A woman stood over Westly. She was ten feet tall from Justine’s viewpoint, with black leather pants and a short-waisted leather jacket topped by wild dark hair. Westly, on hands and knees, was picking up the pipe. He lunged at the woman. Too quick for Justine’s freaked out mind to comprehend, the woman snatched the pipe from Westly and smacked his head. Stunned, he offered no resistance when she lifted him up and dropped him on top of a dumpster.
Near death experience forgotten, Justine marveled at the woman’s strength and speed, where she herself had been so inadequate. What happened next convinced her she was experiencing a dark dream before she woke up in Hell.
The woman held Westly’s right arm, wrist up, and raised it to her mouth. She bit down hard. Westly uttered a brief cry. He thrashed about for fifteen seconds, helpless against the woman’s steady grip. Blood ran across his palm. He lay quiet then. Justine heard a faint sucking sound as the woman’s jaws worked at his wrist.
At last the woman released him. Head tilted back to face the sky, she let out a long satisfied, “Ahhhhh.” Then she turned to Justine. She had a slight French accent, easily understandable.
“I do hope I saved the correct person. You were trying to kill him, ne c’est pas?”
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From ALL THE SHADOWS OF THE RAINBOW by Inanna Arthen:
She swallowed hard and started toward the huge weathered rock, so riveted on the dark shape, she stumbled several times. She realized she should make noise deliberately and began scuffing her feet hard on the ground with each step. When she was about twenty feet away, the figure sat up, although she was sure he’d heard her long before. His back was toward her.
“Brigid? What is it?” She stopped again, and the man pivoted smoothly around to look at her. He froze for a moment, and she saw him glance quickly back at the house. She faintly heard a woman’s voice calling something about a bed, and a reply, so the man on the boulder knew his housemates were safe. But she was suddenly humbled that his first thought upon seeing her was to check on his friends. Embarrassed, she waited for him to say something, but all he did was stare down at her, as motionless as though he was part of the boulder.
They stayed like that for a long time. Diana wished she could see his face more clearly, but without the glow of body heat, all she could discern above his dark beard was his eyes, locked onto hers. She started to shake; was this a staredown? Was he challenging her? Was he waiting for her to do something?
At last she could bear no more and flung her hands up helplessly. “I’m sorry to bother you.” She turned and started back toward the house.
“Wait! Just…wait, don’t go.” She turned back to see him step off the boulder into mid-air, drop ten feet and land as lightly as though he’d stepped off a curb.
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Diana cleared her throat. “It really is very important, and we’re working against a deadline. Can you make a compound for us? We’re willing to discuss any terms you ask.”
He simply looked at her in silence, his expression enigmatic. But when Diana started to speak again, he reached out and put a finger on her lips.
“I have one more thing to show you, come over here.” He walked toward the far wall of the cellar, beckoning. She followed, taken by surprise, to where a heavy wooden chest she had assumed was a tool box stood against the wall. He knelt down beside it, undid its complicated encoded latch and lifted the lid. Inside the chest, carefully nestled into a deep bed of gray fluff made from cattail rushes, was a heavy glass bottle filled to the brim with an iridescent liquid that appeared to glow with its own nacreous light.
“You made it already?” Her voice was hushed, partly from incredulity, partly from awe. She extended a hand over the bottle, feeling tiny prickles in her palm. The purity of the compound’s magical nature was as close to perfection, she thought, as a mortal could have achieved—certainly closer than she ever could have accomplished on her own, if she had taken a year in seclusion to make it.
“Ay, after your first letter came, that’s when I started it.” He stared raptly at the bottle as well—as anyone would have who glimpsed it. The soft shimmering colors played like light on water. “This is what you wanted, then?”
For a moment she couldn’t speak. “It’s…it’s perfect, Gregory. But—how did you know?”
“From what you said in your letter—and I see things now, Di. More than before, even, I can’t explain it. But this…” he stroked the surface of the glass with one finger, and the colors moved and changed where the shadow of his hand fell. “It’s the best I’ve made, or ever will. And it had to be, since it was you asking for it.”
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Detective Fellman nodded. “What did you think when you saw Miss Standish at the wake?”
“I just about fainted from shock. I didn’t know what to think.”
“Why didn’t you call her presence to the attention of the funeral home staff?”
“I was too stunned. I didn’t want to create a disruption at the wake. I took Veronica’s hand and led her outside, so I could ask her what was going on.”
“And did she tell you what was going on?”
“She was very uncommunicative.”
“Why didn’t you take her to the emergency room immediately to be checked out?”
“Veronica hated hospitals. She didn’t want to go.”
“So she was communicating well enough to indicate that.”
