by Rob Rogers
“You were one of my heroes,” Jason said quietly, grunting at the strain of the oar, barely aware that he was slipping into Greek. “You knew you were going to— You knew what might happen to you, but you weren’t afraid.”
A mocking smile crept up Idmon’s lips. “You’re a fool,” he said, speaking in English now. “I’m terrified. I’m frightened every day as my time grows closer.” He nodded at the vast, blue Aegean. “I vomit into the waters in fear.”
Jason’s mouth felt dry. “Then you have no choice?”
Idmon shook his head, spat upon the Argo’s deck. “I choose,” he said. “I am proud of my choice. That does not relieve the fear.” He turned back to his oar.
Jason stared at the man’s back for a moment, felt his hands gripping tight against the oar, the roughness of the wood as the sandlewood oil was slowly rubbed away.
One of the men at the front of the ship began to sing, the other Argonauts joining in. It was a coarse ditty about the labors of Heracles, clearly sung at the huge man’s expense, though he joined in as enthusiastically as the others. One voice stood apart from the rest, not in volume or pitch, but in mellifluous clarity and soft beauty. It was easily the most beautiful voice Jason had ever heard. Orpheus. He strained to listen to it, to focus on that voice alone.
“You’ll be waking soon,” the woman said.
Still trying to focus on the words of Orpheus, he frowned at her.
“There’s something I need you to do,” she said.
As he listened to her, Orpheus’s voice faded into the background.
A six-hour standoff in Bogan Heights between Devil’s Cape police and 27-year-old Michael Orfanos ended with a crash this afternoon. Orfanos, wanted for questioning on charges of armed robbery, had entered the home of a neighbor, Nicole Cayce, 34, whom he held hostage. A police insider who preferred to remain anonymous reported that Orfanos was just on the verge of surrendering to police when a masked figure in a mustard yellow and black uniform literally flew through a skylight in Cayce’s home. The figure emerged through the same skylight a minute later carrying Orfanos in his arms. Police are investigating the incident and a manhunt is on both for Orfanos and the masked figure. Cayce told reporters that Orfanos identified the masked man as ‘Scion.’
— Excerpted from “Masked figure breaks police stand-off,” by Dedrick Swader, Devil’s Cape Daily Courier, local news section
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Devil’s Cape, Louisiana
Eight days after the deaths of the Storm Raiders
7 p.m.
As he slowly and cautiously walked across the roof of the condemned warehouse, old tar sticking to his feet, the darkness of this mostly abandoned corner of Devil’s Cape’s warehouse district shrouding him, Julian Kalodimos hoped again that Uncle Costas knew what he was doing with this woman Rusalka.
She’d been stuck in the hot shack on top of the warehouse for three days now, the weak air conditioner he’d installed for her reducing the summer heat to a level that was survivable, but not at all comfortable. She ate the food he brought her, drank the water as though dying of thirst, and refrained from touching him, as he’d ordered her, but her eyes smoldered with hatred.
The shack itself, a ramshackle clapboard structure little bigger than the room that she’d spent most of the past few years in at the Holingbroke Psychological Institute, wasn’t strong enough to keep her detained. What riveted her was the weakness of the warehouse. Most of its supporting structure had been ravaged first by a hurricane the prior autumn, then by the weight of an unexpected January snowstorm, until the whole building swayed in a light breeze and chunks of plaster from the upper levels routinely broke off and fell to the ground far below. Cain had watched her try to walk out of the shack, to navigate her way across the roof to a safe way down. But each time she’d done so, she’d been turned back by the groaning of the roof’s boards and the shifting of the roof itself. Once, her foot actually broke through the tarpaper so that she was slammed onto her face, hearing the wood splintering around her, no doubt certain that she was about to die. It had taken her close to an hour to crawl back to the shack on her belly.
Each time Julian had walked over to her shack, she’d watched him carefully, noting where he’d placed his feet, obviously planning to copy his steps and follow the safe path he appeared to be privy to.
