“Which would be Salem.”
“Right. Once you have a flux point, summoning a demon lord becomes possible.”
“Going under the natural assumption that that’s bad,” Mindforce says, “how can we stop it?”
Astrid smiles. “That’s the beauty of the thing: we don’t have to. Black Betty has completely outsmarted herself.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Yeah, you lost me too,” I say.
“In order to summon a demon, any demon, you need a human host, and host bodies can’t contain that kind of power forever. Imps can ride a host for a month, month and a half at most. Major demons burn through hosts in a matter of days. A demon lord would consume a host within minutes.”
“Hold on. You’re not suggesting we let Black Betty complete the ritual?” Concorde says.
“I’m not suggesting it, I’m saying it outright. She needs to corrupt at least four ley lines to create a viable flux point, and she’s already taken down three. We let her finish the ritual, let her summon Kysztykc, he fries his host before he can do any damage — problem solved.”
Something about her explanation doesn’t sit right with me, but I can’t pinpoint what’s off about it. Then again, I’m trying to wrap my normal brain around a highly abnormal situation. Maybe Astrid’s telling the truth.
“She’s lying,” Missy says, and Astrid reacts as if Missy slapped her. “She’s lying. She wants Black Betty to summon Kysztykc.”
“What? Kiddo, that’s nuts,” Nina says. “Why would she want to —?”
“Missy, honey, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Astrid says in the soft, gentle tone with which you’d speak to a child who is severely trying your patience.
“Missy,” I say, “what’s going on?”
“I don’t know but she’s lying —”
“Missy,” Astrid says, “you need to stop.”
“— she wants to summon Kysztykc —”
“Missy. Shut up.”
Everyone starts talking at once, trying to make sense of things, trying to bring some order, but the result is a mass shouting match, with no one person able to rise above the din until —
“Kysztykc is Astrid’s father!” Missy shouts.
Bad becomes worse in an instant. Astrid, snarling, reaches out and, from ten feet away, Force-chokes Missy into silence. Before Stuart can take a single step toward Astrid, before I can blast her, Sara nails her with a telekinetic ram that drops her on her ass. Missy collapses to her knees, gasping for breath. Nina pounces on Sara, wrapping her arms around her head and neck in a sleeper hold. Matt grabs Nina to pull her off, but the Entity (where the hell did he come from?!) appears out of nowhere to lock Matt up in a full nelson.
And then everyone freezes — and I mean freezes; we all become statues, unable to move, unable to speak, unable to blink.
“Enough,” Mindforce says.
I repeat: yow.
He lets tempers cool for a bit, then disassembles the mess one body at a time, freeing me and Stuart first, then the Entity, Matt, Nina, Sara. He doesn’t free Astrid, not voluntarily. She’s released when Mindforce doubles over, retching violently. Sara likewise drops to her knees, spraying sick everywhere.
Oh, no.
I fire up my headset and pull up the satellite data. The entire town is under an umbrella of blood red.
“Guys,” I say. “We’ve been suckered.”
What was it Black Betty said? Figured you’d have caught on to the game by now, but, as usual, you still don’t know how to play the angles.
She anticipated Astrid would eventually puzzle out her modus operandi, so she doubled down on the last ritual within the ritual; while we were crashing the party at the school, a few miles away, in the middle of several acres of conservation land, well hidden from the public eye, a second group successfully carried out the same ritual. The resulting demon, a charming fellow who boasted such titles as the Roaming Blight and the Corrupted Reach (due, one must assume, to the fact his touch reduced organic matter to a rotted mass within seconds), was not as easy to take down as Astrid had led us to believe.
Maybe that’s because Astrid totally bailed on us.
That’s right, she teleported away with a heartfelt eff-you, leaving us to fight the demon by our non-magical selves. I’ll forego the play-by-play and simply say this: I was already in awe of Mindforce after he used his psionic powers to completely lock up seven human bodies, and then I witnessed Nina Nitro cut loose on Mister Roaming Blight. We could have cleaned up that mess with a broom and dustpan. Literally.
