Shotgun Sorceress (16 page)

I bit my lip. Pal was right. And apparently also really pissed off at me. My hand still trembling, I took the card from Cooper.

“Fine. I’ll give it a try. But I’m going to try contacting Mother Karen first, just so you know. What are we going to do if the mirror magic won’t work because of the suppression spell?”

“We’ll figure something out,” Cooper said.

“Do you have the power of creation in that hell fragment of yours?” Pal asked.

Yes, I do
.

“Try the spell in there. Mirror magic should be workable from within a hell dimension,” Pal said.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go back inside; I’ll ask to use the ladies’ room and try opening the mirror in there. If that doesn’t work, I’ll go into my hellement.”

“Hellement?” Cooper frowned. “What hellement?”

“It’s sort of a long story,” I said. “I’ll explain later once I understand it myself.”

chapter
fourteen

Mirror Matter

T
he women’s restroom was practically spotless; evidently Rudy had time on his hands and nervous energy to spare. I locked the door behind me, then turned to the mirror above the sink. Could it work? I slipped my father’s pointer into a side pocket of my backpack. After rummaging through the main compartment for a few moments, I found a long strand of Mother Karen’s hair. I tucked the strand up under the corner of the mirror’s frame and touched the glass; it seemed impossible that I could enchant the materials. Every time I tried to focus on Mother Karen’s office, tried to focus on bringing out my Talent, it felt as if a strong hand was closing around my throat, my mind.

Time to try a different tack. I went into the toilet stall, hung the pack on the door hook, and sat down on the toilet. Could I even get into my hellement in this place? I stared down at my blackened stump.

Despite having no flames to concentrate on, slipping into my hellement was even easier than it had been in Mother Karen’s yard. I found myself standing in front of the red door in my childhood bedroom. Everything appeared to be exactly as I left it. I went to the mirror above my dresser and brushed the dust off the top of the frame. How would the magic work in here? Names mattered, after all, and I had Mother Karen’s name and her address.

I touched the glass and concentrated on visualizing the inside of Mother Karen’s office as it would appear from the vantage of the mirror. “I wish to speak to Karen Mercedes Sebastián, daughter of Magus Carlos Sebastián and Mistress Beatrice Brumecroft, of 776 Antrim Lane, Worthington, Ohio, 43085.”

I spoke an ancient word for “open.”

The mirror darkened, then began to clear. For just a moment I got a blurry view of Mother Karen’s office. Yes! Success!

And then the mirror went entirely black. A life-size medieval knight in full silvery Spanish plate armor rose in the frame.

“Begone, hellspawn!” the knight shouted, swinging his steel longsword at me. The blade thrust out of the mirror straight at my head. I managed to duck in time, snatching up my own sword from its place against the dresser, and parried his swing with a teeth-rattling clang.

The knight leaped through the mirror, knocking everything off my dresser, swinging at me wildly. He was quick, strong, and hard to parry.

“Can’t I just leave her a message?” I hollered at him as he knocked me backward onto the bed.

“Devils deserve no quarter!” He lifted his sword with both hands, preparing to skewer me to the mattress.

I saw a gap in the armor under his raised arms, and I jabbed upward. My blade sank deep into his armpit.

The knight snarled and disappeared in a puff of acrid blue mist.

I lay there on Buzz Lightyear’s quilted face, clutching the sword, panting for air, my heart pounding in my ears.

That’s one hell of a security spell
, I thought.
Mother Karen ain’t fooling around
.

Once I’d regained my composure, I sat up and checked myself for injuries. Even sixty seconds of a sword fight can slice you up good if it doesn’t kill you outright. Karen’s knight had nicked the knuckles of my right hand, and I had a nasty defensive gash running along my left forearm. I went down the hall to the bathroom and patched myself up with some gauze and a roll of bandages I found in the medicine cabinet, then went back into my bedroom to try again. My only remaining option was to contact my father.

I touched the glass, imagining my father’s workshop as I had seen it before. “I want to speak to Magus Ian Shimmer.”

I spoke another ancient opening word. Nothing happened. Not even so much as a flicker in the mirror.

