Shotgun Sorceress (20 page)

I straddled the muscular GI on the brothel cot and slipped his eager flesh inside mine. “Oh, you so big, I fuck you long time.” I knew good English, but the GIs on leave didn’t want to hear good English. They wanted their girls skinny and underage and stupid, so I moaned nonsense like any other Tokyo whore while he whined drunkenly about wanting to be on top, but I put my hips into it, making it feel good for him while I got myself off on his tight ripe body, and as the sweet orgasm shuddered through me I grabbed the sides of his head and gave a hard, practiced twist that instantly snapped his neck, and his life was flowing into me, filling my hunger, the taste of his soul an electric ecstasy that eclipsed any moment I’d spent pinioned on a man’s cock and it was all I could do not to throw my head back and howl—

“You fucking bitch, let her go!” I distantly heard Cooper shout above me.

He’d snapped out of his paralysis and swung the butt of his shotgun at her head, connected with a sharp crack of fracturing bone.

Miko fell, but it wasn’t Miko anymore, it was the old woman, but Cooper didn’t seem to notice as he bashed her again and again, her skull splitting horribly. Blood splashed onto my pants and shirt.

“Cooper, Cooper, stop!” I grabbed his arm, but he shook me off. “Dammit, stop, she’s gone!”

He finally stopped, still holding his weapon high, breathing hard through gritted teeth. I’d never seen him so angry in my entire life, and it scared me.

“Fuck.” He turned on his heel and stomped over to a nearby fabric display where he began to furiously scrub the blood and hair and bits of tissue off his shotgun. “Fuck.”

I went up to him and touched his shoulder. My hand was shaking. “Are you okay?”

“I’m just
dandy.
” He gave the gun a final wipe and turned on me, scowling. “Let’s get out of here.”

He grabbed me by the wrist and practically dragged me along behind him, looking neither to the left nor to the right as he marched us back into the Western store.

“I got thimbles.” Cooper reached into his pocket and slammed the cards down on the counter in front of the Warlock.

“Whoa.” The Warlock looked at Cooper’s red face and the blood spatters on our clothes. “What happened?”

“Don’t want to talk about it.” Cooper stripped off his ruined dress shirt and tossed it angrily on the floor. He turned away from us and went over to Charlie, who was still smoking Virginia Slims by the window. “Can I have one of those?”

“Yeah, sure, they’re kinda girly—”

“Don’t care, I just need a smoke.”

As Charlie tapped out a cigarette for my boyfriend, I whispered to the Warlock, “Since when is he a smoker?”

“Since
never,
” he whispered back. “I mean, Coop sometimes bums a clove off Opal when we’re out drinking, but I’ve never seen him smoke outside a bar. What the hell happened to you two over there?”

I suddenly felt acutely ashamed about what Miko had done to me, and even more disturbed at what I’d felt inside her memories. “We ran into a meat puppet, and things got weird.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Weird how?”

“Weird like I don’t want to talk about it, either.”

Cooper took a long drag off his cigarette and turned toward us, bitter smoke jetting from his nostrils. “I am going to kill that cunt.
Kill
her. How
dare
she touch you like that. She … she fucking
molested
you. I am going to kill her, then raise her from the dead so I can kill her again!”

Cooper slung his shotgun over his bare shoulder and headed for the door.

“Honey, wait, where are you going? We don’t even know where she is!”

He glared at me; he had the expression I always thought he might wear if he caught me kissing a boy at a bar. “I need a walk.”

Charlie looked worried. “You shouldn’t go out by yourself, there could be zomb—”

“Oh, I hope so. I’d
love
to find something else that needs a skull cracking!” He snatched the pack of Virginia Slims out of the startled girl’s hand and stormed outside.

Hey, Pal
, I thought to my familiar, who was still standing guard in the parking lot watching the highway.

“What’s going on?” he replied inside my head.

Cooper’s pissed off, and he’s not thinking straight. I’m worried he’s going to get himself hurt. Could you keep an eye on him for me?

“I certainly will.”

The Warlock was staring at me, both eyebrows high. “The meat puppet molested you? Do tell.”

“It wasn’t the meat puppet. It was Miko. She took over the puppet’s body.” Embarrassed, I started pulling the thimbles off their white cards.

