“Are you still alive?” Marlin asked.
“Barely,” she whispered.
“I think a strategic withdrawal is in order.”
“I think you’re right.” With the strength of the armor she managed to brush Alex’s bones from on top of her and used a rib bone to lever herself upright. As she stepped off the pedestal, the Black Dragoon landed in front of her, his claws aimed at her.
Then from nowhere, two more Dragoons appeared on either side of her.
***
“What the hell?” Marlin said. “How can there be three of them?”
“I don’t know,” Emma said. These two other Dragoons were similar in shape, but instead of claws, the one on the right wielded a pair of maces while the one on the right carried two large swords. The three Dragoons took a step towards her to close in for the kill.
The bones around her concealed her slight bouncing motion as the Dragoons came closer. As the one with the maces swung at her, Emma leaped into the air. With more time she might have made it onto the second floor and then tried to escape from there. Instead, she twisted around in midair; she ignored the pain in her joints. Her gloves caught the wall to allow her to hang there for a moment.
The original Dragoon fired his claws at her. She scrambled up the wall, but she wasn’t quick enough. Claws pierced both shoulders to pull her from the wall. She reached out for the wall, but couldn’t reach it as she plunged back to the first floor.
She landed only a few feet from where she started, right at the feet of the Dragoon with the maces. It started to bring these down on her, but she stuck out her leg to topple him backwards. Pain ran through her shoulders as she pushed herself upright to run for the elevator. If she could get down the elevator shaft to the sub-subbasement then she could get into the sewers, where her superior knowledge of the terrain would allow her to escape.
She didn’t make it more than a few feet before she fell forward again. The Dragoon she’d tripped had swung one of his maces to repay the favor. As she shook the chain of the mace from her foot, the Dragoon brought the other mace down squarely on her lower back.
Emma screamed in pain as the weight of the mace shattered the armor and then the blades of it tore into her flesh. She screamed again as the Dragoon dragged the mace from off of her, to shred more armor and skin. Despite the pain, she pushed herself to her feet. She had to escape, to heal and find some way to defeat these Dragoons—
Even before she could get fully upright, she found the other two Dragoons in front of her. The original model drove the claws of his left hand into her chest. When he pulled the claws out, she collapsed to the floor.
From there her world became a red haze as all three Dragoons pummeled her. She had never in her life endured as much pain as they inflicted on her, but they were careful not to kill her. They easily fended off her feeble attempts to fight back as they surgically pounded and stabbed at her.
All at once it ended. The Dragoons took a few steps back; their red eyes stared at nothing. Through a fog of agony she managed to rock her battered body from one side to the other until she could flip herself onto her stomach. From there she began to crawl towards the elevator shaft, towards safety.
“Well, well, look at the valiant Scarlet Knight,” a woman’s voice said. Despite the ringing in her ears and massive blood loss, Emma knew that voice. “Crawling around like a baby. How appropriate.”
Emma couldn’t lift her head, but this didn’t matter as Isis squatted down to look her in the eye. “What do you think this is going to accomplish, Dr. Earl? My new friends can easily stop you before you reach the elevator.”
Emma continued to drag herself forward. Isis snapped her fingers and a moment later Emma found herself hoisted upright; one Dragoon held either side of her. Isis got to her feet and then tore the helmet from Emma’s head. “You certainly have not aged gracefully. I guess that’s the price of too many late nights fighting bad guys.” Isis brushed hair away from Emma’s face and then tilted her chin up to look her in the eye. “I think you know why I’m here.”
“The book,” Emma managed to say.
“Very good, Dr. Earl. That book your darling little girl found belongs to me. I want it back. Tell me where it is and I’ll let you live.”
Unable to muster any words, Emma spat a wad of blood and phlegm into Isis’s face. The woman wiped this off without her smug expression wavering. “Spitting into the face of death. How cliché. I expected someone so bright to be more reasonable.”
