Switchblade Goddess (4 page)

“I was going to feel around for portal seams.”

“You can detect portals with that?”

“Yeah; how do
you
find them?”

“Spike finds them.” He reached into his breast pocket and the little jeweled lizard crawled up into his hand.

“What is that critter?” I asked.

“My familiar; he’s mechanical … obvious, right? A Viennese watchmaker built his body in 1880. You can’t see it, but there’s a soul-crystal inside, and that’s where the familiar spirit stays. Spike’s a pixie who pissed off his local faery queen and got himself indentured.”

Randall held his hand out flat in front of him. Spike glowed blue and went into a retriever-style point at an alcove beside the couches. “Awesome; it’s transspatial and not transdimensional. Good to know it’s not going to somebody’s hell.”

I pulled my glove back on. “Will he tell you where the portal goes?”

He shook his head. “Spike can’t tell. Gotta open sesame for that part. But at least I know a devil or demon probably won’t come popping out. Does your … hand thing tell you where a portal goes before you open it?”

“No, but I can take a look at the portal with this”—I tapped my left temple beside my ocularis—“and sometimes I get an idea of what I’m in for.”

He peered at my stone eye. “Did you get that from Dad?”

His question rattled me. “Yes, why?”

“Just curious. I thought it looked like his work.”

“Does he make a lot of these?”

“He makes a lot of stuff, period. Sight-stones, compasses, mirrors, enchanted swords, armor, you name
it. I’m not much of a judge of enchantments myself—I can’t make ’em so they all seem pretty cool to me—but from all I’ve heard, he’s one of the best enchanters in the world. He’s always tearing new tech apart in his workshop, figuring out how it works on a mundane level, and then figuring out how he can make it work with magic. I brought him an iPhone last time I visited and he had all kinds of fun with that. He’s kinda old school, so it took him a few years to really embrace the concept of computers, but now he’s totally into them. He can debate Linux vs. Windows all night if you let him.”

I found myself smiling as I imagined my father up late at night arguing operating systems on Usenet. At Ohio State, I’d met a few guys who bragged about their Internet trolling, and it gave me a warm fuzzy feeling to picture the greasy unlaid lot of them turning into toads after they flamed Magus Shimmer. “So which OS does he use?”

“Linux. Of course. I swear, one of these days he’s gonna try to install that on a dead badger. I think he maybe has too much free time on his hands, but no one’s asked me, so whatcha gonna do? He’s a natural-born hacker, and he’s all about open source. I think he’s made some Windows viruses and stuff, though.”

I gave my brother a hard look. “What? Viruses?”

Randall looked as if he’d suddenly realized he’d said more than he should have. “Not for regular people. I mean, he’s got a lot of agencies gunning for him, and he needs to be able to get at secured information. Sometimes that takes a spell, sometimes it takes a bribe, and sometimes it takes grabbing a password
through a key logger. He’s just using them to protect himself.”

“Doesn’t that bother you? I mean, you’re a cop, aren’t you? And he’s a criminal.”

“We’re both trying to help our people,” Randall said, looking uncomfortable. “Yeah, my bosses would not be cool with what my dad is doing if they knew about it … but come on, he’s my
dad
. And you know as well as I do that a lot of the laws we have to follow because of the Virtus Regnum are complete bullshit. Dad does what he thinks is right, and … well, it’s not like Dallas Paranormal is ever going to have an APB out on him. I’m never gonna be in a position where I have to try and arrest him.”

“How can you be so sure?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m
real
sure.” Randall laughed. “After what happened to him and Mom, he’s sure as hell not coming back to Texas anytime soon. And probably not the States, either. Until the legal sitch changes over here, he’s happy to stay where he is.”

His-and-hers grand necromancy convictions and being sentenced to life in prison probably
would
put most people off returning to the scene of the crimes. “Where is he?”

Randall paused. “Elsewhere.”

“You can’t say?”

“I’m … actually under a geas not to. It’s kind of a serious thing. He absolutely does not want uninvited visitors. And that’s intel that even Miko couldn’t get out of me. Not that she was too interested in information …”

He grimaced, shuddering, and scrubbed his face with his free hand as if to wipe the bad memories
away. Then gave me a smile. “But you’re family, so I can totally take you there. You want to see him, right? His place is really cool; you’re gonna love it.”

