Switchblade Goddess

“
M
iko … you don’t have to do this.” I strained against the leather straps binding me to the old electric chair, unable to break free, unable to take my eyes off the keen blade she kept flicking open and closed in her hand. It was a restless, angry motion, like that of a caged jaguar lashing its tail.

Only difference was, Cooper and I were the ones trapped in this dungeon, we the ones at the mercy of a predatory keeper.

She stopped flicking the switchblade and gave me a withering smile. Something far beyond hate burned in her green eyes. Her naked skin was flushed, sheened with perspiration, but her nipples were as hard as if we were in a meat freezer.

“Oh, but I do,” she said. “I promised you I’d take a trophy tonight, and I will. I can’t break a blood oath, Jessie. It’s not in my nature.”

She turned to my boyfriend, whom she’d shackled to a rough wooden Saint Andrew’s cross in the corner. Cooper was sweating, breathing hard against the blue silk rag she’d stuffed into his mouth. His white cotton dress shirt was soaked, plastered against the tight muscles of his abdomen. Miko opened the stiletto again and began to pick the buttons off his
shirt with the point of the blade. I heard them ping against the concrete floor and roll away into darkness.

Once she’d exposed his torso, Miko drew the blade down the center of his chest in a single quick motion, bright red spilling down his damp flesh as his skin split. His eyes rolled white as he shuddered, but he didn’t make a sound.

“No! Don’t!” I begged.
“Please.”

To my surprise, she stopped. And then she turned and stepped toward me, my lover’s blood dripping from the tip of her weapon. Her bare feet crunched on the broken glass littering the floor, turning the shards to glossy rubies.

“I must take a trophy,” she repeated. “Will you take his place, then?”

“W-what?” I said.

“You or him; it doesn’t matter to me.” She paused, tilting her head thoughtfully to the side as she stared at me. Appraising me. “
You
might even survive it. I don’t know about him, though. Sometimes the wiry ones can go the distance … and sometimes they’re done in five minutes.”

I scanned the unforgiving stone walls, looking for something,
anything
that would give me an idea of how to get us out of this. Jesus. There didn’t seem to be any escape except to submit to whatever twisted vivisection she had planned. All my powers seemed lost to me here.

“It’s up to you.” Miko turned and slowly walked back to Cooper. “I won’t touch you without your consent.”

“What about him? You … you’ve got him gagged,
he
can’t
consent to this.” I couldn’t keep my voice from shaking.

She smiled and patted his stubbled cheek. “Oh, he made me certain promises when we were alone together. I have all the consent from him I’ll ever need.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. How had Cooper and I ended up like this? I’d tried to do the right thing, but now I was starting to doubt anything honorable or noble could survive when Miko was involved. How could I have stopped us getting to this horrible place?

The decisions I’d made only a few days before had led us here, and all other roads were lost to me now.

   My familiar, Palimpsest, bent his eight legs into a crouch on the hot pavement outside Rudy Ray’s Roadstop. I tightened the straps on my backpack and pulled the enchanted gray satin opera glove up higher on my left forearm so I wouldn’t accidentally set him on fire. Gripping handfuls of his ferret-pale, shaggy fur, I hauled myself up onto the saddle pad wedged between two of his vertebral crests. Pal grunted in pain.

I worried I’d burned him, but the glove still covered my flame hand, so I stopped moving. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” There was an odd strain in his telepathic voice.

“You’re sure you’re fine?” I pressed.

“Yes, quite. I’m just a bit sore from my scuffle with the rats. It’s nothing more than bruises; I gave myself a couple of solid knocks on some low-hanging pipes down there.”

Bruises, my ass
, I thought. His rangy legs were scratched, and he was missing patches of fur. The
wererats in the steam tunnels beneath the local university had lured him to a place where he couldn’t use his magic; he was lucky he’d gotten out of there alive.

“If I’m on one of your sore spots, I can sit someplace else,” I said aloud.

Pal replied by changing the subject. “Are you absolutely, positively, without-a-doubt sure you want to do this?” He looked back over his shoulder at me and blinked his four eyes, licking his saber-toothed muzzle uncertainly.

“Those miserable people are burning this very minute,” I replied, thinking of the thousands of townsfolk Miko had stripped of their souls since she’d taken over Cuchillo. She was the daughter of the Japanese death goddess Izanami, and was so damn dangerous that the Virtus Regnum put an isolation barrier around this particular ventricle in the heart of Texas. Guardian spirits had driven us here, either to die or to weaken Miko or both. But when she tried to take my soul, she got the devil I’d been possessed with instead. Having the beast inside her drove her mad; whatever afterlife she’d created for the souls she’d taken had surely become a place of nightmarish torment, supposing it hadn’t been one before.

My devil, my job to clean up after it.

“I have to get ’em out of there if I can,” I said.

The trouble was, I was sick with fever, physically and mentally exhausted, and I didn’t have any clear idea about how I could possibly defeat Miko once I found her.

“
Please
tell me you’re not planning to head straight into the desert to go looking for her, are you?” Pal asked.

“Oh. Uh, no. I … should probably tell Cooper and the Warlock what I’ve decided to do, huh?”

My stomach knotted at the thought of having to face my boyfriend and his brother. Miko worked her black magic on our emotions, horning the Warlock and me up and making Cooper furious and distant. It was a sick trap, all right; when Cooper caught his brother and me in a compromising position, the two men had come close to murdering each other.

Hell, I’d come pretty damn close to killing the Warlock myself. I’d dragged him into my own personal hell dimension, and … I still wasn’t sure what to call what we’d done to each other in there. The memories made me want to swallow a bottle of Rohypnol and scrub my skin raw in the shower. It didn’t matter that it hadn’t happened in the “real” world—we’d tapped into something dark and terrible in our psyches. I wished eternal damnation on Miko for putting us in that position, but what I’d done in the hellement was my own sin. And I didn’t know how I could make up for it, not to the Warlock, and not to Cooper.

“Letting your beloved know where you’re going would seem prudent.” Pal’s tone was dry. “Shall I take us back to the Saguaro Hotel, then?”

“Sure, but give me a moment.”

I turned toward Rudy and his daughter, Sofia, who were talking in hushed Spanish in the shade of the awning over the gas pumps. Although both of them had been Miko’s captives, they hadn’t seen each other in at least a year; old Rudy was smiling, but his craggy face was still wet with tears.