Shotgun Sorceress (14 page)

We rose higher in the air, and a sudden choppy crosswind caught my skirts. I felt the zipper give entirely and my bodice slid down to my hips. The way Pal was carrying me, I couldn’t reach down to grab it. I tried for a charm but my adrenaline-soaked brain wouldn’t come up with anything useful.

“My dress! Guys, help!” I spread my legs to try to keep it from flying away; the heavy fabric flapped between my knees like a sail, jerking my legs back against Pal’s thorax. The wind whistled bracingly through my thin underwear.

“It’s too much drag!” Pal exclaimed. “It’s slowing us down; let it go!”

“I’m gonna be naked!” I wailed.

“And we’ll be dead if they catch us!”

Pal’s logic was unassailable. I closed my legs and felt the fancy green satin-and-crinoline ball gown flap away toward the fields below. Stupid fucking dress. At least I still had my boots on. “Are we losing ’em, or are they gaining on us?”

“They’re gaining!” Cooper yelled. “Hey, where’s your dress?”

Christ on a cracker. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes to keep from screaming in frustration. And suddenly realized that my ocularis was itching like someone had rubbed my eye socket with poison ivy.

I opened my eyes, blinked to the door-sight gemview, and began to scan the sky. And just a few hundred feet in front of us, I saw the faint outline of a wide oval, big enough to admit one of those flying Pringles cans they call regional jet planes—but maybe too small for a Virtus—hanging in the sky.

“Whoa! There’s a portal! Go up, to the left!” I shouted.

Pal obeyed.

“What’s a portal doing here?” the Warlock asked.

“I don’t know; it’s big,” I replied. “Pal, stop, we’re on top of it.”

“They’re coming fast, we can’t stop long,” Cooper said.

I fervently wished that I could turn my head to see behind us. “Let me try this.”

I reached out to probe the edge of the portal with my flame hand. The moment I touched it, the portal sprang open with a pop, revealing a circle of bright jet-stream blue within the cloudy sky. A wind rose from the difference in pressure, dragging us toward the portal, but Pal was strong enough to resist it. I was too low to see the ground that lay beyond the portal, but it was disorienting to see the sun twinned in the second sky.

“Something’s not right—” Pal began.

The Warlock and Cooper swore and shouted. A burning plasma pseudopod whipped through the air, perilously close to my head.

“Fuck it, go through, go through!” I screamed.

Pal went through.

And suddenly we were falling.

part
two

The Devil in Miss Shimmer

chapter
twelve

A Bale of Trouble

P
al was still performing his musical spell as we plummeted toward the ground. I tried to shout an old word for “slow” but felt my magic blocked as solidly as if someone had put me in a stranglehold. Cooper was shouting an incantation, too, with no better result. More bizarrely, I realized my flame hand had been extinguished, leaving nothing but a couple of inches of coal-black stump below my elbow.

“Haystack below! Go left so I don’t crush you!” Pal released me, and I twisted midair and pushed off his hairy body with my legs.

I landed on my backpack on a steep hill of scratchy hay, rolling sideways until I tumbled to a stop against some straw bales at the bottom. The pack had miraculously stayed on my back. A piece of baling wire jabbed me painfully in the side, and I gasped. Instantly, my mouth and nose were filled with a foul roadkill stench.

I rolled away from the protruding wire and came face-to-face with an eyeless, desiccated corpse, the leathery lips vermin-eaten and pulled back from the tobacco-stained teeth in a rictus.

“Augh, there’s a dead guy!” I hollered, scrambling to my feet and leaping over the bales to the sandy ground beyond. “Ew, ew, nasty, ew!”

I dropped the opera gloves that were still clenched in my right hand and slapped at imagined maggots on my naked body and legs.

Pal was a dozen yards away, heaving himself over onto his stilting legs in the straw.

“Oh dear, there’s a corpse over here as well.” He bent to examine what I’d initially thought was just a bundle of rags. “She appears to have missed the haystack entirely when she fell.”

I took deep breaths, trying to still the creepy shivers jittering up my spine. The air was as hot and thick as the blood of a man dying of fever. Every inhalation brought the bitter-sharp smell of a thousand spiny weeds and the pungent stink of rotting flesh and something I took to be gasoline or kerosene.

