Armed with one of the assassin’s knives, Akako staggered through the doorway. A moment later, she fell to her knees, blinded by a surge of blue light. Still unable to see, she could hear the klaxons she’d installed go off to indicate a breach. Over these klaxons she heard a heavy clang as the door to the vault sealed shut.
Akako’s vision soon cleared enough so there were only a few bright spots to obscure things. She limped down the path and wondered what spell had gotten out. If she were lucky, it would be an immolation spell that would burn the assassin to ashes.
She wasn’t that lucky, as she found out when the assassin leaped out from the shadows to knock her to the ground. “What’s all that noise?” the assassin asked.
“The alarms for a magical breach. We’re sealed in here.”
“What? For how long?”
“That depends on how long the magical radiation lasts. Could be hours or days or years.”
“Then I guess we’ll wait until your friend wakes up to let us out.”
“She can’t open the door. No one can. Except the Scarlet Knight. Where’s Emma?”
“I don’t know.” The assassin rolled off of Akako and in the process snatched the knife out of Akako’s hand. “One minute she was on the ground and the next minute a scroll fell on her and she was gone.”
“Oh no.”
“What?”
“The spell must have made her disappear.” Akako pushed herself to her feet; she ignored the pain in her arm and leg as she raced over to the shattered pigeonhole. The label had shattered along with the crystal on the front of it so Akako couldn’t read the inscription right away. She sifted through the wreckage, until she put the words together: Forward Thinking. “Oh no,” she said again.
“Is she dead?” the assassin asked.
“Probably not.”
“Then where is she?”
“It’s more like when she is.”
“What?”
“I think she’s gone into the future.”
“Great. Just great.” The assassin tore the black ski mask from her face and threw it to the ground in disgust. The fallen ski mask freed waves of dark red hair that along with the sharpness of the woman’s face and the fury in her green eyes prompted Akako to gasp—as if she’d seen a ghost. “What are you looking at?”
“What’s your name?”
“Why? You writing a book?”
“I figure it’d be nice to know who’s going to kill me,” Akako said.
“Cecelia,” the assassin said.
“Cecelia what?”
“None of your fucking business.” Cecelia took a step forward and brandished the knife she’d taken from Akako. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“You look like someone I used to know.”
“Are you coming on to me? If you are, I’ll slit your throat now, you fucking dyke.”
Akako winced at the last word; she remembered what she’d said to Emma during their late night sessions. “It’s not like that.” She took a step back against the rack of pigeonholes. They showed no reaction to her, but when Cecelia stepped forward, they came to life, to throw themselves at the crystals that sealed them in.
There was only one reason the spells reacted that way: the presence of magic. Cecelia was not part of the coven, but she had some magic in her bloodline. From the look of her, Akako knew where it likely came from. “Did you know Sylvia Joubert?”
“The arms dealer? What about her?”
Akako took a deep breath, not sure if she should press the assassin on this issue. The woman clearly had a short temper; it might not take much to prompt her to kill Akako. She wasn’t surprised when Cecelia pressed the knife to her neck. “What does she have to do with any of this?”
“She’s Aggie’s sister—the woman you left up there’s sister. She was a witch like Aggie, but she died a few months ago. She had a daughter she gave up for adoption about a hundred seventy years ago in Paris.” The assassin’s eyes went wide; her mouth opened but no sound came out. She lowered the knife away from Akako’s throat and her arms went limp at her sides. Akako understood what had rattled Cecelia so. “You’re her daughter. Aren’t you?”
Akako squinted, but Cecelia’s face was completely smooth, like that of a twenty-year-old. Still, given her ability to work with potions, she wouldn’t have had much difficulty to make one to keep herself young for the last hundred seventy years. As a half-mortal, Cecelia’s magical abilities wouldn’t have been enough to bring her to the coven’s notice, at least until now.
“My mother already died. When I was a baby,” Cecelia said.
“But you were born in France a hundred seventy years ago, weren’t you?”
