“Vinnie’s told me about you guys,” Gears said. “You play Magic: The Gathering?”
“Yes,” Jeal said.
“You’ve got time, Gears,” I said, smiling. “Take her to your shop and break out the cards. But I’ll warn you, she can make some pretty mean red decks.”
“I’ll bet,” Gears replied, flashing a wicked grin. “But wait till you see the artifact deck I’ve built.”
He led my Prime Liberator away, and I turned to Petra. “Has Psyke started yet?”
Petra nodded. “She and Mrs. Rita are in there now. Cynthia and Jake are, too.”
“Does Psyke know Mrs. Rita, too?” I asked, thinking of how Panacea and Mrs. Rita were somehow acquainted.
“Seems so,” Petra said, taking my hand. “Come on.”
We went into the newly outfitted Medical bay and found Cynthia sitting on a chair. The Electrical Woman was almost regal in how she carried herself, her luminescent blue eyes shining. Despite the fact that she was barefoot and dressed in a Patriots hoodie and sweatpants, she looked as if she might be holding court. I marveled at the change in her. When I’d met her, she’d been toddler-sized, and her innards had been exposed in places. I’d been able to literally watch the gears in her head turn as she considered things. But when she’d absorbed the Rosario, a magical weapon made of celestial metal, she’d absorbed more than enough celestial metal to give her a complete adult-sized body. Now her skin was whole, and the once audible whirring of her joints and mental facilities was completely silent. Of course, since absorbing the Rosario, she’d also absorbed the malevolent force that had resided within it. That force, whose only desire was to kill paranormal creatures, had taken control of her a few times, which was why her wrists and ankles were bound with the strongest cuffs we had.
Standing behind her and to one side was Jake, a reassuring hand on her shoulder. Jake gave me a nod, but I could tell from his eyes that he was nervous. Cynthia had been something akin to a child in his care for going on two centuries, so for her to grow to adulthood literally in the span of a few minutes, and to also suddenly be hosting not one, but two other personalities, was wearing on him almost as much as it was her.
To the right, Herb Wallenby lay in a bed, the monitors registering his vitals as steady and strong. The pudgy necromancer’s brown hair was pushed back from his face, and he didn’t look like he was sleeping so much as he looked like an empty shell on a bed. Which made sense, given that Herb’s soul had been bound to the Rosario, and Cynthia had absorbed that, too. In short, it was a mess. And it was my fault. I was hoping that Psyke would be able to untangle the three of them; not to mention having Cynthia, Jake, and Herb along for the fight would be a tremendous advantage. Psyke placed her hand on Cynthia’s head and closed her eyes. A faint purple haze shimmered around Cynthia, and the Electrical Woman’s eyes flared blue, red, brown and then blue again.
“Can you sense all three of them?” Mrs. Rita asked.
“Yes,” Psyke replied without opening her eyes. “This will be delicate, one moment.” She gestured with her other hand, a sort of twirling motion, and a streak of silver light unwound from Cynthia and coiled into Herb.
The monitors attached to Herb beeped and warbled, and the necromancer took a huge gulp of air as he sat bolt upright. He looked around in confusion, breathing fast through his mouth. “Where’s Megan?” he demanded in a dry, raspy voice.
“Easy, Herb,” I said, moving over to him and pressing a cup of water into his hand. “You’ve had a rough couple of weeks. I’ll explain everything in a minute.” Mrs. Rita draped a blanket over Herb’s shoulders and began checking him out.
“Where is she?” Herb asked again. His voice sounded better now that he’d had some water.
“Sit back, Herbert. Vincent will answer your questions in a moment.” Mrs. Rita said, popping an old-fashioned mercury thermometer into Herb’s mouth. The only reason Mrs. Rita used those was to keep us quiet while she worked. She began checking Herb’s vitals as I walked back to Psyke.
“That was the easy part,” Psyke said. “There were three souls inside her, but only one was human. The other two are… artificial. Separating them will be more challenging, and will likely take me the rest of the day, if not longer. And no, Vincent Corinthos, this process cannot be sped up without risking killing them both, so do not ask me to.”
