by Anton Strout
“What the hell is that?” Jane asked, her voice on the verge of slipping into full-blown hysteria. I had to calm her, and quick.
I walked over to her and put my hand over the mark. It was below the skin, but the snakes were definitely moving within the pattern itself. I pressed my hand down harder, trying to feel for them, but it was like trying to touch a projection on a movie screen.
“Odd,” I said, feeling the rise and fall of her chest as she panicked. I traced it with a gentle touch. “Does it hurt at all?”
“No,” she said. “Does that really matter? It’s on me. Isn’t that enough?”
“Calm down until we have something to panic about, okay?” I asked. Jane nodded. “Good. Now, do you feel any different?”
“You mean other than freaked-out?” Jane asked, sharp.
“Yes,” I said. “Other than that.”
“Nope. Just freaked-out.”
I looked her in the eye and gave her a smile. “So I take it you didn’t get this from a wild night out with the girls, then?”
“What?” she said, missing my attempt at humor and snapping at me instead. “No, Simon! Get it off of me!”
“Hold on,” I said. I grabbed the edge of the towel, lifted it, and rubbed at the spot. After a minute of vigorous scrubbing, I pulled the towel away.
“Well?” Jane asked.
“No use,” I said. “It’s still there.” I looked at the towel. It was still clean. “Whatever it is, it’s not like an ink stamp. None of it came off.”
“Oh, hell,” she said. “This is it. That bitch marked me, didn’t she? I knew something felt off. I got in the damn shower and I just stood there for, like, an hour letting the water run over me, but look at my skin and hands. They didn’t even prune. I’m telling you, she did something to me. I’m going to go to bed and when you wake up, you’ll be lying next to a giant water snake or a puddle or something—”
“Calm down,” I repeated, saying it for my benefit as well as hers.
“That’s easy for you to say,” she said. “You’re not marked. That woman didn’t dive through you!”
“We don’t know anything yet, so don’t panic,” I said. “When you went through D.E.A. orientation, didn’t they teach you that panic is for the norms?”
“What orientation?” she asked. “The day I started, they sent me to HR and they barely handed me my welcome kit before Director Wesker pulled me out of there and dragged me off to Tome, Sweet Tome to start cataloging the Black Stacks. I think the only real orientation I ever received was being instructed not to cry while working for Thaddeus Wesker.”
“A valuable lesson, mind you,” I pointed out.
Jane craned her head to look around into the mirror at herself. “That doesn’t really help me now, Simon.”
I grabbed Jane and eased her out into the hall so she couldn’t look at the tattoo anymore. “I know,” I said, guiding her down the hall toward the bedroom, “but we don’t really have an emergency room for something like this, you know? I don’t think anyone from the graveyard shift is up on this type of thing, but I think I know who might be able to tell us something in the morning.”
“You do?” Jane said, looking hopeful for the first time tonight.
“Yup,” I said, leading her over to her side of the bed. “Allorah Daniels.”
Jane’s face was a mask of skepticism. “Won’t she be busy Enchancelloring?”
“We’re all working hard to cover each other’s asses these days,” I said. “I’m sure she won’t mind taking a break from old men and paperwork to get in some lab time. Science was her first love, after all. But first, you need to rest tonight. If there’s no pain or symptoms from it, we’ll defer to her expertise in the morning first thing. I promise.”
Jane lay back against her pillow and slid underneath the sheets, leaving her towel lying in a pile on the floor right next to the bed. “I don’t see how I’m supposed to get any sleep,” she said, worry returning to her face.
I tucked her in, and then went over to the night table on my side of the bed.
“I have just the thing for that,” I said, fishing a small vial out from a jumble of miscellaneous junk in the drawer. I held it up. Down one side were the letters RVW.
“What is that?” she asked.
I held it out to her and dropped it in her hand. “Wow,” I said. “They really did rush you through your orientation. You have this in that welcome kit you still carry around as a purse. It’s a sleeping potion of sorts.”
“RVW,” she said, reading the side of it before twisting off its top. “Rip Van Winkle. Not very clever.”
“I’m pretty sure the Enchancellors came up with the name,” I said. “Leave it to the bureaucrats to lack any artistic finesse.”
She raised it to her lips.
“Careful,” I said. “Just a drop should do it. Otherwise, who knows when you might wake up.”
“Don’t worry,” she said, taking a tiny swallow from it. “If I slept for twenty years, I’m sure that this thing on my back would have killed me by then.”
“Comforting,” I said, and crawled into bed on my side.
“I thought so,” Jane said, already yawning. Her eyes slipped shut.
“Sweet dreams, my love,” I said, putting my hand on her forehead. I ran my fingers through her still-damp hair.
“Only if you visit. . .” she said with a sleepy smile and was out like a light. I took the vial from her hand and stared at her for a few moments, wondering about the mark. How was I going to get to sleep thinking about it?
What the hell, I thought, and took a hit of the stuff myself. I only hoped the woman in green wouldn’t visit me in my dreams. With my luck, I’d be naked without my bat, and I really didn’t want to look that up in any of the dream interpretation books.
