“That’s enough of that.” Heloise withdrew the gun from my back long enough to rap me lightly on the crown of the head with its grip. “Don’t try to confuse my Jimmy. I don’t like it when people do that.”
“She’s so good to me,” said Jimmy, in a dreamy, puzzled tone. “She takes such good care of me.”
“Yes, I do, don’t I, Jimmy?” There was a soft smacking sound, and I knew without looking that she had just blown him a kiss. Gross. Evil people shouldn’t blow kisses at my honorary cousins.
We had almost reached the fence. James jogged ahead to unlock and open the door, holding it for us.
“Thank you, James,” said Heloise, and started to push me through. The woods loomed dark and tangled and all-consuming, and I knew, all the way down to the bottom of my heart, that if I went into them with her, I would never come back out. My body could molder among the roots for years before anyone stumbled over it.
I couldn’t help Sarah by getting myself killed. I couldn’t help anyone that way. So when Heloise urged me forward again, I did the only thing I could do, and grabbed hold of the fence with both hands, swinging myself around in the process, so that I was blocking the exit.
Heloise blinked at me, clearly nonplussed. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Stopping.”
She lifted both eyebrows. “If you say so. Jimmy?”
“Right away.” James moved toward me, hands outstretched, air around them crackling with cold.
I blinked. “She has you, but she doesn’t have-you have-you, does she? Huh.”
“What are you talking about?” demanded Heloise.
I kept my eyes on James. “I know you and Annie have been digging in the library, going through all Grandpa Thomas’ old books, looking for ways to be better sorcerers. It’s like, all the two of you do most days. I’ve seen you do all sorts of stuff, and now all you’re doing is trying to turn people into ice cubes. She has you, because she’s in your head and everything, but she doesn’t have you, not really. You’re pushing back. Is that a sorcerer thing, or a stupidly stubborn thing? Either way, keep it up.”
James made a sharp growling noise and grabbed my hand.
The cold flowing out of him was intense enough to violate half a dozen laws of physics in the process of giving me virtually instant frostbite. I hissed through my teeth, fingers tightening on the metal, which did me the immense favor of freezing solid and adhering to my skin. That was going to hurt when it came time to pry me loose.
“Make him let go,” snarled Heloise.
James pulled my hand off the fence. My skin, frozen to the metal and taxed beyond all reasonable limits, did the only thing it could do, and tore. I staggered backward, staring at my red, raw fingers, which were slowly leaking blood. James lunged for me. I stuck my hand out automatically, catching him across the face, leaving a red smear behind.
James froze, eyes becoming slightly glazed as he stared at me.
My eyes widened. In the battle between cuckoo compulsion and incubus attraction, which would win? It wasn’t a question I’d ever really wanted to ask myself before, especially since it meant being close enough to a non-family cuckoo for it to matter. Suddenly, it seemed like a very big deal.
“Jimmy! What the hell are you doing? Get him!” Heloise waved the gun in her hand like it was some sort of badge of authority.
Hell, maybe it was. But if she was going to kill me, she was going to do it here, where at least my family would have a chance of finding my body. “No, James,” I said, voice calm and level. “Don’t get me. I want you to stay right where you are, buddy, okay? We’re friends, right?”
“Friends,” he said, sounding dazed.
I winced. I’d never actually bled on anyone who wasn’t related to me before. Even in elementary school, when I’d been young enough that people just wanted to be my friend and maybe give me their pudding cups, I’d been careful enough to avoid skin contact with people who could be enthralled. How long was this going to last? And was James ever going to forgive me?
Not that it mattered if I was dead. Sorry, buddy, I thought, and nodded vigorously. “Friends,” I echoed. “We’re friends, and Heloise here, she’s not your friend. No matter what you think you remember, you only met her tonight, and she’s not acting like a friend, is she? Friends don’t hold their friends at gunpoint.”
“What the fuck is this, an episode of Mr. Rogers? Grab him!” Heloise adjusted her stance, once again taking careful aim at my chest. Headshots are tricky. Even the best marksman can miss. Chest shots, at close range, are much more likely to do the kind of damage jerks like Heloise prefer. “Grab him, or I’m going to shoot you both.”
Slowly, James turned to face her. His motions were jerky, like he was fighting some force I couldn’t see. I wanted to cheer for him. I kept quiet. The last thing I wanted to do right now was attract more potentially deadly attention to myself.
“You’re my friend, Hel,” he said.
“I know, Jimmy. I know.” Her voice was treacly sweet, a parody of a friend’s concerned tone. It made my skin crawl. The way she batted her eyelashes at him made it worse. “He’s a bad person. You need to stop him.”
James nodded in that same jerky manner. Then he reached up, swiped his thumb through the blood on his cheek, and stuck it in his mouth. His eyes cleared. He lunged for Heloise, who shrieked and stumbled backward on the lawn, aiming her stolen gun directly at his face and pulling the trigger.
Nothing happened. There was a dull click and that was all, and I had to swallow the urge to laugh even as I pulled the cosh out of my pocket with my uninjured hand. In all the chaos and the triumph of getting her hands on the gun, she had forgotten one essential step.
She had forgotten to take the safety off.
If this had been a movie, I would have said something pithy about safe shooting, some stupid little quip that would probably have alerted her to the problem. Thankfully, while we all come from the Spider-Man school of combat—the bad guys can’t hit you if they’re too busy trying to figure out what the hell you’re talking about—my parents had always been very clear that there was a time and a place for helping your enemies improve. The middle of combat was neither of those things.
I rushed for Heloise, swinging my arm around so that the cosh hit her in the shoulder. She yelped with pain. She dropped the gun. James lunged for her again, barely missing as she staggered backward.
And that’s when Sam dropped down on her from above like the two hundred pounds of furious pseudo-simian he was. He landed feet-first on her shoulders, toes gripping hard. For one glorious moment they stood there like cheerleaders getting ready to do a really impressive trick. Then physics kicked in, and Heloise went down hard, Sam on top of her, lips pulled back from his teeth in a genuinely impressive snarl. She screamed. The sound was almost enough to drown out the click of a hammer being pulled back. I looked behind me.