I let out a breath. “He’s from a different culture. Might not hit him as hard. And if we can get to him in time, it will not matter. Acertijo is strong willed.”
“In any case, I was a poor companion. I fought her binding constantly. I was sworn to many lifetimes, but she did not account for the fact I can kill myself and revive over and over again. I am not without resources and willpower of my own.” He stood, and his eyes were grim over his mask. “I watched and listened as I dwelled within her magical realm. She is a pathetic creature at the core of it, not able to live fully in one world or the other. Scorned by the elder fae for her human blood and denied any real power, and unsuited to humanity’s realm by manner or education. No less dangerous for her insecurity, perhaps more dangerous for it.”
“And so she specializes in binding powerful people to make herself feel better.” I sighed. “Killing her might be a mercy.”
“Whoa, boss...” Alpha started, but Beta put up a hand.
“Is that really the best thing to do, here?” He asked.
I checked my emotions. I was angry, yes, but... I took a breath. “It’s not off the table, but it won’t be the first resort. We need to figure out why she’s gone rogue. That’s the core of this puzzle.”
Khalid paced, as he thought. “It might have something to do with her mother.”
“Her mother?”
“Yes. Her mother is some sort of captive in the realm of the Unseelie.”
A shiver ran down my spine, as a thought rose, bounced around my mind, and brought me to my feet. “Her name!”
“What? Well yes, I know it— ”
“Her name, is it Dorothy?” I was practically shouting now, hands on his shoulders, restraining myself from shaking him. After all this time, after all my fruitless attempts...
“Yes!” Khalid grabbed the chair to keep himself upright. “How did you know?”
“Dorothy Hampston!” I cackled, as I roared, hands up, full-on maniacal laughter filling the room.
CHAPTER 14: WAKING THE DEAD
“The best and worst thing about magic is that it's easy, until it isn't.”
--Black Sabbas, demonologist
“You realize we’re taking a huge risk?” Vector said, as I leaned back in the driver’s seat of the truck. The windows were polarized, no way to view the outside from inside. I didn’t have my hands on the steering wheel, the vehicle was driving itself. We’d left the hideout shortly before dusk. I’d run the probabilities and thought my precautions would be enough to keep Sloth off of us until we disembarked. Then we’d be in darkness shortly after that, using night vision to see. Sloth didn’t have the benefit of night vision, as far as Vector knew. Wasn’t a perfect plan, but lucky breaks didn’t hit me often, and this one was too perfect not to follow up on.
“Oh, she knows the risk,” I replied. “Khalid, you’re certain you can pull off a séance?”
He rattled around in the back of the van. “So long as you are certain of the name and the grave, then I have the necessary components.” A goat’s bleat accompanied his last words. “Easy! Foul thing. Well, it should work. I do not know if this vat-grown creature has enough spiritual essence or not.”
“Please!” Vector frowned. “This isn’t my first time dealing with magical types. I grew that Kid model from genuine goat cells. They’ve been tested before, never found lacking.”
“Not sure which is creepier,” I said, grinning under my mask. “That you’ve tested ritual sacrifices with cloned livestock before, or that their cells are part of your always-carried gear.”
Vector’s eyes crinkled with a smile, and he tapped his nose. “When they mature in a day or two, they can also turn grass into spidersilk, by the kilo. Their meat is full of enough nutrients to keep anyone going for a month, too.”
“Really?” That was pretty impressive. “You’ve got a bunch of different cells on tap, don’t you?”
“Everything from combat beasts to survival symbiotes. You should see my pharmacow. Oh, and this little toy, too.” He reached a hand in his pocket, pulled out something that looked like a pink pancake with tentacles. “Combination respirator and moisture recycler. I call it the Facesucker.”
I snorted. Khalid muttered prayers in Turkish.
“So now that we’ve got all this stuff, and gotten on the road in a hurry, can you tell me what this is all about?” Vector tucked away the hentai pancake.
I thought back to the disaster that had been my unintentional trip back in time. Not entirely a disaster, there had been good with the bad. And one of the good things had eluded me ever since my return. I considered, and finally spoke.