Of course, if Astrid had been there, we might have been able to avoid such drastic measures in the first place, but she wasn’t. She abandoned us. One more item on my list of grievances against her.
We return to Protectorate HQ late in the afternoon. I dash home to have an amiable meal with Mom and Granddad, then leave under the pretense of hanging out with Sara at her house.
Where I really go is to Astrid’s apartment. The ground floor door is locked, but that’s easily addressed with a small, concentrated zap. I’m sure she can afford a new deadbolt. Hey, I’m carrying around a lot of market-fresh anger; a minor act of vandalism is not beneath me right now. I do manage to keep my knock polite and non-destructive, however.
Astrid opens her apartment door, stink-eye already firmly in place. I respond with a mild smile. “I’d like to talk to you.”
Astrid pauses. “What do you want?”
“An explanation, for starters.”
“Pft. Kid, I don’t owe you an explanation for anything.”
My expression hardens. “You pulled a Darth Vader on my friend. An explanation is the very least you owe me.”
She opens the door. “I’ll tell you right now, I am in no mood to be lectured, so don’t —”
“I don’t give a damn what you’re in the mood for.”
Stop. Back it up, girl, this is the same knee-jerk anger that always makes things worse. Deep breath, clear your head, and continue like an adult.
Aaaaaaand go.
“I’m not here to lecture you. I’m here to understand.”
It takes her a minute or two, but she finally lays it all out, starting with her messed-up heritage — which is, in and of itself, more than enough to break one’s brain. Then she explains why she decided to sell us all out so Black Betty could complete the ritual.
“It’s a fine detail but an important one: when you summon a demon, you’re not actually bringing that entity into this world,” she says. “You’re drawing a fraction of its essence here, and planting it in a host to create an avatar — a representation of that being.”
“I play video games, I know what an avatar is.”
“Then you know that when your avatar dies, you don’t. You, the real you, continue to exist. If I kill Kysztykc’s avatar, it could create a paradox that could undo the rite of ascension.”
“Killing the avatar triggers the spell,” I say, “but, because Kysztykc is still alive, you can’t become the new Lord of the Dismal Realms. The spell goes kerflooey and you’re off the hook.”
“Exactly.”
“See? I understand. I also understand you don’t know for sure whether you’re right. You said it could create a paradox that could undo the spell. Not would; could.”
“...No. I don’t know for sure.”
“And what you said about Kysztykc burning out his host? Was that hypothetical too? Or are we facing a very real possibility of a demon lord, no pun intended, raising hell on Earth?”
She doesn’t answer, which is answer enough. I shove my anger back in its box, but it doesn’t go willingly. “Why didn’t you ask us for help? Why lie to us?”
“I’m a hellspawn,” she says, as though that answer should explain everything. “I doubt that little revelation would have gone over well — and on top of everything else I’m dealing with, I don’t need my friends looking down on me because I’m a freak.”
“Oh? Which of your oh-so-n
ormal friends would do that? The two psionics? The genetic mutation? The other genetic mutation? The creepy leather guy? Maybe the girl with alien technology in her hands?”
My point hits home; her eyes drop to the floor.
“Astrid, I don’t look down on you because you’re half-demon,” I say. She gives me a weak smile, and I almost feel bad for what I say next. Almost. “I look down on you because you attacked Missy so you could cover up a half-thought-out longshot plan to —”
“Don’t you think if I had another option, I would take it?” Astrid hisses. Where have I heard that line before? “I lost that chance when Black Betty swiped the Libris!”
“So you jumped on the first flimsy opportunity that came along, risks be damned,” I say, the box breaking open. “You’re putting the entire world in danger for your own selfish reasons and you don’t even —”
“Oh, it is so easy for you to stand there and judge me, you arrogant, ignorant girl. I know what’s waiting for me if I don’t block the rite of ascension! You don’t!” Astrid says, jabbing a finger in my face. I hate it when she does that. It takes a supreme effort of will not to slap it away. “So don’t you dare dump all over me because I don’t want to go to Hell!”
