Shotgun Sorceress

Chapter eight

Mirror, Mirror

After Cooper and the Warlock left on an errand in the Land Rover, I went looking for Mother Karen in the kids’ playroom. She was arbitrating a fight over a Transformers toy; when she got the two kids settled, I pulled her to the side.

“Can I borrow the mirror in your study?” I asked.

“Sure.” She dug in her jumper pocket for the key and handed it to me.

“Um.” I stared down at the key. “Does your mirror have any … security enchantments? To protect against magical spycraft or identity spoofing, if that kind of thing happens?”

Her eyebrows rose. “It has some protections against demons and malicious spells, yes. Who or what exactly are you planning to contact?”

“My father. My real one, I mean, not my step. I think. I haven’t ever met him, and it’s all super-weird and hard to explain, but if it’s him I really need to talk to him.”

“Well.” She pursed her lips. “Just don’t give out any sensitive personal information, unless you’re absolutely certain he’s who he says he is. Saying ‘oblittero’ will cut off the connection if you need to; so will clapping your hands or stomping your foot twice if you can’t speak.”

I thanked her and went into the study, latching the door behind me. Mother Karen would surely be able to get into her own study without the key, but I didn’t want any of her kids coming in there in case there was trouble. What kind of trouble could come from contacting someone (or something) that claimed to be my father, but wasn’t? I didn’t have a clear idea, but having spent some quality time in a hell, my imagination was supplying plenty of dire scenarios. At least two of them involved hooked chains, rusty razor blades, and a TV stuck on a Jerry Springer marathon.

I sat on Karen’s couch and stared down at the card, mentally doing a dare-I-eat-a-peach dance with myself. In the end, it seemed better to try to get answers than to spend the rest of my life wondering what might have been. So I went to the antique mirror, stuck the card under the frame, and spoke the opening charm.

Nothing happened right away, so for a few moments I wondered if I’d done it wrong. And then the reflection changed to show an empty tall-backed wooden chair, and behind that an arcane-looking workshop that appeared to occupy an old-fashioned domed observatory. In addition to a big telescope, I saw several antique brass solar system models, an alchemical apparatus of glass tubes and distillation flasks for potions on a long table, and chalkboard walls with a mixture of spell glyphs and complicated mathematical equations written on them in the same neat, precise handwriting as on the note.

“Um … hello? Anyone there?” I called.

“Oh!” The reply was a deep, pleasant baritone—nothing like the somewhat sinister whisper I’d heard before—somewhere off to the side where I couldn’t see. The speaker had a slight accent, maybe German? I heard a chair scoot across the wooden floor. “Is that you, Jessie?”

“Yes, it is,” I replied.

I heard the sound of feet slapping across the floor in flip-flops. A tall, strongly built man with long, wavy, penny-brown hair and a full beard stepped into the mirror view and sat down in the chair. His face was deeply tan. He was wearing bright orange Thai fisherman’s pants and a long madras patchwork jacket over a black T-shirt with white Courier lettering: “I Void Warranties.” I began to suspect that my disinterest in fashion was probably genetic.

“It’s so good to see you.” He beamed at me, and I realized that if someone fattened him up a bit, gave him a pair of wire-framed glasses and a red suit, and aged him twenty years, he’d easily be able to pass himself off as Santa Claus.

“It’s, um, good to see you, too.” I wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen next.

“I imagine you have questions.” He sat back in his chair, looking perfectly relaxed. “Ask anything. Ask away!”

“Okay. Well.” I paused, wondering if “ask anything” actually meant anything. I supposed I didn’t really have that much to lose by being blunt (not that I ever have much luck trying to be delicate). “So I heard you died in prison?”

He laughed, sounding a bit embarrassed, and tugged at his beard. I realized that his hands were spotted and gaunt, looked considerably older than his face. “Well, if you get sent to prison for life, you might as well die and get it over with, right?”

“So you, what … died and got better?”

“Oh, come on. By now you of all people should know that resurrection magic is entirely doable, even if the powers that be tell us otherwise. Death never stopped a Shimmer.”

He paused. “Though mine did put me out of commission longer than I’d hoped. By the time my friends finally got to my body, it was too late for me to save your mother. Fortunately she was able to save you before the Virtii’s minions took her from us.”

To save you. Benedict Jordan had told me that I’d been diagnosed with untreatable cancer when I was a child, and that my mother stole the life energy of a boy awaiting a heart transplant in the hospital in her spell to cure me. He said she was forbidden from using any magic, much less grand necromancy, so she’d been quietly put to death soon after. I remembered finding my mom dead on the floor; the coroner told us it was an undiagnosed aneurysm. She couldn’t really have done what Jordan claimed, could she? I had to know.

“Jordan said she murdered a kid to save me,” I said.

“That boy was going to suffer a slow, painful death from his illness,” Shimmer replied gently. “What your mother did for him was a mercy.”

“But she could have saved him.” I hadn’t expected I’d be so contrary with him, hadn’t expected to be suddenly feeling so much anger and sadness over what had happened so long ago. “She had that power, didn’t she?”

