Shotgun Sorceress

Chapter six

Siobhan’s Boys

Cooper continued to saw serious logs, but I slept fitfully at best the rest of the night. It didn’t help that Pal stuck his big shaggy head into the tent and poked me awake a couple of times on the grounds that I was dreaming, or looked like I might be dreaming. Shortly after dawn’s first light, I hauled myself out of the tent and staggered into the house in search of hot coffee and a warm bath.

I found blond toddler Blue wandering around the kitchen, looking forlorn in his hand-me-down Superman footie pajamas.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Why aren’t you asleep?”

He stared up at me with huge cloudless-sky eyes. Because the venom from his Wutganger still tainted my blood, Blue was able to communicate with me telepathically, as if he were a kind of familiar. So far, he hadn’t uttered a single sound, not a laugh or cry or even a hiccup. Mother Karen had speculated that his muteness might be traumatic. I thought the boy might simply prefer telepathy with me; he was surely able to convey much more complex information than if he were trying to wrestle unfamiliar words out through immature vocal cords.

“Tertius and Quartus woke me up,” Blue replied earnestly. “I think they have dirty diapers. They are very upset.”

I winced. Diaper duty before I’d had any caffeine was simply inhumane. I wished Mother Karen believed in using changeless diapers, but she didn’t, at least not anymore. There was an ongoing debate among Talented parents about where the waste from the diapers actually went. It turned out there was an ambiguity in the standard baby-safe enchantment and it wasn’t clear whether the waste was whisked away and destroyed or if there was a poo dimension someplace where it all just built up. The environmental/ethical concerns of dropping diaper loads on unsuspecting people aside, if the waste was simply stored someplace, there was the possibility it could be used as a pointer against the young Talents later.

“Well, let’s go see if I can’t get them changed.” I took Blue’s tiny hand and let him lead me upstairs to the nursery. He probably didn’t know his brothers’ real names—it was likely that their mother’s murderous husband, Lake, had never bothered to name the boys at all—and Blue surely didn’t know the Latin names for the fourth and fifth sons born into a family. But when he conveyed the concepts of his infant brothers to me, in my mind I’d begun hearing Tertius, Quartus, Quintus, and Sextus.

Blue sometimes referred to the Warlock as Septimus. As far as Lake had been concerned, the boys were merely components for the blood ritual intended to give his adored first son, Benedict, tremendous magical power. If the boys’ mother, Siobhan, had enough mind left to give the Warlock and his numbered brothers proper names, I hadn’t heard them spoken in Cooper’s hell.

Names matter in the magical world. Knowing the true, secret name of a devil or other supernatural creature can help you gain control over it. It’s one thing for a Talent to be thoughtlessly named; it’s another to have never been named by your parents at all. Being a nameless Talent means you don’t have full access to your own potential, your own powers. You’ve been cut from the grounding forces of your own family bloodline. A nameless wizard can still be a powerful wizard, but almost never a well-rounded one.

I stared down at my gloved arm, thinking of my dead mother. Whether we like to admit it or not, our parents give us everything we have to start out with, good and bad. Sometimes their mistakes hang around your neck like loops of heavy, unbreakable chain.

Blue and I reached the nursery. I couldn’t hear any babies crying, but Mother Karen had probably put a sound-dampening enchantment on the room so her other kids wouldn’t be disturbed. She’d surely have some kind of baby monitor working at the same time. I opened the door.

The room was in utter chaos. Mother Karen was floating in the air, surrounded by a swirling storm of stuffed animals and colorful teething toys. She was holding onto the edge of the changing table for dear life, her free hand clutching a folded dirty diaper. Her graying brown hair was blown out in a wild corona around her face. Below her, the naked baby boy on the changing pad giggled and kicked in delight.

“Karen—” I began, ducking to dodge a flying teddy bear.

“All under control! Shut the door!” she cheerfully yelled back.

“But—”

“TakeBluebacktobedandshutthedoor!”

I quickly did as she told me, feeling rejected and useless. And, frankly, a bit scared. Most Talented kids don’t start developing their magical skills until they’ve reached an age of rational thought. And that’s exactly as it should be. A happy baby with full-blown magical powers is far more dangerous than an angry baby with a bag full of live grenades.

