling the lymph nodes in my neck and under my jaw. “You’ve definitely got some swelling in here.”

  She pulled a wooden tongue depressor and a penlight out of her breast pocket. “Open your mouth, stick your tongue out, and say ‘Aaah.’ ”

  I did as she asked.

  “Okay, you can close now.” She turned away and tossed the depressor into the trash. “I think, my dear, that you’ve got the local superbug: Ehrlichia mutans.”

  I suddenly felt a bit queasier. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a bacterium in the family Anaplasmataceae.” She went to the sanitizer dispenser on the wall, pumped some clear alcohol gel into her palm, and vigorously rubbed her hands together. “Normally it’s transmitted by tick bites, and normally symptoms don’t develop until a few weeks after exposure, but things aren’t exactly normal around here, are they? Our local mutation is a speedy little bugger. It mostly causes the flulike, rashy ick you’re feeling now, but I’ve been seeing it destroy some people’s kidneys. To my regret we haven’t had much luck at keeping people alive on dialysis around here, so aggressive treatment from the start is our best option. Knock it out before it knocks you out.”

  I nodded. “Sounds good to me.”

  Dr. Ottaway turned to the nurse. “Please bring me a bottle of doxycycline, the usual strength, and a bottle of ibuprofen 200s.”

  The nurse left to fetch the antibiotic, and the doctor pulled a small notepad out of one of her front coat pockets and started writing down some directions. “I’m going to give you a bottle of hundred-milligram doxycycline tablets. I want you to go straight to the cafeteria, have some food, and take three of the doxy pills. You’ve already had eight hundred milligrams of ibuprofen, and you’re likely to make yourself sick if you take all this on an empty stomach. And then tonight when you get ready for bed, I want you to take two more doxy pills, and then one in the morning and one at night until the bottle’s empty. I’m also going to give you a bottle of ibuprofen, but do not take more for at least eight hours … after that, take two every four to six hours as you need them for fever.”

  She paused. “Also, try to stay out of the sun as much as possible—both these drugs can make your skin burn very easily. Do you understand everything I’ve told you?”

  I nodded. “I think so.”

  “Good.” She tore the instructions off her notepad and handed them to me. “If you see any blood in your urine, come back in here immediately.”

  “I will. Thank you.”

  Nurse Barnes returned with my medication in a small brown paper bag, and the good doctor bade me good-bye and sent me on my way.

  chapter

  twenty-three

  Monsters

  After a breakfast of antibiotics, rubbery powdered eggs, and watery oatmeal in the student center’s cafeteria, Pal helped me back to the dorm and strapped me back into the restraint chair so I could take a nap.

  “That egg ration wasn’t terribly filling,” Pal said. “I’m still feeling rather peckish. I think I smelled rats when we were in the lobby … do you mind if I go down to the basement to see if I can do a little hunting?”

  I don’t think that’s a good idea, I thought back, unable to speak with my head immobilized. I mean, I don’t mind for myself, as long as you locked the doors so nobody could come wandering in here while I’m asleep. But you look like a monster and practically everybody here has a big gun. I wouldn’t want you to get shot.

  Pal looked offended. “I was aware of that, thank you. I planned to turn myself invisible. And I am otherwise perfectly capable of defending myself against firearms.”

  Still. I just don’t think it’s a good idea … how about I go down there with you once I’ve rested for a little while?

  Pal blinked at me and scratched the carpeted floor impatiently with one of his middle legs. “I am really quite hungry, but I suppose that would be an acceptable compromise, provided you don’t sleep too long.”

  Cool. My eyelids were already growing heavy, and soon I was fast asleep in the chair.

  I woke with a start when I heard a key scrabbling in the lock. Based on the angle of the sunlight streaming through the miniblinds, I’d been asleep for at least two or three hours. It was hard to look around, but I was no longer seeing the fey, and my headache and chills were gone, so apparently the medicine was working. Unfortunately, I also couldn’t see my familiar.

  Pal, where are you? Someone’s coming into the room, I thought, suddenly aware of how vulnerable I was. And I didn’t know how many people might have access to the dorm’s master keys. Pal, are you here?

