Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis

by P. T. Dilloway

  “That’s bad, isn’t it?” Emma said.

  “I’d say,” Sylvia grumbled.

  “Hush,” Ms. Chiostro said to her sister. “But yes, this is very serious. The bone is drawn to magic. Whatever happened to you, it’s not giving off magical energy.”

  Emma looked out the broken window. “Is there such a thing as anti-magic?”

  “Not that I’m aware of, dear.” Ms. Chiostro took a small leather case from her pocket. Inside was a pair of rose-colored glasses. She slipped on the glasses and then stared at Emma; her eyes gradually widened.

  “What is it?”

  “Your aura. There’s something wrong.” Ms. Chiostro took off the glasses to give them to her sister. Sylvia stared at Emma and finally shook her head.

  “What’s wrong with my aura?”

  “It’s like there’s something else there, attached to it,” Ms. Chiostro said.

  “Becky?”

  “I don’t think so. It’s something else.”

  “Something dark,” Sylvia added.

  “Dark? You mean like Isis?”

  “No, if it were Isis it wouldn’t have repelled the bone. It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before.”

  Emma gulped; she definitely didn’t like the sound of that. “What do we do?”

  The witch patted Emma’s arm. “You should stay here and rest. Sylvia and I are going to the Sanctuary and see what we can find.”

  “Can’t I go too? I don’t want to be alone.”

  “We won’t be long, dear.”

  “But—”

  “It will be a lot faster if we vanish ourselves there. I don’t want to try any kind of spells on you until we know what we’re dealing with. Mixing magic is very dangerous.”

  “All right. I’ll stay here.”

  “We won’t be long. I promise.” Ms. Chiostro gave Emma’s chubby hand a squeeze. Then she took a step back. Emma put a hand to her eyes to shield them from the bright light that accompanied the witches’s departure. When she opened her eyes again, Emma was alone—but she didn’t feel alone. She could feel something else in the room; it watched her just as in Bykov’s bunker.

  Emma ran for the stairs. She was winded by the time she reached the top, but still she managed to race into the guestroom and launch herself onto the bed. She pulled the covers over her head; but just like when she was a child, she could feel something still there. She prayed Ms. Chiostro didn’t take much longer.

  ***

  Becky could feel something was wrong. Her mattress had become rock hard. Had she fallen on the floor? That hadn’t happened without the assistance of her sisters—or her mother—since she was ten.

  She thought back to last night. She hadn’t been drunk; she’d stuck to ice cream to drown her sorrows. Though she knew she was perfectly justified to keep Emma out of her house—her and Steve’s house—she couldn’t help but feel guilty. Her best friend had looked so dirty and thin, even for Emma.

  Long ago, Becky had promised Emma’s mother to look after Emma like a big sister. It was the least Becky could do after how the Earl family had taken her into their home. Once Emma’s parents died, Becky had taken that promise very seriously. She had watched over Emma and protected her as best as she could. Even after Emma had gone away to college, Becky kept in touch with her to keep their friendship alive. When Emma returned to Rampart City, Becky insisted they live together so Becky could look after her friend.

  That was all before Steve’s murder. An assassin’s bullet had torn through Steve’s heart a moment before he could kiss Becky to seal their wedding vows. Becky still couldn’t be sure if the bullet had been meant for Emma, but certainly Emma’s second job as the Scarlet Knight had drawn the assassin to the church that afternoon. She had brought the death and destruction upon them and taken away the only man Becky had ever loved.

  That Becky could not forgive, no matter the promises she had made. Still, she couldn’t help but feel guilty about it, especially with Emma in such a pitiful state. Becky wished she could be spiteful enough to enjoy her former best friend’s misfortunes in the last nine months, but she couldn’t. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t erase the memories of the times they had shared over the last twenty years.

  “Are you going to lie there all day?” a familiar voice asked.

  Becky opened her eyes to see Marlin the ghost over her. Stranger yet, she looked through him to see a ceiling of brown rock. “Where am I?” Becky asked, but something was wrong; it wasn’t her voice. It sounded like Emma’s voice.

