Also by Lucy A. Snyder

Spellbent

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DBALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK

LUCY A. SNYDER

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Sale of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If thisbook is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as “un-sold or destroyed” and neither the author nor the publisher may havereceived payment for it.

Shotgun Sorceress is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, andincidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fic-titiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, livingor dead, is entirely coincidental.

2010 Ballantine Books Mass Market Original

Copyright © 2010 by Lucy Snyder

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of TheRandom House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.,New York.

Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

978- 0- 345- 51210- 9

Cover illustration © Dan Dos Santos

Printed in the United States of America

www .ballantinebooks .com

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For Sara Larson,who, it should be noted,bears absolutely no resemblanceto the Sara you’ll find in this book.

Well, okay, there’s one resemblance:her kitten Fred is indeed a little dev il.

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I’d like to thank the people who helped bring this bookinto the world: my agent, Robert L. Fleck; my editor,Shauna Summers; and her assistant, Jessica Sebor. I’dalso like to thank my publicist, April Flores, and mydeepest gratitude goes to my first readers: Dan, Trista,and my ever- patient husband, Gary.

And finally, I must express my appreciation to the fol-lowing molecule for helping me make my deadlines:

Image of caffeine structure courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Ac know ledg ments

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Suburban Outlaws

partone

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I t felt wonderful to step back out onto the dampearth of the cornfield, to feel the sun on my skin. I tooka deep breath of the summer air and turned around.The scarecrow was once again just an old black suitand a straw- stuffed burlap sack head hanging on acouple of old rake handles.

“Well, thank God that’s over,” I said to Pal.An unseasonably cool breeze wafted across my

shoulders, and I shivered, looking upward. The skywas darkening. A late summer storm?

“I’m sorry, dude,” the Warlock said to Cooper.“I . . . I just didn’t know what to say in there. I don’tknow how to raise anything that can’t live in an aquar-ium, you know?”

“It’s okay.” Cooper gave the Warlock a brotherlyslap on the shoulder. “It’ll work out. The kids’ll befine. You’ll do better with the whole big brother thingwhen they’re a little older.”

“All the people Riviera mentioned will be very finefoster parents,” Karen added. “I don’t think you needto worry.”

The hairs on my arms and the back of my neckprickled as the wind rose, turned downright cold, rat-tling through the cornfield. Sudden scudding clouds

chaptereleven

A Hole in the Sky

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blotted out the sun, and my heart dropped when Isaw four pavement- gray spirals begin to twist downfrom the overcast.

“Guys, look at that!” I said.“Tornadoes?” said the Warlock. “What the hell?”“No, I don’t think they are,” Cooper replied.The tips of the descending spirals crackled with

lightning, opened like the burning eyes of vast gods toreveal a blinding brightness behind them, and fromthem descended huge creatures that looked like crys-talline orreries circling pulsing magma hearts.

“Shit, it’s the Virtii!” I hollered. “Y’all get in the carand get the hell out of here!”

I slung both my arms through the backpack straps,hiked up my skirts, and pelted down a corn row, run-ning as hard and fast as I could away from the War-lock’s Land Rover.

“What are you doing?” Pal demanded inside myhead.

Leading them away from you guys. I hope, I thoughtback, shielding my face from the lashing corn leaves.

“But you can kill these creatures!”I killed one. With great difficulty, if you remember.

I take on four, I’m dead.“But we have Cooper and the Warlock to help us

this time.”They’d be good if there were one or two Virtii. If we

fight four, there’ll be nothing left of us but scorchedteeth and bad credit. Get everyone in the car and getthem out of here.

“What are you planning to do out here on yourown?” Pal sounded genuinely angry.

Planning to try to stay alive, first. I think I see some

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trees I can hide in for a little while. I’m betting there’sa back door to the Faery Tavern floating around out here someplace.

“They’ll enslave you if you go back there unin-vited!”

Still better than being dead, right? If that happens,tell Cooper he better come back here and break meout.

I ran out of the cornfield onto a dirt road andpromptly tripped over a muddy rut. As I tumbled for-ward onto my hands and knees, I felt the zipper andfabric at the back of my ball gown pop and rip. Swear-ing, I got to my feet, held my smirched skirts up withmy flesh hand, and started running toward the treesagain, my bodice slipping ominously downward.

