Shotgun Sorceress

Chapter eleven

A Hole in the Sky

It felt wonderful to step back out onto the damp earth of the cornfield, to feel the sun on my skin. I took a deep breath of the summer air and turned around. The scarecrow was once again just an old black suit and a straw-stuffed burlap sack head hanging on a couple of old rake handles.

“Well, thank God that’s over,” I said to Pal.

An unseasonably cool breeze wafted across my shoulders, and I shivered, looking upward. The sky was darkening. A late summer storm?

“I’m sorry, dude,” the Warlock said to Cooper. “I … I just didn’t know what to say in there. I don’t know how to raise anything that can’t live in an aquarium, you know?”

“It’s okay.” Cooper gave the Warlock a brotherly slap on the shoulder. “It’ll work out. The kids’ll be fine. You’ll do better with the whole big brother thing when they’re a little older.”

“All the people Riviera mentioned will be very fine foster parents,” Karen added. “I don’t think you need to worry.”

The hairs on my arms and the back of my neck prickled as the wind rose, turned downright cold, rattling through the cornfield. Sudden scudding clouds blotted out the sun, and my heart dropped when I saw four pavement-gray spirals begin to twist down from the overcast.

“Guys, look at that!” I said.

“Tornadoes?” said the Warlock. “What the hell?”

“No, I don’t think they are,” Cooper replied.

The tips of the descending spirals crackled with lightning, opened like the burning eyes of vast gods to reveal a blinding brightness behind them, and from them descended huge creatures that looked like crystalline orreries circling pulsing magma hearts.

“Shit, it’s the Virtii!” I hollered. “Y’all get in the car and get the hell out of here!”

I slung both my arms through the backpack straps, hiked up my skirts, and pelted down a corn row, running as hard and fast as I could away from the Warlock’s Land Rover.

“What are you doing?” Pal demanded inside my head.

Leading them away from you guys. I hope, I thought back, shielding my face from the lashing corn leaves.

“But you can kill these creatures!”

I killed one. With great difficulty, if you remember. I take on four, I’m dead.

“But we have Cooper and the Warlock to help us this time.”

They’d be good if there were one or two Virtii. If we fight four, there’ll be nothing left of us but scorched teeth and bad credit. Get everyone in the car and get them out of here.

“What are you planning to do out here on your own?” Pal sounded genuinely angry.

Planning to try to stay alive, first. I think I see some trees I can hide in for a little while. I’m betting there’s a back door to the Faery Tavern floating around out here someplace.

“They’ll enslave you if you go back there uninvited!”

Still better than being dead, right? If that happens, tell Cooper he better come back here and break me out.

I ran out of the cornfield onto a dirt road and promptly tripped over a muddy rut. As I tumbled forward onto my hands and knees, I felt the zipper and fabric at the back of my ball gown pop and rip. Swearing, I got to my feet, held my smirched skirts up with my flesh hand, and started running toward the trees again, my bodice slipping ominously downward.

A Virtus loomed above me like a manta ray preparing to suck up a shrimp.

“Surrender or be expunged,” it thundered.

Crap, I’m gonna die, I thought, still running. I’m gonna die in a prom dress in a stupid cornfield out in the middle of BFE.

I heard calliope music behind me, and suddenly Pal scooped me up underneath my arms and whisked me off toward open sky.

“Dammit, Coop, move, you’re on my nuts,” the Warlock complained from somewhere on Pal’s back.

“Dude, there’s no place for me to move to—” Cooper began.

“Christ, guys, why didn’t you get out of here like I told you?” I hollered back at them.

“I wasn’t just going to leave you out here!” Cooper sounded indignant.

“Nor was I,” added my familiar.

“Warlock, what’s your excuse?” I yelled.

“I didn’t want to get stuck changing diapers!”

Pal’s clawed fingers were digging painfully into my armpits, and my backpack was crammed up against the back of my head and neck; I couldn’t turn to see if our pursuers were gaining on us or if we were making good our escape.

“Where are the Virtii?” I yelled against the wind.

“The closest one’s, oh, a couple hundred yards back,” the Warlock replied hoarsely, a faint tremor in his voice. “It’s getting kinda glowy … that’s bad, right?”

“Very bad, yes!” I stripped the glove off my flame hand just in case we were forced to fight. “Pal, if you can get us away from them any quicker, do it!”

“I know a teleportation incantation—” my familiar replied.

“Yes! Teleportation would be double-plus good!”

“—but I can’t sing more than one spell. I’d have to land us first. They’d be on us before I could finish.”

I swore. “Fly faster!”

“I’m trying!”

We rose higher in the air, and a sudden choppy crosswind caught my skirts. I felt the zipper give entirely and my bodice slid down to my hips. The way Pal was carrying me, I couldn’t reach down to grab it. I tried for a charm but my adrenaline-soaked brain wouldn’t come up with anything useful.

“My dress! Guys, help!” I spread my legs to try to keep it from flying away; the heavy fabric flapped between my knees like a sail, jerking my legs back against Pal’s thorax. The wind whistled bracingly through my thin underwear.

“It’s too much drag!” Pal exclaimed. “It’s slowing us down; let it go!”

“I’m gonna be naked!” I wailed.

“And we’ll be dead if they catch us!”

Pal’s logic was unassailable. I closed my legs and felt the fancy green satin-and-crinoline ball gown flap away toward the fields below. Stupid f*cking dress. At least I still had my boots on. “Are we losing ’em, or are they gaining on us?”

“They’re gaining!” Cooper yelled. “Hey, where’s your dress?”

Christ on a cracker. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes to keep from screaming in frustration. And suddenly realized that my ocularis was itching like someone had rubbed my eye socket with poison ivy.

I opened my eyes, blinked to the door-sight gemview, and began to scan the sky. And just a few hundred feet in front of us, I saw the faint outline of a wide oval, big enough to admit one of those flying Pringles cans they call regional jet planes—but maybe too small for a Virtus—hanging in the sky.

“Whoa! There’s a portal! Go up, to the left!” I shouted.

Pal obeyed.

“What’s a portal doing here?” the Warlock asked.

“I don’t know; it’s big,” I replied. “Pal, stop, we’re on top of it.”

“They’re coming fast, we can’t stop long,” Cooper said.

I fervently wished that I could turn my head to see behind us. “Let me try this.”

I reached out to probe the edge of the portal with my flame hand. The moment I touched it, the portal sprang open with a pop, revealing a circle of bright jet-stream blue within the cloudy sky. A wind rose from the difference in pressure, dragging us toward the portal, but Pal was strong enough to resist it. I was too low to see the ground that lay beyond the portal, but it was disorienting to see the sun twinned in the second sky.

“Something’s not right—” Pal began.

The Warlock and Cooper swore and shouted. A burning plasma pseudopod whipped through the air, perilously close to my head.

“F*ck it, go through, go through!” I screamed.

Pal went through.

And suddenly we were falling.