she looked at the major. “Um, I need to take her to see Sara.”
“Of course.” The major straightened up and glanced down at his wristwatch. “And I need to attend evening security inspections.”
He gave me a curt, formal head bob, turned on his boot heel, and strode away.
“I think she’s in the North Tower,” Charlie told me. “But, um, your spider won’t fit so good in the lobby.”
I turned to Pal and pulled off the riding pad and saddlebags. “Do you think that just this once you could shrink yourself down? I’d hate for us to get separated given that things are mind-bogglingly screwed up around here.”
He blew a chord that sounded like a sigh. “Fair enough.” He began playing a different tune, and his body shrank until he stood about as tall as a mastiff. “Better?”
“Yeah, that should get you through a regular door,” I told him.
We collected Cooper and the Warlock and headed into the dormitory lobby. The building was only weakly air-conditioned, but it did provide some respite from the oppressive heat outside. A couple of young men were playing Team Fortress on an Xbox hooked up to the TV in the corner, and some others were reading books and playing cards at the tables. Sleeping boys were stretched out on all the sofas. It could have passed for a men’s dorm in most any college if not for the uniforms, general dinginess, and looming feeling of despair.
And the cats. There were cats everywhere: lounging on the TV, lurking in the bookshelves, curled up on the sleeping students. I felt a shiver when, as a group, they opened their yellow and green eyes and stared at me.
Charlie passed her AK-47 to the tired-looking blond girl stationed behind the front desk. “No guns allowed past the lobby unless you’re a resident advisor or an officer.”
We dutifully handed in our weapons. The blonde tagged the guns and gave us pink paper claim stubs. “Now, don’t lose these,” she admonished.
“We won’t,” the Warlock replied.
“I think Sara’s probably going over the scout reports in the RA lounge—” Charlie began.
She was interrupted by a scream in the hallway to our left. A large black cat came rocketing out of the corridor with a balding, middle-aged man in a Catholic priest’s black cassock close behind. The priest was carrying a large sledgehammer and mumbling something in Latin between panting breaths.
The cat slid to a stop in front of Pal and fluffed up its fur, hissing at my familiar. The priest stormed up on the stymied feline and brought the sledgehammer down on the cat with enough force to break its body wetly in two.
Shouting his Latin prayer now—I was starting to recognize it as one of the old demon banishments that really didn’t work too well—the priest brought the sledgehammer down on the cat’s skull.
A woman in her midthirties came rushing out of a back office. She was wearing a light blue T-shirt on which someone had Sharpie-markered “Mayor Pro Tem,” baggy mom jeans, and a child’s red plastic cowboy hat over her prematurely white hair. She was also wearing a big-ass .480 Ruger Super Redhawk revolver strapped to her hip.
As the priest raised his sledgehammer for another blow to the cat’s corpse, the woman drew the Redhawk with both hands, put the nine-inch barrel to the back of his head, and pulled the trigger. His skull came apart like a watermelon, and suddenly all of us within ten feet were wearing him.
The woman wiped a bit of skull and blood off her cheek with her thumb and frowned at the priest’s headless corpse. “Now, Padre, I’ve warned you three times, you don’t hurt the kitties. I can’t have you acting like this. I just can’t. I think I’ve been more than reasonable about this.”
The woman finally seemed to notice all of us standing there gaping at her and smiled at me. “Oh, hello, you must be Jessie! I’m Sara Bailey-Jones, acting mayor of Cuchillo. The kitties told me you’d be coming. I’m so sorry about your clothes—ask Brittney at the front desk for a fresh tee. I think they have some leftovers from World Peace Day. You’d take a large or an extra-large?”
As I looked into Sara’s Adderall-blue eyes, it occurred to me that she was utterly, completely, break-out-the-straitjacket batshit crazy. And also she appeared to be in charge. And based on the general lack of reaction to her blowing the priest out of his socks, this wasn’t the first time this