Her smile twisted sardonically, and she nodded toward the shower. “Speaking of messes, you should really get yourself rinsed off. Nobody in here is going to go with you as long as you look like some bloodthirsty murderer.”
She paused. “Well, the Zodiac and the Doodler might want to come with you. But I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t want those gentlemen back in the living world, would you? And they’re very energetic playmates; I’d hate to lose them.”
It took me a moment to realize she was talking about serial killers. “Right. No thanks. I didn’t come here for them.”
I stepped to the shower, set my sword and shield down inside the stall, and shucked off my leather jacket. A sharp, intense pain told me I’d taken some of the charred skin of my left hand off with it. I dropped my jacket, swearing, and stared down at my hand. Part of my palm was missing, and I could see yellowish tendons and bones through the red, ragged patches of cooked tissue.
“It’s just flesh, Jessie.” Miko sounded amused. “I’m not blocking white magic … just heal yourself.”
Awesome. She was allowing spells I couldn’t even use because I’d tainted my spirit with necromancy. I could probably do something about a shallow cut, but not this kind of damage.
“I can’t,” I replied through clenched teeth, feeling angry and embarrassed. “And you know that.”
She laughed. “Look up. There’s burn powder in the cabinet.”
Sure enough, there was a mirrored medicine chest set in the stall above the shower head. I cautiously opened the door. A glass shaker full of some type of anonymous white powder sat on the shelf inside beside a clear squeeze bottle of pink liquid soap.
“Well, go on,” she said. “I swore I wouldn’t interfere in your little quest, and harming you further would count as interference. I promise the powder will help. But if you’d rather stay in agony while you’re here instead of accepting my hospitality, I won’t mind a bit. After all, your hand will heal—bing!— just like that, once you get back to the living world, won’t it?”
I could feel myself flushing red with anger and frustration.
“But, oh … I forgot,” she said. “You’re missing that hand entirely, aren’t you? I guess it won’t heal then. Alas.”
Swearing under my breath, I got the powder down and began to shake it on my wounds. To my surprise, the dead flesh began to flake away, healthy tissue growing fast to replace it. In moments my hand was restored.
“Thank you,” I ground out.
“Enjoy your shower.” She smiled.
I wasn’t going to strip down in front of her, and I didn’t have a bucket for washing my dirty clothes anyhow, so I turned on the faucet and tested the temperature with my finger. The water was pretty cold, but not unbearable. I stepped under the stream; it actually gave me a welcome wake-up jolt. I grabbed the bottle of pink liquid soap, put a good squirt in my right palm, and began to lather up my skin and clothing. The damned stuff smelled like lollipops and bubblegum. And after I’d already put it all over myself, I realized it was liberally laced with bright pink glitter.
I washed my leather jacket and my weapons, using as little of the soap as possible, but by the time I’d gotten all the ichor off, my body, my wet clothing, and my sword and shield were completely spangled. Blinged in the worst possible way. I did not look heroic. I looked like a dork. And smelled like a refugee from a tween girls’ sleepover party.
“Well, aren’t you just adorable.” Miko held a purple My Little Pony towel out for me to dry off with. Oh God. I hated that cartoon. Hated, hated, hated it, and my stepmother had played it constantly for the twins. Gah.
But I was getting cold, so I took the towel and began to vigorously dry off my hair. Felt something gritty and itchy fall lightly on my cheek. I wiped my face with my forearm, and saw a thick smear of bright purple glitter on my wet skin.
“Oh, you suck,” I hissed to Miko.
“It looks good on you. Really.”
I closed my eyes, trying to regain my calm. She wasn’t interfering, technically, but I knew she was trying to get me so wound up and embarrassed that I wouldn’t be able to convince anyone to do anything. So I grabbed my jacket and armaments and strode away from her, down the garden path into a nearby park bordered by tall yellow rosebushes. I stood up on one of the lacquered wood and wrought-iron park benches and took a deep breath.
