Switchblade Goddess (3 page)

“Okay,” I told her. “I’m going to get you some help, as soon as I can. Just sit tight, okay? Do you have enough food and water to get through for the next day or so?”

She nodded. “We do. But please hurry.”

“I’ll do my best.”

I closed the mirror and turned to Randall, who’d been silently listening to the conversation. “Are the Warlock and Cooper up in the penthouse?”

He nodded, brushing his windblown sandy hair out of his eyes. “They’re still helping the others get back on their feet. Half of them had been under Miko’s spell for over a year, and it’s hard to get your game back after that. It’s like you just came out of a coma. Some of the guys in my squad are in really rough shape. I was lucky; she only put me in the spell-circle a couple of months ago.”

He patted the jeweled lizard in his breast pocket. “And she left Spike here locked in a box in the treasure room with all the other talismans and whatnots, so that’s double luck. We can’t find most of the flesh-and-blood familiars. The little ones like rats, they’re fine, they could hide in the walls, but we’re worried the others all got killed.”

Randall paused, seeming to realize he had gone off on a tangent. “But that’s got nothing to do with your friend’s sitch. What’s going on?”

“I gotta get some help to Karen, like … yesterday. Do you think you can find a way to get past the isolation field and take the brothers Grimm back to Columbus?”

“Yeah, but won’t you be coming with us?” He frowned, looking concerned.

I shook my head, feeling guilty before the words even crawled from my throat. “I can’t. I just … can’t. I’ve got too damn much unfinished business here.”

“
S
tay here and face Miko by yourself? Are you out of your mind?” Cooper Marron’s voice was loud enough that the other Talents in the penthouse were staring at us uncertainly. He, the Warlock, Pal, and I were in a secluded corner where I hoped we wouldn’t be overheard during normal conversation … but I hadn’t expected my boyfriend to start hollering at me right off the bat.

I searched his expression, dreading I’d see the mindless rage that Miko’s diabolic magic had inflamed. But he wasn’t angry: he was scared. And realizing that didn’t make me feel any better.

We take Miko to school, save what’s left of the town, and we’re out of here
. That’s what he’d said to me just a couple of days before, summing up our grand escape plan in a few breezy, supremely confident words. I wanted to see the wizard who’d told me that, not this frightened, battered survivor in front of me. Because seeing the man I loved so afraid made it so much harder to hold down my own terror that I was going to lose everything in this godforsaken town.

“I’ll have Pal with me,” I said, trying to sound soothing and assured. But the moment the words left
my mouth I realized they probably sounded haughty and dismissive:
I don’t need you, sweetcheeks, I’ve got a big damn magic spider
. Christ. Miko really was the gift that just kept on giving, at least where our emotions were concerned. Or maybe it was just the heat and lack of sleep and food and everything else that had happened since we got here.

“Jesus, no, I’m not letting you stay here!” Cooper looked anguished. He didn’t as much as glance at my familiar, who’d shrunk himself down to mastiff size for the elevator and hadn’t enlarged himself so he wouldn’t make the other Talents nervous. “I’m not letting us get separated again. It’s too dangerous. I can’t lose you again. No. No
way
.”

“Someone needs to help the souls Miko took. Someone needs to stop her from doing this again, and do you see anyone else around here who can do that? No offense, but she caught you. Y’all both fell right into her trap.”

Cooper scratched at the black four-day beard on his jaw and scowled miserably at his borrowed combat boots while I silenced the little voice in my head that was hollering that I’d fallen for her trap just as hard as they had, and it was mainly dumb luck that I’d escaped.

I turned away from him and faced the Warlock, whose eyes were fixed on the ceiling tiles.

“Blue is
your
brother,” I told him, my voice harder than it needed to be, “and someone needs to go talk him off the cliff,
today
, because if we don’t get him calmed down, the Virtus Regnum’s going to kill him and probably Mother Karen and her other kids in the process.”

The Warlock wouldn’t meet my eyes. I realized I was dangerously close to shouting, so I took a breath, trying to speak more slowly, trying to sound as calm and reasonable as possible. The Virtii might care about humanity as a species, but as individuals we were as good dead as alive, and I wasn’t sure anyone but me really understood that. I looked from one man to the other.

