The Devil's Standoff

by V. S. McGrath

  As she spoke Hettie found a stick and dug a hole in the dirt floor. A few inches down she hit the edge of the barrier spell. The bubble of power completely surrounded them.

  “My son…” Beatrice hugged her elbows. “How is he?”

  “You can ask him yourself as soon as we get out of here.” Hettie searched the tent, breathing deep to suppress her growing fear. “Walker’s hiding under a glamor spell, but that won’t keep him safe for long. Apparently there’s a general here who’s a powerful sorcerer—”

  “El Toro,” she uttered. “You won’t get far with him around. He’s using a blanket influence spell on everyone in the camp.”

  “Blanket influence spell?” Uncle had planted talismans on people, including her, to make them compliant and do whatever he asked. He was plenty talented, but it’d taken considerable energy to twist people’s mind like that. From what she’d read, blanket spells covered large groups of people over large areas. Not many sorcerers used them, though, because of the toll it took on the caster, and influence spells were particularly complicated and required a high level of maintenance. Hettie could only imagine what it took to maintain over a camp of several hundred men.

  Beatrice warned, “Everyone’s on high alert because he wills it so. Whatever plan you have cooked up, it may not work.”

  “Well, we have to try. Everyone’s waiting for a signal from me, including Walker.”

  Beatrice’s jaw tightened, and she snapped into action. “All right.” She drew a short paring knife from the bottom of her boot, the kind of thing an herbalist might carry around the garden to cut tough stems. “Put your gun out of sight. They wear their talismans around their necks, so you’ll have to act quickly.”

  Before Hettie could ask what she had planned, Beatrice shouted something in Spanish in a high, shrill voice. Two guards marched in, looking less than pleased by the summons. The healer waved the knife around wildly and with amateur menace. The soldiers gawped, taken aback.

  Hettie had her opening.

  Diablo in hand, she dropped into her syrup world. As she reached for their talismans, a shock sent her reeling backward and dropped her from her time bubble. The soldiers turned to her fully, shouting and aiming their weapons as they spotted the mage gun.

  In a fraction of the time it took to think about it, her arm whipped up, and Diablo’s thorn pierced her finger. Hettie only had enough time to think, Please don’t kill them.

  The gun knew better. She gleaned in Diablo’s mind’s eye that there was no way to save her without taking lives or else drawing more attention from the rest of the camp. The green glow burst from the muzzle, and in slow motion Hettie watched the men’s heads disappear in a puff of red mist.

  The definition of agony was carved into her flesh as the headless corpses thudded to the ground. Her spine snapped back, and her pores oozed fire as two years were subtracted from her life.

  It was over sooner than she thought it would be. Respite, she thought blearily, because she was in mortal danger and the Devil’s Revolver didn’t have time to exact its full price on her. She climbed shakily to her feet. Beatrice stared, pale and shaken.

  “You’ve bonded,” she said hollowly, then straightened, her face a mask of calm. “I understand now.”

  Hettie grimaced at the bodies. The lines where Diablo had parted heads from necks were perfectly straight, reminding Hettie of unfinished fleshy tapestries on looms. She gingerly collected the amulets, wiping her blood-slicked hands on one of the soldiers’ jackets.

  Talismans acquired, they slipped out of the tent.

  No one seemed to have noticed Diablo going off. Hettie knew that wouldn’t last, though. “Raúl?”

  “I lost contact. What’s happening?”

  “I have Beatrice Woodroffe, but she was separated from the others. They’re somewhere else in the camp. I need a way to figure out where.” She dragged Beatrice into hiding as a pair of soldiers marched past. Hettie whispered, “We were being kept in a magicked tent. Can you tell from where you are which ones are spelled?”

  “They’re all spelled to one degree or another.”

  “Well, then, I need to know which ones have extra magic on them. Ones with spells to keep people in.”

  He paused. “Yes, I can tell which are which. But I can’t see you to guide you to them.”

  She looked toward the hills. Any kind of signal would attract way too much attention.

