Shotgun Sorceress

Chapter seventeen

Meat Puppetry

I rode Pal a few yards above and behind the van. Charlie was good to her word, and kept her speed at a steady fifty-five on the highway. As soon as the first wayward grasshopper smacked me right in the forehead, though, I wished I had a helmet and a pair of goggles.

Fields gradually gave way to modern ruins: a boarded-up gas station, a gun shop with smashed-out windows and the bars behind crumpled as if they’d been rammed with a large truck, the blackened wreck of a Dairy Queen that had burned sometime before Miko squelched fire.

The walkie-talkie crackled on, Charlie’s voice tinny and faint against the wind: “The store’s coming up on the left. I’m going to pull into the lot.”

“Okay,” I replied.

The strip mall came into view; the Kmart-size Western store was wedged between a Michaels craft store and a Mexican grocery. All the front plate-glass windows had been smashed, but at least from the outside only the grocery seemed to have been looted heavily. Not surprising, since the city had been cut off from fresh supplies for a year. The parking lot was littered with abandoned cars and overturned grocery carts rusting in the sun. By the cart corral I saw the bleached, rodent-gnawed bones of a large dog and near it, scattered human remains, and shreds of clothing. Weeds had cracked through the worn blacktop all across the lot. The place smelled of caliche dust and old rot.

Pal touched down as Charlie parked the van in a clear spot a few dozen yards away from the entrance to the Western store.

“We don’t want to stay too long.” The girl opened the driver’s-side door and stepped onto the pavement, looking nervous. “There aren’t so many dog packs now, but you never know when you’ll run into Miko’s creeps. Or worse.”

“I’m guessing lycanthropes.” The Warlock got out of the passenger seat, hefting an M249 machine gun onto his shoulders. “When an isolated town like this starts to go into the darkness, it attracts bad characters from miles around. Like rats to garbage.”

“Didn’t the local Governing Circle have a defense plan?” I slid off Pal onto the pavement, holding my left hand high to keep from scorching his fur.

Charlie looked perplexed. “A Governing Circle? I never heard of anything like that, sorry.”

“The Talents out in these Western towns like to think of themselves as lords of their private domains.” Cooper heaved the sliding door shut behind him and checked the feed tube of his shotgun. “No rules, no tedious Circle meetings, nobody poking their nose into your craft. Works great until shit like this happens.”

“Whoa.” I stared at him, unable to keep a half smirk off my face. “Did I just hear you defend the government?”

“Governing Circles are a necessary evil.” Cooper shrugged. “I don’t have to like them any more than I have to like the taste of dragon eyeballs.”

“We should really get that glove.” Charlie adjusted the cat sling, shouldered her AK-47, and started across the lot, beckoning us to follow her.

“I’ll wait out here and keep watch for more SUVs,” Pal told me.

The front glass door to Lee’s Western Wear & Rodeo Supply was hanging brokenly on its steel hinges. Charlie pulled it aside and we followed her into the store. There were five checkout lanes and a customer service desk; all the cash registers had been forced open, the dumped-out money trays lying atop discarded checks and small change on the conveyor belts. The floor was covered with stray pennies and dust and grit that had blown in. Someone had smashed a glass case of knives, taking everything but the tiniest pocket folders. There was an impressive collection of rodent droppings and shredded cardboard and plastic beneath what used to be display racks of beef jerky and cactus candies. Most of the rest of the store looked relatively undisturbed, however.

I spotted an aisle sign for “Bull Riders’ Bazaar” toward the back of the store. It occurred to me that a bull-riding glove would be long enough to cover my burning bits and surely sturdy enough to resist being pierced by my claws.

“Hey, guys, I’m going down this way to look.” I started toward the aisle.

“I’ll come with you.” Cooper hurried to catch up to me.

The Warlock glanced up from inspecting the Damascus blade on one of the looter-spurned pocketknives. “I’m gonna stay up here looking for stuff we can use for the enchantment.”

“Watch out for rats,” Charlie said. “If they’re starving they’ll jump out at your face and try to blind you.”

“Been there, done that,” I muttered.

Cooper and I stuck to the middle of the aisles, nervously watching for sudden movement on the shelves. My fire abruptly went out when I was about fifty yards away from Charlie and her mysterious orange tabby. We passed rows of dusty leather chaps, helmets, gear bags, ropes, and vests until we came to the gloves.

