Shotgun Sorceress (24 page)

“I’ll do my best,” I replied.

“I shall do another set of divinations to try to get you some helpful information; it’s difficult to see past the Virtus Regnum’s magical barriers, but I think I can manage something.” He paused. “But
promise
me you will focus on getting out of there. I know that you have a charitable, good nature and you want to help the surviving townsfolk … but those people are not your blood. Family must always come first. Please do not gamble your or your brother’s safety for the welfare of mundane strangers. Please promise me this.”

He looked so sad and worried I found myself saying, “I promise.”

And then immediately wondered if it had been the right thing to do.

chapter
twenty-one

Doppelganger

O
nce I said good-bye to my father and closed the mirror, I sat down on my bed to think. He was right; clearly Miko meant to drive us all to so much angst and misery that we’d surrender ourselves to her. The meat puppets hadn’t been serious adversaries because they weren’t
supposed
to be. Their attacks were intended to exhaust our bodies, fill our minds with horrible memories of carnage, and burden our souls with the guilt of having had to slaughter people’s grandmothers. Attrition through demoralization, as the major had put it.

If I could just keep my head on straight, I knew I could blaze through everything and get us home, somehow. But my lust made that damned difficult, and Cooper’s anger wedging us apart made it thornier still. It wasn’t just that I felt as if I would go insane if I couldn’t get laid; I
missed
him. I missed hugging him, missed the comfort of his touch, missed laughing with him. Our stolen moments together in the tent in Mother Karen’s backyard seemed like a lifetime ago.

I looked at the bedroom around me. This was my dimension now. I created all this, purely from memory and will. What else could I create in here?

I held my hands out in front of me and closed my eyes. Thought of Cooper, his powerful legs, his lean body, his muscular arms, his runic tattoos, his curly black hair, the sound of his voice, the warmth of his touch …

Strong, familiar hands took mine.

I opened my eyes.

Cooper was standing before me, smiling down at me. He was naked, his long handsome cock half hard. Glad to see me, clearly.

“I missed you,” he said. A moment later, I realized it was what I’d wanted him to say. And decided that right then, I didn’t really care.

“I missed you, too.” I stood up; with a thought, my clothes were gone. We kissed; his mouth tasted like Nutella, as if we’d just come in from making a mid-morning snack in the kitchen. His skin smelled like fresh gingerbread and clean healthy man.

When we broke from our embrace, Cooper cupped my breasts in his warm hands, leaned down, and began to suck on my right nipple, sending an electric thrill through my chest and belly down to my vulva. The sudden spark blossomed into a sharp, insistent ache in my loins that made me moan. Smiling, Cooper straightened up and gently pushed me down so I was sitting on the edge of the bed. I lay back, my legs hanging over.

He knelt on the carpet between my legs and spread my lips with his thumbs. My flesh ignited at his touch; the anticipation was killing me. He began to run the tip of his tongue around the opening of my vagina in light, teasing circles. And then slowly up, up my juice-slick groove to my clit, which he circled, tapping gently just beyond my pleasure’s reach, tormenting me.

“Fuck me,” I whispered. “Please fuck me.”

He wet his fingers against my pussy and began to rub my flesh in gentle circles, still just barely touching my clit. I sucked in my breath. He slowly stood up, gently brushing his hard cock along the length of my inner thigh to my vagina. He pressed the tip against my waiting flesh and began to slowly push into me as he rubbed my clit directly—

—I moaned again as the dam of my pleasure swelled, ready to burst—

He drove his cock in deeply and I came, my flesh shuddering around his shaft. I threw my head back against the mattress and wrapped my legs around his waist, trying to pull him in as deep as possible.

When the surge of my orgasm had passed, he worked his flesh in mine more slowly, gently, giving my tension time to build, and then he thrust faster and faster, pinning me to the bed, my body at his mercy. I felt his cock shudder inside me as he came, and the feel of his seed spurting inside me sent me over the edge and I was coming again, gasping for air, my nerves singing with so much carnal joy I nearly passed out.

We collapsed, spent, after that. I fell asleep in the slow afternoon light filtering through the silent windows.

chapter
twenty-two

Fever

I
awoke with a start in the hellement; Cooper’s doppelganger was gone. How long had I been in there? There was no way to tell. I rolled out of bed and opened the red portal door.

