Switchblade Goddess

by Lucy A. Snyder

  “Me immudum tuo sanguine,” uttered the priest.

  The clanking noise I heard was the sound of a silver chain striking a silver incense holder as the priest swung it back and forth, spreading a surprisingly thick cloud of cinnamon-scented smoke all around the area.

  “Me immudum tuo sanguine,” echoed what sounded like a hundred different voices. Without having to ask or look at Teresa for confirmation, I knew the ritual had begun.

  “Cujus una stilla salvum facere. Totum mundum quit ab omni scelere,” said the priest, his words once again echoed by everyone around me. I pulled in a breath and the scent of the incense filled me with an odd calm. Suddenly I was feeling a whole lot better about being shackled helpless on a cold floor surrounded by chanting strangers.

  But it wasn’t until the priest began singing, “Jesu quem velatum nunc aspicio” that I was able to identify this odd calm: it felt exactly like I’d just taken a massive bong hit of Acapulco Gold. I was getting high. In a church. Cathedral. Chapel. Thing. Was Elvis going to show up soon?

  Each initiate took a place standing behind one of the sisters as the old priest made one last circle around, handing off the incense holder to an initiate who bowed and quickly vanished with it back into the sacristy.

  “Oro, fiat illud, quod tam sitio,” sang the priest. He had a really good voice, not amazing like Shanique’s, but pretty impressive just the same. If Vegas Chapel Elvis showed up, they should do “New York, New York” together. I felt light and drifty. That’s why they’d put the shackles on me; it was so I wouldn’t go floating up into the rafters like I’d been filled with helium. Whee.

  I looked around at the faces of the sisters. All eight of them were still singing, their eyes closed in concentration, their faces a little blurry. I wondered if they were getting as high as I was.

  Then it hit me: eight nuns? Where’d the extra one come from?

  The nun at my feet stood up. Her clothing was much tighter and clingier than the habits of the other sisters; I could see her hard nipples through the blue fabric. My pleasant little buzz evaporated as she pulled off her veil.

  “Do you really think these people can save you from yourself?” Miko asked.

  I lurched against my iron restraints, trying to call for help, but my throat felt constricted by the smoke. Miko threw herself on top of me, and I felt us plunging into my hellement.

  chapter

  thirty-six

  Heat

  Miko hurled me across the dungeon and I smacked into the damp granite wall, my teeth cutting the inside of my lip.

  “Nuns? Priests? Really?” Miko’s voice was mocking. “You should’ve stuck with the old woman’s voodoo. At least you can dance to that. But this old Latin … so boring.”

  “I am so sick of you.” I wiped the blood off my mouth and turned to face her. “I’m sick of your tricks, I’m sick of your games. Get out of here and leave me alone.”

  I could still hear the men and women singing, their music all around as if every stone contained a speaker. And the song was shifting; the words were no longer Latin but Aramaic and Greek … and something else. Something even older.

  I could feel a painful vibration starting in my bones and spreading through my flesh. And that, I knew, was but an echo of what my body was actually experiencing in the living world. We were getting to the heart of the ritual: the physical and spiritual purge. Whatever they’d put in the incense was intended as a sedative, and I wasn’t feeling it in here. I’d participated in enough exorcisms with Cooper to know they could get pretty rough; people often broke their own arms and legs against their restraints unless you secured them carefully. My shoulders began to ache, whether as an echo of my body writhing against the iron or from my own imagination I couldn’t tell.

  Miko laughed at me. “I’m not going to be chased away by a little smoke and some chanting. You should know better than that.”

  I took a deep breath. “I don’t consent to your being here. I would like you to leave my hellement. Now.”

  Another laugh. “Oh, please. Does this look like it’s still your hellement? And as to consent, well, I seem to recall you made me certain promises when we were together—”

  “That’s bullshit and you know it!” Despite my words, I felt my cheeks grow hot with shame. I did remember telling her she could do anything she wanted whenever she wanted, just don’t stop oh God don’t stop. “I … I wasn’t thinking straight.”

