Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis

by P. T. Dilloway

  “Thanks,” Louise said. She began to stuff the artifacts back into her backpack. “I’ll check these in officially tomorrow with the rest of the stuff still at the airport.”

  “That’s fine.” Emma stood up and took a step towards the door. “I think I’ll get some rest. Goodnight, baby.”

  She held on to her daughter until Louise slipped out of her grasp, her face red with a teenager’s embarrassment. “Goodnight, Mom.”

  As she climbed up the stairs, Emma couldn’t help but smile at the thought of how beautiful she and Jim’s daughter turned out to be. All her worries about the future drained away as her head touched the pillow and she closed her eyes.

  ***

  In her dream, Emma sat in a sandbox, surrounded by broken and rusty toys. Her legs dangled over the edge of the box, into the grass that would come up to her knees if she stood up. She had seen this place before, six months ago in her reckoning. The last time she’d seen it as Megan Putnam after a nasty asthma attack.

  “I thought you’d never get here,” a familiar voice said.

  Emma saw the voice was so familiar because it was her voice. She sat on a plastic child’s swing; she looked just as she had before she became pregnant with Louise. As if she sensed her thoughts, the younger version of herself said, “I’m not you. I’m Joanna. They call me Red because of my hair, remember?”

  “Yes,” Emma said. “But you were just a little girl the last time.”

  “And so were you in some ways.”

  Emma pushed herself up to her feet and then brushed sand off her body. That the sand felt so real she knew was because it was real. She was in a parallel universe, brought here in her sleep by this young woman who looked so much like herself at that age. “I guess that’s true,” she said. “But I’m not a girl anymore, am I?”

  “No, you’re a mother.”

  “Yes, I am.” Emma instinctually put a hand to her belly before she remembered she wasn’t pregnant anymore—at least not in this time. “Did you bring me here to send me back?”

  “I couldn’t do that.”

  “Couldn’t or wouldn’t?”

  “Mostly the latter. Mom always told me not to interfere with things.”

  “How is your mother?”

  “Dead.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. What happened?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “I understand.”

  “No, you don’t. Not yet.”

  “How do I get back to my time?”

  “You’ll find out.”

  Emma stepped out of the sandbox, into the grass, which was even longer than she’d thought. Clearly Joanna wasn’t one to do yard work. “Then why did you bring me here?”

  “To warn you.”

  “Isn’t that violating the rules?”

  “It’s more like self-preservation. If she finds it, the consequences to the entire universe—to every universe—will be dire.”

  “The Book of Isis,” Emma said. “You felt it too.”

  “Yes. You have to keep her from finding it.”

  “I can’t steal it from Louise.”

  “You will if you want her to live.”

  Emma stared at Joanna, whose face betrayed no emotion. “She’s going to die?”

  “Everyone will die if she finds it: you, Louise, even me.”

  “What’s in the book?”

  “You’ll have to find that out for yourself.”

  “The rules?”

  “I thought you scientists liked finding things out for yourselves.”

  “I suppose that’s true.” Emma ran a hand through her hair; she felt as though she were talking to a fortune cookie. “How can I get rid of the book?”

  “You’ll know what to do. Just remember that nothing is gained without sacrifice.”

  “Sacrifice, right. I’ll figure out what that means later, right?”

  “If you’re successful, yes.”

  “You can’t see that far ahead?”

  “You’ve studied quantum physics.”

  “If I’m not successful, everything will be destroyed?”

  “It’s very likely.”

  “Now you’re sounding like a Magic 8-Ball.”

  “I wish I could be of more help, but I can’t.”

  “Rules. I know.”

  “Mother made me promise not to interfere unless absolutely necessary. She said we can’t live in a deus ex machina universe. We can’t live expecting someone else to solve all of our problems for us.”

  “Your mother was a smart lady.” Emma turned and started back towards the sandbox; she knew she wouldn’t get much else out of Joanna. After a step, she turned back around. “Could I ask you a question about her?”

