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Chapter 71 by CalamitousIntent CalamitousIntent

In Springfield, a phone buzzed loudly in the middle of a computer science class.

[Interlude] The Search for Vanessa Hawthorne: Seeing Red

‘Pride’. That’s where he’d been last.

A pair of elves, drunk on several expensive wines from ‘Gluttony’ were in her way, so Erica grabbed the closest and threw him to the ground. His girlfriend turned to say something furious, but the moment she saw the berserker's eyes, she made the right choice to get out of her way. Anyone else between her and ‘Pride’ quickly scrambled to the side. The altercation did not go unnoticed… rumors whispered through the onlookers.

“It’s her!” “Someone get a guard before this turns ugly.” “What’s wrong with her eyes?” “How rude these humans are.” “Isn’t that the girl from ‘Wrath’? It is!” “I thought this place had more class, letting in a boor like that.” “Um… that supposed to be happening?”

Erica curled a hand into a fist and dug her fingers in. She should never have let John out of her sight. He was her responsibility! A wave of nauseous self-hatred crashed against the shore of her eroding confidence. If she’d been there with him then… No. What was done was done. Now she’d chase him to whatever hell had taken him in this time and they’d fight their way out together.

And she’d kill anyone who got in their way.

“Isn’t that right… Snow?”

No!

A sharp pain dispersed the swirling black mist that had gathered in her fingers. Erica felt as much as tasted the blood in her mouth from where she’d bitten into her lip. The echo of cold laughter faded in her ears, drowned out by the sound of enchanted music. ‘Pride’.

It tried to pull her into its sway, but in her current state it couldn’t even dampen the rage that threatened to tear her apart. She hated too much, she hated the world for being the cruel place it was, she hated Dante for fucking with her, and she hated herself above everything else. Guilt and failure tore her apart, but they also burned as fuel for her motivation. Get John, get out, deliver him to the Order, rip out the filthy necromancer’s throat and call it a day. That’s what she’d do.

Dante had placed two guards at the door to the bathroom, one of whom held up a hand as she approached it. “We’re sorry, miss, but this is off limits until we’ve finished cleaning it up. Janitorial… stuff? You know how it is,” he said, with the tone of someone who most definitely did not. They were badly dressed in rubber gloves and smocks, but she could see the end of a gun sticking out of his pocket.

“Move.” Subtlety was dead; Erica had no time to waste on peons.

“He said this is off limits,” the other guard spoke in a lumbering accent. Based on the grey skin and height, he was probably an ogre. Good. She could use something that could take a punch.

Erica whirled and kicked the legs of the human guard out from underneath him, toppling him over as he reached for his gun. Her fist followed the motion, crackling with electricity. She threw every ounce of self-enhancement she had into the blow, crushing the ogre’s chin into the nearest wall with a crack loud enough to be heard over the music. He fell to to the ground, instantly and bleeding between broken teeth. Erica shivered. It’d been too long since she’d felt that sensation on her knuckles. Feeling them bleeding and raw…

The human was staggering to his feet, but she didn’t give him a chance. Erica snatched the gun out of his makeshift holster while twisting one of his arms behind his back with her free hand. The barrel groaned under her grip. “I said, move.” She kicked his leg hard enough to leave a painful bruise but not quite enough to break the bone and dropped the man to the ground. He scrambled for something else as she glanced at the gun in her hand.

An off-blue covering of ice had spread across the metal from where her fingers touched it. She reeled back in disgust and threw the thing to the ground. It shattered on impact into chunks of plastic and metal.

“Hostile in ‘Pride’, near disturbance. I repeat, hostile in ‘Pride’, send backup!”

The idiot had gone for his walkie-talkie. Fine, she’d silence him too. Erica pulled back a fist and… saw the burns her frozen hands had left on the man’s wrist. No, this…

“Stand down? What do you mean, stand down? She broke Doug’s jaw and my leg! My gun’s been completely destroyed! Send help before she kills both of us!”

Erica felt her skin cool in seconds from the furious heat that had been boiling beneath it. She looked over at the ogre, ‘Doug’, then down at the man desperately praying for help. Neither of them were the reason that John was gone… neither deserved what had happened to them. She’d… used them as an outlet for the hate riling inside of her. It’d felt good. She felt sick.

