“My master told me,” William said. “The Spirit of Murder.”
“Does she know Death?” I asked, half-kidding.
William paused as if listening to an invisible friend beside him. I knew that feeling. “She says yes.”
“Ah,” I said, believing him. “So, you think David is working for Dracula?”
I hoped not. That little bird had successfully rescued me from my longstanding funk, and I wasn’t about to turn on him. Mind you, if he’d set me up to steal the Primal Orbs, I’d fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. It also meant that he had intimate knowledge about how my mind worked since it required a fake Mindy, Jane, and Society of Superheroes Dark. God, that was a stupid name for a team.
“I think Dracula is dead,” William said. “Permanently.”
That was a claim that gave me pause. As much as the deaths of heroes was leaving me nonplussed, a lot of supervillains had died in the past couple of years as well. They weren’t coming back either. Tom Terror was the biggest name on that list, killed by yours truly, and his absence had resulted in a bunch of infighting among PHANTOM’s goon squads. Given they were Nazis, I couldn’t help but feel schadenfreude. Which was German for happiness at the misfortune of others, a concept I heartily endorsed when the others were fascists.
“He’s come back before,” I pointed out. “Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Frank Langella, and Gary Oldman. Dude is like a Time Lord.”
That was not the nerdiest statement I’d ever made but probably in the top ten.
“Yes, but you made a magical ban on this universe that altered the fundamental rules of its metaphysics,” William said, completely ignoring my jokes. “Resurrection magic, divine or otherwise, no longer works. Undead can’t be created in this world anymore and if they are destroyed, they stay destroyed. There are no more ghosts created either.”
I blinked. “No wonder I’ve been so lacking in business lately. It’s like that crappy decision to make the Ghostbusters drive themselves out of business in the second movie. This is why The Real Ghostbusters cartoon is the true sequel.”
William didn’t even blink. Wow, this guy obviously didn’t know pop culture at all. “I’ll have to take your word for it.”
“Still, Dracula could have been revived from his last defeat before the ban went into effect,” I suggested. “I mean Mandy’s still alive-ish.”
“Nancy and I slew your universe’s Dracula a week after coming here,” William said. “He was attempting to seduce teenage girls into marrying him with Young Adult fiction.”
“The cad!” I said, faking shocked. “So, what, is the Dracula here an alternate version? Assuming you really did kill ours and not an imposter. I mean, I’ve met vampires who have claimed to be Lestat, as well as Gary imposters. It happens.”
Honestly, given William and Nancy had torn through Sheriff Injustice and his gang, I didn’t doubt they could deal with Dracula for a minute.
Dracula may have been one of the A-listers among supervillains, the guy who put the A in archvillain, but he’d also suffered countless defeats over the years. The only reason he’d remained a threat was because he always came back from Hell within a few months at best. He was the Dread Pirate LeChuck of vampires, or well, the Dracula. I didn’t need to reach for another example there. My bad.
“It is possible, but I doubt it,” William said. “I believe the imposter is possibly far more dangerous than Dracula, though. Our realities are merging, and I can sense how the ley lines are intersecting. This world is being overlaid with multiple other realities to circumvent the ban you placed. The worlds being merged are ones with strong necromantic energies to them, which implies to me they are trying to brute force their way past your enchantment.”
“Speak English, Doc,” I said.
“Someone wants to raise the dead in this reality and are willing to smash universes together to do it,” William said.
“Huh.” I blinked, processing that. “Sounds like Merciful.”
“Your doppelganger,” William said.
“Yes,” I said. “But it could also be Dracula. If anyone knew how to escape the rules of final death, it would be the original grandmaster of it. Maybe it’s an alternate universe Dracula. These things happen.”
Rarely, even in my world, but they did happen. Mr. Chaos had been the nastiest and most evil enemy of the Nightwalker for decades, a serial killer with a twisted sense of humor and the ability to inflict horrifying bad luck on anyone he met as long as it was funny. We’d never fought. He’d ended up gunned down by a gun-toting grandmother while trying to launch a bank into space. The next week, his doppelganger from Earth-B had shown up and started raising hell in an identical manner. Because, really, we just can’t have nice things.