  Raúl said, “I have an idea. I could project what I see to you.”

  She hesitated. “You mean, let you into my head magically?”

  “Yes. It would be temporary, and it will drain some of my power, but I can do it.”

  “How?” It sounded like a complicated spell, and she assumed some kind of talisman would be needed, or at least physical contact.

  “I have one of your hairs. I found it on your serape and took it just in case.”

  Everything inside Hettie recoiled. “You just … took it?”

  “I didn’t think anything of it at the time. It was … insurance. And it was a good thing I did, too.”

  Hettie would have words with the sorcerer later about respecting her personal bits and pieces, but right now she had to focus on the task at hand. The alternative would be creeping around in the dark looking in every tent until they stumbled on the villagers or until Walker or those soldiers’ bodies were discovered. “Do it.”

  “Close your eyes and open your mind.”

  She’d been through something like this before with Patrice Favreau. She closed her eyes and felt something brush her scarred temple. Her head snapped back, and a hot, bright flash seared the backs of her eyes, as if her brain were a match head that’d been struck.

  The layout of the camp became like a memory of a dream—familiar but indistinct. In her mind’s eye she could see the tents glowing faintly with spells to keep out wind and rain. Magicked tents with special spells on them glowed much brighter. And judging by the false memory, the prisoner tents were interspersed throughout the camp.

  Hettie headed for the closest one. No one stood guard. She pulled the flap back. Six roughly dressed men and women looked up as Beatrice held her finger to her lips, then quickly explained in Spanish who Hettie was.

  “How do we get them out?” Beatrice asked. “We only have the two amulets, and I doubt we can get more of them without drawing attention.”

  “I’ll work on that. How many more people are we missing?”

  “Four more.”

  One of the men spoke up and said something that made Beatrice blanch.

  “What is it?”

  “Raúl’s cousin, Julia, was taken to the officers’ tent. She is young and … exceptionally beautiful.”

  Hettie swore. “Okay. We need to find the others first. Everyone needs to get ready to run straight to the easternmost exit. The others will be waiting.” Beatrice related her instructions, then followed Hettie out of the tent.

  “Raúl, we need to break the spells on the tents holding the prisoners. Can you do that?”

  He hesitated. “Perhaps.”

  “Yes or no, Raúl?”

  “Walker would be better suited to this job. If I do this, I will be spent for the rest of the night, and we will have no protection on the journey home.”

  “Well, until you get in contact with him, it’ll be on you to break those spells.” She headed for the next magicked tent, Beatrice on her heels.

  “Maybe you should stay here, Mrs. Woodroffe,” she cautioned.

  “If you think I’m going to leave my son in danger, you’ve got another think coming.”

  Like mother, like son. Hettie didn’t argue. They scuttled to the next tent but found only boxes of supplies. “We’ll cover more ground if we split up,” Beatrice suggested.

  It would double their chances of being discovered, but their odds of escaping were d
ecreasing with every minute that passed. Hettie searched through her mental map. “The nearest magicked tent is in the next row, third from the north end. I’ll go two aisles over, tenth from the south end. We’ll meet at the end of the aisle. If anything happens to you, raise hell.”

  She nodded and slipped into the shadows.

  “You let an old woman put you all in danger.” Raúl’s disapproval and frustration telegraphed to her clear as light down a long tunnel.

  “Well, you can yell at her when we’re dangling from the gallows. Now stop distracting me.”

  Over in the next aisle, a soldier emerged from a tent and looked in her direction. She turned a sharp corner and forced herself to walk away at a leisurely pace, as if she belonged there and was simply on her way to another part of the camp.

  He said something out loud, but she kept walking. His voice grew louder. Hettie forced herself not to run. Her sweaty grip flexed around Diablo.

  Boot steps approached her from behind. She didn’t have a choice. Just as she turned to silence him forever, a shadow darted out. He arched back as a hand covered his mouth and a gash opened up in his neck. Blood gushed from the wound. The soldier struggled only briefly, then fell to his knees.

