by Brie Tart
Up close, her assailant’s whole look screamed modern-day Three Musketeers remake instead of back-alley assassin. His slicked-back ponytail highlighted his sharp jaw and high cheekbones. The blade he used had a double edge and a sword hilt with a vine-like guard twisting into its pommel. Who brought a fancy sword to kill somebody?
The attacker came for Helen again. She flung Lucy into the pile of trash bags and twisted, avoiding another cut by a hair. The mystery man moved like wind, one attack wooshing into another. Helen had never seen anyone—anything period—move so fast. How could she keep up? Instinct operated faster than she could as that lethal point struck at her. She couldn’t focus long enough to look for a weapon or an opening between spontaneous dodging. More shallow slashes tore at her shirt, her arms, her jeans. The smell of her own blood filled her nose.
Lucy whimpered behind Helen somewhere. Between fight and flight, Helen went for the attack every time. But that toothpick would kebab her if she went for a grapple, or tried punching that guy in his perfect jaw. Her knife wouldn’t be any good either from far away.
People passed by the mouth of the alley, not even turning their heads at the fight happening in broad daylight. One or two should’ve gawked, or held up their smartphones to start recording. Those mounted cops from earlier clopped past, keeping their horses at an easy gait.
“Hey, offic—Agh!” Helen cried out as the point of the sword jabbed low into her side. She vaulted away toward the sidewalk and rammed at a mom carrying her baby in a wrap.
Helen bounced off thin air like somebody had strapped an invisible trampoline across the alley’s entrance.
“They cannot sense us,” Mr. Musketeer-Wannabe said in an uppercrust, European accent Helen couldn’t place. “I was promised a challenge, yet you have not advanced on me once. Where is your battle frenzy?”
Helen panted hard. The longer she kept him talking, the more time she’d have to think, to catch a second wind. “You caught me with my pants down, and I’m still kicking, ain’t I?”
“Your lowly blood stains this sparring ground, not mine.” He lowered his sword, pointing it at the blacktop. “Could it be that I have the wrong woman? No, you’re covered in the Unseelie’s stench. Perhaps you are still untested, hidden away for so long.”
She didn’t have an answer for his dramatic, old-timey monologue. That rickety fire escape ladder hung behind him, a way out. If only Helen could grab Lucy and get a hold of it.
“You’re not gonna be nice, and let me know why you’re trying to kill me?” Helen edged down the wall toward that pile of trash bags and Lucy.
“Kill you? That would defy my orders.”
“So why the hell are you stabbing me?”
“To provoke your blood. It won’t do to leave it dormant. My master must see the result of his experiments on that witch.”
“Witch?” Helen froze a second. “You’re here about my mom?”
“Yes, Elaine Carver. No one has told you?”
“You’re the only one telling me anything.”
“Hmm, perhaps I approached you with the wrong tact, then.” He bowed at the waist, never taking his eyes from Helen’s. “Helen Carver, I am Ewan, the Witty Blade. Elaine Carver was given a gift by my master, the benevolent Seelie lord, Ailpien of Far Seeing Owls. It would seem she has passed some of it on to you. He is eager to see how she accomplished that feat. Accompany me to see him? I promise you will learn much.”
“Does that offer come with an apology?” So it wasn’t an assassination attempt, it was kidnapping. Helen only had a foot or two before she could grab Lucy. Her daughter had stayed awful quiet for a petrified toddler. Helen would’ve pegged her little girl as a loud crier in dangerous situations, not the rolly polly type to curl up and play dead. She’d be proud, if she wasn’t dealing with Mister Witty Blade.
“You will join me, whether you accept or not, Helen Carver. There is still the issue of your blood, though. Endangering your life did not succeed. If only that man were here, the older one. He would elicit a reaction.” Ewan’s eyes were a striking shade of pale blue with slit pupils that followed Helen as she went. He lifted his eyebrows, but his forehead didn’t wrinkle, like he’d had too many Botox injections there. His attention landed on Lucy, and his cat pupils widened to big circles. “Ah, Master Ailpien said not to kill the girl, but never forbade harming her.”
