“You two are conspiring against me,” he said.
“I’m just asking you to expand your horizons,” Emily said.
“You know what? Maybe you should build Neal’s body.”
“I don’t know how,” Emily said.
“Well you sure act like you do!”
“Man, you are such an infant,” Emily said.
“You’re deliberately making me question my sanity,” Henry said. He looked over at Jane. “She’s doing this on purpose.”
“She does this to everyone, Henry, you should know this by now,” Jane said. The conversation was interrupted by a chirping noise through the ship’s comm system. Emily scooted over to the nearest console and booted it up. The screen flickered but didn’t turn on.
“Hello?” the familiar voice of Titus said.
“Hey, fuzzball!” Emily said. “Miss you, Chewie.”
“Miss you too, you lunatic,” Titus said.
“You’re the werewolf. I think you own the term lunatic. I’m more of a generalized insanity,” Emily said.
“Won’t argue that,” Titus said. “Is Jane with you?”
“Sure is,” Emily said. “Want me put her on?”
“I don’t know how much you guys have working there,” Titus said. “Can you kick me to a private line?”
“Oh, keeping secrets,” Emily said. She yelled over to Jane. “Hey sunbeam, the room to your left has a functioning communications system. I’ll send the call in there.”
Jane shook her head in disbelief at how weird it was to see Emily embracing her mad genius, but complied anyway. She entered the adjoining room and closed the door behind her. A screen on the wall lit up when she entered. Titus’s face appeared, grainy and faded.
“Hey, boss,” Titus said.
“Hey yourself,” Jane said. She tried not to wince at the sight of him. She hadn’t seen him in a while, and had forgotten how much damage he’d taken during the Nemesis attack. The healing scars on his face hurt her heart. “The buzz cut suits you.”
Titus scratched the silvery stubble on his head and laughed.
“Yeah, I can’t wait to grow it back,” he said. “But it’s still not growing in quite right, y’know? So for now I’ve got a whiffle.”
“Could be worse. You could have a lumpy head.”
“Small miracles,” Titus said. “Hey, you know where Doc is?”
“He’s running down a lead on something,” Jane said. “He didn’t mention much about it. Why?”
Titus sighed.
“Kate and I were working a missing persons case here in the City, and we came across something… we think there’s some magic involved.”
Jane grimaced.
“Great,” she said.
“Yeah. Yeah, it’s not good,” Titus said. “I won’t go into the gory details right now, but this was pretty bad, what we ran into.”
“I’ll try to find him for you,” Jane said.
“Thanks.”
“Hey,” Jane said. “How’s Kate?”
The Dancer, more than anyone else on the team, had withdrawn after the Nemesis attack. She’d never been much of a talker, but Jane worried that the things she’d seen and done were weighing on her, and being Kate, she wouldn’t ask for help if she needed it. At least Titus is back in the City, Jane thought. If nothing else, she’s not completely alone.
“She’s Kate,” Titus said, smiling sheepishly.
“She can hear you, can’t she,” Jane said.
“She’s not here, but I never assume she’s not listening somehow,” Titus said. “Always best that way.”
“I do the same thing,” Jane said. “Be careful, Titus. I’ll get Doc on the line as soon as I find him.”
“Thanks,” Titus said. “Hey Jane?”
“Yeah?”
“I should let you know I’m… I’m learning a bit about magic.”
“I assume you don’t mean pulling a rabbit out of a hat or how to sneeze a handkerchief out of your nose,” Jane said.
“If only,” Titus said. “By the way—the rabbit thing, that’s a teleportation spell. That’s way harder than it looks.”
“Can I ask why you’re learning magic?” Jane said.
“One of us has to,” Titus said. “Might as well be me.”
Jane studied the battered face on the other side of the camera. They all carried burdens, every one of them. But sometimes she thought Titus was determined to carry even more of the weight of the world on his shoulders than even she did herself. More than all the Indestructibles, she knew that she and Titus were similar in ways the others didn’t understand.
