“Well, damn.” Russell chewed his lower lip. “If we don’t find anything else that actually gets us past the isolation barrier, we might have to try that beach portal after all and hope for the best.”
“Could there be another portal at the old fort?” I asked. “I mean, if they had a direct route to the whorehouse, it would make sense for them to have an escape route to another city in case the Comanches attacked, wouldn’t it?”
“That would make sense, yeah. But it could be Miss Hattie or one of her girls arranged for the portal and the soldiers didn’t have their own Talent to set up anything else.” He got Spike out of his shirt pocket, and the little lizard bobbed on his palm. “There’s definitely something upstairs. Let’s go check it out before we go to the fort.”
We left the store and started up the stairs, Randall leading the way. A few steps up, a sudden dizzy spell nearly sent me tumbling, but I caught myself, bumping heavily against the plaster wall.
“Whoa, you okay?” Randall looked back at me, concerned.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just clumsy.” I smiled, hoping I looked better than I felt. Maybe my vertigo was from the antibiotics the local doc had given me; maybe it was my fever or the heat. Whatever the cause, I was looking forward to the day when I would finally get to see an expert healer. Maybe Pal and I could get a twofer deal.
The preserved bordello rooms upstairs were outfitted in a hodgepodge of old furnishings, everything from Victorian couches to a 1940s RCA phonograph. The peeling ceiling was gold-painted tin, and the windows were draped with lace and heavy red velvet curtains. Every lampshade had a fringe. Department store mannequins dressed in garish feather boas, beaded flapper dresses, and huge feathered hats stood as mute, dusty sentries in the corners.
Spike bounced in Randall’s palm and pointed to a bedroom that had “Miss Kitty” painted on the door in ornate pink calligraphy with desert roses sprouting from the “I”s. We stepped inside and found a relatively small room dominated by a brass bed covered in a rumpled handmade patchwork quilt. A wooden trunk at the foot of the bed was draped in a large lace doily. The walls were decorated in amateur paintings of cowboys and horses and photographs of ranch life that looked to be from the 1920s.
The little mechanical lizard circled in Randall’s palm and made an excited clicking noise.
“Huh.” Randall went over to the antique dresser and opened the bottom drawer. Inside were various articles of moth-eaten lingerie. He reached inside, apparently feeling around on the underside of the drawer above. I heard a faint rip as old tape or putty gave way, and Randall pulled out a quartz crystal that had been carved to look like a small phallus.
“Oh, wow, the Warlock has one of those,” I said, instantly recognizing it as a venereal disease detector.
“They’re handy, for sure.” Randall slipped the fetish into the thigh pocket of his cargo pants. “And it looks like Miss Kitty was probably responsible for the portals downstairs.”
“Why in the world would a Talent work as a prostitute in a little Texas town?” I wondered aloud. “If she was powerful enough to create portals, surely she’d have better job options than this.”
Randall shrugged. “Maybe she was trying to piss off her parents. Maybe she really, really liked sex with cowboys. Or maybe she was part succubus, and needed a steady supply of dude-sauce to keep her power up. Blood’s not the only fluid useful in necromantic spells, y’know.”
He pocketed Spike and moved around the bed to push aside the curtain that covered the doorway to Kitty’s closet. A cloud of dust rose from the heavy pink brocade. Coughing, I followed him inside, and my stone eye instantly showed me the outline of a door on the far wall. This one had fancy paneling, as though it went someplace swanky.
“Well, let’s see where this one goes.” I pulled off my glove, stuck my flame fingers into the edge, and pulled.
The portal swung open, revealing an upscale hotel room beyond. The king-size bed was covered in a down comforter, and the flat-screen TV across from it was shiny and new. A black netbook slept on the mahogany computer desk, and a red Samsonite case sat on the luggage rack by the closed closet door. The room overlooked gleaming downtown corporate buildings; familiar, but I couldn’t quite place the skyline.
Randall held up his hand to warn me to stay where I was. He cautiously stepped into the room and peeked around the corner into the bathroom. “Good, the guy’s not here.”
