Authors: Lucy A. Snyder
Well, embiggen yourself, already … looks like we’ve got more corpse hauling to do
.
She wiped her face on the back of her hand. “It’s okay. What was I gonna say, anyhow? ‘Sorry I brought this evil into your life’? ‘Sorry you liked the evil a whole lot better’n you ever liked me’? ‘Sorry you turned out to be a real freak, and yet part of me still loves you’? Shee-it. The bullet probably said everything that needed saying.”
“Do you want to bury him?” I asked.
“No.” She stood up slowly, still gazing down at his body. “He used to be the best friend I’ve ever had … but all these other guys? They were someone’s best friends, too. Someone’s sons and maybe a few of them were someone’s daddies. Whatever we do for David, we do for all of them. And I ain’t got the strength to dig all those graves, do you?”
“Tell her we can give all of them a proper burial,” Pal said. “I know a spell we can use …”
chapter
twenty-nine
Showdown
I
was completely wrung out by the time we got back to campus. After a couple of cadets hosed the blood off me in the courtyard, it took my last bit of energy to go upstairs, take a hot shower, change into one of the stupid pizza shirts to sleep in, and collapse into the restraint chair. I was out before Pal finished strapping me in.
A pounding at the door woke me as the morning’s first light was streaming through the blinds. The sound hurt my aching head.
Pal, get that, would you?
I forced open my blurry, sticky eyes and watched him open the door. Charlie was standing there in tiger-stripe fatigues, her AK-47 locked and loaded. She looked pale and scared and excited.
“Miko’s super pissed that we cut off her supply,” Charlie said. “We just got word from the scouts that there are thousands of meat puppets coming to attack campus; they’ll be here in less than an hour. She had
way
more zombies in reserve than anyone knew. We’ve got the guns, but we’re pretty severely outnumbered. I heard some people talking like maybe we don’t have enough ammunition. Captain Flynn—he’s in command now—is mobilizing everyone and having them report for battle.”
While she spoke, Pal came over to me and undid my head restraints and pulled out the mouthpiece so I could reply.
“Am I supposed to report for battle, too?” I asked, trying to work the stiffness out of my jaw.
She shook her head. “Well, not here, anyway. Sara told me to tell you that whatever y’all are planning to do to attack Miko, y’all best get to doing it pretty soon. The only thing is, I can’t come with y’all, I gotta stay here. Captain’s orders.” Her expression darkened. “And Sara said I’d just get myself killed, anyhow.”
Charlie reached into her sling and pulled out two MREs sealed in tan plastic. She tossed them onto the bed. “That’s y’all’s food for today; they shut down the cafeteria and gave guns to all the cooks. I got you a vegetarian one, and him a meat one.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Did Sara happen to say where I’m supposed to find Miko?”
“Oh. Yeah. She says the cats say that Miko’s base is in the Saguaro Hotel downtown. It’s hard to miss; it’s the tallest building in the whole city.”
She shuffled her feet awkwardly. “Hey, I’ve got to go. I feel like I should give you a hug or something. But that might be kinda weird with you in that chair.”
“Yeah, probably.”
“So, um … bye? I hope I see you around later?”
“Me, too,” I replied. “Fight good. Stay safe.”
Charlie gave me a little wave, then hurried away toward the elevators. Pal freed me from the chair, and I stumbled into the bathroom to pee and splash some cold water on my face.
“I’m so not ready for this,” I croaked to Pal as I rested my forehead against the cool edge of the sink. “I feel like I’ve been run over by a whole fleet of Greyhounds. And then set on fire. God knows what other crap I got infected with yesterday.”
Pal picked up his MRE. “Well, eat some food and take your medicine; perhaps that will help you feel a bit better?”
“I guess it can’t hurt.” I found my Leatherman tool and opened up the veggie MRE, spreading the contents on the cot. The thought of eating cold cheese tortellini for breakfast made my stomach churn, but the package also had chunky peanut butter and crackers and, even better, a chocolate Soldier Fuel bar. I ate the energy bar with a bottle of water and took my antibiotics and ibuprofen. Then waited to see if the food and medicine would stay down.
To my joy, they did.