“Well,” Jane said. “Be careful.”
“Always am,” Titus said.
“Don’t let Kate throw you out of any windows,” Jane said.
“Can’t promise that,” Titus said. “Talk soon.”
“Yeah,” Jane said, terminating the call.
She stepped out into the hallway just in time to hear the very clear sounds of Sam Barren complaining loudly just out of sight.
“Every time you teleport me around like this it is a violation of my rights!” Sam said.
“How else were we going to get here this fast?” Doc said. “And when did you become such a complainer?”
“I’ve always been a complainer,” Sam said. “You just have those stupid rose-tinted glasses on all the time. It messes with your perspective.”
Doc. Great, Jane thought. She trotted down the hall to find the pair bickering in the same room where she’d left Henry and Emily.
“Hey Jane!” Emily said, wearing a devilish grin. “Look what the cat dragged in!”
“Next time we take a helicopter,” Sam said.
“A helicopter is a thousand times more dangerous than teleportation,” Doc said. He saw Jane enter the room and smiled. “Hey, Jane.”
“Doc, just the man I was looking for,” she said. She noticed he had a set of files tucked under one arm in a manila folder.
“And you are just the woman I’m looking for,” Doc said. He found a clear space on a countertop and started flipping through the files.
“Those are my files,” Sam said. “You just teleported into my office and took my files.”
Henry’s interest had perked up as well now, stepping away from the Coldwall suit to look at what Doc had brought.
“Those are my files,” Henry said. “You gave those to me.”
“These are my files,” Doc said. “Which I gave to you before we went into the alternate timeline with Anachronism Annie.”
“Oh, no,” Henry said. “Those are the files.”
“With all this buildup, if those aren’t the actual X-Files and Mulder and Scully don’t teleport into this room in the next three minutes I am going to be profoundly disappointed,” Emily said.
Doc sorted through the dense papers, setting aside small bundles. Jane picked two up that he’d placed side by side and gave them a quick scan.
“Atlantis is real?” Jane asked. “There’s some Atlantean princess out there running around? And… wait, Amazons are real too?”
“Amazons are real?” Emily said, all but leaping across the room to steal the file from Jane’s hands. “This is a boy. This file is about a boy. Why is a boy an Amazon? He’s a very good-looking boy but he’s… I think a boy Amazon is an oxymoron.”
“Put that down,” Doc said, still rummaging through the paperwork. “And yes to all of your questions.”
“Why do we not have an Amazon or an Atlantean princess on our team?” Emily said. “Not that I don’t like our team. But I’m just saying. One can always become more badass.”
“They turned me down,” Doc said absent-mindedly. “You should meet them someday though. Echo and Artem are heroes in their own rights. You’d like them.”
“Which one is Echo and which one is Artem?” Emily said.
“Clearly they’re not the ones you’re worried about right now,” Jane said, sensing an edge of worry in Doc’s voice she didn’t like.<
br />
“No,” Doc said. He pulled the file he’d been looking for out of the folder and handed it to Jane. “This is the one I’m worried about.”
The file read: Alice Lapine – the Crimson Child. It gave a date of birth that made her maybe twelve years old. The file listed a location in New Orleans, and in Doc’s strangely arcane handwriting, the term: magical adept.
“What’s an adept?” Jane said.
Doc exhaled heavily.
“Most magicians, like me, acquire our abilities through practice,” Doc said. “You have to want to be a magician. Magic is hard. It’s dangerous. And you don’t just drop out of magician school—as a general rule if you can’t cut it, magic kills you. It tends to weed out the weak. But some people are born with magic inherent in their blood. Sometimes it’s just a sensitivity to it; sometimes it’s an aptitude. Sometimes they’re just natural spellcasters. Usually it means there was some tinkering in the family history—a demon or warlock in the family tree or whatever.”
“Like when one of your parents is a really good athlete,” Emily offered.