The berserker stumbled into the bathroom, barely making it to the urinal before she heaved and vomited up the snacks they’d bought at ‘Gluttony’. The taste of bile lingered on her tongue. Her bleeding knuckles stung. Echoes of two hideous laughs rang in her ears.

“Where’s that precious control of yours?”

“Leave me alone!” The tiled wall beside the urinal cracked under a punch, her fist leaving four trails of blood on it as she collapsed to her knees.

Get John. Get out. Focus… She still had time.

It took several minutes of heaving, pained breaths to pull herself together, and even then she couldn’t stop from hurling again. This time all that came up was air and acid. It was a mixed blessing.

Once Erica had steadied herself on her feet again, and once she’d bottled up enough of her rage to function properly, she limped over to the open bathroom stall. Odin’s beard and the Lady’s virginal twat… that was a lot of blood. The cameras hadn’t properly captured the gruesome scene, but truthfully anything short of taking it in personally wouldn’t have conveyed the violent nature of the . She’d seen less blood on the floor of an arena after watching a loser get beheaded. At least it… wasn’t John’s. That, thankfully, gave her a morbid sense of relief.

Unfortunately, the prince in peril was nowhere to be found. His footprints led into, out of and then back into the stall before simply stopping. It was as though he’d vanished straight into thin air… which he had. Damn it all. What was it? Barrier, teleportation, invisibility or… disintegration? She tried to sift through her knowledge of translocation and transdimensional magic. Verifying the absence of a static Barrier was easy. There wasn’t one. Nor was there a stench of brimstone or glowing dust, so neither Heaven nor Hell had a role in her partner’s abduction.

She cursed. Both of those would’ve been a lot easier than the alternatives. The Inferno was no minor place to sweep someone out of. You’d need to be far more skilled than the average hedge-mage to break into the wards, much less pull off a transdimensional extraction spell on your unwitting victim. That left a narrow range of possible suspects.

Erica sniffed at the air. The lack of a cloying scent of pollen ruled out Summer; the lack of a barren and frigid staleness ruled out Winter. Who else would want to kidnap a burgeoning mage with no notable talent for a discipline. He could barely throw out curses!

Of course, John’s stupid powers played havoc with all the laws of magic, so who even knew what the rules were with him. It was even entirely possible he’d portaled intentionally… but why in any of the nine hells would he want to do that? He’d at least tell her before he did anything stupid. He would. Right?

Just in case, she pulled out her phone and sent a message that desperately tried, and failed, not to seem too worried. Her screen pinged a moment later, but instead of resolving her concerns, it only created new ones. It was oddly similar to the automated responses she occasionally got from Tricia.

John (1:45): The user you have tried to reach is out of service range. Probable cause assessment attributes this to: Unreachable Location. Would you like to receive an automated message when they reconnect?

Erica hit yes and stared at the bloody dust surrounding her. Her eyes burned, and she rubbed at them, smearing a bit of the mess on her cheek. ‘Unreachable’ wasn’t dead. That meant there was hope. She didn’t know what she could do to help him… her skill with Barriers was breaking them, not unravelling a spell trace to figure out where, who or what the caster was, and her other skills could be neatly summarized as ‘hit stuff’, ‘hit stuff harder’ and ‘hit stuff really, really hard’. Divination was Lorelei’s thing, and she’d never been good with the concepts the Order’s theoretical mages worked with…

Lorelei.

Her spiritual sight was supposedly the Lady’s. Erica didn’t understand that any more than she understood the creepy sense of purpose the Order knights always had… but if there was anyone she knew that could help, it’d be the seer.

She dialed Lorelei’s number and prayed to any god that would listen for her to pick up. The phone rang… and rang… and rang… and rang…

“Lorelei speaking,” the seer intoned with the manners of a 20th century housewife. “Who is this?”

“Hey, it’s Erica. Look, I need you to do me a huge favor, okay?”

She could hear voices in the background, “Of course, Lady Carpenter. However, it will have to wait. I’m sorry, but I’m preoccupied right now with counseling the Lord Protector on the matter of Miss Hawthorne and the other missing girls.” Lorelei sounded tired, “I’ll ask Cornelius to help me call you back once we’re finished.”

Erica concentrated on the faint voices she could hear through the phone. One was definitely the deep baritone of Lord Brighton, and she had no trouble making out the yapping sycophant, Stolt. The leaders of the Order were in the middle of a war council, and she was crashing their party… normally that’d make her balk, but…

“I know where the killer is,” she said.

