On the conference table was a cage, inside which was a bird—a hawk or falcon she couldn’t be sure. She had seen birds like it back in France, where some of the royals had liked to hunt with such creatures. This bird looked different; there was a dark red tinge to her features and her eyes were much too green.
One of Aggie’s feelings told her this was no ordinary bird. She had found her niece.
Aggie wasted no time to use a static charge spell on the glass. The window didn’t even crack. The bird did turn on its pedestal. It began to flap its wings and shriek at her. “I’m coming, dear!”
Aggie needed two more static charge spells before the window shattered. She floated inside and landed beside the conference table. “Cecelia? Is it you?”
The bird managed to nod its head slightly. “Don’t worry, dear, I’ll have you out of there in a moment—”
The door burst open and two women in black charged inside. From the outfits, Aggie knew they were Heretics like Cecelia had been. The darker skinned of the two glared at Aggie and then smiled. “Agnes Chiostro. I should have known you’d show up for our little birdie.”
“I’m taking her and leaving. Don’t try to stop me,” Aggie said. She reached for the cage.
“The hell you are.” The woman took a dagger from her belt. “I’m going to cut you to pieces and then feed you to the bird.”
“I don’t think so, dear.” Aggie opened the cage. The moment she did, Cecelia shot out of it. She didn’t fly so much as she catapulted herself into the assassin’s face. While Cecelia clawed at the woman with her talons, Aggie turned to the other one. She used a static charge to throw the woman into the wall.
“Come along, dear. I think these two have learned their lesson.” Aggie gently collapsed Cecelia’s wings against her body. The bird shrieked, but allowed Aggie to take her in her arms. Then with a flash they vanished back to Aggie’s basement in Rampart City.
She set Cecelia on the floor and then squatted down. Cecelia screeched at her. “Just a moment, dear. This is going to be a bit painful I’m afraid.”
At first nothing happened. Then Cecelia collapsed onto her side. Her limbs began to elongate. The talons on her feet shrunk until they were ordinary toenails. Her three toes became five and the flesh turned pink. The rest of her body took on a human shape, though it was still covered in feathers. These feathers turned gray and then black before they crumbled into dust.
Aggie brushed this dust off to reveal the naked pink flesh and dark red hair of her niece. Cecelia looked up at her and after a moment there was recognition in her eyes. “Aunt Agnes?” she whispered.
“Yes. You remember me?”
“Yes.”
“How old are you?”
“A hundred seventy-five.”
“Very good, dear.” Aggie took Cecelia by the arm and helped her to her feet. “Let’s go upstairs and find you some clothes. Then I’ll put on some tea and we can talk.”
“No,” Cecelia said. “We have to get to Prague. That’s where they’ve taken her.”
“Who?”
“Shelly. They changed her into a child. The Headmistress is going to convert her.”
“I see.” Aggie patted Cecelia’s shoulder. “Then we’ll skip the tea, but I don’t think you can go to Prague like that.”
Cecelia looked down at herself and then smiled slightly. “I guess not.” She leaned against Aggie for support as they went upstairs, to the parlor. She helped Cecelia onto the couch and then went to fetch some of Sylvia’s old clothes, which undoubtedly would fit her daughter.
When she returned, she found Cecelia still on the couch; the girl sobbed into a pillow. “It’s going to be all right, dear,” Aggie said. “We’ll get Shelly back.”
Cecelia shook her head. “She’s already gone.”
“That may be, dear, but once we give her the antidote—”
“It won’t matter. Her mind was already so fragile. Now it’s gone.” Cecelia sniffled as if she were a toddler. “She’ll be better off not remembering me.”
“Don’t talk like that, dear. We’ll find a way to bring her back. We can ask Glenda and Akako can search the archives—”
“It won’t work,” Cecelia said. She threw the pillow aside and then wiped at her tears. She sprang from the chair, which was a relief as it meant her niece had returned to normal. Cecelia took the clothes from Aggie and then began to dress. “Let’s get moving. Even if Shelly doesn’t remember me, I’m not going to let them keep her.”
