Action Figures - Issue Two: Black Magic Women

by Michael Bailey

  That’s where Astrid comes in. The changes in air pressure, they’re the result of a spell similar to the one she used to snuff out the fires in the library: she’s dispersing all the oxygen to create a hard vacuum over the entire island. That’s the theory, anyway, but whether she can make it happen on such a massive scale...

  At ten seconds on the nose, theory becomes practice, and the result may not be dynamic, but it’s effective: the flames struggle to stay alive, flaring briefly as they consume the last of the oxygen, then they fade, dwindle, die out. In as much time as it took to cast the spell, the fire is extinguished, down to the last tiny ember. The town goes completely dark.

  The darkness doesn’t last long. A few at a time, like stars coming out for the evening, lights begin to dot the landscape. I can make out the outline of streets, clusters of houses. The wail of burglar and fire alarms, roused from their unwilling slumber, call out to me over the water. There will be confusion, there will be questions, but there will be no ambulances racing casualties to the hospital. There will be no funerals.

  It’s a fine night in Salem.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Well, in most of Salem; Winter Island, not so much. The soil, dry and lifeless, crunches beneath my feet. Trees reach for the sky with dead, black fingers. Nature has an astounding talent for bouncing back from destruction, but it’ll take a lot of time to bounce back from this.

  “It could have been worse,” Concorde remarks.

  “Please don’t say that,” I say. Oh, hey, Concorde sounds like a fast food drive-through speaker again. “I see your suit’s back up.”

  “It rebooted as soon as the Luddite Field dropped — which reminds me: we need to have a chat. Follow.”

  We find a relatively quiet area, away from the others, away from what must be every last firefighter in the city — who, perhaps out of a need to feel useful, hose down the ground, reducing it to a disgusting mud that stinks like rotten eggs. Your tax dollars at work, Salemites.

  Concorde slides up his outer visor. “I want to make something extremely clear,” he says, sticking a finger in my face to show me how very serious he is (and man, am I getting sick of people doing that). “I value my privacy. It’s necessary if I’m to function effectively — as me, and as Concorde. It’s necessary if I’m to have a personal life. You understand me?”

  “Totally.”

  “I hope so, because I’m trusting you with my secret — not that I have a choice.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, I have no idea who you are.”

  Concorde does a double-take, blinks at me. “You don’t?”

  “Nope. No clue.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. Never seen you before in my life.”

  “Oh. Okay. Huh. Well, good. That’s, uh, that makes things — you’re positive you’ve never seen me before?”

  “Do you want to tell me?”

  “No! No. No, better for us both this way. Look, chances are, you’ll figure it out sooner or later —”

  “When I do, I won’t say anything to anyone, not even the Squad, especially not Matt, cross my heart, hope to die, would you like me to sign something in blood?”

  “...That won’t be necessary,” he says.

  Please note: he had to think about it.

  Once the cleanup has begun in earnest and we all take a few minutes to breathe, we get down to the business of answering the question on everyone’s mind: what was this all about, anyway?

  Kysztykc and Black Betty weren’t trying to summon anything, they weren’t trying to form a cross-dimensional bridge, and they weren’t trying to destroy the ley lines; they were trying to contaminate them by creating a wellspring of dark magical energy in the form of a little slice of Hell (or, more accurately, the Dismal Realms) here on Earth. We stopped the effect early enough that it will make the ley lines converging over Salem, in Astrid’s words, “a little sick,” but won’t pollute them on a large scale.

  “If we hadn’t stopped the spell?” I ask.

  “That much raw dark magic would have backed up into the ley lines worldwide, like a sewer backing up into a home’s plumbing,” Astrid says. “Necromancers, those attuned to such energy, would have been able to tap the ley lines, but they’d be at best inaccessible, at worst poisonous to most sorcerers. It would have shifted the balance of power in a major way.” She pauses.

  “Or.”

  “Or?”

  “Or, set the stage for something else. Something huge. Apocalyptically huge.”