“How do you know it’s a guy?” I asked from the portal.
“Left his tighty whiteys on the bathroom floor. Or in this case, his tighty, browny streakies.”
“Um, ew.”
“Yeah, don’t go in there.”
Randall crossed the room to the window, stared out at the skyscrapers, then picked up the hotel notepad that lay on the desk. His eyes lit up. “Toy store! This is the Alden Houston … Space City Paranormal Defense is just a few blocks away. We won’t have any problem getting back up to Dallas from here.”
Grinning, he rejoined me in Miss Kitty’s closet and spoke the charm to close the portal. “Let’s go back to the Saguaro and get the others.”
chapter
four
Send-Offs
Randall knelt on the gray penthouse carpet and dug through the main compartment of his olive drab tactical pack. He pulled out two small cork-stoppered, unlabeled stainless-steel bottles about the size of Red Bull cans.
“Twenty-four-hour energy potions,” he explained, offering them to me. “Shouldn’t make you anxious or overly jittery, and they’ll give your magic a boost, too. You can kinda burn through them, though, if you’re doing a lot of spells and … these are a little old at this point. So you might not get the full effect. My rec is to take one before you head out and keep one on you for after.”
“In case I need to run from the Virtus Regnum?” I took the potions from his hand.
“Yeah, exactly that.”
I stared at the shiny, featureless bottles. “So what’s in these?”
“Oh, you know … stuff.”
I raised my eyebrows at him. “ ‘Stuff’?”
“Um.” Randall closed his eyes, frowning, apparently trying to remember. “Ginseng, guarana, molasses, sea salt, jalapeño juice, black dragon bile, monarch butterfly wings, phoenix ash … couple of other things I’m forgetting.”
“Like unicorn poop? It might help the flavor.” Despite my misgivings, I stashed the bottles in my backpack.
“It does have a bit of an aftertaste,” Randall admitted with a shrug. “But it gets the job done.”
I woke up Pal, and we went downstairs to say our good-byes. Cooper and the Warlock were already in the lobby with Randall and his team. When he saw me step off the elevator, the Warlock cut his eyes away from me, staring at the shiny floor, his fists clenching anxiously. He was looking more and more upset every time he saw me. Big, strong, cool-as-a-shark Warlock was afraid, and that didn’t make me feel like a badass—it made me feel horrible. How could I ever fix things between us?
Cooper, who had a distracted, faraway look, didn’t notice his brother’s distress, but when he saw me he seemed to regain his focus and smiled at me, looking genuinely glad to see me. Out of it or not, Cooper was still damn hot. My heart beat faster, and I wished I could just take him up to the room and spend the day under the covers with him. But that wasn’t going to happen, at least not anytime soon.
He leaned in to give me a serious kiss, and as much as I wanted to feel his lips against mine, I gave him my cheek instead.
“Why are you turning away?” He looked hurt.
I winced, hating to have to explain in front of Randall’s team. They were all still looking at me like I was Wonder Woman and I didn’t want them to realize I was a whole lot closer to Typhoid Mary. Hey, guys, I got hepatitis! Two kinds! And tick fever, too! Woo hoo!
“Germs,” I whispered. “Remember? Don’t want to get you sick.”
“Oh. Yeah. Sorry.” He gave me a light kiss on my forehead, then pulled me close. I
could feel his strong heartbeat, and I hugged him tightly, wishing I could just melt into him.
“You will wait for us to come back, right?” he asked.
“Um.” My gut was telling me I had to try to get to Miko as soon as I could, but even if Pal and I were both 100 percent healthy, having the guys around for backup might mean the difference between success and failure. This wasn’t an algebra final—failing with Miko could mean we’d both end up as scattered bits of charnel for the vultures. And we were far from 100 percent.
I felt my anxiety build as dueling voices in my mind shouted Do it now! and You’re gonna die if you screw this up! There had to be a sane compromise. And I’d already promised him once that I’d wait.
“I’ll stay here until morning, like I said.” I stood up on tiptoes to kiss his cheek. “That’s the best I can do.”