  She shook her head, smiling. “No take backs, Jessie. Not in here. Not ever.”

  The vibration in my body was growing stronger, and I could feel heat building in every cell, a divine fever strong enough to wipe out the diseases in my blood. Sweat broke out on my forehead. My body was probably drenched in the real world; I hoped I hadn’t lost control of my bowels or peed myself. That was dead common in exorcisms, too, but that didn’t make it any less horrifying to me.

  “You know what I want,” Miko continued. “Agree to join me as my lieutenant, and we can share a bowl of tea in here to seal our contract. And then I’ll send you on your way.”

  She waved her hand, and the dungeon transformed itself into a paper-walled Japanese tearoom outfitted in low tables with green silk seat cushions atop bamboo mats.

  “And if I refuse?” I’d expected the heat to start sapping my energy like most any fever, but instead I was starting to feel strange exhilaration along with my fear.

  Miko frowned at me. “Oh, Jessie. You know I’ll have to bring someone in here as a playmate. Maybe the Warlock. Maybe the little girl. Or Charlie. And you’ll have to watch.”

  I shook my head. “Another doppelganger like your version of Cooper? Right. I’m not falling for that again.”

  “You can’t be sure, though, can you?” Her expression was dark. “You can’t tell the difference between a real soul and my constructs. How will you forgive yourself if your inaction leads to your friends truly being hurt this time?”

  “Fuck you.” I started blinking my ocularis to the tenth view my father had told me to try. Maybe if I got a better perspective on the hellement, I’d be able to figure a way out. I had to figure a way out soon. The hot pressure in my body was building, building, and the song was shifting again and I didn’t know what was going to happen next—

  Miko sprang at me, clawing at my face. I managed to grab her hands just before she got to my left eye. And then I tried to put her in an arm bar. But her elbows were like rubber and she easily reversed the hold on me and flung me down onto my back.

  “Nice try.” She sat down on my chest, pinning my body and arms to the bamboo floor with her strong legs.

  I’d gotten to the tenth view of my ocularis, and at first the hellement just seemed dim, but the solid parts of the dimension began to brighten against a background of dozens of holes. My father was right; it really was built like a cobweb.

  “Shit, you really do have lots of ways in here, don’t you?” I told her. “I gotta get rid of those.”

  Her switchblade appeared in her hand, and she grimly shook her head. “I have a better idea. Let’s get rid of that pesky eye of yours.”

  I strained to push her off, and the heat inside me rose, crested. Something broke free.

  Miko screamed and scrambled backward, a huge blistered burn on the inside of her right thigh. At that same moment, I felt a sharp pain in my left hip, and I instinctively jerked my hand up away from my body. My hand had burst into flame.

  The voices of the nuns and priests were loud in my head now, their words urgent, faster, condemning the denizens of hell to return from whence they came. Pushing my diabolic flames back to their source, back here to the hellement. Leaving them only one possible outlet.

  Miko stared at my flame hand, her expression a mix of surprise and consternation. “Jessie, I—”

  I blasted her with a massive jet of incendiary ectoplasm, giving her everything I had absorbed from the Goad, everything I had left. Miko screamed as the flaming goo hit her face and body, melting her flesh dow
n to her bones, crumbling her bones to dust.

  She kept screaming even as I blasted her dust straight through the biggest hole in the wall of my hellement, sending her ashes flaming out into the vast emptiness that lay beyond.

  When I was sure she was gone, when my flames had died down and my hand was flesh again, I slowly got to my feet and began to pull the holes closed with my fingers. I might make a lot of mistakes, but I do my best not to repeat them. Nothing was getting in here again without my permission.

  chapter

  thirty-seven

  Aftermath

  I came back to my body in the living world. The seven sisters and the initiates were crowded around me, concerned.

  “Are you all right?” asked Teresa.

  “Yes.” My voice was a croak. “I think so.”

  I tried to get up, but iron clanked against iron, and I remained pinned to the floor. The white gown clung damply to my skin. It felt as if I’d nearly dislocated both my shoulders in the throes of my purification. The backs of my heels and my butt felt bruised. “Can I get out of this now, please?”

