Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
chapter
one
A Kick in the Head
The festering mob of meat puppets in their tattered Sunday best shambled aside as I rode Pal down Main Street toward the stark white columns and broad marble steps of the Saguaro Hotel. There had to be a thousand bodies in the stinking brown sea parting before us. My skull was pounding, the July 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. It could sense the impending carnage.
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.
Oh, fuck that noise, the rest of me replied. Fuck that long and hard.
But wait.
I’m getting ahead of myself … as usual.
I should have known my life would keep going merrily to shit. The previous Friday had been busier than a dam full of beavers on crystal meth. I’d run police roadblocks, battled dragons, and literally gone to hell and back as I rescued my boyfriend, Cooper, and his little brothers from a fate considerably worse than death. Every muscle in my body ached, and I was looking forward to getting some rest, if perhaps not much actual sleep. I’d seen some things that evening that would probably give me insomnia for, oh, the next decade or so. And there was the little detail that I’d put our city’s head wizard into a coma and killed a major guardian spirit. They both richly deserved it, but I’d broken about infinity-plus-one laws and surely the authorities were going to hunt me down with extreme prejudice. So I had prison and perhaps execution to look forward to as well. Yay, go me.
But, so far, it appeared I was safe for the night. I was definitely looking forward to the late dinner my witch friend Mother Karen was making for me and the other Talents who’d helped in the rescue. Whatever she had cooking in her kitchen smelled wonderful. And I knew my familiar, Pal, was plenty hungry.
I carried a platter of savory, steaming ham and a wooden bucket of water down Karen’s back steps out into the moonlit yard. It probably looked the same as most other backyards in the neighborhood: rattan furniture and a shiny steel gas barbecue on the brick patio, a wooden picnic table on the lawn, a scattering of oak and buckeye trees bordering the tall dog-eared plank fence ringed by softly glowing solar-charged lights. However, I suspected this was the only place in the entire state of Ohio sheltering a shaggy, six-foot-tall spider monster.
Who, based on the circles his clawed legs had torn in the turf, had spent the past half hour stalking his own posterior.
“Hey, Pal, I got your dinner,” I called.
He stopped going around in circles and blinked his four eyes at me, licking his whiskered muzzle uncertainly.
At least, I thought Palimpsest looked uncertain; as a ferret his emotions had been pretty easy to read. But now that his familiar form had become magically blended with his true arachnoid body … well, I didn’t exactly know what “happy” or “sad” or “puzzled” was supposed to look like on such an alien face.
“Having troubles over there?” I asked, setting the platter and bucket down on the picnic table.
“I … have an itch,” he replied gravely, his voice strange and muffled in my mind. Our telepathic connection was slowly improving, but that, too, was taking some getting used to.
“I could reach every part of my Quamo body and my ferret body,” Pal continued, “but oddly these new rear legs aren’t very flexible. I can reach my underside, but not my back.”
“Maybe you just need to do some yoga.”
Through the valved spiracles on his abdomen, he blew noisy chords that sounded like a child randomly banging on the keys of an organ. Laughter? Oh-please snorts? I’d only known Pal for a week, and already I had to get to know him all over again.
“That doesn’t help me at the moment,” he said.
“Horses back into trees and fence posts to scratch themselves,” I replied. “You’re tall enough to stand on tippytoes and scratch yourself on the low limbs of that oak over there.”
“How dreadfully undignified.”
“Or you could just roll around on the grass.”
“And that’s more dignified how?”
“Oh, hush. It’s not like anybody can see you back here,” I pointed out. “Otherwise you’d have flipped out the neighbors already and the cops would probably be here.”
Long ago, Mother Karen had put her house and its yards under a camouflage charm to keep her foster children’s magical practice sessions out of sight of the neighbors. So at least there would be no panicked suburbanites dialing 911 to report a monster prowling through Worthington.
I glanced up at the sky, half expecting to see a Virtus silently descending, ready to smite me like a curse from Heaven. One of the huge guardian spirits had already tried to do a little smiting earlier that evening. Mr. Jordan, the aforementioned now-comatose head of the local Governing Circle, had convinced the Virtus that I was committing some kind of grand necromancy instead of simply trying to rescue Cooper. I’d defended myself, not expecting to win the battle, but win I did.
It was still hard to believe: I had killed a Virtus. Nobody was supposed to be able to do that. Not with magic or luck or nuclear weapons or anything. It was as if I’d thrown myself naked in front of a speeding freight train in a desperate, stupid attempt to halt hundreds of hurtling tons of iron … and had somehow stopped it cold.
Miracles had abounded that evening. But I doubted the Virtus Regnum would see me as anything but a threat. They’d be coming for me, and from what I’d seen so far, they were as merciful as black holes.
I squinted up at the dark spaces between the stars, wondering what lurked there.
“Speaking of things that shouldn’t be seen by mundanes, how is that working for you?” Pal asked.
“Huh?” I looked at him, confused.
He nodded toward the gray satin opera glove on my left arm. “The gauntlet. Is it keeping your flames contained?”
“Yes, Karen and the Warlock did a good job enchanting this,” I replied, looking at the thin curls of smoke that were trailing from the cuff of the glove, as if I’d used it as a place to stash a still-smoldering cigarette. So far, that was the only sign that the lower half of my arm was a torch of hellfire, courtesy of my having to plunge my arm into the burning heart of the Goad, the pain-devouring devil that had imprisoned Cooper and his family.
“It slips down a little sometimes—I might have to find some double-sided tape or superglue to hold it in place.”
Sheathed in the glove, my arm functioned more or less normally, but still had a squishy unreliability. Fine finger movements were still difficult. And that wasn’t surprising, considering that my hand was boneless, fleshless, nothing but diabolic flame. I’d had to rely on a natural talent for spiritual extension to give it any kind of solidity; Pal had referred to the ability as “reflexive parakinesis.”
And it was pretty close to true reflex. My crysoberyl ocularis—a replacement for my left eye, which I’d lost the week before in a battle with a demon—still hurt a bit, and I was constantly aware that I had a piece of polished rock stuck in my head. But a couple of times that evening, I had completely forgotten that my left arm was no longer entirely flesh. And fortunately I hadn’t dropped anything important as a consequence.
“With luck we may be able to find someone to remove the underlying curse, and you’ll have your regular arm back,” Pal said.
I frowned. Everyone was treating my flame hand—and its power—like a curse. If I were an evil person, somebody bent on destruction and domination, my hand would have seemed almost purely a gift from the gods. With that kind of power literally at my fingertips, so what if having a fiery hand presented a few practical problems? That would be like complaining that you had to move a few boxes out of your garage to make way for the new Porsche. Or in my case, the new tank with a seemingly unlimited supply of surface-to-air missiles.
I was pretty sure I wasn’t an evil person.
