Shotgun Sorceress

Chapter twenty-four

Sprung Traps

I got downstairs as fast as I could and ran out into the courtyard, breathing hard. If I’d been thinking straight I would have stopped for my shotgun and to grab a cat, but between my fever and my panic I was lucky to be able to speak in complete sentences. All I could think about was getting to Cooper. Dark spots were blooming in my vision, but at least I wasn’t seeing the fey again. I scanned the courtyard, but couldn’t see a ring of curious cadets surrounding a fight; I listened, but couldn’t hear grunts of men laboring to murder one another, nor the thud of fists hitting flesh.

So I hurried over to an airman who was reading a gun repair manual at one of the shaded picnic tables. “Did you see those two guys who were fighting? Did you see where they went?”

He looked up, blinking at me from behind glasses that were held together with duct tape and electrical wire. “Uh. Yeah. One of the dudes swore at Sara and then started yelling these crazy-sounding words at her, and she got really mad and had ’em both thrown out of the compound.”

Panic crested in me like a tsunami. “Thrown out? Where?”

“Just over there.” Looking puzzled, he pointed at the main entrance we’d come through the day before.

I swore and ran to the gate; thinking back, I still don’t know what the hell I was planning to do. “Let me out!”

The guards shrugged at each other and pulled the chain-link panel aside. I sprinted into the empty streets, hollering the men’s names until my voice was nearly gone.

After a few minutes of running, sweat and tears were streaming down my face, my blood was pounding in my ears, and the edges of my vision were starting to darken. I stopped, leaned forward, hands on my knees, trying to catch my wind.

“Jessie …”

I looked up. Miko was standing right in front of me.

She smiled down at me. “I’ve got your men. Give yourself to me, and they’ll go free. If you don’t … well. I’m sure I can find lots of delightful uses for their bodies once I’ve taken their souls.”

I swore and yanked open the Velcro cuff of my bull-riding glove, intending to strip the deerskin off and slash the bitch in the face. But in a blink she had me by my flesh wrist and just as suddenly I was at her mercy as she flooded my nerves with ecstasy one moment and agony the next and I fell to my knees on the pavement.

“I think that deep down, you like the taste of murder just as much as I do, little girl … I think you and I could make a great team, if you would just learn to cooperate a little.”

The pleasure turned to pain again, and one of her memories rose in my mind:

I flipped on the light in the motel bathroom and examined my body in the full-length mirror. The pain had worsened as my body had made more blood and my nerves reawakened. I looked ghastly, even by my standards. There was a baseball-size entry wound in my back above my left kidney and a saucer-size exit wound above my belly button. Buckshot ground between my vertebrae. The ragged ends of a few broken ribs had pierced my skin. My T-shirt was almost a vest. I was pincushioned with cactus spines from my thighs to my chin. Dirt and dead grass matted my wounds. I pulled my switchblade and pliers out of my rucksack and took a deep breath, steeling myself for another fun Friday night of do-it-yourself surgery—

With effort, I pulled myself out of Miko’s memory and gave my free hand a hard shake to shuck off the glove. No cat meant no fire, but I still had my claw. I rose up against her with as much strength as I could muster and drove my blades deep into her body.

Miko left, and the meat puppet she’d possessed collapsed. It was Major Rodriguez, his eyes staring wide at me, unseeing. I’d slashed his chest open, and my claw shone with his blood.

The sight of his corpse turned my exhaustion to lead bricks on my bones, made my fever and sickness feel a thousand times worse. I sank back to my knees on the hot pavement and wept. I had failed, utterly failed. I’d lost the love of my life and one of my best friends and slaughtered the only person who could seemingly keep Sara’s madness in check. I’d failed, I’d failed, we were all lost …

After a few minutes, I heard the sound of someone running up the street behind me. I didn’t care.

“Jessie?” It was Charlie’s voice. “Jessie, what hap—Oh no. Oh God, no.”

I heard her step toward me more slowly.

“Miko tricked me,” I whispered. “He was her puppet. I didn’t know until I killed him.”

“I believe you. But some of the others won’t. They … they’ll want to blame you for his death, because you’re killable, and Miko ain’t.” She tugged at my sleeve. “We gotta get back to the compound; it ain’t safe out here.”

I numbly stared down at the major’s body. “We can’t just leave him out here. It doesn’t seem right.”

“We have to. If we bring him back with us … you’re covered in blood. You’ll be dead in an hour. There ain’t no helping him now; Miko’s got his soul. It doesn’t matter to him if the animals take his body, and if they do, well, his men won’t figure you did it, will they?”

Charlie helped me to my feet and poured her canteen over my claw to wash away as much of the incriminating blood as she could. She pulled a tan bandanna out of her cat sling and let me use it to dry off my claw.

“Have you seen Pal? My spider?” I pulled my bull-riding glove back on, and in the movement imagined pulling myself together. Maybe everything wasn’t lost. And even if it was, well, I couldn’t give Miko the satisfaction of my surrender.

She shook her head. “Did you see your guys?”

I felt tears well in my eyes, and I savagely wiped them away with the back of my flesh hand. “Miko’s holding them hostage. She says she’ll let them go if I give myself up.”

Charlie looked worried. “You’re not gonna, are you?”

