Yeah. I had a lot of stuff to try to get my head around. It’s always unsettling to discover you’re not the person you thought you were, even if the new you seems a whole lot more interesting.
“Hey, sis, you’re back!” Randall smiled at me, showing straight white teeth, but even his bright grin couldn’t mask the anxiety I saw deep in his hazel eyes. He stepped toward me, and my eye instantly fell on the shiny bronze lizard brooch he was wearing on the pocket of his gray T-shirt.
Just as I was wondering why the heck he was wearing a piece of jewelry that would look more at home on some little old lady at a tea party, the glittering lizard blinked at me and crawled into the pocket.
Randall didn’t seem to notice my surprise. “Dad says you need to mirror someone named Mother Karen, like right now.”
I felt a sudden surge of alarm that drove away my curiosity over his little metal friend. Were Cooper’s infant brothers in trouble? I had a sudden, irrational vision of the Virtus Regnum burning down Mother Karen’s foster home with the wailing boys trapped inside. After everything I’d seen, I wouldn’t put that kind of atrocity past them.
I hurried up the marble steps. “Why? What’s going on?”
“I’m not real sure, but he said it was important to get a move on. There’s some kind of trouble in your hometown.” Randall reached into the right thigh pocket of his gray tactical cargo pants and pulled out what looked like a square silver makeup compact. He flipped the shiny case toward me as if he were making a pass to a teammate in Ultimate Frisbee, and I fortunately managed to catch it in my good right hand. If I’d tried a grab with my left, the compact probably would have whiffed right through my glove; boneless flame hands can be pretty limited if you aren’t trying to ignite things.
“You can mirror her on that,” he said. “All you need to do is to speak her name and address … you know her full info, right?”
“Yes, I do.” I popped the case open with my thumbnail. Inside, there was no makeup, just highly polished metal, and when I opened the compact completely, the halves joined together seamlessly into a rectangular mirror about the size of a small media player.
The mirror sent a faint magic buzz into my right palm. I blinked through several views using my ocularis, the chrysoberyl orb that served as a replacement for my left eye. I still didn’t completely understand how the magic stone worked or what it was showing me, but through some of the views the mirror seemed to be glowing with energy. Someone with real skill as a speculomancer had created it.
I took a deep breath, staring down at my sunburned, hollow-cheeked reflection, remembering my last disastrous attempt to contact Karen. Of course, this time I had a proper enchanted mirror, and I wasn’t in a hell. Still, the thought of accidentally triggering her security spell made me twitch a bit. I wasn’t anxious to eat Spanish steel for dinner.
“I wish to speak to Karen Mercedes Sebastián, daughter of Magus Carlos Sebastián and Mistress Beatrice Brumecroft, of 776 Antrim Lane, Worthington, Ohio 43085.”
The mirror grew colder in my hand, darkened, cleared. I was looking into Mother Karen’s spacious study from the vantage of the huge mirror above her fireplace. And things had clearly gone wrong: the teapot and delicate china cups atop her driftwood coffee table had been knocked over. Oolong spilled across the glass top and dripped onto the thick cream carpet below. Someone had ransacked the spellbooks and ingredient containers stored on her floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelves; tomes and glass jars were scattered across her desk and on the floor. Either she’d been robbed, or she’d been desperately searching for something. The windows on the western side showed tall gray waves and black sheets of rain crashing over a rocky north Pacific beach; the eastern windows showed Caribbean palm trees whipping in the gale winds of a hurricane storming ashore.
Trouble, indeed. I couldn’t see Karen, but the door at the far end of the room was open, so I started calling for her: “Hey, Karen, are you there? It’s me, Jessie … are you there?”
I heard the distant thump of footsteps in the hallway, and a few seconds later Mother Karen hurried in. She was dressed in a forest green silk suit, as if she’d been seeing important company, but her graying brown hair was a frizzy mess and her clothes were rumpled and dirty as if she’d just taken a few spins in a tornado.
