Action Figures - Issue Two: Black Magic Women (29 page)

TWENTY-NINE

For the record, I’m not proud of what I said to Astrid. Yeah, she needed to hear it, but I take no joy in being the messenger.

Whether any of it sinks in, I guess we’ll see, but I don’t look forward to the moment of truth, whenever that may be. Concorde has us on stand-by again, and he told us to expect to move out sometime within the next two to three weeks, as per Astrid’s estimate, but there’s no way to predict exactly when Black Betty will make her move. We’re braced for sooner rather than later, but either way, guess what? Back to sitting on our hands and waiting.

Matt, to his credit, has given up on idle distractions; instead of gaming at the Coffee Experience, we’re killing time at the library (which, I am pleased to report, is currently under repair thanks to a generous donation from an anonymous benefactor. You can hardly tell the place nearly went up in a blaze of hellfire).

For a plain old public library, the place is shockingly well stocked with books on magic and the supernatural. Couple that with the Internet, and we’ve been able to uncover a lot of interesting, if not entirely useful, information.

“As near as I can tell,” Matt says, sifting through his hand-written notes, “no one has ever successfully summoned a demon lord, so the repercussions are nothing but guesswork, but Astrid might have been right about the host body burning out before the demon could do any damage.”

A passing librarian, overhearing this, stops to give us a questioning look. “Prepping for a
Dungeons and Dragons
game this weekend,” I tell her. She purses her lips in disapproval of us kids and our silly games, but moves on without comment.

“Nice cover,” Stuart says.

“I’m getting good with spontaneous lies,” I say. Again, I’m not proud. “Go on.”

“Going by what Astrid told us, along with some stuff I found online, I did the math and calculated exactly how much mileage a demon lord could get out of a host.”

“Wait, you
did the math
?” Sara says. “On how long demonic possession lasts? Do you know how crazy that sounds?”

“Hey, man, crazy ain’t what it used to be,” Stuart says.

“It was pretty easy, once I nailed down some benchmarks. I assigned an imp a power factor of one so I had a baseline, which made a major demon a ten, and a demon lord a hundred. I then averaged out the time it takes for a host to burn out under different —”

“You’re making my head hurt,” Missy says.

“I second that,” I say. “Get to the point.”

“Sorry. According to my calculations, a demon lord’s host body would burn out within one or two hours, absolute max, under optimal conditions,” Matt says, “If it expended any serious power, for any reason, its lifespan decreases exponentially.”

Hold on, one or two hours? That’s not a lot of time for some Kysztykc-possessed guy to find and, um,
get familiar
with Astrid’s mother. Heck, my first date with Malcolm lasted all of four hours. How could Kysztykc have knocked up Momma Enigma if he only had one or two —

Oh.

Oh, God. I know how. The thought makes me queasy.

“Guys, my point is,” Matt says, “I don’t think Astrid was lying to us.”

“Maybe not about Kysztykc burning out his host,” I say, “but she totally lied to us about her motives.”

“She was manipulating us, Matt,” Sara says, “and I don’t think it was the first time. And do I need to remind you what she did to Missy?”

“No,” Matt says.

“She Vadered me,” Missy says.

“I know.”

“She found my lack of faith disturbing.”

“Missy...”

“Focus, people. Let’s think about this for a minute,” I say. “Say the summoning works. According to Matt’s theory, Kysztykc can either stick around for a couple of hours, tops, because he’s not using any power — meaning he’s not causing any damage — or he can wreak havoc and cut his lifespan down to a few minutes, which I’m going to optimistically assume wouldn’t be enough time to do anything super-serious.”

“Right,” Matt says.

“Right. So what aren’t we seeing?”

“What do you mean?”

“Come on, Matt, would Black Betty really put this kind of effort into a plan she must know is a total dead end?”

Matt shrugs. “She
is
thirty-one flavors of crazy. Crazy people don’t think straight.”

“I think it’s job requirement,” Stuart says.