And we apparently had a house full of ’em. Christ in a chum bucket.

“Okay, I’m supposed to take you back to bed,” I said to Blue as I led him down the hall to his room.

“But I’m not tired,” he replied.

“When adults tell you to go to bed, that mostly means they want you to stay in your room and play quietly.”

“Oh.”

I pulled open the door to his room. It was one of the smallest bedrooms, maybe eight by eight, with a child-size low bed in the corner, a green beanbag seat, a toy chest, and a play table and little red chair. The dissected remains of an old Batman clock radio lay in neat piles on the beige carpet. Blue had even carefully pried the transistors off the circuit board and had put them in color-coordinated piles.

“Why did you do that?” I asked, pointing at the radio dissection.

“I wanted to know how it works,” he replied.

“Until you’ve read the manual, that’s not going to help you understand it,” I said. “It’s just going to leave you with a broken radio.”

“Oh. Why?”

“Because you can’t put it back together again the way it was, and so it won’t work anymore.”

Blue stared down at the radio parts, a slightly rebellious look of determination creeping across his face. “I bet I remember exactly how it goes together.”

I picked up one of the transistors. “Remember how this was stuck on with metal blobs?”

“Yes.”

“The blobs were stuff called solder. Regular glue won’t work. And since solder is poisonous and soldering irons are dangerous, I’m not going to give you any to play with.”

Any other kid genius would have gotten mad at this point; I was partly testing Blue to see if he had indeed shuffled all his capacity for “bad” emotions off into the demon he’d created. But Blue didn’t even seem the least bit frustrated. Of course, his mind was older than mine, almost as old as Cooper’s.

“Why won’t glue work?” he asked.

“It doesn’t conduct electricity.”

Blue reached down to the carpet and picked up a twisted paper clip, which he’d apparently used as a tool in his radio dissection. “Does this conduct electricity?”

“Yes. So do you. So don’t go sticking that in an electrical socket, or you’ll hurt yourself.”

“I don’t hurt,” Blue replied, turning the paper clip over in his hands. I realized for the first time that his little nails were chipped, and he had cuts and blisters on his fingers, presumably from prying the radio apart. “What if I melted this and used it to attach the transistor back on the green board thing?”

“How do you plan to melt it?”

He looked up at me. “With my mind.”

Uh-oh. “It would take a lot of heat to melt that.”

He shrugged. “That’s okay.”

“No, it’s not. You’d melt the circuit board and the transistor. You also might set the house on fire. Mother Karen wouldn’t be happy with you trying that.”

“I can be careful.” He shrugged again. “And she doesn’t have to know.”

“This is her house; she has to know. You couldn’t hide this from her.”

“I think I could. I’m good at hiding things.”

And he was; he’d built a whole secret passageway in the house in hell, apparently without the Goad ever realizing. Mother Karen, for all her skill at keeping a watchful eye on her foster children, surely couldn’t supervise her home as ruthlessly as a devil monitored its hell.

Hoo boy. I racked my brain, trying to figure out how best to redirect Blue onto something harmless. Or at least onto something less potentially harmful than bare-handed soldering.

“But it would be rude to secretly do things she doesn’t like in her house,” I said. “Rude and disrespectful and … and just plain mean. You don’t want to be mean, do you?”

“I guess not,” he replied, sounding uncertain.

Appealing to a sense of honor he couldn’t have possibly developed yet wasn’t going to work. I went to the closet, hoping its contents would provide inspiration, and opened the door. And there, crammed in the corner atop old boxes of Christmas and Hanukkah decorations, was an old blue-and-white, Dalmatian-spotted iMac computer, its hockey puck mouse wedged under the top handle.

“I have a better idea,” I said, grabbing the iMac and hauling it out of the jumble. “This is a computer. Computers are cool. You can use them to learn lots of new things without having to destroy anything else.”

I set the iMac down on the play table, then went back into the closet to disentangle the USB keyboard and power cord from some tinsel garlands.

“What kind of things?” Blue asked.

“All kinds of things.” I got the keyboard free, then turned it over and tapped the back to knock out bits of stray tinsel and old crumbs. “And you can play games on them.”

Blue watched intently as I attached the keyboard and mouse and blew dust off the iMac’s vent holes. I plugged in the power cord, then paused, my finger over the power button.