“Please don’t either of you tell me they won’t kill a little kid, because you know damn well they will,” I said. “The situation at Mother Karen’s could go so bad in so many ways. Guys, I
cannot
be both places at once. I need y’all to take care of this.”

“What are we supposed to do to calm the kid down?” the Warlock finally said, his words slurred from his healing mouth and jaw. I could see a purple lump on his chin even through his thick, curly black beard. He still wouldn’t look at me, and his body posture told me he didn’t want to be this close to me. Clearly we had a tremendously awkward conversation in our future about what we’d done to each other in my hell. But today wasn’t the day for it.

“He thinks we all blew him off and he’s mad,” I replied. “Or he’s depressed. Or
something
. But I think mostly he just needs someone to spend some time with him and help him put his radio back together.”

I searched their faces for some sign of agreement. I didn’t find any.

“C’mon, guys, you can do this,” I begged. “I can wait awhile before I go after Miko, and if you can get back here, we can all go gunning for her together. But Blue
can’t
wait, and Miko
won’t
stay wounded for
long. He’s your
brother
, and … and you guys
have
to do this. We have no other options, there is no plan B, the fat lady just took a deep breath and she’s about to hit high C.”

“I don’t really know much about fixing radios,” the Warlock mumbled.

“Oh Jesus Pogosticking Christ, Google it!” I threw my hands up in the air. “It’s a transistor radio, not an alien spaceship!”

Cooper rubbed his bloodshot eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Okay. We’ll go take care of Blue without you. Can your brother get us to Columbus and then get us back here pretty quickly?”

I nodded. “He says he can.”

Pain and worry in his eyes, Cooper put his hands on my shoulders and gave me a gentle squeeze. “Promise me you’ll wait for us to come back.”

I paused, considering. How quickly would Miko be able to recover on her own? It was an impossible question to answer, so I went with my gut. “I think I can wait until tomorrow morning, supposing nothing else happens. But after sunrise, if you’re not here, I have to go after her, one way or another.”

I
sat with Randall on one of the maroon leather penthouse couches as we tried to figure out how we were going to get Cooper and the Warlock to Columbus and back in the next eighteen hours. Pal crouched at my feet, listening.

“We could reopen the portal that got us here,” I suggested.

“The aerial trap above the big hay pile?” Randall asked.

I nodded.

“And the Virtus Regnum is after you?”

I nodded again. “Unfortunately, yeah.”

He shook his head. “They’ll have something watching that portal to see if you come back through. Even if you’re not with us, they might decide to grab us just to have some leverage if you give ’em the slip again. I think I should just open a new portal to Dallas and take y’all back along with my team, and once we’re there I can open a portal directly to where you need to go. Let me check with my squad leader.”

Randall turned and called to a gaunt man with shaggy dark hair and a year’s worth of Rasputinesque untrimmed beard: “Hey Javier, these people need to
get to Ohio … once we’re back at the base, can I borrow the lock to get them home?”

Javier’s tired brown eyes flicked from Randall to me, and he cracked a lopsided grin. “If they’re her friends, hell yes, and you can buy ’em all a steak and martini dinner on me before you take ’em back.”

“Hey,” I said to Randall and Javier. “My familiar Pal got into a fight, and his wounds don’t look good to me. I know he’s kind of an oddity, but do you have anyone on your team who’s any good at healing animals?”

“Bettie is,” Randall said, looking at Javier.

Javier nodded, and then turned toward the back of the room.

“Hey, Miyazaki, come over here, please! And bring your kit,” he called.

A girl about my age who seemed to be all elbows and knees and long black hair came jogging over, carrying a gray medical pack.

“So, ya, I’m here, somebody hurt?” Bettie had a thick Minnesota accent.

“My familiar.” I patted Pal and he stood up, holding out his left foreleg, which bore the worst scratches and abrasions. “He got into a fight with the rats in the steam tunnels.”

“Oh ya, looks like ya sure did, didn’t ya?” Bettie knelt in front of Pal and gingerly took hold of his foreleg, squinting as she peered into his wounds. “Looks like ya definitely got some infection in here. How bad does it hurt? Can ya talk? What kind of critter are ya?”

