“Do you have a point?” I said.
“I think it would be a mercy to put him out of his misery,” she replied. “And take his soul for safekeeping. We can find a cute new ferret body to put it in once you’ve seen reason and accepted the position I’ve offered you.”
“Go to hell.”
“Perhaps I should put the old woman down, instead. Perhaps I’m at her house, right this very minute, and before you can get your little boat turned around I’ll have her scattered all over her garden. And you can watch Palimpsest die horribly tomorrow.”
My heart was pounding so hard that my vision was shaking. I stared at Miko, who was floating on her back, just her face and naked breasts clear of the water. “Why would you do that?”
She shrugged. “Because I can. Because
you
need to know that I’m determined to help you see reason. And as far as I’m concerned, your familiar is just a distraction.”
“If you hurt either of them,” I growled, “I will not rest until I’ve destroyed you. I will see you burn. And before I’m done, you will wish you’d stayed down there in that deep-sea trench.”
Miko laughed uproariously at that, splashing merrily, and I decided that ignoring her was probably the best thing I could do. So I focused on poling the boat as quickly as I could while Miko began to detail all the grotesque ways she would kill my loved ones, and their loved ones, if I failed to submit to her will. I wished I had a pair of earplugs, but part of me suspected all this was happening because she’d wormed her way into my brain. And if she
was
inside my head, not even a jet engine would drown out her voice.
We reached the mouth of the stream, which opened into in the dark maze of a bald cypress swamp. The tree limbs dripped with Spanish moss. The water here was stagnant, the surface thick with duckweed and drifting mats of ragged algae. I could smell rotting vegetation and the rankness of reptile dung, either from gators or from something much bigger.
“… in Tepes’ time, a good impaler could hammer in a stake without destroying any major organs,” Miko was saying, “and a young, healthy victim could suffer for two or even three days before he died. But I’ve heard that with modern piercing techniques and saline and penicillin injections you can keep your playmate aware and in agony for nearly twice as long. I think I’ll try that with the Warlock—he seems pretty strong, don’t you think?”
I was still ignoring her, but when she said that a terrible image rose in my mind, a psychic sucker punch: the Warlock hanging screaming from a huge wooden
spike that someone had rammed up under his rib cage and out through his shoulder. My senses spun with vertigo, and I fell to my knees in the boat. Fortunately I didn’t lose my pole. Or my dinner.
“What’s the matter?” Shanique looked even more scared than before.
“Just got dizzy.” I blinked to try to clear my vision and got to my feet. “Where do we go from here?”
“That way.” She pointed out into the dark bayou. “He’s northwest of us. I can feel him.”
I kept on poling the boat through the debris and cypress knees as Miko’s descriptions grew even more horrifying and vivid. Sometimes the water around us turned into a lake of blood and dismembered bodies, even through my ocularis. Vegetal rot turned to a charnel house stench. Sometimes the Spanish moss transformed into festoons of steaming entrails, and the trees became a thousand crooked gallows decorated with the corpses of the condemned. Sometimes the entire landscape around me looked like a Hieronymus Bosch nightmare.
After another half hour, “sometimes” became “always.” I tried dispelling the vision by speaking various old words for “clear sight,” but my magic did nothing. Nothing, and nothing, and nothing. I was getting really good at nothing.
“What, don’t you like this change of scenery?” Miko whispered in my ear. “But you’ve got such a talent for killing! Don’t shy away from it … embrace it. Don’t be a coward, Jessie. Just admit to yourself what you are, and your life will be so much easier.”
My clothes were drenched in sweat, and my anxiety was driving my fire up to the cuff of my glove. The
hell with Sap Daddy; if Miko kept mind-fucking me I was going to accidentally immolate myself before the night was over.
“I’m … having a hard time seeing straight,” I finally told Shanique. “Make sure I’m going the right way, okay? If it seems like I’m going to wreck the boat, say something.
Please.
”
The girl looked back at me, and I flinched. It looked like someone had scraped her face off with a length of razor wire or an equally crude tool.
“Are you okay?” she asked, and the part of my head that was buying Miko’s illusion marveled at how well the girl could enunciate without any lips.
