“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Great.” Sylvia leaned close and a smile lit up her face. “I think he might be the one.”
“You do?”
“It’s been so long since I felt this way about a man.”
“That’s good. You two seem like a great couple.”
“How are things going for you? Maybe we could double date sometime?”
“I’ve been a little busy lately. I haven’t had time.”
“You’re still pining for Dan.” As Tim had said, sometimes it seemed as if Sylvia was psychic. “If you want him, why don’t you go out and get him?”
“I don’t know. Every time I get mixed up with him, bad things happen.”
“Come on, Emma, at some point you have to stop running away from it. Take a chance. Maybe you’ll be surprised.” Sylvia brushed a tress of hair away from her face. “Weren’t you the one who told me to do something to shake things up? Why don’t you take your own advice?”
“I guess I could try.”
“Atta girl. In fact, why don’t you do it now? I’ll tell Tim that you left something back at school. That’ll give us some alone time.”
Emma took a deep breath and then let it out. “OK,” she said. “I’ll do it.”
She hurried out of the restaurant, careful so she didn’t run into Tim on her way out. She hoped he wouldn’t be too disappointed by her sudden absence; she supposed Sylvia would take care of that. It had begun to rain since she arrived and she had not thought to bring an umbrella. She tightened her jacket around her and waved frantically for a cab.
She didn’t need the cab, though, as she saw Dan coming down the street. Pressed next to him beneath his umbrella was Becky, his hand in hers. As Emma watched, Dan leaned down to whisper something into Becky’s ear. They laughed at whatever he told her. Then they stopped and turned to face each other. Time seemed to slow down as he bent down to kiss her on the lips just as he had done in front of her house the day Emma moved in.
Emma stood paralyzed; she watched them until the cabbie said, “Hey lady, are you getting in or not? I don’t have all night for you to make up your mind.”
Emma turned away from her best friend and the man she loved to duck into the cab, out of the rain. She choked up as she said, “Take me home.”
VOLUME V
Betrayal Begets Blood
Prologue
The house that overlooked the Mediterranean was visible from miles down the winding road. Harry Wittman stared at it for a moment; he had often yearned to own such a house beside the sea, but had never been able to afford one. The best he could do was to visit one.
Harry checked the directions again as he neared the front gate. Whoever this Eileen was, she was loaded. He couldn’t imagine what she would want to buy from him, unless she was one of those dictators in exile who hoped to stage a counter-revolution. Or maybe she just wanted to equip a private army to protect her mansion from attack.
As he reached the gate, he saw an intercom and pressed the red button. “Can I help you?” came a pleasant female voice.
“My name is Harry Wittman. I’m here to see Eileen.” Eileen had not given a last name in her Email, only a first name, an address, and the promise of a substantial payday.
At another time Harry might have blown it off as a trap by Interpol or another law enforcement agency, but he couldn’t be too choosy at the moment. Ever since 9/11 the arms business had boomed and yet Harry hadn’t seen any benefit from it. If anything it had been a disaster for him as too many sellers flooded the market and cheap Chinese-manufactured weapons had brought prices down.
Eileen’s message had come to him in Grakistan, where he’d had a line to sell to a splinter group of Grakistanis. He’d worked for two months on the deal to sell them a bunch of used AK-47s, RPG launchers, and SA-7 anti-aircraft missiles. He would have made a fortune on the deal—except someone beat him to it.
Sylvia Joubert. That old, dried-up dyke. He’d never met her in person, but he knew her well. She was one of those rare arms dealers with morals. She refused to sell to a side she didn’t believe fought for a worthy cause. There were stories that if someone tried to use her weapons unjustly they’d refuse to work—some stories indicated they would even turn against the owners. Harry discounted these stories, but couldn’t discount she was a nuisance to undercut him at the last moment.
The woman’s voice startled him as she said, “Oh, you must be the friend Eileen mentioned. Come on in.”
The gates parted to let Harry inside. He drove his rented Mercedes up a steep driveway, past a lush yard populated by palm trees. The trail wound enough that he lost sight of the house for a few moments. Then it popped back into view; its white façade and orange tile roof filled the front windshield. If he weren’t driving he might have rubbed his hands together with glee in anticipation of a sizable transaction.
He stopped in front of the house; there were no other cars in the driveway. They were probably back in the garage. He tried to imagine how many there would be: Ferraris, Mercedes-Benzes, and Land Rovers lined up in neat rows, at least one for every day of the week.
He expected a butler or maid to let him in. Instead, there was only a middle-aged woman in a sweatshirt and jeans, her blond hair in a sloppy ponytail to give the overall impression she’d just cleaned the attic or painted the kitchen. When she spoke, it was in the same cheerful voice he’d heard at the gate. “Hello, Mr. Wittman. I hope you didn’t have any trouble finding the place?”
“No, no trouble at all,” Harry said. “Are you Eileen?”
“Oh heavens no! I’m her mother.”
“Her mother?” Unless she’d discovered some kind of Fountain of Youth, there was no way for this woman to be over forty. For her to be Eileen’s mother meant Eileen was in her early twenties at most. A rich princess or duchess maybe.