  “You could, but I wouldn’t answer it.”

  “Right.” Emma stood at the center of the sandbox. She could feel the sand erode beneath her feet as a hole opened beneath her. “Will I see you again?”

  “Maybe,” Joanna said. She waved her hand and then Emma found herself falling—

  She sat up in bed and looked around the unfamiliar room. She brushed forward a tress of hair and saw it was still gray, which meant she was still here in the future. Still here with Louise—and the book that could destroy them all.

  Chapter 9

  In her line of work, Cecelia had often woke up in strange places. She had once spent a night inside a disemboweled cow to surprise a wealthy dairy farmer. So to wake up on a hard, flat surface that didn’t smell like blood and digested grass was a definite improvement.

  The only drawback was someone shaking her shoulder. “Miss, you can’t sleep here,” a man’s voice said.

  “Leave me alone,” Cecelia said, but her voice sounded too high, too perky to belong to her. This didn’t bother her much either as just six months ago she’d spent two days as a twelve-year-old Goth girl to track down someone named Harry Ward. The hardest part of the assignment had been to get the girl’s mother to go away long enough so Cecelia could sneak out and finish the job to return home.

  “Miss, you have to leave. Otherwise I have to call the police,” the man insisted.

  Cecelia reached to her side, where her knives should be. Instead she found only a lump of fat. This prompted her to finally open her eyes. A bald man with a thick mustache glared down at her. Behind him, she saw a train, an old coal-fed locomotive that belched black smoke as it chugged away.

  “I’m going to count to ten,” the man said.

  “Yeah, fine. Whatever,” Cecelia said in her too-cheerful voice. She sat up to find her feet swallowed by a stomach that pressed against a lilac-colored dress. She grunted as she tried to stand up, but she couldn’t make it. Despite the size of her belly, her arms hadn’t caught up; they remained almost skinny. “Can you help me up?”

  “Sure thing.” The man offered her a hand that dwarfed her own, but he grunted almost as much as she did as he helped her up. His other hand reached down to pick up a brown suitcase. “I think this belongs to you, young lady.”

  Cecelia took the bag and snuck a peek at the tag on the handle, which identified her as Maria Costopolous. Probably Greek, she thought. She looked around and recognized the main terminal of Central Station in Rampart City from the chandeliers that dangled over the benches like the one she had apparently fallen asleep on.

  But it wasn’t Central Station from the 21st Century. From the suits on the men and the dresses and hairstyles of the women, Cecelia figured it for the 1940s. This guess was reinforced by a poster on one wall that advertised war bonds. Just great, she grumbled to herself.

  “Do you need any help finding your way, miss?” the man asked.

  “No. I’m fine.” She tilted her head up in what she hoped was a haughty fashion and then marched towards the ladies room. That seemed like the place to start to get some answers about who this Maria Costopolous was and why Cecelia inhabited her body.

  Her memory of the station at this time was accurate enough that she found her way easily into th
e bathroom. There she turned to the mirror and saw the face of a young woman—a girl really—she didn’t recognize. The glossy black hair and olive-tinged skin went perfectly with the Greek name. What didn’t jive were the green eyes—Cecelia’s eyes. She smiled to display the crooked yellow teeth of a girl who’d probably never seen a dentist before; along with the rough fabric of the shapeless purple dress and the battered suitcase, it was safe to assume Maria was not well off.

  Inside the suitcase, beneath more rough, shapeless clothes that were probably homemade, the rest of the story became obvious. She found an envelope with three dollars and a letter written in Greek. As part of her job, Cecelia had studied foreign languages; she could speak four languages fluently and seventeen others passably—including Greek. The letter was written by Maria’s mother. “Take this money and find somewhere for you and the baby. I will send for you when it’s safe.”

  Cecelia tucked the three dollars into a pocket of her crude dress and then put the letter back into the suitcase for the real Maria to read. It was clear in Cecelia’s mind from the letter that Maria was a poor girl who’d gotten knocked up and come to the big city, where people might be less judgmental about that sort of thing. Three dollars wasn’t a whole lot to start off with even in the 1940s, but it was probably all Maria had after she took the train. With so little money she’d gone to sleep in the train station to save on a motel.

