Action Figures - Issue Two: Black Magic Women (32 page)

“Demonic terraforming?”

“Pretty cool, huh?”

“Not really, no.”

“Next question: how do we stop it?” Doc Quantum says.

“The fire seems to be the means of conversion,” Matt says, “so put out the fire.”

“It’s hellfire,” Astrid says, “you can’t just
put it out
.”

“Why not? It’s in our universe, which means it follows our rules. Fire needs fuel and oxygen. Take away one or the other, it goes out.”

“And how do you suggest we do that?” Doc Quantum says. “Unfortunately, we have an abundance of both.”

“Trust me, Charlie,” Matt says, “I got an angle.”

I wish the brains would hurry up and be brilliant, because this is turning into the losingest of losing fights.

The battle zone is surrounded by a raging wall of fire that continues to grow in intensity, fueled by acres of trees and winter-dried brush (not that hellfire is at all discriminating about what it incinerates). It’s slow to burn out, but where it has, there’s nothing left but blackened earth. The field has become enemy territory, and the charcoal zombies are benefitting from the home court advantage, big time, reforming as fast as we can destroy them. A cloud of ash, kicked up by the fight, hovers low over the land like fog, sickening us with its stench, obscuring our vision; the haze reduces the combatants to vague silhouettes, and if it weren’t for the fact the zombies glow like logs in a fireplace, I’d have nothing to target.

Unfortunately, the host of this party doesn’t glow; I never see his attack coming.

A bolt of blue lightning lances up from the ground. My aura takes the brunt of it, or so I assume; I can’t imagine this could hurt any more without killing me. I fall and land hard, the impact driving the breath from me. I gasp for air, but get a lungful of foul ash instead. I dry-heave so hard my eyeballs threaten to pop out of their sockets.

“Poor little stargirl.” I flop onto my back to see the robed man looming over me, blue arc fire crackling around his fingers. He’s going to go Emperor Palpatine on my helpless butt, and I can’t stop him.

He doesn’t make a sound. He doesn’t scream, doesn’t cry out, doesn’t utter so much as an annoyed grunt, as the Entity —
the freaking Entity
— melts out of the shadows and, with a single swift, graceful movement, snaps the robed man’s neck.

“I don’t want to ever again hear you people complain I’m not around when you need me,” the Entity says. I cough and wheeze in response. “If you’re trying to thank me, don’t bother. I don’t want your gratitude.”

I’m not trying to thank him. I’m trying to warn him that the man he killed is being very stubborn about not dying, and is about to return the spine-breaking compliment. Dammit, lungs, work with me!

Oh, hey, right: I don’t need lungs.

I power up, and the burning sensation in my chest vanishes. I let the robed man have a little taste of my pain, blasting him for all I’m worth. At this point, I doubt a full-intensity zap will do much more than piss him off for a few seconds, but man, it feels good to unload.

“Don’t bother to thank me, either,” I say to the Entity.

“Hrm,” he says.

Clear out!
Mindforce shouts in my head.
Full evac, now!

I reach out to grab the Entity, to pull him out with me, but he pulls his freaky vanishing act. Jeez, between him and Astrid...

Wherever he went, I hope he didn’t miss Mindforce’s follow-up message, which spells out what’s going to happen next, and he definitely does not want to be at ground zero when the big brains execute their plan.

One second into the countdown, I feel the air pressure drop. Three seconds later, I’m airborne, and high enough that I can see the full extent of the spell’s damage. The fire is eating away at the island with terrifying speed, and at this rate, Winter Island will be a wasteland within minutes — and unless this plan works, the mainland is next. If the island went up this fast, what would happen if hellfire starts eating cars filled with gasoline, homes with tanks of heating oil, or anything connected to a natural gas line? The entire city is basically a gigantic bomb, and Winter Island is the fuse.

Five seconds. I’m out over the ocean, well out of the danger zone (I hope). The island is a torch in the night, spewing noxious smoke they’re probably smelling all the way in Maine. The air pressure shifts. My God, all the way out here, I can feel the change.