“That’s right. Her father is out back, tending to the garden.” Eileen’s mother motioned for Harry to come inside. He found the interior as lavish as the outside of the house with paintings and sculptures along the main hallway, a living room appointed with expensive leather furniture, and a dining room that could seat two-dozen.
“You have a beautiful home,” Harry said. His estimation of Eileen’s net worth increased with every step.
“It’s not really ours. It belongs to a friend of ours. This place is a bit much for us, but Eileen seems to like it. It’s done wonders for her disposition. She used to be so cranky, but now she’s happy as a lamb.”
Harry resisted the urge to raise an eyebrow at this. Cranky, especially bothered him, though he couldn’t be sure exactly why. What else troubled him was Eileen’s mother seemed so Middle American, and yet here she was in a villa along the sea in Spain. Something didn’t add up here. Again he considered the possibility of a trap; certainly there were enough places for government agents to hide until he incriminated himself.
Eileen’s mother motioned to a white door at the end of the long hallway. “She’s in the nursery, having tea with her other friends,” she said.
Nursery? Harry retreated a step even as Eileen’s mother opened the door. Once she did, he saw his worst fears realized. “Is this some kind of joke?” he said.
Harry gaped at the nursery with its pastel blue walls decorated with cheerful clowns and balloons, stuffed animals on the floor, and porcelain dolls on shelves near the ceiling. His gaze turned to the center of the room and a round wooden table. Four tiny chairs sat around the table, one occupied by a stuffed unicorn and another by a large baby doll, both with plastic teacups, saucers, and plates of cookies in front of them. A third place was set in an identical fashion, though at the moment no one sat in the chair.
At the fourth chair sat a little girl. She looked nothing like Eileen’s mother with glossy black hair bound into pigtails and the tan skin of someone from the other end of the Mediterranean. She wore a pink dress nearly identical to the ruffled and lacy one worn by the baby doll at the table.
Eilee
n’s mother paid no attention to his question. Her body had turned stiff; she moved with a jerky gate as if she were a life-sized marionette. “Eileen? Mr. Wittman is here to see you.”
Harry hoped he had missed someone else in the room, someone considerably older who might be hidden in the closet. Instead, as he feared, the little girl spoke. “Thank you, Mother,” she said with the grace of a queen. “You may leave us to talk privately.”
To Harry’s surprise, Eileen’s mother gave a short bow and then backed out of the room like a servant. She closed the doors behind her with a barely audible click to leave Harry with the well-spoken toddler.
The little girl turned to face him. He told himself it must be a trick of the light that her irises appeared to be as black—no, blacker—than her pupils. She smiled at him to reveal dimples that would have been adorable on a normal little girl but on her gave him a cold shiver. “Have a seat, Mr. Wittman. We have much to discuss.”
Though he wanted to run from the nursery and its creepy occupant, he squatted to sit on the open seat at the table. To his surprise there was actually tea in the cup. “I had Mother put on a fresh pot before you arrived,” Eileen said. “I trust you don’t mind English Breakfast? It’s my favorite.”
“You’re English?” Harry asked. The little girl spoke with no accent that he could trace.
“No. I come from someplace much farther away.”
Harry sipped the tea and tried not to make a face; he had always preferred coffee. “I could have Mother bring you a cup of coffee. Cappuccino, perhaps?”
“I’ll be fine,” he said. He nibbled at one of the almond cookies and tried to think of a polite way to ask how the hell a girl so little could speak so well.
Once again, he didn’t need to ask. “Do you believe in magic, Mr. Wittman?”
“You mean like Houdini or David Copperfield?” Harry shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”
“No, Mr. Wittman, I speak of real magic, like you read about in fairy tales.”
“I haven’t really thought about it.”
“You should, Mr. Wittman.” Eileen took a dainty sip of her tea. Harry glanced over his shoulder at the door and wondered how quickly he could get out of this madhouse and back to the main road. She again read his thoughts. “That would be foolish of you. You would miss out on a tremendous opportunity.”
“What kind of opportunity?”
“One beyond your wildest aspirations.” Eileen smiled at him again. “But then you haven’t ever aspired for very much. You’re a petty, fourth-rate arms dealer selling to the third world. Any day now you’ll wind up lying facedown in the desert to feed the vultures.”
“Now listen you little brat—”
He raised his hand to smack her upside one of her adorable pigtails but found he couldn’t move his hand. “You don’t want to do that,” she said. “You would make me very upset.”
Harry lowered his hand as jerkily as Eileen’s mother had left the room. “Why don’t we get down to business?” he finally said.
“Very well, Mr. Wittman. I will give you the guidance and means to cash in on the greatest weapons deal of any death merchant’s wildest dreams.”
“You? You’re just a kid,” he blurted out before he could stop himself.
“Perhaps I’ve misjudged you. That’s unfortunate.”
Though he knew it was ridiculous, Harry felt his body stiffen in anticipation of something he couldn’t name. She was just a little kid, even if she was a creepy, well-spoken one. Still, one look into her black eyes prompted him to shiver again. In those eyes he saw a deadly abyss, one from which he would never return.
