Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis

by P. T. Dilloway

  To apply the potion was the easiest part for Sylvia. She simply had to rinse Emma’s hair in the sink and then rub in the potion like shampoo for any client. The only difference was that her client was unconscious, wore only her undergarments, and the shampoo smelled distinctly like burnt coffee grounds.

  As she rubbed in the shampoo, Sylvia repeated the information on the flyer over and over again until it became a sort of mantra. She couldn’t be sure Emma really heard her, at least until she saw Emma’s hair lighten from its usual orange-red to gold and then finally to a white-blond. Sylvia watched as the features of Emma’s face began to change as well: her nose shrunk, her jaw narrowed, and her cheeks inflated a bit. Sylvia had always thought Emma was too pale and yet somehow her skin turned even whiter, to the point Sylvia thought she might be dead—or possibly undead. She put a finger to Emma’s shorter neck to feel a strong pulse.

  Sylvia rinsed out the last of the shampoo. The last suds had drained down the sink when Emma sat upright in the chair. Her eyes opened wide, still blue but a lighter shade than before. She looked around the darkened salon and finally turned to Sylvia. “Where am I?” she asked in an unfamiliar voice, one even softer than her usual one.

  Sylvia forced a smile to her face. “Well, young lady, I think we’re all done here.” She spun the chair around so Emma could face the mirror. “What do you think?”

  Sylvia had expected a scream or a gasp; she didn’t expect Emma to hyperventilate. The girl’s face began to turn red and then purple as she struggled to breathe. Her hands clawed at the armrests of the chair until she threatened to tear them off. Sylvia put a hand on Emma’s shoulder. “Settle down. It’s all right. Just breathe slowly.”

  “Inhaler,” Emma said through her wheezes. One hand went to her throat, as if to tear it open to let air in.

  “Oh shit,” Sylvia said. She hadn’t planned for this contingency. While Emma’s face started to turn blue, Sylvia tried to think of a spell that might work. None came to mind to cure an asthma attack. Then she looked back at Val’s workstation and remembered Val had asthma too, though not this serious. Sylvia put a hand on Emma’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Hold on. Just hold on.”

  Sylvia broke open the box that contained Val’s personal items. She rifled through bottles of perfume and tubes of lipstick before she found the inhaler at the bottom. She held it aloft as if it were the Holy Grail. “Here you go, sweetheart,” she said. She pressed the inhaler into Emma’s hands. “Come on, now.”

  Emma’s hands gripped the inhaler like a life preserver. She brought it to her lips and then squeezed it. For a few seconds Sylvia thought nothing would happen, that she had doomed her friend. Then Emma’s breathing relaxed; her face slowly turned back from blue to purple and finally back to its normal pasty white.

  Then Emma sagged in the chair and the inhaler fell on the floor. Sylvia picked it up; she decided she had better get the girl home as quickly as possible.

  Part 2

  Chapter 14

  Since she’d never gone to a modern high school, Aggie had no idea what she was supposed to do. Akako had far more experience in this department, so she took the lead. “We have to figure out what classes we’re supposed to go to,” Akako said.

  “How do we do that?”

  “Go to the office.”

  “Where’s that?”

  Akako shrugged but started towards the rectangular main building. As they walked across the football field, Akako explained that the building had a bunch of different rooms, each one a classroom where different classes were held. Whenever a bell rang, the class would end and students would have a few minutes to get to the next one before another bell sounded. “It sounds like musical chairs,” Aggie said.

  “I guess it is kind of like that.” Akako went on to explain that each student had a locker in which to keep books and other personal articles. “We’ll have to see if they’ll give us the combinations or we won’t be able to get our books.”

  Aggie hoisted her bag higher on her shoulder. “This already has books in it.”

  “Your textbooks?” It was Aggie’s turn to shrug. Akako pointed to a bench outside the gate for the football field. “Maybe we should see what’s in there first. There might be some good information.”

  “You’re the boss,” Aggie said.

