by T. S. Mann
Matt rolled his eyes. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, not this again!”
“What are you on about?” Electra asked in confusion. It was Ethan who answered.
“Back at Fisher College, their dad called on Fate directly for a solution about how to deal with the chaos fragment.”
At that, Electra literally stepped back from the trio, visibly shocked at Ethan’s words. “… he opened himself directly to Fate. He’s really that powerful?!?”
Ethan shrugged. “Apparently. I’m not any good at Fate magic, but … I sure felt a master-level effect.”
Electra stood still as she absorbed that. “What did he say Fate wanted him to do?” she finally said quietly.
“Well, he said several people had things to do,” Luke said. “I had to say the words that would wake Matt up long enough for Dad to transfer the bad stuff out of his head – which I did. Mrs. Caulfield would have to tell the person she trusted least that it was okay to betray her.”
At that, Electra’s eyes widened even more.
“Oh, and then Doc would have to apologize to someone,” he continued, “but Dad didn’t know who.”
At that, she rolled her eyes instead. “I knew the bastard wasn’t sincere,” she muttered. “He just wanted to check off a prophecy condition.”
She shook her head. “Anything else?”
“Just that everything would come down to Matt’s brilliant idea.”
“Which, by the way, I don’t have,” said Matt. “So, can we go with your plan to transfer the chaos thingy to Lindsay and be done with all this?”
Electra didn’t answer him. Instead, after several seconds in thought, she turned to Ethan, the most knowledgeable of the three boys about magic.
“Do you swear to me that you’re not lying about this? About St. Angel calling on Fate and then telling you all of that?”
Ethan’s eyebrows rose slightly. After a second of hesitation, he nodded his head.
“Conditional on the fact that I’m still fairly new to strangeness and don’t know very much about Fate magic. But based on what I know, I swear we’re telling you the truth.”
Electra stared at him expectantly. Finally, with a grimace, Ethan said “Cross my heart!” while by making an X over his heart with his finger.
She watched him intently as if waiting to see if Magic would punish him for a lie. Then, in a sudden and shocking move, she pulled out her twin pistols, aimed down at the prone body of Brother Falcon, and opened fire. For a few seconds, there was a bright nimbus of magic around him as his shield absorbed the damage though his body jerked in response to the bullets. Then, the shield collapsed, and several slugs hit him before he went still once more.
“What the hell?!?” exclaimed a horrified Ethan, while the twins just stared in shock.
“He’s not hurt,” she said as she holstered her guns. “Just in stasis like you were earlier. I needed him out of the picture.”
“He was already unconscious!” Matt responded angrily.
“No,” Electra replied calmly. “He was faking. The plan was for me to persuade you to lead me to your father, and then he’d follow behind under a veil since he wasn’t bound by any oaths.”
“… SERIOUSLY?!?” Matt exploded as his face turned purple. “You … you were just going to betray us!!! AGAIN!!!”
Electra shrugged. “Fate of the world, Matt? Ring any bells?”
“For God’s sake, Matt!” Luke said reproachfully. “Did you really not even consider the possibility that she was playing you? I mean, no offense lady, but that was probably the most obvious good cop-bad cop routine I’ve ever seen. And I’m pretty sure that oath you swore had loopholes you could drive a truck through.”
“Not to mention the fact that you took out Falcon with one kick,” Ethan added. “I mean, he’s a jerk, but he’s a lot better at combat magic than that!”
Electra gave Luke an appraising look. “If you didn’t believe my oath, why did you go along with it?”
The boy lifted his chin defiantly. “Because I’d planned on zapping you in the back once we were out of the break room,” he answered confidently.
She looked almost amused. “You've never cast a single hex that’s hit anyone, have you? Did you really think that was going to work?”
Luke shrugged. “When you’re desperate, you try things. Sometimes they work. Besides, I knew Ethan didn’t believe you either, and I thought maybe the two of us together could have taken you. Or at least kept you busy long enough for Matt to realize what was going on and join us for a three-on-one fight.”