A Virtus loomed above me like a manta ray prepar-ing to suck up a shrimp.

“Surrender or be expunged,” it thundered.Crap, I’m gonna die, I thought, still running. I’m

gonna die in a prom dress in a stupid cornfield out inthe middle of BFE.

I heard calliope music behind me, and suddenly Palscooped me up underneath my arms and whisked meoff toward open sky.

“Dammit, Coop, move, you’re on my nuts,” theWarlock complained from somewhere on Pal’s back.

“Dude, there’s no place for me to move to—”Cooper began.

“Christ, guys, why didn’t you get out of here like Itold you?” I hollered back at them.

“I wasn’t just going to leave you out here!” Coopersounded indignant.

“Nor was I,” added my familiar.

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“Warlock, what’s your excuse?” I yelled.“I didn’t want to get stuck changing diapers!”Pal’s clawed fingers were digging painfully into my

armpits, and my backpack was crammed up againstthe back of my head and neck; I couldn’t turn to see ifour pursuers were gaining on us or if we were makinggood our escape.

“Where are the Virtii?” I yelled against the wind.“The closest one’s, oh, a couple hundred yards

back,” the Warlock replied hoarsely, a faint tremor inhis voice. “It’s getting kinda glowy . . . that’s bad,right?”

“Very bad, yes!” I stripped the glove off my flamehand just in case we were forced to fight. “Pal, if youcan get us away from them any quicker, do it!”

“I know a teleportation incantation—” my familiarreplied.

“Yes! Teleportation would be double- plus good!”“—but I can’t sing more than one spell. I’d have to

land us first. They’d be on us before I could finish.”I swore. “Fly faster!”“I’m trying!”We rose higher in the air, and a sudden choppy

crosswind caught my skirts. I felt the zipper give en-tirely and my bodice slid down to my hips. The wayPal was carry ing me, I couldn’t reach down to grab it.I tried for a charm but my adrenaline- soaked brain wouldn’t come up with anything useful.

“My dress! Guys, help!” I spread my legs to try tokeep it from flying away; the heavy fabric flapped be-tween my knees like a sail, jerking my legs back againstPal’s thorax. The wind whistled bracingly through mythin underwear.

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“It’s too much drag!” Pal exclaimed. “It’s slowingus down; let it go!”

“I’m gonna be naked!” I wailed.“And we’ll be dead if they catch us!”Pal’s logic was unassailable. I closed my legs and

felt the fancy green satin- and- crinoline ball gown flapaway toward the fields below. Stupid fucking dress.At least I still had my boots on. “Are we losing ’em,or are they gaining on us?”

“They’re gaining!” Cooper yelled. “Hey, where’syour dress?”

Christ on a cracker. I took a deep breath and closedmy eyes to keep from screaming in frustration. Andsuddenly realized that my ocularis was itching likesomeone had rubbed my eye socket with poison ivy.

I opened my eyes, blinked to the door- sight gemview,and began to scan the sky. And just a few hundred feetin front of us, I saw the faint outline of a wide oval, bigenough to admit one of those flying Pringles cans theycall regional jet planes— but maybe too small for a Virtus— hanging in the sky.

“Whoa! There’s a portal! Go up, to the left!” Ishouted.

Pal obeyed.“What’s a portal doing here?” the Warlock asked.“I don’t know; it’s big,” I replied. “Pal, stop, we’re

on top of it.”“They’re coming fast, we can’t stop long,” Cooper

said.I fervently wished that I could turn my head to see

behind us. “Let me try this.”I reached out to probe the edge of the portal with my

flame hand. The moment I touched it, the portal sprang

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open with a pop, revealing a circle of bright jet- streamblue within the cloudy sky. A wind rose from the differ-ence in pressure, dragging us toward the portal, but Palwas strong enough to resist it. I was too low to see theground that lay beyond the portal, but it was disorient-ing to see the sun twinned in the second sky.

“Something’s not right—” Pal began.The Warlock and Cooper swore and shouted. A

burning plasma pseudopod whipped through the air,perilously close to my head.