“Sure.” I was plenty curious to meet my father. “But I’ve got to take care of Miko first.”

“I know. And I have some potions upstairs to help with that; no offense, but you’re looking kinda hammered.”

“No offense taken.” I knew I looked like day-old roadkill. I glanced down at my flesh arm; the rash was getting worse. And the sunburn was surely doing absolute wonders for the scars on my face. I wasn’t going to win any beauty pageants when all this was over, and I wasn’t in the running for any Miss Congeniality awards, either.

“Well I got something in my gear bag that’ll perk you right up.” He glanced down at Spike, who returned the look with his tiny sapphire eyes; they were probably talking to each other telepathically. “Let’s go see about this portal over here.”

We walked to the alcove. A pay phone had once been bolted to the wall inside, but someone had pried it off with a crowbar, probably to smash it open for the coins. The maroon wallpapered plaster around the frayed wires and stripped bolt holes had broken away from the wooden wall beneath. Most of the city had suffered looting when Miko first took over. But people with lousy impulse control didn’t keep their souls long around her, so the odds were that whoever had been eager to vandalize the hotel for a few handfuls of quarters was probably in the pile of stinking corpses outside.

“I bet that back when the hotel was built, the registration
desk was farther out and this was in a back room.” Randall looked around at the ornate 1920s Renaissance-style lobby. “I can see where they took walls out and stuff.”

I blinked my ocularis through to views that had shown me portal doors in the past, and through one I saw the blue outline of a big, old door that looked like it had been made of lashed-together bamboo. It was tall enough for a man on horseback to get through if he ducked, maybe wide enough to admit an old Model T automobile.

“Someone definitely set up a portal here on purpose.” I pulled my glove off again and stretched my flame fingers in the air. “Let me see if I can open it.”

I reached out for the old iron ring that served as a door handle, and the portal sprang open at the touch of my flames. There was a whoosh of air into the hotel lobby, and along with it the smells of the ocean. We were staring at a section of isolated beach, nothing in sight but warm yellow sand, gently breaking waves, swaying coconut palms, and skittering brown crabs.

“This is maybe … southern Mexico?” Randall put Spike back into his T-shirt pocket and cautiously poked his head through the portal to take a look around. “I can’t see any buildings. Can’t tell where this is. It’s pretty, but … hmm. Probably I can’t get to Ohio from here, at least not quickly. Definitely keep this in mind if you want to kick back with some reggae and margaritas later, though.”

He stepped back into the hotel lobby and I pulled the portal door shut with my flame hand. “Got any other ideas?”

“I’m thinking.” Randall drummed his fingers against his chin for a few seconds. “Wait. There’s a building a couple of blocks away that was a whorehouse back in the speakeasy days. And those places
always
have old portals set up by people who didn’t want to be seen coming and going.”

I pulled my glove back on. “Okay, let’s check it out.”

We went out into the heat and corpse stink. As we were stepping down into the street, I saw a familiar face: Charlie, the freckled nineteen-year-old girl who’d helped me cut off Miko’s zombie supply. I’d probably be dead without her. The last time I’d seen her, she’d been heading out to battle; she was still wearing her tiger stripe camouflage fatigues and had her AK-47 slung over her back. Her fatigues were smudged with dirt and blood, and she had a stained bandage wrapping her right arm from her knuckles to her elbow.

“Oh, hey, Jessie!” Her face brightened in recognition and she grinned at me; I don’t think I’d ever seen her smile before. Of course, there hadn’t been a lot for her to smile about. “You survived! Sweet!”

“Yeah, thanks, glad to see you’re okay, too, but what happened to your arm?” I nodded toward the bandage.

“Oh, one of Miko’s creeps threw a bale of razor wire on me, can you believe it? It’s not that bad, though … Doc Ottaway gave me some antibiotics and a tetanus shot just in case, but probably the worst that’s gonna happen is my arms are gonna match.” She gestured toward the jagged white shark-bite scars on her left forearm.

“Shouldn’t you be taking it easy, just the same?” I asked. “That’s got to hurt, and you must be exhausted.”

