Action Figures - Issue Two: Black Magic Women (23 page)

“I prefer talking face-to-face. Makes it harder for people to lie to me. Are you making coffee?”

“Would you like some?”

“Hell, yes. I’m running on nothing but caffeine and sheer force of will lately,” Astrid says, slumping against the counter. Now that she mentions it, she does look a little haggard — and yet, damn her, still amazing. She puts the
hot
in hot mess. “Been putting in some long days.”

“Chasing down Black Betty?”

“Trying.”

“You’ll have to excuse my ignorance,” I say, scooping coffee into the filter, “but why can’t you just cast a Find Black Betty spell?”

“First thing I tried, but she’s working some serious counter-magic. That note she left for me? I should’ve been able to use that to home in on her like a bloodhound, but I’ve come up empty.” Astrid snorts, shakes her head. “Arrogant bitch flat-out challenged me to find her...”

“Is there no counter-spell to the counter-spell?”

“Theoretically, but I don’t know how she’s blocking me. Casting spells isn’t simply about creating an effect; I have to understand the process that creates the effect.”

“Oh, well, when you put it that way...”

“Okay, a practical example: when I hit the Soulblack with that sunlight spell? I didn’t think, ‘Boy, sure wish it was really bright right here, right now.’ I understood that sunshine was reflecting off the moon, and that diffused sunlight was shining all up and down the East Coast, and that a lens of sufficient size and shape would focus all that scattered light into a concentrated beam...”

“Like a kid using a magnifying glass to fry ants.”

“Bingo. That’s what I did, but on a much, much bigger scale.”

Okay, I am appropriately wowed.

“In my line of work, the saying ‘knowledge is power’ is very literal,” Astrid says. “If I don’t have some grasp of the mechanics of what I’m trying to achieve, I can’t make it happen. If I want to find Black Betty, I need to know how she’s staying off my radar.” She sighs. “And I am completely in the dark.”

I know that tone: that is the sound of someone unaccustomed to failure admitting they are clueless. I use it myself, on occasion.

“In the meantime,” I say. “Missy.”

“Yes. All right, give me the full rundown.” Astrid listens with her eyes narrowed, hands folded, not making a sound. She doesn’t pick up her coffee until after I tell her about Missy’s behavior earlier today, at which point she takes a long sip and says, “That much sounds to me like an angry young girl dealing with hurt feelings.”

“And the rest?”

“Not so much.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

Astrid cocks an eyebrow. “Nothing I can do about it. There are some things magic can’t cure. This is one of them.”

“Then how about you talk to Missy? Maybe try to explain things to her.”

“She’s your friend,” she says. “Plus, you were the one who didn’t bother to tell her about the repercussions of —”

“Oh, don’t you dare try to dump this on me,” I say. This time, both eyebrows jump. “Yeah, I made a bad call not saying anything, but you could have said something to her too, and you didn’t — and you’re the expert on this stuff. You have some responsibility in this.”

Astrid glares at me. She’s not used to people reading her the riot act, and she definitely doesn’t take kindly to it. She takes a hearty swig of coffee, slides the mug over to me, and takes out her cell phone.

“You, Miss Hauser, are a brazen young woman,” she says as she punches in a number. A smirk appears on her lips. “No wonder I like you.”

Missy picks her phone up from the nightstand. Somehow, she’s not surprised to see Astrid’s name on the screen, even though she never gave Astrid her number. Her thumb hovers over the REJECT button, then, for no reason she can put into words, presses ACCEPT.

“What do you want?”

“I’d like to talk,” Astrid says. “Are you home?”

“Don’t wanna talk to you.”

“Missy, please.”

“...Fine. Whatever. Talk.”

“Thank you.”

Missy yelps as the lights in her room invert and, upon their return, reveal Astrid standing at the foot of her bed.

“OhmyGoddon’tdothatthat’sreallyscaryandweird!”