***
Akako didn’t get much of a chance to use her Japanese anymore. For the last two years she had only spoken it a few times with Emma, just so they could both stay in practice. She found it was like riding the proverbial bike; the words flowed back to her as she and Ms. Chiu talked after Akako had put Renee to bed.
That took longer than usual because Renee wanted to sleep in her crib with her stuffed toys and her unicorn mobile overhead. “We’ll be home soon, sweetie,” Akako said. “You have to make do for now.”
“No!” Renee wailed. She cried until her face turned beet red. Akako worried her little girl would pass out, but eventually she tired herself out and fell into a fitful sleep in the unfamiliar bed. Akako leaned down to kiss Renee’s forehead as she always did.
“You spoil her,” Ms. Chiu said in Japanese. She sat on a cushion in one corner of the room with two cups of sake. Akako hadn’t drunk sake—or anything else—since she and Aggie began trying to conceive. She found the taste of the alcohol unpleasant, but it did help take a little of her edge off.
“Agnes says the same thing,” Akako said, her Japanese halting.
“And she’s right. Your child is destined for a difficult life. You must begin making her strong now.”
“She’s a baby.”
“She’ll always be a baby if you continue to treat her like one.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“She will never be able to embrace her destiny then.”
“What destiny is that?”
“She will lead a new coven with a new breed of witches.”
Akako turned to the crib, where Renee slept on her stomach and sucked her thumb. Renee was so shy around other people, even those she knew. How could she possibly become the leader of a coven? “You’re sure?”
“It’s been foreseen.”
“I thought telling the future was forbidden.”
“So is creating a child with a mortal.”
Akako nodded and looked down at her feet. She always felt responsible for the ostracizing Aggie received from the coven. If she hadn’t come through the temporal rift, Aggie would never have met her. If she hadn’t been so adamant about a child, they never would have made Renee. “I know.”
“That is why everyone here fears her. They know she is the agent of change. They’ve become set in their ways.”
“But you don’t agree with them?”
“I believe change is the natural order of things.” Ms. Chiu let this sink in for a moment. “Our world is constantly changing. The day becomes the night. The summer becomes the fall becomes the winter becomes the spring. Much as some would like to, we cannot stop these changes. They are inevitable. The best we can do is to move with the change, to accept it.”
“That’s why they want her, isn’t it?”
“Yes. The Heretics want her power for their own. They mean to turn Renee into a weapon against us.”
Akako put a hand to her mouth in disbelief. “Renee wouldn’t hurt anyone.”
“They will twist her mind for their purposes.”
“You mean they’ll brainwash her?”
“Yes. They will indoctrinate her with their lies. Then she will destroy us.”
“How?”
“That we have not seen yet. I’m sure it will reveal itself in time.”
Akako resisted the urge to pick Renee up, to reassure herself by feeling the warmth of her baby’s body against hers. Instead, she took the cup of sake Ms. Chiu offered. “Do you thin
k Aggie and Cecelia can stop them?”
“Perhaps.”
“Haven’t you looked into the future for that?”
“It’s difficult to say. Things are in motion right now that could change the outcome.”
“So what can I do?”
“Wait. Prepare Renee as best you can.”
“How?”
“You have to start letting her go. You have to stop looking at her as your baby and start to see that she is much more.”
“I can’t do that. I love her.”
“If you really love her, then you’ll want what’s best for her future.”
“I’ll try,” Akako said, though she didn’t really know how to do that. Renee was her baby, the miracle child who was an extension of Akako and Agnes’s love. How could she let that go, to distance herself from such a special girl?
They eventually turned to happier topics. Ms. Chiu talked about the last time she had visited Tokyo thirty years ago. It sounded very different from when Akako had visited there as a little girl. In this world Tokyo was merely a major city in Japan, while in Akako’s world it was the largest city on the planet; it took up the entire archipelago. Akako tried to explain this difference to Ms. Chiu, whose eyes went wide.