“Well, at least you can actually try one of these on now.” Cooper started sorting through the boxes of left-hand bull riding gloves. “What kind do you want?”

“That Heritage Pro model up on the top shelf looks good,” I replied, looking at a black deerskin glove with a wide built-in Velcro wrist wrap.

Cooper plucked the box off the shelf and slid the glove out. As my sweaty hand touched the leather I got a faint echo of the deer’s death. I carefully slipped it onto my claw; the death-memory was gone. The glove was several times bigger than anything that would have fit on my flesh hand, but I wanted it to have some give to accommodate the claws; the built-in wrist strap would tighten it down enough to keep it from slipping off. It seemed as though the leather and padding would resist being sliced fairly well, and the neoprene cuff came up high enough to cover everything that would be on fire.

“So do you think you and the Warlock could strengthen this up a little bit?” I handed the glove back to Cooper. “I’m pretty sure it will work as is, but my claw tips are kinda sharp.”

“Yes, I noticed that.” He stretched the cuff and peered inside at the foam padding. “Why don’t we go to the craft store next door and get some thimbles to stick down in the fingers? That would make things a whole lot easier.”

“Oh. Yeah, good idea.”

But Cooper didn’t move. He chewed the corner of his mustache thoughtfully, glanced down the aisle toward the front of the store, and pulled me closer to him.

“I’m trying to decide what to do here,” he whispered. “On the one hand, I do want to help the townsfolk. I feel bad for Rudy, and Charlie seems like a nice girl. I’m curious to meet this Sara person. But on the other hand, I’m worried about my baby brothers. I’m worried that someone in the Circle might’ve sold us out, and that Riviera might go back on her word and drug the kids or lock them up. But on the other other hand, Mother Karen is not to be trifled with. I pity any idiot who tries to hurt a kid in her care.”

Now that he had brought it up, I was a little worried about the babies, too. I felt that Riviera had been straight with us at the meeting, but considering we’d been ambushed right after it, I couldn’t be sure about her true motivations. “I couldn’t get through to Mother Karen, so I don’t know what’s happening there.”

“We could take Charlie easily enough,” Cooper continued. “Not, you know, hurt her or anything, but put a short-term sleeping charm on her, grab that cat of hers, and have Pal fly us back to the haystack and see if we can get the portal open.”

“Um. I’d be all for that … except I talked to my father, and he said my brother Randall’s here.”

“Whoa, you’ve got a brother? I didn’t know that.”

“Me neither, until today.”

“Wow, looks like we’re drawing every king in the deck, huh?” Cooper lifted his fist for a bump.

“Yeah, go Boy Power, huh?” I dapped him gently on the knuckles. “My father says Miko captured Randall, and wants us to go rescue him.”

“Hm.” Cooper scratched his goatee. “That definitely tips the balance for staying here to see what good we can do, at least for a while.”

We went back up to the front and passed the glove off to the Warlock, who was busy chipping the red phosphorous tips off a bunch of matches and crushing them into powder on the glass customer service countertop. Charlie was taking slow drags off a Virginia Slims cigarette and staring out the window at Pal, who in turn was gazing solemnly at the empty highway. The girl held the cigarette carefully, almost reverently, and when she brought it to her lips, she had the expression of a penitent taking communion.

“Hey, we’re going next door to get some thimbles,” I told her, holding my now-flaming hand high.

She gave a start. “Oh. Okay. Watch out for—”

“Rats. Right.” I gave her a wave and followed Cooper outside.

The craft store had been looted more lightly than the Western store, and most of the damage aside from the smashed cash registers seemed to have been from a fit of vandalism: somebody had overturned most of the shelves of silk plants and flowers so the faux flora was in piles on the floor. My fire went out as we headed into the sewing section, but I wasn’t concerned because we almost immediately saw a display of steel thimbles on white cards. Cooper grabbed a handful and stuck them into his pants pockets.

And then came a raspy wheeze to our left. I turned. A gaunt, bent old lady of seventy or so was standing there, swaying on weak legs, her knobby, spotted hands gripping a battered aluminum walker. Her bare feet were dirty and rat bitten. She smelled sourly of old sweat and fermenting urine. A stained pink “World’s Best Grandma” sweatshirt hung practically to her knees. Her permed gray hair was stiff with weeks of grime, and her mouth hung open, her lips and tongue flaky and dry, her eyes clouded.

I felt as if I were looking at somebody who had died about five minutes ago, but her body hadn’t quite gotten the message yet.