I shook my head. “Not so much, no. But … it’s my problem, not yours. Just don’t let me wreck us.”
A little while later, I heard Shanique inhale sharply.
“What is it?” I couldn’t glimpse anything but the landscape of carnage.
“It’s him … he’s here, I know it.”
“Where?” I strained to see past the bloody veil.
“I dunno, I can’t—”
The girl shrieked and something big and strong rammed the bottom of our boat, knocking it sideways, and suddenly I was plunging into the warm, sticky gore. I went under completely for a moment, fighting against what felt like a dozen dead hands grasping my arms and clothes, but I managed to surface, spitting foul gore from my mouth. The lake boiled around my flame arm, the stench of the smoke and steam like the toxic emanations of a rendering plant in the pit of Hades.
Shanique was still screeching in panic. The girl definitely had a sturdy set of lungs.
“It’ll be okay!” I hollered up at her, part of me wondering if I was telling her a terrible lie. I still couldn’t see the beast, but I could feel the vibrations of something huge pulling itself across the muddy swamp bottom. “You know what to do … sing to it!”
I heard her take a deep breath, and I figured she’d just start screaming again—hell, if I’d been in her situation when I was nine they could have strapped me to the roof of a fire truck and used me as a siren—but what came out was a beautiful soprano note, a little shaky at first, but it got stronger and stronger and became a sound of such transcendent clarity you could compare it to the purest stream in the mountains above Shangri-la or the gleam of Caladbolg’s steel or the glitter of the Hope Diamond and all those other things would seem mundane and unimpressive. Shanique had the kind of voice that could make the most cynical, hard-minded atheist instantly believe in a benevolent higher power, believe in
anything
, really, and in that moment I realized that my father was helping Madame Devereaux stay hidden not for the old witch’s sake, but for the girl’s. She wasn’t even old enough to bleed yet, and she could sing like
this
? Oh my god. She was a Talent rare even in the world of Talents, and a whole lot of people would have loved to get their hands on her.
She held the note a little longer, then took another breath and began to sing an old Spanish Christmas song. I didn’t understand the lyrics, but the words didn’t matter. The power was all in her voice, and as Shanique’s music flowed over me, Miko’s horrible vision evaporated like fog in sunshine. The gore
around me became innocuous swamp water, and what had seemed to be zombie hands grabbing at my legs was just a tangle of common river weeds.
I looked up and found myself staring up into a set of toothed jaws the size of Madame Devereaux’s Volkswagen. I’d have been momentarily petrified if the sight of the monster wasn’t a welcome relief from Miko’s visions. The creature looked like the skeleton of some kind of dragon that had been taken over by the flora of the bayou. Creaking green vines linked the ancient bones, serving as muscles and sinew. Moss bearded the dragon’s jaw and huge scarlet rose mallow flowers bloomed in caches of muddy debris on its back and sides. I could see between its ribs, and where the dragon’s flesh heart should have been was a knot of dark, shiny vines that pulsed with a faint blue glow.
Shanique was standing ramrod straight in the boat, apparently giving the song all she had. I caught her eye and she pointed at the bag of gear with an expression that clearly said, “Get on with it already!”
So I got on with it. I splashed back to the boat, grabbed the gym bag, slung it across the front of my body, and began to climb the beast’s slippery vines to reach the heart. My flames were still sizzling against the wet glove, but the sulfurous steam wasn’t thick enough to do worse than make me cough a little. And Sap Daddy was too damp for me to accidentally set on fire.
Gripping a mossy rib between my knees as if it were a tree trunk, I unzipped the bag and pulled out the African knife. My access to the heart vines was blocked by some stray vegetation; I cut as little of it away as possible, just enough so I could squeeze the
jug and funnel into the chest cavity. I positioned the receptacles beneath one thin, pulsing black vine, then slit it with the tip of the knife.
Black sap—the same sap that Madame Devereaux had put in Pal’s apples—began to ooze from the core of the vine down into the funnel and the jug. The fishy odor was much more pungent in this fresh dragon molasses, and that on top of the sulfur in my steam made my eyes start watering. The vine clogged after a little while and I had to make another cut. My thigh muscles began to ache from the effort of clinging to the rib after about fifteen minutes, but I hung on until the jug was full. I carefully corked the jug, slipped it and the knife and funnel back into the gym bag, and slid down to the water.