Akako went on to explain that in her world the Black Death had wiped out most of Europe, to leave North America to be colonized by the Asian powers. Japan had eventually won out and colonized most of what in this world was the United States. For that reason, Tokyo had become the premier city of the world, the unofficial capital of Earth.
“That is amazing,” Ms. Chiu said. “I should like to see that.”
“Don’t worry, you will soon enough,” a voice hissed.
Akako turned to see a half-dozen women at the door to Ms. Chiu’s quarters. At their head was an older woman with gray hair and glasses; her blue eyes narrowed as she studied Akako. Ms. Chiu shot to her feet and struck a defensive pose.
“I should have known it was you,” Ms. Chiu said.
“You’re the one who wants Renee?” Akako asked. “You’re the Headmistress?”
“Yes. Give me the child and you will not be hurt.” The Headmistress signaled to the five other women with her, who carried a variety of deadly weapons.
“Your minions are no match for me,” Ms. Chiu said. She closed her eyes and held up her hands, but nothing happened.
“Your powers won’t work here. Not against me,” the Headmistress said. She signaled to two of the women with her to rush forward, towards the crib.
“No!” Akako shouted. She lunged forward to stop them, but one knocked her to the ground as easily as batting a tree branch out of the way. “Renee!”
She heard her baby cry out as one of the women reached into the crib to pick her up. Akako tried to get up, but one of the Heretics knocked her down. The others had taken hold of Ms. Chiu and pressed a dagger to her throat. The Headmistress stood in the same place on the floor to watch with little interest.
Renee’s face had again turned red as she wailed. “Mama! Mama!”
“Let her go! She’s a baby,” Akako said.
“Only for now. One day she will grow into a woman. A very powerful woman,” the Headmistress said. “And all of that power will be mine.”
There was nothing Akako could do as the assassin passed Renee into the Headmistress’s arms. The old woman smiled down at Renee, who continued to cry. The Headmistress put a hand on Renee’s head and whispered, “Sleep, little one.”
Renee complied almost instantly; she went silent and rested her head on the Headmistress’s shoulder. “Please don’t take my baby,” Akako said. “She’s not a weapon; she’s a child.”
“Don’t worry, no harm will come to her,” the Headmistress said. Then she smiled at Akako. “I think it’s time you go back where you belong.” She reached into her pocket to produce a scroll. Akako had seen this before, last time in Sylvia’s hand. She looked for something to grab on to, but there was nothing within reach.
The Headmistress hurled the scroll over Akako’s head; the glass tube that surrounded it shattered. There was an explosion of purple light that formed a gateway. The woman who stood over Akako danced aside a moment before a hurricane wind came from the gateway. Akako focused on Renee as the gateway began to pull her in. She clawed at the floor; her fingernails left scratches along the hardwood surface as she slipped away. In the end, there was nothing she could do. She could only scream Renee’s name one last time before she was pulled in.
When she opened her eyes, she found herself in a very familiar room. It was her bedroom. Not her bedroom in Rampart City or the archives, but her bedroom at her parents’s house in New Tokyo. The walls were the same pastel green as she remembered with posters of various actors and singers tacked up.
The latter disturbed her because she knew her parents had taken these down when she went off to college. They had always thought such posters unseemly, too provocative for a girl’s room. She had pleaded with them for days until they let her keep them up.
She went over to the vanity. There she confirmed the portal had not only taken her back to her dimension, it had taken her back in time about ten years. From the number of zits on her face and the braces on her teeth she figured she must be thirteen years old. “Oh no,” she whispered.
Besides the zits, braces, and general gawkiness of her adolescent body, there was another change as well: she couldn’t hear the others. The only thoughts she heard in her mind were her own. While this should have comforted her to finally have some privacy, she felt despair. To lose those two hundred twenty-five other voices was like she had lost a piece of herself. In a way it was, since those voices were her, all the different versions of her.
