“Oh.” From the disappointment in his voice and something in those strange, red-brown eyes, Aggie knew Rizzard loved Emma. Aggie had heard about the sculptures he made of the Scarlet Knight and her alter ego, but to Aggie this had been more like some kind of strange worship, like totems erected by primitive tribes. Now she could see the feelings ran much deeper than that.
“She’ll be back soon. Don’t you worry. That girl can take care of herself.”
“Yes,” Rizzard said. “She strong.”
“Yes, she is.” If not strong in muscles—though she could certainly beat Aggie in an arm wrestling match—then strong in heart at least. Perhaps that was what Rizzard loved about her, that and she didn’t recoil in horror at him and the company he kept.
After she checked Rizzard’s wounds, Aggie went down to the parlor. There was still no sign of Emma. As she set to repair a gown she had recently purchased from the estate of a wealthy widow, Aggie wondered how Emma felt about Rizzard. The concern she had shown when she sat at his bed certainly indicated she cared for him, but did she love him? Aggie couldn’t be certain about this.
She doubted Emma did either. In her heart she still loved Dan Dreyfus, the Egyptologist she had worked with at the Plaine Museum. Against Aggie’s strict advice, Emma had slipped him a potion to make him forget their time together and send him back to Egypt. There he’d fallen in love with a woman named Isis, who had turned out to be the evil creature who had long ago created the Black Dragoon. She had died, but Emma had not moved in on Dan. That wasn’t her style. As well, Emma still had her duty as the Scarlet Knight, whom Dan blamed for killing his beloved wife.
The situation was a mess, one that would only get messier if Rizzard entered the picture. Perhaps it was time for Aggie to have a talk with the girl, to get everything out in the open. She supposed it wasn’t really her business, but since the first time they’d met, Aggie had seen Emma like one of her grandchildren. The thought of this made Aggie sigh. By now she probably had great-great-great-great-grandchildren, but there was no way she could see them. It was against the rules to tell them she was a witch and it would be impossible for them to believe someone who looked as young as she did was their great-to-however-many-times-grandmother. Emma and her friend Becky were the closest she had at the moment.
She wasn’t sure when exactly she fell asleep. One moment she was thinking about her distant relations and Emma Earl and the next she found herself in a sandbox. It was a typical child’s sandbox with toys and dolls scattered around. These belonged to a little redheaded girl who looked like a much younger Emma. The girl smiled, which showed off adorable dimples that belied the iciness of her voice. “No, I’m not your friend Emma.”
“Then who are you?”
“My name’s Joanna.” She patted one of her pigtails. “But people call me Red because of my hair.”
“So you’re one of the others like Akako,” Aggie said.
“Not exactly, but close.”
“Is there something wrong with Akako?” Aggie asked.
“Very good. You need to get to the archives right away. Akako needs you.”
“What’s happened to her?”
“You’ll find out when you get there. Just be careful. Akako is one of my favorites.”
“Wait—” Aggie started to say, but she was already sinking through the sand; the little girl disappeared from view.
Aggie’s eyes shot open. For a moment she looked around and found herself in the parlor. She threw aside the dress she had been working on and then scrambled to find a pen and paper. She scrawled a note to tell Emma she had gone to the archives. Then she vanished in a flash of light from the parlor.
***
She reappeared on the first floor of the archives to see little Joanna was right. Akako lay on the ground with blood in her hair. Aggie bent down and put a finger to the wound. It didn’t seem too deep, not nearly enough to cause any serious injury. Akako might just have a bad headache whenever she woke up.
Aggie helped Akako sit up. Then Aggie tapped the young woman’s cheeks, to rouse her. She slapped Akako harder, enough to leave red marks on Akako’s almond skin. “Come on,” Aggie said. “Wake up.”
With another mortal—or even another witch—Aggie could have tried an electric touch spell to give Akako a little jolt, but magic wouldn’t work on her. She would have to rely on more conventional means, but there were no buckets of cold water handy. That at least she could summon with a sprinkler spell.
