Dead Waters

23

Connor, the Inspectre, and I stopped back at the Department long enough to visit Allorah Daniels. We found the youngest Enchancellor back in her office-slash-lab, where I was surprised to also find Jane with her. I walked over to the two of them with the tattered shoulder bag held up in my right hand. Jane grabbed for it like a kid hungry for presents on Christmas morning.

“Sorry, doll,” I said. “This is going on our lovely Enchancellor’s dance card.”

Allorah looked up from the pile of books in front of her. She did not look happy. “Oh, is it, now?” she asked. “What about Jane’s health? She keeps wanting to go home and shower, but I convinced her that’s not a good idea right now.”

Jane nodded, then scooped up a large glass from the lab table. “I’ve traded up,” she said. “I’ve switched to drinking water, which helps kill the craving to shower.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“Not really,” Allorah said. “That’s her twenty-eighth glass.”

“Twenty-eighth?” I repeated.

Jane put her hand on my arm. “It’s okay. I feel fine.”

“That’s what worries me,” I said. “That would kill a normal person.”

Jane gave a grim smile. “As the mark indicates, I’m not normal.”

A moment of awkward silence passed, before the Inspectre cleared his throat. I snapped out of my fog and held the shoulder bag out to Allorah. “This is for you,” I said.

“Do I not seem busy enough trying to save your girlfriend’s life here? I would think you’d show some appreciation for that.”

The Inspectre stepped forward into the room. “Please, Allorah. As a personal favor to me.”

Something in the seriousness of his tone softened her in an instant. “Of course, Argyle. For you, anything.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I owe you.”

Allorah waved his words away and rose up from her desk. She took the bag from me and brought it over to her workbench, emptying its contents out onto it. “What are we looking at here?”

“We found this,” I said, “in the same lighthouse that Professor Redfield converted into his impromptu workshop. It belonged to one of his students, but he bled him out to barely living and then fed him to. . . something. I’m not sure what. There was a sort of disposal-pit-well thingie underneath a hidden room where he had been keeping all this arcane paraphernalia. It was too dark for me to see when I flashed on it.” I stepped over to the workbench. “Let me get one last read off of it now that I’m not at the bottom of a feed pit.”

I pulled off my gloves and slapped my hands down on the bag, pressing my power into it. I feared seeing any of the gory details of Professor Redfield’s actual carving up of George so instead focused my energy on pulling a location on the rest of the students from it. A dorm room at New York University and a slew of classrooms flew by my mind’s eye as I went back in time. Through all the flashes, one location stood out among the more mundane ones. It was a poorly lit section of the university where George skulked along, hoping that no one was following him as he slipped into a room marked 247. When I pressed my vision for further details it blanked out and I was forced to bring myself back to reality.

Hungry from the rush of low blood sugar, I went for the Life Savers in my jacket pocket.

“Anything, kid?” Connor asked, coming over to no doubt make sure I didn’t pass out on anything expensive near the lab equipment.

I nodded as I stuffed my mouth full of rainbow-colored salvation. “I think I’ve got an address.”

“Excellent,” the Inspectre said. “We should get moving.”

I held up a finger. “In a minute,” I said. I turned to Jane. “You might want to take a look through his computer as well.”

“Me?” she said, surprised. “What for exactly?”

“We found this in the water below the lighthouse,” I said. “That place may be connected to that she-bitch. It might help out with your. . . situation.”

Jane’s face was a little sad, but she nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Can I consider that a prezzie from you, then?”

I kissed her on the cheek, then joined the Inspectre and Connor by the door leading out of Allorah’s office.

“Be careful,” Jane called out.

“Why start now?” Connor darkly added.

“Don’t be so pessimistic,” the Inspectre said, twirling his sword cane around in his hand with a bit of a flourish. “Not everyone gets to spend field time with a member of the old guard.”

“No offense, boss,” Connor said, heading out the door, “but I’m going to stick with my pessimism. It’s served me well.”

