Switchblade Goddess (8 page)

Pal crouched attentively at the foot of my bed. “Well, if your experiment goes badly I’ll do my best to get you to a healer or a doctor. But I’d suggest sitting down first, just in case. No sense in courting a nasty knock on the head. Even if yours seems uncommonly hard.”

I snorted. “Right.”

Perching cross-legged on the bed, I cracked open the bottle. Sniffed it. The liquid inside was black as coffee that had been boiling in the pot all day, and smelled strongly of jalapeños and faintly of something sourly metallic. “Well, bottoms up.”

I tossed back the potion. The surprisingly thick fluid burned my tongue, and a moment later tripped my gag reflex, but I forced it down, held my breath to keep from tasting it any more clearly than I had to.

I waited. Swallowed again. Released my breath.

Nothing.

“I don’t think this potion is still—” I began.

And suddenly there was a heat like a small supernova exploding in the pit of my stomach, then a wave
of adrenaline like a million tiny Maori warriors surfing through my bloodstream, and my exhaustion evaporated, my aches and pains gone like so many vampires drowned in liquid sunshine, and I could climb dragons, I could slay mountains—

I was on the floor. The inside of my mouth tasted like I’d drunk rancid chili from a dirty ashtray. A shaggy belly pressed heavily against my face. My whole body. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe.

“Mmmf!” I tried to wiggle out from under Pal.

“Are you sane?” He sounded cross. “Tap me three times with your toes if you understand me.”

My left foot was the only part of me that he’d left free. I tapped him. He stood up, and I took a gasping breath.

“What the hell?” I frowned up at him.

“You began bounding around the room like an utter lunatic.” He frowned back at me. The expression looked a lot scarier on him. “I thought it best to restrain you lest you hurt yourself or decide to start burning the hotel down.”

“No way. I don’t remember that at all.”

“You began shouting ‘I am the banana master now, bitches!’ ” he added.

I squinted at him. “You’re just messing with me. I did
not
say that.”

“Oh, you most certainly did.” Pal stepped aside and crouched down, seeming amused. “You also declared yourself to be ‘Queen of the Motherfucking Chainsaw Brigade’ and made a series of profane, scatological threats against all the ‘goat-faced jack-fuck haters.’ You might’ve actually said ‘moat bait Mack truck hatters,’ though in context that doesn’t
make quite as much sense. Our telepathy was garbled, and you do tend to flatten your ‘A’s, so it’s hard to be certain.”

“Um … wow.” I really needed to have a chat with my subconscious about anger management.

“ ‘Fuck’ does seem to be your go-to epithet for almost every occasion, doesn’t it?” he said.

I got to my feet. “My stepmother loathes that word. Like, even more than ‘cunt’ if you can believe it. I got in
so
much trouble the first time I dropped an F-bomb around her. Mouth washed out with Ivory soap and everything.”

I paused, remembering the incident. Normally my stepmother would never have done anything so physical as to drag a thirteen-year-old girl kicking and screaming into the bathroom for corporal punishment. But Deb was flush with first-trimester hormones, and I learned a valuable lesson that day: don’t provoke pregnant women. Especially if they’ve gone into a nesting, cleaning frenzy.

“I didn’t say it around her again,” I continued. “But once I realized it bugged her beyond human reason, it sorta became my favorite word in the whole urban dictionary.”

“Dysfunctional, yet oddly logical.” Pal’s tone was dry. “So how are you feeling now?”

“Good. Energetic. Like I can do
stuff
.” I looked around the room for the empty potion container; I’d apparently thrown it as hard as I could at the wall, which was now dented. The bottle lay against the baseboard, looking innocent. “But I should go easy on it next time, maybe just drink half the bottle at first.”

“A prudent plan,” Pal agreed.

I found a little sample of Scope in the bathroom and washed out the nasty taste of the potion. Then Pal and I went downstairs to see if Cooper and the Warlock had returned.

S
ara Bailey-Jones was waiting for us in the lobby, her red plastic cowboy hat perched atop her prematurely white hair. Her .480 Ruger Super Redhawk revolver was still strapped in a brown leather holster over her baggy jeans.

