Aggie tried not to let it bother her that instead of going to this National Museum to find out who wanted Renee, they had to stop for tea and sympathy. Cecelia had been a good ally throughout this adventure and after the shock she’d suffered, she needed a break. Part of Aggie—the part that was Renee’s father—wanted to go on without Cecelia. The rest of her—the five hundred year old witch part—knew she would probably need Cecelia’s help. Not only to get inside the museum, but also to deal with whatever they faced inside. If that meant she had to wait a few minutes to console the poor girl, then Aggie could wait.
Just as everything seemed to be on track, the airplane flew low overhead. Though Aggie couldn’t see inside it, she could feel Emma inside it. Moreover, she could feel that something had gone very wrong with Emma’s trip to Russia, not only because of a premonition but because Emma was in a plane and not the flying carpet.
Emma had touched down on the riverbank when Aggie and Cecelia arrived. Lucky for them, most of the people in the area seemed more focused on the plane sinking into the river and the man who thrashed around in the water than on the Scarlet Knight. Emma used the cape to go invisible, but Aggie could still feel her close by.
“What are you guys doing here?” Emma asked. Or more accurately, the Scarlet Knight asked her. Aggie hadn’t really felt it before, but now that she stood near the Scarlet Knight, she could feel the rent in Emma’s mind, the two personalities that cohabitated in her body. At the moment Emma’s personality—the shy young geologist and mother—had submerged itself in favor of the Scarlet Knight, the cold, angry avenger.
“How did things go in Russia?”
“I got Louise back but they took her again. Or I guess someone else took her.”
“Oh dear.” Aggie wished she could pat the girl’s shoulder, but she couldn’t see it. “Let’s find somewhere a little more private to talk.”
Aggie and Cecelia walked across the bridge to a newer part of the city. There were still plenty of alleyways here too, though they were slightly wider. Aggie motioned for Cecelia to follow her into one of these and then waited until the Scarlet Knight let her cape drop. To Aggie’s relief, she took off the helmet and shook out her hair. Aggie put a hand to her lips; she resisted the urge to cry out with joy.
“What’s wrong?” Emma asked.
“Haven’t you noticed?” Aggie asked.
“Noticed what?”
Aggie motioned for Emma to stand in front of a glass window to see her reflection. For a moment Emma frowned, as if she didn’t understand. Then she put a hand to the crown of her head, where the roots of her hair had turned back to their natural copper color. Though she wasn’t a doctor or psychologist, Aggie knew Emma’s hair was turning back to normal because of her daughter’s love.
Aggie put a hand on Emma’s shoulder. “I think you should tell us what happened.”
Emma nodded and then sat down on an old milk crate. She told them about the carpet crash, her trek through the woods with her boyfriend, and their being picked up by a kindly farmer. He took them to his farm near Bykov’s estate, where they later found Louise had already been taken. So she and her friend had taken Bykov’s natural son captive and arranged to trade him for Louise. “That’s where everything went wrong,” she said.
Emma had to stop to cry as she described her boyfriend giving his life to make sure Louise could escape with her mother. Except they didn’t get to escape very far. Helicopters had shown up to try to take Louise back. Emma had gone to fight them, while Louise hid. “Marlin said a witch took her. She vanished Louise here, to Prague.” Emma paused again and Aggie could tell the younger woman had to fight off a sob. “But they moved her. I don’t know where. So I took that plane and I came here to try to find out where she went.”
Aggie squeezed Emma’s shoulder and looked her in the eye. “Don’t worry, dear, we’re going to find your little girl.”
“Thanks, but there’s something else you need to know. They have Renee too.”
“What? But she was at the school—”
“Marlin saw her with Louise in Prague.”
“She’s still here, but getting to her might be something of a challenge,” Marlin said. He appeared through a wall.
“What are you doing here?” Cecelia growled.
“I’ve been doing some reconnaissance while you were crying into your tea.”
Aggie said, “Let’s not get too testy right now. What did you find out?”
“They’ve closed the main building of the museum. Supposedly for ‘emergency repairs,’” Marlin said. “There’s at least twenty of them in there. They know you’re coming.”
