Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis

by P. T. Dilloway

  “Dr. Earl?” he said.

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  She wasn’t prepared for him to hug her. “Thank God you’re here,” he said.

  She held him out at arm’s length so she could look him in the eye. “What’s going on here, Tim? What is that thing?”

  “An anti-matter reactor.”

  “Anti-matter? But that’s impossible. No one’s ever been able to produce more than microscopic amounts of it before.”

  “I’m not sure if it will really work,” Tim said. He ran a hand over his tired face. “It’s all theoretical.”

  “How—”

  “There’s no time to explain. He has Sylvia. She’s going to die unless we hurry!”

  Chapter 29

  On his computer, Tim brought up a layout of Harry Ward’s office on the thirteenth floor. A normal desk and chair took up one side while the other housed an enormous vault similar to the one in Aggie’s basement. A strange portal of purple light dominated a third wall. “I’m not exactly sure what that is,” Tim said. “Some kind of inter-dimensional gateway. Did you ever see that movie Stargate?”

  “No,” Emma and Jim said in unison.

  “Well it was about a gateway that was sort of like a wormhole between two planets. I think that’s what that is,” Tim said.

  “How did they create that?” Emma asked. She thought of Akako, Joanna, and the infinite number of Reds who supposedly existed on parallel worlds. Was this a similar phenomenon?

  “I’m not sure. They’ve been having Dr. Stone handle that.” Tim tapped his finger against the vault. “That’s where they’re holding her. She said it’s cutting her off from her magic, so she can’t keep herself young anymore.” Tim choked back a sob. “She’s dying. She was in her sixties the last time I saw her, but by now—”

  “We’ll get her out of there,” Emma said. It occurred to her that something else was probably in that vault: her armor. That would explain why the armor wouldn’t come to her even with the magic words.

  “He’s probably got even more guards up there.”

  “We have to try,” Emma said. She turned to Jim. “We’ll climb up the elevator shaft. Pepe can take the others through the air vents and water pipes and meet us there.”

  She and Jim started towards the door when she heard Tim say, “I’m coming with you.”

  “It’s going to be dangerous up there,” she said.

  “I don’t care. I love her and I’m not going to leave her up there to die.”

  Emma glanced over at Jim, who nodded to her. She knew Jim would do the same for her and she the same for him. She took out a knife from her pocket. “Just let Jim and I lead the way, OK?”

  “Right.” Emma didn’t know what good Tim would be in a fight, but she supposed at this point they could use all the help they could get.

  Pepe and the rats swarmed into the air vents and the toilets to make their way up to the thirteenth floor while Emma and the other humans made for the elevator. She wasn’t surprised to see another trio of guards by the elevator. There were probably more on the stairwells to keep anyone from getting up there.

  Before she could say anything, Tim stepped out from behind her. He held up his badge. “I need to see Mr. Ward,” he said.

  “He’s not taking visitors,” one guard said.

  Tim poked the man in the chest with one finger. “Look, pal, I’ve been working three fucking days on this project and I’m not going to have it wasted because some overfed gorilla won’t let me up there to see him. Got it?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Cooper, but—”

  “Hold it right there!” a woman’s voice called out. Emma recognized Ward’s secretary, Ms. Fielding, who had chased her and Jim out of TriTech before. This time she’d brought three more goons to assist her. “Your work isn’t complete yet, Mr. Cooper.”

  “I’ve run into a little snag,” Tim said. “I need to discuss something with him.”

  “Whatever you need, I can get it for you.”

  “Well, what I need—” While Tim stammered something about ion regulators and thermal detonators, Emma and Jim crept towards the guards around him. As she leaped out of hiding, Emma motioned for Tim to hit the deck. Emma felled one guard an instant later, as did Jim. Before the others could react, Emma seized Ms. Fielding and put her knife to the woman’s neck.

  “We’re going up to see Mr. Ward. Got it?” Emma said. She hoped her voice sounded tough enough that they would take her seriously.

  “This isn’t going to work,” Ms. Fielding said.

