Shotgun Sorceress

Chapter three

Youthful Indiscretions


I stood in the backyard wearing what I’d already come to think of as the Itchy Plaid Wool Skirt of Abject Shame. An olive-drab sleeping roll and a pillow were tucked under my good arm. My left hand burned nakedly in the night air. The ectoplasmic emission had ripped open the seams on my glove, and at the moment Mother Karen and the Warlock were too busy with the guest room to fix it.

“Are they able to repair the damage to the house?” Pal stilted toward me on his rangy legs.

I nodded and tossed the sleeping bag and pillow onto the picnic table. “But it looks like I’m bunking with you tonight, out here where I’m less of a fire hazard.”

He blinked at me. “But surely you and Cooper have enough self-control to avoid further carnal—”

“Wet dreams.”

“Ah. Yes. Those.”

“And probably any old nightmare would do it, too.” I cleared my throat. “The others thought that you should stay up to watch me and wake me up if it looks like I’m having a bad dream. I mean, if you’re up for that. I … I guess you’re not really my familiar anymore, are you? So you’re free to do what you want, but we’d all really appreciate it if you kept me from burning anything else down.”

“Of course. I don’t mind, and keeping Mother Karen’s home safe certainly seems like a worthy cause.”

I bit my lip. “What’s going to happen to you now? It seems like maybe I’m not in as much trouble as I thought, but I don’t know what kind of pull Riviera Jordan has with your jailers.”

Pal scratched his shaggy thorax thoughtfully with one of his middle legs. “Honestly, I have no idea what will happen. I managed to break the binding spells my overseers placed on me, so I suppose the next logical thing for them would be to pursue me directly and take me back into custody. But so far there’s been no sign they’ve implemented that plan. Even if I am exonerated for my actions over the past week, I still have several decades left on my sentence.”

“So what did you do to get into trouble in the first place?”

Pal’s face was still unreadable, but his voice sounded pained. “I was very young, and had an unfortunate interest in diabology, and some nefarious individuals discovered my interest and naïveté, and, well …”

I was dying to know what trouble Pal could’ve gotten into. “Well, what?”

“One thing led to another, and they convinced me to help them bring a manifestation of the ancient god you may know as Abraxas into the largest city of my home planet.”

In the wake of all the chaos, my memory wasn’t what it should have been. “Abraxas … I hate to sound dumb, but I can only remember that’s the name of an old Santana album Cooper’s got in his vinyl collection.”

Pal blinked at me. “The entity is also known as Abrasax. Does the title ‘Demon of the Great Year’ help you?”

My brain pinged on some of my Egyptian studies. “Head of a rooster, snakes for legs, carries a whip and shield?”

“That’s one described manifestation, yes. Abraxas has many recorded forms.”

“But it’s not really a demon, right? I mean, that’s just mundane confusion over the whole demon-versus-devil-versus-god situation, right?”

“Indeed. Abraxas is no mere demon,” Pal replied.

Demons are basically just supernatural servants. Gods, devils, and powerful Talents can create them, sometimes by accident, but usually intentionally. They’re often created from pieces of broken souls, although some golem demons don’t have any soul elements at all (and consequently have all the personality of your average vacuum cleaner). As a group, demons are neither good nor evil, unlike devils, which are typically selfish schemers at best and sadists of the nastiest nature at worst. Devils poke and prod mortals into action and feed off the resulting psychic energies; the best of them are the muses, but even they rarely have any qualms about driving their artists mad to satisfy their own hunger.

Good servant demons—or daemons, as the more intelligent ones would rather be called—normally go about their tasks with quiet efficiency and are seldom encountered by people they don’t have business with. Accidentally created demons, on the other hand, are usually uncontrolled, destructive, blatant incarnations of strong emotions like hate and anger. Their horrible natures taint the reputation of demonkind as a whole; even I carry a shoot-first prejudice against demons, and I should know better.

