Courageous

by Nicholas Olivo

  For its part, the snake tail was undaunted by the loss of its teeth. While I’d been extinguishing myself, it had wrapped around Cynthia’s wrist and pulled her off balance, dropping her to the floor. Gears clambered up Cynthia’s back, launched himself off her shoulder, and latched on to the snake’s midsection.

  In other circumstances, it would have been comical. The snake released Cynthia, and flailed as it tried to shake Gears loose. Gears hung on like he was riding a mechanical bull, letting out a “Wooooo!” as he swung around. Then there was a flash of silver and a spray of red as Gears’s claws slashed into the snake over and over again. After a handful of strikes, Gears severed the tail, and both the tail’s remains and the gremlin dropped to the ground.

  Once Gears was clear, Cynthia drove the blade with the yellow brown fluid, paranormal poison, unless I completely missed my guess, into the chimera’s side. The effect was nearly instantaneous. Black veins bulged against the chimera’s otherwise bright fur, and the creature visibly withered. The goat head bleated in pain once, and then the entire monstrosity collapsed to the ground with a shudder.

  Gears popped back into view on the other side of the chimera and wiped his brow before fishing a fun-sized Hershey bar from the front of his coveralls. The candy had melted, but that didn’t stop Gears from opening it anyway. “Let’s not do that again,” he said, licking the melted chocolate out of its wrapper.

  I nodded. “Thanks, Cynthia, are you all right?”

  Cynthia still had her poisoned blade in the chimera’s flank, her glowing blue eyes fixed on the wound. “This is the third being I have killed, Vincent Corinthos,” she whispered. “I have read accounts of what it feels like, but said accounts seem… hollow.”

  I had an idea why. Cynthia had been made to be a savior, a messiah, not a destroyer. I put a hand on her shoulder. “Killing is a terrible thing, Cynthia, and it’s good that you don’t enjoy it. The people who do, or the people who are indifferent to it, those are the people I worry about. Even so, unfortunately, there are times when it can’t be helped. Sometimes, you have to, in order to protect the people you care about.”

  “Have you killed many people, Vincent Corinthos?”

  I thought back to the hobgoblin and troll armies that I’d laid waste to when I was a god on the Bright Side. I thought about the redcaps I’d killed to save the kobolds; the pukwudgies I’d slain to rescue Katrina Grady; Ulysses Pendleton; Sakave; the countless upyr I’d dusted when fighting Carmilla’s forces. “Too many,” I sighed. “And I never enjoy doing it, but it ultimately comes down to you or them. And killing should always be your last resort. If you can spare someone’s life, do so. When people get second chances, they often turn things around for the better.”

  “I do not think this beast would have changed its behavior, were it given a second chance, Vincent Corinthos,” she said.

  I gave a faint grin. “True enough. Like I said, sometimes, it can’t be helped. Come on, let’s grab Jake and get out of here.” I turned and started walking down the corridor. “Where’d you leave him, anyway?”

  “In the hallway,” she replied. “I did not wish him injured while I fought.”

  “You said he’d been electrocuted, but I’ve seen Jake take a lot more punishment than that. What else is wrong with him?”

  “He requires the Breath of Life,” Cynthia replied. “Our recent exploits have caused him to consume it at a much greater rate than normal, but I am synthesizing more as we speak. It will be a short while before it is ready.”

  “Well, let’s get out of here and then hole up someplace safe. We—” I cut off as we rounded the corner and found Eva and five other individuals leveling their weapons at us. Eva still wore her business casual, but the others were clad in black and red body armor that was covered in eldritch runes. The rifles they had pointed at us were standard AK-47s, but it was a safe bet that the ammo would be enchanted to kill paranormals.

  “Vincent Corinthos,” she said, shaking her head. “I can see you really are as much of a problem as Treggen’s files imply.”

  I smiled at her. “I think you’ll find I’m an even bigger problem than he realizes.”

