“Miko … she figured out how to get into my hellement, and she trapped us there. Tortured us.”
“Oh dear.”
“And I … I had sex with her. In front of him.”
Pal blinked at me, looking shocked. “Of your own free will?”
“Y-yeah,” I stammered, feeling myself blush deeply. “And I d-don’t know what she did to him after that. I don’t know where he is. I don’t even know if he’s still alive.”
“Listen,” Pal said. “There’s not much we can do for him here. Let’s focus on getting to your father’s castle; perhaps Cooper will be there this evening, just as the Magus expects. And if he’s not, your father has tremendous resources in terms of magic and people for search parties; I’m sure we’ll be able to find him.”
“Okay.” I wiped my face. “You’re right. Let me get my stuff packed up, and we can say good-bye to Shanique and Madame Devereaux …”
After a whirlwind run through another dozen portals, I was standing with Pal on my shoulder outside a hiker’s lodge somewhere in the Swiss Alps. Below us spread a gorgeous evergreen-forested valley dotted with small glacier lakes that gleamed like silver dollars in the early evening sun. A path of crushed rock was before us; it wound along the ridge above the valley, ending in a walled village on a mountain plateau
that looked to be about two miles away. In the middle of the city rose a peak of granite, and built into it was a slate-roofed castle that was dominated by five tall, elegantly spired towers of varying heights; they reminded me of cathedral organ pipes.
“Have your familiar fly you to the tallest balcony on the northern tower,” my father told me from the mirror. “I must attend to another somewhat pressing matter at the moment, but I will meet you in the antechamber there in two hours, if not sooner. I will have the servants bring you a light lunch, and they will attend to any other needs you may have. Good-bye for now.”
The mirror went dark, and I stuck it into the back pocket of my dragonskin pants.
“Let’s go over here to get you changed,” I said to Pal as I began walking toward a cluster of bushy yews. We hadn’t encountered many people inside the lodge, and despite the beautiful weather it didn’t seem like there were many hikers on the trail, but I didn’t want to run the risk of anyone freaking out if they saw a grizzly bear.
Of course, they’d be more likely to freak out about a giant spider monster, but by then we’d be airborne and heading to the castle. Where presumably people were used to seeing dragons, at least, so how much would Pal scare them?
“Feeling sneezy?” I ask him once we were hidden from view.
He took an experimental sniff as I set him on the leaf-littered ground. “Actually, no, my allergies seem much better here.”
“All this fresh mountain air, no doubt.” I reached
into the pocket of my dragonskin jacket and pulled out a packet of pepper I’d found in Madame Devereaux’s kitchen. I broke the paper open and poured the grounds into my hand.
“Try this.” I held my peppered palm out to him.
Pal took a good snort and almost immediately let fly with a mighty sneeze—
—and nothing happened, except that now a bit of ferret snot glistened on my fingers.
“Oh dear.” Pal blinked down at himself. “This could be a problem.”
“Try again.”
He took another snuffle of the pepper, and sneezed. And remained a hairless ferret.
“I don’t know what’s wrong.” Pal twitched his tail, agitated. “It was so very easy this morning …”
“Well, you’d
just
had a major spell performed on you, didn’t you?” I said. “You were full of all kinds of magical energy then, and now … well, not so much. Or maybe the changes are something you can only do every so often. Or maybe there’s some other key element we’re missing, and we just have to figure that part out.”
“The figuring out could take quite a long time.” Pal was sounding genuinely upset now. “I can’t believe I’m stuck like this—”
“It’s not so bad.”
“It
is
!” he exclaimed, indignant. “Not only am I a tiny, nude vermineater, I can’t bloody well play my flying spell like this, can I? I can’t take us
anywhere
. All I am right now is hawk bait.”
“Look,” I told him. “Calm down. We’ll figure it out. Later. But for now, the castle is right over there.
I’ll just walk it, okay? It’s a nice evening for a hike, and my father isn’t even going to be available for a while. And the potion hasn’t worn off yet. We’ll be fine.
Really
.”
I took off my backpack and fished out my Leatherman tool and one of the thick gray woolen boot socks I’d taken from the beach house.
“What are you doing?” Pal asked as I pulled open the knife.