“I am here to bring anyone who wants to leave this place back to the living world!” I shouted at the bright blue sky. At least with all the glitter shining on me, people ought to be able to spot me easily.
I waited for a moment. No response. So I tried again: “If you want to go home, I will take you there!”
“I don’t think you could do that, actually,” Miko said, sauntering up the path into the park.
I made a hushing movement with my hand. “Don’t interfere,” I warned her. “I’m not lying; I’ll take them home.”
She shrugged. “How am I interfering? And I didn’t say you were lying. What I’m trying to say is that some of the people here never had a home before me. Or if they did, warm hearth and loving family and a live body to return to are all long gone now. What will you be taking them back to, exactly?”
“Whatever lies beyond,” I replied curtly. “They’ll be free of you to continue on to the afterlife they were supposed to have.”
She laughed. “Oh, what afterlife? No gods have accosted me demanding their worshippers back. Not a single angel has come to me protesting, ‘Oh, no, this one was baptized, you can’t have her.’ ”
“Well, I’m here now, and I have a list of people you’re specifically not supposed to have. People with live bodies and loved ones waiting for them back in Cuchillo.”
I closed my eyes and began to recite the list as loud as I could. After I was done, there was the sound of small sneakered feet pounding down another path. I hopped off the bench and stepped toward the sound just as a young boy of about five or six burst into the park.
“I want my mommy,” he said, clutching a toy car, staring at me uncertainly. “If I go home, will my real mommy be there?”
“If she’s not in here, then yes, I’m sure she’s waiting for you.”
He dropped his toy and ran over to me, hugging my damp glittery knees, hiding his face from Miko. “Take me home. I want to go home. I want my mommy.”
Miko shrugged and smiled. “Sure. Take him, with my compliments. It’s for the best. I’m not really any good with little kids who come here without their parents. I’ve tried and tried to replicate ideal mothers from children’s memories but they never seem to do what they’re supposed to. I guess I just can’t quite believe in them myself, and it spoils the illusion.”
I licked my lips and awkwardly patted the kid’s head. Of the fourteen people still alive at the clinic, I’d gotten just this one little boy to show up. Where were the others? I called the names on the list again. Heard nothing but the gentle breeze riffling through the roses and songbirds twittering in the distance. What now? I hadn’t met any of the puppets … but I had seen one at a distance. And more important, I knew his sad, mad, loving wife.
“Bob Bailey-Jones!” I shouted. “I know you’re out there … I need to talk to you!”
Then came the sound of heavy hoofbeats, and a gigantic white warhorse bearing a knight in full battle plate armor leaped over the roses and onto the park grass, rearing dramatically in front of me, neighing loudly. The little boy shrieked and let go of my legs. He dashed under the park bench and crouched there, covering his head with his arms as if this were a tornado drill at school.
The knight held a red-and-white striped jousting lance tucked under his right arm; he shoved the visor of his scarlet-feathered helmet up and glared down at me. I recognized his face, or at least the lower half of it—he was Sara’s husband all right. Taller, buffer, with an epic handlebar mustache he probably could never have grown in the living world, but it was still him.
“I no longer recognize that name.” His tone was h
aughty, and he had the worst British accent I’d ever heard outside my high school theater club’s production of Camelot. “Thou shalt address me as Sir Ravenstone, peasant.”
“Bob. Don’t be a douche,” I replied. “All this is a bunch of happy horseshit, and you know it. Come back to the real world with me. Your wife is waiting for you.”
“The Princess of Arkhamshire awaits her champion.” He started to rein his steed away, and I jumped in front of his mount to stop them.
Bob jabbed his wooden lance down at me and I slapped it right out of his grip with the flat of my sword. The flagged tip snapped off when it sank into the lawn and the shaft went bouncing away into the rosebushes.
“Ow!” He clutched his smarting hand, wincing, then noticed his shattered weapon. “Hey, you broke it!”
“You’re no knight,” I said, pointing my sword up at him, suddenly feeling really angry. He didn’t seem deluded by Miko as much as he seemed to have enthusiastically embraced this chance to explore his inner jackass.
