Damon said nothing. He wouldn’t identify himself unless he decided the blind seer could help him. He resisted an urge to laugh, and concentrated on bringing forth the Word he needed.
See.
The Word meant many things. Seeing was but one of its myriad facets. Analyze was another. So was Comprehend. Damon Saw Cassandra Camlo’s mind and soul, and the events that shaped them, so he could determine if she could be of use. After all, she had been there, one of the five who were offered absolute power. She might be able to help him. She might take the place of his daughter.
He caught glimpses of her nomadic life as a young woman, the confidence games, the dalliances and adventures of a trickster. Then came the day when her dreams started to come true, when she became haunted by visions of things that were to come. Those visions led her to New York and the fateful meeting with Mr. Night. Like Damon and the rest, she was tempted with the promise of absolute power. In her vision, she became Goddess: her power to see possible futures was transformed into the power to determine the future. Her will became Cause and Effect, and she drew the lines of time, decided in advance who lived and who died, for how long and when and how. The world she created was a placid place where no one but her had even the illusion of free will. Her rejection of that possible future had been visceral and absolute. She’d been punished for it too, losing her eyes and all memories of the event.
“You are a sneaky fellow, aren’t you?” Cassandra said. “I don’t think you mean me any harm, though. Look for as long as you want, but don’t touch anything.”
Damon ruefully shook his head. The woman had avoided being tainted, the only one in that gathering to escape that fate. She had refused everything Mr. Night offered, and by doing so had forsaken any claim over the Source, beyond whatever the Source saw fit to bestow upon her. There was nothing she could do for him. A nagging feeling remained, a feeling that she might yet play a role in the final struggle, but that wouldn’t help him now.
He was on his own.
Without saying a word, he took his leave, laughing silently at himself.
Pripet Marshes, Dominion of the Ukraine, January 14th, 2010
“Talk to me!’ Damon roared. “Show yourself, or I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and you know the rest!” He laughed madly. His inner darkness was gnawing at him, eroding his sanity. It was getting worse, a little worse every day. He didn’t have a lot of time left. A lot of time. A little time. No time. Time to kill and time to die.
For a while, his thoughts wandered. It took a deliberate effort to rein them in, to focus on the matter at hand.
The ghost of a dead child dwelled in this wooden wasteland. Damon had seen him in a vision, seen the Power Seed merge with the child upon its arrival, turning him into an avatar of the Power itself. That vision, the result of yet another failed attempt to access the Codex, had led him to this place. He would find the dead child and force him to show Damon how to access the Power Seed. Then he would be able to expel the Taint from his soul, would escape the madness growing inside of him, would…
You are not welcome here.
The mental voice stopped Damon in his tracks. He tried in vain to locate the source of the voice. The ghost was well secluded in the swamps and forests of this region.
I need your help, Damon called out. Help, I need. Help me, little child, and I’ll give you a piece of candy. Be a good boy, and I won’t eat your eyes.
I know what you want. You cannot have it. You bear the Enemy’s Mark. You will be overwhelmed eventually. Access to the Source will not help you. Only death will.
Help me, little boy, or I’ll find you, and hurt you.
You will not. I have already alerted the Dominion, and the Witch of Pinsk and her men are searching for you. They will find you, and put you down.
Damon roared in rage. The ghost wasn’t lying. He could sense the approach of someone more powerful and terrible than him. He fled, vowing to return.
He never did.
Face-Off
New York, New York, March 17, 2013
At first, I was too relieved after Christine came back to life to care about much else. But when I heard Condor shout out a warning, I let her go and got back in gear.
I rose to my feet as more automatons marched into the room. Before I could do anything, though, Janus floated off to see to them. He caught a volley of plasma blasts on his golden shields, covering all of us. His return fire turned all ten or so killer robots into a small lake of molten metal. The rest of us didn’t have to lift a finger. And here I was thinking I was hot shit.
Medved walked in after the robots.