  I glance around, and I see my own expression on the face of every one of my teammates, my friends. We dodged a bullet, big time, and we all know it.

  Well, almost all of us. “That is an interesting theory,” Concorde says. “One of several you’ve thrown at us, each one worse than the last. Are you certain this time? Or do we have yet another nasty surprise waiting for us?”

  “One way to find out,” Astrid says.

  The day was saved, the dastardly plan was foiled, the bad guy was defeated. So why the hell is this nutjob still smiling?

  Small comfort, I’m not the only one bugged by it. “You want to tell us who this guy is?” Nina says. “I’d like a name to put to the set of teeth I’m about to kick in.”

  He wouldn’t be able to stop her. Such a unique prisoner requires a unique jailer, and Mindforce is serving that role, using his power to keep our playmate docile and immobile until we finish helping with the clean-up — although I worry he won’t be able to hold the guy for long; Mindforce has been pushed to his limits tonight, and the strain is showing.

  (I wonder how Byrne will handle him? I know they have methods for containing people with superhuman abilities, but as we’ve all learned, it’s not easy to get science and magic to work together.)

  “Astrid, did you not introduce me to your friends? Well. We were all a little busy, weren’t we? Hello, everyone,” he says, shining his smarmy grin on all of us. His teeth stand out as exceptionally white against the mask of dried blood coating his face. “I’m Kysztykc. I’m Astrid’s father.”

  Who the what?

  “That’s your dad?” Stuart says. “Dude. I thought he’d be...”

  “Taller?” the alleged Kysztykc says.

  “More demony.”

  “He’s not my father,” Astrid says, but wow, if looks could kill...

  “I’m not,” Kysztykc admits, “but I am.”

  “This is the man my father possessed in order to...impregnate my mother,” Astrid says. “I always assumed he died, burned out like host bodies normally do.”

  “And when you assume...heh. No, Astrid, my host didn’t die, obviously. I abandoned this shell before that happened, but by that point, my essence had fully corrupted his soul.” Missy, unconsciously, sidles up to me. I put an arm around her. She’s trembling, violently, and it’s not from the cold. “I know what he knows, he knows what I know. I am, for all intents and purposes, Kysztykc.”

  Which explains why he was able to throw around magic like crazy without burning out. I think. All right, it’s official: I hate magic.

  Astrid and her kinda-sorta father lock eyes. “Tell me, ‘Dad’: what did you hope to accomplish?” she says. “What was the point?”

  Kysztykc snickers. “Poor girl. Still can’t see the angles. I guess you are your mother’s daughter.”

  “Damned right I am. Get this filth out of here,” Astrid says, her words dripping with venom. She storms off, but she doesn’t get far.

  “Speaking of Mommy? She says hello.”

  Astrid locks up. Nina is right there, telling Astrid not to listen to him, he’s trying to provoke her, walk away, please, walk away.

  “Actually, that’s not true,” Kysztykc says. “All she ever says is: ‘YAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!’”

  He launches into a sickening outburst of shrieks, screams, and pleas for mercy in an affected feminine voice. Missy calls out Astrid’s name. Matt says he’s lying, he has to be, he’s a demon, don’t believe him. N
ina grabs Astrid by the shoulders, shakes her, begs her to walk away.

  She doesn’t.

  Roaring, Astrid throws Nina off. Jagged forks of magical energy leap from Astrid’s hands and drill into Kysztykc. She spits curses at her pseudo-father. The screams change, become his own. It’s Emperor Palpatine executing Luke Skywalker, but infinitely more horrifying, because this is happening right in front of us. This is real.

  The assault hits its climax. Kysztykc teeters on his feet, then drops to his knees, smoke wafting off his body, now a solid mass of ugly burns, and good God, the smell...

  His eyes have clouded over, but they find Astrid nevertheless. “The king is dead,” he croaks. “Long live the queen.”

  This adventure has been a nightmare from start to finish. I’ve seen things I once thought couldn’t — shouldn’t exist in our world, in any world. My concept of reality has been shattered and reassembled in a jagged, funhouse version of itself. I have fought monsters, figurative and literal. I witnessed what could have been the beginning of the end of the world.

