by Anton Strout
Jane continued staring at the receipt, a smile slowly building on her face. “Oh, Simon, thank you,” she said. “I love you.”
She wrapped her arms around me and kissed me hard. I melted into it, but after a few moments I felt I had to pull away.
“Not to put a damper on things,” I said, “but we kinda need to do something here. Something along the heroic lines.”
“Oh,” she said. “Okay. Right. Of course.”
She handed the slip of paper back to me, hands trembling. When I went to reach for it, it slipped from her hand, the wind catching it and blowing it away. I turned, grabbing for it. It was just a slip of paper, but the weight of everything it stood for was so important that I felt compelled to get it back. It tumbled along the walkway of the bridge and I ran a few steps before catching it, then folding it and stuffing it back into my messenger bag as I turned back to Jane.
She wasn’t there. I peered through the dozens of ghosts manifested all along the bridge looking for her. After a moment I caught a hint of movement back where we had all climbed up onto the bridge together earlier. Jane was hurrying to get back to the island below, which meant… she had tricked me by pretending to let go of the note too soon. Why? To distract me. To run off before I could stop her.
“The boat,” I said, and then started running after her, my heart sinking. “Jane! No!”
I tore along after her, but the small lead she had grew as she monkey-barred her way down the structure of the bridge toward the land below. I climbed down after her as fast as I could, but by the time I had worked my way down, Jane had already reached the boat and was casting off the line, leaving it dangling from the tree we had secured it to.
“Jane!” I screamed above the sounds of the storm. The swells of water coming from the gigantic monster writhing in the river threatened to capsize the boat. Jane raised her hands above her, calling out to the boat, and its systems flew on, it searchlights practically overloading with power as they shone out into the darkness. Her eyes, however, remained on me.
There was no way I could reach the boat now that it was launched. Unless …
I looked up at the underside of the bridge. The under support holding up the structure was a web of steel that snaked out over the dangerous waters. If I could get myself out onto it, there was a chance I could jump down onto the boat. I started climbing out onto the steel skeleton until I was back in shouting distance of the boat.
“Jane,” I shouted. “Come back! Pull that boat over now!”
“I have to do this,” she said. “It’s too late for me, anyway. I can feel Charybdis pulling at me. She’s trying to take possession of me.”
“Just get off the boat,” I shouted. “We can fight her, together.”
Jane turned and pointed up at several of the tentacles crashing down around her, rolling the boat to its nearpitching point. “We have to stop this one if you’re going to have any chance of defeating her. I can do that.”
“Fine,” I said, “but do it away from the monster, then.”
Jane shook her head, and then slammed her hands down onto the control console of the boat. “Afraid it doesn’t work that way, hon. I’m so sorry.”
She turned herself away from me and pressed her magic into the boat, the lights on it rising as it gained speed heading for the body of the creature. I gauged my distance to the boat from where I was. There was no chance I’d hit its deck at this angle. I had to get myself back up to the bridge, and started climbing.
When I pulled myself back up onto the Hell Gate Bridge, I immediately looked for Aidan, spotting him off to my right farther along the bridge. I ran over to him, Connor joining me while the Inspectre continued trying to reason with Mason through his protective wall of water.
“Jane’s down there,” I said. “Go help her. Please.”
Aidan shook his head. “I keep telling you,” Aidan said. “We’re pretty much useless in water. You know, like the way you are when you’re breathing.”
“So you can’t fight that monster?” Connor asked.
Aidan gave a smile. “I didn’t say that, now, did I?” he said and sped farther off along the bridge.
Already the enormous creature was making its way up out of the water. I didn’t have time to count all of its tentacles, but bunches of them were smashing and crashing against the sides of the bridge already. I steadied myself under its sway as I watched Aidan leap up off the bridge, grabbing one of the tentacles near him. He wrapped it around one of the bridge struts, holding it in place, pinning it.
He looked over at us and smiled. “Happy?” his voice said, unnaturally amplified from where he stood.
“It’s a start,” I said.
“Well, I think it’s safe to say we know for sure what brought the General Slocum down,” Connor said.
“Crap on toast,” I said. “That is one giant octopus thing.”
“Steady, kid,” Connor said. “Just remember. The bigger they are …”
“The more damage they do… ?” I finished.
“That’s not where I was going with that,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do with all these spirits up here, see what they can do to help Jane. Let’s see if I can get them interested in a little revenge on this monstrosity or the woman.”
As the bridge creaked and swayed, I started back to the water woman, Mason Redfield, and the Inspectre out at the center of the bridge. Ghosts were flying across my path and I was having trouble seeing, but when I was about fifteen feet away, I caught sight of the three solid figures. The Inspectre looked like he wasn’t having much luck in dealing with either of them.
“Charybdis,” Mason shouted, pointing at the Inspectre. “Attack!”
“No!” I called out, racing the last few feet to put myself between them and the Inspectre, who looked resolved to await his fate at their hands. I braced myself for a wave of water coming my way, but when nothing happened a moment later, I opened my eyes.
