Action Figures - Issue Two: Black Magic Women (22 page)

BOOK: Action Figures - Issue Two: Black Magic Women
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“Where is it, Missy? Come on, girl, you’re the only one who has a bead on this thing. Talk to me.”

“I don’t know where it is, but it’s out there and I can feel it and it’s getting closer!”

“Enigma!”

“Not yet,” Astrid says, “not until it fully manifests.”

“Until it attacks, you mean. Dammit, Enigma,” Concorde says, his volume rising to overcome a surge of wind howling down the street, rushing toward him.

No. Not wind.

“CONCORDE!”

“Missy!” Concorde grabs for her, but finds only air in the space where she stood a heartbeat earlier.

A dissonant chorus erupts in his ears, frantic voices crashing against one another. Concorde tunes them out, focuses on the moment. He shouts Missy’s name, shouts for Enigma to get over here now, and gives chase to whatever is hiding in the suffocating darkness.

— except, for some reason, it doesn’t seem quite so dark anymore. He can’t make out anything past a few yards, but he can see the snow, a million twinkling fireflies twirling and spinning with the wind, as though he were the centerpiece of a jostled snow globe. He sees the ground with particular clarity, a white carpet, flawless and undisturbed, save for a shallow trench where something was dragged through the snow — something about the size of a fifteen-year-old-girl.

And he can see the blood.

It’s everywhere. Dear God, it’s everywhere.

He calls out for Missy, her name catching in his throat, lodging there. His lungs don’t want to work. There’s a weight on his chest, crushing him, a familiar weight to accompany a familiar terror, a smothering sense of helplessness.

It’s happening again. It’s happening again.

“No no dammit no dammit not again not again...”

Something slams into his chest with wrecking ball force, throws him onto his back. He throws the weight off, rolls away, rolls to his knees, the modules on his arms humming dangerously, building for another strike. It takes him a second or two to make sense of the form on the ground, and even then, his mind refuses to accept what he’s seeing.

Missy is so still...

Another you couldn’t save
, the wind whispers to him.
Another child’s blood on your hands
.

Concorde looks up. A man stands over him, so very normal, if sorely underdressed for the weather in his jeans and T-shirt. An icy crust coats his clothes, his hair. A perverse grin plays on lips turned blue from the cold.

“Broken man,” he says, “how delicious you taste.”

He’s going to kill me
, Concorde thinks distantly.
Let him
.

Lightning lances down from the heavens, impaling the figure on a blinding spear of blue-white energy. The strike launches the man, sends him pinwheeling through the air.

“Stay down,” Astrid says, a disembodied voice in the night. “I got this.”

Concorde obeys, though not by choice; the pressure on his chest releases and he swoons, dizzied by the blood surging back into his head. The temperature inside his suit skyrockets from the sudden release of nervous energy. Desperate for relief, he tears his helmet off. The air, clean and cold, it’s like ice water to a man dying of thirst. The dizziness abates. The fever, imaginary as it is, breaks.

None of it compares to the relief he feels when Missy stirs. She lolls onto her back, moaning.

“Missy? Hey. Hey, kid,” he says, shaking her ever so gently. Her clothes are soaked with melted snow — snow, and nothing more. “Missy? Are you all right? Missy!”

Her eyes snap open, blazing with fury. She leaps to her feet, roaring like an animal. Concorde grabs for a handful of her costume, but comes up empty.

Concorde?

Mindforce! Over here!
Concorde fumbles his helmet back in place as his teammate reaches him, Matt close on his heels. “You have to stop her!”

“What? Stop who?”

“Missy! She went after the fear demon!”

“Matt, give me some light!” Mindforce charges in, homing in on the crackling maelstrom of psychic energy.

