“Someone once gave me a pithy little lecture regarding my aunt Vicky that I think very much applies to your situation, Benny. What was it? Oh, right: ‘A big part of knowing what’s going on is being interested enough to try to find out.’ And it doesn’t seem to me that you were very interested in Reggie’s life. Fortunately, you have me to clue you in.”
I dropped the jar onto the concrete floor. It shattered, splashing the contents in an irregular circle that quickly melted into a glowing silver pool.
Jordan was no match for me in this place. I grabbed him by the back of his neck, forced him down to his knees, pushed his face forward into the pool.
“Take a good long look, Benny,” I said as he struggled in my grip. “This is your sin of omission. This is how you failed your cousin. This is what you let happen.”
I pulled him from the nightmare pool when I felt him start to go slack, rolled him coughing and gagging to the fence.
“N-not my fault,” he insisted. “Not my fault.”
I materialized a fresh jar and swept the pool into it with a quick motion of my hand. “It seems that vintage didn’t broaden your horizons. How about Corvus?”
I reached under the cot and found Corvus’s memory of being forced to cripple himself.
“You weren’t responsible for their deaths, or their suffering, not at first. But the moment you became a real wizard, the moment you decided you were so important you should run the whole city, the day you decided you knew what was best for the rest of us—every day after that, what happened to them was entirely your fault, because you were the one who should have stopped it.”
I smashed the jar onto the floor and forced him down into the new pool.
“Can you feel that?” I said. “Can you feel what it’s like to push the saw through your own flesh and bone?”
Jordan shrieked in the pool, his hands scrabbling at the concrete, but I held him fast.
“His spirit had to relive that every day! Every day! You could have saved him, but you just let him suffer!”
I pulled him from the pool and lifted his head.
“No… I never.. . no…“ he said weakly.
Disgusted, I threw him against the chain-link fence. “So you’re not moved by the suffering of your cousin and Corvus? Fair enough.” My voice dripped with sarcasm as I put Corvus’s memories away in a fresh jar. “After all, Reggie was supposed to be the responsible adult. If he wasn’t man enough to take what the world dished out, then he was just a weakling, right? Doomed. You couldn’t have helped him if you tried, so why try? And Corvus, well, he’s not any blood relation to you, is he? He’s just a stranger. He might as well have been some mundane kid in a Chinese sweatshop putting the laces in your deck shoes. Out of sight, out of mind, not your problem, right?”
I went to the cot and pulled another jar from the darkness beneath.
Jordan’s eyes widened when he saw the glowing vessel.
“No, not that one,” he said, his voice cracking.
“Ah, this one you do recognize, don’t you, Benny? Every man should recognize the pain of the woman who gave him life.”
Jordan tried to crab-scramble away, but there was no place to go. I put him in an arm-bar, hauled him to the middle of the floor, and flipped him onto his back. I stepped on his neck to keep him down while I unscrewed the jar. He gasped in pain, grabbed my boot but couldn’t pry my foot away.
“This is the hell your mother was in while you were jacking off in boarding school,’ I said as I slowly poured the contents of the jar straight down into his gaping mouth. “This is the hell she had to endure for decades because of your cowardice. Every Christmas, every Easter, every Mother’s Day, this is what she was enduring because of your cowardice. Justify it to me. Go ahead. Justify it.”
Jordan couldn’t speak under the bitter silver stream, couldn’t take a breath, and soon his eyes rolled up into his skull. I tossed the empty jar aside and willed us back to his library.
We reappeared in the same positions as we’d left.
The air was thick with the stench of charred flesh. Jordan was still sitting at his desk, slumped in his chair, out cold. I released his nearly cremated hand and checked his neck for a pulse. He was still alive. Whether his mind was irretrievably broken, I didn’t know. And found I didn’t much care.
I turned his head to the side, then gently patted his cheek with my flesh hand.
“Sweet dre—on second thought, maybe not so much. Nighty-night.”