12
The next morning we were up and out of the house like the devil was chasing us. For all we knew about that mark on Jane’s back, maybe he was. I reported the discovery of Mason Redfield’s killer to the Inspectre before dragging a worried Jane down to Allorah Daniels’s office/lab and calling her in. She was more than happy to get away from her Tuesday-morning breakfast meeting with the rest of the Enchancellors, most of whom looked like they might be asleep at the meeting table when I pulled her away.
Allorah guided Jane over to a bare, brushed-steel table that stood at the lab end of her office and had Jane lie down on it.
“Gah!” Jane cried out. “Cold!”
“Sorry,” Allorah said and set about examining the mark on Jane’s back by pulling up Jane’s plain black tank top until the writhing symbol was fully in sight.
I leaned over to look closer myself. “Don’t you have any of that giant tissue paper doctors use on their examination beds?” I asked.
Allorah turned her head and gave me a silencing look with cold eyes. “My apologies,” she said. “The creatures that I poke and prod at usually don’t complain.”
“Oh no?”
“No,” she said, turning back to her examination. “They’re usually dead or, at the very least, rotting.”
I was starting to think I had made a bad call bringing Jane to her. “Maybe we should take Jane to a regular doctor,” I said.
Allorah turned to me, standing up straight. “And say what exactly? That a mysterious woman dove through Agent Clayton-Forrester? I didn’t know that traditional medicine could cure that these days.”
“It’s okay,” Jane said, still facedown on the table. “Really. I just wasn’t ready. The cold of the table took me by surprise, that’s all.”
Allorah went back to examining the spot between Jane’s shoulder blades. She grabbed a digital camera off one of her nearby laboratory shelves and took several close-ups before setting the camera aside once again. She bent over Jane, so close she could have licked the spot.
“Strange,” she said.
“What is?” I asked, moving even closer to try to see what she was seeing.
Allorah reached inside
her lab coat and pulled out a large circular necklace hiding within her own shirt. I was familiar with it. My psychometry had shown me Allorah in her younger days as a high school science teacher defending herself against Damaris, Brandon’s vampire consort. Just remembering the damage the circular blade had done sent a chill up my spine upon seeing it once again.
“Look at the designs in the mark on her back,” she said, showing me her necklace at the same time. “They remind me of the ones on my apotropaic eye. They look Greek in origin.”
“You sure about that?” I asked, studying the necklace against the symbol.
“Pretty sure,” Allorah said, twirling the necklace on its chain. “I got this in Greece.”
Jane propped herself up on her elbows. “I don’t care what it is,” she said. “I just want to know if you can get it off of me.”
Allorah looked down at her, meeting Jane’s eyes. “Like, cut it off? I could try.”
The color left Jane’s face and she put her head back down onto the surface of the table. I gave Allorah a look of disbelief. “You people skills still leave a lot to be desired, Ms. Daniels.”
Allorah’s face softened. “Don’t worry,” she said, putting a reassuring hand on Jane’s shoulder, smoothing her tank top back down. “I wouldn’t do that to you.”
Jane turned to her, glancing up with hope on her face. “You wouldn’t?”
“No,” Allorah said. “I don’t know how it’s bonded to you quite yet. We could try to remove it, but whatever may be protecting it might kill you in the process.”
Jane flinched at her words.
Allorah looked over at me. “What?” she said, defensive. “I’m much better at dissecting and dismembering.”
“Don’t we have—I don’t know—a witch doctor or something?” I asked.
Allorah looked pissed. She stormed off with her arms widespread, showing off the expanse of her extensive open office space. “Do you see what I’m working with here? High school classroom leftovers. . . I’m pretty resourceful, but I’m quite a bit short of being a medical MacGyver.”
Jane sat up, pulling her tank top back into place. “So, what do you suggest we do?” she asked. “I’m beginning to think I was safer when I was still temping for cultists.”
Allorah sighed. “For starters,” she said, “you can go home and relax.”
“That’s it?” I asked, exploding.
Allorah remained calm and cool. “That’s it.”
I looked at her in frustration, then walked off across the open loft toward her office area. “You’re as useful as going to the school nurse.”
“Simon,” Allorah said in a sharp tone. “Please understand. Jane’s been marked. Of that, there’s no doubt. The real question is: for what reason? She’s not in pain or visibly hurt. Until Jane exhibits some kind of symptom because of it—and she may not—there’s very little we can do.”
“Shouldn’t I be quarantined or something?” Jane asked, hopping down from the table. “I could barely pull myself out of the shower last night.”
Allorah smiled. “Maybe you just like showers,” she said. “There are some mornings I can’t get out of them, either. For now, you’re fine. I’ll research this. There’s no sign of anything wrong with you, other than the mark. Nothing viral, no wounds or sores . . .”
“I feel sore,” Jane said.
“You and me both,” I added.
Allorah put both her hands to her ears, covering them. “I don’t need to hear about your sexual exploits, I assure you.”
“It’s nothing like that,” I said, shaking my head at her. “We both just took a pretty brutal beating at the hand of that aqua-woman.”
“Hold on,” Allorah said, running over to her desk. She shuffled through several of the folders on it until she pulled one to the top, flipping through it. “Argyle told me about this. This is the same woman you dove off the roof after, yes? The one that tried to drown you?”