  She smiled back, her eyes twinkling behind her glasses. “But you’re the one on the wrong end of the gun. So, you and your friends are going to do as I say and go back to your cells, nice and easy. Then you’re going to sit quietly for a time, until Treggen gets back.”

  “I had everything covered,” Gears said. “How’d you find us?”

  Eva rolled her eyes at the gremlin. “Seriously? With the amount of noise you three made coming down here, and then fighting that chimera? You may have blinded the security systems, gremlin, but my ears still work just fine. Now, as I was saying, hands up and let’s walk back to your cells.”

  I felt Cynthia and Gears tense behind me. If these were plain old bad guys packing plain old guns, then I’d give us seventy-thirty, maybe even eighty-twenty odds on us coming through this with limited injuries. But these were Caulborn operatives, and they’d be trained to handle all manner of paranormal attacks and entities. Which meant I’d have to get creative.

  Though I’d lost the powers granted to me by my followers, apertus energy, which lets me make portals and Open things, is an innate talent. The same goes for tachyon manipulation, which lets me affect time. My ability to portal was being blocked by HQ’s wards, but I have yet to find any human artificer who can craft runes against time. So, I bent it.

  Bending time is a trick my father had shown me just the other day. It allows me to take something outside time, where it can no longer affect the events happening in the timestream. Blue energy flared around my hands as I redirected the flow of time so it went around the agents and Eva. The five agents winked out, temporarily removed from time.

  Eva didn’t.

  She blinked, her mouth fell open, and she glanced around at where her companions had been. That was enough of a distraction for Gearstripper to charge forward, scramble up her side, and punch her in the side of the head. He vaulted off and landed gracefully a few feet away as Eva collapsed to the ground. Blue light still swirled around my hands as I held the bend in time. I looked at Eva, and what I was doing with time. She was right in the path of my bend; she should’ve vanished along with the others. How had she done that?

  “Is she dead?” Cynthia asked.

  “No,” Gears said, holding up his hand. His right fist was covered in silvery metal. “I just made myself a knuckle duster to clock her one. I owed her for Billy.” To me, he asked, “Where’d the other guys go, Vinnie?”

  I explained what I’d done. “They won’t be a problem until I release the bend,” I said. “I’ll do that once we’re out of this hallway.”

  “Let us get behind where they were, and then release them,” Cynthia said. “I will dispatch them non-lethally.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded. “I studied them long enough to craft this,” the sword blades extended from her arms, dripping a milky white fluid. “This toxin functions as a tranquilizer dart would. It will do no permanent damage.”

  I blinked. The Rosario, the legendary paranormal killing weapon that Cynthia had absorbed, could craft poisons deadly to any supernatural being. Had Cynthia retained that ability? But that brought up another question. “You can craft poisons that affect non-paranormals?”

  She nodded. “It was a simple matter of reapplying what the Rosario taught me.”

  “Taught you? No, forget it, now’s not the time,” I said. “We’ll talk once we’re out of here.” We moved a few feet down the hall, so we were behind where Eva’s men had been standing, and I released the bend in time. They jolted as they reappeared, and Cynthia moved like lightning, flechettes coated with neurotoxins spraying from her blades. The darts struck each of the men in the back of the neck, and they all fell in crumpled
heaps. Moments later, the flechettes melted into pools of liquid, which ran along the ground toward Cynthia, where she reabsorbed them through her feet.

  “This way,” Gears called, and the group of us pounded down the hallway to a massive steel door. I moved to Open it, but Gears jumped up and caught my wrist, dangling from my arm. “The door’s electrified, Vinnie,” Gears said. “Don’t touch it yet.”

  He dropped to the ground and put his palms against the door. And while lightning crackled all around him, the gremlin didn’t even twitch as he ripped open a small access panel with his claws and severed a handful of wires. The lightning flowing around him vanished. “There we go,” he said, dusting his hands off. “All yours, Vinnie.”

