Rites & Desires

by Amanda Cherry

  "Oh, for fuck’s sake," Ruby exhorted. Maybe they would have had better luck with the door after all.

  Fire pushed past her cohorts and then past Ruby as she shook her head and rolled up her striped sleeves.

  "This is all me," she declared. She sidled up to Decay. "Get me a good void around them."

  With a few scoops of his hands and strokes of his fingers, Decay managed to clear out all of the concrete on all sides of the exposed metal, leaving the criss-crossed steel bars hanging in the air of the meter-wide hole.

  Fire turned and shot Ruby a smirk.

  "Does steel even burn?" Ruby asked Doubt quietly.

  "Everything burns," Fire announced, clearly having overheard her boss’s comment, "if it gets hot enough." She turned her attention to the steel bars, running her fingers and then her hands over them in a motion some people might have thought bordered on obscene.

  But the steel heated. At first it was only the smell of hot metal that heralded the change, but soon enough the bars began to glow red-orange from Fire’s repeated caresses. The melting steel heated the room around them, causing uncomfortable perspiration to form at the base of Ruby’s neck. Her hairstyle was likely being destroyed along with the rebar, but she wasn’t going to let that dampen her spirits now.

  One by one, Fire knocked the glowing steel with her fist, causing the now-brittle rods to break apart at their junctions and fall in chunks to the floor. They landed in the chalky concrete dust, which Ruby could only hope wasn’t flammable--at least not at the same temperature the rebar was vulnerable to.

  Doubt looked dubious about the whole operation, but none of the others seemed to be too concerned.

  Ruby wasn’t sure how long it took (save that it was just long enough for her to have to blot the perspiration from her upper lip twice and seriously consider unzipping her jacket) but in relatively short order, the meter-wide hole was free of its metal reinforcements, and Decay was back to crumbling away the concrete. Ruby's toes twitched as the indentation became an opening. There was a tiny hole at first, which quickly opened wider and wider as Decay made final passes over the crumbling concrete. Ruby was grinning with replete fulfillment as she gauged the size of the opening.

  She was surprised the wall hadn’t been thicker. Knowing the nature of the items stored inside the vault, she had pictured something more substantial. Of course, she figured two solid feet of steel-reinforced cast-concrete would be enough to deter most people. Ruby Killingsworth was not most people. Once she was sure the hole in the vault’s wall was large enough for her to squeeze through, she signaled to Decay that he’d done enough and made her move toward the opening.

  Leading with her left leg, she deftly slinked through the opening in the concrete and into the vault. She pulled a tiny flashlight from the pocket of her jacket and passed it around the space. The ceiling was lower than she’d expected, likely reinforced to discourage would-be thieves trying to break in from the ground floor. There was a row of fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling that made it feel lower still. Along the near wall was a counter with bundled sage, pots of salt, and boxes of differing materials lined up on it. Ruby guessed these were the things the CCPD deemed necessary to have on hand should anyone need to interact with the items stored in this vault.

  On the far side was a cage of black metal, beyond which stood a series of plain-faced lockers of varying sizes. "Damn." Why did this have to be so complicated? "Ruin," she called out through the hole in the wall, "get in here!"

  "No can do, boss lady," Ruin answered her, sticking his head and hands into the opening. He rotated his hands, framing the hole with them as he shrugged. "There’s no way I’d fit."

  Ruby snarled, "So make the hole bigger!" She hadn’t gotten this far just to be foiled by a damned chain link fence and a bunch of school lockers. If the hole needed to be larger so Ruin could get in and help her, then she would stand there and wait.

  "I’ve got this," Fire sounded before Decay could move into place to start back in on the concrete. She stepped easily through the narrow opening and brushed past Ruby on her way to the metal cage. She cracked her knuckles as she approached the padlocked door.

  "Are you sure you can do this?" Ruby asked the girl, shining her flashlight on the combination lock to give Fire a better view.