  “You’re exactly where you were when I left. Now stop lollygagging and get moving.”

  “What are you talking about?” Becky held up a hand to her face; the fingers of the hand were long and thin to the point of being nearly skeletal. Becky flexed these thin fingers; she watched them move as she directed.

  “You’re supposed to be out fighting crime, not taking a nap.”

  Becky sat up and immediately noted something was wrong when she didn’t feel her stomach rest on her thighs like usual. She looked down and saw she didn’t have much of a stomach anymore. Her midsection was caved in to again make her think of a skeleton. “Who do you think I am?” she asked Marlin. Again she heard Emma’s voice when she spoke.

  “Did you suffer brain damage while I was gone?”

  “Humor me. Who am I?”

  “You’re Emma bloody Earl. The one chosen—sometimes I can’t imagine why—to be the Scarlet Knight to battle evil and injustice. Any of this ring a bell?”

  “Oh my God,” Becky said. She put a hand to her head and felt the extremely short hair. Becky remembered the haircut Sylvia had given Emma to get the rats out of her snarled hair. “What the hell is going on?”

  “What are you blathering about? Are you going to open the case and get moving or sit there asking stupid questions all day?”

  “You’re sure I’m Emma?”

  “Of course I’m sure. What’s the matter with you?”

  “I’m not Emma. I’m Becky.”

  “If you’re Becky you’ve certainly dropped a lot of weight in the last eight hours.”

  “I mean it. When I went to bed last night I was me. And now—” She shrugged helplessly, unsure how to finish the sentence. “You have to believe me.”

  “I’ve heard crazy stories in my time, but this one—”

  A burst of white light interrupted the ghost in mid-sentence. Becky squeezed her eyes shut but it was too late to avoid being blinded by the flash. She felt someone touch her shoulder and swatted at whoever it was.

  “It’s all right, dear. It’s me,” Ms. Chiostro said.

  “It’s us,” Sylvia added.

  Becky’s vision cleared enough so she could see the witches over her, albeit surrounded by green and purple blobs. “What’s going on? What happened to me?”

  Ms. Chiostro squeezed her shoulder. “I think it would be best to show you.” For some reason Becky couldn’t fathom, Ms. Chiostro put on a pair of rose-colored glasses. She squinted through these for a few moments before she nodded to herself. She offered Becky a hand. “You’d better close your eyes, dear.”

  Becky did so, but even through her eyelids she could sense another flash. When everything turned dark, she opened her eyes to find herself in Ms. Chiostro’s parlor. “She must have gone upstairs. Sylvia could you go fetch her?” Ms. Chiostro said.

  The witch grumbled under her breath as she went upstairs. In the meantime, Becky picked up a teaspoon. She couldn’t see her face clearly, but she could make out the pale skin and red hair. “What’s going on?” she asked again. “Why do I look like Emma?”

  “Hold on a minute, dear.”

  Becky heard footsteps come down the stairs. She gasped as she saw herself come around the corner. “Hi Becky,” Emma said shyly in Becky’s voice.

  Chapter 15

  Becky’s body didn’t have the well-honed reflexes she was accustomed to, so she was unable to sidestep before Becky lunged forward to grab her by the throa
t. Emma didn’t fight back, too in shock that she was being strangled by her own body. The good thing was that her flight from Europe had left her body weakened so Becky didn’t have time to kill her before Sylvia pulled her off.

  “You bitch!” Becky screamed. “You did this! I don’t know how but you did.” Even with only one hand, Sylvia was more than a match for Becky.

  “I’m sorry,” Emma croaked. She pushed aside her double chin to massage her neck. “I don’t know what happened. I went to the Sanctuary and tried to open the crate and then it shocked me. When I woke up I was you. And I guess you’re me.”

  Becky went still in the armchair, but her muscles looked poised to spring again at any moment. Emma took a step back. “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  Ms. Chiostro put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t worry, dear, we’ll find a way to fix this. Until then you two will have to try to make the best of it.”

