Action Figures - Issue Two: Black Magic Women (28 page)

Mindforce’s services may not be necessary; by the time he lands the Pelican and finds a way inside, Cuckoo Bananas the Wizard has regaled us in great detail about the coming storm, the dread that will consume us all, end the world, blah blah crazy sorcerer talk blah blah.

“Shut him up already,” Concorde says. Mindforce gestures at the man. He passes out mid-ramble.

While he’s out, Concorde checks his pockets for — I don’t know, identification? A concealed magic wand? A bag of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans? What he finds is far more telling: two pieces of crinkled parchment, stained with age, bearing an illustration of the symbol on the floor, surrounded by squiggly writing in a language I don’t recognize.

“Part of Astrid’s book, I assume?” Concorde says, showing the pages to me.

“Yes? Maybe?” I say. “I don’t know, I never saw the thing.”

“Hey, where
is
Astrid?” Mindforce says.

As if on cue, Astrid pops back, sporting a seriously cheesed-off expression. I bet that has something to do with the fresh blood smeared across her lips.

“Whoa, what happened?” Nina says.

“She sucker-punched me,” Astrid growls. “She
punched
me. She can’t even fight like a real sorceress.”

“Let me look.” Nina slides her goggles up out of the way and, with her fingertips, gently probes Astrid’s face. “Hm. Nose isn’t broken, so that’s good news.”

“Woo-hoo.”

“Girl, someday you need to break down and let me teach you how to throw hands.”

“Someday I need to wipe that bitch off the face of the earth. ‘I’m Black Betty, bam-a-lam!’ Annoying little...”

“Put your grudge match on hold. We need you to translate lunatic to English,” Concorde says, indicating our sleeping Saruman.

Astrid makes a disgusted noise. “Mad Hector. Man, she’s scraping the bottom of the barrel. Did he say anything useful?”

“No, it was all gibberish.”

“Gibberish to us, but hopefully not to you,” I say to Astrid, “though he did work up a pretty impressive stream of crazy. I think he was making up words at the end.”

“Why? What did he say?” Astrid says.

“The end is nigh, darkness is coming, doom is upon us.”

“No, the words you think he made up. What were they?”

There was only the one, actually, but when I tell her, she blanches.

“You’re sure?” Astrid says, her eyes boring holes through my skull.

“Positive. Why?” I say. “What’s a Kysztykc?”

TWENTY-EIGHT

“Enigma?” Concorde says. “You going to tell us what’s going on here?”

“Give me a minute,” she says, turning away.

“
Enigma
.”

“I said give me a minute, dammit!” Astrid barks before stalking off to a far corner of the field house.

“Give the woman some space,” Nina advises, so we let her brood for a while, and use the time to lug our prisoners out to the Pelican — by which I mean, Stuart throws them over his shoulders and, two at a time, lugs them out.

“Sorry about that. I needed to think this through,” Astrid says upon her return. “I’ve been poring over my books lately, sifting through a lot of lore, and I’d put together a few theories, but Kysztykc narrows them down to one.”

“And that is?”

“This whole thing is an elaborate summoning ritual. Kysztykc is far too powerful to be summoned by a something as simple as this,” Astrid says, pointing at the sigil on the floor. “Black Betty needs to weaken the barrier between worlds first. Once she does that, once she creates a flux point —”

“Which would be Salem.”

“Right. Once you have a flux point, summoning a demon lord becomes possible.”

“Going under the natural assumption that that’s bad,” Mindforce says, “how can we stop it?”

Astrid smiles. “That’s the beauty of the thing: we don’t have to. Black Betty has completely outsmarted herself.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Yeah, you lost me too,” I say.

“In order to summon a demon, any demon, you need a human host, and host bodies can’t contain that kind of power forever. Imps can ride a host for a month, month and a half at most. Major demons burn through hosts in a matter of days. A demon lord would consume a host within
minutes
.”