  Aggie dropped the bag on the bench with a sigh of relief. How a young girl could carry around so much junk she had no idea. Then again back in her original teen years in France they didn’t have cosmetic products that were so portable. In her late teens she had learned how to control her power so she could vanish herself and her things wherever she wanted.

  She plopped onto the bench next to the bag and wiped sweat from her brow. Her walk across the football field with the heavy bag had felt like a marathon; she wondered if this is how Rebecca felt every day. How could she live like this? Aggie smoothed her purple dress across her flabby stomach and tried a crash diet spell that of course did nothing.

  Aggie sat back and stared up at the blue sky while Akako began to take items out of the bag. She set a pile of notebooks next to Aggie, each of these black with skull-and-crossbones, bats, and pentagrams drawn on the covers. Aggie picked one up and expected to find science or math notes. Instead, she saw page after page of poetry. ‘“The darkness surrounds me. There is nothing to see. Black swallows my head. I am already dead.’ Goodness,” she said. She skimmed through more of the poems. “They’re all that bad.”

  “I didn’t think it was so bad,” Akako said. “At least it rhymed.”

  “So do limericks on the bathroom wall.”

  Akako rummaged through the bag, but produced nothing related to school: a jar of black nail polish, a tube of black lipstick, and a pair of black pantyhose. Most of the weight in the bag came from an entire series of vampire books stuffed in there, each one as thick as a dictionary. From the bottom, Akako took out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “You’d better keep those hidden,” Akako said. She put the cigarettes back on the bottom of the bag. “If a teacher sees you with those you’ll get in trouble.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Aggie said. She had never smoked, not once in her over five hundred plus years of life. It had always seemed like a disgusting habit to her, smelly and messy. Sylvia had smoked up to a pack a day until about twenty years ago, when she had decided the increased cost wasn’t worth it. Aggie’s sister had become grouchier than usual for a few months while she kicked the habit, but she refused the cleansing potion Aggie offered; cold turkey was the only way for someone as stubborn as Sylvia to quit. Alejandro had smoked too, as had Aggie’s sons, despite her attempts to dissuade them. It had been fashionable in those days and no one had seen any danger in it.

  “Agnes, are you all right?” Akako asked.

  Aggie realized then she was crying. She wiped at her eyes and came away with a glob of black mascara. “I was just thinking of Sylvia. Why did she do this to us?”

  “She’s never liked me very much,” Akako said. “Maybe she wanted me out of the way and you were just an accident.”

  “Maybe.” While that explanation made some sense, Aggie didn’t believe it. As tough as she liked to appear, Sylvia wasn’t cold-blooded and she had never misused her power like this in five hundred years; why would she start now?

  Aggie shoved the junk—her junk for the moment—back into the bag. None of it had provided anything useful, except that apparently the her in this universe smoked, wrote terrible poetry, and read silly vampire novels. That wasn’t much to go on. “I guess we’d better go find this office,” she said. She heaved herself off the bench.

  She followed Akako around a corner; she bowled over her much smaller friend when Akako came to an abrupt stop. Aggie was about to ask Akako what was going on, but then she saw the half-dozen kids on the steps at a back entrance to the building. All of them wore variations of the outfits Aggie and Akako wore, all of them had black lipstick and nail polish, and all of them smoked cigarettes.

/>   A girl at the center of the group looked up at them and sneered. Despite the long black hair, baggy black T-shirt, and silver stud in her nose, Aggie recognized her mentor. “Glenda?” she said.

  “Where the fuck have you been, Agnes?” Glenda asked. She pronounced Aggie’s name like a curse. “And why’d you bring the midget? Shouldn’t she be protecting her Lucky Charms?”

  “She’s not a leprechaun,” Aggie said. “Those are Irish.”

  Glenda blew out a cloud of smoke. “Whatever.” A bell rang, but Glenda and the other kids didn’t move; they continued to puff on their cigarettes.

  “Shouldn’t we go to class?” Aggie asked.

  “Oh, right, we wouldn’t want to be late,” Glenda said, the sarcasm evident in her voice. “You’ve been hanging around that teacher’s pet sister of yours too long.”

  “Sophie? What’s she got to do with anything?”

