Shotgun Sorceress (26 page)

We came back to our bodies in the dorm room in the same positions we’d left. My jaw ached as if the Goad had been grinding my teeth. The Warlock spat out my nipple and straightened up, his unbloodied face pale and frightened. His semiflaccid cock lolled from his open fly, a bit of semen still beaded on the tip; it felt as if he’d ejaculated copiously all over my chest and belly.

“What was that?” His voice shook. “What the hell just happened? Oh God, what did we just
do?
”

“Get me out of this chair,” I begged.

The Warlock nodded, tight-lipped, quickly got himself zipped up, and moved to undo the straps on my arm, but there was the sound of a key in the lock and suddenly Cooper was standing there in the doorway dressed in tiger-stripe fatigues.

We all three froze. Cooper’s shocked gaze moved from the Warlock’s guilt-plastered face to my bared breasts and the drying ropes of spunk that adorned them. His face contorted, turning a deep heart-attack red.

Without a word, he launched himself at his brother and rammed his knee into the Warlock’s groin. The Warlock gave a strangled gasp and fell to the floor in a fetal heap. Cooper was right on top of him, brutally punching him, trying to do to him in the real world what I’d done to him in the hell. The Warlock tucked his head under his hands and elbows, rolling into a tight ball. The blank fury in Cooper’s eyes scared me to death. He’d kill his brother.

The twin kittens were still crouched on the shelf above the bed, eyes bright, both purring loudly.

“Help!” I screamed as loud as I could. “Somebody get help!”

Pal!
I thought.
Pal, I need you! Get up here!

Still no response. Where could he possibly be? I started hollering for help again.

After what seemed like an eternity—probably it was actually only a minute or so—a quartet of cadets came rushing in, Sara close behind.

“Break it up!” Sara barked. “No fighting in the dorm! Y’all take this outside!”

The cadets wrestled the brothers apart, hauled the Warlock to his feet—I could tell his nose was broken, and he had a nasty gash above his left eye—and frog-marched them both out into the hallway, dragging them toward the elevators.

Which left me alone in the room, still strapped in the chair. Well, not entirely alone: the kittens blinked at me from above the bed, clearly pleased with the proceedings.

Dammit, Pal, where are you?
I thought again.

Still nothing. Panic started creeping up my spine. Would Sara bother to keep Cooper from killing the Warlock? My gut told me she wouldn’t. And what had happened to Pal?

So I started hollering again, my voice getting hoarse: “Somebody! Get me out of this thing!”

Charlie stuck her head in the doorway and goggled at the chair, the straps, my bared breasts. “Whoa. What happened in here?”

“
Please
get me out of this. I gotta get downstairs—I think Cooper’s gonna kill the Warlock!”

Charlie came in and started undoing the straps. “Were you and the Warlock … uh. Fooling around on this thing here?”

I squeezed my eyes shut and took a deep breath. “It’s complicated. But Cooper thinks we were.”

“Oh.” Her cheeks reddening, Charlie finished freeing me.

When she opened the last strap, I muttered, “Thanks,” and jumped up, ignoring the pain in my joints, ignoring my dizziness and sudden headache. I yanked my bra and shirt back into place and ran down the hall to the elevator to try to stop Cooper.

chapter
twenty-four

Sprung Traps

I
got downstairs as fast as I could and ran out into the courtyard, breathing hard. If I’d been thinking straight I would have stopped for my shotgun and to grab a cat, but between my fever and my panic I was lucky to be able to speak in complete sentences. All I could think about was getting to Cooper. Dark spots were blooming in my vision, but at least I wasn’t seeing the fey again. I scanned the courtyard, but couldn’t see a ring of curious cadets surrounding a fight; I listened, but couldn’t hear grunts of men laboring to murder one another, nor the thud of fists hitting flesh.

So I hurried over to an airman who was reading a gun repair manual at one of the shaded picnic tables. “Did you see those two guys who were fighting? Did you see where they went?”

He looked up, blinking at me from behind glasses that were held together with duct tape and electrical wire. “Uh. Yeah. One of the dudes swore at Sara and then started yelling these crazy-sounding words at her, and she got really mad and had ’em both thrown out of the compound.”

Panic crested in me like a tsunami. “Thrown out? Where?”