Once the guys left for the bordello portal, Pal and I went outside to see if we could help with corpse cleanup. Three Talents in stained medical scrubs—two men and an older woman, their faces covered with red bandannas that appeared to have been smeared with Vicks VapoRub to cover up the stench—had transported the bodies to an empty parking lot beside the abandoned tan brick community hospital a few blocks away from the hotel. Someone had found a few dozen shipping pallets and they had alternately stacked wood and bodies in a rough two-story pyramid on the gravelly asphalt. It wasn’t nearly enough fuel if they were going to rely on regular fire, but it was better than nothing.
The sweaty trio was arguing about what spell they should use to ignite the grisly pyre. I should have probably said hi and introduced myself like a civilized person and asked if they wanted my help. But my eye fell upon the bloated face of a woman who reminded me of my aunt Vicky. Reminded me of how horrible she looked when I found her four days after her suicide. My chest ached with old sorrow. I looked away, looked up, and that wasn’t any better because now I was seeing the faces of all those other dead people. Knowing that I’d come so very close to joining them filled me with anger and anxiety, and suddenly I wanted the carnage gone, erased. So instead of observing any social niceties whatsoever I simply strode forward and stripped off my glove.
“Here, let me give it a try.” I let my fire flare high.
The Talents got the hell out of my way. I took a deep breath, feeling the pressure build in my hand, and let loose on the corpse pile with a firehose jet of burning purple ectoplasm. The flaming goo melted flesh, wood, and bone like wax a moment before the substances ignited and flash-burned down to noxious black ash. It was fairly disgusting, but I held my breath and kept the spray steady. I could tell I didn’t have a lot of firepower left, probably not enough to give a Virtus even a half-assed blistering, so I might as well put the remainder to good use.
In a few minutes it was over, nothing but a few charred bones and stray blackened nails from the pallets still burning in a tarry pool of melted asphalt. Ash swirled in the overheated air; I hoped I hadn’t inadvertently seeded us all with some kind of diabolic black lung. The Talents coughing into their Vicksy bandannas looked variously relieved, horrified, and impressed.
I stared up at the rising smoke and said a quiet good-bye to the townspeople I’d never known and had arrived far too late to save.
chapter
five
Hellement
Pal and I went back upstairs to the penthouse so I could retrieve my backpack and shotgun and his riding tack. Then we searched the floor below, using a key-card spell my familiar knew to pop doors until we found an unclaimed suite with a cushy queen-size bed, a sofa bed, and a big soaking tub in the bathroom. I felt as though my whole body was covered in gritty ash, so I drew myself a bath while Pal charm-cleaned my clothes.
As I lay back in the warm water, my mind flashed on the Warlock’s expression, and I felt bad all over again. What could I say to him? I knew I had to say something; I couldn’t just pretend we hadn’t hurt each other the way we had. And I had to tell Cooper what had happened, whether the Warlock had told him or not. I owed my boyfriend the truth … but first I had to figure out what the truth actually was here.
I trailed my flame hand over the side of the tub so the glove wouldn’t get wet and fill the bathroom with sulfurous steam. As I washed my face with my flesh hand, I considered the situation and my options. The Warlock and I had gone to a seriously dark, nasty place; even though Miko had goaded us into it, I couldn’t say with any certainty that we’d just been puppets acting out her twisted desires. Had that kind of violence been in us all along, just waiting to come out? Was all that horror really us?
And were there any words in the whole world that could make any of it better?
Before I realized what I was doing, my spiraling thoughts dropped me down into my hellement. This place was the remains of the nightmarish dimension Cooper had been trapped in. I’d killed the devil running the hell by plunging my left hand into its molten lava heart. Part of it had stuck to me, apparently permanently, turning my hand into a torch of enchanted fire and linking me to the hell.
But inside the hellement I was whole again, my burning hand restored to flesh and bone, my fever and aches gone. In an effort to erase the evil of the place, I’d turned the dimension into a perfect replica of my beloved childhood bedroom, the perpetual late afternoon sunlight streaming in through the mini-blinds, my stuffed animals lined up at attention on the dresser, my grape juice–stained Buzz Lightyear comforter on the bed.