Mason had turned to the woman within their protective bubble. “Did you not hear me?” he asked. “I told you to attack.”
The woman walked over to him, taking slow, deliberate steps. “I think… not,” she said. “I serve no man.”
“What?” Mason said, fury in his eyes. “What about our arrangement?”
“There is only one arrangement,” the woman said. “And that is mine.”
The woman pulled in her arms, the column of water around her closing in on the two of them. The professor’s face filled with horror as water rushed into his mouth and down into his lungs. From the panicked look in his eyes, there was no doubt that he knew his death would not result in his rebirth as it had the last time.
Before any of us could try to reach into the watery barrier, the professor’s body imploded from the water pressure, red rushing out of him. It ran into the woman and her body changed, growing in power and strength until the water ran clear and her body turned more solid in the column of water than I had ever seen her.
“Why?” the Inspectre shouted. “Why would you do that to your ally?”
The woman spoke in Greek again, but I didn’t bother to wait for the translation from Connor. I thought I knew.
“Betrayal,” I said, piecing some of it together from everything I had investigated so far. “It feeds her soul, which is why it took Professor Redfield sacrificing students like George to bring about her rise, but in order to get his help in that, she had to promise him something. His own rebirth. She killed Mason Redfield the first time so he could be reborn first to help her rise and also to awaken Charybdis.”
“Taking the professor’s life now was all the more cruel and sweet a betrayal,” she said, “the power of his blood growing tenfold from it. In death, his power completes our ceremonial rebirth.”
She dropped what remained of the professor’s lifeless body to the tracks of the bridge and he fell through a shattered section down into the water below. I spied Jane and the lights from the boat as she headed straight for the sea monster, aiming
for the yellow of its giant eye. I had to act fast.
I went to charge into the water wall around the woman, but the Inspectre’s hand came down on my shoulder. I turned toward the far end of the bridge and called out to Connor’s brother.
“Aidan,” I shouted. “Do something!”
He looked at me like I was stupid. He let go of the tentacle with one of his hands where he held it in place wrapped around the bridge support and pointed at it. “I am!”
“No,” I said. “About Jane!” I pointed down at the boat below as the spiked ram slammed into the creature. “Down there. Hurry!”
“I can’t let go,” he said. “If I do, that thing will destroy her boat for sure.”
Aidan was right. With the creature pinned in place up here, it couldn’t take on Jane or the boat unless he let go of it. The best I could do was join Connor and the Inspectre in fighting the green water woman. Maybe the key to stopping the monster lay in beating its keeper, the one helping it rise to full power.
The three of us turned our attention to the woman within the circle of water. Connor was busy uncorking a dozen or so stoppered tubes, rallying a thick swarm of ghosts all around him. He shouted instructions at them, but from where I stood I couldn’t quite make them out. I hefted my bat and came in swinging. I landed a solid hit on the woman through her tower of water, but once she felt it and became aware of my presence, every subsequent swipe of my bat passed through a liquid form of her body.
Another sound rose to meet my ears, one that horrified me. Jane’s voice rang out in all its technomantic glory from down below over the fight. With terror filling my heart, I realized it could mean only one thing. Jane wasn’t just going to ram the creature. She intended to blow the creature up with the blast materials and depth charges the Inspectre had brought along to dislodge all the sunken ships.
The fight went out of me and I ran to the edge of the bridge. “Jane!” I shouted.
The boat was underneath us and from where I was I could actually see her face. She looked up at me, her face sad but determined. She spoke, but I couldn’t hear her over the sound of everything, yet there was no mistaking the words her mouth formed.
I love you.
“Jane, don’t,” I shouted, but it was too late. She turned her head back to the ship and pressed her power into it. Sparks rose up all over the vessel as she pulled power from the boat itself, sending raw power across the bow like lightning strikes.
All that was enough to set things off, and the ship exploded. The heat of it rose up with concussive force, straight through the bridge. The gas of the boat and blasting caps fed one another, shooting a column of flame up in the air with its fury. Bits of the creature flew through the air, and I tried not to think of the same happening to Jane.
All around me the world slowed. I got back to my feet in time to catch Aidan letting go of the now-severed tentacle, letting it unwind and fall from where it had been wrapped around the bridge. Like a shot, the vampire transformed and shot up into the night sky and then down into the firecovered river below.
Behind me an inhuman keening arose from the woman as she watched her precious charge dying. The steady stream of water around her faltered and dropped away, yet she herself remained.
“Focus,” the Inspectre called out, slicing his cane through her body to no avail, passing right through her. “Don’t let up.”
His call to arms awoke something dark in the pain of my heart. I charged the woman again. Blow after blow of mine still passed through her as she came at us with a watery fury, unleashing waves of it at each of us. Connor’s assembly of spirits swarmed her to the point of distraction that had her firing off her powers in every direction. One of the blasts hit the Inspectre, sending him flying onto his back, his sword cane falling through the slats of the bridge.
“If you got anything better than a bat,” Connor said, still orchestrating the spirits in their attack, “now’s the time to use it, kid.”