Matt pulls a pair of handheld floodlights from his coat. The beams gleam off the thinning snowfall, bathing the area in light as brilliant as sunshine, but it fails to help him make sense of the scenario before him. The elements fall into place one at a time: Astrid, on the ground, a ripening bruise on her cheek; Mindforce, kneeling next to her in a protective posture; a man, a stranger, flailing and screaming as a black blur tears into him, staining the ground with streaks of red.

Astrid cries out, something between an order and a plea. Mindforce exerts his will over the blur, orders Missy to
STOP
.

“Whuh?” she grunts. She sways, staggers, and crumples to the ground, kicking up a cloud of snow. The man — the demon — he collapses next to her, bleeding from countless wounds marring every inch of his body.

“Well,” he says, his laugh coming out wet and ragged, “that was interesting.”

 

 

TWENTY-TWO

 

Mom and I manage a few simple pleasantries as we get ready for our respective days: good morning, how did you sleep, how about that storm last night, so on. That puts us more or less on-schedule; whenever we have a blowout, it normally takes a couple of days to get to the point where we can talk to each other without any tension or awkwardness. By tomorrow, we’ll look like we actually like each other.

The doorbell rings. “Sara’s here. Got to go.”

“You should wait for the bus today,” Mom says. “The sidewalks are terrible.”

“We’ll be fine. Can I have my phone?”

“It’s on the coffee table. Have a good day.”

“You too.”

See? We’re all kinds of civil. Familial bliss, here we come.

I second-guess my decision to walk to school after stepping outside, because it is freakin’
freezing
out. Sara, bundled up like an Eskimo, gives me a hello nod. She has some serious raccoon eyes going on.

“Hey. You okay? You don’t look too hot.”

“Tough night. You missed all the fun, and I use that term
veeeerrrrrry
loosely,” she says, a stuffy nose robbing her of her ability to pronounce Ns clearly.

I check my phone. There are a half-dozen calls from Concorde, all placed within a ten-minute period. “What was it?”

“Another demon. We spent an hour running around Gloucester in the middle of the storm trying to find it.”

“How did it go?” Sara hesitates. “What? What happened?”

She tells me. She tells me everything, from the first telltale wave of nausea onward, sparing no detail.

Then she gets to the worst part...

 

“Why am I on the floor?” Missy says.

“We...needed the medical table for something else,” Mindforce says, easing Missy into a sitting position. “Stuart, help her to her feet, please?”

“How’re you feeling, Muppet?” Stuart says.

“Okay, I think. What happened?” Missy shrinks as she realizes everyone in the Pelican, Protectorate and Hero Squad alike, is staring at her with a mix of emotions, none of them comforting. “What happened? I didn’t get possessed again, did I?”

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Astrid says.

“Me and Concorde were looking for the demon thing, you and Concorde were yelling at each other...um. Something grabbed me, I think?” Missy frowns. “Why are my hands all sticky?”

“I’m showing her,” Astrid says, pushing through the group.

“I don’t think you should,” Mindforce says.

“Noted.” Astrid draws Missy’s attention to the long black bag strapped to the airship’s retractable medical table. “This was the demon’s human host. What’s left of him.”

“Oh, gross,” Missy says.

“You did that. He attacked you. You attacked back. This is the result.” Astrid pauses, watching for Missy’s reaction.

Or lack thereof: “Uh-huh...”


Uh-huh
? That’s all you have to say?
Uh-huh
?”

“What? What was I supposed to do?” Missy says, punctuating her sentence with a shrug. “What? Why is everyone looking at me weird?”

“Dammit, I told you we should have talked to Astrid,” Matt says.

“Talked to Astrid about what?”

“Wait, this wasn’t the first time she went nuts?” Astrid says.

“She didn’t go
nuts
that first time,” Stuart protests.

“She kind of did,” Sara says.

“Hey!” Missy barks with a stamp of her foot. “Will someone tell me what you’re talking about because I’m confused and I don’t like it when everyone knows what’s going on except me, especially when it’s about me.”