“This is not real,” I told him. “Your real body is lying on an army surplus cot at the Cuchillo State University clinic. Your wife Sara is probably sitting there this very minute, holding your hand, crying and praying you’ll come back to her. She’s been doing that every day: sitting by your side, weeping, holding your hand. She’s been waiting for her champion to come back. And meanwhile, you’ve been in here playing patty-cake with imaginary princesses? What kind of lame-ass Prince Charming are you supposed to be?”
Bob’s eyes were downcast, and he didn’t say anything for a moment. “Things are perfect here.”
“Things sure weren’t perfect when the Goad took over,” I replied.
“Well, that was a long time ago.” His tone was dismissive. “It hasn’t happened since.”
“A long time—Jesus, Bob, that was only fifteen minutes ago!”
I looked back at Miko, who was standing very still, her hands clasped primly in front of her, looking like not even the tiniest fleck of butter would melt in her mouth. Christ at a craps game—had she tricked me? Had the goddamned shower been a trap after all? Not to poison me, or chill me, or even embarrass me, but to give the souls time to lose themselves in their fantasies again and forget everything else? Dammit, dammit, dammit!
“Bob, you have to come back!” Maybe if I kept using his real name, he’d snap out of it and come to his senses. “Don’t you remember your wife Sara?”
“Of course I remember her.” He’d stopped looking so indignant; now he mostly looked sad and guilty. “I remember her mother, and those creepy cats, too. I remember how she started to go crazy. I remember everything going bad between us. I can’t go back to that.”
“You two can work it out—”
“I don’t want to work it out!”
“But she loves you! Doesn’t that matter to you, at all? Your wife loves you.”
Bob’s face had gone white, and his lips were in a tight, anguished line. “She’ll get over it.”
And with that, he jerked on the reins and his horse took him leaping away, back over the roses into his garden-variety medieval fantasy world, leaving true love behind forever.
I felt as though I’d been gut-shot.
Miko cleared her throat. “Well, then—”
“I’m not done here yet!” I whirled on her, shaking. “I’m. Not. Done.”
Surely everyone in here wasn’t an avoidant dumb-ass. I wracked my brain, trying to think of someone, anyone I could call on, since a third holler-through of the names on Sara’s list clearly wasn’t going to produce the square root of jack divided by shit. And then a face rose in my memory: the commander of the resistance against Miko. He sure as hell wasn’t a coward.
“Major Woodrow Rodriguez, U.S. Air Force!” I shouted. “I’d like to speak to you, Major!”
I heard the sound of lighter, quicker hooves, and a painted mustang leaped over the roses and into the park. Atop him rode a chiseled, sun-dark Comanche warrior, his hair in glossy feathered braids, his strong legs clad in buckskins. Behind the warrior rode a muscular young man, his long hair a loose, golden cascade under a black U.S. cavalryman’s slouch hat. The youth wore a tight buckskin shirt, Union-blue britches and shiny riding boots. His clean-shaven face was tan, his lips full and wine red.
The warrior nimbly hopped off the horse and strode toward me, his moccasined feet making almost no noise on the grass.
“I’m here,” Rodriguez said, folding his buff arms over his beaded breastplate. “What do you want?”
“Um.” I’d had a speech in my head about his duty and his country needing him, but looking at him now, suddenly those words felt trivial. “I’m taking souls back to the real world. Did you want to come with us?”
He cocked his head, giving me a sharp look. “Is my body still alive?”
I swallowed. I’d killed his body myself when Miko used it as a puppet against me. I hoped he didn’t know about that. “No. It’s not.”
“Well then, why would I want to leave?” His face was stony.
“Because you were tricked into coming here?” I replied. “Because you gave yourself up to an enemy you swore to fight, and staying here means you’re giving aid to that enemy?”
His eyes narrowed. “I pledged my life to serve my country. And my life was spent in that service. This is what I have now. I never once prayed to any god while I was alive. Can you guarantee me there’s some other afterlife waiting for me out there, or would you just be taking me to oblivion?”