“What do you care?”
“I care because that would make you Agnes’s niece, a part of our family.”
“I am not part of your family—” To punctuate this sentence, Cecelia punched one of the pigeonholes. Akako tried to scream a warning, but it was too late. The assassin’s fist shattered the crystal cap.
Akako only had time to jump back a step before the scroll shot out of the pigeonhole to launch itself at Cecelia. The assassin brought up her knife to slash at the paper. The moment the blade touched the scroll, there was an explosion of yellow light. Again Akako found herself blinded; the explosion threw her onto her knees.
It took another few minutes for her vision to clear. When it did, she saw Cecelia was gone. She searched through the rubble to piece together the words for the pigeonhole the assassin had shattered: Unfinished Business.
“Oh no,” Akako said and then sagged to the ground to wait.
Part 2
Chapter 8
Emma opened her eyes, but had to wait a minute for the flashbulbs popping in her vision to settle down. Once they did, she found herself at a round wooden table in a kitchen. The moss-green walls of the kitchen were unfamiliar to her; they didn’t belong to the house she shared with Becky, Aggie’s home, or Dan’s mansion. There was a window over the sink, but at the moment she could see nothing but darkness.
She saw a cup of tea in front of her. The floral pattern of the teacup was familiar from her childhood. The china cups had belonged to her mother and were then transferred to Aunt Gladys. Like many of the items she remembered from her childhood, the cups had wound up in a box up in the attic; she and Becky didn’t have much use for fine china.
She reached out to pick up the cup, but then stopped herself. The hand in front of her had the same long, narrow fingers she remembered, but the skin on them was thinner, the blue veins more pronounced. There was also a mole on her right index finger she didn’t remember on her own hand. She had seen such a mole on Aunt Gladys’s hand.
With her hands she pushed back from the table. Immediately she could see a stomach so flat it caved in. “Oh no,” she whispered. What had happened to her baby?
She thought back to when she had arrived in the archives only to find the assassin there. The woman had then knocked Aggie out with a poisoned knife before she demanded Emma surrender the armor again. There was a brief struggle and Emma had run, but the assassin caught her. Then Akako had intervened and Emma had run into the vault. She’d tried to get the door closed, but it was too heavy. The assassin followed her, threw a knife, and broke open one of the pigeonholes. A spell had leaped from the pigeonhole like a wild animal. Everything had exploded in blue light.
Now Emma was here, in this strange kitchen, her baby gone. What had the spell done to her? What had it done to Louise? She looked down at her right hand again, the hand that looked so much like Aunt Gladys’s.
Emma found a cookie sheet on the counter. The metallic bottom of the cookie sheet didn’t make an ideal mirror, but it told Emma what she needed to know. In the surface of the pan, she saw her aunt, just as she remembered from before Aunt Gladys had died. Emma took a handful of iron-gray hair that still retained a few rusty strands.
She’d gone back in time. That’s what the spell had done. It had transported her back a
bout fifteen years, to when Aunt Gladys was still alive. She was her aunt and Louise—what had become of Louise? If she found some way back to her own time, would her baby still be alive inside of her?
Emma set the cookie sheet on the counter and then sagged back onto the chair. She took a sip of tea and noted it was her aunt’s favorite: orange chamomile. Emma had always preferred Earl Grey, the same as her mother had drunk. Her mother had said once with a wink, “That’s why I married your father, because I thought he was related to the tea.” The orange chamomile tasted a little sweet, but it was warm.
As she finished the tea, she looked around the kitchen again. The kitchen was the only thing she didn’t understand. This wasn’t the house in Parkdale where Emma had lived with Aunt Gladys, nor was it Aunt Gladys’s apartment in the Trenches. It could belong to some friend Emma hadn’t met, but why would her aunt bring a fragile china teacup along?