“What did she do to you?”

“Just, um, grabbed my wrist.” I pried at a difficult thimble with my thumbnail.

“And then?”

“I came.” I barely whispered the words.

“You what?”

I cleared my throat and stared up at him, suddenly feeling intensely annoyed. “I came.”

The Warlock rocked back on his heels and crossed his arms, giving me a look. “Oh really?”

I felt myself blush, and I looked away. “Yeah, really.”

“And then Coop had an alpha-dude shit fit.”

“Yeah.”

The Warlock began to chuckle.

“It’s not the least little bit funny,” I protested. “The meat puppet was an old lady, somebody’s grandmother, and Cooper bashed her skull in. It was really ugly. I’ve never seen him like that before.”

The Warlock scratched his chin through his beard. “Coop always acts real cool, but underneath that cucumber façade he’s got a temper worse than Opal. Takes a while to get him there, but once he’s good and mad he stews for a while. Give him time, he’ll get over it.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.” The Warlock winked at me. “Wanna help me enchant your glove? Not that the fire doesn’t look good on you, and I love hanging out with hot women as much as the next guy, but even I have my limits.”

I stretched, trying to work some of the tension out of my back. My spine popped. “Sure, let’s do the glove. Maybe Cooper will be back by the time we’re done.”

Once I worked the thimbles down into the fingertips of the glove—the death-memories from the deerskin were pretty minimal as long as I kept my hands dry—we started on the enchantment. It was mostly me handing the Warlock supplies when he asked for them and otherwise following his lead, since I didn’t have a clue about this type of enchantment. As we worked, I started noticing that he smelled good, and I mean
really
good. Lickably good. I found my eyes drifting down toward his crotch in my idle moments while the Warlock recited incantations. I’d never given his gear much thought before—and had managed to avoid seeing it in action despite his and Opal’s tendency to get busy pretty much whenever and wherever the mood struck them—but now I was hard-pressed to keep speculations about his dimensions out of my head.

It would be okay, I told myself, shutting my eyes. We could get to wherever we were going for the night, Cooper would calm down, we’d find some way of keeping my arm from spewing burning ectoplasm everywhere. He’d exorcise me. And then we’d find a condom. Several condoms. And a dental dam. And then Cooper would make love to me, and I’d have a really satisfying, mind-blowing orgasm, and I would not infect him with hepatitis or anything else. I would not hurt him. My brain would be wiped clean of thoughts about Miko and the Warlock and anybody who wasn’t Cooper. Period. I would get properly laid sometime very soon and it would all be okay.

It would all be okay, it would all be okay.

“Jessie? Hey, Jessie?” The Warlock snapped his fingers near my ears.

I opened my eyes. “Sorry. What?”

“Are you all right? You’re looking all red and sorta sweaty.”

“It’s just the fire. My arm. Makes me feel weird,” I half lied.

“Well, the glove’s done.” He held it out to me. “Want to try it on to see if it works?”

“Sure.” I took the leather glove from him and gingerly pulled it on over my flaming hand, my claws clacking into the thimbles. The neoprene extension on the cuff covered everything that needed covering, and the Velcro wrap made the fit just about perfect. Thin trails of smoke rose from the cuff, but there was no sign that the material itself was burning.

“Looks good,” I said.

Charlie came back into the store; she’d gone to the grocery to hunt for cigarettes, and was now carrying a couple of packs of Benson & Hedges. “We should leave soon.”

I shook my head. “Not until Cooper comes back.”

“We can’t stay here tonight; this place really isn’t defendable.” The girl looked worried.

“Another half hour won’t kill us, will it?” I asked her sharply, then turned away and closed my eyes to concentrate on contacting my familiar.

Pal, are you out there? What’s going on? We need to leave soon
.

No response. I tried again:
Pal, are you there?

Nothing.

He was just out of range, I told myself, trying to quell the anxiety building inside me. I chewed on my thumbnail.

“You okay?” the Warlock asked.

“I’m fine.” I smiled at him, probably completely unconvincingly considering the look he gave me right afterward. And despite my anxiety, looking at him filled my head with a hundred wet unwanted thoughts, a swarm of vermin fleeing the flooded tunnels of my id.