I didn’t answer, and we walked on in silence. Halfway back to the compound, my heart soared with happiness and relief when I heard Pal’s calliope music overhead, but almost immediately I found myself getting mad all over again.

“Where the hell were you?” I hollered at him as he touched down on the street in front of us.

He was holding one of the black kittens curled in his left front paw. His legs were crisscrossed with nasty-looking scratches. Patches of his fur had been torn out all over his body.

“I’m quite sorry,” he replied. “You seemed to be resting so comfortably, and I was getting so very hungry, and I thought it would only take a half hour at most to find a few rats to snack on …”

“Whoa,” Charlie said. “He looks like he’s been down in the steam tunnels.”

Pal’s alien face was still hard for me to read, but it seemed to me that he looked embarrassed. “The girl is quite perceptive. While I was in the basement, I found a sealed door to the tunnels, and to my great regret, my hunger drove me to pick the lock and go inside.”

“What’s in the steam tunnels?” I asked both of them.

“Rats,” Charlie said, hugging her orange kitty. “Really huge, nasty rats.”

“More specifically, a pack of murothropes prowls the tunnels,” Pal told me. “They used genuine Norway rats to lure me out of range of the cats’ magic field, and they attacked me in great numbers. I count myself lucky to have escaped with my shell intact.”

“Wow.” Wererats are worse than werewolves; what they lack in brute strength they more than make up for in pack size, cunning, and sheer viciousness. My anger toward Pal vanished, and I kicked myself for believing he’d thoughtlessly abandoned me.

Promise me you won’t go off by yourself again? I thought to him as the three of us started walking back to the compound. Things got really screwed up today because we got separated. And I promise I won’t go to sleep if you’re hungry.

“I gladly promise you that. This does not seem to be a good place for any of us to get separated.” Pal held up the kitten. “And on that same subject, I found this in the room, but I haven’t seen Cooper or the Warlock. Do you know where they are?”

I felt the tears coming again, and I shut my eyes against them. Miko’s got them. She laid a trap for us and we fell right into it.

I telepathically gave Pal the short version of everything that had happened after he left to go hunting.

“Oh dear. That’s … dreadful.”

We passed “dreadful” several miles ago. And I have no idea what to do now.

“Well, might I suggest that we can best do our decision-making on a full stomach? Breakfast was surely a long time ago for you, and I never did get to eat a rat.”

Sounds good. “Hey, Charlie, any idea what they’re serving for lunch?”


The three of us sat at an isolated table in the corner of the cafeteria. Our keeping to ourselves wasn’t entirely intentional, but none of the people who came in seemed eager to be near Pal. Charlie and Pal had bowls of the leftover beef stew and some rice. The server took pity on me when I said I couldn’t have the stew and she gave me a double portion of rice and a handful of peanut packets. It wasn’t much, but it was food and it wouldn’t make me feel worse than I already did.

“I really am trying to look on the bright side here.” I popped two Advil in my mouth and washed them down with a swig of Gatorade. It hadn’t been quite eight hours since my visit to the clinic, but the fever was kicking me hard. “But every way I look at it, Miko has completely boned us.”

“Sara sent me to find you for a reason; she doesn’t send us after just anybody who falls out of the sky, you know.” Charlie took a drink of her Coke. “The cats told her you were here to do something important.”

“Then why the hell did she throw Cooper and the Warlock to Miko?” I asked. “How are Pal and I supposed to do anything but die horribly without the guys to help us fight?”

“She didn’t send me to get all y’all,” Charlie pointed out. “Jessie Shimmer was the only name she gave me. It’s you the cats were interested in, not anybody else.”

“And clearly the Virtii lured you here for a reason,” Pal added. “Perhaps these cat-devils know what the Virtii know: that you—and, dare I say it, perhaps I—have the ability to defeat the town nemesis.”

“Well, I wish someone would fill me in on exactly how I’m supposed to take on Miko,” I fumed, replaying her bathroom surgery memory in my head. Once we found her real body, my shotgun clearly wasn’t going to do much to stop her. Provided, of course, that the memories I was getting from her were authentic and not designed to trick me. “It would be real nice if one of the cats could leave me a little note: ‘O hai, she haz bad left knee’ or ‘LOL, peanut allergy!’ A little help, somebody, please!”

I was ranting louder than I realized, and the people at the other tables had turned to stare at me and whisper to each other.

“Inside voice, Jessie.” Pal downed his bowl of beef stew in one gulp and looked longingly at the food line.

“Right.” I passed him a packet of peanuts and stuck my tongue out at the staring airmen.

“I know some stuff.” Charlie absently rubbed the jagged white scars on her forearm. “Not about Miko, but about the zombies. She can possess them, but she can’t make them. Someone else does that.”

I sat up and leaned toward her. “Do tell.”

She bit her lip and pulled a pack of Marlboros out of her pocket. Nobody paid the least bit of attention to the “No Smoking” signs on the cafeteria walls.

“I’ve never told anyone about what happened to me.” Charlie’s voice was low. “It’s kind of a long story. I don’t know what to leave out.”

“I think we have time,” I said.

“Okay, then …”

Charlie lit up a cigarette, took a deep drag, and began to tell us about her shadow.