In the comics, this would be the time when we’d all pause dramatically and let the big guy regale us with some catchphrase or even a nice villain monologue. Under the circumstances, that didn’t seem like a good idea. We lit him up the second we saw him.
Well, my friends lit him up. I went for my liberated blaster rifle and discovered that it had blown up under my jacket at some point during the festivities, probably when the automatons were hosing me with plasma. I hadn’t even noticed the explosion, or that my leather jacket with the expensive Kevlar inserts was pretty much gone on that side; I’d been too distracted by the fact I’d my pants. Without a gun, I couldn’t do much until the giant asshole got into ass-kicking range.
I stood by and watched while the rest of the gang let the big Russian have it: Christine’s blasts, Kestrel’s big-ass gun, everything Condor could throw at the guy, including grenades, boomerangs and bottled hydrochloric acid, and, most importantly, Janus special golden cocktail of charged particles traveling at relativistic speeds. I’d like to say that nothing would have survived that kind of thing, but I’d be bullshitting. There were a good half-dozen people off the top of my head that could have made it through that firestorm; a couple of them would have made it in good enough shape to actually do something back to us.
As it turns out, Medved was one of those people.
Big and Ugly had a shield of his own, purple-black like all the other nasty shit we’d been running into since this caper had started. He walked through the firestorm my companions unleashed on it, leaning forward as if pushing against a heavy wind. His shield absorbed most of the attacks harmlessly; near-misses and plain energy backscatter turned his section of the chamber into a mess of molten rock and sublimated metal. He walked through that, too; his boots splashed on fresh lava as if it was mud.
Since I had nothing to do until the asshole got into range – not that I was eager to go mano a mano with the fucker who’d eaten Ultimate’s lunch – I was the only one who noticed something had appeared in the big pit where the Source had been. I was pretty sure it wasn’t the Source making a triumphant comeback.
It started out small, a little black sphere maybe as big as a softball. It started to swirl and grow, and I got the same sickening feeling I always enjoyed when coming close to Outsider stuff. The symbols carved on the walls started vanishing one by one, turning into small packets of light that flew into the sphere.
Nothing I could do about that, either. I wasn’t about to leap into the pit and punch the black sphere. I turned back to the main event. Medved was still on his feet, getting closer, step by slow step. He wasn’t unscathed anymore; stuff was getting through his defenses. All the hair on the left side of his head had been burned off. Something or other had blown off a piece of his right cheek, enough that you could see teeth where you shouldn’t be seeing teeth. He also was sporting a bleeding hole on his right shoulder; I scored that point for Christine. Die, motherfucker, I wished silently.
He didn’t die. I started walking toward him. Time to dance with the Devil. I turned on the little doodad Condor had given me, hoping it might do something about the Outsider energy shield. And I didn’t charge him, like I normally would. Like I said, I wasn’t feeling particularly eager to take him on. Very courageous of me.
While I courageously took my time and tried to stay out of the line for fire in the hopes that the fucker
would die before I reached him, Janus took matters into his own hands. He flew past me, right into everyone else’s line of fire, ignoring a burst of 40mm grenades that exploded on his golden aura and showered me with shrapnel. He bull-rushed Medved, slamming into him and unleashing a burst of energy that knocked me on my ass.
Medved screamed.
There was a brief flurry of action, a bright flash of light – and they were gone No bodies or body parts, just vanished.
“What the fuck just happened?” I blurted out, getting back to my feet. If I hadn’t been such a cowardly fuck, I might have been able to join in before they disappeared – and disappeared myself. Sometimes he who hesitates doesn’t get fucked up.
“Janus teleported away, I think,” Condor suggested.
“I thought he couldn’t do that in here.”
“Then maybe Medved did it.”
“That wasn’t Medved,” Christine broke in, shivering slightly. “That was Mr. Night wearing Medved’s body.”
“Even better. What now?”
“I think…” Christine began to say when the entire chamber shook hard enough to knock everyone but me off their feet. I swayed back and forth but that was it, courtesy of my psychokinetic strength. I had a bad feeling about what had caused the earthquake, and a glance back at the central pit confirmed it.
