as creepy as Cooper’s dark basement prison. I supposed that it would take more than a change of scenery to make a hell feel homey.
I took the shield back into the bedroom with me, propped it up beside the sword against my dresser, and exited through the red portal.
I found myself standing on the lawn, staring down at my flame hand. Wait, hadn’t I been sitting down when I left?
“Hey, Pal, was my body here this whole time?” I asked.
“Yes; was it supposed to go someplace?”
“Well, I wasn’t sure if my body would stay here, or enter the hell with me.” I suddenly had a mental picture of myself disappearing headfirst into my flame hand, Girl Ouroboros. Probably for the best that wasn’t the case. “I guess it’s just sort of like an astral projection. Weird.”
I realized that if it hadn’t been for the damage I’d done to Benedict Jordan’s mind, I’d have had no other proof that entering the hell was anything more than a figment of my own imagination. “When did I stand up?”
“Just a moment ago; why? Is everything all right?”
“Yeah, everything’s fine. I just didn’t remember standing up, that’s all.”
I pulled my opera glove back on, shook the grass off my skirt, and crawled back into the tent to join Cooper.
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