“She was communicating very clearly indeed by the time we parted. Very clearly.” Regan could feel herself grimacing at the memory, and tried to smooth her expression, but she could see that Detective Fellman had noticed. He was watching her so intently, he couldn’t miss the slightest change in her face.
“You said that she didn’t tell you anything about her plans, when she left you.”
“Nothing. She seemed very…purposeful. She seemed to have something in mind. She got out of my car and just went walking off. I tried to…to ask her some questions, but…” Regan had to blink, because the memory of Veronica spinning around and throwing her hand off was suddenly so clear, the room around her had momentarily vanished. She realized that she had raised her hand, the one Veronica flung off, from the table top and uncomfortably put it back down. She looked up and saw Detective Fellman leaning back, his expression calculating.
There was a pause, and then he said, “Did she hurt you, Ms. Calloway?”
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“Stand back!” I said, and the crowd gave me room to dismount. I approached the prostrate husband and commanded him to rise and speak.
“Justice, my lord Baron!” He wept, clinging to my doublet. “My wife has been slain!”
I steeled myself not to pull away from his rank breath. He had nearly twice my years, an advanced age for a peasant. Half his teeth were gone and the rest rotting. I doubted that his deceased wife had been any more attractive, but his grief was piteous to see.
“Where is your lady?” I hoped my voice didn’t betray my apprehension. I had no idea what I faced.
Jamie struggled to my side and soon had the crowd dispersed back to their usual tasks, save the new widower. My steward repeated my question.
“She is still in the field where she was found,” the Goodman finally said. “None thought it meet to move her until you had seen her, my lord.”
More likely, I thought, they had left the corpse to lie where found out of superstitious fear. “Show me,” I said. Jamie at my side, I followed the man to the field where the woman’s body lay. Her drab-clothed form lay like some weird fungal growth among the glistening wheat. An overturned basket, its contents ransacked by animals, lay nearby. After making my way along the already trampled path to her body, I knelt beside her. I had been expecting something gruesome, and was surprised at how peaceful she looked. Her eyes were closed and her arms were folded across her chest. My nose detected the usual unpleasant aftermath of death, but I saw no signs of violence.
“You said she was slain, Goodman. What caused you to call it thus? She appears to have gone peacefully to God.”
“Look at her neck, my lord,” the Goodman whispered, crossing himself.
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He was in a spacious office filled with bookshelves populated by legal texts and leather bound journals of city and county history. It was a very masculine and imposing room, full of earthy tones and right angles, a place of power and tradition.
It was not a suitable place for reflection and contemplation. It was a place infected by the trappings of Ego-as-defined-by-Power, where decisions were made and action was born. It was not a place where Justice was welcome.
Generally, he resented the hell out of such places.
“I apologize we couldn’t meet at UCCCF headquarters in the Federal Quadrangle,” Mitchell Haggard said, “but due to the lack of a non-aggression treaty or interspecies alliance agreement between the Olympians and the U.S. government, there’s no way you would be welcome there. National Security clearance issues and all that. The D.O.J. and Homeland don’t trust your kind. Neither does the FBI, but they, at least, have learned that you in particular are a reasonable security risk. And, too, there’s still a lot of bad blood about what happened to Ric Corrigan last year, even if he was criminally compromised…”
“Not a problem,” Quinn replied softly, ignoring the comment about Haggard’s deceased predecessor as the UCCCF’s Metropolitan Section Chief over the Violent Anomalous Cases Division. Corrigan, a high-ranking managerial operative within Anomalous Cases, commonly called The Freak Show, had been acting as a double-agent in the employ of the Apollyonu. “Your government has yet to understand that we Olympians are not a ‘nation’ or a ‘people’ in the traditionally defined sense.”
“Yeah, well, it might not hurt you guys to get together, unpleasant as you each may find it, and see if you can jointly define something to present to the United Nations or somebody so you can freely interface with the human world with less friction—not to mention less bloodshed,” Haggard suggested. From his manner, he clearly recognized there was little hope his words would have any effect.
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Carstairs looked sideways at the inhumanly calm, deep-voiced black man. He didn’t want to stare at Quinn head-on. He didn’t want to risk seeing what he’d seen only once before, on the occasion of their first meeting, when Quinn’s eyes had appeared to be nothing more than windows on a madly burning inferno, when there were no actual eyes in his sockets, just sizzling red light. He still had nightmares about that. Vampires he had learned to deal with.
