This Eternity of Masks and Shadows

by Karsten Knight

  Once Nook had learned of Themis’s death, he checked in on Cairn once—and that was it. All her subsequent calls went straight to voicemail.

  Two days after the fire, Cairn returned to the charred husk of the windmill and ducked under the crime scene tape roping it off. She found Vulcan sitting in the middle of the Arboretum’s remains. The roof had burned away completely, and a cold drizzle fell on the half-melted LCD screens.

  “Hey, buddy,” Cairn said, leaning on the blackened doorframe.

  Vulcan sat on a pile of rubble in the middle of the room. Soot caked his face from combing through the wreckage, and the raindrops sent rivulets through it.

  After the fire, Cairn had helped Vulcan piece together what happened that terrible night. Vulcan had been at the local pub just down the street, having a cocktail and watching the football game. A woman across the bar had sent him a drink.

  That was the last thing he remembered. Once he’d been dosed with Nocturne, Phobetor had manipulated him into returning to the mansion. Vulcan had incapacitated Themis, tied her to the windmill, doused the grounds with accelerant …

  And then lit the match.

  “It’s ironic, you know,” Vulcan said finally. “Fire is how I came to live with Themis in the first place. I went through the foster care system when I was a kid, and I got bounced around like a pinball because no one wanted the third-grader who kept inexplicably setting fires around the house.” He traced a circle in the ashes with his bare toe. “Somehow, Themis tracked me down and invited me to live with her. Rather than shunning my pyromania, she had a forge built here for me and brought in world-renowned engineering professors from the university to hone my skills. All that kindness and look what she got in return.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Cairn placed a hand on Vulcan’s shoulder. “I hardly knew her, and I’m shaken—I have no idea how you must feel.”

  Vulcan gazed into one of the warped LCD screens, and his distorted reflection stared back. “I’ve lived with her since I was nine years old, but it’s not like she was ever a mother figure to me. Themis always kept everyone, even your mom, at arm’s length. Still, she was the closest thing I had to family.”

  “This is not your fault,” Cairn said. “You want to avenge Themis? Help me catch Phobetor and track down the person who hired him to assassinate my mom and the other ex-members of the Pantheon.”

  Vulcan perked up. “Ra is the only one left alive. Case closed as far as I’m concerned.”

  “No.” Cairn shook her head. “There was another.”

  It took a moment for Vulcan to catch on. “Aether? The little girl? How? Why?”

  “I assumed all this had to do with Mami Wata, the infant they killed. But then, right before Nagual tried to kill me back in West Virginia, he mentioned a woman—someone who could ‘bypass locked doors.’ What if we’ve been looking at it all wrong? What if Aether had a reason to silence everyone on that trip?”

  “Motive?” Vulcan asked. “She was just a kid at the time.”

  “How about anonymity?”

  Cairn pulled out her phone and played a video clip. It was shaky amateur footage taken by a bystander inside of a bank heist. A masked robber suddenly noticed the hostage recording and raised his gun.

  Before he could shoot, a dark figure clad in crimson armor materialized behind him out of thin air. With a single swing of her saber, she decapitated the thief. His head rolled toward the camera and Cairn paused on the still of Columbia as she was in the middle of teleporting away.

  Vulcan whistled. “You think Aether is Columbia?”

  “Every superhero has an alter ego they want to keep secret. In this case, maybe she’s not such a hero.”

  Cairn could see the wheels turning in Vulcan’s head. “It’s not the worst theory,” he said. “She’d be in her mid-twenties now, so it’s mathematically plausible. But if we go down this road, we need to be extremely careful. I’ve spent half my life in and out of the presence of powerful gods, but a teleporter teamed up with an assassin who can peer into the darkest pockets of your subconscious at night? That is a lethal combination.”

  “I know.” Cairn tilted her face to the sky and let the cold raindrops paint her cheeks. “But we have to try. For my mother.”

  Vulcan climbed down off the rubble. “Okay, I’ll do it—for Sedna. But I’m going to need a new forge.”