“Close enough,” Doc said. “The magic world calls them adepts.
“So, this kid is an adept?” Jane asked.
“I think so,” Doc said. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “You know before we formed the Indestructibles I had been monitoring a number of young people with special abilities.”
“There were others?” Emily said.
“There were always others,” Doc said. “Partially I looked out for them to build a roster for the team. But also because untrained children with superpowers are walking weapons and it’s good to know where those weapons are.”
“She was on your list,” Jane said.
“Right,” Doc said. “And I left her alone, because she was far too young to recruit, and also because her powers hadn’t manifested themselves yet.”
“I was pretty young when you recruited me,” Emily said. “What’s the difference?”
“The difference is you started throwing cars full of people around by accident,” Doc said. “Your powers kicked in and we went and got you before you killed someone.”
“Which you did right in the nick of time,” Emily said. “I sometimes see the look on that police officer’s face in my dreams when I accidentally bubble-of-floated his cruiser into the air…”
Jane waited for Emily to trail off before chiming in again.
“So, her powers have manifested now,” Jane said.
“I don’t know. That’s my theory,” Doc said. “Because her family moved to California and now their entire town has disappeared.”
“Her… entire town disappeared,” Jane said.
“It’s more complicated than that, but, yeah,” Doc said. “And it’s my fault. I lost track of her.”
“We’ve been a little busy,” Jane said. “You can’t be expected to monitor every strange thing in the world. I mean, we’ve saved the planet a few times lately. That’s a valid excuse.”
Doc shook his head.
“This is the equivalent of losing a magical nuclear bomb,” Doc said. “It’s my fault. I’m going to find her and help her.”
“We’ll help,” Jane said. “We’ll suit up.”
Doc put a hand on Jane’s shoulder.
“Can’t punch our way out of this one, Jane,” Doc said. “But I’ll explain what I’m doing and we’ll get through this. I promise.”
Emily raised her hand. Henry and Sam sighed simultaneously.
“Go ahead, Emily,” Doc said.
“The file says she’s called the Crimson Child,” she said. “Why?”
Doc bit his lip.
“You know on a meteorological map how different colors show the different intensity of a weather pattern? Green is mild, yellow worse?”
“Oh no,” Jane said.
“Yeah,” Doc said. “Her code name is the Crimson Child because if magic is weather, she’s the hot spot; at the center of a hurricane.”
Chapter 13: The Lady and the King
The Lady Natasha Grey had taken up residence in a penthouse apartment in Las Vegas, because the world is strange and full of wonder, and after a year on the coast of Spain she wanted to experience something a little more bizarre. She had views of casinos like castles and historical monuments, and enjoyed watching the sun sweep over this desert city each day. She wandered the streets at night to watch humanity at play, engrossed by the gamblers and the players, the interweaving of vice and desire and desperation and exhilaration around every corner. Nothing felt real here, and that amused her. In some ways, Las Vegas was the most magical town in this reality, because nothing felt truly real here to her.
I won’t stay long, she thought, swimming in a pool on the top of the hotel. I’ll return to the Old World soon. Europe is a better fit for me. But this place feels like the circus, and deserts, all deserts, are inherently awash in magic. Deserts are where demons are born and dragons sleep and phoenixes fall and die. Magic loves extremes and abhors the ordinary.
She climbed from the pool, ignoring the long glances of another patron, a movie star with too much time on his hands and not enough tact to look away. It’s been a while since I ruined a mortal’s life for fun, she thought. It might be entertaining to make a bargain with him and watch him fall.
But she decided against it. Too much time around Doc Silence, she knew. His inherent kindness was rubbing off on her. She found it irritating and terribly boring.
She returned to her room, a vast expanse of overpriced luxury she paid for with currency laundered through dark dealings with monsters both mortal and not. She showered off the pool chemicals and dressed in clothes too expensive to be casual, and looked out over the city as the sun began its descent in the West, bathing the world in red light.