  Hettie gaped as Beatrice wiped her knife across the man’s sleeve. Something between awe and fear tingled across Hettie’s skin. “There was nothing in that tent.” The healer’s voice quavered, and she nodded at the body. “We should hide him.”

  They propped the soldier up against a barrel in the shadows, making it appear as if he’d simply fallen asleep there.

  The remaining villagers were in the next tent. Hettie told them the plan and turned to Beatrice. “You stay with them. I’ll find Julia.” She couldn’t leave the young woman behind.

  “But … you don’t know what she looks like.”

  “Raúl will tell me. Wait for my signal.” She headed for the officers’ tents.

  Raúl’s mental picture of his cousin came as clearly to Hettie as if she’d known the girl all her life. Smiling rosebud lips and an hourglass figure, long, dark hair, and innocent, doelike eyes—Hettie wasn’t surprised the officers had singled her out.

  The command tent echoed with music and rough laughter. A lot of spirits were being passed around. If Walker was in there, he hadn’t been discovered yet. A handful of soldiers remained on duty outside.

  Short of slitting the tent open from the side, there was no way in. “Raúl, I’m going to have to accelerate a part of our plan to distract the guards. Have you made contact with Walker yet?”

  “No. Which part of the plan—”

  She was already heading away from the command tent. “Keep your eyes peeled. I need to know where Walker is the moment you spot him.”

  The pigs in the pen were mostly asleep. The area wasn’t guarded, which was a relief.

  Carefully, she unlatched the gate. There were maybe fifty pigs in all, sleeping happily in their own filth.

  Drawing Diablo, she pointed it at the ground and focused. Scare the pigs. Get them running.

  She pulled the trigger.

  The gun went off like a crack of thunder, the green ball of light crashing into the ground with the force of an avalanche. The swine leaped up, funneling out of the pen through the open gate like a great wave crashing over and through a break in a shoal. They stampeded through the camp, mindless with fear.

  Shouts went up as one, then two, then five tents collapsed in the pigs’ run for freedom. When Hettie reached the command tent, the guards had abandoned their posts to chase down the pigs. Apparently saving their supply of pork was more important than babysitting their drunken commanding officers.

  Hettie breathed deep. Diablo at the ready, she ducked into the tent.

  Four men lounged in chairs ranged roughly in a circle, drinks and cigars in hand. A very pretty young woman perched on one man’s lap, looking terrified as he stroked her bare arm. Hettie instantly recognized Julia.

  Walker was nowhere in sight.

  Someone shouted. Instinctively she ducked, dropping into her syrup world. She moved carefully around the men, their faces frozen in surprise and confused dismay.

  She wasn’t sure how much she could do in her suspended bubble. Once the warlock Zavi had stretched that bubble so she’d walked all the way through the underground caverns at the old Sonora Zoom station. She hadn’t done anything like that since. Staying suspended in the cocoon of time was like flying in a dream: it didn’t work if she tried too hard, and it seemed to require the right balance of concentration and instinct. It made her scalp buzz, and her senses became more heightened.

  Testing her limits, she grabbed a clear bottle full of foul-smelling tequila. It lifted as it normally would, but when she poured some out the liquid left the bottle and stayed suspended, droplets tumbling slowly through the air. She took the bottle to the far wall of the tent and poured the contents onto the canvas, then grabbed a lantern and set the flame to fabric. The flame lapped at the trickle of alcohol and expanded into a blue-orange tongue.

  Hettie breathed hard. The air wavered, its gold hue paling. She was losing her grip on the time bubble. She sprinted at Julia and grabbed her around the waist.

  The moment she touched her, the time bubble collapsed. Julia lurched forward, and Hettie pushed her on, screaming, “Run, run!”

  A fireball erupted across the back of the tent as the flaming tequila hit the canvas. The men shouted in alarm. Hettie dragged Julia behind her.

  “Who are you?” she cried as they burst out of the tent.