When I came to in the restraint chair, I immediately knew something was wrong. My vision was blurry. My head was throbbing. Fever chills were washing through me. I tasted bile in the back of my throat, and my guts were in an uproar.

Pal?
I thought.
Pal, are you here?

“Oh, thank goodness you’re back. You had me worried sick,” he replied. “You were gone all night.”

I feel like crap. Can you untie me, please?
I blinked my eyes to try to clear my vision; Pal came into focus, hovering beside me.

“Certainly.” Pal undid the straps binding my head and jaws, then released my arms and freed my legs.

I pulled out my mouthpiece and got up slowly, my stiff joints and strained muscles bitching at me with every inch. My stomach was cramping, acidic. The floor felt like it was tilted at a weird angle. The furniture seemed to be undulating, and suddenly I realized I was seeing small, indistinct creatures scuttling in the periphery of my vision.

“I’m seeing the fey,” I slurred.

“Oh dear.” Pal put a clawed paw to my forehead. “You’re burning up.”

I sat back down on the chair. “I thought the hepatitis wouldn’t set in for weeks.”

“This doesn’t look like hepatitis to me. Admittedly I am not especially familiar with the disease, but you don’t seem to be jaundiced. A different blood-borne infection that the Warlock’s fetish couldn’t detect is the likely culprit.”

“Where are the guys?”

“The Warlock and Cooper came back about an hour after you went into your hellement—Cooper was apparently given a clean bill of health by the doctor—but an airman came to get them soon after. Evidently they were needed to help repel an attack by the meat puppets. Unfortunately I have no idea when they are likely to return.”

“Well, damn.” I licked my lips; my tongue felt like it was covered in paste. I could see the fey more clearly now: the weird little creatures were all over the place. A vermilion-feathered starfish was napping on my knee. “Could you grab me a bottle of water?”

“Certainly.” Pal turned away to get into my backpack.

One of the kittens mewed, attracting my attention. In my fevered vision, it no longer looked much like a kitten: it was a rangy creature of utter blackness with huge mirrorlike eyes and a gaping mouth of long, curving teeth. Its head reminded me more of a deep-sea angler-fish than anything truly feline.

I watched, horrified, as it pounced on a fey that looked like a fleshy daisy with tentacle legs. The “kitten” devoured the fey in two savage bites.

“Hey, Pal?” My voice shook.

“Yes?” He handed me the water bottle.

“I just found out what Sara’s kitties eat—they’re fey predators.”

“Oh dear. Well, given their reaction to the exorcism magic, we can be certain that they’re some type of devil.”

I looked around the room. “Also we’re apparently surrounded by paradimensional cat poop.”

“I must say I’m pleased that I do not share your enhanced vision.” He put his paw against my forehead again as I took a long drink from the bottle. “I think you should go see the doctor.”

“No argument here.”

Pal helped me up out of the restraint chair, and I leaned on him as we made our way down the hall to the elevators. It was probably five in the morning, and the dorm lobby was utterly quiet. A new girl was napping in the chair behind the counter. Once we got outside, the heat made me queasier and dizzy and I tripped on the curb in the early morning darkness. Pal caught me, sang himself a bit bigger, and carried me the rest of the way to the clinic.

The broad entry hall of the Student Health Center was completely lined with military cots on which meat puppets lay blindfolded and earplugged, their arms and legs tied down. IV drips carrying nutrition and drugs were taped into every arm, and catheter bags hung beneath the cots. At the end of the hall, I saw Sara sitting in a folding chair beside one puppet, holding his hand, her eyes wet with tears.

A petite young woman in green scrubs goggled at Pal and came hurrying over. Her name tag read Arleen Barnes, RN. “Can I help you?”

Pal, put me down
.

“I’m sick, got some kind of fever,” I told the nurse as Pal gently set me on the floor. I nodded toward Sara. “What’s that about?”

She followed my gaze, and her face fell. “Oh. Yes. That’s Sara’s husband, Bob. He was taken from us about six months ago, and she hasn’t been right since.”

“So you’re just keeping all these bodies alive in the hopes you can get their souls back somehow?”