She didn’t do anything to him. She merely motioned to the door with her teacup. “You are free to go, Mr. Wittman. I’m sorry we couldn’t reach an agreement.”
With a wince he stood up from the tiny table and then hurried towards the door. As he reached for the handle, she said, “Before you go, Mr. Wittman, what do you know of your family?”
“Not much. My dad and I didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye about my career choice.”
“Then I don’t suppose anyone ever told you about your great-great-great-great-grandmother Cecelia?”
“Who?”
The little girl shook her head sadly, as if she were the adult and he the child. “Perhaps you are more familiar with her mother: Sylvia Joubert?”
Harry’s mouth fell open. He made a series of nonsense sounds before he finally gathered the wherewithal to say, “You don’t mean—” He stopped as he saw the smug grin on her face. “That can’t be. She’d have to be over two hundred years old!”
“Five hundred nine to be exact.”
“But that’s impossible! No one could live that long!”
“All things are possible with the right magic,” Eileen said. She patted the place setting he had abandoned. “Sit down and I will open your eyes to everything that is possible for you.”
Harry sat back at the table and listened to what the little girl said. When she finished, Harry again wanted to rub his hands together with glee; he would make far more from this than he’d ever imagined.
Part 1
Chapter 1
Dr. Emma Earl liked the morning session of Geology 101 the least of all. It wasn’t the course material or even the students that bothered her. The problem was the nine o’clock start time.
She would have preferred to teach the afternoon and night sessions, but as the newest member of the faculty at Rampart State, she didn’t have that luxury. She reminded herself she was lucky to have a job at all. If Dr. Maxwell hadn’t thought of her when an opening became available, she’d probably be sweeping up hair in Sylvia’s salon.
This particular morning she felt more sluggish than usual; she downed a can of Red Bull before class and poured another into her coffee mug to drink while she lectured on the basics of plate tectonics. She hadn’t fallen asleep until five in the morning, when she had passed out in the Sanctuary, still clad in most of the Scarlet Knight’s armor. If Marlin hadn’t woke her up two hours later, she might have slept all morning.
When she had examined her face in the mirror of the ladies room, she had done what she could about the bags beneath her eyes. More problematic were the bruises on her left forearm from when she’d awkwardly landed after she was thrown from the roof of the Plastic Hippo. She hadn’t had time even to use her cape to slow her descent before she landed on her arm in the alley, where a dozen nasty men had waited for her.
If not for the armor they would have torn her to pieces. Instead, she took down half of them hard enough that they would require a trip to the hospital before they went to jail. The rest had retreated to the relative safety of the strip club. She might have gone after them, but she had completed her test of the modifications she and Sylvia had made to the Scarlet Knight’s armor. She could now definitely say their attempts to make her invisible to cameras and other automated sensors had failed miserably.
Had it been successful, it might have been much easier to get into Don Vendetta’s headquarters. Ever since Becky—who at the time had switched bodies with Emma—had raided the Plastic Hippo in a violent raid, the don had quadrupled her security. Besides video cameras, the don’s people had installed motion detectors, infrared scanners, and even X-ray machines to make sure the Scarlet Knight couldn’t infiltrate the club. A concoction of several plants Emma never knew existed spread on the cape and armor was supposed to have phased her out of reality so nothing could see her. She got as far as the club’s side entrance, where the dozen goons had been, before she knew the experiment was a failure.
She resisted the urge to let out a tired sigh as she sat at her desk to open her grade book. The mundane procedures like attendance had come easily to her after years of disciplined study and as head of the geology department at the Plaine Museum. She scanned the list and easily put the names with faces in her classrooms. That was until she came to Putnam, Megan.
Emma looked around the classroom for the absent student. “Megan Put
nam?” she asked. The other fifty-five students in the class stared down at her blankly from their seats in the lecture hall. “Megan?” Emma waited a moment before she put an ‘X’ beside Megan’s name in the book.
It was the third such ‘X’ this week. Before that, Megan Putnam had never missed a class. In fact, she had always arrived before Emma; she would stand nervously at the door until Emma opened it for her. The girl would then whisper, “Thank you, Dr. Earl.” After that she took her customary seat in the fifth row, in the middle. Once other students arrived, Megan would hunch down in her seat, as if she wanted to disappear under the table.
This week, Megan finally had disappeared. She had not shown up Monday or Wednesday for class. She had not phoned Emma’s office or left a message with any of the department secretaries. Emma found this third absence disconcerting.
At the moment, there was nothing she could do but finish the roll. After a hearty swig from her coffee mug full of Red Bull, she began her lecture on the basics of plate tectonics. As she spoke, she couldn’t help but look at the empty seat in the middle of the fifth row and wonder what had become of the girl who had occupied that seat.
***
An intern in the registrar’s office with an artificially pale white face and far too much black makeup around her eyes handed a thin folder to Emma. “Here you go,” the girl said. The chain in her nose jangled as she leaned forward. “Just don’t leave the building with it.”
Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis Page 31
