by G A Chase
“I see about a thousand problems,” Sere said in exasperation. “How about you don’t use this as a logic exercise and get to the point? I’d like to start work on getting the fuck out of hell.”
He drew circles representing Thomas, Fisher, and Devlin. “Every possessed doppelgänger or human has had to deal with the demonic spirit that originally occupied the duplicate body.” He looked up from his masterpiece. “Except you. Why do you think that is?”
Sere shrugged. “I don’t know. Paranormal science isn’t my thing. I just figured my father evacuated the body before putting me inside.”
He pointed his pen at her from the view screen. “Exactly right. And where do you suppose that doppelgänger girl’s spirit is?”
She looked around at the computer equipment in hell. “Stored in one of these databases?”
“The only spirits in this equipment are those whose bodies dissipated.” He drew another little girl figure, labeled Doppelgänger Sere, and a little-girl ghost floating away from it, labeled Jenna. “In order to put you in her body, Jenna became a lost soul—much the way Jennifer would have become if you two had lost your hold of each other out there. Baron Malveaux couldn’t have cared less about the delicate spirit. Sanguine, however, knew the ghost would come back to haunt everyone eventually.” He drew a bunch of other doppelgänger circles. “Jenna couldn’t inhabit another doppelgänger, as each one already had its own spirit. Sanguine, however, wasn’t concerned about my little paranormal diorama.”
Chloe bit her lip. “I don’t like where this story is headed.”
Sere felt the cold in her stomach stretch out through her veins like ice freezing in a water line before it split into pieces. “Jenna is the cormorant in my dreams—and the one who attacked Jennifer—isn’t she?”
“You’re getting ahead of me, but yes.” He drew a bird shape around the Jenna ghost. “Sanguine had control over the basic elements of hell and its creatures. She hoped giving Jenna the ability to fly and hunt the river for food would keep her occupied. If she were to see you, however, she might get ideas of wanting her old body back. That’s why Sanguine moved you out to the swamp.”
Jennifer picked up the matching pencil in hell and sketched a bird with a woman’s arms, legs, and parts of her face. “She wasn’t just a bird, though.”
“The harvesters work for her,” Kendell blurted out. “We don’t know how, but from an early age, bird-girl Jenna started trying to build a body like a little girl pulling parts off her dolls to create something unique.”
Sere stood with steely resolve. “Go on.”
Polly stood up from behind the professor and crossed her arms over her chest. “Don’t give me that self-righteous attitude, Sere. You may not remember being Serephine Malveaux, but she was a sweet, caring, lovely child who had more empathy than everyone in this room combined. That’s why she killed herself. She couldn’t live with the knowledge of what her father had done. Even after the baron was consigned to the deep waters and you became the person you are now, if we’d told you of Jenna’s existence, you would have driven yourself crazy trying to save that lost soul. Nothing good would have come of that quest. It was either you inside that body or Jenna. And we didn’t know how the baron had managed the transfer of human soul to doppelgänger body.”
Sere’s early history in hell started falling into place like a puzzle magically solving itself before her eyes. “So that’s why you had Joe teach me to fight?”
“Not just because of Jenna,” Kendell said. “We knew you couldn’t hide out in the swamp forever. You needed to be able to protect yourself from hell’s demons. But yes, we’d hoped turning you into a warrior would help you deal with the hard facts of your existence.”
“And my impression of doppelgängers as hollow dolls that I could do with as I pleased?” Sere asked with growing irritation. “That was from you too?” She nodded at the warrior standing next to her. “Because knowing Doodlebug, I can see that the spirits in those made-up bodies aren’t just static electricity.”
The girl covered in harvester gore and loaded down with weapons blushed. “Thanks for that.”