I understand the basic concept of Matt’s plan. Fire needs fuel and oxygen in order to burn. Depriving it of fuel, that being the ground itself, is impractical, if not impossible, but taking away its air...

That’s where Astrid comes in. The changes in air pressure, they’re the result of a spell similar to the one she used to snuff out the fires in the library: she’s dispersing all the oxygen to create a hard vacuum over the entire island. That’s the theory, anyway, but whether she can make it happen on such a massive scale...

At ten seconds on the nose, theory becomes practice, and the result may not be dynamic, but it’s effective: the flames struggle to stay alive, flaring briefly as they consume the last of the oxygen, then they fade, dwindle, die out. In as much time as it took to cast the spell, the fire is extinguished, down to the last tiny ember. The town goes completely dark.

The darkness doesn’t last long. A few at a time, like stars coming out for the evening, lights begin to dot the landscape. I can make out the outline of streets, clusters of houses. The wail of burglar and fire alarms, roused from their unwilling slumber, call out to me over the water. There will be confusion, there will be questions, but there will be no ambulances racing casualties to the hospital. There will be no funerals.

It’s a fine night in Salem.

THIRTY-TWO

Well, in most of Salem; Winter Island, not so much. The soil, dry and lifeless, crunches beneath my feet. Trees reach for the sky with dead, black fingers. Nature has an astounding talent for bouncing back from destruction, but it’ll take a lot of time to bounce back from this.

“It could have been worse,” Concorde remarks.

“Please don’t say that,” I say. Oh, hey, Concorde sounds like a fast food drive-through speaker again. “I see your suit’s back up.”

“It rebooted as soon as the Luddite Field dropped — which reminds me: we need to have a chat. Follow.”

We find a relatively quiet area, away from the others, away from what must be every last firefighter in the city — who, perhaps out of a need to feel useful, hose down the ground, reducing it to a disgusting mud that stinks like rotten eggs. Your tax dollars at work, Salemites.

Concorde slides up his outer visor. “I want to make something extremely clear,” he says, sticking a finger in my face to show me how very serious he is (and man, am I getting sick of people doing that). “I value my privacy. It’s necessary if I’m to function effectively — as me, and as Concorde. It’s necessary if I’m to have a personal life. You understand me?”

“Totally.”

“I hope so, because I’m trusting you with my secret — not that I have a choice.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I have no idea who you are.”

Concorde does a double-take, blinks at me. “You don’t?”

“Nope. No clue.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. Never seen you before in my life.”

“Oh. Okay. Huh. Well, good. That’s, uh, that makes things — you’re
positive
you’ve never seen me before?”

“Do you
want
to tell me?”

“No! No. No, better for us both this way. Look, chances are, you’ll figure it out sooner or later —”

“When I do, I won’t say anything to anyone, not even the Squad, especially not Matt, cross my heart, hope to die, would you like me to sign something in blood?”

“...That won’t be necessary,” he says.

Please note: he had to think about it.

Once the cleanup has begun in earnest and we all take a few minutes to breathe, we get down to the business of answering the question on everyone’s mind: what was this all about, anyway?

Kysztykc and Black Betty weren’t trying to summon anything, they weren’t trying to form a cross-dimensional bridge, and they weren’t trying to destroy the ley lines; they were trying to contaminate them by creating a wellspring of dark magical energy in the form of a little slice of Hell (or, more accurately, the Dismal Realms) here on Earth. We stopped the effect early enough that it will make the ley lines converging over Salem, in Astrid’s words, “a little sick,” but won’t pollute them on a large scale.

“If we hadn’t stopped the spell?” I ask.

“That much raw dark magic would have backed up into the ley lines worldwide, like a sewer backing up into a home’s plumbing,” Astrid says. “Necromancers, those attuned to such energy, would have been able to tap the ley lines, but they’d be at best inaccessible, at worst poisonous to most sorcerers. It would have shifted the balance of power in a major way.” She pauses.