  Fire shook her head and frowned at the older woman. "I’m a torch," she responded. Fire turned back around and took hold of the lock by the shank with her fingertips. In no more than the blink of an eye, the metal heated up to glowing. Scarcely a moment later, the body of the lock fell to the ground, cleaved neatly on both sides by the heat from Fire’s fingers. She thumped the left behind half-circle of metal through the loops in the cage door and pulled it open for her boss to pass through.

  Ruby crossed intently toward the row of lockers, passing the flashlight over each of the doors as she did. Truly, she had no idea what she was looking for. She was sure there wouldn’t be a sign--super-scary-powerful Eye of Africa inside--but she’d had it in her head somehow that she would be able to identify the thing when she got close. Now it was literally right in front of her, and she had no idea which door to open.

  "We pop them all," she declared after a moment. It just made sense. Open only one door, and it would be obvious what they’d been after. Open all the doors, leave the whole place in chaos, and it may take significantly longer for anyone to figure out what exactly had gone missing--hopefully long enough for Ruby to have the Eye of Africa safely in the heavily warded basement of her house in Regency Heights, and to have discerned and removed any magical trackers it may have had placed on it. There was no record of the Cobalt City Police Department having anyone with magical ability on staff, but Ruby wouldn’t bet against that being the case. If she were to come regularly into custody of coveted and powerful magical items, she’d find a way to hex a beacon onto them in case of theft.

  "Here," said a quiet voice behind Ruby. She spun on her heel, ready to strike out at whoever was there and realized it was just Doubt who had snuck up behind her.

  Doubt was holding out a crow bar with a stern look on her face. "When in doubt," she commented wryly, "smash everything."

  Ruby couldn’t help but chuckle. Doubt had mostly been a wet blanket on the whole operation, but this was not the first time she’d come through when it mattered. Ruby traded Doubt her flashlight for the crowbar and began working at the first of the twenty-odd locker doors against the wall of the vault.

  The lockers, as it turned out, were more for organization than they were for security. Each of the doors popped open with minimal effort on Ruby’s part. Their contents were oddly varied, not all of them obvious with occult potential. Ruby reckoned some of the items to be sham, but supposed the CCPD would rather be safe than sorry--and if a patient in the Fermi Institute claimed an item in their possession was magical, then it was better to lock the thing up just in case. There were books and scrolls, candles and incenses, cauldrons and athame, one locker filled to brimming with voodoo dolls, and plenty of trinkets of varied sizes and shapes that were likely talismans of some stripe. It was only when she’d gotten through a particularly sticky lock and found salt pouring out onto her boots that she felt like she’d hit paydirt.

  For a moment, she was surprised and aghast at the idea of getting salt in her ankle-high Manolo Blahnik stacked heel boots, but when it hit her that only the most frightening and powerful items would warrant such a precaution, she figured it was a small price to pay. What was a little salt in her shoes compared with getting her powers back? She tucked the crowbar under her arm and used her gloved hands to scoop out the remaining salt from the locker. She’d have salt in her gloves, too, but it didn’t matter. It was only a few sweeps of her hands before the locker gave up its contents.

  She had found it. She had found the Eye of Africa.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The tool that Loki had suggested would bring her powers back was now in her possession. Doubt shone the flashlight on the thing as
Ruby turned it over in her hands. The case was smaller than she’d figured from looking at the picture, no larger than a child’s metal lunch box. It was heavier than it looked, the little aluminum case almost certainly lined with lead, and Ruby was careful not to touch the thick mass of copper wire spooled around it and connected to a World War II-era lantern battery.

  It looked like a ramshackle science project, but it was what they had come here for. Ruby was grinning wildly. She threw her head back in satisfied laughter but was stopped short when a blinking red light in the corner of the room caught her eye. "Damn!" she said, shoving the crowbar she was still holding back into Doubt’s grip.

  "What is it?" the other woman asked, clearly stunned by her boss’s abrupt change in demeanor.

