Switchblade Goddess (2 page)

“Hey, um, I’ve got to go,” I called over to them. “Y’all stay safe, okay?”

Rudy hurried over, his cowboy boot heels clacking on the pavement. “You ain’t leaving so soon, are you? Caint you stay for some supper?”

“I’m sorry, but I really do have to head back.”

“Well, you take care.” He looked from me to Pal and grinned. “You take care, too, big feller. I know you had a lot to do with bringing my daughter home.”

“He did,” I said. “I’d have never made it this far without him.”

“You look like you got yourself into a real scrap,” Rudy said, frowning at the cuts and abrasions on Pal’s legs. “And you’re looking a mite peaked besides.”

Rudy looked back up at me, concerned. “I think you should take him to see a vet, if they have vets for critters like him.”

“Believe me, I will, if I can find one,” I replied.

Rudy pushed his cowboy hat back on his head. “Well, thank you for all you done, miss. If you ever need anything, anything at all, let me know and I’ll make it happen if I can.”

Rudy waved adios to us and headed back to join his daughter in the shade.

I gave Pal a pat to let him know I was ready to go. His abdomen expanded as he took a deep breath, and he began to play his flying spell through the valved exhalation spiracles on his belly. It sounded like out-of-tune calliope music. He leaped into the air as the spell began to take hold, and soon we were soaring fast through the sun-hot air, heading straight for the tallest building in the middle of the small city.

* * *

Pal gave another grunt of pain as he touched down in a clear space in the street in front of the Saguaro. The broiling blacktop was littered with hundreds of corpses: townsfolk who’d been desouled and turned into Miko’s puppets. They mostly wore a mix of pajamas and once-nice clothes; every scrap of cloth clinging to their wasted forms was blood-brown and ragged. She’d hit the town on a Sunday morning when the people would be most vulnerable. To her, a sleeping family home was a delicious bento box, a packed church an all-you-can-eat buffet. According to the memories I’d tasted in some of her victims, few people had thought to bring a weapon into a house of God … not that any mundane weapons could provide much defense. A gunshot wound was of little more consequence to her than a mosquito bite. She’d been born in the apocalypse at Hiroshima, so I doubted anything much smaller than a tactical nuke would stop her.

Without Miko around to control the zombies, their diseased bodies had expired within minutes. Mercy at last. The smell was epic roadkill putrescence, the kind of stench that slips up your nostrils and chokes your whole brain until you can’t think a single thought that isn’t centered on getting the hell away from it. I hoped some of the local Talents were preparing a spell to bury them as quickly as possible. Failing that … well, I could help burn the dead, at least.

The strength of the diabolic fire in my left hand was fading; I wasn’t sure I’d have enough power to defend myself whenever the Virtus Regnum decided to lower
the isolation barrier and attack me directly. They were waiting to see if I’d finish off Miko, or see if she’d be the end of me. It was just a matter of time before I’d find myself running like hell from one of the huge guardian spirits again.

As far as the Regnum was concerned, I was vermin—
dangerous
vermin, sure, but ultimately nothing more than a creature to be killed as quickly and efficiently as possible once I was no longer useful to them. I had no more right to counsel or appeal than a sewer rat. And that sucked huge donkey balls … but at least I never had to wonder if my life was in danger.

Unfortunately, it also meant that the lives of the people I cared about most were also in danger.

“Are you
sure
you’re okay?” I asked Pal as I slid down to the street.

“Yes, quite. Don’t worry about me.” He was starting to wheeze.

I didn’t believe him. Not even a teeny little bit. Rudy’s veterinarian suggestion struck me as a good one, but I didn’t know if any of the Talented healers who’d survived Miko could help a strange hybrid like Pal.

The front doors of the hotel slid open and my brother, Randall, stepped outside. Seeing him was like looking at my reflection in some charmed fun house mirror that turned me into a blond man. It was a little eerie, and made even stranger because I was still getting used to the idea of having an older brother. While I’d been living my decidedly unglamorous life as a student in Columbus, Ohio, he’d been going on all kinds of adventures as part of the Dallas Paranormal Defense team. I had no clue he even existed—not
the slightest hint that my parents had a child before me—until my father asked me to rescue him from Miko.