The pile of hay we’d fallen into was positively mountainous; the top had to be over a hundred feet high, and the base was easily the size of a football field. Cooper and the Warlock had gotten stuck in the hay much closer to the top and were struggling down the hill, sinking knee-deep in the fodder with every step; they both seemed to be uninjured. The cloudless sky was the blue of a natural gas flame, and the sun stung my bare breasts and shoulders; I’d be burned to blisters in a half hour. The makeup Mother Karen had put on me smelled as if it had some kind of sunscreen in it, so at least my face would be okay for a while. The tops of my ears and my nipples, maybe not so much.

Where were we? I turned to survey the landscape. At first glance, I thought we were in a junkyard planted randomly in the middle of a vast expanse of flat scrub, but then I realized the twisted metal frames were the wreckage of various types of smaller aircraft, from gliders to crop dusters to small commercial jets. I even saw the stripped, sun-bleached bones of a dragon. Farther in the distance I could see abandoned, intact aircraft; apparently their pilots had coasted to safe landings.

Or mostly safe: some had broken wings and fuselages, and I could see dark, muddy fuel spills beneath them. Why hadn’t they exploded or even burned? And what had made them crash? Clearly we were in a magical dead zone, but planes didn’t need magic to stay in the air. Or if they did, the airlines sure weren’t advertising it.

Cicadas were a steady, feverish buzz in the scrubby mesquites scattered among the wrecks. The earth was a mix of exposed crumbling limestone and dry caliche dotted with tufts of brown arrowgrass, purple-blossomed nightshades, ragweeds, and horse crippler cacti.

“Hey, guys, I think we’re in Texas.” I shrugged off my backpack and dug out a disposable lighter.

“Texas?” The Warlock was running his purple healing crystal over a nasty scratch on his face as he limped through the straw toward me. The wound was sealing, so the crystal was still working. His gaze rested on my bared breasts for two heartbeats, then slid away to the airplane wreckage. “What makes you think this is Texas?”

“The weeds, mostly. And the general landscape.” I flicked the lighter several times and didn’t get so much as a spark off the steel. Huh. Planes probably didn’t need charms, but they definitely needed internal combustion. Apparently someone—or something—had nixed fire as well as spoken magic. I blinked through all the gemviews; my ocularis seemed to be working properly. Whatever was squelching our spells didn’t seem to affect enchanted items.

The Warlock ran his fingers through his sweaty curls and scratched his scalp. “But it’s so … flat. Where are the mountains?”

I laughed and started digging my street clothes out of the backpack. “You’ve seen too many Westerns; you’re thinking of Montana. Hollywood thinks it looks more like cowboy country than the Lone Star State. Or maybe it’s just cheaper to film up there.”

Cooper joined us. “Not that I don’t love talking about movies, but maybe we should be talking about this spectacular trap we just randomly fell into?”

I wiggled into my sports bra. “Trap, yes. Random, no.”

The Warlock frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Well, the trap part is obvious.” I slipped on my Hello Kitty T-shirt and gestured at the hay mountain. “That or this is the shittiest theme park attraction I’ve ever seen.”

“Did you know this was probably a trap when you had Pal go through?” Cooper asked.

“Yeah, I had an idea.” I started taking my boots off so I could slip on my dragonskin pants. It was way too hot for them, but at least they’d provide a bit of protection if we got attacked. I couldn’t bear the thought of putting on the dragonskin jacket, even though my arms were getting pink from the sun. For all the stuff I’d packed, I’d forgotten sunscreen.

“You
knew
this was a trap?” The Warlock looked like he was ready to pay me back for the broken nose I’d given him. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“I was thinking we were facing certain fiery death if we didn’t go through the portal.” I stepped into the pants and pulled them up with my flesh hand; immediately my legs started sweating uncomfortably under the leather. “And since the portal didn’t seem to lead into outer space or a live volcano or Rush Limbaugh’s underwear, it seemed like the better of two lousy choices.”

I was getting faint flashes of the dragon’s death as the leather clung to my damp skin. If I closed my eyes, I could feel Moorish steel slashing my long neck and belly as I belched fire at the impudent raiders. But the death-imprint was old, faded, hovering just at the edge of my perception. I could get used to it, probably tune it out entirely after a while like a mild case of post-nightclub tinnitus.