William was not easily distracted, though. He remained laser focused on our current situation. “Either way, it seems to me that bringing the Primal Orbs to him is an astoundingly bad idea. It is very probable that this world merging is the result of him having the other four as well as magic or technology enough to harness their power.”
He had a point. My world often didn’t seem like it, but it did have its own internal form of logic. “Well, thanks for the warning. I suppose this is time that I call in the Society of Superheroes. Which I note a lot of people have been advising me not to.”
“Yes,” William said. “They are also suspiciously busy.”
“What?” I asked, looking up.
William pulled out his Omegaphone—though it was apparently made by some company called Apple—and showed me a wireless feed of the Society of Superheroes battling hordes of zombified superheroes. The Texas Guardians were there, the Society of Superheroes Dark, the Shadow Seventeen, and the Evo-Lutionaries too. The zombified heroes looked a lot like the Nightwalker that had attacked me, which told me that there was a whole Lich-Wight invasion going on.
“Those sons of bitches,” I said, staring at the phone. “They’re having a multi-team crossover without me!”
I was getting distracted again—blame my undiagnosed ADD from childhood—but this could not go unchallenged! When there was a big universe-spanning crossover event, you invited everyone! That was the rule. That was the whole point! Whether it was an alien invasion, Great Beast, zombie attack, time getting rewritten, or supervillain mass team-up, you brought all hands on deck! I was being snubbed!
“My condolences,” William said. “It must be hard not to be important enough to be invited.”
“Strong e-mails will be sent,” I said. “I fully intend to podcast about this. They’ve done this to me before, ya know! Like when they had a big secret invasion by a bunch of Venusians that caused a civil war on multiple Earths, you know who got left on monitor duty? Me! It’s like they’re ashamed of me.”
“Probably because they are,” William said, proving that showing tact was not his strong suit.
“I didn’t even get an invite to the Christmas Party at the Island of Hot Druidesses that Guinevere comes from! Mr. Inventor got invited to that one and he’s married!” I said. “Cindy still is ticked that I didn’t bring her.”
“Your world is a very silly place,” William said, his expression remaining somewhere between stone faced and lifeless. “What are you going to do?”
“I honestly don’t know,” I admitted. “I’ve only known the feathery jerk a little while, but I’d rather not think David is leading me into a trap.”
“I looked up his Superpedia page,” William said. “The Nightflier was a creation by the Filmation company for their short-lived Nightwalker and Sunlight cartoon. It aired in 1968 and the Nightflier was voiced by Casey Kasem.”
I blinked. “I thought he sounded familiar. Still, the fact the Nightflier is fictional doesn’t necessarily mean he’s not real.”
“That is literally what it means,” William replied.
“Then explain Mercirat!” I said, frowning. “My furry cartoonish friend from animation world!”
“I understand you’ve only seen this f
igure when you’ve been concussed or when fighting LSD Man and Marijuana Girl,” I said.
“Ah yes, Lawrence Sylvester Dodds and Mary Jane Pottsman,” I said. “Good times.”
“I repeat, your world is a very silly place,” William said.
“Thanks,” I replied.
“It wasn’t a compliment,” William said. “Either way, I know something about what people are willing to do in order to bring back their loved ones. They are willing to shake heaven and Earth to do so. Nothing stands in their way and all evils become justifiable in the name of restoring what they have lost.”
“I know what that’s like,” I replied, sighing. “But you can’t go home again.”
I couldn’t help but think of myself as toxic and a danger to those I cared for most. Cindy was my best friend, Mandy was the love of my life, and Gabrielle was somewhere between.
“Perhaps home is where the heart is,” William said. “I know I keep the beating heart of my worst enemy there so I can always make sure it’s not regenerating into a full resurrection.”
I stared at him.
“That was a joke,” William said. “I keep it in a locked box in an underground vault.”