  "That!" Ruby snapped, pointing up at the little beacon as she darted through the wire cage and back into the vault proper.

  "What’s that?" Doubt questioned, following Ruby out through the giant hole Decay had provided and rolling her eyes at the sudden haste.

  "It’s an alarm," Ruby explained, stumbling through the cement dust and turning toward the exit. "A motion sensitive, silent alarm," she emphasized. "It’s a Starcom Security thing--only for certain clients, like the police department or the building next door to Starcom Tower." She’d been shown just this model when deciding on security for her business and her penthouse.

  "Damn." Doubt finally repeated Ruby’s initial curse.

  "And that’s not the worst of it," Ruby insisted as they rounded the corner toward the door to the stairwell.

  "What is?" Fire piped up from the rear of the group.

  "The damned thing summons Stardust," Ruby answered tersely as she tugged open the door to the stairs and started up, "and it locks down the building in the process."

  Fire shook her head and turned around. She ran out of the stairwell and into the basement.

  Ruby was not about to halt her retreat, but called out "What the hell are you doing?" after the girl. It was only a moment before she realized what it was. The overhead lights in the stairwell switched on as the deafening sound of an alarm klaxon echoed through the hollow concrete stairwell.

  "They won’t lock down the building if it’s on fire!" Fire asserted as she caught up to the others in the doorway to the alley.

  Sure enough, there were other people beginning to file out of the station’s other fire doors. There was no one else in the alley where they emerged, but the throngs of uniformed officers spilling out onto the sidewalks at the front and rear of the building were easily spotted. Fire, Pestilence, and Doubt rushed past the others and farther up the concrete stairs as the rest of the group made for the exit.

  "Where are you going?" Ruby asked, daring to pause long enough to listen to their answer.

  "The roof!" Fire replied, never breaking her stride toward the next flight of stairs.

  "Why?" Ruby challenged.

  "The hell do you think Stardust is coming from?" Pestilence snapped, still running up the stairs. "Do you want us to cover your escape or not?"

  Ruby nodded. She understood. She and the others continued into the alley and moved toward the rear of the building, where officers and others were steadily streaming from the doors. The confusion seemed to be enough to allow them to blend in, but still Ruby hoped Doubt would be paying enough attention from the roof to keep her from being recognized.

  They were scarcely ten meters from the end of the alley when Ruby realized she was still holding the very conspicuous lead and aluminum case containing the Eye of Africa. Even if the no one in the current ranks of the CCPD had ever seen the thing before, and even if no one on the street would possibly recognize it, the case still looked suspiciously like a bomb. And anyone walking around the side of a police station wherein the fire alarm had just activated, carrying something that might have been a bomb, was likely to raise suspicion.

  She held out the case to Decay. "Can you get through the wires?" she asked him as the group slowed their progress toward the ever-growing crowd of police and civilians on the street.

  Ruin took the case from her hands before Decay had the chance, and immediately the wires began to fray. One by one, the copper strands came apart until they fell away entirely, landing on the asphalt and immediately blending into the assorted detritus native to the alley. He fumbled for a moment with the aged clasp, crusty as it was with the corrosion of the metal in the mixture of salt and leaked eighty-year-old battery acid. When the case came open, it was cleaved in two--falling apart at the hinges and the clasp.

  Ruby tossed the lid aside and reached into the other half. Not caring whether she damaged the already sloughing purple velvet of the structure that kept the Eye from rattling around inside of its case, she snatched up the muslin-wrapped item tucked inside. "Take these back to the Tower," she instructed the Blights, as she thrust the piece of metal case back at Ruin.

  Quickly, Ruby unwrapped the heavy item in her hand from its oiled and smelly muslin casing, just enough to get a glimpse. If her instincts had been wrong, if this wasn’t the Eye, then it would be better to know now than find out after having done the work to get away with it. One glimpse was all it took for her to be sure. This was it. The fire in the black opal and the peculiar shape of the metal surrounding it were exactly as Loki’s drawing had depicted. She had it. She held the Eye of Africa in her hands.

