“Pal would never do that.” I set my tray down and pulled out a chair.
“Oh, but he’s—”
“—surely thinking about it!”
“You can see it—”
“—in his eyes.”
I gave Pal a look as he placed his tray on the table beside mine. “Really? Seriously?”
He blinked, seeming abashed. “They do smell delicious.”
Eat your tuna and stop eyeballing their rodents, I thought to him, annoyed. Don’t you have any sense of professional courtesy?
“I’d be doing them a favor, really.” He wolfed down a patty in one bite. “Familiars killed in the line of duty often receive a reduction in sentence.”
“Well, he’s not going to hurt your rats,” I announced to everyone at the table. “Otherwise I’d have to kick his ass.”
I paused. “So, I’m Jessie Shimmer. And y’all are … ?”
“Callirhoe Jackson,” said the lady to the left. “You can call me Callie. And my rat is named Bosworth.”
“Involucrata Jackson,” said her sister. “People call me Poppy. And this is Pierre.” She gave her rat a little scritch on the top of his head between his ears and he gave a cheerful squeak.
“Pleased to meet you all,” I said.
“Likewise,” the sisters said.
“So, are y’all from around here?” I asked.
“Yes, we are,” said Callie. “And we’re very much—”
“—looking forward to things getting back to normal,” Poppy finished.
“Um.” I lowered my voice. “There might be kind of a hitch with the whole ‘going back to normal’ thing.”
Callie laughed. “You mean other than the town being wrecked?”
“And nearly everybody dead?” added Poppy.
“Well, that, yeah,” I agreed. “But also … well, did you two meet Sara Bailey-Jones before Miko caught you?”
“Sara,” mused Callie. “She’s the one—”
“—with the dozen cats?” finished Poppy.
“Yes, her.” I said. “Only now there are a lot more than a dozen cats. And they’re actually devils. Don’t know what kind, but they seem to feed off chaos. And Sara’s acting mayor. And she’s crazy. And I mean bad crazy, not ‘Ha-ha, she’s so much fun at parties’ crazy. I mean like Pol Pot shooting people in the head just because they wear glasses crazy.”
“Oh my,” said Poppy. “That could certainly be—”
“—a problem. But I’m sure that if all us witches and wizards join together—”
“—we can get her to see reason.”
“Or teleport her into the desert.” Callie pursed her lips.
“Whatever works,” agreed Poppy.
chapter
eight
Potion
After we finished eating, I said good-bye to the Jackson sisters and dropped our dirty dishes onto the conveyor belt. Pal and I went back to our suite where I took my antibiotics and some Advil for my fever. And then I collapsed into the queen-size bed and quickly passed out.
I slept pretty hard, but my dreams were unsettling. In all of them, I was a little girl back in my parents’ house in our old Lakewood neighborhood in Dallas. My mom was still alive. Even though I was only seven or eight in the dreams, I had all my adult memories. I knew how—and why—my mother had died.
When I was eleven, I was diagnosed with an aggressive brain cancer that the mundane doctors couldn’t treat. Mom had been convicted of grand necromancy before I was born and was forbidden from associating with other Talents or casting even the smallest charm. Almost immediately after she performed a spell to save me, Virtus Regnum agents quietly executed her for her crimes. I was the one who found her cold body on our kitchen floor.
In those not-quite-nightmares, I was desperate to warn her about what was going to happen. But whenever I opened my mouth, I couldn’t get any words to come out. Or if I found my voice, my mother would disappear into mist, or turn a corner and vanish. I ran through the empty house, crying for her, but she was gone.
The dreams finally ended when the alarm clock buzzed at dawn. I dragged myself from the sweaty, twisted sheets, feeling absolutely horrible: sticky eyes, shivers, cramping stomach. Everything hurt—my muscles, bones, teeth, seemingly even my hair.
When I tottered into the bathroom and turned on the light, I was faced by a reflection that looked a whole lot like one of the corpses I’d burned the day before. I poured myself a tepid, bitterly mineral drink from the sink faucet; whatever magic the hotel’s resident Talents were using to keep the plumbing going wasn’t doing much for the water quality. My hands were shaking so much it was hard to hold on to the hotel glass.