Connor walked out the door, leaving the two of us standing there. I looked over at the Inspectre and he looked hurt. Even his mustache seemed a little sadder.

“Don’t worry, sir,” I said, gesturing him politely to go next. “Beating up some college students should improve his mood.”

I was weirdly glad to see that my powers were still keeping us on track and that the greater traumas of people dying seemed to suppress any flare-ups of the tattooist’s emotion. It was a shame that it took panicked flashes of someone dying to trump my other issues, but at least my powers were focused on the case at hand now.

I found the old hallways of the unused theater space in one of the New York University buildings along the east side of Washington Square. Room 247 was exactly as I had seen it, with the exception that it had been closed off by copious amounts of yellow caution tape.

I reached for the door with one hand while unhooking my bat from its holster with the other.

Connor stopped the hand I was reaching with and used his other to point at the strip of yellow NYU caution tape across the door. It was split where the door met its frame.

“Guess they probably aren’t expecting company,” he whispered.

I pulled out my bat, extending it. “Too bad for them,” I said.

My blood was up after what we had found earlier. On a silent count of three, Connor kicked the door in. I ran in first, bat at the ready. We were in a dark, cluttered space filled with stored bits of classrooms past. The only light in the room came from far off in the middle of it through a maze of desks, chairs, and old-style chalkboards. Three of Professor Redfield’s favorite students—Elyse, Darryl, and Heavy Mike—were sitting around a circle of desks, each with a laptop open in front of them. All three heads popped up from their screens and turned our way.

“Freeze!” I shouted, waving my bat as I started working my way through the jumbled accumulation in the room.

The girl with the short shock of blond hair, Elyse, slammed her laptop shut. “Crap,” she said, jumping up. She looked across the circle of desks at the tall guy with the gauged ears sitting across from her. “Darryl, I told you we should have booby-trapped the door.”

Darryl stood up as well, cradling his laptop in his arms, still typing at it with one hand. Between him and the girl was the chunkier guy, Mike, who was already cramming books and notebooks into a large duffel bag.

“What part of ‘freeze’ did they not teach you at this institute of higher learning?” I shouted.

Connor and the Inspectre began picking their way through the jumble of furniture, but the going was slow. We’d never catch them at this rate. I leapt up and took to the tops of the desks in front of me and ran across them as fast as I could, hoping my precarious path held up under my feet as I went.

Heavy Mike kept stuffing his bag, looking over to the tall one. “Is it ready?” he called out.

“Almost,” Darryl said, still typing away at the keyboard. “Get the hell out of here.”

Heavy Mike didn’t need to be told twice. He snatched up his bag, threw it over his shoulder, and disappeared into the shadows that stretched out behind him. The sounds of stuff falling over left and right rang out as he ran off. I looked around the room, searching for the blond girl again, but I couldn’t see her anywhere. Then I spied her shock of blond hair lowered down inside the center of circled desks. She was knelt down in the middle of them with a sizable curved blade in her hand, and she was not alone. The other freshman from Eccentric Circles, Trent, was tied in place on the floor with several computer cables draped across his body. The open ends of them were frayed with the other ends running up to several of the laptops.

“Go for the tall one,” I shouted over to Connor. My partner course-corrected through all the storage, heading for Darryl. I leapt down into the open circle in the middle of the desks, swinging my bat to disarm Elyse. I wasn’t one for going full force with human foes, which threw my timing off, and Elyse ducked under my swings, nicking the prone freshman with her knife before lunging at me. It slammed into my satchel with the scrape of metal on metal ringing out—it hit against my Ghostbusters lunch box.

“Nice lunge,” I said, pissed, but thankful I had avoided a wound.

“Thanks,” she said with a wicked smile and a wild panic in her eyes. “The college provides excellent facilities that come in handy beyond the acting program. Helps to keep me a triple threat.”