“Or.”

“Or?”

“Or, set the stage for something else. Something huge. Apocalyptically huge.”

I glance around, and I see my own expression on the face of every one of my teammates, my friends. We dodged a bullet, big time, and we all know it.

Well, almost all of us. “That is an interesting theory,” Concorde says. “One of several you’ve thrown at us, each one worse than the last. Are you certain this time? Or do we have yet another nasty surprise waiting for us?”

“One way to find out,” Astrid says.

The day was saved, the dastardly plan was foiled, the bad guy was defeated. So why the hell is this nutjob
still smiling
?

Small comfort, I’m not the only one bugged by it. “You want to tell us who this guy is?” Nina says. “I’d like a name to put to the set of teeth I’m about to kick in.”

He wouldn’t be able to stop her. Such a unique prisoner requires a unique jailer, and Mindforce is serving that role, using his power to keep our playmate docile and immobile until we finish helping with the clean-up — although I worry he won’t be able to hold the guy for long; Mindforce has been pushed to his limits tonight, and the strain is showing.

(I wonder how Byrne will handle him? I know they have methods for containing people with superhuman abilities, but as we’ve all learned, it’s not easy to get science and magic to work together.)

“Astrid, did you not introduce me to your friends? Well. We were all a little busy, weren’t we? Hello, everyone,” he says, shining his smarmy grin on all of us. His teeth stand out as exceptionally white against the mask of dried blood coating his face. “I’m Kysztykc. I’m Astrid’s father.”

Who the what?

“
That’s
your dad?” Stuart says. “Dude. I thought he’d be...”

“Taller?” the alleged Kysztykc says.

“More demony.”

“He’s not my father,” Astrid says, but wow, if looks could kill...

“I’m not,” Kysztykc admits, “but I am.”

“This is the man my father possessed in order to...impregnate my mother,” Astrid says. “I always assumed he died, burned out like host bodies normally do.”

“And when you
assume
...heh. No, Astrid, my host didn’t die, obviously. I abandoned this shell before that happened, but by that point, my essence had fully corrupted his soul.” Missy, unconsciously, sidles up to me. I put an arm around her. She’s trembling, violently, and it’s not from the cold. “I know what he knows, he knows what I know. I am, for all intents and purposes, Kysztykc.”

Which explains why he was able to throw around magic like crazy without burning out. I think. All right, it’s official: I hate magic.

Astrid and her kinda-sorta father lock eyes. “Tell me, ‘Dad’: what did you hope to accomplish?” she says. “What was the point?”

Kysztykc snickers. “Poor girl. Still can’t see the angles. I guess you are your mother’s daughter.”

“Damned right I am. Get this filth out of here,” Astrid says, her words dripping with venom. She storms off, but she doesn’t get far.

“Speaking of Mommy? She says hello.”

Astrid locks up. Nina is right there, telling Astrid not to listen to him, he’s trying to provoke her, walk away, please, walk away.

“Actually, that’s not true,” Kysztykc says. “All she ever says is: ‘YAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!’”

He launches into a sickening outburst of shrieks, screams, and pleas for mercy in an affected feminine voice. Missy calls out Astrid’s name. Matt says he’s lying, he has to be, he’s a demon, don’t believe him. Nina grabs Astrid by the shoulders, shakes her, begs her to walk away.

She doesn’t.

Roaring, Astrid throws Nina off. Jagged forks of magical energy leap from Astrid’s hands and drill into Kysztykc. She spits curses at her pseudo-father. The screams change, become his own. It’s Emperor Palpatine executing Luke Skywalker, but infinitely more horrifying, because this is happening right in front of us. This is real.

The assault hits its climax. Kysztykc teeters on his feet, then drops to his knees, smoke wafting off his body, now a solid mass of ugly burns, and good God,
the smell
...

His eyes have clouded over, but they find Astrid nevertheless. “The king is dead,” he croaks. “Long live the queen.”