  “Just fucking great,” Cecelia growled, but Maria’s singsong voice took the bite out of the words. Cecelia turned away from the mirror and the pudgy, girlish face in it. Her stomach churned, no doubt more from the baby than the shock of what had happened to her.

  She darted into a stall just in time to throw up into the toilet. There wasn’t much to her vomit, which indicated Maria hadn’t eaten lately. If she couldn’t afford a motel she couldn’t afford a meal on the train either. “Poor dumb kid,” Cecelia grumbled.

  Still hunched over the toilet, she thought back to those last few minutes in the coven’s archives. She’d tracked Emma Earl to the archives from the residue left by the poison on her knife. That had taken a month to circle the globe as well as to stake out Earl’s friends in Rampart City. Once she’d narrowed down the location, she spent another week to get an audience with the Headmistress to discuss how to get inside the archives. Another three days went by as she watched the burial mound and waited for her chance to sneak inside.

  The initial attack had gone fairly well. She’d disabled the archivist with little trouble. Then Earl and a witch had shown up on the lift. Cecelia took out the witch with a sleeping potion. Then came her mistake—the same mistake she’d made at the Plastic Hippo, a mistake the Headmistress had warned her against.

  She could have just thrown another knife with sleeping potion on it, knocked Earl out, and then tied her up. Without the scarlet armor, Dr. Emma Earl was as ordinary and helpless as Maria Costopolous. It would have been easy then to torture the location of the armor from Earl. The good doctor wasn’t a pushover, but she would have broken in time, especially after a few superficial cuts to her vulnerable belly. The thought of this brought sour bile up Cecelia’s throat and into the toilet.

  That’s what she should have done. Instead she had baited the woman, tried to negotiate with her. In her line of work, Cecelia knew the second most important rule—after covering your ass at all times—was never to give anyone a free shot. Like the villain from a bad spy movie she’d talked and talked, until she got close enough that Earl took a swing at her and then connected with her other hand.

  Cecelia didn’t know what had come over her both in the archives and at the Plastic Hippo. “You know better than that,” the Headmistress had told her after the incident at the strip club. “You’re the best there is.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Cecelia had said, just like a child in the principal’s office—they didn’t call her the Headmistress for nothing.

  The best theory Cecelia could come up with was that she’d never gone up against anyone like the Scarlet Knight before. Her targets were all ordinary people—mortals. Some of them like JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. had been powerful, but they were still mortals. None of them could have lasted more than two seconds against the paralysis potion Cecelia had used in the Plastic Hippo. They certainly couldn’t have gotten on a motorcycle and driven away. Even without the armor, Emma Earl still had some of that presence that made Cecelia want to prove her superiority. The best way to do that would have been to play it smart, not showboat like a greenhorn.

  She’d only compounded things when she’d chased Earl into the vault. That led to her greatest mistake when she took off her mask. In one hundred fifty-five years, she had never let anyone see her face during a job—at least not her actual face; sometimes she used potions to disguise herself as someone the target knew, but that only worked on mortals.

  That cunt of an archivist had not only seen her face, she knew who Cecelia was. More than that, she knew how old Cecelia was and where she had been born. But she was wrong about Cecelia’s mother. Cecelia knew her mother had died when Cecelia was two years old. She vaguely remembered her parents had been wealthy and very loving. Then came the fire. All Cecelia could remember was that a servant had clutched her to her chest and that it was really hot and smoky. At just two years old she’d learned about death when the servant explained Mama and Papa had gone to Heaven. The servant didn’t have the money to raise her, so she was given to an orphanage, where she waited five years for someone to adopt her, while every night she wished and prayed Mama and Papa would come to take her home. They had been her parents, not Sylvia Joubert, not a witch.

