perhaps? Figments of her mind that her powers have made tangible? Some type of devils? We’ll have to watch how they behave. But clearly they’re able to counteract Miko’s antimagic field, so it would seem prudent to keep one nearby.”
“Mein Gott, what a mess you’ve made!” An old woman in a short-sleeved purple dress tottered out from the hallway to our right. At first glance I thought she was a meat puppet—her body was positively cadaverous, and she certainly smelled like she was close to death—but there was a sharp intelligence behind her yellowed eyes.
“Must you do this?” The old woman waved her cane at the dead priest. I saw an old, faded concentration camp tattoo on her nearly fleshless left forearm. “Would you do this to a rabbi, too? You’re acting like you belong in the SS-Totenkopfverbände!”
“Mom!” Sara turned on the old woman, her face flushing red. “Don’t say that. That’s mean. I have to keep order here!”
At that, the young men in the lobby started quietly closing their books, setting down their cards, pausing their video game, and slipping out of the room. Behind the counter, Britt looked as if she wished she could do the same.
“This is not order, this is fascism!” The old woman pounded her cane on the floor, punctuating every word.
The kitten in my arms was starting to vibrate, and I could see tiny electrical sparks arcing between the hairs of its fur. It felt like the static when you put your hand on an old cathode-ray TV screen.
“Mom, do you want to go back to the graveyard? Do you want that? Because I’ll take you back there!”
“Is that anything like sending someone to the cornfield?” the Warlock whispered. I silenced him with a backward kick that connected solidly with his ankle.
Charlie tugged on my sleeve. She was carrying a stack of tie-dyed T-shirts, sheets, towels, and some boxes of white soap. “I have y’all’s keys. We really should go upstairs now.”
We quickly followed Charlie down the right-side hall to the elevators. Once we got in, Charlie and the kittens seemed much calmer.
“They get into fights like that sometimes. It’s really better not to be near them when that happens,” Charlie said.
“So does Sara murder a lot of people around here?” Cooper asked.
Charlie looked pained. “Only when Major Rodriguez ain’t around. And only when they do stuff that makes her really mad. Hurting the cats is right at the top of her list. I feel bad for the padre, but he knew what she was gonna do. He must have lost his shit completely. Or, I dunno, maybe he wanted Sara to kill him, just so he wouldn’t give his soul over to Miko.”
We got out on the eighth floor and Charlie led us down to a corner suite of two bedrooms joined by a large shared bath. Each of the bedrooms were furnished mostly with built-ins: two couches that pulled out into single beds, two blond wood desks, and a set of shelves. The only freestanding furniture was a pair of wooden dressers, a couple of wooden chairs, a torchière-style floor lamp, and an old steel trash can. Narrow sliding doors led to cramped closets, empty except for dust and some wire coat hangers.
“Most of the rooms on this floor don’t have their own bathrooms,” Charlie said, “but Sara wanted you to be as comfortable as possible. I’m not sure what she’s wanting you to do, but she’s got something in mind.”
“Oh, goody,” I heard the Warlock whisper to Cooper.
Charlie set her armload of T-shirts and towels down on the closest couch-bed. “Y’all can get cleaned up and rest up here for a while. They’ll be serving food in the cafeteria until midnight, but it’s just canned beef stew and butterscotch pudding today. There might be some salad left. We’re running pretty low on everything, but the ag students are still able to harvest veggies from the greenhouses every so often. Let Britt at the desk know if you need anything else.”
Charlie left us staring at the stack of tees. The shirts themselves had been tie-dyed in gaudy spirals of orange, yellow, green, and purple, and the fronts of the shirts had been silk-screened with the image of a cheese-dripping slice of pepperoni pizza and the slogan “I Got Me a Piece at World Peace Day!”
“Wow. Those are … bright,” Cooper said. “I think I’d rather just wear the tux jacket.”
The Warlock shook his head. “The lady at JCPenney said I’m a winter.