After she said a few words, Aggie held up her left hand a few inches from Akako’s face. A jet of cold water burst from the hand to spray into Akako’s face. Nothing happened for a moment and then Akako groaned. Her eyes fluttered open. She smiled when she looked up at Aggie. “You came,” she said.
“Of course I did.”
Aggie wiped water from Akako’s face with one hand. “What happened here? Did someone hit you?”
“I don’t know. I was at my desk and then the lift opened and—oh no.”
“What is it?”
“Your sister. She came out of the lift. She looked so sad. I think she had been crying. She handed me a piece of paper and then—”
“Then what?”
“Something hit me. Do you think it was her?”
“It’s possible,” Aggie said. It wasn’t a secret Sylvia didn’t like Akako, was jealous Akako had usurped Aggie’s affection. Even after she found that nice young man Timothy, Sylvia still held a grudge when it came to Akako; she refused even to speak Akako’s name. But for Sylvia to go so far as to attack Akako, that didn’t seem likely. Or more to the point, for Sylvia to attack Akako and leave her alive didn’t seem likely. With all the guns, knives, and other weapons Sylvia owned it didn’t make sense for her to simply hit Akako in the back of the head, not when she could have blown her into tiny pieces. “What else did she say?”
“She said she wanted a spell. An old one.”
“Then she’s probably down in the vault. Stay here.”
“Agnes, no. You can’t go alone. Her magic—”
“She’s my sister, Akako. She wouldn’t use her magic on me.”
Aggie heard a metallic click. She didn’t have to look up to know Sylvia had taken the safety off one of her precious guns. Aggie turned slowly to confirm this. “What are you doing, Sylvia? If Glenda finds out—”
“I don’t care about that,” Sylvia said. “Just stay out of my way and I won’t have to hurt you.”
Aggie put an arm around Akako’s shoulders and then they stood up together to face the barrel of Sylvia’s gun. “Hurt me? Sylvia, what’s going on? Let me help.”
“You can’t, Agnes. Not this time. I have to do this for myself.”
Aggie took a step forward; she still supported Akako on her shoulder. “Sylvia—”
“Not another step, Agnes.”
“You won’t shoot me.”
A tiny smile came across Sylvia’s face. She pointed the revolver at Akako. “But you know I’d shoot it.”
“No you wouldn’t. You’re not a killer.”
“It wouldn’t matter, would it? Another one would show up. How many of you are there?”
“Two hundred twenty-six that I know of, but potentially an infinite number,” Akako said.
“See? No big loss.”
Aggie still didn’t think Sylvia would shoot Akako—not fatally at least—but she didn’t want to find out. At the same time, whatever Sylvia was up to needed to stop before she got herself into trouble with the coven, trouble not even Aggie could smooth over, as she had before. Though she didn’t carry an actual weapon, she had other weapons at her disposal. The problem was Sylvia was far better at offensive magic. Aggie would lose in a fight between them. But there were other spells that might work.
One that didn’t was an empathy spell. Once she finished, anyone she looked in the eye would feel the same things she felt. The difficult part was to meet Sylvia’s eyes because her sister uncharacteristically looked down at the ground. “Sylv
ia, this is stupid. But then you’ve always been a hothead. I guess that comes from being the baby of the family.”
Sylvia turned to face her and in that moment their eyes met. Sylvia’s eyes went wide for a moment and then she put her hook to her temple. “Agnes, I’m sorry,” she said. She clicked the safety on the gun before it dropped from her grasp. “Are you all right?” At the moment she had picked up on Aggie’s concern for her and mirrored it.
“I’m fine. So is Akako. What about you?”
Sylvia shook her head. The shaking became more pronounced until Aggie worried her sister might develop whiplash. “No!” Sylvia screamed. “I can’t stop now. He’s going to kill him!”
Aggie took a step forward and put a hand on Sylvia’s shoulder. She tried to project calm so it would in turn work on Sylvia. “Who’s going to kill who?”
“You’re not going to get away with this,” Sylvia said through clenched teeth. She staggered back to Akako’s desk and grabbed it with her hook for support. Her hand reached into her pocket. She continued to shake her head as if possessed.