“All the more reason to think there’s something else going on here.” I grab Matt’s notes, skim through them. Ugh, his handwriting. I recognize maybe six words as actual English. “Matt, could a sorcerer take advantage of corrupted ley lines for some other purpose?”

“Not that I could find. Ley lines’re way more useful if they’re working right.”

Not that he could find. Well, I’m not surprised the Internet isn’t a treasure trove of arcane knowledge. That stuff is more appropriate to dusty old tomes like the
Libris
(you know: the book Black Betty has) and individuals schooled in the mystic arts (you know: like Dr. Enigma, who is persona non grata).

“I think we’ve hit a dead end,” I say, “but we should talk to Concorde anyway.”

Matt jumps on that. “I’ll call him. I can do that now. I have his cell number.”

“Dude, we all have his cell number,” Stuart says.

“Don’t ruin this for me.”

As we are all polite young people, we step outside to make the call. Concorde isn’t picking up, which is unusual (well, it’s unusual when
I
call him), so Matt leaves a message and, with the library closing and our stomachs rumbling, we head to our respective homes for some dinner.

For me, dinner will be a light meal of baked cod and rice pilaf. Mom must’ve had a hard day if she’s making such an easy dinner. Tread lightly, Carrie.

“Hi, hon,” Mom says. “How was your day?”

“Good.”

“The coffee shop sick of you guys yet?”

“Nah. Jill’s cool, she doesn’t mind us hanging out all day.” Doesn’t hurt that we tip generously.

“Hm. That’s nice of her. Dinner will be ready in a bit.”

Wait, that’s it? Two innocuous questions? No probing inquiries? No lengthy grilling to learn my every whereabouts? Take the win, girl, slink out of the kitchen before she —

“Oh, Carrie?”

And here it comes. Maternal nosiness prevails, all is right with the world. “Yeah?”

“I know you usually spend the weekends with your friends, but I’d appreciate it if you could be home for dinner this Saturday night.”

“Um, okay. Why?”

Mom gives me a small shake of her head. The gesture says,
Oh, no reason
, which tells me there
is
a reason, and she’s choosing not to share with me.

Rock, meet hard place. Things have been going so well between us, and I don’t want to screw that up by telling her I can’t, but the Squad is still on call. The best I can do is make an empty promise, then pray Black Betty tries to end the world on a schedule that works better for me.

Ha. Good one, Carrie.

“Sure, I can come home that night,” I say. Mom thanks me with a little more heartfelt gratitude than such a simple request deserves, and my paranoia climbs from a four to a seven. As Sherlock Holmes might say, something is most definitely afoot.

(Yes, I know the exact quote is “The game is afoot.” Don’t correct me on Sherlock Holmes. Only James Bond and Bilbo Baggins occupy more space in this girl’s heart.)

I could sure use some of that patented Holmesian deductive reasoning now. I can’t shake this feeling there’s something to Black Betty’s scheme we’re not seeing. I get that she’s nuttier than the proverbial fruitcake, but crazy people still have an internal logic, twisted and warped though it may be.

After dinner, I retreat to my bedroom to sift through everything we know, hoping to pick up on some telling detail we missed. So: Black Betty summoned an imp that, in the guise of Stacy Hellfire, hit a number of libraries that house items once belonging to author-slash-paranormal investigator H.P. Lovecraft, ostensibly to retrieve a book of powerful dark magic, which was in fact in the possession of one Dr. Astrid Enigma, who was hoping to find a way to undo a ritual spell that will, upon the death of her demon lord father, make her the absolute ruler of a Hell-like alternate dimension — which is incidental to our main challenge: foiling a summoning ritual capping off a series of ley line-corrupting summoning rituals, all pulled off by Black Betty’s minions using pages torn out of the
Libris Infernalis
.

Yep. Clear as mud.

Normally when I need to figure out something, I use Sara as a sounding board, but she’s as clueless about magic as I am — and with Astrid on the outs, there’s only one person who might be able to help me make sense of it all.