  Teresa nodded and gestured for the other nuns to begin removing my restraints. The young initiate who’d secured my flame hand quickly knelt to unlock the cast-iron gauntlet. When he pulled the halves apart, a collective gasp arose.

  “It is beautiful!” Teresa whispered, her eyes big.

  I looked at my left hand. In the back of my mind, I’d hoped it would be restored to flesh, but nobody had mentioned that as a possibility. And so I’d refused to let myself think about it much. But I was utterly surprised to see that diabolic flame had been turned to pure, pale energy. It was my old hand in form if not in substance; as I flexed my fingers I could even see familiar lines in my softly glowing palm.

  The initiate kneeling over my hand paused, and then tentatively reached out to touch my wrist. I could feel his fingers, and more: I could feel the electricity of his life force flowing inside him.

  “It is cool,” he said, sounding amazed. “It does not burn.”

  “It might still flame up,” I replied. “Please put my opera glove back on, just in case.”

  After I got dressed in the sacristy, Teresa led me back out to the hallway outside the chapel where Cooper, Pal, and my father were waiting.

  “Please come with me to my office,” Magus Shimmer said to me. “My personal physician is there; we want to make sure the ritual worked and that you have truly been cured of your illnesses.”

  His physician turned out to be a slight, middle-aged man with a pointed white chin beard and monocle. He had me sit on a stool and peered in my eyes, ears, and down my throat, and took some blood from my arm that he mixed with strange liquids in various test tubes.

  Finally, after much frowning at the tubes and shaking the contents therein, he declared: “She is free of disease.”

  “Thank goodness!” Pal exclaimed, and Cooper gave me a big hug.

  chapter

  thirty-eight

  The Conversation

  I dreamed again that I was a little girl back in my old house. I stood on the kitchen stool beside my mother at the counter; we were making Christmas cookies. Mom was cutting the rolled buttery dough into snowmen and candy canes and arranging them on the cookie sheets, and I was decorating them with colored sugars and jimmies. I was warm and happy; it was a perfect moment.

  And then I remembered she was dead. Killed by the Virtus Regnum for saving me from brain cancer.

  “I’ve missed you so much,” I told her, finally finding my voice in the dream. “I never got to say good-bye to you. Every day, I’ve missed you.”

  “Oh, but honey, I’ve been right here,” she told me. “I haven’t ever gone anywhere, not really.”

  My body began to shrink on the stool, and I reached up to try to grab her hand, not wanting to leave her, not wanting the dream to end—

  —I jerked awake on the silk sheets. Cooper moved sleepily beside me. He’d still been dressed in his fatigues when he spooned me to sleep; we were both far too tired for more than a couple of good-night kisses. But now he was dressed in pajama pants and a T-shirt. I saw Pal’s shaggy bulk snoozing on the rug by the fireplace. By the angle of the light coming through the curtains, I guessed it was already late morning.

  I slipped out of bed and went into the bathroom to wash the sleepy grit from my eyes and rinse out my mouth. My shoulders and heels hurt, but I wasn’t as sore as I’d expected. As I dried off my face, I decided to take the bull by the horns and deal with something that had been put off far too long.

  I dressed quietly, brushed my hair, and went out into the hallway to look for a servant or guard. It didn’t take me too long to find a white-aproned chambermaid.

  “Excuse me, miss? Can you tell me where the Warlock’s room is?” I asked her.

  She made a quick, formal head bow. “Yes, meine dame. Please follow me.”

  The maid led me down the corridor to a separate wing of the castle, and we stopped in front of a chamber door.

  “He is in here,” she said. “May I help with anything else?”

  “No, thank you.”

