Action Figures - Issue Two: Black Magic Women

by Michael Bailey

  Missy’s eyes flutter open. “Stuart,” she says dreamily. “Hi.”

  “Hey, Muppet,” Stuart says, tears spilling down his cheeks, mingling with his blood. He hugs her close. She’s too exhausted to respond in kind.

  “M’sleepy,” Missy mumbles, and then she slips into unconsciousness.

  “Take her home,” Astrid says. “Put her to bed.”

  “Will she be okay?” Matt says.

  “She’ll be wiped out for a few days. Let her sleep it off, she should bounce back.”

  There’s something off about the way she says that. I catch Astrid’s eye. She shakes her head at me. I say nothing.

  “Let’s get her home,” Matt says.

  “Carrie?” Astrid says. “Hang back a minute.”

  “You guys go on,” I say. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” They take off, Missy a softly snoring ball in Stuart’s arms. “And don’t forget to take your costumes off before you get home.”

  Astrid lays a hand on my shoulder and squeezes. Then she pulls me into a smothering hug.

  “Good call,” she says into my ear.

  “I didn’t know what I was talking about,” I confess. “I was guessing.”

  “Don’t complain. It worked.”

  “Yeah. Is she going to be okay? Really?”

  She hesitates. “The documented cases of people escaping possession are few and far between, and from what I’ve read, those who do escape don’t come away totally unscathed,” she says. “Once someone has had such intimate contact with a demonic entity, their soul is forever tainted.”

  “But it was only for a few minutes,” I say. Like I know what I’m talking about.

  “All that means is maybe the after-effects will be minor. Don’t say anything to her about it, but keep an eye on her. If anything weird happens, if she behaves at all strangely, call me, immediately.” Astrid gives me a friendly slap on the shoulder, the universal sign for catch you later, and begins the long walk back to the library. “I’ll take care of Stacy. Get gone.”

  “Hey.” She stops. “The Libris Infernalis.”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s not actually in the public library, is it?”

  Astrid laughs. “Of course it isn’t,” she says before vanishing into the night. “I have it.”

  Meanwhile...

  “She’s just a devil wo-man, with evil on her mi-ind, beware the devil wo-man, she’s gonna get you...”

  It’s a nice little neighborhood, she thinks as she counts off the street numbers. It’s quiet, cozy, full of quaint, small-town New England charm — not at all the kind of neighborhood she ever expected Astrid to settle down in.

  Well, truth be told, she never expected Astrid to settle down, period. But, alas, the wild child has long since been tamed by life as a respected academic. How sad: not even thirty, and she’s already an old woman. Perhaps their parting of the ways was inevitable.

  No time for sentimentality, Bets. Eyes on the prize.

  Number forty-two. Black Betty takes a step back to better take in the pathetic sight of That New Age Store, the final nail in the coffin containing Astrid’s street cred within certain circles.

  “A friggin’ New Age store, Astrid?” Black Betty mutters. “Tsch. What did I ever see in you?”

  Oh, yes: your to-die-for collection of arcane knowledge.

  Black Betty slides her hand along the brick wall where, by all rights, a door leading to the second floor should be. It looks real enough and, more impressively, feels real enough. It has texture, and radiates absorbed winter cold like real brick would. She kneels, her fingers detecting an irregularity in the sidewalk. A whispered word causes her hand to glow, and that glow reveals a line of runes chipped into the cement, about the width of a door.

  At least you thought to change the locks, she thinks, bending closer to inspect the characters, taken from a language long dead and forgotten. It’s a decent ward, as wards go, but it’s nothing but camouflage; a glamour on the door, more than enough to deter the average would-be visitor — and, perhaps, lull extraordinary visitors into a false sense of security. Black Betty probes deeper, and yes, there it is, a second ward, designed to repel anyone tainted by black magic.

  Anyone — or one specific someone.

  This is the first test — the last, too, if the bypass she was given fails to do its job. Black Betty reaches into her jacket pocket, removing a crystal vial no larger than a salt shaker. She turns it in her fingers, watching the dark liquid within ooze about the interior. She removes the stopper and, as though tossing back a shot of tequila, downs the contents.

