Shotgun Sorceress

Chapter seven

Riviera

Taking a shower when one of your hands is made of fire is a bit more challenging than you might expect. Almost immediately, I got water in the opera glove, and the bathroom filled with thick, sulfurous steam despite the vent fan’s buzzing labor. Within a few seconds, it was pretty hard to breathe in there. I quickly soaped and rinsed all the important parts one-handed and got out to get dried and dressed.

The Warlock was waiting by the bathroom door when I emerged, toweling off my hair. He held his nose and waved his other hand dramatically when the rotten-egg steam reached him. “Sweet Zeus, woman, what have you been eating?”

“Oh, bite me.”

“I’d love to, but I’m sure my dear brother would object.”

I made a rude noise and whipped my damp bath towel at the back of his legs; he narrowly dodged the snap and danced into the bathroom, quickly latching the door behind him.

Downstairs, Mother Karen was busily directing her teens in the kitchen; it looked like French toast and sliced fruit were on the menu that morning. The smell of the toast made my stomach growl; I hoped it wouldn’t taste of caged horror.

I went out into the backyard to take Pal’s order (a bucket of peeled cantaloupes and a few dozen hard-boiled eggs) and woke Cooper, who was still snoozing away in the tent. I brought him inside and he helped me set the table.

Breakfast with eighteen kids was pretty loud, but went far better than dinner had; the French toast gave me a brief twinge from a couple of weevils that had fallen into the wheat grinder, but the ambrosia salad was quiet and sweet. Afterward, we helped clean up and then played boxing and snowboarding on the Wii in the rec room until it was time to talk to Riviera Jordan.

Mother Karen led me, Cooper, and the Warlock upstairs to her study. The room was one of many spatial surprises in the house; its door was tucked in between the master bathroom and the teen girls’ room, and based on how everything else was laid out, you’d expect it to be a windowless cave at most nine feet wide and possibly ten or eleven feet deep. But when I stepped inside, I found myself in a vaulted haven bigger than many living rooms. Tall windows with gauzy curtains alternated with floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelves loaded with spellbooks, cookbooks, and various jars and enchanter’s implements. The windows on the western side looked out over a rocky north Pacific beach; the eastern windows had a view of white sands and gently lapping Caribbean surf. Near the door, there was a nautical blue-striped couch and chair set around a coffee table made from glass and driftwood. Set in an alcove in the middle of the room was Mother Karen’s desk, and across from it a wet bar with a coffeemaker and tea caddy. At the back of the room was a big marble fireplace with a softly burning enchanted fire that matched the sea-green wallpaper, and above it was an eight-foot-wide antique silver mirror in a gilded wooden frame.

“I’ve never seen anyone open a mirror,” I said. It was one of a list of enchantments Cooper hadn’t showed me. “Is it hard to do?”

“It’s harder than opening iChat”—Karen nodded toward the Mac tower on her desk—“but I suppose having us all crowd around the webcam would lack a certain gravitas.”

Mother Karen led us to the fireplace and pulled a business card out of one of her pockets; a lock of bright silver hair was stapled to the back. “Riviera’s courier dropped off this pointer to her office. What happens next is I put this under the edge of the mirror’s frame and recite the opening trigger.”

“But what if you didn’t have a pointer, or a mirror that was already enchanted? Could you still do it?” I asked.

“You ubiquemancers would have a better chance than I would, I suppose, but I’m not sure how you’d go about it,” she replied.

“In theory it’s doable,” said the Warlock. “Any mirror will work, but you’d have to be at least somewhat familiar with the person you’re trying to contact. You know, be able to keep a good solid mental picture of him and the room his mirror’s in while you do your chant. And you’d have to hope that he’d either be there to respond to the mirror spell, or that his mirror has a message enchantment.”

“Eh,” replied Cooper. “That’s a chancy lot of work, and if you don’t have a pointer, you never really know who you’re actually talking to. Lots of sorcerers and demons like to play mirror games. And if you know your contact well enough to have a pointer … shoot, you probably have their phone number, right? So just call them on your cell. No sense in blowing magical energy when there’s cheap technology that does the job just fine.”

“Well, wizards of the old school see resorting to technology as disrespectful and lazy,” Mother Karen replied. “We should mind our p’s and q’s and do this the way Riviera wants us to.”

She tucked the card up under the edge of the gilded mirror frame and looked back at us. “Last chance to brush hair and straighten clothes and check your teeth for strawberry seeds. Jessica, this means you.”

“Oh. Yeah.” A couple of the buttons on my borrowed blouse were undone; I’d gotten a little overenthusiastic playing Wii Boxing. I fixed them, and ran my fingers through my hair. “Good?”

“Good enough,” Karen replied. She put her hands against the glass, closed her eyes, and spoke the trigger: “Speculus, speculus.”

