by Anton Strout
“All right, lady,” I said, raising my bat, winded. “I don’t know what you are, but I know this—you’re coming with us.”
The look of panic on her face dissolved and in its place rose an unexpected look of calm that unnerved me. I stepped forward using caution, but the woman just shook her head at me in slow motion. A dark smile crossed her lips.
“No?” I asked, tightening the grip on my bat. I let uncertainty get the better of me and stopped advancing on her.
The woman shook her head again, and then cocked her eyes over to Jane on my right. I wasn’t sure what the woman was up to, but I didn’t like that she was shifting her focus to Jane now. From the uncomfortable look on Jane’s face, she wasn’t too keen on the attention, either.
“Hey!” I shouted, slapping the bat down in my gloved hand with a wet smack that sent up a small splash of water. “Eyes over here!”
My words had no effect on her and she just continued staring at Jane. I had to do something. I stepped forward, closing the gap.
The woman pressed herself back against the bricks of the wall behind her. Her hands spread out along it, her fingers digging into the wall while her eyes remained on my girlfriend.
“Easy,” I said, drawing out the word as long as I could.
I reached for the woman’s right arm, but it was already too late. She pushed herself away from the bricks, launching herself directly at Jane. I expected the woman to raise her arms, to try to grapple with Jane, but instead she dropped them to her sides. The woman’s body slammed into Jane, but didn’t knock her over. Jane staggered for a moment, reeling as the woman transformed, losing all solidity and washing over her.
There wasn’t even a chance for Jane to scream. Her mouth filled with water as the green woman passed both over and through her. Jane’s eyes went wide as she struggled to catch a breath, but it was over before full-on panic could set in. The wave rolled beyond Jane, forming once again into the woman when it was past us. She didn’t miss a step as she hit the ground running and took off splashing her way back up the alley toward freedom. All of a sudden I felt pretty sure I knew how Mason Redfield had died.
Jane staggered and I dropped my bat to catch her before she fell into my arms, coughing. She took several choking breaths of air as she spit up a small fountain of the greenish water. I patted her back, helping her as best I could to return her to her regular breath. After a moment, her chest stopped heaving and she laid her forehead calmly against my chin.
“Well,” I said. “That could have gone worse.”
Jane looked up at me. “Oh, really?” she said, her voice weak. “How exactly?”
“You’re still breathing, aren’t you? Consider yourself luckier than Mason Redfield when she tried to drown him.”
Jane narrowed her eyes at me like she was going to say something snippy, but the look vanished almost as soon as it had appeared. “True.”
“I know Wesker probably sets a different bar for success than the Inspectre does for Other Division, but we consider ‘Still Breathing’ a good benchmark.”
Jane looked back up the now-deserted alley, her eyes barely open against the downpour of rain. “You want to go after her?”
I shook my head as I reached down and picked up my bat. “I’m afraid it’s too late for that. She’s long gone by now.”
Jane looked sad, like she might even be crying, but with all the rain it was hard to tell. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“What do you have to be sorry about? That a psychotic water woman chose to give you a bath in the middle of a rainstorm?”
Jane gave me a sad smile.
“You should be happy,” I continued, squeezing her in my arms. “After an attack like that, we have pretty solid confirmation now of who drowned Professor Redfield from the inside out. Now what we need to do is figure out who she is, why she would want the good professor dead, and how we can stop her from drowning anyone else alive.”
Jane nodded, but still looked quite shaken.
“Cheer up,” I said, hugging her.
She squeezed me tight, her head buried in my neck. “Why?” she asked with weak hope in her voice.
I pushed her back from me, looked her in the eye, and nodded. “You seemed to actually hurt her,” I said. “That’s promising. All I managed to do was menace her with a bat, and not very effectively. Back at the van, you scorched her pretty good.”
Jane looked uncertain. “Blowing up a van. I’m going to catch holy hell for that, aren’t I?”
“We can check it with Ghoulateral Damage Division, if there’s anyone left there these days.”
I spun Jane around and headed her back down the alley. I traded my bat for my umbrella and slid the bat into its holster. I opened the umbrella and the two of us huddled under it despite the fact that we were both already soaked through. There was a comfort in it nonetheless. Now if I could only fine some answers about the crazy woman in green that comforted me …
11
Jane looked over at me across the wrought-iron elevator cage we rode up to my apartment. She gave me a weak smile, which warmed my heart even though she looked as much like a drowned rat as I did. The old-world elevator rose up through my building, clattering its way up past floor after floor, the low hum of its motor a soothing sound after a night of chaos.
Jane moaned, followed by a piteous trail of laughter. “You know you’re in trouble when just riding in an elevator hurts,” she said.
I would have nodded in agreement, but I couldn’t lift my head forward from where it rested against the side of the elevator. Tonight’s pursuit had been a brutal one, but only when it was over did our bodies truly start to feel the toll of our exertion. The only good thing to happen since hobbling our way out of the alley near the professor’s high-rise was that the rain and broken hydrants had taken care of dousing the flames of the van Jane had exploded with her technomancy. Other than that, our bodies had slowly given in to the aches and pains that followed our fruitless chase.