“If you’re willing to risk every life on the planet to save your own ass, you deserve to go to Hell.” Not content to leave on that killer exit line, I pause in the doorway. “We’re going to stop Black Betty, with or without you. If you’re not with us? Stay out of our way, or I swear to God I will personally take you down.”
TWENTY-NINE
For the record, I’m not proud of what I said to Astrid. Yeah, she needed to hear it, but I take no joy in being the messenger.
Whether any of it sinks in, I guess we’ll see, but I don’t look forward to the moment of truth, whenever that may be. Concorde has us on stand-by again, and he told us to expect to move out sometime within the next two to three weeks, as per Astrid’s estimate, but there’s no way to predict exactly when Black Betty will make her move. We’re braced for sooner rather than later, but either way, guess what? Back to sitting on our hands and waiting.
Matt, to his credit, has given up on idle distractions; instead of gaming at the Coffee Experience, we’re killing time at the library (which, I am pleased to report, is currently under repair thanks to a generous donation from an anonymous benefactor. You can hardly tell the place nearly went up in a blaze of hellfire).
For a plain old public library, the place is shockingly well stocked with books on magic and the supernatural. Couple that with the Internet, and we’ve been able to uncover a lot of interesting, if not entirely useful, information.
“As near as I can tell,” Matt says, sifting through his hand-written notes, “no one has ever successfully summoned a demon lord, so the repercussions are nothing but guesswork, but Astrid might have been right about the host body burning out before the demon could do any damage.”
A passing librarian, overhearing this, stops to give us a questioning look. “Prepping for a Dungeons and Dragons game this weekend,” I tell her. She purses her lips in disapproval of us kids and our silly games, but moves on without comment.
“Nice cover,” Stuart says.
“I’m getting good with spontaneous lies,” I say. Again, I’m not proud. “Go on.”
“Going by what Astrid told us, along with some stuff I found online, I did the math and calculated exactly how much mileage a demon lord could get out of a host.”
“Wait, you did the math?” Sara says. “On how long demonic possession lasts? Do you know how crazy that sounds?”
“Hey, man, crazy ain’t what it used to be,” Stuart says.
“It was pretty easy, once I nailed down some benchmarks. I assigned an imp a power factor of one so I had a baseline, which made a major demon a ten, and a demon lord a hundred. I then averaged out the time it takes for a host to burn out under different —”
“You’re making my head hurt,” Missy says.
“I second that,” I say. “Get to the point.”
“Sorry. According to my calculations, a demon lord’s host body would burn out within one or two hours, absolute max, under optimal conditions,” Matt says, “If it expended any serious power, for any reason, its lifespan decreases exponentially.”
Hold on, one or two hours? That’s not a lot of time for some Kysztykc-possessed guy to find and, um, get familiar with Astrid’s mother. Heck, my first date with Malcolm lasted all of four hours. How could Kysztykc have knocked up Momma Enigma if he only had one or two —
Oh.
Oh, God. I know how. The thought makes me queasy.
“Guys, my point is,” Matt says, “I don’t think Astrid was lying to us.”
“Maybe not about Kysztykc burning out his host,” I say, “but she totally lied to us about her motives.”
“She was manipulating us, Matt,” Sara says, “and I don’t think it was the first time. And do I need to remind you what she did to Missy?”
“No,” Matt says.
“She Vadered me,” Missy says.
“I know.”
“She found my lack of faith disturbing.”
“Missy...”
“Focus, people. Let’s think about this for a minute,” I say. “Say the summoning works. According to Matt’s theory, Kysztykc can either stick around for a couple of hours, tops, because he’s not using any power — meaning he’s not causing any damage — or he can wreak havoc and cut his lifespan down to a few minutes, which I’m going to optimistically assume wouldn’t be enough time to do anything super-serious.”
“Right,” Matt says.
“Right. So what aren’t we seeing?”
“What do you mean?”
“Come on, Matt, would Black Betty really put this kind of effort into a plan she must know is a total dead end?”