Once I was back in the boat, Shanique continued caroling as I poled us away back toward the stream, avoiding the mossy wrecks of other boats that had ventured into the swamp after Sap Daddy.
“Do you think you can keep singing long enough for us to get home?” I asked her. Whatever magic the girl was able to weave in her music, it was doing a fabulous job of keeping Miko out of my head. I knew Shanique couldn’t keep it up forever, but I’d enjoy what peace I could get while it lasted.
Shanique nodded, looking a little mischievous. She took a deep breath, and started belting out “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”
I smiled and began to sing along with her.
M
adame Devereaux was waiting for us on the stream bank, looking impatient. “Why you singing that, girl? I told you not to waste your Talent on them silly songs!”
Looking innocent, Shanique pointed at me. I just shrugged.
“She’s helping me out with a little problem tonight.” I threw the loop of the mooring rope over the tree stump and stepped out of the boat with the gear bag. “We got the sap; you want it?”
The old witch ignored the bag and frowned up at me. “ ‘A little problem’ my bony posterior! Bend down here so I can take a look at your eye, girl. Your flesh one.”
I did as she asked, and she took off her spectacles and peered into my eye, holding up her kerosene lantern for a better look. What was this, an optometry exam?
Shanique hopped out of the boat and peered at my face. “Ooh, your eye’s gotten all purple! It looks like a grape!”
“Well, now, when was you gonna tell me you’re bein’ diabolically possessed?” Madame Devereaux’s
sharp tone of disapproval made me instantly feel defensive.
“Well, now, since when do
you
care?” I shot back. “It’s my problem, not yours.”
“It gets to be my problem right quick if your head starts a’ spinnin’ while I’m in the middle of my spell for your critter, don’t it? If your devil makes you distract me, your familiar don’t get cured. He gets
dead
. Do you want that?”
I flinched, realizing I’d been an idiot. “No, ma’am. I’m sorry.”
The witch lowered her lantern and sighed at me, shaking her head. “Come on to the house. I got something that’ll keep it getting’ any worse. But leave your kickers on the porch … don’t be tracking mud all over my floors!”
Feeling utterly tainted, I followed her up to the front door, pulled my mucky boots and sodden socks off and left them on the concrete steps, then followed the old witch inside, my pruned feet slapping on the polished hardwood. She took me to a back bedroom where she unlocked a large mahogany jewelry chest and pulled out a necklace made of blue glass beads with a large round turquoise pendant. When she held the necklace out to me, I realized that the beads and the stone had been carved to look like eyes.
“Put this on, wear it close to your heart. And keep it on till you get to your daddy’s castle,” she said. “I reckon whatever’s tryin’ to get its hooks into you won’t be none too happy about being spirit-blocked. So when you take this off again, be ready for the devil to hit you hard.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I slipped the necklace over my head
and tucked it under my T-shirt. The moment the stone and glass touched my bare skin, I felt the same kind of cool washing-over relief that Shanique’s song had given me in the swamp.
After that, I went outside again and helped Madame Devereaux set up a black iron cauldron on a tripod over a pine log fire in the middle of a big circle of packed earth in the backyard. We gathered fresh herbs from her garden, and then put the dragon molasses, plants, and some silver nitrate powder in the cauldron to boil. I went into the barn, roused Pal and got him to roll back onto his levitating litter, and pushed him over to the spell circle.
“Put your critter on the ground right there.” Madame Devereaux pointed at a spot that looked to be due north of the cauldron, just beyond the worst heat of the fire. “And take that litter back to the barn; the magic in that could interfere with my magic.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I did as she asked and came back to the circle. “Is it okay if I sit beside him?”
Madame Devereaux nodded. “Matter of fact, I need you to stay with him. Make sure he don’t try to leave the circle.”
She headed back to the house. Even with her protective amulet, I was starting to feel anxious again about Miko showing up, anxious about what she had done to Cooper, anxious about everything. I leaned against Pal’s warm bulk, whispering “it’ll be okay” over and over. I wasn’t sure if he was conscious enough to actually hear me.