“The Plaine Museum North Branch,” she corrected him.
“And how old are you?”
“Twenty-nine. Why are you asking me these questions?”
“Maybe because the last time you were here, you thought you were some little whippersnapper named Joanna Reed and that you were your own daughter.” He shook his head. “Honestly, I don’t know how someone so book smart can be brainwashed so easily.”
“That wasn’t me. That was a girl from a parallel universe. And yes, she’s my daughter there, which is why she looks like me.”
“She looks exactly like you. Or at least before you lost your mind and started attacking orderlies.”
“There’s an explanation for that, but I really don’t have time for it now. Merlin wants to see me. That’s why I’m here.”
“Yes, well, I suppose we’ll just have to wait for his flying fleabag to come and fetch you.” Marlin looked up at the sky and then shook his head. “Well, I’m sure by now that other nag has dinner ready. I hope you like mutton. That’s all we ever have here. Thought I’d never tire of mutton, but here we are. Of course it’d be better if she could actually cook. Half the time all she does is stick it in the fire and it comes out raw inside.”
Marlin continued to rant about his mate—Emma really had no idea what to call them since they weren’t married in the traditional sense and they weren’t really “dating” either—as they walked along the dirt path. When he finally had to stop for air, Emma asked, “So how did you get here? Is the armor gone?” She had taken off the armor before she’d become a baby and unleashed all of this horror.
“No, it’s not gone. She could never do that. The master’s magic is too strong for her. She has it locked up somewhere, though unlike certain other people, she banished me instead of forcing me to sit around in that infernal box for months.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Emma said. She had constructed a box made from the metal of Ward’s vault to contain the magic armor while she was on maternity leave. That was the only way she could make sure Megan or someone else wouldn’t hear the Call to take up the armor in her stead. As a consequence, Marlin’s spirit had been trapped inside the box as well, something she doubted he would ever let her live down. “You don’t know where she has it, do you?”
“Of course I do. Up in her new palace.”
“Where’s that?”
“You’re the genius, why don’t you tell me?”
She needed only to glance up at Merlin’s mountain to figure it out. “Robinson Tower. The highest point in the city. So she can look down on her domain.”
“Ah yes, perhaps you’re not as dumb as I thought.”
***
At the end of the dirt path they came to a clearing. Last time there had been just a single lean-to made out of tree branches. Now there were three. The lean-tos sat a short distance from the fire pit, where as Marlin had said, a blond woman dressed only in sheepskins cooked a joint of mutton. This was Marlin’s mate, Beaux, a shepherdess back in their old village in ancient Britain.
Percival Graves sat beside Beaux, similarly dressed in animal skins; he’d gone native since he’d come here almost five years ago. His rugged face, which looked younger since the last time she’d seen him, lit up when he saw her. “Hello, lass. Didn’t expect to see you here again so soon.” He stood up to wrap her in a bear hug that would probably have broken her ribs if she weren’t already dead.
She managed to keep the flowers from being crushed as well. Once Percival backed away, she shyly held these out to him. “I brought you some flowers.”
He sniffed at the daisies and nodded. “They’re almost as pretty as you, love. But I think you ought to save them for our other dinner guest.”
“Other dinner guest?”
“Oh yes. He showed up here not long ago. What would you say, Beaux, about a week ago?”
“Why are you asking me?” Beaux snapped without turning around.
“Well, love, I thought you might have a better sense of time here than I do. It’s so hard to keep track without a calendar and all that.” Percival scratched at the gray stubble on his chin. “Nice chap, but keeps to himself most of the time. He’s usually down in the cave by the shore. Probably there right now.” He nodded towards the south with his head.
Emma’s heart began to race as she listened to Percival. It couldn’t be. He couldn’t be here. Could he? She kissed Percival on the cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered.
As she ran, she ignored the branches and thorns that tried to pull at her dress and cut her feet. It was as if she glided along the ground as if in a dream. Maybe this was another dream or maybe it was another nightmare. At the moment she didn’t care.