  None of it will haunt me more than the fact that throughout his own murder, through to his dying breath, Kysztykc never stopped smiling.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Astrid pulled her vanishing act after that – poof and gone. She’s been incommunicado since — not that any of us have made an effort to reach out to her. Too much has transpired, too many dark secrets have been laid bare, too much trust has been betrayed. No one is all that eager to welcome Astrid back into the fold.

  In fact, that’s why I’ve been summoned to Protectorate HQ, why I’m sitting with the team in the conference room: to help decide what to do with Dr. Enigma.

  “Why me?” I say. “I’m not one of you.”

  “You might not be part of the Protectorate,” Nina says, “but you are definitely one of us, kiddo.”

  “Which is why we need you to cast the tiebreaking vote,” Mindforce says. He and Nina want to keep Astrid on the team; Mindforce is inclined to give Astrid a second chance because that’s the kind of person he is, and Nina wants to support her friend. I get that, but I don’t know if I could ever forgive that kind of betrayal. Concorde, naturally, is taking a hard-line stance and wants Astrid gone. Catherine thinks the Protectorate shouldn’t have to worry about loyalty and trust issues within the group. The Entity, I’m told, has been silent on the issue. He may be reliable enough on to show up when he’s needed in a fight, but Mindforce says he’s not big on the whole bureaucracy thing.

  So it all comes down to me.

  As a young lady with strong opinions, and no reservations about stating those opinions, I do what one would expect when faced with making such an important decision: I waffle.

  “I hate to be nitpicky, but how can you throw Astrid off the team when she isn’t actually on the team? She’s only a consultant.”

  “Who has full security clearance to HQ, and knows our civilian identities,” Concorde says.

  “And you’re talking about cutting her loose? You’re not worried she’ll become the world’s worst disgruntled ex-employee or something?”

  “One of the many, many issues we’ve been debating,” Mindforce says. “Trust me, Carrie, we’ve spent the entire day picking this apart, and no one is budging from their initial vote.”

  Which brings it back to me.

  I understand why Astrid kept her parentage a secret. I can even understand why she did what she did, considering what was at stake for her, but she can’t justify anything else. She came through in the end, sure, but things could have gone catastrophically wrong. She put her friends, the entire world in danger, for selfish reasons. That’s not how a super-hero acts.

  Before I can cast my vote, someone knocks on the conference room door. Can’t imagine who it is, unless the Entity decided to dabble in internal politics...

  The door cracks open. Astrid pokes her head in. “Um. Hi.”

  No one speaks, not to invite her in, not to send her away, not to ask her what the hell she thinks she’s doing here. One order of stunned silence for table, waitress.

  She lets herself in, closes the door. She stands at the foot of the table, head bowed, shoulders down, hands folded. Everything about her is contrite. The posture is neither familiar nor comfortable.

  “I screwed up. I know that’s the understatement of the century,” she says, “and I know I have no right to ask this, but...I want to be part of the team.”

  “You what? You have got to be bloody kidding me,” Concorde says, rising from his seat. “You squandered whatever goodwill you had with us, so you can turn around right now and —”

  “Excuse me,” I say. “I haven’t voted yet.”

  “Voted?” Astrid says.

  “Whether to remove you from the team,” Nina says. “I’m sorry, babe.”

  “Carrie, what do you think you’re doing?” Concorde demands.

  “Hearing all sides so I can make an informed decision,” I say. Concorde snorts, then sits. I turn to face Astrid, and I wait, very patiently, for her to make eye contact. It takes her a while. I’m prepared to feel nothing for her, but the pain I see in her is so raw and real.

  All right, Dr. Enigma, you have one shot to make your case.

  “Whatever happened to, ‘I’m not a super-hero’?” I ask.

  “I’m not,” Astrid says, “but I want to learn. I need to.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  No, Astrid thinks, that’s not my head pounding; someone really is at the door.