Yep. I was totally ready to take on the death goddess who’d destroyed nearly the entire town. Maybe if I gushingly bled out on her she’d slip and break her neck in some new and different way that her regenerative powers couldn’t cope with? Yeah. Sure.
After I washed my face to try to wake myself up a bit more, I went back into the bedroom to rouse Pal, who was snoozing on the thin sofa-bed mattress. I wasn’t sure how quickly a creature like him was supposed to heal, but it looked to me as if some of the claw marks on his legs were getting worse rather than better.
“How are you feeling?” I asked as he lifted his shaggy head and blinked at me blearily in the dimness.
“I’ve felt better,” he admitted.
“Do you want to see if I can find some more help?”
He shook his head and licked his muzzle. “I spent some time listening in on conversations while you were otherwise occupied; I don’t think anyone here has much more than basic skill as a healer. Apparently there was one white witch who was attending to the people in Miko’s spell-circle, but she tried to escape and Miko killed her. That’s why Miko resorted to the mundane nurses. At any rate, if Bettie’s and my own efforts at healing my body have come to naught, I don’t expect anyone else here will do better.”
“Are you sure?” I hoped his pride in his own magic wouldn’t keep him from seeking what healing assistance he could get. “It wouldn’t hurt to try again, would it?”
“I’ll be fine.” He gathered his legs under him and stepped off the sofa bed. “But how are you feeling?”
“Completely craptastic. It’s taking pretty much all I’ve got just to stand up. I think my meds have reached their limit of usefulness. So I’m going to try something else. But before I get started … do you think you can carry me back to the clinic at the university if this goes horribly wrong?”
He nodded. “What, may I ask, are you going to attempt?”
I bent down to get into my backpack; the movement sent a jag of pain through the front of my head, ocularis to eyeball. Ignoring it and the sudden wave of nausea the headache brought on, I retrieved one of the stainless-steel bottles my brother had given me and straightened up.
“I’m going to try one of these energy potions.”
Pal looked concerned. “Do you think that’s a good idea on an empty stomach?”
I shrugged. “I don’t think I can eat for a while. And Randall didn’t tell me I had to take it with food or anything. He just warned me to chug it and not sip it. Some of the ingredients are pretty foul, so … yeah.
“But no, I haven’t had this before,” I continued, “and no, I don’t know what it’ll do. For all I know I could barf, have a heart attack, turn into a newt. No clue. But as shitty as I feel right now, I’m willing to risk it in the hopes that this will make me even slightly more functional.”
Pal crouched attentively at the foot of my bed. “Well, if your experiment goes badly I’ll do my best to get you to a healer or a doctor. But I’d suggest sitting down first, just in case. No sense in courting a nasty knock on the head. Even if yours seems uncommonly hard.”
I snorted. “Right.”
Perching cross-legged on the bed, I cracked open the bottle. Sniffed it. The liquid inside was black as coffee that had been boiling in the pot all day, and smelled strongl
y of jalapeños and faintly of something sourly metallic. “Well, bottoms up.”
I tossed back the potion. The surprisingly thick fluid burned my tongue, and a moment later tripped my gag reflex, but I forced it down, held my breath to keep from tasting it any more clearly than I had to.
I waited. Swallowed again. Released my breath.
Nothing.
“I don’t think this potion is still—” I began.
And suddenly there was a heat like a small supernova exploding in the pit of my stomach, then a wave of adrenaline like a million tiny Maori warriors surfing through my bloodstream, and my exhaustion evaporated, my aches and pains gone like so many vampires drowned in liquid sunshine, and I could climb dragons, I could slay mountains—
I was on the floor. The inside of my mouth tasted like I’d drunk rancid chili from a dirty ashtray. A shaggy belly pressed heavily against my face. My whole body. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe.
“Mmmf!” I tried to wiggle out from under Pal.
“Are you sane?” He sounded cross. “Tap me three times with your toes if you understand me.”
