The two extra empty chairs at our breakfasting spot acutely reminded me of Cooper and the Warlock. Were they okay? Was Mother Karen okay? Feeling a fresh surge of anxiety, I pushed my plate aside and pulled my brother’s compact out of the pocket of my dragonskin pants.
I opened the mirror and peered into the silver. “Devil in a black dress.”
It took Randall a few moments to answer. His blond hair was mussed and his hazel eyes bloodshot, as if he hadn’t slept at all that night. Behind him, I saw a hand-painted scarlet and gray birdhouse hanging in the branches of a buckeye tree; he was in Mother Karen’s front yard.
He smiled brightly at me just the same. “Hey, sis, how you feeling?”
“Feeling fine, thanks to your potion … but how are you guys doing? What’s going on?”
“Well,” he replied slowly. “The kid let Cooper and the Warlock into the castle, but they haven’t come back out yet.”
“Do you know what’s happening in there?”
He shook his head. “No clue, really. It’s been quiet. Mostly I’ve been helping the others keep up an illusion so the mundane neighbors don’t see what’s happened here; the kid keeps interfering with it for some reason, so we have to keep redoing the spell.”
“What others?” I felt another pang of anxiety, wondering if the Regnum authorities had gotten involved in the situation. What would happen then? My heart began to pound as I imagined the authorities arresting Cooper and the Warlock to force me to surrender.
“So far there have been some people from the local governing circle. One lady, I guess the head honcha, Riviera Borden—”
“—Jordan,” I corrected, feeling a bit of relief. I still wasn’t convinced she was on our side, but I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt and think she wasn’t our enemy.
“Yeah. She’s been by.”
“What did she do?”
“Frowned a lot and talked to dudes in suits, mostly. Nobody who looked like a Regnum agent, though,” he quickly added, apparently realizing my worry. “Anyhow, she told me that if Cooper and the Warlock didn’t bring everyone out in twenty-four more hours, she was going to have to take action.”
“What kind of action?”
Randall shrugged. “She didn’t say. But if Dallas Paranormal was on this, I know exactly what we’d do: we’d drop a localized isolation sphere on the house, then cast a magic-suppression spell and fill the house with knockout gas. Get in, bring everyone out, pump Junior full of magebane, and take him to juvie for psychological evaluation. And if he’d seriously hurt anyone in the house, he’d be staying locked up for a good long time until everyone was sure he’d been civilized.”
“How are Acacia and Horatio? Were they badly injured?”
“No, they were just shaken up a bit. Some bumps and bruises were the worst of it. They’re mostly worried about the kid, can you believe it?”
“Yes,” I said. “Mother Karen says they’re really nice people.”
“Yeah, they seem supernice. But, seriously, the kid could’ve killed them; if some little shit tossed me three stories, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to take him home with me afterward, you know?”
“Kids screw up; that’s just what they do,” I said, thinking back on the stupid, hurtful things I’d done when I was young. Yelling. Hitting. Telekinetically exploding Eddie Chong’s PlayStation. Setting my bedroom on fire.
I hadn’t meant to do any of it, and I knew what it felt like to be rejected by family because of it. “Good parents always give second chances.”
“Well, when it comes to people trying to kill me, I’m a one-chance kinda guy,” he said lightly. “And that’s why I always carry clean ammo and fresh condoms.”
*
After I finished talking with Randall, I closed the mirror, thinking hard. Even if my brother didn’t know what was happening inside the house, I could contact Karen myself and find out, couldn’t I? I reopened the compact and spoke Mother Karen’s name. The image cleared to a view of her office, which was still a wreck. But at least it seemed no worse than before.
“Karen!” I called. “It’s Jessie, are you there? Kaaaren!”
I kept at it for nearly three minutes, getting more than a few annoyed looks from nearby Talents who understandably liked a little peace and quiet for breakfast. This was likely the magical world’s equivalent of the Most Annoying Cellphone Call Ever. But Karen never showed up. Finally, I closed the mirror and stared down at my cold food.