Only, of course, there was no safe path. No place on that roof was safe at all, except for the shack itself, for which Julian had carefully constructed a series of supports running all the way to the warehouse’s foundation. When he walked across that rickety roof, he was more or less flying, reducing his own weight to something in the nature of twenty pounds. She just didn’t have any way of knowing that.
“I hope you like tandoori,” he said, stepping softly into the shack, holding up a paper bag and another half dozen bottles of water.
Although he knew perfectly well that she’d been standing by the door watching him approach until a few seconds earlier, Julian found Olena Zhdanov stretching languidly on her cot, a diaphanous yellow nightgown that she’d brought with her stretched tight against her.
She sat up slowly, trying not very subtly to draw his attention to her body as she reached forward and took a bottle. “I am not minding it,” she said. “Only I am hoping that perhaps we can eat somewhere else.”
Julian smirked. Her broken English was a sham, something she’d been putting on since he’d met her to make him underestimate her. The nightgown, too, was another technique, a clumsy one. “Nice color,” he said, gesturing at it. “Kind of matches mine.” He was dressed, as he had been every time he had seen her, in the uniform he wore as Scion, a dark mustard yellow bodysuit with black on the sides and on his gloves. A mask covered most of his face, leaving his eyes and mouth visible. He figured that his goatee wasn’t distinctive enough to make him recognizable, and besides, few people saw him dressed as Scion for long, or in good lighting.
He tossed her the bag of tandoori chicken, the scents of garlic, ginger, and kashmiri red chili powder quickly filling the small shack.
She caught the bag deftly enough, pouting at him. “You not very nice,” she said.
“You not very smart,” he echoed, mockingly. “I saw what you did to that orderly. I watched him shrivel up. I saw your eyes, how excited you got, the steam blowing out of your mouth like you were smoking a cigarette after a good screw.” He shook his head, leaning back against the doorframe. Leaning back away from her. “You think flirting with me is really going to be very effective?”
She glared at him.
“Oh, you’re pretty enough, in a Euro-trash sort of way,” he went on. “But I know better than to get close to you.”
She stepped forward as though getting ready to slap him.
He stood straight, stuck out a gloved hand. “No,” he said firmly, watching her stop herself, considering, and readjust her nightgown. He grinned. “Beyond the fact that I won’t hesitate to knock you unconscious again,” he said, “you probably shouldn’t try to kill me. What if you succeeded? Hell, it wouldn’t take you long to run out of food and water and then where would you be?” He stretched one boot outside of the shack and slammed his foot down. Boards and metal as far as fifty feet away groaned in protest and the whole shack wobbled.
Something flickered and died in Zhdanov’s eyes, and Julian felt ashamed of himself. For some reason, staring at this striking, troubled Russian woman, he couldn’t help remembering the body of David Dees from years ago, lying in an alley only a few blocks away from here, the blood spreading out from him.
“Look,” he said. “Eat the damn chicken. We need to talk.”
“I change first,” she said, gesturing to her nightgown.
He nodded. “Yeah, fine. But that’s another thing. Lose the bad grammar, okay? I know your English is impeccable.”
She stared at him, her hand pulling at one of the straps of her nightgown. She raised an eyebrow. “Fine,” she said. “Get the hell out of my
shack while I change, then. Unless you want to be a voyeur.”
Her shack. He shook his head, then stepped outside, closing the door behind him. The night air was hot, as usual, and thick with smog and the diesel odor of the nearby wharf. He heard crickets chirping and rats scuttling their way through the broken building. Zhdanov called herself Rusalka after a Slavic myth about young women murdered near lakes who rose as spirits that drew men to their deaths, drowning them or killing them with the force of their hysterical, chilling laughter. And he’d seen what she could do. It wasn’t drowning, exactly, but she’d laughed to herself while doing it, the light in her eyes exultant, the sweat a fine sheen on her skin. She seemed rational, for the most part, but that moment of ecstasy, while she drew the life from an orderly who was doing nothing but lying unconscious in her path through the hallway, after Julian had subdued him, was stark in his mind. It had made his next action—punching her in the back of the head to knock her senseless, an easy one. He didn’t doubt that she’d been locked in that asylum for good reason.
