Switchblade Goddess (20 page)

“He sure didn’t seem too big in your memory.” Cooper’s grip on me tightened. “You came like … well,
I
never feel that way when I come. That was really intense.”

“It was also extremely fucked up,” I countered, feeling embarrassed. And irritated that of the dozens of life-or-death matters that could be foremost on his mind, cock size was it. “I’m not that much into pain in real life, and you should know that.”

And then I reconsidered. If I were in his position … well, yeah, I’d have concerns. He probably had other questions crowding in his brain that were far more difficult to talk about, so he’d voiced the first one he could peel off his tongue. Perhaps reliving my memory had left him doubting his sexuality. And maybe he was still supremely creeped out by what had probably felt a whole lot like incest by proxy. My sympathy wasn’t quite strong enough to dispel my aggravation, but I took a deep breath and tried for a rare moment of tact.

“I am perfectly happy with your body and everything attached to it, honey,” I said. “Honest.”

Cooper fell silent, his grip relaxing, but I could still feel the tension in his body. We lay there in the fading afternoon light, watching the sky turn purple and pink through the windows. We gradually drifted off, holding each other over the chasm of unasked and unanswered questions between us.

We slept until Pal began to scream in the darkness.

“
W
hat the—?” Cooper threw off the sheet as Pal emitted a second head-splitting shriek.

I was out of bed right after my boyfriend, hastily turning on the light. It sounded like something was killing my familiar.

Pal had fallen off the futon and was on the floor, his eight legs clenched and trembling. Fur was sloughing off him in alarming clumps, piling around him like hay. The sores on his legs were an angry red and seemed considerably bigger.

“Are you okay?” I ran over to him and knelt beside him. The sores on his legs were moving, expanding, like cancer tumors on speed. I heard a cracking noise that might have been the sound of deranged flesh invading bone.

“This hurts!” Pal’s voice was a strained gasp inside my head.

“Oh hell.” Cooper knelt beside me, staring at Pal’s wounds. “What bit him?”

The moment my boyfriend asked me that question, I knew what was happening, and realized things were far worse than I’d imagined: during his fight with the rats in the steam tunnels, Pal had been infected with some kind of viral lycanthropy. My brain had skimmed
right past that scenario, dismissing it before it reached the level of a conscious thought. I couldn’t imagine him turning into a rat purely on the strength of a virus, not with his alien physiology. And I’d seen what happened to people who got infected but couldn’t change their shape due to some quirk of fate or body. The disease made their bodies boil with malignancy, cancers erupting viler than Ebola, ulcers and tumors swarming over healthy flesh until at last their systems collapsed. At the end, flesh and bone liquefied into red muck.

My brain wouldn’t willingly entertain the idea of Pal suffering that kind of horror, so I’d been blind to the possibility.
Let
myself be blind to it.

“Oh God,” I whispered.

“What bit him?” Cooper repeated sharply.

“Rats. Wererats.”

“Shit.” My boyfriend shook his head, looking grim. “His body’s destabilizing. I … I can’t do anything for this.”

“Jessie!” Pal’s voice was weak. “Where are you? I can’t see you.”

“I’m right here.” I put my hand on the side of his head.

“I’m rotting from the inside out; I can feel it.” He blinked cataract-blinded eyes at me. “Promise me … promise me you’ll kill me if there’s no cure for this.”

“It won’t get that bad! We’ll figure something out.”

“Promise me!” He heaved himself back and forth on the floor, trying to stand but he was too weak to get his legs under him.

“Stop that! Lay still, or you’ll hurt yourself!”

“Promise me!”

“Okay! Okay.” I felt my breath hitch in my chest. “I—I promise.”

Pal lay back on the floor, his sudden anxious energy spent.

My vision blurred, and I realized I was crying.

“Are you okay?” Cooper touched my arm.

“No.” I wiped my eyes on my flesh forearm.

“Here.” He held the pocket mirror out to me. “Call your father; maybe he can help.”

“Okay.” I took the compact from him and went outside onto the sand.

“I wish to speak to Magus Shimmer,” I told my red-eyed reflection.

The mirror went dark, then resolved to a view of the empty high-backed wooden chair in my father’s workshop.