When the elevator hit my floor, I rolled back the black iron accordion gate and the two of us hobbled our way to my apartment door at the end of the hall. I fished out my keys and managed to get my door open despite my feeble state. I didn’t even bother to flick on the lights and instead took in the welcoming silence of my home. The quiet majesty of my living room was dark, but the wall of windows along the left side of it let in enough light to show off my old-world gentleman’s club motif—rich leather sofas and an entire wall of shelves that housed various antique finds of mine. I pulled off my waterlogged coat and hung it by the door before going any farther.
I helped Jane squirm out of her coat and hung it next to mine. “You really ought to have a chute installed that drops straight down to the incinerator.”
“I don’t think that would be such a great idea,” I said, crossing over to my sofa. “I’d be half tempted to throw myself down there, if only to dry off.”
I started off down the main hall that led back to the other rooms of the apartment. “I’m going to change.”
“I’m going to shower,” Jane said. She kicked off her shoes and squelched down the hallway behind me in her wet socks on her way to the bathroom. “If you could just pull something out for me to wear, that would be great.”
“Sure,” I said.
I continued down the hall to my bedroom and changed into something less soaking wet. One Ramones T-shirt and a fresh pair of jeans later, I hit my couch out in the living room, opening up my satchel and pulling out the now-soaked books that Jane had picked for me from Redfield’s place. The distraction of trying to read them with my powers if only to identify students from his lectures was a welcome one after the night we had been through, and I was thrilled to see that exhaustion seemed to be keeping any untoward flare-ups at bay. NYU lecture halls filled my mind’s eye as I pushed into the visions of the professor educating his students on the history of film. While engaging, it hardly was anything I imagined someone killing him over. Eventually the drone
of his voice and the subject matter became too much and I decided to switch up books.
When I pulled out of the vision, it was to a different sound entirely. Jane was screaming from the other room.
“Jane … ?” I said, my voice and body both weak from the hit my blood sugar took with the vision. I grabbed a pack of Life Savers from a tray of them on one of my end tables and opened it, popping them in my mouth and swallowing them whole.
“Simon!” Jane called out from the bathroom.
I rose from the couch and ran on unsteady legs down my hallway toward the back of the apartment. I threw open the bathroom door, startling her. Her hair was hanging down, wet, and Jane was wrapped in a white towel. Her eyes were so bugged out I thought they might pop.
“What is it?” I asked. I looked around the bathroom for any sign of trouble.
“I just got all the ick off me from tonight,” she said, “and when I was drying off, I found this.”
Jane pulled aside her hair and spun around, facing her back to the bathroom mirror. She lowered the towel so it exposed just below her shoulder blades. Set between them was what looked like a tattoo of a dark green swirl of symbols with words circling them in a language I didn’t know. The outer edge of the swirl was a ring that was composed of what looked like writhing snakes that were, in fact, writhing.
“What the hell is that?” Jane asked, her voice on the verge of slipping into full-blown hysteria. I had to calm her, and quick.
I walked over to her and put my hand over the mark. It was below the skin, but the snakes were definitely moving within the pattern itself. I pressed my hand down harder, trying to feel for them, but it was like trying to touch a projection on a movie screen.
“Odd,” I said, feeling the rise and fall of her chest as she panicked. I traced it with a gentle touch. “Does it hurt at all?”
“No,” she said. “Does that really matter? It’s on me. Isn’t that enough?”
“Calm down until we have something to panic about, okay?” I asked. Jane nodded. “Good. Now, do you feel any different?”
“You mean other than freaked-out?” Jane asked, sharp.
“Yes,” I said. “Other than that.”
“Nope. Just freaked-out.”
I looked her in the eye and gave her a smile. “So I take it you didn’t get this from a wild night out with the girls, then?”
“What?” she said, missing my attempt at humor and snapping at me instead. “No, Simon! Get it off of me!”
“Hold on,” I said. I grabbed the edge of the towel, lifted it, and rubbed at the spot. After a minute of vigorous scrubbing, I pulled the towel away.
“Well?” Jane asked.
“No use,” I said. “It’s still there.” I looked at the towel. It was still clean. “Whatever it is, it’s not like an ink stamp. None of it came off.”
“Oh, hell,” she said. “This is it. That bitch marked me, didn’t she? I knew something felt off. I got in the damn shower and I just stood there for, like, an hour letting the water run over me, but look at my skin and hands. They didn’t even prune. I’m telling you, she did something to me. I’m going to go to bed and when you wake up, you’ll be lying next to a giant water snake or a puddle or something—”
“Calm down,” I repeated, saying it for my benefit as well as hers.
“That’s easy for you to say,” she said. “You’re not marked. That woman didn’t dive through you!”
“We don’t know anything yet, so don’t panic,” I said. “When you went through D.E.A. orientation, didn’t they teach you that panic is for the norms?”
“What orientation?” she asked. “The day I started, they sent me to HR and they barely handed me my welcome kit before Director Wesker pulled me out of there and dragged me off to Tome, Sweet Tome to start cataloging the Black Stacks. I think the only real orientation I ever received was being instructed not to cry while working for Thaddeus Wesker.”