“It’s not that simple.” The professor tapped his pen against the desk. “Originally, the doppelgängers were nothing more than projections with no sense of identity. Between the baron interacting with them, Sanguine taking possession of them to interact with the devil, and you yourself showing them that consciousness was possible, they evolved. Sanguine was the first to see and understand the change. Doppelgänger Jenna was barely a spark of awareness. But to answer your question truthfully, yours was a calculated education. As Polly said, you were a very caring child. Nothing about your existence is your fault. We were just trying to give you the tools to deal with what had happened.”
She really wanted to scream. “Why was I freed from hell?”
The professor drew a bunch of small bird figures next to the bird woman. “Jenna has her flock—and has had them since she was deposited in her bird body. As she got older, she started sending them out to search the streets for you. Sanguine did what she could to distract the bird woman, but there are a lot of birds flying around New Orleans.”
“Wait,” Sere interrupted. “Sanguine continued to have contact with Jenna while she was raising me in hell?”
Kendell sat in a foldout chair next to the table as if the weight of the information she’d been carrying had suddenly become too much. “I would say that she was keeping an eye on a potential enemy, but that wouldn’t be entirely accurate. Sanguine felt as responsible for Jenna as she did for you, but she had to keep you two as far from each other as possible. While we were busy training and teaching you in the courtyard behind the Scratchy Dog, Sanguine would fly off to check on Jenna.” She looked at both Sere and Jennifer. “Like you two, Jenna is no idiot. She was closing in. We decided—me representing voodoo, the professor paranormal science, and Sanguine Wicca—that the best thing was to rescue you from hell.”
“That’s some story.” Jennifer rubbed her arm.
“It’s not over.” The professor returned his pen to the pad. “We’d warned Sere about meeting you for a very specific reason.” He drew a face labeled Sere and, some distance away, one labeled Jennifer. He then drew two lines out from the faces, creating a triangle. At the far point, he drew a bird. “Jenna functions as our mirror in hell. Jennifer’s energy passes through my equipment, bounces off her lost soul to pick up hell’s energy, and returns through the hell mouth to Sere. But she’s not exactly a mirror. All Jenna can detect is the energy coming at her from her real.” He scratched out the human-faced Jennifer and redrew it next to Sere. “But if the two of you are together, she can make you out, Sere. When you and Jennifer met, Jenna realized you weren’t in hell and discovered her connection to you.”
“This just gets better and better,” Sere said sarcastically. “How does this relate to our current problems?”
The professor drew a hell mouth between the two faces in life and the bird in hell. “When the gate opened up last night, all three of you were linked up. I don’t know if Jenna was trying to pull her way into life or if she was trying to drag you to hell. I’m pretty sure she didn’t mean to include Jennifer. That’s how the two of you ended up in this predicament.”
Sere had been closer than she’d thought in considering herself the reason for the hell mouth widening. “Chloe, could this be the knife cutting through the cake of our three realities?”
The swamp witch put her finger to her chin, stood up, and twirled around a few times as if the idea needed to be separated out and she was the centrifuge. “It’s very possible,” she finally said.
“How do we move forward?” Sere asked.
The professor put his pen down and crossed his arms over the page. “Our immediate problem is that we’re hanging onto Jennifer’s soul by a thread. We have to get her back in her body. As I see it, we have two options. The first is better established but harder to pull off. Thanks to you, we’ve got the baron
’s old journal, so we know how he transferred your soul into the doppelgänger body. And due to Marjory’s experiments, we have confirmation that the process works—even if we are trying to convince her otherwise—but to use his method, we would need a paranormal vault.”
“But that’s taking a human soul and putting it in a doppelgänger body,” Sere said. “All we need to do with Jennifer is return her to her human body.”
The professor drew a box marked Hell and another labeled Life with a line connecting the two. “The problem isn’t that her soul is out of her body, though that is a challenge. Hell and life are different realities. Those World Trade Center vaults exist between dimensions. Using a vault is like double-clutching an old truck while shifting gears.”
Sometimes the professor could be a little too obscure for Sere’s tastes. “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”
He flicked the pen against the pad. “The vault helps mesh the two realities so the soul can make the crossing. Without one, it would be like gears grinding against each other.”