A dozen housecats stood watch around her; if you didn’t have a magic sight-stone or some other enhanced vision, you probably never would have guessed that the cats were really individual cells of a hive-mind devil. But they would probably creep you out just the same, because they’d seem weirdly familiar, and it might take you a few minutes to realize you’d seen them all in movies and TV shows and commercials.

“Jessie Shimmer!” Sara exclaimed, her smile and Adderall-blue eyes bright. To look at her you’d think we were long-lost BFFs. There wasn’t a trace of worry or hesitation in her expression.

And there should have been. There should have been
some
sign she realized that she’d screwed us over and that I was surely not going to be happy to see her. The last time I’d laid eyes on her, she’d thrown Cooper and the Warlock out of the campus compound, leaving them to Miko’s sweet mercies while
she left me strapped in a chair, helpless to do anything to save the men I cared about most in the world.

It had been one of the worst days of my life, and at that moment I dearly wanted to pay her back for her part in it. I wanted to beat her bloody for what she’d done to my boyfriend and his brother, but I didn’t know how powerful she really was. I’d already seen her murder a Catholic priest without so much as a wince of regret, and if I pissed her off she might try to hurt Pal. And clearly my ability to keep my friends safe around her was not very good.

So I settled for a clipped reply: “What do you want, Sara?”

“The kitties told me you’ll be seeing Miko today!” She sounded as enthusiastic as a grade school teacher telling her class they had all won a trip to Disney World. “And I’ve got something to help you find her.”

She pulled a small white envelope out of her back pocket.

I eyed it suspiciously. “What’s that?”

“Three of her hairs. One of the kitties helped us find them clenched in a zombie’s hand. A genuine death-grip! She’s no kind of animal, not like us, and she doesn’t shed, so this was quite a discovery. And the kitties say you can use it to find her.”

That I could.

“Thanks.” I took the envelope from her outstretched hand and tucked it in my own pocket.

“The kitties say she’s on a ranch near Devils Courthouse Peak to the north of here, but she might be someplace else by sundown. They think she might slip away through the holes in the spirits’ net once
she’s got her head straight again. Just like your brother did.”

I don’t know why it came as a nasty surprise to realize Miko could probably open portals on her own, but it did. And suddenly I felt more anxious than ever to track her down.

Pal must have read the change in my expression, or maybe he heard my heart start pounding. “Steady, Jessie. We mustn’t run headlong into this. We should try to wait for Cooper and the Warlock to return.”

“Okay,” I replied, and Sara beamed, thinking I was speaking to her.

“When you see Miko, there’s something I need you to do. Something we
all
need you to do.” Sara reached into her other back pocket and pulled out a folded piece of yellow legal pad paper. “These are the names of all the people we’re keeping alive at the health center whose souls were stolen. My husband, Bob, is one of them.”

Her face fell then, and a profound sadness took hold of her features. I remembered watching her weep beside his cot, and despite everything she’d done, I felt genuinely sorry for her.

The very picture of a lonely, grieving wife, she held the paper out to me. “Will you please bring them home? The kitties say that all you have to do is get their souls out of Miko and they’ll return to their bodies. I guess you’ve done something like that before?”

“Yes, something like that.” I took the paper from her. “I’ll do my best.”

Just then, the Jackson sisters sashayed in from the
dining room, both wearing vibrant blue caftans. Their rat familiars were nowhere in sight.

“Well hello there!” exclaimed Callie. “You must be—”

“—Sara, our fearless acting mayor,” Poppy finished.

Sara blinked, looking puzzled. A couple of her cats were starting to fluff up their fur, hackles and paws raised in wary confusion. “Yes, that’s me.”

“Wonderful!” the sisters exclaimed simultaneously.

“We’ve been meaning to have a little chat with you,” said Callie.

“Over tea, and they’ve got a lovely pot of orange pekoe brewing in the sunroom,” said Poppy. “Just waiting for us.”

“What did you want to chat about?” Sara asked, sounding suspicious.

“The city’s almost free—” said Callie.

“—and then the Regnum will be here—” said Poppy.

“—and if we don’t have a plan for reconstruction—”

“—they’ll surely give us one—”

“—so if we want them keeping their pointy noses—”

“—out of our local business—”

“—we need a proposal for rebuilding—”

“—and restoring city services—”

“—and suchlike things,” finished Callie.

