When Miko figured out I’d run from her, she’d tear my body apart and that would be the end of me.
I held my breath, waited for the inevitable.
And waited.
And waited.
I scratched my scalp. Was I dead? Shouldn’t I have felt my death, somehow? And if I was dead, was I stuck here in the hellement forever?
There was only one way to find out. I went to the red portal door. Turned the handle.
And found myself sprawled on my back, the marble stairs digging painfully into my hips and spine, Pal’s paws cradling my head, his face peering down into mine. I felt my hand flame up again; at least it was stretched out away from my body so I wasn’t in danger of burning myself.
“Oh, thank Goddess. I thought you were dead,” he said. Then his eyes turned toward my flames. “My goodness.”
The black claw was burning away in my flames, crumbling painlessly to ash.
“What happened?” I asked. “Where’s Miko?”
“It was very peculiar,” Pal said. “She touched you, then screamed, shoved you away, and disappeared. The meat puppets all fell down; wherever she went, she’s no longer controlling them.”
“Whoa.” I finally figured out what had just happened. “She popped the Goad spirit out of me instead of my soul. Guess she didn’t much like the taste of it.”
“I imagine not.”
“Help me up; we gotta get the guys down from those crosses.”
They were both unconscious; the Warlock still bore the gash on his forehead and other injuries from his beating, but it looked like Miko or one of her puppets had worked Cooper over even worse. He had knotty, purplish bruises everywhere.
Pal and I cut the ropes binding them to the mesquite logs and carried them into the cool of the lavish, 1920s Renaissance palace–style hotel lobby. Nobody was in there except for a couple of meat puppets dying quietly on the shiny chessboard floor. We put Cooper and the Warlock on a couple of the wide leather couches and between the two of us were able to work enough healing magic to bring them out of their comas.
“Wow, you’re a sight for sunburned eyes.” Cooper gave me a lopsided smile, then winced as he sat up. “Where’s Miko?”
“She’s gone. She tried to take my soul, and got my devil instead. So the Virtii and the cats were right, and I didn’t really have to do anything but show up.”
“Huh. Why didn’t we think of that?” the Warlock murmured.
“More to the point, why didn’t Sara or anyone else just tell us that?” I sounded whiny, even to myself, but dammit, after everything I’d been through, I felt I’d earned a good whine.
“Miko’s a mind reader,” Cooper said. “So it wasn’t gonna work if you knew about it.”
“Have you seen my brother Randall here?” I asked Cooper.
He nodded, then looked like he wished he hadn’t moved his head quite so vigorously. “I think so, yeah. Everybody’s in the penthouse on the top floors. She’s got the Talents chained up, broadcasting her antimagic spell. Some of ’em are in bad shape. We should get up there and get ’em free.”
Thankfully, the old wire-cage elevator still worked. Pal and I helped the guys into the lift car. As we stood there, I realized the guys weren’t meeting my or each other’s eyes. Glad as they were to be free of Miko’s torment, I got the feeling they weren’t so happy to see me. Crap.
We stepped out onto the thick maroon carpet of the twenty-fifth floor, and almost immediately encountered the first real, live, soul-intact human in the building: a startled-looking Hispanic woman in stained, pale blue hospital scrubs who was clutching a pair of plastic IV bags. She was in her late twenties, and something about the curve of her jaw and the set of her shoulders seemed familiar.
“Are you Sofia Ray?” I asked her.
Her eyes grew big. “Yes. Who are you people?”
“I met your father at his store; he asked me to find you.”
“Papa is still alive?” she breathed.
“He was when we left his place a couple of days ago,” I replied. God, had we been in this godforsaken town for only days? Quick math told me we had, and I continued: “Miko seems to be gone now, so if you could show us where she’s keeping her prisoners …?”
Sofia led us down the hall into a big room that was set up with hospital cots outfitted with restraints; I counted thirty Talents strapped down to the cots, IVs dripping into veins and