Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis

by P. T. Dilloway

  The girls continued to chatter as they walked to the parking garage. The car that had been a two-seater this morning expanded to reveal another row of seats. Emma broke into the conversation enough to volunteer to sit in the backseat. She stifled a groan as she compacted her body to slide onto the hard seat and then tucked her knees almost to her chin.

  Louise got behind the wheel again, not that she had to drive much. Mostly she and Renee continued their chatter. From what Emma could tell, Renee had been away at boarding school for the last year. Her semester break had coincided with Louise’s return from Egypt; Emma wondered if this was really a coincidence.

  As she continued to listen, Emma saw her daughter did not inherit her shyness. Even around Becky, her best friend since kindergarten, Emma had never felt entirely comfortable with conversation. The way Louise went back-and-forth with Renee indicated she didn’t have any problem in being open with at least one person. Then again, Louise hadn’t lost both of her parents in a horrible accident either. Still, she couldn’t help but smile from her uncomfortable position; she listened more to the cadence of the words than the content.

  She didn’t realize she’d fallen asleep until she felt someone shake her and heard Louise say, “Mom, are you all right?”

  Emma blinked her eyes open to see both Louise and Renee staring at her with concern. “I’m fine. I’m just a bit tired.”

  “Maybe I should take you home.”

  “No, I’ll be fine.” She smiled at them to alleviate their concern. “I could use a little help getting out of this seat, though.”

  Renee offered her slim, long-fingered hand for Emma to take. The girl didn’t show any discomfort as she pulled Emma from the backseat. She turned to Louise, her voice much more serious. “Go on ahead, Lou. I want to catch up with your mom.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Louise said, though she didn’t sound happy about it. “I’ll go let Dan know we’re here.”

  Once Louise had left, Renee slipped a hand into her purse; the hand returned a moment later with a brown vial. “You should take some of this,” she said.

  “Are those drugs?” Emma asked.

  “No. It’s one of Aggie’s potions. To give you an energy burst.”

  “I don’t think I should,” Emma said. She thought of the spell that had brought her here to start with. Aggie had always advised her against mixing magic whenever possible.

  “There aren’t any side-effects. I use it all the time when I need to cram for finals.”

  “I see.” Emma cleared her throat. “Do you mind if I ask you something?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Does Louise know about what Aggie does?”

  “No. And we should keep it that way.”

  Emma studied the girl’s face; though Renee was younger than Louise, she seemed older. An old soul as the expression went. “I think we should get inside,” Emma finally said.

  Dan’s house hadn’t changed much in twenty years. This didn’t surprise Emma as Dan spent much of his time in the field. There was one addition she noticed: a picture of Dan and Becky on the wall that led to the dining room. She estimated the picture had been taken a few years from the time Emma had left. In it, Becky knelt on the front of a sailboat with Dan behind her; both of them smiled against the setting sun. Becky looked thinner than Emma had ever seen her, to about the same weight as Emma had been with Louise in her belly.

  What she didn’t see in the house was Becky herself. Dan met them in the enormous formal dining room along with Louise. There were four places set at a table that could seat ten times that number; the four places were in the center of the table with two seats on either side so they wouldn’t have to scream to each other to be heard. “I’m glad you could make it,” Dan said.

  “I’m glad I could too.” He motioned for her to sit next to him while Louise and Renee sat next to each other across the table so they could continue their rapid-fire conversation about Louise’s trip to Egypt and Renee’s stay at boarding school. Emma took a sip of water from the glass in front of her.

  “I thought after being over there for six months it’d do Lou and me good to have a real dinner.”

  “That’s true. I’m sure you’re sick of all that canned food,” Emma said. Though she was practically a senior citizen now, she looked down shyly at the white tablecloth, still unable to look Dan in the eye.

  “Anything without sand in it is fine with me.”

  “So I guess sandwiches are out then.”

  He laughed harder than this joke deserved. “No, I guess not.”