Sere couldn’t believe she’d gone to so much work defeating and escaping Marjory only to be told she’d left something important behind. “Getting to the vault in the bank’s basement would take a whole platoon of Barts and Joes. As for the one in hell, I don’t even know where to look—though I’ll admit, saving Sanguine from her imprisonment would be worth the effort.” She raised her hand that was clutching Jennifer’s. “This connection, however, won’t make the search easy.”
“Which brings us to option two,” the professor said. “The bridge of the damned that Marjory built. Because she’s trying to take a human soul in life and instill it in the matching doppelgänger she’s brought into her dimension, her process requires all the paranormal equipment she can get her hands on.” He pointed at Jennifer. “As Sere said, we’re just trying to get you back to your original body. There are no modifications necessary to either your soul or your form, unlike what Marjory is attempting. So long as she isn’t using the bridge at the same time, we should be able to sneak you across.”
Sere wasn’t crazy about using something Marjory had developed, but then, much of her personal existence depended on work her father, who’d had much more sinister intentions, had done. “Are you sure she won’t end up in Marjory’s vault—or worse, in Devlin Laroque?”
The professor held up a paranormal bandage. “Here’s how we would do it. While you two are connected and Jennifer has form, you’d need to find as many healing bandages as you can in the hell lab. Then you’d wrap Jennifer up until she looks like a mummy and plug her into our equipment. From our end, we would do the same with her body. She’d be hardwired together so there would be no way to lose her. Then it’s simply a matter of using the amped-up spiritual power Marjory and Andy injected into my equipment.”
“You mean the dead souls.” Sere wasn’t about to let the lost spirits be considered anything less than human.
“Correct.” He bit the stem of his pipe—a clear indication that the plan wasn’t as simple as it sounded. “The danger is that Jennifer’s soul could become another of the spirits of the damned. Without knowing what exactly Andy created, I can’t be sure of when I’m using the power cord and when I’m simply adding to it.”
“But I can,” Doodlebug said. “I’m part of the demon jacket that goes around the conducting energy.”
Sere still wasn’t sure how far she could trust the demon girl. “What if I’m also connected to the equipment? I could communicate with some of the lost souls. At least two of them would be willing to listen. They did help me in life.”
The professor shook his head. “You can’t be involved. Hooking you up as well as Jennifer might short out both of your lives—or direct Jenna straight to you.”
Sere toyed with the handle of her sword. “So our options are me going out and finding the vault so we can use the sure thing or you experimenting with Jennifer’s soul. If your hardwire solution would work for transferring her, would it also keep her intact while I go on the hunt?”
The professor set his pipe in the big green-glass ashtray. “It should.”
“Then if I’m successful, it would just be a matter of getting her cocooned soul into the vault. And if I’m not, you’ll still be ready to flip the switch and hopefully zap her across dimensions. Sounds like we have a plan.”
“Wait,” Jennifer said. “Don’t I get a say? It is my soul, after all.”
Kendell unwrapped her tightly crossed arms from her stomach. “Of course you do.”
Jennifer put her free hand on Sere’s arm. “We barely made it through the Quarter, and that was with both of us working together. I’m not willing to let you risk your existence out there alone to find some magic box to save me. I trust Doodlebug. She got us this far, and I’m sure she’ll fight just as hard to get me out of here. You need to focus on how you’re going to escape.”
“I’m not the problem. I’ll get home the same way I did before—riding on Lefty’s back through the hell mouth at midnight.”
“Then that settles it,” Kendell said. “There’s not nearly enough time for Sere to find the vault, carry Jennifer to it, have us transfer her soul, and still get out to the hell mouth before midnight. The only reasonable solution is to use the professor’s plan.”
Sere didn’t like going with the risky proposal when a sure thing was within her grasp, but time and hell were against her—not to mention a demonic cormorant intent on taking back her body. “I suppose getting back out of hell is going to be enough of an adventure for one day.”