Maybe she hadn’t really gone back in time so much as sideways. During their late night talks, Akako had told Emma about how Sylvia had transported Akako and Aggie into a parallel universe. In that universe, Akako had inhabited the body of a nine-year-old genius named Renee Kim while Aggie was her fifteen-year-old Goth sidekick. Emma had been an old woman in that place, a substitute teacher at the high school. Maybe that’s where she had gone.
The only flaw in that theory was the spell Sylvia had used had not been recovered. There was no copy left in the archives, not even on the computer system. Moreover, Akako had described the portal to that dimension as purple, not blue. Of course it could be a similar spell that had taken her to another dimension.
She put her hands to her face and closed her eyes. Why did these things keep happening to her? Nearly six years ago she’d jumped into a different timeline, where she was married to Dan. Later she had switched bodies with Becky thanks to an alien parasite. Just six months ago Sylvia had used a potion that caused Emma to think she was Megan Putnam.
The creak of a door shook Emma from her thoughts. She lowered her hands and then reached for the cookie sheet. She might be Aunt Gladys or someone else entirely, but she could still stand up to an intruder in her house. As she crept out of the kitchen, she reminded herself this might not be her house. She might be the intruder here and the rightful owner had come back. Still, she wasn’t about to take any chances.
With the cookie sheet in hand, Emma found her way along a darkened hallway. Whoever had opened the door had not turned on a light yet, which didn’t strike Emma as something a rightful owner would do. As she continued into the foyer, she heard something heavy hit the floor nearby.
Emma could make out a humanoid figure crouched in what appeared to be a living room. She froze as she heard a zipper—opening or closing she couldn’t tell. Had this person in the living room pulled out a gun? Emma slid her hand along the wall of the living room until she found a light switch. She flipped the switch and then brought up the cookie sheet to strike—
A young woman’s voice shouted, “Mom, what the hell are you doing?”
***
The young woman stood up; she came only to Emma’s shoulders. She wore a khaki vest and shorts both lined with extra pockets and a black T-shirt, all of which were covered in dust, as were her face and arms. Emma had worn a similar outfit when she had done her fieldwork in Montana to earn her PhD.
“I’m sorry to show up like this, but the flight was delayed and I thought you’d probably already gone to bed, so I figured I’d just crash on the couch tonight,” the young woman said. When the girl brushed tangled dark red hair from her face, Emma saw the girl’s blue eyes stared at Emma, who still held up the cookie sheet as if ready to bang it like a cymbal. “Mom? Are you feeling all right? What’s with the pan?”
Emma finally brought the cookie sheet down to her side. “This? Oh, nothing. I was just in the kitchen, having some tea. Would you like some?” She didn’t know if there was more tea in the kitchen, but it seemed a good way to buy time while she figured out what had happened.
“You didn’t have to wait up for me.”
“Well, that’s what mothers do, isn’t it? Worry about their little girls?”
“I’m not a little girl anymore, Mom. I’m nineteen for Christ’s sake.”
“You shouldn’t use that kind of language.”
“Fine. I’m nineteen for crying out loud.”
“Better.”
The girl knew her way to the kitchen and stood on her toes to reach into a cupboard for another teacup. Emma was relieved to see a pot of tea on the counter, apparently with enough for a full cup. She stood in the doorway to watch this stranger stir in a packet of sugar and then reach into a jar for a handful of cookies. “I know, it’s too late for sugar. So sue me,” the girl said. She sat down across from Emma’s cup with a huff. “You know, out there I feel like a grown-up but as soon as I come back here it’s like I’m five again.”
“I’m sorry,” Emma said, unable to think of anything better. She sat down across from the girl, her body slack in the chair.
“I know. It’s just how you are. Wouldn’t even let me cross the street by myself until I started high school.” The girl shoved a pair of cookies into her mouth and began to chew noisily. Part of Emma wanted to mention this, but given what the girl had already said, she thought it better to remain quiet.
“So how was your trip?” Emma finally ventured. Given the girl’s clothes and the dust on them, as well as the mention of a late flight, it seemed a good guess that the girl had been somewhere far away.