“He can’t speak,” I said. “He’s a quamo who got
blended with a ferret and probably something else in a magical accident,” I said.

“Well, that’s different,” she replied cheerfully. “Lemme see what I can do about this.” She put one of her hands over the worst of his scratches, closed her eyes, and began to recite a healing spell in what I guessed might be an older Japanese dialect. After a few minutes, she pulled her hand away.

The scratch hadn’t healed even a little bit.

“So, that’s not good.” Bettie bit her lip. “That spell should have totally worked … so, ya, something’s not right here. I can give you some peroxide and gauze and antibacterial cream, but that’s all I got.”

“Well, thanks for giving it a try,” I replied.

   Pal took a badly needed nap in a quiet corner while Cooper and the Warlock and Randall’s team gathered the rest of their gear from the room that Miko had used as a dump for her captives’ belongings. Randall and I went downstairs to look for likely places to create a portal to Dallas. As I closed the wrought-iron door of the old-fashioned cage elevator behind us, I became aware of the warmth and weight of the compact mirror in the pocket of my dragonskin pants. I pulled out the shiny case and held it up.

“Do you need this back?” I asked.

He shook his head, smiling. “You keep it. I’ve got another just like it. That one’s already enchanted to quick-mirror Dad’s workshop—you just need to say his name. You don’t need his address or anything else … he doesn’t exactly want that overheard, you know?”

I turned the case in my hands, looking at my distorted
reflection in the lid. “Isn’t he worried about his enemies getting hold of this?”

“Nah, it won’t work for anyone who isn’t a close blood relative. And there’s a duress detection built in that shuts it down if the spell thinks you’re being forced to call him against your will, or you’ve been charmed, that kind of thing.”

I flipped it over, looking for a signature or other maker’s mark and not finding anything but more polished silver. “Can this do anything else?”

“Well, you can start a fire with it, though I don’t guess you need any help with that. And it can quick-mirror my other mirror.”

He paused, getting a faraway expression that was a bit wistful and more than a bit embarrassed.

“So what’s the phrase for that?” I asked.

“ ‘Devil in a black dress.’ ”

I gave him a long sideways glance. “ ‘Devil in a black dress’?”

“It’s a line from an old Sisters of Mercy song,” he replied, his face turning ever so slightly pink. “I … had that spare mirror made for my fiancée. Well, she
was
my fiancée. The Sisters were one of her favorite bands, and when I met her she was in this phase where she was listening to
A Slight Case of Overbombing
practically every time I got in her car. Anyhow … well, a mirror isn’t like a cellphone, I can’t just press a button and delete the trigger. Maybe if I was a better enchanter, but I’m not, so oh well.”

The elevator finally creaked to a stop at the lobby and the door rattled open.

“It sounds like your relationship was pretty serious.” I stepped out onto the shiny chessboard floor.

“It was,” he said.

“So what happened?”

He shrugged, I guess trying to look nonchalant, but there was an uncomfortable twist to his movement. “You know. The usual stuff. We loved each other but I was gone a lot on missions, and she cheated on me and I cheated on her and it just got weird. I don’t think either one of us was cut out for monogamy.”

“Some people aren’t,” I said, thinking of the Warlock and his girlfriend, Opal. “Did you consider a poly arrangement?”

“Aw,
hell
, no. I mean, not with her, anyway. That would’ve just brought
all
the drama, and I get more than enough of that at work.”

His tone and expression made me suspect the situation had been considerably more complicated than he was willing to say, but I wasn’t going to pry. Now wasn’t the time, and I didn’t really care what I had to say to the mirror as long as it got me in touch with the people I needed to talk to.

So I changed the subject: “You said you thought there might be a portal around here?”

“Um. Yeah.” He pointed to a couple of brown leather couches near the abandoned marble registration counter. “I got the sense of something over that way when I was walking through there, but I didn’t have the chance to check it out.”

I pulled off my gray satin opera glove, and my flame hand flared bright orange in the dim lobby.

Randall looked startled. “Whoa! What are you doing?”