She opened the door for him, now wearing sweatpants and an oversized Lehane University T-shirt. Backing away from him, she sat in an old wooden chair and began pulling her tandoori chicken from the bag. “So,” she said, opening a container and jabbing her fork inside. “Are you finally ready to tell me why you’ve brought me here? Did I kill someone you care about?” Her voice had lost almost all hint of a Russian accent, and she spoke about killing without inflection, as though this were a matter of little importance.
“No,” he said, though he remembered the orderly’s withered corpse, wondering if the man had family, feeling responsible. “I don’t particularly care about what you’ve done.” He pulled absently at one of his gloves. He seemed to have more tolerance for heat and cold than most people, but he was still sweating inside his uniform. “Have you ever heard of Costas Kalodimos?”
She narrowed her eyes, chewing on a bite of chicken. She shook her head. “No,” she said, though he wasn’t sure that she was telling the truth. She looked at him. “You should bring me some cigarettes next time. I could really use a cigarette. Stolichnyes or Bogatyris. Not your American crap.”
“Costas Kalodimos is an important local businessman,” he said
“Maybe he can bring me some cigarettes,” she said, taking a bite of saffron rice.
“He is very influential in the city’s community.”
“He is a criminal, you are saying.” She shook her head, pointing at the rice with her fork. “Too much saffron. Are you wanting me to work for this Costas Kalodimos or kill him?” she asked blandly.
There were times, Julian thought, when killing Uncle Costas sounded like an excellent idea. “To work for him,” he said.
She bit into another piece of her chicken. “He is an influential criminal, you say, and he has enough power to control you and to arrange this.” Her hand swept the room. “But he’s not influential enough that I’ve ever heard of him.”
“He keeps a low profile,” Julian said.
She snorted. “So do garbage men.” She stabbed the air with her fork. “He is looking to change things. He is unhappy with his situation. He wants me to kill someone.”
She was sharper than he’d suspected. “Yes,” he said.
Her eyes went to his. “To reach the level you suggest he has in this city,” she said, “he either opposes the Robber Baron or works for him. Yes?” She rattled off the Robber Baron’s name without hesitation, as though the man weren’t one of the most powerful and feared crime figures in the history of the world.
“The latter.”
She smiled, smug. “Then that is it,” she said. “He wants me to kill the Robber Baron.” Her smile grew. “That will be very expensive.”
He was staring at her, uncertain how to respond, when he heard the cracking noise. A board on one side of the roof had snapped. He thought he heard a man’s voice, probably swearing.
Someone else had made it to the top of the building.
“Wait here,” he said, stepping out of the shack, slamming the door, and sprinting lightly across the roof, using his flight to make himself nearly weightless. Even without flying, he’d once clocked himself running at more than sixty-five miles per hour. He covered the space of the roof in seconds, kicking chunks of tarpaper into the air. They fluttered to the ground below like dying birds.
Julian found himself facing a tall black man in a gray suit, its fabric torn from the climb up the side of the building. The man wore a pink and blue striped tie that caught the faint glimmer of distant lights. Balancing himself on the edge of the building, standing on the balls of his feet like a trained fighter despite his conservative clothing, the man sized up Julian and his uniform. He sniffed the air. “Orange blossom, coriander, cedar,” he said. “I believe that you are responsible for freeing my patient.” He smiled, showing very white teeth, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. They looked as empty and dark as the smog-filled sky.
At the birth, the doctor was shocked. One nurse fainted while another ran screaming. The parents had to be sedated. An exorcist was flown directly to the scene by the Vatican. Why? Because of the baby. Baby Boy Doe was born with bright-red skin, horns and a forked tail.