“Don’t fight against it, Sylvia. You’re only going to hurt yourself.” Aggie took another step towards her sister and reached out with one hand to calm her. They had been through this the first time Aggie was seventeen and had used the empathy spell by accident on eight-year-old Sylvia. The problem came when Mama gave Aggie a thrashing for it; Sylvia had experienced the same pain. It was a painful lesson about misusing magic. “It’ll wear off in a few hours. Just like it did last time. Remember?”
Before Aggie could touch Sylvia, she saw that Sylvia had produced a scroll from her pocket. That must have been what she had come to the archives to find. “Sylvia, whatever that is, you can’t—”
Sylvia didn’t have to say any words to make the spell work. The older, more powerful spells kept in the vault didn’t need to be spoken. They only needed the presence of magic to manifest themselves. An ancient spell had literally thrown itself at Aggie and caused her mind to turn backwards.
This spell didn’t throw itself at her. Instead, it streaked like a falling star to a few feet from where Akako stood. Aggie put an arm to her eyes so the explosion of purple light wouldn’t blind her. When this explosion cleared, Aggie saw a portal of the same purple light. A hurricane wind suddenly enveloped the first floor of the archives; it easily swept Akako into the portal. Aggie screamed her name but received no answer.
She fought against the wind and reached out for Sylvia’s hand. Her eyes met her sister’s for a moment before Sylvia turned her back away and sunk her claw into Akako’s desk. “Sylvia, please!” Aggie screamed as the wind pushed her away from the desk an inch at a time.
“I’m sorry,” Sylvia said, or at least Aggie thought that’s what Sylvia said. Then a gust of wind threw her into the air and batted her into the portal. After that her world went dark.
Chapter 8
The sound of loud music woke Aggie. The music was like nothing she listened to, with a techno beat and dreary, almost dirge-like singing. She wondered where this strange music came from.
She opened her eyes and saw the red digital numbers of a clock radio, which at the moment read, “7:00.” Am or pm? she wondered. How long had she been unconscious? And for that matter, where was she?
From the softness beneath her, she assumed she was on a bed. With a sigh of relief, she played the last moments of consciousness through her mind. She had vanished herself into the archives, where she found Akako injured. Then Sylvia had shown up and pointed a gun at them. Aggie used an empathy spell to confuse her sister. Sylvia had reached into her pocket for a scroll. She’d thrown it. It had shattered. A purple gateway opened. The gateway sucked Akako into it. Then—
Then it had sucked Aggie in. So the gateway must have deposited her somewhere and some kindly person had found her and given her shelter. What about Akako? Would she be here too? Aggie stopped herself; she decided she should figure out where she was before she jumped to any other conclusions. She reached out to turn off the annoying radio—
Even in the dim light of the bedroom she knew something was wrong. Her hand looked far chubbier than she remembered from before she was knocked out. She flexed the stubby fingers, the ends of which were painted with dark nail polish. Clearly this hand belonged to her.
The unfamiliar hand mashed buttons on the radio until it finally turned off. Aggie stared at her hand for a few more moments, as her mind still tried to wrap around the problem. She wondered if perhaps she was still asleep. She touched her face like a blind person. She pinched a cheek just as pudgy as the hand and winced from a stab of pain.
So it’s not a dream, she thought. She sat up and looked down at herself. A rough blanket covered her body so she saw only the outline of a much flatter bosom and much bulgier stomach.
“Oh no,” she said. At least her voice sounded the same, though perhaps slightly deeper.
A door eased open. Aggie could make out the profile of a woman in the doorway. “Agnes, it’s time to get up. You don’t want to be late for school.”
School? Agnes hadn’t ever gone to a real school; her mother had taught Aggie and her sisters the basics of reading and writing and then the coven had taught them about magic. That had been almost five hundred years ago.
“Agnes, do you hear me?” A light flicked on; Aggie put a hand to her eyes and let out a cry of pain. “Are you feeling all right, Agnes?”