“I really need to get back Diabloman,” I replied. “The substitutes I’ve been using just aren’t working out.”
“I must return to training the young men and women of this camp how to survive,” William said. “Education is not to fill a hole but light a fire. The next generation of your world’s heroes must be prepared.”
That was a weird sentiment coming from a guy who was one skull mask away from being the villain of a Blumhouse movie. Still, I wasn’t about to let him go just yet. “Do you really think there is a Big Ass Time Disaster going on?”
William blinked. “I don’t know. Your reality seems to be pretty twisted. Jane tried explaining to me that you had two eight-year-old daughters born years apart and who you both raised as well as didn’t raise.”
“Yes,” I said. “Time compression.”
“Perhaps something is going on,” William said. “But would you change time so it moved only forward?”
I blinked. “I dunno. I can’t exactly talk about wanting to undo reality because I love having my kids. If not for all these shenanigans, I wouldn’t have either Leia or Mindy. But I also don’t want them to be eight years old for the next ten years then suddenly become adults like we’re watching Days of Our Lives.”
“Is that show still on in your reality?” William asked. “In ours, it was cancelled for a vampire orientated soap opera. They felt it was a missing daytime television demographic.”
I tried to wrap my head around that. “Why would you make daytime television for vampires?”
William blinked. “That is a good question. Someone clearly dropped the ball at the network.”
My discovery that William did have a sense of humor was interrupted by the sound of an explosion just outside of the cabin, which caused me to cover my ears. It shattered glass and left the windows of the cabin broken in pieces on the ground. My ears were ringing, and I needed to steady myself since it turned out that explosions were not things you could power walk away from, unless you were invulnerable or a Michael Bay character.
Looking up, I asked, “Any chance that is one of your students?”
“No,” William said, frowning. “We must go protect them.”
I sighed. “Well, another chance to kill bad people. I’m in.”
The two of us headed out the door of the counselor’s cabin and found ourselves in the middle of a battlefield. The summer camp was under attack by a horde of Lich-Wights and I had flashbacks to the invasion of Falconcrest City by the Brotherhood of Infamy’s zombies. These particular monsters were a lot nastier and uglier looking than those zombies too, being deformed seven- and eight-foot-tall mounds of muscle wearing burlap sacks or hockey-masks. They were ogres, one and all, with a variety of farm equipment as weapons. Some had pitchforks, shot guns, chainsaws, and others had machetes. At least one of them was a depraved looking giant Daisy Duke sort of girl with razor teeth who was driving a tractor that had been outfitted with buzzsaws.
It was the Clan.
I hadn’t entirely been kidding when I’d said that there were mutant cannibal hillbillies in Satan’s Hollow. The Clan was a bunch of Scottish Satanists who had been driven out of their home country in the sixteenth century. Unfortunately, they’d ended up in the New World seeking religious freedom to continue eating people for the Devil. The Nightwalker had supposedly defeated all of them, but it turned out there was a fairly large number of the extended Hills Have Eyes-rejects and they’d come back numerous times for revenge.
This looked like someone had managed to successfully bring the entirety of the horde back at once and it wasn’t just Scottish Baba Yaga’s descendants here either. There were also the remains of the Brotherhood of Infamy, dressed in pointed black hoods and robes that made them look like discount Death Eaters. Hell, that wasn’t even a joke so much as an observation as a few wielded wands that were blasting away at the campers. A few were even riding around like Satanic Sabrina the Teenage Witches.
Wait, that was a thing now.
“Early graduation day, it seems,” I muttered.
“I must protect my students,” William said, grabbing an ax buried in a tree stump and running into the battle.
“I have to admire a teacher who takes his job seriously,” I said, throwing a fireball at the tractor before it ran over a pair of frightened blue-skinned eleven-year-olds. They were among the children not being trained in combat because, well, eleven-year-olds. The tractor exploded and Mandy scooped up both kids and spirited them away.
