Shotgun Sorceress

Chapter fifteen

A Little Gift from the Welcome Wagon

I opened the red door and suddenly I was back in my flesh body … but I was naked, standing on hot pavement, the sun beating down on my skin, covered in something warm and wet and itchy, the taste of pennies in my mouth—

—and then the death-memories hit me all at once:

The beautiful raven-haired woman with the deep green eyes smiled and whispered, “Come join your wife” and I fell to my knees before her on the carpet of the funeral home and she touched my head and I felt the shock run through me, a tugging and tearing inside me and everything went black—

The naked auburn-haired girl came at me in the parking lot, grinning madly, swinging her black scythelike left hand at me, connecting with my neck, the spray of my blood sparkling like rubies in the sunshine—

I struggled against the dead-eyed men holding me fast as the green-eyed lady came toward me down the church aisle, my prayers dying in my throat as she reached out and touched my forehead—

The naked girl axed me down and fell on my neck, tearing at my flesh with blunt teeth.

I fell forward onto the pavement; there was something in my mouth. I spat it out: the tip of a man’s finger. More twinned death-memories hammered my senses: spiritual death at the touch of the beautiful green-eyed woman followed by brutal physical death at my hand. I began to throw up blood that was surely not mine. I realized I was leaning forward on both hands, not just my good right hand, but my left was a coal-dark claw that scraped crablike against the blacktop.

“Oh God, what happened?” I gasped. My eyes focused on a man lying nearby in a pool of drying blood. His throat had been ripped out, his lower jaw torn away. By me, the death-memory told me. Or by something that had taken up cheerfully homicidal residence in my body while I’d been in the hellement.

“Jessie, is that really you?” Cooper asked.

I nodded, heaved again, but very little came up. The blood coating my mouth and my stomach was absolute torture. My body was trembling with exhaustion; my muscles felt completely spent, as if I’d just sprinted to the finish line of a daylong triathlon. I tried to get up, but my legs collapsed under me. Suddenly I felt incredibly cold despite the heat; I began to shiver. My eyes entirely lost focus.

“Get this—get this out of me. The blood. Get it out,” I managed.

“She’s going into shock,” I heard the Warlock say. “What the hell happened to her hand?”

Someone brought a big towel, and Cooper wrapped me in it and carried me into the store.

“Do you have a shower?” he asked Rudy. “And any syrup of ipecac?”

“Yes sir, I got a shower back here in my apartment,” Rudy said. “And I think I got some in my medicine cabinet.”

The death-memories were overwhelming me. So much remembered lust for and fear of the beautiful woman, the tearing dark of souls sundered from still-living bodies, the raw agony of claws and teeth shearing skin and nerve and muscle, my own panic and horror at knowing my body had been used to commit mass murder. That the men I’d slain were soulless didn’t matter, because it hadn’t mattered to the entity that had possessed me. The expression of monstrous blood lust I’d seen on my own face through the dead men’s eyes made me want to slit my own throat for fear of that happening again. Better to be dead than to be used for such evil. Better to be dead.

I was barely aware and mostly blind with tears as Cooper set me down into a bathtub of warm water.

“Drink this,” he said, pushing a small plastic medicine cup to my lips. I opened my mouth and took the shot of sickly sweet syrup.

“Now this.” A bottle of Evian was at my lips. “Drink it all if you can.”

I tilted my head back and swallowed down the cool, sweet water. Mere seconds later, my stomach began to cramp and roil.

“Over the side! Bucket’s right here!”

I turned my head and spent the next half hour or so being miserably sick into a galvanized steel bucket that smelled of bleach and harsh soap while Cooper sat close by on the lidded commode.

“Jessie, can you hear me? Are you all right?” Pal’s voice was faint in my head.

I’m pretty f*cking far from all right, I thought back.

“Oh, thank Goddess. I thought we’d lost our connection for good. I’ve been trying to get through to you for quite some time.”

What the hell happened?

“Do you remember anything?”

Bits and pieces. Death-memories. I … I can see myself killing those poor guys.

“Don’t spend a second longer feeling guilty about those men.” Pal’s sternness was a thin veneer over an underlying tone of worry. “They were nothing more than meat puppets, and their master does not appear to have good intentions toward us.”

How did you know they didn’t have souls?

“That was fairly obvious: dead eyes, jerky gait, like the lad at dinner but without the pretty flowers and good complexion.”

So what happened?

“Shortly after you went off to try to open the mirror, two vehicles arrived with the puppets. They demanded our surrender. Cooper and the Warlock began fighting with them, and then you came out of the store attacking whoever happened to be closest to you. Cooper is most fortunate he quickly realized you were not yourself.”