No one speaks. None of her friends can bring themselves to tell her —

“You’re suffering from...I guess I’ll call it post-possession trauma. Your contact with the imp contaminated your soul, which makes you prone to occasional uncharacteristic behavior, such as,” Astrid says, tapping the body bag. She adds, pointedly, “And apparently other things I wasn’t immediately informed about.”

“Missy,” Stuart begins. She cuts him off with a withering glare.

“You knew? You knew something was wrong with me and you
didn’t tell me
?”

“We didn’t...we thought,” Stuart says, fumbling.

“What? What did you think? That I didn’t need to know? That you were protecting me because poor innocent little Missy would totally freak out because she’s totally incapable of handling bad news so let’s not tell her that she might GO CRAZY AND KILL SOMEONE?!”

“Missy,” Astrid says, “you can’t blame yourself for —”

“You shut up!” Missy says, the tears falling. “You knew too and you never said anything either! You suck! You all suck! You’re supposed to be my friends!”

Lacking a better option, Missy storms out of the bay so she can cry in the meager privacy of the Pelican’s cockpit.

 

“She refused to talk to us,” Sara says. “She wouldn’t even talk to Stuart, and if
he
couldn’t get her to open up...”

“God,” I say. “Poor Missy.”

“It’s our own fault. You were right. Matt was right. We should have told her.”

“We have to do something.”

“What can we do to make up for
this
? We completely betrayed her trust.”

I kick the question around in my head for the rest of the walk to school. The best we can do, the best answer I can come up with, is to apologize, lavishly, and promise her — promise ourselves — we will never, ever again keep secrets from each other. Keeping secrets doesn’t spare anyone any pain; it only makes the truth hurt that much more when it finally comes out.

(Says the girl who won’t tell her mother what she does in her free time. Hypocrisy, thy name is Carrie Hauser.)

We get our first chance to act on the plan soon after arriving at school, but Missy doesn’t give us an opening; we spot her while we’re at our lockers, stashing our winter layers, but she spots us first. She walks away before we can get a word out.

“She looks royally pissed,” Sara says. “I’ve never seen her that angry.”

“We might have to let her be for a while. You hurt someone that badly, you have to give them a cooling-off period,” I say, drawing on my own ample experience in such matters.

Missy helps us out with that one; she avoids us like the plague all day. She dodges us in the halls, she doesn’t make an appearance at lunch, she won’t even look at Sara during gym class, and at the end of the day, she doesn’t meet up with us at my locker.

“We screwed up so bad,” Stuart says.

“Yes, we did,” I say, and I repeat my advice to let Missy have her space. “She’ll come around. I don’t see Missy as someone who holds a grudge.”

“Until last night, I didn’t see Missy as someone who would turn a guy into coleslaw,” Matt says. Thank you, Captain Downer.

Stuart, predictably, leaps to Missy’s defense. “That was totally different. That was, like, heat of battle stuff. Doesn’t mean she’s hatin’ on us.”

On that point, I think he’s right, but, “I don’t want to take any chances. It’s uncharacteristic behavior; Astrid should know. I’ll call her on the way home.”

There is some token grumbling, most of it from Sara (who really needs to get over this jealousy toward Astrid thing), but in the end, the group agrees: we need to make a full disclosure.

I make the call when I get home, while prepping a pot of coffee. Granddad is out for the day again, so no need to worry about him overhearing the stream of profound weirdness I’m about to unleash.

Jeez, I’m about to talk about demonic possession and its aftereffects on my genetically mutated friend with a for-real sorceress. My life hasn’t been normal for a while now, but when did it get
this
strange?

Astrid picks up on the first ring. “Carrie.”

“Are you busy? We need to talk about Missy.”

“Hold on.” Silence fills my ear for a few seconds. “Had to lock up. Be right there.”

Before I can respond, Astrid blinks in. Even expecting it as I was, it makes me jump.

“Do you have a thing against phones?” I say.

BOOK: Action Figures - Issue Two: Black Magic Women
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