Nurse Barnes nodded. “Yes. That’s our job, and we’re doing it the very best we can.” She pulled a digital ear thermometer out of her breast pocket.

“Why the blindfolds and earplugs?” I asked. “Are they sensitive to light and sound?”

“No. We found out the hard way that Miko can use them to spy on us.” The nurse looked uncomfortable at the thought. “Lean down a little so I can get your temperature.”

I did as she asked. The tip of the thermometer was cold and uncomfortable in my ear canal.

“Goodness, you do have a fever,” she said. “It’s 103.5. Come with me, we need to get your temperature down.”

Pal sang himself mastiff-size, and he supported me as I followed the nurse back to a cramped beige examining room that was absolutely filled with mushroomlike fey with tiny butterfly wings. At the nurse’s request, I sat down on the vinyl-upholstered exam table. There wasn’t a sheet of paper covering it; I supposed they’d run out some time ago.

The nurse took hold of my hands, frowning at the angry red marks the straps had left on my wrists. “What’s this all about?”

“I … had a seizure. My friends tied me down to keep me from hurting myself.” I got the feeling that the nurse was already plenty freaked out by Pal, and she didn’t need to know that I was possessed by a devil.

“Do you have seizures often?” She held open my eyelids one by one and shined a penlight in my eyes. “And what’s this thing?” She frowned at my ocularis.

“It’s a makeshift artificial eye,” I replied.

“Did you start getting the seizures after you lost your eye?”

“Yes.” It wasn’t a lie.

She turned away to furiously write notes on a clipboard, looking up only to ask for my name and Social Security number, both of which I gave her.

“What about your rash?” she asked, pen poised above the clipboard.

“Rash?” I looked down at my arms, and sure enough, my skin was covered in itchy-looking red bumps. “Wow. I didn’t even see that. This is new.”

“Have you been exposed to the blood of one of the Taken?” she asked.

I guessed that the medical personnel had been discouraged from using terms like “zombie” to describe Miko’s puppets. “Yes, a couple of them bled all over me yesterday. And … I’ve been recently exposed to hepatitis, but I don’t know if I’ve actually got the disease yet or not.”

The nurse hmmed and wrote more notes. “Well, a lot of people around here have that as well. Dr. Ottaway should be up by now … let me go see if she can take a look at you.” She set the clipboard down, went to a nearby cupboard, and pulled down a big bottle of ibuprofen 800s.

“Do you have any bleeding problems? Are you allergic to Advil or aspirin or tetracycline antibiotics? And are you pregnant?” she asked.

“Nope, nope, and nope.”

“Good.” She filled a paper cup with water from the tiny sink, and handed me one of the ibuprofen horse pills and the cup. “Take this … it should help bring your fever down. We’ll give you more to take back to the dorm with you.”

“Thanks.” I swallowed the medicine.

The nurse left, and a few minutes later she returned with a tired but pleasant-looking woman in a long white doctor’s coat. Her thick graying brown hair was parted in the middle and pulled back from her face; the style reminded me of Frida Kahlo, but wasn’t as severe. I guessed the doctor was just a few years older than Cooper.

She gave a start when she saw Pal crouched attentively on the floor beside me. “Holy smokes, what’s that thing?”

“This is Pal,” I replied. “He’s cool.”

“But what is he?”

I racked my fever-addled brain for a believable response. “He’s a … spider weasel … bear … from … Japan. They’re the hot new pets there these days.”

It had finally occurred to me that although he was a spider in general form and a ferret in coloration, there was something distinctly bearish about his teeth, broad skull, and the texture of his fur.

“I’ll have to take your word for that.” She straightened up, seemed to recover her professional demeanor, and stuck out her hand. “I’m Christine Ottaway, M.D. And you are”—she glanced at the clipboard—“Jessie Shimmer?”

I took her hand and shook it. Her grip was strong, and she had a guitar player’s calluses on her fingertips. “Yes. Thanks for seeing me on such short notice.”

“Honey, it’s
all
short notice around here.” She laughed. “I’m lucky if I get a solid five hours of shut-eye. But let’s not make this about me. So. You’ve got a pretty bad fever, and a rash, and you’ve had some blood contamination. Any new headaches and body pains? Upset stomach?”