I stepped away from the desk. My rage was gone, but my arm still blazed. My eye fell on a nearby suit of German gothic armor, and an idea pinged. I went to the suit, pried off the steel gauntlet, vambrace, and greaves, then slipped the armor onto my arm. The metal quickly turned hot to the touch, but contained my flames nicely.
I left the library and found the butler sitting in a chair in the hallway. He looked supremely worried.
“Is Master Jordan. .. ?“
“He’s alive,” I replied curtly. “But I’d call a healer if I were you.”
I strode past him and went to the courtyard to find Pal.
chapter twenty-six
Ever and Ever
Pal landed on Mother Karen’s front lawn, and I swung my legs over his head and slid to the ground.
“I’m hungry,” he said.
“Okay, I’ll bring you something from the kitchen after I check on Cooper. I don’t think you’ll fit in the house. What do you want?”
“Erm.” He scratched the ground with one leg. “Ham, I think.”
“Ham you want, ham you get. I bet she’s got one in her freezer.”
I jogged across the grass toward the front door.
A cool breeze ruffled my hair, and then I heard the same faint whisper that had spoken to me in the Warlock’s apartment. “You’ve done well, my girl. Your mother will be so proud of you.”
I stopped, spun around. “Who’s there?”
“There will be plenty of time for explanations later. We’ll soon have the chance to meet properly,” the voice replied. “That man of yours has a bright soul, hard as a diamond. Not a scratch on it, even with a murder before the age of seven.”
“That wasn’t his fault,” I said. “He was forced to do what he did.”
“In the end, weren’t we all?” The voice faded away.
I shivered, continued on to the house. Mother Karen opened the door before I reached it.
“Is everyone okay?” I asked.
The witch nodded, looking tired. “It took me forever to get the babies to sleep. They’re a real handful.”
“Sorry about that. I did offer Jordan the opportunity to take care of his family responsibilities, but unfortunately he declined to take custody of the kids.” I paused. “I couldn’t have just left them down there…”
“No, no. Of course not. That would have been a monstrous thing to do. You did the right thing.” Karen wiped her hands on the front of her apron. “Cooper’s asleep in the guest room. I’m making a late dinner for everyone. Do you think you can eat something, or are you too wound up?”
“I can eat. Could you cook up a whole ham for Pal? I’ve been working him pretty hard.”
“Consider it done.” Mother Karen grimaced as I looked at the greasy ichor on my dragonskins. “But you are not bringing all that into my house. Wait out here, and I’ll find you some fresh clothes. I’ll tell the Warlock to hose these off and leave them to dry on the back porch…“
Cooper was fast asleep under the homemade quilt. I gently brushed his hair away from his forehead, then leaned down and planted a kiss on his lips. His eyes opened, focused on the elbow-length gray satin opera glove that the Warlock and Mother Karen had enchanted to contain my flames.
“Ooh, silky,” he said, his voice slurred. Mother Karen had probably given him a heavy-duty pain-killer. “But do you really think it goes with those khakis and the Hello Kitty T-shirt?”
“It goes better than the armor. The metal was starting to chafe.”
&nb
sp; “Huh?”
“I love you, too, goofball,” I replied.
He looked at me with amazed adoration. “You are the best girlfriend ever.”
I laughed. “Why, thank you.”
“I can’t believe you came after me. That was… incredibly awesome. I’m taking you to dinner in Paris. Rome. Wherever you wanna go.” He cleared his throat. “I heard Mother Karen talking… are we in a lot of trouble with the Circle Jerks?”
“‘A lot’ might be an understatement, but whatever happens, we’ll manage.”
He looked out the window at the bright harvest moon. “So much is going to change.”
“But not everything… you still love me, right?” He gazed up into my eyes. “Forever and ever and ever.”
I crawled onto the bed beside him. We kissed deeply, passionately, until Mother Karen stuck her head in and told us dinner was ready.
epilogue
There’s more to our stories, of course. A lot more. I haven’t even gotten to the parts where I’ve changed the course of your life, have I? I mean, you’re probably not that guy who saw me and Pal flying to Jordan’s house, thought I was some kind of angel, and consequently had a religious epiphany that inspired him to quit his job and start an apocalyptic cult in Marysville. Seriously, you’re not him, right? Because that would be pretty weird.