“But it’s a telling detail that Abraxas is referred to as a demon,” Pal continued. “It was once a god of creation and destruction, both good and evil, but as the aeons passed and other creators like Jehovah gained followers and power, Abraxas has become more associated with its darker nature. It’s reclusive, mercurial, and nobody really knows what its true intentions might be these days.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” I said.

“In fact, it was not. I am purely fortunate that I only got a few hundred years’ sentence as a familiar. I suffer everlasting dismay that I was duped so very easily, when at the time I prided myself on what I supposed to be my superior intellect.”

“So, why did you help them?”

“They were attractive and knew exactly what to say to me. In retrospect I was surely an easy mark; despite my aloofness I was desperate to belong. They preyed on my youthful conviction that democracy is fundamentally doomed to failure because the populace as a whole lacks sufficient intelligence and moral fiber to make good decisions. A god-emperor, they convinced me, would provide solutions to all our society’s ills. And of course they promised that I’d have some important role in our brave new world under Abraxas.”

“And then what happened?”

“They raised Abraxas—or what they claimed was Abraxas, at any rate—right in the middle of our capital city. To this day I don’t know what it really was, but it was mainly interested in devouring as many of my people as possible. I realized my terrible mistake, of course, and went to the authorities with what I knew. The minions by then had staged a raid on the capital treasury and were long gone with a considerable number of priceless artifacts. Fortunately the authorities managed to banish the entity before the city was destroyed. And, as it turned out, I was one of a dozen youthful Talents they’d recruited for their scheme.”

“Wow.” I was silent for a moment. “Can you ever go back there?”

“Surely not like this.” Pal gestured toward his hybrid body. “They don’t have ferrets on my world, and even if they did, I’d still look nearly as monstrous to my own people as I seem to yours.”

“Maybe Riviera can help you get your real body back, or find someone who can.”

“Perhaps.” Pal sounded supremely doubtful and a bit sad. “For all I know, the Fates have willed this unsightly mash-up to be my true form.”

I didn’t believe in Fate—or didn’t want to, anyhow—but I didn’t feel like arguing the point with Pal. As I pondered the frustrating nature of predestination, I let my flame hand drop too close to my leg. The fire bit right through the wool skirt into my skin.

“Ow!” I jerked my hand away from my scorched thigh. “Christ, I’m gonna have to start carrying a healing crystal like the Warlock. Dammit. Ow.”

“It might be best if Riviera Jordan were to focus her resources on removing your curse,” Pal said. “My current condition does not render me a danger to myself.”

I no longer doubted that my flame hand was some kind of curse. I could barely eat, couldn’t safely get off, and now it looked like decent sleep was definitely off the menu, too. “Well, I hope Riviera can do something about this. I hope she’s not just lying to Mother Karen about wanting to talk things over reasonably.”

The burn on my leg was roughly the size of a business card, and it stung like crazy. I placed my flesh palm over the wound and spoke an ancient word for “heal.” It helped, but not as much as I’d hoped.

Worried anew that I was losing my ability to use white magic, I began to pace around the yard, holding my flame hand well away from my body.

“You should try to get some rest,” Pal said.

“I will, in a little while.” I was absolutely bone-tired, and wanted nothing more than to lie down and sleep for the next sixteen hours, but I was afraid of what might happen once I drifted off. If I drifted off.

My flame hand seemed to catch on something. I looked down, puzzled. I was out in the middle of the yard; there wasn’t so much as a tall dandelion nearby. I waved my hand through the empty air. And there it was again, the sensation of an invisible seam.

“Hey, there’s something weird over here,” I said to Pal. “Can you see or feel anything?”

He came over to investigate. “No, I don’t sense anything … What is it?”

“I’m not sure.” I blinked through several views with my enchanted stone eye. One showed a faint blue rectangular outline in the air, just barely perceptible.