  Tangy. Lightly salty. A hint of spice. A mild zing of copper. A fine vintage, all in all.

  Bypassing the illusion, that’s as simple as willing herself to disbelieve the lie. A door appears, a door bearing the number forty-two and a half on it. Black Betty takes a breath, braces herself to learn whether her little bit of sympathetic magic will be enough to fool Astrid’s protections.

  If not? Well, it’s been a fun ride.

  She lays a hand on the door handle, utters her cantrip to pop the lock. She pulls.

  Black Betty stands in the open doorway for a full two minutes, savoring her triumph – the first in a series, collect the whole set.

  The spell should shield her from any other wards — that was what her partner promised, but she didn’t survive this long by trusting in others. Black Betty expands her senses and climbs the stairs, scanning for any other traps. Astrid, it appears, has grown a tad paranoid since their parting: every step is rigged with a different ward sensitive to dark magic. Step three is primed to detonate in a spray of splinters. Step seven is set to spontaneously combust. Step thirteen — Oh, bravo, Astrid — is tainted with a magically enhanced flesh-eating virus. None of them trigger; the bypass spell, powered by a draught of very special, very unique blood, holds.

  It holds all the way up the stairs, into Astrid’s apartment (Oh, honey, this place is tragic), but that’s where the spell’s usefulness ends. The next part, the critical step in the plan, is all on her.

  Black Betty spends a few minutes studying the door, studying it on levels unknown to those without power, determining its strengths, its flaws, looking for that one crippling weakness that might allow her passage.

  There.

  Maybe.

  “Screw it. No guts, no glory,” Black Betty says, taking a small measure of satisfaction in the knowledge that, if she fails at this juncture, the resulting mess would force Astrid to finally clean up her depressing dump of a home. Or move out.

  Yeah, take that, bitch.

  The door swings open. The sanctum is hers.

  “Bam-a-lam.”

  How do you define suckage? I define it as changing out of my costume and into human clothes in the woods near my house, at night, in the middle of a New England winter. I cannot wait for spring to get here.

  (Mental note: figure out how to manipulate my body temperature while flying so I never again have to risk turning into a Carriesicle.)

  Mom springs up from the couch as I enter the house. Crap, she has the Worried Parent Look going on. That’s never good.

  “Where have you been?” she says. “I’ve been calling you for two hours.”

  “Oh, nuts, sorry, forgot to turn my phone back on after school,” I say, which is only a small lie; no actual forgetting was involved.

  “Carrie, damn it all, what if there had been an emergency?”

  I strip off my jacket and, through sheer force of will, pretend I am not still freezing to death. “Was there?”

  She plants her fists on her hips. “That is not the point, and you know it.”

  “Mom, I’m sorry, I forgot, okay? No biggie.”

  Much scowling ensues. “Did you also forget to come home for dinner?”

  “We were doing homework at the coffee shop. We lost track of time, then we had to take Missy home because she got sick.”

  The anger slides down a notch. “What’s wrong with M
issy?”

  “Don’t know. Flu, maybe? I heard a lot of kids in school were out sick today...”

  “Oh,” she says. “Well, I hope for her sake it’s not the flu.”

  Success. Parental wrath: calmed.

  “Carrie, honey, please be better about turning your phone on, okay?”

  “I will.”

  Mom nods. “Dinner’s in the fridge if you want to heat it up,” she says, moving past me. “I’m hitting the hay early. We apparently have a big start-of-the-year staff meeting tomorrow, I don’t want to fall asleep in the middle of it.”

  “Good call. Good night.”

  Mom heads upstairs; I head into the kitchen. The gut-wrenching terror of the night has released its hold on me, and my God, am I starving.