“I’m gonna do a little more shopping back here,” I told him and Charlie, hoping that out of sight would mean out of mind. “And yes, I’ll watch out for rats.”

I went into the T-shirt aisle first; I was wearing way too much of the World’s Best Grandma and wanted something cleaner. A black shirt bearing a cartoon of a stick man being thrown from a stick horse above the caption “I Do My Own Stunts” caught my eye. I pulled off my old shirt, used it to scrub the blood spatters off my dragonskin pants, and put on the new tee.

Finished with changing, I went down the horse-riding equipment aisle. Pal was much better able to fight at his current size, so there was no point in asking him to shrink himself down to a size that would fit in the van. I’d probably be riding him the rest of the way to the university; having my butt wedged between his vertebrae was surely not that comfortable for him. Clearly he found my libido horrifying—hell,
I
was finding it fairly horrifying—and if I was going to get all juiced up the moment a stiff wind blew across my nipples, well, some extra padding between my muff and his fur would help us both maintain what was left of our dignity.

None of the saddles would accommodate his alien physiology, so I took a look at the saddle pads. I found a moss-colored SMx Heavy-Duty Air Ride pad that seemed flexible enough to conform to Pal’s back and that promised breathability and shock absorption. Farther down, I found their stock of saddlebags; I picked out a glossy leather model with spacious panniers deep enough to temporarily hold a rifle stuck in catty-corner. They had several types of leather gun scabbards, but since I couldn’t use an actual saddle there wouldn’t be any good way to secure one to Pal short of probably disastrous experiments with braiding his fur. Remembering the sting of the airborne grasshopper collision, I went to their riding helmet section and picked out a visored Troxel Cheyenne covered with embroidered chocolate leather. With a little luck, the padded fabric lining would keep most of the unpleasant memories from the leather at bay.

I slung the saddlebag over my shoulder and tucked the pad under my arm and headed for the front door.

“I’m going out to the van for a little bit,” I told Charlie and the Warlock in passing.

“Why?” she asked.

“I’m going to drop all this in there for safekeeping until Pal gets back, and I’m going see if you have anything with a little more oomph than this Glock. And then I’m going to shut my eyes for a little while, because I’m tired.”

Charlie looked impatient. “We really need to—”

“Leave. I
know
. Gimme fifteen minutes of quiet time, okay? And then I’ll start looking for Cooper and Pal.”

I carried the tack out to the van. My fire went out halfway there. I got in the passenger side, shut the door, and climbed into the backseat. It was like an oven in there, even with the vent windows cracked. I tossed my backpack into the seat beside me, piled the tack on the floor between the seats, pulled one of the Mossberg shotguns I’d coveted out of its rack, and laid it on top of the saddle pad.

And then I sat there in the sweltering dimness, eyes closed, and focused on contacting Pal, hoping that the extra fifty yards would somehow make a difference.

Are you there?
I thought.
Hey, Pal, are you there?

Still nothing.

Keeping my eyes shut, I started trying to clear my head of the building panic and carnal thoughts that threatened to wreck my strained nerves. Breathed in, breathed out, slowly, rhythmically, just like my hapkido instructor taught us in concentration exercises. I pictured my mind as a smooth ocean wave rolling out to sea … and promptly imagined myself going down on the Warlock in the warm sand and foamy surf. Dammit.

There was nothing to do for it but take matters into my own hands. Hand, anyway. I unbuckled my gun belt and loosened the drawstring on my dragonskin pants so I could slip my fingers into my underwear. It was a hot mess down there, and I regretted bringing only a single change of underwear in my backpack. Buddha in a biscuit. At the rate I was going, someone might as well tattoo
NO SELF-CONTROL
right across my face and be done with it.

Everything was so slippery it was hard to get much satisfying friction going at first, but I leaned into it and bore down and pretty soon I was coming hard enough that I was pounding my head against the back of the seat in front of me to keep from crying out. I fell back, sweating, forehead hurting, stomach roiling again, legs sprawled. And suddenly aware that I stank of tang, and the moment I went back into the store the Warlock would know that I’d been pathetically jilling off in the van. Charlie would probably know, too. And so would everybody else I’d meet that day. Yay for good first impressions.