  “You can work out of my garage for now,” Cairn said, then added, “Just try not to light my cat on fire.”

  Vulcan moved into the guest room in the Delacroix house, and for the next few weeks, their mission consisted of two objectives:

  1) To find out where Phobetor had disappeared to since the night Cairn confronted him and

  2) To learn more about the mysterious vigilante known as Columbia, so they could anticipate her next moves.

  To Cairn’s frustration, the first question yielded only dead ends. After Phobetor’s escape, he’d made no return to Outer Brewster Island. The authorities had been monitoring the greenhouse since a SWAT team stormed the island and found the real Aristaeus decomposing in a keg, just as Phobetor had promised.

  Every night she fully expected the nightmare god to return to her dreams. But she only saw his emissaries, the murderous puffins, periodically making cameos as if to remind her that sleep would never fully be safe again.

  As for Columbia, her movements were impossible to predict. Over the course of the last few months, she had stopped at least thirteen violent crimes in progress, usually to fatal consequences for the perpetrators.

  “So what do we do?” Cairn asked one day. “Stage a bank robbery and see if she shows up to stop it?” She was only half-joking.

  “Maybe.” Vulcan was staring doggedly at the cluster of screens he’d assembled in Cairn’s garage, a makeshift command center until he could rebuild the Arboretum. He’d queued up footage of Columbia’s appearances and been analyzing them for hours, searching for patterns. “But before you start orchestrating a major crime, I think I’ve identified something strange …”

  Vulcan clicked play. News footage on three screens rolled simultaneously. In all three, field reporters broadcasted from the perimeter of the crime scenes, filming live. “Each of these takes place shortly before Columbia’s arrival,” he explained. “Notice any similarities?”

  Cairn squinted at the streaming video, trying to decipher the pattern Vulcan had recognized.

  “Where are the police?” Vulcan prompted her.

  She studied each image again. “What police?”

  He grinned. “Exactly.”

  Vulcan tapped one of the screens. An anchorwoman stood in front of the Museum of Fine Arts, animatedly gesturing toward the towering columns and discussing the hostage situation progressing inside. It wasn’t until several minutes passed that the police arrived and ordered her to back up as they established a perimeter.

  “Thirteen times Columbia has made the evening news for stopping violent crimes,” Vulcan said. “And all thirteen times the news vans arrived before the police did.”

  “You think she’s been calling the media so that they can film her saving the day?” On the screen, a visibly irate Nook barreled into the frame and shoved a camera out of his face.

  “Oh, I think it’s even more twisted than that,” Vulcan said. “Everything about this feels impeccably choreographed to me. The media is fast, but not that fast. What is the only way Columbia could find out about all these crimes before the police got wind of it, and have the proper time to make sure Channel Four rolled in before she made her grand entrance?”

  Cairn’s eyes widened as the implication dawned on her. “If she planned the crime herself.”

  And there it was. Little Aether, all grown up, fashioned herself a superhero, but needed villains to play the role of foil. So she orchestrated a series of crimes, bankrolling small-time crooks and minor gods to carry out scores for her—a museum heist, a kidnapping, an assassination attempt.

  Except that partway through, she would show
up to plunge a sword through their necks.

  “If there are no dragons to slay, you create your own,” Cairn said.

  The other lingering question was where the senator fit into all of this. “If Columbia and Phobetor had teamed up to murder the Pantheon one by one, why is Ra still alive?”

  “Leverage?” Vulcan suggested. “If they compromised him like they did Nagual, he could be more useful to them alive than dead. Friends in high places and all that.”

  Cairn pulled up a recent news clip of the senator. He was promoting an upcoming event: a celebration in Boston’s Seaport district to commemorate the anniversary of the infamous Boston Tea Party. On December 16, 1773, the American colonists had rebelled against Britain’s latest tax by raiding East India Company trading ships and dumping their tea shipments into the harbor. Now Ra had declared a new holiday—Liberty Day—to mark its anniversary, complete with a massive block party.