“I took the liberty of charm-cleaning and drying your clothing after you fell asleep,” Pal told me as he licked clean the inside of his packet of pot roast. “The hose-down left the leather quite damp, and your T-shirt seemed … unsanitary.”
“Thanks, Pal.” I stretched, trying to unwind my knotted back muscles. “Well, let me get dressed, and let’s do this thing.”
I couldn’t bear the thought of another day in the hot riding helmet, so I had Pal clean it and then I traded it to a girl down the hall for her straw cowboy hat. She seemed happy to have something solid to wear into the impending battle. Evidently, combat and tactical helmets were in relatively short supply on campus.
Once we were airborne, our destination was dead easy to find; it was the tallest structure in the city by at least twenty floors. Furthermore, the pale brick tower had the letters
SAGUARO HOTEL
spelled out in tall steel letters on top of its red, Mission-style hipped tile roof. I was pretty sure anyone within fifteen miles could spot the building.
Once we got closer, I could see a crowd milling at the base of the hotel.
“Jesus, she didn’t even send all the puppets she’s got to campus,” I marveled to Pal. Miko had certainly made serious headway on her two hundred thousand souls during her reign in Cuchillo.
I spotted an alleyway a block from the hotel that was clear of puppets. “Land us over there, behind that diner.”
Pal descended quickly but landed gently beside a green Dumpster. “How are we going to get through that crowd?”
“My shotgun and your charm,” I replied. “But maybe we won’t have to use either. Miko did seem like she wanted a face-to-face with me.”
Pal trotted out of the alleyway into the street in front of the hotel, expecting a fight. But the festering mob of meat puppets simply shambled aside as I rode Pal toward the stark white columns and broad marble steps of the hotel. There had to be a thousand bodies in the stinking brown sea parting before us. My skull was pounding again, the heat and hard West Texas sun nearly unbearable. I tipped my straw cowboy hat forward in a futile attempt to get some of the weak breeze on the back of my head.
And in a blink, Miko was suddenly
there
on the steps, Cooper and the Warlock strung up naked and sunburned on rough-hewn mesquite crosses to either side of her. As a small mercy, their limbs had been tied, not nailed, to the twisted branches. Their heads hung forward, insensible, as their chests shuddered to pull in shallow breaths.
The devil kitten in my saddlebag was purring loudly.
You ready for this?
I asked Pal.
“Ready for a slow, bloody, excruciating death followed by eternal damnation? Of
course
. What fun.”
Ignoring his sarcasm, I drew my pistol-grip Mossberg shotgun and racked a cartridge into the chamber.
“Give ’em back, Miko!” My voice was tight, shaky, a mouse’s outraged squeak at a lion.
She smiled at me, and all at once her beauty and power hit me like a velvet sledgehammer. If I’d been standing I would have fallen to my knees. I hoped I wasn’t getting wet; Pal would know and it would be a sprinkle of embarrassment on top of the disaster sundae I’d brought to our table.
“You know what I want,” she whispered, her voice floating easily over the distance between us. “Give yourself to me, and your men shall go free.”
A tiny part of me—the part that was exhausted, weary of fighting, weary of running—wondered if giving my body and soul to her would really be such a bad thing. It was the same part that had entertained the shadow’s vision of my future with it. I kicked that part of myself in the ass and chased it from my mind.
I swung my leg over Pal’s vertebral crest and slid down to the pavement.
Stick close behind me. I won’t last long against her, and I don’t want the kitten out of range
.
“Consider me your glue,” Pal replied.
“What do you want me for?” I slowly approached Miko, the shotgun still gripped in my hand. It would be completely useless against her, but I didn’t want her to know I knew that.
She laughed. “I always knew you would make a far better partner than the shadow, and you proved that beyond any doubt yesterday. Losing my puppets is … inconvenient, but I have more than enough to break down the last resistance. It’s time to move on from here.”
“What do you need a partner for?” I was still moving toward her; another twenty steps and I’d be able to light her up even if I couldn’t get my hand to stop shaking. “I mean, not that I’m not flattered and stuff, but it seems like you do okay on your own.”
Another laugh. “Oh, I do, but running a paradise takes a certain amount of focus and time, and it’s nice to have someone who can be relied upon for both work and recreation.”
I never thought the word “recreation” could sound quite as salacious as she made it sound.