“The guys aren’t coming back today, are they?” I said to Pal.
He shook his shaggy head. “It doesn’t seem likely, no.”
“Well, damn.”
“Indeed.”
I stabbed my fork into my frittata and began to grimly eat breakfast.
“Do you have a plan?” Pal asked.
Well, more or less, I thought back to him as I took a drink of my iced coffee.
“Care to share?” He gulped down a ham slice.
“Well, first off I need to memorize this list that Sara gave me.” I pulled the yellow paper out of my pocket and unfolded it. There were fourteen names printed on the sheet. I studied them, trying to get a feel in my head for the rhythm of their syllables. “If I can figure out a tune these go with, I should be able to get them all stuck in my head in an hour or so.”
“And then?”
I shrugged. “Find Miko. Negotiate like Kissinger and get her to give up her souls. If that doesn’t work, administer an epic beat-down and bring out whoever I can grab. Get the hell out of here and go home.”
“Your plan lacks a certain specificity, I think,” Pal observed.
“If I lay my plans any more carefully, you know there’s going to be a rain of toads, or the earth is going to open up and we’re going to be swarmed by a million angry lava gnomes or some damn thing like that,” I replied. “Finding her should be straightforward, and if it’s not, well, the rest won’t matter. The beat-down, yeah, that’s tricky, but I can improvise.”
I had to improvise. We were walking into an almost entirely unknown situation. I didn’t know how hurt Miko was, and more important, I didn’t know the true extent of her powers. All I knew was that my gut was telling me that every hour that passed was an hour for her to get her strength back. Every hour that passed was another hour for the energy potion to wear off. Every hour that passed was an opportunity lost forever.
“Might I suggest,” he said, “that you use one of the hairs Sara gave you to create a poppet to try some offensive sympathetic magic?”
I hadn’t thought of making a voodoo doll. “But that’s black magic.”
“Yes, quite. But not nearly at the magnitude of some of the necromancy you’ve already inadvertently performed, so I shouldn’t think that your ability to work healing magic will be any more impaired than it already is.”
“How much time will it take?”
“Six hours or so, I expect.”
I shook my head. “That’s too long.”
“You’ll need all the help you can get,” Pal said.
“Are you absolutely sure that sympathetic magic can hurt her?”
“Well … no, I suppose not,” he admitted.
“Then I’d rather not let her get six hours healthier,” I replied.
“Hey, Jessie!”
I looked up. Charlie was making her way through the table maze toward me, still toting her AK-47, but she was in a clean pair of jeans and one of her Cuchillo State University Tae Kwon Do Club tees. She looked worried.
“What’s up?” I asked. “Come sit down with us. Do you want to get some food?”
“No, I already had an MRE like an hour ago.” She took a seat in the empty chair beside me and set her rifle against the edge of the table. “Um. Do you have time to talk?”
I paused. A few more minutes wouldn’t hurt, would it? And maybe it would be long enough for a miracle, and Cooper and the Warlock would show up despite all the evidence telling me that wasn’t going to happen. “Sure, why?”
<
br /> The girl glanced around, as if to make sure nobody was listening in on our conversation. Then she leaned in close.
“You know how David told me he had a bunch of loot at the gardener’s cottage? Stuff he’d scavenged from abandoned houses?” she whispered.
I nodded. David had been her best friend, once; most recently he’d been the shadow-devil’s servant, until he’d forced Charlie to kill him.
“Well, he wasn’t exaggerating. There’s gold and jewelry and more paper money than I can count up there. And … I don’t know what I should do with it. Part of me’s like, ‘Hooah, cash!’ and I start thinking of everything I could do with it … but the rest of me knows it’s not mine. It’s, like, some kind of blood money, you know? And I want to give it back, but the people it used to belong to are all dead, and if I just turn it in to Sara I don’t know what she’ll do with it. I don’t know who it rightfully belongs to now.”
“Is it someplace safe?” I asked.
She nodded. “Totally safe. I got it moved to a better hiding place.”
