Jim crept along the hallway to the next door and here detected the more familiar odors of the sewers. It didn’t surprise him to find the room was the one where Emma had taken him to recover after his injuries. The sheets were still unmade from when he’d left the previous morning and he couldn’t smell anyone besides himself and Emma. Her scent of dusty old books and sweat had become ingrained in his consciousness since the first time he met her.
Her scent still hovered in the air, but it had become stale, which meant she hadn’t been in the house for some time. The woman with the dark red hair he didn’t know nearly as well. He remembered a scent like soap combined with gunpowder. He picked up traces of this as he walked around the house, but it too had become stale.
By the time he reached the basement steps, he didn’t have any hope to find Emma in this house. He let Pepe do a quick sweep of the basement to confirm that the house was empty. Jim went out to sit on the front steps and try to think of where to go next.
Emma’s scent still lingered around the steps, though the fresh air would have obliterated it to a far less observant nose. She was out there somewhere, still alive, but most likely a prisoner of that other woman. What that woman would do to Emma he didn’t want to imagine; he couldn’t bear the thought of her suffering, not after all of the kindness she had shown him. He thought back to the store and then—
Jim stood upright and turned to the house to hiss at Pepe to hurry up. He found his ratskin coat in the bushes and used it again to scoop Pepe up to keep the rat concealed. Pepe asked if Jim knew where they could find Emma. “Not yet,” he said. “But I have idea.”
At a moment like this, Jim wished he could drive or that he had some money of his own to call for a taxi. That would be a lot faster than to run through the sewers on foot as he did now with Pepe. Some of the other tribes tried to flag him down, but he ignored them, focused solely on his destination.
Jim didn’t know anything about TriTech, but he remembered his visit there with Emma. The cold-blooded woman who had greeted them had only further aroused Emma’s suspicions—and his own as well. There was clearly something strange about TriTech, but he didn’t have any idea what it could be. It did seem logical that since they’d seen Emma earlier they might have asked the woman with the dark red hair to track Emma down and take her prisoner so Emma wouldn’t ask any more inconvenient questions.
He neared the area where the explosion had gone off. The city workers had cleaned up most of the damage, but had left behind some yellow tape as a marker. Jim easily slipped beneath this tape to make his way through. He wasn’t superstitious by nature, but he did look around him as he passed through the tape in case there might be another bomb.
Shortly past this, he reached the area connected to TriTech. Even before he saw the guards, he could sense trouble in the form of the overpowering stench of beets and vodka. He pressed himself against the sewer wall and crept forward to see a half-dozen bulky men in rubber suits, all of them armed with submachine guns. Jim signaled Pepe to stay close to him so they wouldn’t draw attention to themselves.
He wished Emma were with him so she could translate what the men said. The harsh syllables didn’t make any more sense to him than ratspeak did to most people. The guards rumbled with laughter about something, but didn’t move from their positions.
Since he didn’t have any chance to sneak past the guards, Jim backtracked to the nearest ladder up to the surface. He carefully pushed the manhole cover aside and looked for any traffic before he jumped up onto the street. In a nearby alley, a familiar scent nearly bowled him over.
A pick-up truck sat in the alley, abandoned. The truck itself didn’t interest him so much as the dusty book smell he’d picked up the moment he stepped into the alley. Pepe sensed it too and squeaked with excitement. Jim cautioned him Emma wasn’t actually here. From the smell of the bed of the pick-up the red armor had been in the back recently, but there was no trace of Emma herself.
The truck was of course locked and the windows rolled up. Jim didn’t bother with subtlety this time; he used a piece of an old crate to smash the driver’s side window in. As soon as he did, the mixture of smells sent him reeling.
Emma had been in the cab of the pick-up, as had the woman with the dark red hair. With closer investigation, he determined Emma had ridden in the back of the cab while the other woman had drove. There was another odor as well, one he hadn’t smelled around Emma before, one like burnt coffee grounds. Maybe the woman had stopped for a cup of coffee on her way to TriTech. That would seem foolhardy if she had a prisoner in the backseat. From the strength of the coffee smell it was recent too.