“Just over there.” Looking puzzled, he pointed at the main entrance we’d come through the day before.

I swore and ran to the gate; thinking back, I still don’t know what the hell I was planning to do. “Let me out!”

The guards shrugged at each other and pulled the chain-link panel aside. I sprinted into the empty streets, hollering the men’s names until my voice was nearly gone.

After a few minutes of running, sweat and tears were streaming down my face, my blood was pounding in my ears, and the edges of my vision were starting to darken. I stopped, leaned forward, hands on my knees, trying to catch my wind.

“Jessie …”

I looked up. Miko was standing right in front of me.

She smiled down at me. “I’ve got your men. Give yourself to me, and they’ll go free. If you don’t … well. I’m sure I can find lots of delightful uses for their bodies once I’ve taken their souls.”

I swore and yanked open the Velcro cuff of my bull-riding glove, intending to strip the deerskin off and slash the bitch in the face. But in a blink she had me by my flesh wrist and just as suddenly I was at her mercy as she flooded my nerves with ecstasy one moment and agony the next and I fell to my knees on the pavement.

“I think that deep down, you like the taste of murder just as much as I do, little girl … I think you and I could make a great team, if you would just learn to
cooperate
a little.”

The pleasure turned to pain again, and one of her memories rose in my mind:

I flipped on the light in the motel bathroom and examined my body in the full-length mirror. The pain had worsened as my body had made more blood and my nerves reawakened. I looked ghastly, even by my standards. There was a baseball-size entry wound in my back above my left kidney and a saucer-size exit wound above my belly button. Buckshot ground between my vertebrae. The ragged ends of a few broken ribs had pierced my skin. My T-shirt was almost a vest. I was pincushioned with cactus spines from my thighs to my chin. Dirt and dead grass matted my wounds. I pulled my switchblade and pliers out of my rucksack and took a deep breath, steeling myself for another fun Friday night of do-it-yourself surgery—

With effort, I pulled myself out of Miko’s memory and gave my free hand a hard shake to shuck off the glove. No cat meant no fire, but I still had my claw. I rose up against her with as much strength as I could muster and drove my blades deep into her body.

Miko left, and the meat puppet she’d possessed collapsed. It was Major Rodriguez, his eyes staring wide at me, unseeing. I’d slashed his chest open, and my claw shone with his blood.

The sight of his corpse turned my exhaustion to lead bricks on my bones, made my fever and sickness feel a thousand times worse. I sank back to my knees on the hot pavement and wept. I had failed, utterly failed. I’d lost the love of my life and one of my best friends and slaughtered the only person who could seemingly keep Sara’s madness in check. I’d failed, I’d failed, we were all lost …

After a few minutes, I heard the sound of someone running up the street behind me. I didn’t care.

“Jessie?” It was Charlie’s voice. “Jessie, what hap—Oh no. Oh God, no.”

I heard her step toward me more slowly.

“Miko tricked me,” I whispered. “He was her puppet. I didn’t know until I killed him.”

“I believe you. But some of the others won’t. They … they’ll want to blame you for his death, because you’re killable, and Miko ain’t.” She tugged at my sleeve. “We gotta get back to the compound; it ain’t safe out here.”

I numbly stared down at the major’s body. “We can’t just leave him out here. It doesn’t seem right.”

“We have to. If we bring him back with us … you’re covered in blood. You’ll be dead in an hour. There ain’t no helping him now; Miko’s got his soul. It doesn’t matter to him if the animals take his body, and if they do, well, his men won’t figure you did it, will they?”

Charlie helped me to my feet and poured her canteen over my claw to wash away as much of the incriminating blood as she could. She pulled a tan bandanna out of her cat sling and let me use it to dry off my claw.

“Have you seen Pal? My spider?” I pulled my bull-riding glove back on, and in the movement imagined pulling myself together. Maybe everything wasn’t lost. And even if it was, well, I couldn’t give Miko the satisfaction of my surrender.

She shook her head. “Did you see your guys?”

I felt tears well in my eyes, and I savagely wiped them away with the back of my flesh hand. “Miko’s holding them hostage. She says she’ll let them go if I give myself up.”

Charlie looked worried. “You’re not gonna, are you?”