  To Cairn, it sounded more like a thinly veiled excuse to use taxpayer dollars to subsidize what was effectively a campaign rally for his reelection.

  The last week of November, Cairn’s father surprised her by flying home to celebrate Thanksgiving, just for the weekend. He was understandably surprised to discover Vulcan brining a turkey in their kitchen, and even more so when the young man thanked him for letting him stay in the guest room.

  When Vulcan finally returned to cooking, Emile raised a suspicious eyebrow at his daughter. “I’ve only been gone a few weeks, and you’ve started hosting male overnight guests. Should I be concerned?”

  “Just a friend whose house burned down.” Cairn pointed at herself. “Still gay.”

  Emile sighed with relief. “Oh, thank the gods.” He leaned down and kissed her on the top of the head. “For a split second, I thought I was going to have to pretend to be an overprotective father.”

  The week after her dad returned to Canada, an idea began to percolate in Cairn’s mind, one desperate Hail Mary to lure Phobetor into exposing himself. Since their confrontation at the greenhouse, the nightmare god seemed reluctant to invade Cairn’s dreams with more than basic surveillance. While this had kept her alive, it also prevented her from studying Phobetor’s subconscious. If she could lure him into visiting her nightmares again, maybe she could glean something useful from her surroundings, something that would hint at his whereabouts or next move.

  Cairn knew convincing Vulcan to go along with it would be an uphill battle at best. When she finally worked up the nerve to suggest it, the forge god shut her down immediately. “Absolutely not.”

  “Look,” she replied. “We’re running in circles. We have no way of predicting where Columbia will appear next, and Phobetor is keeping his distance. But if his emissaries discover that I’ve taken Nocturne, he won’t pass on the opportunity to sleepwalk me to death. And while his guard is down, I’ll be on high alert for any clues that his subconscious leaks through.”

  Grudgingly, Vulcan relented, knowing that it was better to go along so he could watch over her than risk her going it alone. That afternoon, after Cairn had acquired a vial of Nocturne from an old classmate who moonlighted as a drug dealer, she let Vulcan strap her to her bed. He’d even padded a special brace to secure her head in place—“In case he tries to get you to break your own neck,” he’d explained.

  Before he put her under, Vulcan held up a needle. “This is epinephrine. If I get even a whiff that you might be in distress, I’m going to inject you with this to pull you out. Understand?”

  Cairn nodded once, trying to quell the panic at how completely immobilized she was. Although she was willingly entering the dream realm on her own accord, once she was unconscious, there was no guarantee she would know that she was only dreaming. Whatever nightmare Phobetor concocted would feel very, very real.

  But it was a risk she had to take. “Let’s do this.”

  With a sigh, Vulcan lowered the vial of Nocturne to her lips. The opaque liquid, which tasted like bitter apricots, spiraled down her throat. Above her, Vulcan’s face blurred. “Cairn?” he asked, but his voice was just a distorted mumble as the room around her dissolved.

  Darkness.

  Cairn smelled the stench of death first.

  Her eyes fluttered open. She stared up at a cloudless sky. A cold wind numbed her cheeks, and she could hear waves gentling lapping against the shore nearby.

  But that smell …

  The odor was so intense Cairn had trouble focusing on anything else. It reeked of decay, worse than bacon grease and eggs rotting out in the hot sun. It was all she could do not to throw up.

  The situation only grew worse when she tried to stand up.

  Cairn was paralyzed.

  No, not paralyzed—she could still feel her arms and legs, but her limbs had been fastened to a strange, slippery surface she couldn’t immediately identify. It felt rubbery beneath her fingers.

  When she craned her head forward to look, she let out a scream.

  She first saw the metal studs that been driven through her wrists and legs, pinning her to the flesh of a massive, white creature. Flies swarmed around its body, which tapered down into two tail flukes, motionless against the ice.

  Cairn had been nailed to the carcass of a beached beluga whale.

  Together, they lay on an iceberg, drifting through Arctic waters. Cairn had always enjoyed watching the ice floes from the shore of her mother’s hometown.

