Shotgun Sorceress (5 page)

“And then what happened?”

“They raised Abraxas—or what they claimed was Abraxas, at any rate—right in the middle of our capital city. To this day I don’t know what it really was, but it was mainly interested in devouring as many of my people as possible. I realized my terrible mistake, of course, and went to the authorities with what I knew. The minions by then had staged a raid on the capital treasury and were long gone with a considerable number of priceless artifacts. Fortunately the authorities managed to banish the entity before the city was destroyed. And, as it turned out, I was one of a dozen youthful Talents they’d recruited for their scheme.”

“Wow.” I was silent for a moment. “Can you ever go back there?”

“Surely not like this.” Pal gestured toward his hybrid body. “They don’t have ferrets on my world, and even if they did, I’d still look nearly as monstrous to my own people as I seem to yours.”

“Maybe Riviera can help you get your real body back, or find someone who can.”

“Perhaps.” Pal sounded supremely doubtful and a bit sad. “For all I know, the Fates have willed
this
unsightly mash-up to be my true form.”

I didn’t believe in Fate—or didn’t want to, anyhow—but I didn’t feel like arguing the point with Pal. As I pondered the frustrating nature of predestination, I let my flame hand drop too close to my leg. The fire bit right through the wool skirt into my skin.

“Ow!” I jerked my hand away from my scorched thigh. “Christ, I’m gonna have to start carrying a healing crystal like the Warlock. Dammit. Ow.”

“It might be best if Riviera Jordan were to focus her resources on removing your curse,” Pal said. “My current condition does not render me a danger to myself.”

I no longer doubted that my flame hand was some kind of curse. I could barely eat, couldn’t safely get off, and now it looked like decent sleep was definitely off the menu, too. “Well, I hope Riviera can do something about this. I hope she’s not just lying to Mother Karen about wanting to talk things over reasonably.”

The burn on my leg was roughly the size of a business card, and it stung like crazy. I placed my flesh palm over the wound and spoke an ancient word for “heal.” It helped, but not as much as I’d hoped.

Worried anew that I was losing my ability to use white magic, I began to pace around the yard, holding my flame hand well away from my body.

“You should try to get some rest,” Pal said.

“I will, in a little while.” I was absolutely bone-tired, and wanted nothing more than to lie down and sleep for the next sixteen hours, but I was afraid of what might happen once I drifted off.
If
I drifted off.

My flame hand seemed to catch on something. I looked down, puzzled. I was out in the middle of the yard; there wasn’t so much as a tall dandelion nearby. I waved my hand through the empty air. And there it was again, the sensation of an invisible seam.

“Hey, there’s something weird over here,” I said to Pal. “Can you see or feel anything?”

He came over to investigate. “No, I don’t sense anything … What is it?”

“I’m not sure.” I blinked through several views with my enchanted stone eye. One showed a faint blue rectangular outline in the air, just barely perceptible.

Acting on a hunch, I dug my flame fingers into the seam and pulled. A small door swung open midair, revealing the inside of a wooden shipping crate. It was a little bigger than a school gym locker, maybe three feet tall and two feet wide, and perhaps as many deep. Stacked inside were several plastic-wrapped bricks of white powder and compressed plant matter. The air inside was musty with a familiar sweetly weedy odor.

The patio door slid open.

“We fixed your glove,” Mother Karen called, sounding more like her old cheerful self again.

“Hey, did you know someone put an extradimensional drug stash back here?” I called back.

“A
what?
” Karen strode across the yard and stared into the crate. Her expression changed from surprise to irritated recognition. “Darn that boy, I
knew
he was lying to me.”

“Which boy?” I took the repaired opera glove from Mother Karen’s outstretched hand and slipped it on. I hoped Jimmy wasn’t in any trouble; I liked the kid.

“I fostered a teenager named Rick Wisecroft about five years ago. He had a lot of natural ability, but he seemed mostly interested in making drugs and selling them at the local high schools. I personally have nothing against adults partaking responsibly in whatever substances they choose to, but his behavior was completely unacceptable. Neither the authorities nor I could ever find anything on him, of course. He swore up and down he never brought anything illegal to the house.” She sighed. “I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, but some kids just don’t want to do the right thing.”