“It’s not going to do you very much good with a broken arm,” I said, swinging to disarm her.

Elyse feinted back and dodged the blow. “Darryl!” she called out. “Ready?”

“I think so,” he said, “but the footage isn’t cued up.”

“Then use the office piece,” she said, taking a moment to look down at the bound boy on the floor. “Anything!”

I glanced down as well. The tiny river of blood from where she had nicked Trent had flowed down over the boy’s arm, pooling at the inside of his elbow joint where it touched a fray of the exposed wires from the network cable.

“Launch it!” Elyse shouted, backing to the edge of the circle.

Just as my partner arrived at Darryl’s side, the tall guy fumbled his machine away from Connor’s grasp. He held the laptop out of reach and then flipped it around until the screen of it was facing away from him.

At my feet, a spark rose from where wires mingled with the boy’s blood, causing him to howl out in pain through the gag in his mouth. That distraction was all it took for Elyse to make a break for it. She threw herself back onto one of the surrounding desks, lifted herself into a back walk-over, and landed on her feet.

“Guess that makes me a quadruple threat,” she said. “Looks like all those years of auditioning for roles as an Olympic gymnast paid off.” Already Elyse was backing away across the desks.

I started after her, but stopped in my tracks by the sounds of chaos coming from Connor and Darryl struggling against each other. The laptop in Darryl’s hands was sparking the same way the frayed network cable had when it touched the freshman’s blood. Its screen was taken up by a full video displaying the professor’s office that we had broken into the other night. The camera swept across the professor’s shelves, the ones that were covered with his massive collection of movie monster miniatures, which I was upset to see were coming to life. They flew, ran, and crawled their way toward the camera, the first of them—a tiny Harpy with a considerable wingspan—flying out of the laptop screen itself. Tiny skeletal hands clawed their way along the edge of the laptop screen as bony, undead Sinbad pirates pulled their bodies out and dropped to the floor. Within seconds, dozens of foot-high creatures were swirling through the air or dashing across the floor of the unused classroom. The room quickly filled with enough of them that I started to worry about them as a real threat.

I spun back around toward Elyse. She was putting a greater distance between us with each passing second. I leapt up onto the desk to give chase but something was at my leg. I looked down at one of the Harpies dangling around my ankle, its claws tearing into the edge of my jeans as its wings flapped wildly about. I brought my bat down on it without a second thought and was happy to see it break into a mangled twist of clay and a metal skeleton underneath. What didn’t make me happy was seeing it fall onto the bound freshman, who had several monsters of his own to contend with.

The bound student was being swarmed by a battalion of pirate skeletons, some of which brandished curved cutlasses. I doubted if they could even do any real damage with those, but the boy was prone and I couldn’t just leave the poor bastard there to play pincushion, especially considering he was already bleeding.

“Dammit,” I said and jumped back down into the circle. The tiny skeleton pirates shifted their focus from their helpless victim to me. “Back to the boneyard for you, me hearties!” I swung at the closest one and sent it flying off into the darkness where it landed with a shattering sound. “Who’s next?”

The answer, apparently, was all of them. Before I could pick my next target, the entire group rushed me. The miniature horde was like a track-and-field team as they bolted for me, several of them leaping into the air, climbing up my pant legs. The pokes of tiny swords dug at me along the back of my jacket, but for now they weren’t even piercing the fabric.

I grabbed one of the skeletons climbing up my right thigh and tore it off my body. A piece of my jeans went with it, but I didn’t care. The little monster writhed in my hand, but I didn’t give it time to act. I threw it up into the air like I was coaching little league kids how to play outfield, and then swung at it. The skeleton shattered into tiny pieces, its structure proving to be even more fragile than the Harpies. That gave me hope.

The sensation of the others scrabbling their way up my back started wigging me out. I threw myself backward onto the desk behind me. A mashing crunch sounded as my body slammed down onto the desktops. A few of the broken pieces dug into my back, but compared to the thought of their tiny blades poking at me, I was fine with it.

