I asked, setting the platter and bucket down on the picnic table.
“I … have an itch,” he replied gravely, his voice strange and muffled in my mind. Our telepathic connection was slowly improving, but that, too, was taking some getting used to.
“I could reach every part of my Quamo body and my ferret body,” Pal continued, “but oddly these new rear legs aren’t very flexible. I can reach my underside, but not my back.”
“Maybe you just need to do some yoga.”
Through the valved spiracles on his abdomen, he blew noisy chords that sounded like a child randomly banging on the keys of an organ. Laughter? Oh-please snorts? I’d only known Pal for a week, and already I had to get to know him all over again.
“That doesn’t help me at the moment,” he said.
“Horses back into trees and fence posts to scratch themselves,” I replied. “You’re tall enough to stand on tippytoes and scratch yourself on the low limbs of that oak over there.”
“How dreadfully undignified.”
“Or you could just roll around on the grass.”
“And that’s more dignified how?”
“Oh, hush. It’s not like anybody can see you back here,” I pointed out. “Otherwise you’d have flipped out the neighbors already and the cops would probably be here.”
Long ago, Mother Karen had put her house and its yards under a camouflage charm to keep her foster children’s magical practice sessions out of sight of the neighbors. So at least there would be no panicked suburbanites dialing 911 to report a monster prowling through Worthington.
I glanced up at the sky, half expecting to see a Virtus silently descending, ready to smite me like a curse from Heaven. One of the huge guardian spirits had already tried to do a little smiting earlier that evening. Mr. Jordan, the aforementioned now-comatose head of the local Governing Circle, had convinced the Virtus that I was committing some kind of grand necromancy instead of simply trying to rescue Cooper. I’d defended myself, not expecting to win the battle, but win I did.
It was still hard to believe: I had killed a Virtus. Nobody was supposed to be able to do that. Not with magic or luck or nuclear weapons or anything. It was as if I’d thrown myself naked in front of a speeding freight train in a desperate, stupid attempt to halt hundreds of hurtling tons of iron … and had somehow stopped it cold.
Miracles had abounded that evening. But I doubted the Virtus Regnum would see me as anything but a threat. They’d be coming for me, and from what I’d seen so far, they were as merciful as black holes.
I squinted up at the dark spaces between the stars, wondering what lurked there.
“Speaking of things that shouldn’t be seen by mundanes, how is that working for you?” Pal asked.
“Huh?” I looked at him, confused.
He nodded toward the gray satin opera glove on my left arm. “The gauntlet. Is it keeping your flames contained?”
“Yes, Karen and the Warlock did a good job enchanting this,” I replied, looking at the thin curls of smoke that were trailing from the cuff of the glove, as if I’d used it as a place to stash a still-smoldering cigarette. So far, that was the only sign that the lower half of my arm was a torch of hellfire, courtesy of my having to plunge my arm into the burning heart of the Goad, the pain-devouring devil that had imprisoned Cooper and his family.
“It slips down a little sometimes—I might have to find some double-sided tape or superglue to hold it in place.”
Sheathed in the glove, my arm functioned more or less normally, but still had a squishy unreliability. Fine finger movements were still difficult. And that wasn’t surprising, considering that my hand was boneless, fleshless, nothing but diabolic flame. I’d had to rely on a natural talent for spiritual extension to give it any kind of solidity; Pal had referred to the ability as “reflexive parakinesis.”
And it was pretty close to true reflex. My crysoberyl ocularis—a replacement for my left eye, which I’d lost the week before in a battle with a demon—still hurt a bit, and I was constantly aware that I had a piece of polished rock stuck in my head. But a couple of times that evening, I had completely forgotten that my left arm was no longer entirely flesh. And fortunately I hadn’t dropped anything important as a consequence.
“With luck we may be able to find someone to remove the underlying curse, and you’ll have