Shotgun Sorceress - By Lucy A. Snyder Page 0,23

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

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