Ex-Cape | Book 2 | Ex-Cape From A Small Town

by Wentzel, Daniel

  Of course, a high percentage of Capetown would also probably be there. The Capetown High football season had only ended last week, and people needed another excuse to sit outside on the bleachers in cold weather. Most of them hadn’t put away their blankets, bleacher pads, and other gear.

  Still, it was a place to be. She checked the time on her car stereo. Five o’clock. She had time to head home, walk Buster, and head to the town square. Then she’d have a little over an hour to see if she could locate someone who could be The Aerialist.

  ✽✽✽

  Molly kept a blanket in her car for emergencies, and she hefted it onto her shoulder to use as a bleacher pad. She took a deep breath and stepped out into the cold. It was a disadvantage being Molly’s size in this weather. There was a reason why wooly mammoths and other creatures that lived in the ice age had been so much bigger than their modern-day counterparts.

  The square had undergone quite a bit of change since earlier in the afternoon. The stage had been split, with podiums on either side for the two candidates. More microphones were set up front and center on a lower platform. Those would probably be for the moderators.

  The stage was not the only thing that had been modified, however. Along the sides of the square, two tents had been erected. They served as home bases for people to learn more about the candidates, and Molly could see the huge stainless steel carafes under both tents. In this weather, free hot coffee and tea were less about bribing the electorate, and more about keeping them from frostbite.

  And, American politics being what they are, there were other tents set up all around for various protest groups. Molly headed that way. Right now, protesting sounded like it would be good for her soul, and anyone disgruntled with Matt Nelson was approaching soulmate status.

  Molly had just chosen a tent when a man with a salt and pepper beard stepped in front of her.

  “I thought that was you, liebchen.”

  Molly’s eyes nearly shot out of their sockets. She was not used to seeing this man in a heavy woolen peacoat and a stocking cap. Chainmail was more his style.

  “Wulfric!” She smiled at him and gave him a quick hug. Her old friend The Hospitaller returned the hug and didn’t break any bones doing so. “What are you doing here?”

  He pointed to a tent for the Anti-Muslim Defamation Society. “Matt Nelson has a history of unfortunate biases.”

  Molly nodded her understanding. “I guess that means he’s here with you.”

  ✽✽✽

  “Why does it have to be in a graveyard?” Etherya kept her voice as level as possible. Whining did not go over well in her circles.

  “We are hunting the undead, my dear. Whatever were you expecting?” Mystro smiled down at her. He hovered several feet above them both.

  Etherya gave her friend the best possible glare. “We’re taking on Professor Skeleton. He’s done everything from robots in the shape of skeletons to animating corpses with electronics. He does not do actual undead.”

  “Except this time, we think he is.” The Hospitaller sounded sad. “And not simply with bodies, which would be bad enough. He’s bending the spirits of the lost to his will.”

  Etherya nodded gravely – trying not to notice the pun. “So, we’re ghost hunting?”

  “Which is why you’re here,” Mystro smiled in his usual gallant fashion. “Supernatural threats such as this are rather commonplace for me. As for The Hospitaller, his particular mission in life gives him a certain power over these spirits.”

  “Burying the dead is a corporal work of mercy.” The older man responded. His hand tightened on the grip of the mace he carried. “This is a blasphemy and an abomination.” The Hospitaller didn’t do the whole righteous anger thing that often. It was just a tad frightening.

  It had to be a serious matter for Mystro and The Hospitaller to work together. The Hospitaller was over nine-hundred years old and had grown up in a time when any practitioner of magic would have been burned at the stake. While he had taken a much less judgmental stance over the past few centuries, he was never comfortable with Mystro. The Master of Magicks shared his antipathy. In fact, he had massive issues with any form of organized religion.

  “Okay, so I’ll bite. Why did you invite me?”

  “Etherya, though your powers came to you in a laboratory, science is only partially responsible for them. You really do have supernatural energies coursing through you.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Which of the two of us can see auras?”