My left foot was the only part of me that he’d left free. I tapped him. He stood up, and I took a gasping breath.
“What the hell?” I frowned up at him.
“You began bounding around the room like an utter lunatic.” He frowned back at me. The expression looked a lot scarier on him. “I thought it best to restrain you lest you hurt yourself or decide to start burning the hotel down.”
“No way. I don’t remember that at all.”
“You began shouting ‘I am the banana master now, bitches!’ ” he added.
I squinted at him. “You’re just messing with me. I did not say that.”
“Oh, you most certainly did.” Pal stepped aside and crouched down, seeming amused. “You also declared yourself to be ‘Queen of the Motherfucking Chainsaw Brigade’ and made a series of profane, scatological threats against all the ‘goat-faced jack-fuck haters.’ You might’ve actually said ‘moat bait Mack truck hatters,’ though in context that doesn’t make quite as much sense. Our telepathy was garbled, and you do tend to flatten your ‘A’s, so it’s hard to be certain.”
“Um … wow.” I really needed to have a chat with my subconscious about anger management.
“ ‘Fuck’ does seem to be your go-to epithet for almost every occasion, doesn’t it?” he said.
I got to my feet. “My stepmother loathes that word. Like, even more than ‘cunt’ if you can believe it. I got in so much trouble the first time I dropped an F-bomb around her. Mouth washed out with Ivory soap and everything.”
I paused, remembering the incident. Normally my stepmother would never have done anything so physical as to drag a thirteen-year-old girl kicking and screaming into the bathroom for corporal punishment. But Deb was flush with first-trimester hormones, and I learned a valuable lesson that day: don’t provoke pregnant women. Especially if they’ve gone into a nesting, cleaning frenzy.
“I didn’t say it around her again,” I continued. “But once I realized it bugged her beyond human reason, it sorta became my favorite word in the whole urban dictionary.”
“Dysfunctional, yet oddly logical.” Pal’s tone was dry. “So how are you feeling now?”
“Good. Energetic. Like I can do stuff.” I looked around the room for the empty potion container; I’d apparently thrown it as hard as I could at the wall, which was now dented. The bottle lay against the baseboard, looking innocent. “But I should go easy on it next time, maybe just drink half the bottle at first.”
“A prudent plan,” Pal agreed.
I found a little sample of Scope in the bathroom and washed out the nasty taste of the potion. Then Pal and I went downstairs to see if Cooper and the Warlock had returned.
chapter
nine
Sara’s Mission
Sara Bailey-Jones was waiting for us in the lobby, her red plastic cowboy hat perched atop her prematurely white hair. Her .480 Ruger Super Redhawk revolver was still strapped in a brown leather holster over her baggy jeans.
A dozen housecats stood watch around her; if you didn’t have a magic sight-stone or some other enhanced vision, you probably never would have guessed that the cats were really individual cells of a hive-mind devil. But they would probably creep you out just the same, because they’d seem weirdly familiar, and it might take you a few minutes to realize you’d seen them all in movies and TV shows and commercials.
“Jessie Shimmer!” Sara exclaimed, her smile and Adderall-blue eyes bright. To look at her you’d think we were long-lost BFFs. There wasn’t a trace of worry or hesitation in her expression.
And there should have been. There should have been some sign she realized that she’d screwed us over and that I was surely not going to be happy to see her. The last time I’d laid eyes on her, she’d thrown Cooper and the Warlock out of the campus compound, leaving them to Miko’s sweet mercies while she left me strapped in a chair, helpless to do anything to save the men I cared about most in the world.
It had been one of the worst days of my life, and at that moment I dearly wanted to pay her back for her part in it. I wanted to beat her bloody for what she’d done to my boyfriend and his brother, but I didn’t know how powerful she really was. I’d already seen her murder a Catholic priest without so much as a wince of regret, and if I pissed her off she might try to hurt Pal. And clearly my ability to keep my friends safe around her was not very good.
So I settled for a clipped reply: “What do you want, Sara?”