  “Shut up,” Emma hissed. She backed towards the elevator; Jim and Tim fell in behind her. Emma had never used a human shield before, but she couldn’t help but feel a bit of satisfaction about the discomfort on Ms. Fielding’s face. Once the elevator doors closed, Emma lowered the knife.

  Tim motioned to the keypad on the elevator. “She has the code.”

  “Then she’d better put it in.”

  “You won’t kill me,” Ms. Fielding said. “Or you’d have done it already.”

  As he had in the wine cellar, Jim seized the opportunity to play bad cop. “I kill,” he said. He flashed a wicked grin and brandished his knife. “You bad woman. You mean to us.”

  “Oh yes, Ms. Cabot and her friend. I should have known by the smell alone.”

  Jim put his knife to Fielding’s neck. “You tell us or die.”

  “Then we’ll climb up the elevator shaft and get up there anyway,” Emma said with a shrug. “It’s your choice.”

  Fielding looked around the elevator and no doubt saw two men who would kill her without hesitation, and Emma, who was ambivalent. “Very well. It’s only going to hasten the inevitable.”

  She typed in the code and then the elevator began to move. Emma put a hand on Jim’s shoulder; he stepped away from Fielding. “You should have gone with our security package,” Emma said and then punched Fielding in the stomach. She crumpled to the floor and passed out.

  “Good job,” Jim said.

  Emma turned to Tim. “That was some good quick thinking. Thanks.”

  “Anything for her,” Tim said as the elevator came to a stop on the thirteenth floor.

  ***

  It didn’t come as a surprise to find a full dozen guards waited for them with weapons drawn as the elevator doors opened. Had they simply fired their weapons, Emma, Jim, and Tim would have been dead, but she knew Ward wouldn’t do that. For one thing he still needed Tim Cooper to complete the anti-matter reactor in the lab.

  She hissed at Jim in ratspeak to drop his knife and let the guards drag them from the elevator, over to Ward’s desk. She had only seen him in pictures before; up close he looked like nothing more than a nondescript middle-aged businessman. He grinned smugly at them from behind his desk. “Hello, Mr. Cooper. And this must be the famous Dr. Emma Earl. I would have liked to have gotten you on my team, but your reputation preceded you.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Emma asked, mostly to buy time for Pepe and the rats to arrive.

  “My sources told me you were far too good to work for me. And I can see they’re right. It’s going to be such a waste to kill you.”

  “No! Let Dr. Earl and the others go and I’ll do whatever you want.”

  Ward considered this for a few moments. Emma thought she heard a light scrape in the airshaft, but kept her eyes on Ward so as not to give anything away. “That is a tempting offer. I have a better one: go back down there and finish the project or I’ll splatter Dr. Earl’s brains on the wall.”

  Before Tim could say anything, the air vents opened up and it began to rain rats. Others, led by Pepe, scurried along the floor, still dripping with water. When the guards turned to try to shoot at the rats, Emma and Jim sprung into action. She had two guards down in seconds, but a third landed a punch to her midsection to send her down to the floor. The pain reminded her she didn’t wear the scarlet armor. She lay on all fours and sobbed dramatically as the guard came over to finish the job. When he grabbed her
hair and lifted her to her feet, she gave him a sharp elbow to the midsection and then threw him to the ground. A kick to the face finished him off.

  When she turned around, she saw the rest of the guards unconscious on the floor. Ward still sat behind his desk. He tried to look calm, despite that he was surrounded by a swarm of angry rats and three angry humans. “That was impressive,” he said.

  Tim grabbed Ward by the front of his shirt to lift him up. “Open the vault. Now.”

  “Fine.” He punched in a code on his computer. A metallic clunk came from the vault and then the door yawned open. Tim had already thrown Ward back into the chair and was halfway across the room before the door opened.

  Emma left Jim and the rats to watch Ward. She reached the door just as Tim came out with Sylvia in his arms. At least Emma assumed it was Sylvia. The witch more closely resembled one of the mummies in the Plaine Museum, her wrinkled skin stretched tight across her bones without an ounce of fat. A few white strands of hair remained on her head, while most of her scalp was exposed.