  Etherya blinked at that for a moment, then shook her head. Maybe it mattered where the source of her powers came from, but it didn’t matter right this second.

  “So, shall we begin?”

  “A moment,” responded The Hospitaller. He closed his eyes, made the sign of the cross, and knelt in the dirt outside the cemetery gates. Mystro rolled his eyes in impatience. Etherya shot her friend a reproachful glare, then knelt beside the old man. She considered herself a devout Catholic, though she chided herself inwardly when she thought how long it had been since she’d been to Mass. The Hospitaller sensed her and reached out to give her shoulder a supportive squeeze.

  They prayed in silence for a moment. She took her cue from him and stood when he did. Mystro cocked his head and gestured toward the gates of the cemetery. They entered warily, Etherya bringing up the rear.

  The cemetery was the largest one in the city. Graves were crowded together, and tombstones and mausoleums of all sizes made line-of-sight all but impossible. Plus, it was dark out. Etherya felt every hair on her neck stand up straight the moment she passed through the cemetery gates. She didn’t consider herself an easy person to creep out, but something was substantially wrong.

  Both of her companions also noticed the bad vibes. The Hospitaller reached up to his neck and fingered the cross he wore there. He began muttering in Latin. Etherya simply tensed, unsure whether using her powers was a good or bad idea.

  “I think stealth is appropriate at the moment.”

  So saying, Mystro waved his hand again. Etherya could still see her friends, but it felt like they were blurred, out of focus. It wasn’t that she couldn’t look at them and see them clearly. It was that she suddenly didn’t want to see them clearly. She knew the same would be true for anyone looking on, though she wasn’t sure how the spell would work on the undead.

  They proceeded deeper into the cemetery. Finding Professor Skeleton wasn’t hard. They just kept walking in the direction they least wanted to go. The sense of wrongness became a physical presence, like an awful stench or bone chilling cold. As they got closer, Etherya also heard chanting. The language wasn’t anything Etherya was familiar with. It certainly didn’t make her feel any better.

  Professor Skeleton had always been one of Etherya’s least favorite bad guys. Whereas other villains were after world conquest, or just ill-gotten wealth, the Professor took a perverse pleasure in simple, honest fear. Sometimes, it wasn’t clear that his schemes had any agenda other than to frighten as many people as possible.

  He stood inside of an open grave. If not for his tall, gangly frame and the awkwardly oversized boots he always wore, he would have disappeared inside of it instead of peeking out from the shoulders up. As always, his head was covered in a skull shaped helmet. The flames in the eye sockets were a computerized graphic, but they were still creepy as all get out.

  It was particularly creepy when those eyes turned directly toward them.

  “Sorry. I’m not quite ready for guests.”

  Etherya didn’t know how he pulled off his raspy voice without going completely hoarse. Maybe he simply smoked eight or nine packs a day. She certainly didn’t know how he had pierced Mystro’s spell so effortlessly. What she did know was that he was about to attack.

  The images of ghosts she saw in the movies hadn’t quite gotten it right. Those pictures either looked like regular people made up of blue-white light or they were completely invisible except for flashes of cadaverous monsters.


  What came at the heroes were people who seemed to be continuously melting and reforming. One second, Etherya could see the fully formed figure of a man with light brown hair and a butcher’s apron as he jogged toward them with a cleaver in hand. In the next instant, a blob of green and red light shimmered in a mostly bipedal outline, and yet it kept moving toward them along with a dozen of its compatriots.

  Mystro let loose with a volley of golden light which formed into a glowing cord. Nine of the strange figures were suddenly caught in that rope, and despite their amorphous shapes, they seemed bound.

  The Hospitaller charged forward, leading with his shield. Or rather, Etherya realized, with the white cross emblazoned on it. “Miserere, Domine, et liberabo eas de vincula eorum.”

  Her Latin was atrocious, but the spirit forms reacted with a scream. It wasn’t in terror, and not exactly in pain either. It was more like a man shoving a dislocated shoulder back into its socket. Agony turned into release, and the forms caught within the cord suddenly flared into deep red light and disappeared.