“The kitties told me you’ll be seeing Miko today!” She sounded as enthusiastic as a grade school teacher telling her class they had all won a trip to Disney World. “And I’ve got something to help you find her.”
She pulled a small white envelope out of her back pocket.
I eyed it suspiciously. “What’s that?”
“Three of her hairs. One of the kitties helped us find them clenched in a zombie’s hand. A genuine death-grip! She’s no kind of animal, not like us, and she doesn’t shed, so this was quite a discovery. And the kitties say you can use it to find her.”
That I could.
“Thanks.” I took the envelope from her outstretched hand and tucked it in my own pocket.
“The kitties say she’s on a ranch near Devils Courthouse Peak to the north of here, but she might be someplace else by sundown. They think she might slip away through the holes in the spirits’ net once she’s got her head straight again. Just like your brother did.”
I don’t know why it came as a nasty surprise to realize Miko could probably open portals on her own, but it did. And suddenly I felt more anxious than ever to track her down.
Pal must have read the change in my expression, or maybe he heard my heart start pounding. “Steady, Jessie. We mustn’t run headlong into this. We should try to wait for Cooper and the Warlock to return.”
“Okay,” I replied, and Sara beamed, thinking I was speaking to her.
“When you see Miko, there’s something I need you to do. Something we all need you to do.” Sara reached into her other back pocket and pulled out a folded piece of yellow legal pad paper. “These are the names of all the people we’re keeping alive at the health center whose souls were stolen. My husband, Bob, is one of them.”
Her face fell then, and a profound sadness took hold of her features. I remembered watching her weep beside his cot, and despite everything she’d done, I felt genuinely sorry for her.
The very picture of a lonely, grieving wife, she held the paper out to me. “Will you please bring them home? The kitties say that all you have to do is get their souls out of Miko and they’ll return to their bodies. I guess you’ve done something like that before?”
“Yes, something like that.” I took the paper from her. “I’ll do my best.”
Just then, the Jackson sisters sashayed in from the dining room, both wearing vibrant blue caftans. Their rat familiars were nowhere in sight.
<
br /> “Well hello there!” exclaimed Callie. “You must be—”
“—Sara, our fearless acting mayor,” Poppy finished.
Sara blinked, looking puzzled. A couple of her cats were starting to fluff up their fur, hackles and paws raised in wary confusion. “Yes, that’s me.”
“Wonderful!” the sisters exclaimed simultaneously.
“We’ve been meaning to have a little chat with you,” said Callie.
“Over tea, and they’ve got a lovely pot of orange pekoe brewing in the sunroom,” said Poppy. “Just waiting for us.”
“What did you want to chat about?” Sara asked, sounding suspicious.
“The city’s almost free—” said Callie.
“—and then the Regnum will be here—” said Poppy.
“—and if we don’t have a plan for reconstruction—”
“—they’ll surely give us one—”
“—so if we want them keeping their pointy noses—”
“—out of our local business—”
“—we need a proposal for rebuilding—”
“—and restoring city services—”
“—and suchlike things,” finished Callie.
Sara blinked. “Well, as acting mayor, all that is my job, I think …”
“Wonderful!” the sisters exclaimed, and before Sara could protest they’d swept her away toward the sunroom in a flutter of true-blue sleeves and municipal chatter as the nonplussed devil kitties hurried to catch up.
“Their kung fu is strong,” I whispered to Pal. “Do you think they’ll get her off the crazy train?”
Pal shrugged, or at least made a passable effort at it considering he didn’t really have any shoulders. “I believe they’ll make a heroic attempt, at any rate.”
He peered into the dining room. “Shall we go to the breakfast line? I think I smell ham. Perhaps you can’t eat, but I need my last meal if you expect me to fly to certain doom this morning.”
chapter
ten
Frittata con Gaga
The cooking Talents had worked a bit of magic with the dwindling kitchen ingredients, and they had savory black bean frittatas and flapjacks warming over Sterno cans in steel hotel pans at the buffet. And, as Pal’s sharp nose had detected, some fried slices of canned ham dressed up with a maple glaze. We filled our plates and found an unoccupied table.
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