  “I’m here with Raúl.” All around them, soldiers chased pigs. More than half of the army was awake now, half dressed and stumbling through the dark, alternately dodging or corralling the panicked swine. She pushed Julia ahead as the officers shouted.

  Thick smoke billowed from the command tent. A bell rang furiously. The pigs were forgotten as soldiers poured out of their tents to the panicked shouts of “Fuego!”

  There’s your signal, Raúl. Hettie pointed. “Run toward that gap. Raúl and the other villagers are waiting for you there.”

  Julia hesitated only briefly, then fled.

  Gunfire erupted behind her, and a bullet whizzed past Hettie’s ear. She dove behind a pile of crates. Three men with rifles advanced toward her. Soon there’d be more, and she’d be surrounded.

  Let them come, Diablo challenged. Its weight doubled with hungry anticipation. The Devil’s Revolver became an impossible burden when it was denied its destructive purpose.

  “Raúl, where’s Walker?” she shouted.

  “I’m still trying to find him.”

  Hettie scrambled into position. She glanced at Diablo and scowled. Don’t you kill anyone else tonight. Just stop them from shooting me.

  She took a breath and stood from her cover, simultaneously dropping into her time bubble.

  The soldiers stood plainly in the open, shooting without cover—a little overconfident, she thought in disgust. She took aim at the trunk of a tree to their left and focused, picturing exactly how she wanted it to fall.

  She pulled the trigger. Hell-green power scythed through the air, exploding against the base of the trunk and gouging a piece of the ground out. Hettie’s time bubble popped, and she ducked back down.

  She heard a snap, a loud creak, then a sound like ripping. Shouts, and then a thunderous boom couched in a cloud of crackling. The gunfire stopped.

  She peeked out. The tree had toppled so that the ripped-up roots and spindly branches shielded her from any more direct fire.

  Good job. Diablo responded with something like grudging satisfaction.

  She ran. Above them, the posse from the village fired into the camp to draw the army’s attention away from her.

  “I see Walker,” Raúl said in her ear. “He is north of you. He has his gun drawn and is heading east.”

  “Ha
ve you broken the spell on the tents?”

  “I will. But once I do, my connection with you will be severed.”

  “Do it. I’ll meet you at the rendezvous.”

  She ran east, skirting half-dressed soldiers fumbling for their weapons as they searched for their attackers. Hettie sensed more than heard the spell Raúl cast—it was like a giant foot stomping out a fire in the camp, only when it was lifted, the enchantments on the prisoners’ tents had been shattered. The captives streamed out, rushing for the horses to make their escape as planned.

  A wave of flame and power lifted the hair from her neck and heated her skin. Hettie knew Walker’s fire spell well. She turned toward the source, but the whisper of a bullet grazing her cheek had her throwing herself into a tent to escape a barrage of gunfire.

  The shooting ceased abruptly. She looked up: the word explosivos stenciled on one of many wood crates fairly shouted down at her.

  Smart of the soldiers not to blow them all to high heaven, but a tent full of explosives was not going to stop them from rushing her. She scooped up several sticks of dynamite from one open crate and dropped them into her pockets. Then she slit the tent open on the other side with her boot knife and dove through the opening, rolling into the next aisle—and right into a group of soldiers. They shouted and raised their rifles.

  Hettie lobbed a stick of dynamite toward them and dropped into her time bubble. With the men taking aim in slow motion, she scrabbled to her feet and ran, dodging bullets that swam through the syrup of time like lead-colored fish. Ten feet away, she targeted the still-hovering stick of dynamite and pulled the trigger.

  When the bubble popped, heat bloomed on her back, and the concussive force of the explosion propelled her forward, nearly lifting her off her feet. Screams and the smell of singed flesh and smoke filled the air. Hettie kept running.

  Around the next corner, a broad black shadow bounded into the open, sidearm in one hand, gloved fist glowing with power. Walker ran as though he were chasing the devil.

  “Walker!” She caught up with him. “The villagers are all out. We need to get to the rendezvous.”