Acting on a hunch, I dug my flame fingers into the seam and pulled. A small door swung open midair, revealing the inside of a wooden shipping crate. It was a little bigger than a school gym locker, maybe three feet tall and two feet wide, and perhaps as many deep. Stacked inside were several plastic-wrapped bricks of white powder and compressed plant matter. The air inside was musty with a familiar sweetly weedy odor.

The patio door slid open.

“We fixed your glove,” Mother Karen called, sounding more like her old cheerful self again.

“Hey, did you know someone put an extradimensional drug stash back here?” I called back.

“A what?” Karen strode across the yard and stared into the crate. Her expression changed from surprise to irritated recognition. “Darn that boy, I knew he was lying to me.”

“Which boy?” I took the repaired opera glove from Mother Karen’s outstretched hand and slipped it on. I hoped Jimmy wasn’t in any trouble; I liked the kid.

“I fostered a teenager named Rick Wisecroft about five years ago. He had a lot of natural ability, but he seemed mostly interested in making drugs and selling them at the local high schools. I personally have nothing against adults partaking responsibly in whatever substances they choose to, but his behavior was completely unacceptable. Neither the authorities nor I could ever find anything on him, of course. He swore up and down he never brought anything illegal to the house.” She sighed. “I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, but some kids just don’t want to do the right thing.”

“What happened to him?” I asked.

“He stayed long enough for his eighteenth birthday party, and then ran away that night with his gifts and the cash from my purse.” She paused, looking sad. “I haven’t heard of or from him since. I’m surprised he left all this behind.”

“Maybe he made some enemies and had to leave in a hurry. Or maybe he smoked too much of his own supply and forgot where he put it,” I replied. “It was pretty well hidden.”

“How did you find it?”

“Pure accident, I think. I felt the doorway in the air.” I wiggled my flame fingers at Karen. “Apparently the Hand o’ Doom is useful for more than wanton destruction.”

“Thank goodness for that.” Karen reached inside the crate and pulled out the bricks of white powder and stacked them on the grass. “These I assume are cocaine or methamphetamine; be a dear and burn them, would you? Just try not to breathe the fumes.”

Karen pulled out the bricks of marijuana. “I’m going to check these to make sure they haven’t been tainted with PCP or any nonsense like that. And then … well, no sense in wasting a perfectly useful herb.”

“There’s probably more of these,” I said. “I mean, if I were a high-school coke dealer, I’d want to have more than one hiding place, just in case.”

Mother Karen nodded. “Please check the rest of the yard, would you?”

“Sure thing.”

I spent the next hour slowly going over the yard bit by bit with my flame hand. I found another extradimensional cache by the fence that contained just a couple of organic chemistry manuals, but in the trees I made a startling discovery: doors that led into the basements or gyms of the toniest high schools in the city: Thomas Worthington, St. Charles Prep, Bexley High, Bishop Hartley, and Upper Arlington. There wasn’t a door into the suburban Talent high school, Dublin Alternative, presumably because the custodians there were on the lookout for such enchantments.

“The kid was slick.” I carefully closed the last portal.

“It does seem he was running quite the operation.”

I hefted one of the kilos of anonymous white powder. “Maybe he wasn’t making standard drugs. Maybe he was selling memory enhancers and love potions and stuff like that, too. I mean, seriously, kids would go crazy over love potions in high school.”

“It’s possible,” Pal replied. “But I wouldn’t try any of that to find out. It’s so old by now it’s probably unstable, assuming it was ever stable to begin with.”

“I wasn’t planning on it.” I dropped the kilo into my flame palm and closed my fiery fingers around the package; it burned with a quick blue flame and disappeared into ash and acrid smoke that I did my best to avoid breathing.

“Know what I’m happiest about right now?” I coughed, stepping away from the smoke and fanning the air with my flesh hand.

“No, what?”

“I’m really damn happy I didn’t find little Ricky’s corpse stashed out here. ’Cause it’s been just that kind of week.”