  Glenda flicked her cigarette to the ground and then stood up. She came over to stand practically nose-to-nose with Aggie; she flicked aside a tress of hair to look in Aggie’s eyes. “You going retarded or something?”

  “No.”

  “Did you do your makeup in the dark or you have your mommy do it for you?”

  “No. I’m just a little hot.”

  “You wouldn’t be if you put down the Twinkies once in a while.” A second bell sounded. Glenda turned to look over at her companions. “Come on, we’d better get to class before Agnes tells on us.”

  Without a word the others threw down their cigarettes and began to file through the door. Aggie knew better than to follow them. She stood rooted in place as Glenda stomped away until Akako touched her arm. “We’d better go find the office,” Akako said.

  “OK,” Aggie said. She followed Akako into school. However they were going to get home, she doubted she could count on this Glenda for help.

  ***

  A middle-aged woman looked up from filing her nails; her eyes narrowed at the sight of Aggie and Akako. “Aren’t you girls supposed to be in class?” she asked. Aggie saw a nameplate on her desk that read, “Mrs. Strathmore, Administrative Assistant.”

  Aggie looked down at Akako and let her friend take the lead on this. “Sorry, ma’am, but we forgot our schedules. We were hoping you could give us a copy.”

  “You forgot? Someone hit you on the head or something?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “You girls been smoking dope behind the softball field again?”

  “No, ma’am,” Akako said again. “It’s just that—”

  “Let me guess, the other girls were picking on you again and you thought you could get an excused absence if you came here saying you forgot your schedules?”

  “No, ma’am.” Akako looked up at Aggie and silently pleaded with her to come up with some kind of plausible excuse.

  Aggie looked down at her feet and tried to make her face seem as pitiful as possible. “You’re right, ma’am. We were just trying to get an excused absence.” Aggie turned around and took a step towards the door. “I guess we’ll just go on to class now and take our punishment. Sorry to waste your time.”

  She had grabbed the doorknob before she heard Mrs. Strathmore sigh and say, “Just a second, young lady.” Aggie turned back around to see the administrative assistant punching keys on her computer. “I guess it’ll just take a second.” She wagged a finger at Aggie and Akako. “But this is the last time I help you two.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Aggie and Akako said in unison.

  An elderly dot matrix printer came to life to print out two pieces of paper. While it whined and buzzed, Mrs. Strathmore fixed them with a weary gaze. “I don’t know why you girls dress like that. You’re too sweet to hang around that crowd.”

  “They’re our friends,” Aggie said, though she wasn’t convinced on this point given the way Glenda had acted towards her this morning.

  “That ‘Glenna’ doesn’t have any friends,” Mrs. Strathmore said. She put air quotes around what Aggie assumed was Glenda’s pseudonym. “You’d be smart to stay away from her. Especially you,” Mrs. Strathmore added. She indicated Akako with a nod. “A girl your age ought to be home playing with her Barbies, not smoking cigarettes and dressing like a tramp.”

  Mrs. Strathmore tore the papers off the old printer and handed one page to each of them. “Thank you,” Aggie said.

  The administrative assistant scribbled on a pink notepad and handed a note to each of them as well. “Now you two get your butts to class and don’t let me see you here again. Got it?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” they answered in unison again.

  Though Mrs. Strathmore tried to glare at them, Aggie could see a smile pull at the corners of her mouth. She supposed to the administrative assistant they were just two silly teenage girls behaving like silly teenage girls. She had probably seen a lot like them in her office over the years. Despite this, Aggie knew better than to do anything other than nod slightly and hurry out of the room, Akako behind her.

  Once outside, Aggie read over the paper Mrs. Strathmore had given to her. Aggie was grateful to see her name was still the same, but according to this she was only fifteen years old. As she scanned the rest of the paper, she understood the titles of the classes like ‘Amer Lit’ and ‘Earth Sci’ but couldn’t make sense of notations like ‘A203’ and ‘R101.’

  “What does—?” Before she could ask the rest of the question, she noticed tears in Akako’s eyes. “What is it?”

