“Yes.”
“You impudent child!” Isis shouted, but quickly regained her composure. “You are right that I can’t kill her. Not until she’s watched you die.”
“Go ahead. Kill me, if that’s what you wish.”
“Gladly.” Isis set Aggie down to hold up both of her hands. Renee could feel her searching for a weakness to exploit. Renee felt her try to plant the same suggestions as before, that Renee was just a foolish little girl, that she was a freak of nature, that everyone ridiculed her. Nothing happened. Renee remained the same as she was. “No! This can’t be! You’re nothing! You’re not even a full-blooded witch!”
“Pure magic doesn’t need blood, only one willing to listen.” Renee stepped forward. She didn’t need any magic for this, just a solid left hook Ms. Chiu had taught her. Isis staggered back; very human blood spurted from her nose.
While Isis bled and sputtered in disbelief, Renee knelt down in front of little Aggie. She looked into the baby’s eyes; she still saw her father behind them. She repeated the instructions she’d given Emma, “I want you to close your eyes. Don’t think about anything. Let yourself simply exist. Can you do it?”
Aggie stared at her for a moment, until Renee thought perhaps she was too far gone. Then Aggie nodded slightly and closed her eyes. As in Emma’s bedroom, Renee closed her eyes as well. She could feel Isis come towards her, a ceremonial dagger in hand. Renee didn’t so much as flinch as Isis plunged the dagger into her chest. She continued to focus on Aggie, to guide her as she grew from an infant to a child and then a woman again.
Renee felt a hand on her shoulder. She opened her eyes to see Aggie in front of her; she looked just the way Renee remembered before Isis had shown up. Isis stood next to her, the shattered knife still in her hand. “Are you hurt, dear?” Aggie asked.
Renee shook her head. She stood up and then brushed the blade of the dagger off of her as if it were lint. “I’m fine, Father. Go help Emma and Louise. I’ll take care of her.” She said this in a dry monotone that indicated it was not a boast, merely a promise.
“Very well, dear.” Aggie gave her a kiss on the cheek and then vanished.
This left Renee to face Isis, whose black eyes had gone wide with disbelief.
The goddess turned and fled.
***
The good thing about Black Dragoons, Louise had learned in her short tenure as the Scarlet Knight, was they weren’t very quick. By the time Renee vanished Louise and Mom across the room to the altar, the Dragoons hadn’t even begun to turn around. Once Renee had disappeared again to tangle with Isis, Mom began preparations for the sacrifice. She lifted a knife like the one Louise had found in the desert that had been left at the altar.
“Keep them off of me until I’m finished,” Mom said.
“Sure thing, Mom.”
Louise lifted the visor just long enough for Mom to lean down and kiss her on the cheek. “Good luck, baby.”
“You too, Mom. I love you.”
“I love you too.”
With that Louise sprinted off to launch herself into the midst of a dozen Black Dragoons. She had had trouble enough with one of them, let alone twelve, but she didn’t have any choice. Mom needed time to say a prayer to Anubis so he would claim her soul when she died. Only then would she stab herself with the ceremonial knife and let her blood flow across the altar. How long all of that would take, Louise didn’t know.
In midair, she decided the best strategy would be to take advantage of her agility versus the clumsiness of the Dragoons. She touched down in front of them; she didn’t bother to take the Sword of Justice from its sheath. “All right, assholes,” she hissed. “Come get some.”
One of the Dragoons with maces for arms—a Balls—tried to smash her like a fly. Louise rolled to her right and straightened in time to punch another Dragoon—a Blades—in the crotch. She was disappointed the Dragoon didn’t double over or even cry out, but he did stagger back a few steps. Louise took advantage of this to use a leg sweep on him while she spun around to face the others.
One of the Claws launched all the claws on his left hand at her. She didn’t have time for a full jump, but she tucked in her legs to get clear of the claws. The Dragoon’s claws ripped into the one she had just knocked down as it tried to get up and took the Blades back to the ground again. He would probably get back up in a minute as she didn’t have time or opportunity to cut his fucking head off as she would have liked to do.