Helen threw all caution out the door as she dragged a second wind out of herself. She snatched Lucy from the trash bags and hoisted the toddler onto her back. “Piggyback!”
Lucy latched onto her mom’s shoulders.
Helen supported her daughter’s legs as she feinted left, making to get around her pompous attacker.
He slashed left.
Helen charged right instead. She headed for the dangling fire escape ladder.
The point of Ewan’s blade bit into Helen’s thigh. She staggered forward and kept sprinting. The ladder was higher than she could reach flat-footed. She let go of Lucy and jumped for the ladder. Helen managed to snag the bottom rung with both hands and hang off it for a hot second. Her daughter’s grip around her neck almost choked, but the girl held on. All Helen had to do was pull her and Lucy up, then they could climb to the roof.
The rung gave out, snapping off its rails under Helen’s weight.
Helen landed flat on her feet. Painful spasms pulsed up her shins.
The rest of the ladder slid off after her. It clattered to the cement below.
Ewan flashed across the alley with his sword poised to stab into the little girl hanging off Helen’s shoulders.
Helen slapped the sword away with the ladder rung. A thin pipe wasn’t any match for an actual blade for damage, but it evened the fight enough that she could make her own opening. Ewan’s blade edge got a nasty spot of tarnish where the rusty steel touched it, going from bright and shiny to dull and cloudy.
Helen took another ham-fisted swing at him with the rung.
Ewan backed off from the hit and went for Helen’s arm, the one holding her improvised weapon. Something about that thin pipe with a bunch of dents must’ve bugged him.
A funny rumble bubbled up in Helen’s stomach like her danger sense gone haywire. It burst out to her legs, then her arms. Heat exploded in her muscles, and sweat soaked her tank top.
Helen ducked under Ewan’s next slash faster than she’d ever moved before. She could follow his next moves, read how he advanced forward and brought his blade back around for another slash. Her mind raced, zeroing in on his exposed ribs.
She thrust the rung into the opening and shoved through the thin gap between his bones like they were fragile twigs. It tore through the navy trench coat, skin, and muscle like pudding. Helen had worked her ass off to get the nickname “The Amazon” at her local gym, but it took more than raw strength to make a short rusty tube do all that.
Ewan cried out and lurched back. He dropped his sword, pulling at the rung lodged in his lung. Smoke came from his hands as he pawed at it. The skin on his palms peeled off, and stuck to the ladder rung where he touched it. His jacket sizzled around the tear like Helen had shoved a red hot poker in him. The burning spread, turning the dark blue fabric into patchy rags. An odor like pork chops cooking too long saturated the area around Ewan as black veins crawled up the man’s neck and turned his perfect jaw to a red blistered mess.
Helen let go and backed up to the mouth of the alley. The heat in her blood settled, leaving her chest warm and satisfied. Tingles ran through her cheeks like right after a good lay, even better. Helen had apprehended plenty of criminals, brought them down, beat them to a pulp, and sent them packing to the police. She’d never ended another life in the line of duty. Was it always this intense?
Lucy sniffled beside her mother’s ear, but kept up her petrified silence.
Focus, Hel. She stood over the smarmy man-about-town she’d just reduced to a squealing mass of twitching limbs. If she stayed and the cops saw the situation, she could explain it as self defense. They�
�d buy that right? But the guy had third and fourth degree burns blackening every visible inch of his tissue. She couldn’t explain that. They’d take her in, question her, take Lucy away.
Helen charged through the mouth of the alley. Whatever had blocked it before had disappeared. She pushed through the crowd at her top speed. The bystanders stopped all at once. Someone shrieked. Cries for the mounted police came behind her.
Helen sprinted down the street with Lucy hanging off her back.
CHAPTER 4
Helen had done a lot of running in her career, and it came in handy for the first couple miles as she made her way to less crowded side streets. When she started to slow down, she checked over her shoulder. Nobody was chasing her. She ducked between a couple shops and hid herself and Lucy by a trash bin. They stayed there until sunset turned the sky purple.