Sigh. I hate calling Matt. Not because he can on occasion (
rare
occasion) make me feel dumb, not because he can be insufferably smug about making me feel dumb, but because I know his ringtone for me is
You Light Up My Life
by Debby Boone, which is plain embarrassing.

“Yo, Debby, what up?” Matt says.

“Shut it, you. Are you busy?”

“Not really.”

“Good. I’ve been going over everything with Black Betty...”

“You too, huh?”

“Yeah, not that it’s done me any good. You?”

“Nope. Been surfing Ye Olde Internet since I got home, doing a little deep digging, but I’m not finding anything new. Everything I’ve read says the same thing: nothing beneficial comes from messing with ley lines. What’s the point of screwing up your own power source?”

“Good question. Black Betty’s power would be affected too, so what would she gain?” I say it aloud, and it hits me, “Maybe that’s the wrong question. What would Black Betty gain if
every
magic-user on the planet lost their power?”

“A totally even playing field,” Matt says. He chews it over for a few seconds. “No, still doesn’t work.”

“Why not?”

“Because that’s not the point of the ritual. Black Betty is tampering with the ley lines so she can summon this Kysztykc guy — thing, demon, whatever — not the other way around.”

Finally, something falls into place. “What if the point of the ritual is to do both? Magic is the best defense against a demon, but what if there was no magic anymore? Something as powerful as Kysztykc would be virtually unstoppable.”

“Yeah, for the precious few minutes he’s here before his host burns out.”

“Maybe he only needs a few minutes. What if this is a Kamikaze run? Kysztykc pops in and cuts loose in one catastrophic burst of evil mayhem, Salem goes up in flames,” I say. The thought chills me. “Astrid said Salem was a point of power in the world. If it’s destroyed, who knows what sort of ripple effect that could have?”

“Astrid would know.”

She would indeed. Problem is, we can’t count on her anymore.

I wonder if we ever truly could?

Guuhhhhh...why is someone cranking
Speed of Sound
? I hate that song.

Wait.
Speed of Sound
? Oh, crap.

I fumble by cell phone off my nightstand. The display tells me it’s one in the morning. This so can’t be good.

“Concorde? What is it?”

“I got a call from Gwendolyn. She’s picking up a spike in Salem,” Concorde says. “The Quantums are en route. I want the Squad suited up and ready to go in twenty minutes. Head to the high school; we’ll pick you up there.”

“Yeah, right, we’ll all sneak out of our houses at one in the frickin’ morning. I’m sure our parents will be totally cool with that.”

“This is a red-level threat, Carrie. Make it happen. Twenty minutes,” he says, and he hangs up.

Again, I say: oh, crap.

Eighteen minutes after I receive Concorde’s call, the Hero Squad is ready for its pick-up. The phrase “red-level threat” is a powerful motivator.

Red-level threat: a major incident involving superhumans with a high body count potential. I can’t even wrap my head around that. We could be heading into a literal war zone, with nothing less than all of humanity at stake.

No pressure.

“Someone talk,” I say. “I need to get out of my own head.”

“Is it me, or is the school seriously creepy at night?” Sara says.

Oh, I wish she’d picked up on something else, because wow, is she right. The main parking lot is empty, only a handful of lights are on, and there’s enough of a wind to coax a soft howl from the surrounding woods. The school itself is a dark, looming thing in the distance and, inexplicably, there is a single light on, its glow visible through a second-floor window. Some teacher probably forgot to turn it off before leaving for February break, but in the current context, it’s creepy as hell.

“Did you ever hear the story about the janitor who committed suicide in the school?” Matt says. “They say if you listen closely, you can still hear him mopping.”

“That’s not funny,” Missy says.

“He has a plunger instead of a hand.”

“Shut up.”

“
Yoooou kiiiids
,” Matt moans spectrally, “
stop runniiinng innn the haaaaaalllss
...”