I levitated six feet off the ground and turned insubstantial, hurling fireballs one after another into the attacker. This was something I knew how to do and would allow me to be an actual hero. Almost as soon as I froze a guy waving around his chainsaw in a particularly phallic way, I fell back to the ground and landed in a pile of mud. I also felt all my magic fade away.
Uh oh.
That was when I was grabbed by the base of my cloak and dragged into the air, upside down, before the face of Sheriff Injustice. He was staring at me with red eyes and a face that contained all the hatred in the universe.
“You killed mah daughter,” Nordbert said, breathing hot air into my face that reeked of the same cheap whiskey that I sold for way too much in pharmacies.
“Well, crap,” I said.
Chapter Eighteen
Where I Get My Ass Kicked (Again)
“You killed mah daughter!” Sheriff Injustice shouted again, glaring at me with pure fury in his eyes as he held be suspended in front of his face by my cape.
“And my mother insists she looks like Barbara Streisand in Funny Girl. Neither of which is remotely true,” I said.
Truth be told, I was of a mixed opinion of how I should respond to Sheriff Injustice’s accusation. The fact was that his daughter was dead and that was peripherally related to me, even if I wasn’t the guy who finished Missy off. A part of me, the dad part that suspiciously sounded like my own dearly departed abba, sympathized with him over it in a universal non-individualist manner. The rest of me knew that he was the one who’d abandoned her to die and brought her to murder us in the first place. I didn’t get a chance to find out which part would have won their hypothetical debate because Sheriff Injustice started banging me around against the ground one bash after another.
Honestly, if not for the fact that I was on a heavy concentration of magic that seemingly disrupted Sheriff Injustice’s powers—at least that’s what I assumed was happening—I would have been dead right then and there. Even then I could feel my supernatural powers slipping away again and if he could properly digest this haunted campsite’s magical wellspring then we were in serious goddamn trouble. Now a sane person would have fled like a jack rabbit and called William or Nancy down here to deal with Yosemite Sam the same way that they’d done earlier. I, however, was any
thing but sane.
“This is because I had sex in a haunted summer camp, isn’t it? That and the drinking plus wanting to smoke weed? I’m cursed now. Those are the rules,” I said, spitting up blood in the muddy pit I was currently laying in. At least, I hoped it was mud. I could hear pigs squealing and noticed that I’d been thrown through a damaged fence into what had formerly been the petting zoo. Either that or Cindy’s personal pigsty. She’d never been kosher and had become even less so inclined after turning herself into a werewolf. Sweet, sweet pork, how you tempt even the most Maccabean soul.
“Imbecile!” Sheriff Injustice said, pulling me back by my cape. “You think you’re Bugs Bunny but I’m gonna skin ya alive.”
I reached into my utility belt and pulled out the Kangaroo Hunter’s boomerang. “You think it’s an insult to compare me to Bugs Bunny, I consider it a compliment. Also, that would make you Elmer Fudd. Which is weird because I already mentally compared you to Yosemite Sam. You’re really messing with my references here, man.”
Sheriff Injustice seemed honestly impressed at my gumption or maybe he was just savoring that last bit of tension before the kill. Maybe he just really loved Looney Toons and was giving me props for making a reference to ninety-year-old cartoons. “You ain’t gonna hurt me with that thing there, boy. Do you even know how to throw a boomerang?”
Once more hanging upside down in front of his face, I shook my head no. “Not in the slightest. No, it’s mostly this is a grenade and a knife as well as a boomerang.”
“What?” Sheriff Injustice asked right before I stabbed him through the eye with the orichalcum alloy weapon. The weapon passed through his flesh like it wasn’t as hard as Ultragod’s and burned against the anti-magic properties of the metal. He promptly dropped me, and I rolled away him, holding the boomerang’s detonator in my hand. It was almost a shame to detonate it, but I did so, taking off the alien’s head.
“Huh,” I said, impressed by the Kangaroo Hunter’s weapon’s effect. “I really should have used this first.”
The Supervillainy Saga (Book 7): The Horror of Supervillainy Page 16