Beneath the dust ruffle I could see the jarred memories from Cooper’s dead family glowing in the darkness under the bed. The jars were trophies from the devil I’d slain when I rescued my boyfriend; seeing them clustered there so cold and quiet suddenly gave me the creeps, so I glanced behind me to make sure the big red portal door was set in the wall beside my closet. The door was exactly where it was supposed to be, my Totoro poster Scotch-taped to the front. Comfortingly close at hand.
When I turned back, a doppelganger of the Warlock was standing before me.
I wasn’t startled to see him. This was my domain now, and as far as I knew, nothing appeared without my wanting it there, consciously or subconsciously. He was dressed in his ripped tuxedo, and his face was a bloody, broken wreck that barely looked human. I’d done that to him, held him down and hit him again and again while I … while I …
“Say it.” His words were slurred; his tongue was so badly lacerated I was surprised he could talk at all. “Be honest.”
I felt heat rise in my face, my heart pounding like the whole world was staring at me in judgment, instead of this solitary emotional construct in my private gallery. I remembered the ugly animal violence of what I’d done, the dirty rush it gave me, like a plunged syringe of heroin and venom.
I took a deep breath. Honesty.
“I got off on hurting you,” I said. The admission felt like bitter rust in my mouth. “I wish to hell I hadn’t, and I wish I could take it back, but I don’t get a do-over, do I?”
The doppelganger shook his bloody head, his blue eyes bright and sharp.
“Was that really me?” I whispered. “Or was it Miko?”
The doppelganger reached up and put the pieces of his shattered jaw back in place, straightened his nose, smoothed his cuts away with his fingers as though his flesh were modeling clay. In seconds his face was restored.
“What do you think?” he asked, running his thick, callused fingers through his black curly hair and smoothing the sprung curls of his mustache and beard.
“I think … I just don’t know. I’d like to think that if I had free will I’d never, ever do something like that. And certainly not to a friend.”
The Warlock arched an eyebrow at me, a familiar expression of disbelief. “Am I your friend?”
“Yes. Of course. You were the only person besides Mother Karen and Pal who helped me when Cooper disappeared.”
“Just because I’m useful doesn’t make me a friend. Just because I came through for my own brother doesn’t mean I did it to help you. Coop raised me fr
om the dead, or damn close to it. I mean, I had to help, right?” He paused. “And I piss you off most of the time, don’t I?”
“Well, yeah, but being annoying doesn’t mean you’re not my friend.”
The Warlock stepped closer, gazing down at me intently. “I hit on you all the time. And that gets old in a hurry, doesn’t it? Unless …”
My mouth went dry. “Unless what?”
“Unless, deep down, you’re flattered by my attention. Unless maybe, just maybe, you don’t mind me being interested, because you’re interested, too.”
He took a step closer. “Unless maybe you fucked me in here because you wanted to fuck me all along. Maybe what you did was a little less about the power and a little more about the sex.”
I shook my head, my heart pounding. “No. I never thought about you like that before Miko touched me.”
“The devil made you do it, huh?” He laughed. “It wasn’t because part of you wanted to keep your options open in case things didn’t work out with Cooper?”
“No. No way. I never thought that, ever. Miko—”
“Miko’s not here now.” He stepped even closer. I could feel the heat of his body, smell clove cigarettes and his girlfriend Opal’s perfume lingering on his jacket. The scents made me think of hot, dark nightclubs where nobody could quite see what you were doing with your date in the shadowed booths. “Are you still thinking about me?”
“I … I …”
My control was slipping; my subconscious was flinging hidden blades I didn’t know how to block. I turned to flee for the portal door, but the Warlock grabbed my arm and pulled me back, wrapping me in an embrace. His beard rubbed against my bare neck, and the sensation sent a thrill through me.
“Let me go,” I said, my voice shaking. I could break free easily enough, throw him off and walk away, but I didn’t want to do any more violence to him. Even if this version of him wasn’t really him.
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