  Skeleton snarled and rose up from the bottom of the grave. He didn’t jump, he didn’t climb, but he levitated as though pulled up by invisible wires. In his right hand, he held up a green glowing crystal set into a golden base. The sense of wrong about the thing was nauseating. He seemed to squeeze the crystal and its glow burned brighter. Two dozen more spectral shapes came from nowhere or everywhere and formed a wall between the villain and the three heroes.

  Mystro waved again, sending out a larger cord of golden light. This caught a full score of the shapes and did it even faster. “You can’t win like this, Professor.” Mystro said with a thundering, magically enhanced voice. “Summon as many spirits as you like, and we shall banish them all back to their realm.”

  Skulls always look like they are grinning, but Etherya knew it was more than that when the Professor turned his gaze to the magician. It occurred to her, from past memory, that though the crystal was in his right hand, Professor Skeleton was left-handed.

  “Look out!” she screamed, but too late. He had drawn the semi-automatic swiftly and his aim was true. Mystro dropped to the ground before the echoes of the shot had dissipated, a bloom of scarlet erupting from the middle of his chest.

  The Hospitaller was next to the wizard in two long strides. White light flashed from his hand, and the wound closed instantly. Mystro moaned, but did not rise.

  His healing power did not come without a price. When the big knight lumbered to his feet, Etherya could tell he could barely stand. Two more gunshots ricocheted off his shield.

  With gunshots ringing, and with The Hospitaller pinned down as he stood protectively over his ally, it was up to Etherya. She sprinted forward, becoming intangible as she went. (She usually thought of it as ghosting, but it seemed like the wrong word to use as there were actual ghosts here.)

  Between her and Professor Skeleton were seven specters. One, a tall, professionally dressed woman in heels, ran forth to meet her, raking at Etherya with nails that couldn’t possibly have been so long in real life. Etherya’s reactions were instinctive. She ducked the swing heading for her eyes and delivered a wicked punch to the woman’s gut.

  It was the weirdest feeling she ever had. She had both hit the woman and not hit the woman. Her brain absolutely refused to try to process what had just happened, though she thought she had a better understanding of Schrodinger’s Cat. Adrenaline surged, and she ignored her mind and attacked again, this time kicking the woman’s legs out from under her.

  One spectral assailant, she could handle. With her martial arts training, she might have dealt with as many as four, but when the remaining six leapt at her all at once, she quickly found herself dragged under their arms and restrained.

  The Hospitaller took a step forward, trying to come to her aid, but Professor Skeleton kept up a barrage of bullets, and Etherya saw one of them strike the old man’s calf. He dropped to one knee with a grunt.

  The Professor didn’t see the lean, cat-like form take a twenty-foot standing jump from on top of one of the tombstones, but Etherya did. She was still trying to decide if he was friend or foe when the scimitar flashed in his right hand, though there was no light she could see to reflect off of it. Still in mid-air, he brought the blade down and shattered the crystal into a half dozen pieces.

  Professor Skeleton screamed. Definitely, some of the bones in that hand were broken, and he dropped the remains of the crystal’s base into the grave below. Whatever force levitating him seemed to disappear as well, and he fell with an audible thump. Since his screams stopped instantly, Etherya figured he’d hit his head on the way down.

  She was suddenly aware the ghostly pressure holding her down was gone, had been gone since the crystal fell. She straightened and dashed over to where the stranger stood over The Hospitaller.

  “How bad is it?” said the newcomer, sheathing the scimitar.

  “Not nearly as bad as you were in Constantinople,” The Hospitaller replied, “But a little worse than I was in Cairo.”

  The stranger smiled, his teeth brilliantly white. “You could just say, it’s just a deep scratch.”

  “Just testing your memory,” the knight reached up and let the lean, hard-muscled man help him to his feet.

  Etherya blew out a breath of mild frustration. “Since no one else is rushing to say ‘thank you,’ can I be the first, please?”