I’m sure that it technically wasn’t a black hole. A real black hole would have sucked up the entire planet into its event horizon or pie hole or whatever. But it sucked the light around it and things were falling toward it as if it had a gravity field strong enough to overcome Earth’s. The black sphere had grown to the size of a basketball; I saw an e-tablet and in inkjet printer fly into it and disappear in a flash of dark light. I could feel the damn thing pulling me towards it.
Pulling all of us. My friends were suddenly yanked off the ground and would have flown into the pit if I hadn’t acted. I grabbed Christine with one hand, and caught one of Kestrel’s ankles. I only missed Condor, who smashed against the railing around the pit and held on to it for dear life. Kestrel flicked her whip in his direction, and he managed to grasp it. She had to let go of her big-ass gun, and it flew down into the pit and disappeared. I was pretty sure we didn’t want to follow it there.
In the space of those few seconds, the sphere doubled in size. More computers and lab equipment, everything that wasn’t nailed down, and a few things that were, fell into it. I ran towards the exit, dragging everyone along. As we made it to the tunnel, I glanced back and saw the walls of the chamber flexing in, chunks of concrete tearing off and falling into the now much bigger sphere.
“We need to get back to my father’s room!” Christine shouted. The alarm had gone silent, but now there was a constant roar of rushing air that made it hard to hear anything.
We ran.
The ground kept shaking beneath us, and we had to wade through hurricane-force winds, but we headed towards the tunnel Christine had created.
We were almost to the collapsed section of wall when she stopped. She turned toward me, her eyes wide and wild. “The doorway is closed! I can feel it from here! Somebody shut it down, as in broke it and dispelled the energy used to create it!”
Fuck. “What do we do?” I shouted back. The only answer that came to mind was ‘die horribly.’
“Follow me, or die!” said someone behind us.
It was the Asian chick we’d last seen being carried by Medved during the dust up out on Lake Michigan. She was swaying on her feet like the rest of us, but she looked pretty calm and didn’t make any threatening moves. “I know a way out!” she said and started heading down one of the corridors we had skipped on our way to the Source.
“Kestrel, no!” Condor shouted and grabbed his girlfriend’s whip before she could take a shot at the woman. There clearly were plenty of hard feelings left over from the fight at Lurker’s Island.
Christine ran after the Asian chick. “Come on!” she yelled. Her super-empathy would have told her if the woman was lying. We followed her.
It was getting pretty bad in there. I could see the ferroconcrete walls of the facility cracking up under the stress. A loud crash behind us made me look back, and I got a nice view of a section of tunnel collapsing – and being sucked away as if by God’s own straw. A gust of wind, the worst one yet, actually swept Kestrel off her feet; she was lucky I was close enough to grab her before she flew past. I slung her over my shoulder and kept moving, pushing Condor along with my free arm so he wouldn’t get sucked out as well. I really hoped our new buddy was leading us to an exit.
She was. The gate was a carved circle covered with symbols, much like the one we’d used on our way in. The woman stepped near it and concentrated. Another dark portal opened, and not a moment too soon, because whatever was going on behind us was getting bigger, and it sure as fuck felt like a black hole to me.
“Go!”
Condor and Kestrel leaped through the portal, and Christine and I followed a second later. There was one terrifying moment when I felt the pull of the singularity or whatever it was while we were in transit, in the darkness between places. If we got stuck there…
We stumbled into another room, office space of some sort, perfectly ordinary except for the Outsider magic circle on the floor. Condor and Kestrel were there already. Asian chick came out in an acrobatic roll, and the portal closed behind her with a pop almost as loud as a gunshot.
The earth was still shaking. The lights in the office flickered. Wherever we’d ended up, it clearly wasn’t far enough. What if the singularity didn’t stop growing?
There was one final seismic shock, and everything went still. “Glad that’s over.” I turned to our savior. “Where are we?”
