hem over my dragonskin pants had ignited, so my skin hadn’t burned.
“Whoa.” A brown-haired, freckled, bespectacled girl of about eighteen or nineteen had jumped out of the van. She had a blue baby sling across her chest and an AK-47 in her right hand. At her hip was an army-green flask canteen. A yellow Post-it note was in her left hand. Her left forearm bore nasty-looking jagged scars, white on her tanned skin. I wondered if a dog had mauled her.
The girl goggled at my flaming hand, then at Pal, and looked down at her note. “Are you Jessie Shimmer?”
“Yeah …?” I replied slowly.
“Um. I’m Charlie, and I’m supposed to pick you up.” She had a square-shouldered, stocky look about her that made her seem overweight at first glance even though she was probably mostly sinew and bones under her loose jeans and oversize blue “CSU Tae Kwon Do Club” tee.
“Are you working for Miko?” Cooper asked sternly. “We’re not going anywhere with you.”
The girl looked horrified. “No, I ain’t working for Miko! I’d sooner die. Sara sent me.”
“And how did this Sara person know we were out here?” Cooper asked.
Charlie bit her lip. “The cats told her.”
We all stared at her.
“Uh. Yeah. That sounds kinda crazy, huh?” She pulled down the edge of the baby sling to reveal that she was carrying not an infant but a large orange tabby. “Miko made it so that we couldn’t shoot guns or start fires, but the cats fixed that. And they know stuff, but they only talk to Sara. We all thought it was nuts, too, at first, but then she kept being right all the time. Like now. She told me you’d be here and here you are.”
I looked at Cooper, who looked down at my burning arm. He held out his palm and whispered an old word for “fire flower.” A rose of purple flame appeared in his palm. He quickly blew it out, and stared sidelong at the cat. The cat just blinked green eyes at him and purred.
“Oh, cool, you guys can do magic stuff.” Charlie seemed impressed. “So that’s why Sara was all in a hurry for me to get y’all. Miko always grabs people like you real fast.”
“Where does she take them?” I asked, thinking of my brother Randall and Rudy’s daughter. I blinked through several gemviews. The cat in Charlie’s sling looked pretty strange through some of them, but I didn’t know how to interpret what I was seeing. Clearly the creature was not what it seemed.
Charlie shrugged. “Someplace downtown. But I mean, you don’t want to go there. There’s zombies all over. We mostly stay at the university where it’s safer.”
“Does Sara have a plan for fighting Miko?” Cooper asked.
“Well, she did, but people keep surrendering to Miko, so we only have enough guys left to guard the dorms and the greenhouse and physical plant.” Charlie’s face fell. “At first we were doing okay, because the zombies aren’t any tougher than we are and we can move faster, but Da—I mean, the guy who makes the zombies, he started infecting them with all kinds of diseases so we’d be afraid to fight them. A bunch of people got really sick before Sara and Doc Ottaway figured out what he’d done. Some of them caught AIDS and stuff and they figured that Miko was better than wasting away.”
I thought on Miko’s words to her victims in the death-memories. “She’s promising people some kind of afterlife paradise?”
Charlie nodded, briefly looking wistful, then added quickly, “But I don’t believe her. You’d have to be dumb to believe her, right?”
The girl’s expression turned uneasy as she looked down the highway. “Hey, um, we should go now. She’ll send more cars for sure.”
I dug through my backpack one-handed to find the opera glove to contain my fire. And then quickly realized there was no way it would fit on the claw.
“Can you guys reenchant this to make it a bit bigger? And cut resistant?” I asked Cooper and the Warlock.
They looked at each other, and Cooper shook his head. “No, sorry—Mother Karen actually did most of the fabric magic on that. I doubt we’d be able to do a new enchantment over her work without wrecking it entirely.”
“Well, crap.” I stuck the glove back into my pack.
“We could probably enchant that grilling mitt Rudy gave you,” Cooper said.
“Unfortunately, it’s barbecue.” I nodded toward the burning SUV.
“Well, any leather glove that was the right size for you from the