Jim climbed out of the pick-up truck and headed back towards the street. His nose was tuned finely enough that he could detect the scent of the red armor and the woman with the dark red hair from across the street. He was so intent on following these that he didn’t notice the guard until the man hit him in the stomach with the butt of his submachine gun.
Jim fell onto his rear and found the guard had a weapon pointed at his face. “No beggars,” the guard said.
“Not beggar. Looking for woman,” Jim said through clenched teeth.
“No hookers either.”
Jim stared up at the guard and tried to think of what he could do. As it turned out, he didn’t have to do anything. Pepe slunk up behind the guard and then sunk his teeth into the guard’s leg. While the guard screamed and hopped around on one foot, Jim bolted to his feet. He easily stripped the weapon from the guard’s hands and then slammed the butt of it into the guard’s back. The man fell to the ground and cursed in a language Jim didn’t understand.
Jim dragged the man across the street, into the alley. Jim wasn’t nearly strong enough to heft the man into the truck, so he propped the guard against the wall. “What you want?” the guard asked.
“Looking for woman. Emma Earl. You seen her?”
“Who?”
Jim leaned closer to the man and kept the weapon pointed at the guard’s chest. He wished he had a picture of Emma, but the only representation of her he had were his sculptures. These he didn’t think would be of much help, so he did his best to describe her. The guard began to nod as Jim described Emma’s red hair. “Redheaded woman went in earlier with bag,” the guard said.
Jim asked, “Her hair like copper or like wine?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Her hair. What color red: light like copper or dark like wine?”
The guard thought about this for a moment. “Dark,” he said.
“Thank you.” Jim hit the guard on the side of the head with the weapon and made sure the man was unconscious before he turned to Pepe. “She not here. She somewhere else,” he said.
Pepe made the rat equivalent of a groan and then began to sniff around the alley for some clue they might have missed. Jim admired the rat’s persistence, but he didn’t think they had any chance to find her now. The woman with the dark red hair had probably dropped Emma off somewhere else, maybe even into the harbor with cement around her ankles. The thought of the harbor made Jim remember that wonderful moment when Emma had kissed him. He would never kiss her again—
Pepe interrupted his thoughts with a high-pitched shriek as if to shout, “Eureka!” Jim followed the rat to the end of the alley and then squatted down. He picked up the same thing as Pepe: Emma’s scent mingled with that of burnt coffee grounds. It was faint, but at this moment it was the only thing they had to go on.
From what Pepe and Jim’s nose indicated, the scent came from the opposite direction of TriTech. Maybe it would take them back to the harbor, where he might be able to dive down and find Emma’s body. Until he found her at the bottom of the harbor, he would assume she was alive and he would find her.
Chapter 19
Though usually the first to spot a silver lining in any situation, Aggie couldn’t find one in this case. Her magic powers were gone and their only hope to contact their own world for help had literally gone up in f
lames. There didn’t seem anything she could say at the moment to put a positive spin on things.
Instead, she could only waddle along the sidewalk and let Akako lean against her. The little girl’s tears had long since dried up, but she still sniffled every now and then. While Akako had never met this Red Hartner in person, the two of them—like all the other Reds in existence—had shared a mental bond. They had known everything about each other, felt everything the other felt, and now he was dead. It was like when Aggie had lost Sophie, Alejandro, all of her children and grandchildren, and Red, the boy Akako had replaced. From those experiences, Aggie knew nothing she could say would make Akako feel any better right now. The pain would become less immediate, but the hurt would always remain.
The silence continued until they reached a road sealed off by a set of metal gates. Beyond the gates, Aggie saw houses three or four times larger than the one she shared here with Sophie and her mother. A sign next to the gates identified the area as “Woodbridge Heights.”