  She rises from her couch too quickly. She plants her feet, throws her hands out for balance, wills herself to remain standing despite the violent head rush.

  Yes. Still vertical. Good.

  The doorknob briefly proves too complex a thing for her to manipulate.

  Missy smiles at her from the hallway. “Hi! It’s me. Missy. It’s almost lunchtime, why are you in your pajamas? Are those Star Trek pajamas? I didn’t know you were a Trekkie. I like them, they’re cute. I’m coming in,” she says, blowing past Astrid before she can close the door — which, in her current condition, would have provided a crippled tortoise ample time to cross the threshold. “Wow, your place stinks like booze. That is booze stink, right? I mean, I’ve smelled wine and I’ve smelled beer and I smelled sake once when my uncle brought some with him last time he had dinner at my house and I thought it smelled like rubbing alcohol and I was like, wow, how can anyone drink that stuff, but he liked it, so whatever. How’re you?”

  “Very hung-over,” Astrid says.

  “That sucks.”

  “Yes. It does.”

  “You shouldn’t drink that much.”

  “I disagree.”

  “Why? Did it make all your problems go away?”

  Astrid cycles through several possible retorts before settling on, “Shut up.”

  “Oooh. Burn.”

  “Missy, what do you want?” Missy follows Astrid back to the couch. Missy sits. Astrid flops.

  “I wanted to see how you were doing. Besides hung-over, I mean. I tried calling you but you were doing the whole I’m not going to pick up my phone thing again. How can people check on you if you don’t answer your phone?”

  Astrid laughs, weakly, bitterly. “Moot point, kid. No one’s called to check on me.”

  “No one?”

  “No one but you.” She shrugs. “Whatever. I’ll be fine. There’s your answer: I’m fine. I’ll be fine. I need some time to myself is all. I need some space. I need to be left alone. And yes, that is a hint.”

  “Uh-huh. Astrid?”

  “Yes, Missy?”

  “Cut the crap.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Missy takes a moment to gather her thoughts. “Cut. The. Crap. As in, cut the mysterious loner crap because no one’s buying it. You act like you don’t need anyone, but you do. And if you really wanted to be alone, you wouldn’t have joined a super-hero team, you’d make your magic door vanish, and you wouldn’t have let me in.

 
“I don’t know why you let people into your life and then try to push them away with your creepy sorceress routine, but it’s stupid and pointless, and maybe if you’d accepted the fact you have friends who care about you and want to help you, none of this stuff would have happened, and you wouldn’t be sitting here in your PJs hung-over because you drank too much instead of acting like a grown-up and accepting responsibility for what you did.”

  “Missy.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re scary when you’re focused.”

  “I know, right?”

  Astrid plucks a half-empty tequila bottle off her coffee table. “I screwed up,” she says, considering the bottle. She replaces it without taking a sip. “I screwed up bad.”

  “I know. But if you apologize to everyone, I bet they’d —”

  “Not that. I mean, yes, I screwed up with my friends, but...do you remember what Kysztykc said before he died?”

  The night is a series of vaguely connected events in Missy’s head, moments and images and emotions that have lost their context, a bad dream that refuses to be fully remembered. Kysztykc’s defeat and demise likewise defy recollection, yet his final words, incongruously, remain vivid.

  “‘The king is dead, long live the queen,’” Missy says, “but I don’t get it.”

  “It means I didn’t sabotage the ritual of inheritance,” Astrid says, her voice coarse, “I completed it.”

  “...What?”

  “Kysztykc’s power passes on to the demon that kills him. I thought by killing his avatar, it would create a paradox and screw up the ritual. Instead, by symbolically killing Kysztykc, I sealed my claim to his throne by right of blood.”

  “Oh. Uh...was that the plan all along?”

  Astrid shrugs. “That’s the problem with demons: you never know what they’re really up to. Completing the ritual might have been his real goal, or he could have been...” She shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters to your friends. It matters to me.”

  “Why? Why do you care? After all the pain I’ve caused you, why would you give a damn about me?”