The professor aimed his pen at Sere’s blood-soaked top. “Before we do anything else, we need to get Jennifer wrapped up and connected to our equipment so we can get that wound taken care of.”
16
Wrapped in cloth and laid out on the worktable, Jennifer looked like a cross between Sleeping Beauty and a mummy. Sere kept hold of the woman’s hand while Doodlebug made the last of the connections between the bandage and the computer. “Last chance to back out.”
Jennifer squeezed Sere’s hand. “Not gonna happen.”
On the computer screen, Polly and Kendell were just finishing up the same preparation to Jennifer’s body. The professor checked his notepad. “Okay. So here’s the rundown of what’s going to happen. When I activate the link, Jennifer will go into a temporarily unconscious state of limbo. That will allow Sere to let go of her hand and sever their connection. Then Doodlebug will dig out the slug from Sere’s back. Since Sere is once again in hell, it will be easier for me to project the saved data regarding her flesh to heal the wound. It will still take a little time, however, so while that’s going on, Doodlebug will put on the headband to establish her connection to my equipment and join the other demons in Marjory’s bridge. In her computer-conscious state, she’ll be able to keep Jennifer calm. The instant Sere’s flesh is whole, we’ll start Jennifer’s transfer. That’s when things will really get interesting.”
Jennifer took such a deep breath that Sere thought she saw her body back in life inhale. “I’m ready.”
“See you back in the land of the living,” Sere said. Energy from the souls locked in the computer created a tingling sensation in her hand that grew into a constant electric shock, making it impossible to hang on. When Sere finally pulled her hand away, she turned to the computer screen. “Tell me you have her.”
The professor continued staring at his laptop for an uncomfortably long few seconds. “We’re all good. The connection is holding.”
“Now it’s your turn,” Doodlebug said, knife in hand.
“You don’t have to look so excited.” Sere unwrapped the makeshift tank top from her chest and leaned forward onto the desk next to the wrapped soul of Jennifer so Doodlebug could get at the wound.
As the only one with field medical experience, Bart sat alone at the computer in life. “Take the knife and cut an X over the wound. You’ll need to get at the sides of the bullet to make sure the whole thing comes o
ut. There can’t be any pieces left inside Sere.”
Doodlebug aimed the dagger at the computer. “I am aware of the projection’s limitations. Just walk me through the surgery.” She pressed the edge of the knife firmly into Sere’s back.
Though the incision hurt, Sere had experienced far worse. “Make sure you go all the way to the slug,” she said.
Doodlebug angled the tip of the blade below the level of the bullet. “You really need to let me do this without kibitzing. No wonder doctors sedate their patients.” Her second cut was far less gentle than the first. “Now what?”
Bart leaned forward. “Push the hemostats as deep as you can alongside the bullet, grab it, and twist it out. Watch for any pieces that might break off.”
“Got it.”
The plunging metal tips reminded Sere so much of a bird pecking its beak into her flesh that she had to close her eyes and rest her head on her arms to keep from shaking. She willed herself into motionlessness until the oversized medical tweezers—and the nightmare image of a beak—pulled out of her flesh.
“Step two finished.” The sound of the professor’s pen scratching across his notepad prompted Sere to raise her head. “You can relax in the lounge chair while Doodlebug takes your seat at the table and puts on the headband.”
Free of Jennifer’s grasp, Sere settled into the professor’s Barcalounger while his equipment projected back tissue over the bullet wound. She turned the spent slug between her fingers. Even distorted from the impact with her stays and her flesh, the bullet’s copper exterior had the telltale dark red of having been cast in hell’s fires. Instead of blowing out like the hollow tip that Bart had showed her, being squeezed between the steel slats of her corset had forced the soft metal to retain some of its original shape. White plastic had squished out of a drill hole in the bottom and stuck to the edges. The replacement for the paranormal filling intended for Sere’s destruction felt like shredded coconut.