— Excerpted from “Devil baby born in city of Dubai,” American Inquiry Weekly
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Devil’s Cape, Louisiana
Eight days after the deaths of the Storm Raiders
6 p.m.
Jazz walked from her bathroom to her bedroom in the camelback upstairs, stairs creaking under her bare feet, shuddering once again at the thought of Gork having walked through her house. But standing in her bedroom with its black-painted walls and black satin sheets, she felt more comfortable, more confident. She was close, she thought. One way or another, something would happen tonight. The crucible was lit.
Jazz hadn’t spoken to Cain—in person, at least—since the hot summer afternoon when she’d laid her curse upon him. She’d kept tabs on him, though. She’d heard about him taking his mother and neighbor hostage, heard about the things he’d been shouting. So she knew that her curse had been successful, that she’d actually managed to transform him into a beast. She’d healed, eventually, from the bash to her head, though she still suffered headaches, usually late at night, and a small scar on her cheek reminded her every day of the switchblade he’d used on her.
She’d been surprised and somewhat disconcerted to learn that Cain had apparently reformed. He’d quit the Concrete Executioners, done his time, absorbed himself in his classes at school, studied to become a psychiatrist. She’d never really intended or wanted to “scare him straight.” She’d meant to scare him to death. But she’d decided, after meditating on it many times and consulting her cards, her tea leaves, her numbers, and the soft lines on her hands, to leave well enough alone. The curse was always there, waiting, hovering over Cain, in case she needed it.
As soon as the Robber Baron walked into her home, she needed it.
She’d deceived the Robber Baron on one point. It was true that she couldn’t see the future, and that she had little control over the insights she had into other people’s lives. But she had her own influence. In a moment of fury and terror, she’d cursed Cain. And at other times throughout her life, focusing her concentration through certain spells and rituals, she’d been able to influence others. She could make them see or hear things that weren’t there. She could talk to them in their dreams.
Not long after she’d cursed Cain, she’d been able to chase off an uncle who had been making advances on her. She’d made him dream of fire and monsters and flashing teeth, and eventually, he’d left Devil’s Cape.
A customer who’d come in for a palm reading and then purchased dozens of items from her store with a bad check had been given glimpses of ghosts and rotting zombies whenever she’d looked into a mirror or seen her reflection. Within a week, Jazz had returned to her house one afternoon to find a tidy box on her gallery. It was packed wi
th the items, three twenty-dollar bills, and a note that said merely, “Please release me.”
She’d given a neighborhood crack dealer nightmares so horrible, filled with images of dying children and blood-filled streets, that he’d eventually killed himself.
And a night not long after the Robber Baron’s visit, she gave Cain Ducett a nightmare of himself as a demon once again, made him see her and hear her at every turn, driven him to become the cursed monster that she’d created.
Because perhaps a monster could save her. A monster could protect her from the Robber Baron.
Only it hadn’t worked. Cain should have come looking for her, tormented, ready to do anything to free himself from her power.
Instead, nothing.
Oh, she’d disturbed him that first day. She’d even sacrificed the beloved antique full-length mirror she’d bolted to one wall of her bedroom, breaking it so that, through magical synchronicity, she could in turn shatter the window of his car to get his attention. She’d managed to sneak a copy of the old tabloid with the “Devil Baby of Dubai” story into his office.
But he hadn’t come looking for her. Instead, he’d been distracted, the fear draining away from him. Her influence over others worked by initial surprise and growing dread. When she frightened others, they lowered their barriers, and she could influence them even more. But not Cain.
She had tried last night to enter his dreams again, and been shocked to find herself in someone else’s. She’d seen the news reports of a new superhero in Devil’s Cape, Argonaut, and it had been simple enough to deduce that she was in his dream. But she’d been unsure why—something to do with his abilities, not hers—and unsure what to do with the opportunity. Perhaps Argonaut could protect her from the Robber Baron, and she could forget about Cain. But that didn’t feel right. She needed Cain. She needed to break him away from whatever was distracting him. She needed to force the curse to take hold of him again.