Isis nodded to the Dragoon with the blades. He stabbed the blade into a bare section of Emma’s abdomen. She didn’t have the strength to do more than whimper with pain at this. Her body went slack in the hands of the other Dragoons.
“I suppose with someone so bright, violence won’t be much of a motivator. Let’s try a different tactic. You tell me where the book is, and I’ll let your daughter live.”
“You don’t have her,” Emma said.
“Not yet. Do you think it will take my boys here long to track her down? She’s just a little girl. Or maybe you think your friend Agnes can protect her. I think you remember what I did to her sister the last time we met.” Isis’s grin broadened. “And as you can see, my powers have grown quite a bit since then.”
“You can’t have it.”
“You would really sacrifice precious Louise’s life for a book that is of no use to you? Such an uncaring mother you are.” Isis snapped her fingers. “Remove the armor. But be careful not to injure the good doctor any more than she already is.”
The Dragoon with the blades sliced at the straps that held the armor to Emma’s body with the precision of a surgeon. Emma heard the armor clank to the floor a bit at a time until she was clad only in her ragged, bloodstained pantsuit. Then the Dragoon stepped back, so she could face Isis again.
“For twenty-two years I thought about the best way to repay you for what you did to me. Do you have any idea what it was like to be trapped in that tiny body? Having to learn to walk and talk and use the bathroom again, all while possessing more knowledge than your feeble brain can even begin to grasp? I thought for a long time that I would make you find out, turn you into a drooling, thumb sucking infant only able to bawl for her mama.” Isis held up one hand, poised to snap her fingers. Emma waited for those fingers to snap, to end up on the floor in a diaper.
Instead, Isis used her hand to pat Emma’s cheek. “Then I came here and I saw a much better way to torture you.” Isis kicked the pile of bloodstained armor at Emma’s feet. “I’m going to kill everyone you love. And there won’t be anything you can do about it.” Isis leaned forward to hiss into Emma’s ear. “I’m going to save your precious daughter for last, so you can watch her take your place—and then die just like you.”
“No!” Emma caught her captors by surprise as she lunged forward. Her arms slipped free to reach out for Isis’s throat. She had never killed anyone before, but she wanted very badly to kill Isis, to wring the life from the evil woman’s youthful body.
This vision ended as the Dragoon with the blades brought one across her back. She screamed futilely; her hands grazed Isis’s throat before she collapsed to the floor. Emma tried to stand, but her legs had gone numb.
Isis squatted in front of her again. Emma reached out towards her, but couldn’t make it. “Last chance, Emma. Give me the book and it’ll be you who dies instead.”
The pain she felt in that moment eclipsed everything she had experienced so far. She saw Louise in her mind’s eye, that beautiful product of her and Jim’s love. How could she sacrifice that beautiful life for a book? But it wasn’t any book, it was the Book of Isis. Though Emma didn’t know what it was, she knew things would only be worse if Isis had it. Then not only would Louise die, but so would untold millions or even billions.
“No,” she whispered.
“Very well. Whenever you’re ready to change your mind, let me know.” Isis nodded to her Dragoons. “Let’s leave the good doctor. Her friends should be here
any minute.”
Emma heard their footsteps retreat, but there was nothing she could do except to sag to the floor. Her last thought was that she had just signed her daughter’s death warrant.
***
The encounter at the Brass Drum had left Renee shaken. Instead of man hunting, she stopped at a diner for a cup of coffee that she hoped would steady her nerves. Louise sat across from her in the booth and idly dumped sugar into a cup of coffee she didn’t want. “What’s going on?” Louise asked.
“It’s really hard to explain,” Renee said. “She gave me a bad vibe.”
“Yeah, me too. I mean, Dan’s daughter? She’s older than me, so where the hell has she been all this time?”
“I don’t know.” Renee was glad to steer the topic away from the bad vibe Renee had picked up. There was no way she could explain this to Louise, not unless she told Louise about everything else. Mom and Aggie had made her promise not to do this unless it was a dire emergency. Not that Louise would believe it; Renee didn’t believe it most of the time.