Of course, a month ago I hadn’t known who my real father was, either. It had been a bitter relief to discover that my mundane stepfather wasn’t my real father; after my mom died and my magical powers started to develop, he panicked and would have dumped me in a mental institution if my mother’s sister hadn’t offered to take me. His rejection hurt and kept on hurting, a slow burn of feeling like an unwanted freak that finally went away when I met Cooper Marron my first year in college. Time might heal all wounds, but being in love (and being loved in return) deftly plucked that thorn from my psyche.

So, good to know my biological father was really the notorious Magus Shimmer, an outlaw necromancer who couldn’t be a dad to me because he’d been sent to a high-security Talent prison before I was even born. And then he’d escaped prison by having himself murdered. The resurrection afterward had apparently been a bit rough, and his recovery delayed his intended parental duties by another few years.

Yeah. I had a lot of stuff to try to get my head around. It’s always unsettling to discover you’re not the person you thought you were, even if the new you seems a whole lot more interesting.

“Hey, sis, you’re back!” Randall smiled at me, showing straight white teeth, but even his bright grin couldn’t mask the anxiety I saw deep in his hazel eyes. He stepped toward me, and my eye instantly fell on the shiny bronze lizard brooch he was wearing on the pocket of his gray T-shirt.

Just as I was wondering why the heck he was wearing a piece of jewelry that would look more at home on some little old lady at a tea party, the glittering lizard blinked at me and crawled into the pocket.

Randall didn’t seem to notice my surprise. “Dad says you need to mirror someone named Mother Karen, like right now.”

I felt a sudden surge of alarm that drove away my curiosity over his little metal friend. Were Cooper’s infant brothers in trouble? I had a sudden, irrational vision of the Virtus Regnum burning down Mother Karen’s foster home with the wailing boys trapped inside. After everything I’d seen, I wouldn’t put that kind of atrocity past them.

I hurried up the marble steps. “Why? What’s going on?”

“I’m not real sure, but he said it was important to get a move on. There’s some kind of trouble in your hometown.” Randall reached into the right thigh pocket of his gray tactical cargo pants and pulled out what looked like a square silver makeup compact. He flipped the shiny case toward me as if he were making a pass to a teammate in Ultimate Frisbee, and I fortunately managed to catch it in my good right hand. If I’d tried a grab with my left, the compact probably would have whiffed right through my glove; boneless flame hands can be pretty limited if you aren’t trying to ignite things.

“You can mirror her on that,” he said. “All you need to do is to speak her name and address … you know her full info, right?”

“Yes, I do.” I popped the case open with my thumbnail. Inside, there was no makeup, just highly polished
metal, and when I opened the compact completely, the halves joined together seamlessly into a rectangular mirror about the size of a small media player.

The mirror sent a faint magic buzz into my right palm. I blinked through several views using my ocularis, the chrysoberyl orb that served as a replacement for my left eye. I still didn’t completely understand how the magic stone worked or what it was showing me, but through some of the views the mirror seemed to be glowing with energy. Someone with real skill as a speculomancer had created it.

I took a deep breath, staring down at my sunburned, hollow-cheeked reflection, remembering my last disastrous attempt to contact Karen. Of course, this time I had a proper enchanted mirror, and I wasn’t in a hell. Still, the thought of accidentally triggering her security spell made me twitch a bit. I wasn’t anxious to eat Spanish steel for dinner.

“I wish to speak to Karen Mercedes Sebastián, daughter of Magus Carlos Sebastián and Mistress Beatrice Brumecroft, of 776 Antrim Lane, Worthington, Ohio 43085.”

The mirror grew colder in my hand, darkened, cleared. I was looking into Mother Karen’s spacious study from the vantage of the huge mirror above her fireplace. And things had clearly gone wrong: the teapot and delicate china cups atop her driftwood coffee table had been knocked over. Oolong spilled across the glass top and dripped onto the thick cream carpet below. Someone had ransacked the spellbooks and ingredient containers stored on her floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelves; tomes and glass jars were scattered
across her desk and on the floor. Either she’d been robbed, or she’d been desperately searching for something. The windows on the western side showed tall gray waves and black sheets of rain crashing over a rocky north Pacific beach; the eastern windows showed Caribbean palm trees whipping in the gale winds of a hurricane storming ashore.