The forest thinned out and the roar of the ocean pounded in her ears. She came to a stop on a ledge that overlooked the beach, from which a steel blue sea stretched into infinity. She didn’t see anyone on the beach. Then she saw the lip of a cave beneath her feet.
With the flowers pressed to her chest, Emma picked her way along a series of boulders, down to the beach. There she stood in front of the cave. He stood in the shadows, as if he had expected her.
Tears stung her eyes. “Jim?”
He stepped out of the shadows and she saw it really was him, just as she’d left him back in Russia in his ratskin coat. Despite his surroundings, the stench of the sewers still clung to him. That smell had once repulsed her, but now it was like a sweet perfume. He brushed tangled hair from his face to smile at her. “It me,” he said.
She ran forward into his arms, not concerned anymore if she ruined the flowers. His kiss felt just the way it had back in Rampart City, when they had both been alive. Only now as she kissed him, she didn’t feel the urge to bite his neck or suck his blood. She only wanted to hold on to this moment forever.
But nothing could last forever. They eventually had to part. She blushed as she thrust the crushed daisies towards him. “I picked these for Percival, but he thought you might like them. I know you don’t really like flowers—”
“I like flowers from you,” he said. He took them from her. He pulled one out of the bunch to tuck into her hair. “You still pretty.”
“Thanks.” She looked down at her bare feet, which were now covered with sand. “It’s only been a week or so since—you know.”
“I die. You die too?”
“Yes. For now.”
“Louise? She with you?”
“No, she’s not.” She took Jim’s hand. “I think we’d better talk.”
***
Jim had used some branches tied together and set on a pair of rocks to fashion himself a worktable. At the moment he had a log on the table, a sharpened rock sticking out of it. Near the top of the log, Emma could see the rough outline of a woman’s face—her face no doubt. Like the cavemen of antiquity, he had etched a drawing on the wall, only his was a far more detailed sketch of her to use as his guide while he carved. She should have figured a man who had learned to make art out of garbage in the sewer didn’t need modern tools for his work.
“If I’d known you were here, I would have brought you a knife,” she said. He had rolled in a pair of flat-topped boulders to set against the wall for chairs.
“Fine like this,” he said. “Not need now.”
She looked down at the sand floor and felt ashamed that she had raised his hopes. “I’m not staying. At least I’m pretty sure I’m not. I came here to see Merlin. That’s why I killed myself. After that, I have to go back to save Louise—and everyone else.”
“Louise in trouble? But Bykov dead.”
“Someone much, much worse than Bykov took her. Her name is Isis. She’s a goddess—an evil, vindictive goddess.” She told him everything, about the first time she had tangled with Isis, when she had wound up here, and Isis’s rebirth as the little girl named Eileen. She explained what Akako and Joanna had told her, that Isis had been behind everything since Harry Ward and TriTech. She managed to keep her composure until she came to the par
t about finding Louise in Aggie’s old house with Isis. “By the time I got there, she had turned Louise into a mindless, wild thing. She said the only way Louise could be herself again was if I traded places with her.”
“You save Louise?”
“No. It was a trick. She took my body and used it to regain her power. Then she took Louise back, along with Aggie and Renee and everyone in the city. She turned the whole city into her playground.” She put her head on Jim’s shoulder, unable to continue for the moment. He stroked her hair and soothed her with his touch and his presence. “That’s not the worst part,” she said.
She went on to tell him about how Isis had turned her into a baby. “I tried to hold on to you and Louise, but I couldn’t. Then I woke up as if from a dream—into a nightmare.” She told him about the alternate world Isis had created, where Emma was a dim nineteen-year-old recovering drug addict who worked as a cashier at the Plaine Museum gift shop. “You were there too, in the store. At first you weren’t nice to me, but then you invited me to a party. And we danced and kissed—and I had to run away because I kept thinking about hurting you.”
“Why you hurt me?”
