Pal’s logic was unassailable. I closed my legs and felt the fancy green satin-and-crinoline ball gown flap away 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’s your dress?”
Christ on a cracker. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes to keep from screaming in frustration. And suddenly realized that my ocularis was itching like someone 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 feet in front of us, I saw the faint outline of a wide oval, big enough to admit one of those flying Pringles cans they call regional jet planes—but maybe too small for a Virtus—hanging in the sky.
“Whoa! There’s a portal! Go up, to the left!” I shouted.
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 open with a pop, revealing a circle of bright jet-stream blue within the cloudy sky. A wind rose from the difference in pressure, dragging us toward the portal, but Pal was strong enough to resist it. I was too low to see the ground that lay beyond the portal, but it was disorienting 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.
part
two
The Devil in Miss Shimmer
chapter
twelve
A Bale of Trouble
Pal was still performing his musical spell as we plummeted toward the ground. I tried to shout an old word for “slow” but felt my magic blocked as solidly as if someone had put me in a stranglehold. Cooper was shouting an incantation, too, with no better result. More bizarrely, I realized my flame hand had been extinguished, leaving nothing but a couple of inches of coal-black stump below my elbow.
“Haystack below! Go left so I don’t crush you!” Pal released me, and I twisted midair and pushed off his hairy body with my legs.
I landed on my backpack on a steep hill of scratchy hay, rolling sideways until I tumbled to a stop against some straw bales at the bottom. The pack had miraculously stayed on my back. A piece of baling wire jabbed me painfully in the side, and I gasped. Instantly, my mouth 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, the leathery lips vermin-eaten and pulled back from the tobacco-stained teeth in a rictus.
“Augh, there’s a dead guy!” I hollered, scrambling to my feet and leaping over the bales to the sandy ground beyond. “Ew, ew, nasty, ew!”
I dropped the opera gloves that were still clenched in my right hand and slapped at imagined maggots on my naked body and legs.
Pal was a dozen yards away, heaving himself over onto his stilting legs in the straw.
“Oh dear, there’s a corpse over here as well.” He bent to examine what I’d initially thought was just a bundle of rags. “She appears to have missed the haystack entirely when she fell.”
I took deep breaths, trying to still the creepy shivers jittering up my spine. The air was as hot and thick as the blood of a man dying of fever. Every inhalation brought the bitter-sharp smell of a thousand spiny weeds and the pungent stink of rotting flesh and something I took to be gasoline or kerosene.
The pile of hay we’d fallen into was positively mountainous; the top had to be over a hundred feet high, and the base was easily the size of a football field. Cooper and the Warlock had gotten stuck in the hay much closer to the top and were struggling down the hill, sinking knee-deep in the fodder with every step; they both seemed to be uninjured. The cloudless sky was the blue of a natural gas flame, and the sun stung my bare breasts and shoulders; I’d be burned to blisters in