“Hello, Dad?” I’d said the D-word without thinking, but it left a strange aftertaste. “It’s Jessie—we need some help out here.”

I heard him flip-flop across the floor, and a moment later he plopped down into the chair.

“What’s happened?” he asked. “Has your familiar taken a turn for the worse?”

I nodded. “He’s got viral lycanthropy. Cooper and I are sure of it. He got bitten by at least one wererat, and there’s no way his body can change.”

“This is most serious.” My father looked grave.

Tears rose in my eyes again. “I can’t lose him. I just can’t. I’ll do anything to save him. Is there anything we can do?”

“I’ll send another potion; it will help with his symptoms for a few hours. I lack the skills necessary to
help him, but I know someone who may provide a cure.”

“
May
provide a cure?” I repeated, feeling the blood drain from my face. “As in, it’s not a sure thing?”

“I’m afraid it is not certain, no,” he replied. “Curing lycanthropy is a complicated process that involves any of several ingredients that are most hard to come by. If the ingredients cannot be found, the cure cannot be made, no matter the skill of the healer. I recommend that you take your familiar to Madame Devereaux as soon as possible. He should be feeling well enough to travel shortly after he gets the potion.”

“How do we find her?” I asked.

“Her location is a sensitive matter. A great many people with bad intentions would like to find her, and we’d rather that didn’t happen. I can give you directions to her home when you are ready.” He paused. “Hold on, the potion should be there momentarily.”

There was a blue flash high in the sky, and a dark speck began to plummet to earth, just barely visible in the moonlight. It slowed as it neared the sand, and I realized it was a green bottle. I plucked it from the air and ran back inside to give it to Pal.

T
he new potion was black and smelled like iron and dirty socks. Pal gagged on it, but he kept it down and it seemed to take away the worst of his pain. However, even after a few minutes he still had trouble standing, his leg muscles trembling and unable to support his weight. Walking was clearly not going to happen for him anytime soon.

While he rested, Cooper and I got dressed and then went out into the moonlit brush to gather palm fronds and a few branches from an orange-flowered kou tree. With the aid of my Leatherman tool we lashed the fronds and branches together with palm fibers into a triangular Pal-size litter. We carried the litter back to the beach house, put the futon pillow on it, and managed to roll him over onto the middle. Cooper cast a buoyancy charm on the litter and it rose, lifting Pal a few feet off the floor.

I opened the mirror and called my father again.

“I think we’re ready to go,” I told him, then flashed the mirror on Pal so he could see for himself. “He can’t walk on his own, though, and we probably can’t take him through narrow passages or dense trees. What do we do now?”

“If you would, once you’re all outside, please pull the cord again.”

Cooper and I gathered our stuff—I grabbed a few changes of fresh clothes from the garment rack and stuffed them into my backpack—and left the house, careful to stay on either side of Pal in case the litter started to tip over. Once outside, I did as my father had asked and gave the cord poking out of the corner of the house a good hard tug. The house folded in on itself as if it had been made out of playing cards, shrunk down to the size of an armchair, and then shot up into the sky, vanishing behind a burst of bright blue light.

“What do we do now?” I asked, hitching my backpack and shotgun straps higher on my shoulders.

“Well, your familiar’s inability to walk or fly complicates your path slightly,” he said, frowning at something to the side of his mirror that I had no way of seeing. Then he brightened. “Ah, found it. Begin by carrying him down the beach to the south; keep your mirror open, and I’ll tell you where to stop.”

My father led us to a portal near a rocky cove. I pulled off my glove to open it, and was nearly blinded by the midday sun shining bright on a stretch of desolate salt flats that had to be on the other side of the world.

“I hope you two are well rested,” he said, “because I am about to jog you around the world in eighty seconds. Keep moving; the Virtus Regnum may catch on to your location if you remain in one place too long.”

I never had time to take in much of the surroundings during the next minute and twenty seconds because
my father had mapped out a route to Madame Devereaux’s that had us going through so many entrances and exits I lost count. In almost every instance the doors leading from one portal to the next were practically facing one another and the three of us were suddenly characters in some door-slamming stage comedy or a Warner Brothers cartoon. But my father guided us, his voice strong and confident, and I followed his directions without question, something I never would have imagined myself doing a few months ago.

