Shotgun Sorceress

by Lucy A. Snyder

  Cooper spotted me, and at first he had an “uh-oh, busted” expression on his face, but then I guess he saw my tears and looked genuinely concerned. I was too angry to care; he knew I hated it when they went drinking. They could have used a pretty easy spell to get themselves sobered up after their bender, could have at least pretended they’d actually gone shopping, but no. That would have required a slight bit of effort and respect for my feelings.

  “Jessie, whassamatter?” he slurred.

  “Shitfaced and it’s not even three. You guys are so fucking predictable.”

  “Jessie, we just—” the Warlock began.

  I held up my hands as I strode away from them to the patio doors. “Save it. Just leave me alone.”

  Pal approached me as I stomped into the backyard. “How did it go with your father?”

  “I don’t really want to talk about it.” I went into the tent and flopped down on the sleeping bag.

  I heard Pal nudge the tent fly aside and step into the doorway. “Was it a fraud?”

  “No, it was him, he just … he … gaaah!” Rage and frustration flared in me again, and I started slugging the pillow with my flesh hand. “Why do people have to suck so bad? Why?”

  “Oh.” I heard Pal shuffle his feet on the grass. “I’ll be out here if you feel like talking.”

  I lay there, seething. A few minutes later, I heard the patio door slide open, and then a man’s heavy footsteps approached the tent.

  “Jessie, I—” Cooper began.

  “If you’re still drunk, go away!”

  He retreated, and a moment later my anger turned to sadness and regret. I wept quietly into the battered pillow, and after a while I fell asleep.

  “Jessie …”

  I woke up, groggy. “What?”

  A moment later, I smelled grilled hamburgers, and I felt intensely hungry. Stupid inconsiderate barbecuing neighbors, making delicious food I couldn’t have anymore. The jerks.

  “Can I come in?” Cooper asked. He sounded sober, and downright cheerful, but beneath the surface I thought I could hear a slight strain in his voice. “I thought you might be hungry, so I made us a snack.”

  I squinted at the fading sunlight coming through the tent flap; it was already evening. I’d been asleep for hours.

  “Sure, come on in, I guess.” I sat up and swung my legs over the edge of the grassy bed, rubbing my sticky eyes. The flesh around my ocularis ached.

  Cooper ducked into the tent carrying a plate of little hamburgers piled high with caramelized onions, melty cheddar, and crispy bacon. “Don’t worry, these sliders are all vegan. Even the cheese. And I guarantee they won’t taste like old jockey shorts.”

  “There’s a fair distance on the tasty scale between ‘good’ and ‘jockstrap,’ ” I said as he set the platter down beside me.

  “Just try it.”

  I did. The burger patty was savory and juicy, tasted just like real beef, and the bacon was perfect and salty and crisp. The cheese was rich and tangy. I was in gustatory ecstasy.

  “Dude, this is sex on a bun,” I replied around my mouthful.

  Cooper grinned at me. “Ye of little faith. Have another.”

  “Where did you learn to make this?”

  “One of my exes ran into a necromantic side effect that made it a bad idea for her to eat animal flesh, too. It’s more common than the pointy-hats would have you believe. Anyhow, she learned how to make a good meatless bacon cheeseburger, and she passed the recipe on to me. They’re not very nutritious, so you couldn’t live on ’em, but they’re not as bad for you as the real thing, either.”

  I swallowed my mouthful, then looked around for something to wash the crumbs down. “Is there anything to drink?”

  “Oh. Yeah. Left them on the picnic bench while I was grilling.” He snapped his fingers, and two sturdy glass mugs of dark beer shot across the yard into his outstretched hands.

  I accepted the mug he held out to me and took a sip. It was Guinness, fresh Guinness, not the oaky ditch-water it’s usually staled to by the time we Yanks find it in a grocery store. “Yum.”

  After we’d cleaned the platter and drained our mugs, Cooper crawled onto the sleeping bag beside me. He cleared his throat. “Look, I’m really sorry about earlier. We really did intend to go shopping up at Polaris, but in the car I started talking to the Warlock about how bummed I was about Smoky dying and he said he wanted to cheer me up and before I knew it we were at Hooters—”

  “You guys went to Hooters? What, were all the strip clubs closed or something?”