“Thank you, Psyke,” I said instead.
“You can thank me when this is done,” she replied. “Besides, I know this’ll piss off that bitch to no end.” That bitch, of course, being Aphrodite. Given how Aphrodite felt about me, any activity that helped me would irritate her. That seemed to please Psyke quite a bit. For a goddess of love, Aphrodite wasn’t well-liked. I wanted to ask more, to take more time, but there wasn’t any. While this hadn’t taken long, and was necessary, my time to recapture Croatoan was ticking by. I glanced over at Mrs. Rita, who had just taken the thermometer out of Herb’s mouth.
“He will be weak for a time,” she said to me. “But I believe he will make a full recovery.” She took my ruined arm in her hands. “What happened to you, Vincent?”
I didn’t want to keep retelling this story. “Got mugged for my watch,” I said with a shrug.
“Are you in pain?”
“No. I mean, it’s tingling like crazy, but I’m pretty sure that means it’s growing back.”
Mrs. Rita nodded. “Limb regeneration is often a slow and painful process. If you need anything, let me know.”
“Where’s Doc, by the way? I expected he’d be here.”
“Over the years, Joseph has accrued over three hundred hours of unused vacation time. When he met Panacea, he decided to take some of that time.”
“Seriously?” I asked. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for Doc, but the timing…”
Mrs. Rita’s gaze was firm, but not angry. “Vincent. Joseph has spent nearly his entire life healing Caulborn agents. He never found love in all his years. He never had time for it. You gave him some of that time back. He will not waste that chance.”
“I never thought of it like that,” I said.
“Do not worry,” Mrs. Rita said, her wrinkled face brightening with a smile. “I am quite youthful, and energetic enough to cover the office by myself for a few days.”
I returned the smile, then walked over to Herb, who was struggling to get out of bed. He’d been comatose for a few weeks, and while his muscles hadn’t exactly atrophied, they were rubbery from lack of use. He held on to my shoulder as he swung his legs over the edge of the bed, his bare feet dangling above the floor.
“Did we save Megan?” he asked as he adjusted his hospital gown.
“We did save her, Herb. You did great.”
“Then where is she?”
I rubbed my face. I had no idea how to talk about this to Herb. “Come on,” I said, hoping to buy myself some time to think, to find the right way to explain to Herb what had happened. “Let’s get you some pants, and then I’ll tell you what’s going on.”
Mrs. Rita planted her fists on her hips. “Vincent, Herbert has been through a terrible ordeal. I will need to examine him and ensure he is fit to be up and about. Herbert, wait for me in that room there.” She pointed to one of the exam rooms just a bit down the hall. Herb headed there, and Mrs. Rita raised an eyebrow at me.
I put up my hands. There are some people you don’t backtalk to, and Mrs. Rita is one of them. “I need him, Mrs. Rita. Please.”
Her wrinkled features softened. “I know. I will give him some magically infused food to restore his health and vitality. Then he will be able to help you. Go wait in the conference room. I will bring him to you when he is ready.”
It took about half an hour, but finally the group was back in the same conference room where my life had completely gone down the tubes. There were no bloodstain
s on the furniture or floor, no burn marks on the walls from Croa-Treggen’s lasers, no holes in the ground to indicate where the chains had claimed me. Had Croa-Treggen somehow scrubbed the place? I didn’t know the full extent of the celestial phylactery’s powers, so I supposed it was possible. I rubbed the back of my neck. Now was not the time to consider if Treggen had some sort of magical cleaning powers; I had bigger problems to deal with. I looked at my companions seated around the table: Gears, Jeal, Petra, and Herb. I’d been hoping that Jake and Cynthia would be here, too, but Cynthia’s soul still needed sorting out, and Jake’s presence would be soothing to her.