  “We need to have a long talk once we’re out of here, Gears,” I said, Opening the door. The chamber beyond was a natural stone cavern, easily sixty feet across and maybe twenty high at its tallest point. Moisture collected on gray stalactites hanging from the ceiling, and faint drip sounds could be heard throughout the cavern. “Okay,” I said as the door swung shut behind me. “So, our new HQ was built on top of the Bat Cave?”

  “I think Woof used this place as sort of a gladiator ring,” Gears said. “Look.” As we moved a bit further in, I saw a twenty-foot pit had been carved into the rock. Two gates on opposing sides looked as if tunnels led away from them, perhaps to some unseen locker rooms.

  “What a racket,” I said, rubbing my chin. “She’d probably pit two beasts against each other, make money off of bets and then serve the loser as a special entrée.” I took a step forward and felt extradimensional energy flare around me. “Hello,” I said, unable to suppress a grin. “I think we’re out of range of HQ’s wards.”

  Gears grinned back at me. “Yep. Beam us up, Scotty.”

  And with that, I snapped Open a portal to my house on Mount Olympus.

  Chapter 4

  As the portal sizzled shut behind us, my shoulders relaxed and I released a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. It had only occurred to me as I was stepping through the portal that I hadn’t checked to see if the key was still on me. Anyone who tried to portal into the house without it would meet a sudden and brutal demise. Luckily, while Sojin and company had been thorough in going through my pockets, they hadn’t looked in my shoes. I kept the coin-sized artifact in a hidden pocket in the tongue of my Reeboks for situations just like this.

  The house on Olympus had belonged to my father until recently, when he’d given it to me. The great thing about the place was that it obeyed my every command, meaning I could rearrange the entire place with just a thought. It wasn’t just the layout of the rooms or the furniture I could change, either. Through nothing more than my own willpower and imagination, I’d remade the house into a replica of Courage Point, the sanctuary of my favorite comic book hero, Commander Courageous.

  I’d taken us into the house’s workshop, which was outfitted with all manner of technological wonders that you’d only find in the comics. Wonders which I hoped we could use to revive Jake. Cynthia set him down on a worktable, and Gears began hooking the big man up to various monitors and computer terminals.

  Cynthia sat down on a stool by one of the workbenches. “I am creating more Breath for Jacob,” she said. “The runes in the Caulborn cell prevented me from doing so before. I estimate six point five hours to completion.”

  “Can you talk while you do that?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Great. What did you mean back there when you said the Rosario taught you stuff?”

  “The force that dwells within the Rosario is a hateful, malevolent thing,” Cynthia said, her voice shuddering slightly. “Yet it knew that while it was entangled with me, it could not get what it wanted, which was, of course, to kill as many paranormals as possible.”

  “Wait, it’s sentient?”

  She shook her head. “Not in the way you’re thinking. It is not a spirit capable of rational thought, it only wants to kill. Our two essences were incompatible, but nevertheless, the Rosario tried to… merge itself with me. As if it wished to superimpose its essence over my own. When it did that, I saw how it worked, learned how it changed its mass and created paranormal toxins. And because I had absorbed the enchantments that were imbued in the Rosario’s celestial metal, I was able to do those things as well. Thankfully, the need to kill, the constant bloodlust that drives that spirit, did not transfer to me.”

  “So Psyke was able to remove it from you completely?”

  “She was.”

  “What happened to it?” I asked.

  Cynthia frowned. “I do not know. When I awoke, Psyke was there, the presence was gone, and I felt… shorter.”

  I’d need to speak with Psyke about this soon. Add that to the to-do list. “Okay, Cynthia, do you need anything?”

  “Only time, Vincent Corinthos.”

  For a moment, I considered trying to speed time up for Cynthia, causing her to produce Breath faster. But since I didn’t know exactly how she made Breath, that probably wasn’t a smart idea. For all I knew, temporally-tweaked Breath may only be good for half as long. Or less. Ugh. Have I mentioned how temporal manipulation gives me a headache sometimes?