Instead, Louise came back down in nearly the same spot. The Dragoons weren’t stupid; they waited for her as she landed. One of each variety tried to hit her, but she was already throwing herself to the left, right between the legs of a Claws. She tripped him up and squirted away as he toppled over.
She almost took a sword blade to the chest as a Blades lined her up. Louise barely managed to get down enough so that the blade only scraped her shoulder. “Fuck you!” she shouted back in very un-Mom-like fashion. She grabbed the Blades’s arm to flip him over her shoulder. With her other hand she decided to finally get out the Sword of Justice.
Marlin had told her someday she would need to be able to guide the sword while some thug held on to her. She supposed this was as good of time as any to learn. She hurled the Sword of Justice into the air while she simultaneously did a somersault to avoid being pounded into paste by a mace.
The sword rocketed straight down to slice through the neck of the Balls that had tried to flatten her. Louise had already flung herself to the right in a cartwheel. At the apex of the cartwheel, her right foot slammed into the face of a Claws to knock it backwards. When she finished the cartwheel to come up in a standing position, the Sword of Justice was already in her left hand. She drove the blade into the Claws’s neck.
In the process she left herself vulnerable for a moment. She felt three claws tear through the cape to plunge into her left shoulder blade. “Shit!” she cried out, but managed to keep her grip on the sword. She ducked as she spun around and threw the Sword of Justice like a dart.
With her shoulder injured, she wouldn’t be able to do any more cartwheels. She decided instead to use the soles of her boots to launch herself back into the air. Halfway through her arc, she twisted to avoid a barrage of claws, all while she called the Sword of Justice back to her hand. As she landed, she brought the sword around to chop the head off another Balls. That made only four of them, with eight more left.
She wished she could sneak a glance back at Mom to see how she fared, but she couldn’t. Then she heard Aggie’s voice whisper, “Your mother is doing fine—thanks to you.”
The witch was fully-grown again and as usual looked like an ordinary though still attractive middle-aged woman. Her hands glowed with white light. “I think it’s time we make things a bit more fair, dear,” she said.
“What do you have in mind?”
“A little fog ought to do the trick.”
“Sounds good to me.” Like her own armor, the Dragoons could see at night, but Louise doubted Isis had given them infrared on top of it. As ribbons of fog spun away from Aggie’s body to fill the area around them, the Dragoons stiffened, suddenly unsure of what to do. Louise decided to make the decision for them when she waded into their midst and used the Sword of Justice like a scythe. When a Dragoon would try to get her, she would duck out of the way, back into the fog Aggie had created, while she ignored the pain in her shoulder.
She was in the middle of disemboweling a Balls when all of the Dragoons who remained again straightened. Only this time they put their hands—or what passed for hands—to their heads and began to bellow. Louise pulled the Sword of Justice from the Balls and took a step back to watch as the Dragoons turned to piles of ash on the floor of the temple.
Louise didn’t need to look over at the altar to know what had happened. Mom had made the sacrifice and it had been accepted. Louise took off her helmet to wipe the sweat and hair away from her face. As she did, she saw movement out of the corner of her eye. Crawling along the wall of
the temple like a rodent was Isis.
The woman no longer wore that smug look of hers. Louise could see why when she grabbed the front of Isis’s dress to see the woman’s eyes were now an ordinary brown. Tears dripped down Isis’s cheeks and snot dribbled from her nose, which gave Louise a moment of satisfaction. “Please don’t hurt me,” Isis said.
“Why not? You never had any problem hurting anyone.”
“It wasn’t me. It was her. She made me do terrible things. I didn’t want to do them. She didn’t give me a choice.” Isis took Louise’s right hand, which at the moment held the Sword of Justice poised to strike. “My name is Isis Nazif. I’m just a regular person. I swear I had nothing to do with any of this.”
Louise shook the woman’s hand away to hold the Sword of Justice over the woman’s head. The blade glowed brightly enough to make the whole temple like daytime. “Nice try,” Louise said. She seized Isis by the front of her shirt and dragged her across the floor, to the altar.