Sara blinked. “Well, as acting mayor, all that
is
my job, I think …”

“Wonderful!” the sisters exclaimed, and before Sara could protest they’d swept her away toward the
sunroom in a flutter of true-blue sleeves and municipal chatter as the nonplussed devil kitties hurried to catch up.

“Their kung fu is strong,” I whispered to Pal. “Do you think they’ll get her off the crazy train?”

Pal shrugged, or at least made a passable effort at it considering he didn’t really have any shoulders. “I believe they’ll make a heroic attempt, at any rate.”

He peered into the dining room. “Shall we go to the breakfast line? I think I smell ham. Perhaps you can’t eat, but I need my last meal if you expect me to fly to certain doom this morning.”

T
he cooking Talents had worked a bit of magic with the dwindling kitchen ingredients, and they had savory black bean frittatas and flapjacks warming over Sterno cans in steel hotel pans at the buffet. And, as Pal’s sharp nose had detected, some fried slices of canned ham dressed up with a maple glaze. We filled our plates and found an unoccupied table.

The two extra empty chairs at our breakfasting spot acutely reminded me of Cooper and the Warlock. Were they okay? Was Mother Karen okay? Feeling a fresh surge of anxiety, I pushed my plate aside and pulled my brother’s compact out of the pocket of my dragonskin pants.

I opened the mirror and peered into the silver. “Devil in a black dress.”

It took Randall a few moments to answer. His blond hair was mussed and his hazel eyes bloodshot, as if he hadn’t slept at all that night. Behind him, I saw a hand-painted scarlet and gray birdhouse hanging in the branches of a buckeye tree; he was in Mother Karen’s front yard.

He smiled brightly at me just the same. “Hey, sis, how you feeling?”

“Feeling fine, thanks to your potion … but how are you guys doing? What’s going on?”

“Well,” he replied slowly. “The kid let Cooper and the Warlock into the castle, but they haven’t come back out yet.”

“Do you know what’s happening in there?”

He shook his head. “No clue, really. It’s been quiet. Mostly I’ve been helping the others keep up an illusion so the mundane neighbors don’t see what’s happened here; the kid keeps interfering with it for some reason, so we have to keep redoing the spell.”

“What others?” I felt another pang of anxiety, wondering if the Regnum authorities had gotten involved in the situation. What would happen then? My heart began to pound as I imagined the authorities arresting Cooper and the Warlock to force me to surrender.

“So far there have been some people from the local governing circle. One lady, I guess the head honcha, Riviera Borden—”

“—Jordan,” I corrected, feeling a bit of relief. I still wasn’t convinced she was on our side, but I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt and think she wasn’t our enemy.

“Yeah. She’s been by.”

“What did she do?”

“Frowned a lot and talked to dudes in suits, mostly. Nobody who looked like a Regnum agent, though,” he quickly added, apparently realizing my worry. “Anyhow, she told me that if Cooper and the Warlock didn’t bring everyone out in twenty-four more hours, she was going to have to take action.”

“What kind of action?”

Randall shrugged. “She didn’t say. But if Dallas Paranormal was on this, I know exactly what we’d do: we’d drop a localized isolation sphere on the house, then cast a magic-suppression spell and fill the house with knockout gas. Get in, bring everyone out, pump Junior full of magebane, and take him to juvie for psychological evaluation. And if he’d seriously hurt anyone in the house, he’d be staying locked up for a good long time until everyone was sure he’d been civilized.”

“How are Acacia and Horatio? Were they badly injured?”

“No, they were just shaken up a bit. Some bumps and bruises were the worst of it. They’re mostly worried about the kid, can you believe it?”

“Yes,” I said. “Mother Karen says they’re really nice people.”

“Yeah, they seem supernice. But, seriously, the kid could’ve killed them; if some little shit tossed me three stories, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to take him home with me afterward, you know?”

“Kids screw up; that’s just what they do,” I said, thinking back on the stupid, hurtful things I’d done when I was young. Yelling. Hitting. Telekinetically exploding Eddie Chong’s PlayStation. Setting my bedroom on fire.

I hadn’t meant to do any of it, and I knew what it felt like to be rejected by family because of it. “Good parents always give second chances.”

“Well, when it comes to people trying to kill me, I’m a one-chance kinda guy,” he said lightly. “And that’s why I always carry clean ammo and fresh condoms.”