“Oh, thank God, I thought he’d blocked the mirror, too. Jessica, you’ve got to get back here, fast as you can. I just can’t control him, he’s got us locked in—”
“Whoa, slow down,” I said. “Who’s got you locked in?”
“Blue,” she said, and my heart dropped. Little Blue was surely the most powerful of Cooper’s baby brothers, but he’d also seemed the most stable and easygoing.
Years ago, possibly even before I was born, Blue had gotten so angry during his imprisonment in Cooper’s hell that to preserve his sanity he dissociated himself from all his difficult emotions like hatred and sadness and cast them away in a broken-off piece of his own soul. That soul-shard had taken physical form as a demon when it came to Earth, and battling that monster had cost me my eye and arm—not to mention the lives of four innocent human beings and the best damn dog in the history of history itself, Cooper’s much-loved familiar, Smoky.
Despite his serene demeanor, Blue was a real little boy now, not a disconnected spirit trapped in the stasis of a hell. And in us flesh-and-blood people, emotions like rage and hate have a way of regenerating themselves just when you think you’ve got a nice tight lid on them.
“What happened? What did he do?” I asked.
“He was the last one … it was his day to go with his new foster parents,” Karen replied, looking and sounding more panicked than I’d ever seen her. “Horatio and Acacia Fox—very nice people, a very nice home—I explained it to him and he seemed to understand, he still won’t talk, but he did seem to understand, he nodded when I asked him, oh sweet Goddess I’ve never seen a child do anything like this—”
“Karen, calm down. What did he do?”
She took a deep breath and shut her eyes for a moment. “I took them to his room to introduce everyone, he brought out this old shoebox filled with … I don’t know, hardware, junk—”
Oh, jeez, that stupid radio, I thought. Blue had taken apart an old Batman clock radio in his room to see how it worked. I’d put all the pieces into a shoebox and told him that I’d come back to help him put the radio back together, or that I’d send someone to help him. Crap in a hat. In the chaos of trying to deal with being trapped with Miko in Cuchillo, I’d forgotten all about my promise.
“—and he held it out to them like he expected them to do something with it. When they didn’t he … he threw them out of the house.” Her face paled at the memory.
“Threw them out?” I had a hard time imagining a toddler having the leverage to physically remove an adult man from a room, much less muscle him downstairs and push him out the front door.
She nodded, her eyes closed. “Suddenly there was … there was a tunnel in the side of his bedroom, and a force like an invisible hand just swept them outside into the trees. He didn’t move or say a word, Jessie … he didn’t cast a spell. He just did it. I’ve never seen a child with this kind of at-will magical power. And before I could call for help, he put a wall around the entire house.”
I thought of King Lake’s castle in Cooper’s hell. “Made of dark gray stone, like a medieval fortress?”
She nodded. “Exactly that. We’re completely sealed in, and none of my spells can so much as chip the rock.”
Karen paused, looking anguished. “My other kids are so scared, Jessie, and I don’t know what to tell them. Blue refuses to speak; he just stares at the box.”
“Are Horatio and Acacia okay?” I asked. If Blue were older I’d have wanted to roundly kick his ass for pitching a fit over something as trivial as a radio. But he was a little boy who’d been through a horrible trauma, and … well, we could have expected something like this to happen sooner or later.
She shook her head.
“I don’t know. Blue put the wall up before I could see where they landed. I certainly hope they weren’t badly injured.”
“Jesus.” I rubbed my flesh eye, trying to think. I wanted to help Mother Karen and her kids, and I had made the promise to Blue. And clearly he took broken promises very badly. But Miko was out there in the desert, and I was convinced I was the only Talent in Cuchillo who had a shot at putting her down for good. There were other people who could help Blue.
“Okay,” I told her. “I’m going to get you some help, as soon as I can. Just sit tight, okay? Do you have enough food and water to get through for the next day or so?”
She nodded. “We do. But please hurry.”
“I’ll do my best.”
I closed the mirror and turned to Randall, who’d been silently listening to the conversation. “Are the Warlock and Cooper up in the penthouse?”