“Fuck it, go through, go through!” I screamed.Pal went through.And suddenly we were falling.

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Pal was still performing his musical spell as weplummeted toward the ground. I tried to shout an oldword for “slow” but felt my magic blocked as solidlyas if someone had put me in a stranglehold. Cooperwas shouting an incantation, too, with no better re-sult. More bizarrely, I realized my flame hand hadbeen extinguished, leaving nothing but a couple ofinches of coal- black stump below my elbow.

“Haystack below! Go left so I don’t crush you!” Palreleased me, and I twisted midair and pushed off hishairy body with my legs.

I landed on my backpack on a steep hill of scratchyhay, rolling sideways until I tumbled to a stop againstsome straw bales at the bottom. The pack had miracu-lously stayed on my back. A piece of baling wire jabbedme painfully in the side, and I gasped. Instantly, mymouth and nose were filled with a foul roadkill stench.

I rolled away from the protruding wire and came face- to- face with an eyeless, desiccated corpse, theleath ery lips vermin- eaten and pulled back fromthe tobacco- stained teeth in a rictus.

“Augh, there’s a dead guy!” I hollered, scramblingto my feet and leaping over the bales to the sandyground beyond. “Ew, ew, nasty, ew!”

chaptertwelve

A Bale of Trouble

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I dropped the opera gloves that were still clenchedin my right hand and slapped at imagined maggots onmy naked body and legs.

Pal was a dozen yards away, heaving himself overonto his stilting legs in the straw.

“Oh dear, there’s a corpse over here as well.” Hebent to examine what I’d initially thought was just abundle of rags. “She appears to have missed thehaystack entirely when she fell.”

I took deep breaths, trying to still the creepy shiversjittering up my spine. The air was as hot and thick asthe blood of a man dying of fever. Every inhalationbrought the bitter- sharp smell of a thousand spinyweeds and the pungent stink of rotting flesh and some-thing I took to be gasoline or kerosene.

The pile of hay we’d fallen into was positivelymountainous; the top had to be over a hundred feethigh, and the base was easily the size of a footballfield. Cooper and the Warlock had gotten stuck in thehay much closer to the top and were struggling downthe hill, sinking knee- deep in the fodder with everystep; they both seemed to be uninjured. The cloudlesssky was the blue of a natural gas flame, and the sunstung my bare breasts and shoulders; I’d be burned toblisters in a half hour. The makeup Mother Karenhad put on me smelled as if it had some kind of sun-screen in it, so at least my face would be okay for awhile. The tops of my ears and my nipples, maybe notso much.

Where were we? I turned to survey the landscape.At first glance, I thought we were in a junkyardplanted randomly in the middle of a vast expanse of flatscrub, but then I realized the twisted metal frames

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were the wreckage of various types of smaller air-craft, from gliders to crop dusters to small commer-cial jets. I even saw the stripped, sun- bleached bonesof a dragon. Farther in the distance I could see aban-doned, intact aircraft; apparently their pi lots hadcoasted to safe landings.

Or mostly safe: some had broken wings and fuse-lages, and I could see dark, muddy fuel spills beneaththem. Why hadn’t they exploded or even burned?And what had made them crash? Clearly we were ina magical dead zone, but planes didn’t need magic tostay in the air. Or if they did, the airlines sure weren’tadvertising it.

Cicadas were a steady, feverish buzz in the scrubbymesquites scattered among the wrecks. The earthwas a mix of exposed crumbling limestone and drycaliche dotted with tufts of brown arrowgrass, purple- blossomed nightshades, ragweeds, and horse cripplercacti.

“Hey, guys, I think we’re in Texas.” I shrugged offmy backpack and dug out a disposable lighter.

“Texas?” The Warlock was running his purple heal-ing crystal over a nasty scratch on his face as he limpedthrough the straw toward me. The wound was sealing,so the crystal was still working. His gaze rested on mybared breasts for two heartbeats, then slid away to theairplane wreckage. “What makes you think this isTexas?”

