Free Shotgun Sorceress by Lucy A. Snyder Page A

the Warlock. “Any mirror will work, but you’d have to be at least somewhat familiar with the person you’re trying to contact. You know, be able to keep a good solid mental picture of him and the room his mirror’s in while you do your chant. And you’d have to hope that he’d either be there to respond to the mirror spell, or that his mirror has a message enchantment.”
    “Eh,” replied Cooper. “That’s a chancy lot of work, and if you don’t have a pointer, you never really know who you’re actually talking to. Lots of sorcerers and demons like to play mirror games. And if you know your contact well enough to have a pointer … shoot, you probably have their phone number, right? So just call them on your cell. No sense in blowing magical energy when there’s cheap technology that does the job just fine.”
    “Well, wizards of the old school see resorting to technology as disrespectful and lazy,” Mother Karen replied. “We should mind our p’s and q’s and do this the way Riviera wants us to.”
    She tucked the card up under the edge of the gilded mirror frame and looked back at us. “Last chance to brush hair and straighten clothes and check your teeth for strawberry seeds. Jessica, this means you.”
    “Oh. Yeah.” A couple of the buttons on my borrowed blouse were undone; I’d gotten a little overenthusiastic playing Wii Boxing. I fixed them, and ran my fingers through my hair. “Good?”
    “Good enough,” Karen replied. She put her hands against the glass, closed her eyes, and spoke the trigger: “Speculus, speculus.”
    The mirror shimmered, brightened, and our reflections dissolved into a view of a slim, well-dressed woman in a plum business suit seated in a tall-backed antique chair. Queen Victoria could have scarcely looked more commanding. Her hair was a thick, fashionable bob of bright silver, but her face was smooth and unwrinkled. Powerful Talents have a wide array of antiaging magic at their disposal; if you don’t fall into poverty or die through accident or violence, you can keep going for centuries if you’re determined enough. Some people get tired of the endless and increasingly difficult rejuvenation rituals after a time and let nature take its course; one look in her sharp, intense eyes, silvery as her hair, and I doubted Riviera would ever willingly surrender her grip on life.
    “Well, now.” Riviera had an upper-crust Southern accent, the kind that shows its British roots. “I see you’ve all gathered as I requested. But we’re missing one.”
    She turned toward me, expression still intense but not hostile. “Where’s your familiar, Miss Shimmer?”
    I felt a sudden urge to curtsy; instead I did an awkward little head bob. “He’s too big to fit in the house. Ma’am.”
    “Ah.” She leaned forward slightly. “I do realize that there are most certainly some trust issues on your side as well as on mine, but there are serious issues at hand that we had best discuss in person, and in private. So I have arranged for us to meet tomorrow afternoon on neutral ground: the Seelie Tavern west of Winesburg.”
    My heart beat a little faster; I’d always heard that there was a faery realm hidden near Amish country, but you couldn’t find it unless you were invited. I’d heard all kinds of stories about the hazards mortals face when visiting Faery: those deemed graceless transformed into pigs, those found cocky turned to mice for the cats, those seen as too pretty lulled into spending the night and emerging the next morning to discover that they’d disappeared for a century and aged almost as much. Too quiet and you might become a tree, too loud and you might become a crow. What were we getting into?
    “Please be there promptly at four; I will send another courier with a faery token so the guards will let y’all in. They will be able to accommodate your familiar, I’m sure,” Riviera continued. “But to avoid offending our hosts—and the most serious