  The Hospitaller turned to his comrade and nodded at her. “Quite right, my dear. Thanks to you, old man.”

  The stranger rolled his eyes but smiled. “One week older than him, and he never lets me forget it.”

  Etherya turned to Mystro. She knelt by him and made sure he was all right. Mystro was paralyzed from the waist down (a pre-existing condition) so she knew he wouldn’t be getting to his feet, but he seemed to be resting comfortably.

  “Will you be introducing me to your friend,” the stranger chided. “I didn’t realize you enjoyed them that young.”

  The Hospitaller scowled good-naturedly. “If you’re asking if she is seeing anyone, I believe the answer is yes. In any case, I’m sure she has better taste than to be seen with you.” Both men turned to her. “Etherya, allow me to introduce Fathi Faizan, the man who is destined to kill me.”

  With that, the two men laughed and embraced like only old friends can.

  Chapter Seven

  Fathi smiled down at her with instant recognition. “I see you found one of your lost sheep, Wulfric.”

  Molly stepped up and gave Fathi a hug. They weren’t nearly as close as she and The Hospitaller, but she extended her friendship to him on Wulfric’s behalf.

  “Forgive me,” he said softly. “I don’t remember what I should call you out of uniform.”

  “Molly Martin, Fathi.” She regarded him seriously. “And there is no uniform anymore. I’m just Molly.”

  “You live around here?”

  She nodded. “A little development about halfway out of town.”

  Fathi shot a grin at his old comrade. “Would you mind having some houseguests this evening?”

  She rolled her eyes playfully. “All that’s in my house is Scrabble and Uno.”

  Wulfric laughed heartily. “You know us well, liebchen.”

  “Not well enough to know how many games I have in the trunk of my car,” Fathi replied.

  She couldn’t help but keep smiling at them. They were the chosen warriors of the two sides of the Crusades. Both were destined to live until the one killed the other, thus proving the strength of their respective devotion. As the story had been told to her, the two had met on the battlefield during a rather insignificant skirmish during the Second Crusade. Instead of challenging each other, they’d turned from the battlefield and tended to the wounded. When they realized how much of a force for good they could be with an eternity to help others, they had simply decided never to face off against each other.

  It was an inspiring story of tweaking one’s nose at destiny, and Molly found
it helped her get to sleep some nights.

  Both men also had an almost obsessive love of board games. However, since there was at least some precedent for battles being decided with something like a game of chess, they could never play directly against each other. They always needed a third, at least, for their games. For reasons never entirely clear to her, they had made Molly, or at least Etherya, one of their favorite plus ones.

  “You’re of course welcome,” Molly said graciously, “but I should warn you that my life has quite a bit of drama right now.”

  “This Aerialist I’ve read about?” guessed Wulfric.

  “Him too,” she admitted.

  “Still attached to the speedster?” asked Fathi.

  Molly suppressed a sigh. “Him too,” she repeated.

  “Something with Matthew Nelson then?”

  She frowned up at Wulfric. “If you make me say ‘Him too’ one more time, I may have to slug you.”

  “Do you need to talk about it?”

  Wulfric gave her a look which was the soul of understanding. Fathi smiled down at her, equally serene. Both men were trained counselors and had been focusing some of their efforts on soldiers returning from war.

  “No.” She gave the most appreciative look possible. “Just understand that I might also be getting a visitor tonight. If I do, she’ll have to take precedence. I owe her that.”

  “Ah,” said Fathi, “family obligations.”

  She rolled her eyes good-naturedly. “Well, when you guess everything else first, that’s pretty easy.”

  An hour later, despite having two allies assisting her, she was no closer to finding The Aerialist. She wasn’t particularly surprised. Working with a general description of height and weight pretty much right in the middle of average wasn’t likely to get much in the way of results. Especially with the cold weather mandating that everyone was in well-padded outerwear, they hadn’t had much chance of success.

  Molly had spotted a few people she knew in town. Heather had somehow finagled a spot pretty close to the lower stage. At least ten of the faculty members of the school district were peppered throughout the crowd.