The bat was doing nothing more than distracting her for a few seconds at a time. I collapsed it and slid it into its holster. I reached into my satchel to assess my other options. My hand slapped against what I thought was my emergency medical kit, but when I pulled it out I saw it was the Ghostbusters lunch box Jane had given me. Without hesitation, I opened it and shook out the contents. I grabbed it by its handle and lid, thrusting it toward the woman. I had been going about this the wrong way. I thought back to the vision where I had first seen Mason Redfield. He and the Inspectre had tried going for the ghouls’ hearts as a first means of stopping them. Even tonight, the Inspectre had tried that tactic, trying to stab her there, but that wasn’t the way to go about it. A blade or a bat could pass through water, no problem. What I needed was to take the woman’s heart from her in whatever form I could.
I swung the lunch box at her. Her body went liquid and it started passing through her like all my bat attacks had. When the lunch box was fully within the water, I stopped it in the center of her chest, slamming the lunch box shut and pulling it out by its handle… full of water. The woman screamed out, her eyes widening and her body stumbling. I stepped back from her, but she kept coming for me, clutching wildly for my lunch box.
I spun around and found Connor off in a crowd of ghosts. “Connor, catch!” I shouted and threw the lunch box over to him, but not before I felt a wave of the water woman wash over me. The fight was going out of her, but not fast enough. I spun back around and all the hate and surprise in her eyes were focused on me. She was going to make it her dying wish to take me with her, and there was nothing I could do to stop it now. With Jane gone, I didn’t care.
Falling to my knees on the slats of the bridge, I felt my strength leaving me. I was drowning. My last thought as I drowned was wondering if soon I’d be just another bridgebound spirit that Connor would be able to talk to in a few minutes.
Then another thought struck me. As my world went dark, I wondered if Jane was already waiting for me on the other side or if Connor would find her standing around on the bridge, too.
31
White light, I thought. That’s a good sign, right?
The blur in my eyes roused me and I struggled to awaken the rest of my senses as well. The ringing of an angelic host, complete with accompanying harps, sounded more like the beeps, pings, and whirs of …
“Hospital equipment,” I croaked out. “I’m not in the afterlife?”
“I don’t know, kid,” Connor’s familiar voice spoke out. “Does your personal vision of blissful eternity include me?”
“Or me?” another voice asked. The Inspectre.
I willed my eyes to fully open, and to my surprise they did, the world coming into focus. I was in a hospital bed, the overhead lights of the room turned off, the white blur that woke me coming from the hallway outside my room.
Connor was already standing at the side of the bed. The Inspectre stood up from a nearby chair, using the empty scabbard of his sword cane to help him up. I tried to turn my head to him but couldn’t. I went to speak again but managed only to get out a dry croak before Connor grabbed a Styrofoam cup with a straw sticking out of it from the table next to my bed. I sipped from it, and the hit of refreshing water shot through me like a jolt of energy. Once I was done drinking, I tried speaking again.
My mind stumbled forward slow, the world and everything around me a fog. “Why can’t I move?”
“That’s probably the pain meds,” Connor offered. He put the water back down on the bedside table. “You’re probably on enough morphine right now to warrant a rehab program when you leave here.”
“What happened?” I asked, feeling like a foreign passenger in my own body. Questions were forming, but slowly, not nearly fast enough, and I was having trouble organizing my thoughts.
The Inspectre stepped closer. “You sustained quite a bit of damage,” he said.
“So removing the woman’s heart didn’t work…” I said.
“Quite the contrary,” the Inspectre said. “It worked
remarkably well.”
I forced my head to do my bidding and I felt it shift a fraction to my left.
“Easy,” Connor said. “You’re in a neck brace. What you did with the lunch box worked, but you still sent that woman into a blind death panic. When she wasn’t trying to drown you, she was trying to crush you with all that water. Your body is pretty battered and bruised, but I asked the docs and they say you’re going to live.”
“What about all those spirits on the bridge?” I asked.
“They moved on,” Connor said with a smile. “To wherever spirits go. Once Scylla and Charybdis were dead, their hold over the Hell Gate passage broke.”
A new thought slammed into my head, pushing past all of its cloudiness. How had it not been there right away? “Jane,” I whispered. “What about Jane?”
Connor’s face sobered. “ ’Fraid not, kid,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“She went down fighting,” the Inspectre said. “She saved us all.”
The meds numbed me. I could barely think, let alone process what had happened to Jane. Fleeting images of her running for the boat and the explosion played themselves over and over in my head, but my mind refused to process the fact that she was gone. I lay there not speaking for a long time. Connor and the Inspectre stood at my side and remained silent themselves as the sounds of life struggled out all around us in the hospital. The figures in the hall passed by until one of them stopped in the doorway. I recognized him, even without his hoodie pulled up.
“Aidan… ?”
Aidan Christos stumbled into the room. He was soaked through, his clothes clinging to him, what had survived of them, anyway. Most of what remained of his hoodie was charred or torn. His features, while still human-looking, were drawn and gaunt to the point that he looked like a spectral version of himself. Connor ran over to him and helped him into the room.