“What about Renee?”
“They’ve got her in an underground room. She’s asleep right now. There’s another tot in there with her. One with blond hair. Pasty little thing.”
“Who could that be?”
“Shelly,” Cecelia said
“So I suppose the question is: what do we do?”
She expected Emma to propose some complicated, albeit brilliant scheme as she usually did. Instead, Emma said, “Let’s go in the front door. They already know we’re coming. No sense to keep them waiting.”
“Sounds fine to me,” Cecelia seconded.
“Very well then,” Aggie said. “Let’s be on our way.”
***
The front steps of the National Museum were deserted except for a few pigeons around the fountain. Aggie led the way with Emma in the Scarlet Knight armor behind her, followed by Cecelia at the rear. On the way up the steps, Aggie glanced back to make sure Cecelia was still with her. The girl’s face looked grimly determined, her resolve hardened now.
A red-and-white sign on the door indicated in Czech and English that the museum had closed for emergency repairs, as Marlin had said. A chain accompanied the sign to make sure no one could get in. At least no mortal who didn’t have magic armor. Aggie stepped back so Emma could tear the chain off with one slight tug. Then Aggie pulled open the door.
Inside she found a room three stories high with a skylight to let light in. Stairs led from this main room to the second floor, where archways led to the other parts of the museum. In those archways on the second and third floors, Aggie saw women clad in black, as Cecelia had worn when she had worked for the Heretics.
There was another archway on the ground floor directly ahead of them. Three more women emerged from this, followed by an older woman who was the only one not in a mask at the moment. As she came closer, the old woman’s face brightened with a smile.
The glasses Aggie didn’t recognize, but she knew the cold blue eyes behind them. She had thought she would never see those eyes again. She thought those eyes had been extinguished from this universe over three hundred fifteen years ago. “You look so surprised, Agnes,” the old woman said. The other three women with her parted so she could step between them.
“Sophie?”
“Very good.” Sophie’s smile broadened. “Did you really think I would be stupid enough to let mortals burn me at the stake?”
“But why didn’t you tell Sylvia and I that you were alive?”
“There will be time for that later. If you and your friends surrender, that is.”
“We’re not surrendering anything!” Cecelia said. A dagger appeared in each hand.
“Still as hot-tempered as your mother. You see how that turned out for Sylvia.”
Aggie didn’t move, though she badly wanted to wring her sister’s neck. “How did you get past the coven’s security? What did you do with Akako?”
“Their ‘security’ is a joke. As for your wife, I sent her back home.”
Aggie knew from Sophie’s smug tone that this wouldn’t be Akako’s home in Rampart City or even in the archives. She had sent Akako back to her own dimension. “The scroll. How did you find it?”
“Really Agnes, you’re so predictable. I hardly had to expend any effort. It is my house too.”
“Why are you doing this? I loved you.”
“Then join us. Help us destroy the coven and then you can have Renee back. And you can have your grandchildren back.”
At this, the three women with Sophie pulled off their masks. They had varying shades of blond hair and blue eyes. She recognized Brigitte’s pug nose, Lise’s freckles, and Zoe’s square chin. These had become burned in her memory since she had first helped to deliver them over a hundred eighty years ago. They were her granddaughters, the ones Glenda had said might have gone over to the Heretics.
“But you were dead. I went to your funerals,” Aggie said.
“You of all people should know how easy it is to fake a death,” Lise said.
Aggie felt tears sting her eyes as she stared at her granddaughters. She could still see them as little girls around the kitchen table to eat a fresh batch of cookies or to help her shuck a bushel of peas for dinner. She had healed their skinned knees and sat by their bedsides when they had a fever. “How could you?” she said, not just to Lise, but to her other granddaughters as well. “Shame on you. All of you.”
“Shame on us? You’re the one who should be ashamed,” Zoe said. She had always been the most hot-tempered of the three, to the point where Aggie had sometimes wondered if she had really been Sylvia’s child. “You would have let us die like mortals if Aunt Sophie hadn’t come to us.”