“What?”

The muffled voices cut off as Lorelei shouted something unexpected in the middle of a sensitive meeting. Erica reeled back to save her eardrum further punishment, but the seer had already run off, leaving her alone on the line. She could barely hear Lorelei’s voice saying excitedly something to someone, probably Lord Brighton.

Moments later, her suspicions were confirmed when he picked up the phone, “Carpenter. You’ll forgive me if I cut the pleasantries short.” Things must be serious. “My seer tells me you have information.”

Erica reported to him every detail she could remember from her conversation with Dante, Mortimer’s name, the Marlowe Mortuary, his claimed history and domain of study, even the allusions to his horrid ‘project’. Lord Brighton listened in silence, only interrupting to press her on details she didn’t have and with skepticism that their narcissistic ‘ally’ would carry through on his word to deliver all information the Inferno had on Mortimer.

“Your findings could not come at a better time. This ‘Mortimer’ is getting brazen and reckless. Five people went missing an hour ago in Upper Westside with mundane eyewitnesses claiming they were by a group of ‘living skeletons’. One man, two women, a boy of fifteen and a twelve year-old girl. His foul work is coming to a head. It must be stopped, and it must be stopped now.

“Get Newman and bring him to the manor. Anwyn will take care of his remuneration while we begin preparations to siege the necromancer’s stronghold.” Orders issued, Lord Brighton handed the phone back to Lorelei before Erica could explain the rest of her situation. She sighed. It was hard not to respect the man’s drive for defending the innocent, but he could be less of a jerk about it.

The moment she heard the seer on the other side of the line, Erica cut straight to the chase, “Lorelei, please. I need you to find John.”

“Find him? I do not understand, he was with you earlier,” Lorelei murmured.

Erica bit back her impatience, “We got separated.”

“I can… see that now, yes. However, I cannot quite see him. He is alive but trapped somewhere hazy and dark. There are boats… rotten skeletons, a graveyard of sunken ships,” the seer’s voice took on a slight drunken slur. “Eyes too… so many eyes. A garden of them buried at the bottom of the sea.”

That did not sound good.

“Lorelei?” Erica called her name hesitantly.

“They’re staring back at me,” she whispered, as though sharing an intimate secret.

“Okay then… uh… Look, I can’t really work with ‘garden of eyes’. Can you give me something that isn’t a confusing mystery for once?”

An uncomfortably long pause followed, and Erica wasn’t sure if the call had dropped until Lorelei finally responded, “His prison is a snowglobe in the hands of the Scarlet Witch. A trap not meant to be sprung but triggered by accident. Dark forms circle him in a world of endless water: a never-ending deep.” The seer sighed painfully, “The Lady’s Sight shows nothing more. I pray that helps you find him.”

“It’ll have to do. Thanks, dude. Tell Lord Brighton… tell him I won’t be able to help with Mortimer. Not until I get John back first,” Erica said goodbye and hung up the call.

Wentworth.

That hag had been the cause of all of this in the first place! She’d been the one that sent John on a futile quest to figure out how her bratty pet princess had gotten offed; now she’d ‘accidentally’ locked him up in some kind of sea-hell jail? That was bullshit. All of this was bullshit!

Of course, bullshit or not, it was still the reality she faced. While Erica was very, very good at hitting stuff, she wasn’t so good at hitting things when they were a centuries-old witch with a tenuous non-aggression pact signed by her employer. Otherwise, the very first thing they’d have done was go straight to the Scarlet Bitch and strong-arm her into leaving John alone. Mrs. Wentworth could go dig up Vanessa’s rotten corpse on her own time for all she cared.

Erica sighed. Wishful thinking wasn’t going to get her, or John, anywhere. She didn’t have the power to make demands of the Witch, and they both were well aware that the Order wasn’t interested in fighting her over a single contracted mage. Even if they were, Lord Brighton would be directing his resources and people into dealing with the cabal necromancer first. A mass murderer on the loose or a single kid in the wrong place at the wrong time. The brutal calculus of it was… she couldn’t bring herself to blame her boss for the decision he’d make.

At the very least, John had found this… this… whatever this was. If she could just uncover what he’d learned here, she might be able to convince the Scarlet Witch to let him go. Asking him about it was obviously impossible, but there had been one other person present. Someone who might be able to help her make sense of this. Erica pulled together her strands of a plan.

She had a goblin to interview.

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