“What happened to him?” I asked.

“He stayed long enough for his eighteenth birthday party, and then ran away that night with his gifts and the cash from my purse.” She paused, looking sad. “I haven’t heard of or from him since. I’m surprised he left all this behind.”

“Maybe he made some enemies and had to leave in a hurry. Or maybe he smoked too much of his own supply and forgot where he put it,” I replied. “It was pretty well hidden.”

“How did you find it?”

“Pure accident, I think. I felt the doorway in the air.” I wiggled my flame fingers at Karen. “Apparently the Hand o’ Doom is useful for more than wanton destruction.”

“Thank goodness for that.” Karen reached inside the crate and pulled out the bricks of white powder and stacked them on the grass. “These I assume are cocaine or methamphetamine; be a dear and burn them, would you? Just try not to breathe the fumes.”

Karen pulled out the bricks of marijuana. “I’m going to check these to make sure they haven’t been tainted with PCP or any nonsense like that. And then … well, no sense in wasting a perfectly useful herb.”

“There’s probably more of these,” I said. “I mean, if I were a high-school coke dealer, I’d want to have more than one hiding place, just in case.”

Mother Karen nodded. “Please check the rest of the yard, would you?”

“Sure thing.”

I spent the next hour slowly going over the yard bit by bit with my flame hand. I found another extradimensional cache by the fence that contained just a couple of organic chemistry manuals, but in the trees I made a startling discovery: doors that led into the basements or gyms of the toniest high schools in the city: Thomas Worthington, St. Charles Prep, Bexley High, Bishop Hartley, and Upper Arlington. There wasn’t a door into the suburban Talent high school, Dublin Alternative, presumably because the custodians there were on the lookout for such enchantments.

“The kid was
slick.
” I carefully closed the last portal.

“It does seem he was running quite the operation.”

I hefted one of the kilos of anonymous white powder. “Maybe he wasn’t making standard drugs. Maybe he was selling memory enhancers and love potions and stuff like that, too. I mean, seriously, kids would go
crazy
over love potions in high school.”

“It’s possible,” Pal replied. “But I wouldn’t try any of that to find out. It’s so old by now it’s probably unstable, assuming it was ever stable to begin with.”

“I wasn’t planning on it.” I dropped the kilo into my flame palm and closed my fiery fingers around the package; it burned with a quick blue flame and disappeared into ash and acrid smoke that I did my best to avoid breathing.

“Know what I’m happiest about right now?” I coughed, stepping away from the smoke and fanning the air with my flesh hand.

“No, what?”

“I’m really damn happy I didn’t find little Ricky’s corpse stashed out here. ’Cause it’s been just that kind of week.”

chapter
four

Raising the Tent

“
H
ey, I found a tent for you in the attic,” Cooper called from the patio. A green nylon bundle was slung over his left shoulder and he gripped a wooden mallet in his free right hand. He grinned at me, and I felt myself melt.

It was the first time he’d looked genuinely happy since I’d brought him back from his hell. The man had a great smile. Anybody can have nice, straight white teeth these days; it’s what the smile
says
that matters. And Cooper’s grin told me that, yeah, we’d been having an epic bad week, but everything was gonna be okay, and once we’d put things right, he had lots of delicious plans for making my toes curl.

“Aw, you’re a sweetie!” I hadn’t even realized I needed a shelter; it was one of those things I’d probably have thought of right around the time I was too exhausted to do anything other than crawl into the sleeping bag on the open grass and hope that Mother Karen had an antimosquito charm working.

“Well, I want you to get as good a night’s sleep as you can out here.” Cooper looked at Pal and chewed the corner of his mustache. “Do you want a tent, too? I think I saw a pup tent up there that I could magic up to make big enough for you.”

Pal blinked his four eyes at Cooper; I wasn’t sure, but I thought his expression was slightly indignant. “Please thank him for his kind offer, but I prefer the open air. And also I am quite capable of working my own spells.”

“Pal says he’s good, thanks,” I told Cooper.

Cooper carried the tent over and we opened the big drawstring bag. We pulled out the fiberglass poles, hard plastic stakes, tie-down ropes, then the green nylon tent body, fly, and thick waterproof tarp. We spread the tarp on a nice flat spot in the middle of the lawn and got the poles threaded through the fabric to pop the tent into shape.