I didn’t answer, and we walked on in silence. Halfway back to the compound, my heart soared with happiness and relief when I heard Pal’s calliope music overhead, but almost immediately I found myself getting mad all over again.

“Where the hell were you?” I hollered at him as he touched down on the street in front of us.

He was holding one of the black kittens curled in his left front paw. His legs were crisscrossed with nasty-looking scratches. Patches of his fur had been torn out all over his body.

“I’m quite sorry,” he replied. “You seemed to be resting so comfortably, and I was getting so very hungry, and I thought it would only take a half hour at most to find a few rats to snack on …”

“Whoa,” Charlie said. “He looks like he’s been down in the steam tunnels.”

Pal’s alien face was still hard for me to read, but it seemed to me that he looked embarrassed. “The girl is quite perceptive. While I was in the basement, I found a sealed door to the tunnels, and to my great regret, my hunger drove me to pick the lock and go inside.”

“What’s in the steam tunnels?” I asked both of them.

“Rats,” Charlie said, hugging her orange kitty. “Really huge, nasty rats.”

“More specifically, a pack of murothropes prowls the tunnels,” Pal told me. “They used genuine Norway rats to lure me out of range of the cats’ magic field, and they attacked me in great numbers. I count myself lucky to have escaped with my shell intact.”

“Wow.” Wererats are worse than werewolves; what they lack in brute strength they more than make up for in pack size, cunning, and sheer viciousness. My anger toward Pal vanished, and I kicked myself for believing he’d thoughtlessly abandoned me.

Promise me you won’t go off by yourself again?
I thought to him as the three of us started walking back to the compound.
Things got really screwed up today because we got separated. And I promise I won’t go to sleep if you’re hungry
.

“I gladly promise you that. This does not seem to be a good place for any of us to get separated.” Pal held up the kitten. “And on that same subject, I found this in the room, but I haven’t seen Cooper or the Warlock. Do you know where they are?”

I felt the tears coming again, and I shut my eyes against them.
Miko’s got them. She laid a trap for us and we fell right into it
.

I telepathically gave Pal the short version of everything that had happened after he left to go hunting.

“Oh dear. That’s … dreadful.”

We passed “dreadful” several miles ago. And I have no idea what to do now
.

“Well, might I suggest that we can best do our decision-making on a full stomach? Breakfast was surely a long time ago for you, and I never did get to eat a rat.”

Sounds good
. “Hey, Charlie, any idea what they’re serving for lunch?”

    The three of us sat at an isolated table in the corner of the cafeteria. Our keeping to ourselves wasn’t entirely intentional, but none of the people who came in seemed eager to be near Pal. Charlie and Pal had bowls of the leftover beef stew and some rice. The server took pity on me when I said I couldn’t have the stew and she gave me a double portion of rice and a handful of peanut packets. It wasn’t much, but it was food and it wouldn’t make me feel worse than I already did.

“I really am trying to look on the bright side here.” I popped two Advil in my mouth and washed them down with a swig of Gatorade. It hadn’t been quite eight hours since my visit to the clinic, but the fever was kicking me hard. “But every way I look at it, Miko has completely boned us.”

“Sara sent me to find you for a reason; she doesn’t send us after just
anybody
who falls out of the sky, you know.” Charlie took a drink of her Coke. “The cats told her you were here to do something important.”

“Then why the hell did she throw Cooper and the Warlock to Miko?” I asked. “How are Pal and I supposed to do anything but die horribly without the guys to help us fight?”

“She didn’t send me to get
all
y’all,” Charlie pointed out. “Jessie Shimmer was the only name she gave me. It’s
you
the cats were interested in, not anybody else.”

“And clearly the Virtii lured you here for a reason,” Pal added. “Perhaps these cat-devils know what the Virtii know: that you—and, dare I say it, perhaps
I—
have the ability to defeat the town nemesis.”

“Well, I wish someone would fill me in on exactly how I’m supposed to take on Miko,” I fumed, replaying her bathroom surgery memory in my head. Once we found her real body, my shotgun clearly wasn’t going to do much to stop her. Provided, of course, that the memories I was getting from her were authentic and not designed to trick me. “It would be real nice if one of the cats could leave me a little note: ‘O hai, she haz bad left knee’ or ‘LOL, peanut allergy!’ A little help, somebody,
please!
”