  No response came. The door swung open and I was relieved to see the Warlock come in. But when I saw that he was alone I felt anxious all over again. He was dressed in a pair of tiger-stripe camouflage pants and a tan T-shirt; based on the soot, smudges, scratches, and bruises on his face and arms, I guessed his tuxedo pants and shirt had been ruined during his overnight mission.

  He had an olive-drab canvas map bag slung across his shoulder; he set it down on the nearby bed. His black kitten crawled out and climbed up to the shelf above, blinking its yellow eyes at us. Its twin crept out from under the bed and clawed up the bed up to join it.

  “Where’s Spiderboy?” The Warlock’s eyes were glassy, bloodshot. He had the thousand-yard stare of somebody who’d been up far too long but was too wound up on adrenaline to sleep. He looked at the strap holding my jaw shut. “Right. You can’t possibly talk with that on, can you?”

  He locked the door behind him and came over to my chair to take off the restraints binding my head. His hands were dark with dirt, grease, and speckles of what was probably blood.

  “Wash first, please,” I slurred around the mouthpiece as he reached for it.

  He gave me a slightly annoyed look, but went into the bathroom to quickly scrub himself off at the sink.

  “Thanks,” I said after he pulled the mouthpiece out with clean, damp hands. “I guess Pal got hungry and went off hunting rats. Where’s Cooper?”

  “He’s off killing meat puppets, still. He’s enjoying it far too much if you ask me.” The Warlock set the mouthpiece aside on one of the dressers and pulled a folding chair over to sit in front of me. “But who am I to deny my own brother his pleasures?”

  Something about the way he said “pleasures” set the Gothic bells tolling in my head. I gave him a harder look. “Get me out of this chair, please.”

  He was staring at my breasts. “You know, you look really hot all strapped in like that. Really, really hot.”

  My heart beat faster in mixed alarm and—goddamn it—arousal. No, no, this was not happening. I met his gaze, and knew that part of his mind was just gone. His superego had fled the building, leaving his id in charge of the party.

  “Did you see Miko out there?” I stammered. Obviously, he had, and she’d triggered a lust in him that was at least as bad as mine. Worse, maybe. “Please just unstrap me. This can’t go anywhere good.”

  “I saw …” He trailed off for a moment, then leaned in and breathed deeply near my neck. My skin prickled under his hot exhalation. “I saw you naked in the desert. I’d wanted to see that for a long, long time. I think I want to see it again.”

  I tried to squirm away from him, but the c
hair held me fast. I started trying to summon the words for a spell to free myself, but all I could think of was letting the Warlock take me to the bed and fuck me blind. Panic rose along with my abject lust, chasing the ancient words from my mind.

  “Please don’t,” I begged. “You’re not thinking straight. I’m not thinking straight. Miko’s messing with us.”

  He didn’t seem to hear me. “You’ve got a gorgeous pair, Jessie. Did you know I can make a woman come just by sucking on her nipples? Oh yeah. That’s one trick I know I can do better than Coop. He doesn’t half deserve a fine woman like you.”

  “Christ, Warlock. He’s your brother.”

  “I don’t see a ring on your finger. If he wanted you all to himself, he should’ve made the vow by now.”

  “I’ve. Got. Hepatitis!”

  “And I’ve got condoms.” He started to pull my shirt up. “And I can tell when a woman’s getting all juicy. You look like you’re getting a whole bunch of honey on those tight leather pants of mine.”

  “No, dammit, no. I don’t want you to do this. Stop.” I was starting to get angry now. Really angry. So what if I was obviously aroused by him? That didn’t give him the right to jump on me like a dog that had found a bitch in heat. He owed me more respect than this, damn him.

  The Warlock stood up and unzipped the fly of his camouflage pants. Levered his cock out. His organ was about as long as Cooper’s but much thicker and gnarled with hard veins, the purpling mushroom head boastfully flared, and I couldn’t help but wonder how it would feel inside me. Damn Miko to oblivion.

  “This is another thing I know I’ve got on Coop,” he said, stroking his cock slowly with his left hand. “All the ladies who’ve done a taste test with both of us have always come back to me for seconds. And usually thirds and fourths.”

  “If you touch me,” I warned him through gritted teeth, “I will kick your ass like it’s never been kicked before.”

  “Oh yeah?” He cocked an eyebrow and smiled at me as if he’d taken my threat as a challenge. “Well, we’ll just have to see about that, won’t we?”