“Hold on. You’re not suggesting we let Black Betty complete the ritual?” Concorde says.

“I’m not suggesting it, I’m saying it outright. She needs to corrupt at least four ley lines to create a viable flux point, and she’s already taken down three. We let her finish the ritual, let her summon Kysztykc, he fries his host before he can do any damage — problem solved.”

Something about her explanation doesn’t sit right with me, but I can’t pinpoint what’s off about it. Then again, I’m trying to wrap my normal brain around a highly abnormal situation. Maybe Astrid’s telling the truth.

“She’s lying,” Missy says, and Astrid reacts as if Missy slapped her. “She’s lying. She wants Black Betty to summon Kysztykc.”

“What? Kiddo, that’s nuts,” Nina says. “Why would she
want
to —?”

“Missy, honey, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Astrid says in the soft, gentle tone with which you’d speak to a child who is severely trying your patience.

“Missy,” I say, “what’s going on?”

“I don’t know but she’s lying —”

“Missy,” Astrid says, “you need to stop.”

“— she
wants
to summon Kysztykc —”

“Missy. Shut up.”

Everyone starts talking at once, trying to make sense of things, trying to bring some order, but the result is a mass shouting match, with no one person able to rise above the din until —

“Kysztykc is Astrid’s father!” Missy shouts.

Bad becomes worse in an instant. Astrid, snarling, reaches out and, from ten feet away, Force-chokes Missy into silence. Before Stuart can take a single step toward Astrid, before I can blast her, Sara nails her with a telekinetic ram that drops her on her ass. Missy collapses to her knees, gasping for breath. Nina pounces on Sara, wrapping her arms around her head and neck in a sleeper hold. Matt grabs Nina to pull her off, but the Entity (
where the hell did he come from?!
) appears out of nowhere to lock Matt up in a full nelson.

And then everyone freezes — and I mean
freezes
; we all become statues, unable to move, unable to speak, unable to blink.

“Enough,” Mindforce says.

I repeat: yow.

He lets tempers cool for a bit, then disassembles the mess one body at a time, freeing me and Stuart first, then the Entity, Matt, Nina, Sara. He doesn’t free Astrid, not voluntarily. She’s released when Mindforce doubles over, retching violently. Sara likewise drops to her knees, spraying sick everywhere.

Oh, no.

I fire up my headset and pull up the satellite data. The entire town is under an umbrella of blood red.

“Guys,” I say. “We’ve been suckered.”

What was it Black Betty said?
Figured you’d have caught on to the game by now, but, as usual, you still don’t know how to play the angles
.

She anticipated Astrid would eventually puzzle out her modus operandi, so she doubled down on the last ritual within the ritual; while we were crashing the party at the school, a few miles away, in the middle of several acres of conservation land, well hidden from the public eye, a second group successfully carried out the same ritual. The resulting demon, a charming fellow who boasted such titles as the Roaming Blight and the Corrupted Reach (due, one must assume, to the fact his touch reduced organic matter to a rotted mass within seconds), was not as easy to take down as Astrid had led us to believe.

Maybe that’s because Astrid totally bailed on us.

That’s right, she teleported away with a heartfelt eff-you, leaving us to fight the demon by our non-magical selves. I’ll forego the play-by-play and simply say this: I was already in awe of Mindforce after he used his psionic powers to completely lock up seven human bodies, and then I witnessed Nina Nitro cut loose on Mister Roaming Blight. We could have cleaned up that mess with a broom and dustpan. Literally.

Of course, if Astrid had been there, we might have been able to avoid such drastic measures in the first place, but she wasn’t. She abandoned us. One more item on my list of grievances against her.

We return to Protectorate HQ late in the afternoon. I dash home to have an amiable meal with Mom and Granddad, then leave under the pretense of hanging out with Sara at her house.

