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“You’d be surprised.” Before he could question me further, I continued. “A sorcerer, by definition, takes his magic.”
“How do you take magic?”
“By killing someone you love.”
Jimmy flinched. “No one who’s human would do that.”
I wasn’t so sure. I’d met some humans who rivaled the Nephilim for evil. We weren’t supposed to kill them, but … accidents happened.
“Which is why we need to know what kind of sorcerer we’re dealing with so we know how to kill him. Some are part shifter, part vampire—Well, basically anything that creeps can take some magic and become a being that’s even harder to kill.”
Now that I thought about it, Ruthie’s sending Jimmy after a sorcerer alone would have been a very bad idea. As it was … not knowing what kind of murdering magician we were dealing with was a very bad idea. Once again, I got that prickle at the back of my neck.
“Tell me exactly what Ruthie said.”
“She sent me to get you.”
I glanced sideways. “Why me?”
He stared out the front window as if the never-ending highway that disappeared into the flat, soon-to-be Iowa plane was beyond fascinating. “I didn’t ask.”
“No?” That smelled like a lie, but I couldn’t see why he’d bother.
“Ruthie says ‘jump,’ I say ‘how high?’ Don’t you?”
Not in exactly those words, but yeah, pretty much.
“What else?”
“That we should go to the foot of Mount Taylor, where we’d find a sorcerer, and you’d know what to do.”
I’d had better instructions. Then again, I’d had worse. And if Ruthie’d said I’d know what to do, I had to believe I would. No doubt whatever sorcerer we’d find there would be a type I’d found, and eliminated, before.
I began to tick them off in my mind. The Nagual, a Mayan Jaguar shaman, he’d died by silver dipped in blood.
The Aghori, a Hindu cannibal that ate magicians in order to ingest their magic. I’d used hemlock on him.
While I doubted we’d find a Hindu sorcerer in New Mexico—I’d found stranger things in stranger places—I did carry hemlock in the trunk.
I also carried knives made of every metal known to man, bullets in the same colors, crossbows, arrows, assorted poisons in solid and liquid form, animal and human blood, as well as ropes, chains, and whips. It paid—usually in lives—to be prepared.
“Killing what they started out as won’t kill them?” Jimmy asked.
“Once they’re a sorcerer, you’ve gotta kill that, too.”
“How?”
“You know why they burned witches?”
Jimmy shrugged. “Why?”
I tightened my fingers on the steering wheel, then focused on the distant horizon.
“Because it worked.”
* * *
Mount Taylor loomed large from the flat, arid land like a pyramid in the midst of Egypt. As we rolled closer, the ponderosa pines that dotted the foothills turned what had appeared from a distance to be a gigantic blueberry snow cone into Tso dzilh, the sacred mountain of the south.