“Because she made me a vampire. That was her sick little game. I’ve never killed anyone, so she made it so I would have to kill someone to survive. She wanted it to be you, but I resisted. Then it was Megan, but I couldn’t bite her either. I even caught Pepe in an alley and almost bit him.”
“But you not do it?”
“No, I couldn’t, not even to an animal. I kept getting hungrier and hungrier and my body started to rot. I attacked Dan in the museum and then my mother tried to give me an exorcism. I almost killed Percival at the hospital—and then you saved me. I was just a dried-up old mummy by then, so you cut open your hand to give me some of your blood.” Emma had to stop again at the memory of lying in bed with Jim and then what happened next. “Some police came and they took you away. I tried to break you out of jail, but Renee was there. She was a grown-up witch—and she killed you.”
“Not me. I already dead.”
“I know, but it felt the same. I almost killed her. I would have if Tim hadn’t shown up to rescue me.” She took another moment to recover before she finished the story. “Later, once I was out of the city, I had a dream. I was a little girl in a nursery and most of my friends were there: Becky, Aggie, Megan, Sylvia—and Louise. She was sitting on Isis’s lap. She didn’t know who I was. She thinks Isis is her mother.” She broke down and sobbed on Jim’s shoulder for some time. She finally wailed, “What have I done, Jim? Our little girl, she’s lost!”
“Not yet,” he said. “You save her.”
“I couldn’t the last time.”
“She not trick you again.”
“How do you know?”
“I know you.”
They kissed again and then Jim showed her to the bed he had made out of twigs and grass. It was big enough to accommodate both of them, as if he’d known that one day she would show up here. Maybe he had.
The last time they had made love was in a motel in Pskov, Russia in their attempt to save Louise from Bykov. This time she definitely didn’t have to worry she might get pregnant again since they were both dead. She focused on enjoying the moment as their bodies merged; it might not happen again for a long, long time.
Afterwards, they lay on the bed and held each other just as they had back in the Rat’s Nest. While that might not have been the real Jim, Isis’s version felt exactly the same to her. He had probably been created from Emma’s memories, which explained why he had loved her. She saw the crude drawing Jim had made of her on the cave wall and then thought of the one that other Jim had made of her. The real Jim had never drawn her naked, not even here. She giggled at this thought.
“Why you laugh?”
“When I was in the city under Isis’s control, the other you drew me naked. He tried to give the drawing to me, but I got upset with him.”
“Why?”
“I thought he just wanted me for sex.”
“I not just want you for sex.”
“I know.” She kissed him again and then smiled playfully at him. “Maybe while I’m here, though, you could draw me like that. If you want.”
He smiled back at her and then nodded. “I can do it.”
“So how do you want me to pose?”
“No need. I draw from memory.”
And indeed he did draw her from memory; he kept his eyes closed while he carved the drawing into the rock. Emma could only watch in amazement as he worked. For all her intelligence, this was something she could never do. She gasped in astonishment to see the end result, which looked exactly like her as she lay on the bed. “That is so beautiful,” she said with tears in her eyes.
“Not as pretty as you,” he said. She pulled him down, back onto the bed.
Chapter 31
She awoke to the sound of a horse. Emma sat up on Jim’s bed and put a hand to her mouth to stifle a gasp when she saw the Pegasus paw at the sand in front of the cave. The flying horse whinnied again.
“Jim, wake up,” she said and shook him.
He sat up; from the way his face sagged, she knew he had seen the Pegasus too. “You go now?”
“I’m afraid so.” She leaned over to kiss him again. “I’ll come back. I promise.”
“Not until you old—but still pretty.”
“You’ve got a deal.” She picked up her white gown and slipped it over hair that had become tangled, bits of twigs and grass stuck in it. She closed her eyes for a moment and imagined her hair smooth and clean and her dress free of wrinkles. She wanted Jim to remember her like that, though she imagined he’d have an easy enough time to remember her with the drawing he’d made last night.