Where I really go is to Astrid’s apartment. The ground floor door is locked, but that’s easily addressed with a small, concentrated zap. I’m sure she can afford a new deadbolt. Hey, I’m carrying around a lot of market-fresh anger; a minor act of vandalism is not beneath me right now. I do manage to keep my knock polite and non-destructive, however.

Astrid opens her apartment door, stink-eye already firmly in place. I respond with a mild smile. “I’d like to talk to you.”

Astrid pauses. “What do you want?”

“An explanation, for starters.”

“
Pft
. Kid, I don’t owe you an explanation for anything.”

My expression hardens. “You pulled a Darth Vader on my friend. An explanation is the very least you owe me.”

She opens the door. “I’ll tell you right now, I am in no mood to be lectured, so don’t —”

“I don’t give a damn what you’re in the mood for.”

Stop. Back it up, girl, this is the same knee-jerk anger that always makes things worse. Deep breath, clear your head, and continue like an adult.

Aaaaaaand go.

“I’m not here to lecture you. I’m here to understand.”

It takes her a minute or two, but she finally lays it all out, starting with her messed-up heritage — which is, in and of itself, more than enough to break one’s brain. Then she explains why she decided to sell us all out so Black Betty could complete the ritual.

“It’s a fine detail but an important one: when you summon a demon, you’re not actually bringing that entity into this world,” she says. “You’re drawing a fraction of its essence here, and planting it in a host to create an avatar — a representation of that being.”

“I play video games, I know what an avatar is.”

“Then you know that when your avatar dies,
you
don’t. You, the real you, continue to exist. If I kill Kysztykc’s avatar, it could create a paradox that could undo the rite of ascension.”

“Killing the avatar triggers the spell,” I say, “but, because Kysztykc is still alive, you can’t become the new Lord of the Dismal Realms. The spell goes kerflooey and you’re off the hook.”

“Exactly.”

“See? I understand. I also understand you don’t know for sure whether you’re right. You said it
could
create a paradox that
could
undo the spell. Not
would
;
could
.”

“...No. I don’t know for sure.”

“And what you said about Kysztykc burning out his host? Was that hypothetical too? Or are we facing a very real possibility of a demon lord, no pun intended, raising hell on Earth?”

She doesn’t answer, which is answer enough. I shove my anger back in its box, but it doesn’t go willingly. “Why didn’t you ask us for help? Why lie to us?”

“I’m a hellspawn,” she says, as though that answer should explain everything. “I doubt that little revelation would have gone over well — and on top of everything else I’m dealing with, I don’t need my friends looking down on me because I’m a freak.”

“Oh? Which of your oh-so-normal friends would do that? The two psionics? The genetic mutation? The
other
genetic mutation? The creepy leather guy? Maybe the girl with alien technology in her hands?”

My point hits home; her eyes drop to the floor.

“Astrid, I don’t look down on you because you’re half-demon,” I say. She gives me a weak smile, and I almost feel bad for what I say next. Almost. “I look down on you because you attacked Missy so you could cover up a half-thought-out longshot plan to —”

“Don’t you think if I had another option, I would take it?” Astrid hisses. Where have I heard
that
line before? “I lost that chance when Black Betty swiped the
Libris
!”

“So you jumped on the first flimsy opportunity that came along, risks be damned,” I say, the box breaking open. “You’re putting the entire world in danger for your own selfish reasons and you don’t even —”

“Oh, it is
so
easy for you to stand there and judge me, you arrogant, ignorant girl. I know what’s waiting for me if I don’t block the rite of ascension! You don’t!” Astrid says, jabbing a finger in my face. I hate it when she does that. It takes a supreme effort of will not to slap it away. “So don’t you dare dump all over me because I don’t want to go to Hell!”

“If you’re willing to risk every life on the planet to save your own ass, you deserve to go to Hell.” Not content to leave on that killer exit line, I pause in the doorway. “We’re going to stop Black Betty, with or without you. If you’re not with us? Stay out of our way, or I swear to God I will personally take you down.”