  Akako handed the schedule to her. On the first line, Aggie saw that Akako’s name here was Renee Kim. Next to the name, Aggie saw why Akako cried—according to her schedule she was only nine years old. The comment Mrs. Strathmore had made about Akako playing with her Barbies and Akako’s tiny size compared to the other kids made sense now. “I’m just a little kid,” Akako said.

  Aggie patted Akako’s back. “It’s all right. We’ll find a way out of here and then you’ll be back to normal.”

  “What if we don’t?” Akako said. “I mean, when you’ll be eighteen I’ll only be twelve. Don’t you see what that means?”

  It took a moment for this to sink in. The relationship they had back in their universe would be almost impossible here, at least for another nine years, by which time Aggie would be twenty-four in normal reckoning. “It’s not going to matter,” she said. She bent down so her face was level with Akako’s. “Even if we can’t find a way out of here, I’ll wait for you to grow up. You know I will. I love you.”

  She leaned in to kiss Akako on the cheek, but kissed only air instead. “Akako?” She turned and saw her friend racing down the corridor. “Akako, come back!” Aggie started to run after her, but then the bell rang and students began to pour out of classrooms so she couldn’t see where Akako had gone. Aggie was left in the middle of the hallway; students brushed against her as they went about their normal days while she could only think of how alone she was here.

  ***

  Aggie missed her second class that day when she wandered around the building to find Akako and to figure out where she was supposed to go. She didn’t find her friend, but she did figure out that the letters and numbers next to the class names stood for different parts of the buildings and different levels. Much too late she figured out that her American Literature class in A103 meant it was located in the east wing in the basement level.

  Since she didn’t want to walk in with five minutes left in class, she squatted in a bathroom stall with all of her clothes still on. As she sat there, she ran through her inventory of spells again; she willed just one to work even slightly to give her hope they might be able to return home—home to where she and Akako were both adults and the only thing that separated them was Akako’s duty to the archives.

  When the bell rang she stood up and went out into the hall, in the hope she might catch a glimpse of Akako. It would be nearly impossible to see Akako’s tiny nine-year-old frame amongst a herd of teenagers. Still, Aggie had no other choice but to hope for a bit of good luck.
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  As the hallways began to clear out, Aggie knew she had to hurry and get to her next class, which of course was on the third floor on the western end of the building. She waddled as fast as she could to the elevator. Though she stood with her back turned to the hallway, she could sense kids snicker at her as they passed by; they made their little jokes about how the elevator would be past capacity once she stepped in it.

  As the elevator clanged to a stop, Aggie had a vision of Akako inside and then Aggie would stop the elevator between floors so they could talk things out. The doors opened to reveal no one inside. Aggie pushed the button for the third floor and then listened to the elevator make more ominous sounds as it rose up the shaft.

  The bell sounded as the doors opened. Aggie hurried as fast as she could down the now-empty hallway. She scanned the room numbers on the doors she passed until at last she came to R311. When she flung open the door, she strained to hold in a scream.

  She stood at the front of the classroom and wrote on the chalkboard. Not her as she looked now or even as she had for almost the last two years, but her when she still called herself Mrs. Chiostro. The silver hair, the baggy cardigan sweater, the unflattering housedress, and the reading glasses that dangled from a chain were all reminders of the elderly woman she had disguised herself as for well over a century.

  Then the old woman stopped writing on the chalkboard and turned to face Aggie. She had to stifle another scream as the old woman spoke, “Have a seat, dear. I’ll be taking attendance in a moment.”

  Aggie took the first available seat, which happened to be next to her sister. Sophie shot her a dirty look that quickly softened into one of concern. Then as if she realized she’d let her mask of indifference slip for a moment, Sophie turned away.

  The old woman faced the class of thirty teenagers, wrinkled hands clasped in front of her. Over her shoulder she’d written her name in painstakingly neat handwriting. “Hello, class. My name as you can see is Miss Earl. You’re all too young to remember, but I taught here for some years. I’m going to be your teacher for the rest of the semester while Mrs. Marsh is on maternity leave. We’re going to learn all about our planet—”