start would work, too,” the Warlock said. “The fire resistance we can do easily enough, it’s just hard to get multiple enchantments to stick without a lot of time on the spellwork.”
“What do you need a glove for?” Charlie asked.
“This.” I waved my flame hand at her. “So I don’t set fire to everything I touch.”
“Lee’s Western Wear & Rodeo Supply is a few miles away.” The girl pointed her AK-47 in the direction she’d come from. “They have all kinds of gloves there. We’ll pass the store on the way to CSU.”
“Well, that sounds like a plan.” I looked at Pal. “Do you think you can fly?”
Pal began blowing his weird calliope music and rose a few inches off the ground. He stopped and fell back to earth. “Yes, I believe so, provided we stay in range of that cat-creature.”
After some logistical debate, Charlie agreed to give me a walkie-talkie and a Glock 17 semiautomatic, just in case. She opened the back doors of the van to retrieve the pistol. The rear of the vehicle held a miniarsenal of rifles and shotguns racked into a battery of modified Rubbermaid yard tool towers. Cooper took a black Beretta AL391 Urika 12-gauge shotgun for himself and checked the magazine and firing mechanism on the Glock for me to make sure it was loaded and operational. I’d have preferred one of the pistol-grip Mossberg 500s I saw on the leftmost rack, but there wasn’t any good way for me to fire one single-handed. And I wanted to be able to take out the van’s back tires if Charlie tried to go speeding away. Not that I told Charlie that, of course.
“Okay, then,” I said as Cooper strapped the pistol’s holster around my hips. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
chapter
seventeen
Meat Puppetry
I rode Pal a few yards above and behind the van. Charlie was good to her word, and kept her speed at a steady fifty-five on the highway. As soon as the first wayward grasshopper smacked me right in the forehead, though, I wished I had a helmet and a pair of goggles.
Fields gradually gave way to modern ruins: a boarded-up gas station, a gun shop with smashed-out windows and the bars behind crumpled as if they’d been rammed with a large truck, the blackened wreck of a Dairy Queen that had burned sometime before Miko squelched fire.
The walkie-talkie crackled on, Charlie’s voice tinny and faint against the wind: “The store’s coming up on the left. I’m going to pull into the lot.”
“Okay,” I replied.
The strip mall came into view; the Kmart-size Western store was wedged between a Michaels craft store and a Mexican grocery. All the front plate-glass windows had been smashed, but at least from the outside only the grocery seemed to have been looted heavily. Not surprising, since the city had been cut off from fresh supplies for a year. The parking lot was littered with abandoned cars and overturned grocery carts rusting in the sun. By the cart corral I saw the bleached, rodent-gnawed bones of a large dog and near it, scattered human remains, and shreds of clothing. Weeds had cracked through the worn blacktop all across the lot. The place smelled of caliche dust and old rot.
Pal touched down as Charlie parked the van in a clear spot a few dozen yards away from the entrance to the Western store.
“We don’t want to stay too long.” The girl opened the driver’s-side door and stepped onto the pavement, looking nervous. “There aren’t so many dog packs now, but you never know when you’ll run into Miko’s creeps. Or worse.”
“I’m guessing lycanthropes.” The Warlock got out of the passenger seat, hefting an M249 machine gun onto his shoulders. “When an isolated town like this starts to go into the darkness, it attracts bad characters from miles around. Like rats to garbage.”
“Didn’t the local Governing Circle have a defense plan?” I slid off Pal onto the pavement, holding my left hand high to keep from scorching his fur.
Charlie looked perplexed. “A Governing Circle? I never heard of anything like that, sorry.”
“The Talents out in these Western towns like to think of themselves as lords of their private domains.” Cooper heaved the sliding door shut behind him and checked the feed tube of his shotgun. “No rules, no tedious Circle meetings, nobody poking their nose into your craft. Works great until shit like this happens.”
“Whoa.” I stared at him, unable to keep a half smirk off my face. “Did I