  “They have pretty good chicken wings there.”

  “Breasts, too, I’ve heard.” My tone was brittle as ice.

  He held up his hands. “Look, I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking, and things went from dumb to stupid. I’m sorry I made you mad.”

  “I was already pretty mad. You just made it worse.”

  He gave me comically sad puppy dog eyes. “Forgive me?”

  I sighed. “I suppose I have to, seeing as you made me the most kick-ass burgers I’ve had in over a year.”

  “Hug?”

  I gave him a hug, and he held me close. I could feel an odd tension vibrating in his body.

  “You know I love you, right?” he said.

  “Yeah?” I replied slowly. He never asked that. First the baby talk, and now this … what the heck was going on with him? I knew spending time in a hell was bound to change a man, but I never expected it would make Cooper want to start talking about our Relationship, capital R. I worried about where this was going.

  He took a deep breath. “You don’t feel that I’ve been taking advantage of you, do you? Sexually, I mean?”

  I sat up and stared at him. “No, why do you think I would think that?”

  “It’s just … well.” He rubbed his face. “We’ve been together almost five years now, and …”

  “And?” I prompted.

  “I mean, your—Some people would think we should have gotten married by now. But you don’t want that, right? I guess we haven’t really talked about it.”

  True enough; we hadn’t ever discussed marriage as far as I could remember. Not that I’d really cared one way or the other. I was never one of those girls who dreamed about being a bride in a fancy white dress. The only wedding I’d ever attended was my stepfather’s, and that little soiree left me with a lasting impression of needless stress, unpleasantness, and expense. Until that weekend, Cooper and I hadn’t had any family to stand up in front of and declare our love to, and none of our Talented friends seemed to view weddings as anything other than an excuse for a party.

  As far as I was concerned, being in a committed relationship was being in a committed relationship, whether a priest and a ring and a piece of paper were involved or not. And if you needed a religious contract and the symbolic equivalent of a shackle to keep you from stepping out, well, how committed could you have really been in the first place? I’d always figured that a decent person does the right thing because it’s the right thing, not because he’s expecting some kind of cookie in the afterlife.

  “I guess I kind of thought we more or less already are married,” I replied. “I love you, you love me … how would our lives be any different after a formal wedding ceremony?”

  “Things would be a lot different,” Cooper replied, that odd strain coming back into his voice.

  “How?” I wondered what he was getting at. Had my outburst at dinner and the fire and my not being all gung ho about having a baby with him given him second thoughts about being with me? Was he finding the scars on my face repulsive? Dammit, I’d gotten those scars rescuing him. My stomach began to clench. “Wait, is this your subtle way of saying you want to break up with me?”

  “No!” Cooper looked alarmed. “No, no, that’s not it at all.”

  He paused, his expression smoothing into a look of mild worry. “I just … I just want you to be happy.”

  “I am happy,” I said. “I’m happy I got you back and that we�
��re both in more or less one piece.”

  “Okay,” he said, seeming to relax a little more. “I’m glad.” Then he grinned. “Wanna go make brownies and play Halo?”

  chapter

  ten

  Faery

  The next morning I got Mother Karen to try another healing poultice on my face. I sat in the rec room watching cartoons with the littler kids for close to an hour with a wet tea towel over a clammy green mudpack that stank like someone had slathered Vicks VapoRub all over a plate of anchovies. It did seem to deaden the ache around my ocularis, at least.

  “Well, we’ve got to start getting ready, or we’ll run the risk of being late,” she called from the kitchen as the clock struck ten. “Come into the bathroom, please.”

  I followed her into the small half bath off the downstairs guest room. She had me sit on the toilet lid as she wiped the poultice off with a hot washcloth, then turned my head from side to side, frowning.

  “Well, that helped a bit, but only a bit.” She poked my cheek. “The scar tissue is better, but these scaly patches really just don’t seem to want to go back to normal.”

  “Do you think it’s some kind of curse?” I asked.

  “It’s possible.” She wrung out the cloth. “Honestly, this is a bit beyond anything I’ve had to deal with as a healer.”