“Making you a sweater so you don’t get cold or sunburned.” I cut out a half-moon of fabric an inch below the toe seam and cut some holes for his legs. “See? It’ll be like a little hoodie.”
Pal reluctantly let me pull the sock on over his head and slinky body, and after a few seconds we got his legs through the slits.
“I feel so incredibly foolish in this.” He blinked at me from under the shade of the toe fabric as I straightened the sock hem kilting his naked tail.
“You’re adorable,” I assured him as I put the Leatherman away and shrugged the pack back on.
“Don’t want to be adorable, want to have my magic back,” he grumbled as I set him on my shoulder.
The path was steeper than it had seemed from the hiker’s lodge, and it took me nearly two hours to get to the walled village. And while the balcony servants might have been expecting me, the jerks guarding the front gate definitely weren’t.
“Look, I don’t
have
a passport,” I told them for the third time. “Magus Shimmer sent for me. He’s expecting me at the castle.”
The first guard scowled at me. “You said you were supposed to fly there. Why did you not?”
“Right, I broke my helicopter pulling it out of my ass,” I snapped, finally losing my temper with them. “Do I
look
like I can fly anywhere?”
“Fraulein, we cannot allow—” the second said.
“For God’s sake, if you don’t believe me, ask the castle guard. Ask ’em.
Please
.” I pointed at the radios clipped to their belts. “They gave you those things for a reason, I hope.”
Finally the first guard radioed in, and after some back-and-forth in German that I didn’t understand, he paled a bit, then waved at the guards on the other side to open the gate for me.
“Please enjoy your stay in Schimmerstadt, meine dame.” He stood at stiffly formal attention in his blue uniform, all his suspicious condescension gone.
“I’ll do my best.” I strode past the guards into the village.
All the buildings seemed to have been built in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and most of the people who passed me on the cobblestone street were wearing old-fashioned clothing. If it weren’t for the occasional Bluetooth headset wedged on an ear or pedestrian engrossed in BlackBerry texting, I would have started to think that I had entered a place that had become lost in time.
I went around a corner and began walking up the street that looked to lead most directly to the castle when I heard someone a few feet behind me call my name.
“Huh?” I turned, surprised.
A teen boy in a grimy cotton tab-collared shirt and
knickerbockers stood there, staring at me, gripping his tweed ivy cap anxiously. Just as I was about to ask him what he wanted, I felt strong hands at the back of my neck. Pal hissed and leaped off my shoulder at my attacker, and I instinctively ducked. The beads snapped tight around my throat.
Oh god he’s trying to steal my amulet
, I thought, turning, trying to grab the thief’s hands to pry them open as Pal continued to worry at his thumb, but he jerked his hands up and back, choking me briefly before he snapped the cord.
Time seemed to slow down as I saw the blue glass eyes fly into the air, catching the last light of the setting sun—
—I looked up into the thief’s eyes and saw they were clouded, dead. He was a meat puppet.
And in a heartbeat, he transformed into Miko.
She smiled down at me. “You didn’t really think you were going to get away from me so easily, did you?”
I yanked Pal off her hand and tossed him to what I hoped would be safety, but I couldn’t be sure because the entire village around me seemed to be engulfed in flames, even the cobblestones hot coals in the hellish conflagration. The people on the street were shambling infernal zombies, their bones hot irons burning through their blackened flesh.
“Pal, run!” I shouted. My voice sounded like the frightened bleating of a sheep, and I wasn’t sure I was still speaking in a language he could understand. Our telepathy felt broken, whether because of my fear or because I’d accidentally injured him I couldn’t tell.
“He can’t help you now. Nobody can,” Miko said.
“Cooper won’t help—he doesn’t want you, after what you did. You’re nothing but a whore to him now. And you father won’t help you, either, once he knows the truth about you.”
I felt my own flames rise above my glove as my heart pounded with a dizzying mix of panic and rage.
“But you can help yourself,” she continued. “Swear your allegiance to me and all will be right with the world.”
“I—I didn’t consent to this!” I stumbled backward, away from her. The fire seemed so much worse than the charnel house horrors she’d shown me in the swamp; I’d expected the swamp to be hostile, but here in my father’s domain I really thought Pal and I would be safe. Miko’s ambush was another psychic sucker punch, and I was having a hard time recovering. I could feel my sanity starting to crack.