“The weeds, mostly. And the general landscape.” Iflicked the lighter several times and didn’t get so muchas a spark off the steel. Huh. Planes probably didn’tneed charms, but they definitely needed internal com-bustion. Apparently someone— or something— had

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nixed fire as well as spoken magic. I blinked throughall the gemviews; my ocularis seemed to be workingproperly. What ever was squelching our spells didn’tseem to affect enchanted items.

The Warlock ran his fingers through his sweaty curlsand scratched his scalp. “But it’s so . . . flat. Whereare the mountains?”

I laughed and started digging my street clothes outof the backpack. “You’ve seen too many Westerns;you’re thinking of Montana. Hollywood thinks itlooks more like cowboy country than the Lone StarState. Or maybe it’s just cheaper to film up there.”

Cooper joined us. “Not that I don’t love talkingabout movies, but maybe we should be talking aboutthis spectacular trap we just randomly fell into?”

I wiggled into my sports bra. “Trap, yes. Random,no.”

The Warlock frowned. “What do you mean?”“Well, the trap part is obvious.” I slipped on my

Hello Kitty T-shirt and gestured at the hay mountain.“That or this is the shittiest theme park attraction I’veever seen.”

“Did you know this was probably a trap when youhad Pal go through?” Cooper asked.

“Yeah, I had an idea.” I started taking my boots offso I could slip on my dragonskin pants. It was way toohot for them, but at least they’d provide a bit of pro-tection if we got attacked. I couldn’t bear the thoughtof putting on the dragonskin jacket, even though myarms were getting pink from the sun. For all the stuffI’d packed, I’d forgotten sunscreen.

“You knew this was a trap?” The Warlock looked

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like he was ready to pay me back for the broken noseI’d given him. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“I was thinking we were facing certain fiery death ifwe didn’t go through the portal.” I stepped into thepants and pulled them up with my flesh hand; immedi-ately my legs started sweating uncomfortably under theleather. “And since the portal didn’t seem to lead intoouter space or a live volcano or Rush Limbaugh’s under-wear, it seemed like the better of two lousy choices.”

I was getting faint flashes of the dragon’s death asthe leather clung to my damp skin. If I closed my eyes,I could feel Moorish steel slashing my long neck andbelly as I belched fire at the impudent raiders. But the death- imprint was old, faded, hovering just at theedge of my perception. I could get used to it, probablytune it out entirely after a while like a mild case ofpost-nightclub tinnitus.

“But maybe they just wanted to take us into cus-tody,” Cooper said.

“Look, guys, contrary to pop u lar belief, I’m not anidiot.” I pulled the hem of my shirt out over the top ofmy pants and started to put my boots back on. “I got apeek inside the mind of the Virtus I killed. They wantme dead, period, end of sentence. And to be on the safeside, they want you guys dead, too. They are probablythe least random beings in the universe; everything theydo is carefully planned and mea sured against a thou-sand possible outcomes. The Virtus probably didn’thave to miss when it took a swing at us, so they wantedus to go through this par tic u lar portal. So it was a setupfrom the beginning. And we just have to deal.”

“But why here?” the Warlock asked. “I mean, if

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they want you dead . . . well, this hay pile doesn’t fitin with that, you know? Whoever is running the show here wants people to survive the fall. So are we look-ing at some kind of fate worse than death out here,like prolonged torture or something?”

“They’re not sadists.” I shook the dust off theopera gloves and stowed them in the pack. Trying toexplain to the others what I’d seen and felt when I’dtouched the Virtus’ mind was pretty difficult. I justdidn’t have the words for all of it.

“I killed one of them,” I continued. “That meansI’m dangerous to them in a physical sense, sure. ButI’m also dangerous to them on a prophecy level, andto them, that’s even worse. Clearly the Virtus I tookout the other day hadn’t planned on dying, right? Iupset their carefully-laid plans, and they just can’tstand that. Their wanting me dead isn’t vengeance or something— it’s simply to fix a bug in their program,I guess is the best way to put it.”

I tucked my pants cuffs into my boots. “And thatprobably means they expect I’ll die here without theirhaving to risk any more of their own people to do it.Obviously, that’s not good. But there’s also the possi-bility that they herded us out here because their cal-culations say I’m likely to end up fixing some otherproblem they don’t want to deal with directly.”

I stood up and faced them. “And that means wemight get out of this alive.”

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