It all started early the morning of her eleventh birthday with the strangest dream. She imagined she sat in a sandbox like the one in the park where Mom and Aggie had taken her when she was a toddler. The toys in the sandbox were all broken and grass had grown up around the sides of the box. Renee saw an older girl in a black dress on a swing; the girl gently rocked back and forth.
The girl looked a lot like Louise’s mother, only younger. She didn’t seem to notice Renee for a minute; the skirt of her black dress swelled with every arc as she continued to swing. It wasn’t until Renee stood up that the girl turned to look at her. “You shouldn’t be here,” the girl said and continued to swing.
“Why not? This is my dream.”
The girl turned to glare at Renee in a way that made her look even more like Dr. Earl. “This is my house now and I say who comes here and who doesn’t.”
“I’m sorry,” Renee said. “I didn’t mean to come here. It just happened.”
“Then you can show yourself out too.”
“Why are you being so mean to me?”
The girl jumped off the swing and stomped towards Renee with tears in her eyes. She stabbed a finger towards Renee. “Because you shouldn’t be here. You aren’t one of us. Your mother knew better.”
“How do you know my mother?”
“That isn’t your business.” The girl closed her eyes as if she listened for something. “Look, someday you might be ready to come here, but not now. You’re still just a child.”
“Who are you to say that?” Renee said with a huff. “You’re a child too.”
“I am not. I’m twenty years old!”
“Yeah, well, you don’t look it.” To her surprise, the girl dropped to her knees and began to sob. Renee reached out and put a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“I miss Mom so much. Why did she have to go away?”
“I don’t know. She probably didn’t have a choice.”
“Just leave me alone. Please. Go back where you came from.”
Renee looked around, but she didn’t see any way to get back. “How?”
“Step back into the middle of the sandbox,” the girl said. She still cried to herself as Renee stepped into the sand and felt it pull her in like quicksand.
She woke up in her bed; sweat poured down her face. As she told herself what a terrible dream it had been, she felt the sand on her bare feet and began to scream. These screams brought Aggie into the room.
That was when she first channeled. She didn’t know what happened; one moment she screamed in bed while Aggie hugged her and the next Aggie lay in the closet and Renee found that her body glowed. Renee held up a hand and stared in awe as it glowed white. Renee ran over to the broken closet door, where Aggie still laid with her feet sticking out.
It was Aggie there, but she looked so much older, as if she’d aged forty years in those few seconds. Aggie was still alive, but just barely. There was blood beneath her head from where she’d run through the door and her breath came out in wheezes. Her eyes opened and she said, “Renee? What did you do to me?”
“I don’t know!” Renee began to sob like the girl in her dream. “What do I do?”
Aggie didn’t answer. Her eyes had closed again. For an awful moment Renee thought Aggie was dead, but then she saw Aggie’s chest rise and fall. She reached out to take Aggie’s shoulder to shake her. “Aggie—”
The moment she touched Aggie, she felt a surge run through her entire body. The white glow faded away to leave a tingle. She didn’t understand what had happened, but whatever it was, Aggie looked younger again. Renee leaned forward to hug Aggie, but Aggie dragged herself back. “Don’t touch me!” Aggie said.
“What? Why not?”
It was in the kitchen where they had the talk. Other kids’s parents lectured them on sex or drugs, but Renee’s lectured her on magic. “This is going to be hard to accept, but you must,” Aggie started off with. “I am a witch.”
“A witch? But—”
“No, I don’t have a pointy hat and I don’t fly around on a broom and I don’t have a wart on my nose. I do have a cauldron in the basement. Let me show you.”
That was the first time Renee was granted access to the vault. Inside she saw the shelves and drawers. Aggie opened a drawer to reveal neat lines of vials. “These are potions I made. They do all sorts of things.” She picked one up at random. The label read, “Angel Food.” “This one would give you wings that would allow you to fly—for a little while.”
“You really expect me to believe that?”