  She never thought she would one day die on one.

  Cairn felt the bile rise and turned her head to the side so she wouldn’t drown in her own vomit. When she had finished purging her stomach, she tried to quell her panic. She didn’t know how she’d ended up crucified to a whale, but déjà vu gnawed at her, an insistent reminder that there was a reason she was here, that she had a job to do. Distantly she could hear the echo of instructions Vulcan had given her. Observe every detail of your surroundings, he’d said. No detail is insignificant. What do you see? What do you hear, smell, taste, feel?

  But why?

  Someone stepped into view, eclipsing the sun overhead. Phobetor grinned down at her. “The prodigal daughter returns,” he said.

  “I’m an only child, but nice attempt at a metaphor.” Cairn struggled to pull her right arm free, to pluck out the same nail the nightmare god had driven into her wrist and stab it through his eye. The agony that followed was so intense her vision fluttered with white spots.

  This has to be a dream, Cairn told herself. But the stench of the rotting beluga, the buzz of the flies, the pain from her wounds—everything felt so real.

  Phobetor tilted his head to the side, then clarity washed over his face. “Ah …” he whispered. “You’ve tied yourself up back in reality. Well played—except you didn’t calculate that you’d be defenseless here as well. I guess that means you’re at my mercy now.”

  Phobetor disappeared behind her, and Cairn could turn just enough to see him at the whale’s melon-shaped head, pushing with superhuman strength. The carcass slowly slid across the ice, with her along for the ride.

  “Ever since I killed Sedna, I know you’ve often wondered what it feels like to drown,” Phobetor said. “I know you even submerged your head in the bathtub once and opened your mouth just to try. How many seconds were you under before you chickened out and lay gasping and retching on your bathroom floor like some sniveling, pathetic child? Ten seconds? Five?”

  “Shut up,” Cairn hissed. Down at her feet, she saw that they were approaching the edge of the iceberg.

  “Well, you’re about to find out what it’s like to take your last breath of oxygen,” Phobetor continued. “Just because I can’t make you sleepwalk off the back of a boat doesn’t mean I can’t still make you suffer.”

  The whale stopped moving. She heard water lapping at the ice directly below her. “I’m going to find you,” she snarled. “And when I do, I’ll make sure you only dream in black for the next ninety years.”

  Phobetor hovered over her. “Save your breath. You’re going to need it.�
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  Then he gave the carcass one last kick. It slipped off the edge of the iceberg, and after a short fall, both Cairn and her rotting stockade plunged into the sea.

  She couldn’t have been less prepared for the shock of the frigid water hitting her skin. It instantly sucked the warmth from her body. As she slipped deeper into the ocean, part of her knew this was a dream, but it felt so viscerally real—the unbelievable cold, the sting of the saltwater in her eyes.

  She had bigger problems than the cold. Summoned by the smell of the rotting beluga, a shark appeared through the murk. Its jaws ripped off a piece of carcass near Cairn’s face and it was all she could do not to open her mouth and scream. Another shark emerged from below, taking a bite out of the whale’s tail flukes.

  As more creatures joined the feast, a curtain of darkness descended around Cairn, blotting out what little light penetrated the surface. At first, she thought it was the iceberg passing over her, until she looked closer and saw fine particles of ash.

  Cremated remains cascading down like snow.

  A bonfire had exploded in Cairn’s lungs as her body begged for oxygen, and she wriggled hopelessly against the stakes through her limbs. But she stopped fighting as she watched a humanoid figure drift out of the column of cinders in front of her. The body had decayed, and fish had nibbled away at parts of her flesh, but Cairn still recognized the face of her mother. She still wore the same sundress as the day she died.

  When her mother’s body was within arm’s reach of Cairn, her eyes flashed open.

  Cairn recoiled.

  “You failed me,” Ahna accused her, the words hoarse from her rotting larynx. “You let me drown. You let our family fall apart. And now you can’t even track down my killer. It should be you down here instead of me”