“All right, everyone, here’s the situation. I was thrown into Tartarus on a technicality. I don’t have time to get into all the details right now, but the upshot is Hades has offered me a deal. If I can capture a demon that escaped from the Pit within” — I glanced at the clock on the wall — “a little under twenty-four hours, I’m free to go. If I fail, I’m stuck in Tartarus for eternity. This isn’t any of your fight. I honestly have no right to ask you to help me. But I would greatly appreciate it if you would. Jeal, your cunning will be invaluable. Petra, I’ve never seen you lose a fight. Gears, well… you’re just plain awesome. And Herb, I’m up against a demon with some insane necromantic powers, the kind that only someone like you could counter. If we do this, I can’t promise we’ll make it back. So I’m asking you if you’ll help me.”
“Why are we wasting time, Vinnie?” Gears asked. “Let’s just suit up.”
“I agree with Gearstripper,” Jeal said.
“You know I’m with you,” Petra said, giving my hand a squeeze.
I looked at Herb, who rubbed his face. “I followed you into some screwball pocket dimension to get Megan back. I wake up and am told we succeeded, but I’ve been in a coma for a few weeks, and in that time, something’s happened to Megan again.”
“Herb—”
“Shut up, Vincent,” Herb snapped, stabbing a finger at me. “You don’t get to talk right now. I listened to you a lot. ‘We’ll save Megan,’ you said. ‘We’ll just break into this building,’ you said. ‘We’ll just fight past this giant monster that can compel the dead,’ you said. And it nearly killed me. You don’t get to be glib or gloss over stuff right now. Before I do anything else, I want to know what happened to Megan.”
I could’ve pushed back. I could’ve argued we didn’t have time for this, and we didn’t. I could’ve just cut Herb loose, let him go looking for Megan, but in truth, I really wanted him along. I knew what Croatoan could do, and I knew that Herb had the skill to counter that, and Croatoan wouldn’t expect me to have a necromancer along. And, if I was being honest with myself, I owed Herb an explanation. Actually, I owed him a lot more than just that. This man had followed me into an extraordinarily dangerous situation, and I’d let him down. I wanted to make that up to him, but I didn’t have any good news for him right now. So all I could do was tell Herb the truth.
“She’s gone, Herb. A man named Treggen killed her,” I said. Herb took in a sharp breath. “I had promised to keep Megan fine, and Treggen knew about it. He knew the ramifications of me not keeping that promise. So when he hit Megan with that death ray, or whatever it was, it sent me to Tartarus.”
Herb’s face was stony. “What did the death ray do?”
I bit back my irritation. Hadn’t I said death ray? Instead, I asked, “What do you mean?”
“Like, did it disintegrate her? Blow her head off? Dissolve her into a puddle?”
“It blew a hole in her chest,” I said.
“You idiot,” Herb said, his voice weary. “She’s not dead. Well, not exactly.”
“Um, Herb, I—”
“Vincent, Megan was strigoi viu. That means when she dies she comes back.”
My mouth opened and closed. Pieces started to click in my mind. Megan had died. I’d been so focused on that fact that it hadn’t occurred to me that she’d rise again. It wouldn’t matter from Orcus’s perspective, because once she was dead, she wasn’t “fine” anymore, no matter what happened after that. But to Herb, and to Treggen…
“Treggen would’ve known all about Megan’s innate undead-ness,” I said. “He would’ve known that she’d rise again. And Hades said that Croatoan’s shell likely absorbed some of Croatoan’s powers, so Treggen would gain command over the undead. So he brings Xavier back as a wight and just compels Megan, who’s become a strigoi mort.”
“The amount of power he’d need to compel a strigoi mort would be insane,” Herb said, half to himself. Then to me, he said, “It doesn’t matter. We will get her back” The steel in his voice was unmistakable, and not for the first time, I found I really liked Herb Wallenby.
“But we have to capture this demon first,” Petra said. “Otherwise, Vincent won’t be able to help Megan.”
“So what do you say, Herb?” I asked.
“I will help you, but only so you can help Megan. And if you get killed, I will raise your sorry behind and put your ghost to work on this. You will not rest until we’ve gotten Megan back. Is that clear?”
“Crystal,” I said.
“So what’s the plan?” Herb asked.
