The Last Adventure of Constance Verity (2 page)

Connie got into a lot of messes in a lot of different places. After decades of globe-trotting adventures, the governments of the world had created a special international agency dedicated solely to keeping track of her. It wasn't much, but it did make cleaning up the messes in the aftermath easier. Lucas Harrison was the lead agent of that agency.

He gazed down into the now quiet abyss in the basement.

“What the hell is that?”

“The Hungry Earth,” said Connie.

“The hungry what?”

“Earth. Have you ever wondered what's underneath that shell of rock we're standing on?” She pointed to the rows of teeth and flaccid tongues. “There you have it.”

“Like a monster? How big is it?”

“You should know this already,” she said. “It's in the files.”

“We have a dozen cabinets of files on you, Verity. I can't be expected to memorize every weird thing you've been involved in.”

“Isn't that your job?”

“I'm the liaison. Agent Barker is records.”

“How is she doing?” asked Connie.

“She's on paid leave. Read something in one of the files that gave her night terrors.” He pointed to the giant maw below. “How big is that thing?”

“Earth-sized,” she replied. “It's in the name: The Hungry Earth.”

“You're telling me the earth is a monster.”

“More or less.” She nodded to the six remaining cultists who hadn't been eaten by their mindless god. “And these yahoos almost woke it up. What? You didn't think it was hollow, did you?”

Her condescending tone rubbed him the wrong way.

“I distinctly remember that incident with the subterranean Neanderthal invasion,” he said.

“Part of it's hollow,” she corrected. “But most of it's monster.”

“We're living on the skin of a sleeping monster. What the hell happens when it wakes up, Verity?”

“Don't know. Don't want to find out. I chucked some cinnamon into its mouth, and that put it right back to sleep.”

“Where the hell did you find cinnamon so fast?”

“I'm resourceful.”

“You're telling me you just saved the world. Again.”

“Technically, I saved us from the world.”

“I'll be sure to include that in my report. This will probably push Barker over the edge.”

Barker wouldn't be the first agent overwhelmed by the secret files of Constance Verity. It was doubtful she would be the last. Harrison himself had replaced the previous agency head who had called it quits after having to fish Connie out of the ocean and find an environmentally friendly way of disposing of the six-hundred-ton corpse of the kraken. Constance stayed sane by virtue of having confronted this stuff since she was a child. It wasn't weird. It was life.

“What are we supposed to do with this great big hole?” asked Harrison. “Fill it with concrete?”

Connie handed him a business card. “Call this number. Ask for Abigail Cromwell Nightshade. Be sure to use the full name. She's very particular about that. She'll know what to do.”

“You just carry this around on you in case of emergencies?”

“I carry a lot of things around with me in case of emergencies, Harrison. You know that.”

He tucked the card in his pocket. “I don't know how you do it, Verity. I'd be exhausted if I constantly got into adventures.”

“Who says I'm not? Sure, I can get by on one hour of sleep. I've got the unflagging endurance of a kid who grew up wrestling dinosaurs and running from space barbarians. But it gets old. You can only punch so many zombies, and after a while, saving the world loses its charm.”

“So, why don't you stop?”

“Now, why didn't I think of that?” She shook her head. “It's not really up to me. It's out of my hands. Always has been.”

“You're telling me that with everything you've done, every unbelievable person you've known, every incredible near escape and last-minute save, you can't control your own destiny? I don't know, Verity. If you can't, who the hell can?”

Connie chuckled.

“Something funny?” he asked.

“No. Hadn't thought of it. That's all. You said exactly what someone should've told me years ago. I'm Constance Danger Verity. I've defeated magical Nazis in four different alternate realities, and saved the King of the Moon from a literal army of ninja assassins. I can do anything. Why the hell can't I do this?”

She slapped Harrison on the shoulder.

“Thank you.”

“You're welcome.” Grumbling, he answered the phone. “Harrison here. Yes, most of the goddamn planet, apparently.”

Connie left him to his conversation and set out on her great adventure.

P
rofessor Arthur Arcane sat in his study. Two layers of dust covered everything, and Connie brushed off a stack of books, all written by him, on the paranormal. Arcane was the foremost authority in the field of parapsychology. Or he had been, up until he'd sacrificed his life to repel an incursion by an army of disgruntled specters from the Other Side.

“I'm dead, you say?” he asked.

“Yes, sorry to have to break it to you,” she replied.

“Funny. I don't feel dead. I expected it to be . . . colder. Or warmer.”

She shrugged. “Maybe it's because of the way you died.”

“When did it happen?” he asked.

“A couple of years ago. There was this artifact buried at these crossroads . . . Y'know what? The details aren't really important.”

“And now I'm a ghost. I suppose there's some irony in that. I was wondering why the cleaning staff was doing such a lackluster job.”

He blew at some dust, and his spectral breath managed to raise a few specks.

“Nobody's bought the house since I passed?”

“People say it's haunted.”

He laughed.

“And why are you here again, Connie?”

“I like to check on you. I kept a key to the place.” Not that she needed it.

“Check on me?” He folded his hands under his chin. “Since I don't remember any of those other times, I have to assume that means I have standard recurring spectral memory fugue.”

She nodded.

“And we've had this conversation before.”

“I've lost count.”

“Disappointing, but not unexpected.”

“You always say that.”

“Yes, I imagine I'm prone to repetition. Nature of a repetitive spirit manifestation, isn't it? After all the time I spent studying them, I have to say becoming one isn't very interesting.”

He always said that, too.

“I miss you, Arthur. I never really got the chance to tell you when it mattered, but I think I was falling in love with you.”

Arthur eyebrows arched. His glasses slid down his nose. He pushed them up.

“I had no idea.”