I took a sip of my iced coffee, thinking. “Well. Rightfully I guess it belongs to the surviving family members, and if there aren’t any, I think it would belong to the community to go toward taking care of injured survivors and rebuilding the city. So … I would wait a little while for things to calm down and for there to be a real local government here again. Turn it in then. I don’t think it’s going to be Sara’s game for too much longer.”
“That’s good.” Charlie looked somewhat relieved. “It’s not like I hate her, but I hate what she does.”
“And remember,” I said. “You’re a survivor, too. You lost your entire family because of the shadow and Miko, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.” Her expression turned bleak. “But a whole lot of other people here lost their families, too.”
“Well, those other people didn’t get the money away from David,” I replied. “So I think you should take some for yourself as a finder’s fee. Say, enough to pay for your college tuition and a decent apartment for four years.”
She looked surprised. Then hopeful. “You … you think that’s fair?”
“I think so. Lots of parents pay for their kids’ tuition, but you can’t ever have that because of what happened here. You’ve seen as much combat as any soldier in Afghanistan, but there’s no GI Bill for you because you’re not official military,” I replied. “Yeah. I think it’s entirely fair.”
Charlie had been plagued by devils since she was eleven, and the universe hadn’t even gifted her with an awakened magical Talent as a hard-earned return for all the pain and misery the supernatural world had put her through. She just had scars. And more than her share of guilt. If all she really needed was somebody’s permission to take advantage of the one piece of good luck that had fallen into her life, I didn’t mind giving it to her.
After she said good-bye and left to go back to the makeshift military compound at Cuchillo State, I finished eating and then focused on memorizing the list Sara had given me. During my second run-through, I realized that if I rearranged some of the names I could sing the list to the tune of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” Hey, it worked. Once I had the tune, keeping the names in my head got a whole lot easier. I handed the paper over to Pal to test my memorization, and once we were both sure I had it down, we went back to our room and the penthouse to gather my gear and some supplies.
All the while, I hoped the guys would show up. But they never did. And so there was nothing left to do but head out to the desert.
chapter
eleven
Into the Desert
I sat astride Pal in the street outside the Saguaro; the late morning sun was oppressively harsh and my water bottle–laden pack was tight against my back. My T-shirt and underwear were soaked under my sweltering dragonskins, even with the front of my jacket open and the hem folded and tucked behind me so I got as much breeze as possible on my sides. But I didn’t want to sunburn any worse than I already had. Nobody upstairs had any damn sunscreen, and my private attempt at a protective charm with the body lotion sample I found in the bathroom had fizzled miserably, the cream turning to thin, rancid oil and sour steam. On the upside, the leather would give me a measure of protection in case I got ambushed, or at least that’s what I kept telling myself.
“I still wish you knew a spell for sunblock,” I muttered to Pal as I pulled a black strand from the envelope Sara had given me.
“The need for me to know that bit of magic has never arisen before now. My former masters had the sense to remain in moderate climates with adequate shade,” Pal replied, sounding cross. “Besides, can’t you Babblers manage that sort of thing on your own?”
I held the hair up in the sunlight. It certainly looked like one of Miko’s, straight and thick and silky. “Normally, yeah. But apparently sun protection counts as healing magic. Which Randall’s potion unfortunately is not helping me with right now.”
If anything, my white magic had felt even more distant since I’d downed the potion, and that worried me. Perhaps the magic of the potion had completely gone toward fighting off my disease symptoms and there wasn’t much left for anything else. At least my flame arm seemed solid. I still didn’t have a lot of juice there, either, but I felt as though I could defend myself with it if I had to. Maybe not for long, but my boots were fine for running.
And, hey, last time I’d checked, using a pointer to locate a devil didn’t require the tiniest bit of spiritual purity. I held my fiery hand at eye level, took off my glove, and dropped the strand of hair into my flames. It ignited with a foul stink, and I focused on the spiritual residue in the hair, chanting old words for “find.”