He nodded, brushing his windblown sandy hair out of his eyes. “They’re still helping the others get back on their feet. Half of them had been under Miko’s spell for over a year, and it’s hard to get your game back after that. It’s like you just came out of a coma. Some of the guys in my squad are in really rough shape. I was lucky; she only put me in the spell-circle a couple of months ago.”
He patted the jeweled lizard in his breast pocket. “And she left Spike here locked in a box in the treasure room with all the other talismans and whatnots, so that’s double luck. We can’t find most of the flesh-and-blood familiars. The little ones like rats, they’re fine, they could hide in the walls, but we’re worried the others all got killed.”
Randall paused, seeming to realize he had gone off on a tangent. “But that’s got nothing to do with your friend’s sitch. What’s going on?”
“I gotta get some help to Karen, like … yesterday. Do you think you can find a way to get past the isolation field and take the brothers Grimm back to Columbus?”
“Yeah, but won’t you be coming with us?” He frowned, looking concerned.
I shook my head, feeling guilty before the words even crawled from my throat. “I can’t. I just … can’t. I’ve got too damn much unfinished business here.”
chapter
two
Argument
“Stay here and face Miko by yourself? Are you out of your mind?” Cooper Marron’s voice was loud enough that the other Talents in the penthouse were staring at us uncertainly. He, the Warlock, Pal, and I were in a secluded corner where I hoped we wouldn’t be overheard during normal conversation … but I hadn’t expected my boyfriend to start hollering at me right off the bat.
I searched his expression, dreading I’d see the mindless rage that Miko’s diabolic magic had inflamed. But he wasn’t angry: he was scared. And realizing that didn’t make me feel any better.
We take Miko to school, save what’s left of the town, and we’re out of here. That’s what he’d said to me just a couple of days before, summing up our grand escape plan in a few breezy, supremely confident words. I wanted to see the wizard who’d told me that, not this frightened, battered survivor in front of me. Because seeing the man I loved so afraid made it so much harder to hold down my own terror that I was going to lose everything in this godforsaken town.
“I’ll have Pal with me,” I said, trying to sound soothing and assured. But the moment the words left my mouth I realized they probably sounded haughty and dismissive: I don’t need you, sweetcheeks, I’ve got a big damn magic spider. Christ. Miko really was the gift that just kept on giving, at least where our emotions were concerned. Or maybe it was just the heat and lack of sleep and food and everything else that had happened since we got here.
“Jesus, no, I’m not letting you stay here!” Cooper looked anguished. He didn’t as much as glance at my familiar, who’d shrunk himself down to mastiff size for the elevator and hadn’t enlarged himself so he wouldn’t make the other Talents nervous. “I’m not letting us get separated again. It’s too dangerous. I can’t lose you again. No. No way.”
“Someone needs to help the souls Miko took. Someone needs to stop her from doing this again, and do you see anyone else around here who can do that? No offense, but she caught you. Y’all both fell right into her trap.”
Cooper scratched at the black four-day beard on his jaw and scowled miserably at his borrowed combat boots while I silenced the little voice in my head that was hollering that I’d fallen for her trap just as hard as they had, and it was mainly dumb luck that I’d escaped.
I turned away from him and faced the Warlock, whose eyes were fixed on the ceiling tiles.
“Blue is your brother,” I told him, my voice harder than it needed to be, “and someone needs to go talk him off the cliff, today, because if we don’t get him calmed down, the Virtus Regnum’s going to kill him and probably Mother Karen and her other kids in the process.”
The Warlock wouldn’t meet my eyes. I realized I was dangerously close to shouting, so I took a breath, trying to speak more slowly, trying to sound as calm and reasonable as possible. The Virtii might care about humanity as a species, but as individuals we were as good dead as alive, and I wasn’t sure anyone but me really understood that. I looked from one man to the other.
“Please don’t either of you tell me they won’t kill a little kid, because you know damn well they will,” I said. “The situation at Mother Karen’s could go so bad in so many ways. Guys, I cannot be both places at once. I need y’all to take care of this.”