“To make a long story short, Dire ended up going back in time, had to kill a lot of Nazis, and rescue Tesla from Hitler.”
“You’re joking, right?”
“No, hush. During this time, we had to jaunt through wherever the heck fae live. One of her companions, the sorceress Dorothy Hampston, traded her womb for safe passage. Nine children, by fae husbands, before she could leave again.”
“Lust has seven sisters,” Khalid said, quietly.
I closed my eyes. “Fuck. One short. Those assholes didn’t let her leave. Something happened and she couldn’t deliver the last. Got to be it.”
“You’re sure she’s one and the same?” Vector asked.
“Looking back on it... yes. She had similar cheekbones, some other physical similarities. Not enough to draw Dire’s notice in the heat of the battle, but enough to corroborate the evidence.” I cracked my knuckles. “Dire went looking for news of Dottie, after her return from the past. But there was nothing. She’d vanished, and now we know why.”
Vector nodded. “All right. So what’s in Bracknell? It’s not Dorothy’s grave, right?”
“No. We were only together for a few days, but Dottie was a chatty sort. Confided many things to Dire. Including how she’d go to her grandmother’s grave to talk with her, learn her secrets of witchcraft and the fae.”
“So this is an intel-gathering trip?”
“Or a ghost-gathering trip.” I shrugged. “Grandma’s probably not going to be too happy that her favorite granddaughter is stuck in faerieland.”
“Faerie,” Khalid corrected.
“Whatever.”
Vector shook his head. “I don’t like this. I’ll come right out and say it. I’m sorry, but this seems like a bad diversion.”
“No need to be sorry.” I shrugged. “If you disagree, say it. Dire’s still in charge, but you might change her mind. Nobody’s infallible. Learned that one the hard way.”
“Huh.” He studied me for a second. “Sorry. I’m mostly used to working with Pride. This is... kind of good. But speaking of him, he’s got our number. At some point he’ll find us. We should probably be building up to defend against him, and figuring out ways to counter and take him down. This side-trip to save your friend... don’t get me wrong, it’s a worthy cause, but it’s taking time away from the main goal.”
“Yeah, it is.” I settled back in the seat. “But if things are as Dire suspects, we’ll also have an edge against Lust. Maybe even an ally, depending on her reasons for going rogue. And honestly...” I shrugged. “There are a lot of things we could do to prepare, but Maestro has no reason to stop throwing heroes at us. All he has to do is find us, kick up a ruckus, and the heroes will come to do his work for him. And once we’re captured, we’re in a system he’s likely had time to rig. We need better intel, and Lust is the most likely source of that. But since she’s dangerous, Grandma is the best edge against her that we’ve got.”
“I am more concerned about your ability to find her grave,” Khalid offered.
“Don’t be. Dottie was very exacting with her description, and Dire’s memory is eidetic.” I tapped my forehead. “And we’ve got an advantage she never dreamed of.”
“Which is?”
Alpha spoke up. “Satellite photos, bay-bee! Straight from MI9’s archives.”
“How the hell did you get those
?” Vector asked. “Took me months to bribe my way in for old files.”
“Hacked,” I said. “Took about three minutes.”
“Okay, your power is just unfair.”
“Says the guy who can eliminate measles with a bathtub and a few household chemicals.”
Vector’s eyes slid away.
“What?”
“So, uh, I might’ve already taken care of measles.”
“What?” I sat up. “How!”
“Competing retrovirus that mimics the symptoms and hunts down the actual strains. But mine’s never lethal and will die out in, oh, about six months.”
Khalid swore in Turkish, and I let out a low whistle. “Global exposure?”
“They don’t call me Professor Vector because it rhymes.”
“Any chance of heroic interference?”
“Please. I did it thirty-five days ago.”
“You have done humanity a great service,” Khalid said. “Why do you not seek recognition for it?”
“Heroes,” Vector said, and I snorted in agreement.
“I know of no heroes that would see the destruction of such a disease as a bad thing.”