“Sorry, I thought it would be better to have this talk in person. May I sit?” Missy shrugs. Astrid eases onto the foot of Missy’s bed, cautiously, like a predator trying not to spook its prey. “I wanted to talk about...what happened to you. I want you to know, I understand what you’re going through.”

“Yeah, right,” Missy says, her frown intensifying. “That’s what grown-ups always say when they try to talk to kids about serious stuff.” She levels a cold eye at Astrid. “Were you possessed by a demon?”

Astrid takes a long breath. She wasn’t as braced for this conversation as she thought; the impulse to look away, to look anywhere but into Missy’s eyes, is overpowering, but she pushes the urge down and says, “My name is Astrid Lilith Enigma, the Dismal Princess, the Lady of Shadows, the Earthbound Hellmage. My mother was Emma Abigail Bruckner. My father was...his name is Kysztykc.”

“Kostok?”

“Kysztykc the Flesh Reaver, the Bleak God, the King of Shadows, the Nightmare Enigma, the Lord of the Dismal Realms.”

Missy’s claws, unconsciously, instinctively, extend, digging into the heavy quilt atop her bed.

“Your...your father’s a demon?”

“Not just any demon; a demon lord, the absolute ruler of one of those quasi-Hell dimensions I told you about — as evil as they come, and powerful beyond measure,” Astrid says. “Like any king, he’s constantly fending off would-be usurpers — and, like any king, he took steps to ensure whoever inherited his crown would be someone of his choosing. To that end, he possessed a human man and sought out a mate in my mother, a sorceress of considerable might herself, someone who’d give birth to a child capable of holding the throne as capably as he ever did.”

“You.”

“Me. You are looking at the pivotal element of a complex inheritance ritual. If, during my lifetime, Kysztykc should be slain, his power would become mine.”

“And...what happens then?”

“I don’t know. Nothing good.” She hesitates. “That’s why I had the
Libris
. I was looking for something, anything, that might tell me how to circumvent the ritual.”

“Oh.”

She waves a hand:
beside the point
. “I wasn’t feeding you a line, Missy; I truly do know what you’re going through. I know about the dark thoughts that creep into your head. I know about the impulses that make you say and do things you normally never would. I know how everything seems perfectly fine, you seem perfectly fine, yet there’s some tiny part of you that realizes something’s wrong. It’s like someone is screaming at you to wake up from a horrible nightmare, but you can’t...worse, you don’t want to.”

Missy swallows audibly. A chill gnaws at the base of her spine. “How do you fix it?”

Astrid shakes her head. “I’m sorry. You can’t. It’s part of you, now and forever. It’s like an addiction: you’re never completely free of it, all you can do is manage it.”

“So how do I manage it?”

“Be a good person.”

“Seriously?” Missy says, skeptical. “Be a good person?”

“There’s an old saying: inside every person are two wolves fighting for control of the soul, one of them good, one evil. The one that wins is the one you feed.”

“Yuh-
huh
.”

“I know, it sounds dopey, but I know people who fed the wrong wolf. Things...ended badly.” Astrid falls silent, momentarily lost in her own thoughts. “Well. I’ve said my piece. Thank you for letting me talk.”

“Thank you for talking to me. At least someone is,” Missy mopes.

“Yeah, I heard about that. Don’t be too hard on your friends. They thought they were doing right by you. You’re lucky to have people who love you that much,” Astrid says, wistfully, and then she is all business once again. “No one else knows any of what I told you, Missy, and it has to stay that way.”

“I won’t tell anyone, ever, I swear.”

She nods and, her business finished, Astrid Lilith Enigma, the Dismal Princess, the Lady of Shadows, the Earthbound Hellmage, vanishes.

TWENTY-THREE

It’s day two of the Big Mother-Daughter Blowout (Episode Number I Lost Count), and as anticipated, tensions between us have mostly vanished. We’re pleasant to one another, or fake it well enough that we fool Granddad into thinking everything’s cool. By tomorrow, we’ll be back to normal. With luck, she’ll commute the remainder of my sentence, and I’ll get to spend the weekend gaming with my friends (or rattling off my overdue debriefing statement to Concorde — in which case, keep me locked up, please).