Trouble, indeed. I couldn’t see Karen, but the door at the far end of the room was open, so I started calling for her: “Hey, Karen, are you there? It’s me, Jessie … are you there?”

I heard the distant thump of footsteps in the hallway, and a few seconds later Mother Karen hurried in. She was dressed in a forest green silk suit, as if she’d been seeing important company, but her graying brown hair was a frizzy mess and her clothes were rumpled and dirty as if she’d just taken a few spins in a tornado.

“Oh, thank God, I thought he’d blocked the mirror, too. Jessica, you’ve got to get back here, fast as you can. I just can’t control him, he’s got us locked in—”

“Whoa, slow down,” I said. “Who’s got you locked in?”

“Blue,” she said, and my heart dropped. Little Blue was surely the most powerful of Cooper’s baby brothers, but he’d also seemed the most stable and easygoing.

Years ago, possibly even before I was born, Blue had gotten so angry during his imprisonment in Cooper’s hell that to preserve his sanity he dissociated himself from all his difficult emotions like hatred and sadness and cast them away in a broken-off piece of his own soul. That soul-shard had taken physical
form as a demon when it came to Earth, and battling that monster had cost me my eye and arm—not to mention the lives of four innocent human beings and the best damn dog in the history of history itself, Cooper’s much-loved familiar, Smoky.

Despite his serene demeanor, Blue was a real little boy now, not a disconnected spirit trapped in the stasis of a hell. And in us flesh-and-blood people, emotions like rage and hate have a way of regenerating themselves just when you think you’ve got a nice tight lid on them.

“What happened? What did he do?” I asked.

“He was the last one … it was his day to go with his new foster parents,” Karen replied, looking and sounding more panicked than I’d ever seen her. “Horatio and Acacia Fox—
very
nice people, a very nice home—I explained it to him and he seemed to understand, he still won’t talk, but he
did
seem to understand, he nodded when I asked him, oh sweet Goddess I’ve never seen a child do anything like this—”

“Karen, calm down. What did he do?”

She took a deep breath and shut her eyes for a moment. “I took them to his room to introduce everyone, he brought out this old shoebox filled with … I don’t know, hardware, junk—”

Oh, jeez, that stupid radio
, I thought. Blue had taken apart an old Batman clock radio in his room to see how it worked. I’d put all the pieces into a shoebox and told him that I’d come back to help him put the radio back together, or that I’d send someone to help him. Crap in a hat. In the chaos of trying to deal
with being trapped with Miko in Cuchillo, I’d forgotten all about my promise.

“—and he held it out to them like he expected them to do something with it. When they didn’t he … he threw them out of the house.” Her face paled at the memory.

“Threw them out?” I had a hard time imagining a toddler having the leverage to physically remove an adult man from a room, much less muscle him downstairs and push him out the front door.

She nodded, her eyes closed. “Suddenly there was … there was a tunnel in the side of his bedroom, and a force like an invisible hand just swept them outside into the trees. He didn’t move or say a word, Jessie … he didn’t cast a spell. He just
did
it. I’ve never seen a child with this kind of at-will magical power. And before I could call for help, he put a wall around the entire house.”

I thought of King Lake’s castle in Cooper’s hell. “Made of dark gray stone, like a medieval fortress?”

She nodded. “Exactly that. We’re completely sealed in, and none of my spells can so much as chip the rock.”

Karen paused, looking anguished. “My other kids are so scared, Jessie, and I don’t know what to tell them. Blue refuses to speak; he just stares at the box.”

“Are Horatio and Acacia okay?” I asked. If Blue were older I’d have wanted to roundly kick his ass for pitching a fit over something as trivial as a radio. But he was a little boy who’d been through a horrible trauma, and … well, we could have expected something like this to happen sooner or later.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Blue put the
wall up before I could see where they landed. I certainly hope they weren’t badly injured.”

“Jesus.” I rubbed my flesh eye, trying to think. I wanted to help Mother Karen and her kids, and I had made the promise to Blue. And clearly he took broken promises very badly. But Miko was out there in the desert, and I was convinced I was the only Talent in Cuchillo who had a shot at putting her down for good. There were other people who could help Blue.