  A cook appeared with miniature quiche appetizers. Emma took a bite of one and tried to remember the last time she’d eaten something this rich. Dan made a satisfied noise and then smiled. “I really missed these,” he said.

  “Maybe you should stay home more.”

  “I couldn’t do that. I love it out there. I just wish they catered better.”

  The cook brought out glasses of wine for her and Dan and fruit juice for the girls. This reminded Emma of her first date with Dan when she had been Louise’s age, still too young to drink, and how mortified she was when the waiter brought out the wine list. She’d felt so foolish then to be on a date with someone so much older and more experienced while she was still a kid in most ways.

  This time she could pick up her glass of wine and hold it up along with the others. “To the pursuit of knowledge,” Dan said. “May we never stop seeking.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Louise said. They clinked their glasses together; the sound echoed throughout the dining room. “I can’t wait to get a better look at that stuff we brought home, especially that book.”

  Emma said nothing to this, but when she looked across the table, she saw Renee give her a knowing look. She wondered if Renee had the same condition as Akako that allowed her to hear the voices of the other versions of her in parallel universes. Did that pass from one generation to the next?

  She realized then Dan was talking to her about their initial findings. “There seemed to be a whole cult centered around human sacrifices to the goddess. It’s not that different from the Aztecs or other primitive tribes,” he said.

  The word “sacrifice” rang in Emma’s ears. She put a hand to her heart and remembered the sacrifice she had made when she gave her heart to Isis. Maybe Marlin was right and that was what she needed to do in order to destroy the Book of Isis. She took a sip of wine for courage before she asked, “Did the ancients believe you could kill a god?”

  “Kill a god?” Dan rubbed his chin in thought. “Not really. Mostly the best you could do was pit one god against another and hope yours came out on top.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “There are some people who believe the only real way to kill a god is for people to stop believing in it, that gods live off belief like we live off food or water.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I don’t think gods need us so much as we need them. After all, they made us, right?”

  “Yes, I guess so.” From experience, Emma knew Isis didn’t need souls who believed in her. She simply devoured the souls, to absorb them the way Emma’s body was already absorbing the miniature quiche. Her heart had given Isis what could crudely be described as a fatal case of indigestion.

  But if Dan was right, a god couldn’t really die. This prompted her to shiver.

  During the main course of roast pheasant, Dan leaned in close enough that she thought he might try to kiss her. Instead, he asked, “I don’t suppose you’ve heard from Becky recently?”

  “No,” Emma said, though really she had no idea.

  Despite how quietly Dan had asked the question, Louise still must have sensed what they had said. “I don’t know why you’d want to hear from her. She ran out on you and Mom.”

  Renee patted her friend’s arm. “Lou—”

  “What? It’s true. Good riddance, I say.”

  “That’s enough, Louise,” Emma said.

  Louise glared at her for a moment
and then took a sip of her drink. Emma turned to Dan, who stared sadly at his plate. “I’m sorry about that,” she said.

  “No, Lou is right. She did run out on us. I just keep hoping she’ll come back or at least call or write or something.”

  “I’m sure she will, when she’s ready,” Emma said, though she had no idea what had happened to make Becky run away from them. She thought it best not to ask Dan for fear she’d upset him even more. She could always ask Louise, but her daughter didn’t seem like the most objective source.

  “I’m going to powder my nose,” Louise announced.

  “I’ll go with you,” Renee said. Emma imagined Renee would attempt to calm Louise down so they could get through the rest of dinner.

  The girls’s departure left Emma alone with Dan. He shook his head sadly. “I think it was hardest on Lou. She and Becky spent so much time together; she was like a second mother. No offense.”

  “None taken.” Emma smiled slightly. “She was like my second mother too.”

  “To second mothers,” Dan said. They clinked the glasses again, the sound much smaller this time.