Anyway. I’m out of paper and shotgun shells, so I need to make a run for fresh supplies. Wish me luck if that’s in your heart. If I make it back here, I’ll get to work on the rest. Which would have happened way before you found these pages, actually, so check my sock drawer. And if you are that guy.. . hands off my undies.
The Devil in Miss Shimmer
Want to delve back into Lucy A. Snyder’s world of dark and sexy magic?
Read on for a glimpse, inside Spellbent’s gripping sequel
The Devil in Miss Shimmer
by Lucy A. Snyder
All things considered, it had been a damn busy Friday. In the previous seven hours, I’d run police roadblocks, battled dragons, and literally gone to hell and back as I rescued my boyfriend, Cooper, and his little brothers from a fate considerably worse than death.
Every muscle in my body ached, and I was looking forward to getting some rest, if perhaps not much actual sleep. I’d seen some things that evening that would probably give me insomnia for, oh, the next decade or so. And there was the little detail that I’d put our city’s head wizard in a coma and killed a major guardian spirit.
They both richly deserved it, but I’d broken about infinity plus one laws and surely the authorities were going to hunt me down with extreme prejudice. So I had prison and perhaps execution to look forward to as well. Yay, go me.
But, so far, it appeared I was safe for the night. I was definitely looking forward to the late dinner my witch friend Mother Karen was making for me and the other Talents who’d helped in the rescue.
Whatever she had cooking in her kitchen smelled wonderful. And I knew my familiar Pal, was plenty hungry.
I carried a platter of savory, steaming ham and a wooden bucket of water down Karen’s back steps out into the moonlit yard. It probably looked the same as most other backyards in the neighborhood: rattan furniture and a shiny steel gas barbecue on the brick patio, a wooden picnic table on the lawn, a scattering of oak and buckeye trees bordering the tall dog-eared-plank fence bordered by softly glowing solar-charged lights. However, I suspected this was the only place in the entire state of Ohio sheltering a shaggy, six-foot-tall spider monster.
Who, based on the circles his clawed legs had torn in the turf, had spent the past half hour stalking his own posterior.
“Hey, Pal, I got your dinner” I called.
He stopped going around in circles and blinked his four eyes at me, licking his whiskered muzzle uncertainly.
At least, I thought Palimpsest looked uncertain; as a ferret his emotions had been pretty easy to read. But now that his familiar form had become magically blended with his true arachnoid body… well, I didn’t exactly know what “happy” or “sad” or “puzzled” was supposed to look like on such an alien face.
“Having troubles over there?” I asked, setting the platter and bucket down on the picnic table.
“I … have an itch,” he replied gravely, his voice strange and muffled in my mind. Our telepathic connection was slowly improving, but that, too, was taking some getting used to.
“I could reach every part of my Quamo body and my ferret body,” Pal continued, “but strangely these new rear legs aren’t very flexible. I can reach my underside but not my back.”
“Maybe you just need to do some yoga.”
Through the valved spiracles on his abdomen, he blew noisy chords that sounded like a child randomly banging on the keys of an organ. Laughter? Oh-please snorts? I’d only known Pal for a week, and already I had to get to know him all over again.
“That doesn’t help me at the moment,” he said.
“Horses back into trees and fence posts to scratch themselves,” I replied. “You’re tall enough to stand on tippy-toes and scratch yourself on the low limbs of that oak over there.”
“How dreadfully undignified”
“Or you could just roll around on the grass.”
“And that’s more dignified how?”
“Oh, hush. It’s not like anybody can see you back here,” I pointed out. “Otherwise you’d have flipped the neighbors out already and the cops would probably be here.”
Long ago, Mother Karen had put her house and its yards under a camouflage charm to keep her foster children’s magical practice sessions out of sight of the neighbors. So at least there would be no panicked suburbanites dialing 911 to report a monster prowling through Worthington.