“Uh-uh, I’m feeling too hyper,” she said. “So I figured I’d help the guys who are going around looking for survivors. Doesn’t look like any of the zombies are still around, which is totally good! I had to kill like twenty of them this morning in the fight, and that stuff’s kinda hard to get out of your head afterward, you know?”

“Yeah, it is,” I agreed.

She nervously shifted her rifle strap and looked at my brother, blinking behind her spectacles as if she’d just realized a really cute guy was standing a mere two feet away from her. And then she started to blush, ducking her head shyly. “Oh … um, hi.”

“Hey there.” Randall smiled at her and stuck out his hand. “I’m Randall, Jessie’s brother.”

She shook his hand, her smile frozen in social terror. “It’s meet to nice you. I mean, nice to meet you! Um. I’m Charlie.”

She released his hand and looked back at me, her face still red. “So. Um. I should probably go, you know, someone might need help.”

“Okay,” I said. “Talk to you later.”

Charlie fled down the street like a spooked cat.

“Ah, virgin geek girls.” Randall smiled as he watched her disappear around a corner. “Gotta love ’em.”

“Be nice.” I wasn’t sure she was a virgin, but if she’d ever had sex it probably wasn’t anything she’d want to remember. “She’s been through a lot. And
also she has really good aim with that Kalashnikov of hers.”

He held up his hands. “Hey, sis, I’m nothing but nice. Not hatin’, just sayin’.”

We walked down Main Street to East Concho Avenue where we found Miss Hattie’s Café and Saloon and, a few doors away from it, Miss Hattie’s Bordello Museum above a jewelry store. The jeweler’s had been thoroughly looted. The door had been torn completely off its hinges, probably by thieves with tow chains and a truck; inside I could see smashed glass cases and scattered empty black velvet trays among the dust and leaves and tumbleweed fragments that had blown inside. So much for containing civil unrest in the most heavily armed state in the union. The dark wooden stairway up to Miss Hattie’s was relatively clear of debris; apparently the looters hadn’t bothered with the museum.

Randall glanced up the stairs and then turned to survey the wrecked jewelry store.

“All this was probably part of the bordello back in the day.” He reached into his pocket to retrieve Spike. “I bet the original saloon was over this way; there might be portals here on the first floor.”

He set the mechanical lizard on his palm, and the little creature glowed blue and went into another point, but this time his jeweled head did an odd sideways bob.

“Huh.
Two
transspatial portals over here,” my brother said. “Let’s check ’em out.”

I followed him into the jewelry store. The lizard led us to what looked to have been the manager’s office. My ocularis started to itch, which was a sure sign
something was nearby. I blinked through to the portal view, which showed the plain outline of an invisible doorway in the western wall. I pulled it open with my flame hand. It led into a parlor outfitted with late-nineeenth-century furniture and an old Texas flag and cavalry swords mounted on the walls. It smelled of dust and old paper, like a museum. The sky that showed through the lace curtains was a twin of the sky I saw through the store window.

“I think this is part of the officers’ quarters in the old frontier fort a couple of miles from here.” Randall spoke a charm under his breath, and the portal closed. “Let’s take a look at the other one.”

The second downstairs portal was in the store’s vault, which was standing wide open, the lock inexpertly reamed out. A burned-out hand drill lay among the discarded jewelry trays and metal shavings on the floor. The safe room inside was a little larger than a hall closet, and we had to pull the remaining steel shelves off their tracks to get to the portal.

It led to the kitchen in the basement of the Saguaro Hotel. A woman in a white apron at the stainless-steel counter stared at us openmouthed, her chef’s knife poised above some canned white potatoes on her cutting board. We waved at her and I quickly closed the door.

“Well, damn.” Russell chewed his lower lip. “If we don’t find anything else that actually gets us past the isolation barrier, we might have to try that beach portal after all and hope for the best.”

“Could there be another portal at the old fort?” I asked. “I mean, if they had a direct route to the whorehouse, it would make sense for them to have an
escape route to another city in case the Comanches attacked, wouldn’t it?”

“That would make sense, yeah. But it could be Miss Hattie or one of her girls arranged for the portal and the soldiers didn’t have their own Talent to set up anything else.” He got Spike out of his shirt pocket, and the little lizard bobbed on his palm. “There’s definitely something upstairs. Let’s go check it out before we go to the fort.”