  I wish I could say such tense exchanges with my mom are rarities, but no, they happen on a semi-regular basis. My secret life as a part-time super-hero kicked in only days after we moved to Kingsport, and thanks to a couple of fairly destructive throwdowns in town, including one at school, Mom got it in her head we’d moved to a war zone (she has no idea I was personally involved in said throwdowns, but that’s irrelevant). For a while, she was actively looking around for a new place to live. Granddad talked her down, and the possibility of moving hasn’t come up for a few weeks, but all it takes is me coming home late or “forgetting” to turn my cell on after school, and it sparks a full-on anxiety attack. Man, she’s going to be a total basket case when I start dating again.

  To be fair, not-so-little things like a demonically possessed woman blowing up half of Main Street aren’t helping my situation.

  Whenever she has one of her fits, I wonder if I should tell her what I do in my spare time. Then I wonder: what would that accomplish? It definitely wouldn’t make her less paranoid about my safety. On the other hand, it might kill the idea of moving away. She could relocate us to the other side of the country, and I could fly back to Kingsport in a few minutes, so what would be the point?

  Halfway through my late dinner of veal parmesan, the meal my mouth loves but my conscience hates, Sara calls.

  “Hey. Wanted to let you know, we got Missy home okay. We told her mom she got sick after school, might be the flu.”

  “Great minds think alike,” I say, peering out into the living room to make sure Mom or Granddad didn’t slip in. “I told Mom that same thing after she grilled me for getting home late.”

  “That old tune...”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Sara pauses, then says, “I don’t like Dr. Enigma.”

  Gee, I never noticed. “We’re going to need her,” I say. “I mean, come on, magic. That’s so out of our league it’s not funny.”

  “I know, but...”

  “But?”

  “Carrie, she killed some poor woman. She didn’t think twice about it, she didn’t hesitate, she didn’t care she was killing someone —”

  “I don’t think she didn’t care,” I say, but Sara barrels over me.

  “— and she was ready to do the same thing to Missy. If you hadn’t stopped her, she would have.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “She’s dangerous. We can’t trust her.”

  I won’t deny that Dr. Enigma is more hardcore than the others in the Protectorate — cold sometimes, maybe even brutal, but I can’t help but think Sara’s dislike is rooted in something else: everyday jealousy. Astrid is a gorgeous woman, no question, and Matt, clueless doofus that he is, didn’t even try to hide how bad he was crushing on her, so it’s natural Sara feels threatened. Stupid, I know, it’s not like Astrid would ever get romantically involved with a fifteen-year-old, but no one ever said love promoted clarity of thought. Times like these call for bland reassurances, not rebuttals.

  “Let me worry about Astrid. If we can do this without her, we will, but we’d be dumb to shut her out completely.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  She’s hardly mollified, but it doesn’t matter, because mine is an empty promise; every instinct tells me Astrid isn’t out of the picture quite yet.

  TEN

  Officially speaking, Missy is laid up with the flu.

  Stuart called her folks this morning to see how she was doing. Mrs. Hamill reported that Missy was out like a light, running a slight fever, but she seemed to be comfortable, though that news did little to put Stuart at ease.

  “She’ll be fine. Missy’s a tough little Muppet,” I tell Stuart before we part ways for the morning. He grunts, nods, and puts on a brave face that fools no one.

  The first thing he does when we get out of school is call Missy’s house. No one picks up, presumably because the parental units are off at work, so Stuart tells us he’s going to hike over and check in, make sure she’s okay. As the rest of us debate whether to join him in his well-intentioned but ill-advised act of breaking and entering, my phone buzzes in my pocket (because, dutiful daughter that I am, I turned it back on as soon as I got out of the building).

  “Uh, boy,” I say, reading the screen. “Guess who?”

  “Astrid?” Matt says hopefully. Sara scowls.

  “No.” I pick up, and as I suspected, we’re receiving another royal summons from His Majesty King Concorde the First. He wants an immediate full report on last night’s shenanigans. Man, this guy and his debriefings.

  “What about Stuart?” Sara asks.

  “He’s got more important things on his mind,” Matt says. “Let him do what he needs to do.”

  “Agreed,” I say, and we head into town.