I began typing on the keyboard. “Okay, first and foremost, our target is a demonic spirit named Croatoan. We think he’s currently inhabiting a temporary phylactery of sorts. Hades told me Croatoan’s first likely goal is to find himself a more suitable host body.”
“Croatoan had access to a lot of Caulborn data,” Gears said. “Are there other, more powerful phylacteries that he might go for?”
“I don’t think so. From what I’ve learned, Croatoan won’t want to be in a jar or other inanimate object. He wants a legit body again. And not just any body will do. He’ll want a demon body.”
“And is one of those lying around somewhere?” Gears asked.
“Oh yes,” I replied, pulling up a map. “There’s one right here.”
“Dana,” Petra said, pursing her lips as she read the monitor. “The Quabbin Reservoir.”
“Right,” I said. “Back in the 1930s, there were four towns in Western Massachusetts that were flooded to create a new water supply for Boston. Dana was one of them. Around the same time, Caulborn agents defeated a demoness named Belzatha, who had been terrorizing the area. Belzatha had command over Earth elementals, and was using them to cause earthquakes and crush people. The agents were able to kill her, but I’ve learned that some demons’ bodies don’t decompose after death. So to prevent it from being possessed again by another entity, the Caulborn sank her remains in the Quabbin reservoir in a magically warded casket.
“I’ve got fifty bucks that says that’s where Croatoan’s headed. If he can pull her body to the surface, he’ll be able to possess it, and then, he’ll have not only his undeath powers, but a measure of her powers, too. Croatoan would know about this place from the Caulborn archives, and Belzatha would be the closest demonic vessel in the area. The next closest one is down in New Jersey, and I don’t think he’ll be up for a road trip.”
“How do we know he hasn’t already retrieved it?” Herb asked. “You said he’d been free for a few days.”
“Aside from the fact that the Commonwealth isn’t being overrun by zombies and rogue elementals? Croatoan would’ve needed some time to gather his energies after being released from his ball. He’d also be traveling to the reservoir on foot, assuming he was able to raise an undead to carry him. And then, he’ll have to get through the wards and security that the Caulborn left behind. From what I’ve read in the case files, they put some serious magical shielding around Belzatha’s casket. We go to Dana, stop Croatoan, absorb his spirit into this” — I held up the soul crystal — “and then I can get out of the Pit, and we” — I looked at Herb — “can go get Megan back.”
The pudgy necromancer rubbed his chin as he considered what
I’d said. “All right,” he said after a moment. “But how will we get down to the casket? Do you guys have a submarine or scuba gear or something?” Herb said.
“Shipments of new equipment have been arriving since we took over Woof’s. We have plenty of scuba gear,” Gears chirped. “Well, enough for you and Vinnie, anyway. The suits are heated, too, so you won’t freeze to death in the cold water. Billy’s waterproof, so I’m good.”
“Me, too,” Petra said. “I swim like a rock, though.” She gave me a grin.
“I’ve got a suit that should fit you, Petra,” Gears said. “And on the plus side, you don’t need to breathe underwater.”
“She doesn’t need to breathe—” Herb started.
“Gearstripper,” I said, looking to Jeal. “Do we have any scuba gear small enough for a kobold?”
“That will not be necessary, Lord Corinthos,” Jeal replied. “I can breathe underwater while in dragon form.”
“No kidding? Huh. Learn something new every day,” I said. “All right. Gears, let’s get everything together.”
“You bet, Vinnie,” the gremlin replied. “I’ll gather up the equipment and power up Billy. C’mon.”
Herb caught me by the arm. “Hold on,” he said. The others followed Gearstripper out of the room, leaving Herb and me in the conference room. “I remember… something. Darkness. But I think I spoke with Megan. You were there, too.”
Oh man, this was too convoluted a story to try and sum up in a few sentences. “When we fought the Keepers, you were impaled by an undead killing weapon called the Rosario. It absorbed your soul. The metal woman you saw in the other room is made of the same alloy as the Rosario, and she absorbed the Rosario into her own body, and by doing so, absorbed you. When that happened, your soul woke up, just for a second, and you spoke through her. That’s what you’re remembering.”
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