  But all that aside, I was pretty sure Cynthia wanted time for more than just making Breath. She hadn’t had a chance to process all the changes she’d gone through. Going from being a toddler to a full-sized adult in the blink of an eye would be a shock all on its own, but then when you added in suddenly having two other presences occupying your head and then having those ripped out, well, it was enough to make anyone need some quiet time.

  I wasn’t quite sure what to say, so I said, “I’m here if you need to talk, Cynthia.”

  “Thank you, Vincent,” she said, and there was a ghost of a smile on her face. “Perhaps when I have had more of a chance to reflect on everything that has transpired.”

  I nodded to her then turned to where Gears was working on Jake. “Anything I can do to help?”

  The gremlin consulted the monitors and gauges Jake was connected to. “Hmm. Can you conjure up two or three kilograms of powdered iron?” There was a time when I’d have thought a request like this odd, but at this point in our relationship, I knew that if Gears said he needed something, he needed it. I waved my hand, and a metal cylinder filled with iron filings appeared. Gears thanked me, tore the lid off, and then began rubbing the iron onto Jake’s wounds. I watched in amazement as Jake’s body absorbed the metal, leaving unmarred skin in its place.

  When Carmilla had beaten Jake to a pulp, I’d left the big man in Gears’s care. A few hours later, Jake had been up and about again, looking a bit worse for wear, but his skin and hair had been returned to their normal state. Was this how Gears had fixed him back then? I asked him as much.

  “Yep,” Gears replied. “I asked Alexis for the metal last time, but I figured, hey, you’re right here. Jake’s body absorbs the iron, uses it to heal up, and then he’ll be as good as new. Well, physically, at least. The runes in his cell sucked the Breath of Life right out of him. Once Cynthia makes more, he’ll be up and about.”

  “Okay. Let’s give Cynthia some quiet time. You and I need to talk.” We went into the kitchen where, upon my command, the house generated two large pizzas, breadsticks, a glass of Pepsi for me and a bottle of Karo syrup for Gears.

  “Let’s start at the beginning,” I said. “You could’ve gotten out of that cell at any time. Why didn’t you break Jake and Cynthia out sooner?”

  Gears bit a chunk out of a slice of pepperoni before replying. “I knew you’d be coming back, and I didn’t want you to get waylaid.”

  “I did get waylaid, Gears.”

  Gears rolled his eyes. “Fine, I didn’t want you to get waylaid without me being there to help get you out,” he said. “If I’d broken Jake and Cynthia out, it would’ve been ten
times harder to get back in and free you. Treggen didn’t know about the powers I’d acquired from the cyberium, and I wasn’t about to tip my hand. There weren’t any runes lining my cell, just plain old magical wards.”

  “Magical wards that had no idea how to react to a technologically advanced bacteria?”

  Gears grinned. “Pretty much, yeah. The cyberium give me access to any computer network I want. For a while, I was tapped into the central archives of Anatiel’s home planet.” Anatiel had been an alien with access to some super-advanced cloning technology, and she’d been the one to inject Gears with the cybernetic bacteria. We’d thought that Treggen might be interested in her ship, but that was before we learned he’d transferred his soul into a celestial phylactery. “Once I was in Anatiel’s archives, I read everything I could about the cyberium, how they work, and how to control them. Now, I can just think, ‘connect me to the Caulborn data network,’ and bam, I’m in.” He frowned. “Except I can’t seem to do it here.”

  “I think that’s because we’re in another dimension right now,” I said. “Alexis can cross dimensional barriers, but that’s because I believe she can, and she can do whatever I think she should be able to. So, if you need to hack anything while we’re here, she’s your best bet.” I took a swig of my Pepsi. “And how exactly were you able to touch that electrified door without getting fried?”

  “I funneled it into the cyberium,” he replied. “It gave them a nice power boost. You remember in the first Avengers movie when Thor hit Iron Man with lightning, and it boosted Iron Man’s armor to four hundred percent power? Same thing.”

  “Nice,” I said. I rubbed my face, not sure how to ask the next question. “Gears, the cybernetic bacteria were intended to dominate organic life, convert it into something like Anatiel. Are you sure you’re okay?”