  Chapter 11

  There was a contest at the Plaine Museum that would award ten thousand dollars to anyone who could get audio of the director raising her voice. The contest had started long before Louise started to work at the museum, back when she was a toddler and Mom first became the museum director. No one had claimed the prize yet and Louise knew no one ever would. Audio of her mother raising her voice would be as rare—if not rarer—than video of Bigfoot or extraterrestrials.

  From experience, Louise knew her mother never needed to raise her voice. Instead she relied on what Louise had dubbed The Glare. She would simply stare at you with those deep blue eyes until you finally caved in. The Glare and what Louise could only describe as an authoritative presence were more effective than all the threats in the world.

  When Louise got behind the wheel after dinner at Dan’s house, she could feel The Glare on the back of her head. Louise had already mumbled an apology, but she knew that wouldn’t be enough. Not for her sainted mother. It didn’t come as any surprise when she heard Mom say, “What you did was very rude.” Her voice sounded as flat as if she described the features of a meteor to a tour group, but Louise knew the flatter her mother’s voice, the angrier she felt.

  “I apologized to him,” Louise said.

  “You should know better than that. You’re supposed to be a grown-up.”

  Beneath The Glare, Louise never felt like a grown-up. She felt as if she were four years old and had just broken the cookie jar. “I’m sorry, Mom. I’ll make it up to him tomorrow. I swear.”

  “Good.” Mom closed her eyes. She’d fallen asleep before they were halfway home. This was something Louise hadn’t seen before, something that worried her. Mom had always looked tired, but she had never acted tired before. Since Louise had arrived home, she had caught an emptiness in her mother’s expression at times. Between that, the fact she’d fallen asleep in the car, and referred to Louise as “baby,” there was something not right about her mother’s mental state.

  “She’s getting old,” Renee said. Louise’s best friend had always seemed to be able to read her mind.

  “She’s only forty-seven. It’s not time for her to sit in a rocking chair at the rest home yet,” Louise said.

  “Age isn’t a number. It’s a state of mind.” It was always obnoxious how Renee could come up with these kind of fortune cookie sayings sometimes while other times she would talk like a perfectly normal seventeen-year-old.

  “You think she’s getting senile?” There was a history of Alzheimer’s in the family with Louise’s great-aunt Gladys, but Mom had already undergone tests that showed no genetic indicators for the disease.

  “Not senile so much as tired. I mean, for the first twenty years of her life she pushed herself to get her doctorate and work at the museum and then to become the director. She’s always had a lot on her plate.”

  “You forgot she had to raise a little hellion.”

  “That’s a given.”

  They smiled at each other, but behind those smiles was a kernel of truth. Louise hadn’t made things easy on her mother. Besides the usual childish indiscretions, Louise had pushed herself through school even faster than her mother had. The big difference was she didn’t have Mom’s infinite patience and empathy when it came to bullies. She’d received The Glare more than a dozen times before she was ten when she had figuratively—and sometimes literally—handed an older boy his lunch. Then of course was the incident when she was thirteen and got busted at a sorority party at Berkeley. Mom had come the closest to losing her cool Louise had ever heard. “What you did was against the law. Don’t you understand that?” Mom had said.

  Though some of the problem was Mom’s own fault, or so Louise had often thought during her college years. If Mom had gotten married—or even found a steady boyfriend—she could have had someone to take some of the pressure off. Instead she had never so much as gone on a date that Louise could remember. Some of this was probably Mom’s shyness in social situations and her busy schedule, but mostly Louise thought her mother didn’t have any interest in dating.

  It always begged the question of how Mom had gotten pregnant. Even before she understood how reproduction worked, Louise had pestered her mother about where Daddy was—and who Daddy was. After she came home in tears when she was six because she didn’t have anyone for the Daddy-Daughter Dance, Louise wailed, “Where is he? Doesn’t he love me?”

  Mom had patted her back and said, “Daddy loves you very much.”

  Louise had picked up on Mom’s use of present tense. “Then why can’t I see him?”

  “That’s up to him to decide.”