  The first stop, as always, is Coffee E for some liquid enthusiasm, then it’s over to the Protectorate’s public office. Ms. Hannaford, the team’s psionic secretary, shuffles us into the Wonkavator.

  Astrid greets us in the subbasement. “Sorry about this, guys,” she says. “I tried to tell Concorde this could wait, but you know how he is.”

  “No biggie. It’s all part of the job,” Matt says, all cool and devil-may-care. Yes, Matt, very smooth, I’m sure Astrid is fighting to keep from throwing herself at you.

  She leads us upstairs. “That was good work last night.”

  “Good, but not great,” I say. “We should never have let things get so out of hand.”

  “Things could have gone down a lot worse, but they didn’t, thanks to you,” she says to me.

  “Don’t be too impressed. I told you, I had no clue what I was talking about.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short like that.”

  “I’m not, I’m being honest. I got stupid lucky. You’re the expert on...those kinds of things.”

  “And look what almost happened. Sometimes, kiddo, it’s counterproductive to know it all...or believe that you do. It’s harder to think outside the box when you’re convinced you have all the answers. On the rare occasion something completely stumps you, you don’t look for other options, you just assume there are no other options.”

  “You outsmart yourself.”

  “Exactly. Happens to the best of us. How’s Missy doing?”

  “Guess she’s been asleep all day,” Matt says. “Stuart’s checking on her. That’s why he’s not here.”

  “Good on him.” Astrid pauses at the door to the interview room, sighs, and utters what has become our mantra for these debriefings. “All right. Let’s get this over with, shall we?”

  “Here we are again,” Mindforce says with half-hearted cheer. I guess he had better plans for the day, too.

  “At least we made it through the holidays without an incident,” I say. “That’s a decent stretch of nothing, right? I mean, it’s not like super-powered weirdoes pop up out of nowhere and cause trouble for no good reason all the time.”

  Mindforce purses his lips and slides Concorde a look.

  “They don’t, right?”

  “It’s...not constant, no,” Mindforce says, “but we deal with random minor superhuman incidents a lot more often than we deal with red-level threats.”

  “Red-level threats?”

  “It refer
s to any major incident involving superhumans with a high body count potential. Would-be world conquerors, terrorist groups, et cetera — the sort of crises people think we handle all the time, but the reality is less exciting. More often than not, we’re taking down lone rogues like this Stacy Hellfire character.”

  “But where do they come from?” I say.

  “Same places normal human criminals come from. At their core they’re simply people driven to extreme measures by desperation, greed, weakness...”

  “Insanity,” Astrid adds. “Black Betty, case in point.”

  “And thus endeth the lesson,” Concorde says irritably. “Let’s get on with this.”

  Mindforce starts recording, and off I go, recounting the Stacy Hellfire incident in all its flamey, possessiony, magicy glory. Concorde says nothing until I finish, and then, like a lawyer in a cheap courtroom drama, he crosses his arms and says,

  “And why didn’t you bring the Protectorate in on this?”

  Before I can respond, Astrid jumps in. “That was my call.”

  “Oh? Care to explain?”

  “Not really, no,” Astrid says with a sarcastic smile.

  “Oh, dammit, Enigma...”

  “Do I have to again remind you, I’m not part of your team? I am a consultant. You ask for my assistance, I provide it, but I am not at your beck and call, and I do not have to run everything I do by you...and I don’t need your permission to ask them to watch my back,” Astrid says, gesturing at me.

  “No, you don’t, but the Hero Squad are young and inexperienced, which is why they’re operating conditionally, and under our authority. They are our responsibility. Secondly, this isn’t about who’s in charge. This is about taking down a serious threat to public safety, and doing so in a way that minimizes risk, to the public and to them,” Concorde says, poking the air in my direction, “but you didn’t do that. You put them in the line of fire, and Missy got hurt because of it. That’s on you. So spare me the attitude, and get your priorities straight.”

  Astrid’s eyes flash. Her fists clench. Concorde does not back away.