Vector palmed his face.
“I’ll handle this,” I said, and turned around. “Khalid, Vector has a record. He’s killed people with diseases. Accidentally, mind you, but wide-spread enough that his record will never go away. Anything good he does is suspect, anything charitable is going to be an obvious scheme for a more sinister purpose. You’d have super-scientists picking apart his cure, other biological supervillains twisting it to their own ends, hell, even time-travelers going back and stopping him before it got released.”
“Villains can become redeemed, surely. Given such a thing, it would be possible to do a good work on that scale without that level of harassment.”
“Yes, but there’s the other problem.” I turned back to Vector. “Why haven’t you gone after the more expensive diseases to treat? This is a trick question, she knows the answer.”
“If I did that I’d be dead in days,” Vector said, flatly. “It would look like an accident, or maybe it wouldn’t if they were desperate enough.”
“They?” Khalid said.
“The medical industry.” I smiled. “It’s more obvious in the United States of course, but it’s a problem worldwide. Pestilence is profit, Khalid. Medicine is money. While not every corporation or organization involved in it is corrupt, enough are that any sudden, sweeping change would be viewed as cutting into the profits of some asshole or another. And that’s only one example. Don’t get her started on big helium, or the coal lobby. Hell, even oil has bloody hands.”
“The notion is not unknown to me,” he said, coming to the front of the seats for the first time. “But I must admit, my focus for the last few decades has been policing the supernatural. Are things truly so desperate?”
I sighed. “We live in a world where Vector or Dire could change the world in days, for the better. Hell, even Doc Quantum could do it. Couldn’t understand why he didn’t, not for the longest time. But as she collected data, she saw the big picture. Khalid, the world and the powers-that-be only allow superheroes to live because they don’t rock the boat. They levy laws, keep watch on them, and do their damnedest to ensure that nobody gets too Samaritan and cuts off a profit stream before its time.”
“Before its time, meaning before some group of businessmen who make more than your average third-world country have a chance to squeeze every last drop of profit from it, whatever commodity it might be.” Vector snorted. “God, it feels good to have someone else around who sees the problem.”
“You’re welcome,” I replied. Though from what I could see of Khalid’s face, I’d done him no favors. The man was an optimist, a humanitarian, and I’d basically just pissed on that.
But he had a strength all his own. “Perhaps that is so,” he said. “But in time, I have faith that humanity will find its way. Oh, maybe not this current society or path of progress, but eventually God’s plan shall bring us to a better world.”
Vector snorted again. I didn’t. I reached back and took his hand, gave it a squeeze. “And if he doesn’t, then Dire shall kick ass until the world improves. That’s been her plan for years, just got to get through a few distractions first.”
“Speaking of that, we’re about here,” Alpha announced. “You ready to suit up?”
“I thought you were bringing that in case of trouble,” Vector said.
“Yeah, but our teleportation network doesn’t stretch out this way. And there’s no way in hell Dire’s going anywhere near a magical ritual without some serious titanium between her and the supernatural. Well, that and a few other ingredients.” I undid my seatbelt as the van slowed, made my way into the back of it.
I hadn’t had much time to retrofit the armor, but I’d given it a steel outer shell, with the highest grade iron that I had. Khalid kept insisting that cold iron was necessary for certain fae entities, so I’d used the nanoforges to mix it. No fire involved there, so hopefully that would work out. I’d sent the rest of my minions out to raid one of Khalid’s stashes at his request, retrieving a few of his tools. They’d checked in a few minutes ago. Hopefully we were set, if things went awry.
Dottie said her grandmother had been throttled to death by an irate priest, so Khalid’s professional opinion was that either suffocation or bare hands would be enough to put her down— if it became necessary to do so. I was really hoping she’d be the peaceful sort of spirit.
Gods, magic was a pain in the ass. Made no sense at all, shouldn’t work, yet it did. Hopefully one skilled alchemist would be enough to trump a dead witch if it came to it.