“Yeaaah,” Ethan drawled. “Actually, I figured you were gonna do something like that, and I was going to use the opportunity to run away to the portal.” The other three all gaped at him, but he shrugged unrepentantly. “What? I’ve been a hero twice today, and all I’ve gotten from it is bitten on the ass.”
Matt turned his own glare back on Electra. “So why should we trust you now? You’ve betrayed us repeatedly. And you’ve pretty much been an absolute bitch to me from the moment we met!”
Electra assumed a haughty expression. “It’s a hard life being a Stranger, Matt. Something I hope you and your brother live long enough to appreciate. And one thing I came to understand a long time ago is this: Sometimes you have to be a high-riding bitch to survive strangeness. Sometimes being a bitch is all a Stranger has to hold onto.”
Matt started to respond, but Luke beat him to it.
“Oh. My. God! Did you seriously just say that?!?”
“What?” she answered. “Got a problem with it?”
“No,” Luke snapped. “I have a problem with the fact that you are the single most derivative and unoriginal person I’ve ever met. Is there anything about you that you didn’t crib from someone else?!?”
“… excuse me?” Electra said dangerously, her eyes flashing in sudden anger.
“Luke, why are you antagonizing the scary lady?” Ethan asked as he quietly edged away before a fight broke out. Luke ignored him.
“’Sometimes you have to be a high-riding bitch to survive?!?’ You stole that from Stephen King! It’s a line from Dolores Claiborne! Vera says it to Dolores while she’s trying to justify murdering her cheating husband!”
To the surprise of Matt and Ethan, Electra visibly flinched at the accusation.
“And it’s not just that,” Luke continued. “It’s … everything! Your appearance is based on Milla Jovovich’s character from Ultraviolet. Your fighting style, from what I’ve seen of it, is mostly Trinity from the Matrix movies. Oh, and I don’t know where you snatched ‘Dellamorte’ from, but Electra is Daredevil’s girlfriend!”
The temperature in the room seemed to drop noticeably as Electra grew more and more angry at Luke’s critique. Her hands twitched as if she ached to pull her guns back out and open fire. But she didn’t. Instead, after several seconds spent regaining her composure, she started undoing the clasps of her white leather biker jacket that Luke had just mocked.
“Fine!” she spat angrily.
After a final hesitation, Electra jerked the coat off her shoulders and let it drop to the floor. Instantly, there was a shimmer about her, and her features began to change. Her alabaster skin darkened to a dusky tan. Her black-as-night hair seemed to shrink into her head, at once lightening to a dark brown and curling into short bushy locks. Her pristine white biker gear turned into jeans and a t-shirt, and she also shrank a bit from her previous statuesque height down to about 5’3” or so. To the boys’ shock, the unearthly beautiful woman who’d stood before them was now a Latina probably not much older than the twins, pretty but no longer a super-model or a movie femme fatale.
She took a deep breath as if preparing for a confessional. “My name is Daniela,” she said before giving Matt a significant look. “Daniela Torres. Dani to my friends.”
Matt's eyes widened at the revelation of Electra’s True Name; she’d warned him earlier never to reveal his own True Name to anyone else.
“I went strange ab
out six years ago,” she continued. “I later created Electra Dellamorte as a fiction cloak based on an amalgamation of movie action girls so that I could copy the sort of things they did in films magically but without expending a lot of juice doing so.”
Then, she fixed Luke with an imperious glare. “And for the record, I did not name her after Daredevil’s girlfriend! I called her Electra after the character from Greek mythology because like her, one of the first things I did as a Stranger was avenge my father’s murder!”
She huffed angrily. “Also, that movie sucked!” she added as an afterthought.
Luke nodded in agreement. “And Dellamorte?”
She sniffed. “I came up with that on my own. I think it’s cool. And if you don’t like it, you can fuck right off!”
He chuckled in response.
“Actually … it is a cool name,” he conceded.
Ethan looked back and forth between the two in consternation. “Are … are you two … flirting?”
Luke and Dani both blushed slightly but did not respond. Dani turned her attention back to Matt.