  She had ultimately gone to the dance with Dan Dreyfus, who had been like her real father. Sometimes she liked to imagine he was her father; when he wouldn’t notice she would sneak a peek and try to see something in his nose or jaw or ears that she shared. About all she could pick up on was they both had curly hair, which was hardly enough to establish paternity. She’d considered trying to get a sample of DNA, but she already knew what her mother would say if she conducted an unauthorized DNA test.

  “Don’t worry about her,” Renee said, to break into Louise’s thoughts. “Your mom is the toughest lady I know.”

  “Tougher than Mrs. Winslow?” Louise asked. Mrs. Winslow was Renee’s lacrosse coach, who made them run wind sprints for two hours if they lost a game.

  “Are you kidding? Your mom could kick Mrs. Winslow’s ass.”

  “I’d like to see that,” Louise said. She smiled at the thought of Mom kicking anyone’s ass. More likely she would give Mrs. Winslow The Glare until the old coach backed down.

  The car pulled into the garage and Louise turned to gently shake her mother’s knee. “We’re home, Mom.”

  “Already?”

  “You’ve been asleep for like ten minutes.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.” Renee got out of the car and offered Mom a hand so she could get out. The brief wince was enough to make Louise worry again. Her mother had been undergoing arthritis treatments for a year now, but they didn’t seem to help. Before long they’d have to think about robotic enhancements, but Louise already knew her mother didn’t approve of those for some reason.

  “Are you going to be all right?” Louise asked. “I was going to drive Renee home and see how Aggie’s doing.”

  “Go ahead, baby. I’m just going to go up to bed and get some rest.”

  Louise gave her mother a brief hug and then watched as she limped inside the house like an elderly woman. Maybe Renee was right and age was more than a number.

  ***

  Emma didn’t have any intention to lie to Louise. The catnap in the car had been enough to convince her another eight hours of sleep were just what she needed. Before she could get as far as the dining room, though, the phone on her wrist lit up. A holographic message popped up that said, “Need 2CU. Loc#3
.” The message didn’t identify a sender, but Emma could guess it was from Captain Donovan—or whatever rank Donovan held after twenty years. By now she was probably the commissioner, or maybe something even higher than that.

  After she made sure the car was gone with Louise and Renee in it, Emma summoned the armor in the dining room. Inside the red crate, she saw the Book of Isis. She briefly set it on the table while she removed the armor. Once she’d taken the armor out, she set the book inside and then closed the lid.

  To don the armor took three times longer than it did back in her time. Her stiff joints had trouble with the various fasteners to hold the armor in place. The breastplate actually slipped from her hands to clang on the floor. This summoned Marlin into the dining room so he could smugly say, “You ought to get a squire to help you with that.”

  “I don’t have a sidekick,” she said. She managed to get the breastplate fastened on the second try and then drop the helmet over her head. Once she did, the stiffness in her joints faded away so she felt twenty-seven again. She lifted the visor to ask, “Where’s Location Three?”

  “Are you going daft?”

  “Just humor me.”

  “Under the Gertzman Bridge of course.”

  “Great. Thanks.”

  She started for the front door, but Marlin cleared his throat. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  “What?”

  “Your bike.” She stared blankly at him. “In the garage?”

  “Oh, sure.” She went into the garage and expected to find something like her motorcycle, but saw what could best be described as an even more streamlined Segway or a pogo stick with wheels. “You mean that?”

  “You’re the one who bought it.”

  She stepped onto stirrups above the wheels and searched for the ignition. Since most everything else had utilized a thumbprint scan, she took off her right glove and touched it to a silver spot on the side. Immediately an engine whined to life.

  The throttle controls weren’t much different than her motorcycle. The engine, despite being a fraction of the size, was far more powerful. While it didn’t have the same throaty roar to scare motorists or pedestrians in her way, it did move far more quickly. Several times she barely had time to flick the steering column to the right or left in time to avoid some poor person on the sidewalk.