Cooper glanced down at my cooling claw and swung his shotgun around, gripping it by the barrel to use it as a club. “Meat puppet. Be careful.”

“What the heck is she going to do? Doesn’t look like she could so much as spit.” Despite my words, I felt nervous that I couldn’t fire my pistol. I wasn’t sure I had the stomach to slice her up if she somehow managed to attack us. “We should just leave.”

I took a step back. The old lady took a torturous breath and groaned, her lips and tongue working to form words. She released her walker and took a wobbly step toward us.

And in the space between heartbeats, she wasn’t an old woman anymore. Short gray hair had become a thick, dark, silken cascade. She’d shot up about a foot, lost fifty years, lost her clothes. Her breasts were astonishing. I’d heard guys wax rhapsodic about breasts my entire life, and I’d never seen what the big deal was. The world was filled with boobies, and I grew even more jaded to them once I had a pair of my own.

But this woman’s rack was perfect. It was a piece of art that Michelangelo himself could never replicate. Drunken fumblings with cheerleaders aside, I’d never had a single seriously sapphic thought in my entire life, and now I wanted to kiss those breasts, bury my face in them, rub expensive lotions on them, and name them after muses.

The woman laughed, a husky, throaty sound that made every single gland in my body pop to Pavlovian attention. “My eyes are up here, Jessie.”

I blinked, swallowed, my heart pounding in my sweating chest, and took in the rest of her. She was built everywhere else, too. No weak-limbed supermodel body here; she was the very definition of fit, looked like she could take on Zeus himself. Of course, all she’d probably have to do was to show up and he’d pass out from the sudden rush of blood out of his brain to his nether regions.

When I saw her face, I had no doubt that I was looking at no mere demon. She was some kind of goddess, and when I saw her deep green eyes I knew who she was.

“What do you want with us, Miko?” I stammered.

She smiled down at me. “Why, I want you, little girl. And your boyfriend, too. But mostly, I want you.”

I followed her gaze to Cooper, figuring he’d be standing there dazed with an epic erection … and was surprised to see him red-faced and flaccid, his features twisted in rage, his whole body trembling with a paralytic fury.

“What’s wrong? What did you do to him?” My voice broke like a teenage boy’s.

Miko smiled again. “Oh, he’s just thinking about all the things I can do to you, all the pleasure I can bring you, and he knows that all the sex you’ve ever had or ever will have with him won’t even come close. He knows that once I’ve had you, whenever you close your eyes beneath him, you’ll be wishing I were making love to you instead. He’ll never, ever have you all to himself again, because part of you will be thinking about me.”

“That’s not true.” It was hard to speak.

“Oh, but it is.”

She reached out and ever so gently took hold of my right wrist, and her touch was an electric arc that went straight to my pinks, and I was coming, coming hard, and I fell to my knees with a wail and a gasp and she didn’t let me go and I was at her complete mercy in the throes of the orgasm—

—and then I was inside her head, inside her memories, reliving them in nonlinear flashes as if I were inside her body. Miko was death, through and through, and her memories were more vivid than anything I’d tasted in any flesh:

I lay in the slagged wreckage, small and weak, my infant voice wailing in pain for the mother who’d expelled me from her rotting womb and abandoned me. The metal and brick and charred bones around me were hot with radiation, my flesh burning and healing over and over, the hunger in me far brighter than the sun trying to force its rays through the smoke-dark skies—

I walked into the bookstore, sizing up the shopkeeper and his fat old wife through the corner of my eye as I pretended to look at comics. I could take them both right there, tear them apart and devour them hot and nobody would ever know. Mother, I had gone so long without even a broken-down derelict to fill me, and the hunger made my ribs and teeth ache. But I had to wait a little longer. He could be the one. After all these years, this painfully mundane old man could be the one—

I straddled the muscular GI on the brothel cot and slipped his eager flesh inside mine. “Oh, you so big, I f*ck you long time.” I knew good English, but the GIs on leave didn’t want to hear good English. They wanted their girls skinny and underage and stupid, so I moaned nonsense like any other Tokyo whore while he whined drunkenly about wanting to be on top, but I put my hips into it, making it feel good for him while I got myself off on his tight ripe body, and as the sweet orgasm shuddered through me I grabbed the sides of his head and gave a hard, practiced twist that instantly snapped his neck, and his life was flowing into me, filling my hunger, the taste of his soul an electric ecstasy that eclipsed any moment I’d spent pinioned on a man’s cock and it was all I could do not to throw my head back and howl—

“You f*cking bitch, let her go!” I distantly heard Cooper shout above me.