“I
don’t
consent to this,” I told her, trying to regain my composure. “Please stop this.”
“Stop
what
? I haven’t touched you. All I’m doing is sharing a different perspective on this fine world we both live in, and it’s not my fault if you can’t simply tune me out. I’m like a street musician playing a little song for you in the subway. If you don’t like the music … well. Pay the piper or run away, little girl.”
At that, unthinking rage overtook my fear. I stripped off my glove and punched her right between her breasts with my flame hand, and she fell … only it wasn’t her. It was the meat puppet, a huge smoking hole in his chest.
“Papa!” the teenager screamed behind me, and then I heard him running at me, so I whirled around and met him with my flame hand. He wailed as his
flesh sizzled like a steak on a grill and I threw him down to the cobblestones. There was a crack of a bone snapping, and he didn’t move.
“You’re so
good
at murder,” Miko whispered admiringly inside my head, and everything in me that had been cracking under her pressure shattered.
The fires around me rose high, swirling into the sky, and I was sprinting as hard as I could away from the corpses, screaming at the top of my lungs for everyone to get the fuck away from me, because I couldn’t tell the phantoms from the real people anymore. They all looked like burning monsters and the part of my head that could remind me it was just an illusion had gone silent, and all I could hear was the pop and snap of the fire.
I tripped on something and went sprawling, nearly burning myself with my hand, and when I got to my knees I saw that a tall devil stood before me. He was all naked red muscle and long shiny black horns and eyes of purple flame, and when he spoke his voice shook me like an earthquake, but I couldn’t understand the words he was saying. In his clawed left hand he gripped what looked like a coil of barbed wire, and he held it out to me.
I scrambled up and raised my flame hand defensively, not knowing whether to let loose on him or not. “What the fuck do you want?”
He raised his other hand and made a gesture, and I realized he was casting a spell on me and I only had a half second to defend myself—
—
T
hen the half second was up and it was too late to do anything and the devil shouted a thunderous curse and a blue light blasted over me—
—I went blind for just a moment—
—And when my vision came back, the village was back to normal. The only things on fire were my hand and a section of cobblestones near my feet where I’d dripped incendiary ectoplasm.
Cooper stood before me dressed in forest green fatigues, staring at me with a look of profound worry. He was holding my gray opera glove, which I had apparently dropped in the street during my panic.
“Jessie, can you understand me?” he asked, speaking slowly.
Tight-lipped, my heart still jackhammering in my chest, I nodded. “I m-murdered a kid.”
“No you didn’t.” He shook his head firmly. “The kid will be fine, the medic got to him right after you dropped him … he’ll be in the hospital for a while, but they expect a full recovery.”
“His father—”
“Had been dead for at least a day; what the hell happened? Who sent a meat puppet after you?”
“What?” I blinked at him; couldn’t it have been any
more obvious who’d done this? But Cooper seemed genuinely confused. “It was Miko … when did you get away from her?”
“Huh?” His puzzled frown deepened. “You rescued me at the hotel … don’t you remember?”
For a moment, I was confused, too, but I realized he was talking about what had happened back in Texas. “No, not that, I mean … when I was at Madame Devereaux’s. I went into my hellement that night after you left. She had you tied up in there …”
I trailed off. Cooper still looked puzzled and worried.
“No, Jessie. That wasn’t me,” he replied gently. “I haven’t seen her since we were in Cuchillo.”
From the corner of my eye, I could see a swat team armed with net guns and tranquilizer darts creeping around the corner. Cooper made an impatient motion with his right hand, and they fell back.
“She captured us,” I insisted, feeling upset and anxious. “And tortured us. Don’t you remember? Did she—did she mess with your memory, or something?”
“No, baby, that didn’t happen.”
“It
did
happen!”
“But not to me,” he replied. “After I left you, I went to Columbus and took care of things there with the Warlock, and then your brother brought us here. And then your dad sent us into the forest to fight off a gang of ogres and redcaps that keep trying to break into his subterranean vault. We’ve been running around out there for the past couple of days. I saw a lot of strange creatures out there, but Miko wasn’t one of ’em.”