My heart sank. I needed more information, or I needed a pointer of some kind, and I didn’t have either one. Too bad I couldn’t have brought the card into the hellement with me. I didn’t even know if Ian Shimmer was his true name, and I certainly didn’t have his home address.

Then I had a little duh-moment epiphany: Shimmer was my biological father. Half my DNA was also his DNA. So wasn’t my own flesh and blood a kind of pointer to him?

I slipped my right index finger under the bandages covering the gash on my forearm and smeared a bit of sticky blood on the glass. Concentrated.

“I need to speak with my father.
DvaaramuddhaaTaya!
”

The mirror hazed, resolved. I was looking into my father’s workshop.

“Um, hello?” I called. “Are you there?”

I had almost said, “Are you there, Dad?” but the D-word stuck in my throat and refused to come out.

I heard the sound of flip-flops slapping across the wooden floor, and my father appeared, still dressed in his orange pants and patchwork jacket. He sat down in the wooden chair across from his mirror, looking at me with an expression of deep relief and concern.

“Jessie, I’m so glad you’ve been able to contact me again,” he said. “Are you in Cuchillo?”

His question surprised me. How did he know where we’d gone? And then I was surprised that I’d been surprised. After all, how had he known that I was in the backyard to receive the teddy bear message? My father kept an eye out, clearly.

“Yes, we’re at a liquor store just outside the city limits.”

“I see you’re mirroring from a hell. Is everyone all right?”

“We’re okay. Do you know what’s going on out here?”

“I only know what Randall told me before he went there with Dallas Paranormal Defense. That was almost a year ago. He said that there was a report of a small town taken over by a powerful demon; he seemed to think it would be a routine operation for them, but his whole team went incommunicado that night. And then the Regnum put down a regional isolation barrier and I haven’t been able to get through—”

“Wait, who’s Randall?”

Shimmer blinked at me. “He’s your older brother.”

The word “brother” sent a shock straight down to the soles of my feet, and in the next moment I thought that surely I’d misunderstood him.

“What?” I asked.

“Randall is your older brother,” Shimmer repeated.

“I … I have a brother?” I replied stupidly, suddenly feeling thrilled. I’d wished for a big brother to play with when I was a little kid, yearned for someone to commiserate with when I was a teenager. Like most of my childhood longings, it wasn’t something I thought about much as an adult, although brotherly figures still popped up in my dreams every so often. The Warlock was too much of a hound to fill in as a surrogate, but he came pretty close sometimes.

“Yes, you have a brother.” Shimmer smiled, apparently amused by my reaction, and his expression infuriated me.

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” I scowled at him.

My father raised an eyebrow at me. “You didn’t exactly give me a chance when we talked before.”

“But what about Vicky?” I demanded, feeling betrayed. Having a brother was a damn big deal, and I wanted to know why nobody in my whole family had seen fit to clue me in. “She knew, didn’t she? Why didn’t she tell me?”

“She thought the boy was dead,” my father replied quietly. “That’s what the authorities told her when she went asking about him after your mother died. And so she didn’t tell you about him for fear it would just upset you more during a difficult time of your life.”

“And you didn’t tell her anything different?”

Shimmer shook his head. “We only had a few moments to talk outside the Regnum’s surveillance, and frankly I was too worried about your situation to think to mention him to her.”

I paused, trying to get a grip on my roiling emotions. “Tell me about my brother.”

“Randall is five years older than you,” Shimmer replied. “The authorities removed him from your mother’s care and put him in a foster home during our trial. She wasn’t allowed to have him back afterward; they claimed we’d exposed him to necromancy and they wanted him to have some sort of fresh start. They told him we’d both died considerably sooner than we actually did.”

Shimmer shook his head, looking angry and disgusted.

“How did you find him? Or did he find you?” I asked.

“I wanted to see my son graduate from high school, so I attended in disguise. Randall saw right through my careful obfuscations.” Shimmer smiled, looking proud. “The lad has sharp eyes and a good memory. He tracked me back to my hotel, and we’ve stayed in touch in the years since. He’s strong, well-trained … all my divinations say he’s still alive, but whatever is happening there in Cuchillo is most serious and dangerous.”