A knock came at her door. It gave her pause. She’d cast spells and set wards here to make sure no one knew she was here. The hotel staff all but forgot the room existed while she stayed there. Anonymous and invisible until she wanted to be. That was how Natasha moved through this world.
Still, someone knocked. She answered.
She hadn’t seen the man in the hallway in longer than she could remember. Tall and striking, he wore a dark suit without shirt or shoes, his body, where visible, marked with magical sigils and symbols. He gave off a sense of both infinite vitality and something deathlike, the way certain magical beings do. And he smiled at her like an old friend.
Which, Natasha thought, might once have been true.
“The King of Tears,” Natasha said.
“The Lady of the Grey,” the man said. “May I come in?”
Natasha gestured for him enter, and he strode in confidently, but strangely respectfully, as if acknowledging he had entered her sanctuary. Magicians have a funny way of doing this, she knew. We don’t like our spaces entered, but we also don’t like entering each others’ spaces. They fill up with the strange energies unique to each spell weaver, and those patterns and wards create a disconcerting hum to those sensitive enough to pick up on it.
“This doesn’t seem like your kind of town,” King Tears said. He found the minibar and poured himself a drink without asking, but was polite enough to ask if she wanted to join him. Shrugging, she said yes. Might as well, she thought.
“I’m retired,” Natasha said. “Consider it a vacation.”
“People like us never retire, Lady Grey,” King Tears said. “You’ll take a few years off, and then you’ll grow bored and start meddling in the affairs of mortals again. We always do.”
“You’ve been quiet of late,” she said. “I thought you’d retired yourself.”
“As I say. Took a few years off,” King Tears said. “Though I started doing some consulting for some mutual friends of ours.”
“Oh really,” Natasha said, accepting a glass of golden bourbon from him.
“Really,” he said. “And they’ve gone and put themselves in a bad spot. So I’ve decided that perhaps I could step in and…”
&n
bsp; “Rebuild?”
“Take advantage of an existing infrastructure that is going to waste,” King Tears said. “You know I hate to see something die that can be resurrected and put to good use.”
“That always was your favorite game,” Natasha said. “What brings you to my door?”
“I’m looking for something,” he said. “And I think you know how to find it.”
Natasha felt a gnawing at the pit of her stomach. She’d never trusted King Tears, but then again, most magicians don’t trust each other by nature, and for good reason. But she watched his body language, the way he looked around the room, and knew, instantly, that this was not a friendly visit.
“And what exactly are you looking for?” Natasha said. “I’ve been retired for a little while now, but I did have my hands in the magical artifacts business for a while. Buying and selling.”
“Queen of the bargains, you were,” King Tears said. “Don’t be so modest. No one made better deals with devils and men than you did.”
“A good dealer keeps a low profile,” Natasha said. “So, tell me about this thing you’re looking for.”
“It’s not a thing,” King Tears said. “It’s a who.”
The Lady Natasha Grey did not become a renown bargainer of the arcane by not having a good poker face, and her expression held. But her pulse spiked, just a little.
“I didn’t really deal in people,” Natasha said. “I did quite a bit of work with soul stocks, but those aren’t really ‘who.’ And you know who most of those get traded between. Not usually your style.”
King Tears smiled. He looked like a happy skull.
“Lady Grey, I know you helped something through the veil,” King Tears said, and though his tone was jovial, his tone was not. “I want it, and I intend to have it.”
“That sounds vaguely threatening, Tears.”
The magician threw up his hands dismissively.
“There’s no need for threats, Lady Grey. I know the way to make you agreeable isn’t to scare you. It’s to offer you a deal you can’t refuse.”
“You’re asking me to betray a client,” Natasha said.
“You can’t tell me you’ve never done that before.”
“Oh, of course,” Natasha said. “But that just means the price goes up.”
The Indestructibles (Book 5): The Crimson Child Page 7