a little worried about the babies, too. I felt that Riviera had been straight with us at the meeting, but considering we’d been ambushed right after it, I couldn’t be sure about her true motivations. “I couldn’t get through to Mother Karen, so I don’t know what’s happening there.”
“We could take Charlie easily enough,” Cooper continued. “Not, you know, hurt her or anything, but put a short-term sleeping charm on her, grab that cat of hers, and have Pal fly us back to the haystack and see if we can get the portal open.”
“Um. I’d be all for that … except I talked to my father, and he said my brother Randall’s here.”
“Whoa, you’ve got a brother? I didn’t know that.”
“Me neither, until today.”
“Wow, looks like we’re drawing every king in the deck, huh?” Cooper lifted his fist for a bump.
“Yeah, go Boy Power, huh?” I dapped him gently on the knuckles. “My father says Miko captured Randall, and wants us to go rescue him.”
“Hm.” Cooper scratched his goatee. “That definitely tips the balance for staying here to see what good we can do, at least for a while.”
We went back up to the front and passed the glove off to the Warlock, who was busy chipping the red phosphorous tips off a bunch of matches and crushing them into powder on the glass customer service countertop. Charlie was taking slow drags off a Virginia Slims cigarette and staring out the window at Pal, who in turn was gazing solemnly at the empty highway. The girl held the cigarette carefully, almost reverently, and when she brought it to her lips, she had the expression of a penitent taking communion.
“Hey, we’re going next door to get some thimbles,” I told her, holding my now-flaming hand high.
She gave a start. “Oh. Okay. Watch out for—”
“Rats. Right.” I gave her a wave and followed Cooper outside.
The craft store had been looted more lightly than the Western store, and most of the damage aside from the smashed cash registers seemed to have been from a fit of vandalism: somebody had overturned most of the shelves of silk plants and flowers so the faux flora was in piles on the floor. My fire went out as we headed into the sewing section, but I wasn’t concerned because we almost immediately saw a display of steel thimbles on white cards. Cooper grabbed a handful and stuck them into his pants pockets.
And then came a raspy wheeze to our left. I turned. A gaunt, bent old lady of seventy or so was standing there, swaying on weak legs, her knobby, spotted hands gripping a battered aluminum walker. Her bare feet were dirty and rat bitten. She smelled sourly of old sweat and fermenting urine. A stained pink “World’s Best Grandma” sweatshirt hung practically to her knees. Her permed gray hair was stiff with weeks of grime, and her mouth hung open, her lips and tongue flaky and dry, her eyes clouded.
I felt as if I were looking at somebody who had died about five minutes ago, but her body hadn’t quite gotten the message yet.
Cooper glanced down at my cooling claw and swung his shotgun around, gripping it by the barrel to use it as a club. “Meat puppet. Be careful.”
“What the heck is she going to do? Doesn’t look like she could so much as spit.” Despite my words, I felt nervous that I couldn’t fire my pistol. I wasn’t sure I had the stomach to slice her up if she somehow managed to attack us. “We should just leave.”
I took a step back. The old lady took a torturous breath and groaned, her lips and tongue working to form words. She released her walker and took a wobbly step toward us.
And in the space between heartbeats, she wasn’t an old woman anymore. Short gray hair had become a thick, dark, silken cascade. She’d shot up about a foot, lost fifty years, lost her clothes. Her breasts were astonishing. I’d heard guys wax rhapsodic about breasts my entire life, and I’d never seen what the big deal was. The world was filled with boobies, and I grew even more jaded to them once I had a pair of my own.
But this woman’s rack was perfect. It was a piece of art that Michelangelo himself could never replicate. Drunken fumblings with cheerleaders aside, I’d never had a single seriously sapphic thought in my entire life, and now I wanted to kiss those breasts, bury my face in