Free Shotgun Sorceress by Lucy A. Snyder

bathroom?”
    “Me,” I said. “I definitely need a shower.”

chapter
seven

Riviera
    T aking a shower when one of your hands is made of fire is a bit more challenging than you might expect. Almost immediately, I got water in the opera glove, and the bathroom filled with thick, sulfurous steam despite the vent fan’s buzzing labor. Within a few seconds, it was pretty hard to breathe in there. I quickly soaped and rinsed all the important parts one-handed and got out to get dried and dressed.
    The Warlock was waiting by the bathroom door when I emerged, toweling off my hair. He held his nose and waved his other hand dramatically when the rotten-egg steam reached him. “Sweet Zeus, woman, what have you been eating?”
    “Oh, bite me.”
    “I’d love to, but I’m sure my dear brother would object.”
    I made a rude noise and whipped my damp bath towel at the back of his legs; he narrowly dodged the snap and danced into the bathroom, quickly latching the door behind him.
    Downstairs, Mother Karen was busily directing her teens in the kitchen; it looked like French toast and sliced fruit were on the menu that morning. The smell of the toast made my stomach growl; I hoped it wouldn’t taste of caged horror.
    I went out into the backyard to take Pal’s order (a bucket of peeled cantaloupes and a few dozen hard-boiled eggs) and woke Cooper, who was still snoozing away in the tent. I brought him inside and he helped me set the table.
    Breakfast with eighteen kids was pretty loud, but went far better than dinner had; the French toast gave me a brief twinge from a couple of weevils that had fallen into the wheat grinder, but the ambrosia salad was quiet and sweet. Afterward, we helped clean up and then played boxing and snowboarding on the Wii in the rec room until it was time to talk to Riviera Jordan.
    Mother Karen led me, Cooper, and the Warlock upstairs to her study. The room was one of many spatial surprises in the house; its door was tucked in between the master bathroom and the teen girls’ room, and based on how everything else was laid out, you’d expect it to be a windowless cave at most nine feet wide and possibly ten or eleven feet deep. But when I stepped inside, I found myself in a vaulted haven bigger than many living rooms. Tall windows with gauzy curtains alternated with floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelves loaded with spellbooks, cookbooks, and various jars and enchanter’s implements. The windows on the western side looked out over a rocky north Pacific beach; the eastern windows had a view of white sands and gently lapping Caribbean surf. Near the door, there was a nautical blue-striped couch and chair set around a coffee table made from glass and driftwood. Set in an alcove in the middle of the room was Mother Karen’s desk, and across from it a wet bar with a coffeemaker and tea caddy. At the back of the room was a big marble fireplace with a softly burning enchanted fire that matched the sea-green wallpaper, and above it was an eight-foot-wide antique silver mirror in a gilded wooden frame.
    “I’ve never seen anyone open a mirror,” I said. It was one of a list of enchantments Cooper hadn’t showed me. “Is it hard to do?”
    “It’s harder than opening iChat”—Karen nodded toward the Mac tower on her desk—“but I suppose having us all crowd around the webcam would lack a certain gravitas.”
    Mother Karen led us to the fireplace and pulled a business card out of one of her pockets; a lock of bright silver hair was stapled to the back. “Riviera’s courier dropped off this pointer to her office. What happens next is I put this under the edge of the mirror’s frame and recite the opening trigger.”
    “But what if you didn’t have a pointer, or a mirror that was already enchanted? Could you still do it?” I asked.
    “You ubiquemancers would have a better chance than I would, I suppose, but I’m not sure how you’d go about it,” she replied.
    “In theory it’s doable,” said