  Despite this, she was alive. Her breath rattled out of her worse than Megan Putnam’s during an asthma attack, but she was still breathing. Her leathery face contorted into a toothless smile as she looked up at Tim. “What…took…so…long?” she said.

  ***

  Inside the vault, Emma was reunited with someone else as well. “It’s about bloody time,” Marlin said. “I was starting to think you weren’t coming.”

  “I got held up,” Emma said. She dragged an olive green duffel bag out of the vault. She breathed a sigh of relief to see the scarlet armor. That relief was short-lived as the elevator doors opened again.

  Ten armed guards burst through the door, firing their Uzis.

  Emma barely had time to grab the cape from the bag before bullets whizzed over her head. She tied the cape around her neck as she lay on the floor and then began to crawl over to where Tim lay flat on the floor, his body on top of Sylvia’s.

  She saw Jim had taken cover behind Ward’s desk along with some of the rats across the room. The others scurried around to find someplace safe. Ward himself had taken advantage of the diversion to crawl over to the elevator. The guards continued to fire indiscriminately; they didn’t seem to care if they hit anything or not.

  Emma crawled over to where Tim and Sylvia lay; she draped the cape over them so the three of them vanished from sight. “Are you OK?” she whispered to Tim.

  “I’m fine.”

  The guards finally ceased fire to look around the room. She knew it wouldn’t take long before they realized Jim didn’t have a gun and that she and the others were huddled in this corner of the room. Emma searched her pockets for another smoke grenade, but she couldn’t find one, only a pair of firecrackers.

  “Well, here goes nothing,” she mumbled to herself. Before she spoke again, she hoped she had fully recovered from Sylvia’s potion so she had the vocal dexterity to throw her voice. In a louder voice, she said, “Hey, I’m over here!”

  The guards spun around to face the opposite corner from the vault and opened fire. While they did this, she took out the firecrackers and lit them under the cape. These she hurled across the room to explode near the opening to the strange portal. The guards again spun around to face the portal.

  As Emma had hoped, Jim and his friends had taken advantage of the distraction to come out of hiding. When the guards turned to face the portal, the rats swarmed at them. Emma untied the cape and left it draped over Sylvia and Tim. “Stay here,” she said.

  Then she hurried over to the duffel bag to take out the Sword of Justice. She held the golden sword in her hand for a moment and watched as it began to glow a bright yellow in the presence of evil. She hurled the blade through the air, towards where Jim and the rats grappled with Ward’s guards. With her mind, she guided the blade to dip down to slash across the hamstrings of the guards. They cried out in pain and toppled like a row of dominos only to have the rats jump on them to finish them off.

  When the dust settled, Emma looked around the office, but Ward was nowhere in sight. “He gone,” Jim said.

  “Not too far,” Emma said and then began to dress in the armor.

  Chapter 30

  Aggie expected the portal would take them back to the archives. She also expected that she would come out as the thin, beautiful young woman she’d been when she’d gone in. As it turned out, she was wrong on both counts.

  She landed on her rear end in the middle of a nearly empty room. To one side she saw a vault similar to the one she kept in the basement of her house for her potions and Sylvia’s weapons collection. This clearly wasn’t her basement from the glass desk and office chair on the other side of the room.

  When she sat up, she saw the gut she’d become all too familiar with over the last few days. At least her hair didn’t feel like the spiky Goth do she’d sported the last time she woke up in an unfamiliar place. She heard a groan from beside her.

  Akako did a half push-up and turned her face to Aggie. “Hi,” Akako said. She looked the same as when they’d left, much to Aggie’s relief.

  “Hi yourself.” Aggie looked around the room again. “Where are we?”

  “I’m not sure. An office, I guess.” Akako closed her eyes and then smiled beatifically. “I can hear them again. The others.” When Akako opened her eyes, tears sparkled in them. “I’ve never been so glad to hear them in all my life.”

  “Can one of them tell you where we are?”

  “It doesn’t work that way, Agnes. You know that.”

  “I was just hoping.” With a grunt she hefted herself to her feet. “I guess we’d better find out the old-fashioned way then.”