I think it helps that Mom has another reason to be in a good mood: last night I took a break from my book (
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
, my Christmas present from Stuart), went downstairs to grab a snack, and overheard Mom’s half of a telephone conversation with someone who made her giggle a lot.

Please note: she
still
has not disputed my accusation that she spent the night with a man. I’ll let you do the math.

On the way to school, I fill Sara in on my little chat with Astrid and her subsequent talk with Missy. We wonder aloud if it did any good.

It looks like it had some effect; Missy approaches us at my locker, her expression neutral. “I wanted to let you know I’m still mad at you guys,” she says.

By Missy standards, this is a scathing rebuke. It hurts appropriately.

“You should be mad at me first,” I say. “Astrid told me right away there might be, um, problems, and I should have said something. I don’t know why I didn’t. I don’t have an excuse, but I was wrong, and I’m sorry.”

She briefly makes eye contact. “Still mad at you.”

“That’s fair.”

“See you at lunch?” Sara says hopefully.

Missy quirks her lip. “Sure. But I’ll still be mad at you,” she says before marching off to homeroom.

She makes good on her promise: she slides into her usual seat at our usual table, says in a low voice, “Good afternoon,” then proceeds to joylessly eat her lunch (although, in the interest of full disclosure, none of us are finding much joy in today’s offering of rubbery macaroni and, ahem, “cheese”).

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

“She’s still mad at us,” Sara says. Missy confirms this with her silence.

“But we’re going to fix that, right now,” I say. “I’d like to call an emergency team meeting.”

“Wait, why do you get to call a meeting?” Matt says.

“Because I’m the duly elected chairwoman, remember?”

Matt sputters. “You’re going to milk that, aren’t you?”

“Oh, like you wouldn’t.”

“No, yeah, I totally would.”

“Anyway. Missy.” She pokes at her mac and cheese, making a show of focusing on her lunch instead of on me. “It’s been said already, but it bears repeating: we screwed up royally, and we’re sorry, and we’re going to make sure this kind of thing never happens again.

“I want us to all promise that we will never keep secrets from one another,” I say to the group. “It’s poisonous. We’ve seen how much it hurts when we aren’t honest with each other, so let’s not make that mistake twice. Deal?”

“Hell yeah, deal,” Stuart says.

“Absolutely,” Sara says.

“Yeah,” Matt says, but he’s not looking at Missy; his eyes are on Sara. Three guesses which truth he’s wrestling with.

“All right,” I say, and I leave it at that. It’s in Missy’s hands now, but I don’t expect her to —

“I don’t like being mad at you guys,” she says. “Being mad’s hard and it’s no fun.”

“No fun for us either, Muppet,” Stuart says. Missy allows him to put an arm around her.

All might not be right with the world, but we’re getting there.

The day ends and, lacking a ride from my handsome suitor, whose car is in the shop, I head to my locker to swaddle up for the cold trudge home.

“This blows,” Sara says. “It’s no fun hanging out without you.”

“Gee, thanks,” Matt says.

“You guys had fun before I joined the group,” I point out. “Not that I’m not an absolute delight who adds sunshine to any gathering...”

“It’s not the same without you,” Sara says.

“Well, thank you, but it’s only for a few more days.”

“Yeah, but what are we supposed to do Friday night?”

“I had an idea about that,” Matt says, deliberately lagging behind me several steps.

“Oh?” Sara says.

“I’ve been thinking. We’re all about being honest with each other now, right? That includes being honest about, you know, how we feel about...um, stuff...”

Oh, I see where this is going. I put some more distance between us, because I don’t want to hear this if it turns into a train wreck, but it’s not enough.

“Matt, I, um,” Sara says. She takes a breath to steady herself. “I’m all for being honest with each other, but you know, if we’re honest with each other, we’d have to be honest back, and that might not be a good thing if that honesty isn’t what the other person wants to hear. You know?”

Cue awkward silence.