Lucy settled into Helen’s lap and clung to her mother’s arm rather than her shoulders. Helen checked the girl over, making sure that sword hadn’t nicked anything. Lucy was untouched, besides her ringlets being a twisted mop, and her yellow sundress having smudges of reddish brown from Helen’s cuts. That helped Helen relax enough to think over the situation as her side throbbed.
She had some names. Ewan, a sword-happy lackey, and Ailpien, his boss. They’d done “experiments” on her mom, and apparently there was something in Helen’s blood that needed to wake up. Helen’s best guess was her mom had gotten caught up in some kind of cult and came back home to recruit her. But then how’d that guy been so fast? Was it drugs? Another mystery.
Helen did know what to expect after just killing somebody and fleeing the scene. She couldn’t bring herself to feel guilty over it. He’d wanted to hurt her and her little girl, and must have stalked her family to know so much about them. Cops and courts didn’t always see things that way. She needed Tommy. She needed to know what was going on.
She pulled out her phone and dialed Tommy’s number. It went straight to voicemail. That meant his phone was off, so he’d probably left it in the motel room. He must have found something high-risk and promising. Helen wouldn’t hear from her uncle ‘til he came home.
Helen hailed a taxi when it got dark and no flashing sirens lit up the street. Both her and Lucy stayed quiet on the way back. The driver didn’t bother asking any questions, and Helen paid him a hefty tip for it. In the apartment, Helen locked all Tommy’s deadbolts and pulled the blinds on every window. She set up Lucy’s crayons and paper, then showered and bandaged herself with the first aid kit. Her side wound would be fine until the next day with the gauze she packed in it. If Dylan and Tommy weren’t back by then, she made a mental note to head to urgent care with Lucy.
Lucy drew away with her red crayon while the Helen flipped on a local news channel. Helen let the local station play for an hour or so. Then she switched to the next one. Another couple hours. She moved on to a national station. None of the “Breaking News” reports covered a John Doe burning to death in an alley, or a massive woman with a little girl escaping authorities. No interviews with stunned onlookers who saw nothing one moment, then screamed at the writhing body that appeared out of nowhere. According to the media, it never happened. That realization made Helen’s arms break out in goosebumps.
Helen took the remote and turned off the screen as her eyes watered from staring so long. She turned her anxious attention to Lucy. What had gone through the girl’s head? She’d been too quiet. Was she scared? In shock? Helen slid off the couch and scooted up beside her daughter on the floor. She leaned over, catching a peek at the girl’s newest masterpiece.
Lucy’s picture had a tall woman with black hair, big muscles, and flames coming off her. On her back was a little person with yellow swirls on her head. They both had green dots for eyes.
“Who’d you make, baby girl?” Helen asked, already knowing the answer.
“Hellfire and me.” Lucy stared at Helen with her big eyes full of wonder and awe. “Mam and me.”
“Is that really what I looked like today with the bad man?”
Lucy nodded.
“You think that could be our secret?” Helen held out her pinky for her daughter’s. “Swear on it?”
“I promise I won’t tell nobody Mam is Hellfire.” Lucy hooked her smallest finger around Helen’s.
Helen shook their locked hands. Her baby girl had no reason to exaggerate what she saw. The superpowers explanation was the best one Helen had. Something about that fight had made her a real life Hellfire in every way Lucy imagined. So what did superheroes do at the beginning of their story? They dug deeper. Helen pinky-promised herself to do the same, and make her little girl proud.
* * *
Helen put Lucy down at seven sharp and finished telling about the mission with “Pretty Joe.” Lucy’s eyelids drooped shut. Soon she murmured along with her dreams, a sure sign she was asleep.
The night was Helen’s. She hurried to the agency office downstairs. Nothing prickled the back of her neck or sent her gut twitching. She still took out her boot knife and checked the empty streets half a dozen times before ducking in.
Helen huddled in her and Tommy’s office with the desk key he’d given her. She pried the top left drawer open, just as heavy and empty as before. Tommy had mentioned his film noir obsession, and how somebody had to be clever with the people who’d taken her mom.