Prone, my legs dangled over the edges of two of the desks and a skeleton head rose up over the crest of my left knee. I kicked my leg straight out as if a doctor had been testing my reflexes, sending the pirate figure up into the air above me. I flashed my bat out at it and it exploded into dust and fragments of wire.

Jumping up to my feet, I was feeling pretty good with the way things were going. I grabbed another one on my leg, swinging it by its head until there was an audible popping sound and its body separated, sailing off with a distant crash.

My moment of triumph was cut short when I looked down at the center of the circle. Two of my pirate attackers had been smart enough to stay clear of me, and had instead taken position by the bound student’s head. Their swords were poised over the frantic movement of his widening eyes.

“No!” I shouted, diving for them, but they were already lowering their blades. I wasn’t going to make it. I hit the floor hard, skidding into the student with a harsh “oof” as I drove into him.

Connor’s feet shot past my head, one landing on the floor next to the student’s own head and the other lashing out at the two skeletons. They shattered as his foot connected, their pieces raining down on the student’s tightly shut eyes.

“Jesus, Simon,” Connor said, “I thought you were trying to save him, not add to his injuries.”

I scrambled up to my knees and began untying the poor kid. “What happened to the Harpies?” I asked Connor.

Connor lifted up his hand, displaying a fistful of tornoff Harpy wings.

“Nice,” I said. “Remind me never to buy you a bird as a gift.”

Connor tossed them to the floor. “As long as it’s not an evil bird,” he said.

“Where’s Darryl?” I asked.

Connor looked away. “He might have escaped.”

“Might have?”

Connor got testy. “It was a little hard keeping track of everyone, what with the chaos of fighting Harpies and rescuing you.”

“You weren’t rescuing me,” I said.

“On, no?” he said, haughtiness in his voice. “So you could have lived with yourself watching the kid here get his eyes gouged out, then?”

I didn’t bother responding and continued untying the student. I undid the final knots, before a thought hit me. “Where’s the Inspectre?”

We both looked around but we couldn’t see the Inspectre anywhere. “Crap,” I said, but Connor held a finger up to silence me.

Off near where we had come in came the sounds of struggle, even though we couldn’t see much from where we stood. We hurried our way through the maze of stored stuff while the student finished untangling himself from the coil of ropes encasing him.

Following the sounds, we came across the Inspectre, flat on his back on the floor. He was still clutching his sword cane, but every other inch of him was wrapped up in a writhing sea of movie snakes and sea serpent models, including a mutant octopus-looking thing that had full control of him from the waist down. Muffled cries for help came from behind either a tentacle or snake section that ran across his face. I couldn’t tell which.

Without wasting a second, Connor and I made quick work liberating the Inspectre from his monstrous little captors. I pulled the tentacle from around his head, ripping it in two before throwing it off into the surrounding darkness.

“Are you all right, sir?” I asked.

The moment he was free, the Inspectre scrabbled around on the floor until he could get up on his knees.

“What, what?” he said, somewhat flustered. “Yes, yes, of course I’m all right.” He found his sword and sheathed it back into the hollow of his cane, and then used it to help himself up. I moved to help him, but he brushed me away.

“It would appear,” he continued, “that my fencing skills were a bit lacking, I’m afraid.”

“I don’t get it,” I said, shaking my head. “You routinely clean my clock in the F.O.G. training room.”

Connor chimed in, “I’m sure it’s not easy trying to fence miniature sea creatures.”

“No, I don’t suppose it is,” the Inspectre said, shaking his head. He stroked his mustache, and then stopped, pulling away with something pinched between his fingers. “There are scales in my mustache.”

Something caught Connor’s attention back in the center of the room, and he turned.