“What are we supposed to do to calm the kid down?” the Warlock finally said, his words slurred from his healing mouth and jaw. I could see a purple lump on his chin even through his thick, curly black beard. He still wouldn’t look at me, and his body posture told me he didn’t want to be this close to me. Clearly we had a tremendously awkward conversation in our future about what we’d done to each other in my hell. But today wasn’t the day for it.
“He thinks we all blew him off and he’s mad,” I replied. “Or he’s depressed. Or something. But I think mostly he just needs someone to spend some time with him and help him put his radio back together.”
I searched their faces for some sign of agreement. I didn’t find any.
“C’mon, guys, you can do this,” I begged. “I can wait awhile before I go after Miko, and if you can get back here, we can all go gunning for her together. But Blue can’t wait, and Miko won’t stay wounded for long. He’s your brother, and … and you guys have to do this. We have no other options, there is no plan B, the fat lady just took a deep breath and she’s about to hit high C.”
“I don’t really know much about fixing radios,” the Warlock mumbled.
“Oh Jesus Pogosticking Christ, Google it!” I threw my hands up in the air. “It’s a transistor radio, not an alien spaceship!”
Cooper rubbed his bloodshot eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Okay. We’ll go take care of Blue without you. Can your brother get us to Columbus and then get us back here pretty quickly?”
I nodded. “He says he can.”
Pain and worry in his eyes, Cooper put his hands on my shoulders and gave me a gentle squeeze. “Promise me you’ll wait for us to come back.”
I paused, considering. How quickly would Miko be able to recover on her own? It was an impossible question to answer, so I went with my gut. “I think I can wait until tomorrow morning, supposing nothing else happens. But after sunrise, if you’re not here, I have to go after her, one way or another.”
chapter
three
Portals
I sat with Randall on one of the maroon leather penthouse couches as we tried to figure out how we were going to get Cooper and the Warlock to Columbus and back in the next eighteen hours. Pal crouched at my feet, listening.
“We could reopen the portal that got us here,” I suggested.
“The aerial trap above the big hay pile?” Randall asked.
I nodded.
“And the Virtus Regnum is after you?”
I nodded again. “Unfortunately, y
eah.”
He shook his head. “They’ll have something watching that portal to see if you come back through. Even if you’re not with us, they might decide to grab us just to have some leverage if you give ’em the slip again. I think I should just open a new portal to Dallas and take y’all back along with my team, and once we’re there I can open a portal directly to where you need to go. Let me check with my squad leader.”
Randall turned and called to a gaunt man with shaggy dark hair and a year’s worth of Rasputinesque untrimmed beard: “Hey Javier, these people need to get to Ohio … once we’re back at the base, can I borrow the lock to get them home?”
Javier’s tired brown eyes flicked from Randall to me, and he cracked a lopsided grin. “If they’re her friends, hell yes, and you can buy ’em all a steak and martini dinner on me before you take ’em back.”
“Hey,” I said to Randall and Javier. “My familiar Pal got into a fight, and his wounds don’t look good to me. I know he’s kind of an oddity, but do you have anyone on your team who’s any good at healing animals?”
“Bettie is,” Randall said, looking at Javier.
Javier nodded, and then turned toward the back of the room.
“Hey, Miyazaki, come over here, please! And bring your kit,” he called.
A girl about my age who seemed to be all elbows and knees and long black hair came jogging over, carrying a gray medical pack.
“So, ya, I’m here, somebody hurt?” Bettie had a thick Minnesota accent.
“My familiar.” I patted Pal and he stood up, holding out his left foreleg, which bore the worst scratches and abrasions. “He got into a fight with the rats in the steam tunnels.”
“Oh ya, looks like ya sure did, didn’t ya?” Bettie knelt in front of Pal and gingerly took hold of his foreleg, squinting as she peered into his wounds. “Looks like ya definitely got some infection in here. How bad does it hurt? Can ya talk? What kind of critter are ya?”
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