“I’ll find him,” I blurted out. “I’ll get him out of there. What does he look like?”

“I think you’ll see a family resemblance right away. He’s a few inches taller than you, just a shade over six feet, has your and your mother’s hazel eyes, but my mother’s sandy blond hair. Girls find him quite handsome; boys, too, apparently, but I won’t begrudge him his dalliances if he doesn’t deprive me of grandchildren when the time comes.”

I didn’t really know what to say to that; surely it was entirely Randall’s business if he wanted to have kids or not. So I changed the subject: “About us being stuck in Cuchillo … what you’re saying is nobody can get into or out of the city?”

Shimmer nodded. “That does seem to be the case. Sometime after Randall and his team disappeared and the authorities locked down the city, the demon apparently set some trans-spatial aerial traps to capture aircraft, but my sources say the authorities found and closed most if not all of them. I take it you encountered a stray open trap?”

“It was a stray closed trap; I had a choice between opening it or throwing us at the mercy of the Virtii.”

“Well, those creatures haven’t any mercy, so you made the wisest choice,” my father said.

I pondered what he’d told me about the demon. “Putting an isolation barrier around a whole town is a pretty serious move. They must think the demon is a real threat. Do you think the Virtii stranded us here instead of just killing us because they think we’re strong enough to kill the demon?”

“Apparently, yes. Or that you would weaken the demon enough to make their job of destroying it much easier.”

“So we could kill it and save the townspeople who are still hanging on here?”

My father looked concerned. “Your heroic impulse is most admirable, Jessie, but I think the Virtus Regnum has wagered that you will die in Cuchillo. So I beg you to focus on getting yourselves and your brother out of there. Do you think you can get back to the trap portal you came through? It might be possible to reopen it.”

I shook my head. “Magic mostly doesn’t work here. The demon is casting some kind of suppression spell. And we don’t have fire, either; there’s no internal combustion and so no cars or helicopters. Unless I can find a tame dragon, I have no way to reach the portal, and even if I did, I’m not sure I can overcome the antimagic enough to open it again.”

Shimmer tugged his beard thoughtfully. “Your brother is also quite talented when it comes to portal magic—I fear the demon may have forced him into helping it create the aerial traps. But if you can find him and free him, I’m sure the two of you together could create a new portal to escape the city, isolation barrier or no.”

“Could you let Mother Karen know what’s happening? I don’t want her to think we’re dead or blew her off or something.”

He nodded. “I can get word to her.”

We said our good-byes and I closed the mirror. I sat down on the bed. It was hard to process: I actually had a long-lost older brother. Who, according to his proud papa at least, was brilliant and handsome and talented … and possibly our main hope for getting out of this mess.

I hoped he wasn’t a dick.

chapter
fifteen

A Little Gift from the Welcome Wagon

I
opened the red door and suddenly I was back in my flesh body … but I was naked, standing on hot pavement, the sun beating down on my skin, covered in something warm and wet and itchy, the taste of pennies in my mouth—

—and then the death-memories hit me all at once:

The beautiful raven-haired woman with the deep green eyes smiled and whispered, “Come join your wife” and I fell to my knees before her on the carpet of the funeral home and she touched my head and I felt the shock run through me, a tugging and tearing inside me and everything went black—

The naked auburn-haired girl came at me in the parking lot, grinning madly, swinging her black scythelike left hand at me, connecting with my neck, the spray of my blood sparkling like rubies in the sunshine—

I struggled against the dead-eyed men holding me fast as the green-eyed lady came toward me down the church aisle, my prayers dying in my throat as she reached out and touched my forehead—

The naked girl axed me down and fell on my neck, tearing at my flesh with blunt teeth
.

I fell forward onto the pavement; there was something in my mouth. I spat it out: the tip of a man’s finger. More twinned death-memories hammered my senses: spiritual death at the touch of the beautiful green-eyed woman followed by brutal physical death at my hand. I began to throw up blood that was surely not mine. I realized I was leaning forward on both hands, not just my good right hand, but my left was a coal-dark claw that scraped crablike against the blacktop.