  She glanced down at her watch. “We better start getting dressed. Please wash the rest of that off your face and then come up to the attic; I think I have a formal gown that will fit you.”

  I did as she asked, and a few minutes later found her in the gigantic cedar closet she’d installed beneath the eaves.

  “Hmm,” she said, shuffling through a rack of dresses and gowns. She pulled out a long strapless dress made of dark green satin with a poofy underskirt of black crinoline. “I think this would fit you. Here, try it on.”

  I slipped out of my jeans, T-shirt, and sports bra and wriggled into the dress. Karen zipped me up. I had to do some gyrations and tugging to get the bodice comfortably into place, but it was indeed a passable fit. I hadn’t worn anything like that since Aunt Vicky talked me into going to the senior prom with some friends. The DJ mostly played a bunch of crappy love songs you couldn’t really dance to, so after a while we ditched and went to someone’s house. We played Texas hold ’em and got trashed on peach schnapps. I lost all my pocket money on a bad bluff and somehow ended up having to kiss a cheerleader named Brittany. She was too pretty and rich and stuck-up for me to have wanted to have anything to do with her normally, but I was drunk enough to feel like everybody in the room was made of awesome. At first I thought the two of us were just putting on a little show for the guys, but she got into it like she was trying to find the secret answers to our algebra final in my tonsils.

  Over the next couple of weeks, she kept sending me text messages, asking me out. I told her as nicely as I could that I was straight, but she kept pestering me. After that, I began to suspect some kind of setup. You know the deal: she’d lure me to some seemingly private location, get me naked or close to it, and then somebody hiding in the bushes or closet would take a bunch of photos that would show up all over the Web five minutes later. Good times. So finally I just started replying to her texts with animated GIFs of volcanic porn cocks and she got the hint.

  So anyhow, now I inevitably associate ball gowns with sickly sweet liquor and suspiciously enthusiastic cheerleaders. I suppose it could be worse.

  “Do you think you’re going to come out of that bodice?” Mother Karen asked.

  “If a troll runs up to me yelling, ‘Whoo boobies!’ and yanks the front, yes. Otherwise, no, the puppies are safely kenneled.”

  Mother Karen laughed. “I doubt that would happen. Unseelies aren’t usually allowed into the tavern.” She paused, scrutinizing the outfit. “I can give you the other opera glove; that will look nice. I think I have some dark heels in your size—”

  “Heels? Nuh-uh.”

  She frowned. “Heels would look very pretty with this dress.”

  “I am not wearing anything I can’t run in. This meet could be a big ol’ trap for all I know, and I want to be prepared.”

  She looked over her shoe rack. “All my flats are too small, unless you want Cooper to resize them, and you can’t very well wear sneakers.”

  “I’ll just wear the dragon boots. Nobody can say those aren’t expensive enough,” I pointed out.

  She made a face, which I suppose was only natural since the last time she’d seen the boots, they’d been on the back porch tarred in dried devil ichor. “Those filthy things? They won’t really match.”

  “So I’ll get Cooper to clean them up and put some dark polish on them. The dress will mostly cover them, and anyway, who’s really going to be looking at my feet?”

  A couple of hours later, the emergency babysitters had arrived and we were on the road toward Winesburg in the Warlock’s Land Rover. Pal cruised along overhead, hidden by an invisibility charm, although I could hear the weird calliope music of his flying spell over the engine noise. Cooper had done a great job shining up the boots, and he’d cleaned off the rest of my dragonskins, which I’d stashed in a black JanSport backpack I’d borrowed from one of the teens along with my street clothes, my Leatherman tool, a bottle of water, a couple of PowerBars, a small medical kit, hand sanitizer, and some stray spell ingredients in translucent plastic Fuji film canisters.

  Mother Karen had done my makeup—doing her best to camouflage the scars—and had put my hair up in a French braid. I’d gotten wolf whistles from both Cooper and the Warlock when I came downstairs. Still, with my shoulders bare, I felt uncomfortably exposed, and also weirdly felt like I was in drag. I envied the guys being able to wear pants. The Warlock had gone back to his place and found tuxedos for both him and Cooper. Apparently the Warlock had been considerably slimmer in his early twenties, and the old tux wasn’t even that far out of style. The Faeries, I supposed, cared almost nothing about current human fashion and mainly wanted to feel that we’d paid proper respect in our attire.