“Neither did I. Not until after you were gone.” She sighed. “Died, I mean. You're still here.”

“And you still come to visit me?”

“I hope you aren't here. And I hope you are.”

“Connie, you can't torture yourself like this. I'm sure you did everything you could to save me.”

She laughed. “I'm not feeling guilty, Arthur. I've lost people before. Goes with the territory. I just wish we could've lived different lives.”

“Yes, well, I'm afraid it's too late for one of us. And you never really had a choice.”

“I'm going to become normal,” she said.

“Do you want to do that?” he asked.

“I'm going to try.”

“No, Connie. I didn't ask if you could. I'm asking if you
want
to.”

“Of course I want to. What kind of question is that?”

“Connie, being normal isn't as easy as not having adventures. It's not something you just become.” He tried to take her hand, but his fingers passed through hers. “Oh, right. Ghost. Keep forgetting that. My point is that you can't just elect to be normal. You've seen and done too much. It's not as simple as flicking a switch.”

“I know at least four or five guys with time machines,” she said.

“Time machines are not how ordinary people solve their problems,” he said. “As I recall, you always said time travel never works out the way you want, anyway.”

“I never got to go to my prom,” she said.

“I didn't go to mine.”

“I didn't
get
to go. I was off fighting yetis on Venus. Not that it would've mattered. I barely went to school. Didn't make any friends there. You're my second-best friend, Arthur, and you're dead.”

“Again. Not a very ordinary thing. Is it so bad being special?”

“I used to love this stuff. Gallivanting across the universe, fighting evil, discovering lost mysteries, saving the world.” She smiled. “It was fun. And I didn't think a whole hell of a lot about what I was losing in the process. Proms and weddings and casual Fridays. I lost my virginity in the Amazon jungle to Korak the Savage, and it was glorious. But it isn't supposed to be like that.”

“It's easy to see what you don't have.”

“Don't feed me that
grass is always greener
line. I keep thinking of all the things I didn't have that most people do, and it's starting to piss me off. I know a million people would trade places with me in a heartbeat, but it's not everything it looks like from the outside.”

“Yes.” He cleaned his glasses. “As clichéd as this might seem, we all have our crosses to bear.”

She was hoping he'd understand where she was coming from. His own extraordinary passion had been his undoing, and now he was trapped between life and death. It probably helped he kept forgetting that.

“I missed your funeral, Arthur.”

“I'm sure you had a good reason.”

“There are always reasons. And they're always good. But,
goddamn it, I loved you. I could have at least been there to pay my respects.”

“If there's one thing I've learned from this experience, it is that ghosts don't generally care about such things.”

“Yes, but the living do. I do. Even if I ignore all the things I can't get back because it's too late, I think about all the things that are destined to come up. My mom had a bunion removed the other day. She didn't call me. It wasn't a big deal, but one of these times, it will be a big deal. And I won't be there for her or Dad when it happens. I'm sure there will be a good reason for it, but it won't change that I'll end up letting down the people I care about.”

“But what about all the people you've helped?”

“Strangers. Mom keeps a scrapbook of all the commendations, thankful letters, and awards I've gotten. It looks nice, but what does it add up to in the end?”

“Haven't you saved the world on multiple occasions?”

“That's what people tell me, but I'm beginning to think that the world isn't as fragile as all that. The universe got along just fine for billions of years without me. I don't think it needs me to save it. I think it all works out about the same in the end. Sometimes, I like to think of myself with a dead-end job that I dislike, a husband who is letting himself go, and some ungrateful kids I take to soccer practice. It sounds dreary, but at least it would be my life. I know it sounds selfish.”

“It's not selfish,” he said. “Or maybe it is. But it's not unreasonable.”

He smiled at her, and he was so handsome in a bookish way that she wished she could kiss him. Touch his face. Caress his hand. Anything.

“My question does then become
Can you?
” he asked.

“I can try,” she said.

“I'd wish you luck, but you don't need it.”

“Thanks.” She paused on the way out of the study. “Sorry again about missing your funeral.”

“Funeral? Wait? Am I dead?”

Sighing, she closed the door on him.

C
onnie, as a woman of two worlds, had always had some trouble making friends. The extraordinary people she met on her adventures were usually so busy on their own adventures that unless they needed help foiling an alien invasion or exploring the booby-trapped ruins of a long-lost civilization, they didn't keep in touch.

Ordinary friends came with their own unique set of problems. It wasn't easy to balance the normal and the extraordinary. Those two sides of her life didn't get always get along, and the consequences could be bothersome.

She'd had three boyfriends meet tragic ends. Once would have been bad luck. Twice would have been forgivable. Three times was a sign from the universe. The healthiest relationship she'd ever had had been with a warlord who lived in the mythic past, and that was complicated by the whole time travel thing, which she'd learned to avoid ever since having to kill several evil versions of herself from the future. Or
would kill them at some point. She still wasn't clear on that.

Connie did have one friend among the ordinary, who had been a friend of hers since Connie's seventh birthday party, which had been interrupted by a giant snake attack. After she'd slain the monster by taking advantage of its severe birthday cake allergy, all the other children had fled. All of them except Tia, who had managed to save a cupcake for Connie. From then on, they'd been the best of friends.

They'd made plans to meet up at their go-to, a kitschy chain restaurant designed with a manufactured quirky aesthetic. It was boring and dull, the kind of place adventures didn't happen. Not often, anyway. Everywhere Connie went, adventure might be lurking.

Connie arrived first. She always did. It was protocol. She found a table, and when she sat down, her cell rang.

“The eagle eats cheese at midnight,” said Tia mysteriously.

“The moose dances under the half-moon,” replied Connie, equally mysteriously.

There was a pause.