Switchblade Goddess by Lucy A. Snyder

damn thing like that,” I replied. “Finding her should be straightforward, and if it’s not, well, the rest won’t matter. The beat-down, yeah, that’s tricky, but I can improvise.”
    I
had
to improvise. We were walking into an almost entirely unknown situation. I didn’t know how hurt Miko was, and more important, I didn’t know the true extent of her powers. All I knew was that my gut was telling me that every hour that passed was an hour for her to get her strength back. Every hour that passed was another hour for the energy potion to wear off. Every hour that passed was an opportunity lost forever.
    “Might I suggest,” he said, “that you use one of the hairs Sara gave you to create a poppet to try some offensive sympathetic magic?”
    I hadn’t thought of making a voodoo doll. “But that’s black magic.”
    “Yes, quite. But not nearly at the magnitude of some of the necromancy you’ve already inadvertentlyperformed, so I shouldn’t think that your ability to work healing magic will be any more impaired than it already is.”
    “How much time will it take?”
    “Six hours or so, I expect.”
    I shook my head. “That’s too long.”
    “You’ll need all the help you can get,” Pal said.
    “Are you absolutely sure that sympathetic magic can hurt her?”
    “Well … no, I suppose not,” he admitted.
    “Then I’d rather not let her get six hours healthier,” I replied.
    “Hey, Jessie!”
    I looked up. Charlie was making her way through the table maze toward me, still toting her AK-47, but she was in a clean pair of jeans and one of her Cuchillo State University Tae Kwon Do Club tees. She looked worried.
    “What’s up?” I asked. “Come sit down with us. Do you want to get some food?”
    “No, I already had an MRE like an hour ago.” She took a seat in the empty chair beside me and set her rifle against the edge of the table. “Um. Do you have time to talk?”
    I paused. A few more minutes wouldn’t hurt, would it? And maybe it would be long enough for a miracle, and Cooper and the Warlock would show up despite all the evidence telling me that wasn’t going to happen. “Sure, why?”
    The girl glanced around, as if to make sure nobody was listening in on our conversation. Then she leaned in close.
    “You know how David told me he had a bunch ofloot at the gardener’s cottage? Stuff he’d scavenged from abandoned houses?” she whispered.
    I nodded. David had been her best friend, once; most recently he’d been the shadow-devil’s servant, until he’d forced Charlie to kill him.
    “Well, he wasn’t exaggerating. There’s gold and jewelry and more paper money than I can count up there. And … I don’t know what I should do with it. Part of me’s like, ‘Hooah, cash!’ and I start thinking of everything I could do with it … but the rest of me knows it’s not mine. It’s, like, some kind of blood money, you know? And I want to give it back, but the people it used to belong to are all dead, and if I just turn it in to Sara I don’t know what she’ll do with it. I don’t know who it rightfully belongs to now.”
    “Is it someplace safe?” I asked.
    She nodded. “Totally safe. I got it moved to a better hiding place.”
    I took a sip of my iced coffee, thinking. “Well. Rightfully I guess it belongs to the surviving family members, and if there aren’t any, I think it would belong to the community to go toward taking care of injured survivors and rebuilding the city. So … I would wait a little while for things to calm down and for there to be a real local government here again. Turn it in then. I don’t think it’s going to be Sara’s game for too much longer.”
    “That’s good.” Charlie looked somewhat relieved. “It’s not like I hate
her
, but I hate what she does.”
    “And remember,” I said. “You’re a survivor, too. You lost your entire family because of the shadow and Miko, didn’t you?”
    “Yeah.” Her expression turned bleak.