  “Make the best of it?” Becky laughed, which sent a shiver through Emma’s body. Becky managed to slither out of Sylvia’s chokehold to get to her feet. Emma braced for her friend to come at her again, but Becky started for the door instead. As she reached the front door, she turned back around. “All right, I’m going to make the best of it. I’m going to get some tattoos and piercings and maybe a couple pounds of heroin. How’s that for making the best of it?”

  “Rebecca, please, don’t do anything foolish to Emma’s body. We’ll sort this out. You just have to be patient.”

  “The hell with being patient. And the hell with all of you!” Becky slammed the front door. Emma turned to go after her, but Ms. Chiostro tightened her grip on Emma’s shoulder.

  “Let her go, dear. She needs some time to adjust.”

  “Not like you could catch her anyway,” Sylvia grumbled.

  Emma felt her cheeks turn warm at this. There was no way she could run down Becky—not like this. She would have to hope Becky didn’t decide to do anything crazy while she occupied Emma’s body. “What do we do now?”

  Ms. Chiostro looked over at Sylvia. “I think this is too much for us to handle on our own. We have to see the head of our coven. She has more experience; she’ll know what to do.”

  “What if she doesn’t? What if we’re like this forever?”

  “You can’t think like that, dear. We’ll find a way to change you back. In the meantime, try to do what Rebecca would normally do.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “That’s a good girl. Now, Sylvia and I have to go get ready. Will you be all right?”

  “I’ll be fine.” For the first time, she noticed what she wore. “I’d better go and change. I can’t go to work like this.”

  “Be very careful. This is Rebecca’s life, not yours.”

  “I will. Thank you.” Emma waddled back out to Becky’s car, glad to see Becky hadn’t tried to take it. With the car she might be able to find her friend, but she supposed Ms. Chiostro was right. Becky just needed some time for the shock to wear off. In the meantime, Emma would try to do what Becky normally did, even if she didn’t know anything about politics.

  She nearly crashed the car into a tree when Marlin appeared through the passenger’s side door. “So you’re Emma now, are you?” the ghost asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You really got the short end of the stick. Or should I say the fat end of the stick.”

  “Shut up.”

  “If you think those hags are going to fix this, think again. This is the kind of magic only my master can fix.”

  “What am I supposed to do, cut out my heart again?”

  “You could try it.”

  “Shut up,” she snapped again. She turned to where the ghost floated over the passenger’s seat. “Hasn’t anything like this ever happened before?”

  “Of course not. This only seems to happen when you’re involved.”

  Emma replayed what had happened again in her mind. “It was your armor that did this to us. I tried to open the case and it shocked me and then I woke up as Becky.”

  “If the case did that it must have had a good reason. It was probably trying to protect itself from something.”

  Emma remembered the last time the armor had tried to protect itself. She had gone mad and rampaged through the city in search of her dead mother until Becky stopped her. Back then Ms. Chiostro had explained that the scarlet armor was like a living organism that would do anything to protect the integrity of its magic. Its magic. She thought of the tests Ms. Chiostro had run. There was something wrong with her aura, something that wasn’t supposed to be there.

  “It’s the meteor,” she said. “That’s what the armor is protecting itself from.”

  “What are you going on about?”

  “The meteor at Bykov’s house. After it shocked me I tried to call for the armor but it wouldn’t come. You couldn’t come to me either.” The ghost stared at her. “Don’t you get it? Something in that meteor infected me—my aura. The armor made sure that I couldn’t spread the infection to it by doing this.” She poked her gut for emphasis.

  “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. If the armor wanted to stop you, it could have easily killed you. Then it could send out the Call to find someone else.”

  Emma considered this for a moment as she drove. She checked her rearview mirror before she shifted lanes. For a moment she caught a glimpse of her eyes—Becky’s brown eyes. “No, the armor couldn’t kill me,” she said. “I bonded with it, remember? There is still a little bit of it in me.” She pointed to her eye. “It did the next best thing.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “I won’t argue with you there.” Emma pulled into the driveway of Becky’s house. She thought perhaps her friend would be here, but the house was silent as she entered. Marlin disappeared for a few moments; he returned to report there was nobody upstairs. “Well, I guess I’d better go to work.”