How could the drawer be heavier than it looked? The plywood and particle board of the desk didn’t weigh that much. Had Tommy added more than a lock? What more did it need? Wait. He loved to rent out of old buildings because they had secret places everywhere, like cubbies under loose floor slats he could use to hide things. All of those thoughts collided together. The answer hit her.
Duh, a false bottom! Helen dug her nails into the edge of the drawer, feeling around for a gap wide enough to lift. There! The base pulled loose and came up. It covered a jumbled heap of papers and files.
Helen pulled out the entire stack, and set it on top of the desk. She parked herself in Tommy’s cracked leather chair. If she had to comb over every case file, scribbled note, and typed sentence in the pile, she would.
She read all night until her eyes burned. Half the information was written in shorthand. The case files had such minimalist, one word notes, they may as well have been in code. Once Helen had found a journal of Tommy’s in their first apartment outside of Brooklyn. It had the same kind of paranoid conspiracy nonsense. Either Tommy had taken his obsession with crime dramas too far, or he’d stumbled onto something huge. She moaned and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes as her head spun.
The copies of Elaine Carver’s missing person report and clipped out articles about how she set their apartment on fire made sense. But why the small army of foreign pocket dictionaries? She found Gaelic—both Irish and Scottish—and Welsh and German and various Scandinavian languages. She took out the bottom-most file, the thickest of the manilla folders. The sky outside had lightened to the gray light that came right before dawn. Helen yawned as she opened the file.
A black and white picture of Dylan grinned up at her.
Specifically, a photo-copy of a green card with Dylan’s information on it. It stated his Country of Birth as the United Kingdom. He’d always made it seem like his parents had immigrated to America, not him. And why would Tommy have a background check on her boyfriend in his secret drawer instead of the personnel files?
She skimmed over the rest. “Thief” was written beside a picture of a pretty silver sword that reminded her of an elven prop weapon from Dylan’s fan conventions. The blade made her think of Ewan’s double-edged number. Maybe Tommy had uncovered a renaissance festival conspiracy.
Helen’s head bobbed as she started to drift off. She jerked upright and her thoughts swirled with strange, new information. If Tommy was paranoid enough to hide his stash of coded files, she shouldn’t bring it to her room to finish deciphering his shorthand. Plus Dylan and Lucy might find it there. The only way to make progress was to stay parked and k
eep going.
* * *
Tires scraped against cement, coming to a stop. It came from the street-side parking in front of the agency.
Helen bolted awake, flying up from the spread of papers all over Tommy’s desk. Her world blurred as fresh midday sunlight slipped through the blinds and shined in her eyes. She groaned as she held her stiff neck. Her whole body throbbed, especially above her hip, where she’d been stabbed. When had she nodded off? It had to be sometime between cracking open the dictionaries to figure out what un-English words meant and playing with letter ciphers. She grabbed her phone from under a sheet of paper, tapped the camera app, and made it front-facing. The bags under her eyes reminded her of a skull’s hollow sockets, and her hair stuck out on one side more than the other. She turned the camera to her arm to see how bad her superficial cuts were the day after. The couple on her bicep had...vanished?
Helen set her phone face down on the desk and curled her arm, flexing to full extension and back. It barely stung. The skin was unbroken except for a few faint, pink streaks. How the hell did it look like that after only a night? She lifted up her shirt and unwrapped the bandage around her stomach that held down the gauze in her side. A red puckered scar sat under the brown gauze. That one should’ve healed, with stitches, in at least a week and a half.
Footsteps trudged on the stairs running alongside the office, leading up to the apartment.
Helen gathered the clutter of papers and folders into a loose pile—she couldn’t afford to leave those out. It took a second to shove them back into the drawer, push the false bottom board over them, and lock the drawer shut. Her heart raced in her ears as she stepped out of the office and peeked through the blinds on the lobby windows. A jalopy of a Honda was parked in front of the agency. Tommy’s car.
Her heart slowed a fraction. The boys were finally home.
She headed for the door and pulled her jangling keys from her pocket. It was past time for her to open the doors, judging by the wall clock whose hands showed a little past ten forty-five. She unlocked the deadbolt and stepped out onto the sidewalk.