Mom lay atop the altar, her hands folded on her chest in prayer. Blood oozed from between her hands, from where she had stabbed herself with the dagger. The blood left a trail from Mom’s hands, along her chest, down along her waist, and then onto the altar, where it drained into a bowl. To add to the horror of this scene was the fact that Mom smiled; Louise wanted to think because she was proud of her daughter.
“That’s my mother,” Louise hissed at Isis. “She was more of a goddess than you ever were, you selfish bi—brat.”
“Please don’t kill me,” Isis begged. “I don’t want to die!”
Aggie and Renee had joined them; Aggie leaned against her daughter, an arm thrown proudly around Renee’s shoulder. That was the kind of moment Louise wouldn’t be able to share anymore with Mom thanks to Isis. She tightened her grip on the front of the woman’s dress as she thought of never being able to hug Mom again or to kiss her cheek; she would even miss The Glare.
Louise raised the Sword of Justice to strike, to chop off Isis’s head on her own altar. Isis began to sob and wail; she tried to curl herself into a protective ball. This seemed like an appropriate end for the woman who had caused so much trouble for Mom and so many others.
She was about to bring down the blade when she saw Mom on the altar. Maybe it was an illusion, but Louise no longer saw the smile on her mother’s face. The Sword of Justice trembled in her hand and then clattered to the floor. Louise hoisted Isis back to her feet and pressed her face close enough that her nose touched Isis’s cheek. “I’m not going to kill you,” Louise said. “Much as I want to, I know it’s not what Mom would want. She never killed anyone in her life, not even those who deserved it.”
“What are you going to do with me then?” The former goddess sniffled pathetically as she looked from Louise to Renee to Aggie. “You can make me a baby or an old woman, or whatever you want. Just don’t kill me.”
“It’s not up to us to decide what to do with her,” Renee said in that flat, world-weary voice she had adopted.
Louise sighed and nodded; she looked back at Mom on the altar. “You’re going to confess to the murders of Dan Dreyfus, Becky Beech, Megan Putnam, and all the others your little friends killed. You’re going to tell the police you’re the Second Heartbreaker Killer.” Louise wagged a finger in Isis’s face. “You try to double-cross us, you try to get up to your old tricks, and I will personally turn you inside-out. Got it?”
Isis could only nod in response, too terrified to say anything. Louise shoved the pathetic shell of a goddess into Renee’s arms. Then she picked up the Sword of Justice to put it back into its sheath and retrieved her helmet. Fully dressed as the Scarlet Knight, she gently lifted Mom’s body from the altar.
“You were the best, Mom. Someday I hope I can be half as good as you.” She carried Mom over to Renee and the others, glad for the visor so they wouldn’t see her cry. “Let’s go home,” she whispered.
With a flash of light they were gone.
Chapter 30
Since there was no Medicare or Medicaid in the ‘40s, a poor farm girl like Maria Costopolous probably would have received only the bare minimum in treatment if not for a benefactor. That benefactor was of course Sue Johnson, who took time away from Harmon-Farmer to be the forewoman of Cecelia’s recovery. As in the factory, Sue barked orders at the nurses and even the doctors to demand the latter make sure Cecelia’s bones healed properly and the former treat Cecelia with respect.
Not even in the Headmistress’s care had Cecelia ever felt so pampered before. Nurses fluffed her pillows, constantly asked if she needed anything, and provided a radio for her to listen to. The doctor actually sat at her bedside and listened if she complained; he didn’t just pretend to listen, write a note on the chart, and walk off as usually happened with poor patients, especially poor patients who had been carrying a baby out of wedlock.
The latter issue made her stay in the hospital unbearable despite all of the pampering she received. Every time she looked down and saw her feet instead of her pregnant stomach, Cecelia remembered what had happened and felt the stab of pain. Sue was right that the pain didn’t go away and not even having been through it already made it any easier for Cecelia. To have already lost one baby to carelessness made the pain even worse because she had promised herself it wouldn’t happen again, let alone while she borrowed someone else’s body.
She didn’t delude herself into thinking she had any sort of real attachment to the baby. It was Maria’s baby, not hers. Even if the kid had survived it probably wouldn’t have ever amounted to anything more than a factory worker. Hell, she might have done the world a favor and eliminated another petty criminal to haunt Rampart City’s streets.