“Okay, Matt. I’ve told you my True Name. You literally can’t do anything bigger as a Stranger in terms of trust-building exercises. So, will you accept my help now?”
Matt hesitated and then nodded.
“Terrific!” Luke exclaimed sarcastically. “We’re all finally on the same team. So, let’s go find Dad, extract the, um, Aztec demon-thingy that's inside him, and get the hell out of here!”
Dani winced at that, and Matt’s eyes immediately narrowed.
“You can’t actually do that, can you?” he said accusingly. “All that bullshit about just transferring the chaos fragment from Dad to Lindsay – you were just saying that to trick us into go along with you!”
The girl sighed. “I’m sorry, but no. I don’t think I can transfer the fragment. To be honest, I don’t know whether it’s even possible for anyone to transfer it from your father into Lindsay or any other host who hasn’t freely consented like your father did. Maybe someone who was ritually prepared as a sacrificial host, but morals and ethics aside, that would take hours or more that we don't have.”
She took a step towards Matt. “But listen! If Mickey St. Angel really is a master-level karmatrophian and he really communed directly with Fate to determine a course of action, then I’m sure there’s a way to stop the shard from actualizing and get rid of it safely. We just have to fulfill the conditions Fate set for him.”
“Alright,” said Luke, “I guess we’re back to my previous question. Matt, what’s your brilliant idea for saving the day?”
“I DON’T HAVE A BRILLIANT IDEA!” Matt yelled before turning away from the group in frustration.
“Well, Fate says you’re gonna get one,” said Ethan. “So, you should probably try thinking about it harder.”
Matt rubbed his hands across his face still with his back to the group before he slowly turned around.
“I don’t have a brilliant idea,” he said in resignation. “But I do have a stupid and probably suicidal one. Will that do?”
Later, after “the Plan” was explained …
Matt stepped into the gym and slowly crept towards the twin tables where Mickey St. Angel and Lindsay Forrester lay in repose, “comatose” and “mostly dead,” respectively. It felt odd for Matt to think of John Sullivan as “Mickey St. Angel,” but that was how nearly all the magical world identified the man. As Electra/Dani had explained, fiction cloaks not only offered powerful protection for one’s True Name, a Stranger could also incorporate narrative tropes into the fabric of a cloak so that it also granted innate semi-magical powers.
“Electra Dellamorte” made Dani incredibly proficient with both guns and martial arts and also gave her a host of other skills drawn from action movies that featured powerful female leads.
“Parker Ellington” gave Doc (or whoever he was beneath that identity) connections to Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington, and in his younger days before he joined the College, he’d apparently relied heavily on jazz and blues music as foci for his magic. With age and experience, he’d moved beyond those crutches, but by that point, he’d invested too much of himself into that identity to just cast it aside for something new.
But those were nothing compared to "Mickey St. Angel," which incorporated the names of both a saint and an archangel into a single supernatural identity.
As one of his biological offspring, Matt was one of the few people in the world capable of even conceiving that Mickey St. Angel was really John Sullivan, a fact that had protected his father from censure by other Strangers over the problems he’d caused in Boston so many years before.
Among the Collegians, only Doc clearly remembered St. Angel’s True Name because he’d sworn an oath to John under that name to keep an eye on Matt and Luke and to let Mickey/John know if they were in trouble. The Unity Blade members could only see through the cloak to the man underneath after he’d voluntarily returned to the city that he’d been banished from all those years before. Simply by coming back to save Matt and Luke’s lives, he’d awakened the Unity Blade’s collective memories of his former crimes.
And even worse, by returning, he’d willingly walked into a trap that Lindsay never even realized she’d made. Because the insane nephilim couldn’t possibly have anticipated that by driving Matt and Luke into strangeness, she would summon back to Boston a man cloaked behind the name of both a saint and an archangel.
All of which apparently made him an ideal host for an Aztec star demon.
