Shotgun Sorceress (22 page)

We dutifully handed in our weapons. The blonde tagged the guns and gave us pink paper claim stubs. “Now, don’t lose these,” she admonished.

“We won’t,” the Warlock replied.

“I think Sara’s probably going over the scout reports in the RA lounge—” Charlie began.

She was interrupted by a scream in the hallway to our left. A large black cat came rocketing out of the corridor with a balding, middle-aged man in a Catholic priest’s black cassock close behind. The priest was carrying a large sledgehammer and mumbling something in Latin between panting breaths.

The cat slid to a stop in front of Pal and fluffed up its fur, hissing at my familiar. The priest stormed up on the stymied feline and brought the sledgehammer down on the cat with enough force to break its body wetly in two.

Shouting his Latin prayer now—I was starting to recognize it as one of the old demon banishments that really didn’t work too well—the priest brought the sledgehammer down on the cat’s skull.

A woman in her midthirties came rushing out of a back office. She was wearing a light blue T-shirt on which someone had Sharpie-markered “Mayor Pro Tem,” baggy mom jeans, and a child’s red plastic cowboy hat over her prematurely white hair. She was also wearing a big-ass .480 Ruger Super Redhawk revolver strapped to her hip.

As the priest raised his sledgehammer for another blow to the cat’s corpse, the woman drew the Redhawk with both hands, put the nine-inch barrel to the back of his head, and pulled the trigger. His skull came apart like a watermelon, and suddenly all of us within ten feet were wearing him.

The woman wiped a bit of skull and blood off her cheek with her thumb and frowned at the priest’s headless corpse. “Now, Padre, I’ve warned you three times, you
don’t hurt the kitties
. I can’t have you acting like this. I just can’t. I think I’ve been more than reasonable about this.”

The woman finally seemed to notice all of us standing there gaping at her and smiled at me. “Oh, hello, you must be Jessie! I’m Sara Bailey-Jones, acting mayor of Cuchillo. The kitties told me you’d be coming. I’m
so
sorry about your clothes—ask Brittney at the front desk for a fresh tee. I think they have some leftovers from World Peace Day. You’d take a large or an extra-large?”

As I looked into Sara’s Adderall-blue eyes, it occurred to me that she was utterly, completely, break-out-the-straitjacket batshit crazy. And also she appeared to be in charge. And based on the general lack of reaction to her blowing the priest out of his socks, this wasn’t the first time this had happened in the dorm.

“Extra-large, please.” My voice was a hoarse squeak.

“Ooh, look, kittens!” Sara squealed like a teenage girl.

I looked down at the floor. The pieces of the smashed cat were healing themselves, sprouting legs and heads and tails and turning into fluffy little black balls of cuteness.

“Okay, I’m officially freaked out now,” the Warlock whispered.

Sara didn’t seem to hear him. She reached down and scooped up the kitten that had formed from the cat’s back legs and held it out to me. “It’s dangerous to go alone. Take this.”

“But—but I’m not alone.” I wished I could keep my voice steady. “I have Pal here, and Cooper. And the Warlock.”

“You need a kitten. They’re
crucial.
”

“But … what do I feed it? And where are the litter boxes?” It finally occurred to me that one of the things that was disturbing me on a subconscious level was that, despite there being twenty-odd cats in the immediate vicinity, it didn’t smell the least bit litter-boxy. All I could smell was blood and gunpowder. And sweaty guy funk. But no cat poop.

Sara waved her free hand dismissively, as if I’d asked her how often the city plowed the streets during snowstorms. “Oh, we don’t worry about that here! Please, take the kitten.”

Her voice hardened a little on the word “please,” and there was a gleam in her eye that worried me, so I reached out and took the little creature from her. The kitten settled into the crook of my arm, purring. It smelled like hot electrical wiring.

“That’s better.” Sara beamed at me. “You can keep him in that saddlebag of yours; they like riding around in sacks and slings. I think they’re sort of like cockroaches that way; they like darkness and a little pressure on their bodies. Only they’re cute, of course. And cockroaches don’t like ear scratchies and belly rubbies.”