“A valuable lesson, mind you,” I pointed out.
Jane craned her head to look around into the mirror at herself. “That doesn’t really help me now, Simon.”
I grabbed Jane and eased her out into the hall so she couldn’t look at the tattoo anymore. “I know,” I said, guiding her down the hall toward the bedroom, “but we don’t really have an emergency room for something like this, you know? I don’t think anyone from the graveyard shift is up on this type of thing, but I think I know who might be able to tell us something in the morning.”
“You do?” Jane said, looking hopeful for the first time tonight.
“Yup,” I said, leading her over to her side of the bed. “Allorah Daniels.”
Jane’s face was a mask of skepticism. “Won’t she be busy Enchancelloring?”
“We’re all working hard to cover each other’s asses these days,” I said. “I’m sure she won’t mind taking a break from old men and paperwork to get in some lab time. Science was her first love, after all. But first, you need to rest tonight. If there’s no pain or symptoms from it, we’ll defer to her expertise in the morning first thing. I promise.”
Jane lay back against her pillow and slid underneath the sheets, leaving her towel lying in a pile on the floor right next to the bed. “I don’t see how I’m supposed to get any sleep,” she said, worry returning to her face.
I tucked her in, and then went over to the night table on my side of the bed.
“I have just the thing for that,” I said, fishing a small vial out from a jumble of miscellaneous junk in the drawer. I held it up. Down one side were the letters RVW.
“What is that?” she asked.
I held it out to her and dropped it in her hand. “Wow,” I said. “They really did rush you through your orientation. You have this in that welcome kit you still carry around as a purse. It’s a sleeping potion of sorts.”
“RVW,” she said, reading the side of it before twisting off its top. “Rip Van Winkle. Not very clever.”
“I’m pretty sure the Enchancellors came up with the name,” I said. “Leave it to the bureaucrats to lack any artistic finesse.”
She raised it to her lips.
“Careful,” I said. “Just a drop should do it. Otherwise, who knows when you might wake up.”
“Don’t worry,” she said, taking a tiny swallow from it. “If I slept for twenty years, I’m sure that this thing on my back would have killed me by then.”
“Comforting,” I said, and crawled into bed on my side.
“I thought so,” Jane said, already yawning. Her eyes slipped shut.
“Sweet dreams, my love,” I said, putting my hand on her forehead. I ran my fingers through her still-damp hair.
“Only if you visit…” she said with a sleepy smile and was out like a light. I took the vial from her hand and stared at her for a few moments, wondering about the mark. How was I going to get to sleep thinking about it?
What the hell, I thought, and took a hit of the stuff myself. I only hoped the woman in green wouldn’t visit me in my dreams. With my luck, I’d be naked without my bat, and I really didn’t want to look that up in any of the dream interpretation books.
12
The next morning we were up and out of the house like the devil was chasing us. For all we knew about that mark on Jane’s back, maybe he was. I reported the discovery of Mason Redfield’s killer to the Inspectre before dragging a worried Jane down to Allorah Daniels’s office/lab and calling her in. She was more than happy to get away from her Tuesday-morning breakfast meeting with the rest of the Enchancellors, most of whom looked like they might be asleep at the meeting table when I pulled her away.
Allorah guided Jane over to a bare, brushed-steel table that stood at the lab end of her office and had Jane lie down on it.
“Gah!” Jane cried out. “Cold!”
“Sorry,” Allorah said and set about examining the mark on Jane’s back by pulling up Jane’s plain black tank top until the writhing symbol was fully in sight.
I leaned over to look c
loser myself. “Don’t you have any of that giant tissue paper doctors use on their examination beds?” I asked.
Allorah turned her head and gave me a silencing look with cold eyes. “My apologies,” she said. “The creatures that I poke and prod at usually don’t complain.”
“Oh no?”
“No,” she said, turning back to her examination. “They’re usually dead or, at the very least, rotting.”
I was starting to think I had made a bad call bringing Jane to her. “Maybe we should take Jane to a regular doctor,” I said.
Allorah turned to me, standing up straight. “And say what exactly? That a mysterious woman dove through Agent Clayton-Forrester? I didn’t know that traditional medicine could cure that these days.”
“It’s okay,” Jane said, still facedown on the table. “Really. I just wasn’t ready. The cold of the table took me by surprise, that’s all.”
Allorah went back to examining the spot between Jane’s shoulder blades. She grabbed a digital camera off one of her nearby laboratory shelves and took several close-ups before setting the camera aside once again. She bent over Jane, so close she could have licked the spot.
“Strange,” she said.
“What is?” I asked, moving even closer to try to see what she was seeing.
Allorah reached inside her lab coat and pulled out a large circular necklace hiding within her own shirt. I was familiar with it. My psychometry had shown me Allorah in her younger days as a high school science teacher defending herself against Damaris, Brandon’s vampire consort. Just remembering the damage the circular blade had done sent a chill up my spine upon seeing it once again.
“Look at the designs in the mark on her back,” she said, showing me her necklace at the same time. “They remind me of the ones on my apotropaic eye. They look Greek in origin.”
“You sure about that?” I asked, studying the necklace against the symbol.