Olympians still made his blood run cold. Quinn was an Olympian, commonly called a Haunt. They were immortal, truly immortal. They did not die. Vampires had greatly extended lifespans and lived impossibly long lives, but, eventually, they died. Olympians didn’t. Some of them had been around since the death of Christ. The very concept was mind-boggling: beings who haunted the annals of history, interfering with a treaty here, killing a king or a czar there, the persistent voice of unnatural reason in the ear of a madman, the power behind the throne, the kingmakers, the martyr-makers, the last face you see as the axe fell. Olympians were the keepers of the secrets. They knew what happened to ancient Mu, what sank Atlantis and where the lost continent slumbered, where the Holy Grail was kept, where Arthur Pendragon’s mighty sword Excalibur was buried, what “Croatoa” meant at the colony of Roanoke. They knew the identity of Jack the Ripper, what had happened to Amelia Earhart, what happened aboard the Mary Celeste, the secrets of the Yeti and Loch Ness, and what really happened at Roswell. They knew because they had been there. They knew and they guarded those secrets jealously. Luckily, there was some strange law of Natural Order, some boundary of Universal Balance, that insured there were only 1100 of them existing on the planet at any one time.
But even among Olympians, Quinn was a rarity. Apparently, Quinn was some kind of a mutation, a variant on the Olympian species. He frightened other Olympians. He could do things no vampire and no sorcerer or warlock could do. These dark talents did not make Quinn all-powerful or godlike, but instead made him seem less human than the blood-drinkers he hunted. The Moon-Chosen were terrified of him, those that didn’t hate him with an insane enough passion to make them reckless. He was called The Adversary. No one had ever really explained what that meant, but Carstairs knew that it couldn’t be a good thing.
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While they waited, Justine inspected the room. There was no way to get out without explosives, except the door. Sure, they could beat a hole with their fists through the concrete walls, in about a year or two. They were not in a comic book and their superpowers were limited.
“I don’t think this room was made to be a cell,” Justine said as she roamed the fifteen by ten foot chamber.
“A storeroom, probablement,” Simone said as she circled the room in the opposite direction.
They came together by the wooden door, which had thick rusty iron straps and a five inch square peep hole covered by a steel plate on the outside. Justine touched the door. “Wood, old, two inches thick. What do you think?”
Standing off to the side, Simone said, “Maybe try the peephole first?”
“Sure, why not?” Justine flexed a fist.
Too late—Simone punched through the hole. The steel plate slammed back on its hinges. She stepped back, then graciously said, “You can look.”
“Show off.”
Justine put her eye to the peephole, then jumped back as the muzzle of a shotgun poked through.
A deep German accented voice said, “You are to be kept in one piece, but if you come through I will shoot you. Sie verstehen?” He didn’t give them a chance to respond, just withdrew the gun and slammed shut the plate.
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The only person she could trust, besides Harry, to free Justine and Simone was herself. Fully rested, she might be able to transport herself onto the ship. But she had no idea how many were aboard or where they might be. And if she found her partners, would she have the power to transport them off? Sure, she’d moved the three of them a hundred miles one time. It had been a last-ditch escape which had laid her up for two days. She suspected she’d need to save her strength for a real life and death situation, which seemed to happen on a regular basis.
With a deep sigh, Teresa concluded she was on her own. She packed her small backpack and small briefcase that Simone called her petite boite magique. She hesitated only a moment over the fact that her life consisted of two small pieces of luggage and an SUV shared with two vampires. She used the bathroom, picked up her bag, and sucked in a few deep breaths.
Her cell phone chirped. It was Harry, looking for Justine.
“Yes, I do know where she is, Harry. I’m leaving to rescue them now. Any suggestions on how to rescue hostages from a ship?”
“Call the SWAT Team.”
“I am the SWAT team.”
“Teresa, call Detective Roulard. I think he’s okay. He knows who you are.”
“But does he know what we are?”
“I don’t think he will be surprised to find out.”
Somebody knocked on the door.
“Un minuto, Harry. Someone at the door.”
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Justine said, “Don’t worry Tee. We won’t let them hang you.”
“Jesu, I wish they would. A damn broken arm is not supposed to hurt this much. What did you do to me?” She reached for her first aid kit, fumbling for pain pills.
“I set the bone. There may have been some damage, and unfortunately, glamour does not last.”
“Mierda. If you are immortal, and we’re going to travel together, you both have to go to medical school. Si?”
“We’ll sign up as soon as we find your daughter,” Justine said. “But before you down all those pills in your hand, tell us where to go.”
“That’s a tempting thought.” Teresa washed down three Vicodin.
“Tee, we can’t go to a doctor or an Emergency Room. The police, and who knows who else, are looking for us. Grace can fix your arm, but we have to find the person to take us to her.”
“Kazza told us you would know where to find him when the time came. Time’s here, mi Bruja.”
Teresa seemed to ignore Simone. Her body stiffened, then her eyes fluttered closed and she melted onto the seat. “Those pills work…faaast. Rockport, sorceress, Ian.” And Teresa was out.
“Rockport seems pretty straightforward.”
Simone grunted, staring out the side window at the dark passing sea. “You Young Bloods, always so naive.”
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