Aggie popped open the vial and then drank from it. Nothing happened for a moment. Renee was about to gloat when a pair of feathery white wings sprouted through the back of Aggie’s shirt. There was even a golden glow over her head like a halo. “I don’t like to use this because it causes too many misunderstandings with the Christians.”
Renee staggered back until she tumbled backwards into the old barber’s chair that had belonged to Aunt Sylvia. “You are a witch.” Renee thought of the glow that had taken over her body in the bedroom. “So I’m a witch too? What about Mom?”
“Your mother is not a witch. I don’t know what you are.”
“But if Mom’s not a witch—”
“This will be even harder to accept, dear, but I am your father.”
Mom and Aggie had joked about this before and from the way Aggie wielded the belt she had sort of fallen into the fatherly role, but from the look on Aggie’s face, Renee realized she meant something else entirely. “That can’t be. You’re a woman. Aren’t you?”
“Yes.” Aggie reached into one of the drawers in the vault to pull out a purple vial. “I brewed a gender confusion potion so your mother and I could conceive.”
Renee put her hands to her mouth, but found no sound would come out. She finally worked up enough air to say, “This can’t be. I must still be dreaming.”
“I wish you were, dear.” Aggie shook her head. “I hoped we wouldn’t have to have this conversation until you were older. Most witches don’t begin to discover their power until they’re thirteen or even a little older.”
“So what happened in the bedroom?”
“I’m not sure. Let’s try an experiment.” Aggie took a golden knife from off the back wall of the vault. She came out of the vault and kept the hilt of the knife at arm’s length to offer it to Renee. “Go on, take it.”
The moment Renee took the knife, she felt another tingling sensation run up her arm and her arm began to glow again. In the meantime, the knife turned black and then disintegrated entirely. Renee stared at where the knife had been in horror. “What happened?”
“You channeled the magic from the knife into your body.” Aggie took a cautionary step back. “You must have taken my magic from me in the bedroom.”
It wasn’t long after that Aggie decided Renee would be better off at the Milton School for Girls. “They’ll be able to help
you control this power of yours,” Aggie said. Renee wore a pair of opera gloves so she could safely hug Aggie before she got on the plane.
Mom was there as well; she cried and leaned against Aggie for support. All during the drive to the airport, Mom said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” She could touch Renee without a problem and did so frequently. “Be very careful, honey. There’s still so much we don’t know about this.”
On her way to Milton, Renee thought it would be like Hogwarts, full of adventure and excitement. Instead, she found an otherwise ordinary boarding school that taught spells and potions in addition to the three R’s. There were no evil wizards, giants, trolls, or talking animals of any variety. They played ordinary lacrosse against other nearby schools; they never used their magic to affect the score.
Among the handful of witches there, Renee was a freak. Like Louise she was the youngest at the school, which didn’t help, but her power made her even more of an outsider. No one else at the school could channel magic like she could, not even the teachers. The girls at Milton soon became afraid of her when they saw her siphon magic from Lucinda Jerome. That had been an accident; Lucinda had tripped on the sidewalk and fallen into Renee, but no one believed her, not even Lucinda.
Though she didn’t have any friends at Milton, Aggie had been right that they would help her control her power. In particular, Ms. Chiu had helped Renee learn the focus and concentration necessary. Ms. Chiu taught self-defense classes at Milton, something Renee thought would come in handy as the school freak. After the first class, Ms. Chiu had said, “Your mother is Akako the archivist, isn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“You have the blood of the samurai in your veins then.”
“I do?”
“Yes. If you listen closely you will be able to feel it.” Renee began to stay after classes to work with Ms. Chiu on ancient meditation techniques. Through these, Renee learned to harness her power so she no longer needed to wear gloves and long sleeves or avoid personal contact with other witches. She also learned how to siphon magic from the environment without any physical contact at all, something Ms. Chiu was less than thrilled about. “You must be very careful with this, Renee. If you misuse this gift, your life will become one of endless torment and pain.”
Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis Page 80