  Ruby quickly stashed the jewel in the right-hand pocket of her biker jacket and zipped it up before slipping casually into the crowd on the street behind the police station. There were sirens in the distance, no doubt racing to respond to the fire alarm in the CCPD station.

  But the sound of the most concern to Ruby as she tried her best to blend into the milling mélange of officers and passers-by was the droning roar of Stardust’s suit approaching. Living just across the street from him had given Ruby a singular ability to recognize the sound of his proprietary rockets. She wondered as she made her way through the throng on the sidewalk toward the parking structure where her car was waiting if anyone else had even noticed the sound yet. Stardust was about a minute out, from what her ears were telling her. She was likely to have made it to the garage by then, but still she was thankful for the hat she wore. A black knit cap would blend in to the crowd a whole lot better than the mane of bright red hair underneath it.

  But even with the cap on, she’d feel better once she was off the street and out of view. It was highly unlikely Jaccob would recognize her, what with the mayhem of the arriving fire vehicles and the chaos of the ever-growing throng of people that would undoubtedly continue to increase once Stardust showed up. But the idea that he might was making her nervous.

  She moved toward the parking structure as quickly as she could without arousing the suspicion of any of the hundred or more police on the sidewalks. Ruby had never been one to choose the stairs over the elevator in any situation, but under the circumstances, she thought better of standing still in the semi-exposed vestibule of the parking garage. She decided instead to make a mad dash up the concrete steps to where her car was waiting.

  Ruby had told her driver before she left not to get out and open her door upon her return. Fortunately, the magic he was under had everything to do with the contract she’d had him sign when he’d first come to work for her, and nothing to with her missing powers. She got into the town car on her own and let herself breathe for a moment, secure in the knowledge she wouldn’t be spotted.

  She was pleased to discover that, from the safety of her back seat, she was able to watch the next events unfold at the police station. Through the rear windshield of her town car, Ruby watched as Stardust descended heroically toward the roof of the building. He was accompanied by another person springing across rooftops who Ruby eventually recognized as Wild Kat.

  The two of them made it onto the roof just as the first of the fire trucks pulled up to the building. There was smoke pouring out from the lower floor windows now, and it was beginning to waft out of the upper floor windows as well, leaving Ruby to
wonder just what Fire had done to the building.

  She was easily spotted on the roof, her brightly colored hair drawing attention to her even in the presence of two superheroes. She was standing with her face tilted skyward as a burst of flame erupted under Stardust’s boots.

  Ruby winced as she watched him fly back into the air again briefly and then land in the middle of the ball of fire. It occurred to her then that she hadn’t ever made it plain that the Blights were absolutely not to do Stardust any permanent harm. Doubt seemed to have a good enough head on her shoulders to have figured that out, but there was no telling about the other ones. And Ruby was unsure of the rules that governed the Blights under her purview. It’s not like Loki had sent them with an instruction manual. Were they aware of her intentions somehow, extensions of her will, or were they only subject to her orders?

  It was no small sense of relief Ruby felt when she saw that Stardust’s suit seemed to be fireproof. Whether or not she’d thought to tell Fire and Pestilence not to hurt Jaccob, it looked like he’d be able to handle himself against them. Having her date for the evening injured by her own henchmen would make this night suddenly a lot less wonderful.

  But then she saw Jaccob beginning to act as though maybe he’d somehow been burned through the metal of his suit. He was writhing almost, moving uncomfortably this way and that, and as the flames died down beneath him, Ruby couldn’t tell what was causing it.

  It was Wild Kat who drew Ruby’s gaze to the root of the problem. The utility of having Pestilence along for this caper also became clear as Ruby watched. Wild Kat, having been poised low on the rooftop, pounced at Stardust’s feet. A dark gray ball (that Ruby instantly recognized as a rat) flew from her paw and over the side of the smoking building.