“Paradise?” I was genuinely puzzled. She didn’t sound as though she was speaking with irony or sarcasm. “What paradise?”
“In here.” She pointed at her heart. “I am an entirely benevolent goddess to those who submit their souls to me. They receive the gift of living the afterlife of their dreams. If I have to take a soul by force, well … that soul gets to watch everyone else having a good time.”
“That sounds real nice.” I was in range. I dropped the shotgun and before it had hit the pavement I’d yanked off my glove and let loose with a blast of incendiary ectoplasm—
—which fizzled into nothing as she made the smallest of gestures with her left hand.
And then she grabbed my claw with her right, sending me down to my knees on the marble steps, flooding my body with pain.
“Now, that
wasn’t
very nice,” she said softly. “Or very smart. Did you seriously think I’d still be vulnerable to something as common as fire?
That
curse hasn’t bound me since I won my soul.”
Miko shook her head at me. “A shame you weren’t just a little more intelligent. I guess it’s true … good help
is
hard to find.”
She reached down to touch my face with her left hand, and I knew that she meant to take my soul, and I couldn’t speak or move and in my panic I did the only thing I could think to do and retreated into my hellement.
I found myself standing in the bedroom, the floor still sticky with the remains of the jelly.
I’m about to die
, I thought. When Miko figured out I’d run from her, she’d tear my body apart and that would be the end of me.
I held my breath, waited for the inevitable.
And waited.
And waited.
I scratched my scalp. Was I dead? Shouldn’t I have felt my death, somehow? And if I
was
dead, was I stuck here in the hellement forever?
There was only one way to find out. I went to the red portal door. Turned the handle.
And found myself sprawled on my back, the marble stairs digging painfully into my hips and spine, Pal’s paws cradling my head, his face peering down into mine. I felt my hand flame up again; at least it was stretched out away from my body so I wasn’t in danger of burning myself.
“Oh, thank Goddess. I thought you were dead,” he said. Then his eyes turned toward my flames. “My goodness.”
The black claw was burning away in my flames, crumbling painlessly to ash.
“What happened?” I asked. “Where’s Miko?”
“It was very peculiar,” Pal said. “She touched you, then screamed, shoved you away, and disappeared. The meat puppets all fell down; wherever she went, she’s no longer controlling them.”
“Whoa.” I finally figured out what had just happened. “She popped the Goad spirit out of me instead of my soul. Guess she didn’t much like the taste of it.”
“I imagine not.”
“Help me up; we gotta get the guys down from those crosses.”
They were both unconscious; the Warlock still bore the gash on his forehead and other injuries from his beating, but it looked like Miko or one of her puppets had worked Cooper over even worse. He had knotty, purplish bruises everywhere.
Pal and I cut the ropes binding them to the mesquite logs and carried them into the cool of the lavish, 1920s Renaissance palace–style hotel lobby. Nobody was in there except for a couple of meat puppets dying quietly on the shiny chessboard floor. We put Cooper and the Warlock on a couple of the wide leather couches and between the two of us were able to work enough healing magic to bring them out of their comas.
“Wow, you’re a sight for sunburned eyes.” Cooper gave me a lopsided smile, then winced as he sat up. “Where’s Miko?”
“She’s gone. She tried to take my soul, and got my devil instead. So the Virtii and the cats were right, and I didn’t really have to do anything but show up.”
“Huh. Why didn’t we think of that?” the Warlock murmured.
“More to the point, why didn’t Sara or anyone else just tell us that?” I sounded whiny, even to myself, but dammit, after everything I’d been through, I felt I’d earned a good whine.
“Miko’s a mind reader,” Cooper said. “So it wasn’t gonna work if you knew about it.”
“Have you seen my brother Randall here?” I asked Cooper.
He nodded, then looked like he wished he hadn’t moved his head quite so vigorously. “I think so, yeah. Everybody’s in the penthouse on the top floors. She’s got the Talents chained up, broadcasting her antimagic spell. Some of ’em are in bad shape. We should get up there and get ’em free.”
Thankfully, the old wire-cage elevator still worked. Pal and I helped the guys into the lift car. As we stood there, I realized the guys weren’t meeting my or each other’s eyes. Glad as they were to be free of Miko’s torment, I got the feeling they weren’t so happy to see
me
. Crap.