  “Agnes?” a small voice said.

  She looked around the room, but didn’t see anyone. An instant later a young man appeared on the floor by the vault, the Scarlet Knight’s cape beside him. “Who are you?” Agnes said. “Where did you get that?”

  He rolled to the side, away from the cape. “I’m Tim Cooper. Sylvia’s boyfriend. You’re her sister? I thought you were older.”

  “We’ve had a little mishap, I’m afraid. Where is—” She was about to ask where her sister was, but then she saw for herself. A woman lay on the floor where Tim Cooper had been. Aggie put a hand to her mouth, and felt her last meal threaten to come up her throat.

  The woman on the floor looked like a mummy, but Aggie knew it was her sister. The hook hand at the end of one emaciated arm was a dead giveaway. More than that were the woman’s eyes. Even though they’d turned rheumy from cataracts, after five hundred ten years, Aggie knew those eyes almost as well as her own. “Sylvia!”

  Aggie hurried over to Sylvia’s side and knelt down beside her. “What happened to you?”

  Sylvia tried to say something, but her voice was too weak. Tim Cooper answered for her. “Mr. Ward put her into some kind of box that wouldn’t allow her to use magic.”

  “Oh dear.” Aggie understood the problem immediately. Unable to use magic, Sylvia’s body slowly began to revert to its natural state. How old was she at the moment? Two hundred? Three hundred? Maybe even five hundred. Yet somehow she was still alive. Through sheer force of will, she had survived. Aggie doubted she could have lasted so long, but then Sylvia had always been tougher.

  “Can you help her?” Tim Cooper asked.

  “I don’t know. She’s so far gone.”

  “Don’t,” Sylvia rasped. Each word that came from her mouth sounded like a separate death rattle. “Let…me…die.”

  Tears ran down Aggie’s cheeks. “You know I can’t do that, dear.” She closed her eyes and tried to focus on her love for her sister. When she opened her eyes a minute later nothing had happened. Was Sylvia that far gone that it wouldn’t work? Or was it that Aggie simply didn’t have the power for it to work?

  “Agnes.” Sylvia’s voice was so soft Aggie almost didn’t hear her. “Must…tell.”

  “Don’t try to talk, dear. Just try to relax.”

  Sylvia�
�s skeletal right hand flailed around until Aggie took hold of it. Sylvia’s rheumy eyes focused on Aggie’s face. “Me…Alejandro…daughter…so…sorry.”

  Aggie replayed these words through her head again while she looked into her sister’s eyes. Then she understood. Sylvia and Alejandro had slept together and produced a daughter. Aggie had never known about either of these. She had never so much as suspected Alejandro would ever be unfaithful to her; she had thought their love too strong for that, so strong she’d kept his name a hundred fifty years after his death. What a fool she’d been. As for Sylvia, her sister hadn’t spent that much time around Alejandro that Aggie knew of; she’d thought it was because Sylvia didn’t like her husband, as she didn’t like most people in general. What a fool she’d been about that too.

  She pressed her free hand to Sylvia’s chest. “It’s all right,” she said. “I understand. And I forgive you.” Her sister’s body weighed so little that Aggie thought Sylvia might already be dead. Aggie wrapped her arms around Sylvia and pressed her close, so that her mummified body pushed into Aggie’s stomach. “It’s all right,” she repeated. “I love you.”

  Aggie felt the same tingle as in the hallway at school and in the park with Glenda and the others. Though her eyes were blinded by the glow from her body, she could feel Sylvia’s body thicken and hear her breath grow stronger.

  At the same time, Aggie felt herself grow weaker. The tingle she’d first felt became a numbness until she couldn’t feel anything at all. She sagged to the floor, unable to muster any movement in her limbs. Her eyes faced Akako, who was in tears. Then Sylvia must have tilted her head to the side. She saw her sister the way she had been, young and beautiful. Sylvia smiled down at her. “Agnes, you old fool. You know better than that,” Sylvia said.

  “I know,” Aggie whispered. She smiled back at her sister. “I’m just going to take a nap now.”