  “Work?”

  “At Councilwoman Napier’s office.”

  “Why don’t you just call in sick? Take a mental health day.”

  “For how long? It might be weeks before we can find a way to switch us back—if ever.” Emma started up the stairs; her legs burned as if she’d run a mile by the time she reached the top. The bedroom looked exactly as she’d left it this morning, which meant Becky hadn’t shown up at the house. But if Becky stayed on foot she might arrive later. Emma turned to see Marlin hover by the ceiling. “Try to find Becky. Make sure she doesn’t do anything stupid.” Emma smiled tiredly. “I want my body back the way I left it.”

  The ghost grumbled to himself as he disappeared back through the ceiling. The last thing Emma heard him say was, “We never had this problem with the men.”

  ***

  The whole night and morning had been strange, but not as strange as when Emma stepped into the shower. She hadn’t seen Becky naked since she was five years old and Mom gave them a bath together after they got into a mud fight outside. She traced her fingers along the stretch marks on Becky’s stomach like those of a pregnant woman though Becky had never been pregnant.

  She kept her eyes closed as she shampooed Becky’s longer hair and then while she ran the soap along Becky’s skin. She ran the bar of soap underneath Becky’s gut, but stopped before her hand went any lower. She thought of what Becky had promised to do to Emma’s body; she supposed it would be a small thing to wash Becky’s privates, but she pulled her hand away out of embarrassment.

  After she wrapped a towel around herself, she stopped in front of the bathroom mirror again. She ran through every facial expression and thought of how she had been Becky’s friend for twenty years but never really thought of what it was like to be Becky. “I’m going to take good care of you,” she said into the mirror and then smiled.

  Unlike earlier in the morning, this time she rummaged through the closet more slowly to pick out a black suit and white blouse she remembered she’d seen Becky wear to work before. She turned her head away as she reached into a drawer for a pair of panties;
she didn’t want to see Becky’s underwear. The clothes were a little more snug than Emma was used to, but they would do at least for today.

  As she drove into work, Emma waited for Marlin to return and update her on what Becky had done with her body. He didn’t appear by the time she reached city hall, where Becky worked as the top aide for the city council president. When a security guard stopped her just inside the entrance, Emma thought for sure the jig was up and she would be exposed as an impostor. The guard asked to see her identification badge. Emma reached into Becky’s purse until she found it.

  “You’re supposed to wear it at all times while in the building, Mrs. Scherr,” the guard said. It wasn’t until the guard handed the badge back to her that Emma saw the name was listed as Mrs. Rebecca Scherr even though Becky and Steve’s wedding had not been official; Steve didn’t live long enough to sign the marriage license, a fact Emma blamed on herself. If she had paid more attention, she might have spotted the assassin and saved Steve’s life so he and Becky could be together instead of Becky by herself, her only comfort in pints of rocky road ice cream.

  The guard cleared his throat to indicate Emma should move on. “Oh, yes, thank you.” Almost immediately after the elevator doors opened on the fifth floor, Emma’s nose detected the smell of donuts. Her stomach rumbled to remind her Becky hadn’t eaten anything since that pint of rocky road.

  She followed her nose through the maze of cubicles to the kitchen, where someone had left a box of donuts. Emma usually drank only a protein shake or can of Red Bull for breakfast, but she couldn’t stop herself before she snatched four of the donuts from the box. She downed one in the kitchen before she even filled a cup with coffee. The second she devoured by the time she reached the kitchen door.

  The other two she ate at her desk. No one said anything about her appearance; they didn’t seem to pay any attention to her. She wolfed down the donuts and then washed them down with the coffee before she suppressed a satisfied belch. She wiped at the crumbs on her mouth when a young man poked his head into her cubicle. “Hey Becky, Napier’s looking for you.”