“But maybe they just wanted to take us into custody,” Cooper said.

“Look, guys, contrary to popular belief, I’m not an idiot.” I pulled the hem of my shirt out over the top of my pants and started to put my boots back on. “I got a peek inside the mind of the Virtus I killed. They want me dead, period, end of sentence. And to be on the safe side, they want you guys dead, too. They are probably the least random beings in the universe; everything they do is carefully planned and measured against a thousand possible outcomes. The Virtus probably didn’t have to miss when it took a swing at us, so they wanted us to go through this particular portal. So it was a setup from the beginning. And we just have to deal.”

“But why here?” the Warlock asked. “I mean, if they want you dead … well, this hay pile doesn’t fit in with that, you know? Whoever is running the show here wants people to survive the fall. So are we looking at some kind of fate worse than death out here, like prolonged torture or something?”

“They’re not sadists.” I shook the dust off the opera gloves and stowed them in the pack. Trying to explain to the others what I’d seen and felt when I’d touched the Virtus’ mind was pretty difficult. I just didn’t have the words for all of it.

“I killed one of them,” I continued. “That means I’m dangerous to them in a physical sense, sure. But I’m also dangerous to them on a prophecy level, and to them, that’s even worse. Clearly the Virtus I took out the other day hadn’t planned on dying, right? I upset their carefully-laid plans, and they just can’t stand that. Their wanting me dead isn’t vengeance or something—it’s simply to fix a bug in their program, I guess is the best way to put it.”

I tucked my pants cuffs into my boots. “And that probably means they expect I’ll die here without their having to risk any more of their own people to do it. Obviously, that’s not good. But there’s also the possibility that they herded us out here because their calculations say I’m likely to end up fixing some other problem they don’t want to deal with directly.”

I stood up and faced them. “And that means we might get out of this alive.”

chapter
thirteen

Texas Hold ’Em

“
W
hat kind of problem could you solve for them?” the Warlock asked.

“Jeez, I don’t know,” I replied. “It’s not like they e-mailed a memo. If certain people had bothered to share basic information with me, none of this would have happened in the first place.”

I frowned, getting angry at Benedict Jordan and my father all over again.

The Warlock tugged at the crotch of his tuxedo pants, looking unhappy. “So what now?”

“Well.” I picked up my backpack and shrugged into it. “We could get some shade under one of those planes, but I think we should look for civilization. I’ve got only one bottle of water, and out here that won’t last the four of us even until sundown. It also won’t last us much of a hike in this sun, so does anyone see anything nearby?”

Cooper squinted off into the horizon. “I think there’s a gas station or something over that way.”

I followed the direction of his gaze, and saw the sun glinting off a red-and-white sign a mile or two away, the logo and lettering unreadable at our distance. Near it was what looked like a low building, and beyond it, a gray water tower that was barely visible against the sky.

Cooper loosened his tie and slipped off his tux jacket; his dress shirt was already drenched in sweat, clinging to his tight ab muscles. The Warlock followed suit, and I stowed their jackets in my backpack.

“I think before we wander off toward the Great Unknown, we should check the planes for supplies,” Cooper said, rolling up his sleeves. “Just in case the survivors left behind some water or food or something. And I don’t know about you guys, but I could use a hat.”

We checked out the nearest, mostly-wrecked planes first, and found more corpses that none of us felt like moving in order to search the aircraft. As we moved farther through the airplane graveyard, we spotted an American Airlines regional jet that had plowed deep furrows in the rocky earth during its touchdown, snapping off at least one of the wheels. The crew and passengers had gotten all the doors open, and from them hung the deflated remains of the emergency slides.

“I bet there’s something still in that one,” Cooper said. “If the crew was sticking to protocol, they wouldn’t have let people take any luggage off.”

“Should we try to break into the luggage hold?” the Warlock asked.

Cooper shook his head. “Probably any bottled water would be in the passenger compartment.” He looked at me and then at the limp yellow slide. “That thing looks hard to climb. If we boosted you up high enough to grab the edge of the door, do you think you could pull yourself in there one-handed?”