got a temper worse than Opal. Takes a while to get him there, but once he’s good and mad he stews for a while. Give him time, he’ll get over it.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.” The Warlock winked at me. “Wanna help me enchant your glove? Not that the fire doesn’t look good on you, and I love hanging out with hot women as much as the next guy, but even I have my limits.”
I stretched, trying to work some of the tension out of my back. My spine popped. “Sure, let’s do the glove. Maybe Cooper will be back by the time we’re done.”
Once I worked the thimbles down into the fingertips of the glove—the death-memories from the deerskin were pretty minimal as long as I kept my hands dry—we started on the enchantment. It was mostly me handing the Warlock supplies when he asked for them and otherwise following his lead, since I didn’t have a clue about this type of enchantment. As we worked, I started noticing that he smelled good, and I mean really good. Lickably good. I found my eyes drifting down toward his crotch in my idle moments while the Warlock recited incantations. I’d never given his gear much thought before—and had managed to avoid seeing it in action despite his and Opal’s tendency to get busy pretty much whenever and wherever the mood struck them—but now I was hard-pressed to keep speculations about his dimensions out of my head.
It would be okay, I told myself, shutting my eyes. We could get to wherever we were going for the night, Cooper would calm down, we’d find some way of keeping my arm from spewing burning ectoplasm everywhere. He’d exorcise me. And then we’d find a condom. Several condoms. And a dental dam. And then Cooper would make love to me, and I’d have a really satisfying, mind-blowing orgasm, and I would not infect him with hepatitis or anything else. I would not hurt him. My brain would be wiped clean of thoughts about Miko and the Warlock and anybody who wasn’t Cooper. Period. I would get properly laid sometime very soon and it would all be okay.
It would all be okay, it would all be okay.
“Jessie? Hey, Jessie?” The Warlock snapped his fingers near my ears.
I opened my eyes. “Sorry. What?”
“Are you all right? You’re looking all red and sorta sweaty.”
“It’s just the fire. My arm. Makes me feel weird,” I half lied.
“Well, the glove’s done.” He held it out to me. “Want to try it on to see if it works?”
“Sure.” I took the leather glove from him and gingerly pulled it on over my flaming hand, my claws clacking into the thimbles. The neoprene extension on the cuff covered everything that needed covering, and the Velcro wrap made the fit just about perfect. Thin trails of smoke rose from the cuff, but there was no sign that the material itself was burning.
“Looks good,” I said.
Charlie came back into the store; she’d gone to the grocery to hunt for cigarettes, and was now carrying a couple of packs of Benson & Hedges. “We should leave soon.”
I shook my head. “Not until Cooper comes back.”
“We can’t stay here tonight; this place really isn’t defendable.” The girl looked worried.
“Another half hour won’t kill us, will it?” I asked her sharply, then turned away and closed my eyes to concentrate on contacting my familiar.
Pal, are you out there? What’s going on? We need to leave soon.
No response. I tried again: Pal, are you there?
Nothing.
He was just out of range, I told myself, trying to quell the anxiety building inside me. I chewed on my thumbnail.
“You okay?” the Warlock asked.
“I’m fine.” I smiled at him, probably completely unconvincingly considering the look he gave me right afterward. And despite my anxiety, looking at him filled my head with a hundred wet unwanted thoughts, a swarm of vermin fleeing the flooded tunnels of my id.
“I’m gonna do a little more shopping back here,” I told him and Charlie, hoping that out of sight would mean out of mind. “And yes, I’ll watch out for rats.”
I went into the T-shirt aisle first; I was wearing way too much of the World’s Best Grandma and wanted something cleaner. A black shirt bearing a cartoon of a stick man being thrown from a stick horse above the caption “I Do My Own Stunts” caught my eye. I pulled off my old shirt, used it to scrub the blood spatters off my dragonskin pants, and put