The student was attempting to lift himself up onto the desks and pull himself along the tops of them while trying to kick his legs free from all the rope. Connor reached the open circle and grabbed one of the dangling ends. “Not so fast,” he said. He pulled the student back toward him like he had just roped a steer at a rodeo. “Going somewhere?”

“N-no,” the student said, looking a little crazed. “I was just trying to get free of all this.”

“Uh-huh,” Connor said, not letting go of the rope.

“I was,” the student said, still sounding uncertain. “What? You think I was trying to escape with the rest of those guys?”

“Trying, yes,” Connor said. “Succeeding, no.”

The sounds of several Harpy cries came from out in the darkness along with the sounds of a few chairs falling off the tops of desks.

I lifted up my bat and readied it. The Inspectre unsheathed his sword from the cane and looked around.

The student looked at me with recognition. “You again,” the student said. “The guy from the bar who followed us to our studio the other day.”

“That’s me,” I said, looking around the room for more enemies.

“Relax,” the student said. “I don’t think you have to worry. Those things won’t last long. They lose their juice faster than a laptop battery. That’s part of the problem.”

“What problem?” I asked.

The student stopped fussing with the ropes and went silent. He must have forgotten who he was talking to and clammed up when he remembered. He shut his mouth and shook his head.

“What problem?” Connor repeated.

“I don’t think I should say anything more,” he said.

Connor stepped closer to him. “Oh, I think it’s in your best interest if you do,” he said.

“They were going to kill me,” he said, still in shock.

“I might kill you, too,” Connor said. “Making me destroy all of this classic memorabilia.”

“What?” the student said, snapping out of it. He looked over at the Inspectre. “You look old enough to be in charge here. This one isn’t really going to kill me, is he?”

“Don’t look at me, young man,” the Inspectre said. “At least not for sympathy. Your friends were the ones who unleashed those things on us, after all.”

“They aren’t my friends,” the student said. “They had me tied up.”

The doubtful look on the Inspectre’s face got a little doubtier.

“Okay, fine,” the student said, looking away. “They were my friends, but not after today.”

Connor walked back over to him. “You want to tell us what they were about to do with you, then?”

“Want to tell you?” he said with a nervous laugh. “No. You’ve seen what Elyse, Darryl, and Heavy Mike can do. I think I have more to fear in retribution from them than I do from you.”

“We still beat them,” I said.

“They still got away,” the student countered.

I really couldn’t argue with that, but I didn’t have to. Connor already had him by the front of his bloodied shirt.

“Make no mistake,” he said. “Your friends ran like cowards. Trust me when I say you have more to fear from us.”

The kid finally looked scared, but he also looked a little pale in general.

“Maybe we should get him to a hospital,” I said. “He is bleeding, after all.”

Connor looked down at the gash on the boy’s side where Elyse had cut him. He reached into his inside coat pocket, pulling out a Departmental favorite when it came to combat in the field, a tiny wound-up piece of cloth that looked like a human digit and bore a sectional crook in two places along it.

“What the hell is that?” the student asked.

“Mummy Fingers,” I said.

Connor nodded. He placed it against the student’s wound, and at contact, it unfurled itself, running its bandage back and forth over the spot until it staunched the flow of blood. The student squirmed as he watched it wide-eyed, and then looked up once it was fully settled into place.

“Who are you people anyway?” he asked.

I collapsed my bat down and slipped it back into its holster at my hip. “We’re the good guys,” I said.

“All right,” Connor said, grabbing the student by the rope still tangled around him and heading back toward the door we came in. “He’ll live, but he’s coming with us.”

The dazed student stumbled along after Connor, slamming into desks and knocking over chairs as he went. “I’d move faster if I were, you know, untied,” he said.

“What’s your name again?” Connor said.

“Trent,” the student said.

“Okay. . . well, then, Trent,” Connor said, “shut up.”

Trent turned and looked at me as Connor dragged him off again. “Is he always this way?” he asked, fear in his eyes.

“No,” I said, following after them. “Sometimes he’s actually mean.”