He’d snapped out of his paralysis and swung the butt of his shotgun at her head, connected with a sharp crack of fracturing bone.

Miko fell, but it wasn’t Miko anymore, it was the old woman, but Cooper didn’t seem to notice as he bashed her again and again, her skull splitting horribly. Blood splashed onto my pants and shirt.

“Cooper, Cooper, stop!” I grabbed his arm, but he shook me off. “Dammit, stop, she’s gone!”

He finally stopped, still holding his weapon high, breathing hard through gritted teeth. I’d never seen him so angry in my entire life, and it scared me.

“F*ck.” He turned on his heel and stomped over to a nearby fabric display where he began to furiously scrub the blood and hair and bits of tissue off his shotgun. “F*ck.”

I went up to him and touched his shoulder. My hand was shaking. “Are you okay?”

“I’m just dandy.” He gave the gun a final wipe and turned on me, scowling. “Let’s get out of here.”

He grabbed me by the wrist and practically dragged me along behind him, looking neither to the left nor to the right as he marched us back into the Western store.

“I got thimbles.” Cooper reached into his pocket and slammed the cards down on the counter in front of the Warlock.

“Whoa.” The Warlock looked at Cooper’s red face and the blood spatters on our clothes. “What happened?”

“Don’t want to talk about it.” Cooper stripped off his ruined dress shirt and tossed it angrily on the floor. He turned away from us and went over to Charlie, who was still smoking Virginia Slims by the window. “Can I have one of those?”

“Yeah, sure, they’re kinda girly—”

“Don’t care, I just need a smoke.”

As Charlie tapped out a cigarette for my boyfriend, I whispered to the Warlock, “Since when is he a smoker?”

“Since never,” he whispered back. “I mean, Coop sometimes bums a clove off Opal when we’re out drinking, but I’ve never seen him smoke outside a bar. What the hell happened to you two over there?”

I suddenly felt acutely ashamed about what Miko had done to me, and even more disturbed at what I’d felt inside her memories. “We ran into a meat puppet, and things got weird.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Weird how?”

“Weird like I don’t want to talk about it, either.”

Cooper took a long drag off his cigarette and turned toward us, bitter smoke jetting from his nostrils. “I am going to kill that cunt. Kill her. How dare she touch you like that. She … she f*cking molested you. I am going to kill her, then raise her from the dead so I can kill her again!”

Cooper slung his shotgun over his bare shoulder and headed for the door.

“Honey, wait, where are you going? We don’t even know where she is!”

He glared at me; he had the expression I always thought he might wear if he caught me kissing a boy at a bar. “I need a walk.”

Charlie looked worried. “You shouldn’t go out by yourself, there could be zomb—”

“Oh, I hope so. I’d love to find something else that needs a skull cracking!” He snatched the pack of Virginia Slims out of the startled girl’s hand and stormed outside.

Hey, Pal, I thought to my familiar, who was still standing guard in the parking lot watching the highway.

“What’s going on?” he replied inside my head.

Cooper’s pissed off, and he’s not thinking straight. I’m worried he’s going to get himself hurt. Could you keep an eye on him for me?

“I certainly will.”

The Warlock was staring at me, both eyebrows high. “The meat puppet molested you? Do tell.”

“It wasn’t the meat puppet. It was Miko. She took over the puppet’s body.” Embarrassed, I started pulling the thimbles off their white cards.

“What did she do to you?”

“Just, um, grabbed my wrist.” I pried at a difficult thimble with my thumbnail.

“And then?”

“I came.” I barely whispered the words.

“You what?”

I cleared my throat and stared up at him, suddenly feeling intensely annoyed. “I came.”

The Warlock rocked back on his heels and crossed his arms, giving me a look. “Oh really?”

I felt myself blush, and I looked away. “Yeah, really.”

“And then Coop had an alpha-dude shit fit.”

“Yeah.”

The Warlock began to chuckle.

“It’s not the least little bit funny,” I protested. “The meat puppet was an old lady, somebody’s grandmother, and Cooper bashed her skull in. It was really ugly. I’ve never seen him like that before.”