  I also hoped that none of the seelies would take an inordinate interest in Cooper. He looked absolutely delicious in the hand-me-down tuxedo. The satiny jacket accented his broad shoulders and narrow waist, and the pants were just snug enough to nicely show off his buns and package. My inner Old Lady Mabel hated the saggy pants fashion that had reigned over American males seemingly my entire life.

  A little while later, the Warlock pulled off the highway onto a dirt road running between two cornfields.

  “This should be it,” he said, glancing down at the magic compass he’d brought along. “Karen, you got Riviera’s token?”

  “Right here,” she replied, patting the small beaded purse in her lap. She was wearing a long-sleeved sea-green silk gown and long strings of pearls; the outfit must have dated from the 1930s, and it looked good on her.

  We got out of the Rover. The ground was soft and damp, so I was glad I wasn’t in high heels. Pal’s calliope was loud overhead. I slung my backpack over my shoulder and began to follow Mother Karen and the Warlock down a corn row.

  Cooper nudged my backpack. “You could leave that in the car, you know.”

  “If something happens, it’s not going to do me a lot of good if it’s locked in the car a mile away.”

  “The seelies are probably just going to make you check it at the door.”

  I shrugged. “Checked at the door is still closer than locked in the car.”

  We came to a clearing where a battered old scarecrow hung crucified on a couple of rake handles. A cloud of dust rose as Pal touched down, and Cooper spoke an ancient word to turn off his invisibility.

  A tin cup had been tied to the straw fingers of the scarecrow’s left hand. When we got within ten feet of the scarecrow, my stone ocularis started to itch in my skull. I blinked through to the gemview that had shown me the invisible door to the drug stash. I saw an odd double image of the scarecrow and a set of bronze-reinforced oak doors big enough to admit an e
lephant.

  Mother Karen dug the token—a small golden coin—out of her purse and stepped up to the scarecrow. She dropped it into the tin cup. The scarecrow shuddered, the tattered old black suit expanding as it filled with ogrish bone and muscle. The creature broke the rake handles like straws and leapt to the ground, glowering at us with coal-black eyes. It dumped the token out into a mottled, callused gray palm.

  “Who seeks entry to our realm?” Its voice rolled like thunder.

  Mother Karen stepped forward. “Karen Mercedes Sebastián, daughter of Magus Carlos Sebastián and Mistress Beatrice Brumecroft. And associates. We come at the invitation of Maga Riviera Jordan to dine with her at the tavern.”

  He turned his baleful face toward me and pointed a long black claw at my ocularis. “We don’t like spies.”

  “What? I’m not a spy.” My voice shook.

  “Don’t try to be clever with that sight-stone, or someone will pluck it right out of your pretty head.”

  I quickly blinked back to the gemview that showed the world simply as my flesh eye did. “Is this better?”

  “It is acceptable.”

  Still scowling, the scarecrow reached into the air where I had seen the bronze handles on the great oak doors. He pulled, and suddenly the doors were visible to the naked eye, swinging wide to reveal a twilight-dimmed forest lit by a huge harvest moon. A road of ancient silver coins sunk in the damp earth glittered before us. The evergreen trees swayed gently in a brush of night wind, and tiny glowing creatures flitted through the branches.

  The air from the forest smelled of midnight’s denizens, deep dark earth, and night blooms headier than any liquor.

  “Follow the silver path to the tavern,” the ogrish guardian ordered. “Stray from it at your own peril.”

  “We better hold hands,” Cooper said. “Things can get pretty weird in Faery.”

  We followed Mother Karen and the Warlock inside; Pal followed along behind us. The scarecrow shut the door after my familiar stepped onto the path, and almost instantly, the darkness seemed to solidify around us like a crush of unseen bodies just beyond arm’s reach, the breeze like soft cold fingers brushing across my shoulders and the nape of my neck. Cooper’s hand tightened around mine; I could tell he felt it, too.