Akako finally pulled away from Aggie and wiped at her eyes. “That’s where you live?” Aggie asked.
“Yes.” Akako checked the Cinderella watch on her wrist. “I’d better go. Daddy will be home soon.”
“Wait, can’t I go with you?”
“No. Daddy doesn’t like you. He says you’re a bad influence. If he sees us together, he’s going to send me to private school.”
“Akako—”
“Call me Renee.”
“We’re going to find a way out of here. You can’t give up hope.”
“There’s nothing we can do, Agnes. We’re stuck here. We might as well get used to it.” Akako got up on her tiptoes to kiss Aggie on the cheek. “I’ll see you in school tomorrow.”
“Just be careful. They might try to get you next.”
“If they knew who I was, they’d have killed me already.”
Aggie could only watch as Akako waved at an unseen security guard in a booth next to the gates. The gates yawned open a moment later to let Akako pass. A man’s voice said, “Good evening, Miss Kim.”
“Good evening, Floyd,” she said. Aggie wondered how Akako knew the man’s name—or was it Renee who had spoken? After the gates had closed, Akako waved to her. Aggie waved back and wondered if it were the last time she would see Akako again, if tomorrow Renee Kim would have taken her place.
This dark thought consumed her as she walked home. In time would she too begin to lose herself? Would Aggie the witch erode away until there was only Aggie the Goth girl left? In that case, Sylvia would have murdered her and Akako when she stranded them here.
As she passed a pocket park, she heard Glenda say, “You getting some exercise, Agnes? You could use it.”
Aggie turned to see Glenda and the rest of her friends on the playground equipment; they smoked as they had at school. “I was just walking Akako—Renee—home.”
“Where’d you leave the stroller then?”
“She’s not a baby.” Aggie took a step towards Glenda with her fists clenched. “She’s my friend.”
Glenda stepped towards her until her midsection rubbed against Aggie’s gut. “The coven isn’t for kids. You keep bringing her along and we’re going to excommunicate both of you.”
“Coven? You mean you do spells and stuff?”
“That’s right. We were just about to put a curse on Miss Earl.”
“Emma? Why would you do that?”
“The old biddy assigned us a ten-page paper on global warming because we were five minutes late to class. When we get done with her she’ll be pissing blood and coughing up shit.” Glenda squeezed Aggie’s left bicep hard enough to make Aggie wince. “You going to help us or not?”
“I don’t know—”
“It’s not like we really need you anyway. You’re a fucking poser. You and that little nerd of yours. Don’t know why I ever thought you’d be cool enough to join us.”
Aggie considered whether or not to help Glenda put a curse on Emma. Ordinarily she would have refused, and yet if this coven really could work magic, they might be able to help her and Akako get back home. “I’ll help,” she said. “What do you want me to do?”
At Glenda’s direction, the half-dozen girls formed a circle in the grass, Aggie between one with pink hair and one with a green Mohawk. They took each other’s hands and looked into the center of the circle, where Glenda laid out candles in the shape of a pentagram. Once the candles were lit, Glenda began to chant what Aggie soon realized was complete nonsense. The other girls echoed the words while Aggie lip-synced.
The chant continued for a full minute until Glenda stopped abruptly. Aggie could feel Glenda’s eyes on her. “Someone isn’t saying it right. I wonder who that could be—Agnes.”
With a grunt, Aggie got to her feet. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But this is a joke. You can’t curse someone with candles and chanting.” She looked around at the other girls. “Didn’t someone get a lock of her hair? Or a fingernail? Or at least something she’s owned.”
“What are you talking about? We don’t need any of that crap.”
“How else do you plan to tap into her spirit, to taint her essence?” Aggie looked around the circle for support, but the rest of the supposed coven looked down at the ground. Glenda’s pale skin had turned bright red to the point where Aggie thought steam would shoot out of her ears like in a cartoon.