“It looks pretty stable,” I said as we set the assembled tent in place on the tarp with the entrance facing the patio. It was basically just a one-person model, though two people could fit in it if they didn’t mind close quarters. “I don’t think we need to stake it to the ground. Unless there’s supposed to be a rainstorm or wind tonight.”

Cooper gave me a look. “With the luck we’ve been having?”

“Right. Better stake it down, then.”

I started tying the ropes through the tent grommets as Cooper stripped off his borrowed T-shirt and began pounding stakes into the lush sod. The muscles in his shoulders and his abs seemed unusually defined; I suddenly imagined myself running my tongue through every hard groove on his belly, kissing his navel, gnawing gently on his delicious hip bones.

Pal sniffed the air. “Jessie, whatever you’re thinking about, please stop thinking it.”

I didn’t reply; I just focused on putting the fly on the tent. Which took a whopping two minutes, so it wasn’t much distraction. Cooper was still driving hard, thick plastic into the moist, yielding lawn. A slight sheen of sweat gleamed on his smooth skin. My knees were starting to quiver.

“Jessie …” Pal warned.

Cooper stood up. “The grass seems pretty springy, but if you think you’ll need an air mattress—hey, what’s the matter? You’re all flushed. And you look so
sad.
”

He gazed down at me with concern. It was all I could do not to grab him by the ears and stick my tongue down his throat.

“I need a … hug,” I replied. “Can we cuddle on my sleeping bag in the tent for a while?”

“Jessie!” Pal exclaimed.

A look of “uh-oh” realization flickered across Cooper’s face. He scratched his goatee, looking conflicted. “Well, I don’t think that’s a good idea—”

“
Please,
” I said, as much to Pal as to Cooper. “I nearly lost you, and it feels like it’s been so long since we’ve been able to just hold each other. For all I know I could get dragged off to prison tomorrow and never see you again. Please. I’m not going to have a flaming, gushing orgasm from cuddling, I promise.”

“I suppose there’s no harm in that.” Cooper coolly glanced at Pal, his expression daring my familiar to disagree.

Pal pawed the ground and glared at us. “Just keep in mind that I have a bucket of very cold water out here, and I’m not the least bit afraid to use it.”

Cooper stood before the tent, twisting the much-chewed corner of his mustache thoughtfully. “This thing is really kind of puny, isn’t it? Not much room for more than one person. And not very comfortable for you if you’re going to be in there all night.”

He closed his eyes, raised his arms, and began a chant. I recognized old words for changing size and dimension. The ground and the tent simultaneously began to expand, the earth trembling, and soon the tent was as big as a small bedroom. Cooper winced and leaned forward on his knees as he finished the spell, looking pale and a bit drained. Too much, too soon.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

He straightened up and smiled at me. “I’m fine. Check it out!”

When I pushed the tent fly aside, I discovered that he’d raised the earth into a bed-size platform, the sod beneath the tarp grown thickly into a natural mattress.

Cooper helped me unzip the sleeping bag all the way and we laid it on the grass mattress. We crawled on top and lay down in the dark, sharing my pillow, Cooper spooning me. Through my skirt and his pajama pants, I could feel he had a rubbery half-erection.

“Warlock and I are planning to go to the Costco up at Polaris tomorrow to get some supplies,” he said. “Five babies need a whole lot of formula. And diapers. And everything, really. Hoo boy.”

“They sure do,” I agreed. I wondered if he was talking about his infant brothers because they were the most pressing matter on his mind, or because he was trying to chill his libido. Probably both.

“The boys … wow,” he continued. “I always wanted a bigger family, and now I’ve got it, and that’s extremely cool … but, jeez,
babies
. I do
not
know how to take care of babies.”

“Well, Mother Karen does. And there are lots of books you can read.”

“I know, but … I don’t want to screw this up. They’ve been through so much, and I don’t want them living in those shadows. Not like the Warlock and I did. I want my brothers to grow up to be good men.” Cooper rubbed his face and slipped his arms around me, his hand resting gently over my nipple. I couldn’t tell if he’d done it on purpose or not. “Taking care of them properly means we’ll have to wait.”