The Warlock scratched his chin through his beard. “Coop always acts real cool, but underneath that cucumber façade he’s got a temper worse than Opal. Takes a while to get him there, but once he’s good and mad he stews for a while. Give him time, he’ll get over it.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.” The Warlock winked at me. “Wanna help me enchant your glove? Not that the fire doesn’t look good on you, and I love hanging out with hot women as much as the next guy, but even I have my limits.”

I stretched, trying to work some of the tension out of my back. My spine popped. “Sure, let’s do the glove. Maybe Cooper will be back by the time we’re done.”

Once I worked the thimbles down into the fingertips of the glove—the death-memories from the deerskin were pretty minimal as long as I kept my hands dry—we started on the enchantment. It was mostly me handing the Warlock supplies when he asked for them and otherwise following his lead, since I didn’t have a clue about this type of enchantment. As we worked, I started noticing that he smelled good, and I mean really good. Lickably good. I found my eyes drifting down toward his crotch in my idle moments while the Warlock recited incantations. I’d never given his gear much thought before—and had managed to avoid seeing it in action despite his and Opal’s tendency to get busy pretty much whenever and wherever the mood struck them—but now I was hard-pressed to keep speculations about his dimensions out of my head.

It would be okay, I told myself, shutting my eyes. We could get to wherever we were going for the night, Cooper would calm down, we’d find some way of keeping my arm from spewing burning ectoplasm everywhere. He’d exorcise me. And then we’d find a condom. Several condoms. And a dental dam. And then Cooper would make love to me, and I’d have a really satisfying, mind-blowing orgasm, and I would not infect him with hepatitis or anything else. I would not hurt him. My brain would be wiped clean of thoughts about Miko and the Warlock and anybody who wasn’t Cooper. Period. I would get properly laid sometime very soon and it would all be okay.

It would all be okay, it would all be okay.

“Jessie? Hey, Jessie?” The Warlock snapped his fingers near my ears.

I opened my eyes. “Sorry. What?”

“Are you all right? You’re looking all red and sorta sweaty.”

“It’s just the fire. My arm. Makes me feel weird,” I half lied.

“Well, the glove’s done.” He held it out to me. “Want to try it on to see if it works?”

“Sure.” I took the leather glove from him and gingerly pulled it on over my flaming hand, my claws clacking into the thimbles. The neoprene extension on the cuff covered everything that needed covering, and the Velcro wrap made the fit just about perfect. Thin trails of smoke rose from the cuff, but there was no sign that the material itself was burning.

“Looks good,” I said.

Charlie came back into the store; she’d gone to the grocery to hunt for cigarettes, and was now carrying a couple of packs of Benson & Hedges. “We should leave soon.”

I shook my head. “Not until Cooper comes back.”

“We can’t stay here tonight; this place really isn’t defendable.” The girl looked worried.

“Another half hour won’t kill us, will it?” I asked her sharply, then turned away and closed my eyes to concentrate on contacting my familiar.

Pal, are you out there? What’s going on? We need to leave soon.

No response. I tried again: Pal, are you there?

Nothing.

He was just out of range, I told myself, trying to quell the anxiety building inside me. I chewed on my thumbnail.

“You okay?” the Warlock asked.

“I’m fine.” I smiled at him, probably completely unconvincingly considering the look he gave me right afterward. And despite my anxiety, looking at him filled my head with a hundred wet unwanted thoughts, a swarm of vermin fleeing the flooded tunnels of my id.

“I’m gonna do a little more shopping back here,” I told him and Charlie, hoping that out of sight would mean out of mind. “And yes, I’ll watch out for rats.”

I went into the T-shirt aisle first; I was wearing way too much of the World’s Best Grandma and wanted something cleaner. A black shirt bearing a cartoon of a stick man being thrown from a stick horse above the caption “I Do My Own Stunts” caught my eye. I pulled off my old shirt, used it to scrub the blood spatters off my dragonskin pants, and put on the new tee.

Finished with changing, I went down the horse-riding equipment aisle. Pal was much better able to fight at his current size, so there was no point in asking him to shrink himself down to a size that would fit in the van. I’d probably be riding him the rest of the way to the university; having my butt wedged between his vertebrae was surely not that comfortable for him. Clearly he found my libido horrifying—hell, I was finding it fairly horrifying—and if I was going to get all juiced up the moment a stiff wind blew across my nipples, well, some extra padding between my muff and his fur would help us both maintain what was left of our dignity.