“She showed us what we could really be,” Lise said in a voice so reminiscent of Emma’s. A sweet, delicate voice that shouldn’t belong to a trained killer.
“What you could be? What is that? Murderers? I thought your mother raised you better than that. I thought I raised you better than that.”
“You raised us to be meek and submissive,” Zoe said.
“Victims,” Brigitte said. She had always been the quiet one, the one who liked to read books and had dreamed of going to university. She had died before she got the chance; she supposedly died in a carriage accident when she was eighteen. She still looked eighteen, only by now she was almost as old as Cecelia.
Sophie took another step forward. “If you surrender now, we’ll let the three of you live.”
“What about Renee?”
“And Louise,” Emma added.
“And Shelly,” Cecelia said.
“Renee and Shelly will remain in my custody. You’ll be free to visit them. As for Louise, I’m afraid she’s already gone.”
Emma took a step towards Sophie; her hand went to the Sword of Justice’s hilt. “What did you do with her?”
“I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to say. I can tell you she’s safe and she’ll be cared for by a good family.”
“She’s my child. Not Bykov’s or yours or anyone else’s,” Emma said.
“She wouldn’t have existed at all if Cecelia had done her job properly back when you were pregnant. I should have known better than to send her, given her predilection about not harming children. But she had never failed me before.”
Aggie put a hand on Cecelia’s shoulder before her niece could lunge at Sophie. “Calm down, dear. She’s trying to get under your skin. She knows that despite the numbers, she’s overmatched.”
“You always were so arrogant,” Sophie said. “Not to mention vain. Always too busy primping in the mirror or staring at the young men when you should have been studying.” Sophie raised a hand that began to glow white. “But I should thank you. Without you, I wouldn’t have these lovely ladies. Or my adorable niece. In a way, this is all because of you, Agnes.”
Aggie turned to Emma and then let go of Cecelia’s shoulder. “Girls, I think it’s time. Go find Renee and Shelly. I’ll deal with my sister.”
“I thought you’d never ask,” Cecelia said. She ran up one set of stairs, towards some of her former colleagues. Emma only nodded to Aggie and then used her boots to bounce up to the top of the other set of stairs.
While she heard the sounds of fighting in the background, Aggie stared straight ahead at her sister and granddaughters. “It doesn’t have to be this way, Sophie. You can turn over Renee and Shelly and help us find Louise. I’m sure Glenda will be fair—”
“Glenda? Fair?” Sophie’s bitter laugh sent a chill up Aggie’s spine. “Who do you think tried to have me killed? Who do you think incited those foolish mortals in Salem?”
“Why would she do that? She was Mama’s best friend. She was practically family.”
“She knew I was too close to the truth. She knew I would find out and tell you and Sylvia. She couldn’t let us know the truth or else she would lose her precious coven.”
“Truth? What truth?”
“You’ll find out.” Sophie nodded to Aggie’s granddaughters. “That’s if you live long enough.”
With a flash of light Sophie disappeared. Zoe and Lise circled around Aggie, daggers in their hands. Aggie ignored them to look straight ahead at Brigitte. She was the one who could most likely be reasoned with, if they could be reasoned with at all.
“You girls don’t want to hurt me. I loved you. I still love you. Put down the knives and come back with me.” She studied Brigitte’s face, but the girl betrayed nothing.
“Come back to you where? The coven that wouldn’t accept us because we weren’t real witches?” Zoe asked.
“Not if you don’t want to. You can come back with Renee and me to Rampart City, to America. We can make a new life there.”
“A new life doing what? Sewing clothes? Styling hair?”
“Whatever you want to do.” Aggie continued to focus on Brigitte. “Didn’t you always want to be a doctor, Brigitte? There’s plenty of time for you to become one. It’s not too late. You can help people instead of hurting them.” Brigitte’s cheek twitched slightly. Her sky blue eyes seemed to brighten for a moment.
“Don’t listen to her,” Lise said. “It’s a trick. She’ll turn us over to Glenda the first chance she gets.”