I finished suiting up, and opened the van doors. It was pretty out here, at the edge of Bracknell. All heavy woods, with a dirt road stretching away north. But we had no time to sightsee, and landmarks were a risk, so I turned my view toward the setting sun, barely visible over the trees. “THIS WAY,” I said, and a murder of crows burst from the nearby foliage, shrieking as they fled.
Yeah, this place boded.
We moved through the trees. I didn’t bother with stealth, and wildlife fled as I approached. Khalid moved more slowly, fiddling with the night vision goggles I’d given him, holding the vat-grown kid in his free arm like a pampered yuppie carrying a small dog. The young goat bleated for all it was worth, and struggled. Couldn’t really blame it.
Vector, for his part, walked without night vision goggles. He’d said that his internal ocular modifications would suffice when darkness fell. Alpha kept pace with him, strolling without a care in the world, carrying the backpack of stuff the Janissary had grabbed.
My memory was flawless, and Dorothy had described her family’s cottage in loving detail, but it had been decades since her description was accurate. The area had been left to go to seed since, incorporated into a park or some other sort of preserve.
If I had been going on her words alone, it would be impossible to find what I was seeking. But I was Dire, and I had technology for every occasion.
I blinked through my command prompts, overlaying my night vision with geosight. Specialized ultrasound emitters thrummed to life on my legs, poking and probing into the nearby terrain, illuminating the geology on my HUD. My spectroscope analyzed the readings, filtering out stray veins of ore, looking for worked stone.
Sixty years gone, wood rotted, mortar flaked, and stone chimneys toppled. But foundations were another matter entirely.
“THERE,” I announced, pointing slightly to the north. “THE MOST LIKELY CANDIDATE.”
“That’s what we thought, too,” Gamma said from her perch on a wide tree branch.
Khalid whirled, Vector practically jumped out of his skin, and Alpha laughed. “Hey little sis.”
“Technically we’re not siblings.”
“We’re totally siblings,” Delta insisted from a tree over.
A few chords resounded from a lonely guitar.
“The hell?” Vecto
r asked.
“We found it in the bunker. Beta repaired it. Said it helps de-stress him,” Gamma explained.
Vector shot me a look. “Are you certain your minions are taking this seriously?”
“FIGURE IT’S ABOUT SIXTY-FORTY THERE. EPSILON?”
A steel figure rose from one of the thickest tangles of brush. “It’s here. I cleared away enough to find the remnants of the chimney.”
“WHICH MEANS THE GRAVE IS...” I swept the geosight east, playing over the old yew trees. “THERE.”
The tombstone was little more than a pile of fragments, crumbled by age and scattered around its base. But the thing just beneath the soil was the size of a coffin, collapsed and flattened by time and vermin.
We had the ingredients. From here on out, the rest of the course would be on Khalid, and I was glad for it. This was getting into territory that needed skills I neither had nor desired.
Khalid paced out, examined the clear spots and the trees, measured the sun, and nodded. “Alpha, you will find four wooden rods in the backpack. Use them to dig a trench six feet long, running from due east to due west, ending at the point the sun will set. Six inches wide should suffice, and...” he eyeballed the kid. “...four inches deep.”
“Can all of us dig it or do I have to figure out how to use four sticks with two hands?”
“Yes, all of you can pitch in.”
Beta abstained, citing philosophical reasons. The other ’bots pitched in, finishing the work as the shadows lengthened, and darkness started to fill the woods.
“We should have perhaps ten minutes, once she imbibes,” Khalid warns. “The animal is smaller than generally preferred.”
“TEN MINUTES SHOULD BE ENOUGH. IF DOTTIE’S STORIES WERE TRUE, THE OLD GIRL NEVER SUFFERED FROM INDECISION.”
“All right. It’s time. Please stand away from the trench.” Everyone hastened to obey. I found a tree to lean on, not that I needed the support with my harness. Still, having my back to the wood gave a sense of reassurance. Even for me, this setting, this ritual, the circumstances... well, I’d be lying if I said they weren’t a bit spooky.
DIRE:SINS (The Dire Saga Book 5) Page 17