None of the saddles would accommodate his alien physiology, so I took a look at the saddle pads. I found a moss-colored SMx Heavy-Duty Air Ride pad that seemed flexible enough to conform to Pal’s back and that promised breathability and shock absorption. Farther down, I found their stock of saddlebags; I picked out a glossy leather model with spacious panniers deep enough to temporarily hold a rifle stuck in catty-corner. They had several types of leather gun scabbards, but since I couldn’t use an actual saddle there wouldn’t be any good way to secure one to Pal short of probably disastrous experiments with braiding his fur. Remembering the sting of the airborne grasshopper collision, I went to their riding helmet section and picked out a visored Troxel Cheyenne covered with embroidered chocolate leather. With a little luck, the padded fabric lining would keep most of the unpleasant memories from the leather at bay.

I slung the saddlebag over my shoulder and tucked the pad under my arm and headed for the front door.

“I’m going out to the van for a little bit,” I told Charlie and the Warlock in passing.

“Why?” she asked.

“I’m going to drop all this in there for safekeeping until Pal gets back, and I’m going see if you have anything with a little more oomph than this Glock. And then I’m going to shut my eyes for a little while, because I’m tired.”

Charlie looked impatient. “We really need to—”

“Leave. I know. Gimme fifteen minutes of quiet time, okay? And then I’ll start looking for Cooper and Pal.”

I carried the tack out to the van. My fire went out halfway there. I got in the passenger side, shut the door, and climbed into the backseat. It was like an oven in there, even with the vent windows cracked. I tossed my backpack into the seat beside me, piled the tack on the floor between the seats, pulled one of the Mossberg shotguns I’d coveted out of its rack, and laid it on top of the saddle pad.

And then I sat there in the sweltering dimness, eyes closed, and focused on contacting Pal, hoping that the extra fifty yards would somehow make a difference.

Are you there? I thought. Hey, Pal, are you there?

Still nothing.

Keeping my eyes shut, I started trying to clear my head of the building panic and carnal thoughts that threatened to wreck my strained nerves. Breathed in, breathed out, slowly, rhythmically, just like my hapkido instructor taught us in concentration exercises. I pictured my mind as a smooth ocean wave rolling out to sea … and promptly imagined myself going down on the Warlock in the warm sand and foamy surf. Dammit.

There was nothing to do for it but take matters into my own hands. Hand, anyway. I unbuckled my gun belt and loosened the drawstring on my dragonskin pants so I could slip my fingers into my underwear. It was a hot mess down there, and I regretted bringing only a single change of underwear in my backpack. Buddha in a biscuit. At the rate I was going, someone might as well tattoo NO SELF-CONTROL right across my face and be done with it.

Everything was so slippery it was hard to get much satisfying friction going at first, but I leaned into it and bore down and pretty soon I was coming hard enough that I was pounding my head against the back of the seat in front of me to keep from crying out. I fell back, sweating, forehead hurting, stomach roiling again, legs sprawled. And suddenly aware that I stank of tang, and the moment I went back into the store the Warlock would know that I’d been pathetically jilling off in the van. Charlie would probably know, too. And so would everybody else I’d meet that day. Yay for good first impressions.

I found an old bandanna on the floorboards that had been recently employed as a dipstick rag and used it to wipe my hand off. Hopefully the motor oil and diesel would mask my funk. And also kill off any hepatitis I just managed to get on the rag. Crap.

There wasn’t a trash receptacle in sight. I pulled up my pants and buckled on my pistol, then stood on the seat so I could lean out of the sunroof and wedge the rag under the .50 gun; I figured in lieu of fire the heat of the sun would be the best I could do to sanitize the thing. And at least it wouldn’t be floating around on the floor of the van looking like something someone could use for emergency nose blowing.

“Jessie!” It was Pal’s voice inside my head.

Thank God, I thought back. What happened to you and Cooper?

“We’ve run into a spot of trouble, I’m afraid … we’re coming your way. Please have a machine gun ready. All of them if possible. I don’t think we can have too many guns right now.”

What? Crap.

I stuck my shotgun up on the van’s roof and boosted myself up to sit behind the .50 gun mount. And promptly realized that although I thought I could figure out the firing mechanism, I had no way to shoot the weapon without Charlie’s cat nearby.

“Charlie! Warlock!” I hopped up and down, waving my arms at the Western store. The van rocked ominously beneath me. “Get out here; I need the kitty!”

I stood on the roof of the van and scanned the highway as the Warlock and Charlie came running up.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“I’m not sure yet. Pal contacted me. He and Cooper are coming and it sounds like they might have some company.”