  The maid bowed again and went back to her duties. I faced the door, took a deep breath, and rapped my knuckles on the wood. I waited a few moments; there was no response. I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans and rapped again, more loudly. This time I heard the slap of a man’s bare feet on the stone floor and the click of the lock pulling back and I held my breath as the door swung inward—

  —and I found myself staring at Randall, who was wearing nothing but a pair of snug black boxer briefs and a slightly hungover expression. His body hadn’t been a wreck by any stretch back in Cuchillo, but he was looking a whole lot more fit now; I briefly wondered how many hundreds of sit-ups he’d been doing every day to get ripped abs like that. I’d always been reasonably satisfied with my figure—at least I never angsted over it like many women seem to—but looking at him made me wonder if I could get that kind of definition with a better workout, or if his Y chromosome was a magical trump card in his genes.

  “Oh, hey, s’up?” he yawned, running his fingers through his mussed blond hair.

  “Uh … sorry, the maid told me this was the Warlock’s room.”

  “It is.” He turned away from me, back toward the bed and yelled, “Dude, put some pants on, my sister’s here!”

  “Am I interrupting something?” I asked, finally noticing the hickeys on his chest and neck. The world seemed to have tilted sideways. It was suddenly a little hard to breathe as a complicated mix of jealousy, relief, and embarrassment took hold of me. I was glad to see I hadn’t given the Warlock an aversion to sex … but how much had he told my brother? Well, whatever icky details he’d revealed, they were out there now; I couldn’t very well erase my own brother’s memory. I tried with mixed success to shove my unwanted emotions back down where they’d come from.

  “Nah, don’t worry about it,” he replied, seeming more awake. “I guess you guys should talk, huh? It’s cool; I wanted to go for a jog anyhow.”

  Randall opened the door wide, and I saw the Warlock standing by the bed, dressed in dark green plaid pajama pants and a black bathrobe. He smoothed his mustache and beard with one hand, glancing at me nervously. I tried not to stare at the huge pump bottle of lube on the bedside table. Or at the crumpled wet wipes and Kleenex littering the floor by the bed. Nor at the leather-wrapped handcuffs that still dangled from the bedpost.

  “So, yeah, it’s about ten miles around the castle’s lake. A nice solid little run,” Randall said, apparently trying to fill the awkward empty air with conversation. He dug a pair of black sweatpants out of a nearby duffel bag and slipped them on, then plopped into a nearby chair to put on his running shoes. “I’ll probably be gone for ninety minutes or so. Wanna meet up in the downstairs dining room for some lunch afterward?”

  “Yeah,” the Warlock replied. “Sounds good.”

  “I’ll be there,” I said.

  “Awesome.�
� Randall gave us a bright smile, slipped on a long-sleeved gray T-shirt. He pulled Spike out of the bag, set his mechanical familiar on his shoulder, and then he was heading for the hallway.

  After the door clicked shut behind my brother, the Warlock cleared his throat uncomfortably and gestured toward the pair of armchairs by the fireplace. “Want to sit down?”

  “Sure.” I settled into the chair that faced away from the bed, and the Warlock took the other one.

  “So … yeah,” I continued. “You and my brother are … seeing each other now?”

  The Warlock nodded slowly. “I guess you could say that.”

  I expected him to elaborate just the teensiest bit, but he fell silent for one long minute. The second hand dragged around the face of the mantel clock. Was he going to say something else, or should I just forge ahead with my apology? It seemed like there should be a more graceful way to ease into the whole thing. Maybe I should have gotten him a card or something. Except that Hallmark didn’t make “Sorry I attacked you in my hell!” style greetings, did they?

  Could this possibly be any more awkward? I wondered to myself, and then opened my mouth to start saying what a monster I’d been and could he please, please forgive me, but the Warlock held up his hand in a stopping motion.

  “Wait,” he said. “Just give me another moment. I’ve been trying to figure out how to say this, and I’m still not sure I know how, so … just give me a minute.”

  “Okay,” I said, a little puzzled, and more than a little anxious, and waited.

  Finally, he inhaled deeply through his nose and sat up in the chair. “All right then. What I did to you was … horrible. It was completely inexcusable. I honestly had no idea I was capable of that kind of nonconsensual violence.”

  I was staring at him with what was probably an openmouthed look of pure stunned stupidity, but he didn’t look up at me to notice.