She heard a moan from across the room. With a start she saw a second bed, this one surrounded by posters from anime TV shows. The bedspread peeled back to reveal a little girl’s head, her black hair held back from her face by a headband that matched her pink nightgown. This was Akako’s little sister Aiko. They had shared a room until Akako turned fourteen, when she insisted on her own space.
“Where am I?” Aiko asked. She looked around the room. She put a hand to her head.
“You’re home,” Akako said.
“Akako?”
Akako looked more closely at her sister’s eyes. “Ms. Chiu?”
“Where are we?”
“We’re in my world,” Akako said. She sat down on the edge of her bed and covered her face with her hands. “I’m home.” Home, without Aggie or Renee. Unless she and Ms. Chiu could find a way to reopen the gateway, she would never see them again. Meanwhile, the Headmistress had Renee to twist however she wanted.
Akako rolled onto her stomach and buried her face in her bedspread as she cried. As she did, she saw something had rolled beneath her dresser. She crawled over to the dresser and reached underneath for the object.
It was the scroll, the one that had brought them here. She showed this to Ms. Chiu, who nodded. “Apparently she was careless enough to let it go with us,” Ms. Chiu said.
“Stand back,” Akako said. She tossed the scroll on the floor and braced herself for the gateway to open. Nothing happened. “Oh no.”
Ms. Chiu jumped off the bed and bent down to pick up the scroll. She studied the ends of it and shook her head. “The spell’s power is gone. It’s useless.”
“Then how do we get back?”
“That I do not know.” Ms. Chiu shrugged Aiko’s tiny shoulders. “It may only need time to regenerate.”
There was a knock at the door. When it opened, Akako saw her mother, who looked far less old and angry than when Akako had left. This was before Akako met Aggie, before her Aggie died, and before Akako lost their child. Akako’s mother smiled and said in a sunny voice, “Good, you’re both up. Time to get ready for school. Better hurry or you’ll miss your bus.”
“Yes, Mother,” Akako said. She looked down at her feet. She waited until her mother had gone to turn to Ms. Chiu. “What do we do now?”
The old witch in Aiko’s body shrugged again. “We get ready for school and hope the scroll regains its power soon.”
Though Akako hated to admit it, she knew Ms. Chiu was right. There was nothing they could do at the moment, no way to get back home. She opened her dresser drawers and took out the pieces of her school uniform with its white blouse, plaid skirt, and blue blazer. Then she went over to a pink set of drawers that was Aiko’s to assemble her sister’s uniform.
When they finished dressing, Akako stood in front of the mirror and stared at her young face, the face that didn’t yet know the pain of losing someone she loved.
Part 3
Chapter 21
They hadn’t had the foresight to put a car seat in the back of the SUV for Louise. Because of this, Emma tried not to drive too recklessly even as she fled from Bykov’s people. With every bump they hit, Emma looked into the backseat to make sure Louise was still buckled in. “Are you all right, baby?” she asked more than once.
Louise said nothing. She hadn’t said a word since they’d taken off from the overpass with both of Louise’s fathers dead. She didn’t even cry; she clutched her stuffed turtle as if it were a life preserver.
Emma was grateful for the SUV’s four-wheel drive as she’d been forced to take the vehicle off the highway, onto a muddy trail probably used by farmers. Armored personnel carriers blocked the highway, no doubt members of the army on Bykov’s payroll. She supposed it would only be a matter of time before they figured out she’d turned off onto the trail and began to follow her.
Before that happened, she hoped to put as much distance between herself and them as possible. From her calculations, they weren’t very far from the border with Latvia. Not that they’d be much safer there, but at least it was less likely she’d have to cope with the military chasing after her.
She followed the path as it curved around Pskov. She skirted the town; she figured Bykov’s people would look for her there. She also made sure to stay away from Ivan’s cabin. Even though she knew he wouldn’t be there, she wouldn’t be surprised if he had someone watching it.
The headlights were powerful enough that she could easily see the forest path to avoid the trees and low branches. She managed to brake in time to avoid a deer that ran across her path. She turned back again to make sure Louise wasn’t hurt.
Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis Page 129