“She had the power to save exactly one child before she would be killed for the sin of using her natural gifts. Would you expect a mother to save a stranger’s dying child rather than her own? Would you rather she betrayed you, let you suffer and die of cancer to preserve that sick young boy? Would you rather be dead?”

“No. I wouldn’t,” I replied. The admission made me feel dirty, like I’d personally murdered the boy I’d never even met. “So how much more of that kind of ‘mercy’ has there been? Was that what landed you in prison?”

“If you ask the authorities, they will tell you I was put in prison for grand necromancy and murder. But since you’re asking me, I will tell you I was imprisoned because I dared to study the magic of time and probability, magic that the Virtii feel is their sole domain. If I had been a good little wizard who sat at the back of the bus when I was told to, I never would have been prosecuted.”

“But did you commit murder?”

“I killed a pair of cockroaches who happened to look like men. They tried to rape your mother, and I cut them down. Given the same circumstances, I would gladly do it again. It was my right as a man, and my duty as a husband. Had I used a gun or a sword instead of a killing word—well. Unfortunately my lack of a pistol gave my enemies more ammunition than I expected.”

I did some quick math in my head. “So you were freed and resurrected … when I was eleven?”

“Yes. And I’ve been keeping an eye on you ever since.” He beamed at me again, his slightly gap-toothed smile declaring Aw, my widdle girl is all growed up and ain’t I proud!

I thought back on the horrible months I’d suffered through when my powers began and I didn’t know what was happening to me. My cheeks flushed hot, and I suddenly wanted to smack that smile off his face.

“That was a dozen years ago,” I said, my voice shaking from my sudden anger. “If you care so much about me, why did you wait so long to contact me?”

He blinked at me, apparently confused at my change of tone. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“No, not really.”

“I’m an outlaw,” he said. “If the authorities had any inkling that I was in contact with you, they would have used you as a pawn, made your life miserable—”

“Miserable? What, you mean like being raised by people who act like you’re some bad debt they’re stuck paying off? You mean like having your powers come on without anyone around to tell you what they are or how to handle them, so when you inevitably set shit on fire, everyone thinks you’re some kind of sociopath who belongs in the nuthouse? That kind of miserable?”

“You have no idea how sorry I am that you had to go through that; I contacted Victoria as soon as I could to let her know what was happening—”

“You had Vicky call my stepfather?”

Shimmer spread his hands. “She was no Talent, Jessie; she had no way of knowing what was happening to you otherwise. You thought she just miraculously decided to call your stepfather the day before you were going to be committed to a mental institution?”

I rubbed the back of my neck with my flesh hand. “Yeah, I guess I kind of did.”

He shook his head, a half-smile playing on his lips. “For a girl who claims to despise Fate, you seem to accept tremendous coincidence without much question.”

His gentle joke rankled like mockery, and I felt my blood rise again. “So why am I graced with your fatherly attention now, after all these years of not knowing you even existed?”

“Again, isn’t it obvious? You’ve gotten yourself into so much trouble that my presence in your life can’t possibly make things any worse.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“I’ve studied Fate and probability and chaos magic more than any human alive, so … yes, I’m very sure. Before you got the attention of the Virtii, it was best you didn’t even know about me. But now that you’ve killed one of them—oh, and well done, by the way—it’s quite a different story. I’d like to continue to help you, if you’ll let me.”

“Wait just a minute,” I said, doing a little more mental math about his previous “help” and not liking the sum. I touched the scarred flesh beneath my stone eye. “This ocularis was your doing, wasn’t it?”

He nodded. “I gave it a compulsion charm tuned to you and arranged for the Warlock to find it, yes.”

“You arranged for him to find it … when I was eleven.”

He blinked. “Yes, once I realized your mother was beyond my help, I did an extensive set of probability divinations to try to see where your life might take you. I picked up on Cooper Marron’s thread, and the opportunity arose to get the ocularis into his brother’s hands, so I took it. It seemed to be the most prudent course of action.”

“The most prudent course …” My voice failed for a moment. My face felt like you could cook an egg on it. The only way he could have thought that the ocularis would be any help to me was if he’d been pretty sure I was going to be seriously mangled and lose at least one eye. “You knew all that shit was going to happen from the beginning and you didn’t warn me?”

“There was only a forty percent chance—”

“How hard would it be to send me a note saying, ‘Oh, hi, don’t go calling the rainstorm tonight, there’s a forty percent chance you’ll lose your f*cking eye!’ ”

“The threads were very complex, I couldn’t risk—”

“You couldn’t risk? You didn’t risk anything! Five people died that night, you jackass!” I screamed at the mirror. I yanked the glove off and shoved my flames at the glass. “I nearly died. Cooper nearly died. We nearly lost everything. You didn’t do shit!”

Hot tears were streaming down my face. “You’re as bad as that rat-bastard Jordan. Worse.”

“Jessie, I can explain—”

“Save it. Oblittero.” I yanked the pointer card out of the mirror’s frame and threw it down toward the fireplace. I didn’t look to see if it burned or not.

The mirror went back to reflecting my own furious, red-eyed face. The scaly scars around my left eye socket were livid, inhuman, the ocularis a cold cat’s eye faintly reflecting the firelight. I leaned my forehead against the cool marble mantel and wept.