“Yeah, um, I’m pretty sure Jessie and her friends are tired.” Charlie looked a bit embarrassed and worried, as if she didn’t know what Super Nutty Nutbar thing Sara was going to say or do next. “So could we maybe get Britt to give them the key to their room?”

“Certainly,” Sara replied. “Be a dear and get that for them, would you? We’re giving them the corner quad on the eighth floor.”

I held the kitten out in front of my stone eye and blinked through a couple of gemviews, trying to figure out what I was looking at. “So … where did these cats come from?”

“My television set.” Sara picked up another kitten and handed it to the Warlock. He took it from her gingerly, squinting at the purring fluff ball as if it were a ticking bomb.

“Your television set.” Cooper stared at her.

“Oh, yes!” Sara scooped up the last kitten and cuddled it under her chin. “So soft! I heard the president say on TV that we Americans make our own reality, and I thought, you know, he was right about something for a change! That man screwed up
everything
 … I wanted to give him a real piece of my mind, and then one night my mom and I were watching a Ronald Reagan Western, and a kitty came out of the screen! I named him Ringu. He brought more of his friends from commercials and old sitcoms and cable movies.”

Sara stopped cuddling her kitten and squinted at it. “I think this one came out of
The Matrix
. But it doesn’t matter where they came from, what matters is that they want to help me put things right. And they gave me the idea that we should go visit the president during one of his live speeches.”

Sara stared at me earnestly, and I felt supremely creeped out by the look on her face.

“Did you know,” she asked, “that pound for pound, cats are the deadliest predators on the planet? Yes. It’s true! And so we got ready to go see the president, and his speech was about to start … and the power went out! Miko did it. I
hate
her. She screwed up
everything.
”

What the heck is going on here?
I thought to Pal.

“My educated guess,” he replied, “is that this woman is a latent, untrained Talent whose powers were triggered by an emotional trauma that also set her on the road to madness. Very dangerous. I would avoid upsetting her if possible.”

What about these cats?

“I’m not sure what they are quite yet.” Pal’s claws scratched on the floor as he shifted his weight nervously. “Electrical spirits, perhaps? Figments of her mind that her powers have made tangible? Some type of devils? We’ll have to watch how they behave. But clearly they’re able to counteract Miko’s antimagic field, so it would seem prudent to keep one nearby.”

“Mein Gott, what a mess you’ve made!” An old woman in a short-sleeved purple dress tottered out from the hallway to our right. At first glance I thought she was a meat puppet—her body was positively cadaverous, and she certainly smelled like she was close to death—but there was a sharp intelligence behind her yellowed eyes.

“Must you do this?” The old woman waved her cane at the dead priest. I saw an old, faded concentration camp tattoo on her nearly fleshless left forearm. “Would you do this to a rabbi, too? You’re acting like you belong in the SS-Totenkopfverbände!”

“Mom!” Sara turned on the old woman, her face flushing red. “Don’t say that. That’s mean. I have to keep order here!”

At that, the young men in the lobby started quietly closing their books, setting down their cards, pausing their video game, and slipping out of the room. Behind the counter, Britt looked as if she wished she could do the same.

“This is not order, this is fascism!” The old woman pounded her cane on the floor, punctuating every word.

The kitten in my arms was starting to vibrate, and I could see tiny electrical sparks arcing between the hairs of its fur. It felt like the static when you put your hand on an old cathode-ray TV screen.

“Mom, do you want to go back to the graveyard? Do you want that? Because I’ll take you back there!”

“Is that anything like sending someone to the cornfield?” the Warlock whispered. I silenced him with a backward kick that connected solidly with his ankle.

Charlie tugged on my sleeve. She was carrying a stack of tie-dyed T-shirts, sheets, towels, and some boxes of white soap. “I have y’all’s keys. We really should go upstairs now.”

We quickly followed Charlie down the right-side hall to the elevators. Once we got in, Charlie and the kittens seemed much calmer.

“They get into fights like that sometimes. It’s really better not to be near them when that happens,” Charlie said.

“So does Sara murder a lot of people around here?” Cooper asked.

Charlie looked pained. “Only when Major Rodriguez ain’t around. And only when they do stuff that makes her really mad. Hurting the cats is right at the top of her list. I feel bad for the padre, but he knew what she was gonna do. He must have lost his shit completely. Or, I dunno, maybe he
wanted
Sara to kill him, just so he wouldn’t give his soul over to Miko.”