I thought of the old shopkeeper. There wasn’t a death-memory from him in my head, but then there wouldn’t have been one if I’d simply gutted him in passing as I hurried to get to the fight outside. Rudy … I didn’t … did I?

“No, you didn’t harm him. He was tending to his solar array when the cars arrived. The Warlock has been questioning him out here since Cooper brought you back inside.”

He isn’t beating him up, is he?

“Oh, no. Seeing the corpses of the ‘Welcome Wagon,’ as Rudy calls them, has made him quite talkative. Apparently the town has been taken over by a demon or devil who simply calls herself Miko—what a Japanese entity is doing here of all places, nobody seems to know—and she has captured an unknown number of local Talents along with Rudy’s daughter.”

That fits with what my father told me.

“So you were able to open a mirror after all? Excellent. Any suggestions from him as to how to leave this lovely little hamlet?”

Not so much. There’s an isolation barrier around the whole area.

“How dreadfully inconvenient.”

Dreadful, yeah. Do you have any idea what just happened to me?

“Based on the fragments of diabolic babble you uttered while you turned the meat puppets to slaw, I’d hazard to guess that you were temporarily possessed by some sort of devil. A rather young one, I’d say.”

I thought of the Goadlets I’d slaughtered by the dozens in Cooper’s hell. It looked like at least one had escaped my blade after all. Crap. It’s coming out of the hellement whenever I go in.

“That does appear to be a reasonable hypothesis.”

My eyes were finally starting to focus again. The first thing I saw clearly was the scary appendage that had erupted from the stump of my left forearm. Two black blades had burst out from the remnants of my ulna and radius bones. The blades merged approximately where my wrist should have been in an exoskeletal joint that separated into five flattened claws: four fingerlike and the fifth a thumblike one that could oppose the others. The claws were jointed enough to curl into a cruel-looking rake, but I couldn’t make a fist with them. If I straightened them out and closed the claws, they scissored cleanly together to form a flat, hard blade like a broad spearhead or narrow axe.

“Jesus. That’s nasty,” I slurred.

Cooper apparently thought I meant the grue in the bucket. “Sure is. Do you think you got it all out?”

The death-memories had largely subsided. I nodded. “I need to brush my teeth.”

Cooper stood and rummaged through the drawers under the bathroom sink. He found a pink Oral-B, a tube of Crest, and a floss dispenser. “The brush looks clean, but I think it’s been used once or twice.”

I grimaced. “Considering what I’ve just had in my mouth, do you really think I could possibly care about that right now?”

“Right. I guess not.” Cooper handed me the brush and paste, then turned away to dump the bucket in the toilet.

I brushed my teeth as best I could while I took a shower; the claw wasn’t good for anything more than holding a bar of soap, so flossing was sadly not an option. As I was lathering the murder off my skin, I discovered several scratches and gouges on my body and left leg. They looked like they’d been inflicted when whatever had possessed me had pulled off all my clothes.

I had toweled myself dry and was blotting my wounds with a paper towel moistened with hydrogen peroxide when somebody knocked on the door.

“It’s just me,” Cooper said. “I have your clothes and the Warlock’s healing crystal.”

“Come on in.”

Cooper entered with my backpack and boots and my clothes in a neatly folded stack. He handed me the crystal. “I saw that you’d cut yourself up a bit.”

“Thanks, honey.” I started running it over my wounds to seal them.

“Your hat and your T-shirt were completely shredded, and your bra and panties were ripped, too, but Rudy had some needle and thread and I got them fixed. The pants and boots were okay.”

Cooper handed me my clothes; he’d sewn up my torn underwear with thick blue thread in simple backstitches. The repairs looked like they’d hold. Instead of my borrowed Hello Kitty shirt, I now had a cream-colored souvenir tee emblazoned with the outline of the state of Texas with the words “Cuchillo, Texas” arced around it. A little red star sat off-center in the middle of the state outline, presumably to mark the location of the town.

“So do you remember what happened?” Cooper asked as I got dressed.

“Some. I got death-memories from the blood, so I know what my body was doing before I came to, and Pal told me some of what happened, but I’m still missing a lot.”

I paused, staring at Cooper’s face. His eye was blackened and his lip swollen under a freshly sealed split. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

Cooper shook his head. “The meat puppets you killed rolled up on us in some big hybrid SUVs and came at us with baseball bats and stun guns when we told them we weren’t going anywhere with them.”

“Stun guns?”

“Enchanted, by the vibe of them. The meats seemed intent on bringing us in alive, but clearly their master wasn’t going to mind us having broken arms and busted jaws if it came to that.”