Her pain was far more selfish, focused on her baby. She had never been noble enough to have worn the Scarlet Knight’s armor, not like Emma Earl, but in that one area she did allow herself to be sentimental. The Headmistress had actually encouraged this when Cecelia announced she would not kill any children or pregnant women. “Of course, dear,” the Headmistress had said. “You’re not a monster.”
Despite all of the people she had killed, she had never really felt like a monster—not until now. The way she had always seen it, she had done a necessary service for the world, to eliminate stupid idealists who rocked the boat too much or corrupt morons destined only to be replaced by other corrupt morons. So long as she didn’t harm society’s most innocent creatures, she didn’t feel badly about what she did.
Now that she had killed someone completely innocent—someone not even born yet—she had to reevaluate the rest of her career. The people she had killed certainly were not innocent, but many of them had children: sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, grandsons, and granddaughters who would be harmed by the loss of an adult figure. How many children had she orphaned the way she had been orphaned? How many had to be moved into an awful foster home because of her?
Whenever these thoughts came to her, she found all energy sapped from her body. Sue had taken a special interest in the physical therapy part of Cecelia’s recovery; she excelled at screaming at Cecelia like a drill sergeant as she worked her battered limbs back into shape. On days when Cecelia felt paralyzed by depression, Sue would take her arm to hoist her out of the bed, into her wheelchair.
“I know it’s hard,” Sue told her, “but you have to do it even if you don’t want to.”
Cecelia didn’t put up an argument in large part because her jaw had been wired shut to heal properly. She didn’t try to tell Sue via the notepad in her pocket that it wasn’t the physical discomfort of therapy that bothered her; it was the mental pain she couldn’t endure. As Sue had indicated, there was nothing she could do in that regard except to provide support for Cecelia when she needed it.
She remained alive and in pain for two months, during which her bruises faded, her cuts healed, and her bones set. Once the wires came off her jaw, Cecelia studied Maria’s face in the mirror. Gone was the naïve young farm girl, replaced by a scarred young woman with pain in
her eyes. Cecelia didn’t doubt that once Maria’s eyes turned brown again that pain would remain.
Though her body was mostly healed, Cecelia still needed to lean on a cane once Sue helped her out of the wheelchair, onto the hospital steps. In the 21st Century the doctors probably could have repaired the multiple breaks in Cecelia’s left leg properly, but in the ‘40s the damage was too severe; Maria would probably walk with a limp for the rest of her life, just another sad reminder she would have to carry of how she had suffered thanks to Cecelia.
After the wires came off her jaw, Sue had said, “I think it’s time you wrote your mother and told her what happened.”
“I can’t,” Cecelia said.
“You can dictate something to me—”
“I’m not illiterate.”
“I didn’t mean that. I thought maybe your hands were still sore.”
“My hands are fine.” Cecelia did feel an occasional ache, especially when the weather changed; Maria would probably wind up with arthritis too. “I’m just not ready to tell her about this yet. She was looking forward to being a grandmother, despite everything.”
“I’m sure she was, but don’t you think she has a right to know?”
“It’s my baby. I’ll tell her when I’m ready.”
“Fine.” Sue reached into the front pocket of her work shirt for an envelope. “There’s an open-ended train ticket in there for whenever you want to use it.”
“You trying to get rid of me?”
“Of course not. I just figure at some point you’ll be ready to go back there.”
“Not yet.” There was still one thing Cecelia had on her agenda. Since she’d caught up with Emily Cabot and seen she wasn’t Emma Earl, Cecelia doubted she would ever catch up to Earl, if she was here at all. No, the one thought that comforted her even during her darkest moments was that before she went, she would find Sylvia Joubert, confirm the archivist’s story, and then kill the witch.
She didn’t expect that the opportunity would await her in the room at the Rampart Arms Sue had arranged for her. After they took the elevator up to Cecelia’s floor, Sue ushered her into the suite that was bigger and more expensively decorated than Cecelia’s apartment back home. There, propped next to a fruit basket, was a little yellow envelope with her name written on it. Cecelia expected to find a card, but instead it was a telegram. A telegram from Agnes Chiostro.
Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis Page 100