“An office under the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” she said. She looked pretty calm, for someone surrounded by people she’d been trying to kill not too long ago. “I can lead you to an exit without triggering any alarms or alerting the museum’s security. Daedalus Smith has sat on the Met’s Board of Trustees for quite some time, you see. A lot of special features were added to the building at his behest.”
“Why did you help us?” Christine asked her.
“Mr. Night betrayed my Bear. I repay his treachery with my own.”
I glanced at our resident lie-detector; she nodded. “All right, lady. Lead the way.”
* * *
Outrunning a black hole (okay, I knew that couldn’t be a black hole, even with my miniscule knowledge of astrophysics, but it was black, it sucked things into it, and was a hole of some kind; Q.E.D.) had been tough. Getting out of the Met wasn’t much of a challenge by comparison. It could have been a pain in the ass, though. Five people in costumes (well, four people in costumes and one faceless guy in rags) attract a lot of attention, especially when the costumes are well known. Condor had his own (unauthorized) comic book, and there was a large body of adult literature and cinematography devoted to Kestrel; she’d even appeared in person for some of it. If we ran into a security guard or were seen traipsing around Fifth Avenue, the cops would hear about it.
Lady Shi – she’d told us her name and where she was taking us, but little else – led us through several deserted corridors beneath the museum building, and eventually to a utility tunnel and a small underground parking garage with a variety of cars, from a service van to a couple of stretch limos. “Here we are,” she announced. “You can take one of these vehicles, or make your own arrangements. Farewell and good luck. You will need it.”
“What about you?” Christine asked her. “What are you going to do now?”
“That isn’t your concern. I gave you your lives. That’s all you’ll get from me.”
“We’re not going to just let her go, are we?” Kestrel said. She was clearly itching to get back into it with Lady Shi. I think she sensed a kindred spirit there. Therefore, she had to kill her. That’s how she thought.
Me, I like watching a catfight as much as the next guy, but I had other things in mind. “Listen,” I told the J
apanese woman. “You have a lot of info we could use. If you come with us, maybe we can help each other.” I didn’t want to do business with a killer for hire, let alone a killer for hire who’d worked with Archangel and probably had been involved in Cassandra’s death, but this wouldn’t be the first time I cut a deal with some scumbag for the greater good.
I was trying so hard to convince her of our good intentions that I missed the sidelong glances Condor and Kestrel must have exchanged. Christine sensed their intent, though, because she tried to warn me. “Uh, Face…”
Condor hit Lady Shi with his shock baton, frying the Japanese woman with enough voltage to power several electric chairs. A moment later, Kestrel finished her off with several brutal kicks. I was too shocked to intervene, not that I would have in any case; you have to trust your partners in crime-fighting. I just stared at them while they made sure they’d knocked Lady Shi well and truly unconscious.
“What the eff are you doing?” Christine shouted. She sounded like she was going to start beating asses any second now.
“Like Face said, she has information we need,” Condor replied while he produced some Type Four restraints and handed them to Kestrel. “This is our only lucky break of the night. Think it through. The base is gone. Whatever that black sphere of death was, it obliterated any evidence or information we might have found in it. Mr. Night is gone – not to mention Janus. If she walks out on us, we’ve got bupkis.”
“I was trying to talk her into coming along voluntarily,” I said.
“Hand me a gag and blindfold, will you, Kyle?” Kestrel asked from her kneeling position as she trussed up Lady Shi like a Spanksgiving Turkey.
Kyle produced a couple of leather and rubber devices from his utility belt and passed them to her while he continued arguing with me. “And maybe she would have and maybe she wouldn’t have. Since when do you give assassins a choice, Face?”
I shrugged. Since meeting Christine, of course. Before her, I’d have stomped on Lady Shi myself, because she’d already shown she was willing to betray her employer, and once a traitor, always a traitor, or like the Feebs said, once an asshole, always an asshole, which sounded even better and was just as true. She’d turned on Mr. Night because he’d body-jacked her boyfriend; otherwise she would happily have let us die. Condor was right, and I was being an idiot.
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