  As an assassin, Cecelia had heard of Sylvia Joubert before, but they’d never met in person. Sylvia was a gunrunner—and a witch. The former Cecelia could admire, except Joubert usually sold to the side opposite the one that paid Cecelia. As for the latter, Cecelia could feel nothing but contempt for the smug coven that glided around on their brooms and flying carpets and did absolutely nothing valuable with their power. Her mother couldn’t be one of them.

  Cecelia pushed herself up from the toilet and straightened her tacky dress. Her parentage and the coven weren’t the reasons she was here. She had come to find Dr. Emma Earl and take the scarlet armor from her. That was her job, and that’s what she would do, even if it was the ‘40s and she was a knocked up Greek girl with just three bucks to her name. That dyke in the vault had said Earl had probably gone into the future, but she might have lied to protect her friend.

  Cecelia knew there was only one place to go to find out.

  ***

  After she walked a block from the station, Cecelia’s swollen ankles began to throb and her back ached. There was no way she could walk the two miles uptown to her destination. She could always take the subway, but the thought of trying to stuff herself into a car full of people didn’t hold much appeal. The streetcars that still operated at this time offered the same problems. So Cecelia decided to flag down a cab and use up half of one of Mama Costopolous’s dollar bills.

  The ride took fifteen minutes, during which the cabbie looked back at her in the rearview mirror at least twenty times. “You visiting family?” he finally asked.

  “None of your business,” Cecelia said, but again the words lacked any punch.

  “Just asking. Sorry.”

  “Keep your eyes on the road, pal.” Cecelia crossed her arms over her stomach, and wished she had at least one of her knives with her. Once she got to the safe house she’d be able to get one. That and they’d find her a real bed so she could give her sore body a rest.

  She wondered if it was some kind of cosmic joke that she’d tried to apprehend a pregnant woman and now she was in the body of a pregnant woman. She couldn’t imagine what sort of joke the spell might have played on Earl. That is if they’d gone to the same place. Cecelia couldn’t be certain about that. The Headmistress would know. To get an audience with her wouldn’t be any easier in the 1940s than in the 2000s, but she would have to try. With
any luck, Cecelia could find Earl, get the information she needed, and then get back to her rightful time to complete the mission.

  That would be the start of much bigger things. The Headmistress hadn’t told her the complete plan, only that the day of reckoning was at hand. “No more hiding in the shadows,” the Headmistress had said. “Soon we’ll occupy our rightful place in this world.”

  “Here we are,” the cabbie said, to interrupt her thoughts. “You want I should help with that suitcase?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Looks kind of heavy—”

  “Are you deaf? I said I’m fine.” Cecelia snatched the suitcase and willed herself to carry it level with the top of her stomach to prove she didn’t need any help—at least not from a mortal.

  To the mortals, the safe house looked like an ordinary second-hand bookstore called the Second Life. A couple of mortals inside browsed the shelves of dusty old books. Cecelia paid no attention to them as she strolled up to the counter. A middle-aged woman looked up from a ledger and put her bifocals to her face. “Can I help you?” the woman asked.

  “I’m looking for a first edition of Shore Birds of New England,” Cecelia said. She’d always thought this code phrase was stupid, but it had lasted over a century now.

  “I think we might have a copy in the back room,” the woman said. This was the proper counter phrase. She stood up and then motioned towards a red curtain. “Follow me.”

  The actual back room was little more than a closet with a few books and janitorial supplies. The woman pulled up a section of the floor that revealed stairs that led down into the safe house proper. “I don’t remember seeing you before,” the woman said as she lit an old kerosene lamp to light their way down.

  “Because you haven’t. I’m operating covertly for a mission.”

  “That certainly is a good disguise. Except the eyes.”

  “I know what you mean.” Cecelia followed the woman down the stairs, into a foyer that looked as if it had been transplanted from a Victorian house, which in all likelihood it had. There was a parlor stuffed with 19th Century furniture that included a sofa on which Cecelia gratefully sat and let out a sigh of relief.