I took a deep breath and shook my head. “I can’t guarantee you that, because I don’t know what you’ll find.”
“I’m not done living, even if I’m dead.” He turned to pad back to his mustang and his rough-riding boyfriend. “Thanks for your offer, but I’d rather stay here. Good luck.”
I drooped in defeat, wanting to scream obscenities at the ground, but I also didn’t want to give Miko the pleasure. The little boy crept out from under the park bench as Rodriguez rode away in the bright morning light. He tugged at the hem of my T-shirt.
“Can you please take me home so I can see my mommy?” he asked plaintively.
“Of course I can.” I squared my shoulders. A soul was a soul, and a mother would have her child back in her arms tonight. It wasn’t the victory I’d hoped for, but I could live with it. What other choice did I have?
I took the boy’s hand and turned back toward Miko. “We’re ready to leave.”
Smiling, she zipped herself open, revealing the oak-shaded neighborhood in my hellement. The kid clung to my hand and we ducked through her body to the other side. There was a brief moment of vertigo, as if the world abruptly turned upside-down and then just as suddenly righted itself, and then the three of us were standing on my lawn, Miko’s torso intact once more.
The little boy fearfully stared back at her as I led him toward the red portal; I could tell he expected her to stop us or reveal that this had been some kind of trick. But she was good to her word. I turned the brushed steel handle, and the three of us silently stepped through the doorway.
chapter
seventeen
Familiar in a Coma
We came back to the living world in the same positions we’d left, with Miko’s right hand still around my throat, the switchblade in her left poised above my face, her blasted-apart head still dripping down on me. The right side of my face ached from her punch; I was going to have a hell of a bruise later. My stone eye caught a brief glimpse of the boy’s soul flitting away toward his still-breathing body at the clinic. Good.
And then I felt my adversary’s fingers tighten, saw the stiletto lower toward my cheek. I stared up at Miko’s one good eye.
“You promised,” I choked. “We have … a truce.”
She gave an annoyed growl and released me. I tried to wipe my face off as best I could with a relatively clean part of the hem of my T-shirt as she stepped away and began digging around inside the cavity of her skull. Before I’d gotten my face even halfway
de-gored, she’d magicked up a new brain and was weaving bone, flesh, skin, and hair back into place under her fingers.
“There,” she said after she pulled a new tongue into place in her restored mouth. “Much better.”
She stared down at me, looking amused and pleased. “All that went very well, don’t you think?”
My face grew hot. She’d played me, games within games, and she’d suckered me into … what? Was it all about getting rid of the Goad? Could she have done that on her own? Was it about shaming me in front of her souls? No, that couldn’t be it—they were all so wrapped up in their fantasies, I couldn’t believe that very many of them had realized I was ever even there.
But. I knew from her expression that she’d counted some kind of major coup against me, knew it in my guts and bones, but at that moment I could not figure out what it was.
“Uncle Roy must be so proud of you,” I said.
For a moment, Miko’s expression faltered, darkened, and I realized she hadn’t known that I’d seen that part of her memory. I’d hit a real sore spot without seriously trying to. It didn’t make me feel any better.
She smiled down at me without a trace of genuine mirth. “I’m done with this place; I suppose I’ve probably sucked all the marrow I can get from this little bone of a town. And I’m done with you. For now. But I’m sure we’ll be seeing each other very soon. And you can run as far as you like, but rest assured, I will find you.”
Before I could think of a reply to that, she disappeared.
“Crap,” I muttered, climbing to my feet. Then, as I caught a glimpse of Pal, still unconscious in the dust, I swore harder and hurried out to him. By the angle of the light, I’d been away for a couple of hours.
“Hey, are you okay?” I shook him, gently, but he didn’t respond. His breathing was shallow, irregular. I couldn’t see any blood on him; he had a huge bluish knot between his eyes where Miko had struck him with the butt of my shotgun. I put my hand over the knot and tried to do a healing chant, but the words just wouldn’t come. Dammit.
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