The mirror shimmered, brightened, and our reflections dissolved into a view of a slim, well-dressed woman in a plum business suit seated in a tall-backed antique chair. Queen Victoria could have scarcely looked more commanding. Her hair was a thick, fashionable bob of bright silver, but her face was smooth and unwrinkled. Powerful Talents have a wide array of antiaging magic at their disposal; if you don’t fall into poverty or die through accident or violence, you can keep going for centuries if you’re determined enough. Some people get tired of the endless and increasingly difficult rejuvenation rituals after a time and let nature take its course; one look in her sharp, intense eyes, silvery as her hair, and I doubted Riviera would ever willingly surrender her grip on life.

“Well, now.” Riviera had an upper-crust Southern accent, the kind that shows its British roots. “I see you’ve all gathered as I requested. But we’re missing one.”

She turned toward me, expression still intense but not hostile. “Where’s your familiar, Miss Shimmer?”

I felt a sudden urge to curtsy; instead I did an awkward little head bob. “He’s too big to fit in the house. Ma’am.”

“Ah.” She leaned forward slightly. “I do realize that there are most certainly some trust issues on your side as well as on mine, but there are serious issues at hand that we had best discuss in person, and in private. So I have arranged for us to meet tomorrow afternoon on neutral ground: the Seelie Tavern west of Winesburg.”

My heart beat a little faster; I’d always heard that there was a faery realm hidden near Amish country, but you couldn’t find it unless you were invited. I’d heard all kinds of stories about the hazards mortals face when visiting Faery: those deemed graceless transformed into pigs, those found cocky turned to mice for the cats, those seen as too pretty lulled into spending the night and emerging the next morning to discover that they’d disappeared for a century and aged almost as much. Too quiet and you might become a tree, too loud and you might become a crow. What were we getting into?

“Please be there promptly at four; I will send another courier with a faery token so the guards will let y’all in. They will be able to accommodate your familiar, I’m sure,” Riviera continued. “But to avoid offending our hosts—and the most serious consequences that y’all might suffer—please be on your best behavior, and dress properly. Old-world formal will do. I expect it will take you perhaps two hours to reach the tavern. So until one-thirty tomorrow, you may travel freely within Franklin County, provided it’s by mundane means. After that, you’ll be safe as long as you’re on the highways traveling in the right direction. If you leave the county, or if you use any form of teleportation, our truce is off and I’ll have to have y’all taken into custody and remanded to the Virtus Regnum.

“Do y’all have any questions about these arrangements?” she finished.

“No, ma’am,” we all said.

“Good,” she said. “I look forward to seeing y’all tomorrow.”

And with that, the mirror shimmered and fell back to reflecting our worried faces.

“Dude.” Cooper broke the silence. “Did we just have a meeting about having a meeting?”

“We sure did,” the Warlock replied. “Welcome to Bureaucratica. Population: us.”


Pal met me on the patio. “What did she say?”

“We’re all meeting her tomorrow at four at the Seelie Tavern up near Winesburg.”

“Oh dear,” he replied. “That seems a somewhat perilous venue. Why Faery?”

I shrugged. “She said we should meet on neutral territory.”

“But there are surely faery enclaves within this city—why not meet at one of them?”

“I’m guessing the idea is that we meet on neutral territory that’s also out in the middle of nowhere,” I replied. “And considering the mess Cooper and I accidentally created downtown, well, keeping us away from large, expensive buildings would seem prudent to her, wouldn’t it? I’m trying real hard not to imagine that there’s a more sinister intent here.”

A sudden chill breeze ruffled my hair and a voice whispered, “Look skyward, my girl.”

“What?” I looked around, looked up.

A small object was plummeting down from the clear blue sky. I stepped aside, and it hit the grass near me, bounced twice, and came to a rest. It was an old brown teddy bear; a small cream-colored card was tied to its middle with a piece of kite string. I hesitated, then picked up the bear. Something about it was familiar; I sniffed it, and immediately remembered playing with the bear in my old room in our Lakewood house. The memory strengthened; it was one of several stuffed toys I’d had since I was a baby, but my stepmother, Deb, deemed it junk and sent it off to Goodwill before our move to Plano.

Hands shaking a bit, I untied the kite string and unfolded the card. In it was a lock of copper-brown hair and on it a handwritten note:

I’ve missed you very much. We need to talk.

—Your dad

“What’s that?” Pal asked.

I resisted my sudden, irrational instinct to hide the card and lie; if I betrayed Pal’s trust, it might be a long time before I got it back.

“It’s a pointer,” I replied. “From my father, or so it says.”

“Your father?” Pal blinked in surprise. “But the prison records indicated that he was, well …”

“Dead. I know.” I stared down at the card and lock of hair. “He’s talked to me before this, last night on the front lawn and also at the Warlock’s, but I wasn’t sure it was him.”

“Can you be sure now?”

I held up the teddy bear. “This used to be mine, a long time ago. My mom gave it to me when I was a baby; for all I know, my dad might have gotten it for me before I was born.”

“But for all you know, this could be an elaborate trick conjured up by some dark entity.”

“That’s true.” I closed my eyes and smelled the dusty bear again; it was like an instant portal back to the happiest time I’d had as a child. A thousand questions about my family and my life crowded around the memories, questions only Ian Shimmer could answer. “But if this really is from my father, I have to talk to him.”