“Okay, before I boot this up, you have to promise me something.”

“What?” Blue asked.

“Promise that you won’t try to take this apart. If you’re super-curious, I’ll show you how it’s put together later. And you have to promise not to take apart anything else, either.” I paused. “Especially not the cats. Or yourself.”

Blue looked down at the parts on the floor. “Will you help me put this back together?”

“Yes. But later.”

“Okay. I promise I won’t take anything else apart.”

“Good boy,” I said, feeling relieved. I pressed the Mac’s power button, and although the hard drive made some ominous grinding noises at first, we were soon looking at the old OS 9 desktop, littered with shortcuts to various educational games. I showed him how to use the mouse and keyboard, and then launched Reader Rabbit.

“I’ve got to go, but I or somebody else will check on you in a little while,” I said as I put the radio parts in an old shoebox I found in the closet.

“Okay.” He was already engrossed in the game.

Once I’d gotten the radio pieces out from underfoot, I left Blue at the computer and quietly shut the door behind me.

I ran into Mother Karen in the hallway; she was looking completely frazzled.

“Did you get Blue to bed?”

“Sort of … he wasn’t tired, so I broke out an old iMac I found in the closet and showed him some games.”

“Good enough!” She rubbed her eyes with the backs of her hands.

“Did you get any sleep last night?” I asked.

“Oh, one or two hours, I expect.”

“Want me to make some coffee?”

“Already brewing! You’re welcome to have some, of course.” She pulled a wristwatch out of the pocket of her denim jumper; I figured she’d taken it off before her episode of Iron Mom: Battle Diaper. “We’re supposed to mirror Riviera Jordan in about three hours; I’d like to bathe before I do anything else. Would you mind hanging around the kitchen in case any of the children go downstairs needing help with something?”

I was cheered that she finally wanted me to do something. “I don’t mind at all.”

I went downstairs and had just finished doctoring my coffee with a couple of teaspoons of sugar and a slug of cream when the Warlock came through the front door carrying a brown paper Kroger’s bag.

“Hey, I thought you and Cooper were going to the store together.” I nodded toward the bag as I took a sip from my mug. It was still a little too hot to drink, so I set it back down on the counter.

“I couldn’t sleep, and I wanted to see if Opal was okay. I figured I’d stop to grab some beer on the way back while I had the chance. I’ll go out again with Coop later.”

“So is Opal okay?”

“She had kind of an interesting time with the Circle Jerks after we left, but now everything seems relatively calm. The critters are fine. We had to fix the front doors and one of the upstairs windows, but it could have been worse. The Jerks seem to have called off the dogs for now.”

The Warlock set the bag down on the counter beside me and reached inside it. “I also picked up a little something Coop said you needed.”

He tossed me a fresh six-pack of women’s cotton bikini underwear. The size was right, and the colors weren’t hideous. I was ridiculously thrilled.

“Yay! I don’t have to go commando today! Thank you!” I impulsively hopped up on my toes and gave him a quick kiss on his bearded cheek.

Suddenly, I was lying on a concrete basement floor, my eyes covered with a cloth blindfold; “The Twelve Days of Christmas” tinkled from a music box nearby. A man intoned a command I was too young to comprehend, and the blade of a knife came down on my tender throat, a silvery pain as it sawed through my windpipe and arteries—

“Whoa, Jessie, are you okay?” the Warlock asked.

I’d fallen to my knees on the kitchen floor. My throat still ached from the relived murder, the psychic imprint of the Warlock’s death during the blood ritual. It took me a moment to get any words out. “You died.”

The Warlock looked supremely puzzled. “What?”

I coughed, trying to clear the phantom pain. It was gradually fading. “Your father made Cooper … made him sacrifice you. To steal your magic. When you were a baby. Death’s all over you. You don’t remember?”

He shook his head, his puzzlement changing to a look of worry. “No, I’ve never been able to remember what happened then.”

I picked my underwear pack off the floor and slowly got to my feet. “Be glad of that.”

“I am,” he said faintly.

Mother Karen came down the stairs in a well-worn purple bathrobe, her wet hair wrapped up in a green towel. “Who’s next for the big kids’ bathroom?”

“Me,” I said. “I definitely need a shower.”