“Some company” turned out to be one of the biggest understatements I’d made all year, followed closely by “I think the habañero diablo might be a little spicy.” Pal came galloping down the highway with Cooper clinging to his neck for dear life. Six heavy-duty pickups were speeding close behind; the truck beds were packed with meat puppets armed with bats and axes. Some were wearing what used to be nice suits and dresses, and others were wearing sweats and pajamas. There were close to forty puppets in all as best as I could tell.

Pal ran straight toward us, playing his flying spell, unable to get airborne because he wasn’t close enough to Charlie’s cat. We didn’t have much time. I went to a crouch on the roof of the van, trying to decide whether to go with option A, start blasting with the shotgun, or option B, try to figure out how to operate the .50 machine gun. Smoke rose from the cuff of my glove as my anxiety built, and I suddenly decided to go with option C, yanking off the deerskin and holding my flaming claw high.

Pal’s spell finally took hold, and he rose fast in the air. The lead truck sped up, apparently intent on ramming the van and dashing me to the pavement.

“Get clear!” I hollered.

As soon as Pal and Cooper had flown over my head, I let loose on the trucks. The burning purple ectoplasm came out of me in a firehose jet, and for a moment all I could see was the stuff flaring into an unnatural fireball in the air before me. I hit the lead truck, and the vehicle went up in a hot burst of flames, swerving and rolling clear of us as the melting tires blew out. It was absolutely horrible what happened to the meat puppets in the bed. They were eerily silent as they burned.

But I didn’t have too much time to think about what I’d just done; the other trucks were still coming. I lit them up, too, with equally gruesome but effective results. The air was filled with the stink of brimstone, molten metal, burning tires, and charred flesh.

As I torched the third truck, I realized that my ectoplasmic jet was thinning, growing weaker. Was I running out of energy? Dammit. A few trucks of puppets would be a hell of a thing to blow my remaining power on considering we hadn’t dealt with Miko yet. And surely there would be a few Virtii waiting in the wings for the final act.

I used my fire more carefully after that. Soon it was all over but for a few puppets that had been tossed out of their trucks before they had a chance to be napalmed. They lay twitching in pools of blood, still trying to reach their weapons and get up even though their limbs and bodies were mangled. I felt intensely sick and looked away, looked down.

Charlie was standing there beside the van, staring at the carnage, muttering a prayer over and over under her breath, clutching her AK-47 in shaking hands.

I pulled on my glove, picked up my shotgun, and cleared my throat. “Charlie, do you think you could … you know. Help me put those last few down? Please?”

“Um. Yeah.” She flicked the safety off her weapon and stumbled out into the parking lot.

“You take that bunch on the right, I’ll take the ones on the left.” I slid down onto one of the tires armoring the side of the van, then hopped onto the pavement.

I figured her orange cat would leap out of the sling and run away the moment she pulled the trigger, but it continued to lounge against her chest, purring loudly. Charlie stepped through the bodies, firing single rounds into the skulls of anyone who still appeared to be moving. Her shaking aside, there was almost no hesitation in the girl’s movements; I got the feeling that she’d had to do this before.

I lifted my shotgun and set about the unpleasant task of blowing the heads off any puppets that were still moving. It was one of the most depressing, disgusting things I’d ever had to do. But at least it didn’t take very long, and afterward I walked back to join the guys.

The Warlock was tending to Cooper with his healing crystal. Based on the huge purpling knots on my boyfriend’s face and body, he had taken another club to the eye and a couple to the shoulders and forearms before Pal spirited him away to safety. Pal stood close by, giving me a look I couldn’t quite read.

“Nice job,” Cooper said, apparently without irony or sarcasm.

My cheeks flushed. “ ‘Nice job’? No. There was nothing ‘nice’ about what I just did. That was really f*cking horrible. I am going to see those bodies burning in nightmares the rest of my life, and no, I don’t care that they didn’t have souls and I was doing them a favor or whatever. I do not want to have to do that again, okay? So if you go off looking for a fight, don’t bring it back to me to deal with, dammit!”

Cooper stared back at me. “Okay. I’m sorry.”

He still had a look and tone of anger I didn’t like, but I bit my tongue on another heated reply. Now was not a good time to get into an argument with him.

I turned away to retrieve my backpack and the shotgun and Pal’s tack from the van. “We’re leaving.”