Matt himself didn’t fully understand that last bit, but as Electra explained it, the “Mickey St. Angel” fiction cloak had been passed around from Stranger to Stranger for centuries, with each Stranger who carried it adding more power and magic to it. She had no idea how on Earth someone like John Sullivan who’d been strange for less than a decade had acquired such an incredibly potent magical identity, but while he bore that name – Mika-El Saint/Angel, in its purest form – he met several technical definitions for the word demigod.
Halfway across the floor, Matt stopped and turned back towards the door he’d entered as if looking to see if he was being followed. There was no sign of anyone. He shook his head and then continued towards the other two figures. He checked on his father first. The older man was still in his self-induced coma and, despite everything that had happened, seemed to be at peace. Matt wondered how long that would last.
“Wish me luck, Dad,” the boy whispered.
Then, he turned to Lindsay. The nephilim looked much less at peace given the bloody knife sticking out of her chest and the cursed necklace digging tightly into her neck. After taking in the scene, Matt reluctantly climbed onto the table and sat astride Lindsay at her waist, holding her arms in place with his legs and immobilizing her as much as possible. Then, he took hold of the knife and yanked it out of Lindsay’s chest.
With a deep agonizing gasp, Lindsay’s eyes shot wide open, and her body briefly convulsed almost hard enough to throw Matt off the table. Matt leaned forward to hold her steady and then clamped his hand over her mouth. With his other hand, he held the knife with the blade suspended over her left eye.
“Shut up!” he hissed angrily. “Don’t try to say anything until I say it’s okay or I swear I’ll stuck this through your brain! Understand?”
She stared up at him, her eyes almost twinkling with manic energy. She nodded.
“Good. That chain’s still on you, so you can’t work magic. But you can still swear an oath, right?”
Another nod, though slower and more thoughtful.
Matt licked his lips nervously. “Next question. That chaos thing that was in me. The one that called itself Itzpapalotl. Well, it’s in my dad’s head now. If I free you, can you remove it from him … safely?”
She hesitated this time, but Matt moved the knife closer to her eye, barely an inch away. She froze … and then slowly yes once more.
“Okay, here’s how it’s going to go down. I’m going le
t you free. In exchange, you are going swear me a magical oath. One that says you promise to remove that thing out of my dad without doing anything to hurt him in any way. And you will also swear that you won’t do anything to hurt my dad, my brother, or me ever. Otherwise, I will kill you again and leave you for the Invisible College and the Unity Blade to fight over while I find some other solution for my Dad. Got it?”
Lindsay nodded one final time, and Matt slowly removed his hand from her mouth.
“Cutting a deal with the big bad nephilim? That’s a bold move, Cotton. Let’s see how it pays off for you.”
“Just swear the damned oath, bitch,” he muttered.
She smiled up at him and recited the oath in a smug tone. “I swear on my magic and eternal life that if Matt Sullivan frees me, I will remove that part of the Great Beyond that calls itself Itzpapalotl from Matt’s father without incident or injury to him and that I will never act to harm either Matt, his brother, or his father. This I swear. Satisfactory?”
Matt felt a faint pulse of magic from the woman, a sign the oath had taken hold. Satisfied, he reached for the necklace only to jump in fright when she screamed in agony.
“IDIOT!” she hissed. “You can’t just tear it off once the binding’s in place!”
“Sorry, sorry,” he apologized automatically only to realize that he probably shouldn’t be feeling any such sympathy for the evil lunatic who’d ruined his and Luke’s lives. “How do I get it off without hurting you?”
The nephilim rolled her eyes. “Newbies,” she muttered. “Grasp the runestone … gently. Then, spend some juice on it and will it to stop blocking my magic .Then, it can be removed without any pain.”
Matt followed the directions and then carefully untied the chain. As soon as it was removed, Lindsay flexed her arms, and Matt flew off her to land against the wall about five feet off the ground, his arms splayed out in a crucified pose just as they were when the nephilim immobilized him the same way back at the church.
“Hmm, I’m getting a strange sense of déjà vu, Matt,” she said almost seductively. “Though I liked the vu better when you were in your undies.”