“Better than I ever hoped. I think we hit the mother lode.”
“You did?”
The girl slurped some tea from her cup and then set it down. When the girl smiled, Emma saw that her front teeth were slightly larger than normal, almost buckteeth. “I was going to wait until tomorrow when I checked it in, but I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to show you now. Executive privilege, right?”
“Right.”
The girl practically skipped out of the room, which left Emma to stare at the kitchen table. The buckteeth, the sharp nose, and the tangled hair—those were all features she had associated with Jim Rizzard. The red color of the hair, the blue eyes, and the big feet, however, were more like Emma. “Louise?” she called out.
“Yeah, Mom?”
“Just wondering if you need any help.”
“I’ve got it.”
Emma put a hand to her flat stomach and understood why her baby was gone—her baby was in the living room, fully grown! The face in the cookie sheet that had looked so much like Aunt Gladys was her own, only older. She and her aunt had always looked a lot alike; the differences apparently had narrowed as she aged.
“Mom?” Louise said from the doorway. “Is something wrong?”
“What? No.”
“You’re crying.”
Emma put a finger to her right eye and discovered she was indeed crying. “I’m just so happy to see you,” she said.
“I’m happy to see you too.” Louise slung the dusty backpack onto the table and then leaned forward to put her arms around Emma. “I didn’t mean what I said earlier. I was just a little cranky from the flight.”
“It’s all right. I understand.” While Emma would have liked the hug to go on forever, Louise pulled back to unzip the backpack.
“Wait until you see the stuff Dan and I found.”
“Dan?”
“Dr. Dreyfus.” Louise stared at Emma, who was too surprised to speak. “You know, my supervisor for the expedition? The one you approved?”
“Oh, right. I’m sorry. I’m just a little tired.”
“We can wait until tomorrow—”
“No, go ahead. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
From the backpack, Louise took out a statue about a foot high of a woman, her skin and hair carved from jet, outlined with gold. Emma stifled a gasp; she had seen a statue like this before—in the temple of Isis. “Dan—Dr. Dreyfus—thinks it’s about thirty-five hundred years old. We’ll have to carbon date
it in the lab,” Louise said. She set the statue on the table so it faced Emma, its black eyes seeming to bore into her.
Next Louise took out what Emma thought at first was a shard of obsidian. Then she realized the black crystal was far too smooth and precisely shaped to be naturally formed. “We think it’s a ceremonial dagger,” Louise said. She handed the item carefully to Emma, who almost dropped it when she realized she’d seen these before—sticking out of her side and leg.
“I think that’s a good guess,” Emma said.
“Now this last thing is really going to blow you away.” Louise gently reached into the bag; her hands reemerged a moment later with a book. The covers and binding were also made from jet and gold like the statue. “According to the markings on the cover, this is called the Book of Isis.”
Louise tried to hand it to Emma, who refused to touch it. Her stomach churned as warning bells went off in her mind. The last time Dan had found something that had belonged to Isis in the desert, her evil spirit had possessed an innocent young woman to seduce Dan and come to Rampart City, where she’d resurrected the Black Dragoon and killed dozens, including Emma, who had been brought back to life shortly after by Merlin. “I tried to get it open on the plane—”
“You shouldn’t do anything with it,” Emma said. “You should put all of this back where you found it.”
“Mom, what are you talking about? We can’t put this back. We’re scientists, remember? Or at least you used to be. There’s so much we could learn from this.”
Emma looked from Louise to the statue of Isis that she imagined stuck its tongue out at her, to mock her. She desperately wanted to snatch the items from Louise and bury them in the deepest hole she could make, but she knew her daughter was right. They were scientists; their job was the pursuit of knowledge and while the artifacts might give her the willies, she couldn’t deny their scientific value.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She reached out to pat Louise’s arm. “You’re right. These are important artifacts. I’m proud of you.”
Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis Page 71