Matt shrugs. “She is thirty-one flavors of crazy. Crazy people don’t think straight.”
“I think it’s job requirement,” Stuart says.
“All the more reason to think there’s something else going on here.” I grab Matt’s notes, skim through them. Ugh, his handwriting. I recognize maybe six words as actual English. “Matt, could a sorcerer take advantage of corrupted ley lines for some other purpose?”
“Not that I could find. Ley lines’re way more useful if they’re working right.”
Not that he could find. Well, I’m not surprised the Internet isn’t a treasure trove of arcane knowledge. That stuff is more appropriate to dusty old tomes like the Libris (you know: the book Black Betty has) and individuals schooled in the mystic arts (you know: like Dr. Enigma, who is persona non grata).
“I think we’ve hit a dead end,” I say, “but we should talk to Concorde anyway.”
Matt jumps on that. “I’ll call him. I can do that now. I have his cell number.”
“Dude, we all have his cell number,” Stuart says.
“Don’t ruin this for me.”
As we are all polite young people, we step outside to make the call. Concorde isn’t picking up, which is unusual (well, it’s unusual when I call him), so Matt leaves a message and, with the library closing and our stomachs rumbling, we head to our respective homes for some dinner.
For me, dinner will be a light meal of baked cod and rice pilaf. Mom must’ve had a hard day if she’s making such an easy dinner. Tread lightly, Carrie.
“Hi, hon,” Mom says. “How was your day?”
“Good.”
“The coffee shop sick of you guys yet?”
“Nah. Jill’s cool, she doesn’t mind us hanging out all day.” Doesn’t hurt that we tip generously.
“Hm. That’s nice of her. Dinner will be ready in a bit.”
Wait, that’s it? Two innocuous questions? No probing inquiries? No lengthy grilling to learn my every whereabouts? Take the win, girl, slink out of the kitchen before she —
“Oh, Carrie?”
And here it comes. Maternal nosiness prevails, all is right with the world. “Ye
ah?”
“I know you usually spend the weekends with your friends, but I’d appreciate it if you could be home for dinner this Saturday night.”
“Um, okay. Why?”
Mom gives me a small shake of her head. The gesture says, Oh, no reason, which tells me there is a reason, and she’s choosing not to share with me.
Rock, meet hard place. Things have been going so well between us, and I don’t want to screw that up by telling her I can’t, but the Squad is still on call. The best I can do is make an empty promise, then pray Black Betty tries to end the world on a schedule that works better for me.
Ha. Good one, Carrie.
“Sure, I can come home that night,” I say. Mom thanks me with a little more heartfelt gratitude than such a simple request deserves, and my paranoia climbs from a four to a seven. As Sherlock Holmes might say, something is most definitely afoot.
(Yes, I know the exact quote is “The game is afoot.” Don’t correct me on Sherlock Holmes. Only James Bond and Bilbo Baggins occupy more space in this girl’s heart.)
I could sure use some of that patented Holmesian deductive reasoning now. I can’t shake this feeling there’s something to Black Betty’s scheme we’re not seeing. I get that she’s nuttier than the proverbial fruitcake, but crazy people still have an internal logic, twisted and warped though it may be.
After dinner, I retreat to my bedroom to sift through everything we know, hoping to pick up on some telling detail we missed. So: Black Betty summoned an imp that, in the guise of Stacy Hellfire, hit a number of libraries that house items once belonging to author-slash-paranormal investigator H.P. Lovecraft, ostensibly to retrieve a book of powerful dark magic, which was in fact in the possession of one Dr. Astrid Enigma, who was hoping to find a way to undo a ritual spell that will, upon the death of her demon lord father, make her the absolute ruler of a Hell-like alternate dimension — which is incidental to our main challenge: foiling a summoning ritual capping off a series of ley line-corrupting summoning rituals, all pulled off by Black Betty’s minions using pages torn out of the Libris Infernalis.
Action Figures - Issue Two: Black Magic Women Page 21