“I would never do that to you girls. No matter the poor choices you might have made in your lives, you’re still my grandbabies.” She could feel Zoe lunge at her with a dagger. Aggie floated into the air enough for Zoe to miss her and collapse at Brigitte’s feet. With a few words and a wave of her hand, Aggie could invoke a fireball or any number of other spells to destroy her granddaughter. But she couldn’t bring herself to do that.
Lise hurled both of her daggers at once. Aggie held up a hand as she had done at the restaurant in Stockholm. The daggers halted in midair and turned so that the hilts faced her. She plucked the daggers out of the air to tuck into her pocket.
“What’s it going to be, girls? Are you going to come peacefully or not?”
“This isn’t over—” Zoe started to say. Before she could finish, she cried out in pain and collapsed to the floor. Lise followed suit a moment later. Aggie saw they both had a dagger stuck in one of their thighs. Their bodies went limp and when they finally passed out she thought for a moment they were dead, until she saw they still breathed. The daggers had probably contained the same concoction Cecelia had used to knock Aggie out in the archives two years ago.
Brigitte looked up at Aggie, tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry, Grandmama. I never wanted to hurt anyone.”
Aggie descended to the floor to embrace her granddaughter for the first time in well over a century. She patted the girl’s back as she began to sob. “It’s all right, dear. Everything’s going to be all right now.”
Even as Brigitte cried in her arms, Aggie looked around the room to see that the other assassins were down for the count. She wasn’t surprised to see Emma at the foot of one stairway with nary a scratch on her. “Where’s Cecelia?” Emma asked.
“I’m not sure,” Aggie said.
Then they heard a blood-curdling scream echo across the museum.
***
Athletes talked about being “in the zone,” in that place of pure focus and concentration where it seemed as if the world slowed down for them. Such a feeling had come over Cecelia a few times before on jobs, where her mind had felt so clear and focused that it seemed as if the rest of the world ha
d melted away except for her and the target. At those times, she was so in command of her faculties that it felt as if her body didn’t exist.
The moment Aunt Agnes had let her go and she began to race up the stairs, Cecelia felt “in the zone.” It seemed as if time had slowed down; the other assassins moved as if in slow motion. She easily avoided the first dagger to come her way. A second one appeared to be going so slowly that she thought she could catch it in midair. She didn’t bother with this; she focused on the two women at the top of the stairs.
They barely had time for their eyes to widen in surprise as she leaped on them like a wolf. She threw both of her daggers at the same time and hit both women in the throat simultaneously. Before they could hit the floor, Cecelia had pulled the daggers out and moved on to the next trio of assassins.
They tried to use their superior numbers to trap her, but it didn’t matter. She whirled around and ducked before one could slice her throat open. She grabbed the offender by the belt and then spun her around into the knife of another assassin. The third wisely tried to run away, but didn’t get far before Cecelia threw a dagger into the back of her leg.
She was about to jam her other dagger into the woman’s chest when she heard the Scarlet Knight shout for her to stop. It didn’t surprise Cecelia that the superhero had taken down the assassins on the other stairway as easily as she had. Except of course the Scarlet Knight let her victims live. “Don’t kill her,” the Scarlet Knight said.
“They deserve to die.”
“No they don’t.”
“Why not? They tried to kill Shelly and me. They took her and Renee. They kidnapped Louise and gave her to God only knows who. We should kill every last one of them!”
The Scarlet Knight lifted her visor so Cecelia could see her eyes, which were moist. “If we kill them, I’ll never know what they did with Louise.” Emma patted Cecelia’s arm. “I’ll take care of them in here. Go find Renee and Shelly.”
Cecelia looked up at the third floor; she knew there were more of her former comrades up there. There were probably others in other parts of the museum, ready to spring at any moment. Cecelia wanted to root out every one of them, to wipe them out for what they had done to her, Shelly, Emma, and Aunt Agnes. But she also knew that Emma was right. The Scarlet Knight could handle things in here. It was more important that Cecelia go find Renee and Shelly before they were moved—or worse.
Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis Page 134