The image of an abandoned shack with broken windows and a corrugated steel roof pocked with rusty nailheads flashed in my mind, and then I saw a faint silver trail in the air above me, spinning toward the low scrubby hills to the north of the city. I slipped my opera glove back on.
“I think I found her,” I told Pal, pulling the leather chin string of my straw cowboy hat tight so it wouldn’t blow off. “Let’s fly.”
A half hour later, the faint trail led us into a valley between two rocky hills and disappeared. I spotted the shack from my vision below us. It was a few yards from a dry stream and was half hidden from the sky by the branches of some live oak trees that had grown uncommonly tall for West Texas; no doubt they’d rooted deep into the moist, sandy soil under the creek bed.
Pal landed on the dusty bank opposite the old shack; it might have originally been a hunting or fishing cabin, but it looked like it had been years since anyone had paid any attention to it. The left side of the porch roof had partly collapsed; the four-by-four post supporting it had been gnawed by termites or carpenter ants and snapped in two, leaving the corrugated steel roof drooping. The front door hung brokenly from a single rusted hinge behind the frame of a screen door that had long ago lost its mesh.
I dismounted, warily watching the dark windows with their teeth of shattered glass. I couldn’t see any movement, couldn’t hear anything but the buzz of cicadas. But my anxiety was rising as I stood there; I had an intense desire to run away, to be anywhere but here.
“I think we’re not far from the edge of the isolation sphere.” The sparse hairs on Pal’s legs were fluffed out, and he was panting for breath. The flight seemed to have taken more out of him than I’d thought at first.
“That would explain the screamin’ creeps I’m feeling right now,” I whispered back, trying vainly to see the invisible barrier.
I blinked through several different ocularis views, and suddenly the horizon a few dozen yards beyond the shack was completely filled with a brilliant, swirling force field, so bright it sent a sharp pain through my head and nearly blinded me.
“Ow!” I quickly blinked back to my normal view. “Yeah, it’s right over there. We’re damn close.”
Spheres of this size worked partly by repelling intelligent creatures. As big as this one was, it had to
have a tremendous amount of magical power behind it, and it would use less energy if it drove people away rather than just serving as a huge invisible wall. I’d written a paper on isolation spheres for one of my college classes, but honestly I’d gotten most of my info from Wikimagica and wasn’t any kind of expert. For all I knew, this one had been built to allow small animals like migratory birds unhindered movement. It would fit with Virtus logic: free the birds, fuck the humans.
“I suspect she tried to get through the barrier,” Pal continued. “After she discovered she couldn’t, she sought refuge. It doesn’t appear that she would have many other options for shelter out here.”
I rubbed my arms through my leather sleeves, my skin rashed in goose bumps despite the heat. Staying here for more than an hour or so seemed like it would drive most anyone crazy. Of course, if they were already crazy, it might not make that much difference.
Well, let’s see if anyone’s home, I thought to Pal as I shrugged out of my backpack and took off my hat. I stowed them out of sight under the evergreen branches of a nearby chaparral berry bush and readied my shotgun. Don’t shrink yourself; I need you big and scary if there’s a fight.
“I won’t be able to fit through the front door at my current size,” he pointed out.
I’ll be sure to yell if I need help. Can you tear the wall open?
He blinked at the rickety, weather-grayed clapboards; half the nails had rusted out of the wood and the paint was so dirty and peeled it was impossible to tell what color the shack had originally been. “I feel compelled to remind you that sarcasm and facetiousness are my domain, thank you very much—so I’m going to pretend you did not ask that question.”
“Touchy, much?”
“I love you, too.”
We stepped down off the bank onto the dry, smooth stones lining the creek bed. Tan mud beneath the gray pebbles crackled with every step. I paused, blinking through different gemviews to see if my ocularis could pick up anything in the shack. Unfortunately, the view that helped me see right through the walls in the hellement didn’t show me much in the real world. If it hadn’t been for the isolation field, I was pretty sure I would have been able to sense Miko’s presence, if only as a bad feeling tweaking my spine. And realizing that the field gave her magical camouflage made me wonder if she’d picked this place not from desperation but by design.
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