We got out on the eighth floor and Charlie led us down to a corner suite of two bedrooms joined by a large shared bath. Each of the bedrooms were furnished mostly with built-ins: two couches that pulled out into single beds, two blond wood desks, and a set of shelves. The only freestanding furniture was a pair of wooden dressers, a couple of wooden chairs, a torchière-style floor lamp, and an old steel trash can. Narrow sliding doors led to cramped closets, empty except for dust and some wire coat hangers.

“Most of the rooms on this floor don’t have their own bathrooms,” Charlie said, “but Sara wanted you to be as comfortable as possible. I’m not sure what she’s wanting you to do, but she’s got something in mind.”

“Oh, goody,” I heard the Warlock whisper to Cooper.

Charlie set her armload of T-shirts and towels down on the closest couch-bed. “Y’all can get cleaned up and rest up here for a while. They’ll be serving food in the cafeteria until midnight, but it’s just canned beef stew and butterscotch pudding today. There might be some salad left. We’re running pretty low on everything, but the ag students are still able to harvest veggies from the greenhouses every so often. Let Britt at the desk know if you need anything else.”

Charlie left us staring at the stack of tees. The shirts themselves had been tie-dyed in gaudy spirals of orange, yellow, green, and purple, and the fronts of the shirts had been silk-screened with the image of a cheese-dripping slice of pepperoni pizza and the slogan “I Got Me a Piece at World Peace Day!”

“Wow. Those are … bright,” Cooper said. “I think I’d rather just wear the tux jacket.”

The Warlock shook his head. “The lady at JCPenney said I’m a winter. I can’t possibly wear lime green and shrimp orange in public.”

“Laundry charm?” I asked them.

“Laundry charm,” the guys agreed.

I called dibs on the shower, grabbed my remaining change of underwear from my backpack, and pulled Cooper into the bathroom with me. He completely undressed while I stripped most of the way down. I didn’t really want the Warlock handling my dirty underwear on general principle and certainly not after the day I’d had. It wouldn’t take a genius to look at the state of my panties and know what had been going on in my head the past few hours. Besides, it would be easy enough to hand-wash those on my own, even if I couldn’t find anything better than the tacky white institutional soap Charlie had given us with the towels.

Cooper passed our clothes out to the Warlock to charm-clean while I folded my unmentionables, set them aside under the sink, and readied the shower. It had one of those annoying, clunky single-knob controls set in the tile wall, and it provided seemingly a single-millimeter zone between freezing cold and scalding hot.

After a couple of tries, I got the water tolerably warm. “Hey, honey, come on in.”

Cooper got into the shower stall with me and stood under the spray, head bowed and eyes closed, the water running down through his dark curly hair in rivulets over his delicious smooth back and chest. I had the sudden fantasy of Cooper holding me against the damp wall, my legs wrapped around his waist, his hands all over me.

I took the soap out of the tile-bolted dish and lathered it up, rubbing suds into his shoulders. His muscles were knotted with tension, and I could feel a vibration in his body that wasn’t just regular stress. Miko’s fury still had him deep in his guts.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Fine.” The word was a clipped grunt.

I lathered my hands again and ran them in gentle circles over his back, down his sides to his groin.

His spine stiffened and he pushed my hands away from his genitals. “Sorry. Too much on my mind right now. Maybe later.”

Not looking at me, he took a quick rinse and stepped out of the shower, leaving me frustrated and horny. And also feeling too contaminated and rejected to do anything to relieve my own tensions. Yep, if this kept up I was going to be looking for a rope and a ceiling beam that could take my weight.

The rational part of me realized there was no point in making a big deal about it. If Cooper didn’t feel like fooling around, he didn’t feel like fooling around. It wasn’t necessarily because he was repulsed by my infection—his coldness was probably just the result of Miko’s tampering.

And once we took care of her and got the heck out of this godforsaken town, our relationship would go back to normal, wouldn’t it? And if not … well, surely we could find a healer to cure me, at least.

But before we could go after Miko, there was a small, dark matter we had to take care of first.

chapter
nineteen