I tried to stay in physical contact with Pal and Cooper every time we entered and exited a portal to make sure we remained together, but it was difficult. The journey became a dizzying, almost terrifying mosaic of doors and sounds, odors and rapidly shifting climates; for three seconds that felt like three years we walked six feet between portal doors in what had to be the middle of Antarctica; luckily Cooper knew not to breathe as we crossed the knife-edged icy ground, and Pal’s breathing was so slow that he was never in danger of having his lungs freeze. The ice-wind felt like ten million razor shards being hurled at us with the force of a jet engine. By the time we threw ourselves through the next portal, our eyebrows and eyelashes were frozen solid, as was Cooper’s hair.

“Keep moving,” my father said. “Not far to go, but time is not our friend.”

No kidding?
I almost said, feeling something trapped between fear and frustration blossom in my chest.

“Last one,” said my father as Cooper and I scrabbled
and stumbled our way across a rock-strewn mountaintop toward the final door.

“Seventy-five seconds,” I heard Cooper shout across the screaming wind. I pushed ahead, almost skinning my hands raw on a small outcropping of jagged stones just beneath the shelf where the door stood. I opened the door and this time let Cooper push Pal through the exit before me.

We were on a muddy red dirt road. I could hear a hawk screech somewhere in the piney woods. The air was so humid I could almost
see
the atmosphere ripple as we moved through it; it was an actual weight like an invisible sponge pressing down on us. I could smell water both fresh and stagnant in the distance.

“Holy shit, Susie Q,” said Cooper. “I do believe we are in Creedence country.”

“Welcome to the bayou,” said my father. “I have contacted Madame Devereaux, and she is expecting you. Continue down Mossy Hollow Road until you reach a blue house. There’s a statue of a man by the mailbox.”

He paused, looking again at something to the left of his mirror. “I must attend to another matter. The arrangements with Madame Devereaux should be straightforward, but if you need anything please do not hesitate to contact me.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.”

I closed the mirror and Cooper and I began to guide Pal’s litter down the muddy road. It wound through a copse of oaks furred with Spanish moss and lichens, and then we came to a sprawling blue ranch house with a white barn out back. A huge magnolia tree bloomed in the front yard, the white blossoms humming
with bees. The front door was open behind a closed screen. Beside the galvanized steel mailbox was a stylized African statue of a man decorated entirely with cowry shells of different shades of white, yellow, and brown. He held out a small bronze bowl that contained an assortment of blue glass beads; whether they were offers from or to visitors I couldn’t tell, so I left them alone.

A knock-kneed girl of nine or ten in a purple jumper and bright pink Chuck Taylors came running around the side of the house, then slid to a dead stop when she saw us.

“Gran-maaaAAAA!”
she hollered, pelting into the house, curly black pigtails bouncing. “There’s people heeeere!”

A moment later, a stooped old woman came out of the house, squinting at us from behind thick old-fashioned bifocals. She leaned heavily on a staff of gnarled black wood, and a cowry bracelet hung off her bony wrist.

“Who are you people, and what do you want?” she demanded, her voice implying a strength that seemed impossible given her apparent physical frailty.

“I’m Jessie Shimmer,” I called back. “My father is Magus Ian Shimmer. He told me he made arrangements with you? To help my familiar?”

“Oh.” She blinked at us, looking irritated. “Wasn’t expecting y’all for a few more hours. Got my shows on the teevee right now. Guess I can pause ’em.”

She stepped toward us, looking over the tops of her spectacles at Pal, who was still asleep on his litter. “Lord have mercy, that’s one strange-lookin’ critter you got there. Hurry now, bring him round back and
put him in the barn, afore someone wanders down the road and sees him … they’ll think the Devil done come to town!”

The old woman turned back toward the house. “Shanique! Press the yeller button on the remote. I’ma be out here awhile.”

“Okay, Granma! Can I watch Alton Brown?”

“Why you want to watch that skinny little twerp fer? I cook a hunnert times better’n the people on them fancy shows! All you gots to do is pay attention in the kitchen once in a while.”