“One and the same,” I said.
“And you’re telling me you saw her again?” she asked. She flipped through the folder, and then stopped. “I don’t seem to have a report on that.”
“It just happened last night,” I said. “I haven’t had time to file anything yet. There were fire hydrants going off at us left and right using some form of water manipulation. I think it’s safe to assume she’s the one who drowned Mason Redfield from the inside out.”
Allorah closed the folder and came back over to the lab area. “Do you have a sample?”
I was about to say no, and then remembered my jacket, which was still damp. I went over to where it was hanging on the back of one of the chairs across the lab. It weighed a ton still. In my haste to get Jane to the Department for an exam early this morning, I hadn’t even thought to grab something dry.
I walked over to one of the lab tables covered with supplies and grabbed an empty glass container off of it. I lifted my coat up over it and twisted it until water trickled out of it.
Allorah set to work with different pieces of her chemistry set. “This is a pure sample?” she asked.
“Mostly,” I said. “We were fighting in the rain, after all.”
Allorah continued working in silence for several more minutes like Dr. Frankenstein in his secret lab, running tests and recording results. She was at one of her microscopes when she stood up from it and frowned.
“And you were where again?” she asked.
“Outside the high-rise where we found the professor,” I said, “way over on the East Side by the river.”
“Odd,” she said.
“What is?” Jane asked from the chair she had settled into.
“The water from all those exploding hydrants is still city water. It’s all processed and therefore should be drinkable. In theory, anyway.”
“So?” I asked. “It was raining. We weren’t all that thirsty.”
“That’s the thing,” Allorah said, pointing at the glass slide on the microscope. “You couldn’t have drunk this sample if you wanted to.”
Jane stood and wrapped her arms around my left one. “Why not?”
Allorah tapped at the slide. “Because this sample that this water woman attacked you with? It’s salt water. Seawater. . . as in, from the ocean.”
“But we weren’t even near seawater,” I said.
Allorah cocked her head, and then looked off toward a refrigerated glass case farther along the lab setup. “Hold on a second.” She walked over to the case and searched through it, pulling out three or four other slides. She slid one of them under the microscope.
“What are those?” Jane asked.
“The other water samples,” Allorah said. “These are all from what we found when they emptied the professor’s lungs. He was also drowned with seawater, so there’s confirmation of your killer.”
“I’m not sure what that means for the case,” Jane said.
“I am,” I said. “It means we need to expand our search area for this woman. The closest ocean water is much farther downtown, where the East River meets up with New York Harbor.” I was already heading for the door out of Allorah Daniels’s office. “Time to see the Inspectre for a boat.”
13
I nearly wept in thanks for the sturdiness of the railing leading up the stairs to the Inspectre’s office. Without it, I doubt I would have made it past step one. The burn in my legs from chasing the green woman was less than last night, but stairs were a whole different torture device after all that running. By the time I reached the top step and turned right heading for the Inspectre’s office, I had a nice, slow mummy shuffle going on.
The sounds of struggle came from behind the Inspectre’s office door. I went for my bat and pushed the door open only to find Argyle Quimbley all by himself. To my surprise he wasn’t in one of his usual hundred tweed coats today, nor was he sitting at his desk. The Inspectre was in jeans and a black turtleneck, his broken sword from the cane in hand as he advanced back and forth across his office floor. His face was red
with the effort, but he swung the sword with slow, practiced patterns. Impressive as the moves were overall, I had the feeling that I could have easily dodged them had they been aimed at me. Regardless, I hoped that I had half the skill he showed at his age. I watched in silence for several minutes more until he ended his practice with one final enveloping flourish in the air. He still hadn’t noticed me standing at the door.
“Is it Casual Friday already?” I asked.
The Inspectre started, fumbling the sword cane. It spun out of control in his hand, but he had the quick thinking to pull back from it rather than grab for it, probably saving a few fingers. The blade clattered to the floor, taking a chip out of his desk with its broken tip on the way down. The Inspectre bent down and picked it up, then stood up slowly, his breath coming in short, winded gasps.
“Inspectre?” I said, stepping to him, arms ready to catch him if he fell.
Argyle Quimbley waved me away with his free hand. “It’s nothing, my boy, I assure you. Merely an old man feeling the full effects of his years.”
I nodded silently. I couldn’t argue with him. My psychometry had shown me what he was like in his prime, and he was far past those days.
“I’m dressed down today because I have the sneaking suspicion I’ll be back in the field soon enough the way the budget seems to be dwindling,” he said. “I still haven’t read through all the cuts yet. Thought I’d brush up on some of my old moves, but I fear my hinges need oiling before this Tin Man goes active again.”
“Not bad form, though,” I said, hoping to give some encouragement.
The Inspectre gave me a polite smile before walking back to his desk, where he grabbed up the empty cane and slid the broken sword back into it. “Thank you for humoring me,” he said, “but it’s not necessary.” He moved behind his desk and put the sword cane back up on the top shelf with care. “I trust you didn’t come here to watch me spar with shadows. Any developments on what happened to Mason?”