She blinked a few times to clear her vision. In the doorway was a middle-aged woman who looked remarkably similar to Aggie’s long-dead mother. “Mama?” Aggie said.
“What is it, honey? Are you sick?”
“No, I’ll be fine,” Aggie said. She looked around the room to see posters tacked to the walls, clothes thrown on the floor, and a large canvas bag on a desk with notebooks sticking out of it. From all the other evidence, she assumed she was a teenager, only she had vanished somewhere else. No doubt thanks to that strange portal Sylvia’s spell had conjured. “I just need a minute.”
“Don’t be too long, young lady, or you’ll miss the bus and I’m not driving you to school again.” The woman who was almost certainly Aggie’s mother backed out of the room and closed the door behind her.
Aggie finally threw back the covers to find herself clad in a long black T-shirt and a pair of running shorts that were far too short. Her stomach looked even bigger without the blanket, to remind her of Rebecca. What was going on?
She waddled over to the vanity, where she finally saw herself in the mirror. Given the rest of her body, the bulging cheeks and double chin weren’t a surprise. What did shock her was the short, spiky hair dyed the same purple as that gateway Sylvia sent her through. Between the purple hair and the black on her nails, lips, and around her eyes she knew what she had become.
In the clubs of Rampart City, Aggie had heard of Goth before, but it had never interested her. Dreary music, black clothes, and a fascination with pain and death conflicted with her generally sunny outlook. That kind of thing had seemed more appropriate for Sylvia, but then Sylvia was far too old and cynical for world-weary posing.
“This is not good,” Aggie said to herself. As she stared at her new body in the mirror, she tried to think of what to do. Finally she decided that for the moment she should play along and pretend to be this Agnes, at least until she could figure out where she was and what had happened to her.
In the closet, she found her suspicions confirmed by the wide array of black, gray, and dark purple clothes. She threw on a purple dress and black sweater that were a little tight against her gut but not uncomfortably so. For shoes she found only pairs of ugly black boots and squeezed her stubby feet into a pair of these. Then she snatched up the black canvas bag, which she assumed would be necessary for school.
She found her mother in the kitchen, hunched over the stove. Another girl sat at the table, Aggie’s polar opposite in that she was rail-thin with mousy brown hair and wore a light blue T-shirt and jeans. The girl turned around and Aggi
e nearly fainted at the sight of a ghost.
“Well, looks like the dark princess has emerged from her lair,” the girl said. Her blue eyes narrowed behind her plastic-framed glasses.
“Sophie?” Aggie said.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing.” Aggie sat down at the table. She couldn’t help but stare across the table at her sister, whom she hadn’t seen in over three hundred years.
“Something wrong with you?” Sophie asked. “You look paler than usual.”
“It’s just some new makeup,” Aggie said.
“What exactly do you think you’re rebelling against by looking like a freak?”
“I don’t know.”
“That figures.”
“Now, girls, don’t fight.” Aggie’s mom set down a plate of pancakes between them. “Hurry up and eat your breakfast.”
To distract herself from staring at her sister, she devoured a stack of pancakes. She did sneak a few glances as she crammed food into her mouth. From the look of it, Sophie was about the same age as her, if not older. What about Sylvia? Was she here somewhere too? For that matter, where was here? Some kind of bizarre afterlife? Had that portal taken her to the Great Beyond or was this some kind of reincarnation?
She knew better than to ask Sophie or her mother these questions. They would only think she was ill. She would have to play along and hope she could make some sense of it later.
Aggie felt a hand on her back. “Agnes, come on. You don’t want to be late.”
She blinked her eyes a few times and saw that Sophie had already retrieved a pink backpack and waited by the door for her. “Maybe she should stay home, Mom. She’s acting weirder than usual.”
Aggie’s mother put a hand to her forehead. “You don’t feel warm.”
“I’ll be fine,” Aggie said. She reached down for her canvas bag and then pushed away from the table. Before she left, she stood on her tiptoes to kiss her mother’s cheek, something she hadn’t done in over four hundred years.
“Now I know there’s something wrong with you,” Sophie grumbled.
Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis Page 37