“I’m guessing their master is this Miko creature? Does Rudy know anything about her?” I sat down on the toilet lid to put on my socks and boots.

“Not much,” Cooper replied. “Just that she’s pretty much drop-dead everything. And if she actually is some kind of kuro miko, I’m curious to know what she’s doing so far from her native land.”

Japanese witches weren’t exactly my forte, so I couldn’t begin to guess what she might be doing in Cuchillo. I took a deep breath. “So. Pal thinks I’m possessed by a devil. I think maybe it’s one of the larval Goads from your hell.”

He blinked at me as though I’d just told him the sky was blue. “Well, obviously.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“I’ve done plenty of exorcisms. No biggie.”

His breezy tone annoyed me. “It’s a biggie if you can’t work magic!”

“Miko needs magic to do whatever she’s doing, yeah? So this dampening field can’t be everywhere. We find a weak spot in the field, exorcise you, take Miko to school, save what’s left of the town, and we’re out of here.”

He unzipped my backpack and withdrew a well-used, elbow-length brown suede barbecue mitt. “Try this on your claw. Rudy found it in his shed.”

I pulled the mitt on; I had to keep my finger-claws together but that was probably just as well. That hand wasn’t really useful for anything but mayhem and destruction. At least the worn pigskin would keep me from forgetfully scratching an itch and mangling myself.

“But what if only diabolic magic works out here?” I asked. “The devil possessing me sprouted the claw right off the bat. What if Miko’s not using standard magic?”

Cooper reached into my pack and pulled out a Gatorade, cracked the lid open, and handed it to me. “We’ll be fine. Drink up, get your strength back. We might have a lot of walking ahead of us if we can’t get those SUVs started again.”

I followed Cooper out to the parking lot, sipping the Gatorade slowly. My stomach was threatening another return-to-sender and I knew I had to keep the drink down if I could. But the scene in the parking lot before me was making that especially hard. The carnage was even worse than the death-memories had suggested, and flies were buzzing around the human wreckage. At least none of it had been reanimated by my touch.

Rudy and Pal were at work with shovels in the field across the highway, digging what I guessed would become a shallow mass grave in the rocky caliche. The old man had apparently seen so many grotesque oddities since Miko took over the town that he was able to take a giant spider monster pretty much in stride.

The Warlock was kneeling beside a severed head, frowning down at it. “These dudes don’t look so good.”

“Decapitation does that to a guy,” Cooper replied drily.

“No, I mean they look like they were sick. Look at their skin. This one’s got jaundice and a rash.” The Warlock stood up and started digging in his tuxedo pants pocket. He produced a small carving of a phallus; it was maybe three inches long and looked like it was made from a quartz crystal. “Jessie, come here and hold out your hand. Your good one, I mean.”

I did as he asked. He touched the crystal phallus to my palm and it glowed brightly, flashing several different colors. He cleared his throat, looking pained.

“So, do you want the good news, or the bad news?”

“Uh …” I was afraid to choose.

“Well, the good news is you don’t have crab lice, scabies, chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, HIV, or donovanosis. Nor do you have viral lycanthropy.” He pushed his gray cowboy hat back to sit higher on his head.

“Viral lycanthropy?”

The Warlock looked grim. “Some lyes change to beast-form when they come. That’s a surprise you don’t want on your birthday, believe me. So I check for everything. And it’s nice to know when you don’t need the condom.”

“Doesn’t that thing check for vampirism?” I cocked an eyebrow at him.

“No need. The icy hands and body glitter and neck-staring always gives ’em away.”

“So what’s the other news?”

“You’re fertile—guess that means the ol’ contraceptive charm isn’t holding up out here—and also you’ve got viral hepatitis.”

“What? Goddamn it. Is it B or C?”

“Uh …” He touched the phallus to my palm again. “Both.”

“Shit on a stick! Goddamn it!” I kicked the severed head across the pavement.

“Well, the viruses are just in your bloodstream; it could be your immune system clears them before they get settled in,” the Warlock replied.

“What if my immune system doesn’t clear them?”

He paused. “Then we might have a problem, if we’re stuck here for a long time. Curing hepatitis can be kind of tricky; we’d need a really good healer for that.”

“Better than Mother Karen?” I asked.

“Maybe, yeah,” the Warlock said.

“As bad news goes, that kinda sucks.”

“It could be weeks before you get any hepatitis symptoms,” Cooper replied. “Maybe even months. I wasn’t planning on spending months here, were you?”

“No,” I replied.

He smiled at me. “So let’s stick with the plan. And step one is to see if we can get either of those SUVs started …”