I glanced up at the sky, half expecting to see a Virtus silently descending, ready to smite me like a curse from Heaven. One of the huge guardian spirits had already tried to do a little smiting earlier that evening. Mr. Jordan, the aforementioned now comatose head of the local governing circle, had convinced the Virtus that I was committing some kind of grand necromancy instead of simply trying to rescue Cooper. I’d defended myself, not expecting to win the battle, but win I did.
It was still hard to believe: I had killed a Virtus. Nobody was supposed to be able to do that. Not with magic or luck or nuclear weapons or anything. It was as if I’d thrown myself naked in front of a speeding freight train in a desperate, unthinking attempt to halt hundreds of hurtling tons of iron… and had somehow stopped it cold.
Miracles had abounded that evening. But I doubted the Virtii would see me as anything but a threat. They’d be coming for me, and from what I’d seen so far, they were as merciful as black holes.
I squinted up at the dark spaces between the stars, wondering what lurked there.
“Speaking of things that shouldn’t be seen by mundanes, how is that working for you?” Pal asked.
“Huh?” I looked at him, confused.
He nodded toward the gray satin opera glove on my left arm. “The gauntlet. Is it keeping your flames contained?”
“Yes, Karen and the Warlock did a good job enchanting this,” I replied, looking at the thin curls of smoke that were trailing from the cuff of the glove, as if I’d used it as a place to stash a still-smoldering cigarette. So far, that was the only sign that the lower half of my arm was a torch of hellfire, courtesy of my having had to plunge my arm into the burning heart of the Goad, the pain-devouring devil that had imprisoned Cooper and his family.
“It slips down a little sometimes—I might have to find some double-sided tape or superglue to hold it in place.”
Sheathed in the glove, my arm functioned more-or- less normally but still had a squishy unreliability. Fine finger movements were still difficult. And that wasn’t surprising, considering the arm was boneless from my elbow down. I’d had to rely on a natural talent for spiritual extension to give it any kind of solidity; Pal had referred to the ability as “reflexive parakinesis.”
And it
was pretty close to true reflex. My crysoberyl ocularis—a replacement for my left eye, which I’d lost the week before in a battle with a demon—still hurt a bit, and I was constantly aware that I had a piece of polished rock stuck in my head. But a couple of times that evening, I had completely forgotten my left arm was no longer entirely flesh. And fortunately I hadn’t dropped anything important as a consequence.
“With luck we may be able to find someone to remove the underlying curse, and you’ll have your regular arm back,” Pal said.
I frowned. Everyone was treating my flame hand— and its power—like a curse. If I were an evil person, somebody bent on destruction and domination, my hand would have seemed almost purely a gift from the gods. With that kind of power literally at my fingertips, so what if having a fiery hand presented a few practical problems? That would be like complaining that you had to move a few boxes out of your garage to make way for the new Porsche. Or in my case, the new tank with a seemingly unlimited supply of surface-to-air missiles.
I was pretty sure I wasn’t an evil person. Though I’d certainly made some regrettable decisions— crushing a couple of Mr. Jordan’s men under the Warlock’s Land Rover was currently at the top of my growing list—I’d been trying to do the right thing at the time. Evil, certainly, was bad. But the power in my hand had saved us all from the Virtus, hadn’t it? I was getting pretty annoyed that everyone seemed to think I ought to be in a hurry to get rid of it.
“I should go back inside before they all start dinner without me,” I said. “And anyway, your ham’s getting cold over here… did you want anything else for dinner? Karen’s got pie.”
“Let me start with the ham and see how it sits first,” he replied. “Wanting to eat something and being able to digest it are two different things.”
I left Pal to his dinner and went back inside to the guest bedroom. Cooper lay thin and pale under the covers, dead to the world. Dark curly bangs obscured his eyes. He’d lost a scary amount of weight during his time trapped in the hell; he’d always been on the skinny side, but now I could see every rib, every bump on his sternum.
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