Instead, Glenda poked Aggie in the chest. “This is my coven and we do things my way.”
“I’m sorry, but I thought every novice knew how to put a curse on someone.”
The other girls looked at her now with quizzical expressions. Aggie realized she had said too much. Glenda poked her in the chest again. “Get your fat ass out of here or we’ll put a curse on you next.”
Aggie held Glenda’s stare and growled, “Go ahead. You couldn’t curse a gnat.” She spun around and stomped away from the park. She heard the girls begin to chant again and wondered if they were still trying to curse Emma or if they had moved on to her—not that it would matter in either case. She supposed Akako was right to say they should try to get used to life here.
***
Aggie waited until she was in her bedroom to cry. They were stuck here, in this world where magic was only a joke, a game silly young girls played. Glenda and the others could chant and light all the candles they wanted, but it wouldn’t do anything. They could no more send Aggie and Akako home than she could climb three flights of stairs and not get winded.
Rage suddenly coursed through her body as she looked around her bedroom. It wasn’t her bedroom; it belonged to that other Aggie, the one who believed all that nonsense, the one whose head was filled with terrible poetry. If she didn’t do something, that’s who she’d become.
There was only one thing to do: destroy that Aggie and all of her Goth trappings. Aggie started with the posters on the walls; she tore them down with both hands. She tore these into confetti-sized pieces and sprinkled them around the room as such. Then she yanked open her drawers and tossed anything with black on it into a pile. She repeated this with her closet as well. Finally, she dumped out her bag on the bed, which had been stripped of its black sheets. She ripped pages from the notebooks, her eyes too filled with tears to read the awful text. This still didn’t sate her appetite for destruction, so she started in on the vampire novels. When this was done she pulled CDs from their cases, to break them, but she couldn’t. With a scream of frustration, she threw the CD against the wall like a Frisbee.
A light tap on the door interrupted her rampage. “Agnes? Are you all right?” her mother asked softly.
“Go away!”
“Agnes—”
“I said, ‘Go away!’” To emphasize this point, Aggie threw a black light against the door, which shattered it.
Then, her body covered in sweat, she saw herself in the mirror. She put a hand to her purple-tinted hair. Tomorrow she would go to a drugstore and dye it back to its natural color, or at least something that looked na
tural. Then she’d buy herself some new clothes or maybe some fabric to make some for herself as she’d done in the old days. She’d go on a diet and exercise until she lost the weight and then—
And then what? She would still be here. She still wouldn’t have any magic. What would she do with her life? The only things she knew were witchcraft and sewing; the former she couldn’t do here and the latter wasn’t a skill in high demand. What would become of her?
She sank down to the floor and curled up into a ball to sob. She might as well give in, let the other Aggie win, go back to posing as a Goth witch. Maybe Glenda and the others would take her back if she apologized and said she had PMS or something. The question came to her again: and then what?
Either way her life was doomed to be nothing but a failure. A bland, ordinary existence until she finally died. After over five hundred years, all the places she’d been and things she’d done, and now she would die like any dull mortal woman. It wasn’t fair.
A hand touched her back. “I thought I said—” She stopped when she looked up to see it wasn’t her mother but Sophie beside her. The door was still closed and blocked with the junk Aggie had piled up from her rampage. Then a breeze ruffled the curtains and she realized her sister had climbed in through the window. “What do you want?” she asked.
“Mom said you were freaking out. She wanted to call the cops to break in here and pull you out before you could do anything stupid.”
“Like what?” Aggie’s eyes widened as she realized her mother had thought she planned to kill herself. The thought hadn’t crossed her mind, but she supposed it would have been the next logical step. “Oh, I see.” She sat up and looked at her sister, who wore a mask of calm. As the middle child, Sophie had been the intermediary between Aggie and Sylvia, the calming force to steady them. She’d missed that over the last three hundred years.
Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis Page 49