Dressed in his ratskin coat, he followed her out of the cave. He didn’t even flinch as he stepped into the sunlight. The Pegasus neighed at her; it probably grumbled about her taking too long. She ignored it and turned to look Jim in the eye. “I love you,” she said. “I always will.”
“I love you too,” he said. He punctuated this with a kiss. “Bring Louise home.”
“I will. I promise I’ll get her back. And I’ll make sure she knows what kind of man her father was.”
She climbed up onto the golden saddle; the Pegasus immediately shook as if to try to buck her off. She held tightly on to the reins with one hand and used the other to wave to Jim. Before she could take off, he touched her leg. He looked her in the eye and said, “Take care of my friends. Keep them safe.”
She knew he meant his friends in the sewers, the rats who had taken him in and treated him as one of their own. “I’ll do that too.” She leaned down to give him one final kiss, perhaps the last they might share for decades. It didn’t last nearly as long as she would have liked, but she knew that while time here had no meaning, outside time was running out.
The Pegasus must have sensed when Jim stepped back that they had finished saying goodbye. The flying horse beat its feathery wings as it galloped across the beach. Emma turned to watch Jim become smaller and smaller, until he disappeared entirely from view. Still she waited until she could no longer see the beach at all before she faced forward.
It became clear as she did that they weren’t headed for Merlin’s mountain. Instead, the Pegasus took her out to sea. “Where are we going? Merlin is back the other way. Isn’t he?”
The Pegasus shook its head. “He’s not? Then where is he?” The Pegasus nodded towards the horizon. Was Merlin on a boat? Or another island?
This second guess turned out to be closer to the truth as she saw what appeared to be a mountain on the horizon. As the flying horse closed in, Emma began to smell sulfur. Her eyes watered from the smoke that came from the mountain. No, it wasn’t a mountain—it was a volcano.
A volcano? Did he plan to push her into the lava as some kind of sacrifice? That traditionally required a virgin, which clearly she wasn’t anymore. Or maybe the Pegasus acted on its own; maybe it wanted to leave her strand
ed on the volcano or try to dump her into it.
Since she couldn’t talk to the horse, there was nothing she could do but cling to its neck. At least then it couldn’t shake her off into the lava. The Pegasus’s neck also provided some protection from the smoke and now ash in the air. Yet the flying horse didn’t seem fazed by the thickening air; it didn’t so much as cough as it plunged straight into the black clouds.
Emma screamed into the horse’s neck as it dove through the ash and smoke, into the volcano. Apparently this had been a kamikaze run. Had Isis engineered all of this? Maybe everything—including Jim—had been another of her tricks. If so, it was the worst one yet.
She didn’t die. Neither did the Pegasus. The flying horse dove into the lava and passed through it to leave horse and rider unharmed. Despite all the other strange things Emma had seen in the last ten years, she still couldn’t believe it.
Beneath the layer of lava was a cavern with a second sea of lava, only this had an island in the center of it about as big as the Plaine Museum back in Rampart City. The single building on the island looked in some ways like the museum, with the same Greco-Roman columns and portico. With what had just happened, her mind was too dazed to find this strange.
The Pegasus skidded to a stop on the island, at the base of the building’s front steps. There Merlin stood calmly. He came forward and put a hand on her shoulder to steady her. “Easy now, young lady. You’ve made it.”
“Where?” she managed to ask.
“To where the Scarlet Knight was born.”
***
The inside of the house was like how an artist might depict the giant’s house in Jack and the Beanstalk. Everything was larger than normal, from the tables and chairs to the cushions on the floor and even the plates. The doorways especially were enormous, tall enough to accommodate someone more than twice Emma’s height. She felt as if she were back in Isis’s nursery, a small child adrift in the big world.
Merlin of course didn’t seem to notice this. He strode through the house and discussed the situation with Isis as he went. “She’s been waiting thousands of years for this moment. Now she’s finally got her chance. You can’t expect that she’ll surrender; she’ll fight you to the very last,” he said. His voice echoed off the mountainous walls.
Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis Page 172
